it's all the same thing. >> brown: the drums, the telegraph, the radio, the internet. all of that. write at one point the same paradox was destined to reappear in different guyss. each technology of information bringing its own power and its own fears. >> in our time we worry that there's too much information, that there's an information glut that the last word in my subtitle is a flood. it's only fairly recently that we've been able to talk about information glut or information overload as a thing to be feared or worried about. but maybe it's a little bit reassuring to discover that all of these information technologies brought the same sort of anxieties. people in the early era of the printing press worried about what it would mean when there were just too many books? if there are 10,000 books on earth it means that no one scholar can have a grasp of all recorded knowledge anymore. that was felt to be a sort of turning point. it was a sort of turning point. people complained about it. now we complain about too many books too but everything is on a different scale. >> brown: when

there was my favorite moment here is where you tell of a mother who came to the new telegraph office.hink it was a dish of sauerkraut and told the operator she wanted to send that to her son. >> right. >> brown: she just didn't understand what the telegraph was supposed to convey. >> and all of the vocabulary was changing. all of our most basic understanding of messages, for example, changed. another of those early telegraph stories involves somebody who goes to the telegraph office with a message written out and hands it to the operator and says send it. and the operator taps away, hooks the message up on the hook and says, okay, it's sent. and she says, no, it isn't. i see it right there. >> brown: (laughing) >> we know that a message is something abstract. it's something that you can express in bits. something you can store in a computer and send by e-mail. in different media. these things had to be learned. >> brown: speaking of abstract-- and this is one of the most interesting concept and is hard to talk about. you must have found it hard to write about it. you referred to 1948

it is throughout the city, most notably twin peaks, edge hill, telegraph hill. every once in awhile, you hear about those who make the news with a rock fall or landslide. usually occur in the telegraph and twin peaks. . above the rock are the soil deposits. the most common is dune sand. it is nothing but rocks that has been worn down from the sierras and deposited along the beaches. the wind blew that dune sand over most of the city. it is this mustard color. on the avenues, it is very thick. it can be up to 400 feet thick. as you moved south across slope boulevard, that is the tolar foundation. it was named after the first to score every in -- after the first discovery in the cemetery. the man was out there and noticed this material was unique. he started mapping it. he traced it all the way up to slope. the dune sand generally has the consistency of sugar. it is fine grained sand. it is usually loose. it is poorly graded. the colma foundation can be the same stand but it is denser. it may have to play in it. it is much stronger. it is an excellent supporting ma

morse, amazingly the same man who invented the telegraph, one of the most important inventions of the 19th century. morse felt aobliged to bring european culture back to america. he went to paris because he said he would become a better painter if he spent time there. they all felt that, and hundreds went, but he was one of the first. he decided that he was going to do a painting that would show americans what the inside of a great art museum looked like and what great masterpieces looked like. keep in mind there were no museums of art in the united states. this was 1832 when it was painted. you couldn't go to the museum and look at paintings anywhere in the united states. and very few paintings of my kind, unless they have been copied for private ownership were of the great masters. now most of these are renaissance paintings, italian paintings, some of which were already part of the louvre. you see the mona lisa there in the lower right-hand corner. that had been purchased by francis the i, and it hangs over the door on the right-hand side, right at the corner. >> how big was this p

he got the idea for the morse code, for the telegraph and the code, while he was in france.ut the code -- every painting is a collection of choices by the painter. it is not just what is in the painting -- nothing is in a painting by accident. it is there because they thought about it. but it is also about what is not in the painting, what am i leaving out. when one composes a symphony, you are leaving a lot out. you have to. so in painting this picture, which he has done balls he wants -- because he wants to give scale to the room and to the painting, the grand gallery, which is in the center of the painting was the largest room in the world. that is sort of the vista in the painting. this is a smaller room, all exactly the same today, by the way. the paintings aren't there that way. but he is showing you the expanse of this space, the scale of this public cultural treasure, open to the public. but he's not showing you the public that really would have been there. there are no french aristocrats in the painting, no soldiers in the painting. no priest said. all of whom would

he rode all the way to washington with a revised story in his hand and got to the military telegraph operator dusty and dirty and smelly, rushed in, i need a new story. the union army is defeated and a telegraph operator decided it was in the interest to send that story. this is why new unit--new york readers don't find out until july 26th what actually happened at bull run. here we have an innovation henry raymond decided his fields were over. he went back to new york to resume his editorial responsibilities. he began to hire dedicated professional war reporters who went into the field with the armies and with the army's blessing and often without the army's blessing. there was a natural competition give-and-take between vote reporters and the generals that you still see a little bit of today. a couple of examples, since 1863 after ambrose burnside conducted in his failed offensive in the last weeks of 1862. he then tried a march around robert tv's army and it began to rain. the army got bogged down. burnside decided to boost their routes by issuing whiskey and the army was both drun

