So passengers on Northwest Airlines flight 33 were trapped on board the plane for 28 hours while food and water ran out and the toilets clogged. Yikes.

Actually, double yikes.

This is the second time this has happened to Northwest passengers.

In 1999, Northwest Airlines passengers were stuck on the tarmac in Detroit for more than nine hours because the plane couldn’t get clearance to taxi to the terminal.

In fact, Susan Carey of The Wall Street Journal won an award for her story of that ordeal, in which passengers resorted to calling the airline’s president at home with their cell phones to demand they be deplaned.

Update:
Tom Hughes points out a bit of errata in this: “I am not a great fan of Northwest airlines,” he wrote, “but in their defense about flight 33, I believe that U.S. Immigration shares a very large burden of responsibility for the delay.”

Absolutely true.

“This is the equivalent of a medical tsunami — there was no warning put out whatsoever on this apparently benign, over-the-counter medicine.”
–Browne Green, attorney for Sabrina Brierton Johnson. (Johnson is suing McNeil claiming that Children’s Motrin caused her to go blind.)

A medical tsunami? So the possibility that Motrin caused an allegric reaction compares to the deaths of more than 71,000 people?

In-fricking-credible scumbag lawyer.

I almost missed this. The item below “Swimsuit model survives tsunami” is the equally pathetic, “Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays.” (At 800×600 screen resolution, that appears just below the fold.)

Shameful.

Here’s what CNN.com had moments ago above the fold under news about the tsunami:

• Hundreds of Americans believed missing
• Tsunami aid effort gathers speed
• Survivors face disease threat
• Stingy Americans?: U.N. comment hits nerve
• Scientists: Quake shifted tectonic plates
• SI.com: Swimsuit model survives tsunami

Swimsuit model survives tsunami? Are you $#^@&! kidding me? When more than 56,000 people are killed, THAT makes a headline?

Holy-moly. That’s pathetic, CNN.

(Click here to see a screenshot in case you don’t believe me.)

I always thought that the little ball on a winter hat (or the things a cheerleader shook — I mean the ones that aren’t part of her anatomy) were called “pom-poms.” Turns out that’s not quite right.

They’re really called pompons — with an N at the end and no hyphen. A pom-pom is an anti-aircraft gun, circa WWII.

(Actually, “pom-pom” goes back farther than that, but the most common use was referring to ack-acks.)

I was doing some research on textiles and stumbled upon Dr. Stephanie Kwolek. In the 1960s she invented both Kevlar (for bulletproof vests) and Nomex (for fireproof clothing).

How many lives you figure she’s saved?

Most people have seen what’s called the Bohr model of the atom (’cause it was described by Niels Bohr) — it’s the nucleus with some electrons in orbit around it. (That’s an example on the right.)

Anyway, that model is wrong. It has been since the early 1900s. Well, it’s been wrong since the Big Bang, but we’ve known it was wrong since the 1900s.

A more accurate model would show the electrons as a ‘cloud’ around the nucleus. That’s because, in part, of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which says that we can never know both where an electron is and where it’s going. So physicists think of a ‘cloud of probability’ — an area in which the electron is in all places at all times.

Huh? In other words, until that electron interacts with something — another atom’s electrons, or a human tester — it’s everywhere in that space. As soon as we observe it, it exists in a single place. But when we’re not looking, it’s everywhere.

That’s a pretty cool concept, but a tough one to grasp. As I was lying in bed I realized a good analogy: a fan.

Imagine a desk fan whirling away. You can’t see the blades because they’re moving too fast. But the moment you stick your fingers (or, preferably, the fingers of someone you don’t like) into it, you know precisely where they are.

Crudely, in terms of quantum physics you’ve “collapsed the wave function” — you’ve turned that ‘cloud’ of fan blades into to blade in a specific location: your finger.

Electrons work sort of the same way. Like the spinning blades, they’re everywhere at once and they can interact with anything in their area. But the moment they interact, they’re in a specific location.

I just thought it was a useful analogy is all.

(Click to enlarge.)

Biondi F. et al., “July Temperature During the Second Millennium Reconstructed from Idaho Tree Rings”, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26 No.10, p.1445, 1998.

All right, I got a shirt for Hanukwanzumas this year — I forget the brand, but it’s one of them wrinkle- and stain-free types.

