Sub-History.

The timeline of the subprime meltdown, mostly told through Ben Bernacke's eyes. Kind of dense and boring, but includes the best explanation yet of what happened at Bear Stern's that I've seen.

Michael Lewis on Subprime

They helped distract outsiders from the truly profane event: the growing misalignment of interests between the people who trafficked in financial risk and the wider culture.

The number of financial articles that make you laugh out loud are very few and far between. But the Michael Lewis piece on Subprime mortgages is fantastic, especially if you've read Liar's Poker. The interview at the end -- with Gutfruend -- had me literally on the edge of my seat.

His main point -- that most financial companies don't understand what they are peddling, and the CEOs don't understand the risks, is something to keep in mind.

Even better, it reminds you to ask again and again to get someone to explain to you what they are doing in a way you can understand. Otherwise, it's alchemy.

Ray Ozzie wants 1973 back

It's fascinating to me how people's first interaction with computers seems to harden their ideas of what it can do for the rest of their lives. I can't tell you how many programmers I've met who still lust after Hypercards, or wish to recreate something they did on an Amiga or Commodore64. (My generation being the first to grow up on PCs, not have to work our way through the punchcard nonsense of mainframes.)

I have my own ticks like this: I want to use the simple email program pine at work, and I have yet to find anything to replay earlier versions of stuff that "just worked" like the Mac alarm clock program or the simple "cdplayer" that used to ship with earlier versions of windows.

And for "genius" programmers, it seems it is no different. The summary of this article could be "Ray Ozzie saw the future in 1973 at U of I, and just tries to keep recreating it. (The sad part is that while Notes was ahead of its time in 1989, it's truly awful now.)

But it means an interesting pattern emerges: the first language of computing you learn is the one you feel most comfortable in. You might learn new vocabulary (nifty keyboard shortcuts, iTunes, etc.) but the first impression hardens your mind on what a computer is.

It's a thought worth exploring:
- are programmers' ideas of what's possible shaped by language? (I happen to believe their design patterns of "good code" are often shaped by the first language.)

- are users ever happy with evolutionary software, or do they prefer the revolution to learn a new language of doing things? For example, it seems possible that much computer input could be done by touchscreen in 5 years instead of the keyboard mouse/combo. What will that mean for today's toddler?

I follow Ray Ozzie because I find his work fascinating. (I thought Groove was groovy, and sort of welcome cloud computing at Microsoft because I think it will be a paradigm shift for enterprise computing.) But clearly he keeps chasing what he thought he already had.

Just Good Writing

A very lucid account of why Prop 8 failed in California. I love Hendrik Hertzberg and hope some of his better columns about the Bush administration come out as a book (that I will gladly buy).

What's particularly engaging is his use of very very long sentence. Short sentence. Like this:

You might think that an organization that for most of the first of its not yet two centuries of existence was the world’s most notorious proponent of startlingly unconventional forms of wedded bliss would be a little reticent about issuing orders to the rest of humanity specifying exactly who should be legally entitled to marry whom. But no.

I try to use this style as often as possible when writing email -- the long-short style, I think, catches your attention and is very useful for non-fiction writing.