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Is that Senator Robert Byrd? No, it is not.
My first interaction with the New York Public Library was in the first Ghostbusters movie. During this visit I had a photographic lovefest.
More NYPL
Fun with the cross-screen filter
Staircase inside NYPL
Here are a few cool things I've done this week.
Sitting in one of three live high-definition control centers in the country for the live broadcast of last night's NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams in Rockefeller Center.
Pretending to be an MSNBC anchor at MSNBC Plaza in Secaucus, NJ.
Stealing Tucker Carlson's stapler. Not really.
Working at MSNBC's global broadcasting center in Secaucus.
Working in the MSNBC newsroom.
Medieval and Baroque Section of the New York Public Library
MSNBC reports that George Hotz, a seventeen year old teen from New Jersey, today became the first in the world to successfully unlock the iPhone, freeing it from the requirement that it be used with AT&T. I spent ten minutes reading over the exact steps. It's painful, yes, requiring soldering, chipping off metal connections inside the iPhone, and complicated firmware changes. Over time, however, I believe that enough people will build on George's work and create services to unlock iPhones, and simple tools that make unlocking it yourself easy as pie.
Congratulations George, you've done American consumers a favor.
I've yelled and screamed for years about why there's no fundamental reason why locked phones are better for consumers. I yelled about how over time I thought that the lock-in would become weaker and weaker. The rise of OEM manufacturers like HTC, though, has scared me into thinking that perhaps the unlocked phone would never become reality in America. Because the iPhone is branded with Apple and not AT&T it represented a step in the right direction. An unlocked iPhone is one step further.
Locked phones do not help the consumer. They do not make phones cheaper. They do not help the handset industry. They just enrich carriers. And carriers, today, suck. Work like what George has done represents a step forward for the consumer interested in getting the most useful and economical handset possible. Thanks, George.
I'm sitting in the newsroom of the Washington Bureau of NBC News. WOW. Pete Williams is recording NBC News Radio ten feet away. Tim Russert's office is down at the end of the room.
We've sent the envoy from MSNBC.com to help editors with some new tools they'll be using and we've been having a blast in the off hours. This bureau is enormously historic. Meet the Press is shot here every Sunday and the set, though cool, is majorly antiquated. I suppose that's what you'd expect from the same set where the landmark first Kennedy Nixon debate was held. It's also where the Muppets got their start.
The nights have been great, too. After failing to rub shoulders with pols at The Caucus Room, Tesh and I took in the fantastic view afforded by the bar atop the Washington Hotel. Certainly the quintessential view of the city.
But back to work until tomorrow morning when I head north to NBC at 30 Rockefeller Center.
I'll always remember this as one of the chillingly good moments of debate in the 2008 election season. Obama is loving himself: setting solidly apart from the Bush administration, proclaiming the importance of diplomacy, and being bold, even harkening back to JFK and Reagan. And then....
[youtube video, for RSS readers]
Clinton's response is a perfect demonstration of her enormous policy experience. (Ignore the silly nonsense and group-think coming from Edwards.) If you're Obama at that moment, you're feeling that cold sweat develop, realizing that the opposing team didn't just score a point, they slam-dunked.
Seen in the Chinese Garden at Washington Park Arboretum. A note: I've gotten into a habit of including some photo I've taken at the start of blog posts. Don't expect it to always relate to the content of the post. Liking the photo is perhaps the only requirement I have for including it.
I've buried my nose in a number of great reads this summer. Here are a few.
For someone immensely interested in architecture and The New York Times, this "Towers of Babble" article in The New Yorker is a must. Goldberger does a great job of talking about the beautiful, though metallic, new newsroom at the core of the new NYT tower. When I'm in New York next week, I'm going to spend some time wandering around the new NYT tower and this article definitely got my attention.
Modern cultural liberalism
Louis Menand has, more than any other historian, helped me understand modern American cultural liberalism. Nearly every essay of his has made me stop reading and ponder the incredible explanations he offers for how the world is at it is. This piece on the modern genre of biography is no less powerful. Having loved his The Metaphysical Club, this article sent me out to read his more recent American Studies. American Studies, while we are on the topic of books, is also an immensely worthwhile read.
Menand is also the historian that first explained to me the gift William James gave in his philosophical concept of pragmatism. Reading more Menand reinvigorated my interest in William James and, presently, I'm in the midst of the recent biography of him, In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. This tome, though a daunting read, has thus far proven to be packed with a ton of interesting tidbits. No recommendation yet, but it's been fun so far.
Do publishers edit book before printing them?
And then there's one low note to all of this. Robert Service's Comrades promises a lot: a history of the global idea of communism, not confined to its manifestation in any one country. Loving the underlying history of an idea, I bagged this book for what I hoped would be insightful reading while in Maine.
What a mess. The content is there. Well, I assume it is. I don't know because the text is just so broken. I'd say one out of every four sentences is passive. Service continually squeezes out three sentences for concepts that could be conveyed in one. Unnecessary prepositions appear everywhere. Some sentences even end in prepositions. This is a Harvard University Press book; have they cut all editors?
Seattle from Kerry Park, certainly where most postcards are shot.
After eighteen months my T-Mobile MDA finally gave out. With most of my phones dying after only twelve months, I considered this a sound stretch. In the past two months it started to power down unexpectedly, sometimes it wouldn't charge and progressively deteriorated. In the past two weeks it's gotten really bad: screen flickering like a fifties-era television, the left arrow key stuck down, and finally, a dead keyboard. To keep my destruction story short, I picked up a T-Mobile Dash yesterday, preloaded with Windows Mobile 6.
