experiential

Patches on SD Cards

Scott Murff — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:25:55 -0400

Interesting idea of putting game console patches on SD cards.

Motorola SLVR has a weird caveat

Scott Murff — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 18:17:43 -0400

Testing out the Motorola SLVR. It has the ability to play iTunes files, but the file transfering process requires Windows XP. There must have been a bit of disinterest by the Mac crowd if this were to happen.

Woo can direct action scenes

Scott Murff — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 15:21:05 -0400

I ended up on Quentin Tarantino's Wikipidea page, and came across a quote I loved:

Tarantino was one of the few filmmakers pushing for Chinese action filmmaker John Woo to make an American film. When a studio executive once said "I suppose Woo can direct action scenes," Tarantino replied "Sure, and Michelangelo can paint ceilings!"

The page also references an interview with Tarantino by a site called japattack, and there's this insane dialogue about the influences on Kill Bill. The interviewer has as much arcane kung-fu cinema knowledge as Terentino, and the cite dozens of films and directors.

Finally a site that does surfing justice

Scott Murff — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 10:54:39 -0400

The Roxy surfing site has some gorgeous design. The global landing page is especially sweet. It's incredible how many sports sites with footage like surfing still manage to screw it up. These guys (or girls) definitely did not. Nice surf videos on coolermag done by extreme videos. Check out the day in the life video.

IceRocket

Scott Murff — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 11:13:32 -0400

Mark Cuban had a post this morning about IceRocket, a search too that lets you search the Web, blogs and myspace.

The Golden Age of Skyscrapers

Scott Murff — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 12:17:56 -0400

There is a beautiful slideshow on Slate about skyscraper design. Some of the pictures are arresting and the commentary is pretty informative as well.

2046

Scott Murff — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:46:20 -0400

Enveloping. The WKW interview is worth checking out.

Thanks Tucows folks

Scott Murff — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 14:55:01 -0400

Kim - thanks for the help with the blog. I hope everyone there is doing great.

Redesign // Google as the new short code

Scott Murff — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 10:01:46 -0400

I was sick of the old design and needed to shake it up a bit. I like this look a lot, despite the white on black text. Call it a tribute to the original Wired News design.

Yesterday I saw a Pontiac television ad that flashed a Google Web page with "Pontiac" entered. The announcer said for more info, Google Pontiac. Google is accurate enough that Pontiac can rely that Google will turn up Pontiac first, and that Pontiac can also train users to go back to its site and also use Google, likely lowering their overal marketing budget since Google ads are much more cost efficient. It moves advertising more towards allowing advertisers to have confidence in having product names identified and found. AOL's keywords had a similar purpose, but the purity of Google's search makes it work. If Google continues to clarify product searches, I'd love to see an initiative to tie the PC based search results with mobile short codes next to the result links they kick back. That has the potential to seriously boost off-deck carrier promotions, regardless of the region.

Augmented Reality, Mobile Application

Scott Murff — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 09:43:02 -0500

This is a beautiful demonstration of augmented reality on a cell phone, as published in a recent article by Gizmodo. There is a video at the end of the article, which is really worth seeing.

It's hard to see, but notice how on the table to the right there is no action figure above the black and white grid, but in the phone you can see the little man. Augmented little man reality. That little pirate is cool. Actually, maybe that's a little Zoro.

Ultraviolet Verdict

Scott Murff — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:37:28 -0500

The opening title sequence was brilliant. The rooftop fight scene was super cool. One interesting chase seem that was almost a blend of video game and real life, with crazy changing depth perception shots. Overall, some of the most inspiring set design and color us in the last few years. Suckiest script possible. Almost a total waist of all of the great work on the artistic and effects side, with some seriously weak-ass acting. If your a digital game/set designer, check it out. If not, kind of a lame movie.

UI - Yahoo! Mobile

Scott Murff — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:57:31 -0500

A review worth reading concerning Yahoo's mobile UI, as written by The Register.

Snow // Vertigo // The Lovemakers

Scott Murff — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:45:26 -0500

It's snowed a few feet last night in NYC. Went out and walked around in the snow. Quite fun. I was in the mood for a suspense flick to weather the blizzard, and saw Vertigo for the first time. Probably one of the best movies I've seen in a while with some terrific shots of San Francisco in the 50's. Anyways, it's got a creepy soundtrack, and during a few of the suspensful moments, the trees would know against my window from the blizzard outside, or worse, the glass would snap from freezing. Every time there was a loud pop it would scare the hell out of me. Highly recommended flick in storms.

