I nominate Molly Ivins to the Order of the Shrill

ShrillBlog needs to welcome Molly Ivins into the tentactular realm of the Shrill.

True, she is a classic old school journalist, someone who used to make an effort to be balanced, to make her critiques witty, to keep a sense of humor and balance. She used to be an optimist. In those days she didn't qualify.

She does now. It is time to welcome Molly.

Apocalypse August: I miss so much by not watching TV

I don't watch TV. No time. So I have no clue what's happening out there, except when someone blogs about John Stewart paraphrasing TV. (He's brilliant. Thank you John Stewart. Too bad I only see him in pixellated video streams.) Now I'm up to date.

Huh? America's plastic faced TV anchors are talking about armageddon?

This nation is crackers. The Stewart clip, however, is a masterpiece. Please watch it if you haven't.

Is there no middle ground in America?

Reading Krugman directly costs $50 a year. Happily, some bloggers are routing around the NYT paywall -- at least until the lawyers arrive.

Here Liberal Journal reposts a Krugman column. His thesis -- the middle ground is gone.

The Liberal Journal: Krugman

... those who cling to the belief that politics can be conducted in terms of people rather than parties — a group that also includes would-be centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman and many members of the punditocracy — are kidding themselves.

The fact is that in 1994, the year when radical Republicans took control both of Congress and of their own party, things fell apart, and the center did not hold. Now we’re living in an age of one-letter politics, in which a politician’s partisan affiliation is almost always far more important than his or her personal beliefs. And those who refuse to recognize this reality end up being useful idiots for those, like President Bush, who have been consistently ruthless in their partisanship.

Krugman gives several examples of GOP allies that now support policies that are clearly against their core interests, presumably because they believe the GOP will support their agenda better in the future -- or that the alternative is worse.

I think Krugman is correct that the overall direction of the GOP is such that no GOP candidate should ever be supported -- no matter how excellent they may be personally. This is sad, but Lincoln Chaffee will do enormous harm, regardless of his personal interests, if he keeps Bill Frist in power.

I don' t know of the middle-ground is truly gone from all aspects of US politics. There might be a place for a Clinton-style centrist president for example. Or maybe not.

It's been noted (Krugman?) that historically US politics was very partisan, and that bipartisanship may have been an artifact of post-WW II income compression. The split of US incomes into the flat middle and the ascendant extreme may have thus ended bipartisanship.

Accelerando, Stross, Google, Amazon, Copyright and DRM: a deleted review and a scary collision ...

Ok, I need less coffee. It looks like I retitled my seemingly missing review at some point. Google's Blogger search displayed the old title, but retitling breaks Blogger links. So the Google search returned nothing and I falsely assumed my review had been silently deleted due to an automated comparison between the review on Amazon and the review in Blogger.

So then I tried to correct my error and found Blogger had crashed.

So false alarm. Google's recent misidentification of my blogs as splogs has definitely aggravated any incipient paranoid features.

I wrote a review of Charles Stross book Accelerando and posted it to Blogger [1]. I then put the same review on Amazon where it could be more widely read. Today I went looking for the review. It has vanished from Blogger. It will be interesting to see if this post vanishes too. …

Social networks and the expected implications of exponential growth

Orkut is huge - in Brazil. Nowhere else I think. Myspace is humungous, growing from nothing to everywhere in no time at all.

That's exponential growth. One day there's one lily pad on the pond, a few weeks later the pond is half full, a day later it's full. The last doubling is the big one.

It's fascinating. Why does one network take off and another founder? What makes a movie a hit, or a toy "hot"? Why do some diseases simmer in the Heart of Darkness and others make it to Hollywood? Why does one primate inherit the earth (for now) and all the others die?

There's a fascinating mixture of determinism and contingency. Sure the primate had some handy features, but evolution could have taken a very different course. Orkut in Brazil and MySpace in the US had a combination of both value and serendipity that let them grow. (Survival, of course, is another matter.)

Is LinkedIn doing the same thing? LinkedIn is a snotty "exclusive" (hah!) network that seeks to amplify and extend social networks among "executive" (double-hah) types. Believe me, any club that has me as a member is neither exclusive nor executive. What catches my attention, however, is the rapid growth.

