I woke up this morning as I have most every morning that I have lived in the US, listening to Carl Kasell’s voice and the morning news.  I was sad to hear, about halfway through the hour’s news, that Carl Kasell is actually retiring from the morning news - a post he has held since 1979 when Morning Edition was invented - at the end of this year.

I will miss the scratchy, comforting, and “tell it how it is” voice of Kasell in the morning, but am heartened that he is now devoting all of his energy to his role on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.  As with the retirements of Walter Cronkite* or Tom Brokaw, I wonder who could possibly fill these shoes.

Kasell was as much a part of my life as the smell of Mom’s tea.  I am sure many of you will miss him as well.

* Ok, so I was only 1 when Cronkite retired, but he made a big impression

The most curious thing happened to me while buying a book, Seeing by Jose Saramago, at Bridge Street Books in Georgetown this evening. Seeing, the dust cover explains, is about an election in the capital, where more than 70 percent of the final votes cast are actually blank. “The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. The president proposes that a wall be built around the city to contain the revolution. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that had hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? Is she the organizer of a conspiracy against the state?”

I was debating whether to get the hardback of Seeing, which I had found on the table outside of the bookshop, or the more expensive paperback of Blindness, Saramago’s earlier book, and widely accepted as a classic. While in debate, one shop assistant pegged me, without hesitation, as a spend thift, and didn’t mind saying so, in case I didn’t know myself. “We have Blindness, but not at a price like that. It’s 14.99 I think.” He calls upstairs, “Do we have Blindness up there, Cory?”

Cory walks down with the book, and I sit down to compare the two. Saramago, apparently, is a Nobel Prize winner (as I learn from the cover of Seeing), and I ask if he won it for Blindness. The assistant behind the desk, who is sorting through some files–not in a determined way, but in an end-of-the-day kind of way–scoffs (lightly), “You don’t win the Nobel for one work.” Satisfied that I know nothing about literature, he returns to his assumption of my thrift.

I end up deciding on Seeing, for its seemingly more political connotations. Cory rings me up, and asks if I want a bag. “No thanks,” I say. “Alright, going to show it off, then,” he replies, not in a condescending way, but more matter of fact. Perplexed by such a comment, a once-more immediate judgement, I can only reply, “No need to show off.” Leaving the shop, I walk a few steps on the brick-laid sidewalk and think of a better reply. “Actually, I intend to read it. That is what you do with books, isn’t it?”

How can anyone be happy in a town where the workers at a bookshop believe the books are bought only for ornament? And did they not see an ounce of irony in selling me a book entitled Seeing?

Wired takes a look back in history today, all the way back to the first attempts to put newspapers online. While I get most of my news online these days, I still enjoy the Sunday paper to lounge with. And there is just something satisfying of the smack of a paper on the pavement in the morning as the coffee brews…

Yes, it’s been a while since I posted anything.

Yes there are lots of things to say.

But for now, I give you some builders in tutus.

My sister Melissa and her husband Stuart gave me an iPod when I was about to leave for Oxford.  How fitting, then, that a mere few weeks before I leave these soggy isles, Ye Olde iPod should bite the dust.

Being an inquisitive kind of guy, I of course decided to dissect this tomb of digital music.  Here, for those interested, are the innards of a once-great companion of mine, that had kept me company on many a transatlantic flight.

Of particular significance in this story is that, seven years on, I actually still had the little bugger! I have what some people may call a propensity to absent-mindedness at times, and as a kid would often hop in the car to school without my bassoon, or books, or shoes. I had a tendency to. . . well. . . lose things.  So My Dear Sister, with all her love, decided to laser-etch a little reminder for me on the back of my iPod.  Lis, aren’t you proud of me?  If only Phred had come with a similar note. . .

I saw a bunch of these running around Paris last weekend as I sat at cafes revising my thesis (no joke, that’s really what I did while in Paris). I immediately took to them because of I saw their anomalous status within the usual two-wheeled/four-wheeled world of transport. Since most of my research is about analysing anomalies in classification systems, I was amused to see this piece on the BBC about how you don’t actually need a license to use one.

