I’m still trying to figure out why eBay is paying $2.6 billion (or more, depending on performance, for Skype. Judging from the Business Week article, analysts are having trouble figuring out what’s going on as well. Here’s the closest Business Week comes to taking a stab:

EBay buyers and sellers can communicate with each other via e-mail before a transaction is complete, and presumably Skype would give eBay a way to add voice to such chats. But eBay traditionally has been guarded about such communications out of fears that deals might get taken offline to avoid fees.

That cannot possibly be the answer. That functionality isn’t worth 10% of the amount that eBay is paying for Skype. Is the idea here that eBay just wants to get into a completely new line of business? Honestly, I’m baffled.

I just finished reading Reza Aslan’s No god but God,which I picked up after watching the author interviewed on The Daily Show and reading Phil Carter’s recommendation over at Intel Dump. The author succeeds at his main task — explaining the history of Islam, from its origins in the Arabian desert, through the life of Mohammed, to the various changes and schisms that have brought us to the present day. Like any good history writer, though, Aslan’s main goal is to put forth an argument. I’ll get to that argument in a bit.

If you go into the book wanting to know how Islamists, Islamic fundamentalists, Wahabbis, Salafists, Shiites, Sunnis, and Sufis all differ from each other and where they come from, you’ll walk away happy. The book is a primer on Islam and its history, but it’s written in an engaging way. It’s no surprise to me that Aslan considers himself to be a novelist rather than a historian. The figures you encounter in the book are vividly drawn, and the stories are all well told, making the book difficult to put down.

Throughout the book, Aslan describes a struggle between two schools of theology, which he initially introduces as the Traditionalists and the Rationalists. As becomes apparent as you read the book, Aslan believes that while the Traditionalists have won out historically, the Rationalists are the ones who got it right. To oversimplify his definitions, rationalists believe that while the Quran is God’s message humanity, it is an artifact of the time it was written and is thus subject to interpretation based on its historical context. Traditionalists, on the other hand, believe that the Quran is an unchanging document equally applicable for all time, and that any sort of rational interpretation is precluded.

This ought to sound familiar to Americans. Christian fundamentalists believe that the Bible is literally true and thus should not be interpreted or considered metaphorical in any way. The secular form of this argument is put forth by legal scholars in the form of “strict construction,” a belief that the US Constitution should not be interpreted based on its historical context either. Aslan goes on to explain the impact that this “traditionalist” thinking has had on Islam over the years and the need for modern Islam to return to rationalism. It’s also obvious that he believes that despite the labels, rationalism is much more in keeping with the philosophy and beliefs of Mohammed than traditionalism. I’d make similar arguments about the Bible and Constitution as well.

Since 9/11, I have felt compelled to learn what I can about Islam. Not only because we were attacked by Muslims and have since then America has invaded two Muslim countries, but because our relations with Muslims will define the next period of US history. After reading No god but God, I feel a lot less ignorant than I did before, and found the book to be thought provoking and entertaining as well. I recommend it highly.

For more on the book, see this Blogcritics interview with the author.

Pfizer is offering free prescription drugs to Katrina survivors.

I also heard from a friend who told me that Time Warner converted some trucks that they normally use for promotional events to help provide on the scene Internet access to Katrina survivors. The trucks have a satellite link to the Internet and a bunch of terminals inside. Time Warner employees took out all of the promotional stuff, loaded up with food and water, and headed to the disaster zone to help out.

It’s for people like the users of that truck that I’ve been trying to dig up satellite photos and other resources that they can use to find out how their neighborhoods fared in the storm and subsequent flooding.

It seems like every day, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina offers up more outrages (created by humans), and my energy for commenting at length is ebbing. Some outbound links:

• FEMA prevents volunteers from setting up low power radio station to serve refugees in the Astrodome.
• In all of this, the thing that pisses me off the most remains the self-congratulation from various government officials. You guys have done a horrible job. Quit pretending like you didn’t.
• A Katrina timeline from Think Progress, and another from Josh Marshall.
• NBC anchor Brian Williams reports that law enforcement officers and soldiers in New Orleans are barring press access to some areas of the city and that there are incidents of intimidation against reporters.
• A legitimate-seeming first hand description of the refugees/detainees in Oklahoma.

