Friday, August 4, 2006
After watching Larry King. Coincidence?
Britt Blaser: Queen Noor for President. One subhead: The Experts Usually Aren't. Specifically,
Have you noticed that the leading experts in the fields you know most about are better at being leaders than being expert? That’s because expertise is the stepchild of status, and a wholly different attribute. It’s a little like the absolute rule of male blood supply: few males have enough blood to operate a brain and a penis simultaneously. The "leading expert" corollary might be that few people have enough character to be a leader and an expert simultaneously.
Meanwhile, Stacy Schiff's July 31st New Yorker article on Wikipedia (regretably not online), William F. Buckley Jr. (a Yale guy, we should note) is quoted saying he would sooner "live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the faculty members of Harvard University." A number of whom were in attendance at Wikimania.
Pressback
Jay Rosen responds to Nick Lemann, Mitch Ratcliffe, et. al. Jay's bottom line:
Nick Lemann's article will help if it lowers expectations for "amateur hour." For I don’t think we know how to do users-know-more-than-we-do journalism… yet. My favorite moment was when he wrote: "Great citizen journalism is like the imagined Northwest Passage — it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can learn about public life without the mediation of professionals."
That really made me smile.
Analnymity
So I'm at a session about anonymity (among other things). What I can't get out of my mind is the ...lends incontrovertible truth to John Gabriel's Greater internet Fuckwad Theory cartoon.
Here for yourself
Jimmy Wales: In the next year, we will have a quality initiative. And, We need to turn out attention away from growth, and toward quality. Those are as close to verbatim as I could get. His speech, and everything at Wikimania, is being streamed. (Yes, it did open with Colbert's now-infamous broadcast.)
Guess we have to keep talking
StevenBerlinJohnson: Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?) I agree with #1, but not with the next 4. Sorry. (Backcreds to Mark Hamilton.)
Sometimes the Net finds damage and routes into it
The Slidell Huricane Damage Blog is back up. Weblogs Work sez, Please accept our apology for taking the site down and be assured that we will keep it running for the foreseeable future. Somewhat Frank sez, The moral of the story: don't break the web!
Who new?
Coolness
As we were flying from L.A. to Boston today, we diverted north to avoid weather, having already been told that Boston was, like the whole East Coast, in an awful heat wave. Somewhere over Wyoming we turned east. And then, near Toronto, the pilot came on and said "The Weather has turned. The wind is now out of the East, off the ocean, and the temperature has dropped to the low eighties." Right now, on Harvard Square, it's 67 degrees. People are out walking, just to take advantage of the natural air conditioning outside.
There are thunderstorms to the north and south, the weather map says, and the forecast is for more tomorrow.
Funny thing about the flight. It was a United 757, an old workhorse plane with TVs in the ceiling over the center aisle, and headset jacks that barely work. Mine did, and, as usual, I listened to Channel 9 on the audio system, which carries cockpit chatter with air traffic controllers. On most cross country flights, most of the chatter concerns turbulence, or "chop". If the going gets bumpy at the plane's altitude, there's a chance that it's less bumpy at other altitudes. You'll hear Denver Center say "you've got light chop for the next fifty miles or so at thirty-seven, and it's not much better at thirty-five". Or, "Continental 460, how's your ride?" Meaning that the Continental pilot can provide useful information about conditions for its flight path."
Generally pilots go out of their way to keep the seat belt sign off, and to avoid bumpy conditions, even though they're used to it. Not our guy. We had a couple of long choppy stretches that I'd call "light to moderate". I only heard him request information about conditions at other elevations once, in the region controlled by Minneapolis Center. The controller polled seveal other planes, all of which reported no chop. But our pilot didn't say anything and stuck at 37,000 feet. (Or, in aviation parlance, three seven zero.) What's more, he left the seat belt sign off most of the time. Turbulence didn't impress him, and I guess he didn't expect it to impress the passengers either. I don't think I've been on a flight in which the pilot left the seat belt sign off for longer in bumpy conditions. Some passengers appreciated it too, since it meant they could use the toilets, even though they had to hold onto seats and brace against walls.
Anyway, it's cool to be here. Hope it stays that way the next week.