Jeffrey Pomerantz

This is wicked funny: a spoof ad for the iPod Flea.

Faulty cable crashes Pakistan Internet, from Reuters An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said Tuesday. That’s got to be a first: an entire country dropping off the net. Can you imagine if this happened in the US? I shudder to think.

Breaking news! The Internet transforms modern life, from CNN I’ts just this kind of bold and daring journalism that’s made CNN the most trusted name in news.

At the end of the day yesterday Duke released the final evaluation report of the iPod First Year Experience. Written by guess who? Yes, Yvonne. It’s already getting some press: from the Chronicle, from the Duke Chronicle, from Inside Higher Ed. Once again, it’s funny to see how the media discusses Duke’s iPod plans for next year: 2 of these 3 say that Duke will be scaling back, the other.. Read More

Driving on Franklin St today I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read: oppugn nescient lurdanes What the heck does that mean? So I looked it up. They’re all English words, though archaic. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to look it up for yourself. Extra credit if you can look up all 3 words in any single source other than the OED. Major extra.. Read More

Thanks to Luke for pointing this out: a new memo from Pew Internet & American Life titled Do-it-yourself information online. Some 55% of adult internet users have looked for “how-to,” “do-it-yourself” or repair information online and roughly 1 in 20 internet users — about 7 million people — search for help on a typical day. … More internet users seek do-it-yourself information online than participate in chat rooms (17% say.. Read More

We’re back from Croatia; got back on Tuesday night. And let me tell you, we almost didn’t. I was seriously this close to not coming home several times. I can’t speak for all of Croatia, but Dalmatia (the region from about Zadar south) is gorgeous. Plus the weather was perfect, the ocean is warm, it’s very relaxing, & every cup of espresso I had was orders of magnitude better than.. Read More

An Exotic Evolution, from the WaPo Because the history of Washington has been written by humans, nobody has paid much attention to the fact that 18 Canadian squirrels were released at the National Zoo during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Legend had it at my alma mater, UMass Amherst, that black squirrels were invented there, or rather bred there. The legend went that the black squirrel was an experiment in.. Read More