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I've just had to do something I really hate to do. I just spent a couple of hours (closer to 3) summarily dumping blog comments. I had to do that because I ended up with nearly 4,000 comments waiting in my "pending comments" box.

To all the people whose comments I wiped, please accept my apologies. I didn't want to do it, but I had to. I teach three college classes; write two regular blogs; research and write numerous articles on high technology; spend six hours a week pumping iron in the gym; and pump out a couple of novels a year. Once in a while I like to say Hi to my wife. There are only so many hours in a day.

At this point, only about one in ten comments I receive get published, anyway. There are many reasons for that, so I thought I'd post a quick entry suggesting some dos and don'ts that, if you follow them, will up your chances of having your comment see the light of day, and might just reduce the amount of stuff I have to wade through every day.

DO

* Do be patient. Fielding comments is low on the priority list compared to everything else, such as writing new entries. It often takes me a while, but I try to read every comment.

* Do feel free to express your opinion in a comment to this blog.

* Do feel free to disagree with any position expressed in any posting. That just makes a healthy environment for ideas.

* Do fee free to suggest blog entry topics. I often take up subjects suggested by commenters.

* Do use standard English. It's amazing how many comments are unreadable because of simple errors in English. That includes spelling, sentence structure and using the right word to say what you mean. Nobody expects you to be letter perfect, but try hard. Even if English is not your native language, you want what you have to say to be heard. That won't happen if what you say is unintelligible.

* Do think about what you want to say before you start writing. There is always a "take home lesson" for everything you write. That's a phrase or two that you expect your readers to recall later on. If you don't know what you wanted to say in the first place, how will anyone else figure it out?

* Do write out what you want to say before you put it into the comment text box. Many commenters have commended me on how clear my writing is. That's the result of editing. I typically run everything through several (5-10) revision cycles before posting it. My latest novel, which is in the production stage right now, has already been through 11 separate revisions, and most of those revisions were proofread 3-5 times. You can start on a separate word-processor document, then copy and paste into the comment box when you're satisfied that what you've written actually says what you want to say. Nobody expects you to spend a lot of time revising a blog comment, but you need to take the time to make sure it says what you want it to say.

* Do sign with your name, or at least a "handle" that serves as a name. Your handle should NOT be a marketing message! "Buy my stuff" is not a valid handle. Neither is "my stuff's the greatest thing since sliced bread."

DON'T

* Don't expect a response. Generally, I don't respond to blog comments unless I have a specific reason for wanting to. If I do, count yourself lucky. Less than one out of a hundred comments get a response.

* Don't use profanity. This is a G-rated (well, at least PG) blog. Profanity in comments won't see the light of day. My own writing varies from G to XXX, but I know when and where to say what.

* Don't repeat comments. A lot of commenters write basically the same message in comments to multiple entries. That just fills up the space, and ticks me off because I've got to sort through it. I can tell, and will dump repeated comments in a heartbeat.

* Don't include your marketing message. It's my blog. If you want to sell your product or service, start your own blog. Yes, I often promote my books. That's the point: I promote my books in my blog. You don't promote your stuff in my blog. If you try to, I'll just toss your comment into the dustbin.

* Don't fill up my pending comments box with long strings of text that mean nothing. That's a variation on the old denial-of-service attack. But, it doesn't work here. It takes you a lot longer to paste a pile of rubbish in the comments textbox than it does for me to hit the delete key.

* Don't use blog comments to yammer on about something that you want to talk about, but which has nothing to do with the blog. Put that content in your own blog.

* Don't imagine that sucking up to me by piling a lot of praise into your comment will get your marketing message published. I get plenty of praise. If I see a marketing message, your comment's gone!

Those, I think, are the main things to think about when writing a blog comment.

Happy Motoring!

Variously called tablet PCs, tablet computers, or convertibles, mobile computing devices combining fully functional keyboards, touch screens, and all the performance and features you expect from a business laptop computer are solutions for business professionals on the go.

