The E-Ink Gideons
According to the Telegraph, one hotel is replacing the hard cover Gideon's Bible that is so familiarly located in any given hotel room with a Kindle preloaded with the Bible:
From today, all 148 rooms at the Hotel Indigo will contain a Kindle e-reader pre-loaded with a copy of the Bible. The hotel is claiming to be the first in Britain to offer such a service.
I wonder how they keep all of the units charged and safely stored within the rooms?
Roberts Switched Views?
An insightful article on the process behind the Supreme Court's healthcare decision:
Some informed observers outside the Court flatly reject the idea that Roberts buckled to liberal pressure, or was stared down by the President. They instead believe that Roberts realized the historical consequences of a ruling striking down the landmark health care law. There was no doctrinal background for the Court to fall back on - nothing in prior Supreme Court cases - to say the individual mandate crossed a constitutional line.
The Sentry Post
Here is a pithy tidbit from John Calvin that I was mulling over tonight as I thought about the new Sunday school classes that are starting tomorrow:
“Therefore each individual has his own kind of living assigned to him by the Lord as a sort of sentry post so that he may not heedlessly wander about throughout life.”
Impact
It is hard to believe that the iPhone landed five years ago today. I remember heading out to observe the launch day festivities and trying an iPhone for the first time — it felt like using something out of Star Trek. However, as nifty as it was even at a demo kiosk, the iPhone was significantly different from anything before it, and so it was hard to figure out precisely how useful it would actually prove to be. I wrote about my buyer's indecision after I succumbed to the temptation to buy one.
While very little about the iPhone was “innovative” when the first generation model's features were placed in isolation, putting them all together into a very thin, capacitive touch screen-only device was strikingly innovative. Often times, these are the best sorts of innovations: ones that take a pile of good ideas that are sitting scattered around and putting them together into something new that has a cohesive vision. Before the iPhone, smartphones weren't terribly easy to use and presented users with a very strong step backwards in usability from the mouse driven interface of a desktop computer. With the iPhone, suddenly common tasks such as web browsing were as easy, if not easier, to do on a phone than on the computer.
That's why the iPhone made such a big impact. It is also why these stock growth statistics look as they do.
My Desktop from Ten Years Ago
I ran across this screenshot today and thought it was interesting. This is what my desktop on my computer looked like ten years ago.
Interfaces have definitely improved since then.
Are these Legal Aliens?
An interesting set of survey results from National Geographic:
Nearly two in three Americans think President Barack Obama is better suited than Republican rival Mitt Romney to deal with an alien invasion, according to a survey released Wednesday.
Good to know.
The Danger of Online Reporting
Gruber writes about how Gizmodo managed to report as current news information it had gathered from an article published in late 2011:
Follow that link to the purported source, though, and it comes up as an empty web page. I think, though, it was the mobile URL for this story, published by the same reporter (Cromwell Schubarth) for the same publication (The Puget Sound Business Journal). The problem for Gizmodo: the dateline for that story was September 2011.
Since the article makes a big deal about what is not going to happen “this year,” it is incredibly important that the source story's “this year” was 2011 and not 2012. This is the bad side of reporting that comes out of blogs: sometimes even the biggest and best draw off of other sources without bothering to complete even a modicum of research.
Late Night Haiku XLIV
CXXV. The dark night crept around
The window panes, curled about,
And settled inside.
CXXVI. Kalmar now contains
A secret which hides about,
One foot around it.
CXXVII. What is to be told,
And what has been told so far —
Neither are so clear.
Waiting for the Court
The Washington Post has a nice piece from Robert Barnes, examining the state of the Supreme Court's decisions on cases defended by the Obama administration. He notes some interesting currents in the court:
But whatever the reasons, the losses so far cannot be blamed on the conflict between an increasingly conservative court and a progressive administration. For instance, the authors of the Indian cases that went against the government last week were Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Obama's choices for the court.
Memory Lane
When you've been blogging for ten years, one's blog tells something about one's life. I happened to be trying to look up something today and ended up on Archive.org's Wayback Machine. On a whim, I typed in asisaid.com and went on a stroll down memory lane. While I can view any of the posts from asisaid's 10+ years of history directly on this site, there is something interesting about seeing them in their original form, complete with whatever now dated looking theme I had on the site at that time the post originally appeared. I found myself reminded of old blogging and real world friends I have lost touch with, and others that I have not. I also found it interesting seeing what it was I was contemplating then that no longer seems important contrasted with matters that I am still thinking about, working on or otherwise processing.
Some might suggest (and, perhaps, for good reason) that the archiving of everything that goes online can be a curse. If one is careless in what one places online, it certainly will prove to be. On the other hand, with a dab of commonsense applied, services such as the Wayback Machine actually show the value of the archival abilities of the digital age: the ability for everything to exist in something of a virtual time capsule, available for us to learn from and enjoy.
