fling93 loves fishies

Media Bias?

It’s about time I got into something at least somewhat resembling a rant, so here it is: I’m sick and tired of hearing people complain about bias in the media. I think it’s a total cop-out.

Update on Touch-Screen Voting

Couple of new developments in the touch-screen voting issue. It’s finally starting to get a bit more attention. Economics professor and New York Times columnist (and shrill liberal) Paul Krugman wrote a column about the issue that appeared today:

An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse…

Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn’t contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination.

Why isn’t this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or business story — not as a potential political scandal.

“Why isn’t this front-page news?” is a good question, especially for those who always complain about liberal bias in the media.

Reorganized My Archives

I've reorganized the archives a bit to have a more scaleable directory structure and recognizable filenames, so if you've bookmarked or linked any of the individual entries, you may want to update them (note, this doesn't effect your bookmark to this main blog site -- hey, you got here, right?). The old files are actually still in their original locations for now. I may even eventually get them all to redirect to the new locations (like this one), but maybe not. It's a lot of work, and I don't think too many of you really care.

And do note that they will not be updated when I go back and make changes and corrections (e.g. my fixing of the misspelling of Alegria). Okay, even fewer of you care about that. But note this, and note it well! The presence of the old files may annoy me enough someday that I'll just delete them! After all, we're talking about a guy who makes sure his CDs are oriented right-side-up inside their jewel boxes.

Ooooh, I'll bet yer scared now, huh?

Okie-Dokie, Artichokie!

My sister works in the children’s book publishing business, and one of her best friends, Grace Lin, is an award-winning writer/illustrator of children’s books, so I’d like to pass on her promo for her latest book:

It’s time to start holiday shopping! Most of you have a child or a child-at-heart adult on your shopping list, so I thought I’d help you out with this shameless reminder that my holiday book, Okie-Dokie, Artichokie! has just come out….

Okie-Dokie, Artichokie! is a fun book and perfect for the holidays. Meet Marklee, a monkey, and his new neighbor Artichoke, a giraffe. Marklee thinks Artichoke is an old grouch. Whenever Marklee makes any noise, Artichoke bangs on the ceiling. Can they ever be friends? In this combination holiday and friendship story, misunderstandings are resolved with sweetness and humor.

Our copy just arrived yesterday, and yes, it’s quite a cute story with an important message. But the best thing about Grace’s books has got to be the lovely artwork. The animals are adorable, the colors just leap off the page, and buried in some of the pictures are some cute details (characters in some books often make tiny cameos in others).

Steel Tariffs Lifted

Here’s a bit of President Bush’s statement regarding the lifting of those steel tariffs I mentioned earlier (well, that Kevin Drum mentioned earlier):

“I took action to give the industry a chance to adjust to the surge in foreign imports and to give relief to the workers and communities that depend on steel for their jobs and livelihoods,” Bush said. “These safeguard measures have now achieved their purpose, and as a result of changed economic circumstances it is time to lift them.”

So apparently the threats by the WTO and the EU had absolutely nothing to do with it. Right. And no doubt, Grady Little was fired because he achieved his purpose of taking the Red Sox to Game 7 of the ALCS. Losing control of the clubhouse and being intimidated by Pedro into leaving him in the game too long had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Of course, the tariffs never should have been enacted in the first place, but hey, in American politics, it’s always worth it to slightly hurt the many to greatly benefit a few. Gotta love that Electoral College.

Rubin's Probabilistic Thinking

Brad DeLong recently read In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington, the recently released memoir of Robert Rubin (the Treasury secretary under Clinton), and has an enlightening post on him:

The factor Rubin himself sees as most important is his habit of “probabilistic thinking”: a willingness to always ask questions like “What else might happen?”, “What if we’re wrong?”, “What could happen next?”, and to look at the full range of situations that might come to pass—and at their costs and benefits—rather than to assume that things will go as planned or as the fashionable ideology or favorite administration model would have predicted…. Rubin’s recognition that the world is a complicated and poorly-understood place, where lots of unexpected and surprising things happen (as opposed to a place to which John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman or Irving Kristol has already drawn us an accurate map we need merely to consult), seems to have been the most powerful of his secret weapons.

Sentence italicized by me. Despite being a fan of Friedman (although it’s admittedly been many years since I’ve read anything by him), I’ve always found this kind of thinking to be an admirable quality to be striven towards. The world is a very complicated and unpredictable place, and I am tired of leaders who pretend that it isn’t (well, until only after something goes wrong).

Perhaps this is an inevitable result of democracy in a country where much of the electorate views the world the same way? Maybe most people (or just Americans?) find it inconvenient for the world to be too complicated to predict — so much so that we punish leaders who admit they’re wrong more than leaders who are too stubborn to admit they’re wrong.

