September 16, 2009
The Guild, Season 3 Episode 3
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September 15, 2009
NFL or NBA?
A.X. Perez passes on a link he got from some anonymous person. I found it quite interesting, although I can’t vouch for the numbers.
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The Tea Party protests, summarized by their opponents
Matt Welch sat on a panel the other night, where he learned some interesting things. Specifically, that some of the other panelists had diagnosed (to their own satisfaction) the racist roots of the Tea Party protests:
1) The Tea Parties are experienced by many black Americans as a “racial assault.” This was posited by a white “anti-racism writer,” though the black Tea Party organizer on the panel didn’t seem to agree.
2) The “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, historically, is inseparable from white racial resentment against blacks.
3) My pointing out that the racial-motivation interpretation of the protest was not manifested in the overwhelming majority of signage I saw and conversations I had was directly analogous to white Americans believing that race relations were just fine 50 years ago.
4) Glenn Beck has described Obama’s health care plan as intentional “reparations” for slavery.
QotD: Generational obsolescence
What I find amusing is how some believe that the death of civility is a new development. It started with Joe Wilson and was compounded by Serena Williams. Civility has been chained to a rock getting its liver picked out by buzzards since the golden children of the Greatest Generation were encouraged to let their freak flag fly, to use a horrid phrase.
[. . .]
I’ve always thought it’s imperative to stay engaged with your times until your time, singular, is up. Otherwise your sense of the world calcifies, and your worst impressions become your default opinion. The glories of the imagined past become a means of self-admiration, because you were not only lucky enough to be there but smart enough to get it. Kids today, they don’t. Perhaps growing up in the 70s kept me from idealizing my own past; the culture was all gimcrack glitz and second-hand hippie shite before the jams were well and truly kicked out by the anti-sloth movements of the late seventies and early 80s. They were musical and political; the former was all over the road and the latter emotional and naive, but I think they were the first attempts to wrest control of the social narrative from the early boomers, and as such were derided with the smooth weary conceits you’d expect from the generation that remade the world and expected the rest of us to line up and lay laurel wreaths at their sandaled feet.
Then the rise of internet culture saved the late boomers and Gen Xers from cultural obsolescence, because it was no longer necessarily to participate in any of the usual events to be up to the moment. On the internet anyone can be about 26 years old.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2009-09-15
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September 14, 2009
Should publicly funded media be free?
Let’s just set aside the whole question about whether the government should be even in the media-provider business* . . . if the government paid for it (that is, if you paid for it), shouldn’t it be available to you for free?
Let’s put aside my personal frustration at having my work locked away. The real question here is, since CBC content is funded by the public, shouldn’t the public own it? Or at least have access to it? Actually, the CBC archives are just the tip of the iceberg: the overwhelming majority of stuff made for Canadians with Canadians’ money is inaccessible to Canadians.
In Canada, movies are supported by Telefilm, TV by the Canadian Television Fund, books and art by The Canada Council for the Arts, and so on. But most of this stuff isn’t distributed very well or for very long, and you can only get your hands on a fraction of it.
So I want to put forth one more contrarian position: I think that any publicly funded content should (within, say, 5 years of its creation) be released to the public domain.
Thoughts?
* No, they bloody shouldn’t be. IMO. YMMV, etc.
How to sell a film to a major studio
John Scalzi provides some helpful hints to the producers of Creation, who are complaining that they can’t get a US distributor to pick up the movie (because of all the Christian fundamentalists, y’see):
. . . leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view.
The major US studios are no longer really tuned to distribute films like this in any event. Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much. The “oh, it’s too controversial for Americans” comment is, I suspect, a bit of face-saving rationalization from a producer flummoxed that such an obvious bit of Oscar-trollery such as this film has been to date widely ignored by the people he assumed would fall over themselves to have such a thing.
QotD: Depoliticizing the economy
FOR years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.
Well before the financial crisis erupted, policy makers treated homeowners as a protected political class and gave mortgage-backed securities privileged regulatory treatment. Furthermore, they allowed and encouraged high leverage and the expectation of bailouts for creditors, which had been practiced numerous times, including the precedent of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Without these mistakes, the economy would not have been so invested in leverage and real estate and the financial crisis would have been much milder.
