Cranezilla --Mark Crane's collection of rarely annotated links

Rejection letters are never fun to get in the mail. As a writer, you either have to get used to people saying they're not interested in your numerous queries and book proposals, or you need to find another profession where people hug you all day long.

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, April 30, 2002 |

Without providing any details, Pavitt acknowledged his agency's intelligence-gathering capabilities had been tremendously boosted since September 11 and now exceed those it had during the Cold War.
"Today, the year 2002, I have more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA," he said, adding that the agency was now training more than 10 times as many operatives than just five or six years ago.

# posted by craniac @ Monday, April 29, 2002 |

The Post-it Note’s tactile simplicity is misleading in another way as well. While it often stands in counterpoint to the digital office, a throwback to the days of paper clips, staplers, and typewriters, the Post-it Note is actually postmodernism writ on a square of yellow paper. Unlike its predecessor, the memo, which functions as a self-contained message, the Post-it Note is an analog forebear to hypertext; it acknowledges in its very construction that what’s most important is context – and that context is where you make it, achievable with glue as much as any organic cohesion of ideas.

# posted by craniac @ Monday, April 29, 2002 |

Eventually, however, Fry experienced another moment of inspiration when preparing a report for his boss: to call attention to an important reference, Fry drew an arrow on one of the bookmarks and affixed it to the report. When his boss returned the report with his own comment written on the bookmark, Fry realized his invention might appeal to more than just fastidious hymnal users.

# posted by craniac @ Monday, April 29, 2002 |

Citing concerns about children who lug heavy backpacks in schools, an Assembly committee voted Wednesday to approve a bill that would set maximum weight standards for textbooks.

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, April 27, 2002 |

Takahashi realizes that his book may annoy Microsoft corporate types.
"Any of the insidery stuff they just really didn't want to get out," he said. "The fact that the initial code name was Project Midway -- they don't want the Japanese people to know that because it will hurt their feelings." The Battle of Midway in 1942 was the turning point of the Pacific War. Before the November 2001 launch of the Xbox, all of the players in the console hardware market -- Sony, Nintendo and Sega -- were Japanese firms.

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, April 27, 2002 |

For years, long-distance calls were more expensive than local calls because providers such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint Corp. had to pay fees to local phone companies to have their long-distance calls begin and end on local networks. Over time, the Federal Communications Commission has reduced those fees from several cents each to only half a penny apiece, Pulver said.

"A lot of cost is from originating and terminating a call, not how far it goes," he said. The marginal cost of carrying a call farther on a company's phone network amounts to "some fraction of a penny per call."

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, April 27, 2002 |

"The supposed explosion of digital creativity
on a million websites and a thousand channels... Well,
come 2002, it boils down to 95% market share by a single
ruthless feudal empire! And you wonder where your
excitement's gone? A thing like Linux... that isn't a
competitive free-market innovation, that thing is like a
slave revolt.

But it gets weirder. The public interest in public-
domain intellectual property freezes dead with the humble
birth of a cartoon mouse on a tabletop in Kansas City. The
Mouse is flash-frozen in legal ice. He's unrotting. He's
undying. He's cryogenically preserved.... In ancient
Rome, folks thought it was pretty decadent when the
Emperor Caligula made his horse into a Senator. But in
the modern US Senate, there's a Senator who's a cartoon
mouse!"

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, April 23, 2002 |

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:50 PM PST on April 15

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, April 16, 2002 |

The trouble is, the whole concept of measuring software productivity in "man-years" or "man-months" is profoundly discredited -- and not by some radical new theory of software development, but in what is probably the single most seminal work on software management: Frederick P. Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month," first published in 1975, when Bill Gates was a stripling and personal computing a dream.

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, April 13, 2002 |

Adding the 307 and 1,138 figures equals the alleged 1,445 alcohol-related deaths annually among college students.
But Hingson relies on a key, but unsupported assumption. It does not automatically follow that college students constitute 31 percent of alcohol deaths simply because 31 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are college students.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, April 12, 2002 |

From your OpenMG Jukebox playlist, you are allowed 3 simultaneous downloads (or "check-outs") of a song at one time. Once all 3 check-outs have been used up, the song will still exist on your harddrive, and you will still be able to play it on your computer's jukebox. However you won't be able to download it to another MD until one of the checked-out copies is checked back in. Checking-in a track will delete the song from the MD and increment the number of your available check-outs in the jukebox by one. Note that there is no way to upload a track recorded on an MD up to the harddrive at high speed (and the "check-in" process doesn't involve any actual audio upload). This is an unfortunate limitation for those that were hoping to be able to transfer their live recordings and interviews onto their harddrive to use with other applications. Perhaps in the future...? The speed of the PC-to-MD transfer ("check-out") depends on the selected MD recording mode - 2-4x for SP (292kbps ATRAC), 16x for LP2 (132kbps ATRAC3), and 32x for LP4 (66kbps ATRAC3).

# posted by craniac @ Thursday, April 11, 2002 |

In this changing world, the norms and practices of the lumbering print media leave it increasingly vulnerable to nimble online critics. Over the last two weeks, for example, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman has blasted the right in columns on David Brock's book and Social Security. But Krugman-bashers like Sullivan have unlimited space and time to tear him apart for days between his twice-weekly 700 to 800 word columns. It's no contest, and it's even worse for news reporters who have no means for responding to critics at all.
The newest example of the war between the online and establishment media comes from Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt, who is "widely considered the most slavish recipient" of leaks from Ken Starr's Office of the Independent Counsel, according to an article by Marshall on Salon.com [Salon Premium subscription required]. Following her March 20 story with Neely Tucker on Robert Ray's final independent counsel report, MWO blasted Schmidt as "Steno[grapher] Sue Schmidt" and told readers to e-mail her, presumably to express their discontent with her reporting.

