Link Banana

It’s not the nature of the errors that so amazing, it’s their sheer number. I thought we were supposed to value print for soberness and fact checking the internet doesn’t provide:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

(via kottke)

I now know who to blame whenever I feel bad about using “they” as a singular pronoun.

Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.

And along with promising that soon the dark days of the plural-only “they” will pass into memory, the piece mention a pronoun I’d heard in lore, and begun to consider apocryphal: thon.

Now if only we could settle on a second-person plural more accurate than “you”…

(via Daring Fireball)

There are some great pictures in this slideshow. That’s all.

(via m_f)

UPDATE (07/08/09): The Times has pulled the slideshow as some of it was manipulated. The photog has claimed there was none. (via @austinkleon)

Hyatt Hotels has started to give away seemingly random goodies — a free massage or night’s stay — to guests. The goal of the generosity is to inspire gratitude in the guests which psychologists expect will inspire greater loyalty than traditional points-based loyalty programs.

If a favor seems to be a function of the free will (as opposed to company rules), “you have more desire to reciprocate,” Palmatier says. Hyatt’s strategy of relying on the discretion of on-the-ground employees to provide “acts of generosity” is a pretty fair approximation of the gratitude-creation situation Palmatier says he thinks can pay off.

The New York Times ran a story last week to warm a teetotalers heart:

No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.

Ross Douthat, who to little derision or attention has started having his column published in the New York Times, has a good summary of Obama’s apparent plan for “winning” America’s culture war:

Engage on abortion, punt on gay rights.

And just to say, if the first two weeks are any indication, Douthat’s going to be a great compliment to Brooks. The two most conservative columnists at the paper are very probably the best.

America’s marriage-like legal rights for gay couples are an unfortunate patchwork, but America’s legal definitions of the transgendered can feel a bit like falling down a rabbit hole:

“Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

(via The Awl)

The Economist — I need to start perusing that again — is only printed in English. But some enterprising Chinese crowd-source the translation of every issue and privately release it as a PDF.

Interestingly, after Andy Baio published the story on his site, the New York Times asked him to rework it and published it in the paper. The future of reporting, anyone?

This is interesting information to have around for next time you get a cold:

Nose blowing generated enormous pressure — “equivalent to a person’s diastolic blood pressure reading,” Dr. Hendley said — and propelled mucus into the sinuses every time. Dr. Hendley said it was unclear whether this was harmful, but added that during sickness it could shoot viruses or bacteria into the sinuses, and possibly cause further infection.

The bit I’m really confused by is this, “The proper method is to blow one nostril at a time and to take decongestants.” Do people really try to blow both nostils at the same time — I never in my life thought that was possible.

David Brooks offers a surprisingly reasonable lament about the way that kids today don’t have any respect for traditional structures of power and order.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

David Brooks worries, in a troubling coherent piece, that the incoming President may have already bitten off more than he’ll be able to successfully manage. The conclusion sent chills down my spine:

By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.

Interestingly, Paul Krugman’s piece (also from Friday’s paper) argues that the incoming administration needs to do even more.

David Brooks’s Sidney Awards — for the best long-form magazine journalism — are one of the reasons I started this site last year. The 2008 results are solid, if a little too focused for my liking.

The New York Times slideshow is well done.

(via kottke)

A brief exploration of the importance of your smallest finger.

So what would you lose if you didn’t have one?

“You’d lose 50 percent of your hand strength, easily…”

Long a sucker for both well-written counterintuitive opinions and Frank Capra, I have mixed feelings about Wendell Jameson’s argument. His thesis:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

First, sorry for the title.

Second, the chart attached to this article answers a question I’ve been meaning to ask a knowledgable person for a while: different kinds of meat really are different in the amount of carbon dioxide their raising produces. While chicken produce relatively little CO₂ per pound, beef makes quite a bit. Pork, shrimp, and salmon all fall between those two. All of those are (obviously) much less efficient than grains and other plants.

Also interesting: cheese is actually roughly as efficient, in CO₂ per pound terms, as shrimp.

(via Buzzfeed)

I was about to post to Twitter my displeasure with the Democrat’s indefatigable plan to give money to Detroit, when I saw that David Brook said it much better than I would:

Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target. The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth. Over time, American government built a bigger safety net so workers could survive the vicissitudes of this creative destruction — with unemployment insurance and soon, one hopes, health care security. But the government has generally not interfered in the dynamic process itself, which is the source of the country’s prosperity.

But this, apparently, is about to change. Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. They have decided to follow an earlier $25 billion loan with a $50 billion bailout, which would inevitably be followed by more billions later, because if these companies are not permitted to go bankrupt now, they never will be.

This bit, further down the page, was also good:

It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.

Though I don’t know how much scientific utiliy this has, it’s cool to see this schlieren photo of a person coughing. Also worthwhile: the story explaining the technique and a slideshow of more such photos.

David Brooks seems to have captured the essence of Barack Obama’s stage presence and what good or bad it might tell us about his presidency.

That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan.

This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

Of course, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. New presidents are often amazed by how much they are disobeyed, by how often passive-aggressiveness frustrates their plans.

I’m behind, but this is interesting:

For every congenial character who can warm a room, there’s another who can bring a draft from the north, a whiff of dead winter. And even if the thermometer doesn’t register the difference, people do: social iciness feels so cold to those on the receiving end that they will crave a hot drink, a new study has found.

(via kottke)