I Am Very Tall

This video is taken from Stanford Law's Lawrence Lessig. Guy's got a sharp knack for flash, I'll say that.



I'm sure that most of you know what my opinion on this video would be. However, as a counterpoint, here are some responses that he got on his own blog.

Comment #1, from Seth Finkelstein

Reasonably argued, but regrets, I don't buy it.

1) Obama's no angel

From factcheck.org: Harry & Louise Again? February 4, 2008
Obama mailer on Clinton health care plan lacks context.

Summary: An Obama mailer stretches the differences between the candidates on health care"

2): Running for President requires an ENORMOUS amount of money. It has to come from somewhere. And Obama gets plenty of fat-cat support (can't give links or the spam-trap will eat this message).

3) US foreign policy in the Middle East is majorly driven by the economics of oil and alliances thereof. What the "Arab street" is going to see is not "change" but a colonial administrator, of a type they know real well. You're putting way more importance on symbols meaningful to US liberal intellectuals than make any real difference on the ground.

Other stuff:

4) Obama is a rookie. Going up against an experienced, mean, veteran in many senses. I don't see he can handle it. Bleating "Change!" isn't going to cut it.

5) Moral courage is easy when there's no cost to it. I view him as mostly having taken a gamble that paid off on opposing the Iraq War, rather than it being an issue of right vs. popular. Anyone who keeps doing right and not popular in politics loses power (to a first approximation).

Comment #2, by joe

Did I miss something? How is a man who is focusing on corruption, implying that Hillary Clinton is not for campaign finance reform and hailing Obama as a beacon of hope? Hillary Clinton is a supporter of public financing (e.g. Canada), whereas Obama is apparently a supporter of people giving money but not lobbyists. Don't ask me how Obama's thing makes sense, or how Mr. Lessig can rail against people for being misleading while being misleading himself!?: Including that blurb about Hillary saying she won't join Edwards and Obama in their election campaign gimmick but leaving out the public financing part. Also, I have never heard anyone argue that Obama has as deep an understanding of the issues as Hillary. It seems intelligence and experience would be the first defense against special interests' misleading attacks. Sorry for the caustic letter, but Mr. Lessig's endorsement is hypocritical and does not make sense based even on his own priorities. It also ignores deep differences in the candidates stances towards health care and other issues. Let's face it, Mr. Lessig is endorsing Barack, like many Europeans, because he is black and charismatic. Not bad reasons, but not good enough. Almost as bad as my reasons for making improper use of a colon above.

Comment #3, from Marc Perkel
Serious factual problems with your video

First - Obama wasn't in the Senate at the time the vote to allow Bush to abuse his powers and start a war. Since that vote Obama has vored the same as Hillary on every issus regarding Iraq. He has not made a single principled vote since he took office.

Second - it was Obama, not Clinton who introduced racism into the South Carolina and quite frankly I'm not going to support Obama unless he apologizes for distorting what clinton said painting Clinton as a racist. You are absolutely dead wrong on this issue. Obama has run a far dirtier campaign that Hillary.

Third - when it comes to "moral strength", look at the 1993 attempt Hillary made on health care reform. Hillary took a principled stand and failed to accomplish anything. One thing about experience is the ability to actually get things done, not just take a principled stand and accomplish nothing. Obama is all talk.

Even though neither of us agree with everything the Clintons did in the 1990s, the have the strongest record of accomplishment of any president in my lifetime. The bottom line is that if Hillary is president you're your going to see more of what accomplished. If we elect Obama we're going to see someone who talks about the problems in a more inspirational manner.

I respect you Larry, but you are totally dead wong on this one.

Here's something I sent out to my Church of Reality mailing list. I didn't make an endorsement, but tried to lay out the issues as cleanly as I can.

And, on a stupider note, comment #4, from Common Sense

Two interesting counterpoints today. The first comes from a Paul Krugman Op-Ed article, a certified Hillary supporter:

"I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again."

He then goes on to cite examples of Obama supporting "venom:"

"During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.

And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network."

In response, many of his readers responded, ostensibly citing examples of anti-Obama rhetoric coming from the Clinton camp. This is Krugman's response in his blog:

"[Krugman quoting Clive Crook]

Some commentators accused Bill of playing the race card when he called Obama’s account of his position on the Iraq war a “fairy tale”. How so? What did that have to do with race? And does Hillary’s comment about King, the only instance Morris bothers to offer, even qualify? She merely said that getting the job done required a can-do president as well as an inspiring and visionary champion. And so it did. I cannot see that this subtracts anything from King’s stature, or that it was intended to. Whatever its merits, this is the Clintons’ old theme, not a sinister new one: if elected, she would hit the ground running, whereas the inexperienced Obama would be out of his depth. It took a hyper-sensitive press to turn that comment into a racial slur.

….

I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.

It really makes me sad to see so many people get played by the media on this. If you prefer Obama, fine — but the evil, race-card-playing Clinton campaign is no more real than Al Gore’s claim that he invented the Internet.

And to Obama supporters, just remember: these people are not your friends. After they take down Hillary Clinton, if they can, your man will be next...

Folks, you’ve been played like a fiddle by people in the media who just plain hate the Clintons. They tried to take Hillary down over her clothes, her voice, her tears. When none of that worked, they invented a race war."

Generally, I'm a fan of Krugman's and find his analyses to be dead on target. But I think in this case, he's making several key mistakes.

The first is that his argument about rabid, venom-spewing Obama supporters just doesn't seem to wash with me. The instances that Krugman cites as being evidence of rabid anti-Clinton rhetoric from Obama fans are also being perpetrated by the media. In fact, the second instance that he cited is purely about the actions of MSNBC and has nothing to do with any of Obama's supporters. If he thinks that the Clinton's should not be held accountable for the media's spinning of their commentary, then he should extend the same courtesy to Obama and his supporters.

Secondly, I'm in agreement that a lot of the anti-Clinton rhetoric is the result of media hypin, but it is simply not the case that Hillary's Rovean style tactics are purely the creation of the media outlets. There are clear cases in which Senator Clinton has willfully distorted facts in order to cast doubt upon Barack's record. For instance, she and her husband tried to dismiss his record on the Iraq war by saying that he took his speech off of his website and that he continuously voted to fund the war. The first statement is simply false, the second one completely misleading (as you can be against a war, but still vote to give your troops money for armor and supplies, given that they are already at war and will need these things to survive).

In another instance, she took comments made by Obama about how Reagan's transformational status and the GOP's status as the "party of ideas," and then distorted that in a debate, reframing his comments as support for those ideas.

Thirdly, I think Krugman needs to step back a bit. It's fine if he supports Hillary and thinks that she has a better plan for universal healthcare. That's a valid point and one that I will take into account when thinking about who to support. But I think that he's doing a disservice to his camp and to the party by casting Obama supporters as saps for a cult of personality, or marionettes dancing to the press's puppeteering. How can anyone reasonably insult supporters of a differing candidate (which is more highly educated, according to the polls) and then expect them to just turn around and switch? If anything, his rhetoric is merely going to carve out divisions all the more clearly between the two sides.

