. Guernica interview of Kristoff

"G: How many emails do you get per day?

Kristof: Well, the bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.

G: Now I know some of your colleagues claim that they read all the emails they get. Do you?

Kristof: I try to be careful about the wording on that… Usually my assistant, Winter, reads them. It varies. If I’m writing about religion, for instance, the number might go way up. Recently I came back from a trip to 20,000.

I try to respond to typical ones. One of the things I’ve tried to combat in my blog, kristofresponds.com, is the notion that we [journalists] are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership—so I hope that answering some of the questions I get can help combat that notion.

G: I imagine the most welcome ones are the ones where you get a story lead?

Kristof: Yes, when I was covering intelligence failures, for instance, I actually got a lot of helpful emails from members of the intelligence community. Or if I’m writing about
something I don’t know much about but am very interested in, I can get some very informative letters.

G: I gather that people sometimes send you money…

Kristof: Yes, that’s actually a big problem because sometimes they send cash and I always feel like I have to give them a receipt and then pass along the money. It’s quite a task.

G: What was the largest amount you ever got?

Kristof: Someone wrote in to say he wanted to give a million dollars. He had earned quite a bit from Microsoft dividends and wanted to know of a good charity that would help in Darfur. So I suggested donating it to Doctors Without Borders; they do good work. He ended up only giving $500,000, but…

G: And didn’t Bill Gates credit your articles for much of the philanthropy he does? He had had a plan to wire the third world, but after a series you did on poverty there, he said he decided to get more engaged?

Kristof: Right.

G: It seems like you created a monster.

Kristof: (laughs) Yes, he’s done some fantastic work. But I think one of my articles simply pointed him toward the issue and he did a lot of reading and research on his own. I don’t deserve much credit."

"G: I noticed in your columns lately, you seem to be focusing on less pessimistic aspects of the crisis in Sudan. Is this because you’ve found that Americans disengage from the gloom and doom?

Kristof: I think they do. There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed no matter what we do, no matter what aid is brought in. And so I’m finding lately that a little bit of attention can go a long way."

From: . Guernica

Nikon Lens Info: KenRockwell.com

Good source/starting point for Nikon Lens Info.

National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center

National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center

GMail Drive

GMail Drive: is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.

Photos: Imaging Famine

Intriguing photo exhibit called Imaging Famine

Hemispheres | Three Perfect Days

Great, brief upscale profiles of cities around the world from United's Three Perfect Days.

moleskinerie

The blog begat by the journal.

Islamic influence on China

I am puzzling over the Islamic influence on Central Asia, prompted by a trip to Kashgar where there are a number of obvious influences, particularly mosques. A useful (and authoritative?, given the author's pedigree) travel log explains the origins: "In the year of 622 of the Common Era (C.E.), Muhammad made his famous Hejira (emigration) to Medina from his birthplace Mecca, where he had achieved only very moderate success in winning converts to the new faith as revealed to him by Allah (God). When he died 10 years later, the strictly monotheistic religion he had founded had not only been accepted by most tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, but had also forged a new Arab state with Medina as the source of its spiritual and political power. Motivated by the new faith and strengthened by the new state organization, the Arab people set out on a path of conquest and established, within 100 years of MuhammadÂ?s death, a vast empire spreading out from Spain in the west to the borders of China in the east. "

Image America

Rediscovered BlogThis! and now we're in trouble! Robert Clark, a professional photographer, using a mobile phone on an American Roadtrip.

Pool Cleaners - Colour

Pool Cleaners - Colour
Originally uploaded by pmorgan.

Active FTP, Blogger and Technical Details

I finally figured that my domain host doesn't support passive FTP anymore and that blogger doesn't support active FTP. Drag, but minor mystery solved. Time to change domain hosts and perhaps blogging tools ....

Authors: Susan Orlean

Wonderful story about surfer girls on Maui. The story begat the movie Blue Crush.

"When I left Maui that afternoon, my plane circled over Ho'okipa, and I wanted to believe I could still see them down there and always would see them down there, snapping back and forth across the waves." Source: Susan Orlean - Adaptation

Technology: Charting the Gap

Useful Usability Guidelines Bibliography by Pauline Genise. Charting the space between humans and computers.

Technology: Home Automation

"Not everyone in your household will be as enthusiastic about home automation as you are." Source: Home Hacks section of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site. Kelly had an early had in Wired Magazine and the Whole Earth Catalogues

Ideas, Books, Anthropology: Jared Diamond - Collapse

"In Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves."

Source: The New Yorker

(Since first posted the review has been moved by the New Yorker. One can now purchase everything written in the New Yorker before 2005 on cd. The New Yorker overcame copyright concerns by scanning the pages so they can't be searched.)

Ideas: Power and Population in Asia

"Few would contest the general proposition that the population factor bears directly on the course of the friendly — and sometimes unfriendly — competition between states in the world arena today. Problems arise, however, when we try to move from the general to the specific. How, exactly, do human numbers (population size, composition, and trends of change) affect the ability of governments to influence events beyond their borders — or affect the disposition of a country’s interactions with outside actors? And this is no less important for the would-be strategist: How can we use population indicators to anticipate, with some reasonable hope of accuracy, the impact of yet-unfolding demographic forces on the balance of international power? This essay explores these questions for the world’s largest strategic arena: the great Asian/Eurasian expanse."