I own wrinkle-free shirts from several companies, and they’re all sort of wrinkle-free. They don’t look quite as crisp as one that’s been ironed, but maybe I’m just picky.

(I think the whole wrinkle-free fabric thing is very cool. It’s one of those technologies I like best — the kind that’s sort of in the background but that really makes a difference. Look for a USA Today column on it soon.)

Anyway.

Out of the box, even a wrinkle-free shirt has creases; it’s been stored for weeks. So I go to use this wrinkle-releaser spray on it (quicker than ironing, and most of the shirt is just fine). Well, the stuff just beads off it.

Blink. Blink.

So now I’ve run smack into the “stain-free” part of the shirt. Unlike, say, a spraying of Scotch Guard, this is one of those fabrics that’s been treated at the cloth stage, possibly, I kid you not, with nanotech: Zillions of tiny particles that are bonded to the fabric to keep it sealed from dirt, especially liquids.

And that includes the wrinkle releaser I was trying to use.

The point is, this is pretty impressive to me. I mean, Scotch Guard is supposed to make things stain repellent (or repellant — both spellings are OK), but I’ve never been convinced. But when you see things bead off a cotton shirt, well, something’s at work.

Silly, I know. But I think it’s cool that someone worked hard to develop a way to make things that much more convenient.

I know that I’m supposed to say that I tried staining it will coffee and wine and what-have-you, but I’m not. I like the shirt, and I’m sure stains will be attracted to it given enough time.

In my last entry I made a comment about how the referees did in the Giants in their game against the Steelers. One bad call — roughing the passer after a sack on Ben Roethlisberger — was all it took: The Steelers, who should have been forced to punt, instead went on to score a touchdown. (They won the game 33-30.)

Whenever the Giants get a bad call in their favor (which doesn’t happen this season because they’re a losing team), my Dad never complains. “We get enough bad calls against us,” he says.

So Giants fans, remember days like yesterday. Because eventually the Giants will benefit from a bad call, and people will point it out. And you can tell them, “Well now we’re even.”

Yikes. I was watching the Giants game yesterday (they beat the Steelers, but couldn’t beat the refs), and saw a new AOL TV commercial.

This one had people saying things like “I want to give a virus to all my coworkers” and various other “I want to [insert bad thing here]” comments. (Then kicker at the end was that AOL provides free anti-virus software for its users.)

But haven’t we seen this ad campaign before? Why yes! It’s just about identical to the ads Monster.com used to run — remember? “When I grow up I want to claw my way to middle management” and “I want to file all day.”

So the best AOL could do was steal an idea from Monster.com? Sheesh.

In my column of December 17, I wrote (among other things) “Gateway has a nasty little marketing thing going on” in which it implies that its “low-end” (my term) 2.7-GHz machines aren’t “perfect” for things like image editing and multitasking.

I took Gateway to task for that because I thought that kind of marketing a bit disingenuous. My creaky old 750-MHz machine does image editing and multitasking wonderfully, for example.

I got a note from Lisa Emard, Gateway’s director of media relations. Naturally, she was unhappy with my characterization, and wanted to make Gateway’s position clear.

Although I stand by what I wrote, but she did have some good and important points I want to share. And I want to put her most important idea up front.

Contrary to your focus solely on processor speeds, Gateway does not
highlight one spec to delineate between product lines. We build
complete systems that provide the customer with the best experience for the primary applications they want to run.

She gave some examples, such as:

A Media Reader is the fastest and easiest way to download
images from a digital camera. All of our 5200 Series PCs come with
8-in-1 Media Readers standard. Also, photo editing apps like Photoshop run better with more memory and faster processors. Benchmarks prove this as well.

(Note: The 5200 Series machines are a step up from the “low-end” boxes I was talking about. Her point is that an upgrade is worth it because it’s more than a better processor.)

I can’t disagree; there’s more to a machine that processor speed, and Gateway packs more into their higher-end boxes than into the lower-end ones.

For example, that media reader. It’s a nice touch and it certainly adds some level of convenience to the unit. And sure, Photoshop runs faster on a box with more memory. (More in a sec on that.)

In short, Gateway does add features to it’s higher-priced computers that make some tasks faster and easier.

She also wrote:

In the end, you go back to the description of your Dad who simply uses his PC to write letters, send emails and surf the web. There are a lot of consumers our there just like him, and for people with basic computing needs, we absolutely recommend our Gateway 3200 Series, which starts at just $399. And as you’ll note on our desktop PC site, we feature our 3200 Series just as prominently as our higher-end desktop PCs.

