In one of my periodic attempts to make this column live down to its name, I offer these unsolicited opinions on miscellaneous topics. If anybody had asked for my opinion, these wouldn't be flames.
After disparaging Twitter in this column recently, I have seen an intriguing proposal for Twitter deployment. NASA wants to Twitter- and Facebook-enable its astronauts. Genuine celebrities engaged in life-threatening adventures, but whose sphere of activity is so circumscribed that their tweets actually have news value: Makes sense, in a twisted sort of way.
I'm tired of reading about the fractal beauty of nature. There are no fractals in nature. Fractals are infinite mathematical models that fit many natural phenomena extraordinarily well, so well that fractals are used in CGI to create realistic scenery for movies. But movies are dots on a screen. Beyond the dots, beyond the grains of sand on the coastline, fractal models implode. Fractals are only approximations to natural phenomena. (Or natural phenomena are approximations to fractals.) Emphasizing fractals so much could even get in the way of fully understanding time-based, self-similar natural processes of growth or decay. Fractals are a powerful tool for exploring these rich and mysterious phenomena, but only one tool. The fractal map is not the natural territory.
If I buy a digitally watermarked MP3 from Amazon and the publisher of the song later accuses me of stealing it, what's my proof of innocence? The watermark? You mean, an invisible code that I can't read?
Words are whores. If bigots and propagandists hijack words like "Christian" and "journalist" without challenge from those who think they have an investment in those words, the words soon belong to the hijackers.
That there exists such a thing as the Larry King podcast proves to me that I know nothing about media demographics.
Let me see if I have this right. Joe, we'll call him, evaluates Apple's iPhone against the existing smartphones and decides that it's worth $600 to him, even though he isn't thrilled about the AT&T-only service contract. He buys a phone and signs up with AT&T. Subsequently, Apple reduces the price to $400 and Joe cries foul. The phone that was worth $600 to him two months ago is now abusively overpriced. Next Joe voids his warranty and breaks out of the AT&T exclusivity by hacking the phone with software that he downloads from some German website. Apple cautions that phones hacked in this way will probably not work with future upgrades. Joe ignores this warning and installs the very next upgrade from Apple. His phone quits working. Joe and other Joes threaten a class-action lawsuit against Apple. No wonder Apple's chief lawyer quit.
I wouldn't mind joining in some mass action, like a boycott, against one of my pet peeves: Sites that abuse the intent of hypertext by turning every product or company name in their text into a really annoying and intrusive popup ad that blocks other text. I think these ads are horrible and make the sites they infest nearly unusable. I don't know why there isn't an uprising against this. I'm talking about the ads displayed by Kontera and Vibrant. Yes, sometimes you can turn them off, once they've annoyed you enough that you are driven to look for the off button.
The mantra of marketing and media for so long has been one-way communication: They produce it, we can take it or leave it. When that was a false choice, we took it. More and more now that we have the choice, we're leaving it.
At www.english360.com, they tell of a ceramics teacher who split the class in half and told one half that they would be graded solely on the quality of their work and the other half that they would be graded solely on quantity. In the end, the highest-quality works were all produced by the quantity-only group. You got a theory about why that would be?
When it comes to productivity, it's hard to compete with the combination of a skilled artisan and a tool that fits that artisan's hand like a second skin. After two years trying to make Ruby on Rails do what he wanted, Derek Sivers went back to PHP and finished the job in two months. Although, as he explains on the O'Reilly site, he appreciates Ruby on Rails and learned lots from the effort, PHP just thinks the way he does.
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
