When on a plane, never start a game of peek-a-boo with a 2-year-old. I can add never, ever start a game of tug-of-war with a puppy. But here are a few other “nevers” you should keep in mind:
Never try to slip a counterfeit bill past a stripper.
Never try selling cocaine when you’re 93.
Never pass up the chance for luuuuvin’ when it comes by.
Monday, August 27, 2007
As Rita Rudner Says
All You Need to Know about Obama
If president, he would consult with Republicans like Tom Coburn. You know, the “lesbians hide in school bathrooms” Senator from Oklahoma. The guy who protested NBC showing “Schindler’s List” because it had full frontal nudity in the concentration camp scenes.
Here’s Coburn’s latest:
Citing a concern over the Second Amendment rights of veterans, U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has placed a hold on a bill that calls for the development of a program to address the group's high suicide rates.
Aaron Cooper, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Republican, says Coburn's primary concern with the bill is that information that veterans might provide during mental health screenings could be shared among agencies.
Cooper says that information could be used to infringe upon the rights of veterans to own guns.
Doesn’t matter what Obama would “consult” with Coburn about. The fact that, in order to prove he’s oh-so-bipartisan, he links himself to one of the biggest nut cases to ever sit in the US Senate (think about that for a second) is enough to reveal his capacity for rational judgment and touch with reality. Yet again, the man proves he’s just not ready for prime time.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
What U Can Do
I tend to have a "tragedy of the commons" take on our future. One person's actions will be insufficient to have an impact on the disaster a'comin' and, in the meantime, that person loses out on the enjoyment that one more last evening spin in the roadster can provide. Without concerted collectively organized action and regulation of the institutions that really do impact our emissions, we'll feel better about ourselves as we sweat and run from tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes. I prefer to call it realism (although I do turn out lights, avoid unnecessary trips, keep the thermostat higher than I would like, and drive a '95 Saturn that still gets better gas mileage than most else sold since).
However, for those of you who want that good feeling and/or still think that individuals by themselves can actually make a difference, Joseph Romm does a nice job describing what he's done to reduce his carbon footprint (after basically agreeing with me about the impact of one person's contribution). He also points us to a Popular Science piece that shows a couple of very do-able ways to develop your own wind and solar power sources. So, if you've been looking for ways to do your part while governments and corporations dither, get to it. (Just don't count on planting trees getting it done.)
Friday, August 24, 2007
Friday Nite Music Club
Since I reviewed their album earlier in the week, here's some Rilo Kiley for you...here's "With Arms Outstretched" from The Execution of All Things...
I Remember That
AS AN ENERGY-SAVER, THE CLOTHESLINE MAKES A COMEBACK
Now they just have to get idiot governments to back off bans.
Finally A Purpose
For the stupidest animal on earth, as stated by someone kicked in the leg once by one that had gotten mired in a creek and had to be pulled out by a chain around its neck hooked to a tractor.
Cow-powered Fuel Cells Grow Smaller, Mightier
David Roberts Watch
At Grist. He has some very good posts up on the Busheviks’ evisceration of the nature and cultures of mountain tops all in the name of short-term coal profits, the media once again doing a story on renewables and standards for them without hitting the major points, and the framing necessary to get the emissions reductions requirements approved (along with intelligent conjecture on whether it will be harder to get the first or the last 20% of emissions. Typical good stuff.
Uh, Dad, You Can Stop Helping Now
Vick's dad cites son's involvement in dogfighting
[In fairness to the NAACP, who probably really cared about my blast at them the other day, this story also points out that the national leadership of the org, rather than the dumba—es in the Atlanta chapter, agree that the org maybe should find better use of its resources than defending this thug.]
