Civics lesson
Megan McArdle is smarter than I am – or she knows more, at least. Apparently she got 60 out of 60 questions right on this quiz; I got 50 out of 60 and was pleased with that. I blame the fact that I am not an American and did not receive an American education: I had no idea there even was a president named Andrew Johnson, let alone what his fight with the Radical Republicans might have been about. That said, the average Harvard senior got fewer than 42 questions right, so maybe it's just a really hard test, or maybe Harvard seniors aren't as clever as everybody seems to think they are.
I'd be fascinated to find out the scores of the various presidential candidates if this test were sprung on them. It would almost certainly tell us more than any number of interminable debates. Interestingly, nearly all of Megan's readers (who revealed their score) got at most two or three questions wrong. I guess they're smarter than me, too.
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Del.icio.usEurope vs the USA, Train Station Edition
A tourist mother was overheard in the lobby of the MetLife building telling her daughter that it was a train station. This is something which could only happen in America. I love US train stations, especially the grand ones along the Boston-to-Washington corridor: Washington's Union Station, Philly's Penn Station, New York's Grand Central Terminal. But one thing these imposing edifices all have in common is a very un-European habit of hiding the trains.
Europe, of course, has more than its fair share of grand train stations of many different vintages, from Antwerp to Milan. But as a general rule – one which applies equally to the newest and shiniest of them all, in Berlin – they celebrate the trains, rather than hiding them. The centerpiece of any train station is just as much the large steel-and-glass turn-of-the-century sheds over the tracks as it is any imposing facade.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any obvious reason why this should be the case. Why should the Europeans be the utilitarians, here? I suspect it might have something to do with the vintage of the stations in the US: maybe they were built a bit later than their European counterparts, in more developed cities, and therefore had less room to play with and more incentive to bury the tracks and the trains. But I doubt that's the whole story.
Steve Jobs Gives Me $100
Steve Jobs is giving me $100! Thanks, Steve!
I'm happy about this: my $499 iPhone has now essentially become a $399 iPhone, which is a very attractive price indeed. True, the real $399 iPhone has twice the capacity of mine. But I've been very happy with my phone for over two months now, and would probably have paid the extra $100 for those two months alone.
Plus, I have a feeling that my 4GB iPhone is going to become even more of a collector's item than my first-generation 5GB iPod. Does anybody have one, except for me?
(Yes, I know that technically Steve isn't giving me anything: I can only get $100 worth of Apple product. But what's the chance that I'm not going to spend $100 on Apple product sometime soon?)
Admit mistakes!
Clark Hoyt, the NYT's Public Editor, has a proposal:
How about requiring a personal letter of apology from the person responsible for an error to the person whose name is misspelled?
I'm always a bit wary of proposing rules like this one: there are always exceptions, and it gets complicated, and resentments rise, and people will start bickering about who's "the person responsible," etc etc.
But, that said, I think it's a great idea to suggest that journalists personally apologise to anybody they've misspelled. I've done that myself, and if I'm remotely representative, it actually makes you, as a journalist, feel much better about your mistake. (Most of the time, I'm sure, one gets a gracious reply in return; certainly I did.)
What's more, a personal note from a journalist to someone they're writing about is never a bad idea in any event. Few people like admitting mistakes, but when you do it, it nearly always pays dividends.
Gmail limits now upgradable
O frabjous day! Gmail has finally allowed those of us bumping up against its storage limits to buy more. And about time too.
Of Course You Can Disprove Religion
And Eliezer Yudkowsky does it, wonderfully.
iPhone
I got one, thanks largely to a wonderful birthday cheque from my grandmother. And it really is a thing of beauty. And I'm not going to repeat what everybody else has said. But I will say that the email functionality could do with a bit of work.
The main problem is that there's no "select all" command. If you've already read most of your emails on your computer at home, for instance, then you're very likely to want to mark all those emails as read on your phone when it downloads them. But you can't, not without selecting them one by one. And the same thing goes for deleting emails: there's no way of deleting them en masse. If you don't want vast numbers of emails clogging up your phone's hard drive, then once again you have to laboriously delete them, one by one. And although you can play around with the music and photos and videos on your phone through the iTunes interface, it gives you no access whatsoever to the emails on your phone – so you can't mark them all as read or delete them all that way, either.
There's no select-all when it comes to the content of mail messages, either -- which means there's no way of deleting a large chunk of the email you're replying to, for instance, beyond just sitting there with your finger on the delete key, watching the text slowly disappear word by single word.
I hope and trust that these issues will be fixed in a future software update, and they by no means encroach on my enjoyment of the phone. The little things work wonderfully: the way that if you disconnect the phone from your computer, for instance, it will simply and automatically resume syncing your music when you return; the way that music fades out so that you can take a phone call and then picks up where you left it when the phone call ends; or the way that the keyboard knows what you're typing, and makes the most likely next letters bigger than the least likely next letters.
Mainly, though, I'm just happy that I've finally found a phone which will simply and seamlessly sync with the calendar and address book on my MacBook. I certainly shan't miss my Treo in that respect. And I wish my friend Shane all the best of luck in getting his phone up and running: apparently if you try to switch from Cingular to AT&T (yes, I know they're meant to be the same company), you can end up with no phone service at all for 24 hours. Lovely. I switched from T-Mobile with no difficulties at all.
Exblogmunication
I was "exblogmunicated" by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds in 2006, when he linked to me without linking to me.
Now he's done it again, but if anything even more egregiously.
If I'm on some kind of blacklist, I want to know!
Is there a word for this?
It happens at Amazon, it happens at my local grocery store (sorry about the colour – it's a cellphone pic), and it happens every day all over the world. But is there a name for it?
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