She’s right: The three categories of machine are featured equally. It’s not as if the low-end boxes were relegated to the side. My apologies if I implied that.

So perhaps I was a bit harsh to call it a “nasty little marketing thing.” (I’ve asked my USA Today editor to make a change to the wording to tone it down.)

But.

I still stand by the spirit of what I said: That Gateway’s marketing doesn’t just imply that the higher-end machines are simply faster and more convenient — it implies that the lower-end boxes aren’t very good at things like photo editing.

And that’s my issue. There’s a big difference between something being not as good as something else, and something being not suitable at all. I think Gateway is implying — gently, I admit — that its lower-end boxes aren’t really good for certain tasks at all, when in fact they’re very good at them.

Here’s an analogy:

Imagine if Honda advertised the Civic as “Great for short trips around town, or easy commutes,” but pushed the Accord as “Great for longer highway drives and interstate travel.”

The fact is, the Civic is a great car that performs well, and would be excellent for “longer highway drives and interstate travel.” But that (ficticious) ad implies otherwise — it implies that you really need an Accord for longer trips.

Would the Accord be better? More comfortable, perhaps. More cup holders, a better stereo, arguably. But both cars have more than adequate acceleration, handling, and safety features. They’re both great cars.

And that’s my issue with the Gateway ad. Would your image-editing software have better benchmarks on the 5200 series? You bet. But benchmarks aren’t that meaningful after a certain point.

It’s like the difference between a car with a top speed of 300 MPH and one with a top speed of 250. It doesn’t matter ’cause you won’t ever go that fast.

Lisa Emard also wrote:

Fact: Gateway 5200 Series PCs multitask better than our 3200 series
because they have double the memory, four times the cache, faster hard drives and faster hyperthreading P4 processors. Industry-standard benchmarks prove this.

All right, I’m drooling. I can’t help it.

No argument: The 5200 series is faster and better. And yes, I’d love to own one. (I’ve owned four Gateways and loved every one. In fact, my Dad’s machine — the 200-MHz box with Windows 95 he’s had for a couple of years — is a hand-me-down Gateway of mine and still going strong after about eight years.)

Still, I stand by my contention that computer hardware is now ahead of most software, and even the low-end machines can handle just about anything with aplomb.

My spam project netted its first piece of unsolicited junk: A pyramid scheme entitled “Easy Money With PayPal” that asks me to send $10 to one rstakelbeck@excite.com.

Are the floodgates about to open? Conventional wisdom says that once you get on one of these scumbag’s lists, you end up on tons of them. Let’s see what other spam comes along.

(Click here for the blog entry about the spam project.)

In December of 1996, while I was working for Internet World magazine, I made a comment: “General-interest online services like America Online are doomed.”

I said this because it was obvious to me that the Internet was going to be the place where everything happened. AOL, CompuServe, and (at the time) GEnie were proprietary services that (at the time) didn’t connect to the Internet proper.

Even if they did, I reasoned, Internet access was getting cheaper and cheaper, and heck, it’s the same Internet whether you get it through a small local company or through AOL.

A few years later, in 1999, Wired poked a little fun at that.

After all, AOL seemed to be growing like gangbusters, even though we all knew that the umpteen-million subscribers the company was claiming was inflated.

The problem with Wired was it’s inability to think or see beyond a few years. “Look,” it seemed to be saying, “It’s been three years and AOL is still going strong!”

Just wait, I thought.

Waiting’s over. In an Associated Press article that’s appearing in lots of papers, we learn that AOL is “abandoning its strategy of exclusivity and will free much of its music, sports and other programming to non-subscribers in hopes of boosting ad sales.”

In other words, AOL doesn’t have enough subscribers — or the turnover is too great — to keep it afloat. It’s going to rely on ads.

That doesn’t strike me at the best of all possible models. The company is betting that its formerly proprietary content is better than what can be found on the Net — so much better that people will be willing to sit through even more ads to get it.

Two other bits of data to throw into the mix:
1. On Dec. 7, AOL cut four percent of its workforce to cut expenses.
2. On Nov. 12, AOL announced that it was getting into the online travel business. In other words, it’s going to enter an already-crowded market — crowded with the likes of Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity — and hope to make some money that way.