But we are now injecting politics ever more deeply into the American economy, whether it be in finance or in sectors like health care. Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes, but also we’re repeating them on an ever-larger scale.
Tyler Cowan, “Where Politics Don’t Belong”, New York Times, 2009-09-12
The RAF sets a record, but not a good one
The RAF‘s most expensive aircraft had just made its first flight:
The Nimrod MRA4 programme was initiated back in 1996 by TV presenter, one-time director of BAE Systems and former New Statesman theatre critic Michael Portillo, who was defence minister at the time. Under the original deal, BAE Systems would be paid a “fixed price” of £2.2bn to rebuild, rearm and upgrade the RAF’s fleet of 21 Nimrod MR2s, the last De Havilland Comet airframes left flying in the world, to the point where they would effectively be new aircraft. This would have meant a cost of just over £100m per plane. The project was then known as “Nimrod 2000”, rather optimistically as it turned out.
As time went by it became clear that the price was not fixed, and that “2000” wasn’t a good name for the project at all: it was re-dubbed Nimrod MRA4. BAE Systems has just announced that the first flight of a production-standard MRA4 took place last week, though the aircraft is not yet ready for handing over to the RAF — that will probably take place next year. Then there will be more delay before the type can be declared operationally capable.
Meanwhile the MoD now estimates the programme’s overall price tag as £3.6bn, an increase of more than two-thirds. In fact the situation is much worse than this, as the number of planes has had to be slashed to prevent even worse cost overruns. The RAF will now receive just 9 aircraft rather than 21.
As a result the cost per plane has actually quadrupled: each MRA4 will now have cost the taxpayers a cool £400m, better than $660m at current rates.
On a pure economic level, this is quite a price increase, but it’s typical of military equipment contracts: the very small number of items means that there are no economies of scale to be reaped, and all the design, test, and administration costs must be recouped over a much shorter production run. It still looks very bad . . . unless you happen to be in opposition right now, in which case it’s a great campaign talking point.
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September 13, 2009
Pond fish now protected from boy’s toy boat
If you guessed from the headline that this was another little tale from Britain’s burgeoning “Nanny State”, you’re quite correct:
Security guards ban boy, 9, from sailing toy boat on pond because it ‘frightens the fish’
Security guards reduced a nine-year-old boy to tears after banning him from sailing his toy boat on a pond because it ‘frightens the fish’.
Noah Bailey was distraught after staff at Chiswick Business Park, in west London, stopped him playing with his model of the German battleship Bismarck.His grandfather Paul Fabricius, 57, said that when they went to complain about the draconian rule the guard refused to tell him the name of the manager for ‘security reasons’.
So the fish are being protected from model ships run by nine-year-olds, but you can’t complain because the names and contact information of the “authorities” must be concealed from the public. Don’t you feel safer now?
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A primer on how to manage geeks
Jeff Ello looks at the problem non-geeks have when they need to manage geeks in the workplace:
I can sum up every article, book and column written by notable management experts about managing IT in two sentences: “Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z.”
X, Y and Z are variable and usually contradictory between one expert and the next, but the patronizing stereotypes remain constant. I’m not entirely sure that is helpful. So, using the familiar brush, allow me to paint a different picture of those IT pros buried somewhere in your organization.
I’m often amused (and sometimes alarmed) by the ways companies handle and mis-handle their technical staff. It’s surprising how often the blatant levels of distrust and disrespect non-technical managers display when working with technical staff. He’s quite correct here:
Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. IT pros do not squander this currency. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. Gaining respect is not a matter of being the boss and has nothing to do with being likeable or sociable; whether you talk, eat or smell right; or any measure that isn’t directly related to the work. The amount of respect an IT pro pays someone is a measure of how tolerable that person is when it comes to getting things done, including the elegance and practicality of his solutions and suggestions. IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.
