New Year's Wishes

Here's to hoping that 2005 will establish a more pleasant setting for a "normal" year. So go forth, indulge in your intoxicant of choice (cigars and good whiskey for me), and be sure to tip your designated driver a couple of extra shots when he/she gets home.

Deliberately Obtuse

Yes, blogs have done wonderful things in spreading reports from people who are enbedded in the events of the day. Certainly my betters have done some investigations that put broadcast media to shame. Somehow, that last issue didn't seem all that praise worthy in ABC's decision to name bloggers People of the Year. So they think that Trent Lott was the big story that best defines the blogging phenomenom?

I suppose I could give them a break. I mean, it would be a really tough thing to admit that your personal bull is getting gored. ABC is really trying to be the nice guys by throwing this bone while not admitting that it was one Dan Rather shot out of his own foot.

Tragedy Seen from Above

A pair of satellite photos showing a very stark before and after of the city of Banda Aceh. The city is gone. It is worse than any footage or direct experience I have had with earthquakes. I don't pray much, but in the face of something like this, there is little else to do.

Economic Enivronmentalism

It has been a truism for the anti-free-trade position that opening markets world wide will cause multi-national corporations to farm out their polluting processes to countries too poor to make much of a fuss. A Tech Central Station article by Radley Balko points out data that indicates that this is not happening, however. The "Race to the Bottom" described above is running into a new phenomenom named the "Green Ceiling".

The Race to the Bottom implies that the cost of moving the facility, retraining workers, and transporting materials and finished goods will be offset by the lower wages and savings on environmental technologies. While the salaries being paid are, to many people in the developed world, unacceptably low, they are still an increase in wealth to those getting the jobs. What has been seen in many instances though, is that polluting companies are not leaving developed nations.

The reason for this is that the costs are not offset as well as the figuring would accomplish. Not only are environmental technologies not too costly for large corporations, but the option of doing business in areas that are politically unstable is a particular turn off. Nothing like having the winners of the next coup decide that it would be a good idea to nationalize your industry.

The Green Ceiling is where the wealth of the citizenry has risen high enough to meet survival needs and luxuries become affordable. The Race to the Bottom correctly points out that environmental controls are such a concern. The changes don't even need to be regulations on business. The increase in wealth in Mexico has lead to more people being able to afford better engineered cars with catalytic converters and cleaner burning gasoline. If the industries are hit with new regulations, then the decision has to be made again as to the costs/benefits of yet another move. Sooner or later, the bottom has to be reached as to the last place on earth without environmental regulations, or the wage difference between the pittance and pittance just isn't effective.

Is That What Bile Looks Like?

If this column doesn't make Nick Coleman* of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune out to be the epitome of main stream media elitism, then nothing will. Nothing really shows a writer's professionalism like making snide comments about the other side's endowments:

The lads behind Powerline are a bank vice president named Scott Johnson and a lawyer named John Hinderaker. If you read Powerline, you know them better by their fantasy names, Big Trunk (that's Johnson) and Hind Rocket (Hinderaker). I will leave it to the appropriate professionals to determine what they are compensating for, but they have received enormous attention from the despised Mainstream Media and deserve more.

Interesting that Mr. Coleman concludes that the Powerline guys should be getting more attention from mainstream media, presumably in order to uncover just who pulls the bloggers' strings. At least I think that is what he meant. The sloppy use of the pronoun "they" would make it seem it is replacing the antecedant "appropriate professionals". Then again, I'm just an engineer and not a professional writer.

Back to my point about Powerline getting more attention from the main stream media. I think that it would be a good thing for a reporter or columnist to do research into a story on these guys. Most especially if they do the research before they write the column. I tried to find one fact or snippet beyond mere innuendo that indicates that Powerline got marching orders from anyone. What say you Mr. Coleman? Are you ready to do a little reportage of the pick-up-the-phone-and-call-them variety? Explore the site even slightly (oh, no, work!) and you can find the phone numbers of these gentlemen.

