The History of Assaulting Progress

I own many books in the genre of "non-fiction miscellany" (I find 'trivia' to be too, uh, trivial a term for these things). In any case, I just read in Panati's "Browser's Book of Beginnings" about the formation of FM radio (p.221-2). Basically, Edwin Howard Armstrong patented FM to provide a clearer, less static, signal than the currently dominant AM radio. His patent was in 1933 but FM didn't become available until the late 40s. Why? Well, before I answer that, I will ask you that if you *do* listen to radio, do you do so on AM or FM. I believe the majority will answer FM. OK, so let's continue.

According to Panati and the Wiki, RCA successfully sued the FCC to prevent FM from being allowed on the radio. The suit lasted years. Sarnoff, head of RCA, also sued to prevent Armstrong from getting patent royalties from inventing FM and Armstrong committed suicide in 1954 as a result of that battle.

Why did RCA try to block FM? Because they owned AM. Did RCA succeed in getting the FCC to hamstring and restrict FM? Oh yes indeed. Was this good for the world. No, I don't think it was - considering that everyone prefers FM.

Does this remind you of anything? I'm sure somebody put a list up somewhere, in some book, about these types of things - The History of Assaulting Progress - where a company, or the government - uses all of its resources to hurt others, and hurt progress, in order to keep its own money flow.

I'm not naive, so I am not arguing against commerce or against companies looking out for themselves. But if there's any mature theory of government (libertarians, Marxists, and fellow travelers need not apply), all of these theories try to strike a balance between individual rights and community rights. The corporation ("Big Business") is basically a private collection of individual rights - but the rest of society has a right to progress.

I'll look for the list of those who've assaulted progress but off-hand we can include all those Oil Companies, and their marionettes in the Republican Party including their bought and paid for President G.W.B, who furiously try to keep us from alternative fuel.

Pic of RCA from here, of Armstrong from the Wiki.

End Semester Nigh

I haven't blogged in a while because I'm working furiously to finish all my papers before the end of the semester. It's coming close... and then I'll be able to relax a bit and sort through all the ideas that have clogged unblogged. In this Fin-de-Siecle push, almost everything has been breaking down except for the overall health of my family (and may it stay that way!). My back has held up (but I did lose a tooth - long story), and compared to last year's hospital saga, this has been a breeze.

One last note, I am now indebted to Endnote that I will need to give it much love in an blog entry soon. It's so amazing, especially when paired with the academic search engines (PDF delivery machines, more like it), that I have through school. I know I'm in the right professional direction when I consider it a valuable professional perk to have access to a full online library.

Video of the Day: Agony of Defeat

The picture core I use for my self-made demotivator of the 2004 Election is of the iconic "agony of defeat" ski-jump crash of hapless Yugo/Slovenian skier Vinko Bogataj.

I looked a for a few minutes, right now, on google images and elsewhere for a better quality photo of the Vinksters crash, but couldn't find any. I did come across this awesome wikiness though:

The melodramatic introduction [of Wide World of Sports] became a national catch phrase that is often heard to this day. While "the thrill of victory" had several symbols over the decades, ski jumper Vinko Bogataj, whose dreadful misjump and crash of March 21, 1970 was featured from the early 1970s onward under the words "...and the agony of defeat", became a hard-luck hero of sorts, and an affectionate icon for stunning failure. ....

Bogataj's mishap is also commemorated in Rich Hall's book Sniglets as "agonosis," which is defined as "The syndrome of tuning in on Wide World of Sports every weekend just to watch the skier rack himself."

