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Interesting things afoot in radio these days. Boston folks may remember talkshow host Christopher Lydon from his old show “The Connection” (which still exists, only without him). He feuded with his host station WBUR and was shown the door. He has wandered in the wilderness for a few years, maintaining a part-time blog at Harvard Law School, but now another Boston station, WGBH, has given him a new show called Open Source. The show, which embraces the blogospherical world of information tech, is naturally available as a podcast, and is featured at Apple’s iTunes site.

I learned all this from ITConversations guru Doug Kaye on his Blogarithms site. In this post he observes that, while the old-school thing to do is encourage your local NPR affiliate to pick up the show, internet podcasts mean that he doesn’t care anymore about his local radio station. It’s no longer in the loop; already it’s fading into dim obsolescence. Ouch!

I find this attitude interesting because I’m sure Lydon only got the show because of an old-school radio deal. He gets a nice studio, fancy equipment, syndicated distribution, stuff that costs real money. We haven’t yet reached the point where it’s easy to do something this elaborate from your basement. And yet the podcasts new radio proclaims are slicing through old radio’s Achille’s tendon. Still, Doug Kaye knows whereof he speaks, sitting as he does atop one of new radio’s prosperous properties. I don’t think anybody knows where the money is going to come from, but Chris Lydon is having fun on the air again, and that’s good news to me.

One of the standard birthday gifts you can get for someone, particularly as they start to get a little, er, older, is a scrapbook of what happened the year they were born, or a fake newspaper of events that happened on the day they were born. But really, who cares what was going on when you were born? You don’t remember any of it. It don’t signify.

What I really want is a service that can provide an uninterrupted hour of music from WKZL, FM 107.5 from about 1982. I want it with commercials, DJ chatter, and everything. Or maybe two hours of Sunday night TV from 1977, including Disney and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom hosted by Marlin Perkins. I would pay good money for that, because I was old enough to remember it.

My friend Roy has found exactly what I’m describing, only it’s from where he grew up: South Africa. Someone is assembling podcasts of old radio shows from the Capital 604 station, some going as far back as 1981. Want to know what the weather was like along the eastern Cape coast on October 1st, 1984? Listen to this. Capital 604 was hugely popular because they had good music, good DJs, and perhaps most of all because they were the first truly independent radio station in South Africa, operating with relative impunity from the hinterlands of the independent black homeland Transkei. Since it shut down some years ago, and since it is so fondly remembered by so many who grew up in South Africa during the 70s and 80s, people are pooling their old recordings of the station and making them available via podcast.

Anybody out there want to dig up some old WKZL tapes?

Talkr (their tagline is “Letting blogs speak for themselves”) is a site that lets you listen to popular blogs being read to you. The catch is that it’s not a person reading, but a computer. If your idea of computer-generated voice is the Speak & Spell toy from the 1980s, you can be forgiven for thinking Talkr is a terrible idea. But the speech synthesis here is surprisingly good. Listen to some of the free blogs they have on this page (they have dozens more that you have to pay to listen to). I enjoy reading the Many2Many blog, and the audio version is remarkably uncrappy. It’s not good enough yet for me to make it part of my information diet, but clearly they’re improving fast. Text-to-speech synthesis is a big deal; I’m sure it will start to show up all over the place now that it’s acceptably good.

I just got back from a week’s vacation on the beaches of North Carolina, and no sooner had I squeezed my family into a Boston cab at Logan airport than a right-of-way squabble broke out. My driver, who turned out to be an affable Nigerian gentleman, was trying to work left into a lane owned by a vocal local who was in turn working right to pick someone up. Everyone was held up by a big bus in front of us both. Our interchange went something like this.

MR. CABBIE: <beep beep> (gesticulating to be let across to the left)
MR. DRIVER: [screaming] Go f**k yourself! You should’ve come in behind me!
MR. CABBIE: Where are you going? You shouldn’t be there! [i.e. stuck behind the bus holding up the traffic]
MR. DRIVER: F**k you, a**hole!
MR. CABBIE: [picking up cell phone] Okay, I can call the police and have them make you move.
[Note: I can attest that this next part actually happened.]
MR. DRIVER: [slight pause] Say you’re sorry.
MR. CABBIE: [without hesitating] I’m sorry.