Grammar Wars

Kevin Drum takes on the great evil menacing our society: the mighty apostrophe. The Telegraph argues for correct punctuation:

...punctuation makes it easier to plot your way through the highways and byways of the English language.

Kevin responds:

...it is 100% wrong for the apostrophe, a piece of punctuation that serves no purpose at all. The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused

Aside from the important distinction between singular and plural possessives, I think apostrophes serve another purpose: making it easier for the human brain to identify a word. The brain actually doesn't parse every single letter in the word before it recognizes it; it looks at the overall word shape.

Battlestar Galactica Redux

The Sci-Fi channel is airing a new Battlestar Galactica miniseries. The first episode aired last night, but airs again this afternoon at 3:52pm PST right before episode #2. There’s an encore presentation of both episodes this Sunday at 4pm PST.

The series is pitched as a “re-imagining” of the original series, with changes that have met with strong reactions from fans. The most striking changes: some Cylons now appear as humans (and thus can infiltrate the colonies more easily), Starbuck and Boomer are women, and Commander Adama has to work with a Colonial President.

These didn’t sound like good ideas. Indeed, the new Adama, Edward James Olmos (best known as Lt. Castillo in Miami Vice, Harrison Ford’s enigmatic partner in Blade Runner, and the teacher in Stand and Deliver), actually advised hard-core fans of the old series to not watch the new one. So that, combined with the fact that the Sci-Fi Channel is a bunch of poopieheads for cancelling Farscape, and I had a tons of reasons to hate this going in. But I was actually pleasantly surprised.

The Reagan Dime?

You may have heard by now that Republicans have introduced legislation to replace FDR on the dime with Ronald Reagan.

Conservative Republicans angry over an unflattering television movie about Ronald Reagan want to put his image on the dime in place of Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Democrats are just as determined to keep FDR’s profile in coin purses.
…
Supporters of the “Ronald Reagan Dime Act” said Roosevelt and his government-expanding New Deal represented decades past, while Reagan’s conservative, anti-communist administration ushered in society as it exists today.

Triggering the dispute is a TV movie that depicts a doddering Reagan dominated by his wife, Nancy. The movie is being aired by Showtime after CBS canceled its plans to show it last month in response to pressure by Reagan supporters.

Interestingly enough, Nancy opposes this, recognizing it as the tit-for-tat that it is.

Audioscrobbler

Most tools for discovering new music and new artists rely on the user rating a bunch of artists they like and dislike. Well, Audioscrobbler does this for you by keeping track of what you listen to. Using a Winamp plugin (although version 3 was worse than 2, I’ve heard the newly-released version 5 is better), it checks for songs you actually listen to (it makes sure you actually play at least half of the song, thus filtering out songs you decide to skip), and then submits it to Audioscrobbler’s server where statistics are kept on how often you’ve played each artist. You can then use this to discover other users who listen to the same artists.

By the way, this is not a commercial site that will sell your name and preferences. It doesn’t even ask for your e-mail address. The whole thing is open-source. From their “About” page:

There are no popups/adverts or any other crap, Audioscrobbler plugins are all Open Source. Audioscrobbler data is periodically released under a Creative Commons License. We are striving to eliminate any possibilities of Audioscrobbler “doing a GraceNote” by periodically releasing data collected by plugins, and keeping the plugins and protocol open-source.

The Station Agent Review

The Station Agent is a quiet, character-driven drama about a few outsiders slowly developing a relationship, so the best advice I could give as to whether or not to see the film is simply whether or not you liked Lost in Translation (it also reminded me somewhat of Ruby in Paradise). There isn’t all that much in terms of plot, so you either like these sort of films or you don’t. But it’s a shame if you don’t.

The film is about a man named Fin who struggles mightily to be taken seriously because, well… he’s a dwarf. When we’re introduced to him, we see various people reacting to him as you might expect, and his response is to completely ignore the reactions with a resigned acceptance and just deal with people as little as possible, thus living a completely solitary lifestyle.

Decline of the Two-Party System?

Now that I’ve discovered news aggregators and RSS feeds, I can finally stay on top of Slashdot, which I used to monitor sporadically (and I’d have found out about the new Firefly and Farscape projects much sooner).

Anyway, they have an interesting entry on Dean’s use of the Internet, and how the Internet is actually already starting to bring down the two-party political system. Here’s some of the original Washington Post article:

Keiko Is Dead

No, not O’Brien’s wife from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but the star of Free Willy. No, I’ve never seen the films, but for a guy who likes fishies, this is sad news:

For kids, Keiko the killer whale was the charming hero of “Free Willy.” For biologists, he was the focus of fierce debate on whether captive animals could be returned to the wild. Keiko, who died of pneumonia this week, never strayed far from humans, keeping company with them in a Norwegian fjord to the end.

