newspeak

Is noon AM or PM.

Confession: I grew up some years in between the US and Mexico in Australia having to a) learn Strine b) how many gils there are in a pint (and what a gill is); c) rods to a; d) furlongs in a; e) chains; f) hundredweight (and it’s distinction among the various colonies or former); g) stone; h) the usual gallons, quarts, pints and cups, feet, inches, yards, and so on. That’s not counting surface area metrics, like acreage. And this raises the really interesting point. An acre is fixed, an hectare is not. And when teaching calculus, which would you rather use to make the argument, if any, for describing calculus’ utility in everyday life?

Oh, I also learned all about 12 noon being 12M and midnight being 12MN, but that had more to do with the bully outside the library door than being in Australia.

ClickToPlugin HTML5 replacements.

Speed is good and HTML5 is very good, especially on OS X. As to what makes something speedier than another thing? Architecture. The more modern, the more it takes advantage of the new ways of thinking what apps do and what is required to produce results other apps can leverage, the better.

Firefighters balk at new digital radios, as failures risk lives | McClatchy.

Standards matter. And the lure of the “digital” is really pretty dangerous, if it is thought of as more or less the same way any product from the Jetson’s would be: with excited awe that the future is finally here.

The issue is of course also one of cronyism and profiteering. We see this in developing regions, which are (or were?) colonized by this or that new and seemingly heroic technology that is, in fact, quite wrong for the market, the environment, the milieu. It only wrecks the good and makes it that much harder to become better, and does little to solve the problem of the bad.