Yes. Yes I had agonosis for years and was only diagnosed a few minutes ago! But Youtube has cured all of we agonosis suffers, and those with similar afflictions, which is why we can say we live in a glorious agem - freed from television's cruel schedule. (Note, I may have to make a better 'tube):

National Do Not Call Registry

Whenver some jackhole Republican-Libertarian says that government does not work, don't point to the moon landing (which they won't believe) or World War II - a better example is: National Do Not Call Registry:

According to the 2009 Economic Report of the President, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors: The program has proved quite popular: as of 2007, according to one survey, 72 percent of Americans had registered on the list, and 77 percent of those say that it made a large difference in the number of telemarketing calls that they receive (another 14 percent report a small reduction in calls). Another survey, conducted less than a year after the Do Not Call list was implemented, found that people who registered for the list saw a reduction in telemarketing calls from an average of 30 calls per month to an average of 6 per month.

And for cellphone, this website sez:

In most cases, telemarketing to consumers' cellular phones is illegal. Telemarketers cannot call you on your cell phone without your prior consent.

If you would still like to get on the National Do Not Call Registry, the do not call list for cell phones is the same list as for land lines. You can join the list online or by calling a toll-free number.

To join online, visit Donotcall.gov. You'll enter your cell phone number with area code and a valid email address. Telemarketers should stop calling your number within 31 days of your registering.

To join via telephone, call 1-888-382-1222 from the number you want to add to the list. Follow the prompts on the recording and your number will be added to the list.

Pic from the second website.

Twitter Tax

I'm usually up-to-date, give or take a few months, of new technology except for those which require large expenditures of time or money (e.g. hence why I'm about 20-30 years behind video games). But communication tools are my wheelhouse and that's why I'm an avid email/web/cellphone/blog user. I haven't been able to upgrade to a blackberry because I don't have the money (same thing with an iPhone, although my bad experience with the iPod, specifically the incompatibility with PCs, have militated me against mapple).

Yet there are two current tech-trends that I have not leapt on: texting and twittering. Texting is possibly a generational thing, or manual-dexterity thing, but I have a feeling it's also from personality difference. Despite my fishbowl professions and my public presence, I am jealous about my time-management and private space. So even back in the 90s, when texting was called "IM," I didn't do it. It's against my brainworks to be at someone else's schedule or hierarchy of topic importance. IMing also would crash my OS.

True, because I don't value IM/Text/Twit, I then expand that devalue to disdain - for the mechanism and even for its advocates. The message quality of IM/Twit is meager and made more for speed than comprehension.* Who needs that.

But that brings us to Twitter. As some random dude I read on a blog comments page (I think Balloon Juice, who have great commenters) Twitter exploded because the iPhone made it easy to do - that 'platform' is a key gateway to technology acceptance (an example, from me, for this is why DVDs caught on swiftly even though they replicated the {much more expensive} laserdiscs). So no iPhone for me, no twitting.

But it appears to be a slightly expanded form of Instant Messaging and I say the hell with it. [See the second pic to get the reference] And I think Twitting has been accepted by the mainstream codgers with a relish that feels creepy; it's almost as if journalists scoffed at blogs, found out that soon blogs were eating their lunch, and didn't want it to happen again so they vowed to indiscriminately accept the next new tech tool. Twitter was next up the pike, so they grabbed it.

A different theory is that journalists and politicians actually do think in 140 character bursts.

In either case, I'm annoyed by any reference to twitter, twitting, tweeting, twooting, or what-have-you, and I've decided to add a Twitter Tax to any company that broadcasts proudly that I should follow them on Twitter. Yeah? You really think I'm so dim that I will eagerly invite you to pour 140-character spam into my phone/laptop? A tax on you!

*=link to a good NYer article by Louis Menand on text-culture. Pic from here, a similar curmudgeon. Second pic from here but originally from NewYorker.

Three Cheers for the Intertubes

As I am one of the alta-kockers of my grad program, I've been regaling the whippersnappers of what life was like before the Internet. First of all, the internet (and the cellphone) are utterly life-saving bits of technology that I (should) thank my Good Sweet Lord every day for. A vehi-ratzon, maybe? Anyway, before the intertubes, we needed to go to the physical building called the Libary (a.k.a. Library). And, while that could sound like a snide-bit of aggressive nostalgia, I will assure you that being chained to any physical book or building was *terrible* for learning things. The very existence of the reference section is testimony to how hard it was to find info: because if all you *could* research was limited by: (1) how large your library was, (2) what it's purchasing budget was deigned to be by the slack-jawed neanderthals who run local government, and (3) the book wasn't taken out/lost/misshelved.

