iPhone first impressions

Yesterday afternoon I took off from work early to go stand in line for four hours to get my grubby little hands on an iPhone, a device I’ve been waiting for in one form or another for nearly eight years.

Because I can’t stand to stay away from it for too long, this post will be in the form of an off-the-top-of-my-head list of thoughts about this beautiful — beautiful — device:

Waiting in line and then purchasing two 8GB iPhones (one for me, one for my sister) at the Fifth Ave. Apple Store was perhaps the most pleasant and exciting buying experience of my life. I say experience because the entire thing felt like a spectacle: dozens of companies showed up to jump on the bandwagon and advertise their wares. I got a free fan, buttons, a keychain, slick info packets about everything from recycling your old phone to social networks trying to tie themselves to the iPhone, bottled water and lemonade.

While standing in line I watched a near pornographic campaign video for Giuliani be shot 15 feet in front of me. My guess is that if you google “Rudy girl” within the next couple weeks you’ll see what I’m talking about. Also, listen for man in the background yelling “vote Ron Paul.” That’s me.

I was interviewed three times. Once by a young woman doing competitive market research for LG (she’s going to call in a few weeks to see how I like my iPhone). Once by a Yahoo! Tech blogger (who said her press contacts put the number of iPhones at the Fifth Ave. store at 2,000). And once by a Fox News (barf) woman from the Geraldo show. They grabbed me right after I emerged from the store to the cheers and high-fives of dozens of Apple employees (they cheered everyone — not just me — but I suspect they may have sensed my enthusiasm).

Everyone in line was awesome. I lucked out and ended up next to a true Apple diehard and we reminisced about the days of the Apple II.

I was terrified walking home with two iPhones in tow and a beautiful Apple iPhone bag that screamed “mug me!” I stopped by the vendors at Columbus Circle and they were kind enough to give me some less inviting plastic bags to cover my loot up with.

I cannot explain how giddy I was and still am, though I imagine my roommates who saw my face when I walked in the door have a decent idea. My full experience was delayed a bit when the iTunes activation got stuck trying to talk to Apple’s servers (which I believe were trying to talk to AT&T’s, which according to the forums I read last night were hammered in the activation process.) I went to bed last night around 2:30 with a non-activated iPhone.

I naturally arose shortly after 6am this morning and immediately hopped out of bed and had my phone activated inside of a minute. Aside from the hiccups last night, it was a glorious activation process with no annoying salesperson in sight.

This phone is stunningly, achingly, painfully gorgeous. It is the single best designed piece of consumer electronics I have ever owned. This puts the all three Playstations, all iPods, Tivo, the Wii, the PSP, the DS and all the others to shame. Undoubtedly, the iPhone lives up to the hype.

The EDGE network is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. Word is that the speed was bumped to 270 kbps in major metropolitan areas yesterday right before the launch. The wifi access I hawk from my neighbors is painfully slow sometimes, so right now my fastest net connection in my apartment is on my phone. Weird.

I browsed my favorite blogs, posted on a Facebook wall, checked Gmail. Everything just worked (though I was only able to view Google Docs — no dice with editing them).

There are a million little touches that make you smile. If you get an e-mail with a link to a YouTube video, clicking on it doesn’t open YouTube.com in Safari but instead starts streaming the video in the built-in YouTube player. Deleting e-mail messages is done through a “swipe” gesture that feels like “crossing out” the message. Visual Voicemail rocks. Text messages pop up while you’re on the phone in a delightfully friendly and helpful manner.

Battery life. I’ve been running this pretty hard (browsing the web, e-mail, long phone calls, listening to music, watching videos) for the last 4+ hours and it still shows over half the battery remaining.

My ringer is set to “Old Phone,” which sounds exactly as you would want it to. It’s a pleasant, tasteful, traditional phone ring.

The keyboard, which I was more than a little nervous about, is I think ultimately going to be a non-issue. The first five minutes were frustrating. The next ten were a little better. After an hour, it started to feel decent. My prediction? Within a week I won’t even think about it.

One revelation I hadn’t really thought about before — and which I still have yet to truly internalize — is that I now have Wikipedia in my pocket. Take a moment to think about that. I suspect this is one of those things that seems cool at first but can’t be fully understood until the ramifications begin to manifest themselves. And it’s not just Wikipedia, I’ve got the entire web — the REAL web, not some “junior” version — in my pocket. I have near-instant access to the largest store of human knowledge ever compiled.

The beautiful words that describe America

Katherine has an extraordinary post that spells out how the soaring idealism of the United States can be tethered by the concrete review of our failures. But unlike other folks, she doesn’t see this as a reason to give up on the beautiful words. Even when they seem to be co-opted by people whose actions make a mockery of their own rhetoric.

Those glittering abstract nouns aren’t sufficient, but they can be damn useful. They aren’t accurate descriptions of this country right now, and probably they never have been, but a lot of Americans are sincerely attached to them. And sometimes, when presented with a stark contradiction between the bedtime stories we learned about this country as children, and concrete effects of our actions, we will choose to make the bedtime story true rather than give it up entirely.

