A few words about the way things used to be
When I was in college we thought we were living in the future. We were the first class that could pretty reliably connect to wireless internet anywhere we went on campus. We could make video calls using our cell phones. We were able to wirelessly upload photos to websites. We summoned taxis without speaking to humans. Articles described us as overconnected and said that we were so obsessed with text messaging that we were forgetting how to interact with real people. We were living in the future.
It sounds so funny now — quaint, almost — to think that we felt like we were living in the future. …
People are like streetcars
You can’t miss Philadelphia’s streetcars. They’re everywhere, proudly barreling down the middle of the streets, cars making way for the 30 ton relics.
Streetcars are a lot like buses; they travel along the road and have similar capacity. The difference is they drive on tracks. This has two major implications. First, the tracks significantly reduce friction. The wheels are designed to fit the tracks perfectly so they glide along smoothly, making for a quiet and comfortable ride. The tracks help get people where they’re going quickly and efficiently. …
The Shift Toward Quasi-Synchronous Email
(This essay was originally written for STSC 260, Cyberculture, at the University of Pennsylvania)
Playing on a simple and straightforward metaphor, they decided to call the command MAIL. Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris were researchers in MIT’s Political Science department the summer they developed the command that would evolve into the one of the world’s most ubiquitous digital communication technologies (Crocker 2012). Inspired by a Programming Staff Note suggesting the idea, they created a system for MIT CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) programmers to asynchronously leave direct messages for each other about files they had changed in the system. …
Debunking the classical story of wristwatch adoption among men in the United States
1928 was a big year for the New York Yankees. Legends like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had led the team to a World Series victory against the Pittsburgh Pirates the previous season and the all-star team felt the pressure to do it again. In 1928, despite Babe Ruth’s bad ankle and a few injured pitchers, the Yankees managed to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series (Appel 158-71). When Jacob Ruppert bought the Yankees in 1915, he called the team “an orphan ball club, without a home of its own, without players of outstanding ability, without prestige” (Gallagher 318). …
Cars and the future of urban life
The sound of a jackhammer competes with the hum of a generator and the buzz of an electric drill. The setting is not a construction site but a street corner that is usually quiet, neighboring the Green Line Cafe, a Philadelphia coffee shop popular with locals. Something unusual is happening but it is not the first time this has happened. For the first time last April, the University City District in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities went out and turned sets of two parking spaces into “parklets” where a platform of wooden slats plays home to tables, chairs, and planters. …
How pharmaceutical advertising feminized anxiety
The facts are simple. Twice as many women as men take prescription anxiety medication. The story of why that is is far less simple. We have by now learned better than to make sweeping Malcolm Gladwellian claims about the one big cause at the root. But in the case of prescription anxiety medication, there is certainly one perspective that sheds a lot of light on the question, namely the role of pharmaceutical advertising. The pharmaceutical industry, capitalizing on the state of the field of psychology in the sixties, managed to find an enormous market for anxiety medication and other tranquilizers in middle class white housewives and pursued this market with the full force of its marketing arsenal. …
How desperation and a WWII bomber created modern air travel
A lawyer from Montana
Toward the end of World War II a lawyer from Lolo, Montana received an unexpected request from one of his clients. The company wanted him to join them—as their president. He had been a legal counsel to the company for 20 years and served on the board of directors for six of them. He was 44 years old, of average height, mostly bald, and spoke with an assertive but pleasing voice. Though he struggled through his studies in economics at Montana State University he was accepted to Harvard Law and ultimately landed at a law firm in Seattle where he worked steadily and happily. …
Why we’ll stop using our phones & laptops and move to a system of shared interfaces.
This article was originally published on Nir and Far.
No one wants to make a mistake like the one Clifford Stoll made in 1996. In the February issue of Newsweek Magazine, his now infamous article carried the headline, “The Internet? Bah!”
An “online database,” Stoll wrote, will never replace your daily newspaper. To futurists like Nicholas Negroponte who predicted that one day we’d buy books and newspapers “straight over the Internet,” Stoll responded flippantly, “Uh, sure.”
Clifford Stoll is not a stupid man. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy, was a system administrator at Berkeley Lab, and is considered by some to be the father of digital forensics. …
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