The iPad was not the first tablet computer. The tablet computer has been around for on the order of two decades. The original tablet computer was not a skinny undersized Internet connection device. It was a super-laptop.

In a fit of marketing hubris worthy of Microsoft, Apple hijacked the term "tablet computer" to paste on their oversized but underfeatured smartphone. The iPad is, in network-systems parlance, essentially a "thin client."

Now, I've never much liked the term "tablet computer," anyway. To me it evokes images of Edward-Gorey-esque illustrations of graveyards. I guess from that point of view, I'm perfectly happy having it applied to the physically thin, usefulness-challenged iPad thin client, which actually does look like a Colonial American slate gravestone that has been torn away from its rightful job keeping the mouldering corpse of a Revolutionary War hero from climbing out of the ground to pester third-millennium technogeeks who just wanna surf the Internet while pretending to pump iron at the gym.

"I'm resting between sets," they usually tell me.

I dunno. When I rest between sets, I'm usually waiting for the stars to clear from my vision, my panting breath to re-oxygenate my blood, and my heart rate to return to normal after exhausting my major muscle groups with nearly three-hundred pounds balanced on my shoulders. The last thing on my mind then is clearing out spam from my email inbox, or finding out what Lady Ga-Ga has been up to today.

But, different strokes ....

So, what were tablet computers during the first 90% of their existence?

Doc Manchek, a main protagonist in my novel Red is seen using the original style of tablet computer to run through his email during a stopover at the Driskill hotel in Austin, Texas while traveling by motorcycle across the southern United States. This description, which was drafted, edited, and ready for publication before Apple brought out their pathetic version, shows what is essentially a full-service laptop computer fitted with a touch screen.

Of course, just pasting a touch screen on a laptop-computer display would make a very clumsy package. To properly operate a touch screen, you've got to have it sitting against a fairly solid surface. Otherwise, poking it in the heat of doing whatever you're wanting to do with your portable computer, from ordering electronic parts online to writing the Great American Novel, or even just shoving email spam into the trash bin, would result in bouncing around of the display, knocking the whole thing off your lap, and possible premature failure of the display hinge. To avoid such unpleasantness, tablet computer makers developed an interesting display-hinge arrangement that allowed the user to either raise the display screen over the keyboard, as in a regular laptop, or flip it entirely over to cover the keyboard so it could be used like the current generation of tablets.

Being a complex enhancement of a top-of-the-line mobile-computing solution (which at the time meant a laptop), the thing cost about double what you could get a high-performance business-oriented laptop for. It was economically justifiable only for people who really needed touch-screen-oriented applications as well as keyboard applications. For the vast majority of casual consumers, who just want to download music videos from the Web, it was rediculous overkill.

Some of us, however, wanted them in them in the worst way. When Apple started yammering about coming out with a tablet computer at a bargain price, we started salivating.

When we actually saw the iPad, however, our faces fell. No keyboard. You try hacking HTML code without a keyboard! Or, writing anything more extensive than a text message. Worthless for professional use. In addition, the thing seemed to lack enough horsepower or memory to do decent graphic illustration. Basically, it was a smartphone that was too big to hold up to your ear!

So, it's not a smartphone. It's not an ebook reader. It's not a real computer. It's too big and heavy to shove into your pocket. It's a thin-client Web appliance.

I'd still like to get myself a real tablet computer.

I guess they're now called "convertibles."

I saw an ad for one of them the other day for less than $600. Maybe next time I get paid.

Managing by walking around is a critical skill for managers at every level in any modern organization. To learn more, visit the blog Rational Supervision entry of 30 May 2010.

In my last blog entry, I talked about the notion of "doing what you do best, and leaving the rest for someone else," and how important it is for people in general, but especially for anyone attempting a complex, technology-based project, such as building a website. I got onto that kick by listening to readers who complemented the design of this blog, and were interested in how I achieved it. Most seemed to be hoping for advice they could use to improve the quality of their own blogs.

