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August 31, 2008
Weirdness at the movies
I just finished the fabulous movie Once Upon a Time in America. The movie is very long. It its uncut theatrical form it runs 229 minutes. But my copy was 219 minutes. Now, I don't think I've ever seen a non-tv movie that was 3 hours and 39 minutes. Nevertheless, I wondered what happened to my 10 minutes of movie. You may have noticed (although I did not) that 219/229 is approximately 96% which is 24/25. That didn't mean much to me, but it seems to mean a lot to film buffs.
TV is interlaced while film is not. That means that at the movies you see 24 frames per second, but you see the whole image, while TV is interlaced, meaning that see alternating frames of the odd and even lines of the image, but on PAL (the format of my DVD) is 50 frames a second you see 50 of them a second. Of course, 24 x 2 is not equal to 50. They solve this with a cheat. They make a second of TV footage out of 25 frames of film footage. Therefore, 24 seconds of home DVD covers 25 seconds of the movie. And so the movie takes only 96% as long to play, even though it contains all the images and out of the original. Just like watching it a bit speeded up. This of course slightly changes the pitch of the music and tone of voice of all the actors. This is of great annoyance to film purists, but little can be done.
Source:
PAL's 4% Speedup
Oh, and I'm a believer in the "Opium Theory" and not the story at face value.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:07 AM | Comments (1)
August 30, 2008
Move On is really not getting their money's worth on this advertisement
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2008
Some class from the McCain camp
DAYTON, Ohio -- The Obama campaign was already nervous that Senator John McCain might try to steal the show from their big night by letting the name of his running mate selection slip out, and when the McCain campaign announced Thursday that it would run a new television commercial during their convention, those fears intensified. Skip to next paragraph 2008 Democratic Convention
But when it was finally broadcast, the television advertisement that they had feared would be a knife in their back turned out to be something of a Valentine."Senator Obama, this is truly a good day for America," Mr. McCain said, talking straight to the camera, in a striking departure from some of the pointed advertisements he has run of late. "Too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed. So I wanted to stop and say, Congratulations. How perfect that your nomination would come on this historic day. Tomorrow, we’ll be back at it. But tonight, Senator, job well done."
McCain Ad Is Valentine to Obama on Big Day
This was a good decision for McCain, a real menchadic thing to do. I'm proud to live in a country where having a black parent is not an obstacle to being a serious contender for president. Plus, this acts as great cover for the attack advertisements that McCain has to run. He can say:
1) Nothing personal, when it was time to be personal I was friendly
2) I say what needs to be said, sometimes it is pretty and sometimes ugly
Both seem keeping with McCain's image of being a warrior with honor and a straight shooter. .
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:59 PM | Comments (0)
A great Radio Head concert
A fabulous concert with great music, an amazing light show, and free tickets in the second row because TheBlueEYedGirl knows a roady. What could be bad about that*.
* Well, actually the area was so crowded that it took us an hour to get out of the venue parking lot, but local radio station FM 94.9 was playing more Radio Head until 2 AM, so at least it was a nice wait.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)
Tumi comes through in the end
I father was given a set of Tumi bags for his 50th birthday and they met neither his style nor functional needs for travel. So he gave them to me, and I've enjoyed using them for travel when I am able to do so lightly. They are two carry on bags, the smaller one doesn't see much use, but I like to pair the larger one with my large backpack to trips where I don't need to pack dress clothing requiring a garment bag. The years have not been kind to this bag. The finish was scuffed and faded. In the interior the liner had pulled away in multiple places. Now Tumi bags are expensive, but the Tumi's Total Commitment Warranty is hardly a lifetime one. This is what they promise:
We do have many customers with older, well-traveled bags that they would like to have refurbished or repaired. For these customers, we offer courteous, responsive service and the highest quality repairs and refurbishment at reasonable cost. Many parts are stocked for up to five years after the style is discontinued. If we are unable to repair the bag, we will suggest alternative options. Please call before sending your product for repair or refurbishment to discuss shipping and handling costs and other fees.
I went to the Tumi store in NYC to have my bag repaired. They charged me $15, which I thought was round trip shipping for my bag, and where they would determine the costs associated with the repair. I also wanted to know how much it would be to refinish the outside of the bag. I was disappointed to learn a few weeks later that the repair would cost $95, which included another $15 in return shipping and $40 for the outside polish. I made a bit of a stink, and they waved the $15 fee, but they said that the repair of the outside involved a full redying of the bag and that to do the liner repair work I requested they had to disassemble the whole bag, necessitating the larger charges than I expected. I decided to go for it and they charged my credit card. A few weeks later I get an odd email.
An estimate regarding the repair of this bag was sent to you on the date noted above.
We need to have your approval of the estimate along with the required credit card information (if you
are a consumer) before we can begin the repairs.
Kindly contact our Consumer Affairs/Customer Service Department:
CONSUMERS CONTACT: RETAILERS CONTACT:
FAX: 1-912-537-2057 FAX: 1-888-329-8864
E-mail: repair-estimates@tumi.com
Telephone: 1-800-781-8864 Telephone: 1-800-322-8864
If we have not heard from you within 30 days from the receipt of this letter
your bag will be returned.
