Nil by mouth (Robert Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times): The film critic can no longer eat, drink or speak: “So that’s what’s sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss.”

‘Conversations with the Internet’ – Biz Stone of Twitter (The Rumpus):  “We realized we weren’t really using Odeo, we weren’t investing our own time creating podcasts. We were building a tool that was a great idea for some other people. That’s a dangerous way to go because if you don’t actually use it yourself and love it, then you aren’t going to be as fully invested in it from the start. That’s what leads you to doing side projects.”

Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture (Zeldman): “…there’s gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes. We are not clairvoyants, so we cannot say which fledgling, presently little-read web publications will matter to future historians. Thus logic and the cultural imperative urge us to preserve them all. But how?”

- in today’s op-ed.

Assassins of the Mind (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair): “We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal.”

Is aviation security mostly for show? (Bruce Schneier, CNN): “When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn’t truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn’t make any sense.”

The Messiah Complex (David Brooks, NYT): “It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.”

Thoughts about the Nexus One’s prospects

Does it have better hardware, a better screen, better battery life, better price, more freedom, better apps, better multitasking, better camera than the iPhone? Yes. Is it the iPhone? No.

People who’ll buy the Nexus One say they want to buy something like the iPhone that isn’t the iPhone, and they’re lying even though they don’t know it. They want the iPhone because it’s the iPhone. And nothing else. When you create in your mind a category called iPhone-like, there’s only one member that’s ever going to be a full, incontrovertible member of that category.

These buyers are going to be disappointed even though they won’t know quite why. They’ll blame it on the phone instead of their own expectations, and demand won’t spike the way it did for the iPhone.

Would I buy it?

I don’t like the iPhone, but I like this current crop of Android devices even less. If, in a (thankfully) fictional dystopian universe I had to choose only between the iPhone and the Nexus, I’d take Apple’s baby (and lament long and hard about the lack of alternatives).

Reason #3: form factor wise no Android device has nailed the iPhone. This is HTC and Motorola and Samsung, not Apple we’re talking about. So there. These firms are known for specs, not sex.

Reason #2: I will not buy a phone with a trackball. Ever. Would you buy a Skoda that featured a manually-operated crank to start the engine? Heck, even Blackberrys have moved on.

Reason #1: Polish. I posit that no one has been able to nail the touchscreen experience other than Apple. Not Palm, Not Android. Not (shudder) RIM and most certainly not Microsoft. Since 2007, for instance, Android phones have been underpowered and have had user experience (UX) issues where the phone hasn’t been able to keep up with text or touch input. Now three years later,

Some animations are very smooth, some are janky as hell. The Nexus One has a faster processor than the iPhone 3GS and has twice the RAM, and yet it still cannot have as fluid a UI as the iPhone OS. This is great proof that your software is key—throwing raw power at things won’t necessarily make them better.

And it doesn’t even have to run Android. Every touchscreen phone apart from iPhone suffers from this.

I think it’s worth demonstrating how Apple nails the experience with an example.

In Mobile Safari, the iPhone browser, if you scroll (swipe) too fast, instead of text you’ll see a chequered pattern – the processor can’t render the text fast enough – but the scrolling experience itself is smooth as ever. Once you stop scrolling, text will eventually appear. On any other mobile browser, the scrolling itself will stutter as the processor tries to render everything.

When you’re using a device all day every day as essentially an extension of your body and mind, stuff like this matters more than features.

I’d pick the iPhone. As, sadly, will folks who upgrade from the Nexus One eventually.

Update (10 Jan 2010): Another example of polish in design:

Other issues that I can’t live with day to day? How do I copy text from non-editable field like an email, webpage, or SMS, or even a 3rd party application? Oh, I can’t. Say what you want about the iPhone not having copy and paste for two years — a joke — it’s the single best implementation on the planet for a smartphone and Google’s approach is almost as bad as RIM’s with the Storm-series.

(From Boy Genius Report, via John Gruber)

How to Destroy the Book (Cory Doctorow): Transcript of a speech on copyright at the National Reading Summit in Canada. Part Two of the speech is here.