That led me to thinking about some of the many simple techniques engineering managers need to learn in order to effectively lead the project teams that are so important, nowadays. Another critical skill for managers, which is illustrated in my latest novel Red is called "managing by walking around." Popularized by Tom Peters in the early 1980s, it is a management technique that has been applied by effective leaders from time immemorial. The most effective leaders interact with their workers - the people who actually produce a company's value added - on a regular, one-to-one basis, and they go to their workers, rather than somehow expecting the workers to come to them.

In Red, the technique is introduced during a conversation between the main character, Red McKenna, and her stepfather, Mark Shipton, who is CEO of a multi-billion-dollar corporation:

"Managing by walking around," Mark explained, "is more of a management philosophy than a set of techniques. It starts from the observation that, while holed up in your office, what you are doing is writing memo after memo, and creating report after report. The people who work for you then have to stop whatever useful thing they're doing to read your memos, and reports. While they're doing that, they can't be doing any useful work."

"Managing by walking around gets you up out of your office, so you can't be writing endless memos that interfere with your employees working. Instead, you go around making brief visits here, and there, just to see how things are going. If you find a problem, fix it as quickly as you can, then get your ass out of there. If you find things going along swimmingly, give some encouragement, and get your ass out even faster. You minimize your interferance, apply your efforts only where they're needed, and keep your crew heads-down working, doing what you really want them to do."

Red's mentor, Doc, later points out a second reason managing by walking around is important: " ... while you're managing-by-walking-around, take a look in their eyes to see if someone's having a problem. That's what's so important about face-to-face visits. ... Once in a while you have to check to see what's going on behind the eyes. ... If some guy's got a colicy kid, it'll affect his performance, but be a temporary problem. If he's heading for divorce, it can mess with his mind, big time ...."

This is especially important for supervising knowledge workers. Engineers, scientists, and other people tasked with creating intellectual property, need clear heads and focused imaginations to produce what companies need them to produce. If someone's mind dwells on personal problems while they're hanging parts on a conveyor leading up to a paint booth, so what? They aren't using much of their brains for their task, anyway. If an engineer, on the other hand, is thinking about their kid's trouble at school, it will definitely interfere with analyzing test data, for example, or imagining the gas flow through a turbine engine.

A third reason managing by walking around is important is that it's the best way for a supervisor to know what's actually happening on the shop floor. Having various metrics piped to a computer on your desk is useful, but doesn't hold a candle to going out there to look around.

The best, most comprehensive metrics consist of only a few kilobytes of data. Your eyes, ears, and noses - even your sense of touch - produce thousands of times more data per second when you step out to the shop floor.

Think of it as the difference between a thumbnail image, and a video clip. The thumbnail image can give you a vague idea of generally what you're getting yourself into by clicking on it. You click on it, however, and download the video clip in order to get the full experience. No thumbnail can provide the richness of that experience.

To take that analogy further, think about how many times you've clicked on a thumbnail, only to find that document delivered was either horribly disappointing, or wildly more than you'd expected. The same happens when you use business metrics as an initial guide, but then go out to see actual conditions for yourself. In most cases, the reality is either far better or far worse than you expected based on the terse summary supplied by business metrics.

This is going to have to be a short post, sans image because I'm running out of work time, today. Before I dive into what I want to write about, however, I want to thank my loyal fans, who've put up with my website going "dark" for several months while I consolidated my move to Florida. Especially, all of you who've jumped in to add your comments so quickly after I started posting again, and opened the site up for comments. The hard part has been to keep up with all of your kind words.

What I want to talk about today is a little saying I picked up in MBA school, although I do not remember exactly where it originated: "Do what you do best, and let somebody else do the rest."

This saying came up in answer to multiple commenters complementing my blog site, and wondering how I managed it.

The short answer is that I didn't. I'm a writer. What I write about is mostly technology, but I also tell a few stories, crack a few jokes, and even cover some news items.That's what I do best, and have been doing it long enough so I can claim to be an expert.