As some of you may have surmised from my recent Google away tags, I'm an Obama fan. Here's some of my reasoning, as I originally laid it out in a comment on Fred Wilson's blog. It starts with the single most effective argument in the Clinton campaign, namely her years of experience.

I think the experience argument doesn't take you very far. First, Hillary Clinton's experience, as measured by actual number of years in political office, does not significantly exceed Obama's. What she can lay claim to is being around for most of her husband's experience. However, she has admitted that they never shared confidential information, limiting the extent to which those years can really be called "experience."

Secondly, if experience is such a big deal, then the Democrats should have mobilized behind Joe Biden or Bill Richardson. But they didn't. And if we get into a presidential race with John McCain, having a campaign built on "experience" really isn't going to get anyone very far, as his 25 years in Congress dwarfs Hillary's 7.

The biggest point that I'd like to make is that number of years of experience just does not seem to be a strong predictor of presidential quality. Note that Abraham Lincoln had only a single term in the House of Representatives prior to becoming President. Some of our greatest presidents in recent history had similarly short amounts of political experience, including both of the Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilson. On the other side, some of the presidents with the most experience have turned out to be complete failures, e.g. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford.

What I find interesting is that years ago, a president made an argument that “The same old experience is not relevant," and that time spent with real people was just as valuable as time spent in Washington, if not more so. That was Bill Clinton, campaigning against George Bush. Now he and his wife are finding that same language being used against them and they are trying to deny its importance.

I think the biggest issue is what you do with your experiences. You can have all the experience in the world, but if you don't learn the right lessons, then that experience is wasted. I agree with Hillary on most policy issues. I think that universal healthcare will require mandates if they're to be effective. I think we should try and do the right thing in Iraq, rather than beating a hasty exit (although Obama's withdrawal argument is based solely around using it as a hammer to bring about self-governance). If she made it into office, I'd probably be fine because she'd be pushing my agenda.

However, everything that I've read about her management style indicates that she is not the type of person to brook dissenting opinion (See Brad Delong's experience working with Hillary, or David Brooks's recent article in the Times). These anecdotes are admittedly old and she might have changed since then. But I think the teeth that came out in South Carolina are a worrisome indicator that she still has the same "My way or the highway" perspective, and the last eight years have shown us that we can't afford to have that as a country. Her candidacy will almost certainly be a 51% victory, even with the help of some of the strongest Democratic tailwinds in recent decades.

The right policy decisions can go poorly, if arrived at in the wrong way. There were plenty of reasons why we could have gone into Iraq, but we did it in the worst way possible. I think Obama's natural tendency to build a consensus is the right way to set the ship right. We need a political process that is open and honest, not one where decisions are made behind closed doors, where leaders can't admit to their mistakes, and where ideas from one party automatically become anathema to the other. We need someone who can carry us past the 51% majority mark. I know this probably sounds preachy to some of you, but I like to think that it's just being earnest, a character trait that a lot of politicians should be more willing to exhibit.

This factoid comes to you via Marc Andreesen's blog, which came to him via the FT:

EMI, the big music company, spends 25 million pounds a year "to scrap unsold CDs".

I'm sure that those 2,000 people that they just laid off are psyched about that.

It is currently five past midnight. Pudge left this morning for the CES conference in Vegas, although she apparently took a pit stop at the AVN's for good measure. For today, the sum of my productive accomplishments include the following:

* Stopping by the office for good measure and postage
* Mailing something
* Buying groceries for myself

Those groceries included the following: Vitamin water, beer, gummy bears, chicken nuggets, hot sauce, beer, an apple, and some bananas. This is what I am planning to live off of until Pudge comes back, which I believe to be on Wednesday.

The apartment looks like it has been savaged by an angry bear. There are at least three distinct piles forming in the living room; two of them clothing-based, one of them the remains of my grocery shopping. Other articles from the day - a book and sections of newspaper - are lying exposed on a table, next to a random pad of paper that I pulled out and doodled on. My shoes are not on the shoe rack in the closet. The bed has not been made.

I have been playing Guitar Hero III in nothing but my socks and boxers for over two hours. My eyes burn, as I have not looked at a non-electronic surface for more than 10 consecutive seconds in the last ten hours. My back is sore, possibly from the strange dances that I have begun to perform in accompaniment to the music that I have been 'playing.' My face and hands are coated with a fine layer of oil, which I seem to have been secreting for the day. There must also be oil in my hair, which now has spikes vaguely resembling the nimbus on the Statue of Liberty. I can't be sure, but I'm guessing that I smell. I am a glorious mess.

This will all come to an end soon, when Pudge comes back and order re-enters my life. But until then, my life is chaotic bliss.

Ok, back from Turkey, Taiwan, San Francisco, and Mexico. It's been a long trip. I'm sure all of you missed me dearly. Thanks to Pudge, here's some material from the Economist. In short, it argues that beauty (or it's scientific proxy, symmetry) can be a marker for "other, underlying characteristics such as health, good genes, and intelligence." Here's the bigger quote:

'... three researchers correlated people's bodily symmetry with their performance on intelligence tests. Such tests come in many varieties, of course, and have a controversial background. But most workers in the field agree that there is a quality, normally referred to as “general intelligence”, or “g”, that such tests can measure objectively along with specific abilities in such areas as spatial awareness and language. Dr Miller and his colleagues found that the more a test was designed to measure g, the more the results were correlated with bodily symmetry—particularly in the bottom half of the beauty-ugliness spectrum.'

I have two responses to this (if it's true, of which I'm somewhat skeptical). First, if this is true, then it must really, really suck to be ugly. The second one would be to wonder why this didn't seem to make much of an impact at my school/workplace.

It's been a while, but here I am. Apologies to anyone that's been waiting for me to post something interesting. Here's the skinny:

I'm in Turkey and will be here for the next two months. It's fine out here, but really, the only thing I've seen is the inside of an office building and a hotel. If I ever get out of here, I'll let you know what it's like.

On to bigger and better things:

Stephen Colbert may be (fake) running for President. As of now, it's unclear if he'll be a Democrat or a Republican. According to current statements, he's going to try to run as both. I think the best part, or perhaps saddest, is that he'd probably be a serious contender.

Apple is opening up the iPhone to third party developers. It's about freaking time.

Much love to everyone out there. I'll see you when I get back to the States.

I've always liked Michael Bloomberg. That may be because I want to ingratiate myself to people worth billions of dollars in the hope that they might spare me a couple million. But I think it's because I think of him as a generally competent, polished yet straight-talking kind of guy. That being said, his response to the recent JFK terrorist plot is surprising:

"There are lots of threats to you in the world. There's the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life."

What a sweetheart. Predictably, some people think that he's an ostrich with his head in the sand, others think that this is a breath of fresh air. I'm a little in the middle. I can't see any utility in having millions of New Yorkers freaked out about possible terrorist attacks that they have no way of knowing about or preventing. So I agree with the message.