Legacy Down
In 2004 Howard Dean was the closest to understanding what has happened to the American Legacy and what it would take to restore it in a political world of Repubs and Repub-lites. John Edwards, with his “Two Americas” theme, was closest behind him. Of course we know what was done to Dean by his own party, and John Kerry stupefied and emasculated any effort by Edwards to talk about underlying principles of our legacy and place in the world and for each other. In 2007, Edwards has turned up the dial and is hitting even more of the right notes . . . and dropping in the polls. Maybe it’s that drop that that’s convinced him just to go out with guns blazing and truth hammering. But I think his fate will demonstrate that the bulk of the American people just don’t care about what this country was supposed to stand for. Howard Dean’s problem wasn’t himself or the media. It was the American people. Edwards looks to be facing the same enemy. We’ve ceased to deserve what we’ve been given, and none of the well-planned bromides from the Clintons or Obama, even if victorious somehow in 2008, will reverse that. There’s always been a thread in our country that promised opportunity for every person here, but it’s been swept away in contribution corruption, media perversion, and politician mediocrity and mendacity. Edwards increasingly understands it, but in a democracy you get what you deserve. And that bill is only now arriving.
It's the Feedback, Stupid
Joseph Romm provides Part 3 of his series on why the climate models are likely underestimating future global warming, a point we’ve been nauseating ourselves with. The major point is that the models accept certain things happening, such as permafrost melt, but then don’t feed the carbon release (which is meganormous) back into the models. The result is underestimating the buildup and thus the warming. Of course, the deniers and obstructionists who attack the models only focus on points (uniformly subsequently debunked) that seem to cause overestimation, hypocritically silent on points like Romm’s. There still could be negative feedback that would dampen the buildup and warming that we haven’t figured, but, since that’s been a fertile area of effort by the deniers and obstructionists, it’s hard to believe most or all of the possible complaints haven’t been dug out, and debunked. Which leaves Romm’s alternative even stronger. The models are too conservative, not extremist, and we should prepare for the worst (which Romm outlines here) and the pleasant surprise that would come from being wrong rather than keep dicking around as we are and get a surprise we don’t want. Even if only idiots will claim it’s a surprise.
Wiki-what?
I came across this article via maltaStar about a program created by Virgil Griffith that tracks who is editing Wikipedia entries. Many people (including myself) take information found on Wikipedia as a legitimate, trustworthy source. And I believe it is – for the most part. But none this less, this Wikipedia Scanner has apparently shed some interesting light on entries made by a number of major corporations, the Vatican and even parts of the U.S. government. A few examples:
- In the 9/11 Wikipedia article, the NRA added that “Iraq was involved in 9/11”.
- Fox News removes all controversial topics against the network from the Fox News page.
- Sony removes harmful paragraphs against Blu-ray systems.
Check out the article and more editing examples here
Thursday, August 23, 2007
So there's another study...
...that says that music piracy is responsible for everything wrong with the country today (in particular: $12.5 billion and 71K jobs (pdf)), and it once again turns out that the people in charge of the study don't actually know the habits of P2P'ers (via Daily Swarm).
The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads == lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase. "Unfortunately, there is no precise measure of the degree to which consumers of pirated CDs would continue to purchase those CDs at legitimate prices," according to the study. "While the degree to which these legitimate purchases would occur differs by market, it appears nevertheless that such purchases would comprise a very significant fraction of the total number of pirated CDs now purchased... In this study, the weighted average substitution rate used for the physical piracy of recorded music is 65.7 percent. It is then assumed that only 20% (1 in 5) of these downloaded songs would have been purchased legitimately if piracy did not exist."I can't imagine the impact of file sharing is "not statistically distinguishable from zero"...I mean, maybe it is, but that seems a bit extreme--not even 10% as extreme as the claim that 71,000 jobs have been lost due to file sharing. All I know is, when I was doing the whole file sharing thing back in the day (haven't in a while), a) half of the stuff I downloaded was something I never would have considered buying (therefore there was no lost revenue), and b) if I downloaded something and liked what I heard, I was pretty likely to actually buy the albums I was sampling. That's how I discovered Ben Harper, David Gray, North Mississippi Allstars and others. The bands I liked made money off of me just like normal, only I wouldn't have discovered them if not for P2P services.
