The True Cost of SMS Messages » a gthing science project
Here’s a great analysis of the comparative cost of text messaging, including something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, a price comparison of how much you can fit in an SMS message to a regular postal envelope. The author comes up with a rate of 14kB/$.41 for letters, and 140 bytes/$.20. I think that’s something like 48 times more expensive (per byte/penny).
I guess this answers the question of why we Americans don’t text as much as other places in the world.
Does Constitutional Theory Matter? – Stanley Fish – Think Again
Stanley Fish writes this week about the chicken and egg of interpreting the Constitution through a critique of a book by Barber and Fleming. It’s a bit long, but worth the read if this is a topic you’re interested in.
As Barber and Fleming elaborate … [w]hile we do have an obligation to be true to what the framers intended, we can only fulfill that obligation by thinking philosophically about what their capacious phrases direct us to do. (What forms of punishment, we must ask, are in fact “cruel and unusual.”)
Since the Constitution arguably was a document forged by consensus and not the unified word of some singular mind of the founders, another advantage to this position is that it may allow for alternative but historically plausible interpretations.
Does it matter if judges declare themselves to be adherents of the philosophical approach or the living constitution approach or the intentionalist approach or no approach. … No. When Professor Lief Carter asked a number of judges to talk about their interpretive theories, he found that “the conversation would quickly drift from the theoretical points” he had introduced to anecdotal accounts of practice and opinion writing. “Most of the time,” said one judge, “you reach the result that’s fair and then build your thinking around it.”
This is a study I haven’t heard about, but is a great example of the differences between how law appears to work and what really happens in practice. Despite fictions like this, I would argue we can still answer Fish’s question “Does it matter?” with a resounding “No.”
I’m finally almost caught up with all of the news I missed while he was gone. One piece that struck me, from Entertainment [last] Weekly, was Stephen King’s article about reading a book on his new Kindle electronic reader (1/25/08). He reminds of of a saying that “books do furnish a room,” and further finds “a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them; books solidify an otherwise fragile medium.” Leave it to an author to succinctly capture that “something” about physical media.
This started me thinking about other media. Movies, for example, also can furnish a room as well as say something about its inhabitant. For me, scanning someone’s DVD collection is the equivalent of looking through their medicine cabinet. There is something about finding common movies that another likes well enough to own that seems to speed up the social connection; perhaps because of an imagined common experience or vocabulary. I’m not sure if today, books are capable of creating this type of connection (or for that matter, a Facebook application).
Music is curiously a somewhat different matter. I remember being judged by my CD collection as an undergraduate, and in years past I have spoken with a few people who like the feel of holding a physical CD and the statement that it might make sitting on their shelf. However, while my iTunes shared music has started a few conversations and I have been a long-time user of a music networking site, statistics seem to say that CDs are increasingly for geeks who care about sound quality.
What is it about music that makes some more willing to abandon the physical medium. Is it because the ideas are not as permanent or important as those found in a book? I suspect it might have something to do with how music has become background noise for some (the white earbud syndrome), or perhaps because it doesn’t play as prominent a role in our social vocabulary as movies or books. Maybe it’s because CD spines are so small, you have to really lean in close for a look.
Published on
January 24, 2008 in
Personal.
We’ve returned from a wonderful time away visiting family and seeing the sites in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. If you like pictures, we have a lot (descriptions forthcoming). Take the ship to see more:
The Washington Post has corrected itself on the RIAA’s official stance that CD ripping is permissible. However, after an RIAA representative “misspoke” at the Jammie Thomas trial, who can blame the public for being confused?
On an unrelated and more personal note, pictures will hopefully be posted soon in our gallery.
