stevenberlinjohnson.com

Nerve is running a the transcript of a long, enjoyable conversation I had a few months ago, with my old friend Rufus Griscom, who co-founded Nerve many moons ago and who has brilliantly kept it alive and thriving through all the dot.com madness. It's my favorite interview of all the ones I did for Everything Bad -- partially because Rufus brought up some really interested points, and partially because we conducted it over a bottle of red wine. But my favorite bit is Rufus' introduction, which opens thus:

I know Steven Johnson as not just the founder of FEED, one of the most innovative early online magazines; not only as the esteemed author of four books, the most recent of which is Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter — I also know him as an unkempt college friend with a penchant for technology and pop culture, and a preternatural capacity to subsist on a diet of Lucky Charms, Stouffers blueberry croissants and Budweiser tallboys.

This is really libelous material: they were Pepperidge Farm Blueberry Turnovers, not croissants. And how dare he neglect to mention the Steak 'Ums!

The Strike

For what it's worth, this angry op-ed from The Observer expresses my feelings about the strike exactly.

DOES IT MATTER TO MR. TOUSSAINT that the people he is hurting most are less-affluent workers who don't have the luxury of working at home in front of a computer, who can't simply blow off a few days around the holidays? These workers--health and hospital staff, clerks, salespeople, cashiers and others--simply have to get to work somehow. And they are finding a way to do so, but no thanks to Mr. Toussaint. He is costing them time and, if for some reason they can't get to work or show up late, he's costing them money. Many of these lower middle-class and middle-class workers don't receive 8 percent annual raises and have very little in the way of public health benefits and a pension. These are the people Mr. Toussaint is victimizing. This is a brutal attack on the working poor and low-income New Yorkers who depend on mass transit.

I think the strike will prove to be a massive miscalculation on the part of the TWU. The only question is how long it will take them to figure it out.

On the other hand, I was on the Upper East Side for a few hours yesterday, and seeing Madison and Fifth Avenue entirely free of cars for as far as the eye could see was truly magical. They should have special car-free holidays on celebrated Manhattan streets throughout the year -- that is, without filling them up with street fairs and parades. Soho without cars would be absolutely brilliant.

Thanks to the transit strike and an unmissable appointment in Manhattan today, I spent about an hour this morning trying to figure out the best way to travel via car over (or under) the East River. I am not a regular commuter, so perhaps this is old news to everyone else, but I was shocked at the apparent absence of what would seem to me to be an incredibly straightforward -- and incredibly popular -- web tool: type in your itinerary, and see a single page with all the images from the traffic cams along the route. Wouldn't every commuter in America want to wake up with that as their home page in the morning? Yet I couldn't seem to find anything that offered that service, as obvious as it seemed to be. Am I missing something here? (And yes, I've seen the Google Maps mashups that show you an overview of cams in an area -- but not a single page with all the images simultaneously tracking a specific route, which is what I wanted to see...)

Reading through Ebert's Best 10 Movies of 2005 -- which actually includes about fifty movies total -- it occured to me that 1) I've been watching a lot more television than movies this year, and thus have an unusually long list of films that I'm looking forward to on DVD, which led me to 2) that there should be a one-click way to grab a movie (or list of movies) from a website, and put it in your Netflix queue, even if the movies aren't released on DVD yet.

Something like this may well exist already -- I don't even use Netflix, so it's all theoretical to me. But if it doesn't exist, it will soon.

From the manual for micro dwellings:

The MICRO DWELLINGS are modular, can be scaled up and down, and expand and grow together with other systems into small communities. The MICRO DWELLINGS can be built onto rooftops of existing buildings or be suspended from a bridge or a wall. The modules can be mounted on wheels to become mobile or be connected to form floating constructions. As is the case with the version shown in this manual, they can also be made as watertight, amphibian houses that can be completely submerged or partly elevated to the water surface.

Or you can paint numbers on their sides and use them for a really, really big game of Dungeons and Dragons.

The scroll wheel on my Mighty Mouse seems to have stopped working over the weekend. It's amazing how quickly one becomes dependant on interface enhancements that seemed like minor improvements when you first encountered them. Using a mouse wheel to vertically scroll through windows struck me as a nice enough idea when I first started using a Logictech mouse a few years ago. But now that it has stopped working on my Apple mouse, I feel as though I'm sitting at my computer with one arm tied behind my back. It's almost physically painful, reaching over to hit the arrow keys to scroll down a window.

I think Fasier's right that I'm misusing the phrase "jump the shark" in my iPod post below, though I don't totally buy his extended definition of the phrase:

["Jumping the shark"] doesn't mean by itself that something has become a sell-out, or that something has become uncool. It means that something that or someone who has reached this status has tried ridiculously so to reacquire its former, more glorious, status. Hence The Fonz "jumped the shark" when he literally "jumped the shark."

I think there is some reasonable debate over what you have to do to "jump the shark." But Fasier makes an excellent point that shark-jumping is something that a creator has to do deliberately to his product (i.e., creating an whole episode about the Fonz riding a motorcycle over a shark -- and worse, freeze-framing it with a "to be continued" mid-jump.) So unless Steve Jobs somehow orchestrated that iPod conversation between George Bush and Britt Hume, it's not right to say that the iPod has jumped the shark. It was simply a sign of something that was probably obvious already: there's nothing cool any more about having an iPod. That's not to say it isn't an incredible product. It's just hard to defend the cool factor when the President apparently has two of them...

This clip of President Bush running through his music playlists and expounding on the virtues of shuffle mode can only mean one thing: the iPod has jumped the shark.

Nature took stories from Wikipedia and Britannica on 42 science-related topics and submitted them to experts for review. The experts were not told which encyclopedia the stories were from. "The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not great... Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia -- but reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica respectively."

I like this twist to the argument: it's not whether Wikipedia can get to Britannica's standard of quality; it's that we've been overestimating Britannica's quality all along.

The Kids Are Crazy For Resource Management Strategies

I'm doing a couple of fun game-related items for my friends at Nerve, starting with my contribution to their Holiday Gift Guide. It's a little riff about the brilliant new Age of Empires III, which is the most enjoyable game I've played in a long time. It got me thinking about the distinct pleasure of these sorts of games -- as opposed to the pure problem-solving approach that I took in Everything Bad. Here's the gist of it:

But there's a subtler pleasure to the game that should make the parents and cultural authorities happy: to succeed in the game, you have to maintain your essential resources -- food, timber, and gold. (The convention of resource management applies to all god games -- though the resources vary from game to game.) In Age Of Empires, you can dispatch a team of settlers off to a nearby forest to chop down trees, or send them off on a fishing expedition, or deposit them near a promising bush filled with ripe berries. And once you've dispatched them, you can just sit back and watch those precious goods stream into your main warehouse.

There's something uniquely satisfying about this process, something that is entirely unlike the pleasures of other popular entertainment: it's akin to the quiet satisfaction you feel when you've just cleaned the entire house, or when you get the report from accounting that says your business is finally in the black. Sending a settler off to chop down some trees isn't as exhilarating as sending your calvary off to attack the Spanish settlement next door, but the game quickly teaches you that you can't maintain a calvary if you don't have enough wood on hand to build a stable. It's not enough to be aggressive to succeed in Age Of Empires. You have to be responsible too.