Sir Tim’s Ted talk was pretty silly but his interweb thingie is pretty cool and the true story deserves to be told. Now, for the first time, Verity Stob has that story.

Here, for the first time on the series of tubes that made Sir Tim famous, is the memo that he wrote to make it possible.

You will remember ages ago I knocked out a little app called Enquire on the Vax? It works quite well for organising stuff, so naturally the [nationality redacted] refuse to use it.

My idea is:

• Glue a few NeXT friendly graphics on the front of Enquire,
• Sprinkle a few software marketing terms (’hyper-’ this and ‘turbo-’ that) to confuse the forces of darkness such as the Director and his bunch of admin zombies,
• Recode some of it in Objective C so that nobody can argue about which platform it runs on,
• Bung in the Ops manuals,
• Bung in the Unix man text - oops, I mean ‘hyper-text’,
• Push out the whole lot as a ‘Turbo Universal Reference Document System’ (TURDS for short - this part might need some more work) for the whole of the CERN network.

Neat, eh? No way is ISOLDE going to be able to touch our NeXT when she is running THAT beauty.

(By the way, have you seen Objective C? It’s a scream. It’s like the C language, into which somebody has melted half a pint of Smalltalk. You can bet your bottom dollar that THAT is not going to be around in 20 year’s time. By then, of course, we will all be coding in Occam.)

Read the whole memo at The Register.

Amazingly, our local NBC news stations did a broadcast 8 years earlier than Sir Tim’s fateful memo predicting the whole thing - but also predicted that the “tele-paper won’t be much competition for the printed kind”.

In the old days, we ran to USGS for our earthquake news.

Now we run to Twitter.

USGS should keep up with the times.

I’ve lost track… are conservatives for or against political correctness?

I just watched the Cramer interview on The Daily Show. Awesome.

Of the many, many blogs about the show, the most astute is Glen Greenwald’s in Salon who draws the broader picture - the only journalism happening on TV is on Comedy Central.

Greenwalds draws an interesting parallel between Cramer

CRAMER:  I always wish that people would come in and swear themselves in before they come on the show.  I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show.  It’s very painful. I don’t have subpoena power. . . .

and the run up to the Iraq War

BILL MOYERS: Critics point to September Eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable. Someone in the Administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES.  And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES.  It’s a circular, self-confirming leak.

TIM RUSSERT: I don’t know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.

My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

Greenwald:

Compare Russert’s self-defense to how and why he uncritically amplified Government lies (”I wish my phone had rung“) to Cramer’s pretense of victimization over the fact that CEOs lied to him and so there was nothing he could do but assume they were telling the truth (”I don’t have subpoena power”).  Stewart’s primary criticism of Cramer applies with exactly equal force to the excuse offered by Tim ”Wish My Phone Had Rung” Russert

The most illuminating moment in the Cramer interview was when Jon Stewart asked Cramer who is he responsible to? What’s his role? For whose benefit is Cramer reporting?

The whole news cycle is a game of prisoners dilemma, where the journalists and the politicians and the captains of industry have a lot to gain by cooperating with each other and a lot to lose by not playing the game.

Check out the little old lady at the back who won’t let her husband vote for McCain. Which way was his vote counted?

H/T Julio

I started reading The Economist as few years ago so I could find out what the other side had to say. One year I got a free subscription when I donated to KQED and since then, cheapskate that I am I have been holding out for another free subscription. But it never came and, after three years, I guess it’s not gonna. So I just coughed up some actual money for my subscription.

I was Jonesing for some conservative opinion and couldn’t wait for my newspaper to arrive, so I went online. I don’t know if I changed or if they changed - but I find myself agreeing with The Economist a  lot more than I used to. Maybe I need to find me something further to the right?

The election has taken a nasty turn. This is mainly the Republicans’ fault

AS RECENTLY as a few months ago, it seemed possible to hope that this year’s presidential election would be a civilised affair. Barack Obama and John McCain both represent much that is best about their respective parties. Mr Obama is intelligent, inspiring and appears by instinct to be a consensus-seeking pragmatist. John McCain has always stood for limited, principled government, and has distanced himself throughout his career from the religious ideologues that have warped Republicanism. An intelligent debate about issues of the utmost importance—how America should rebuild its standing in the world, how more Americans could share in the proceeds of growth—seemed an attainable proposition.

It doesn’t seem so now. In the past two weeks, while banks have tottered and markets reeled, the contending Democrats and Republicans have squabbled and lied rather than debated. Mr McCain’s team has been nastier, accusing Mr Obama of sexism for calling the Republican vice-presidential candidate a pig, when he clearly did no such thing. Much nastier has been the assertion that Mr Obama once backed a bill that would give kindergarten children comprehensive sex education. Again, this was a distortion: the bill Mr Obama backed provided for age-appropriate sex education, and was intended to protect children from sex offenders.