A friend (Jacob) sent me an invitation a few months ago, and since I respect his judgment I decided to play with it. I invited my wife. Then my alma mater invited all alumni and students to join up. Yesterday I received two separate invitations to join at an address unconnected to my existing account.

Clearly LinkedIn is now past the inflection point of the exponential curve. A few more doublings and my dog will be getting invitations (hmmm. No reason I couldn't give Kateva an email address and a resume ...).

It will be interesting to see where it goes next and how the stream is monetized. At the moment it is a handy way to keep in touch. They do limit invitations but if you're a friend/family and you want one just email me ...

Life on the net is making the exponential a familiar phenomena to many people ...

Update 8/4/06: I just got my first invitation to connect from a corporate recruiter. Ok, so now I see one way they'll monetize this -- the recruiters will sign up for a lot of expensive value added services. I made the connection -- the recruiters I know are smart and careful types who don't waste time. Of course if they abuse the connection I'll remove it. It will indeed be interesting to see how this evolves. The 21st century is all about identity, reputation and reputation management. (Credit to Charles Stross from writing about this quite well in Accelerando.)

Kansas returns to Reason

The infamous Kansas State Board of Education is once again in the hands of Rationalists. The election was fought in large part over whether natural selection was a well accepted scientific principle. I am pleasantly surprised to discover that the citizens of Kansas agreed that natural selection is fundamental to modern biology and deserves a place of prominence in science ducation. On the other hand Creationism/ID does not belong on the science curriculum.

I would, however, allow mention of 'design' as one of the solutions to the infamous Fermi Paradox. Of course the FP is not usually taught in high school.

The GOP votes to ban the Internet (from Libraries)

The GOP run House of Representatives has made it illegal to use most of Internet in a library ...

Good Morning Silicon Valley: All in favor of hysteria, panic and misinformation, say "aye"

Given the recent outcry over MySpace, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the U.S. House passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) with an overwhelming majority. But I can certainly be disappointed. With a 410-15 vote (410-15!!!) Thursday, politicians approved the bill, which will block access to social networks and Internet chat rooms in most federally funded schools and libraries....

...Here's how DOPA defines social networking sites:

(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.

Great work, Congress, you've just barred anyone who depends upon their local libraries for access to the Web from viewing eBay, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Amazon.

I think they've also banned the upper-crust corporate-focused LinkedIn social network. Would a Democrat dominated House do something this stupid?

I admit I can't prove they wouldn't, and a lot of Democrats voted for this. On the other hand, I suspect they voted for it in self-defense (imagine the ads -- my commie opponent supports pedophilia!). I would, however, like to know the 15 representatives possessed of both safe seats and a positive IQ.

I'll bet a Democrat controlled House would not have done this. Think of that next time you get to vote ...

Why we don't remember the future, and other consequences of the 2nd law

Cosmic Variance is hurting my head again. Coincidentally, I've been listening to the IOT episode on the 2nd law of thermodynamics (excellent) and just the other day I tried to explain time's arrow to my 7 yo ...

Boltzmann’s Anthropic Brain | Cosmic Variance

... Suddenly, a thermodynamics problem became a puzzle for cosmology: why did the early universe have such a low entropy? Over and over, physicists have proposed one or another argument for why a low-entropy initial condition is somehow “natural” at early times. Of course, the definition of “early” is “low-entropy”! That is, given a change in entropy from one end of time to the other, we would always define the direction of lower entropy to be the past, and higher entropy to be the future. (Another fascinating but separate issue — the process of “remembering” involves establishing correlations that inevitably increase the entropy, so the direction of time that we remember [and therefore label “the past] is always the lower-entropy direction.) ...

After this the essay gets much harder. Bayes Theorem makes an appearance, though it is not labelled. Crossing Bayes with the antrhopic principle yields yet more disturbing implications. Now if only CV would toss the Fermi Paradox into the mix ...

Pandora: music radio and recommendations

Jacob Reider pointed to Pandora

Ad supported radio that suggests music based on one's likes. Oldest trick in the book (I think Firefly did this in the early '90s), but surprisingly rarely done. I'm suprised the Apple Store doesn't do this ... Amazon used to, but their recommendations service has all but vanished ...

