Archimedes’ Hot Tub

My good friend Kathy Kleiman had a great moment recently, when she and one of the early ENIAC programmers, whose memory has been kept alive largely by Kathy’s efforts, went to Silicon Valley for a couple of major events: the programmer, Jean Bartik, was given a Fellows Award by the Computer History Museum, and then spent a chunk of time at Google.

Here’s Kathy’s post about the event, complete with video.  And a link to the ENIAC Programmers Project site, which Kathy maintains.

This Media Life article hits all the points of pain — the economic recession snowballs into a media depression, as big advertisers across-the-board cut back and some go out of business, reducing the overall number of potential advertisers. The ones that remain have shifted towards advertising that you can measure. Largely, that means they’re shifting online, where there is absurd overcapacity, depressing prices.
People like me need to gin up a new model (trust-fund journalism, anyone?), hunker down in the dirt-poor online advertising world until a massive amount of consolidation happens there, or find something else to do.

This Graham Greene quote on writing caught my eye:
“Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your 40s, by performance and not by promise.”

I don’t think it’s entirely accurate, though.  I think you’re past the potential stage in your 30s, for instance, and there’s still a certain amount of luck in it for all writers.  Nor do I think Graham Greene felt he was doing nothing well all those years.
From: Bail out the writers! in Sunday’s NYT.

I’ve recently published three different stories of human resilience.

The family that runs the James Hook & Co. lobster company decided to rebuild when their company burnt down at the end of May.  I spent the summer checking on their progress, and wrote this report of their still-unfolding story for the Boston Globe magazine.

Steve Sarowitz, a passionate yet gracious entrepreneur, walked me through a painful failed software project and how he led his firm through that low point to its strong market position today.

Holyoke has suffered badly with the decline in its economy over the last 40 years. But Daniel Ross and Nuestras Raices have used community agriculture to help move the community forward. Now his work is spreading to other communities.

The John Templeton Foundation this week in London held “A Big Questions Conversation: Does the free market corrode moral character?”

The Templeton Foundation (disclosure: I was a 2007 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion) has been taking out ads in various places featuring the expected — Robert Reich — and the less so — Garry Kasparov — on the topic. On its Web site, it has 13 essays and nine videos representing different opinions on the subject. It’s the latest of Templeton’s efforts to get people to think about the morality of the marketplace.

At the London debate were:

• John Gray, emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics and author of books like “False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism;” Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia”;
• Jagdish  Bhagwati, professor of economics and law at Columbia University and author of “In Defense of Globalization”;
• Bernard-Henri Levy, thinker, philosopher and author of books like “American Vertigo” and “Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.”

There’s a video of their discussion here, though I can’t get the video to work in my browsers. There is a transcript on the same page. It is not the most fluid transcript, with the occasional  ‘lazy affair’ for ‘laissez-faire,’ but all in all it’s a good read, perhaps because they don’t talk much about the question, but instead wander all over the economic and socio-political maps.

A few salient comments:

What we have in the world are mixed economies with the state playing a profoundly important role and an increased role.  And I do not expect in my lifetime
any reversion to the kind of economies that existed even a few
months ago.  It is too large a crisis and will require too much
state intervention. — John Brown

…there seems to be a tendency to think that somehow being in markets
is actually going to make you mean, greedy, whatever - I mean,
whatever you want to say.  And I don’t think it’s very - to me
that’s a bit of a welcome Marxist fallacy, that where you work
and what you do really defines your values.  — Jagdish Bhagwati

So I would not say that free market corrodes the moral
character.  I would say the reverse, the moral character, the
decline of the moral values of the democratic society, the decline
of the ideal which was expressed so well by great American,
English and French thinkers through ages this decline has
corroded and is still corroding the system of the free market. — Bernard Henri-Levy

To me, markets themselves are an amoral instrument, but they clearly reflect the interest of market makers, and thus can be instruments of morality, or plain old ethics.

I interviewed my friend and long-time colleague Mary Jo Foley about her book Microsoft 2.0. It appeared recently in Shukan Daiyamondo. To find out why she thinks Ray Ozzie needs to step up, why Steve Ballmer is the guy to run Microsoft, and why the company has a bright future even without Bill Gates, read the interview. Mary Jo Foley

A funny little bit on Gawker about how people want copies of today’s New York Times as a memento of yesterday’s historic election.  Can’t do that with an Internet headline, Gawker acknowledged. I am reminded that I once had a disk of the HTML files for the first-ever farewell Page One at my old newspaper, Copmuterworld. Even if I knew where the disk was (possible), I no longer have a way to read it.

Of course, electronic readers can’t protect the floor from a new puppy, either, but that’s just a market opportunity for the paper business.

I’m not sure when I stopped reading the funnies. True confession: they were the main reason I got the Sunday paper. (Then again, I no longer like playing in the rain, and only make snow angels for the principle of the thing.  No wonder I’ve stopped reading the comics.)  I get three Sunday papers and give the funnies to the kids.  So it was pure happenstance that I  saw the end of Opus.
“Bloom County” used to be one of my favorites, so I made myself go to the page on the Humane Society site where Berkeley Breathed said goodbye to Opus. (Don’t go to Breathed’s site — it’s so slow to load his tribute that it feels like accessing the Web on dial-up).  Having to disconnect from paper to Web was annoying; but it was worse that it stirred nothing.  I didn’t recognize the detritus that Breathed gathered to pull at the heart strings of loyal Opus followers, and thought the placing of him in Goodnight Moon was about Breathed, not Opus. I was happier seeing the sentiment in the eyes of Steve Dallas in the last panel in the paper.

Maybe I need to start reading the funnies again.

I’ve started a “5 Questions for” interview series with book authors over on Big Think.  The first two are with Steve Weinberg, on his recently published dual biography of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, “Taking on the Trust;” and Mohamed El-Erian, co-CEO and co-Chief investment officer of PIMCO, on his prescient investment book, “When Markets Collide.”

E-mail interviews aren’t my favorite — they don’t allow for the same opportunities to clarify thoughts as a live interview.  But they are quick to do, which means muckety-mucks who can type are willing to try them.

A lovely piece on Studs Terkel, who just passed away, or ‘checked out,’ as he would’ve said.  I never met Terkel in the nine years I lived in Chicago, and for some reason never listened to him on the radio, though I read several of his books.  After I became a journalist, I did buy a collection of his interviews on cassette, Four Decades with Studs Terkel, which is available used on Amazon.com and worth the entire penny, plus shipping. I listened in awe: Terkel was a master at turning an interview into an intimate conversation.

The update, Voices of Our Times, came out in 2005. It’s high time for me to upgrade, especially since I haven’t had a cassette player in years.