Sheriff's website protecting us against information overload

Read how the Worcester County Sheriff's Department website is showing us life before Google. See Sheriff's website protecting us against information overload on my Telegram Towns blog.

More on politics and news

[Editor's Note: This is the latest installment of the More On series.]

As of December 1, 2011, there were approximately 614,000 registered Republicans in Iowa. Of those, slightly more than 100,000 Republicans attended and voted at the caucuses. The Three Amigos are each getting about one-quarter of the total. The punditocracy is trying to decide which one won with differences measured in the 100s or less.

None of the Iowa Republican delegates selected tonight are bound by the election results. If they were, the state might lose half of their delegates because the Republican National Committee says that we're starting the election season too early.

There were 137M registered voters in 2010, including 1.5M in Iowa.

Every major television, radio, cable, and newspaper service has been running special coverage of the Iowa results. Countless bloggers and twitterers are cloggging the InterTubes with their thoughts about the meaning of this vote that doesn't even rise to the level of a rounding error.

We, for varying values of we, are idiots.

Why the mother of your daughter's friend can't call you

This afternoon I received a call for a member of our extended family. I received the call because my number is still listed as a landline in the online phonebook, even though I switched the number to my cellphone years ago. The member of my extended family lives in a household where there is no landline; the parents and teenaged-children have cellphones.
Unlike most of the rest of the world, U.S. cellphone users have to pay for incoming calls. As a result, it has been nearly impossible to get public listings of cellphone numbers. If they're going to pay for the call, people want to control who calls them.
By some estimates, the number of households using traditional phones that connected by copper wires to the phone grid will fall below 10% in five years. A majority of people under 30 don't have home landlines.
How do I reach people for whom I don't have phone numbers? Often, I have an email address or a Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn connection. In more than a few cases, I have a secondary connection, such as a cousin-in-law, on one of the social networks. It might take a few detective steps, but I think I can make contact with most of my family and friends.
Phonebooks have become urban litter because we have shown that online information is better and more readily available. An interesting unintended consequence of this always-connected world, however, is that we've lost a way to find the phone number of the parents of your daughter's friend.