Aside

Ok all you oil pundits and economy experts out there, riddle me this: So the current price of oil is about $60 a barrel. That means that one liter of oil is $60 divided by 159 liters (= 1 barrel), which is $0.37 per liter. Amazon (yeah, it’s weird, I know) will sell you two liters of Coca-Cola for $1.19. That means that Coca-Cola is more expensive than oil. Huh? Let’s review: 2 liters of Coca-Cola: $1.19 2 liters of…

Small (Slate): When an ethics cop carries tweezers in his holster instead of a .44 Magnum, it’s a safe bet the crimes he’ll pursue will be cosmetic. New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame conformed to this profile yesterday (Feb. 26) by using his column to give the paper’s eyebrows a vigorous plucking in his exploration of the “thorny question” of whether its news staffers can accept companywide discounts for goods “without creating the appearance of partiality.” Calame produces no…

If there were a hundred good small cities in America fifty years ago—towns built to suit the people who settled them, according to their tastes, aspirations, and the sovereign peculiarities of landscape and weather—today there are no more than twenty-five. In ten years, as the inexorable lattice of sprawl replicates and proliferates, and the downtowns become malls, and the malls downtowns, and the rich syllabary of mercantile America is reduced to a simple alphabet composed of a Blockbuster, a Target,…

One of my favorite professors from my Columbia days, Sam Freedman, is about to come out with his latest book: Letters to a Young Journalist. The following passage is from the end of the Introduction: I’m not trying to scare you off. I hope you find the challenges inspiring. When I was your age, the cachet of journalism attracted plenty of poseurs. One thing you can say about the present unpopularity of journalism is that it drives out all the…

This blog linked to my earlier post about the Boing Boing/Secure Computing debacle. He writes : And it is still a rumor folks. I mean, Cyrus Farivar gives the impression he thinks there was research involved: A couple of bloggers, Joi Ito, (who found the link from Sean Bonner) and Kathryn Cramer, and sex blogger Violet Blue have found that Mr. Foote-Lennox isn’t quite the “protector of kids” that he’d like to make himself out to be. All those bloggers…

I just discovered that the University of Texas has an amazing online map collection, including this one of San Francisco in 1915. You’ll note the absence of the bridges, and the Alameda County line being set just beyond where the trains ended. And Mission Rock looks much more looming on that map than it does today. Also check the 1901 San Francisco Milk Map.

This is my first piece (hopefully not the last!) in The Economist magazine, in the latest issue of the Technology Quarterly. You’ll notice the absence of a byline (“by Cyrus Farivar”) because The Economist is old-school — they don’t have bylines. So you’ll just have to take the fact that I wrote it on faith. Pulling the plug on standby power Mar 9th 2006 From The Economist print edition Energy: Billions of devices sitting idle in “standby” mode waste vast…

ESPN.com: [Russ] Martin spent part of the winter catching Dodgers closer Eric Gagne, who is continuing his comeback from elbow surgery. “He’s throwing very well,” Martin said. “His changeup is as filthy as ever.” The two have spent a lot of time together this spring because they’re battery mates, Canadians and they both speak fluent French. “We speak French all the time, out on the field sometimes, but not when anyone else is around,” Martin said. “We decided that we…

SF Chronicle: (03-09) 10:12 PST SAN FRANCISCO — A fire on the Muni level of the Embarcadero station this morning halted BART and Muni metro trains in both directions and forced authorities to evacuate passengers. Black smoke could be seen pouring for several minutes from the stairways of the Embarcadero and Montgomery street stations and from a grill in front of 425 Market St. starting about 9:30 a.m. The smoke had largely dissipated within half an hour, and the fire…

So the whole Boing Boing vs. Secure Computing saga (my radio piece is here and NYT coverage is here) has gotten just a touch weirder. From the NYT piece: In an e-mail message to Xeni Jardin, another of Boing Boing’s chiefs, Tomo Foote-Lennox, a director of filtering data for Secure Computing, asked why the bloggers were starting a war. “We discussed several ways that you could organize your site so that I could protect the kids and you could distribute…