A TV news anchor and her colleague in Lebanon were both fired after they shared a few laughs on the air over the fate of an anti-Syrian politician who was assassinated last week.

The open microphone captured the presenter saying: “Why did it take them so long to kill him?”

She and a male colleague, who was also sacked, can then be heard laughing.

“Ahmed Fatfat [another anti-Syrian MP] will be next. I’m counting them off,” she went on.

The colleague tells her not to gloat.

“It’s not gloating. But we’ve had enough of them,” she continues.

Sy Hersh got the interview with General Anthony Taguba, the general who initially investigated abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Here he is describing a conversation he had with General John Abizaid:

I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me. I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.

Thomas Vander Wal has written up an interesting post on recombining conversations split across multiple mediums. The problem:

We are seeing our communications move across channels, which can be good as this is fluid and keeping with our digital presence. More often than not we are seeing our communication streams fracture across channels. This fracturing becomes really apparent when we are trying to reconstruct our communication stream. I am finding this fracturing and attempting to stitch the stream back together becoming more and more common as for those who are moving into and across many applications and devices with their own messaging systems.

He also discusses several possible solutions. One he doesn’t mention is Google Desktop. Google Desktop will index everything on your PC including your instant messaging transcripts, your Gmail account, and all of the Web sites in your history. It strikes me as a pretty good option for conversation stitching.

I’ve been thinking lately that book reviews are a better investment than books in terms of attention, for a large class of books. Obviously for many books, the journey is the reward. Obviously, a review of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi will not yield the same rewards as reading the book. Indeed, there’s a good chance that reading reviews will spoil your enjoyment of the book. Likewise, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything is a voyage that no review can satisfactorily capture.

On the other hand, every year there are a number of important idea books that are published. I’m thinking here of books about things like the long tail, black swans, the wisdom of crowds, and crossing the chasm. You can also include revisionist histories in this category. For these kinds of books, reviews often capture most of the value of the books themselves, with a significantly smaller time investment.

Why you might just want to read a few reviews of a book instead of reading the book:

• In many cases, the central idea of the book can be captured in just a few paragraphs. As long as you can comprehend the idea, you don’t really need all of the additional details.
• You get not only the central idea but also the reviewer’s reaction to the idea. Read Tyler Cowen’s review of The Black Swan. There’s a lot of value in the review in addition to the value of the book.
• You save a ton of time.

Here are some reasons why it may be worth it to read the book:

• Reading the book is fun if the author is a good storyteller. Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s explanation of an idea is its own reward, and his anecdotes are always worth the price of admission.
• Oftentimes the ideas conveyed in a book are more nuanced than can be captured in a review. Many reviewers construct a straw man version of the argument in a book rather than engaging the author more fully.

Of course these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. I like to read the reviews of a movie after watching the movie, just to catch details I might have missed. This argument occurred to me because we live in the golden age of reviews. The Internet is full of reviews, review aggregation sites, and weblogs with commentary on books, movies, television shows, and just about everything else. Why read a book these days unless it seems like fun?

I wish there was a way to configure my Tivo so that if I hit the “go back 8 seconds” button, it would automatically turn on closed captioning for the eight seconds it replays.

One thing I’ve been predicting to everyone who’ll listen is that like deployment and scalability, serious IDE support is on the way for Ruby. Learn the language now, reap the benefits of better, easier tools down the road. Looks like that prediction is looking good right now. NetBeans is making serious progress on Ruby refactoring.

In the meantime, Windows developers can pick up Ruby in Steel a Ruby development extension for Visual Studio. It doesn’t support refactoring yet, but once one of the IDEs supports it, they all will shortly afterward. Intellij IDEA has a Ruby editing plugin that doesn’t yet support refactoring. Eclipse fans have RDT. There are a number of other IDEs that are up and coming as well.

Currently, I’m still doing my Ruby development in TextMate, but as soon as there’s an editor that has real refactoring support, I’m certain I’ll make the leap. Tim Bray is right in saying that “find usages” is the make or break feature in terms of refactoring.

Bruce Schneier posted an essay today entitled Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot. He says:

I don’t think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker “terrorist.” But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don’t have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and — regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue — the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population.

Bruce Schneier is the Director of Homeland Security on my federal government fantasy league team.

Did you know that the NFL wanted to prohibit San Francisco 49ers coach Mike Nolan from wearing a suit or blazer on the sidelies when he coaches, and that only under duress did they submit to letting him wear a Reebok-approved suit during two games last year? They’ve restricted him to two games in a suit this year as well, because Reebok gives the NFL millions of dollars in exchange for players and coaches wearing the company’s clothes. One of my favorite sports-related memories is seeing Tom Landry patrol the sidelines in a suit during Dallas Cowboys games, but that tradition has been killed on the altar of corporate sponsorship.

Anyway, a group is 49ers fans is planning to wear business suits to the team’s home opener in support of the coach’s sartorial quest. I love the idea.

Update: Clearly NFL commissioner Roger Goodell feels the power that is rc3.org, and today ruled that Mike Nolan and Jacksonville Jaguars coach Jack Del Rio can wear suits to all of their home games. As far as I know, Roger Goodell wears a suit to work every day.

Andrew Brown notes that he has misunderstood and misused Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. He explains:

I have thought for many years that the point of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was that you could not measure a system without disturbing it. Hence the idea that your measurement of one aspect (say, momentum) must disturb another, like position, since all measurement involves interaction. I was wrong. It turns out, at least according to John Barrow, that this is a vulgar misunderstanding of the Heisenberg principle, perpetrated as a way around the mathematical difficulties.

The uncertainly principle is specifically applicable to quantum physics but I, and many other people, have applied the vulgar definition wherever it seems appropriate. The idea behind it seems applicable to social sciences, computer science, and plenty of other areas as well. For example, it is often applied to anthropology. It is impossible for anthropologists to visit a primitive tribe in the Amazon jungle to document their lifestyle without also affecting their lifestyle. Likewise, in software development, instrumenting a system for performance testing affects the performance of that system, at least a little bit.

The improper application of the uncertainty principle neatly conveys a useful idea. This misappropriation of scientific principles in other situations is pretty common. People often use the concept of inertia to describe any form or behavior that continues beyond its useful life. Evolution describes the way random genetic mutations propagate throughout a population, but it is also commonly used to describe the way systems that are deliberately designed and tweaked change over time.

I actually think this is a useful and interesting practice, but I’m sure it drives scientists nuts. I do wonder whether there’s any effort being made to document these misappropriations of scientific work.

Here’s a map of the United States with the names of the states replaced with the names of countries with a similar GDP. Pretty interesting reference when reading about other countries. I was surprised that Saudi Arabia and Tennessee have roughly the same GDP.