Monday, February 3, 2003

Google News Question

We have an immediate need for a little help over here.

Calling Johnny Cochran

Phil Spector is being held "in connection" with the fatal shooting of a woman in suburban Los Angeles.

That's from MTV News, a source that seems a bit oxymoronic to me; but I haven't watched MTV in about 20 years, so whaddo I know?

Here's Reuters.

Insult to injury: The Beatles' Let It Be album will be re-released, without the stuff added to the original by Phil Spector.

Thanks to Dr. Weinberger for that second link.

GovID

Eric Norlin: The Coming of Governmental Identity.

Made the groundhog want PayPal yesterday

This makes my month.

And this...

...makes me think there should be some kind of Creative Commons use/relationship/licensing thing in respect to relationships between T1, T2 and T3 identity holders.

Compare and contrast

These are essays from a famous think tank.

These are link farmers who think publicly in a new kind of tank.

Bonus link: Blogs become key tools for developers, by David Becker

Funny how those brain dumps go

What I wrote about AOL's ongoing death went high on Daypop and Blogdex, and brought responses like this one. I'm still looking for solid subscriber numbers and trends, by the way. Don't have them yet.

In the interest of equal space, here's some pushback on the piece.

Voice of sanity

Janis Ian comes through again, with a brilliant L.A. Times op-ed inveighing against the suicidal insanities of the record industry:

The Internet means exposure, and these days, unless you're in the Top 40, you're not getting on the radio. The Internet is the only outlet for many artists to be heard by an audience bigger than whoever shows up at a local coffeehouse. The Internet allows people like me to gain new fans; if only 10% of those downloading my music buy my records or come to my shows, I've just gained enough fans to fill Carnegie Hall twice over.

With the court's decision, the RIAA didn't just defeat Verizon, the Internet service provider that the RIAA sued. It damaged the viability of recording artists who don't conform to the mainstream musical tastes of the moment.

Do you like '50s-style acoustic folk? Big band music? European synth? If the decision stands, you'll have to rely on word of mouth to find it -- not the Internet. Because if you get hold of an "infringing" file, you may find yourself on the receiving end of a record company lawsuit too expensive for any individual to fight...

The RIAA says it is doing all this to make more money for me and other artists like me, but don't be fooled. Many musicians would lose money, many fans would be denied a universe of new choices and the possibilities of Internet music would be cut off before the revolution even begins.

Thanks to Archipelago for the link.

Perspectives

Britt Blaser: Maybe we're all soldiers now—it can happen prety fast.

Allan Karl: I remember driving late night or early morning many years ago from the LA area to Edwards Airforce Base with a few friends. Going to the Mojave desert before sunrise. Why? To see the Space Shuttle land. To hear the Sonic Boom. To cheer our country's technological and aviational (sic) prowess, guts and success. Proud. It was so cool.

LookIt: I'm out of it. Growing up, I thought that the fascination with space was weird.

James Lileks: PLANT A FUCKING FLAG ON THE PLANET, I shouted at the radio. Pardon my language. But. On a day when seven brave people died while fulfilling their brightest ambitions, this was the wrong day to suggest we all stay tethered to the dirt until the sun grows cold. Are we less than the men who left safe harbors and shouldered through cold oceans?

Dave: Space travel is more important than the seven people who died and the billions of dollars that were lost. Every time we've gone to space there were benefits that we didn't know about before, that we reaped later. The computer you're using right now is a product of lots of space missions. This is where the moon mission style of development came from. I'm a big believer in it because it produces results. Declare an impossible mission and then achieve it. Then take stock. There's a pretty good chance you invented something important along the way. But you were too busy to notice.

Derek K. Miller: ...at the very lowest end of the range, with 34 deaths out of 450 spacefarers, we have a 7.5% death rate. In terms of the "dangerous jobs" statistics above, that's more than 7,500 deaths per 100,000. So being an astronaut or cosmonaut is well over 60 times as dangerous as logging, and has nearly twice the fatality rate as climbing the world's highest mountains.

Gregg Easterbrook (in 1980!): To truly grasp the challenge of building a space shuttle, think about its flight.

Ken Coar: A single madman with a bomb can break the peace; what has been learned from space will never be lost.

Shelley Powers: The Shuttle Columbia, the very ship we lost today, carried Chandra into space, and it is through Chandra that we've begun to learn about that greatest of mysteries, the black holes of space — the keys to the beginnings of time and light and life, itself. Here's Chandra's own slo-mo blog. Dig the pictures. They're amazing. The kid and I have been observing the three-dimensional universe with the help of Chandra and Starry Night Pro, an absolutely stunning piece of software.

Lou Josephs has advice for following NASA's highly public press briefings. Here's Lou's blog, with much more.

Laurel Clark: I have seen some incredible sights: lightning spreading over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis lighting up the entire visible horizon with the cityglow of Australia below, the crescent moon setting over the limb of the Earth, the vast plains of Africa and the dunes on Cape Horn, rivers breaking through tall mountain passes, the scars of humanity, the continuous line of life extending from North America, through Central America and into South America, a crescent moon setting over the limb of our blue planet. Mount Fuji looks like a small bump from up here, but it does stand out as a very distinct landmark.

Soundtrack

Before we went outside last night, the kid wanted me to play one song on the laptop's speaker system, which is the best in the house. When I asked him what he'd like to hear, he pointed to the list and said "that one."

It was Baja, by the Astronaunts, an outstanding surf instrumental. Can't get it out of my head.

The hard answers

Yesterday the kid wanted to know what, exactly, happened to the astronaunts when the shuttle "came apart" on re-entry. How were they killed? Was it the same as with the Challenger?

I lied. I told him both shuttles were blown into small pieces, astronaunts included. "Small pieces? How small?" More to the point, "Is there any way they could have lived, even for a little while?"

In fact, the Challenger astronaunts were apparently alive all the way down to the water, though it's not certain they were conscious.

What happened to the Columbia astronaunts is less clear. But I didn't want to tell him what I had read about the bodies.

Before we went outside to look at the stars, he said "What's seven and seven?" He knew he answer, but wanted me to give him the number anyway. "Fourteen," I said. "Why?"

"We need to pray for all fourteen astronaunts on the two shuttles," he said.

And so we did.