I’ve been watching the evolution of ’swine flu craze’ with an increasing amount of interest. There is much talk from various media outlets about it being a global pandemic, but with some voices of reason chiming in, such as the New York Times Lawrence K Altman. The world seems a-twitter with people blowing the scare out of proportion, and this has in turn produced some amusing commentary on the instant-know, vacuous updates that seem to permeate so many lives in the always-connected world. I am not a big fan of twitter or updating my facebook status, but then again, it was a good way to tell people about my new position at Harvard, and for them to comment on it.

Jon Stewart pokes his usual fun at the cable news networks for grabbing up the story and making news of it, rather than doing a little investigation before going on air. It is another example of the drive to create news rather than taking time to think through what is actually worth putting on air. Some argue that the 24-hour news networks mean that news comes with less filters, allowing the person watching to make up their own minds on what they are seeing. But I find it unconvincing that there aren’t at least institutional filters through which news is selected for airing. Actually, it is probably the case that the institutions do most of the thinking on these cases instead of the people informing us (I won’t say ‘reporting’). What do you think are the values embodied in the institutions that govern news flow? There are likely right-wing/left-wing biases, and in a competitive market place viewer count is probably another value. But what happened to values like integrity, consideration for multiple viewpoints, and a reflexive view e.g. on the effect scare-mongering can have on the public?

I am also fascinated by all of the thermal imaging equipment in use at airports to monitor who has fevers when coming out of customs. I have a large section of my thesis discussing the dual-use capabilities of thermal imaging systems, and this is a clear case of how they can be very helpful in a non-military setting. Many airports installed (or at least bought) thermal imaging systems after the SARS outbreak in 2003. That they could suggests that multilateral export controls are either a) lenient enough for such legitimate uses to be realised, or b) ineffective because they just bought them from China. I’m not sure there is a way to tell which is the case.

It’s not everyday that you see a piece of technology that really changes the way you think about, well, technology. The work shown here by Festo is absolutely amazing. The materials—and applications of those materials—they are developing boggle my mind at the moment.

In my quick breakfast browse of the news this morning, I came across an article on the BBC about Spotify, a service that is trying to change the way we interact with music.

Instead of paying for and downloading music, you can listen to any track/album/genre you want (that is on their system) for free. The catch is that you have to hear an ad every 20 minutes. That is something I can definitely deal with to be able to hear the music I want.

Spotify is an experiment. Instead of asking “who owns the music?” they completely circumvent the issue by putting it in the public domain, much like a radio station. But the idea is that, in order to hear the music, you have to listen to it through spotify, and therefore will hear the ads.*

I see this as a very democratic technology development, and plan on supporting it as much as I can (read: not subscribing, but listening!). They seem to have a growing classical collection too, though I haven’t wandered around it too much yet (this is just my morning breakfast break after all).

I should note that I am still a big fan of Pandora, even though it’s difficult to get here in the UK. Pandora is a very different idea than Spotify, though, and I believe both can live well together. Pandora focuses on introducing people to new music like the music they already know, which I find an invaluable service, and one of the most useful sites on the internet. But when I want to listen a particular song or artist, I’ll be checking Spotify first from now on.

In the quest to continually reduce my expenses so that I can, well, feed myself, Spotify looks like it will my tummy full and my ears happy. Yum yum.

* There is the option to pay a daily/monthly subscription of £0.99/£9.99 (in the UK) for ad-free content

[techie note: Spotify appears to run a version of Wordpress, the same free software that powers this site. I approve.]

[UPDATE: looks like the free version is only available in some European countries at the moment. People in the US will either need to pay or wait.  Ah well, you still have Pandora to keep you happy.]

I’m not sure if I believe in fate, higher powers, and the like, but occasionally, it seems very obvious that something is trying to help me out.

Such is the case at the moment with gmail. Apparently it has been down for a little bit, and after trying myriad ways to pull it back up, I must finally accept that this is, for all intents and purposes, an omen that my thesis is where my focus needs to be.

Of course, the more astute of you will wonder why I’m taking the time to post this. It’s called meta-procrastination.

Ok, back to writing. . .