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August 27, 2004
I got an email from Hilmar Schmundt at Der Spiegel about the status of Open Spectrum:
Who or what institutions are active in that field in Germany? Is there any country where open spectrum policies have already been instituted (except for the W-Lan spectrum)?
If you know anything about this, you can write to Hilmar by interposing an a_t sign between hilmar_schmundt and spiegel.de
August 26, 2004
I interviewed Dr. Kübler-Ross some time in the mid 1970s for an article for Maclean’s in Canada. At the time, she had gone beyond her “five stages of dying” meme and was fully into proving that there’s life after death by documenting weird coincidences and poorly substantiated tales. I was disappointed because, although I am agnostic about life after death, her methodology was anecdotal and seemed to me to be aiming at supporting a position she merely wanted to believe.
And yet, she did something remarkable. Deeply impressed by her work helping Nazi refugees and by a visit to the Maidanek death camp, she gave us a way to talk about dying. Before that, although it’s hard for today’s young’uns to believe, it was generally a forbidden topic, just as 20 years ago polite people didn’t acknowledge that Uncle Sid wasn’t a bachelor because he’d just never found the right lady. Whether or not the five stages of dying is the right framework — and very likely it is — the mere existence of a framework gave us all, including health care workers, a way to admit that dying is a process, not a door that slams. Thanks to EKR, we have gotten better at keeping the dying with us, tangled in our social relationships, until the twin doors do indeed close.
I admire her life and appreciate what she did for us.
FWIW, I am aware of and deny the supposed irony in my complaining about newspapers pretending to be objective in my previous entry and my complaining about EKR not being sufficiently objective in this one. Objectivity is a useful goal for scientific studies but a self-contradictory one for all but the most limited types of newspaper reportage.
According to Editor and Publisher today:
Two days ago, in a front page news article, two New York Times reporters referred to the Swift Boat charges as “mostly unsubstantiated.” The paper went a step further this morning on the front page, when reporter Elizabeth Bumiller flatly called the charges “unsubstantied,” without a qualifier, in the first sentence of her story on the resignation of the national counsel for President Bush.
Other newspapers were not nearly as bold today…
So long as we have to choose words for sentences, objectivity is impossible.
I know I’ve already blogged about how confusing I found The Bourne Supremacy, but here’s an email (slightly edited) I sent to Sam Allis at the Boston Globe today in response to his “Critic’s Notebook” that luxuriated in that movie racking up bigger grosses than either Collateral or The Manchurian Candidate, two movies he considers to be smug, predictable, and coasting on their star power:
Sam,
I enjoyed your piece today and am glad to see Damon get the credit he deserves. But one thing you said irked me enough to write to you, primarily because I just can’t figure out what the director and editor were thinking…or why apparently it worked for some viewers.
The very scenes you single out as examples of master craftsmanship I found indecipherable. For example, the long fight you admire has two guys dressed in black, filmed in such short and blurry bursts, frequently with their faces cropped outside the frame, that I couldn’t tell who was gouging whom. Likewise, the car chase was a sequence of blurs. Now, I understand that this was meant to convey the impression of speed and action, but…
Lest my befuddlement be attributed to old fogey-hood (I’m 53), my 13-yr-old son came out of the movie with a headache, declaring it to be the worst movie he’s ever seen because of the incoherence of the action sequences.
Compare the car chase scenes in Supremacy to the Bourne Identity. The latter was clear, exciting and ingenious. The former was none of those. It failed (IMO) at the basic level of telling the story. Or, compare Supremacy overall to Kill Bill I. In fact, compare it to all of Tarrantino’s work. Tarrantino knows how to tell a story, no matter how ridiculous. Uma is mowing down dozens of attackers, all identically dressed, but there isn’t a single “What’s happening?” moment.
And while I’m disagreeing with you (remembering that the overall context is that I enjoyed your article…really), I’d make a plea for Michael Mann’s considerable narrative skills. Even though the acting and the story were, in my opinion, inferior to Supremacy, I’d see Collateral again to watch his directorial technique. If I were to watch Supremacy again, it’d be just to try to figure out which blurry streak is supposed to be Damon’s car.
(I’ll probably blog this because, well, it’s what we bloggers do.)
Best,
David Weinberger
August 25, 2004
As it happens, the place where I’m staying on Martha’s Vineyard for a few days is about a half mile down a dirt road from the tiny airfield where the red-footed falcon is staying…the first and only sighting of this bird in North America, and it’s drawing birders from all over. I went out today with my camera and got some startling photos of the little critter…
Roosting in the distance
Tiny against the cloudless sky
Super enlargment of previous photo. Notice the wing markings. Beautiful!
Soaring against the sun
Coming in to roost. It’s not shy of people!
Newborn falcon! How adorable! Now we know why it’s been hanging around!
Crisp and clear…the best photo I got
Birders gather to watch. Had they been a little more observant, they might have seen what I saw.
The Letterman Show lets visitors to their Web site suggest Top Ten entries for a weekly topic. This week the topic is “Top Ten Ways New York Is Preparing For the Republican National Convention.” Go make merry.
The third DigitalID World conference, is set for Oct. 25-28 in Denver. The first one was excellent and I hear the second one was also.
Hotels are at long last figuring out that broadband in the bedroom is a must-have, according to a report by In-Stat/MDR reported by The Center for Media Research. “Total properties deployed will grow from 5,207 in 2003 to 26,828 in 2008.” Apparently, this comes after a three year slump which I assume was due to the hotel industry’s assumption that wifi was just a fad and that Real Men Pull Cable.
I forget who it was who posed this question, but it’s a good ‘un: Why are hotel pools free but many hotels charge for wifi? After all, pools are hugely expensive and few guests use them while wifi is comparatively cheap and lots of guests use it.
August 24, 2004
Very very slick. Be sure to try it out. (Thanks to Marc for the link.)
No child left behind? How about no school left standing, as a certain ex-presidential candidate used to call it?
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