Todays Time Sink

Damn you xkcd. Sigh... TV Tropes.

Science and Engineering Lectures in the Boston Area

I've found Fred Hapgood's Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering in the Boston Area to be the best collection of interesting events in the area and check it every Monday. If you're planning on going to something posted here, let me know.

Incompetence, Avoided?

In the Pipeline writes Incompetence, Avoided? "The world may or may not have been waiting for this, but there's now some theoretical support for the Peter Principle" pointing to an article in MIT's Technology Review, Why Incompetence Spreads through Big Organizations.

"Now Pluchino and co have simulated this practice with an agent-based model for the first time. Sure enough, they find that it leads to a significant reduction in the efficiency of an organization, as incompetency spreads through it. "

Sotomayor Hearings

I'm watching the Sotomayor confirmation hearings on C-SPAN. I expect it to be pretty boring and the opening statements by the Senators are mostly that way (though an audience member just started screaming during Sen. Feinstein's opening statement). I think they should do away with opening comments by Senators just like they did away with having the accountants read the rules at the Academy Awards.

I'll leave it to TPM to liveblog, I'll probably post a few summary comments.

Here are some expectations of court reporters.

1939 The Greatest Year For Movies

Ty Burr writes in The Boston Globe The unrivaled year for moviemaking: 1939 "Yet 1939 trumps them all, and only partly on the extraordinary quality of the movies themselves. Rather, the year marked the peak of the Hollywood studio system - a factory in the paradoxical business of mass-producing individual dreams."

Movie Review: The Happening

Avoid seeing The Happening at all costs. It tries to be a chilling parable but instead it's inconsistent nonsense with incredibly annoying characters. Yet again, and worse than ever before, M. Night Shyamalan foregoes character and any logical progression of actions to stage creepy scenes with his actors.

This film attempts a theme that humans are harming the planet (or more precisely that the planet is upset with us) but fills it with such ridiculous ideas and horrible dialog. I'll end this with a series of quotes from the film, the first one is spoken by a science teacher to his class:

"Science will come up with some reason to put in the books, but in the end it'll be just a theory. I mean, we will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding. To be a scientist, you must have a respectful awe for the laws of nature."

"You know that everyone gives off energy, right? It's scientifically proven. They got these cameras that can record what color you are when you're feeling different things. People that are angry give off a different color than people that are sad. See this ring? This ring can supposedly tell you what you're feeling. Let's see what you're feeling right now. "

"Why are you giving me one useless piece of information at a time? What's going on?"

"We're so much the same, Jess. I don't like to show my emotions either."

"Can you believe how crappy people are?"

"We're not gonna be one of those assholes on the news who watches a crime happen and not do something! We're not assholes! Elliot please tell us what to do!"

"We're packing hot dogs for the road. You know, hot dogs get a bad rep. They gotta cool shape, they got protein."

Movie Review: The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

I have a season pass on my TiVo for all Harold Lloyd films. On June 11th it recorded from TCM, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and I finally watched it this morning. It's Lloyds last film, made in 1947 and has all the quintessential Lloyd elements.

It opens with a football game which is actual scenes from Lloyd's classic, The Freshman. Then he works in an office starting off enthusiastic and ending up broken down and fired. Then he talks to a woman co-worker and describes a lifetime of lost love. Then we get to this scene and I was hooked:



"It ain't as if anyone ever drank a Diddlebock before, you can't tell what it'll do to you!" It just gets wackier. It ends with another archetypal Lloydism, with him dangling from a building ledge. Oddly, that was the low point of the film for me, it was no Safety Last.

After the above bar scene I looked up the film on imdb and found it was written and directed by Preston Sturges. Well that explains it. In fact, Sturges wrote the film to bring Lloyd out of retirement, it had been 9 years since his last film.

The supporting cast was a lot of fun too. The sidekick is Sturges regular Jimmy Conlin. The bartender in the above clip is Edgar Kennedy, famous for his slow burn and listed in imdb as appearing in over 400 movies. I also recognized Lionel Stander and Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West).

