From yesterday’s N.Y. Times Week in Review, a brief item noting that an asteroid entered the earth’s atmosphere in June somewhere over the Mediterranean and exploded with the force of a Hiroshima-strength nuclear bomb. U.S. instruments detected the explosion and properly identified it as the random natural event it was. A U.S. officer quoted in the story asks us to imagine that the asteroid had been poised over, say, India or Pakistan: “To our knowledge, neither of those nations have the sophisticated sensors that can determine the difference between a natural N.E.O. [“near earth object”] impact and a nuclear detonation.”
Archives for October 2002
Busy, busy
Network problems at our SF office kept me off-blog yesterday and much of today (that previous post was written but never upstreamed until a little while ago).
Also keeping me busy was this (of interest only to followers of the matter of the Enron/Tom White story by Jason Leopold that Salon removed from its site).
The Zoe explanation
Probably because I’ve written about “personal information managers,” I’ve occasionally received e-mails about Zoe — an innovative e-mail indexer. But I could never make much headway from Zoe’s site toward figuring out exactly what it did. Now, thanks to this Jon Udell column from O’Reilly, I get it: Zoe Googles your e-mail stash, turning it into a permanently accessible, organized, useful, Web-formatted archive.
This is fantastic. I can’t wait to set it up — though “Release 0.2.6” makes one wary, and I worry how much volume it can handle. (There’s quite a bit of old e-mail in my archives.) In the meantime, here’s a bit from Udell’s column:
Zoe doesn’t aim to replace your email client, but rather to proxy your mail traffic and build useful search and navigation mechanisms. At the moment, I’m using Zoe together with Outlook (on Windows XP) and Entourage (on MacOSX). Zoe’s POP client sucks down and indexes my incoming mail in parallel with my regular clients. (I leave a cache of messages on the server so the clients don’t step on one another.) By routing my outbound mail through Zoe’s SMTP server, it gets to capture and index that as well. |
Just how inevitable is an invasion of Iraq?
As part of my reunion extravaganza, the high school newspaper that first led me down the journalism path was celebrating its centennial. (Alas, its Web site does not appear to be fully operational at the moment.) On Saturday morning I moderated a panel of some of the paper’s more illustrious alumni on the subject of “The Press, the Presidency and Wartime.”
What surprised me was the consensus among the panelists — historian Robert Caro, polling superstar Mark Penn, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher and veteran DC corresondent Nicholas Horrock. When pressed, they generally agreed that it’s more likely we will not wind up in a shooting war in Iraq, and that the entire process we’re witnessing today is an elaborate game of chicken to bend Saddam to our will, or force his peaceful ouster. (Caro offered thoughtful parallels to the Gulf of Tonkin era –Johnson won the political battle for authority to use the military in Vietnam, and ironically it sunk his presidency — but begged off the contemporary analysis.)
It was fascinating to hear this from such a diverse and well-informed group. I hope they’re right. (Today’s Tom Friedman column shares this view.) If it’s all an act, I have to say, it’s a very convincing one. And of course we need to remember that games of chicken (the classic version, where two cars head for a dead-on collision to see who will swerve first) don’t always end well; sometimes either or both parties end up bleeding by the roadside.
History is littered with diplomatic car-crashes that caused unimaginable pile-ups — games of chicken that led to out-of-control wars. The worst-case scenario is August 1914. Those diplomats on the eve of the First World War thought they were playing out their hands in a finely tuned international game; they ended up sparking mass slaughter on a hitherto unimaginable scale. I wonder: Has anyone in the Bush White House read “The Guns of August”?
Radio silence, ended
On my departure last week I foolishly failed to properly set up my Radio software for remote access. (Actually, it was set up, I just failed to take the information with me that would have allowed me to post by e-mail.) Sorry for the dead air. I’m back now.
Traveling
I’m traveling Thursday — returning to my native New York for (gasp!) my 25th high school reunion. Posting will be sparse…
When tantrums strike…
…What’s a parent to do? What’s a bystander to do? David of No Code has some insight: “I remember that it was always easy to judge what another parent should do with the god-awful screaming kid in the middle of the store.” If you’ve ever been there (I have, thankfully not often) you’ll want to read this.
Salon panel at Cody’s
Readers in the Bay Area are invited to Cody’s Books in Berkeley, where on Thursday evening (Oct. 3) a panel of Salon editors and contributors — including David Talbot, Joan Walsh, Jennifer Sweeney and Chris Colin — will talk about “Afterwords,” our anthology of coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath. More info here. It’s free.
Metatags, R.I.P.?
Andrew Goodman writes that metatags — those labels hidden in Web pages’ HTML that are supposed to help search engines determine what the pages are about but that have become a tool for out-of-control online marketing — are dead.
He’s probably right. As he points out, Google has managed to create the most useful search engine to date by downplaying metatags. But note that he qualifies his conclusion fairly narrowly: “Metatags as we know them today – I refer specifically to the meta keyword and meta description tags inserted into the head of an HTML document – don’t factor into this future.” This qualification is important, because, while HTML metatags have proved far too easy to abuse, the concept of meta-information — information that describes what other information is about — will only become more important as the Web continues to grow in both volume of information and complexity of available services.