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, April 09, 2002 |

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002, introduced by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., would give the entertainment and technology industries up to 18 months to agree to a technological standard that would halt the spread of unauthorized copying of digital video and audio.
The bill would require this on any "digital media device" -- any hardware or software that reproduces, converts, retrieves or accesses copyrighted works in digital form. Penalties for altering the standard would be $200 to $2,500 per violation.

# posted by craniac @ Monday, April 08, 2002 |

(Don't get me started on intuitive. You know what's intuitive?
Fear of heights. Everything else we call intuitive, such as walking or using
a pencil took years of practice. Is that what we want? A control that takes
years of practice?)

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, April 06, 2002 |

That is to say, I am not a fan of the student centered class as it is often
outlined. I have had too many experiences and good teachers that have
pointed me in directions and made things that I thought dull, very
interesting and important. If we only stayed with those thing we knew and
were interested in, life would be dull indeed (not to mention very limited).
We are after all rhetoricians. The trick is not to let students decide the
way, but to get them to think they are deciding the way. Rhetoric can be a
really interesting thing to learn (even if students don't know what it is
when they begin the course).

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, April 06, 2002 |

We sometimes think of Sesame Street as purely the result of the creative genius of people like Jim Henson and Frank Oz. But the truth is that it is carefully and painstaking engineered, down to the smallest details. There's a wonderful story, in fact, about the particular scientific reason for the creation of Big Bird. It's very funny. But I won't spoil it for you.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, April 05, 2002 |

There are, of course, blogs of all persuasions on the Net, but the stars of the genre tend to tilt right of center. This is understandable, given the leftward swing of the mainstream press. The Web is an outlet for ideologically homeless opinion-mongers, and the smart ones are using it. Their audience? Readers and viewers who are hungry for alternative points of view.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, April 05, 2002 |

This is the crucial difference between the Edison site and newer museums that many children are familiar with. Older museums tend to be places where you can see and learn, but not touch. The newer ones tend to be entertaining interactive spectaculars that say, "Touch me, please," but at their most superficial are not easy to distinguish from Chuck E. Cheese pizza parlors. Aside from a few push-button displays, including kinescopes of Annie Oakley and a boxing match, the Edison site is definitely in the former camp.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, April 05, 2002 |

"Believe me, things that the press is hearing about today as new initiatives were fully planned out as contingency actions years ago. Nothing happens on the spur of the moment here.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, April 05, 2002 |

I am convinced that if your heart is in the work, either you will find your audience or your audience will find you. And if your heart isn't in it, find something else to do. Above all, we need to bring passion to our investigations, so that the highest scholarly standards can be informed not only by intellectual rigor but also by love.

# posted by craniac @ Thursday, April 04, 2002 |

One example of the suspicion attending my evident passion for maternity came from a colleague in my discipline, who wondered aloud, upon learning that I had four children, "Is she part of a cult?"

# posted by craniac @ Thursday, April 04, 2002 |

A new poll on sleep habits suggests that millions of Americans are in a bad mood, short-tempered and prone to overeat because they are tired.
The National Sleep Foundation Poll, released Tuesday, finds that people say they're much or somewhat more likely to make mistakes, get impatient or aggravated when waiting, or get upset with their children or others when they haven't gotten enough sleep the night before.
One fourth said they were more likely to eat more than usual on days when they didn't get enough sleep, with slightly more women than men reporting this was common.
"The poll establishes a direct association between how Americans are sleeping and their overall behavior, mood and performance," said Richard Gelula, the foundation's executive director. It shows 'you are how you sleep.' And it indicates that some of the problems that we face as a society, from road rage to obesity, may be linked to lack of sleep or poor sleep."

# posted by craniac @ Thursday, April 04, 2002 |

The test of any technology is the extreme case. For a car, it is surviving the Paris-Dakar Rally. For a hair dryer, it is baking Don King's hair into a ziggurat. And for TiVo, the digital video-recording device, it is capturing the wily and elusive Academy Awards broadcast.
In the past year, TiVo has been widely adopted in Hollywood, where it is beloved for its ability to store up to sixty hours of programming; to create a profile of its subscribers based on what they watch and then record shows it believes they will like; and to blitz through commercials at sixty times normal speed. In mid-March, TiVo sent its customers an e-mail urging them to build their Oscar nights around TiVo, but reminding them to "pad" their recordings by at least thirty minutes: "That way, in case the ceremony runs long (ahem!), you're covered."
David Park, an agent at United Talent Agency, went one step further. He said, "I set TiVo to record the Oscars"—slated to run from 5:30 to 8:30 P.M., Pacific Time—"and the hour-long Barbara Walters special that followed it. I knew I had four hours—plenty of time. My girlfriend and I came home after a lovely dinner and chilled on the couch, eating tiramisu and fast-forwarding through the boring parts, the technical awards. We saw Halle Berry freaking out, saw Julia Roberts freaking out, and then, right before she announced Best Actor—it cut off! I said, 'This totally sucks!' " The

# posted by craniac @ Wednesday, April 03, 2002 |