Link Banana

An unexpected editorial about a disaster highlights an unexpected fact:

One inevitable measure of a mountain is simply how often climbers escape with their lives. By that standard, K2 stands almost alone in the world. It is a lesser peak than Everest only in height. In every other respect, it is a far more arduous climb: steeper, colder and more isolated.

Many more people have died on Everest, but only because so many more climbers of every skill level have undertaken it. The risk of failing — and dying — is far greater on K2, as the mountain proved again this week when 11 climbers were killed, nine of them after an icefall swept away the fixed ropes they needed to retreat down an icy chute called the Bottleneck.

Having just recently watched Frontline’s “Storm Over Everest” the even greater danger of K2 wouldn’t have occurred to me.

PBS is planning to drop Mr. Roger’ Neighborhood from the list of programs it regularly beams to member stations (who themselves decide when and if to air it). This fact yielded a good bit of nostalgia among those over 20, and a petition based primarily on that nostalgia.

(via Metafilter)

America’s favorite streaming television site, Hulu, just announced that they’ve now got The Daily Show and Colbert Report. Soon, they’ll also have these great PBS programs:

• Scientific American Frontiers
  
• Wired Science
• Carrier
• Nova

(via TV Squad)

…himself. This is one of those annoying videos that I can’t seem to ignore even as I find it, well, annoying. It’s surreal, it’s silly, and it’s surprisingly entertaining.

(via clusterflock)

PBS’s Cringley can be a little sloppy. This week, after a long column about how Apple really should include Blu-ray drives on it’s computers (true, but only moderately interesting), he dropped something of a bomb. I’d always heard that this was origin of the word “bug” in technology:

was that a malfunction in the Mark II computer at Harvard in 1947 was traced to a dead moth that in its last living act had shorted out a circuit card. They taped the moth carcass in the computer logbook and history was made.

It turns out, the moth story isn’t right. Bug “was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878.”

PBS’s Cringely’s latest column seems as much dissatisfied with Facebook clutter as it is about anything, but there are a few interesting points.

The tip-off that we’re nearing the end of a cycle is the flight to quality we’re seeing from some of the bigger players. At Facebook, for example, you can no longer register using an e-mail address from an anonymous mail site like Mailinator, Operamail, or Countermail. Facebook demands that you take an extra three minutes and get a Yahoo Mail or AOL mail address for example. This is clearly the company pruning its subscribers in anticipation of an acquisition in the next couple quarters. There is no other reason to do it. MySpace isn’t doing it despite a very real sex offender scandal, but then MySpace has already been sold and Facebook hasn’t yet.

Once Facebook has been taken and one or two others, the golden era of social networking acquisitions will be over and the entrepreneurs will be headed for that Next Big Thing.

This is an interesting development no doubt.

Also of note on the the topic, Robert Cringely’s latest column.

I finally got around to watching the most recent Frontline, “The Medicated Child.” It’s a very informative — and perhaps troubling, depending on your feelings — journey into the disorganized world of child psychiatry. You can, as with all episode of Frontline (and most other PBS shows), watch the whole thing online — the link’s around the middle of the page.

Mr. Cringely, PBS’s usually-interesting and often-prescient technology columnist, addresses it as if it’s almost a done deal.

What I DO see happening is Apple buying Adobe, which would give it effective dominance of digital content creation and distribution on a global scale. Bruce Chizen suddenly stepped down as Adobe’s CEO without warning: why? A caretaker CEO (my characterization — no slight intended) is in place. Steve has always viewed Adobe co-founder and co-chair John Warnock like a father. Warnock and co-chair Chuck Geschke are losing interest in Adobe day-to-day as they move on with their lives. Acquiring Adobe would make Apple much more of a cross-platform company. The combined professional applications could be placed in the Adobe division of Apple where they could go up in price for some markets, becoming VASTLY more profitable. But most important — keeping in mind the whole purpose here is driving content distribution — merging Flash and QuickTime would make any other video standards (like Windows Media) simply immaterial.

PBS’s technology columnist, Robert Cringley, has unveiled his predictions for 2008. The most interesting:

5) Here’s a risky one. Google will bid billions and win the upcoming 700-MHz wireless spectrum auction, which is an auction for frequencies that are actually much more useful for a voice network than for a data network. Then Google will impose its open access rules on the frequencies before either TRADING them to Sprint or simply ACQUIRING Sprint to get that company’s WiMax licenses, which are what Google really wanted all along.

9) As part of its transition from a PC company to a consumer electronics and content company, Apple will introduce — and trumpet in a huge media show — its replacement for the mouse. Really.