I have no use for an iPod nano, and yet I want one. It’s sleek, gorgeous, and tiny, and it has a color display. The iPod nano goes for $199 in the 2 gig model and $249 in the 4 gig model. The iPod Mini is no more, being that it is inferior to the iPod nano in every way and costs only slightly less.

The question that immediately sprung to mind was how the iPod nano compares to competing music players. It was then that I realized just how much better Apple’s product line is than Creative’s. Apple has three models, iPod (20 gig or 60 gig), iPod nano (4 gig or 5 gig), and iPod Shuttle (512mb or 1 gig). The form factors and use cases for the players are completely different. If I were buying a music player, I’d have no trouble figuring out which of them I’d like to have.

When I went to Creative’s Web site to do the comparison, here’s what I found:

• Zen Microphoto — 8 gig capacity.
• Zen Vision — 30 gig capacity, plays video.
• Zen Micro — 4/5/6 gig capacity (only $20 less than the iPod nano, much larger, mono display)
• Zen Sleek — 20 gig capacity
• Zen — 20 gig capacity
• Zen Touch — 20 gig or 40 gig capacity
• Zen Nano — 512mb or 1 gig capacity
• Jukebox Zen Xtra — 30 gig or 60 gig capacity

You tell me how you decide which of these players to buy? It took me a few minutes to even figure out which of the models listed was the competitor to the iPod nano. Across the board, Creative’s prices are slightly lower than Apple’s, but the machines are a lot uglier and the features aren’t there, either.

Dell’s product line is as simple as Apple’s, and their prices on the high capacity players are much better. But they’re not beating the iPod nano on price right now, and their competing player is larger and doesn’t have a color display. Something tells me we’ll see a price cut from Dell soon.

There’s more to Apple’s success in this market than the cool factor.

Update: Corrected the capacity of the iPod nano.

The BBC reports that Yahoo’s Hong Kong operation helped the Chinese police track down a journalist who published a Communist Party memo. The guy wound up with a 10 year prison sentence. Reporters Without Borders has more.

I think it would be silly to privatize disaster relief, but it’s hard to miss how much better corporations did in planning for and responding to Katrina than the government did at any level. When President Bush looks for a replacement for FEMA chief Michael Brown, he ought to go beyond his list of cronies and hire someone from corporate America who has experience with this sort of thing.

Entergy and other power companies have done an amazing job restoring power. Not only have they done well in terms of customers served, but they have an excellent triage plan that enables them to turn on the power to crucial buildings first as well as to serve as many customers as possible by getting the easiest work out of the way before tackling harder problems. Then today I read that Wal-Mart had 45 truckloads of relief supplies prepared in Mississippi before Katrina made landfall. Wal-Mart supplied free computers to every shelter in Orange, TX so that refugees could take advantage of resources that are available on the Internet for finding relatives and keeping up with the news. I’m sure the company has done so elsewhere as well.

There are plenty of other examples of how corporations have responded quickly and decisively to the disaster, by evacuating employees, maintaining their operations without access to their headquarters, and providing aid where they can. Perhaps the CEO President can take mine of some of this expertise before the next great disaster.

Apparently the reports of Potemkin food distribution stations set up for President Bush’s aerial survey of New Orleans were misreported.

Mark Schmitt describes the willingness of people to place their faith in President Bush in terms of cognitive dissonance without describing it as such:

But there’s a factor here that I think is always neglected in these polls: There’s always a thin line between what we believe and what we wish to be true, or need to believe to be true. Unless you’ve given up completely on the Bush presidency, you naturally want to think the president and the government are doing the best job they can do with the disaster, because to believe otherwise is kind of terrifying.

Like I always say, cognitive dissonance makes the world go round. In this case, the two cognitions in conflict are that we’re totally screwed if the President is really bad at his job and indisputable evidence that the President is really bad at his job. It’s easier for many people to ignore the evidence than to believe that we’re totally screwed.

Did you know that Hurricane Katrina struck before New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin had a chance to distribute hurricane preparedness DVDs to New Orleans’ low income population that would have let them know in advance that in the event of an evacuation, they would be left to their own devices? This is not a man due much respect.