Month: October 2010

Steven Johnson is optimistic:

What's encouraging is that the early new platforms—Kindle and iPad—are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that. Books are not going away; in fact, publications seem to be increasing and people are willing to pay money for them. And what we've seen in just the past four or five months has been this incredible arms race between the Kindle app and the iBook app; every month they're like—now we've got a dictionary app, now you can take notes, now you can share your notes. The bells and whistles around the text are constantly getting improved. One of the things that's fascinating about the Gutenberg era is how long it took them to invent the things we now take for granted. Gutenberg comes out with the book, and they figure out how to make an index 60 years later. They had 60 years of "You know, it would be really nice if we could look something up."

We're having comparable breakthroughs every six months now.

James Surowiecki considers the philosophical ramifications of procrastination:

Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

John Sides uses Meg Whitman to talk about self-financed candidates. This could be applied to Mitt Romney:

[I]t is important to remember that many candidates spend their own money because they are forced to, not because they necessarily want to. That is, they invest their money because they are facing strong opposition and could easily be defeated, or because they are languishing in the polls and desperately need to give their campaign a jolt, or because they are uncertain about their ability to raise money. Self-financing may be as much a sign of weakness as as sign of strength.

Second, dollars raised from other donors appear to produce more votes than dollars provided by the candidate. This may reflect the additional benefits of cultivating a network of supportive donors.

Massie cringes:

…Richard Curtis, long-time purveyor of smug, self-satisfied tripe, has produced this ad for something called the 10:10 campaign. Watch it and see if you don't feel like starting your own oil company or burning anything you can just because you can…

Goldblog adds:

This is a horrifying little film that will aid the cause of the climate-change-denial movement

Ezra Klein takes Friedman to task:

The worst illusion pundits foist on the populace is the idea that if we just elect the right guy (or gal) to be president, everything will be fine. It won't be. If you don't like how our laws are being made, you have to change how our laws are being made. And that doesn't mean changing the president, who's not even in the branch of government that makes our laws. Elect Ralph Nader, or some other hard-charging third-party candidate with a penchant for applause lines, and everything will just be filibustered to death. "He probably did the best he could do," some pundit will say, "and that’s the point. The best our current three parties can produce today is suboptimal."

Four-party system, anyone?

Today on the Dish, Andrew looked to Israel's moment of truth on the settlements, pulled the reins on Glenn Reynolds, and (almost) defended Glenn Beck. Scott Horton held the adminstration to task on al-Awlaki, and Andrew fought back against Larison on the semantics of killing. Andrew had qualms about the premise of Sam Harris' new book, but that wasn't going to prevent him from reading it.

Mary Fallin abused the Palin model to the extreme, while Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, thought it up first. Jim DeMint kept Christianism alive, attacking gay and female teachers while Dan Savage wanted to see some gay Christian characters on television, but he didn't care for "good" Christian children taunting gay kids. Smear campaigns work, Tom Friedman's third party presidential prospects weren't looking good, and Chait skewered a culture war that is really about economics. We parsed the tax receipt proposal, a reader defended Alan Grayson, and financial reform could be simpler.

Kyle Berlin toured California's first pot factory, we tracked the back and forth over Michigan's medicinal laws, and Rob Kampia started full court press on Prop 19 since it's definitely better than the 1972 initiative. Idaho welcomed a mosque into its community, the housing bust devastated Florida (in photos), and Lee Billings didn't believe in the "Goldilocks" planet. Adam Ozimek championed the societal good of frozen vegetables, and the U.S. needed to hop on the frugal engineering bandwagon. An anonymous freelancer reported from Beijing's casual tyranny, and Ken Silverstein couldn't stand Washington any longer. Jon Hamm liked websites, teenagers used condoms more competently than adults, and American captives gave North Korea the finger. FOTD here, VFYW here, MHB here, and the acronym you need to know here. 

–Z.P.

Jason Kuznicki doesn't think that the "It Gets Better" project goes far enough:

[I]t’s simply not enough that when you’re an adult, you get to move on. We need to face down the problem of high school itself. Rather than focus on the tragedies, let’s look at the deeply weird, deeply authoritarian place that is high school.

Let’s look at how it’s set up, which seems designed only to foster cliques, to identify scapegoats, and to stomp out all individual differences. How a place like this can possibly be a good thing for our society is beyond me.

High school seems made to hurt, which is insane. I knew this back when I was in high school. I faced it every day. I also knew of social spaces for people my age that weren’t designed to hurt. I could never understand why I faced abuse by my schoolmates, but not by the friends I found outside my school. In time, we developed a social circle composed entirely of outcasts, and we had some great, great times together. But that only made me ask all the more insistently: Why is high school the way it is, not just for gay-identified kids, but for all kids?

A couple days ago, Tom Friedman predicted a centrist third-party presidential challenger in 2012. Nyhan, along with a number of other bloggers, thinks not:

I've written at great length about the reasons that successful third party candidacies are extremely unlikely. Along these lines, Steve Kornacki of Salon (where I cross-post) has posted an excellent response to Friedman showing how structural obstacles and the incentive to avoid a "wasted" vote doomed John Anderson's centrist presidential campaign in 1980 (a context with many potential parallels to 2012 if the economy doesn't recover).

And even if a third party candidate did pull off a miracle and win the presidency, it would not create the "superconsensus" that Friedman wants, particularly in Congress.

 

People have been sporting denim since the mid-1600s, according to a recently discovered batch of paintings. Kottke explains:

The word "denim" comes from "serge de Nîmes", a fabric made in Nîmes, France, and "blue jeans" comes from "Bleu de Genes", blue pants made in Genoa (aka Genes). Both cities claim to have been manufacturing denim for centuries, but there has never been much proof in the way of artifacts and such.

Rob Kampia counters marijuana legalization purists who are planning to vote against Prop 19:

Many people who remember the 1972 [marijuana legalization] initiative in California, which lost with 34% of the vote, muse nostalgically about how great it would have been if that initiative had passed … how it would have changed the whole course of events, especially in the midst of President Nixon’s administration. But have you read that initiative? It was inferior to this year’s initiative in California.