Are We Witnessing the Repeal of Stigler's Law?

For those of you who turned in late, there's a nasty (or maybe "comical") scuffle going on over at the Washington Post on the question of who invented Email.  Evidently the Post back on February 17 published a story with the headline:

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: Inventor of e-mail honored by Smithsonian

Apparently about the time the reporter hit the "send" key the Post got hit by a whole spitstorm of, well, e-mail, from techies who undertook to, shall we say, refine the point.  There followed a back and forth with the Post's ombudsman, ending (for the moment) with a shame-faced  apology from the obudsman which has perhaps momentarily quieted the hordes (or maybe not).

Of course I'm not remotely qualified to wade into the substance of the dispute.  Apparently this Ayyudurai person does hold a copyright (sic) on the use of the word "email" in connection with some code he wrote back in 1982, and evidently there is, or was, some kind of Smithsonian recognition.    The original Post story does look pretty wide-eyed but that's hindsight.  What interests me is a meta-issue--specifically, the question whether we are watching the slow-motion (strike that, quick-time) disintegration of "Stigler's Law of Eponymy."

You know Stigler's Law--in Wiki form, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."  Stigler liked to say that he called it  Stigler's law because he didn't invent it.  And flippancy aside, he is making a larger point about the paths of inquiry and the methods of discovery. He's also zeroing in on the romantic notion of the inventor: the idea of the isolated hero, alone in his lab at 3 am (or perhaps in congress with the deviil) whose "aha!" moment sets the world on its ear. 

It's a seductive notion with a long pedigree. Of course we know now that it doesn't work that way--probably never did and certainly does not in an age of lightning communication and galaxy-wide competitive cooperation.   Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball and Marconi did not invent radio.   And Watson and Crick probably copped a bit more credit than they deserved for DNA.  So poor Ayyaddurai, who seems to have been a willing participant in, perhaps the protagonist of, this little drama, just came along too late: people aren't going to let him get away with a ploy that might well have worked in ages past.  Generalizing, the point would be  that people just aren't going to get credit (that they don't really deserve, anyway) just for catching a particular moment in  collaborative process.  I could call this Buce's law but that would be admitting that somebody had already thought of it.   

More Kindle Stuff

I know I should move onto another topic, but still--a friend told me yesterday that old original Kindle-1s were going on Ebay for $9.99.

But no, seems to be a misreading. Those are Kindle book collections go for $9.99. Kindles themselves seem to go in the range of $238.

But the essential point is worthwhile. I heard somewhere that when news reached Venice that Vasco da Gama had doubled the Cape of Good Hope, the Venetian commodity market collapsed: they knew the jig was up. Should be interesting to watch the Kindle market as an index of Ipad acceptance.

But now that I think of it, apparently TI still sells its BA-II Plus, the off-the-rack business calculator. Looks like they have tarted up the appearance a bit, but I bet the internal electronics are the same as when I bought my first one in the 80s. Prices seem to run around $23. I think I bought my first for about $30, so accounting for inflation, that's a bit of a drop. But they must have amortized their sunk costs years ago; from now on, it is just putting together the pieces.

Apple: I'm Not Biting

I've got 70+ books on the Kindle that Ms. Buce gave me for Christmas a year ago, so I guess you could say I've more or less amortized the purchase. I tell people (strangers still ask) that it is a kludgy, overpriced laptop. I suppose that's true, but I need to add that it is my kludgy, overpriced laptop, and as a guy who likes to read a lot, I like the fact that it will slip into a lot of coat pockets, and that it's got a battery strong enough to get me to Sydney (not that I plan to go to Sydney, but it's nice to know that my Kindle will get me there).

So now, the (tee hee) Ipad. I'm not a compulsive early adopter, but I do admit I've been waiting for this one with more than usual interest. And--remind me again, why exactly? What is it that I need that would impel me to transfer 700-odd George Washingtons to the Silicon sage?

I guess I can think of one thing: backlighting. Ms. Buce would deny it, but I think one reason she gave it to me is that she assumed it would allow me to read in bed without shining that big ol' bedlamp in her eye. I thouoght so too, and we were both disappointed. Ipad has backlighting, you say? Hmm.