As this will be our last reminder, we hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
[Tumi] Customer Service
Since I'd already been charged several weeks earlier and I had another trip in 2 weeks (now a few days away) I was upset by this. I called them up and told them that this was in error. After a lot of searching they still could not find any record of my conversation or repair bill. I offered to conference Tumi in with my credit card company to prove it, but miraculously they managed to find it after that. It seems it was in the wrong place. They said they were sorry and expedited my repair.
The bag arrived yesterday. It exceeded all my expectations. Except for a few non-repairable scratches on the bottom of the bag, the bag smells and looks brand new. Except better, because like most well made leather products it has softened and improved with age. Now I have a shiny, dark black, well traveled, glove leather soft leather bag. I am pleased by the outcome if not the process. Had I known that the work would be this exceptional I would have suffered the misleading, expensive and incompetent service procedure with less annoyance.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:45 AM | Comments (0)
What should an Omnivore try before he dies?
Adam Kuban at Serious Eats tips me off to the The Omnivore's 100 list . I've tried 69 items off of Adam's list, which seems decent for a foody that hasn't devoted serious time and effort to seeking out exotic foods.
I think the Eastern European Jewish delicacies of gefilte fish, schmaltz, and chopped liver belong on this list, but so should pizza (imagine if you'd never had it), and a chirashi from a great Japanese restaurant.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:38 AM | Comments (3)
August 26, 2008
I thought this was execellent
To an economist, any conceptual distinction between "hedging" and "speculation" is inherently problematic. When an oil refiner takes a position with futures contracts, it is unlikely to be ignoring its own guess as to where prices are heading. But making a bet based on such guesses seems to be the definition many people have in mind when they speak of "speculation." On the other hand, when a pension fund manager takes a modest long position in commodities, that can reduce the overall variance of the portfolio due to the negative correlations between commodity price changes and other asset returns, which would most naturally be described as hedging against inflation risk. The idea that the motives of a given trader can always be classified as either pure hedging or pure speculation, and that the positions of commercial versus noncommercial traders reported by the CFTC give us meaningful information about those motives, strikes me as a very dubious proposition. Discovering a potential "misclassification" could hardly be the basis for becoming legitimately alarmed. More speculation about those oil speculators
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2008
This is madness
I'm pretty sure every regular reader around here was at my wedding. As you may recall, TheBlueEyedGirl and I choose A Whole New World from Disney's Aladdin as our song. A bit of an embarrassing choice but we had our reasons. Nick Pitera is a 22 year old animator who works for Pixar who sings a version of this song that will surprise you. If you don't care for the song, just skip to 50 seconds in and watch from there.
No, I don't know how he does it. I'm pretty sure this is real.
He went to Ringling College of Art and Design, which sounds like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College but is different. I was sad to learn that the clown college closed in 1997.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2008
Unpleasant truth of the day
In sport after sport, evidence shows that the top female professional athletes in the world are on par with the best American 14- and 15-year-old boys.Olympian Political Correctness
I had a friend in college who's high school soccer team had played and then tied the American woman's World Cup team. Those are the ones that won the contest and that woman took her top off in celebration. Another friend in college, by no means the best athlete in my fraternity said that he ran his track and field event in high school faster than the woman's world record. As for me, I bet the only thing I could could do better than the woman's record is the leg press, where I can do about 700 pounds.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:56 PM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2008
Tune the engine all you want, but if you need a lot of power then buy a big one
High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius is an article that attempts to elucidate the causes of intelligence through the findings of a series of experiments by neurologists. A couple of things struck me about these papers.
The first is that the article mentions sample sizes in these experiments and they are all very small, with none larger than 50. There is a strong concern that with this small sample that phenomena involving a large number of parameters will not appear distinct from noise. In one experiment mentioned, an experimenter measures 10 brain regions in 47 people. Even if brain weight is a cause and not an effect of intellect is a big if. Arguendo, if there is covariance in the distribution of these regions then a sample this small could have 110 parameters (10 coefficients and 100 entries in the covariance matrix). You can't have more parameters than members of your sample! Even if they are all independent you'd still have 20 parameters and 47 observations. That's at the very lowest bounds of what is enough data to do statistics.
Second the causality arguments seem flawed to the point of establishing nothing. The seem to fall into two categories. The primary one is that somehow correlation is causality, that is, I observe a simple correlation between two data series I observe therefore one causes the other. The alternative is post hoc ergo prompter hoc, which is that I did something and then something happened and therefore I must have caused it.
I recognize that MRI time is expensive and funding is scarce. But if this is the best you can come up with with the budget you have then why bother?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:33 AM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2008
Yes, I know it is just an advertisement
I find the Boom De Yada advertisement for the Discovery Channel an inspiring look at our shared monkey curiosity.
Actually, I find it a bit like the Where the Hell is Matt? video.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
This comic blew my mind
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
Why some countries are rich and others are poor
I share with you this tragic story of human drive, ingenuity, hard work envy, and socialism from a fabulous article on the loss and repair of farming soils, Our Good Earth.