On the other hand, I can't really say that this is the most diplomatic way of putting it. Telling the city that it's stupid to worry isn't going to make people worry any less.

This is going to be a nerdy, armchair economist type of posting, so be forewarned.

I was just reading an article in the Economist about Regina Herzlinger, an HBS professor who is a chief agitatator for market-driven, consumer-oriented health care reform. A few years ago, I couldn't have given a hoot about the cost of health care. However, as someone that now has to pay for healthcare and recently got the bill for what I thought was a standard check-up, I'm now paying much more attention to all of the stories about healthcare's skyrocketing costs.

At first blush, I'd be inclined to agree with Professor Herzlinger's approach. According to the article, her book opens as follows:

“The US health-care system is in the midst of a ferocious war. Four armies are battling to gain control: the health insurers, hospitals, government and doctors. Yet you and I, the people who use the health system and who pay for all of it, are not even combatants.”

Sounds pretty good, right? After all, in almost every efficient business, progress is driven by the customer, not the various links in the supply chain. Why shouldn't it be the same in this case?

This is the sort of thinking that's driven the latest push in healthcare - consumer directed health plans. The driving hypothesis is that insurers have essentially taken cost out of the equation for the average American. This has resulted in ballooning costs of provision, as the costs are never directly passed back to the consumers. Hence, you get stories about elderly hypochondriacs that spend an inordinate amount of time at the doctor's office, primarily because they're lonely and have nothing better to do.

For the most part, I'm on the same page as this theory. However, I think that certain preconditions need to be met before this consumer driven dream can become a reality. Consumer price pressure generally comes about when the consumer can look at an array of objects and determine that some are of roughly equivalent value. Moreover, the consumer must also choose to go with the cheaper of the two objects. I'm sure that an economist could probably put a finer point on all of this and start talking about the actual requirements for "perfect competition," but I think this is a fine starting point.

As of this moment, I think there are several obstacles that are preventing these preconditions from being met. These are:

1) Lack of standardization

Healthcare provision is not a standardized commodity. In fact, it's highly variable and can be judged along any number of highly subjective criteria. Even if you were to say that procedure X costs Y dollars, there's no guarantee that the procedure will be exactly the same, as differences between the doctor and the facility can be hugely significant. How can you quantify the trust that you have in a doctor? Things like this can make comparison of healthcare offerings extremely difficult.

2) Lack of information

Let's assume that there was, in fact, a well-designed framework that would allow you to easily compare all of the relevant metrics. There's still a problem with transparency. As of now, there is no 'one-stop-shop' that will show you all of the different providers in your area, that will publish these relevant metrics, and that will allow you to do deeper research about the few providers that you're interested in. The best I've seen is from my insurer, which just shows me a list of doctors in a particular specialty, what schools they went to, and where they're currently located. In choosing a healthcare provider, this is not the information that I need.

3) Lack of pricing information

I haven't really heard of a lot of doctors that tell you up front how much their procedures are going to cost. You can't make a price-based decision if you only get the price after you make the purchase. I could be wrong about this though, having only anecdotal knowledge.

4) Indifference to pricing

This is a generally weaker point, but all the same, I thought it might be interesting to think about. Let's assume that all of the other points have been taken care of, to the full extent that it's realistically possible. We have a sense of standardization, we can access some sort of customer satisfaction metrics for all of the doctors that we're considering, and we know what it's going to cost us up front. I still think that, except for standardized checkups, the bulk of customers will be largely indifferent to price. This is because when people go to the doctor, their inclination isn't to get a bargain. Their inclination is to find the person that will cure whatever it is that ails them, regardless of the price (within reason and affordability). There are a lot of stories out there about people bankrupting themselves paying for the healthcare of themselves or the people they love. That wouldn't happen if they didn't think they had to.

Moreover, given that any metrics that come out will probably be incapable of truly capturing the 'intangibles' of the healthcare experience, it's possible that people may even go in the opposite direction, and start choosing providers that are more expensive, simply because they'll think that the price is somehow correlated with the quality of care.

I'm not saying that a consumer-driven healthcare market isn't going to work. I definitely think that consumers should be at the table when the "four armies" battle it out for control. But all the same, as with any free market, you have to make sure that the requisite preconditions are in place before you can start counting on the invisible hand to do its thing.

This will be a quick post.

I don't know about the rest of you, but every so often I just feel like my brain is getting slower. And I'm not even close to approaching the age when senility would be an acceptable explanation. Enter Lumosity.

The concept isn't new - it's just BrainAge, but it's on the Internet and it's free (for now). It's a collection of simple flash games that are supposed to gradually improve your memory, processing speed, etc. I'm a big fan of the attention game (mainly because I'm good at it) and addicted to the processing games.

I think what this and other IQ/ brain-improvement games do well is provide constant feedback on how you're doing. I think this makes the games incredibly addictive - you can essentially 'see' your brain 'improving' in 5 minute intervals. I think it's a stretch to say that these games really do improve your mental abilities; what's more likely is that you just get really good at figuring out how to work these games, with some tangential improvements all around. Either way, it's some good addictive fun.

I'm trying out a new format. It gives me a little bit more space to write and post pictures, so I'm hoping it'll work out. It also gives me a chance to play with the new blogger template customization schemes, which seem like they might be kind of cool.

It seems like the template that I picked up is a little quirky though, so let me know if anything is messing up big-time.

The NY Times has written more about the state of modern education in the US than any other paper that I know of. I thought I'd take a moment to look at some of the prevailing themes that I've observed. The first is that the US is facing an educational crisis. As reported here and here, an uncomfortable proportion of today's high school students simply are not ready for college. In fact, the latest article states that only a quarter of high school students that took a college preparatory course are actually ready for college work.

What does that mean exactly? The apparent bar is a prediction of whether or not "the students had a good chance of scoring C or better in introductory college courses, based on their test scores and the success rates of past test takers." As with all of these studies, I'd say there's probably a fair amount of subjective fudge room in there, but let's just assume for now that they did their homework and got it right.

The broader case is that there are even more students that did not take college prep classes that are going to be even less prepared. The number of the "less prepared" is fairly significant, with only 54% of the test's participants (ACT exam takers - who takes the ACT anyway?) having taken at least a core curriculum class.

The second theme that's been emerging is the increasing competitiveness of the Ivy Leagues. Anecdotally-driven articles (here and here) describe the lives and accomplishments of students dealing with increasing pressure to be perfectly rounded students. One Harvard interviewer made the following comparative comment:

"What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

Some take 10 AP courses and get top scores of 5 on all of them.

I took one AP course and scored 3."

The take-away from these anecdotes seem to be corroborated by the admissions data reported in yet another Times article, which shows acceptance rates at top schools moving down year over year. In fact, the spillover of qualified students is so large that admissions rates at second-tier colleges are now approaching those of the Ivy Leagues from a few years back.


