Over the Edge

Sometimes, you can go months without synchronicity. Then it bites you on the ass.

Bryant Park is a picturesque park in Midtown, behind the New York Public Library's main branch and the site of one of the better-known free Wi-Fi zone. There's a lovely carousel there, and they show free movies on Monday nights during the summer.

For a little while, there's been an experiment whereby they put hawks in Bryant Park to help control the pigeon population. But the other day, one of the hawks made the perfectly understandable error of mistaking a chihuahua for a rat, and tried to make off with it.

The hawk lost his job. (Were it up to me, I'd have given him a bonus, but once again, the true problem about this city is that they did not ask me.)

Now here's a story from CNN about a judge sparing the life of 170 feral Chihuahuas.

Nearly 170 wild Chihuahua dogs facing death at a Los Angeles-area animal shelter were spared Friday by a judge who released them into the custody of actor Gregory Peck's former daughter-in-law, who runs a Chihuahua rescue operation.

Seems to me that there's this hawk who's out of a job in New York.....

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I was all set to gloat a lot about the fact that Gallagher, Larry Flynt, Gary Coleman, and Ahhhnold are running for governor of California. Then I remembered that I live in the state where recent senatorial candidates included Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis and parking garage magnate/certified nutball Abe Hirschfeld, and where Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Al Sharpton and Gore Vidal all ran for mayor.

Suddenly, it doesn't seem like all the loose screws have rolled west after all...

The AP (via CNN) reports that the FDA has approved a new wheelchair, called the iBOT, that can climb stairs. The story talks about how the device relies on gyroscopes, and how it's being sold by a division of Johnson & Johnson.

Not until the 15th graf does the story mention that the wheelchair was invented by the highly regarded medical inventor Dean Kamen, who put most of the iBOT technology into the Segway scooter -- which is something that maybe a lot of readers might have heard about.

Me, I'd have found some way to work the Segway into the lede. But then, I don't work for the AP.

There's a new health study today -- and isn't there always -- that contains unaccustomed good news. Well, good for me, anyway.

Seems that the Journal of the American Medical Association and the journal Nature published studies this week indicating that eating chocolate will lower your cholesterol. Not just any chocolate. Dark chocolate. The good stuff. The darker the better, apparently. Clutter it up with too much milk and you lose the benefits, because the flavinoids and antioxidants are in the cocoa.

From the AP, via CNN:

Blood pressure remained pretty much unchanged in the group that ate white chocolate, which does not contain polyphenols. But after two weeks, systolic blood pressure -- the top number -- had dropped an average of five points in the dark-chocolate group. The lower, or diastolic, reading fell an average of almost two points.

This is a whole lot more encouraging than the other studies I heard about this week. One says that farmed salmon is loaded with PCBs; the other says that skin carcinomas that start on your feet have a higher mortality rate than ones that start on your arms. I eat a fair amount of salmon, and my feet are tanned.

So am I eating less salmon and using sunscreen on my feet? Nope. But I hereby resolve to eat more dark chocolate. And drink more tea and red wine. Gotta load up on those flavinoids...

The Net likes to know what time it is. (So to TV networks and cable systems and any other distributed resource.) When the Internet was small-ish, it was no big deal to have a few thousand routers checking in with a couple of places to make sure everyone was in sync.

Generally, these conversations go like this:

"Hey! What time is it, anyway?"
"200308281252042143"

And that's the end of it. But as more and more people went online, and more and more of those routers got installed in places like home networks, it was only a matter of time before something broke.

Back in June, the University of Wisconsin was hit with what looked like a massive Denial of Service attack, with hundreds of thousands of requests for the current time. UW happens to run one of the Net's time servers -- a computer that much of the Net syncs up with. Instead of the normal conversation, here's what happened:

"Hey, what time is it, anyway?"
<silence>
"Hey, what time is it, anyway?"
<silence>

... and so on. 250,000 requests per second. It more or less took the University off line.

It turns out that the problem was with a couple of models of Netgear routers. Netgear specializes in low-end stuff, the kind that's installed in home networks. And with the advent of cheap computers and Wi-Fi and all that good stuff, there are suddenly a ton of cheap Netgear routers installed -- many of them with a little programming flaw that caused them to check in with the University of Wisconsin all at the same time.

And like any good infants, when they didn't get an answer, they kept asking. Louder and louder. A quarter-million times a second.

The kicker is that the owners of the routers didn't know there was anything wrong. Their routers worked fine. They probably never heard of the University of Wisconsin.

Netgear has agreed to issue a patch for the five affected routers, and apparently to help the university build a more robust network. A university official pointed out to CNet, though, that the problem probably won't go away soon. Netgear sells into a market that's less than technically astute, and its customers are less likely than most to a) upgrade or b) tweak something that doesn't actually affect the way they use their own network.

I once had an ex-girlfriend who said that I type for a living. (Since at the time I was a reporter for UPI -- and UPI was the second-largest news organization in the world -- you understand why she was ex.) Closer to the truth is that I talk to people people for a living. And e-mail has changed that.

It is one thing to get face-to-face with someone and interview them. You can pick up a lot from the non-verbal stuff -- sometimes more than from the verbal. It's not as good to get someone on the phone and talk to them that way; there's the inevitable loss of personal contact and inflection. On the other hand, it's vastly more efficient, and with some practice and careful listening, it's pretty much worth the trade-off.

But now everyone has e-mail. Even executives. And this I do not like at all.

First of all, there's a spectacular lack of spontaneity. You submit your precise questions, and the interviewee responds (or doesn't) precisely. There's the chance for follow-up (you have an e-mail address, after all), but the give-and-take that makes for excellent and revealing conversation is irretrievably lost. Furthermore, you never know if you're talking to the person himself or his flak. And if you've arranged the interview through a flak, you'd better believe that the responses have been massaged, if not entirely written by the PR department. It wouldn't surprise me, in some cases, if the person being quoted were entirely unaware that he had "granted" an "interview."

It may be something, and it may even be journalism, but too much of it makes for a sorry watered-down version of journalism.

The trade magazine Editor & Publisher had a good piece on this recently:

Before resorting to e-mail interviews, reporters should ask "Why?" If e-mail is being used for the reporter's or source's convenience, a telephone or face-to-face interview is more appropriate. Telephone interviews capture tone of a voice. Onsite interviews reveal a source's demeanor or surroundings so that the reporter can add an element of human interest or spontaneity to the story while enhancing the writing and building trust with the reader.

In other words: resist e-mail. A good choice.

From the Independent (U.K.), by Andrew Gumbel:

Cast your mind forward to the morning of 3 November 2004. Imagine, just for a moment, that George W Bush has gone down to ignominious defeat in the US presidential election, his once sky-high popularity ratings pickaxed and bludgeoned into the ground like some rotten fencepost on a Texas ranch. All across the nation, people are asking where it all went wrong for the chief executive who had seemed so immune from criticism for so long.

And the answer, they all agree, is the moment that the mighty Fox News Channel - the red-meat chomping, propaganda-spewing, flag-waving, all-screaming, ratings-topping cable station doubling as chief baggage carrier for the Bush administration - was reduced to utter humiliation by a single pesky New York comedian.

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