Linked List: July 27, 2009

Monday, 27 July 2009

Texting While Driving Raises Crash Risk 23 Times, Study Finds ★

Matt Richtel, reporting for the NYT:

The first study of drivers texting inside their vehicles shows that the risk sharply exceeds previous estimates based on laboratory research — and far surpasses the dangers of other driving distractions.

Terrifying.

Steven Frank’s Internet Garage Sale ★

Steven Frank introduces Internet Garage Sale, his new “members-only, trust-based online auction site”.

Vanity Fair Copy-Edits Sarah Palin’s Resignation Speech ★

Not mockery — it’s an honest attempt to clean up the prose of a very poorly written speech.

Spotify’s iPhone App ★

So Spotify has created an iPhone app, and, just like their desktop software, it looks to be very well-designed. Its biggest shortcoming is that, like all third-party iPhone apps, it can’t run in the background, but there’s nothing Spotify can do about that.

But so the big question is whether Apple will accept the app, despite the fact that Spotify is clearly a competitor to the iTunes Store. They should. For one thing, competition is good for Apple. For another, I think rejecting Spotify from the App Store could result in an antitrust investigation from the E.U.

Also worth a look: Spotify’s still-in-progress Android version.

Spotify ★

Spotify is a streaming music service available in Europe, but not yet in the U.S. It’s totally legit, they have a huge catalog of popular music, and they seem to have nice software. Service is free with advertising in the U.K., otherwise you can pay for a day pass or monthly premium subscription and listen ad-free.

Check out David Appleyard’s excellent screencast review of the Spotify software and service to see how it works.

Singular ‘They’ ★

Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, filling in for the vacationing William Safire, make the case for my beloved singular they in the On Language column in The New York Times Magazine:

The idea that he, him and his should go both ways caught on and was widely adopted. But how, you might ask, did people refer to an anybody before then? This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine.

Frank Rich on Walter Cronkite ★

Frank Rich:

Moving as it may be to repeatedly watch Cronkite’s famous on-camera reactions to J.F.K.’s death and the astronauts’ moon landing, those replays aren’t the story. It’s a given that an anchor might mist up during a national tragedy and cheer a national triumph. The real test is how a journalist responds when people in high places are doing low deeds out of camera view and getting away with it. Vietnam and Watergate, not Kennedy and Neil Armstrong, are what made Cronkite Cronkite.