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As a child, I was never a fan of Mr. Rogers and his strangely calm neighborhood, and as an adult I never thought about him much, but a few years ago my sister-in-law sent me a profile about him that was in Esquire magazine, of all places. It was a special issue on heroes, and in it Tom Junod had a piece about Fred Rogers called “Can You Say… Hero?” By the time I had finished reading it, I was ready to nominate Mr. Rogers for canonization (and Junod for a Pulitzer).

I scoured the web for the article, but with no luck. I found a few choice paragraphs from the piece here. And if you go to Tom Junod’s page at Esquire, you find the following

During the first day of writer at large Tom Junod’s interviews with Fred Rogers for Esquire’s special Heroes issue (11/98), he accidentally left his pen at Mr. Rogers’s New York apartment. “When I got there the next day,” says Junod, “there was an envelope sitting on his table, and inside that envelope I suppose was my pen, but on the outside of the envelope in Fred’s perfect calligraphy was ‘This is Tom’s pen.’ I keep that envelope next to my desk and I’ve never opened it. It’s a signal that when you write, anything can happen. It just always tells me that you never know what’s going to be inside.”

In my poking around, I found another good article on Mr. Rogers by Rip Rense, which by the way offers yet another quote by Junod.

“I think the greatest misconception involving Fred is that he’s mild to the point of weakness,” said Junod, from his home in Georgia. “When in fact, he’s mild to the point of great strength. He has one of the most powerful and commanding presences I’ve ever been around. His effect on people is astonishing. His affect on me was astonishing. The (Esquire) story meant a lot to me, but I was not in a place I wanted to be, writing-wise. I wasn’t feeling the connection to my work I’m used to. Fred helped me restore that. He did not deliberately do anything. He does not proselytize for any position, but there is no question in my mind but that Fred knew I was in a place I didn’t want to be—and he used his time with me to get me back. He’s a canny guy, that Fred. Watch out for him.”

Look down on us and smile, St. Fred.

I don’t know how I missed this for so long. Mindjack is a digital magazine (megablog? website? I don’t what to call these things anymore) backed up by a talented cast of writers. It’s really the usual suspects from the old Wired magazine: Mark Frauenfelder (also of BoingBoing), Gareth Branwyn, Howard Rheingold, Jon Lebkowsky, and others. I’m putting it on my regular reading list… I hope it lasts.

It’s hard to keep these web venues alive. Salon is just scraping by with the most annoying ads on the web. Steven Johnson‘s Feed magazine is gone. The experimental Plastic.com was designed to let the community provide the content and avoid the high-priced writer problem. It still exists, but as you can imagine the content is low rent and recycled. Weblogs work well precisely because you need so little money. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s room for a new zine-like entity. This editorial board has to be smart enough to realize there’s not much money in an online zine, so I assume they have a plan for keeping it going. I wish them luck.

In the meantime, read the cool interview with game designer Sid Meier and Cory Doctorow’s review of William Gibson’s new book.

From the Star Chamber archives, here is a Valentine’s Day story I wrote two years ago. The premise is that there is not a man in the world who loves Valentine’s day.

I recently watched (delayed by the magic of TiVo) a two-hour special on NOVA called the Battle of the X-Planes. The show concerned the recent defense industry showdown for who is going to build the next (and probably last) manned jet fighter for the United States, the so-called Joint Strike Fighter. The stakes were extraordinary: a winner-takes-all $200 billion contract. Since there isn’t much money available for new planes these days, the competition boils down to a mountain of cash for the winner and a bullet for the loser.

I used to work in the aerospace business (here’s a picture of the plane I worked on at NASA), and I can tell you that the NOVA cameras really did get behind the scenes of what goes on at an aircraft company. I work in the software business now, and the difference between the two environments is stark. Partially because of security clearances, you see the same kind of person again and again in the airplane business: a white man (U.S. citizen, naturally), enthusiastic, patriotic, and geeky in a clean-cut, midwestern sort of way. Very little irony. The software industry is a kaleidoscopic cross-cultural riot by comparison. NOVA managed to capture the earnestness and the intensity airplane builders pour into their work. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in top-secret defense industry cabals behind bomb-proof electronically sealed doors, this show is as close as you may get (Note: it’s not actually very interesting). I’ve been there, and now so has public television. I’m impressed with NOVA, but also with the U.S. government and Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. It was a nostalgic treat for me but also a refreshing beam of sunlight deep into normally dark corners of the government.

NOVA has put together a nice website on the the special. For instance, read about Lesson #1 learned by the NOVA film crew at Edwards: Never take snapshots of your C-5 transport plane without official permission, even if your pilot gives the thumbs up.

If you want to learn more about the Joint Strike Fighter, James Fallows has written a good piece about it in the Atlantic: Uncle Sam Buys an Airplane. In it, Fallows describes a conversation with the Boeing team after their loss.

I mentioned a nightmare scenario for Lockheed Martin: that Boeing, while playing the good loser, would get its revenge by successfully promoting unmanned vehicles as the real way to make defense affordable. The Boeing men all laughed when I said this. Of course that is what they have in mind.

That’s why JSF is going to be the last manned jet fighter the U.S. will ever buy. We’d be stupid to by another one now that the robots have finally earned their wings.

The Economist has a good opinion piece about the space shuttle this week (The Magnificent Seven) which says, more or less, after we mourn the astronauts, we do them no disrespect by questioning the program in which they were employed. Here is one line pulled from the article.

“The American space programme must go on,” said George Bush.