Although I know how to create a website, and have done so many times, it's not what I do best. Other people can do a much better job in less time than me. So, what I do is hire them to do what they do best -- design websites.

Since I'm trying to drum up interest in my latest novel, Red, and the principle of doing what you do best is a major theme in it, I'm going to be flagrantly self-promoting and refer to it.

The main character, Red McKenna, is on a quest to find her long-lost father. Her initial idea is to just drive to the last place she knows for sure he was, and look. That gets her about 250 miles (out of a couple of thousand) before she ends up stranded by the side of the road.

She does finally succeed in her quest, but not without the aid of over a dozen experts who each contribute a little bit to her reaching her goal, from the mechanic who fixes her car, to the SEAL team that finally springs the trap to catch the bad guy. Part way through the project, she admits: "When I first started out, I thought I could do it on my own, but I couldn't....I didn't realize how big it was until I started working on the details."

What she ends up doing is managing the project, not doing it all herself. She's the one who wants to find her father, but she really doesn't have the skills to complete all of the tasks her quest involves. What saves her bacon is hooking up with her mentor, Doc, who does know how to handle the thousands of details that any project involves. He knows to identify those details, then find an expert to do each one right.

So, when you decide you want to build your website, or repair your car's transmission, or any of the thousands of things that people living in a technological society need to do, start by asking if it's in your area of expertise.

We all have our area of expertise, which is a small island surrounded by an ocean of stuff we're really not competent to do on our own. If what you want to do is in your area of expertise, have at it. If not, go find somebody who can do it better. Then get them to do it.

A final example: I'm in the process of publishing a sequel to Red entitled Vengeance Is Mine! One of the most expensive parts of publishing a novel is getting cover art.

I'm supposed to have some talent as an artist. In fact, my mother once told me she expected me to grow up to be a graphic artist, not a writer. I can -- in fact I did -- rough out a cover for the new book that cost me nothing.

I'm not planning to use it, however. I know that there are people out there whom I can pay to put together a much better, more attractive, and more compelling cover than I can. I'm going to end up paying them to do it because I'm not conceited enough to think I can do a better job than somebody who does it day-in and day-out for a living.

Just as I did for Red, I expect to rough out a concept, which I'll hand off to a professional graphic artist, who will do a much better job executing the finished product than I could.

The Red McKenna series chronicles the adventures of a six-foot, three-inch redhead with an athlete's body, a mathematical-genius mind, and an independent streak a mile wide.

Months ago, I promised to alert readers of this blog when my first full-length novel Red appeared. Well, it's out. Actually, it's been out for a while in hard cover, paperback, and e-book formats. It is available through online and brick-and-mortar booksellers. Published by iUniverse, the novel introduces a unique heroine whom I think readers of this blog could relate to. She's a six-foot, three-inch redhead with a mathematical genius mind, as well as a crack-athelete's body and an independent streak a mile wide. Her soul mate is a biker who's even bigger, smarter, and more independent. Together, they harness science and advanced technology to solve riddles that life throws at them.

The idea for the story started back in early 2001 on a bitterly cold January night in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. I'd just flown in from Arizona to spend a week emptying out and closing up the house of my recently deceased father, who'd finally succumbed to cancer at age 87.

When I say it was bitterly cold, I ain't just kiddin'. The high for the day was about zero Fahrenheit, which is cold even for New England in January. For a desert rat living in Arizona, it was unbelievable!

Then, the sun set, and it got colder.

I curled up in a lotus position with the thickest quilt I could find wrapped around me, hoping the furnace would soon drive away the chill that had seeped into the walls during two weeks of the house being empty. Since the house had been empty, there was no TV. I'd been cooped up on an airplane for hours with nothing to do but read, so I was read out. My body was still on Mountain Standard Time, and I'm a night owl, anyway, so sleep was many hours away.

I just sat, and thought.

What I thought was the beginning of this story. It was going to be the adventures of two young people who made a transcontinental journey by motorcycle, visiting all the places I liked to go by motorcycle, doing the things I like to do when touring by motorcycle, and meeting the kinds of people I meet when wandering around by motorcycle.