The Big Zero (Paul Krugman, NYT): “…it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.”

Philip Greenspun writes about what politico-economic system could replace the (flawed) one it has in place today: “…the biggest question that Americans grappled with was what kind of economic system would be best. Whatever system prevailed through 2008 (see below for my characterization) was obviously flawed. Just as in the Great Depression, this opened the door to considerations of alternatives.”

He should turn off the tweet tap and blog instead.

Pose his opinions as questions and open up comments. Let users reply to, and rate each others’ ideas. And Mr. Tharoor could moderate comments.

From his much-maligned Twitter stream could then flow (benign) personal updates and links to these blog posts.

Mr. Tharoor’s blog could do to public policy debate what Fred Wilson’s blog has done to debate on the consumer web.

It could, at its best, be an oasis of reasoned opinion in a heated desert of endless polarized knee-jerk commentary.

Even at its worst, it could save his fledgeling ministerial career.

- the Chrome Comic, Sep 08

In other words, if you can’t build it fast enough, we’ll do it ourselves.

Browsers are unstable and slow because of single-threaded javascript? We’ll build a new browser altogether. Windows/Mac OS too bloated for the folks that want to get on the web? We’ll build a new zippy laptop operating system that has just the web. Too hard to get your email, calendar, maps on your phone? We’ll build a mobile device that just works. Attaching docs and quoting from previous email seems inefficient? We’ll invent email all over again today. Website lookups slowing down your browsing? Use our DNS servers.

We can’t believe the web hasn’t changed given all the cheap bandwidth and online data.

No longer will constrain our applications to fit your web. If your web can’t run them, we’ll re-tool the web ourselves.

And strike distribution deals to get these tools in your hands. So you can get to our applications. Faster and more often.

Welcome to our new decade.

If you run a self-hosted Wordpress/Movable Type blog, you’re already there. Instead of S3, you’re hosting it on your hosting provider’s space (which could well be S3). In fact, this is how rahulgaitonde dot org works.

Now Joshua only alludes to this, but these pieces aren’t coupled loosely enough to move to plug out one component and fit another in. For example, I can’t take the Feedburner RSS component out and replace with another – my RSS feed URL is tied to Feedburner. I can’t move my template transparently between Blogger and Movable Type.

Back in May 2008, I had similar thoughts about separating the email interface from email storage:

There is a market for start-ups that provide only an interface for existing email. For people who are willing to pay for (cheap) storage of their email and for bandwidth. Users will be able to migrate from and to such services without needing to copy huge amounts of email to their new email provider.

I wonder whether in the future we’ll eventually build such a decoupled email system, or find an alternative to email altogether.

The meaning of Open (Google’s Official Blog): An email to Google’s Product Mgrs from the SVP of Prod. Mgmt. “…you are building something that will outlast all of us, and none of us can imagine all the ways Google will grow and touch people’s lives. In that way, we are like our colleague Vint Cerf, who didn’t know exactly how many networks would want to be part of this “Internet” so he set the default to open. Vint certainly got it right. I believe we will too.”

Why banks are suddenly repaying their TARP funds (Newsweek): “From the outset, healthy banks were eager to get out from under the TARP because they wanted to avoid discussions about appropriate levels of executive compensation.”

Mag+, a concept video on the future of digital magazines: “The design has an eye to how paper magazines can re-use their editorial work without having to drastically change their workflow or add new teams. Maybe if the form is clear enough then every mag, no matter how niche, can look gorgeous, be super easy to understand, and have a great reading experience.”

(via the Washington Post’s list of the ten worst ideas of the decade.)

PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps: How PayPal is extending its APIs to let developers build payment into web & mobile apps for the future.

How Apple’s internal organization is different because of the CEO’s obsession with great design. Inputs from senior Apple alumni.

Morgan Stanley’s Mobile Internet Report Dec 09 [PDF]: 92-page ‘key themes’. Noteworthy: the ‘mobile internet’ could be bigger than the ‘desktop internet’ in 5 years.

