Author Archives: Paul

“Great is the truth, and it prevails”

The title of this post is the motto of Horace Mann, the high school I attended. The cover article of this week’s New York Times Magazine is a collection of stories of sexual abuse by teachers of students at the … Continue reading

Posted in Personal | Comments Off

IPOs (or why the absence of a pop is not a fizzle)

The big business story of the day is Facebook’s IPO, which is being described in the press as “modest,” a “whimper,” “fall[ing] short,” “sputter[ing],” “underwhelming,” and “a ho-hummer,” to pick a few choice terms. As even most of these articles … Continue reading

Posted in Business | Comments Off

Kindle Sample Optimization

One of the great things about ebooks is how easy it is to read a sample of a book. It’s become a matter of course to download a sample of any book that sounds interesting, without thinking about it, just … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Web | Comments Off

Dreaming of male answer syndrome

I woke to a dream where I was talking with someone who was either a former colleague who I couldn’t quite place or Ken Cosgrove. We were listening to music, definitely ’60s vintage jazz. He said he thought it was … Continue reading

Posted in Personal | Comments Off

Ambivalence

I strongly opposed the Iraq war. I was in favor of the US invasion of Afghanistan. I favored intervention in Kosovo and the first gulf war. I opposed the US interventions in Latin America in the 1980s. I held all … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

My letter to the US Patent Office

(I wrote this letter this morning, after seeing from Matt Cutts and Daniel Tunkelang that the Patent Office was soliciting guidance on patents following the Bilski decision. I wrote it quickly and it’s less polished than I would have liked, … Continue reading

Posted in Technology | Comments Off

Intelligence failure?

Spencer Ackerman argues that attempted suicide bombing of Flight 253 on Christmas Day didn’t necessarily represent an intelligence failure. I think the key part of his post is: The intelligence community is drinking from a fire hose of data, a … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

“Polled” on Net Neutrality

I just participated in a phone poll from some outfit (Western Wats) calling with caller ID saying 801-823-2023. Occasionally, I’ll do these things out of curiosity about what they’re asking, but this one really offended me by how blatantly the … Continue reading

Posted in Business, Politics, Technology, Web | Comments Off

Newspapers just don’t get the web, part 7542

I spent a little time playing The New York Times’s Times Reader 2.0 this evening and it’s pretty nice. It gives what appears to be a full copy of the day’s Times in an easy to browse format. Cut and … Continue reading

Posted in Technology, Web | Comments Off

The things we carried (personal electronics edition)

For a recent family vacation, we had with us two iPhones two iPod nanos a speaker/docking station for the iPods a MacBook a Kindle a Panasonic LX3 a Flip Mino and a Nintendo DSi At one point on the outbound … Continue reading

Posted in Personal, Technology | Comments Off