*sorry about the registration requirement. I usually make it a point not to link to such sites, but it is almost worth the hassle of coming up with a fake name and a pre-designated junk e-mail address to take a look at this piece of work.

Been Looking Forward to a Good Headrollin'

Some quick initial reactions on the removal of the CIA Deputy for Analysis.

1. In cases such as the systemic failures that had occurred in the CIA, it is appropriate to fire both the manager and the team.

2. The lady had a hard job, being essentially the only department that actually collected and analyzed data. The other branches, operations and human intelligence, where so hamstrung by congressional and media tsk-tsk'ers that they were reduced to virtually nothing.

3. Anybody who puts out a report that essentially says, "Maybe they do and maybe they don't," should get out of the business in favor of someone who could write a report like that (like me) for a lot less money.

The Count is Now: 120

Talk about ingratitude. I would be curious as to how much the home country of Jan Egeland, the Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, gives in those causes. Calling the United States and other wealthy nations stingy hardly seems the diplomatic way of putting things. I wonder if he was looking only at the monies given by the governments or included private giving? I'll take a chance and say the former, which would indicate a true redistributionist mindset at the highest levels of the UN.

I personally think that the truly downtrodden parts of the world would be better off in the long term with less "aid" being sucked up by the corrupt regimes that keep said people downtrodden. Better to have smaller charities dishing the help directly to the people rather than governments blindly air dropping the goods to whomever is strong enough to take it. With the recent track record of the UN with respect to humanitarian causes, I don't think that Mr. Egeland is in a position to talk.

History of The Count below. Looking back at it, it seems that the "Bush voter = stupid" meme has had at least a year to get started.

Maybe the Last Addition to the Storage Locker This Year

Dave Barry's Year in Review with a little equal opportunity slam dancing. Case in point:

Meanwhile, in another blow to the U.S.-led coalition effort in Iraq, Spain withdraws its troop, Sgt. Juan Hernandez. As violence in Iraq escalates, critics of the Bush administration charge that there are not enough U.S. soldiers over there. Administration officials heatedly deny this, arguing that the real problem is that there are too many Iraqis over there.

In the words of one high-level official (who is not identified in press reports because of the difficulties involved in spelling "Condoleezza"), the administration "may have to relocate the Iraqis to a safer area, such as Ecuador." John Kerry calls this "a ridiculous idea," adding, "I wholeheartedly endorse it."

Embrace the absurd: it will be there anyway, so you might as well get used to it.

Link Via The Daily Dish

The Tail of The Power Curve

Welcome to the shallow end of the Blogosphere Power Curve, or as I like to refer to it, the primordial ooze. The latest attention-grabbing idea is The Long Tail, where the trailing portion of the power curve approaches zero but never quite gets there. The article from Wired examines the effect of making the long tail of the popularity curve available to the people whose taste makes them occupants of the tail, but because of scarcity of transportation and retail space were SOL.

Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

Or as I sometimes put it: He who becomes the wealthiest does so in the smallest possible increments.

Blogs are the production aspect of the argument that Wired makes in its article. I hope that I have found a few like minded souls out there who enjoy my work. Maybe someday I'll pop out a post that because of its insight is carried on by some of you and into the positive feedback loop of more and more people saying, "this is a good idea, please take a look at it."

That would be nice. I'm not holding my breath for it, though. Sometimes you're the brilliant idea, most of the time you're the feedback loop. What is really important in the quest for new ideas is that someone, somewhere, is having a great new idea. If they have a blog, even better, because then someone might read the idea and agree. If that person has a blog and advances the idea, then there are two sets of preferably non-identical readerships that are now exposed to the idea. And they'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and you get the idea. Where the article talks about pulling consumers down the tail of the power curve, eventually the ideas created in the tail (aka primordial soup) tend upwards. As it goes, the idea is challenged and refined, and ultimately may break out of the 'sphere entirely.