These are two indicators that don’t bode well for the company. The first says, to me, that it’s hurting. While more and more people are getting online, they’re choosing to do it without the stigma of an aol.com address.

The second says that the company is in the hands of management that’s clutching at straws. Online travel? That’s the plan?

Let’s face it, the big draws of AOL were ease of use, chat rooms, and good marketing. The first two are no longer applicable; it’s easy for anyone to get online, now that we’re past the days of hard-to-configure modems, and many sites offer Web-based chat rooms that are as good or better than AOL’s. And the third point — well, it’s tough to compete in the broadband market with a dial-up product.

(But wait, you say, there’s AOL from Broadband! But in some places that costs more than the local company’s broadband, and in others its competing with Road Runner. From Time Warner — its own parent.

So, Wired folks, I stick with my original statement. I’m sorry it took more than three years for the AOL implosion to happen, but things move slowly when you’re talking about a big, rich corporation. But doomed it is.

This is getting to be funny. On my little chat box (the thing on the right side of my home page), a Mac user called “Bishop” offered the following suggestion:

Andrew, to see a REAL piece of REAL JOURNALISIM, please follow this address: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20041209.html

“Here,” he says, “you will find an article written in a fair and balanced perspective…”

He’s pointing to a column in today’s (12/9) Wall Street Journal, in which Walter Mossberg essentially bashes Microsoft for being behind the curve in anti-virus and anti-other stuff technology, while singing the praises of the Mac: “The company’s new iMac G5 model is the single best desktop computer I have ever reviewed.”

(Mossberg does toss a bone to Microsoft: “To be fair, Microsoft has made some contributions to ease of use in the past couple of years.”)

This is a Mac-user’s idea of “real journalism.” Why? Because it’s pro-Mac. Simple as that. Anti-Mac = bad journalism, Anti-Microsoft = good journalism.

Amazing stuff.

This comes on the heels of other Mac-user logic, namely that the iPod has a huge market share because it’s obviously best in class, but Windows has huge market share for, um, other reasons.

You can’t make this stuff up.

1. The Mac is a great machine. I never said otherwise. It’s beautiful and stable and pretty much virus-immune. But it’s not the machine for me or, it seems, for a lot of other people. (But I don’t spend every column singing its praises, which makes me a Bad Person.)

2. The iPod is also a great product — no doubt about it. There are also other great products that do similar things. I never said otherwise. (But because I’m surprised by its huge market share, I’m a Bad Person.)

I just finished “The Cult of Mac.” It makes a lot of sense.

I decided to try to see how quickly a new e-mail address starts getting spam. Specifically, a new clean address — one that has not had ANY contact with any organization.

Let me explain:

Spammers try to tell you that “You’re receiving this message because you signed up with one of our business partners” or some such nonsense. I think that’s bull.

To test my theory, here’s what I did: I created an e-mail address for a fictious person at one of my domains.

That address has never been used to sign up for anything — not a newsletter, not even a post on any site. The whole idea is that there is no way in heck anyone can say that the addressed established some sort of relationship.

To get the ball rolling, used that address to put a single post on a single Usenet message board (a G-rated one, in fact). It’s just a “hello” and the address.

Now we wait.

Here’s the cool part. Mail to that address will automatically be posted to a Web page: Go to www.kantor.com/spam to get to it.

I’ve set up a system to check that address regularly, and automatically post any messages it receives.

My bet is nothing will happen for a while. (If so, I may post a couple of more Usenet messages or put the address on an unlinked page on my site.)

But I also bet that some spammer’s system will scour that Usenet group and pick up the address. And once one spammer has it, lots will.

And if and when messages appear, there is no way that the sender can possibly, in any way, shape, or form, claim that someone requested information using it, period. There’s no defense.

So let’s see what happens over the next few months. Check in every now and again to www.kantor.com/spam and see if anything’s appeared.

Every now and again I’m tempted to switch e-mail programs. Eudora has been my client of choice since version 2.something, back when I was with Internet World magazine, and I’ve upgraded it when I needed to.

I’d try Outlook Express, then immediately regret it — too many weird behaviors for my taste. And full-blown Outlook? Ick. To me, it’s bloatware (although I can see the appeal for people who keep detailed calendars, to-do lists, and address books).

Besides, using Windows and Office is enough Microsoft for me. When my old office got hit with the Love Bug worm, I was the only one unaffected because I was on Eudora instead of Outlook.