Taken together, what does this say about the American educational system? We have an increasing proportions of high school students that are not ready to college at the same time as we have an increasing number of students that seem to be overqualified by yesterday's standards.

The decreasing proportion of college-ready students can be attributed to either a faltering educational system that has relaxed its standards or a more-inclusive system that is taking in larger numbers of socioeconomically disadvantaged students with less access to educational resources outside of school.

Increased admissions competition can be explained by factors that increase the number of applications, i.e. larger high school populations, higher percentages of students applying to college, and more applications per student (thanks technology!). But this doesn't completely explain why today's rejected applicants outshine the easily accepted from the 1970s. It's not as if there were golden children doing cancer research over the summer that just didn't think to apply to Harvard. Is it a cultural shift? Is it because of an increased number of educational resources outside of school (e.g. Internet, Princeton test prep, etc.)? Or is it a general barbelling of the American educational system, with the spoils increasingly going to those affluent enough to afford private school/residential neighborhoods with good public schools?

[Addendum: Freakonomics posted a cute link on this subject]

Yet another feature from Google, Google Maps now has a "Street View" function that allows you to see what a spot on the map looks like at street level. As a New Yorker, I've got to say that this is one of the most awesome features ever. No more having to go to a random street corner and then searching for a few minutes to find a place - now you can just look at it from the street level and see where it is ahead of time.

The number of photographs that they must have taken in order to construct this feature blows my mind. Some locations are more fully fleshed out than others (my hometown of Atherton only has photos on El Camino vs. the ENTIRE NYC GRID), so if you're in the middle of Podunk, this may not be such a big deal for you. But anyone who lives in a city and has ever spent time searching a street corner will immediately see the value here.

...

Ok, so really, this isn't that big of a deal. It's still really cool though.

Fred Wilson recently posted this about the future of e-mail. His comment is a very VC-like pronouncement about the end of some era or other. His pronouncement is about the death of e-mail, or at least, its reduced usage in the coming era. The essence of his post is captured in this statement:

"Eventually every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?"

Seeing as how I'm a big fan boy of his, I decided to post my first response ever. In the midst of posting that response, I figured that I should probably put the response down on my own blog and kill two birds with one stone. Here it is:

I think you're partially right. In the future, we will probably communicate via a collection of technologies. But I'm pretty sure that e-mail will be one of them, along with traditional phone calls, text messaging, and all that jazz.

I think that what's going to happen is a continuation of a current trend - different services will increasingly be used for highly specialized forms of communication that fit different needs. To clarify, these services have been dividing themselves up along a few axes - voice vs. text, one-way (sort of) vs. two-way, message length, assumed timeliness of response, number of recipients, etc. As user adoption increases, we'll start using the different services as tools that can be used interchangeably, depending on our current communicative needs.

This is already happening now. For example, text messages are a two-way channel with limited message length and assume a high level of responsiveness (although not quite as high as an actual phone call). Twitter is similar, but it's a one-way channel, assumes virtually no response at all, and can be blasted to a huge number of recipients. They each serve very different needs - you wouldn't try to remind your wife to pick up the kids via Twitter anymore than you would want to use text messaging to tell *all* of your friends that you're hanging out at Central Park.

The "axes" could certainly be refined, and will almost certainly change with technological development (e.g. blackberries have changed everyone's assumptions about a person's accessibility via e-mail). There's probably an unspoken social etiquette component out there that needs to be addressed. All the same, I think this is a valuable way of thinking about the evolving landscape of communications.

That being said, I think that e-mail is going to evolve - it's not going to go away. It is a perfect fit for a set of communicative needs and will thus have to stay in the game. The current problem that it's facing is a volume problem, and all of the other two-way communication mediums will eventually run into that same problem as they gain acceptance. This is a surface problem, and is not a fundamental defect of e-mail as a form. If anything, it just calls for more advanced filtering services (much like Caller ID or a good receptionist).

My guess is that social networks will serve as one of multiple filtration layers that go on top of e-mail and other services, rather than functioning as an entirely separate channel in and of itself. I'd also be surprised if someone didn't start gathering data on the types of messages that the user reads most frequently (a la Google Reader's trends) and then put together a predictive "flagging" feature that would tell the user that they should probably read certain messages first.
But I certainly don't see e-mail going away, anymore than I think that phone calls will go away. It serves too great of a purpose.

Craigslist is great and all, but in some ways, it's just a real pain in the ass. Here's my story and the lessons I've learned. I'm trying to sell a bunch of furniture, so I posted it on craigslist last Sunday. Since then, I've had somewhere on the order of 15 people write me e-mails saying that they're interested and would like to schedule a time to come and see the merchandise. As of yet, I have not sold anything.

Here's what I've learned:

First, a lot of people just suck at writing. Any of you who've keyed into the lol-kitteh (or my personal favorite, the lolrus) speak would instantly recognize the constructions that these people are using. Except, the lol-kitteh people are being ironic. The people that have been sending me inquiries are just incoherent.

Second and more importantly, people treat sellers like crap. For a little over half of these people, I responded within half an hour of receiving the e-mail; the rest got something within a few hours. The follow-up rate has actually been ridiculously low. About 80% of these people never bother to respond, even if I follow-up again by calling them or sending them another message. Of the 20% that do respond, 0% have ever set up a real time to actually come by or just buy the damn thing.

I get that everyone wants to have the freedom to pick and choose the things that they want to buy. I've been on craigslist, I know the deal. But really - you can't take 30 seconds to respond to an e-mail and just say, "Sorry, not interested anymore?"

Truth be told, this isn't all that vexing. I'd really like to get rid of my furniture for more than $0, but if worst comes to worst, I'll figure something out. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot going on in my life. So there you guys go. Next up might be a post on financial markets or something.

[Thanks to phonelesscord for lolcats]

I'm busy doing a bunch of work, but I wanted to drop something in for anyone who's actually checking this place. I've been working on another post, but it's getting long and I don't have the time to accurately finish it.

For those of you who haven't heard, Jerry Falwell died. Those of you that are "big" enough to rise above your personal differences with his opinions will bow your heads at his passing. Those of you that aren't and thought that he was a small-minded racist/bigot/spreader of hate will really enjoy this article from Christopher Hitchens, which tars and feathers his memory, and this article which lists out some of Falwell's more quotable sayings. Here are a few:

On Sept. 11: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.' "

On AIDS: "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals."

On public education: "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them."

On feminists: "I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. ... These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem."

On global warming: "I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We'll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn't returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

This may be one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen. The soundtrack makes it even worse.

One of the canonical utilitarian cases against a deontological system of rights involves a ticking time bomb that can potentially wipe out an entire city and what you would be willing to do to the prisoner that (potentially) knows the bomb's location. The argument, which is still fairly contested, is that torturing that one prisoner is justified - the rights of one cannot be held against the lives of the many.

An editorial from Nick Kristof in the Times suggests that even though that's what some people may think, that's not how they act. More often than not, a single person is actually more important than a group of people, judging by people's willingness to give. The evidence for this hypothesis is as follows:

"In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia — but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.

Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia’s suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern."

This seems at once crazy and yet, hardly surprising. In an age where the global warming movement has to be galvanized by photos of penguins and baby polar bears, and where Terry Schiavo can rouse Congress in a way that the soldiers in Iraq never really could, it seems like this study is really just pointing out the freaking obvious.

One has to wonder what would happen if all the people across the world took the principles of the Enlightenment to heart and started acting in a way that would actually be maximally beneficial for the whole, rather than in a way that just... OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT PUPPY!

A four-day old article in TechCrunch talks about the digital divide in America in light of a recent survey of Internet behavior from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results of the survey look like this (as usual the formatting of this blog is too narrow, so you'll probably have to click through to actually see what's going on here. I'll get around to widening the format sometime.)
Arrington wonders:

"Is the switch off factor strictly a question of Age? The study found that the Top 8% are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age of the Top 8% is 28 with more than half of them under the age of 30. The bottom 15% was not surprisingly older, with a median age of 64 – and as a group reported the lowest levels of household income. And yet this group isn’t entirely switched off: 82% watch TV everyday and 76% have cable or satellite service, and collectively had the highest levels of watching TV or listening to radio of any group in the study; it’s just that there not using Web 2.0."

I think Arrington is partially right - age certainly has something to do with it, but this is most likely a generational issue. The younger generations that grew up with technology are just more comfortable with it and certainly won't start becoming more crotchety about it as they grow older.

I think the surprising statistic is that 70% of the top users are male. You would imagine that in an age where women are outperforming men in higher education, they would be doing equally well in their utilization of technology, or at least their ability to understand how to use it. If that's true, then why are the top users predominantly male?

It's possible that there's a Larry Summer's like answer here - that men are naturally more gifted with technology, etc. But I think that the answer is probably a bit more subtle. My guess is that it's simply another generational issue. Given that the median top user age is about 28, that means that most of these people grew up when computer usage was still equated with pocket protectors, command line prompts, thick-rimmed glasses (before Rivers Cuomo made them into a hipster fashion statement), and a heavy dose of asocial behavior. Computer usage was not equated with self-expression, finding friends, music/movies, and all of this other jazz that Web 2.0 entrepeneurs and Apple are trying to push. At the time, there was probably a social stigma against girls/women using computers and I'm guessing this has had a pretty heavy impact on the number of technologically inclined women. Of the ones that are out there now, I'm guessing that they just happen to be smart enough to have gotten it anyway, without needing to be brought up with it.

Now, in a time when you can't be New York hipster cool if you don't have your own MacBook, website, and MySpace/facebook profile, I'm guessing this gender bias will fade away. It will be interesting to see how the technological profiles of the next generation shape up and its affect on the next wave of technology.

An article in the Times today talks about "Lonesome George," the last of a species of tortoises. I am personally quite fond of turtles and tortoises. In college, I had a pet turtle. My aunt had two tortoises that grew to the point where a 3-year old could have comfortably ridden on them (maybe). However, for all this, I don't think I ever grew this fond of tortoises. Read on:

"A few years later, in 1993, there was briefly a companion known as “Lonesome George’s girlfriend,” but she was not a tortoise. She was a 26-year-old graduate student in zoology from Switzerland named Sveva Grigioni.

By coating her hands in the genital secretions of female tortoises and gently stroking him, she managed to demonstrate a couple of times (in the course of several months’ work) that George was capable of an erection. But whereas her touch could induce other male tortoises to reach orgasm within a few minutes, with George she never managed to collect any sperm."

Did you even know that female tortoises had secretions?

One more thing: Every so often, I check feedburner to see where people are coming from. Check out these phrases that actually got people here:

1. "dog pain"
2. "in how many days does a chicken have their eggs"
3. "how tall am i going to be in the future"
4. "do not eat pig and chicken"
5. "BABYS ABORTIONS"

Now, I sort of get the associations, but these are still really weird. If I Google any of these phrases, a link to my blog is nowhere near the top of the list. So how are these people getting here?

Hello all. I am currently supposed to be working, but have decided to take a quick break. What do I do with my free time? I write to a faceless audience that may/may not be populated with complete strangers.

This Sunday, I saw Spiderman 3. I sort of knew that it wasn't going to be up to expectations - the movie's reviews so far have been pretty ambivalent. Sure enough, the movie was kind of a let-down. There are a lot of things to gripe about - an odd amount of camp was added to the movie (why is Peter Parker dancing like a fool?), the storytelling was more ham-fisted, there were too many thinly laid-out stories, and a lot of the acting felt forced (there's a moment when Peter cries and part of the audience started laughing)

But still, nothing is going to stop this movie from making an insane amount of money, and nothing is going to make the studios believe that simply having Tobey Maguire, Sam Raimi, and Kirsten Dunst in a Spiderman movie is not enough to make the movie great. Still, I'd be surprised if Spiderman 4 does anywhere nearly as well as this one. People are going to remember being let down by this movie and it's going to make them think twice about waiting in line, next time around.

I sent a version of my post to the New York editor at Citysearch. Here's the response I got:

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and helpful feedback. We love hearing from the site's users. You're right, this first phase of changes was largely cosmetic (however, we happen to think that's important to). And we're going to be implementing more changes over the coming months, many of which address your concerns about usability and community.

One thing that may help you in regards to searching around a location. If you know of a business near where you are, you can go to that business' page on our site and then scroll down to the bottom left of the screen, where you'll see something that says "what's nearby"--click on one of the business types (restaurant, bar, etc), and you'll see a map of businesses around that initial location. Not perfect, but hopefully it helps.

-Erin Behan
Senior Editor, New York

It's nice receiving personalized responses. It's also good to hear that they're not sitting around idly. Maybe they'll do something interesting soon.

Citysearch is up today with a brand new look. This may not sound particularly exciting, but it's a big deal for me. Citysearch is how I find new places to eat, which is pretty much my favorite activity in the city.

The listed updates include "brand-new profile pages, better search returns," and videos of local businesses. These changes are, for the most part, purely cosmetic. The profile pages have been reformatted with wider sidebars and larger fonts, meaning that at the end of the day, you have to scroll down farther in order to see the same amount of information. The only real addition seems to be user-specific recommendations on the side bar. It's pretty hard to see what's better about their search returns. And I really have no interest in watching videos of restaurants, which are probably just poorly-produced paid advertisements.

The only revision worth noting is that they did away with their 10-point system, in favor of a 5-star system. I'd say this is another cosmetic change, but it's not. You can no longer see the decimal rating for a place - the smallest increment is now a half of a star. In a world where most people are too nice to give a restaurant a truly bad review, the majority of reviews are going to be pretty tightly clustered in the upper half/quarter of the ratings band. This makes it all the more important for users to be able to see the decimal-level difference. And they took that away.

