July 2010
11 posts
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“Web 2.0 users succeed when they generate idiosyncratic, personalized content. ...”
– Dan Drezner
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“The Tea Party Caucus is strictly issue based in nature, promoting policies of...”
– Michele Bachmann starts the congressional Tea Party Caucus
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“Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part...”
– Jonathan Chait on the most pure of the purists
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“Loving sports, by definition, requires a certain suspension of disbelief and...”
– Will Leitch on LeBron James (via @jeremymullman)
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“If you want to see the pinnacle of Apple application design, spend some time in...”
– Michael Lopp on The Setup
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“Behind [vegans’] beliefs is the hopeless longing for innocence. Except that...”
– Harold Fromm
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The Law of One Platform →
Senate challenger Sharron Angle is upset that Harry Reid’s campaign has re-published her primary website which was presumably more Tea Partyish than the presentation of self she planned on using for Nevada’s general electorate (via @pwire).
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“[O]n the much, much more interesting questions—how much of the rise in...”
– Greg Marx
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New Food →
Innovation in cooking continues without the protection of intellectual property rights (via Freakonomics). The parallels to live music seem important.
June 2010
18 posts
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More On The Shallows →
Steven Johnson defends our digital age.
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“All successful revitalization efforts focus on upgrading existing local assets —...”
– Richard Florida
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“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” — Phish, Columbia,...
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Here’s hoping that the next version of iBooks gets the PDF highlighting and notes that were introduced for ePubs today.
If I finish some work ahead of schedule this week, you all might suffer a rant filled with my hopes and dreams for notes and metadata on the iPad, tentatively entitled, “Content Creation, Not the Herculean Task it’s Made to Be.”
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The Velluvial Matrix →
Atul Gawande on complexity in medicine and healthcare.
Via Give Me Something to Read.
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Federal Regions
A smattering of federally defined regions of varying levels of importance.
The Twelve Federal Reserve Districts
United States Courts of Appeals
United States Department of Energy
Federal Emergency Management Agency
Census Regions and Divisions of the United States
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Mind Over Mass Media →
Steven Pinker defends our digital age.
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“In part due to competitive pressures, it’s newspaper writers and talk-show hosts...”
– Joe Sheehan writing about the over-interpretation of small samples in baseball, but it could be about public opinion polls, or primary election results or whathaveyou.
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Sexy Data →
Matthew Yglesias hates when people “…make sweeping statements of social trends without any kind of empirical backing or even recognition of the possibility that assertions can be verified or not through data.”
Me too man, me too. Link via Nyhan who hates sweeping statements even more than me and probably Yglesias too.
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The iPad Revolution →
This essay from The New York Review of Books is sort of a skeptic’s take on the iPad, ebook readers, and recent technological developments more generally. The overall tone seems to be intensely conservative to me.
I’m trying to imagine a person reading this and afterwards trying to decide on a gadget for dad for Fathers’ Day. A person who doesn’t plan a day around every Steve Jobs keynote and...
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“The democratizing tendencies of the Internet have always been overstated. To...”
– Laura McKenna on the evolution of the political blogosphere
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“[F]ind (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to...”
– Paul Graham on Six Principles for Making New Things
I think not such bad advice for research design either.
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“Pay close attention to Greece; at a time of world-wide economic upheaval, it...”
– Robert Kaplan - December 2008
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“Dallas Braden’s perfect game was thrilling. Roy Halladay’s perfect game was art....”
– Joe Posnanski on The Lesson of Jim Joyce
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Walled Gardens in Portland and Cupertino →
A Defense of Apple and the walled garden from Neven Mrgan. The post would make more than a couple libertarians proud.
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Libraries, Libraries, Libraries →
If they are going to make us use DRM, they’ve got to solve the library problem and create a model for genuine sharing.
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May 2010
17 posts
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“Count the economic collapse of Greece as an intellectual victory for Douglass...”
