We just watched the local ABC News programs "special investigative report" about a spate of marriages that took place in Harrison, New York. Apparently five times as many marriages as usual in the space of a month, and all of them men with middle eastern names and women from New York City, and in the months just before September 2001. Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? We heard the teasers several times in the top of the newscast, and stayed for the story. When they finally got there, however, we were horribly disappointed. Jim Hoffer, the investigative reporter, didn't tell us what was going on or why. So I just sent him a little expressing my disappointment, and decided to share it with you.

I was a reporter (well, I still am, but I'm working in a far more limited field these days). As a reporter, his story wasn't finished. And as an editor, not only wasn't it finished, but it wasn't even started. Had he presented that report to me as an editor, I would have said "Okay, great. These are some fascinating questions. Now go out and find the answers; that's your story." But what we got was just the initial questions. I felt my time had been wasted, waiting for that story and then watching it.

The letter:

( Text of my letter to the reporter below this cut. )

If, every time the newscaster mentions tomorrow's New York City Marathon, he calls it "The ING New York City Marathon", has he stopped reporting the news for instead broadcasting an advertisement? I find it a little annoying. Then again, I also don't like calling New Shea Stadium "City Field".

It's kind of up there with the fact that what used to be "the Super Bowl" is now "the Big Game" everywhere except for companies that have paid the NFL enough money. The NFL gets pissed if someone hasn't paid them money but uses the term Super Bowl, but how would they respond if the news media said "You know what? This is entertainment, not news. If you want us to talk about it, buy an ad."?

(Yeah, I've got the news on the tv while I'm sitting here editing.)

I think I'm caught up. Been reading my friends page everyday this week, posting news on SFScope regularly, keeping my e-mail in-boxes properly pruned (they're still THIS high, but they haven't really grown this week), I've only spent scant minutes looking around my new Facebook account (another damn time-sink), and all the freelance editing projects are off my desk, so what am I about to do? Right! I'm going away for a long weekend, just so I can once again fall behind on absolutely everything. Oh well.

I'm off, bright and early (and cold) Friday morning for Arisia. I posted my schedule a little ways back, if you're going to be there and want to see me. Of course, when I'm not at my panels, I'll be wandering around the hotel, wondering what one does at a convention when one isn't standing behind a dealer's table all day. Have pity on me. Come talk with me, or something.

And, yeah, I was delayed today watching the television, too. After about three minutes, I had to tune out the talking heads (who were, admittedly, doing the hard job of keeping the audio track filled, but man, there were times I thought silence would have been much more eloquent). But looking at that airplane floating in the river, I knew it was a picture-perfect touch-down. Damn good flying (well, crashing, but any landing you can walk [or swim] away from…).

The New York Times has this piece in today's edition: "Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs" by Elissa Gootman and Robert Gebeloff. It makes me wonder if New York City's gifted programs are supposed to be an engine for social engineering, a way to make school enrollment "fair" or "equal", or if they exist to give additional educational opportunities to those students who can handle and benefit from them? The tone of this article strongly implies the former, but I think that's wrong. Looking at it as a "gift" for today is being incredibly short-sighted; the concept of gifted programs is that the leaders of tomorrow will have had the educational opportunities to enable them to be as much as they can be, so they can come back to the community to help it into the future. The article talks about the varying numbers of black, Hispanic, and Asian children in the programs since the city instituted a standard cut-off score on the admission tests, but that's not the fault of the tests or the education department. It may be the fault of the parents for not giving their children sufficient experience or impetus, but to blame an educational system because it isn't performing social engineering is to damn a hammer for not being a screwdriver: both are useful, but if you need one, don't use the other. We need social engineering to perform social engineering, but we need gifted education programs to educate those who can most benefit from them.

After writing that, I thought it sounded familiar, and indeed, found that the Times had made the same lament in June, and I'd responded with this post. So now I'm wondering if I'm disagreeing with the Times for what it's writing, or if I'm disagreeing with the newspaper for not so much reporting the news as turning itself into a club demanding social change.

Eliot Spitzer has called a press conference for 11:30 this morning (a little less than an hour from now), and is expected to announce his resignation at that time (although he may not actually leave office for a few days, depending on working out all the details for the transfer of power).