Airport security 1995 - an insider's story

via Schneier. The beautiful thing about the web is all kinds of people can tell their stories, and people like Schneier tell us about the interesting ones. An insider's story about working airport security in 1995 is quite good. I liked the trick where he learned to carry any of the FAA test items through the metal detector without activating the alarm.

I wonder if things are different now; the security people I see at airports now seem a cut above this description. On the other hand, airport security is not terribly important. As has been pointed out many times, the most important post-9/11 security measures are:

1. armored cockpit door
2. pilots treat a hijacking as a suicide attack
3. passengers are inclined to resist (1 and 2 are more imporant).

Spolsky on pricing theory

Why does what you buy cost what it costs? Read Camels and Rubber Duckies - Joel on Software. I have a seriously dense textbook on pricing theory. Spolsky covers the key points in a single article. If you buy anything, it's worth reading.

It's non-trivial.

BTW, one technique he doesn't mention is sandwiching. Apple does this brilliantly. Sell one thing cheaply, one in between, one expensive. The cheap one is a bargain, but it's missing something everyone wants. The expensive one is wicked. The result is people will happily buy the middle one, and will pay more than they would have if the cheap one (which has a crummy margin) didn't exist.

The bottom price exists only to elevate the middle price.

An Interview with Charles (Bell Curve) Murray

About 10 years ago Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein wrote "The Bell Curve", a book that caused great outrage on the American left. I never read the book, but I dimly recall that the authors claimed that there was a general intellectual capacity that was roughly measured by IQ testing, that IQ was largely genetically determined, and that some ethnic groups had bigger average IQs than others. I think he was fond of South Koreans in particular, but I may be losing it there (I have a family relationship to Korea that probably affects my memory).

At the time I didn't say much, because, although I didn't care for the tone of the quotes I read, I suspected the substance would hold up. I thought the evidence even then was pretty strong that IQ was genetically determined [1], and that the main environmental effects were intrauterine and served only to lower the genetic limit. I also felt, with less data, that it was likely that there was indeed a general ability to synthesize and problem solve, and that it had some correlation with IQ test results. As to the ethnic relationships I was and am agnostic, but I didn't think the data was there to rule it out. So the book seemed plausible, albeit infected by an off-putting arrogance.

So I was interested in this Charles Murray interview featured in an obscure web site. Murry may even have mellowed slightly, though his religious devotion to Libertarianism is only mildly abated. It is interesting reading.

By the way, one way in which I believe I differ from Murray is that I don't think being smarter makes a person a more deserving human being. I value traits like integrity, compassion, mercy, wisdom, humility, curiousity, kindness, forgiveness... Murray seems to have adopted the Libertarian faith that intellect is the measure of perfection. (I wonder how they'll feel about our silicon heirs?)

[1] Yes, I've read some recent reviews claiming environment was more important than we'd thought. I thought the articles (NYT) were so dull and confused they weren't worth writing about.

Stress, disease and early aging

The NYT Magazine has a long article on disease and aging though I think the lead family photo is a big misleading (look yourself and contemplate). It doesn't have many surprises in it. It's one of a series of discoveries and reviews that show we age more slowly than we once did, largely because we're sick less often.

The main environmental influences are probably prenatal and certainly before age two (mothers should never smoke), but, there are later effects too. At least for the moment, we are spared much of the disease, parasites, and malnutrition that afflicted our ancestors. As a consequence, we age more slowly.

This is not a surprise to anyone who's studied old family photos. Our ancesters were old at 40 -- rather than 50-55.

FuturePundit, which pointed me to the NYT article, also features a related post about a gene that can be used to tell a person's biological age rather than their chronologic age.

I'm still waiting for the article that shows that aging is non-linear, and that we experience 'bursts' of aging after certain environmental triggers. The old folk tale about 'aging a year in a night' will be shown to be correct.

Geeks don't use Travelers Insurance

JOS calls out a comically stupid and offensive ad campain by Travelers Insurance. I wonder how much business they once had in Silicon Valley.

I assume that each year ad execs gather to nominate the absolutely worst ad effort of the year. This one is reaching for the decade award.

Dyer has about 10 new articles online

The journalist, military historian, arabist and eccentric web author has about 10 new June/July articles. This journlist doesn't do he said/she said articles -- and his record is good. Dig in.