John Scalzi’s When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story is a wonderful take on evolution and the role of humans in the big picture (hint: not necessarily central.)
Your dog has been ringing for the last four hours. Please pick it up. Or, a smart collar and smartphone app product.
I think knowledge of how dogs work is not equally distributed (otherwise, why would Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, be rich and famous?) However, knowledge of how phones work appears to be nearly universal (otherwise, why would Verizon, AT&T, Apple, etc be so rich and famous?).
Perhaps we can bridge the gap then, when it comes to knowledge of pet dogs (even among pet owners), by connecting it to knowledge of phones.
So, to the owners of dogs that bark for hours at at time, at all hours of the day: “Your dog has been ringing for the last four hours. Please pick it up.”
Perhaps you did not hear it? Then, perhaps, you should have it connected to your mobile phone so that when your phone barks you know your dog needs you to pick it up, too.
I’m thinking of a smart collar that comes with a smartphone app and I’m open to angel funding.
A nail-biter, page-turner, on the edge of your seats drama… about cap and trade.
Ryan Lizza’s recent account of the birth and death of the most promising U.S. response to global warming is by far one of the best written thrillers I have read in some time. And it’s all true. It should be taught in every high school history class in the nation, alongside Julius Caesar or whatever it is we use these days to teach our young about the meaning of honor, loyalty and patriotism.
Sean Wilentz revisits the 1950s to witness the birth of the Tea Party; also of Mad Men and Glenn Beck.
Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker: “The current right-wing resurgence has more to do with the inner dynamics of American conservatism in the past half century.”
It’s a fascinating and indispensable introduction to the fault lines in the American right wing.
Even if the long term consequences of this power struggle are positive for those Americans with a conscience (those who bear witness to the enlightened spirit and, yes, letter of the Constitution), the short term implications will most certainly be heaps of cruel disdain – and an immoral disregard – for those individuals, families, communities with neither time nor money to spare.
Tangentially, it also makes me wonder if “Mad Men” isn’t an indirect counterpoint to Glenn Beck, just as the world of “Lost” could be seen as an alternative to that of “24”.
Still true: Migration eases global poverty.
Many people purport to be saddened by the fact that so many people live in countries that are poor, tyrannical, or otherwise malgoverned. And rightly so. But relatively few seem willing to acknowledge that one of the simplest and most effective means at our disposal for addressing these concerns is to make it easier for the residents of such countries to move to richer and better-governed places.
The wonderful experimental video Oops and the phenomenology of film.
There are many reasons to love the 10 minute video Oops by Chris Beckman only one of which is that it can serve as a great reference for a discussion of the phenomenology of film.
On dozing, falling in and out of sleep and landing behind the curtains.
Last night, while dozing off to sleep, I had the rare pleasure of slipping in between states of consciousness, neither fully in nor out. I was thus able to observe my mind bubbling up seemingly random words, ideas, concepts. It was like visiting the geyser at the center of my world, old unfaithful.
It takes one to know one: looking back at the ruling coalition of Christians and conservatives.
In 2004, I was almost entirely overwhelmed by cognitive dissonance. The Christianity espoused by the ruling coalition of the U.S. did not in any way resemble the Christianity I had learned from my mother and the Jesuits at Regis High School. Reality felt absurd. Shocked, I wrote an earnest plea to Christians on the state of the nation – one both overwrought and incomplete.
Elsewhere, J. Brad Hicks was writing his own reconciliation of the books. While imperfect, his is an eloquent, conversational and righteous attack on the origins of the coalition between Christians and Republicans. I highly recommend it.
One out of ten dentists is right: Dr. John Ioannidis’ research into error rates, bias and funding in The Atlantic
Dr. John Ioannidis profiled in The Atlantic:
…Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.
This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously.
Related: Kathryn Schulz on her favorite books about being wrong and error, in general.
A funny thing happened on the way to the Hollywood Bowl
About an hour into last night’s concert, three tall, broad shouldered guys walk into our aisle. They were dressed in fine sweaters and slacks, well-shaven with short-cropped hair. Think Christian Bale dressed in Ralph Lauren.
Perhaps they were buzzed. Perhaps they were drunk. But when they came into our aisle to talk to some friends who were sitting in the aisle above us, they didn’t stop next to us, they stopped on top of us. And they proceeded to have a conversation as if we were part of the furniture. It was the first time in a long time that I had been muscled out of the way.
In fact, it had been too long. I’d lost track of where we are in our slouch towards Bethlehem. Their entitlement, a product of a culture where physical domination is acceptable, is the exception in the circles in which I run, but it remains the norm in many others.
Comparative advantage made tangible: 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds.
The artist Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern:
It turns out that each seed is in fact a unique porcelain replica, hand-painted in Jingdezhen and fired at 1,300 degrees. Some 1,600 artisans worked for two years to make 100 million husks with a combined weight of 150 tonnes: a mass project, its collective spirit now abroad in London.
Comparative advantage at Wikipedia.
Creative destruction: the movie Blind Shaft is a stunning, subtle satire on industrialization in China told as a crime story.
Based on a even more gruesome crime spree that began almost a decade ago, the movie Blind Shaft is a must-see dark satire about two cons who kill hapless migrant works in order to extort the similarly unscrupulous owners of illegal coal mines. The dialogue is smooth yet blunt. An unforgettable scene shows the cons being schooled by hostesses at a karaoke bar on the new, jaded lyrics to a communist anthem.