the thank you. >> my name is linda spence and i live on telegraph hill. i feel i share the views of many of my neighbors when i express support for the redevelopment of treasure island and i hope that you will approve the yire. -- e.i.r. thank you. >> good evening. my name is bob middlestock. i'm a residents of telegraph hill. first i want to indicate my strong support for this project. i would like to design and build things and i'm confident that the design team that will be hired to execute this project will take into account all of the negative factors that have been brought up here and there are many more i'm sure. i also want to make it clear that many of our fellow residents on telegraph hill do not agree with the t.h.d. leadership. in fact, we are strongly opposed to some of the negative effects on the community. fundamentally i do not believe they should be speaking or dealing with anything outside the boundaries of telegraph hill. i think the project, the treasure island project as originally designed, the unat rated version is going to provide a

we are here at the base of telegraph hill to talk about a subject of great interest for the people of san francisco which is rockslide, slope stability, which caused a dramatic front-page news. i am here with two knowledgeable and wonderful guests. i am here with a geotechnical engineer and a geologist. we are here to talk about rockslide, rockfalls, and related issues. what is the difference between a geologist and a geotechnical engineer? >> and engineering geologist deals with identifying site characteristics, mapping, the ground's surface, collecting all of this data. the engineer can come up with medications and designs. >> the structural engineer might be working on a building if there is a building involved. what is your role? >> i am interested in the physical properties of the earth and how the earth will behave: subject to different load changes. when you are building a building, you are applying a load and you are wondering if the earth will be able to supply that load. we work closely together and we come up with practical engineering solutions. >> this is when someone wan

the years that it was up here, it gave the name telegraph hill. it survived although the structure is long gone. come to the 1870's and the city has growed up remarkably. it's fueled with money from the nevada silver mines and the gold rush. it's trying to be the paris of the west. now the beach is the suburbs, the we will their people lived on the bottom and the poorest people lived on the top because it was very hard getting to the top of telegraph hill. it was mostly lean-to sharks and bits of pieces of houses up here in the beginning. and a group of 20 businessmen decided that it would be better if the top of the hill remained for the public. so they put their money down and they bought four lots at the top of the hill and they gave them to the city. lily hitchcock coit died without leaving a specific use for her bequest. she left a third of her estate for the beautify indication of the city. arthur brown, noted architect in the city, wanted for a while to build a tower. he had become very interested in persian towers. it was the 1930's. it was

the lagoon ouna a area. this is different from where we all were just add on telegraph hill. this is a whole different concept. tell us what we have to. we have the big hill behind us, what kind of formations do we have? >> this part of san francisco, we are out in the dune sands which makes up the hill to my right. a crusty old drainage that we are standing is bedrock, 160 million year-old sandstone. the project right in the hillside over there and then farther down along the path that goes to the reservoir. >> there are rock slides, there is unconsolidated material. we have an earth float type slide and a debris flows which are common on the these hillsides where you start to see the evidence of creaks when the trees start to lean over. >> this is a slow movement of the slope. >> yes. you can start to get moving. that will push the trees over a little bit. this had a special history. we had a lot of damage here. i guess the water from leaking laguna runs underground out to golden gate park. it covers about two or three blocks along side to seventh avenue. there was a lot of

i guess the telegraph doesn't do the double source thing. sure we didn't grab rick springfield's album cover from the '80s? he's 61. >> it's impressive. he had his hair done before hand. i'm lynn berry, and this is "first look" on msnbc. stay tuned. "way too early" with willie geist starts right now. >>> with the country energized now by the death of osama bin laden, president obama plans a visit to ground zero and calls on washington to recapture the unified american spirit of september 11th, 2001. the question is how long will that good will last? >>> meanwhile, in light of questions about his government's competence and even his allegiance to the united states, pakistan's president zardari writes a piece for "the washington post" defending his efforts to track down bin laden. the question is how does he explain the most wanted man in the world hiding in plain sight in a suburb of the pakistani capital? >>> and more details on the stunning navy s.e.a.l. operion that led to the end for bin laden, the one the pakistanis didn't even know abou

