Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission, has issued her statement on Net Neutrality. In my view, she correctly assesses the importance of Net Neutrality, but wrongly gauges the ability of a free market to deliver it. As a result, her policy is (in my view) seriously misguided. But so close!

Neelie writes:

When it comes to the issue of “net neutrality” I want to ensure that Internet users can always choose full Internet access – that is, access to a robust, best-efforts Internet with all the applications you wish.

I would have preferred a phrase about all apps and data delivered free of discrimination by the carriers. In any case, based on a new study by BEREC (European regulators’ body), she feels that now enough of the market has a choice of carriers that regulation is not needed.

As my friend JC de Martin wrote on a mailing list [slightly edited]:

I am afraid that this is a bad decision on at least four counts:

1. it overestimates the ability of the average consumers not only to obtain the relevant information, but also
to fully understand its implications;

2. it underestimates the very substantial pain of switching ISPs;

3. in rural areas, or smaller cities, the ISP offer is quite limited;

4. ISPs are not all equal: very soon European consumers will have to face a choice between a fast ISP with “limited Internet” and a slower ISP with “full Internet”: which one will they choose?

If access to an open Net is as important as Neelie believes it is, then it ought not be left up to the vagaries of the market to deliver it, and we ought not be complacent about a situation in which some people cannot afford access to it.

So close :(

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For me, “impacted” refers to an unpleasant dental condition, and cannot be used as a verb. So, given my grammatical self-righteousness on this point, I was chastened to read a column written by William Safire sometime in 1989-1991 (in his anthology In Love with Norma Loquendi) criticizing the use of “conflict” as a verb. He cites a psyhotherapist who says, “Conflicted as a verb is fairly recent.” It had not occurred to me that I need to make an ass of myself about that word as well.

On the other hand, Safire points out that in the sentence “He felt conflicted,” “conflicted” is a predicate adjective — “a past participle used as an adjective after a linking verb” — and thus isn’t being used as a verb. But it is a verb in the sentence “Therapists have to work on resolving what conflicts the patient.”

Since I don’t understand predicate adjectives well enough to be sure I’m right when I denounce someone for misusing a term in a way that no one cares about and does not matter, I will simply have to amp up my sneering tone in order to raise the stakes on pushing back against my criticism.

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Or maybe it’s a dictionary. Or an encyclopedia. In any case, The Mind is a Metaphor you can look up metaphors by keyword and facet the results by date, genre, nationality, gender, etc. (Note that these are facets of the speaker, not of the metaphor.)

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In a paper Natasha Waterson and Mike Saunders describe how Kew Botanical Gardens in England are adopting mobile technology to help visitors become “delightfully lost.” From the abstract:

In October 2010, Kew Gardens commissioned an in-depth study of visitors’ motivations and information needs around its 300-acre site, with the express aim that it should guide the development of new mobile apps. The work involved over 1,500 visitor-tracking observations, 350 mini-interviews, 200 detailed exit interviews, and 85 fulfilment maps; and gave Kew an incredibly useful insight into its visitors’ wants, needs, and resulting behaviours.

It turns out that most Kew visitors have social, emotional, and spiritual, rather than intellectual, motivations during their time here. They do not come hoping to find out more, and they don’t want or need to know precisely where they are all the time. In fact, they love the sense of unguided exploration and the serendipitous discoveries they make at Kew—they want to become “delightfully lost.”

But as I read the actual paper, I was repeatedly struck by how often one could swap “in the Gardens” for “on the Web.” The motivations, the cognitive space, the tools and techniques often mirrored the Web’s. Indeed, one could argue that our experience of the Web is affecting how we view wayfinding in the real world, and not just because the Kew project integrates the offline and online worlds via mobiles, QRcodes, etc. Rather, the sense of serendipity, the loose connections, the desire to be able to follow one’s interests, the expectation that one will always be able to get more information about something, and the desire to contribute back — this is a public space we’re building together — all feel webby. Indeed, the paper’s overall point is that architects of information spaces ought not pick a single motive for those spaces’ users, and that is one of the fundamental lessons of the newly miscellanized world.

(Hat-tip to Hanan Cohen for the link.)

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I spent too much time yesterday debugging a table in the Wikipedia markup language (on a different Wikimedia wiki). This would have come in handy:

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I learned a little Mac trick a few weeks ago and find that it has saved me, oh, probably close to a full minute. More important, it keeps me from the annoyance of fiddling with Finder unnecessarily.

Let’s say you’ve just finished working on a slide deck in Keynote — but the beauty of this little trick is that it works with every Mac app — and now you want to email it as an attachment. Open up your email client and simply drag the little tiny document icon at the top center of the window.

It's the icon next to "architecture01.key"

Drop it into your email client and (assuming it handles the ol’ dragondrop) it’s attached. No stinking Finder required! Use it whenever you want to drag your current file somewhere.

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The Atlantic has crystal clear photos juxtaposing Japan after the earthquake and a year later.

Business Insider has a set of satellite photos of slums around the world.

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Mitch Weiss took this photo…of my nephew, Greg Cavanagh.

Greg doesn’t actually look that much like Jobs. Here, for comparison, is the original Jobs photo by Albert Watson, and here’s a photo I took of Greg a couple of summers ago:

Mitch’s photo shows you the power of lighting and composition.

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For all of my adult life, I’ve been making french fries (maybe once every couple of months) by cutting up the potatoes, putting them on a baking sheet, putting a couple of tablespoons (I’m guessing) of oil over them, mixing them up by hand, and popping them into a 425 degree oven,

For all of my adult life, I then go back 15 minutes later and use a spatula to try to flip them without separating their delicious crusty outsides from their fleshy insides. And failing. Their best parts stay stuck to the frying pan, the bastards. I’e tried aluminum and steel sheets, non-stick sheets, and sheets lined with aluminum foil.

Yesterday I coated the little darlings with oil in a bowl before putting than on the baking sheet. Bingo! Fried heaven!

(Note that this tip is independent of other tips, such as soaking them in cold water for an hour, double frying them, or not eating them because they’re bad for you.)

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So, instead of painting our house over the break, I started making some tweaks to Joho’s “design” that have resulted in a complete overhaul, the first since the site opened its shutters in the year of their lord mumble mumble.

Click on the image to be reminded of what it used to look like in all its former glory.

There are certainly going to be many bugs, rough edges, and further uglinesses to blast with a buff-colored paint gun. But, I hope it’s better.

Yeah, you’re right. It needs more orange. Doesn’t everything?

[Later that day:] As Mirek points out in the comments, it looks crappy in IE 9. I can’t get the rounded corners to work. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears-with-sharp-corners…

Here’s the way the page currently looks to me (Dec. 30) in Safari, which is pretty much how I intend it to look.

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