That's a bit better than the one-to-one argument, but not by much. It essentially assumes that one of every five downloaded songs would have been purchased, were it not for file-sharing. Although a 20 percent figure may not look like much, it is still a percentage not justified by our own knowledge of file-sharing trends. The study needs to make a firm argument for why this percentage is so high. It's a flaw similar to that in a 2006 study commissioned by the MPAA.
Note that the assumption cuts both ways. Not only does it assume many would-be sales, but it also ignores sales that do stem from file sharing. P2P users buy a lot of music, after all. Three out of four P2P users said that they bought music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of the respondents to the survey commissioned by the Canadian Record Industry Association saying that they have bought previously downloaded music on more than 10 occasions. So here again, we have data not being taken into account, data which would necessarily lower the study's estimates.
Another study even goes so far as to argue that the effect of file-sharing on legal music sales is "not statistically distinguishable from zero." Published this past February in the Journal of Political Economy, the study tracked the effects of 1.75 million song downloads on 680 albums. The researchers concluded that the availability—and even increased downloads—of music on P2P networks did not correlate to a negative effect on music sales. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero," the study's authors reported.
The music industry mightily resisted file sharing when it should have been adopting it...and they're STILL fighting this idiotic fight. Instead of embracing the situation and figuring out how to make money through the new technology, they whined and fought and, in the process, allowed the concept to take hold. I'm not going to pretend that file sharing could have been wonderful for the industry, and profits could have stayed exactly where they were in the N*SYNC days, but they made this as hard on themselves as possible, and it appears to have done irreparable damage.
Ad of the Week
Top Gun Motors - Watch more free videos
Don't think this is a real ad. But man, wouldn't it be great if this happened to every loud, annoying person in a commercial?
Weather, Water, Energy 8-23-07
Stupidity just can’t be stopped once it gets rolling. More states getting into ethanol. . . . Elsewhere, serious stuff being done. Leaders of 6 Western states and 2 Canadian provinces finalize their regional agreement to attack greenhouse gases. Under the Western Climate Initiative, the leaders agreed to slash emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate-warming pollutants to 15% below 2005 levels in their states and provinces in the next 13 years. That is about the same percentage as California's commitment under last year's landmark global warming law. Overall, the region would cut emissions by 350-million metric tons over that time period. To achieve their goal, the partners, including Democratic and Republican governors, committed to designing a carbon-trading system within a year. That approach, now in use in Europe, allows industries to trade pollution credits among themselves. Seven Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states are also designing a so-called cap-and-trade system, but that initiative will be limited to power plants. And, yes, Nero in DC is fiddling. . . . As Greenpeace reports that a shift to renewable energies could save East Asian nations $2 trillion (yes, that’s “trillion”) in the next 23 years, those nations make plans to go nuke. And you think there’s hope for sense. . . . Meanwhile, as the world dithers, China is looking at a 10% cut in its harvests by 2030 due to global warming. . . . Moose and wolves around Lake Superior under global warming pressure and threat, but groundwater storage with warming will likely vary depending on the type of substructure. Water managers in CO told to hold onto their hats as snow melt diminishes in the future. . . . Is natural gas really a better alternative to coal in greenhouse gas emissions? Not if it’s imported, with all the steps in that process. Could be 35% more gas overall. . . . Maybe all this is why Grist has a philosophical piece up that concludes with this question: But how much harder is it going to be to deal with our behaviors when they are the cause of the existential threat to our existence? And here’s the quote to take away: Thus, the paradox: knowledge is no longer power. Instead, the better informed you are, the more likely you are to feel existential despair. Gee, I hope that doesn't happen to me.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Here She Goes Again
Natalie Portman, along with Chloe Sevigny and Kyra Sedgwick, in a video promoting CFL lighting rather than traditional bulbs. Have I asked before if Jews can be Saints?
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