Of buried secrets and the return of the repressed.
In a short review of the new Chinese movie 1428, a reference to a macabre symbol of a massive cover-up: in 2009, the foundations of a concrete plant in Sichuan “ruptured as a result of the fermentation of thousands of corpses buried beneath it.”
Stephen Spielberg’s movie Poltergeist turns on a similar if more abstract return of the repressed: the churning “spirits” of slaughtered Native Americans buried under a modern day suburban housing development.
Never mind the jet packs, here’s the diapers.com
You know you’re in the future when you read this in Businessweek:
“They have sensors and they’re supposed to stop if they see you,” says Hilton. “But it’s better to stay out of their way. They’re very quiet, and you don’t hear them coming.”
So Lore avoids robot territory, driving down another canyon and pulling up to a door in a dark corner.
Want to improve the political climate? Make economics a national pastime.
If the left wants to convince voters the stimulus package was effective, it should focus on teaching Americans basic economic theory. Only then does it stand a chance of making sense.
There’s no sense in arguing over politics with someone who doesn’t understand the policy being debated.
Anticipating a decade of double digit unemployment until the GOP gets its tent in order.
Talking to my Dad about macroeconomic policy, it dawned on me that we will not have an appropriate response to the complex challenges of our global economy until the Republican party emerges from its Circus phase.
Meanwhile, we can all pray for the private sector, the Buffett’s and Gates’, to get a move on. So to speak.
Nursing homes and the Tea Party of Palin and Beck
Perhaps if Americans treated their elders better the American elderly wouldn’t be so bitter.
But when you alienate an entire community, they will eventually turn to the politics of alienation: of fear and loathing, rather than honor and hope.
postscript: Will we get political sloganeering that calls out the White Hairs as a voting bloc, irrespective of race, gender or, perhaps, even class? And will they honor the political tradition of previous Whigs?
Among the groups that regularly use science over faith: business. That’s worth celebrating.
As much smack as I talk about the business community, I prefer to side with organizations that invest in science rather than faith.
Here are the headlines from a recent ad for a wealth management firm: “The DNA of Growth”, “Intelligence Trumps Information” and the impressive “Not Just ‘What’ but ‘Why'”.
Is DNA accurate in this context? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely inappropriate. And how can one not favor an approach that even broaches the question of “why?” – a line of interrogation we should associate with Pandora as much as profit.
Kafka’s The Trial is an orderly proceeding compared to the tribulations of the American poor. That’s bad news for the national economy.
When you’re poor and you owe money, you might find yourself in this situation:
On another call, Jimmy spoke with a man whose original debt was two hundred and sixty-eight dollars. The man claimed he had already paid another agency nine hundred and eighty-seven dollars to settle the matter. Jimmy didn’t seem surprised by this. When he opened his agency, he worked with a debt broker who – unbeknownst to Jimmy – had placed the same debt with several agencies simultaneously. Jimmy likened the situation to street hustlers who sell bootleg versions of a movie. “You don’t know what you have until you start working it,” he said.
The debtor had nothing in writing to prove that he had settled the debt. “You made, you know, a bad judgment in reference to paying that debt without any sort of written correspondence, Jimmy said firmly. “Pay the actual claim voluntarily or we’re going to process it as a refusal.” After getting off the phone, Jimmy said that collecting the debt was legitimate, but he suggested that the government should better monitor his industry.
Tell me that two different agencies could collect the same debt twice from GE or Blackstone or Goldman Sachs? Exactly.
American justice may be blind, but that’s of little consequence when the scales are being weighed down with bought judges and paid off legislators.
It is a pernicious fantasy that we have ever lived in a free market. We have always regulated commercial transactions to ensure not just fairness but also to advance our national interests.
I’d be happy to debate anyone who would argue that the companies that exploit the poor are growing the pie and/or fueling economic growth. What value do they create? They’re not even sorting out the market. How are they not simply driving consumers to reduce spending?
Sheltering such rent-seeking businesses is as productive as what the geniuses in Pyongyang do.
Taco trucks, Twitter and the next Apple tablet.
Yesterday I saw a group of working class Jose’s standing around a taco truck at midday eating lunch. There were four or five pickup trucks parked near the taco truck. There were no other patrons.
The scene reminded me of photos I’ve seen of the original lunch wagons from the 19th century which in turn became the fast food franchises of the 20th century – or even the trendy food carts of the 21st century.
Certainly, the hamburger or steak sandwich would not be as popular today if it did not allow for Americans to eat on the go and for restaurants to serve more customers than they can seat.
In a way, a similar transformation is taking place now with information products. It used to be that you could only do computing by going to a place with a giant computer. Then the computer got smaller and cheaper and you could compute from inside your home.
Now, you can compute on the go and the result is a great deal more computing and many more “computers” – meaning both the people doing the computing as well as the devices they use to compute. (Which could make Twitter something like a hot dog stand or a bag of nuts. Or both.)
All of which prompted me to think: if Apple builds a daylight-compatible Retina display, the next lock-in cycle for tablet computers is probably theirs.
Update, two years later: I was barking up the wrong tree. It’s not about seeing the display in daylight. It’s about speech recognition.