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	November 28, 2003

THE JOYS OF UXGA My new laptop has an upgrade called a UXGA screen. I'm told this gives you 25% more pixels to the inch (50% more per square inch), which results in a crisper, more legible picture. This has three consequences that I've just started to grasp. The first consequence is that, with 1600 pixels displayed on a 12" wide screen (note that the advertised 15.4" screen size is a diagonal measure, which shows the contempt marketers have for their customers -- measure your screen if you don't believe me), what you see is no longer what you get. When I display a North American letter-size page in  'page/print view' at 100% on my screen, it is not 8.5" x 11" on the screen, but rather 72% of those dimensions. But because of the higher pixel count it is as legible (even to my poor eyesight) as the 'full-size' page, so I don't have to magnify it to see what it will really look like on the page. The second consequence is that, under my 3-column Radio blog theme, since the size of the two sidebars is fixed, the width of the centre area is immense (see screenshot above). Even some of my long articles all fit on a single screen with no scrolling whatever. But the consequence is that I have to remember to limit my graphics to about 450 pixels wide, since readers with less screen real estate than I have will get wonky results (graphics pushed off the right end of the page, and right sidebar gone completely) if I exceed that limit. On my screen the 450 pixels are just over 3" wide, so small they look absolutely miserly. And the 200-pixel-width maximum graphics I wrap text around, newspaper style, take up only an inch and a half of the nine inches of my centre column. So text wrap that looks fine on small screens looks just silly on mine. The third consequence, which I just discovered last night, is that the 7.5" tall window on my screen (nine inches less the toolbar spaces top and bottom), because it actually displays 10" of legible text on UXGA, shows a complete North American letter-size page on the screen with no scrolling. This is a huge advantage for on-screen editing of Word documents. It finally achieves what I complained about last Spring -- that screens should be tiltable 90 degrees so you can actually read a page on a 'page'. In fact, depending on margin sizes, I can even review two pages side-by-side on the screen at the same time -- An editor's dream come true. 12:04:23 PM  trackback []  comment []

THE FOURTH TURNING You would think I would like, or even find vindication in, a book that predicts an imminent ecological holocaust. After all, that's what the hundreds of scientists who developed and urged passage of the Kyoto Accord did. And my articles in these pages on environment and overpopulation have done the same. So I was surprised at my reaction to The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. And this book, written in 1997, during the dot com boom and before the Bush bust and 9/11, predicted this: A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons. The US and its allies launch a pre-emptive strike. The terrorists threaten to retaliate against an American city. Congress declares war and authorizes unlimited house-to-house searches. Opponents charge that the president concocted the emergency for political purposes. A nationwide strike is declared. Foreign capital flees the US. This is predicted to happen 'around' 2005, and to be the catalyst for The Fourth Turning, a twenty-year period of crisis that will transform Anglo-American society and perhaps the world, as happened in roughly 80-year intervals since the middle ages (the most recent fourth turnings being, going backwards in time, WW2/Great Depression, the Civil War, and the American Revolution. It is human nature to look for patterns, and find them fascinating and sometimes useful. And the authors have done their homework thoroughly, and even offer a whole chapter on how to prepare for the coming apocalypse, though it appears perhaps it has started a few years early. I guess what bothers, even infuriates me about this book is not the lessons from history, which are intriguing, but the whole 'prophecy' flavour of it. While many people have warned that our selfishness and neglect of our fellow man would cause the have-nots to rise up against the haves, and others have warned that our neglect of the environment will cause cataclysmic climate change and disastrous biodiversity loss, these guys are saying that the apocalypse is written in the stars, foreordained no matter how well we had looked after our fellow man and our environment. There is something about that fatalism, that predestination, that rubs me the wrong way. It says, in short, it doesn't matter what we do and when we do it. It is the great catholic cop-out: It is not in our control, what we do ultimately makes no real difference, so go ahead and do whatever the hell you want, but don't forget to ask forgiveness for your sins, and that will make it all OK. It's worth reading, because it's provocative, well-researched, and a good summary of Anglo-American history. But I have a mark on my wall caused by hurling it across the room when I reached the wringing-of-hands sections. So buy the soft-cover edition. The intriguing graphic above is from a Rutgers University study asking whether 9/11 was indeed the catalyst for the Fourth Turning. The graphic is available in a legible wall-sized version on the site. 11:10:15 AM  trackback []  comment []

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