For a time Ouédraogo worked with a farmer named Yacouba Sawadogo. Innovative and
independent-minded, he wanted to stay on his farm with his three wives and 31 children. "From my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather, we were always here," he says. Sawadogo, too, laid cordons pierreux across his fields. But during the dry season he also hacked thousands of foot-deep holes in his fields—zaï, as they are called, a technique he had heard about from his parents. Sawadogo salted each pit with manure, which attracted termites. The termites digested the organic matter, making its nutrients more readily available to plants. Equally important, the insects dug channels in the soil. When the rains came, water trickled through the termite holes into the ground. In each hole Sawadogo planted trees. "Without trees, no soil," he says. The trees thrived in the looser, wetter soil in each zai. Stone by stone, hole by hole, Sawadogo turned 50 acres of wasteland into the biggest private forest for hundreds of miles.Using the zaï, Sawadogo says, he became almost "the only farmer from here to Mali who had any millet." His neighbors, not surprisingly, noticed. Sawadogo formed a zaï association, which promotes the technique at an annual show in his family compound. Hundreds of farmers have come to watch him hack out zai with his hoe. The new techniques, simple and inexpensive, spread far and wide. The more people worked the soil, the richer it became. Higher rainfall was responsible for part of the regrowth (though it never returned to the level of the 1950s). But mostly it was due to millions of men and women intensively working the land.
Last year Reij made a thousand-mile trek across Mali and then into southwestern Burkina with Edwige Botoni, a researcher at the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel, a regional policy center in Burkina. They saw "millions of hectares" of restored land, Botoni says, "more than I had believed possible." Next door in Niger is an even greater success, says Mahamane Larwanou, a forester at Abdou Moumouni Dioffo University in Niamey. Almost without any support or direction from governments or aid agencies, local farmers have used picks and shovels to regenerate more than 19,000 square miles of land.
Economics as much as ecology is key to Niger's success, Larwanou says. In the 1990s the Niger government, which distributed land in orthodox totalitarian fashion, began to let villagers have more control over their plots. People came to believe that they could invest in their land with little risk that it would be arbitrarily taken away. Combined with techniques like the zaï and cordons pierreux, land reform has helped villagers become less vulnerable to climate fluctuations. Even if there were a severe drought, Larwanou says, Nigeriens "would not feel the impact the way they did in 1973 or 1984."
Burkina Faso has not recovered as much as Niger. Sawadogo's story suggests one reason why. While villagers in Niger have gained control over their land, smallholders in Burkina still lease it, often for no charge, from landowners who can revoke the lease at the end of any term. To provide income for Burkina's cities, the central government let them annex and then sell land on their peripheries—without fairly compensating the people who already lived there. Sawadogo's village is a few miles away from Ouahigouya, a city of 64,000 people. Among the richest properties in Ouahigouya's newly annexed land was Sawadogo's forest, a storehouse of timber. Surveyors went through the property, slicing it into tenth-of-an-acre parcels marked by heavy stakes. As the original owner, Sawadogo will be allotted one parcel; his older children will also each receive land. Everything else will be sold off, probably next year. He watched helplessly as city officials pounded a stake in his bedroom floor. Another lot line cut through his father's grave. Today Yacouba Sawadogo is trying to find enough money to buy the forest in which he has invested his life. Because he has made the land so valuable, the price is impossibly high: about $20,000. Meanwhile, he tends his trees. "I have enough courage to hope," he says.
Remember this story the next time someone tells you that development aid is the answer. Africans are not as helpless as these seem, and their governments are are more culpable that casual inspection suggests.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2008
Someone is awake over there
I just noticed in the Amazon Kindle's demo video that the very first text that they show you is an excerpt from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. For those not in the know, Diamond Age is a fantastic sci-fi story centering around a nano-technology based book which can change its pages to show video and different text as needed and is able to download information from the internet (or what the internet becomes). That makes it an inspired choice as the text to show on the Kindle.
Oh, and by the way, you can buy a kindle for $70 off if you have an Amazon Visa and $100 if you are willing to get one. That means you can have it for less than $300. I have to say that is quite tempting. And since you can use the Wisper Net for free with the experimental browser, you can use it to check your email and read your Google Reader for free. Maybe that's not much to the fancy Iphone and Blackberry users out there, but to me I can buy a kindle for the price of less than 6 months worth of internet access on my phone. Woot!
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:50 AM | Comments (2)
August 20, 2008
Interesting comment of the day
I thought it was interesting that the estimated electoral votes by each of the major presidential candidates is effectively a tie: Obama 264 McCain 261 Ties 13. I shared it with a politically minded member of my extended family.
He wrote back with a comment I haven't heard put this well before:
Indeed, he seems to be suffering from the length of the election cycle...One thing is clear -- Obama won’t win on his own strength -- he’ll be carried on the Democrats' coattails rather than the reverse.. I guess a lot of people have said that this is the Democrats' year, what with "everyone" so mad at Bush's performance, but a lot of people have also pointed out what a charismatic, tall, articulate, and demographically desirable candidate Obama is as well.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
August 19, 2008
Funny insanity
How to win a fight against twenty children
Oh, and did you see this?
Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:13 PM | Comments (1)
August 15, 2008
Enhancing video using still photography
Check out this amazing video that demonstrates a new technique for enhancing the color, lighting and even composition of video by taking photographs of the the same scene and using a computer to integrate them. It seems that many of these tasks had been accomplished before in other ways. However, if you take their word for it, it hasn't been done as neatly and well as they have done it in this project.
