What follows is a recollection of what I remember from 9/11, and how that day changed me. We have little right asking for your participation since we’ve barely been participating in the blog ourselves, but I want to open the comments section of this post to your recollections of that day and how it changed you.
It’s hard to believe that September 11, 2001 was seven years ago. I was a high school junior sitting in French class when our headmaster, Mr. Hames, came over the intercom. Mr. Hames was a highly eccentric man, given to exaggeration and flowery language. So when his impassioned voice communicated to us that “a plane has hit the World Trade Center”, we shook our heads. “Probably a Cessna doing an aerial photo shoot or air tourism”, we all thought (which still would have been a tragedy, but hardly worth interrupting class for).
When the bell rang after class, we turned on the TV in the classroom and saw a picture of the famous smoking scar the plane had punctured in the first tower. The angle and zoom of the camera were such that the size of the hole wasn’t immediately evident; this was certainly a terrible accident, but it was still odd that Mr. Hames has chosen to announce it to our entire school during class. In addition to his eccentricity and proclivity for hyperbole, he was also an academic purist. Our small private school was his domain, and any interruption of the ordinary — from backpacks strewn in the hallway to proposed curriculum changes — was met with an unenviable, one-on-one tirade in his office.
Following my French class, we had a thirty minute “activities period” to have club meetings, attend assemblies, etc. I had lingered a little in the French classroom, and had learned there that it was in fact an airliner that had hit the tower. “What on earth was an airliner doing that close to the city?” I thought, still not knowing that it wasn’t an accident. I made my way to the library, where almost all 350 students and the dozens of teachers at the school were crowding around a row of televisions.
Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, contributed a fascinating piece to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You” examines the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that has been developing alongside the evolution of the Web. Thompson brings a balanced perspective to the debate over the influence that the Internet has on our lives, a debate which recently has been dominated by alarmists who claim (often with little data) that the digital millennium will actually take us a step backwards as a race.
Ambient awareness is the term applied to the “incessant online contact” that characterizes the current developments on the Web. From the Facebook News Feed to Twitter, users are currently preoccupied with accessing an aggregation of tiny details to form a larger picture. The metaphor Thompson chooses is beyond perfect:
Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
And so the mystery behind the obsession with keeping on top of our friends and their “updates” is revealed, even to those who think they had it figured out. It’s not the trees that fascinate us; it’s the forest. It’s on a level just beyond passive perception. We skim and absorb the information, choosing only to dive into the details only when something piques our interest.
So is this good or bad? A step forward, or a step back?
Alrighty. After a weeklong hiatus, I’m back with a fury and a bunch of links for your viewing pleasure:
Here’s a great NY Times article explains a major hurdle to widespread wind power: not technology, just updating and modernizing the power grid (costly, but possible without waiting on further innovation). Matt Yglesias says in response:
[A modern grid] would be expensive to build — $60 billion they say. At the same time, that’s six months worth of Iraq spending [...] You hear a lot of talk about “green jobs” and it sometimes seems disingenuous [...] But the jobs associated with upgrading the electrical grid would obviously have to be done in the United States and the green element is extremely real.
Here’s an incredible story, via Mental Floss, of the first woman to ROW from California to Hawaii. Think about that for a second [pause]…that’s right, quite a distance to row. Have a gander at the boat she used, then take in the blog and podcasts she updated as she went. Impressive all around.
Online presentation host SlideShare held a “World’s Best Presentation” contest. The winner, “THIRST,” is a stunning gut check about water scarcity around the globe. Well worth the two minutes it takes to click through. [Hat tip: Tim Berry]
Leave it to the Mythbusters to use an 1,100-barrel paintball gun to paint the Mona Lisa in less than a second [via Gizmodo]:
After slamming a recent crop of start up companies for their lame websites, tech blogger Robert Scoble praises “the ‘gold standard’ of recent start ups” in the online space. Since I think our audience here ranges from the tech-obsessed early adopter set (your dashing authors) to the folks who we’ve introduced to the blogosphere via this site, I’m curious to see if you’ve heard of (or, better yet, use) any of the companies Scoble lists. My list is after the jump…:
Hey there sports fans: sorry for the lack of activity on the site lately. My blogging has fallen victim to a pretty chaotic work and travel schedule (I don't know what Jarred's excuse is), and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. In any case, I wanted to let you know that the blog lives on…so please bear with us. Also, I'm trying out a new tool called Posterous. It's a service that allows me to blog by email. Hopefully that means more content on a regular basis. In any case, expect new (legitimate) content soon…in the meantime, check out pictures from my recent trip to Colorado:
It’s hard to believe that September 11, 2001 was seven years ago. I was a high school junior sitting in French class when our headmaster, Mr. Hames, came over the intercom. Mr. Hames was a highly eccentric man, given to exaggeration and flowery language. So when his impassioned voice communicated to us that “a plane has hit the World Trade Center”, we shook our heads. “Probably a Cessna doing an aerial photo shoot or air tourism”, we all thought (which still would have been a tragedy, but hardly worth interrupting class for).
Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, contributed a fascinating piece to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. 
Subscribe by feed
Subscribe by email
Follow on Facebook