By the way, if any of you are in SF this weekend, you've gotta go see The Lovemakers play. Must be the sickest Valentine's show out there.

Ultraviolet

Scott Murff — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 22:35:11 -0500

Props to the marketing guy that came up with the title for this action flick. Nice.

The trailer has every cliche movie line from Matrix to Aeon Flux. Sweeeet.

Amusing Quote

Scott Murff — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 11:59:36 -0500

Sorry it's been a while. Not much so little just a bitty amount of time now. But, I saw this quote from a letter to the editor in the Dec 26, 05 issue of BusinessWeek and thought it was amusing:

"Many venture capitalists are simply lucky imbeciles hiring other lucky imbeciles to run most of the Valley companies."

- Frank Petkovich
San Francisco

Then again Frank, aren't we all?

God Bless Canada

Scott Murff — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:07:13 -0400

Last night I uncorked a Fin du Monde. A beautiful Quebec beer that Darryl introduced me to in Toronto. In my last post, Steve Jobs said he asks himself daily if what he is doing is how he'd want to spend his last day on Earth. After a few sips of that beer, it became clear what I'd do, and why they came up with such a brilliant name for a beer.

Stanford Address by Steve Jobs, 2005

Scott Murff — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 19:03:20 -0400

Kay sent this to me by email. It's pretty good:

======
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
Text of Commencement address by Steve Jobs
This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs,
CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Commencement at Stanford University, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of
the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college.
Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.
Just three stories.

----------------------------------------------------
The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college
graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very
strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so
everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except
that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking:
"We ha

ve an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?"
They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had
never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.

She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months
later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that
was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class
parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.

After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.
So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out.

OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the
best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking
the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the
ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor
in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5c deposits to buy food with,
and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night
to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to
be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes,
I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the
amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes
great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way
that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer,
it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have
never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no
personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I
would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might
not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect
them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow
connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny,
life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has
made all the difference in my life.
-----------------------------------------------
My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I
started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10
years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company
with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh
- a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.
And then I got fired. How can you get fired from acompany you started?
Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought
was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or
so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and
eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.
So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my
entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let
the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the
baton as it was being passed to me.

I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to
apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure,
and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly
began to dawn on me: I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple
had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love.
And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple
was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness
of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,
less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most
creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company
named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film,
Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple,
and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current
renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.
I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your
work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your
life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't
found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart,
you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better
and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
------------------------------------
My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like:
"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the
past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:
"If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I
know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever
encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure
- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that your are going to die is the best way I know
to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are
already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my
pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was.
The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which
is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought
you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure
everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.
It means to say your good-byes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a
biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach
and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from
the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when
they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it
turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with
surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the
closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say
this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely
intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't
want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one
has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very
likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears
out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too
long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other
people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your
own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought
it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's,
before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with
typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in
paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with
neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was
the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue
was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself
hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words:
"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."
It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as
you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Global quality of living index

Scott Murff — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 18:35:25 -0400

The UN has a study out that ranks quality of living. It's in PDF form and called the Human Development Index. You can click on the section called Human Development Indicators for the full list. Here are the top fifteen quality of life countries according to the UN:
1. Norway
2. Sweden
3. Australia
4. Canada
5. Netherlands
6. Belgium
7. Iceland
8. US
9. Japan
10. Ireland
11. Switzerland
12. UK
13. Finland
14. Austria
15. Luxemberg

El Poder Google

Scott Murff — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 18:00:54 -0400

Good stats in this month's edition of Vanity Fair: The New Establishment 2005: "This year the ad revenues at Google and Yahoo together will rival those of the three major TV networks combined during prime time. Google alone already takes in more ad dollars than The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal."

Overall, a great edition of Vanity Fair, especially the Larry Ellison article. Check it out.

Another Round of Thoughts on Porn for the Sony PSP

Scott Murff — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 21:31:44 -0400

Every couple of months or so I check out the stats pages on my blog to see where referrals come from, who commented, etc. I rarely get comments. I DO, however, get a lot of readership and comments left about a post regarding Sony allowing porn on the PSP (I made two posts - first and second). I don't know any of these folks, so to get genuine comments from complete strangers is somewhat amusing. I was also a little inspired to follow-up on it after reading this IHT article about porn in the US going mobile.

This platform is not yet rated.

Here's the latest:

Re: Re: The "P" in PSP - Porn.
by rsmithflus on 2005.07.29 11:11AM PDT | IP: 67.78.149.134
definitely.. looks like they added monthly memberships now, too. a lot cheaper to go that route and download as many as you want. they're still adding a few new ones every week, too. can't beat it. don't know why anyone would buy the UMDs.