a number of groups came together and made this project possible. >> again, this is the telegraph hillrhood center. >> yes. >> so take a look at the solar panels. >> you're going to put a solar- powered roof on it? >> yeah. serving the community this solar installation is going to save them 86% on their electricity bills. >> wow. >> so they can turn more of that money, those scarce dollars into care for the people. >> it serves a community, an underserved community in north beach, chinatown, russian hill and it's got a daycare center, senior care and programs, gymnasium, and garden. really a wonderful collaborative effort. so you're going to be out there this morning? >> i'll be throughout this morning, hopefully it doesn't rain. >> i know. >> last time it rained and that was auspicious so i think that was good. just dust off those solar packages for tomorrow. >> i'm excited to be here and this is what's possible when groups come together and see that the power of the sun -- there is no energy shortage. the sun keeps blazing away every day. if we take the opportunity to harness it, loo

not the telegraph dwellers, by the way. we were very interested in historic preservation. i spent a lot of time at city hall before various commissions, including the landmarks board. the landmarks board was pretty worthless as far as i can tell in those days. the so-called preservation expert on the board was the person that the developers hired to say an historic building was not historic. i think it is finally time after too many years that the pendulum starts to swing the other way. a lot of us thought long and hard for a real commission with real teeth and historic preservation was not just the grand buildings, the golden gate bridge, grand houses. the preservation is the buildings that make up san francisco. >> thank you very much. next speaker. >> linda chapman. there's no more grim practice than reusing historic buildings and nothing better for affordable housing than saving the affordable rental housing that we have that is under rent control. in the '70's and '80's, knob hill neighbors saved thousands of rental buildings from the high-rise developers who wanted t

grandchildren's health and futures track in the room the rise of hydraulic fracturing and this is from the telegraph and they're talking about inflammable tap water cancer threats and earthquakes probably coming soon near you fracking has been most vigorously criticised for the damaged caused by its waste water which contains carcinogens such as benzene and radioactive elements such as radium some of these chemicals are in the secret cocktail of liquids injected in the wells of people just like because one of the fed it's all secret you're not allowed to know what toxic brew of assets are behind the u.s. dollar backing the u.s. dollar backing the fed and their chip away rating you're not allowed to know that and yet people are like their children are coming down with those leaves and nazia and and they're still allowing this to happen because they're being paid a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars for the right. currency for the right to drill under their lands well that's sounds like a dire situation of folks that don't seem to understand the value of their own life person of the corporate pr

today the telegraph hill neighborhood center in north beach unveiling a brand-new solar rooftop. the new solar panels will help reduce the center's energy consumption by, get this, more than 85%. that's going to allow the center to redirect funding back into community oriented programs. >> this is what's possible when groups come together and see that the power of the sun -- there is no energy shortage. the sun keeps blazing away every day. if we take the opportunity to harness it, look what it can do. look what it's doing for this community center. >> full disclosure here, eco media is owned by cbs and some of the funding for the center was provided by solar power in connection with advertising here on kpix. the bay area suffering from a little shark hangover today. >> we had some sad faces here. the sharks lost in vancouver. they are knocked out of the western conference finals by the canucks in double overtime. they lost last night in game 5, losing 3-2 in five games. >> torture. >> they led 13 seconds to go. >>> even cat lost would say this kitty a little too big to be house t

serious about what's happening i think are looking our way you were quoted in a recent story in the telegraph the question is why does our government invite conspiracy theories all the time why don't they so a paper so what's your theory on that why does our government invite conspiracy theories all the time governments like secrecy. they're not you know whether it's the federal reserve or our foreign policy just think how many times i we've gone to war by distortion of the ever. and as you know and lie our way into war whether it was world war whether it was vietnam war or you know going into iraq i mean they have that you know deceive us. and then when the people distrust the government then any question government is called a conspiracy theory you know in a a doodad to say that you're not a moderate every there yes every everything is a conspiracy but i think the best thing is you should only believe the conspiracies that are true and have of course there's a conspiracy of people getting together and thinking how are we going to manipulate the money supply but in the in the intellectual wa

meetings and meetings on the community level, by the cic, by tihdi, the special meetings with the telegraph hill organizations, a fine organization -- i think they came here today and spread their opposition and concerns. we also heard from other members of telegraph hill. this is democracy in action. i think san francisco is known for its citizens to come up and express their ideas. i am basing my recommendation because of the extensive reading and my participation in this project. i am very qualified to make a statement on the eir. what i have found is a consistency throughout the evaluation and the application of the rules and regulation policies set aside by ceqa. i think the documents meet those criteria. i have also narrowed my interest. i looked at the transportation. caltrans, a state organization, has stood in support of this the guy are. they did mention mitigation issues there would like to have. the organization actually states that we should make sure during the implementation on the bay bridge to make sure there are adequate signs so that motorists approaching the ramparts can