Anyway, I like the Firefox browser so much that I decided to give the Mozilla Organization’s open-source e-mail program, Thunderbird, a shot.

It’s terrific. It’s the first time since the mid-’90s that I have not switched back to Eudora within a day or two. Thunderbird is the best e-mail client I’ve ever used.

Some important caveats: It’s almost, but not quite, ready for prime time. It’s still got a few quirks and will undoubtedly drive some folks nuts.

I like its flexibility. There are tweaks and add-ons (extensions) galore, so (with one exception) I can adjust its behavior to what I like. And that’s part of the caveats: I like to tinker with software to customize it. If something bugs me — e.g., I want Ctrl-D to delete a message — I am willing to read through the Thunderbird message boards till I figure out how to do it.

So to me, knowing there are configuration files I can edit is a major plus. Outlook and Outlook Express were take-’em-as-they-are programs. There wasn’t much you could do to tweak. Thunderbird is the opposite.

The other thing I like about Thunderbird is its cleanliness. It’s a mail client, and you can configure it to read RSS feeds and Usenet newgroups if you’re so inclined.

It doesn’t have a calendar or to-do list (although it will link to Sunbird, the Mozilla folks’ calendar project) or global scheduling. It does one thing and does it very well.

I could spend paragraphs listing its features: It’s virus-proof. It has a spell-checker and built-in Bayesian spam filter. It can integrate with PGP and GPG encryption. And more — read the features page.

It’s not perfect. Its Usenet newsreader is barely adequate (although its RSS feed reader is very nice). When you delete a message you’re reading, it takes you to the next message; there’s no option to ‘return to Inbox.’ The way it handles passwords is odd.

But I’ve learned to live with these things; every other mail client I’ve used has quirks, too. But Thunderbird is free, it’s open-source, it’s slick, and it’s not Microsoft’s. Very nice, indeed.

I find this amusing — and telling.

MacDailyNews (I like to think of it as the National Enquirer of the Mac world) switched Web hosts. It used to run on an OSX-based server, but as of November 9 it’s running on Linux.

Here’s the report from Netcraft (click to enlarge):

Errata: I removed the spaces from MDN’s name that were in the original post. Thanks to “Jon” for pointing that out.

This is so funny I have to share it.

Jeremy Bolton, Defender of All Things Mac, wrote:

Again, Mr. Kantor, you have made a rather sizable mistake that cannot
go uncorrected. Hmm, let’s see, one brand of anything with that kind
of market share? Check out Microsoft’s market share of the PC
operating system market. Or their share of word processor software.
Or, well, you get the idea.

I take it you have decided not to write about or even mention Apple in
any more of your columns. If you are even considering that course of
action, you are right, you should not write about Apple anymore. You
have backed down and we have won.

1. You gotta love the word “Again.” See, it implies that I’ve made a ‘rather sizable” mistake before when discussing Macs. I haven’t, but by tossing that in it makes it seem that I have. You should go into politics, Jeremy!

2. I have backed down and they have won? Huh? Because I’ve joined with other tech writers in not writing about the Mac, they’ve won. [blink blink] The logic here is… stunning. The fewer people who cover them, the better?

If Mr. Bolton was a widget-shop owner, I can imagine him telling a customer who refuses to buy from him, “I don’t want you to shop here! That means I’ve won! Hahaha!”

Incredible.

In a follow-up note, he said, “You’re more alone than you realize.”

Huh? Is he copying comments from some strange phrase book? What’s next, “Your attitude will only attract more moths to the dying embers”? Maybe, “Your opinions are like those of a duck. Yellow now, but large and with a green head later.”

I know that the Mac folks are desperate to believe that everyone is out to get them. They have these knee-jerk reactions if someone says something less than wonderful about any Mac product.

So of course they’re accusing me of hating the iPod because I didn’t gush about it, and, in fact, dared to question its huge market share. (If you don’t love everything from Apple unconditionally, you’re obviously a Mac hater, you see.)

But to be clear: I don’t know whether the iPod is the best MP3 player around. It may be, it may not be. [shrug] I don’t really care. All I said was that I was shocked at its market share because there are other good products out there doing the same thing.

Of course, to Mac users this is blasphemy: Daring to question to superiority of anything from Apple is unacceptable. When Steve Jobs leaves the bathroom, it smells like roses, I’m sure.