Here’s what the bettors on the InTrade prediction market think of Hillary Clinton’s chances to be the Democratic nominee over the past couple of weeks:
rc3.org
Strong opinions, weakly held
Month: February 2008 (page 3 of 4)
Today I read Dr. Z’s annual ratings of football broadcasters and realized that I don’t really have a strong opinion of any of them in particular and that I have a mild distaste for all of them.
Fortunately, I’ve come up with a method of watching football that eliminates the announcers almost entirely. The key is not starting to watch the game at game time. Instead I let about 20 or 30 minutes of the games buffer up on the Tivo, and then I start from the beginning, watching the plays at regular speed and fast forwarding on the slowest speed between plays. It’s quick, and even better, silent. I try to stop in time to see the formation before each play. If I missed something, I just watch the play over and over until I figure it out.
By taking regular breaks during the game to let the Tivo keep its buffer full, I can skip all of the commercials, most of the stuff between plays, and most importantly, the halftime report. Using this method you can watch football games in half the normal airtime and eliminate nearly all of the aggravation.
Not long ago I watched the movie Once, which I recommend highly. The main character, a busker in Dublin, plays a guitar that has large holes worn in it. As it turns out, that guitar is the personal instrument of the actor playing the role, musician Glen Hansard. Then I saw Willie Nelson playing on stage before the Super Bowl, and his guitar was in similar condition.
The guitar made me think about aesthetics of this era, where the highest aesthetic value is often associated not with things that are shiny and new, but rather with stuff that looks old, worn, and lovingly cared for. I attribute this completely to the fact that we live in an era when new things are commonly available and cheap. Wal-Mart, Target, and other stores are full of them.
New manufactured goods are cheap, stuff isn’t built to last as long, and a lot of it is going to be obsolete before it wears out anyway. How many people use computers, televisions, or any other electronics until they wear out? Compare a nonstick skillet of today to the cast iron pans of yesteryear. A well-seasoned cast iron pan from 100 years ago is better to use now than the day it was made, whereas it’s recommended that you throw away nonstick pans as soon as the nonstick coating starts coming off.
I believe the turning point in public taste arrived when people started buying new jeans that were already worn out. When I was a kid, all of the brand new jeans in the store were freshly dyed and crisply starched. By the time I graduated from high school, people wore stone washed jeans, acid washed jeans, and every other form of jeans that came pre-aged. We’re still seeing new advances in jean-aging technology. Stores sell new looking jeans for $5. Artfully aged jeans are sold for hundreds of dollars.
What I find interesting is that tastes always seem to evolve to prize the uncommon, or more accurately, whatever is difficult or expensive to create. So in a world where you can get shiny new guitars anywhere, a guitar that looks like the same person has owned it and played it forever is considered beautiful. A century ago when new guitars were hand made and hard to come buy, and everybody used beat up guitars they’d picked up used, the fashion was reversed.
As a parenthetical note, this is what’s likely to be the first in a series of posts about aesthetics that I’m working on.
One thing that has annoyed me over the past year or so has been the persistent and perhaps willful misunderstanding of why violence is down in Iraq. There’s no question that the presence of more US soldiers has the effect of diminishing violence to a certain degree, but the real key has been co-opting the insurgents through a number of means. John Robb explains how this has worked:
What did happen with the Awakening, and the speed of the transition should be a clue to this, is that the US military opportunistically embraced the insurgency (in a move akin to IBMs embrace of open source development in the 90’s). This embrace showered autonomy, weapons, money ($300 per month x 60,000 participants), protection (from Shiite militias and the Iraqi government), and training on insurgent groups. By doing so, it replaced the ISI (Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaeda affiliate) as the leading participant in the insurgency. The only “cost” to these insurgent groups, which were under extreme pressure from Shiite militias due to overreaching by the ISI, was to sacrifice the ISI. They rapidly complied.
I’m not saying this was a bad plan or the wrong thing to do, but I do think that the implications of paying off as many insurgents as possible so they won’t fight us are much different than the implications of defeating the insurgency militarily and imposing quietude on the country. The insurgents we’re got on the payroll are only going to be on our side until they get a better offer or until we quit paying them.