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A moment of silence for one of the greatest humanitarians ever
Norman Borlaug died yesterday. You may not have heard of him, in spite of the fact that his work helped save the lives of over a billion people. I wrote, earlier this year:
Take a moment to wish a happy 95th birthday to possibly the greatest contributor to human life and health in history, Norman Borlaug. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s not terribly surprising . . . his research and its application have saved the lives of possibly a billion people, but it hasn’t been the sort of work that garners a lot of celebrity attention. Unlike most revolutionaries, his Green Revolution measurably added to the health, wealth, and happiness of the world.
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Are they the big story in the NFL?
Jim Souhan looks at whether the Minnesota Vikings can turn all that potential into solid achievement:
This is a unique day in Vikings history.
Today, the first Sunday of the 2009 NFL season, the Vikings become the biggest story in the most popular sport in America for a reason other than an epic loss or an embarrassing scandal.
Today, the Vikings present a Hall of Fame quarterback who is a defector from their greatest rival and will lead one of the most talented teams in football.
Today, your Vikings will not be the franchise of Super Bowl losses, championship game chokes, 41-0, Love Boat, Ticketgate, Denny Green’s homemade videos and myriad arrests.
Today, your Vikings become the biggest story in the NFL because of what they are capable of doing, not what they are chagrined to have done.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch the Vikings-Browns game, but with Buffalo playing on Monday night, there’s a stronger chance that the Buffalo FOX affiliate will show it in our area.
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September 12, 2009
Is it non-partisan when both parties are at fault?
Belatedly, from a post at Gates of Vienna on September 11, 2009:
After eight years that hole in ground in Lower Manhattan is still there. That’s more than twice as long as it took America to mobilize, rearm, go to war, and defeat Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two.
In the eight years following John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon, the United States went from having no manned space program, though designing and testing the Mercury and Apollo spacecrafts, to a successful landing on the moon.
The original Word Trade Center took six years to complete, from the ground-breaking to the ribbon-cutting.
In the past eight years we have seen plenty of candlelight vigils with teddy bears and flowers and tearful remembrances by the relatives of the slain.
But there’s still a hole in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be.
The bureaucratic wheels grind slow . . . but not necessarily very fine.
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QotD: The Muse of Booze
It’s reasonably well known that the arts of brewing and fermenting arose in nice time for the dawn of human civilization (there are ancient poems and mosaics and that sort of thing, dedicated to the celebration of the fact), but it’s at least as notorious that an open flask of alcohol is a mouth that can lead to hell as well as heaven. This being the case — and one day we shall work out the etymology that leads us to use the simple Italian word for a bottle, fiasco, in the way that we do — then it is as well to have a true Virgil to be our guide through the regions infernal as well as paradisiac.
The late Sir Kingsley Amis (who wrote these slender but thoughtful volumes before receiving his knighthood and who was also the expert to consult on things like the derivation of fiasco) was what the Irish call “your man” when it came to the subject of drink.
Christopher Hitchens, “The Muse of Booze”, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008
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The most welcome improvements in iPhone 3.1
Brian Chen looks at the improvements that are likely to be most popular with iPhone users:
A major addition to iPhone 3.1 are Genius recommendations. Similar to the iTunes function of the same name, iPhone’s Genius feature helps you search for apps you may wish to download based on those you already own. Also, iPhone 3.1 enables you to easily sort apps on your computer screen using iTunes 9. As helpful as these new features sound, iPhone 3.1 comes with major drawbacks: the loss of free, unauthorized tethering and the inability to access the unauthorized app store Cydia. One more caveat: After upgrading to iPhone 3.1, you can’t downgrade to 3.0.
That’s a tough predicament, and many likely face a dilemma. Should you download now or give hackers some time to re-exploit the system? Here, we dive into the pros and cons of the software update to help you make a decision you won’t regret.
As I haven’t jailbroken my phone, the loss of access for Cydia customers isn’t particularly important to me (but I’m sure it’ll be addressed ASAP by the folks there). It’s about time that Apple provided a better way to manage the location of apps in the user interface other than finger-twitching on the iPhone itself.
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