Not a bad outcome for the lone voice in the wilderness. Then again, in the wild west of the blogosphere, you are never really alone.

Good Idea, but Not All That Useful

I am going to need a bit more context to justify my first impression of this article where Mr. Waverley Person suggests that the death toll was so high because the affected nations did not have early warning systems that might have given the victims time to escape.

"Most of those people could have been saved if they had had a tsunami warning system in place or tide gauges," he said yesterday.

"And I think this will be a lesson to them," he said, referring to the governments of the devastated countries.

The context that I would need is the ability to spread information across those regions and the mobility of the inhabitants. I can see this happening in areas where people just don't have the access to information to know even if they need to evacuate. I would be surprised if a majority of them even knew there had been an earthquake if they hadn't felt it themselves. Secondly, what was the area of devastation? Was it a relatively thin ribbon along hundreds of miles of coastline, or was it a shorter front with deeper penetration? In the first case, it would only have been a short run inland to avoid the inundation, and any warning would have been useful. If it was the second case, then a lead time of only "20 minutes to 2 hours" would only serve to catch people on the road.

One last point, this quote, also from Mr. Person:

"People along the Japanese coasts, along the coasts of California - people are taught to move away from the coasts. But a lot of these people in the area where this occurred - they probably had no kind of lessons or any knowledge of tsunamis because they are so rare." Emphasis mine

I have lived in California my entire life, most of it in spitting distance of the San Andreas Fault. I have never heard anything in all of my voluminous education regarding earthquakes about moving away from the shoreline out of concern for tsunamis. Having tried to get out of the Dodger Stadium parking lot after the July 4 fireworks, I know that my fellow Californians do not really grasp the idea of an orderly exit. I shudder to think what it would look like if the word came down that the Big One would hit the next day, and the image of evacuating the coastline inside of an hour is absurd to the point of tragic.

Link via Instapundit.

Ho Ho Frickin' Ho

I wrote before about running out of gas for the holidays. The only thing I really have left is my sense of humor. In hoping that you still have yours, I offer a couple of pilfered links. Did I mention that I'm sick of shopping too?

Prof. Instapundit gets to the true meaning of Festivus with a New York Times article:The New York Times > Fashion & Style > Fooey to the World: Festivus Is Come. I can see where the airing of grievances can lead to the wrestling.

Michele at A Small Victory makes a seasonal offering in her own particular idiom: Weird Al Yankovic's The Night Santa Went Crazy. Sorry about the link chain, if I knew how to link directly to MP3's I would have stolen it outright. Lord knows I'm going to think twice about leaving my flue open tomorrow night.

An Off Kilter Holiday Season

I'm just not feeling it this year. With the drama of my Dad's trip to the hospital and some other personal goings on, it seems that too much of the down side of life has been piling on to really get into the spirit. I feel for my sister who hosted her first Thanksgiving dinner. Making time to visit Dad, then starting dinner late without our parents there kind of dampened the whole event. With trypto-coma setting in at 9:00 pm, no one was really in a mood to stick around for pie.

There's another way that can throw off the holiday spirit. That's getting your presents early. The allure of a massively commercialized day of celebration based on a religious observance scheduled to pre-empt an older religious observance, neither of which really holding much reverence for me, is currently nill now that I've already gotten the two things that are really important to me. The first is my Dad back, at home and a fair distance down the road to recovery. The second is a strong dose of self-respect in the form of a job that I have been training for for years.

Christmas 2004? Been there, done that.

Mandatory Vacations for Reporters

Their is one thing that I really don't like about this time of the year. It isn't the over commercialization or the berserk crowds at the malls. I mean, who needs the Ultimate Fighting Championships when there is only one I-Pod left in the store?

No, my problem are the news stories that wouldn't be stories if not for the fact that the holidays (starting with Thanksgiving) are slow news days. Elian Gonzalez, the day after Thanksgiving. Laci Peterson, Christmas Eve. Jon-Benet Ramsey, the day after Christmas. News reports were dominated for months for each of these stories.