To make it interesting, I'd have the lady be a newbie biker, who'd never been on a motorcycle tour before. Everything would be new to her, and a surprise.

What would she look like? Well, I like tall redheads who are really, really smart. My mother was tall, had auburn hair, and was one of the smartest people I've ever met. My wife is tall, has red hair, and is no slouch between the ears, either. In fact, I'm a sucker for tall redheads with lots of brains. So, my heroine would be tall, have red hair, and be really, really smart.

Since everything in an exciting fiction story must be bigger than life, she'd have to be extremely tall - like six-foot, three-inches tall - have lots of flaming red hair, and be a genius with a full scholarship in an Ivy League college studying something that gives most people phobias: mathematics.

The guy would be a veteran biker, who knew all the right places to go, and could introduce her to the most interesting people. To be able to match her, he'd have to be really tall - like six-foot, six-inches tall - more athletic, and even smarter.

They'd visit motorcycle races, camp out at biker rallies, spend hours shopping at motorcycle flea markets, and spend evenings getting plastered at biker bars. Being really, really smart would give them the wherewithal to thumb their noses at convention whenever they wanted to. They could get into stuff the rest of us only fantasize about.

It'd be a lot of fun for them, and, maybe, for readers.

In that form, however, it'd be lucky to make fifty pages long. That's a longish short story, not a novel. A novel needs a lot more. It needs character development. It needs suspense. It needs mystery.

It needed a lot of work.

Over the next nine years, the story grew. The young lady got a name, Judith McKenna (nicknamed "Red" for obvious reasons), as well as a troubled past. Her troubles, however, were not her fault, and not the fault of any character flaw. The troubles stemmed from a singular event that made building relationships difficult at best, especially building relationships with guys. That event was the untimely and mysterious disappearance of her father just at the time an adolescent girl needs a father figure most.

So, the father figure would be supplied by the mysterious biker, who takes her on a journey, which is no longer a touristy vacation, but a journey of self-discovery. Who was she, inside? How could she relate to other people? What was she going to do with her life?

One of the ambiguities she'd have to resolve could be a bit of sexual confusion. That could be fun!

The mystery, of course, is what happened to her father. Why'd he leave? Why'd he not come back?

Now, my favorite fiction genres over the past lots-and-lots-of-decades have been mystery and science fiction. And, my favorite stories have always combined both. And, my favorite author has been Rober Heinlein, who generally combined those two genres and used them to weave epic tales that explored basic human values. That's what I'd try to do.

Judith's story had a mystery, and had some serious character-development potential. It also had two young people off on their own, providing plenty of opportunities for fooling around between sheets, which will seriously spice up any story. In fact, giving her a chance to peel back layers to slowly discover who this biker was would add a second mystery, which might be fun to develop as well.

What she would find is a scientific genius who could provide technology that would make solving her other mystery - what happened to her father - possible, where it hadn't been before. He'd have built his own company in very short time, capitalizing on his inventions in aerospace technology. I know about aerospace technology. I can do that.

With all that additional content packed in, the space needed to tell the story expanded tenfold. When I finally sat down to type it out, it took a year instead of the three-to-six months I envisioned. From a simple little story about a motorcycle trip, it grew to an epic adventure.

By the way, it's still growing, with new titles coming soon. My wife says she likes the sequel even better.

I think you'll like it, too.

Changing gambling laws have made riverboat casinos superfluous. We spent the night in riverboat ghost town.

This is the second in the ongoing series following our effort to move the Damifino to Naples, Florida.

We only made 74 miles yesterday, which is actually decent progress on the upper Illinois River, with its locks spaced only a few miles. Considering that we didn't start out until after noontime, and passed three locks before giving up the fight at about 6:00 pm, we did okay. It normally takes 1-2 hours to pass through a lock, so getting three hours travel time out of six hours isn't half bad. That's averaging an hour per lock and 25 mph in between.