One of the cool things about The Economist is that they don’t feel the need to play the silly He said, she said games that mainstream American newspapers play. The never pretend that their coverage is objective. The news is always subjective. That’s true of all news outlets but The Economist doesn’t pretend otherwise.

They had a few words to say about Palin too.

Inexperienced and Bush-level incurious. She has no record of interest in foreign policy, let alone expertise. She once told an Alaskan magazine: “I’ve been so focused on state government; I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.” She obtained an American passport only last summer to visit Alaskan troops in Germany and Kuwait. This not only blunts Mr McCain’s most powerful criticism of Mr Obama. It also raises serious questions about the way he makes decisions.

…

Mr McCain’s appointment also raises more general worries about the Republican Party’s fitness for government. Up until the middle of last week Mr McCain was still considering two other candidates whom he has known for decades: Joe Lieberman, a veteran senator, independent Democrat and Iraq war hawk, and Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania (a swing state with 21 Electoral College votes) and the first secretary of homeland security. Mr McCain reluctantly rejected both men because their pro-choice views are anathema to the Christian right.

The Palin appointment is yet more proof of the way that abortion still distorts American politics. This is as true on the left as on the right. But the Republicans seem to have gone furthest in subordinating considerations of competence and merit to pro-life purity. One of the biggest problems with the Bush administration is that it appointed so many incompetents because they were sound on Roe v Wade. Mrs Palin’s elevation suggests that, far from breaking with Mr Bush, Mr McCain is repeating his mistakes.

Much to my dismay, he keeps writing good articles.

That’s how I learned a new language here: “Climate-Speak.”

It’s easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: “Just a few years ago …” Just a few years ago you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a 40-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But for the past few years, the rising winter temperatures in Greenland have melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. Put away the dogsled.

There has been a 30 percent increase in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet between 1979 and 2007, and in 2007, the melt was 10 percent bigger than in any previous year, said Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, which monitors the ice. Greenland is now losing 200 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from melt and ice sliding into the ocean from outlet glaciers along its edges — which far exceeds the volume of all the ice in the European Alps, he added. “Everything is happening faster than anticipated.”

The second phrase is: “I’ve never seen that before…” It rained in December and January in Ilulissat. This is well above the Arctic Circle! It’s not supposed to rain here in winter. Said Steffen: “Twenty years ago, if I had told the people of Ilulissat that it would rain at Christmas 2007, they would have just laughed at me. Today it is a reality.”

The third phrase is: “Well usually …but now I don’t know anymore.” Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders have known their whole lives have changed so quickly in some places that “the accumulated experience of older people is not as valuable as before,” said Rosing. The river that was always there is now dry. The glacier that always covered that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were always there when the hunting season opened on Aug. 1 didn’t show up.

No wonder everyone here speaks climate now — your kids will, too, and sooner than they think.

He wrote a fantastic one a few years ago drawing an analogy between Kennedy’s “we’ll put a man on the moon in ten years” vision with a future president’s vision of being energy independence in ten years. The idea is that we can make it cool to invent a solution that way it was cool, 40 years ago, to want to be an astronaut.

If one of the current candidates for president were to pull all their weight behind that idea, I think it would carry them home.

The Ranger makes a point that I have made a thousand times, comparing american nature documentaries to British ones:

To The Ranger’s British eyes, this American clip seems almost patronising and childish in its presentation. And yet the content is little different; the difference is purely stylistic. It represents another interesting cultural difference across the Atlantic. And of course, The Ranger is forced to wonder, what do viewers in the US and elsewhere think of the BBC’s Attenborough style of natural history presentation? Do they find these scholarly discourses dull and dusty? Do they long for the commentator to chuckle in an avuncular manner or say “Whooa!”?

Compare for yourself.

National Geographic:

BBC:

Another difference that The Ranger does not observe is that US documentaries are usually hosted by Hollywood actors while British ones are usually hosted by scientists.

Moral? If you want to do cool science, become an actor.

Nature documentaries was my favourite genre as I was growing up but now I can barely stand to watch them. When we discovered around episode three that the magnificent Planet Earth was originally narrated by David Attenborough, we turned it off and pledged to buy the British version on DVD so we wouldn’t have to listen to any more Sigourney Weaver.

Brooks is good today.

More fundamentally, McCain’s problem is that his party is unfit to govern. As research from the Republican pollster David Winston has shown, any policy becomes less popular when people learn that Republicans are supporting it. If the G.O.P. sponsored the sunrise, voters would prefer gloom. Many Republicans are under the illusion that they are in trouble because they’ve betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they’d been more conservative, they’d be even further behind.