I've gotta hand it to rsmithflus on one thing - I don't know how UMD's are gaining traction. I went down to Gamestop to see if I'd get a PSP, and saw all of the full-length Hollwood movies there. The game unit itself is pretty awesome, but the whole package seemed EXPENSIVE. And I'm not just talking about the PSP console, but rather the games, the movies, etc. I just couldn't get hooked just yet. I'd much rather see some progress on phones and SD cards before getting into retail purchase of such a heavy (by weight) and pricey (device and content) entertainment unit.

Re: The "P" in PSP - Porn.
by maan71 on 2005.09.15 12:26PM PDT | IP: 67.160.134.73
hey guys there is also another porn site dedicated to your psp. Its not like the other sites because this porn site fits exactly on your psp. So that means you do have to scroll down or left. It is also for free and you dont have to have a username infact you cant have a user or password. its still a bit small but its a cool site. you can also download the movies directly from you psp. so you dont need a usb cable or anything like that. the site is www.psptouch.com It looks so much better on your psp than your pc. <@;)

There you have it. Thanks maan71. (I don't use any of this stuff - honest).

Re: More Thoughts on Interactive Porn for the Sony PSP
by nuhusky on 2005.08.14 06:31AM PDT | IP: 24.154.241.119
The guys over at Mobile Vixen have created a site selling porn for cell phones. [url]www.mobilevixen.com[/url] .

They are also have deals with around 5 content providers and are planning to put out an entire network of PSP dedicated porn sites. Word is they own over 200+ PSP porn related URL's.

As icing on the cake they also released back in July the world's first and only adult (porn) magazine for the PSP. It is free to all and a pretty good read. Augusts issue is currently up on their site now. I also hear they are looking for writters if anyone is interested.

[url]www.mobilevixenmag.com[/url]

This comment interested me, mostly because I do a lot of professional work in mobile content. I tried the URL online but it didn't work. If they bought up 200 links, that means that there is real money flowing out of the PSP in this sector, or that they are making a small bet with the URL cleanup.

Personally, I think mobile video is where US and European entertainment content is going flourish (aside from games). And I mean flourish in the sense that it will be the format that bumps overall usage beyond the 12-15% of users accessing content in a lot of these markets. If this is an area of interest, Rafat Ali does some amazing coverage through the paidcontent.org network of sites. There is a section dedicated to mobile video on the moconews.com site.

Wikipedia

Scott Murff — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 22:41:45 -0400

Such an amazing site. Worth reading for fun.

Movies on Flash Cards

Scott Murff — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 13:44:04 -0400

Article by Red Herring on the use of Flash cards to support movies. I'm not so sure about distributing it via IBM's media kiosks though. Seems like MDM tried pretty hard to use retail outlets like Circuit City to push entertainment cards and it didn't work out to well. Selected quotes from the Red Herring article:

"PortoMedia said on Friday it is working with IBM Research to deliver two-hour, DVD-quality movies in just 18 seconds to mobile phones or portable media players.

The movies would be sold through kiosks and loaded onto secure digital flash memory cards that can be inserted into the phones and other players. Porto said the same content can be shown on TV sets at high resolution.

PortoMedia plans to test the distribution model during a large-scale pilot test next year, but declined to specify where it will take place. However, PortaMedia CEO Timothy O’Brien also hopes to see the technology available in retail outlets in both the United States and Europe next year.

“There is interest in both the U.S. and Europe based on the idea of the Flash card as a portable medium for a new content distribution channel,” said Mr. O’Brien.

The content would be distributed through a network of IBM-managed media kiosks, from which the content will be downloaded onto a Flash memory card. The kiosks would be installed in locations such as retail stores, as well as train, bus, and gas stations."

Question: Why does a company titled Portomedia have a URL http://www.anotherperspective.biz?

Supersonic

Scott Murff — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 13:27:58 -0400

Names with "super" in it are awesome. Japan will be testing out a new supersonic jet to cut down trips to the US and Australia. Japan's NASA (JAXA) is doing the project, which makes me think they intentionally reworked their space agency's name so that they could stick that kick-ass X in the acronym.

Music by Konichiwaaaaa and da sonic booms!)

Kung Fu Hustle

Scott Murff — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 16:14:43 -0400

Brilliant flick. Here's the official site. Interview on the movie.

Sweet! Lolipops, axes, Buddha's palm.

Superfuture

Scott Murff — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:42:38 -0400

Pretty cool site with city maps called Superfuture.

