Friday, August 08, 2003

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Franklin Knew the Truth About Colds I just started the new, brief Edmund S. Morgan bio of Ben Franklin, and I've come across something that makes me love him; the italics are mine : "People at the time were under the illusion, as many still are, that getting cold and wet (swimming, walking in the rain, wearing damp clothes) was the way to "catch cold." There was not yet a germ theory of disease, but Franklin proved, to his own satisfaction at least, that people caught cold from one another and from "too full Living with too little Exercise," not from being chilled. He found that he could spend two or three hours in the water with no ill effects. So get out of the house and enjoy the fresh air, let it rain." So many educated people, unto this day still do not understand, or have not internalized: cold doesn't give you a cold, rhinovirus germs do! 10:38:32 PM    comment []

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There is an episode of Northern Exposure in which Joel, newcomer to Alaska, gets a false sense of excess energy from the Midnight Sun. Despite warnings from natives, he hurls himself into a frenzy of activity, forgetting entirely to sleep. I feel like I am experiencing the same thing, on a much smaller scale, fortunately, as I enjoy my first Minnesota summer, after moving from hot, humid Indianapolis. The weather is just SO pleasant. No doubt it helps that this is a mild summer even by Minnesota standards. And the days are so long. Even now, 7 weeks past the solstice, it seems like we have as much daylight as Indiana does at summer's peak (Indiana, or at least most of it, doesn't observe Daylight Savings Time.) And the pools all have heaters. 10:28:57 PM    comment []

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Housing appreciation has been unequal. "The dynamic is reversed for younger adults, who are struggling to afford houses on the coasts while their counterparts elsewhere in the country are taking advantage of low mortgage rates to buy bigger, better homes than in the past." This statement hints at the seeds of a reversal, as the article concludes by observing: "It will begin to occur, real estate agents say, only when people decide that a mansion in Fort Wayne is more appealing than a small apartment in New York or San Francisco." 10:28:54 PM    comment []

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For years I've believed that PC hardware power had been outstripping any need for it, at least in ordinary, text-based productivity applications (email, web-surfing, word-processing, spreadsheets). But lately I have been working with my departments, multi-thousand task, multi-year project plan, and I have found a reason to wish for a faster computer: recalculating project dependencies. For the first time since the early days of Lotus, on the original IBM PC, I had to turn calculation to manual! 10:28:48 PM    comment []

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Louis Borders: "One specific thing that we learned was that we wanted to have a co-marketing, co-branding model, whereas believing that you can go out and buy eyeballs to build a brand--we learned you just can't go that way. You must co-brand. Co-branding is an interesting business activity, because some of the great success stories in business are co-branding models." I think he may, just may, be onto something. I do frequently come across individual articles that I would like to read, but don’t get to, because they are behind the paid wall. One solution, of course, would be micro-payments: if a random Wall Street Journal article, were priced at, say, $0.15, I would probably cough up the money to pay. But for various reasons, micro-payments have not caught on as predicted. Also, that only works for articles to which your interest has been directed--it doesn’t cover browsing. But paying for content one a one-off, publication-by-publication basis seems too expensive, and troublesome. It’s already the case that I don’t have enough hours in my life to read all the interesting stuff I would like to read. So, since I already can’t read what is either free or that I have already paid for, I’m not very motivated to add incremental subscriptions. But, if I could pay one reasonable annual subscription fee, and get a vast archive for my money, that would have some definite appeal. There are some additional interesting facets to this. It seems to me like this is an area where the first player to get a large scale may have clear advantage. If subscriptions were widespread enough that they could be more-or-less assumed by linkers, then this would go some way to solving the permalinks/free links problem that is problematic in general, and particularly for webloggers. Think about the NYT’s role as paper-of-record, offline and online: even a semi-ideologue like Dave Winer (that label is not meant as criticism, BTW) is willing to link to the NYT, even though doing so requires putting up with undersired layers of: 1) free registration; 2) their special archive policy. Also, it is a good sign that the project severages the economics of the internet by eliminating physical distribution costs, and amortizes the software investment over multiple publications. Plus known ancillary benefits of electronically delivered content, like getting a clear indication of what content gets read, and by whom. 10:28:36 PM    comment []