So what say we all pitch in and buy vacations for all of the news divisions, CNN and Foxnews? I'm sure we could all use the break.

Tone Down the Hype, Please

I really don't like the way the Daily Dish clumps its posts together. It makes it difficult to set a decent permalink, but I'll work around it for this post.

The news that Google is digitizing the contents of five major libraries strikes me as a good thing. More people with more access to information is the key to a greater rate of innovation.

Much like prognostications of the power of the internet pre-tech stock crash, however, the characterization of the impact is reaching ludicrous proportions. I mean, comparing a Googlized library to "the Mind of God"? Intimating that level of power to this information under his control can backfire. I've already been hearing of conspiracy theories of what is to come. Because the digital format is so malleable with no proper way to identify changes, it will be too easy to alter the data that people see, a la Winston Smith of 1984. And much like Big Brother, that type of information will be used to control the people.

I don't buy it. It is precisely because people already know that data can be changed in a blink online that makes the blogosphere a very sensitive bullshit detector. Whatever particularly useful texts that exist in these libraries will also exist in countless copies elsewhere either online or physically. If changes are made, it will inevitably cross paths with someone familiar with the original. The fact that it is Google and renowned libraries only gives the enterprise a starting reputation. If that power is abused, then the bubble reputation will burst.

Channeling Nelson Munz

You know, the bully from The Simpsons. I just couldn't help but feel the "Ha Ha" coming out of me when I read about Spammers ordered to pay $1 billion. I know, it was in absentia, but if you could put a price tag on all of the aggravation endured, then I think we could all agree that any money coming to that one ISP should be divied up. Haven't we all felt that pain?

How Did I Miss That?

Yesterday was my First Blogiversary! The one thing I've noticed about my writing, concise is good.

Blog of the Year? Works for Me.

Congrats to Power Line for having won the inaugural Time Magazine Blog of the Year.

I don't believe that the blogosphere meritted Person of the Year, but this new award, appropriate for a new thing, is just right. It is major attention brought to the table, but not as The Big Thing with which the curious might come to and be disapointed. Kind of like a movie that all of your friends have raved about, but when you see it all it does for you is, "Eh." This award lets blogs be blogs, not some earth shattering event that comes up short of the hype.

Hot Damn!

I have been unemployed for the past several months. My major is something of an obscure field. I could have taken a hint when I graduated from UCLA when there were 250 electrical engineers, 250 computer scientists, and 14 materials engineers. Then again, that was in '97 and before the tech sector collapse.

That condition has ended. I have found a position with a materials testing firm. Its just what I need at this point, both professionally and personally. WaHoo!!

Press Start and Tune Out

We've all done it. Tuning out of reality while engrossed in a book or a tv show or a video game. There may be some advantage to that. A study has shown that kids allowed to play Game Boy immediately prior to surgical anesthesia experienced less anxiety prior to surgery than those who received tranquilizers or the comfort of a parent.

It reminded me of an article in Scientific American that reported on the effectiveness of virtual reality in theraputic settings. The article described some of the well known applications of VR in treating phobias. The instance I am more interested in is its use as an escape from sensation. Precisely, it was a study of children's experience of pain as they underwent cleanings of severe burn injuries. The process is normally incredibly painful, but subjects reported far less pain when they immersed themselves in an virtual environment where they had snowball fights with snowmen. In general, the more immersive (3D vs. flat screen, playing with friends and family vs. solo) the greater the pain dulling effect. I also think that the cold theme also helped them to separate from the sensations resulting from a hot connotation.

The Boy's Not Right

I firmly believe that great ideas come from the combination of two or more ideas that seem to have nothing in common. In some cases, however, the results can be disturbing. Such as, who on earth would wonder about the skeletal structures of cartoon characters, and then go through the process of drawing them. I guess its a hobby that keeps him off the streets.

Link via Farm Accident Digest