Twenty five miles per hour doesn't sound like much to people used to burning up the road at 70-80 mph, but on a boat it's moderately fast for a cruiser. Damifino gets up on plane at 12-18 kt (that's nautical miles per hour -- about 15% faster than the same number in mph). Below that speed, the hull pushes laboriously through the water. Above that speed, it skips over the water like a thrown stone. Planing is much more efficient. In between, the hull is constantly trying to climb the hill of water it pushes up as it tries to plow through.

There are two roughly equivalent ways to think of the process of getting up on plane. Sailors think of it as the hull trying to climb up on its own bow wave. Another way to think of it is the hull trying to climb out of the hole in the water (A boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by fiberglass, into which you throw money.) that Archimedes said it must create to get bouyant force to hold the boat up  against gravity. To a hydrodynamicist, the displacement regime is when bouyant forces support the boat, and planing is when the hydrodynamic lift supports the hull. In between is a transitional regime where the hull rises out of the water, so bouyant force is lower, and hydrodynamic lift does the rest.

The best fuel economy -- miles covered per gallon burned -- comes when the hull moves fast enough to be fully up on plane, but not much faster. It's easy to tell when that happens: when running as a displacement hull, the boat runs flat through the water. As hydrodynamic forces come into play, the nose rises dramatically. When fully on plane, the nose drops back to run nearly horizontally again. At that point, you have to throttle back to avoid running really fast. That's when you get best fuel economy. On Damifino that's between 22 and 25 knots.

In any case, the 74 miles we made yesterday brought us to Hamm's Holiday Harbor Marina in Peoria, Ill. I actually passed the place because all I could see was a bunch of riverboat casinos. Clearly, some were, shall we say, "derelict," being drawn up on dry land. One, however, looked like it could be in operation. I figured that didn't look like the marina we were looking for. I was wrong.

When we sailed in, (boats still "sail," even powerboats without sails) we found a deep pool with floating docks presenting dozens of slips big enough to dock the Damifino. With no better directions, we pulled into the easiest slip to reach, and tied up.

The riverboats are a side business for the marina owner. In the past, shore-based casinos were illegal in Illinois, and a number of midwestern states. There was a loophole, however, that allowed casino gambling on floating platforms -- hence the launching of a slew of riverboat casinos.

That's all changed, now. The states realized how much revenue they were missing, and changed the laws to allow shore-based casino operations. That made the riverboats superfluous. Hamm's marina owner (Mr. Hamm?) has made a tidy business of taking these white elephants off the casino owners' hands, and cutting them up for scrap. Those in and around the marina pool are awaiting the gentle ministrations of low-wage workers bearing cutting torches.

I'm writing this post to thank all the visitors and commenters to this website, and to answer a few of the many questions I get constantly. As you've probably figured out, I almost never answer comments to this site. I've enough to do to vet comments as they come in, which I try to do every day, attempting to separate real comments from spam. I publish what appear to be legitimate comments to blog entries, and delete what looks like spam.

Many commenters ask for link exchanges, which I do not do. The purpose of link exchanges is to pump up external links for websites, but search engines know all about that strategy, notice it immediately, and automatically mark down sites who use it. Thus, instead of boosting a site's ranking, link exchanges can actually downgrade it.

On the other hand, we do like to have other sites use quotations from our site. There's no need to ask permission. The correct way to handle the situation is to separate direct quotes off between quotation marks, and provide a link to the blog entry. The best way to get the correct link information is to go to the page containing the quote, then copy the text that appears in your browser's address window. Then, paste it into the URL field in your blog software's link dialog box. This covers you with regard to copyright issues, proves to your readers that you didn't just pull the quote out of thin air, and gives me credit for the information. If you look back over my posts, you can see how it's done, as most posts include references to online research that went into the entry.

If you really need to contact me directly for some reason, feel free to use the link provided on the blog page to reach my website. There you will find my email address, which you can use to contact me directly.