In a related story, this NYTimes article details Attorney General and then Governor Spitzer's efforts to increase the legal penalties for those who patronize prostitutes.

On the lighter side, a friend suggested yesterday that he could have avoided the trouble if he'd taken the young lady to dinner first: sex after a date is a far more palatable occurrence than simply paying a woman for sex. Me, I don't know if that would've made a difference, but it makes you look at things a little differently, nu?

Edited at 11:55AM: And he's outta there. Governor Spitzer just announced that he will resign on Monday. Lieutenant Governor David A. Paterson will then become New York's 55th governor, the state's first black governor, and the nation's first blind governor. We now return you to our regular, non-Spitzerized lj…

In my admittedly unscientific survey of the morning talk shows (what I saw while Kit was flipping the channels while I got ready to leave this morning), it seems they once again are taking something that is a news story, and turning it into entertainment and meaningless pap. Specifically, it seemed as if every single one of their "news" segments, as well as the talk segments, were focused on the fact the Governor Spitzer cheated on his wife, or had sex with another woman.

But if that were the entirety of the story (say, if he'd had an affair with his neighbor), it shouldn't be a public story at all. Then it truly would be simply an issue of marital infidelity.

What makes it news, and what makes it our business is that he was patronizing a prostitute, which is illegal nearly everywhere in the country. What makes it funny (in a dark way) is that he's the Governor—the guy charged with upholding the laws of the state—and that for the previous eight years he was the Attorney General—the guy who sued and attacked companies and organizations for breaking, or even appearing to break, the law. That's why I'm laughing.

In other Spitzer news, CNN's "Quick Vote" on "Should New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer Resign?" is running 3-to-1 for resignation (162,257 to 48,788 at 11:44AM) while 1010 WINS (New York City's all-news radio station)'s "1010 WINS Poll" on "Should Gov. Eliot Spitzer resign amid allegations of his involvement in a prostitution ring?" is running 17% Yes to 81% No (1% I'm not sure). WINS doesn't give vote totals. Neither poll has any scientific basis: they're both self-selecting. But the disparity of the current results is interesting and amusing.

Edited at 2:47PM: I guess WINS had just posted the poll earlier, resulting in small numbers of votes skewing the result. Looking at it now, the vote is 80% to resign, 14% to stay, and 6% not sure. CNN is still about the same: 78% resign, 22% stay (220,789 to 63,294).

My friend, author Janet Kagan, died this weekend. I hadn't seen her in quite a while, and though she'd seemed frail for the last several years, her death is a sudden shock.

I wrote something about her in this obituary on SFScope. She was a wonderful person.

What do you get when you combine a slow news day with the ongoing need to keep the people afraid? You get stories like this one, which I found from a link on CNN's front page.

An Orlando television news station has picked up on the fact that—shock! horrors!—there's a gun on the International Space Station. Well (as the article goes on to say), it's actually on the Soyuz escape capsule, but the Soyuz is docked to the ISS. And, actually showing some journalistic integrity, the article does note that the gun is part of the emergency survival kit aboard the Soyuz (remember, it lands on land, and they can't actually put it down precisely where they want it, and it sometimes takes the ground crew a long time to pick up their returning cosmonauts).

But there's a gun on the space station. And Lisa Nowak did something really insane seven months after returning from a space flight, and people living in a confined space for long periods of time have gotten on each other's nerves, and…

It's not news, boys and girls. It's, at the most, of scientific interest. But when WESH publishes the article, and then CNN links to it, they present it as yet another thing you didn't know you were supposed to be afraid of. Grrr.

The headline of this article by the New York Times is "Israel Kills Two Palestinian Boys In Gaza," which makes it seem like a state-sanctioned murder, or possibly an execution for crimes. But as the article makes clear in its first line, it wasn't the state of Israel; it was the military responding to a Palestinian rocket attack in the West Bank. Am I misremembering, or does it seem that every article about Israel, and only Israel, uses the country's name for such stories. When activities by US forces in Iraq result in civilian deaths, the headline is never "The US kills people." And the only time I can recall "China kills…" was when the state recently executed a government official who'd been convicted of corruption. Even successful Palestinian attacks aren't credited to the Palestinian Authority or state. But for some reason, Israel seems to always get the blame. Media bias?

Where did that week go?

Anyway, been kind of busy with SFScope and editing.

