What has society come to?

A medical student who corresponds with me wrote the following. It has been edited for length.

She was shopping at a mall with her husband and their children.

As I walked underneath the escalators, I heard a horrific sound. I looked up and saw a body cartwheeling down. I ran to front of the escalator to push the stop button. An 80 or 90 year old gentleman was lying partly on and partly under his walker. He seemed unconscious with blood all over the place. I said "Sir, sir," saw his fingers move, and called 911.

A black man from the top of the escalator made eye contact with me and came running down to see how he could help. He hesitated, his face and body language screaming fear, but he came over. He knew he had to once we made eye contact because I was the only one actually doing something.

A security guard who was heading to work arrived. He had no gloves, no radio, nothing. Why wasn't anyone from security coming? What's the point of security cameras? Wasn't there anyone watching? I turned around to see who else could help. About a dozen people were just standing there with their cell phones taking pictures and videos. Not a soul asked me if they could call 911. In fact when I called 911 a second time, the dispatcher asked me if there were more people with me because I had placed the only two calls.

Telephone and television evolution through my lifetime

6-5-4. That was my home telephone number when I was growing up in the early 1950s. You may wonder how that was possible. I'll explain.

We lived in a small town. Telephones looked like this.

In order to place a call, you picked up the handset from its cradle, and an operator said "Number please."

You said the number, and she (operators were always women) made the connection for you via a switchboard.

Some folks in my town were on "party lines," which were less expensive but involved more than one household on the same line. If you picked up the phone in a home with a party line and it was being used by someone in another house, you could hear their conversation. You would have to hang up and wait until they were through before making your call. For incoming calls, the ring sequence was different for each household.

The ultimate first-world problem: Twitter is slightly different on the computer, iPad & iPhone

Each platform has some advantages and disadvantages.

The standard computers, both PC and Apple, offer the full keyboard and obviously larger screen. It is easier to grab URLs and shorten links. Computers also include all interactions, not just mentions. But retweeting by copying someone else’s tweet and commenting on it is very cumbersome. The URLs do not copy with the “http://” and even the rest of the URL is omitted unless you copy the entire tweet including name and twitter handle of the tweeter.

The iPad lets you “Retweet” and “Quote Tweet.” Quote tweet reproduces the entire tweet with the full URL. You must delete the quotation marks after the tweet if they are directly next to the URL. But on the iPad, your “Mentions” are just that, mentions in tweets. Retweets of your stuff and other interactions like new followers are not listed. The iPad allows you to write a tweet and save it for later, a feature not available on a PC. But shortening a URL is a project that takes several steps because of the clunky way the iPad copies and pastes.

The iPhone lists all interactions, just like the PC and has “Quote Tweet” just like the iPad. It also permits writing a tweet and saving it for later. This feature is in a menu displayed by clicking “Cancel” instead of “Close” as is the case on the iPad. However like the iPad, the iPhone also makes shortening a URL a big deal.

There are other differences like the way profiles are displayed and direct messages are handled.

Is there some reason why there can’t be uniformity across all the devices?