A few commenters have asked about my providing guest posts, or writing other copy for their publications. The answer is, "yes." It's what I do, and have been doing professionally for 25 years. For more information go to my website, where you'll see the services I provide. Basically, I provide written content for print and online publications, and ghostwrite material to be published under the client's byline.

Those are the main questions I'm asked by commenters to this blog's postings. Thanks for taking an interest.

Author C.G. Masi's forthcoming novel looks at how technology developers go about their business in a corporate environment.

Many thanks to the loyal readers of this blog, who have put up with a low posting frequency over the past few months. My excuse is that I've been trying to get my next book into production. It's nearly there, so I should be able to provide more frequent posts to this blog.

Readers who enjoy my commentaries on how technological advances affect current events will have a lot to interest them in the book, which should be in bookstores around mid-summer. Entitled Red, it is a novel whose main characters work in a private applied-physics research company. The title comes from the nickname for the central character, Judith McKenna, who is a tall, athletic, young mathematician, who tosses everything away to search for her missing father after the authorities have exhausted all conventional means of finding him. Her faltering quest is saved by Doc, her mentor and sometime lover, who shows her how to organize the scientific and technical resources she didn't even realize were available to solve the mystery.

To reach her goal, she needs to learn techniques of organization, resource allocation, team building, and decision making under uncertain conditions. If you thought such issues were dry and academic, it's because you haven't seen them played out in the emotionally charged, risk-filled environments where real-life technology developers live and work, where millions of dollars, careers, and even lives are often at stake, and any mistake can lead to disaster.

If you think that's hyperbole, take a look at what's happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico.

We're now doing the final polish edit on Red. The schedule calls for that to be done before the end of June, at which time the book will go directly into production.

Most of the work is now in the hands of others, so I will have more time to devote to looking at how technology interacts with society, which is the focus of this blog. I plan to start by sorting through the issues surrounding the Gulf oil disaster. What actually happened? Who should really be pointing fingers at whom? Are the actions contemplated by the Obama Administration likely to help the situation, or make it worse?

Hopefully, I can help make sense of it all.

Apologies to Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens). The original quote was "... the report of my death was an exaggeration" in a short note written in 1897. Source: University of Sydney

In the roughly quarter century since Al Gore supposedly invented the Internet, pundits have repeatedly posited the impending death of print publishing to a gullible public. So pervasive has been this story, and so credulous the audience, that many publications have, in fact, woken up with stakes through their hearts.

Recently, however, reports to the opposite effect - a resurgence of advertising support for traditional (as opposed to Web based) - publications has been spotted in the business news. Most recently, an article appeared in Editors Only that concluded: "Contrary to all the buzz, online will not obliterate every print edition. Some publications will be online, some in print, some in both. In the end, success will lie in the coexistence of print and online. That's the real

future. That's the end of the rainbow."

This trend squares with apocryphal reports we've been receiving that advertising support for print-based trade magazines, specifically, is stabilizing, although at a diminished level. According to one marketing executive at a major vendor of measurement and control equipment, "Online advertising is effective for generating leads for sales of specific products, but print advertising is necessary to build brand awareness."

We do know that, aside from search engines, the most successful websites are online catalogs, such as Amazon.com, through which visitors can comparison shop, and purchase actual products online. But, that's not what traditional print magazines do best. Advertisers supported print magazines based on their percieved positions as authoritative suppliers of information readers seek. The theory was that when a reader saw an ad in a respected magazine, they tended to view the advertiser as a leader in their field, and their products as more desirable than those of vendors. That theory held up well for several hundred years.

The Internet, however, has not developed the same kind of respect. With the proliferation of social media, which visitors know perfectly well does not adhere to the same kind of journalistic standards we expect from print publications. In fact, everyone knows that Internet content is replete with misinformation, disinformation, and out-and-out lies, in addition to well researched and thought out reports and analysis. The doctrine of caveat emptor, literally "buyer beware" is the order of the day when viewing online material.