It's been a nice, though incremental, upgrade. The Dash, however, is not the subject of my post.
Thanks to the roaming nature of my data, within one minute of powering up the brand new device, I had the following components configured:
I've talked about this a number of times, but I marvel at the redundancy of much of my data. I've got 5,400 photos stored in three independent locations (Flickr, XDrive, and an external hard drive), 400 contacts managed by Plaxo (Plaxo synchronizes those contacts between my corporate Exchange server, Hotmail, my phone, and LinkedIn), documents stored both locally and remotely at XDrive.
Were I to be cheesy enough to assign a vision statement to my whole method for managing my data it would be something like this:
I envision a world where the failure of any piece of technology that I own results in the loss of only the physical asset and no data.
Wow, that's wordy, but at least it isn't grammatically incorrect like Lockheed Martin's slogan. Drives me nuts! But, back to business...
Data storage and redundancy also needs to be low overload. A number of bloggers I read have talked about the huge fault-tolerant arrays they've amassed. Not for me. I'm not willing to invest the number of hours required to manage these pesky behemoths.
Right now I think I'm pretty much there.
"Men like you and I built this country." Don't ask me why, but that's how I captioned this photo. It's just the first quote that came to mind after I finished working with it. According to the Flickr community, this is my best photo. In fact, it was the 449th most interesting photo uploaded to Flickr on August 10th and is now featured in Flickr Explore.
It's interesting: I know that I can do a lot with random portrait shots, but I always feel enormously weird taking pictures of people. Not so with the 55-200mm lens. In fact, none of the people in these photos know that they are stars on Flickr. This, along with the photo below, was shot from completely across the street.
"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" Once again, first quote that came to mind.
This shot, and the one below, are from the hour after Pike Place Market closed for the evening.
I really enjoy sociology books. I know they're bad for me, but I keep buying them: Barbara Ehrenreich, Louis Menand, Malcolm Gladwell. These books are suspect for the same reason that I've derided the recent dumbed-down books on memetics, Made to Stick: they build ideas and instruments to explain a very complicated world, a world too complicated to be accurately explained within the confines of a book less than four hundred pages.
Stephen Levitt attributes the general decline of violence in the late twentieth century to the triumph of Roe v. Wade.
Barbara Ehrenreich attributes the human penchant toward war to the days before humans were the dominant species on the planet.
Louis Menand attributes our Darwinistic education system (SAT, GRE, GMAT, GPA) to the Cold War.
Barbara Ehrenreich attributes the decline of "communal joy" to the Protestant work ethic, the industrial revolution and the increasingly authoritarian ways of churches.
These are enormously compelling stories. Oozing shock and awe, they stake the new ground their stories break. With $27.95 hardcover editions of these in hand, the reader is promised to learn why no one dances in streets, why we go to war, and why violence is down. But is it that simple?
All it takes is a single disproving case to invalidate one of these works and because the field of sociology is so marked by uncertainty, it's tough to distinguish disproving cases from outliers. A simple example: If you believe truth is found in the scientific method, try to prove that the legalization of abortion is why violence declined in the late twentieth century. Impossible. So, do these books tell compelling stories that explain things that we didn't understand before? Yes. Are they "true"? No.
Yet I still love these books. I crave them as much as I crave books on philosophy, theology and religion as a social phenomenon. Recently I've thought a lot about why I crave these works that, I suspect, are all superficial.
I know that I hate chaos and disorder. I know that when I have a problem on my hands, my stress level increases with the amount of uncertainty associated with the task. As I lay out tasks and form a plan, that stress level plummets. I know that I closely associate with instrumentalism, believing that ideas and tools aren't to be judged according to their "truth," per se, so much as by their effectiveness in explaining my world.
What I've come to suspect is that I seek these books because I'm looking for a unified theory. A single mental model that explains the world: why we are as we are, why we behave as we do, why the people around us are as they are. I'm not naïve enough to think that I'll ever find one that truly does explain the entirety of my world, yet my brain is wired such that I find enormous joy in the pursuit of these theories.
This pursuit has its ups and downs. I'm way too judgmental and I've started to develop an explanation for why: I look for ways to organize people into convenient little buckets. There's the neomarxist anti-capitalist bucket (Ehrenreich), there's the hard-charging industrial Darwinist bucket (Skilling, Ellison), there's the -- you get the idea. I know this, too, is wrong as I fervently resist labels and oftentimes find my assessments of people to be completely wrong. Yet I still do it. It's all in the pursuit of a unified theory.
Here are a few schools of thought that have been particularly useful to me in this pursuit:
Memetics and the theory of information cascade
I have nearly 5,500 photos stored on Flickr. I have none stored on Facebook.
Sure, Facebook does a great job of enabling friends to see pictures of people about whom they care. But where is the support for:
All in all, the mediocrity of this feature is quite ridiculous. Facebook doesn't even account for the original size of the photo, applying a brute force resizing and storing the result of that resizing.
Any astute critic would comment that Facebook photo sharing targets a different customer: the one that doesn't necessarily care about the quality and preservation of the photo so much as the, "hey look at our party" effect. But the bar is pretty high to justify maintaining the same data in multiple places and tagging faces isn't going to cut it.
I'll stick with zero photos on Facebook (except, of course, for the requisite profile photo). But please, Facebook, don't improve your photo management and archival functionality because then I won't have as solid an excuse for not sharing photos on your site.
To get an understanding of the underlying reason why I choose to voice my opinions, see my disclaimer of fallibility.
In the interest of full disclosure:
- Flickr
- Photoblog
- LinkedIn
- LibraryThing
- Facebook
- Twitter
- del.icio.us