Programme? I seriously doubt it. George W. Bush must certainly have said “The American space program must go on.” Would the Economist have Bush analysing the colours of our national flag? Finding space shuttle tyres amid the debris? Throwing terrorists into gaol? It’s an interesting point to ponder. After all, how would we quote an illiterate speaker? Then again, an illiterate is not likely to take offense at your rendering of his words, whereas I would be annoyed to have those extra letters put in my mouth.

How many presidents of Libya are there, what with Qaddafi, Khaddafy, and all the others? Saddam Hussein protects himself by moving randomly among various palaces. Qaddafi does a similar trick by moving randomly among various transliterations.

I often wonder how far to carry translation. If I am in France, it’s a reasonable thing to turn cars into voitures. But in England should I refer to lorries instead of trucks? And if I do, am I being helpful or pretentious? Douglas Hofstadter has written a fascinating book on translation called Le Ton beau de Marot in which he discusses exactly this point, having come across a copy of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye that was “translated” from American spelling to British spelling. Apparently reading about Holden Caulfield studying maths was too much for Hofstadter.

Here’s an article from the Guardian by Ben Hammersley about the ever-growing Wikipedia: Guardian Unlimited | Common knowledge. The Wikipedia, you will recall, is an experiment from the wild edges of the informational commons. Change any page you want. Add any section you want. I fixed a typo on the Guy Fawkes page. It was very satisfying. The Wikipedia has been such a hit, that they’ve launched a Wiktionary to go with it. What next? I think a WikiBible (too late!) or some other such bric-a-brac sacred text would be excellent. There is no distinction between the sacred and the profane in the land of Wiki.

Incidentally, have you ever wondered where the phrase “grow like Topsy” comes from? It derives from the character Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Merriam-Webster site has a nice description as part of its Word for the Wise site. To grow like Topsy is to grow “wild, with neither plan, structure, nor direction.”

Incidentally, have you ever wondered if incidental remarks like the preceding ones are going to vanish into the Googlesphere? Behind the guise of clever instruction, all I did was report the results of a Google search on an unfamiliar phrase. You could have done the same thing. Why did I bother? Does a be-googled, wiki-fied world stifle conversation or promote it? Does the net bring us closer together or send us farther apart? I’m fairly certain it doesn’t stop me from rambling.

I don’t know what your weather was like today, but it was overcast and bleak here. No shadows were cast by man or beast. If the marmot’s prognostications are to be believed, winter is thereby curtailed. Whether or not the predictions are correct, I have a peculiar fondness for Groundhog Day. It is an occasion worth marking: the beginning of the end of winter. We are halfway through now, the days are lengthening quickly, and every step from now on brings us out of the cellar rather than taking us deeper into it.

Groundhog Day is also when you are reminded (as we did five years ago on this very site) to remove, destroy, or vandalize any remaining Christmas decorations that still limply and lamely decorate your neighborhood. Remember: it’s always appropriate, but it’s only illegal if you get caught.

Here’s a good example of what SOAP-based web services and an open-minded vendor site can bring about. Amazon encourages people to use web services to build customized interfaces to its book offerings. Here is the work of someone at Kokogiak Media who decided to put all of Amazon into a single page:
Amazon Light. The result is reasonably successful, and it bodes well for the world of interface design. Consider: if you think you can build a better user interface than the folks at Amazon, you can just go try it. And not with fake, cheesy data, but with the real thing. There’s a not unreasonable chance that some clever college student will do a better job than the entire UI design staff at Amazon. That’s good for everybody.

Footnote: It’s a little tricky to figure about who’s behind Kokogiak Media, but it turns out “they” are Alan Taylor, who in addition to being an industrious web tinkerer, is in fact an Amazon employee. Makes sense, I guess. Check out the cool space photos on his nowords.com site.

I was thinking about this Lorem Ipsum text the other day (see my post here, or a few entries down the page) and it occurred to me that there was something oddly genetic about the whole thing. Here is a message that has lost its intrinsic meaning, but nevertheless continues to get handed down from typesetter to typesetter like junk DNA. Geneticists have tools to measure these things, and they can often deduce how long two species have been separated by the genomic “distance” between them.

Why not, I thought, use the tools of a geneticist on this homely passage? If you want to compare two passages, be they poetry or protein, the tool of the trade is the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. It finds the best sequence alignment between the two and returns a score. Starting with the two texts (CICERO for the original and IPSUM for the latter day corruption) we perform a little algorithmic MATLAB mojo and arrive at the following alignment.

CICERO: Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum q
                                         ::::::::::  
IPSUM:  --------------------------------Lorem ipsum--


CICERO: uia dolor sit amet, consectetu-r, adipisci-- 
           ::::::::::::::::::::::::::: : :::::::::  :
IPSUM:  --- dolor sit amet, consectetuer- adipiscing 


CICERO: velit, sed quia- non numquam- ei----u-s modi 
         ::::::::::  :: :::  :::   : : :    : : ::: :
IPSUM:  -elit, sed -diam no--num---my nibh euis-mod- 


CICERO: tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam a
        :       :::::::::::::: ::: ::::::::::::::: ::
IPSUM:  t-------incidunt ut la-ore-et dolore magna- a


CICERO: liquam quaerat volupt-atem
        :::::::   ::::::::: : ::  
IPSUM:  liquam ---erat volu-tpat--

That gives us a total of 44 letter mutations (gaps and changes) out of a 173 letter message. If we assume a relatively speedy mutation drift rate of 10^-8 per letter per generation, and we further assume that a typesetter generation is 20 years, we can work out that Cicero’s original oration occurred 508 million years ago, which places it neatly at the end of the extraordinarily fertile Cambrian period. I understand that Cicero was huge with the trilobite crowd.