It’s been 10 years since the blog was born. Love them or hate them, they’ve roiled presidential campaigns and given everyman a global soapbox. Twelve commentators — including Tom Wolfe, Newt Gingrich, the SEC’s Christopher Cox and actress-turned-blogger Mia Farrow — on what blogs mean to them.
Notwithstanding the words of Tom Wolfe, who puts an elegant boot, below, into the corpus of bloggers, there are many more people today who would read blogs than disparage them.
The consumption of blogs is often avid and occasionally obsessive. But more commonly, it is utterly natural, as if turning to them were no stranger than (dare one say this here?) picking one’s way through the morning’s newspapers. The daily reading of virtually everyone under 40 — and a fair few folk over that age — now includes a blog or two, and this reflects as much the quality of today’s bloggers as it does a techno-psychological revolution among readers of news and opinion.
We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”
Monthly Archives: July 2007
Lufthansa Pondering an Economy Class Sleeping Area
Via Airliners.net:
To increase the travel comfort on intercontinental night flights, Lufthansa is thinking about a separate sleeping area within Economy Class. There, you would have the possibility to sleep in beds with an angle of 180? (Full Flat). This option could be booked instead of a seat.
In the future, when booking a night flight with Lufthansa from Johannesburg to Frankfurt, would you generally be interested in booking into the sleeping area instead of a seat in Economy Class?
Unconventional Wisdom About Management
An interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management:
Question: What do companies do stupid things?
Answer: First, they ignore feedback effects. There has recently been a lot of interest, and apparent surprise, that programmers in India now cost a lot and their wages have been rising rapidly. Did people forget supply and demand? If everyone moves work to India, what did companies think would happen? Or, to take another example, when companies cut their retirement benefits, and people can not afford to retire, guess what, they won’t.
Second, companies often ignore the interdependence or connections between actions in one part and those in another. So, even as some departments are trying to cut the costs of benefits, others are worried about recruiting and retaining enough qualified people. Maybe the parts should work together.
Third, many companies presume that incentives are the answer to everything, and have a very mechanistic model of human behavior. That is also incorrect.
The Cheapest Days to Buy Certain Items
ANOTHER DAY, another deal.
Thanks to online coupons, price-comparison search engines and reward memberships, savvy shoppers can pay less than full price on any day that ends in “y.” But depending on what you’re planning to buy, some days of the week may yield better bargains than others.
We talked to the experts, and narrowed down the best days of the week to buy certain items
Home features 8.4 kW solar electric system
From a story by Alec Luhn in the Wisconsin State Journal:
When he got to what he calls “the mid-life crisis age,” Madison resident Jim Taylor, 45, said he figured “Well, I’m going to have to either buy a sports car or do something.'”
For Taylor, that something was installing an 8.4-kilowatt solar panel array on his roof in April — the largest solar-energy system on a Madison residence.
Although he originally intended to supply only his family’s energy needs, he has been selling his excess energy to Madison Gas & Electric the last two months and now could increase his earnings under a new buyback rate proposed by the utility.
Under the proposal, Taylor would sell all of his energy to MGE at a rate of 25 cents per kilowatt-hour and buy back the portion he needs from the utility’s overall pool of renewable energy at about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.
A Bidet at 40,000 Feet
And Yamamoto may also earned the day’s chuckle award for his quip about one of the innovations ANA brought to the 787’s design. The airline teamed with Toto to create commercial aviation’s first bidet. The subject brings some amused reactions from Boeing executives, but they’ve included it in their furnishings catalog.
“We will be the first airline to refresh the parts (of people) that other airlines cannot reach,” said Yamamoto.
Much more on the new 787 here.
The Resurrection of the Lower Owens River
Healing ailing rivers is Mark Hill’s specialty. So when the tall and lean ecologist visits one of his works in progress, he’s prepared to paddle a long and sinuous route to assess the health of his watery patient.
In this case, his charge is the Lower Owens River, a 62-mile-long stretch left essentially dry in 1913 after its flows of Sierra snowmelt were diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. After decades of political bickering, water was directed back into the riverbed in December, launching the largest river restoration effort ever attempted in the West.
Ecologists knew the Lower Owens would come back to life. But how fast would it rebuild itself? Which wildlife would appear first? Which plants?
Scientists have been surprised by some of the early answers, and to flesh out the details Hill recently took his first survey by kayak of the river. Hill, the lead scientist in the Lower Owens River Project, stepped into a blue inflatable 16-foot kayak, said “Let’s go,” and was soon scooting through the channel that cuts across the Owens Valley.
Highway 395 provides a gorgeous drive through the Eastern Sierra Nevada. It’s also an interesting place to observe the effects of LA’s ongoing thirst.
Notes from Bora Bora
A dream landscape emerged as our dinghy sped through turquoise waters toward the uninhabited South Seas islet of Tapu. Here, on a triangular speck of sand and coconut palms at the bottom of the world, red hibiscus, white gardenia and yellow plumeria blossoms were strewn on the water at land’s edge. As we stepped from the boat, a sommelier offered flutes bubbling with Dom Perignon. Behind him, china and crystal sparkled on a dining table positioned in shallow water at the edge of the lagoon. A French sous-chef, wearing a tall white toque, worked nearby, partly hidden behind a grill disguised by palm fronds.
It was just another day in paradise for the staff of the St. Regis Resort, Bora Bora, where producing dream scenarios is part of the job. On this April afternoon, staffers were helping a couple celebrate an anniversary, and I had tagged along.
NH Rejects Real ID Law
New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch last week signed into law a bill that forbids New Hampshire government agencies from complying with the controversial federal national identification act, or Real ID bill.
The New Hampshire Legislature had overwhelming passed the bill this past spring and handed it off to Lynch, who signed it on June 27.
“Real ID is intended to make us all safer, which I think we can all agree is a laudable goal,” said Lynch in a statement. “However, I strongly believe Real ID’s proposed haphazard implementation and onerous provisions would have the exact opposite effect. The federal government obviously did not think this burdensome system through and that is why we in New Hampshire are right to reject it.”
Beautiful Turkey VR Scenes
Keith Martin posted some beautiful VR scenes from Turkey.