If you like screwball comedies of the 40s and Sturges or Lloyd, you'lll enjoy The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

That Secret Program the CIA Hid From Congress

Current CIA Director Leon Panetta recently told members of Congress about some classified program that the CIA misled Congress about. Spencer Ackerman writes Panetta Wasn’t Talking About Torture

"Great piece by Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff peeling back more layers from CIA Director Leon Panetta’s apparent concession that CIA misled Congress about unspecified ‘significant actions.’ Their reporting finds, contra Sam Stein, that the actions in question weren’t about the ‘enhanced interrogation program,’ but rather some other, still-classified covert program"

This AP piece by Pamela Hess has some good info: CIA Director terminated secret program.

"Democrats revealed late Tuesday that the CIA Director Leon Panetta had informed Congress in late June that the spy agency had been withholding important information about a secret program begun after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Panetta has launched an internal probe at the CIA to determine why Congress was not told about the program. Exactly what the classified program entailed is still unclear. Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that the failure to inform Congress about the program was intentional. The CIA and Bush administration consciously decided not to tell Congress, she said."

Ackerman is going nuts trying to find out What The Hell Was That CIA Program About?

Warrantless Surveillance Report Finally Released

The Long-Awaited Warrantless Surveillance Report Finally Released and Spencer Ackerman takes a look: "A year later, the report is complete, and I’ve just gotten a copy of it. What does it say? I’m still reading it, but one thing it says is that the CIA’s involvement in the program is deeper than has been reported. And one interesting bonus fact: the report calls the program the ‘President’s Surveillance Program,’ rather than the manipulative ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program’ handle the Bush administration gave the program when it became public in order to put critics in a tight spot. "

He goes on to describe what the CIA involvement was: "According to the report, CIA would prepare a threat briefing for President Bush justifying the need for such surveillance. Then-CIA Director George Tenet’s chief of staff was in charge of compiling such a report. Then the agency lawyers would vet the assessment to determine whether there was “a compelling case for reauthorization of the” surveillance. Tenet or his deputy, John McLaughlin, would sign it. Then the Department of Justice lawyers would get involved. By 2005, owing to bureaucratic changes, the responsibility for approving this threat assessment every 45 days passed to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the responsibility for drafting it went to the National Counterterrorism Center"

Herschel Telescope First Light Images Released

Universe Today reports Herschel Telescope First Light Images Released. "The Herschel telescope has now turned on all its instruments, taking a few 'first light' images with each instrument of galaxies, star-forming regions and dying stars. Herschel astronomers said they were 'staggered' by the results, saying 'these observations show that Herschel’s instruments are working beyond expectations."

Herschel is an infrared telescope as the Spitzer Space Telescope is.

100 Essential Skills for Geeks

Wired lists 100 Essential Skills for Geeks. Turns out, I'm not all that geeky.

Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough

Bruce Schneier weighs in on the Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough.

"Last month, IBM made some pretty brash claims about homomorphic encryption and the future of security. I hate to be the one to throw cold water on the whole thing -- as cool as the new discovery is -- but it's important to separate the theoretical from the practical."

Panetta Says CIA Misled Congress

The Wall Street Journal reports Lawmakers Say CIA Misled Congress. "Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon E. Panetta has told lawmakers that CIA officials misled Congress 'for a number of years' since 2001, according to a letter released Wednesday from six Democratic lawmakers."

How long does this shit have to go on? Obama, I want my transparency. Congress I want you to do your oversight job, find out the info, issue subpoenas to get it, put people in jail who refuse. CIA, I want the freakin' truth already. What did Bush and Cheney have you do? You to NSA.

On Google's Chrome OS

A brilliant piece by Fake Steve Jobs, Let's all take a deep breath and get some perspective. "They've already got Android, and nobody wants it. Now they're going to make yet another operating system, this time out of a browser that nobody wants. What's next? A Gmail-based operating system? A YouTube-based operating system? Honestly, Google, is there anyone in charge over there? Is there anyone who knows how to criticize anything in that fucked up little Montessori preschool of yours?"

On thinking it through, it doesn't make too much sense to me. I could imagine writing a stripped down OS that made Chrome run better and assuming all apps are web-based maybe there's something there. Though aside from stripping out X, Linux isn't all that fat.