Keiko’s apparent love of human company — and his popularity — frustrated handlers’ dreams that he would one day leave them in search of food on his own. Millions of dollars were spent trying to teach him to survive, but he didn’t bond with other whales, apparently feared swimming under ice and died less than two years after he was freed.
…
Keiko’s handlers noticed on Thursday he had become listless, and the six-ton orca died Friday afternoon despite veterinarians’ efforts to save him.

“It was pretty sudden,” his animal care specialist, Dane Richards, told The Associated Press. He said Keiko’s handlers went out to check on him during a late afternoon blizzard and he was still alive. Two hours later, he had died.

The whole article tells a pretty interesting story of Keiko’s life. Anyway, killer whales aren’t actually fishies; they eat fishies. So maybe I should be happy, instead? Of course, I eat sushi myself. Can’t bring myself to give it up. :( And I love kitty cats, and they eat fishies, too. Ditto with dolphins.

Buffy: Chaos Bleeds for PS2

Well, I actually did plan to post yesterday (so you get double the pleasure today), but the wife needed me to drop by Fry’s Electronics to pick up some printer paper, and of course I can never resist browsing around Fry’s for a couple of hours, and I finally picked up that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds PS2 game (grammatically speaking, shouldn’t it actually be, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer?). So of course, there’s no way I could avoid playing it.

Yeah, the game’s been out for months, and I’m a huge fan of the show (started watching it soon after they moved it away from Monday nights, so my first episode was the second season episode, “School Hard”, where Spike first shows up). So I’ve been planning to get it for a while. But I absolutely refuse to pay $50 for a PS2 game, and this was the first time I saw it available for $20.

Saddam's Capture

Okay, I originally planned this to be primarily a political blog, and I seem to be getting away from that a bit. Part of the problem is that I feel a lot of what I would comment on current events requires a good deal of background which I haven’t posted yet, and the other part is that I just can’t post several times a day like many political bloggers (so I hope none of you use me as your sole source of news! There are plenty of good political blogs that update much more frequently).

For example, Saddam’s capture (the link is only there to give this post context for future reference. You have to have already known about this unless, say, you’ve been living in a hole in Tikrit… well actually, then you’d probably have been the first to know about it, huh?). There isn’t much I would say that differs from what everybody else has already said. That this is a great development is obvious, although it might not feel like it for Democrats (which is why I dislike our two-party partisan politics so much — it makes many people on both sides miss the bigger picture).

Supply Side Economics

Update 8/24/04: Made some minor revisions and reworded the conclusion.

It occurred to me a while back that one thing that sometimes separates conservatives from liberals is that conservatives tend to know more about economics, and liberals know more about sociology (yes, I know this isn’t always the case). Furthermore, that experts in economics tend to look down upon sociology and other social sciences as not being real sciences, even though economics itself is also a social science, indeed, as Brian Leiter notes, one with a very poor track record of predictive success, which is why it’s called the “dismal science.” After all, with all the mathematics involved, it’s easy to forget that it all relies on a model of human behavior, often a crude one.

And if you can stomach yet another overgeneralization, it seems to me that conservatives often try to take advantage of many liberals’ aversion to economics to pull a fast one on them. Case in point? Supply-side economics, which is often misunderstood or misinterpreted badly by both sides, but is often used by conservatives against liberals who don’t know enough economics to know they’re being had. Again, I’m no expert, but I think I can clear this up a bit. Now, Art Laffer actually had the right idea with the Laffer Curve, but people forget that this was not the only thing about supply-side economics, or indeed, even the primary selling point.

My New iBook

Okay, I gotta warn you that this one’s going to be a geeky post. And I don’t mean in a sci-fi sorta way, but in a techie sorta way. Anyway, I just got my new iBook in and will probably be playing with it quite a bit for the next few days, so my blogging will probably be sporadic for a while. Yeah, I’ve generally been a PC person, but so many people recommended the iBooks and PowerBooks that I couldn’t ignore them. Very happy with it so far!

"The Play" Redux

I haven’t been watching much football this year. Partially because the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants are both out of it. Partially because blogging (both reading and writing) is taking up more of my time. Partially because sports don’t seem to matter as much to me as they used to (boredom has rarely been a problem for me, and lately, watching sports irks me somewhat since I feel I should be doing something more useful with my time).

