His complaints are many, and almost all justified: the grey screen is too grey, there aren't enough books available, stuff other than the text (such as pictures) don't come through well, its newspaper subscriptions leave entire articles out and reading on it just isn't a pleasurable experience. Hell, he doesn't even bring up the whole remote-deletion thing; that must have happened after they went to print.

All in all, it's a pretty damning takedown of Amazon's flagship device. Sure, you can dismiss some of his arguments (textbooks look terrible on the Kindle 2, but they probably look better on the DX), but taken as a whole, it sure doesn't leave you wanting to buy one. And he discovers things I certainly didn't know about it, like its shoddy newspaper conversion.

It's enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition's superb photography-and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

Sometimes whole articles and op-ed contributions aren't there. Three pieces from the July 8, 2009, print edition of the Times-Adam Nagourney on Sarah Palin's resignation, Alessandra Stanley on Michael Jackson's funeral, and David Johnston on the civil rights of detainees-were missing from the Kindle edition, or at least I haven't managed to find them (they're available free on the Times Web site); the July 9th Kindle issue lacked the print edition's reporting on interracial college roommates and the infectivity rates of abortion pills. I checked again on July 20th and 21st: Verlyn Klinkenborg's appreciation of Walter Cronkite was absent, as was a long piece on Mongolian shamanism.

The Kindle DX ($489) doesn't save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them-it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.

Like I said, damning. His solution to people who want a digital version of their books? Buy an iPhone or iPod touch. I'm not sure I agree with that, as I'm still a sucker for paperbacks, but it makes sense. Do we really need a device solely for reading books when so many of us have perfectly capable book-reading devices in our pockets right now?

But man, Amazon can't be happy with the timing of this article, especially one of this scope coming from The New Yorker, a publication that is read by the heart of the Kindle's potential customer base: well-heeled literary nerds. It's pure coincidence that it dropped the week after Orwellgate, but it sure seems like the honeymoon is over with the Kindle. It's just not the device that is going to convince everyone to jump on the eBook bandwagon. Sure, it's got its fans, but regular books are still safe, for now. [The New Yorker]

The cover is simple, yes, but I don't really see the benefit to using such outdated tech. I mean, wouldn't running the latest software be easier? But hey, power to him. It's pretty cool to see such old tech still in use by such big names. [Bob Staake via Boing Boing]

• While machines that could accurately reproduce the sound of human speech, such as Wolfgang von Kempelen's talking head, have been around since the late 1700s, no device has been able to learn the syntactical rules necessary for generating conversation.
• Secondly, the act of hearing and interpreting is more difficult to instill in a machine because of the on-the-fly signal processing that would be required. The complexity of the ear allows it to pick up on the most subtle nuances in sound (according to the article, people can distinguish between hot and cold coffee just by hearing it poured into a glass.
• Roger Schank is a philosopher-programmer who has spent his professional live trying to create a conscious computer that not only has a memory, but can also learn. After years in the field, Schank is skeptical it will ever happen. He says replicating idle chatter and the sheer complexity of speech in general is beyond the abilities of current scientists.
• Steven Pinkner, a Harvard cognitive scientist, says that natural speech could rely on the breadth of one's knowledge, which is "extraordinarily difficult" to endow to a computer.
• R&D efforts in speech recognition began in the 1950s and '60s, but researchers are still hung up on the number of ways to communicate the word yes. Speech engineers for Nuance found that Southerners in the U.S. tend to add "sir" or "ma'am" to responses where as Northerners do not. And "Valley Girl" speak tends to make computers interpret declarative statements as questions.
• Finding it difficult to make a computer able to "learn," scientists turned to brute-force computing and algorithms that relied upon mass amounts of data. But in 1969, high-ranking Bell Labs staffer John Pierce wrote that a speech machine that could recognize, but not understand, was utterly pointless.
• The big emphasis on speech recognition has now moved to emotional analysis, which still uses algorithms to estimate a caller's state of mind. Stanford researcher Elizabeth Shriberg says its impossible to compare emotions in acted speech to emotions in real speech. The escalation of anger, for example, happens in smaller, more subtle increments with authentic speech.
• The most promising breakthrough in emotional recognition is an agression detector that has been deployed through out parts of Europe. Sound Intelligence were able to recreate the processes of the inner ear on a computer, which spawned a device that could learn the sounds of different objects in action and identify them. The Dutch city of Groningen has placed this technology in its pubs, where if it detects excessively aggressive speech in the pub, it will alert the nearest police station. But as Seabrook comments, "This is no HAL."
• Other research labs, like the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, have turned to facial recognition to glean emotional insight, but have come up dry. "Emotions aren't discrete," lab chief Shrikanth Narayanan told the New Yorker. "They are a continuum, and it isnt clear to any one perceiver where one emotion ends and the other begins." To add insult to injury, there hasn't been any real demand for emotional recognition outside the call center arena.