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene
Bhat P., Zitnick L., Snavely N., Agarwala A., Agrawala M., Curless B., Cohen M., Kang S. Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene. Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2007.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:43 AM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2008
More related headlines?
U.S. and Poland Agree to Missile Defense Deal
and
Russia Vows to Support Two Enclaves, in Retort to Bush
Further discussion of America and free Europe's choices in dealing with a newly bellicose Russia over at Q and O in Krauthammer (and others) whiffs
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:19 PM | Comments (0)
What to do with a lot of cash?
Not that I have this problem, but it is possible to get the federal government to insure your bank deposits for more than the $100,000 that the FDIC insures without splitting it up with accounts at many banks. The program is called the Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service or CDARS, pronounced "cedars." and it allows you to have up to $50 million in FDIC insured deposits. There are also a few other special retirement accounts that are insured up to $250,000.
But what exactly are you insuring here? Part of the insurance you are buying here (they lower yields on the CDs by 15 basis points) is against a horrific bank failure where multiple US banks fail. THat certainly is possible, but one has to be concerned against the FDIC being able to pay out against claims under such circumstances. Even if they can, will they do so with money from the government printing presses unleashing inflation that eats up much of the value of your investment any way? So if you are planning to hold a massive amount of cash, I suggest considering a bit of currency and government diversification. The International Association of Deposit Insurers notes that "As of 2008, 99 countries have instituted some form of explicit deposit insurance–up from 12 in 1974." Therefore, you could easily open up accounts near the limit in every country that provides fully insured deposits and is well governed. Then no one country's economic implosion would affect your access to valuable and liquid assets. The administration and FX costs wouldn't be trivial, but the quality of insurance might be significantly better.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)
A couple of business ideas
I went on a bike ride with a friend yesterday and as we talked we talked about our two new business ideas we had.
First is his idea which I share with his permission.
You know head shops, the places that sell marijuana paraphernalia, silly t-shirts, and black light posters? His idea was for a head shop that took trade-ins on pieces. He had recently found a very expensive bong in the trash that he didn't care for. He thought, wouldn't it be great if he he could clean it really well and trade it in for something he liked at a store. He mentioned other stories of people finding pieces they didn't like or simply growing tired of the ones they had. The deal would be that you would clean your piece, show id (like a pawn shop) to reflect where the piece came from, and then you'd get store credit towards buying something else. A functioning two-way market could encourage non-illegal uses for the glass-art like collection and illegal users could avoid wasting a hundred dollars or more on pieces that they later decided they didn't like. Of if a bum roommate left nothing behind but a water pipe you could at least get a couple of Grateful Dead t-shirts out of it.
My idea was for a hair thickening shampoo with sunblock built in. Many balding men have to carefully put sunblock on their heads after they shower in the morning to protect their scalps from the sun. This product would be marketed as an all-in-one scalp and hair treatment to simplify morning preparations. Simply apply it to your scalp and as the foam washes and thickens your hair it also protects your scalp. The soap washes away but the sunblock doesn't. If chemically that isn't possible then you could combine a scalp treatment, sunblock and hair styling gel for those with thinning but not entirely absent hair.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:52 AM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2008
Ways to help Georgia
I didn't have many ideas on how to help Georgia (I wish I understood what was happening in Georgia better) but I did think we should do something. Even the ceasefire seems to have been abandoned by Russia (Bush Sends Aid to Georgia as Russians Occupy a City). The WSJ provided a harsh but accurate assessment of what could be done for Georgia.
Much as it respects and owes Georgia, the U.S. is not going to war with Russia over a non-NATO ally. But there are forceful diplomatic and economic responses at its disposal. Expelling Russia from the G-8 group of democracies, as John McCain has suggested, is one. Barring Russia's long desired entry into the World Trade Organization is another. Russian leaders should also be told that their financial assets held abroad aren't off limits to sanction. And Moscow should know that the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi on the Black Sea are in jeopardy. A country that starts a war on the weekend the Beijing Olympics began doesn't deserve such an honor.
The Georgian people also deserve U.S. support. One way to demonstrate that would be a "Tbilisi airlift," ferrying military and humanitarian supplies to the Georgian capital, which is currently cut off by Russian troops from its Black Sea port. Secretary of State Rice or Defense Secretary Robert Gates should be in one of the first planes. After the fighting ends, the U.S. can lead the recovery effort. And since the Russians are demanding his ouster, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili deserves U.S. support too. Moscow wants a puppet leader in Tbilisi, and U.S. officials are playing into Valdimir Putin's hands with their media whispers that this is all Mr. Saakashvili's fault.
Bush and Georgia
Meanwhile, the NY Times reports that some of this is already happening:
The United States, Mr. Bush said, “stands with the democratically elected government of Georgia and insists that its sovereignty and territorial integrity be respected.” He said a transport plane was already on its way to Georgia, carrying medical supplies and a contingent of Army and Navy forces to carry out an aid mission.
There probably are some Georgians that hope that Russian military forces end up killing some of our troops as a causus belli for our active participation in the conflict. Then again, when we hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade the Chinese accepted our apologies, so maybe that wouldn't happen.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:16 PM | Comments (0)
Newest Bond movie
I noticed that the next Bond Movie will be called Quantum of Solace.
