Posts

The Washington Post ran a profile of blogger Tyler Cowen today. As regular readers know, he’s one of my favorites. What I learned from the profile is to always travel with reading material: This is one of Cowen’s favorite rules, as it relates to consumption of information. “People should be more willing to walk out of movies,” he tells anyone who will listen. “Most movies – they grab you or they don’t, and if they don’t, just leave. Just go. You have already lost money. Why lose the time?” ...

Bruce Schneier cautions people to be wary of worst-case scenarios: There’s a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism. ...

How many people agree with the following statement? In an ideal world, people would be free to reside in any country that they choose.

The BBC’s Paul Mason explains the mechanics and implications of Europe’s huge bailout of Greece and the other step’s the EU and IMF are taking to forestall potential defaults by Spain, Portugal, and Ireland as well. Mason’s argument is that Europe is turning financial risk into political risk, you should read the whole thing. (Via The Browser.)

One of the most interesting running threads through this week’s episode were the disagreements on jazz trivia between Antoine Batiste and the rabid Japanese jazz fan who bought him a new trombone. Their last disagreement was over whether a certain trombonist in a photo of Louis Amrstrong playing a slide trumpet is Kid Ory or Honore Dutrey. Here’s the photo: Batiste wins that one. That’s Dutrey on the left. Hopefully the NPR jazz blog or some other outlet will adjudicate the rest of the arguments this week. The Japanese benefactor was put in touch with Batiste by the Tipitina’s Foundation, a non-profit that seeks to preserve New Orleans’ music and culture. ...

Matt McKeon has created an amazing infographic showing exactly how Facebook has come to open up information people post to a wider and wider audience over time. This is the reason why so many people are linking to Dan Yoder’s 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. The problems with Facebook have been exacerbated by the fact that for many people, it’s their first read/write experience online. I’ve been deciding what I do and don’t want to share with other people online for 25 years, since I started dialing up BBSes on a 300 baud modem. It shouldn’t be any surprise that I don’t post anything on Facebook, really. I do keep my account though, and I’ll explain why. A few months ago I got a message on Facebook from a guy who went to college with a high school friend of mine. He was trying to get in touch with my friend, and I guess had remembered my name, or came across my profile on Facebook, or something. I really don’t know. But if Facebook didn’t exist, or had I not been on it, maybe “Farmer Ted” and “Beaker” wouldn’t have gotten back in touch, and that would be sad. So I stick with my minimal Facebook presence, even though I don’t really care for the site. ...

If Apple is going to dictate draconian licensing terms to developers and impose an onerous review process for applications in the App Store, they probably ought to do a better job of culling spam submissions.

Congressman David Obey, the current Chairman of the House Appropriations committee, is retiring after 42 years of service. He doesn’t pull any punches in his statement: In the last months, two colleagues, Charlie Wilson and Jack Murtha, have died. Both were 76. For me, that is only four years away. At the end of this term I will have served in the House longer than all but 18 of the 10,637 men and women who have ever served there. The wear and tear is beginning to take its toll. Given that fact, I have to ask myself how I want to spend the time I have left. Frankly, I do not know what I will do next. All I do know is that there has to be more to life than explaining the ridiculous, accountability destroying rules of the Senate to confused, angry, and frustrated constituents. ...

One news item arising from the arrest of accused Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was that Emirates Airlines didn’t update their copy of the no-fly list soon enough after Shahzad’s name was added to prevent him from buying a ticket or boarding a flight out of the country. A non-programmer friend of mine was wondering why the airlines keep their own copy of the no-fly list rather than accessing some centralized resource that always has the most up-to-date list of names, and I thought I’d take a stab at explaining a few of the reasons why that may be the case. ...

WebMonkey’s Scott Gilbertson posts on the future of Flash: As browser support for HTML5 grows and the video codec situation improves, the new lingua franca of the web will become more evenly distributed and we’ll stop using Flash to display videos, animations and fancy text. The lure of the iPad’s audience will force developers to push HTML5 designs to mobile visitors instead of Flash. But as long as people keep finding new ways to use Flash that HTML5 doesn’t cover, then Flash will likely continue to be part of the web for some time. ...