– Tyler Cowen
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On the Internet, Community (Only) Costs $5
I don’t know that much about MetaFilter or Matt Haughey. Sure MetaFilter sometimes shows well in Google searches, and Haughey is an internet celebrity, first making an impression with me after reading about his adventures in $40 eyeglasses and more recently with his public battle with a brain tumor.
In March, Dan Benjamin interviewed him on The Pipeline. During the conversation, Haughey...
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Own Your Data →
John Gruber points out that Flickr preserves the ability of its users to access all of the data they’ve added to the website. Another reason that Flickr (and not say Facebook) is the best photo sharing website. Tumblr also makes it easy for users to download and backup their blogs. I can’t imagine investing serious time and energy into a website that didn’t.
I...
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“We all know when to get into this business, or you wouldn’t be here if you...”
– Retiring Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) as quoted by Political Wire from an interview in The Hill
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The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P. →
On measuring national progress and the human condition. More on measurent in the same issue of the New York Times Magazine here.
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How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the... →
An incredibly insightful essay on the Internet (really technology and communication more generally) written by Douglas Adams in 1999 (via Kottke).
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Housing Markets and the Education of Children →
Robert Frank on “expenditure cascades” and running to stand still in the market for education for which, more often than not, the price is a house:
That cascade has raised the cost to poor and middle-income families of maintaining their places in the educational hierarchy. A good school, again, is one that compares favorably with other schools. To gain access to such a school, a family must bid...
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The Dark Magic of Structured Finance →
Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution provides the most clear explanation I have seen of how financial markets tried and failed to manage risk.
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“[G]reatness, when you can find it—if you can find it—is an evanescent thing,...”
– Todd Kliman on the chef Peter Chang (via MR).
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Democrats Fail to Coordinate →
Sure the Republicans have been giving us more things to talk about, but the Democrats have their own (admittedly small) mess too. They’ve failed to coordinate on a candidate for the Hawaii 1st district’s special election. Yes the benefits of a House seat through the rest of the year are small. And yes, the electoral institutions were against coordination marking this case distinct...
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Real Work is Hard →
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) on Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) who apparently has the audacity consider the issues before casting a vote:
I think he’s a guy who’s willing to get down into the weeds. Because he immerses himself in that and understands it so well — the positions he adopts may not always be the ones that everyone else in our conference comes to.
It pus the whole roll call...
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The Extended Grand Old Party →
Jonathan Bernstein was right. Failure will not be tolerated. It doesn’t matter that Michael Steele is an idiot. The party is stronger than the Party.
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Real Scandals Have Drugs -and- Strippers →
From the New York Times obituary of longtime Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Arkansas):
Once held in awe for his near-absolute sway over any legislation with fiscal consequences, [Wilbur] Mills’s power eroded rapidly after an incident in 1974 in which a striptease dancer who performed under the stage name Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker, jumped out of his car and waded...
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The iPad Needs a Guest or Demo Mode →
I agree (via DF).
After getting called out in a talk last week for using my iPad to take notes (thanks Bill!), one of my colleagues wanted to try it out. I made a crack about being worried that the Mail app might have emails of me making fun of him, which I think only made him nervous to really mess around with the device.
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Leave the Party When It's not Fun Anymore →
Political Wire reports that an internal Crist poll showed him leading in a three-candidate race for the Senate seat.
These days it seems that the Aldrich and Bianco model needs a third choice. The overall point about politicians using parties as long as they are useful still stands though. And notice how long and drawn out the decision seemed to be for Crist to make this move. I think it’s...
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“The debate about sovereignty and liberty that took place between 1764 and 1791...”
– Jill Lepore in Boston tea parties past and present : The New Yorker
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Polarization Does Not Affect Trust in Government →
So says John Sides of the Monkey Cage and he has the data to back up the claim.
April 2010
26 posts
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Nobody Leads the Party →
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on the the public’s ability to identify the leader of the Republican Party (via Political Wire).
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“The telephone was an aberration in human development. It was a 70 year or so...”
– Rick Webb about texting (via toldorknown, marco)
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Biden and Geithner Go to Milwaukee →
See also my pictures from the town hall meeting.