Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

Slow News Day

With war drums beating louder than ever, the economy in a shambles, smoking about to be banned through all of the city, this item actually made the NYTimes today: Two 17-year-old boys, apparently following instructions penned by Abbie Hoffman, caused a flash fire in a Brooklyn apartment yesterday afternoon while trying to make a smoke […]

Motorola vs The World

The chairman of Motorola stood up in front of the cell phone industry today and said that what people want is better voice service. The chairmen of LG and Nokia said what people want is more bells and whistles. From CNet: But not being able to rely on a cell phone because a network is […]

Nobody Tell My Wife, OK?

From Reuters, via CNN: Most newlyweds experience a brief emotional bounce after their wedding, but they eventually return to the same outlook they had on life before they tied the knot, according to a study released Sunday. “We found that people were no more satisfied after marriage than they were prior to marriage,” the researchers […]

Government By Tantrum

In India, a proposal to raise the price of fertilizer was shouted down. Literally. From the AP via the NYTimes: Upset by a budget proposal to raise the price of fertilizer, lawmakers in India’s lower house of parliament shouted their opposition for four hours on Tuesday. The tactic was so effective the finance minister withdrew […]

What’s the New Word?

AP story today via the NYPost about using the net to troll — and track — for neologisms both historical and current. Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell, has tricked up software that searches the net for abrupt shifts in lingo tied to a certain era. The program is intended to look at data about […]

You Mean Somebody Actually Wrote That?

Tom Glazer, who in 1963 wrote the song parody, “On Top of Spaghetti,” died recently at age 88. (He did not roll off the table and out the door.) Of course, Glazer did plenty of other things. He was an important member of the Folk Revival movement of the 1950s and ’60s. But there are […]

No Such Thing As Bad Publicity

From Reuters via CNN: Shame television is off the air in Oklahoma after the channel aimed at humiliating men who frequented prostitutes ended up providing free advertising for city street walkers but gaining few viewers…. The scrolling and repeating mug shots of disheveled streetwalkers helped would-be customers identify prostitutes, the spokeswoman said. “It was almost […]

Excellent Sony Interview

Speaking of Tony Perkins (see below), he’s got an excellent, rare and candid interview with the CEO of Sony, Nobuyuki Idei, at his own web site. Sony is pretty much at the center of every piece of technological change going on in the world today — with the probable (and significant) exception of biotech. The fact […]

Thanks For All The Fish

The Red Herring, the last of the Venture Capital Porn magazines, has finally given it up, just short of its 10th birthday. There was a time when the Herring, Upside, and the Industry Standard were riding high wide and handsome. More ads than they could take, more editorial pages than they could fill. They were […]