New Orleans stuff

Scott Murff — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 20:16:06 -0400

OK - so I got a previous chain mail from Kay I posted, and then when I saw how much space it took on my blog, I thought I should put up another essay she forwarded me.

-=-=-=-=-=-

New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize

By George Friedman

The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.

The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.

A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.

The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.

There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.

The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.

What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.

The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.

It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.

A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.

It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.

The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.

Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.

It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.

New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.

The reason stuff is the way it is is because it was like that before

Scott Murff — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 20:12:14 -0400

On average chain mail sucks, but I recently received one from Kay I thought was kinda interesting:

>> LIFE IN THE 1500'S
>>
>> The next time you are washing your hands and complain
>> because the water temperature isn't just how you like
>> it, think about how things used to be. Here are some
>> facts about the 1500s:
>>
>> These are interesting...
>>
>> Most people got married in June because they took
>> their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty
>> good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so
>> brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body
>> odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet
>> when getting married.
>>
>> Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water.
>> The man of the house had the privilege of the nice
>> clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the
>> women and finally the children Last of all the babies.
>> By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose
>> someone in it.
>> Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the
>> bath water."
>>
>> Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with
>> no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals
>> to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals
>> (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When itrained it
>> became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip
>> and off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats
>> and dogs."
>>
>> There was nothing to stop things from falling into the
>>
>> house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where
>> bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean
>> bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over
>> the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy
>> beds came into existence.
>>
>> The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something
>> other than dirt.
>> Hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate
>> floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet,
>> so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep
>> their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more
>> thresh until when you opened the door it would all
>> start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in
>> the entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."
>> (
>>
>> Getting quite an education, aren't you?)
>>
>> In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a
>> big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day
>> they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They
>> ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat.
>> They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers
>> in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over
>> the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had
>> been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, "
>> Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge
>> in the pot nine days old.
>>
>> "Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them
>> feel quite special. When visitors came over, they
>> would hang up their bacon who show off. It was a sign
>> of wealth that a man could " bring home the bacon."
>> They would cut off a little to share with guests and
>> would all sit around and "chew the fat."
>>
>> Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with
>> high acid content caused some of the lead to leach
>> onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This
>> happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next
>> 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
>>
>> Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the
>> burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle,
>> and guests got the top, or "upper crust."
>>
>> Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The
>> combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for
>> a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would
>> take them for dead and prepare them for burial.
>> They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple
>> of days and the family would gather around and eat and
>> drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence
>> the custom of holding a "wake."
>>
>> England is old and small and the local folks started
>> running out of places to bury people. So they would
>> dig up coffins and would take the bones to a
>> "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these
>> coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have
>> scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had
>> been burying people alive. So they would tie a string
>> on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin
>> and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.
>> Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all
>> night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell;
>> thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was
>> considered a " dead ringer."
>>
>> And that's the truth... Now, whoever said that History
>> was boring Educate someone...Share these facts with a friend.

And yet another clever new news source

Scott Murff — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 19:41:57 -0400

Just read an article about Rocketboom. Pretty interesting - worth checking out.

Why I hope Skype bleeds MCI

Scott Murff — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 19:26:46 -0400

MCI? What does Skype have to do with MCI?

Well, today I received three back-to-back spam calls asking that I switch landline carriers to MCI. I use a landline since I have bad reception. This last day of calling follows weeks of constant attempts to get us to do business with them. It's made me think of them as a trashy company and only shows how online champs like Skype can benefit from the aggressively annoying tactics of large telecom carriers and cable companies. To think Skype spends nothing on marketing, while MCI pours millions into doing a quality job convincing me that their service will truly suck - especially considering when this person representing MCI says that they have no records or an inability to track the calls or remove requests - great.... isn't that like the main responsibility of a phone company... keeping call records and routing requests so that they can later bill you for that service?

Weak.

Wicked DoCoMo Phone

Scott Murff — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 10:30:37 -0400

NTT DoCoMo to Release Mobile Phone Handset Able to Slow Down Speakers' Voice Speed

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. will release a mobile phone handset able to slow down speakers' voice speed on the phone in August 2005. The key targeted users are the elderly. The speed converter technology used in the handset slows down speakers' voice speed up to 0.7x, so the listener can feel like that the speakers' dialogue goes slowly. Users can start the function by pushing the camera button on a handset's side during a phone call. The technology does not slow down the voice part, but shortens the part without sound between phrases. When a time lag between the original voice and the converted voice exceeds one second, the function automatically stops.