Google is all about getting more eyes on the web so their ads make more money. If an OS is to do that, they must think that there's some device that doesn't exist because of OS limitations. There are enough desktop and laptop computers with choices of OSes. A new device (perhaps a tablet) that just supports a browser? But still since Linux exists and is free, it's not like there's an MS license preventing manufacturers from creating one.

Maybe the anti-MS faction inside Google just went a little too far on this one.

Google Chrome OS

The Official Google Blog wrote Introducing the Google Chrome OS "So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be."

"Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."

Significant Rulings of U.S. Supreme Court Term

Significant rulings of U.S. Supreme Court term is a good overview of the term from the SF Gate.

"The Voting Rights Act survived the U.S. Supreme Court's just-completed term. School employees weren't given free rein to strip-search 13-year-olds for illicit painkillers. Federal regulation of political campaign ads remains intact, and prosecutors in most cases still can't use evidence that police obtained illegally. It was the year of the shoe that didn't drop, of court analysts' predictions that didn't come to pass. There were no blockbuster rulings, but there were some significant ones."

SSNs Are Guessable

New algorithm guesses SSNs using date and place of birth.

"So far, most of the [Social Security Number]-related ID theft problems have resulted from institutions that were careless with their record keeping, allowing SSNs to be harvested in bulk. But a pair of Carnegie Mellon researchers has now demonstrated a technique that uses publicly available information to reconstruct SSNs with a startling degree of accuracy. The irony of their method is that it relies on two practices adopted by the federal government that were intended to reduce the ability of fraudsters to craft a bogus SSN."

Simon Johnson on Banking

Simon Johnson's, How To Buy Friends And Alienate People talks about the problems with (mostly big) banks and how the ABA is mishandling it.

Movie Review: Julie & Julia

I saw a sneak preview of Julie & Julia today. I didn't know Julie Powell's story at all, but this is based on her book Julie and Julia, 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. She blogged her experience trying to cook all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. The blog became popular and then got a story in the New York TImes which resulted in a book deal. It's more a year of self-discovery rather than a cooking lesson but it was quite fun.

This is a return to form for writer-director Nora Ephron. The less said about Bewitched the better. While not quite as good as Sleepless in Seattle it's better than You've Got Mail. I laughed many times and almost cried once, though I no longer remember at what.

The film starts by saying it's based on two true stories. It spends half time time telling Julia Child's story of arriving in Paris in the 40s and learning to cook French food at Cordon Bleu and then becoming a teacher and writing the book with her partners. There are various struggles as she finds what interests her, overcomes prejudice against Americans at cooking school and struggles to find a publisher. Her husband Paul was a diplomat and had to deal with a McCarthy era investigation. This was almost completely unrelated to anything else in the film, but explained their moving around and provided some opportunity to show their relationship.

The other story is Julie's. She works in a self-described soul-sucking dead-end job answering phones for an organization helping rebuild lower Manhattan after 9/11. This sounded less soul-sucking than many jobs I could imagine but she was the standard powerless customer service rep that has to listen to people complain to her all day long. She and her husband move to a new 900 square foot apartment above a pizzeria in Queens. She's previously written half a novel but has a problem finishing things; hence her one year goal to finish Child's book. The stress of doing that in a tiny kitchen while dealing with work and her husband yields a surprisingly engaging story.

Meryl Streep completely nails Julia Child. Whenever I thought it was too much of a caricature, I had to remind myself that no, no it wasn't. That was how Julia talked and acted. The film makes a few mentions of her 6'2" height but I only caught the use of one obvious Lord of the Rings-type miniature technique.

Early on Amy Adams had a couple of Enchanted moments that worried me, but she then fell well into place as a modern day adorable Meg Ryan in a Nora Ephron film. Based on the bits of the blog I've read they cleaned up her New Yorker language. At one point she wonders if she's used the f-word too much in her blog which is odd to think of her typing since she barely cursed at all in the film.

