Endless Knots

Tom Atkins and cable TV

There have been many wonderful pieces written about Boston's first African-American at-large city councilor, Tom Atkins, in the past few days, including an editorial in The Boston Globe this morning. Tom died of Lou Gehrig's disease last Friday. All the stories mention Tom's pioneering work in civil rights and his role in bridging the racial divide in Boston. What I remember Tom for is something else: in the early 1970s, a small band of committed futurists (including us) became concerned about the potential gold about to be buried beneath Boston's streets, i.e. the stringing of coaxial cable. Back then, cable enthusiasts saw it as what the Web has become, a many-to-many (and one-to-one) communication medium without precedent. Tom was on the Boston City Council then and proved an astute observer of what cable might bring to Boston. At a time when Boston politics was still dominated by the predictable suspects not particularly known for their vision, Tom had foresight and insight about the future of telecommunications.

Jon and the General

Remember Frontier 6, the blogger who said that soldiers should be allowed to blog and post to YouTube? Well, now he's made his first appearance on Comedy Central. Last night, Lt. Gen. Bill Caldwell, recently the face of the military to the press in Iraq and now head of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, was the guest on The Daily Show. Caldwell was there to talk about the new field manual for the Army, which I mentioned here and in a piece for The Standard called "The social general." Jon Stewart was his inimitable self, kidding Caldwell about the dry prose and the very thought that a soldier would pick up the field manual in the heat of battle. Caldwell held his own, explaining that its purpose was for training, not the quick look-up while in combat, and that it contains a different view of the soldier's role than has been prescribed before. Caldwell's best moment in the interview came when he talked about the true multi-tasking that soldiers have to do now - building a road one moment, taking sniper fire the next.  His appearance on The Daily Show is part of the Army's campaign to market the new manual and its revolutionary contents, which say that diplomacy and nation-building must be held up as equal to "offensive and defensive operations." You can see it for yourself.