Citysearch is a property that I both love and hate, and these revisions don't really do much to change that. I find that it is the best repository on the web for finding places within the city. On the other hand, it is also one of the most freakishly stone-aged web site that's around. While every other information-based web site is moving full-blast into Web 2.0, Citysearch and the rest of the IAC-properties staunchly refuse to do anything remotely interesting.

For example, take a look at their "My Citysearch" feature. It's a total joke! It lets you make a bunch of lists, via an incredibly slow process of saving places and then moving them to a list. Why don't they let you search within your lists? Why don't they let you connect with lists made by your friends? For ****'s sake, couldn't they let you tag your saved locations, or at least let you use Citysearch's predefined tags?

As far as I'm concerned, IACI is missing out on a major opportunity here. With half of the web trying to cash in on social networking (I mean, they've got a NASCAR fan social network), it blows my mind that IACI isn't trying to build a massive network based on the actual habits of users. Sure, a lot of the social networking sites out there are fluff and add zero-value. But this could actually be big. One of the major channels for finding new restaurants/bars/places to see in a city is via referral from friends. If IACI could a) help customers easily and accurately record their visiting habits (buy Opentable, you fools!) and b) facilitate linkages between the different profiles, this would be a major benefit to all of their users.

Let's also take a look at their mapping functions. One of the things that I would love to be able to do would be to put in my current position, define what I'm looking for (restaurant, italian, cheap), and then see on a map what comes up within a 5-10 block radius. This is something that, to some extent, I can already do with Google maps. I cannot do this with Citysearch, even though IAC's focused on making major improvements to their Ask maps functionality.

Readers: I've been away for a while. For the last several months, I've been crushed by work. One of those sad things that happens to people that don't have 9-to-5's. There are two key reasons why this has stopped me from writing. The first is that I just didn't have time to write anything. The second and more damning reason is that I didn't really have anything to write about.

Working all the time makes you into a really, really boring person. Because when you do nothing but work, you are effectively being deprived of the opportunity to learn about interesting things (or things that would be interesting to other people, depending on how you look at it). I've barely looked at a book or a newspaper in months, and in fact had to be told about the Virginia Tech shootings by my infinitely more culturally literate girlfriend.

Moreover, once you stop writing, it's hard to get back on the horse. I probably wouldn't even be doing this, if it weren't for the few people that told me to start up again.

So, here's my post for the day. As an analyst at a large consulting firm, you're constantly being
asked to put together slides that make ideas immediately comprehensible. In some instances, this can be accomplished by writing simple, straightforward bullet points. But most of the time, it's better to just have a very clear graphic.

The first example comes from indexed. It very succinctly describes the difficulties in finding adequate mates as we age:

The second example is a Village Voice article on the single, "This is why I'm hot." The article gets a bump because it spends a lot of time illustrating phrases that are otherwise completely retarded. Here's a snippet:

"The most amazing line in "This Is Why I'm Hot"—and, even at this early a juncture, quite possibly the most amazing line of any song to see release in 2007—is "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly/You ain't 'cause you not." Brutal and unassailable in its simplicity. Consider the reasoning, first, of just "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly":
Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? "You ain't 'cause you not" would seem to clear that up:"

That's all for now. I'll try and post an update sometime in the near future.

A recent article in the Times outlines the unfortunate plight of the modern pig. According to cattle-rancher Nicole Niman (Aside: in trying to find out whether she's associated with Niman Ranch, Wikipedia directed me to this utterly bizarre article on lightsaber combat. Somewhat relevant to the criticism of Wikipedia that it's heavy on the information that white, tech-savvy males might know and light on other important issues), pigs are kept in metallic cages so tight that they are unable to even turn around. Their tails are cut off without anesthetic. They are not allowed to roam outside of their cages - not even to handle basic functions. Eating, sleeping, urinating and defecating all happen in the same place (the waste drops into a pit just a few feet below their cages). In order to keep the pigs free from sickness, 10 million pounds of antibiotics are added to their feed, three times the total amount used to treat humans.

There's a wide array of thought about animal rights out there. Peter Singer, one of the largest philosophical proponents for animal rights, argues that the right to minimization of suffering is dependent on the ability to suffer. Pigs, which have intelligence comparable to a dog or small child, are certainly smart enough to know that they are unhappy. Niman points out that many of the crated pigs "exhibit behavior characteristic of humans with severe depression or mental illness." Judge Richard Posner, on the other hand, finds that moral intuition says that "it is wrong to give as much weight to a dog's pain as to an infant's pain."

While there is a substantial portion of the population that thinks Singer is on crack (especially in regard to his views on abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia), I think that we may naturally support his view when faced with the reality of what we are doing. While it is easy to rationalize and say that these animals are simply meat to be put on our plates, I think that that ease has less to do with the fact that they are animals and has more to do with the fact that few, if any, of us ever sees how these animals actually live. We don't have to see the pigs living in a warehouse filled with the stench of their own feces. We don't really think about the fact that millions of male chicks are thrown away upon birth, or that their female counterparts have their beaks cut off with a hot knife and are then thrust into cages so overcrowded that corpses routinely remain unobserved. And because we don't have to deal with that, we're shielded from the visceral consequences of what we do. It's the same sort of shielding that lets people write incredibly nasty messages/e-mails/flames that they would never be able to deliver in person.

I don't consider myself to be an animal rights advocate. Certainly, on the list of global problems that I would fix, it's nowhere even close to the top. And as a mostly carnivorous omnivore, I'm certainly very complicit in the very activity that I'm drawing attention to right now.
However, I do think that if I were to create a bucket of "right" and "wrong," with the former consisting of feeding starving children and the latter of kicking puppies, this would definitely go into the "wrong" bucket.

After college, some of us do things that don't readily lend themselves to conversation. For instance, were any of you to ask me what I'm up to these days, I would tell you that I've been hanging out at the office until around 10 or 11 each day, trying to forecast profits for financial product X, the workings of which would surely be of little interest to any of you. I could certainly talk the job up a lot - from a bird's eye view, it's actually sounds kind of interesting - but that wouldn't tell you anything about what's actually going on in my life.

My friend AKA Media System does not seem to have that problem. Several months ago, he dropped his job in New York and shipped out to Boston. Now, he's "questionably leading" a team at Ambient Devices. More importantly, he's doing his own stuff on his own time and is getting crazy-looking pictures put up in blogs.

If you don't follow the link, it basically discusses how he took a pair of giant green Hulk hands (i.e. big-ass gloves that make threatening Hulk noises when you punch something), soldered a bunch of wires and got them to work as inputs for his drum machines (I've doubtlessly mangled the description, but you get the idea). Other things that he's re-wired include a Boo-bah (which unfortunately had its head ripped off in the process) and a toy cake.

Anyway, my point is this. He's doing something that he enjoys on his own time. I'm envious.

You've got to hand it to conservatives. They really know how to take initiative when people don't agree with them. These initiatives, depending on your perspective, can either be revelatory or completely hysterical.

The latest and greatest comes in the form of the Conservapedia, the conservative response to the "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American" bias of Wikipedia - which is apparently "six times more liberal than the American public." I am incredibly curious as to how you quantify liberalism.

