Accept no substitutes

Day: January 6, 2005

Fruits of Global Warming

January daffodil

Daffodils, quince, and 80 degrees F high predicted for next Thursday. This weekend will be cool in the mid-60s.

The downside is possibly melanoma.

Daffodils are early but they often wait til Saint David’s Day (March 1).

It’s hard to complain about this much beauty in what should be the dark of winter. Especially when the weather elsewhere is roughed and trying.

To add to the pleasure, I’ve sold a poem that will be the Valentine’s feature in the News and Observer.

All kinds of things are popping up.

CrossFIRED!

Bye to bow-tied twits and to Crossfire as we knew and hated it. Thanks to Jon Stewart.

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

The official CNN story on the CNN story here.

Transcript of the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire here.

Not that I ever express opinions here ;->

Many Smart People on What Cannot Be Proved (as yet)

“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the “esprit de divination”). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

“The 2005 Edge Question has generated many eye-opening responses from a “who’s who” of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers. The 120 contributions comprise a document of 60,000 words.”

From John Brockman‘s Edge come some unexpected responses from some very smart people.

Smart People say Dumb things (and Smart Things)

Bill Gates gets caught with a confused message about copyright in an interview with CNet and ends up calling people who want to share “Communists.” This is certain to throw the mostly Libertarian minded Free Software and Creative Commons folks into chaos — not. See boingboing for the best on this. And the /. responses.
He also has a lot to say about:

  • blogging (“I’ve toyed with doing one myself, but I don’t want to be one of those people who start and then don’t finish it, and again I’m thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks–something like that. I’d kind of like to, but I’ve got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.” and later “E-mail is inefficient today with seeing stuff that’s less relevant and how you organize it–bringing in the blog-type capabilities is very important there.”)
  • his beloved Xbox (“And Xbox Live is really talking to your friends, doing things with your friends”)
  • security (“Well, no one invests more in security of their browser than what we do on IE”)
  • FireFox vs IE (“In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.”)
  • Google (” We’ve been in the search business even before Google was around. The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board”)
  • and the future (“the tools around Windows and Office are not even half of what they will be.”)

More local media on local media

Fiona Morgan covers the Durham Herald axings more deeply than anyone so far in this week’s Independent. [This will move to their archives next week].

Geoffrey Graybeal reports, in the Chapel Hill Herald, that WCHL will have a new president and general manager when Walter Sturdivant comes in this week (?) to lead the station. Sturdivant is a UNC School of Journalism grad (1980) and was on the UNC football team where he lead the ACC in kickoff returns.

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