An observation based on my 'Scope work: it seems news comes in batches. That is, it seems that when I hear of a death within the fields, there are usually several at the same time. When I get a list of readings/signings, I tend to get a few (from authors/bookstores/publishers). When I hear about a book sale, I hear about several. Books come several in a day, and then several days with none. Awards news seems to come in clumps (sure, there's a season, but still...). And even magazine news, or market reports, or most anything else: if there's a story, odds are I'll find a few more in the same category in the next few hours or days.

I don't really have a problem with that, although I'd be happier having a news story in every category every day, but it's something I've noticed.

Well, I found this article interesting. IDC estimates that the world generated 161 exabytes of data last year. That number might be taken with a grain of salt (something which is measured in millimeters, not femtometers), because in 2003, the University of California, Berkeley came up with a world data creation number of only 5 exabytes (and isn't it a remarkable world when I can say "only 5 exabytes" and have it mean something?). The article does say that IDC's study was commissioned by EMC, a data storage company, so they might be considered to have a vested interest in a larger number (but really, when we're talking about a number that is between 100,000,000 and 4,000,000,000 times bigger than the storage capacity of this computer I'm typing on, does it really matter?).

And what's an exabyte, you may ask? Well, for those of my readers who haven't a clue (yes, I know who a couple of you are), exa- (abbreviated E, so that an exameter is Em, and is considerably farther than you throw anything [actually, 1 Em is just a little bigger than 1,000 light years]) is the prefix meaning 10 to the 18th power, or a 1 followed by 18 zeroes (like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000).

Wikipedia has a nice table defining all the prefixes we've defined. Aside: I first reached for my college physics textbook. How fast have things changed? This book was published in 1985, and the extremes were atto- (10^-18) and exa- (10^18). The Wikipedia chart stretches from yocto- (10^-24) to yotta- (10^24). Hasn't it been a remarkable two decades, that we've had to extend the range of pronounceable numbers by twelve orders of magnitude?

Have I gone on too long? Probably. But those are some interesting numbers.

Did a lot of car travel today, and heard the news on the radio. This link to the Washington Post article is merely the first I turned up.

The headline was that New York's very own Reverend Al Sharpton has just discovered that his ancestors were owned by deceased Senator Strom Thurmond's ancestors. The cynic in me immediately said, "Ah, Rev. Al must have planted the story to keep his name in the news, and because it's something that might make him look good when next he announces he's running for office." The optimist in me said, "No, this is an interesting conjunction in the lives of famous people."

Nope, the cynic in me wins. Are we surprised that Sharpton's ancestors were slaves? I seriously doubt it. Are we surprised that Thurmond's ancestors owned slaves? Again, nuh uh. And does the fact that, three or four generations back, these families were entwined in slavery really, in any way, matter in the here-and-now? No. Well, yes, I guess it does: it matters because Sharpton's publicity machine is big enough to get it spread all over the local and national news.

But really, what does that history have to do with anything? Did Strom become a senator, or run for president, because of those ancestors? No. Did Al become a reverend and a media personality because of those ancestors? No. They both did what they did on their own, as people, not as descendants.

And the connection? Well, one of my great-uncles was a captain in the US Navy. The wife of one of my friends is a commander in the US Navy, currently commanding a destroyer. Isn't that a strange coincidence? Doesn't it mean something? No, and no. Go far enough, and you can connect any two people for anything (or nothing at all).

Al, if you want to be in the news, do something newsworthy (but this time, please, try to make it something that isn't an attempt to make people angry).

Edited to add: And here's the follow-up. Sharpton wants a DNA test to determine if he is genetically related to Thurmond. And again, the thoughtful viewer asks: "Why?" Is he hoping to get a piece of Thurmond's estate? Will it change his life, one way or the other? And what degree of consanguinity will be enough for him to claim the relationship? (Consider that cousins Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt shared about 1/2048 of their DNA from their family relationship [that's less than 0.05%]. In other words, those cousins were less closely related than any two random individuals.) How closely related do Sharpton and Thurmond have to be for anyone to care?

Still out of town with intermittent access. Heading home tomorrow (should be a "brief" 12 hours on the road, if we're lucky).

However, I just saw this article, and couldn't resist posting the link. I want to comment, but honestly, what else is there to say?