Stanley Tucci as Paul Child reminded me of Gene Kelly in An American in Paris even though he never wears the famous stripped shirt. Chris Messina is Julie's husband Eric and isn't as interesting as the other leads. The character is a little underwritten and he's no Tom Hanks.

Julie Child's life is rich enough for a dedicated biography. The story of Julie's blog probably isn't but the two work well together. The film worked best when it concentrated on the cooking. While there's some food porn, there's not nearly as much as Big Night or Eat Drink Man Woman.

I wondered if those under 30 will recognize the clip of Dan Aykroyd's classic SNL skit. Here's the whole thing for a refresher.

It opens August 7th and I think will be one of the better films of the year. There should probably be a warning for vegetarians as there are several scenes of cooking raw meat, poultry and the killing of inevitably delicious crustaceans.

Interrogation Contracts That the CIA Won’t Let You See

Spencer Ackerman writes "This is my favorite rejection under the Freedom of Information Act ever." so you know it has to be good.

It's Still Kennedy's Court

The Blog of Legal TImes reports on a panel that summarized this latest Supreme Court term, It's Still Kennedy's Court, Say Supreme Court Practitioners

"For all the talk of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. slowly guiding it rightward, the Supreme Court still belongs to Justice Anthony Kennedy."

"Roberts and his fellow conservatives are "going just as far to the right, and just as fast, as Justice Kennedy will let them," said Pamela Harris, executive director of Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute."

The Senate Filibuster

Our Senate and the Fillibuster power: Posner vs Becker.

Medicare's Administrative Costs

Greg Mankiw wrote Medicare has lower administrative costs? and cited a study that said no.

Paul Krugman pounced on it in Administrative costs saying the study was from the Heritage Foundation and flawed and refuted by Jacob Hacker.

Robert Book, the author of the Heritage Foundation report commented to Krugman's article saying, nope it's valid and ad hominem attacks aren't. "expressing health administrative costs as a percentage of total program costs is silly, since the bulk of program costs are health care claims and administrative costs are mostly unrelated to the level of health care claims. (Medicare claims processing is only about 4% of administrative costs; the other 96% is unrelated to the level of claims). This is clear from a moment’s thought — if you insure a healthy 25-year-old who never goes to the doctor (or at least, not enough to exceed the deductible), a health plan’s cost for that person is 100%, no matter how efficient the administration is. Private insurance has a lot more people like that than Medicare does."

Krugman followed up with A bit more on administrative costs which looks at costs of other large health care systems like Canada's saying that public systems can be as efficient or moreso than private.

And Mankiw follows up with Costs versus Efficiency. "True, Medicare’s administrative costs are low, but it is easy to keep those costs contained when a system merely writes checks without expending the resources to control wasteful medical spending."

Honestly this sounds like economists who specialize in other fields, jumping into the health care economics and trying to find their way. Where are the health care economist bloggers?

Google Apps Out of Beta

Wow, it's official Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) including Gmail. Ok, not so interesting...

Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge

The New York Times reports Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge.

"Researchers across the country have been racing to breathe new life into Thomas Edison’s light bulb, a pursuit that accelerated with the new legislation. Amid that footrace, one company is already marketing limited quantities of incandescent bulbs that meet the 2012 standard, and researchers are promising a wave of innovative products in the next few years. Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation."

Now about those CAFE standards for cars...

Finally Watched Palin's Resignation Speech

Mother Jones wrote Say It Ain't So, Sarah and embeds the video. They write:

"You really have to watch the whole thing from beginning to end. There's the dead fish. There's the bit about staying in office being the quitter's way out. There's the basketball riff. There's the part about resigning being the only way she can stop herself from going overseas on lavish taxpayer financed junkets. I guess we all have our favorite parts, but my sister's reaction pretty much summed it up: WTF?"

I guess it was a form of self-sacrifice.

US Finalizes Stem Cell Research Guidelines

US finalizes stem cell research guidelines.

"The new rules, which go into effect Tuesday, follow President Barack Obama's March 9 executive order lifting a ban on embryonic stem cell research, an order that went into effect under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

They allow funding for research using human embryonic stem cells derived from embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF) for reproductive purposes and no longer needed, in a departure from the Bush administration's policy.

