Add This

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

You can't get there from cleveland.com

Is it me or is Cleveland.com the most convoluted site in the history of the Web?(Wait, don't answer. I'm sure there's worse.) But I've had it with its abysmal navigation. Basically you can't get what you need within any level of simplicity. Were it not for The Plain Dealer, I would have no reason whatsoever to visit the site.

As it happens, I visit once every two weeks to copy links to my book reviews that appear in Wednesday's papers. I can only do it within 14 days because after that the content no longer appears in the archives. It would seem a simple enough task. But I wind up having to search under something different every time I log on.

Sometimes I have to look under arts, sometimes under life, sometimes using keywords from the books I reviewed, sometimes using keywords from the headline and sometimes entering (and this is what would seem logical) the column name: From the Self-Help Shelf.

I rarely find something in the PD worth linking to, but today I did. Or at least I thought I did. I was going to call your attenion to an op-ed piece by Simon Singh, author of the soon-to-be-released "Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe."
In a piece titled, "Einstein's tutorial on genius," Singh writes that one of Einstein's original theories on the origin of the universe, he later admitted to being wrong. This is news now because 2005 is the beginning of the Albert Einstein Year (marking the centennial of his annus mirabilis in 1905).

While my boys ate their waffles this morning I read them Einstein's quote: "It's not that I'm so smart; it's just that I stay with a problem longer." Ah yes, that wonderful quality known today as stick-to-it-iveness. Something I hope to pass on to my boys, even as I know they're not hearing my morning news ramblings.

Anyway, as it happens, scientists now believe that Einstein's flawed theory of an anti-gravity force may, in fact, turn out to be the best explanation for the acceleration of the universe.

Since I cannot locate the link on Cleveland.com, I'll share with you the end of this column, which I found most poignant:

"It seems that even when Einstein thought he was wrong, he turned out to be right.

"And, as we celebrate the Einstein Year, let's also bear in mind the fact that he was prepared to admit he was wrong.

"Perhaps humility, more than anything, is the mark of true genius."



2 comments:

George Nemeth said...

No, it is convoluted and abysmal. And I don't understand why, when they have a talented programmer like Colin Toke on staff. Probably, because they don't think they can "make money" on something as newfangled as the internet.

Jim Kukral said...

Wendy has comments! Yeah! And yes, Cleveland.com does suck for archives. However, I do like to read it every day for my local headlines and sports stories. And Seper's stuff, but that's about it.