The small world of “very interesting, very smart scientists who write about evolution for a popular audience” has lost its most prominent member with the death of Stephen Jay Gould at age 60.

I bumped briefly up against this world in the mid-1980s when I spent several summers working for Dr. Chris McGowan in the Dept. of Vertebrate Palaeontology (now Palaeobiology) at the ROM in Toronto. I started off in the bone room sorting turtle bones. Later I converted FORTRAN programs for linear regression into BASIC. It was fun work with absorbing people.

It’s a rare person who can both master the technical arcana of science and also interpret science to the masses. Chris is one (In the Beginning: A Scientist Shows Why the Creationists Are Wrong, T-Rex to Go: Build Your Own from Chicken Bone, Dinosaur: Digging Up a Giant) and Stephen Jay Gould was another.

A reviewer of his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny said it well:

Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliance is evident as always in his ability to make the esoterics of great science available to people who have not thoroughly studied his field. He doesn’t dumb it down, nor remove such huge slices that we are fools walking that dangerous tightrope of a little knowledge.

He will be missed.

The phrase “disastrous fire” is perhaps best typified by The 1973 Fire at tha National Archives and Records Administration in St. Louis. Approximately 16-18 million Official Military Personnel Files were destroyed in the fire. No copies nor microfilm were ever produced, and no indexes created before the fire. This is the kind of thing that keeps archivists up at night, I imagine.

It’s seems as good a time as any to write the eulogy for Island Tel: the new telephone books are out, and they’re quite clearly Aliant-branded, with the old Island Tel name having shrunk to a tag-line along with the names of the other old-line telephone companies.

You can’t really blame Island Tel, err Aliant, err BCE for making themselves bigger and bigger and thus less and less local: everyone else is doing it, after all. From Home Depot to Verizon to Air Canada, our service corporations are expanding and becoming more generic and distant.

I can’t help wonder, though, what would happen if Island Tel’s shareholders had decided to be brave, buck the trend, and reinvest themselves in being a local telephone company, managed and controlled locally, responding to local needs, driving the local economy, employing local people? Surely, if nothing else, to do so would have been to leverage the company’s (and the Island’s) natural strengths: strong local brand, unusual customer loyalty, and the uncanny ability of Islanders to be nimble, flexible and wily as a compensation for small size and fewer resources.

The sad thing is, we’ll never know what might have happened. What we do know, with some certainty, is that as we become aliantienated over the months and years to come we’ll no doubt have access to a broader range of services, more attractively priced. Offered by a generic company controlled from Halifax, essentially indistinguishable from any other telco in North America.

It’s not so much that things will get worse: it’s that we’re left to wonder how much better things could have been.

Good-bye, Island Tel.

I wrote earlier about the problem I have distinguishing between shampoo and conditioner while in the shower without my glasses.

There’s another problem like this: lens cleaner fluid. I need to take off my glasses to spray lens cleaner fluid on them. If I don’t orient the lens cleaner fluid bottle properly, I will spray lens clean fluid into my eyes rather than onto my glasses. However without my glasses on it’s difficult to tell which way the spout is pointing.

There must be a simple solution to this. It makes me wonder, though, if the people who make lens cleaner fluid bottles ever try and clean their glasses.

From today’s New York Times comes this:

Here’s an excerpt from an email I sent to a friend of mine who is involved in the redesign of a website at a large university library in the U.S.:

Another one of those “things that people think will make websites easier to navigate but almost never does” is the “let’s have a different doorway for different types of users.” In your case this might manifest itself as “Students,” “Faculty,” “Alumni” and “Visitors.” In my world it often comes up as “Canadians” and “Americans” or “From Prince Edward Island” and “Visitor to Prince Edward Island” or “Business” and “Consumer.”

The thinking goes that you can “custom target” each of these for the “particular needs” of each “user community.”

The problems with this are: (a) hardly anybody fits neatly into one “user community.” At Trent University, for example, I was, at various times, in each of these categories, sometimes all at the same time; (b) your assumptions about what is interesting or relevant to one group will probably leave out a lot. For example there’s probably a lot of interesting stuff that you would target at faculty that would also be useful and relevant to students and alumni, even if it doesn’t technically fall into the “information for students” category; (c) this stratification means that you have 1/3 (or 1/4, or 1/5) of the energy needed to properly organize each section and this usually means that this organization doesn’t get done properly. In other words you end up relying too much on the initial doorway categories, and just dump in a whole mess of stuff afterwards and finally (d) some people get turned off by having to make an initial “this is who I am” distinction. I will leave any e-commerce site that asks me, before I even look at their catalog, whether I am American or Canada; partly this is irrational, but partly it’s a suspicion that the other guys (i.e. whatever I don’t choose) is going to get better pricing.

In the end you are far better to place your energy in coming up with a well-organized site that works for anyone than to try and figure out who your users are and custom-fit your website around them.

When I was on vacation in Korea in 1998 I picked up a CD by the Korean artist Toy. I stuck this CD in my iBook this morning and this is what appeared (blow-up of text is my doing):

The winners of our very first contest, for a carload pass to the Brackley Drive-in for this weekend, are:

• Mitch Cormier
• Charles Pritchett
• Andrea Ledwell
• Heather Mullen

There are two airports in Dallas: Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field.

Dallas Love Field was the original airport, and when the new International Airport opened in 1974, the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, presumably in an attempt to see it succeed, tried to stop interstate flights (i.e. flights from Texas to some other state) from flying out of Love Field.

In 1979, however, the U.S. Congress passed the Wright Amendment. This allowed large aircraft to fly from Love Field to to locations in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico. This was expanded by the passage of the Shelby Amendment in 1997 which allowed flights to Alabama, Kansas and Mississippi as well.

This is relevant (and I use that word in its most limited sense) primarily because of how it affects Southwest Airlines, a major U.S. discount carrier. Southwest uses Love Field as their airport in Dallas and, as such, cannot fly from Dallas to anywhere outside of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Mississippi, and Alabama.

If you look at Southwest’s route map you can see that Dallas, a large metropolis, is smack dab in the middle of a lot of the U.S. (see the photo of the U.S. from space on this page to see this very clearly). And thus not being able to use Dallas as a jumping off point to the rest of the U.S. is a logistical problem for the airline; it even warrants its own page on their website.

I experienced this restriction personally back in the early 1990s when I wanted to fly from El Paso to Detroit on Southwest. I was routed El Paso, Austin, Houston, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit. If you look at the map, El Paso to Dallas would have been the logical first step, the law notwithstanding.

Thank goodness: Sean Dillon and Niamh finally got together for real. We’re a little behind the times here, of course: it’s already series six in the U.K. and we’re forced to take the unscheduled madness of Vision TV. You take what you can get.