It might seem strange to talk of Web Classical Studies (net Antiquity?) but it’s been, what, ten Moore’s Law doublings since 1995?
But sticking to the topic of web Classical Studies, this Web 1.0 retrospective made me chuckle. Especially the part about 36 k modems. We use Journyx for our timesheets at work, and it sure feels like a 36 k connection… or maybe even a 14.4…
A story I’d seen in the Globe and Mail fell by the wayside when I’d first marked it for follow-up. I rediscovered it when periodically ploughing up old links, searching for overlooked or under-regarded treasure.
In brief, there is growing evidence that:
(a) the Green Revolution has not, by and large, provided sustainably higher yields than organic agriculture
(All but one of the seven links above point to different datasets — and that odd-one-out, from Grist, has additional data cited in one of the first comments.)
The Vancouver gold show was this weekend. Sadly, the freebies were scant this time around, even worse than during the “great lamentation” of mid-2005. The most creative one was from a company doing work in Australia, giving away monogrammed boomerangs. (Made in China, of course.)
Intriguingly, the free plastic bags featured additives from local company epi; they’re supposed to disintegrate the plastic into powdered pellets, over the course of a few months. I’d run into epi at an environmental show a few years back; they seem to’ve made some progress getting their products out there. It’ll be interesting to follow their business arc over the next few years.
A couple days ago, I came across two articles about Nippon Oil’s plans to JV their way into solar power and fuel cells production, respectively. Both projects are with Sanyo (recently taken over by Panasonic, the new official name of Japanese behemoth Matsushita Electric).
This struck me as inspirational, because Nippon Oil is Japan’s largest oil company! Its core competency, or comparative advantage, is fossil fuels and petrochemicals. But instead of choosing to fight a bruising, unethical, long rear-guard action to deny global warming or defend its old ways… management has decided the company needs to evolve.
It’s reminiscient of the decision by pulp-mill / tire-maker Nokia to get into telecommunications. I’m sure there were doubters — especially since their telco division took seventeen years to turn a profit. But was it worth it in the end? I’m sure every Nokia shareholder would now vote “yes”.
Yes, that’s an attempt at a pun.
In the past twenty-odd years, Microsoft has proven exceedingly good at dispatching business rivals. They’ve been unstoppable spider-killers.
Even Google’s search dominance is a limited direct threat — Google has captured a new market, they aren’t “eating Microsoft’s lunch”. And open-source alternatives (Linux, OpenOffice) have been the business equivalent of blackflies, as opposed to, say, Viking raiders.
Until now.
I’ve encountered a major fallacy in two fields, relating to the incorrect application of a steady-state assumption. So I’m making it a category.
I’m going to say arguments suffer from a steady-state fallacy when they improperly assume that a present-day circumstance will carry over unchanged into the future. Because over time, most circumstances do change. People get older. New technologies emerge. Empires fall, and new ones rise. And so forth.
A few examples below the fold…
This semi-recent New York Times post is about DVD’s being unreadable four years after they were recorded. It ties into one of my musings over the years — whether a medium’s information density is inverse to durability or recoverability. Or phrased differently, is the high storage density of electronic media a crippling strength, because the data becomes too “fragile”?
- - - - - -
The sturdy clay tablets of Sumeria have lasted thousands of years.
Paper and animal hide can store far more information per kilogram, but rarely last as long - if the Nag Hammadi Library or the Dead Sea Scrolls were stored in an area with any appreciable moisture (say, Vancouver, BC, Canada) they probably wouldn’t've survived the nearly two thousand years until rediscovery! Fortunately, copies are easier to make.
And electronic storage is the densest — but least durable — of all. (Four years?!) __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
Some ex-colleagues have started a building-integrated solar PV company, MSR Innovations. Cool stuff. The cooler thing, though, is that I found out about them through John Robb’s blog. The web: a highly circuitous way of keeping up with friends. 
Again via Rob Cottingham, an intriguing article that pre-workforce Millenials (aka Gen Y, aka the Net Generation) use e-mail less than their workforce Millenial counterparts — a lot less.
Continuing Casino Royale, I burst out laughing to read the following:
“…On the straight stretches the Amherst Villiers supercharger dug spurs into the Bentley’s twenty-five horses and the engine sent a high-pitched scream of pain into the night.”
James Bond’s first car was a twenty-five horsepower Bentley! Suddenly, the 110 horses of my first (and thus far, only) car, doesn’t seem so shabby.