The National Institutes of Health's (NIH) guidelines are slightly less restrictive than those outlined in a draft document released in April in that they allow the use of existing stem cell lines, in addition to new ones derived from IVF procedures."

My Forecast

This is the NWS service forecast for me for today, Today "A chance of showers and thunderstorms, then showers likely and possibly a thunderstorm after 3pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 71. East wind around 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New rainfall amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible."

Seriously? They felt the need to say showers and thunderstorms followed by showers and then a thunderstorm?!?

Obama Uneasy Over Indefinite Gitmo Detention

Well at least this... "President Barack Obama said Thursday he's uneasy about his own proposal to indefinitely imprison some of the most dangerous terror suspects being held now at Guantanamo Bay. He called it 'one of the biggest challenges of my administration.'"

Reported by The Associated Press.

Coffee Drinks Illustrated

Coffee Drinks Illustrated:

It's already being extended here and here.

Roadside America

Roadside America, Your guide to uniquely odd tourist attractions.

Blogging Economics

The Perpendicular is a good article on economics bloggers.

We Had To Destroy Teh Villiage To Save It

I've now watched a total of 8 minutes of Glen Beck's show. I've had enough.

CIA's former bin Laden expert: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.".

On Greenspan With Some Perspective

J. Bradford DeLong has some Sympathy for Greenspan.

"there is near-universal consensus that America’s monetary authorities made three serious mistakes that contributed to and exacerbated the financial crisis." Allowing the shadow banking sector to be unregulated, nationalizing AIG, letting Lehman fail.

"There is, however, a lively debate about whether there was a fourth big mistake: Alan Greenspan’s decision in 2001-2004 to push and keep nominal interest rates on US Treasury securities very low in order to try to keep the economy near full employment. In other words, should Greenspan have kept interest rates higher and triggered a recession in order to avert the growth of a housing bubble? If we push interest rates up, Greenspan thought, millions of Americans would become unemployed, to no one’s benefit. If interest rates were allowed to fall, these extra workers would be employed building houses and making things to sell to all the people whose incomes come from the construction sector. Full employment is better than high unemployment if it can be accomplished without inflation, Greenspan thought. If a bubble develops, and if the bubble does not deflate but collapses, threatening to cause a depression, the Fed would have the policy tools to short-circuit that chain. In hindsight, Greenspan was wrong. But the question is: was the bet that Greenspan made a favourable one?"

DeLong goes back and forth on this. Mark Thoma says, "The Fed's decision to keep interest rates low contributed to the bubble, but was not itself the sole cause of it. As to whether the Fed made a mistake, I'll just note that the tradeoff wasn't quite as stark as Brad implies, i.e. there were other policy instruments that Fed could have used to limit the housing bubble. Regulation is certainly one means the Fed had to that end, but Fed communication could have helped too. If Greenspan had, for example, told people to stay away from mortgages because they were toxic rather than implicitly encouraging them to invest in housing, things might have been different."

"So narrowly, keeping interest rates low and employment high was the right thing to do. The mistake was letting all of the action brought about by those low rates, or most of it anyway, occur in a single sector, housing, rather than using regulation and other means to limit the flow of resources into the housing market in pursuit of profits based upon the misperception of risk"

David Beckworth says Yes Brad, the Fed's Low Interest Rate Policy Was a Mistake "Brad's uncertainty is understandable given he invokes the entire 2001-2004 time frame. For during this period there was a time when the U.S. economic recovery was sputtering along (2001-2002) and a time when the recovery began to take hold (2003-2004). It was during this latter period that Fed's low interest rates were a big mistake"

He has some charts I won't copy here, but if you can understand this, please explain it to me. :) "Here we see productivity growth soaring just as the real federal funds rate is being pushed into negative territory. Normally, a rise in productivity growth should lead to a rise in the natural interest rate and ultimately, a rise in the federal funds rate for monetary policy to stay neutral. However, this latter development did not happen. It seems, then, the Fed did push its policy rate below the natural rate and in the process created a huge Wicksellian-type disequilibria."

