I used to wonder how it would have been to be a reader in the era of serialized fiction, when Dickens could keep an entire culture hanging on for the next installment, and ships arriving in America might be hailed, before anything else, with questions about how things fared with Little Nell.

This brings a whole new meaning to the concept of paparazzi.

... This territory thick with mobbed-up construction sites and toxic waste dumps turned out, unaccountably, to be a wonderland.

What began as the story of a potential healing became the description of the last stages of an incurable sickness. The images themselves darkened, as if the sun were removing itself permanently from northern New Jersey.

A Northern New Jersey of the Mind

Yardley calls it a "measured but passionate and immensely important book."

Publishers Weekly describes it as "devastating ... alarming ... impressive ... vivid ..."

There are times when the capacity of mankind to blind itself to plain reality is simply breathtaking.

...

Wishful thinking tells me that perhaps this time the call will be heard. Experience teaches another, and far gloomier, lesson.

See also the recent post on The Idols of Environmentalism:

When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Jonathan Yardley, on the new book by Callum Roberts

A sampling:

Most of it doesn’t matter.

Waiting to do something until you can be sure of doing it exactly right means waiting for ever.

Trying to please other people is largely a futile activity.

Everything takes twice as long as you plan for and produces results about half as good as you hoped.

See also Augustine's Laws.

Things I wish I’d known when I was younger

After a hearing lasting more than 40 days, Pakistan's Supreme Court on July 20th overturned the government's suspension of the court's chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

The court's ruling means that Mr Chaudhry is to be reinstated.

The decision is a major blow to General Pervez Musharraf, the president, and a tactical victory for the secular political parties, who have rallied behind the judiciary in protest at what they regard as an attempt to undermine judicial independence.

The ruling is also momentous because the Pakistani judiciary in the past has always been reluctant to rule against the military or a military-led government.

However, while the decision removes one source of political tension, it will do little to stop the terrorist violence now engulfing the country.

Justice wins

Citing a "period of heightened threat" to the US homeland, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell asked Congress to "act immediately" to make changes in current law to permit the interception of messages between terrorist targets overseas, which he said now requires burdensome court orders.

Agency Seeks Greater Surveillance Power Overseas

The day after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, a Saudi woman resident in London, a member of a wealthy family, rang her sister in Riyadh to discuss the crisis affecting the kingdom. Her niece answered the phone.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s here, dearest aunt, and I’ll get her in a minute, but is that all you have to say to me? No congratulations for yesterday?’

The dearest aunt, out of the country for far too long, was taken aback. She should not have been. The fervour that didn’t dare show itself in public was strong even at the upper levels of Saudi society. US intelligence agencies engaged in routine surveillance were, to their immense surprise, picking up unguarded cellphone talk in which excited Saudi princelings were heard revelling in bin Laden’s latest caper. Like the CIA, they had not thought it possible for him to reach such heights.

In Princes’ Pockets

Due out in September.

A career officer (Tommy Lee Jones) and his wife (Susan Sarandon) work with a police detective (Charlize Theron) to uncover the truth behind their son's disappearance following his return from a tour of duty in Iraq.

From Paul Haggis ("Million Dollar Baby", "Letters from Iwo Jima").

In the Valley of Elah (2007)

The core Internet protocols have not changed significantly in more than a decade, in spite of exponential growth in the number of Internet users and the speed of the fastest links. The requirements placed on the net are also changing, as digital convergence finally occurs.

Will the Internet cope gracefully with all this change, or are the cracks already beginning to show?

In this paper I examine how the Internet has coped with past challenges resulting in attempts to change the architecture and core protocols of the Internet.

Unfortunately, the recent history of failed architectural changes does not bode well. With this history in mind, I explore some of the challenges currently facing the Internet.

Why the Internet only just works

Like Pattern Recognition before it, William Gibson's eighth novel, Spook Country, feels like dictation from the zeitgeist. Its "illegal facilitators," nonexistent magazines, terrorists, pirates, junkies, mad art dealers, and WMD are all woven together into something more unsettling and blackly comic than anything he's done before. Gibson and I started talking in '04, shortly before meeting in person while I was in Vancouver working on a doomed TV pilot based on my comic book series Global Frequency. At the time, he disclosed that near-future events would determine whether Spook Country would be comedy or horror. We've stayed in touch electronically ever since, and when wired asked me to talk to him about the book, set for release in August, we picked up right where we left off.

Q&A: William Gibson Discusses Spook Country and Interactive Fiction

If you are interested in Hadoop, this may be newsworthy.

As we noted last week, Doug and Eric Baldeschwieler (Yahoo's Director of Grid Computing) are presenting Meet Hadoop at the 2007 Open Source Convention this week. While this is one of the first times we're really talking about our involvement with Hadoop in public, it certainly won't be the last.

Yahoo's Hadoop Support