So while we might not ever see a robot become a Nobel Laureate, there is one lession to be learned from this New Yorker piece — never talk freely while on hold with customer service. Seabrook learned while at B.B.N. Technologies that they still record the call while you're on hold to assess your emotional state. After a profanity-laced tirade, one annoyed caller took a couple of hits from his bong, waited a little longer, and hung up. [The New Yorker]

• After nearly going bankrupt in 1927, Buckminster Fuller moved his family to a Chicago slum so he could spend his days in the library reading works from the likes of Gandhi and Da Vinci. By 1928, he had compiled 2,000 pages of notes into a 50 page manuscript entitled "4D Time Lock." It was basically described as incomprehensible nonsense. From here, Fuller began work on his Dymaxion line of inventions focused around utopian living.
• The Dymaxion Car, built in 1933, was blimp shaped, sat on three wheels and had a periscope instead of a rear window. Fuller had a vision that the evolution of housing would lead to pre-fabricated homes that could be put anywhere, so people would be living in places like Antarctica or the Sahara, and would need an all-terrain vehicle to get around. The car could turn 180 degrees on a dime, and would often cause traffic jams from slack-jawed onlookers. Future designs for the car called for it to fly using a VTOL mechanism, but a fluke accident at the Chicago World's Fair killed production of the vehicle in 1934.
• Fuller viewed the (still popular) individual homebuilding process as inefficient and antiquated, which gave way to his Dymaxion Home project. He thought homes should be built like cars; constructed in a day, exactly the same as the rest. The Dymaxion Home would have all the necessary amenities and would be installed in lightweight towers. The towers themselves would be constructed in a central location and transported to the building site via Zeppelin, where a bomb would be used to excavate the land. When a family was ready to move, the home could be packed up, removed from the tower and taken to the next site. Unfortunately, Fuller was unconcerned with the availability of the technology he called for, which made building these homes nearly impossible.
• The Dymaxion Bathroom was intended to be built like a refrigerator, with a sink, toilet and bath condensed into a modular unit that could be placed anywhere in the home. Thirteen models were produced before production was nixed in 1936.
• Bucky's most bizarre concept was his Cloud Nine project, which consisted of communities built inside ginormous, super light spheres covered in polyethelyne. Apparently, when the sun hit the spheres and created enough hot air, they would rise up into the sky, essentially creating cloud cities (sans Billy Dee Williams). I don't think further explanation is needed to show why this never happened.
• But Fuller's most realized innovation were his Geodesic domes. Utilizing aluminum struts and fiberglass panels, Fuller made a dome which covered 93 feet and only weighed 8.5 tons, catapulting him to design fame. His services as a speaker and thinker became popular from universities and the Pentagon alike. Obsessed with the shape for their volume optimizing qualities, Fuller wanted to house entire cities under domes and shield residents from the elements, where energy would be conserved and money saved. His envisioned Manhattan covered in a two-mile dome, and more domes in the Arctic, Antarctic and Tokyo Bay.

Buckminster Fuller's failed inventions aren't the only things worth reading about. There are plenty of great anecdotes about his eccentric life — like how he was expelled from Harvard using his tuition money to entertain a group of chorus girls and spent a significant chunk of time only eating prunes, steak, tea,and...umm...Jell-O (unmentioned is that he also served as the second president of MENSA). Basically, he was awesome. [The New Yorker]

• Throwbot: A small camera on wheels that can enter rooms where a gunman might be hiding
• SkySeer: a UAV with a camera meant for urban police work
• PepperBall: Think paintball, but with pepper powder
• Bola Ball: A bolo that cops would use to trip up assailants (proved a tad hard to master)

The piece covers some sweet demos, like Raytheon's Active Denial System pain ray (which we've mentioned), the TigerLight pepperspray-shooting flashlight, and a blinding laser cannon meant to "visually dissuade" assailants.

At the end, the author and Heal visit to the HQ of one of the most successful non-lethal weapons: MAD, or magnetic acoustic device. It's not new, but it's only now being explored as a device for police forces. It's a sound projector that can shoot audio up to a mile in distance, and when it projected the sound of .50 cal machine-gun fire, the author says it sounded like it came from a gun "the size of a backhoe," and mentioned that all the birds in the vicinity took off in fear.

The link will give you a digest of the piece; I think you'll need to find an actual paper copy to read the full story. (What's up with that, New Yorker?? No love for the internet?) [New Yorker]

• As mentioned above, the Door Close button is there mostly to give passengers the illusion of control. In elevators built since the early '90s. The button is only enabled in emergency situations with a key held by an authority.
• The only known occurence of an elevator car free falling due to a snapped cable (barring fire or structural collapse), was in 1945. A B25 Bomber crashed into the Empire State Building, severing the cables of two elevators. The elevator car on the 75th floor had a woman on it, but she survived due to the 1000 feet of coiled cable of fallen cable below, which lessened the impact.
• Elevators are twenty times safer than escalators. There are twenty times more elevators than escalators, but only 1/3 more accidents.
• Elevators are also safer than cars. An average of 26 people die in elevators each year in the U.S. There are 26 car deaths every five hours.
• Most people who die in elevators are elevator technicians.
• The Otis Elevator Company carries the equivalent of the world's population in their elevators every five days.
• The New York Marriott was the first to introduce a smart elevator system that assigned passengers to elevators depending on what floor they were heading to.
• Elevators used to require a two-man dispatcher/operator team to function. The advent of navigational buttons rendered those jobs obsolete.
• The area required for personal space is 2.3 feet. The average amount on elevators is generally 2 feet.
• Elevator hatches are generally bolted shut for safety reasons. In times of elevator crisis, the safest place is inside the elevator.
• The myth about jumping just before impact in a falling elevator is just that — myth. You can't jump fast enough to counteract the speed of falling. And you wouldn't know when to jump.
• Due to the laws of physics, elevators can't be any taller than 1700 feet. Hoist ropes become too heavy after that, snapping at 3200 feet.
• 
  

And as an interesting closing note, Nicholas White, the man trapped in the elevator, received a low six-figure settlement after filing a $25 million lawsuit against the building. But in the process, he lost his job, his money and his apartment. He is now unemployed. [The New Yorker]