This is why the internet should be credited with opening a revolution in information. This is also why I support any project - Google Books, or what have you - that will scan every single book ever published and put it online.

Those who oppose that project fall into three categories: (1) People who hate books, so why clog the valuable tubes with books when there's so much porn to tweet (or whatever); (2) aggressive nostalgics who want everyone to smell the sweet tang of paste, B.O. and dust mites that make up the musk of municipal libraries; (3) book publishers who like their undead brethren in the music industry, want to bottleneck supply so as to substantiate their poor career choice (what, you couldn't sell cigarettes to minors?)

It's the third group that's most menacing. They're akin to the insurance executives who deny coverage (because putting up physical roadblocks in front of ambulances is too time consuming, what with EMTs being so wily). I wish the anti-progress executives (cf. these industries: insurance, tobacco, oil, auto) would discover that while it is definitely EASIER to make money by choking off all potentially better alternatives (green tech, fuel efficiency etc) it is MORE LUCRATIVE to be the first in the great new technologies.

So too with publishing; the availability of online books is an absolute untrammeled good (ignoring the paste freaks above). Find a way to make money on the delivery systems (invest in the next generation kindles, por ejemplo). Know when it's time to step out of the way of the tsunami instead of trying to build a stronger stop-wall...

All this is a long-winded, hey-I'm-Back-Blogging intro to something I found the other day. The London Times is putting up the old (19th Centurty) archives online. Allowing we intertube surfers to read things like the book review for Tess of D'Ubervilles: Mr. Hardy's New Novel.*

[First pic from here, second here.]

Jastrow Online

Over the past few days I have been obsessively going through the free downloads on Google Books. In general, I am a huge fan of the Google Books project - it is a dream of mine that I could do complete library research (with downloading and printing) while sitting at home (preferably in pajamas).

Google has been trying to scan books into their online engines; personally, were I a man with power (=money/elected office), I'd make a law to have every new book loaded online into the Library of Congress. Not scanned - like the googlers - but the actual text: since every book passes through a word processor at one point, this shouldn't be so hard.

Yeah, I know, Napster has killed popular music (note, it hasn't as far as I can tell), so Google Books will kill books. Bull-sheisse. Every author I know (including myself), while they naturally like money, like fame even more. And if a book is available to EVERYBODY at all times, like it would if it were online, then fame is as rapid as a key-word search.

Ahem. Anyway, Google, as part of their book project, has been scanning into downloadable PDFs as many books as they can that have lost their copyright. Which means many century, or more, books are now free for the taking. This includes a lot of Judaica, and that's what I've been plundering over the past few days.

One of the best finds? One half of the famed Jastrow Talmud dictionary is online, free to download: Jastrow: A Dictionary of the Targumim,etc. vol. 2

Volume 1 is still missing as a bulk download (but each page of the original is available here - but grabbing it page-by-page is too arduous for even this obsessive).

Make Your Own Demotivator

Here's one device to make your own de-motivation poster. This genre of humor is one of my very favorites. It's got the right combination of art, humor, and tar-black cynicism. A few choice examples:

Inauguration As Close as You Want It

Via Sullivan, absolutely incredible technology harnessed by David Bergman to allow you to view Obama's inauguration with stunning acuity. Go here.

The Comic Book Periodic Table of the Elements

This website is a perfect example of why the Internet is necessary - because it is the closest we have come to mimicking how our brains work. These dudes combine high and low, science, comic books, and put it together in a manner that until now has only existed in our skulls.

For You Dafyomiites - ShasPod.com

I've heard good things about this - a whole shas-worth of Dafyomi shiurim on one I-Pod: ShasPod.com

Considering that I don't own an I-Pod yet, this may be just the ticket.