DeLong then replies with Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself: I'm a Central Banker of Wealth and Taste... beginning with a rather clear explanation of the original goals of central banking by Knut Wicksell and then points to some other comments on the matter.

6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations

6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations are all useless, but are in face pretty.

Health Care Economics

Paul Krugman wrote, Health care is not a bowl of cherries.

"Both George Will and Greg Mankiw basically argue that we don’t need a government role because we can trust the market to work — hey, we do it for groceries, right? Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care"

James Kwak adds, "lightly regulated” private health insurance is a fantasy, because the whole point of a for-profit insurer is to charge premiums that expect the expected payout under the policy; as a result, no sick person would be able to afford insurance. You don’t need adverse selection or moral hazard to explain this: if I know someone has an expensive form of cancer, I’m going to charge him $100,000 for health insurance, and he won’t be able to pay. The free market for health care is one in which sick people die, and smart people who ignore that point are being less than honest."

He also points to Krugman who points to digby who points out that in much of america, health insurance is already a monopoly. "The Justice Department considers an industry to be “highly concentrated” if one company has 42 percent of the market. In Arkansas — Senator Lincoln should take note — Blue Cross Blue Shield has 75 percent of the market. If you take government self-insurance plans out of the equation, it's higher. The state ranks as the ninth most concentrated in the country. Is it any wonder that insurance premiums have risen five times as fast as wages?"

Zachary Roth in TPM adds Health-Care Market Characterized By Consolidation, Not Competition:

"The report, released by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), uses data compiled by the American Medical Association to show that 94 percent of the country's insurance markets are defined as "highly concentrated," according to Justice Department guidelines. Predictably, that's led to skyrocketing costs for patients, and monster profits for the big health insurers. Premiums have gone up over the past six years by more than 87 percent, on average, while profits at ten of the largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007."

In 10 states, just one or two heath insurers control at least 80% of the market.

My own experiences tackle this from a different angle. I found it impossible to get enough information to make an informed choice on insurance plans. Are the doctors I want in the plan? Well it's easy to check for my primary care physician but I don't know what I might get in the next year and what specialty I might need and what specialist I might want. Blue Cross gave me a choice of several dozen plans and it was impossible to compare them because the information in the grid was mostly the same (100% or 80% coverage) but littered with footnotes saying this plan's deductible doesn't cover this care and this other plan doesn't cover this other care. And still I don't know what illness I might succumb to in the coming year to pick appropriately.

And while my current situation might be a little unusual, getting health insurance from your employer makes little sense to me. Businesses are hard enough to run profitably and health insurance costs are skyrocketing. No one wants to cut them but they have to. How many of you think your company chooses it's insurance company based more on the care you'll get (and that has to be averaged acrossed all employees) instead of the cost of the plans?

Pricing Digital Content

Free: The Future of a Radical Price is a new book by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired.

Priced to Sell is Malcolm Gladwell's review of Free in The New Yorker.

But Seth Godin says (for the first time) Malcolm is wrong.

I've only read the two reviews, not the book. Chris says info wants to be free and money can be made by selling around it (Google gives away search and sells ads). Malcolm says free is just another price point and somethings will still cost money. Seth says "oh yeah..."

I think about this stuff in the background a lot but don't know anything more than anyone else but I want to make a few points. Publishers made lots of money because publishing was expensive. They were the only ones that could get content out to a lot of people. Now publishing is cheap, so publishers will make less money. It's not clear if it's none, but it's going to be less.

One of the bases of economics is that scarcity commands a higher price.

One of the hardest problems in business is pricing things effectively. Too high and you don't sell enough, too cheap and you don't make enough. But sometimes, too cheap means you don't sell enough (if people find your product is too cheap to be worth it) and competition matters a lot. If various big newspapers are giving away their content online, I'm not going to pay for the Boston Globe. I might pay for the Wall Street Journal if I think their content (which at least was specialized and useful) is worth it.

Gladwell cites a case where James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News wasn't willing to pay Amazon 70% to distribute the news via the Kindle. He was outraged. I wonder how much the reporter got.

Or how much a book author gets (not much) or a musician (again not much).

