Quick journey through changing phone styles in the time before you owned your own phone.

Telephone ads through the decades

Almost didn't recommend it until I saw this in the Alerts box:

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The Onion 2056

To travel around America today is to find a country also deeply concerned about education, competition, health care and pensions. It is a country worried about how its kids are going to find jobs, retire and take care of elderly parents. But instead of focusing on a new New Deal to address the insecurities of the age of globalization, the president set off on his second term to take apart the old New Deal, trying to privatize Social Security, only feeding people's anxiety. It won't fly.

If this is how Mr. Bush intends to use his political capital, that's his business. But if he had a vice president with an eye on 2008, I have to believe he or she would be saying to the president right now: "Hey boss. What are you doing? Where are you going? How am I going to get elected running on this dog's breakfast of antiscience, head-in-the-sand policies?"

Tom Friedman pulls no punches in this latest column.

In case you missed it, Lawrence Kotlikoff's The Coming Generational Storm is now available in an updated paperback edition for only $11.53 at Amazon. Sample chapters (including the new foreword by the authors) are available from MIT Press. You may recall that "Storm" was named one of Barron's 25 best books of 2004 and was a forbes.com top ten business book for 2004. If you can't read, "don't have time for a book", or simply prefer moving pictures to written words, you can watch a one-hour presentation by Kotlikoff.

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(Burns offers Homer a check for $2,000. All he has to do is sign this form.)

Homer: Wait a minute, I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.
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On a related topic, How Scary Is the Deficit? When China decides to stop funding the war in Iraq, the GWOT, your education, and your next McMansion, will you still vote for the politicians who have to double your income taxes even as they undo the New Deal? (Oh, you didn't know? Get wise to the impending meltdown; sell your house before it's too late.) But don't be too quick to lay all the blame on your elected officials; they can't help it. You see, political ideology is genetically transmitted:

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors.

The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes.

We urge political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

Run, Dick, Run

The Supernova buzz has begun, and MemeStreams is the talk of the town.

"Going forward, trust (will be) the thing that makes the Internet possible. Reputation management will be more and more important."

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? How long do I have to wait?

Trust thy Internet neighbor

I just updated MemeStreams. There are so many changes, its challenging to come up with a list. There are several major ones, and hundreds of little ones. This is the largest update to the site we have made in a very long time. The bulk of the update has to do with internal workings of the site, but there are a number of things that effect users.

* New Session Handling

All the sections of the site's code that handle cookies and user logins have been changed. This means that everyone will have to login again. There are numerous reasons for this change.

We are not doing much right now to track how you use the site that we have not already been doing, but the current changes are going to allow us to start doing much more. As we continue to improve the site, we will start collecting log information for user pages and make it available for viewing. Examples of this would be how many people read your weblog, view your profile, etc.

We take privacy concerns very seriously, and privacy rights factors heavily into what type of information we log and how we log it. We are not trying to be big brother. We take your right to privacy as seriously as we take our own. The purpose of our cookie tracking is to identify unique users of the site. That information is statistically valuable, and in our implementation it is kept as anonymous as tracking it at all allows. Whatever information we collect is somehow used to empower the users of MemeStreams, not take advantage of you.

User sessions with MemeStreams are now more secure. We have not had a problem with user accounts being hijacked, but its significantly harder to do now. In the future, secure logins will be available, ensuring that you can safely use your account from public and/or "untrusted" networks. (Donations to pay for a SSL certificate are welcome.)

* HTML/CSS Improvements

The use of HTML and CSS in MemeStreams has been on the verge of criminally insane. I can't think of much else to say about it then that. It was really, really bad.

If you evaluated our current HTML/CSS usage, there are still problems even after this update. However, the improvement is massive. Whatever browser you are using, you will see an improvement. IE in particular..

Neither Decius or I use Internet Explorer. We don't catch the subtle problems ourselves. We QA for IE, but not as much as we'd like to. Most of the site's frequent users don't use Internet Explorer either. Well... At least no one who ever complains about problems with the site uses IE. You IE people are damn silent. I personally theorize that users who use Windows are used to getting screwed on a constant basis and just accept a broken website, since they already have a broken computer. We never hear anything out of you. Its possible this has been because the site has barely worked in IE, although I prefer my theory. That aside, if you have problems with the site in Internet Expl... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

"Okay, who estimated the length of the bungee cord?"

Dilbert Comic Strip Archive - How to kill a bad CEO

... has been fixed!

The site is going to undergo a massive update tonight. I will be spending the rest of the evening until then QA'ing and making sure we didn't miss anything major. The trigger should get pulled sometime late in the night so it does not effect the site during heavy usage times. I expect we will be down for somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes. There is a fair amount of database conversion that will take place.

When you visit the site after its complete, you will have to login again. The session/user handling layer has been completely replaced.

The site's HTML has been revamped, and it will display better in every browser. Full Unicode support will be in place, so all languages should work properly as well, including posting/editing and selecting text using the bookmarklet.

I'll post more information after the update..

A Web forum where cryptographers collaborate on the puzzle went from attracting about 50 hits a day to thousands of hits a day, according to its moderator Elonka Dunin.

MemeStreams has been getting a noticable number of referrals from elonka.com.

Sanborn did let CNN have a look at his little-known sister sculpture on the grounds of the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington D.C. That artwork, titled "Antipodes," contains the same text, although it lacks some of the physical clues scattered on the CIA grounds.

Anyone ever gone to the Hishhorn Gallery?

Elonka on CNN.com!!!

1. There will be a site update in 24 to 72 hours that will change the way MemeStreams handles cookies. The end result of this will be that everyone will be logged out of the site and will have to log back in. Your old cookie will be bunk. We apologize for the inconvenience but we think its a minor hassle versus the amout of trouble associated with having to handle the old cookies in the code.

2. There will be a second site update some number of days after the first in which the little recommend bookmarklet will be disabled. We have decided that the little bookmarklet is inefficient and does not have enough room to display the user interface elements we want to display properly. Furthermore, it is much easier to edit a significant amount of text in a bigger window. We suggest that if you are using the little bookmarklet, you ough to upgrade to the big bookmarklet. You'll find it much nicer.

Thank you for your kind attention. We will now return to your regularly scheduled memes....

Important notes about upcoming MemeStreams updates

Tom Friedman wants Old Auto to Fail Fast. (Reread the manifesto from Isenberg and Weinberger. The parallels are striking.)

We don't need to reinvent the wheel or wait for sci-fi hydrogen fuel cells. The technologies we need for a stronger, more energy independent America are already here. The only thing we have a shortage of now are leaders with the imagination and will to move the country onto a geo-green path.

Where have we heard this before? How much time do we have left? Read the report:

As late as September 4, 2001, Richard Clarke asserted that the government had not yet made up its mind how to answer the question: "Is al Qaeda a big deal?"

A week later came the answer.

According to James Fallows, eventually we'll get the leaders we need. But what's along the path between now and then?

The story we will tell Americans begins in 2001, and it has three chapters. For public use we'll refer to them by the names of the respective administrations. But for our own purposes it will be clearer to think of the chapter titles as "Cocking the Gun," "Pulling the Trigger," and "Bleeding."

...

The two-party system had been in trouble for decades. It was rigid, polarizing, and unrepresentative. Eight years of failure from two administrations have finally blown apart the tired duopoly. The hopes of our nation are bleeding away along with our few remaining economic resources.

As Toyota Goes ...