People want as many people as possible to hear their opinions, and as few to know more about who they are.

Which is why Twitter thrives the more open it is, while every one of Facebook’s privacy-related moves breeds paranoia.

In India, for example, Nokia’s music download service is becoming popular mostly because many people don’t have PCs and are using their phones to download music.

I’m surprised. If these downloads are over GRPS/EDGE, they’ll take forever. How else is this done? And equally importantly, do people really pay for music here?

On The Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca: Tim Ferriss presents a translation of Lucius Seneca’s letter – ‘It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”

In defense of readers: “Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking… [w]e concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still”.

Local Governments Offer Data to Miners: “A big pile of city crime reports is not all that useful. But what if you could combine that data with information on bars, sidewalks and subway stations to find the safest route home after a night out?” I can imagine several ways in which this sort of open government combined with mobile access could improve everyday urban life – even in India.

If you’re looking to convert your Mom/Dad/other Net newbie to F’fox/Chrome, you don’t need to talk about security and multi-tabbing and standards-compliance anymore. All you need to do is open Gmail or Facebook or the New York Times on both browsers.

Just speed is enough.

The death of the URL by Chris Messina: “…a future without URLs and without the infinite organicity of the web frightens me. It’s not that I know what we’ll lose by removing this artifact of one of the most generative periods in history… the ability for anyone to mint a new [URL] and then propagate it is what makes the web so resilient, so empowering, and so interesting”

Open as in water by Paul Buccheit: “The basic pattern of openness is that better access to information and better systems lead to better decisions and better living. This general principal is broadly accepted, but we’re just now discovering that it also applies to the minutiae of our lives.”

After Cheney: NYT Magazine’s profile of Vice President Biden. Conjecture is that with resposibility for cleaning up the US’s Iraq mess, Biden could be the second-most powerful VP after Cheney.

[Rich Roman politician Marcus] Crassus had his own private fire department, and if your house caught fire his representatives would offer to buy it on the spot, at a one-time-only, fire-sale price that would fall rapidly as the flames climbed. If you said yes, you’d get a few sesterces, after which Crassus’ firefighters would do their thing. If you said no, you’d end up with a pile of ashes. (No public option being available, few owners were in a position to quibble.

“As I said months and months ago – “jiska koi nahin uska Android”. No product line to convince MS to license you WinMo? There’s Android. No cash to pay for licenses? There’s Android. Want to convince market and customers that you have something up your sleeve? There’s Android”.

WIRED Magazine today takes stock of Android today and its future “explosive growth”.

The manufacturers of the 12 Android devices on the market are Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Dell, Huawei and Acer. Except for the first three, none of the manufacturers had a product line with a mainstream mobile OS – they’ve hitched their smartphone fortune to Android. The case with Moto, HTC and Samsung is more dramatic – they’re all developing a strong Android product line (Moto in particular) in spite of their Windows Mobile backgrounds. I cannot find one smartphone manufacturer that is betting on Windows Mobilee, and I strongly suspect that most of Android’s growth will come at WinMo’s expense.

But my comment was to point out that a commitment to Android implies a lack of coherent strategy for manufacturers. That certainly seems true with Moto, HTC, Samsung and LG. In my opinion, Moto has suffered from terrible hardware design. HTC and Samsung have tried without success to hide Windows Mobile’s ugliness under their customizations. LG’s proprietary OS strategy means few, if any, third-party apps.

For the rest, Android *is* their first strategy. That’s brave. But it’s also evidence that Android’s features are exactly what smartphone users want today – touch-screen support, strong integration with Google’s applications, a capable browser and support for other installable applications. This is also true of Mac OS X on iPhone, but what if you want another phone? Android’s looking like a very, very attractive alternative.

Why do you oppose the income tax?
Because I have a right to the fruits of my labor, and government does not. If you concede the principle of the income tax, you concede the principle that the government owns all your income and permits you to keep a certain percentage of it. (emphasis added) God-given rights to our life and our liberty don’t come from government.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Also, this nugget about time:

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true… all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.