What do you think are the odds that the word quantum is used properly? I looked up quantum in the dictionary and was surprised to learn that it can be used to mean both a large quantity and the smallest amount of something. So if complying with any of the definitions counts, then I'd say it is a high probability.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:00 PM | Comments (0)
Interesting words of the day
Bryan Caplan offers a motivation for discrimination on the basis of statistical features of the group being discriminated against.
A key building block of statistical discrimination is the assumption of stereotype accuracy. For statistical discrimination to be stable, the stereotypes that market participants rely upon must be accurate statistical generalizations. ... The upshot is that stereotypes may actually be self-reversing rather than self-fulfilling. The marginal payoff of distinguishing yourself from the pack is high if people think poorly of the typical member of the pack. ...Some young women are 100% focused on their careers, and don't want kids. Most young women, however, do want kids, and intend to strike a balance between work and family. That balance often involves receiving expensive job training from a firm, then quiting before the firm can recoup its expenses.
Under current law, an employer isn't even allowed to ask about a female applicant's child-bearing plans. If you wanted to blow up the glass ceiling, though, you should not only allow employers to ask; you should allow them to offer deals like "We'll hire you, but your health insurance doesn't cover pregnancy." The career woman would be happy to sign, reassuring the employer.
How will that help women? It won't! On average, it's a wash: It will help career-minded women, and hurt the rest. And if you want to judge female workers on the basis of individual productivity, that is exactly what should happen.
The Truth Hurts: What Harford Didn't Say About Statistical Discrimination
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:24 AM | Comments (0)
Three cheers for a sense of humor
I've long disliked people without a sense of humor. For that reason, while I've respected Martha Stewart for her business accomplishments and her massive home making skills, I haven't really liked her personally in the sense of wanting to meet or know her because she seems so humorless. I'm pleased to report that I was wrong about her. Not only does she have a sense of humor, but she has one strong enough to make fun of herself. I found out this morning that she will be launching Mystery Science Theater 3000-type show where she makes fun of the the earliest episodes of her Martha Stewart Living show.
And so, Whatever, Martha! was born. The Fine Living Network will unveil the new comedy series on September 16. It will be hosted by Alexis Stewart, Martha's daughter, and Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, Alexis Stewart's cohost on the Martha Stewart Radio show Whatever. The two will poke fun of Martha's unfortunate outfits, anal retentive tendencies, and "habit of mixing sexual innuendo with her household hints."...
"Contrary to popular opinion, I do have a sense of humor," Martha told the New York Times, which reported on the new show. The sense of humor will breathe new life into old material, like the fabulous old-school Martha clips below.
'Whatever, Martha!' Mocks Vintage Martha Stewart TV Shows
Martha Stewart is not widely known for her sense of humor. But she is in on this particular joke. In fact, she created it, dreaming up the premise after watching reruns of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" during a sleepless night. That series, produced from 1988 to 1999, delivered sarcastic commentary about old horror movies, and had blossomed into a cable cult hit. ... And what if her core audience members don’t find it funny? "My die-hard fans might get upset," Martha Stewart said. "If they do, then they just shouldn’t watch it."Show Skewers Martha Stewart, With Her Blessing
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:50 AM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2008
Deletionists will win many battles but the inclusionists are obviously winning the war
In Wikipedia terms, a culture clash has emerged between deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists want to keep the bar relatively high. Recently they managed to delete the Port Macquarie Presbyterian Church, New South Wales, Australia, on grounds of non-notability, and the "List of Films With Monkeys in Them," on grounds of "listcruft." Still, even deleted articles survive, on Deletionpedia: 50,000 and counting.Inclusionists, meanwhile, keep saying, "Wiki is not paper."
Things fission and multiply. The Wikipedia pages on Deletionism and Inclusionism will lead you, if you care to follow, to pages on Mergism and Incrementalism. Also to Factionalism -- because the factions have formed not only Associations of Deletionist Wikipedians and Inclusionist Wikipedians but also (can it ever end?) the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They Are Deletionists. Fighting back against deletions is the Article Rescue Squadron. "The deletionists should be aware that all their patriotic work is for naught, as one day all those articles are coming right back," says the user called Jidanni.
'It's a struggle that always came up at the margins," Mr. Wales says, "but as we become bigger and bigger and bigger it becomes a much larger thing." He worries particularly about Biographies of Living Persons, "a huge policy area for us that causes a lot of conflicts and a lot of complaints and a lot of complicated ethical concerns." The more obscure a person is, the harder it is to maintain quality -- to catch hatchet jobs, for example. Wikipedia insists on verifiable sources,meaning written sources, but more and more of the world's information is not written on paper; it is part of an oral or an online tradition.
Wikipedia has reached a delicate point, I think. Unlike trivial edit wars, the battle between deletionists and inclusionists has no clear path to peace, because ultimately both sides have a claim on Wikipedia's core values. The deletionists carry the banner of quality, of verifiability, of trust. The inclusionists say that more information is always better: Any article that can be deleted can be improved instead. Information glut? Bring it on. They quote Stanislaw Lem: "We want the Demon, you see, to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future...."
To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows. Certainly the fervor was on display in Alexandria. Mr. Wales himself tries not to take sides, but if the practical worries could be forgotten -- if Wikipedia had the resources to maintain the quality of even the most obscure entries -- he, personally, would open the doors even wider. The Library of Babel doesn't scare Mr. Wales. "I'd be happy to have, in theory, a good, neutral biography on every single person on the planet," he says. "I mean why not, right?"