It’s not an easy thing to do, but it sometimes works. It’s worked a number of times in this country’s history.

It’s almost Independence Day. Go read something that will make you proud to be an American.

Too good not to post

One of the better policy initiatives I’ve seen in recent months:

Steve Ahlenius, president of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, sent out an e-mail to 140 media outlets nationwide Tuesday morning with the subject line: “McAllen, Texas calls for wall around Washington D.C.”

“We feel the need to protect ourselves from bad legislation, bad ideas and a waste of tax money,” Ahlenius wrote.

“A wall around their homes and businesses will give the legislators and Washington bureaucrats a better understanding of what kind of message this action will send.

“Let’s see if they decide to climb over it, tunnel under it, or walk over it.”

Link to complete article (Found via Cato @ Liberty).

A geography of Spanish verbs

Are you learning Spanish? Take a look at this excellently useful map of the present tense. Who would have thought that organizing verbs into categories such as the industrial north and the laid-back south would be such a handy way to remember them?

Seriously, go look. (And then check out the companion map for the past tense).

Where’s the outrage?

I don’t know how long this has been around, but I just stumbled upon it recently. The market-liberals^[1] at the Cato Institute have compiled an interactive map of botched police raids. It appears to be both well-researched and thorough, and shows that the scourge of police invasions on innocents and nonviolent offenders is not limited to the years under the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, Cato’s ideological brethren over at Reason have this video interview with Regina Kelly, who was wrongly arrested and jailed based upon a “tip” from a police informant. Ms. Kelly tells harrowing tale.

1. This is, I believe, the label they prefer. For an interesting read, check out How to Label Cato, where they explain why they shouldn’t be called a good number of other things.↩

We need an icebreaker

That’s what they say on public radio during fundraisers: “We need an icebreaker.” That means they want one caller to break the silence and encourage other listeners to call in and donate money.

I was thinking of that when I read this extraordinary article about how one man’s resistance has inspired thousands to march in the streets of Pakistan:

[T]he Pakistani bar was first stirred into action with remarkable effect on March 9, when Musharraf tried to force Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry to quit, alleging that he had misused his office for personal gain. Yet despite reports of a five-hour private showdown, in which [President] Musharraf – in full military dress – called in generals and politicians to intimidate Mr. Chaudhry, the chief justice did not buckle.

Musharraf ended up tossing him off the court anyway, but the judge’s defiance rallied a nation. Like most experts here, Pakistan’s lawyers were outraged, arguing that Musharraf wished only to silence a judge who had been ruling against him. “This was the first time a person resisted all alone against the Army,” says Iftikhar Qasi, president of the Karachi Bar Association.

At issue, lawyers say, was the independence of the judiciary and the last check on Musharraf’s authority, and their response was immediate. The following day, bar associations from Karachi to Lahore called emergency meetings, in which tens of thousands of lawyers chose to fight the only way they knew how. “Lawyers know the law, and the law says everyone has a right to express themselves,” says [Lahore Bar Association president S.M.] Shah.

The article says that many ordinary Pakistanis are supporting the lawyers’ protests against the president’s power grab. I am far from an expert on Pakistani politics,^[1]but it seems like a generally terrible idea for the military to be in control of a former democracy. Yet without an “icebreaker” like Mr. Chaudhry, it is hard to see how resistance would have begun.

Pretty remarkable.

1. Much could be said about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, particularly with regard to military operations. This is not the post for that discussion.
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A very old whale

I had no idea that whales could live to be more than 100 years old:

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

When I studied geology, I was amazed by the difference between human lifetimes, measured in 70 or 80 years, and geologic time, measured in tens of thousands of years. Now I am struck by the fact that some of the privileges that are most dear to me — like the right to vote — are younger than this whale.

Thanks, whale. May your spirit be at peace.

Caught in limbo

What do you do after you have rounded up “enemy combatants” from around the world, imprisoned them for a few years, and then determined that they are, in fact, not terrorists at all?

What do you do if returning them to their “home” countries would most likely lead to their torture or even execution?

The New York Times today has a fascinating look behind the scenes of this whole nightmare:

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

To make matters worse, the U.S.’s attempts to find safe countries to place former Guantanamo detainees have been thwarted by the Chinese government:

American diplomats said they had contacted governments from Angola to Switzerland to Australia. Increasingly, though, they have seen the shadows of their Chinese counterparts.

“The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships,” said one administration official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing diplomatic issues.

It’s become almost a truism that China’s global influence will continue to expand rapidly for the foreseeable future. The U.S. has caused untold suffering and destruction under the Bush administration, but those who cheer on the U.S.’s declining role on the world stage ought to take a good, hard look at who’s most likely to fill the power vacuum.