Making publishing cheap should allow the profit to go directly to the creator. Lots of people say that with more content editors will be more important to help people find what they want, but I find that amazon and netflix point me at content better than a lot of traditional reviewers. Maybe editing will be free too. If all you have to pay is the creator, maybe you don't need to pay so much.

A 13 Year-Old Tries a Walkman

BBC News Magazinge reports on Giving up my iPod for a Walkman "The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week."

"It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."

"Personally, I'm relieved I live in the digital age, with bigger choice, more functions and smaller devices. I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can't imagine having to use such basic equipment every day."

22 More iPhone 3.0 Features You May Not Know

iSmashPhone has 22 More iPhone 3.0 Features You May Not Know. Nothing earth shattering but some are interesting.

Minnesota’s Supreme Court Declares Al Franken Senator

Finally. Minnesota’s Supreme Court declares Franken winner "Minnesota’s Supreme Court has dismissed former Sen. Norm Coleman’s challenge to the state’s November election results and declared Democratic challenger Al Franken the winner."

Ben & Jerry's BOGO Sundaes On Mondays

Ben & Jerry's is doing a Thank Goodness It's Monday promotion. Every monday through the end of Aug 2009, buy one Sundae get another one free.

Rob's Transformers 2 F.A.Q.s!

Rob's Transformers 2 F.A.Q.s! is a riot.

"It dawned on me at about 4am last night when I was finishing my review that 2500 words might not be enough to fully describe the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen experience. Additionally, I really didn't get much into the plot, as I was so busy explaining why it was a fundamentally shitty movie. So I took a little time to interview myself about the movie's story in order to help you understand what RotF is all about. Hope it helps!"

I so don't want to see this movie.

Stavros Flatley - Britain's Got Talent

Stavros Flatley from Britain's Got Talent. This is a bit disturbing but very very fun...

Cryptography Breakthrough

IBM Discovers Encryption Scheme That Could Improve Cloud Security, Spam Filtering

"A researcher at IBM reports having developed a fully homomorphic encryption scheme that allows data to be manipulated without being exposed. Researcher Craig Gentry's discovery could prove to be important in securing cloud computing environments and fighting encrypted spam."

I've seen it called "one of the most remarkable crypto papers ever" by a noted cryptographer.

Here are slides by Gentry for a presentation, Fully Homomorphic Encryption Using Ideal Lattices.

Keeping News of David Rohde’s Kidnapping Off Wikipedia

The New York TImes has an interesting article about Keeping News of David Rohde’s Kidnapping Off Wikipedia.

30 Years of Arctic Ice Shrinkage...

Paul Krugman shows us a Scary picture.

Two More Oscar Tweaks

Variety reports on on Two more Oscar tweaks.

"The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences board OK'd the music branch's recommendation to alter the best-song voting so that it's possible there will be no nominees in any given year. It's an apparent attempt to preserve the integrity of the category, but an example of 'in order to save it, maybe we could eliminate it' thinking.

The other move was the board's decision to present the 'testimonial' awards -- the Thalberg nod to filmmakers, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the honorary Oscars for career excellence -- at a black-tie event in November for 500 invited guests, rather than presenting them on the Oscarcast"

I think I'm ok with these changes. I'll probably miss the lifetime achievement award more than the others.

Twitter in Real Life

Stimulous Spending on Transportation

In a White House blog post DOT Sets the Record Straight...

"Those of us here over at DOT want to set the record straight when it comes to whether or not Recovery Act money is getting out to states and putting people back to work. There are reports in the press, specifically in Thursday’s USA Today, that say only a fraction of stimulus dollars dedicated for construction projects is reaching states. This simply isn’t true.
 
So far all 50 states and the territories have obligated or dedicated $16 billion dollars of their highway stimulus money to over 5,000 construction projects. Of those projects, over 1,500 of them are underway - bids are being made, equipment and supplies are being purchased, contractors are hiring and workers are working.
 
The USA Today story said states have only received '$132 million from the stimulus package out of $27.5 billion earmarked for road construction funding.' This is false and shows a misunderstanding of the way states get federal money for highway projects. Let me explain."