Wikipedians Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt
The spectacular growth of pages in Wikipedia continues and though battles may continue between deletionists and inclusionists, it is oblivious that inclusionists are winning the battle of ideas. For example, entire worlds of fiction have their minutiae documented within the system and a massive number of minor academics and politicians have pages. I predict that the standard for inclusion will continue to decline over time. Obscure pages are less of a communal editing project and more likely to be a product of a lone face with his corresponding mistakes. Therefore, you'll just have to consume it thoughtfully, knowing that obscure pages have fewer eyeballs on them to catch errors and bias.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:25 PM | Comments (0)
Amazing fact of the day
Patrick Fleenor, an expert on tobacco taxes at the Tax Foundation, estimates that there is "now a 75% gap between cigarette sales in the city and cigarette consumption." In other words, three out of four cigarettes are bought elsewhere or are contrabandCigarette Tax Burnout
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:10 PM | Comments (0)
Why are Burning Man tickets expensive?
I was peaking over at the 2008 BURNING MAN TICKET INFORMATION after stumbling upon the main burning man website after reading The First-Timer’s Guide to Participating at Burning Man. Not that I'm planning on going, but I've been interested in the event for a while. I was surprised to learn that this year most tickets are $295 and unless you get one of the special scholarship tickets the cheapest you can get them for is $210. I'm sure that for participants Burning Man is still a great value, I just was wondering about the finances of the event.
I don't know all the services provided, and certainly handling security, waste disposal and permits are a pain and costly, but that still seems expensive. For example, Coachella, a multi-day live music event in similar outdoor circumstances charges $269 a ticket for the event but that price pays for three days of live music. I don't doubt that Burning Man is even more entertaining and it does last longer. However, the producers don't actually provide most of what makes Burning Man fun -- right?
So would any of the at least two burners who are likely read this care to explain? Have ticker prices gone up a great deal? Did I miss a lot of the services they provide? Have their been complaints? Is the new policy on "no at the door ticket sales" an attempt to keep out the Vegas crowd? Are the producers taking home a lot of money from throwing Burning Man?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:17 PM | Comments (1)
I like Cooqy
Cooqy is a website that allows you a variety of advanced search capabilities on Ebay. I like it because (among other reasons and unlike Ebay) it allows you to do searches by price including shipping, not just based on current auction price.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:38 PM | Comments (0)
I wish I understood what was happening in Georgia better
You probably have noticed that Russia and Georgia are at war, and depending on who you ask this is about controlling the Baltic's oil, the break away republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Nato's position of Kosovo's independence, or Russia's neo-imperial ambitions fueled by high oil prices. I don't know much about the situation, although it appears that Georgia through the first punch in response to a Russia troop buildup. On the ethics of succession, Volokh has an interesting post called South Ossetia and the Morality of Secession:. The comments on that post are also interesting.
I was surprised to learn that Georgia is the third largest provider of foreign troops in Iraq. If we are going to take military help from allies then honor would seem to dictate that they be returned assistance in their time of need. However, no interest (Georgian, American, Russian or anyone else's) is served if Russia and America have a full on hot war. It seems that America is going to help the Georgians get their 1,700 troops out Iraq(Georgia to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq) and it would be nice if, at the minimum we could leak them some high-tech goodies to help them in their struggle. One commentator at Volokh suggested that f-22's flying out of Israel or Iraq. It has about a 1800 mile range which is more than enough it to cover the distance from either if you can get the airspace rights. By just providing air support you might be able to protect Georgian interests. But you might also start a nuclear war, so I have no idea what to do.
Update:
The week in review section of the NY Times has a decent summary of the political situtation:
Taunting the Bear
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2008
How not to solve the energy problem
Friedman has a bad Op-Ed on energy in today’s NY Times,Flush With Energy . Here is the setup:
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)
The article goes on to praise biking, dual flush toilets, and wind power as the solution. But even he admits that Danish energy consumption is higher now than it was before the last oil price spike in the 1970's and that they sell oil from drilling in the North Sea. In fact, Denmark produces 346,200 barrels a day and consumes 218,000 barrels a day. So you can encourage biking and have expensive gas, but the only way you are going to become a net energy exporter (what energy independence really means) is if you drill a lot more off shore. According to NASA, US consumption is a third higher than in the 70's. So if we came upon an oil find that was as comparably big to the USA's 70's oil consumption as the North Sea was to Denmark's and our consumption grew by a third, then we'd probably be energy independent too. And we would do so without the same devotion to wind and biking.
Then he proceeds with this bizarre quote:
"I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up," Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. "The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income -- so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy."
As I showed above, the only thing they really did to stay energy independent was drill more. The high prices may make them consume less, but really doesn't explain what happened. They are still addicted to oil in the sense that their economy requires it to fly planes and move cars and trucks, and these high prices have just decreased the habit.