Under those conditions, it is much more difficult for a vendor to build brand awareness, and respect through advertising. Print magazines spent a great deal of effort to earn reputations as reliable suppliers of information. Online publications have, generally, not. In fact, social networking media seem to go to great lengths to earn the opposite reputation: that anyone can say anything, whether it has basis in truth, or not.

We suggest that a new model for magazine publishing - which a number of publications have been developing - is the blueprint for the future. These publications combine printed and online content. The print versions provide in-depth analysis that provides an authoritative backdrop for display advertisements that promote vendor company brands. The online versions provide rapidly updated news, reviews, and trends information that provide a compelling backdrop for product-related advertisements. Advertising in these publications is not an either/or proposition. Advertisers are encouraged to purchase combined programs that place image-building ads in print, and ads for specific products in online outlets. Perhaps this, or something very much like it, is what's really at the end of the rainbow.

Ice cliff, Barne Glacier, Antarctica Source: University of Washington

This entry's title is a line from Roadhouse Blues, sung by Doors lead vocalist Jim Morrison. I think of it every time I find someone making important decisions about what to do now based on what they think is going to happen in the future. Of course, such behavior is the closest there is in Zen Buddhism to a sin. Non-buddhists, in general, don't have any idea what a horrible thing it is to sacrifice what you have today in order to secure some reward in an imagined future, so they do it, and even feel proud of it.

Eeeyyyeewww!

A case in point is the perenially stalled movement to curb carbon emissions to avoid global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 claimed: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal ... ." It goes on to detail a raft of dire consequences if we don't heed their warning, and make drastic changes to our lifestyles and energy infrastructure.

So, let's hypothesize a future in which governments of the world gang together, and force their citizens (remember, this is just an hypothesis) to conserve energy by, for example, installing gadgets that won't let you dry your clothes before 10:00 pm, drop your thermostats to, say, 65 degrees in winter and raise them to 80 degrees in summer. They mandate use of electric vehicles that won't go over 55 mph, and can't go farther than 30 miles before recharging (thus limiting personal travel to a radius of 15 miles), and many other good ideas.

Let's say that this goes on for two generations, or about 40 years, at which time the sky is clear and blue, and it's damn cold by anyone's standards. So, roughly 5 billion people have been miserable for forty years (that's one year for each of Ali Babba's thieves) in order to avoid a climate catastrophe that nobody knows would have happened, anyway.

Then, an asteroid falls on 'em and wipes 'em all out.

Is this good planning? Is it based on good science?

The answer to both questions is "No."

I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to figure out why it's bad planning. It is, and that's why the "Green" movement has been stillborn all these years. While everyone is willing to go along with the ideas that global warming is "unequivocal," that it's bad, and that something must be done. Nobody believes it enough to take action based on it.

It's bad science because of the use of the word "unequivocal" in the report summary.

No scientist worthy of the title would use the word "unequivocal." Any sentence containing the word, without a counterbalancing negative (such as in "No scientific theory is unequivocal."), is prima facie not a scientific statement.

On July 5, 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a three-volume book that was the seminal work for the science of physics. Nearly three centuries later, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which, among other things, showed that Newton had, after all, gotten it wrong. He followed that up ten years later, in 1915 with his general relativity theory, which pointed out how Newton got it wrong.

It's now 95 years later, and we're still trying to figure out what's wrong with Einstein's theory. We know he got it wrong, we just don't know what's wrong with it. So far, it's the second most successful scientific theory of all time.

The honor of being the single most successful theory ever elucidated goes to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin turned the discipline of life science on its head by publishing a little tome entitled On the Origin of Species. It's now over 150 years later, and we still call it the "theory of evolution" despite its proven success. Scientists (the real scientists, not the pseudoscientists that creationists like to quote) realize that there's probably something wrong with it, but so far nobody's been able to get a whiff of what that might be.

In science, no statement is ever unequivocal. It's only the best idea we have at the time. So, if it's unequivocal, it's not science.