In order to justify its existence, Conservapedia cites a "growing list of examples" that purport to show Wikipedia's clear liberal bias. These include the following:

4. Wikipedia's entry on abortion reads like a brochure for the abortion industry.
5. Initially a Wikipedia admin named "Nearly Headless Nick" deleted, without explaining his decision, an entry about Conservapedia... Wikipedia's entry is filled with obvious bias, numerous errors, out-of-date citations, and self-serving false statements.
9. Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.
15. Wikipedia claims about 1.5 million articles, but what it does not say is that a large number of those articles have zero educational value. For example, Wikipedia has 1075 separate articles about "Moby" and "song". Many hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles -- perhaps over half its website -- are about music, Hollywood, and other topics beneath a regular encyclopedia. This reflects a bias towards popular gossip rather than helpful or enlightening information.

If you are wondering about the educational value that you might find in a Conservapedia article, take a look at this discussion of the kangaroo's origins:

"According to the origins model used by creation scientists, modern kangaroos, like all modern animals, originated in the Middle East^[1] and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined by baraminologists whether kangaroos form a holobaramin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.

Also according to creation science, after the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land^[2] -- as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart^[3] -- or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters^[2]. A recent theory is that the Kangaroos floated on corks rather than vegetation^[2]. Evidence for this theory was produced in the late 18th century during early exploration of central Australia when a large cache of cork was found near modern day Woolumbinda in south western Queensland. The lack of oak trees, from where cork is obtained, throughout the entire continent further reinforces this theory. Early settlers and explorers alike quickly used the cork to create the fly proof hats associated with the area."

Their article on Fox News is also interesting:

"Fox News was started in 1996 in response to the other cable news channels which all had obvious liberal biases. Because of this, Rupert Murdoch decided to start a real new channel which would tell the truth. The success of Fox news over every other news channel is because it is fair and balanced. ^[1] It has many people on it who work to spread truth such as Sean Hannity who is a great American. ^[2]. Fox News is best because instead of just telling you what to think, they only report the news unbiased and then allow the viewer to decide. ^[3].

In 2005 the White House selected Tony Snow from Fox News to be the new White House press secretary which was a great honor for Fox because it showed how well it was presenting the real truth instead of the fake liberal version. ^[4]"

I could go on. But really, the best thing to do is to go over there and read a few articles for yourself.

For a good write-up of Conservapedia, check out jonswift.

[Link via arstechnica]

An editorial from the NYTimes tells me that today's kids are stupider than they were over a decade ago. Standardized testing apparently shows that only 35% of today's 12th graders are proficient at reading, 23% at math. I'm sure that these kids are proficient at a lot of other things that aren't being captured by these tests. But it doesn't matter! Because if you can't read or do math, then you're pretty much screwed going forward.

This actually has profound implications for our country. Supposing that future generations are all this stupid, than I'm going to have to seriously question their ability to accurately pick out a good Gubernatorial/Congressional/Presidential candidate. Instead, they're probably going to gravitate to the type of people that they would have picked to be high school class president. While those people were sometimes highly qualified, other times, they got the position just because they were popular.

Of course, this assumes that the current population is actually intelligent. Fox's new television show, "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" provides strong (if anecdotal) evidence to the contrary. The name of the show is actually a bit misleading - as far as I can tell, the (fake) 5th graders are actually on the same team as the contestant. That said, everything else is about what you'd expect. It's a trivia show where they ask you questions that you should have learned sometime in grade school (some of it in middle school, depending on your school board).

I will readily admit that the show is not as straightforward as it seems. A lot of it is trivia that doesn't necessarily carry forward, e.g. "What constellation is the Big Dipper in?," and "What is the largest species of bear?" But many of the other questions are incredibly easy. Such questions include, "How many E's are there in the phrase, 'Pledge of allegiance?'" and "What country has the longest border along the United States?" Sadly enough, the contestant answering the first question (who went to college and got a GPA of 3.3) required multiple hints from the host. The contestant answering the second question said, "Mexico" because she'd heard a lot about that border.

The cynical, asshole-ish part of me wants to be in the audience, so I can mercilessly heckle these people. At first, I thought that this was an incredibly petty/snotty thing to want. But then I realized that the "5th graders" were actually thinking the same thing. In fact, if you watch footage of them, they are frequently laughing at the contestants, or blatantly rolling their eyes at their blatant stupidity.

The part of me that's not an asshole just wants to get on the show, so I can win a million dollars.

Update:

There are now four dead mice outside of my apartment. If I find eight of them on my next observation, I'll have the beginning of an exponential curve going.

So, I lied.

I said it's been about a week or so.

It had actually been two and a half.

Time flies.

Hello readers.

It's been a week or so. I've been pretty busy. I'm doing some interesting things at work, but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the fact that a week ago, I found a dead mouse outside of my apartment. Not outside of the building, but outside of the window that leads out into my "backyard." That was not the first dead, squishy mouse that I've found out there. It was the third. When I found it, I was momentarily disgusted. Then I was a bit sad. Then I left.

Admittedly, leaving a dead mouse out there to rot is not the most sanitary thing to do. But back then, I really didn't feel like dealing with it. It was cold and I had other things to deal with.

When I came back today, I found that the little bugger had found itself a partner. I can't tell which one was there first - they both look like they're in pretty bad shape. Luckily, there aren't any other animals around to bother them. If I were more enterprising, I would start taking a daily photo log of them and mimic what they did at stinkymeat. But I'm not, and that project was gross anyway.

I'm formulating hypotheses. Here's the main theory: I think that the backyard is some sort of death trap for them. The place where they die is at the base of a set of steps. Everything around those steps is either brick, steel, or glass, so they probably can't tunnel their way out. If I had to make a guess, they probably have been coming from some other place outside, make their way down to the bottom of the steps, then get stuck and die long, slow deaths.

The cruel, apathetic part of me would want to know what gets them first: the cold or the hunger. I'm guessing that I could probably get some insight by looking at the corpses and seeing if the second one tried to eat the corpse of the first one. Anyway.

The other hypothesis I have is that they somehow fell off a ledge from upstairs apartments. The reason I think that this is possible is because they are very, very flat on the bottom. They haven't splatted or anything, but they definitely look a little squished. Also, I saw a note on the front door of the building from another tenant, asking if anyone else had noticed a mouse problem. So, they're definitely elsewhere in the building. Maybe they made their way down to the outside of my apartment via gravity.

One last thought - I'd really love it if there was a way of getting rid of these things without having to actually pick them up. It's not that I'm incapable of doing it. I've picked up a number of dead things in my lifetime, including a rat that had been left in one of those snap-traps for so long that it was completely stiff, from the tip of its tail to the end of its snout. It's just that it's really unpleasant, especially when you have no idea how long it's been there. It's really unpleasant when you don't know how long it's been there, but you know it's been at least a week. At that point, you know that it's going to be completely liquefied on th inside, and so will be unreasonably squishy around the midsection. You also know that it will probably be stuck to the metal floor, so you will have to really get under there, like a spatula beneath an omelette cooking on an un-oiled, brass pan. This is probably a bit too much detail, but it should give you an idea of why I really am not looking forward to doing this.