Plus, these energy taxes are highly regressive. Variation in income is much larger than variation in consumption and probably larger still than variation in energy consumption. Therefore, any tax on energy consumption is going to hurt the poor for whom energy costs are a relatively larger part of their budget. That doesn't make it bad policy, but the sorts of people who advocate these policies tend to be the same sorts that are against flat taxing structures. At least in America, most of the poor pay almost no income taxes anyway, so this will be a straight up tax hike for them.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:48 AM | Comments (0)
August 9, 2008
Just about says how I feel about the Olympics
I'm not into watching sports. I feel that national Olympic programs are mostly a waste of time and money. The current Olympics gives China, one of the most evil governments on earth, an opportunity to strut and crush internal decent.* And so when I saw this recent headline on The Onion, I had to share.
Man Gets In Best Shape Of Life To Hang From Bar
*
In crowds, keep an eye out for placid-looking men between 25 and 45 years old in Chinese dressy casual—dark slacks and golf shirts or dress shirts—with oversized cell phones carried low by their sides. They're looking for signs of unrest, including protests or unauthorized acts of journalism. Inside the arenas, police will be wearing Olympic volunteer uniforms so as not to dampen the atmosphere. Don't forget to notice the ubiquitous electronic auxiliary force of security cameras—armed with face-recognition and crowd-behavior-analysis software. Smile!
The Beijing Olympics: a Visitors' Guide
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:31 PM | Comments (0)
August 8, 2008
Watch Carefully
The amazing color changing card trick
I found this through the paper Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research which has Teller (the quiet one in the magic duo of Penn and Teller) as one of the authors.
On a side note, check out this note from Penn and Teller's Wikipedia page:
Penn Jillette has told interviewer Larry King that a big part of the duo's success and longevity is due to the fact that they have never been close friends. They enjoy working together immensely, but have little in common besides magic. They have drastically different lifestyles and interests, and rarely socialize or interact when not working. Jillette believes that their partnership succeeds precisely because they give each other a great deal of space off-stage.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:54 PM | Comments (0)
August 6, 2008
Valuing social networks
Giblfiz writes in to suggest the article:
I wish people would stop using "economy" as just a smart-sounding metaphor
The piece attempts to put some hard numbers on putting hard fiscal and numerical values on the reputations established on the web. As a rule of thumb, he suggests starting with your page rank on Google, which implies a certain number of page views for each keyword searched, multiply this by the price of advertising using these keywords and sum across all keywords and there you go, an economic value to your reputation.
This is an interesting first order attempt but I see a few obvious flaws. Google doesn't control all the searches, and does so non-randomly, so this method doesn't clearly provide a true value, just a minimum. It also, much like the difference between market exchange rates and PPP, understates the impact and value of contributions by people living in poor areas. They punch above their weight in economic impact because even though they cannot afford much in the global economy they buy a lot of local, non-transportable, and perishable goods that are disproportionately cheap in poor areas. There is also a problem with externalities that I doubt is captured by this. Your website on bees may in fact motivate people to perform more searchs about bees than would otherwise be there. So your value isn't just in the keywords you get, but also the keywords that others get only because of you.
But I wonder about the ultimate aim here. I thought much of the premise of the reputational economy was that it was post-scarce. Consider the famous example of diamonds and water. Diamonds are rare and (almost) useless, water is common and useful, yet the price of the former is high and the latter low. Price and importance are differ. When we think about how important something is, we are thinking about the total economic value of all the item, with respect to the next best alternative. In water's case that is huge. Price however is more about marginal value. One diamond has much more value than a glass of water, but all water is much more valuable than all the diamonds.
Something similar must be true about the economics of reputations. The adwords prices represent the marginal value of the electronic reputation and not the total.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:42 AM | Comments (0)
August 5, 2008
Connected headlines
Much has been said of the costs of the Iraq war and very little about the costs of not waging the Iraq war. Which brings us to a piece in today's WSJ, My Bet With Francis Fukuyama.
I'll grant that Mr. Fukuyama had decided the war was a mistake -- if only in a whisper -- before it was begun. Where does that leave us now? Perhaps it's worth considering what we have gained now that Iraq looks like a winner.Here's a partial list: Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel. He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.
Don't believe Mr. Stephens? Well how about this quote from today's NY Times article, High Oil Prices Giving Iraq Up to $79 Billion in Surplus Cash.
The soaring price of oil will leave the Iraqi government with a cumulative budget surplus of as much as $79 billion by year’s end an American federal oversight agency has concluded in an analysis released on Tuesday.The unspent windfall, which covers surpluses from oil sales from 2005 through 2008, appears likely to put an uncomfortable new focus on the approximately $48 billion in American taxpayer money devoted to rebuilding Iraq since the American-led invasion.
Over all, the report from the Government Accountability Office estimates, Iraqi oil revenue from 2005 through the end of this year will amount to at least $156 billion.
Surely oil is a bit higher because of the Iraq war, but since Iraq's oil output is higher than before the war, that cannot be the full explanation. So given that Saddam would have sat atop a even larger fortune and still be pursuing his unique brand of terror and mischief, things would be bad in the counter factual as well. Perhaps it still would have been preferable in the cost of human life and economic waste to not have gone, but the naive assumption that Saddam could be properly contained with oil as expensive as it is will not do.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:09 PM | Comments (2)
Illium and Olypos book review
Illium and Olympos by Dan Simmons are a two-book series about a far off future where men have become gods, and they keep a few few hundred thousand mortal humans around for their entertainment. I read them at the recommendation of Shepherd, who suggested they were some of the greatest sci-fi books ever written.
