The folks behind the iPhone Twitter client Tweetie have added a brilliant spoof of the economics of the App Store. It must be incredibly frustrating to work hard on applications that are innovative and interesting, only to be upstaged in the popularity rankings by fart noise generators and “flashlight” applications. This is the best response I’ve seen.
Calculated Risk has a graph showing the trends in shipping traffic at the Port of Los Angeles. Inbound traffic was 20% lower in December than it was in December, 2007. Export traffic was down to 2005 levels. It looks like the entire world is going to have to get used to a size L economy, not just the United States. In the meantime, the stimulus bill was introduced in the House of Representatives today. The opening bid is $825 billion, $550 billion of which is spending. ...
Dahlia Lithwick and Phillipe Sands write about how the Susan Crawford interview from today’s Washington Post changes the debate about torture. We now have a Pentagon employee stating unequivocally that the United States tortured a detainee, and that torture has prevented us from being able to mount a successful prosecution for his crimes. Now the question is what the Obama administration will do about it.
My friend Andrew Brown on cats (and fishing): When you think about it, kittens make an extraordinary animal to choose as an example of ethics. We only think they are cuddly because we are so very much larger than they are. If mice or birds could talk, their word for “kitten” would describe a monster of wanton cruelty: an animal which plays with its victims in a way that not even humans do. Fish are cannibals who will eat their own children with as little compassion as any others. They will even eat their own body parts – as a boy, I caught a perch on its own eyeball. They will sometimes kill for the sheer lust of it, as when trout corner a shoal of fry and charge through them repeatedly, leaving the surface littered with dying, crippled victims. ...
I’ve been convinced for some time that jQuery is the best JavaScript library around. What I am coming to realize is that it’s also one of the best-run open source projects around as well. jQuery 1.3 (released today) has a new selector engine, a key component of any modern JavaScript library. To encourage other projects to adopt their selector engine, the jQuery project has turned it over to the Dojo Foundation, which currently manages the Dojo Toolkit, a jQuery competitor: ...
Good things happen to those who blog (well). Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok and fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver will be panel members at TED 2009. One-time hobbyist fashion photographer The Sartorialist has gotten a major book deal. Obviously blogging is this big huge industry now full of professional writers, journalists, and celebrities, but the people who started out doing this for love and made it big will always have a special place in my heart. The people who publish their thoughts and remain relatively unknown do as well. ...
Ron Rosenbaum in Slate: In the case of the Letter of Last Resort, the reference turns out to be factual: At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.” ...
Jay Rosen on the role the Internet plays in the media sphere: Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized—meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition. ...
If there’s anything I’ll miss about the Bush administration, it’s Dan Froomkin’s coverage of the White House. Today, he analyzes President George W Bush’s final press conference. I understand Froomkin will remain on the job, covering the Obama White House as well. Hopefully he’ll not be forced to spend as much space as he does now correcting the White House’s misrepresentations.
The Daily Beast has a list of anonymous college admissions administrators discussing the criteria they apply to winnow out applicants. Let’s face it, our cultural fixation on merit is quaint at best.