Source: Power and Population in Asia by Nicholas Eberstadt - Policy Review, No. 123

Ideas: Lakoff

A critical concept:

'Frames', according to Lakoff, are the key to understanding how political ideas are received. Human beings don't absorb information as raw material; we sift input through frames of meaning carried in the language we use.

Ideas: aperspective space

Without or not yet having developed a perspective ... a useful state, me thinks.

"Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Jean Gebser tried in his texts about the development of the history of perspective, which he conceived in 1932 and wrote in the 1940's, to work towards an aperspective perception of space which succeeds the unperspective and perspective world. He was not yet able to realize the connection between this development and the speed of media and the resulting tyranny of real time, but already he predicted a new age of perspective."

Source: Jean Gebser

Management: Corporate Consulting Types - Possibly Relevent Article for your Practises

"The demise of the corporate pecking order is a myth, says Stanford professor Harold J. Leavitt. Middle managers are the ones who bear the brunt when an organization pretends that everyone is equal." Source: HBS Working Knowledge: Leadership: The Plight of Middle Managers

A related thesis was really well presented in Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success by Art Kleiner.

Movies: Kubrick on the power of film

"The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle."

Source: Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide

Management: 3M Meeting Network

"Dozens of articles & tips on how to run effective meetings"

Site: 3M Meeting Network

Technology, Design: XPLANE | The visual thinking company

Design, Art: Milton Glaser Posters

Poetry, Travel: Sacred Poetry

"A chaikhana is a teahouse along the legendary Silk Road pilgrimage and trading route linking China to the Middle East and Europe. It is a place of rest along the journey, a place to shake off the dust of the road, to sip tea, and to gather together to sing songs of the Divine..."

Source: Poetry Chaikhana - Sacred Poetry from Around the World: Sufi, Zen, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, amd Yoga Poetry

Technology, Anthropology: Clay Shirky on the Design of Social Software

"Rating, karma, meta-moderation -- each of these systems is relatively simple in technological terms. The effect of the whole, though, has been to allow Slashdot to support an enormous user base, while rewarding posters who produce broadly valuable material and quarantining offensive or off-topic posts."

Source: Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works

"Nature transformed through industry is a predominate theme in my work."

Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works

Frans Lanting Photography

"A collection of images that highlight the precious web of life that the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet campaign seeks to help save."

Frans Lanting Photography :: Portfolios

Buddhist Pictures

"These exercises and assignments formed the basis for this contemplative approach, which shows us how to synchronize our eye and mind, so that perception is free from pre-conceived ideas, therefore direct and unfabricated."

"Since the beginning of this journey of looking and seeing, there has been a quote by Chogyam Trungpa, the meditation master, scholar and artist that has guided me:

"There is such a thing
as unconditional expression
that does not come from self or other.

It manifests out of nowhere
like mushrooms in a meadow,
like hailstones, like thundershowers"

Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
The Art of Calligraphy

~Source: Miksang.net: About Michael Wood:

Beijing Subway

"Subway construction started in China's capital in 1965."

BEIJING (Peking) Subway

Blog Comments and Moderation

[This whole post may not transcend the I-thought-it-was-funny-at-the-time standard]

This academic guy, Philip Greensan, created a massive photo site called photo.net (it’s a good site) and became rich and now an affiliation with Harvard. He maintains a blog which attracts a collection of comments like:

"P.S. Your blog's comments section continues to amaze. It's like some kind of zoo, but with idiots instead of exotic animals." http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2004/08/27#a5783

This reminds me of the quote "The problem with the global village is the global village idiots."

In one comment, the author of Envisaging Information and some other great books about visual design chimed in: "'My first experience with forum moderation and, indeed, my first contact with Philip, took place when he deleted a contribution of my at his photo.net!' EdwardTufte • 8/29/04; 6:09:40 PM #"

And then there is this stream, where Phil tries to sell a TV on ebay, and plug his cousin's new movie.

"Sounds like your cousins interpersonal skills are as refined as his movie productions. Seena Hyena • 9/3/04; 9:53:52 AM #"

"Seena: My cousin made more than $100 million with his last movie, About Schmidt, which was nominated for at least two Academy Awards. If he had better interpersonal skills maybe he could be a Java programmer sitting in a cubicle quietly taking orders from a University of Massachusetts MBA. Maybe instead of going to Knicks games with Jack Nicholson he should be seeing a therapist to become a kinder, gentler, more caring human being. Philip Greenspun • 9/3/04; 12:00:47 PM #"

But there is more!

Philip's eclectic writings include materialism, about which he says: "Not being a materialist in the U.S. is kind of like not appreciating opera if you live in Milan or art if you live in Paris. We support materialism better than any other culture. Because retailing and distribution are so efficient here, stuff is cheaper than anywhere else in the world. And then we have huge houses in which to archive our stuff."

And ...

"So lemme get this straight. The creator of photo.net doesn't have any photos on his e-bay auctions. Ahh, savor the irony. Wayne Menzie • 9/2/04; 2:29:26 PM"

"Photo nerds: You guys sure were right about eBay. I've gotten a whole bunch of questions from people wanting to see photos of the TV. They aren't satisfied with the "check the Sony Web site" or "it is big and grey" answer. They believe that a photo will enable them to evaluate its "condition" (maybe there are a bunch of folks who let their dogs walk all over their TV, thus marring the grey finish)."