On Political Correctness

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Nobel Prize Winner Doris Lessing:

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.
The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.
The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation…” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.
Even five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.

American Airlines

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Dave mentions his recent poor experience with American Airlines. I’ve had a number of those tight connections / run through the airport / arrive at gate / flight is closed / yet there is 5 or 10 minutes until departure time experiences.
However, I can recall two positive AA experiences:

  • Extremely poor cabin conditions:

    I arrived at my middle seat (9E) for a redeye West Coast to Chicago flight only to find that my left seatmate (9D) was very, very big and had the armrest up while occupying some a portion of my seat. The woman to my right in 9F had a cat under her legs….

    I wrote a letter to AA’s CEO (Bob Crandall) and they promptly sent me my money back.

  • Years later I flew through AA’s then hub in Nashville. My in bound flight was delayed and I faced a very tight connection to the last Dallas/Fort Worth plane of the evening. I stood up to depart my plane when my name was called. A bus drove me to the departing plane, just in time. That will probably never happen again.

I’ve also had many good experiences on United and Midwest Airlines. Your mileage may vary.

Obama’s Earmarks

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Washington Post.com

Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) requested federal funding for several projects as part of this year’s annual appropriations process. The projects, with the amounts designated by his constituents and several national organizations were released by the senator.

Photo Detective

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Alexandra Alter:

Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car’s headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.
With millions of Americans obsessively tracing their roots, Ms. Taylor has emerged as the nation’s foremost historical photo detective. During a recent meeting of the Maine Genealogical Society, attendees lined up a dozen deep as she handled their images with a cotton glove and peered at the details through a photographer’s loupe. One man offered a portrait photo and asked if it could be of his great grandmother, who died in 1890. “It’s not,” Ms. Taylor said after about 15 seconds; she’d dated the hairstyle and billowy blouse to the early 20th century. When another attendee asked why her great-great-grandfather was wearing small hoops in his ears in a portrait, Ms. Taylor explained, “He was in the maritime trade.”

Map Making Firms Rumored to Sell for Billions

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Dan Charles:

The latest hot segment of the technology business appears to be maps.
MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps and GPS (global positioning system) navigation in cars are very popular, and all of those maps came from one of just two mapmaking companies.
Both of those companies now are being snatched up by bigger companies for billions of dollars.
Creating a digital guide to the world’s highways and street addresses may be the cutting edge of technology, but it is also just long hours on the road.
Jeremy Onysko’s orange van has four digital cameras mounted on the roof. They are snapping pictures every 30 feet — recording road signs, lane markings and anything else a driver might need to know.

Nikon’s Small World Gallery

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Mark Anderson:

Since 1974, Nikon has sponsored a yearly photo competition for images that delve into the worlds beyond the reach of the unaided human eye. The camera maker feted the photographers who made the top 20 “photomicrographs” in Nikon’s annual Small World competition at New York’s Explorer’s Club. The winners were drawn from a pool of 1,709 submissions.
The dozen images collected here (the top 10 images, plus two Wired News picks) capture facets of living organisms that have a technical meaning to the trained specialist, but appear to be pure art to the layperson. The striking images convey something both strange and alien that could almost be sold as the first glimpses of extraterrestrial life. Yet, many of the objects presented here could not be more mundane or down-to-earth: A piece of ivory, a typical aquarium fish, a drop of sea water.

Ballmer: “Google Reads Your Email and We Don’t”

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Ed Moltzen:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a knock at one of his chief rivals during a speech to an audience in the U.K., saying Google reads customer email as part of a failed bid to drive ad-based revenue.
The software giant’s chief made the remarks during a discussion about consumer software revenue models, and Ballmer used the dialogue as an entry point to take his shot at Google. The video is available to watch via the web site Mydeo.com. Ballmer made his remarks after an audience member asked him if an advertising model could support software business in the future. The CEO said a combination of models – – commercial and ad-paid – – would go forward.
“What’s a good example? Will online publications be largely ad-funded as things move from the physical world to the online world?” Ballmer said. “I think the answer is yes.
“Have we seen the migration of things even like email? . . . Our Windows Live Hotmail, in and of itself, doesn’t generate much ad revenue. So we’ve had to put, essentially, a whole portal around it because the traffic around it is very valuable but it’s not very easily monetized in the context of mail.
“Google’s had the same experience, even though they read your mail and we don’t,” Ballmer said, to chuckles and and a couple of gasps in the audience. “That’s just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It’s not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out.”