Looks like OpenID has caught the eye of the big Web companies. All of those “2008 is the year of OpenID” predictions people made are looking better every day.
It seems that the recent trend in the music industry has been to make tracks available without DRM but to snub Apple by refusing to allow them to sell the DRM-free tracks through the iTunes Music Store. I suspect that this is a sort of vigilante antitrust action by the record companies that they hope will enable them to recapture a bit of power relative to Apple.
Currently, there are a lot more DRM-free MP3s available for download through Amazon.com than there are through iTunes Music Store, and Sony’s catalog hasn’t been made available yet. It was supposed to be available from Amazon.com at the end of January, but it looks like they missed their date.
I suspect that once Amazon.com has captured a good chunk of the market, the labels will migrate their catalogs to iTunes Plus so that both sites can compete with one another on equal ground. In the meantime, they’re playing favorites to escape from the clutches of Apple. One thing that’s interesting to me is that Amazon.com is actually lowering the price of music downloads, I’m not sure where that fits into the labels’ plans.
If you have 20 minutes and are going to vote today (or at any point this year), check out Larry Lessig’s video endorsement of Barack Obama.
Andrew Leonard posts today about Barack Obama’s views on economics. It’s the best analysis I’ve yet seen of Obama’s economic philosophy, and is a bit of a deeper look than the one provided in the New York Times article I’ve linked to a couple of times. Leonard describes Obama’s economic orientation as left-libertarian, which probably describes my own general outlook pretty well.
As you can probably guess, I really dig this stuff, so links to similar articles on any of the remaining viable candidates are much appreciated. On that note, you’d better post any Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee notes tonight, because by tomorrow evening those guys will be toast.
Is it just me or does the Microsoft/Yahoo merger stand to foster a lot of innovation on the Web by driving away many of the smartest people at Yahoo and perhaps even some of the smart people at Microsoft? How many startups will be created by former employees of those companies, and how many startups will hire key staff members from the legions of disaffected Yahoos? If you worked on a project at MSN that is trying to catch up with a similar property already provided by Yahoo, wouldn’t you be thinking it may be time to start looking for other opportunities?
The greatest value of this merger may be in the chaos it generates.
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Installing Ubuntu on OS X
Today’s experiment was to get Ubuntu Linux running in a virtual machine on my Mac. It gave me the opportunity to play with two things — Ubuntu Linux and VirtualBox, an open source alternative to VMware and Parallels.
First step: download VirtualBox and Ubuntu. Second step: wait four hours.
Like all the virtualization tools for the Mac, VirtualBox is an installable package, not just an application you drag to your Applications folder. (It has to install a kernel extension.) Installation is easy, as is creating your virtual machine. You name the VM, indicate which OS you’re going to install on it, and then assign it some memory and a virtual disk image. It supports expandable disk images, so you can start out small and grow the image as needed.
Starting up Ubuntu was easy. VirtualBox makes it trivial to mount an ISO, so I just had to point it to the downloaded ISO, and click on the start button. The Ubuntu live CD starts up, and there’s an installer icon right on the desktop. I ran the installer, pointed it at the virtual hard drive I’d created, and let it rip. It took a few minutes to install the files, I rebooted, realized I had left the ISO mounted, rebooted again, and the entire process was complete.
The whole process took a few hours, but I didn’t have to spend more than a few minutes of attention to get a virtual host running Ubuntu set up, and all with open source software. Now I’m anxious to create Windows virtual machine using VirtualBox. It certainly seems as easy to use as VMware, and the only problem I’ve seen is that it seems a bit more eager to eat up CPU when it’s in the background than VMware is.
As far as Ubuntu goes, I haven’t installed any Linux distribution in a couple of years, and I was shocked to find that the installation process is basically Mac-like. Linux has come a long way since you had to spend hours trying to get X to run your monitor at the correct resolution.
One question I don’t know the answer to is how Ubuntu and my dynamically resizable partition will play together. If I need to grow the partition beyond the initial 8 gigs, will I be able to do so transparently or will I need to use some Ubuntu tools to let it know about the larger partition?
Update: Coolest VirtualBox feature — when you have a VM open, its Dock icon becomes a snapshot of the VM’s desktop that updates in realtime. Yeah, it’s silly eye candy, but it’s still awesome.