But other than that--well here's the thing. I don't watch a lot of movies. I'm not a gamer. They say this is "the machine for everything else." But for me, reading and writing and surfing is everything else. What I really want, I guess, is a netbook with a 10-hour battery--plus maybe a data plan, if it is cheap enough (I do think I saw one of those float by me a couple of days ago; I must not have cared enough to want to make it stop). I laugh at how dorky the Kindle is. I'm one of those who said Jeff Bezos made a mistake a year ago by trying to do something he wasn't very good at--build a machine--when he could have farmed that part out to Hewlett Packard or, hell, to Apple itself, and concentrate on delivering content.

Dorky, then, yes, but it's my dork, and for the moment I think I'll skip the Ipad and keep my money and my Kindle in my pocket.

Obsolete?

Silicon Valley Insider has a clever list of 21 things that became obsolete in the last decade, including a sometimes-interesting discussion of which of these are really obsolete (Is the land line gone? Chez Buce still has a land line, but why?)

One item I didn't notice on the list: the flash drive. I bought two the day before I discovered My Dropbox. Oh, and later Evernote.

And here's a candidate for shortest lifespan: installed dashboard GPS. Mrs. B got one on her new Toyota in 2004; we thought it was cool. Seems like two blinks of an eye and everybody had one on their pocket gadget.

[H/T: Carpe Diem.]

Update: Okay, so I open my Sunday paper this morning and there's a huge ad showcasing the dashboard GPS on the Cadillac Escalade. Does this mean I am behind the curve? Or they?

So, What Do You Call 'Unlucky'? (Oh. Right, Got It)

If it’s lucky, MySpace is the new Yahoo.

Link.

Well, That's a Relief

Apparently my blog is not the web equivalent of the Hummer:

In terms of direct pollution, the impact [of an individual blog on the environment] is likely to be pretty small. To provide a reference point, the popular blogging site WordPress said it transferred about 161,100 gigabytes of data last year across 3,132,606 active blogs. Do the math, and that adds up to only about 51 megabytes of data transferred per blog per year—a tiny amount. Of course, a given blogger's bandwidth will be much higher if he or she receives lots of traffic or posts large images and videos. But even those whose sites transfer a couple of gigabytes a month would be responsible for just a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Using somewhat outdated stats from the Department of Energy, that would put even one of those larger blogs somewhere in the range of the average household's microwave.

That's Slate's Jacob Leibenluft on the environmental impact of blogs and other stuff on the web (link). Works for me on two levels: one, it's another reminder of how just incredibly, jaw-droppingly cheap (in terms of marginal cost, at least) is so much ordinary web use--why people are willing to offer things like near-infinite cloudware storage and, well, and free blogs. And two, how little this point seems to have sunk in as evidenced by the fact that the question is being asked at all.

More Laptop

Due solely to my own indolence and inattention, I dropped my laptop on a concrete floor. Amazingly, it still does its laptop thing (Toshiba Satellite M105-S322)--I think I even jarred loose some dirt from under a refractory Y key. But the disk drive popped out and disconnected from its ribbony link.

Let me show you what an old fashioned guy I am: my first thought was--oh, I've got to take it to a repair shop. And I thought: yeh, right, 60 bucks just to look at it, and then? My next thought was no better: send it back to Toshiba.

It finally dawned on me--wait, do i really need a disk drive? And the answer is: not really. Can't remember the last time I loaded software from a disk. I do watch the odd opera CD--but hey, I do have another (and more heavy duty) laptop, with a working drive. And it finally finally dawned on me--if I really need a disk drive, wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy a portable for, oh, I don't know, apparently as little as 20 bucks.

Still mulling the options, I came home to find my newest computer toy: an Eee Subcompact, less than kilo, responsive right out of the box. An upside: it's Linux and OpenOffice, so I can experiment with life off the Redmond grid. Another upside: a memory slot, so I can finally liberate all those photos on my Treo. A downside: it won't read my high-powered flash drive; guess I will have to hang onto the old steam-powered variety.

Oh and did I mention? No hard drive. But three USB ports, so welcome to the new world.

Oh, and did I mention? I'm writing this on the tiny keyboard. Not really fun for every day, but just fine for travel, which was the whole point anyway.