The confrontation ended instantly, and within seconds we were scooting along on our way home. Brilliant! My faith in humanity was restored. My driver grinned broadly as we dropped into the Ted Williams tunnel: “I will say I’m sorry ten times. It doesn’t cost me anything!” We should all be so wise.

The Power Of Us is a nice Business Week article about how companies can tap into their user communities. The punchline is: no matter how big your company is, there are always more people outside of it than inside of it. If you can get all those outside people to help you out, even a little bit, some amazing things can happen. At the same time, it’s a little unnerving giving the Great Unwashed the keys to your house. Is Open Source a friend or a threat? If you can’t find some way to befriend it, you’re in for some real trouble. John Q. Public is a jerk, but he’s rich, and he’s got a few really good ideas. As the irrepressible Jeff Bezos says, “You invite the community in, and you get all this help.” Here’s an extended quote from the article. I like the image of using social graces to turn windmills.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor who studies the economics of networks, thinks such online cooperation is spurring a new mode of production beyond the two classic pillars of economics, the firm and the market. “Peer production,” as he calls work such as open-source software, file-sharing, and Amazon.com Inc.’s millions of customer product reviews, creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. “The economic role of social behavior is increasing,” he says. “Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products.”

I recently read an article about the latest stem cell breakthrough in South Korea and it resonated with something I read about some months ago: medical tourism. Medical tourism is the practice of traveling to a cheap country with excellent doctors, typically India, in order to get uninsured medical procedures done. Tech Central Station and Yale Global both have good articles about the topic. The bottom line is that, if you’re uninsured for a given operation, it can cost as much as two thirds less to do it in India even when you take air travel and recuperation time into account. As both wealth and medical expenses continue to mount in the West, medical tourism is bound to take off. The trends all point in the right direction, and besides, isn’t your doctor already Indian? Or maybe she’s Chinese?

What struck me recently is how therapeutic stem cell research fits perfectly into this picture. You might travel to another country simply because a procedure is cheaper there, but you might do it because it is illegal and considered morally reprehensible where you come from. That is, if you have the means to save your child’s life through the magic of stem cells, then you you will fly to find them wherever they can be found.

House Republican leader Tom DeLay has made his position on stem cells clear. “An embryo,” he said, “is a person, a distinct internally directed, self-integrating human organism.” Korean researchers, however, don’t give a goddamn about Tom Delay’s opinion on stem cell research (aside from perhaps being grateful for the extra business he sends their way). And when, years from now, you need stem cells to treat your withering Parkinsonism, it will be cheap and pleasant to fly to Korea to get them. Think of all the morally upright American institutions you’ll fly over to get there. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, while you’re over there, you see an aging and palsied Tom Delay getting a stem cell boost of his own.

What is a Sudoku? A Sudoku (as explained here in the Wikipedia) is a number/logic puzzle that involves placing the numbers 1 through 9 on a 9-by-9 grid such that no number appears twice on the same row, column, or specially marked 3-by-3 box. Perhaps the real puzzle is why it should have become such a pop sensation in places from Hong Kong to New Zealand to the UK. Here is some coverage of the story from the BBC and Guardian. Nevertheless, a phenomenon it certainly is, and I am not one to shrink from hopping on the bandwagon.

I have been interested in brushing up on my Java skills, and this Sudoku craze has given something good to chew on. With that in mind, I have created Sudoku Satori, the Sudoku solving assistant. Try it out and let me know what you think. It’s in a pretty rudimentary state right now, but it sure works when it comes to solving these puzzles. It’s a simple matter to have the computer solve the puzzle for you. What this tool does is help you see the patterns so you can understand and solve the puzzle (hence the satori part).

I had come across David Rumsey’s historical map collection before, but this article at the
O’Reilly Network provides some nice background on how it came about.