Lord of the Rings' marathon in Tehran

Anonymous wrote at Salon...Tehran dispatch: The regime shows us movies. "In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a 'Lord of the Rings' marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is 'Don't Worry, Be Happy.' Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead."

KT Tunstall - I Want You Back (Jackson 5 cover)

I like KT Tunstall more than I ever liked Michael Jackson.

"What Can I Do?"

Robert Reich wrote "What Can I Do?"

"We must make Obama do the right things. Email, write, and phone the White House. Do the same with your members of Congress. Round up others to do so. Also: Find friends and family members in red states who agree with you, and get them fired up to do the same. For example, if you happen to have a good friend or family member in Montana, you might ask him or her to write Max Baucus and tell him they want a public option included in any healthcare bill."

Modeling Everything, Public Plan Edition

Modeling Everything, Public Plan Edition is James Kwak talking about Nate Silver’s analysis of campaign contributions and the public health plan option and about Brendan Nyhan's counter-argument.

"So here we have: on the one hand, a quick-and-dirty model on this specific question by a guy without a Ph.D. in anything (I think), which correctly picks the positions of 87 out of 99 senators (but it’s possible that the model would have done just as well without campaign contributions); on the other hand, a guy with a Ph.D. in political science and a research fellowship in health policy at a very good university, citing a paper by three MIT professors that’s more or less on the same general topic, arguing that campaign contributions don’t affect policy."

The End of Transparency (Before It Ever Began):

The Volokh Conspiracy wrote The End of Transparency (Before It Ever Began). Obama seems to have abandoned one of his transparency ideas: "“When there’s a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government’s doing"

Congress is doing an even better job of it. This is about the Waxman-Markey climate change bill:

"As it turns out, there was not even a copy of the final bill language available in any form when the bill passed. Rather, as David Freddoso reports, the House Clerk had a copy of the 1090-page bill that emerged by committee and a copy of the 300-page set of amendments agreed upon at 3am Friday morning, and many provisions in the latter consist of the likes of 'Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11) . . .' In other words, it is highly doubtful that more than a handful of member of Congress knew the contents of the legislation they voted on."

Bacon: the Other White Heat

Bacon: the Other White Heat

Worried about mercury? It's easy to choose safer fish

Worried about mercury? It's easy to choose safer fish "The best fish: Five of the most commonly eaten fish that are low in mercury are shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock and catfish. A variety of small fish is best. Don't fret over wild vs. farmed fish. A Harvard School of Public Health report shows that farm-raised fish contain as much, if not more, healthy Omega-3 fatty acids as wild species do. Fish sticks and fast-food sandwiches are commonly made from fish that are low in mercury, the EPA says."

White House Considers Indefinite Detention

The Washington Post writes White House Considers Executive Order on Indefinite Detention of Terror Suspects

"Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations."

I'm really not happy about this.

"After months of internal debate over how to close the military facility in Cuba, White House officials are increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may be impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the prison by the president's January deadline."

"On the day Obama took office, 242 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo...Since the inauguration, 11 detainees have been released or transferred, one prisoner committed suicide, and one was moved to New York to face terrorism charges in federal court."

"Three months into the Justice Department's reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees cannot be charged or released."

Here's an example of the problem:

"Tawfiq bin Attash, who is accused of involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and who was held at a secret CIA prison, could be among those subject to long-term detention, according to one senior official. Little information on bin Attash's case has been made public, but officials who have reviewed his file said the Justice Department has concluded that none of the three witnesses against him can be brought to testify in court. One witness, who was jailed in Yemen, escaped several years ago. A second witness remains incarcerated, but the government of Yemen will not allow him to testify. Administration officials believe that testimony from the only witness in U.S. custody, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, may be inadmissible because he was subjected to harsh interrogation while in CIA custody."

I don't know what the evidentiary rules are when you can't actually face your accuser but there must be some standard.

Turner Classic Movies - Essentials Jr.

Turner Classic Movies has a series Essentials Jr. that is showing some truly essential classic films this summers. If you have seen them, I highly recommend them all.