At one point, I thought about finding a stray animal of some sort that might want to eat these things. But I'm pretty sure that would be wrong and more importantly, way more trouble than its worth.

Anyway, that's enough of that. I'll post something substantive some other time.

There was a time when a good old-fashioned bout of vomiting was a sign that you were having a good, no, an awesome night. That time was called college. Unfortunately, that is clearly no longer true for me.

Yesterday and for a good portion of today, I've been pretty sick in the stomach. Things came out of my stomach that I thought had been put away days ago.

All this while, there have been two things that came to mind. One, I am very lucky to have a loving girlfriend that was willing to take care of me.

Second, I am also extremely fortunate to have health care, courtesy of my employer. The US is currently the only developed nation to not have a universal health care system. This puts us behind many countries that we typically consider to be mildly retarded/backwards, including Canada, Russia, New Zealand, China, Poland, Mexico, and Argentina[1]. Our system currently leaves an estimated 17% of the population uninsured[2]. That translates to roughly 50m people without coverage. While I'm in no position to go off on a discussion of the pros and cons of our current health care system, I will say a few things.

One, health care costs have been going up at about 7% a year. That means that they'll double in a little over a decade, leaving people without health insurance doubly screwed.

Two, I think it would be incredibly frightening to be in a position where you feel deathly ill, aren't sure if your appendix is about to explode, but feel incapable of calling a doctor because you know you won't be able to afford it.

Lastly, according to the Kaiser Foundation, it would cost about $110 billion[3] to provide health care coverage for those that currently are not being covered. The war in Iraq has currently cost us $360 billion[4] and is projected to hit $1-2 trillion[4] before we are done.

So, yeah. That's about it.

[3] The estimate is actually $69 billion, but I've scaled the number up to account for the 7% growth in expense and the growing number of people that are uninsured.

I lived in Cambridge, MA for four years. This does not really give me the authority to comment on how retarded Boston is, but just for the sake of this post, I'm going to pretend that it does.

In all seriousness, Boston is severely retarded in many ways. It is one of the most heavily college-populated towns in the country and yet it restricts people from purchasing alcohol after eleven (it previously stopped people from doing it on Sunday). That may actually be smart, but from the point of view of the college student, it is very stupid.

It has a subway system where you can buy the equivalent of a Metrocard on one of the lines, only to discover that that Metrocard is not accepted at other subway stops, requiring you to purchase tokens to get back to where you cam from. Yeah. Tokens.

Its major, major architectural project, The Big Dig, was originally estimated to cost $2.8BN and end in 1985. As of now, it has cost $14.6BN and only "finished" in January 2006. And by "finished," I mean, got to the point where people could start driving in it, only to notice the thousands of leaks, usage of substandard materials, and collapsing ceilings.

So yeah, Boston is retarded.

Here is the latest manifestation of its retardation: It got freaked out by 40 glowing Mooninite boards that were posted around the city. It was so freaked out, it had bomb squads come in and shut down half the city. Turner Broadcasting had to pay fines of $2MN for being so crazy as to put up advertisements.

In this post-9/11 era, I can vaguely understand why people would respond the way that they did. The one part that doesn't click with me is - why would terrorists decide to make their bombs glow? More importantly, why would they make their bombs look like little block-shaped cartoon characters giving us all the finger? Isn't that a little too much pop-culture for people that hate us because of our godless, commercial excesses/on-going support of Israel?

Anyway, I digress. To read more about it, check out this article.

[Link via Thomas Bechtold]

Recently, I signed up for Feedburner so I could start tracking the traffic data for this site. I'm interested in basically two things - how many people are actually reading this and who those people are. At one point, this wouldn't have been particularly interesting to me. For the most part, I've just been assuming that no one - save for a few friends and family - would actually bother to pay attention. However, there's been a recent wave of anonymous comments (and by "wave," I mean all of 3-4 comments, which is a lot for me) that have piqued my curiosity. Who are you people and how did you get here?

Since I started checking this out, I'll admit to being even more perplexed about who's actually looking at this thing. Given who my friends are and where they're from, I would have guessed that I'd see traffic coming from New York, Boston, and the Bay area. While I'm right about New York, the rest of the traffic is actually coming from LA and Scottsdale. Boston and the Bay Area aren't even on the radar. Which leads me to believe that either this traffic tracker is feeding me BS or I have somehow attracted people from places where my current friend count is zero.

Sweet.

Update: I've had one person come forward. Now all I want to know is who is coming from Iquique, speaks Castilian, and/or is searching for "record tall tallest giantess women videos."

About a month ago, I joined everyone and their hippy mothers by writing a post expressing my concern about global warming. Since then, there's been a heavy flow of writing around the subject. Notable events included:

* The IPCC releasing a summary report [pdf] stating that it is "very likely" that climate change is caused by human activity. For those wondering wtf "very likely" actually means, it means better than 90%, which is pretty freaking likely.
* The US speculating that "putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption" could be a possible means of dealing with global warming. [via The Guardian, report is here in pdf format]
* The NOAA coming out and saying that 2006 was the "Warmest year on record"
* Vinod Khosla saying, "He should see his proctologist to find his head, and you can quote me," referring to the chief executive of Nestle, the food giant, who had questioned global warming. [Link via Valleywag]

There's still a substantial amount of resistance to the whole global warming thing, which I find pretty surprising. For a random sampling, check out these responses to Fred Wilson's blog, or the comments on this Arstechnica article.

Without being a climate expert, it's hard for me to join in the fray and provide long-winded proofs of anything. I can, however, point to the fact that there seem to be people on the "we're not doing it" side that seem to be actively trying to manipulate the conversation so as to change the way that this story plays out [article here, same as above]. While I'm sure there are very intelligent people that believe that anthropogenic climate change is just a mass-media conspiracy, I find myself made increasingly skeptical by the fact that they need to cover things up in order to make their point.

Update:
The American Enterprise Institute just sent out a letter offering scientists $10,000 plus travel expenses to write criticisms of the IPCC's findings. The paper they hope to sponsor will "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model [forecasting] outputs as they pertain to the development of climate policy..." The letter goes on to criticize the IPCC for being "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work."

Some scientists have criticized the letter, as it is actively soliciting papers with a particular outcome. The American Enterprise Institute receives funding from Exxon ($240k in 2005, $1.6m in total), which they claim represents less than 1% of their total funding. More than 20 of its staff members have worked as consultants for the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former ExxonMobil head, is the vice chairman on their board of trustees.

The Exxon connection is considered significant, as there is a widespread perception that Exxon is actively funding agencies in an effort to cloud public perception on the dangers of public warming. To date, Exxon has spent $16m on funding for 43 "organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science," according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

[Sources: CNN and the Guardian]