Important stuff said by other people

First, and most significantly, the U.S. government is disappearing people. (Report.) As if this slide towards totalitarianism wasn’t disturbing enough, two of them appear to be children:

In September 2002, Yusuf al-Khalid (then nine years old) and Abed al-Khalid (then seven years old) were reportedly apprehended by Pakistani security forces during an attempted capture of their father, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Extensive citation at Obsidian Wings, along with this analysis:

The evidence that our government held Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s sons is not conclusive, and I do not mean to suggest that it is. Still, if you had told me, six years ago, that I would find myself seriously entertaining the possibility that my own government had detained children [...] I would have thought you were insane. Disappearing people of any age, without charges or trial or anything, is what two-bit dictators do; not what we do. But disappearing children, not seventeen year olds about whom one might have interesting debates about when exactly childhood ends but seven- and nine-year olds — that’s so far across the line that it would have been unimaginable to me. And the fact, if it is one, that they are supposedly “handled with kid gloves” and “given the best of care” does not begin to make up for this. Detention is not “the best of care” for anyone. It is certainly not “the best of care” for a young child.

Second, from Pandagon, a fantasy response on an explosive issue. I’d be very interested in any politican brave enough to say something like this:

“Abortion is not fun for any woman, which is why we’d like to keep them rare. I would also like to keep heart surgery rare, if I can help it. But just as we’ll never wipe out heart disease completely, we will never wipe out unplanned pregnancy completely, because women are human and sometimes they have circumstances outside of their direct control. I support prevention in health care. We can reduce the number of abortions and number of heart surgeries by helping Americans have better access to prevention. In the case of abortion, the best prevention is contraception and comprehensive sex education. I’d like to empower women to have the fullest range of options available so they can make the best decision for themselves.”

And finally, a rare example of a judge losing his temper in a stinging footnote to a ruling in the Lewis Libby case. What is most interesting to me is who the judge thought his audience was. I don’t read legal cases as a rule. Do judges write these sorts of insults as a shout-out to their clerks or buddies?

Do they do it as a wink and nod to say “Yeah, I have to rule this way on procedural grounds, but don’t worry, I’m not buying their baloney”? Or is there a more substantive purpose, a way of putting yourself on the record so that there is no later misunderstanding about your allegiances?

(Yes, it’s an annoying PDF, but it’s one paragraph. Click through and read it already.)

Via How Appealing.

(Folks, as most of you have probably figured out, I’m not Nicholas. He’s kindly given me posting privileges, and I’m going to do my best to avoid becoming the kudzu of his blog.)

In translation

I used to think about translation as something mechanical, like a computer. You feed in some words, it spits out some other words. Simple as that. And a bad translation was one that strayed too far from the original, one where the translator tried to get fancy and introduce his own ideas.^[1]

Then I actually learned a foreign language. Blast went a few assumptions, namely:

• Every English word has its equivalent in other languages.
• The best way to get the audience to understand is to literally translate each separate word.
• Translation is pretty much the same, no matter who does it.

Later, in a last-minute scramble to locate a reading for a wedding, I found a collection of Pablo Neruda’s work. Each poem was printed in Spanish on one page, English on the facing page. I was so relieved to find a reading that was loving but not sappy, passionate without being inappropriate, that I hardly glanced at the other books I’d brought home from the library.

Weeks later, I went to return them and came across the same poem again in another anthology. But this English version was uglier, clunkier. This guy clearly doesn’t have as light a touch, I thought. And then I realized that I was thinking of the translator as a poet.

The more closely I looked, the more I was astonished at the variation in translations, not just style but quality.

Consider this line:
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
(Pablo Neruda, Cien sonetos de amor, Sonnet XVII)

It can be translated as prosaic:
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.^[2]

or more formal:
so close that your eyes grow heavy when I tire.^[3]

It can focus on the emotion:
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.^[4]

or take flight into the fanciful:
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.^[5]

It all depends on the translator – her background, her skill, her understanding of the world the poet came from. If she likes him she may translate him sympathetically; if she is contemptuous of his politics she may slash at his naiveté. If she is not well educated her own vocabulary may be impoverished. If she is ignorant of his circumstances she may mistake his tone, reading honest devotion for sarcasm, or vice versa.

So now I’m wondering why no one has published a collection that includes poems in their original language, followed by three or four different translations for contrast. Perhaps this already exists, and I am not aware of it. A quick search found an apparently defunct website of a newsletter that invited readers’ translations of a chosen poem.

The community of professional translators must be fairly small. If a book like this exists, it is probably marketed just to this audience. Which is a shame, because it seems like something that would be a good discusson-starter even in a beginner-level language class. And of course there are probably other people like me, who would read something like that for fun.

Suggestions and speculation welcome.

1. “His or her” is awkward, and so I vary pronouns at random. Please do not interpret this as sexism, feminism, or any other ism.
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2. (Translator unknown.) ↩
3. (Translator David Short.) ↩
4. (Translator Stephen Mitchell, Into the Garden; Harper Perennial, 1993.) ↩
5. (Translator Mark Eisner, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems; City Lights Books, 2004.) ↩