But mostly because I hate what the salary cap has done to the sport. Classic example of everything that is wrong with Socialism. If you look at the final playoff teams the past few years, they’ve all been crappy teams. Yes, even when my NY Giants made the Superbowl against the Ravens. I’ll still probably watch a few of the playoff games (at least the Superbowl, for the commercials), but I generally find it more enjoyable to (badly) play Madden on the PS2 than to watch two crappy teams make a mockery of the game. Just like last year’s Niners-Giants joke of a first-round playoff matchup that featured a lot of botched defense and ended on a botched field goal and a botched call.

But I kinda wish I’d seen that New Orleans-Jacksonville game this past weekend, if only for nostalgia’s sake. I’m sure most of you’ve already heard all this by now, but just in case you haven’t, let me do a recap.

Season's Greetings

Just thought I’d showcase my wondrous talent in MS Paint to wish everybody a…

iTunes

Yeah, blogging’s been slow lately, partly because of the holidays, but mostly because of my new iBook, as I warned. I’m still installing utilities and neat things here and there (maybe I’ll post a summary), and I even bought a neat bag for it from WaterField Designs, but I find I spend the bulk of my time enjoying the ability to surf the web from the living room, often while watching TV in the background.

I know I’ve already mentioned in my Chaos Bleeds review that I’m a late adopter of technology, but it’s especially strange in this case because I actually used to work at a wireless LAN company — indeed, before 802.11b came out. So I’ve known about wireless networking for, like seven years, before ever really using it for myself (testing/debugging it doesn’t count). Mostly because laptops are expensive, become obsolete really quickly, and weren’t really that big a value add for me — until I started blogging.

Aside from wirelessly surfing the web for pictures of Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman, and Alicia Witt… um… I mean for important news stories, I’m also spending a lot of time using iTunes. I’d been staying away from them because I don’t have an iPod, but the feature-laden but relatively bulky Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 instead, which doesn’t play AAC format music files. I’m also leaning towards moving my collection away from MP3 and towards Ogg Vorbis, which is an open patent-free format, unlike MP3, or WMA, which is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft, as my brother learned the hard way when he found out he couldn’t play his WMA collection on his new PowerBook. Ogg is also completely free of DRM (security that limits or prevents users from copying and/or burning), unlike AAC and WMA.

House of Sand and Fog Review

Well, I was going to write a review of Donnie Darko, which I just saw Friday night at the Camera 7 Midnight Movie Madness. But Saturday, we watched House of Sand and Fog, and since it’s a film that’s currently out, I’ll review that one first. But for those who’ve seen Donnie Darko but didn’t understand the plot, check out their interactive web site (I’d recommend using Internet Explorer — it didn’t seem to accept text input properly in Safari). The puzzles are not really that difficult, and at the end of the first level, you get a chance to finally read that Philosophy of Time book which answers a lot of questions (for those too lazy to jump through the hoops, you can also find a transcription of it here). For those who haven’t seen it, do rent it. It’s one of the most thought-provoking films I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, back to House of Sand and Fog, which is a very different animal, but is a very powerful and emotionally moving film — perhaps the best I’ve seen all year. Jennifer Connelly plays Kathy Nicolo, whose husband has left her and is now a recovering alcohollic living alone in a house she inherited from her father. She’s mistakenly evicted from her house due to a clerical error by the county — combined with the fact that, in her depression, she hasn’t been opening her mail.

Before she is able to straighten it out, the county has already sold the house to Massoud Amir Behrani, played by Ben Kingsley, who is simply a remarkable actor (if you haven’t yet seen his turn as the monstrous Don Logan in Sexy Beast, check it out!). Behrani is a retired colonel from Iran who, due to his close ties to the Shah, was forced to come to the U.S. and whose pride keeps him maintaining a lifestyle he feels his family deserves — even though it means working two menial jobs. Since the county auctions Kathy’s house well below market value, Behrani sees it as his last best opportunity for his family to reclaim the lifestyle that is slipping away from them.

Implications of the Wealth Gap

There was a good deal of discussion of the wealth gap in the blogosphere last week. As usual, I’m late to the dance (partially cuz of my new iBook). But time lets you absorb more information and gives you a chance for greater reflection anyway.

First, start with Paul Krugman’s piece in The Nation:

…America was once a place of substantial intergenerational mobility: Sons often did much better than their fathers. A classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic status, 23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent. In other words, during the first thirty years or so after World War II, the American dream of upward mobility was a real experience for many people. Now for the shocker: The Business Week piece cites a new survey of today’s adult men, which finds that this number has dropped to only 10 percent. That is, over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically. Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence…. In modern America, it seems, you’re quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into which you were born.