I'm going to have to disagree. Illium is a good book. It has a complicated, interwoven story of the men vs monster vs gods, varied characters, a good pace, leaps into action without explaining anything, and enough of an interesting story to hold my attention. On the negative side, many of the characters were annoying and unsympathetic, and their transformations into better ones occur either primarily off camera or without explanation. There is far too much jargon in the book. While it is nice that Simmons doesn't over explain, at times, especially early in the first book, this means you are just reading gibberish. This book is frustrating but interesting.
Olympos is a substantially worse book. It is frustrating, juvenile, uninteresting, and sloppy. The pacing is worse. There are repeated pointless graphic descriptions of sex scenes even though there were none in the first book. More technology and mysteries are introduced yet some major concepts like how the Trojan war plays out between Illium Earth and Mars are never explained at all. Other major concepts are explained, but the reason provided are absurd. People behave in an unreasonable manner. I don't need all future technology explained to me, but when it is so incomprehensible and the plot critically depends on it, it isn't anything more than a dressed up deus ex machina.
Oddly, or perhaps not, this is how I also how I felt about Simmons' other major series, the Hyperion series, which I though started well and ended in a terrible mess.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:41 AM | Comments (1)
Politicians are not like you or me.
I'm bad at not answering questions. When someone asks me a straight up question, I find it difficult, even painful to answer something else, lie, or dodge the question. However, a skilled politician can do all those things and more, and do so without any personal suffering, and do it over and over.
As you may know, Nancy Pelosi used floor maneuvers (which are her right as speaker but which she said she'd avoid as minority leader) ) to prevent an expansion of off shore drilling in the United States, leading some to argue that this encouraging even dirtier drilling drilling in other countries. You might wonder what would happen if someone had an opportunity to ask Pelosi a straight up question, why won't you allow a vote on offshore drilling. George Stephanopolous's show "This Week" featured Pelosi and he asked about the drilling vote nine times. He had to ask he nine times because each time she manages to get out of the question and answer some other question. I am not doing this justice. Just spend 5 minutes, read it, and let me know what you think. Oh, and this is not a political party statement. Probably all successful parties have people who can do this on their staff and that many politicians can do this. It is a skill that is both trained and selected for in the political process. But it is sill scary to see it in full effect.
Read what she said.
Hat Tip: Stephanopoulos to Pelosi: Why No Up or Down Vote on Drilling?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:07 AM | Comments (1)
August 2, 2008
More fair and balanced news from The New York Times
But this is to some extent Mr. Obama’s sleight of hand. He relies heavily on surrogates, and tends to back into his attacks. So he cues up Mr. McCain as "an honorable man" and a "war hero," before skewering him as lacking in ideas.With Genie Out of Bottle, Obama Is Careful on Race
Wouldn't the impartial way of saying this be to say that Obama tries to attack McCain as lacking ideas? Or am I wrong? Perhaps it is it an impartial finding of fact that Obama has successfully attacked McCain as lacking ideas.
There really are only three issues that the Republicans seem to have any advantage over the Democrats; energy, foreign policy / defense, and taxes. The people seem to care less about these issues than ever and the Republicans are failing to change the debate to focus on them.
Something has been bothering me about Obama's policy on Afghanistan. Are all those people who are against the Iraq war and love Obama for being against it going to be happy if he scoops up all those troops in Iraq and moves them into Afghanistan? Because those guys are going to be in harms way. They will be shot at, blown up, and otherwise in a unfriendly environment. They just will be in a place differing in different one from the one they left in weather, geography, and language, making much of their experience useless. I wonder (although hope not) if the body count will be just as high there. No one who cares may be paying attention now that we are in a bit of an anyone but Bush honeymoon, but then the peacenicks are going to try to eat him alive once he has their undivided attention.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)
August 1, 2008
Opps, I'd better find a new motto
A 1978 U.S. congressional act gives the Olympic Committee exclusive rights to the words Olympic, Olympiad and Citius, Altius, Fortius, the Olympic motto, which is Latin for "faster, higher, stronger." The legislation was drafted to protect the Olympics Committee's lucrative sponsorship deals. It was upheld by a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that barred San Francisco Arts and Athletics from calling their contest the Gay Olympic Games. The court ruled that "Olympic" isn't a generic word and therefore is subject to trademark protection.'Olympic' Competition
Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement for Belligerati's current motto "Civitatas Americanus Citius, Altius, Fortius" which is "American Civilization Higher, Faster, Stronger"?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:45 AM | Comments (1)
What a scientific people we've become
Scientific thinking infiltrates our way of thinking, reaching all the way to the way into areas like art which we might have held separate. It is difficult to imagine an artist of a hundred years ago deliberately using scientific principles to inform his work. However,today a group of neuro-scientists and psychologists are exploring the way we see photographs and using it to teach us how to take better pictures. But you need not pick up a copy of Science, or even the Scientific American to read about it. You can find it in the most recent issue of Popular Photography or online at The Photographer's Guide to the Eye. That's how far down scientific reasoning's merger with art goes, all the way to the pretty picture amature photography magazines. That seems like a more positive development than all those ladies magazine that purport to teach you how to be a better lover.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:24 AM | Comments (0)