Reading: Longitude by Dava Sobel
A while back Craig Burton recommended Dava Sobel's book Longitude to me. The book is a fascinating and easy to read tale of the problem of finding longitude and how a self-educated clock maker named John Harrison finally succeeded in building not one, but four time pieces with sufficient accuracy. Like any good story, there are twists and turns in the plot--even an antihero. Sobel brings the history to life. I found myself picking up the book any chance I got to find out what would happen next.
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A Member of Eastern Standard Tribe
Yesterday during a minor scheduling snafu with an IT Conversations interview Scott Lemon remarked that we all ought to just use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and forget about it. Cory Doctorow had a book with a title evocative of that idea: Eastern Standard Tribe. This morning, someone else mentioned the same kind of scheduling problem to me and I started thinking that we really ought to have just one timezone for the entire US. Maybe the whole world. China, after all, runs the whole country on Beijing time. You might think "those poor people in western China--having to get
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Sifry on the Attention Economy
Dave Sifry of Technorati is speaking on The Economy of Attention. What are the rules that guide the attention economy and how are they different than the rules we're used to in the real economy. Attention is about time directed to a purpose by people. Most economic models focus on what is scarce in the system. Economic systems aren't only defined by what is scarce, but it's a pretty good tool to find the seams in the fabric of the economy. In the attention economy, computing power, storage, network bandwidth, and even money aren't scarce. Time is what even
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