Brendan Nyhan on the relationship between economic growth and presidential vote share.
tofias dot net
log | a bucket full of thoughts
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.
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 doesn’t know about RSS or HTML5. I think that person would be confused and maybe a little scared for the future.
I don’t think the future is so scary. I think it’s really very exciting. We need to share the joy. If you’re the least bit intellectually curious, today is the best time in the history of the world to be alive. Apple isn’t going to squash that. They couldn’t if they tried.
Link via AK.
“ The democratizing tendencies of the Internet have always been overstated. To write blog posts about politics, one needs a very high education level and a very high interest in politics.”
— Laura McKenna on the evolution of the political blogosphere
“ [F]ind (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.”
— Paul Graham on Six Principles for Making New Things
I think not such bad advice for research design either.
“ Pay close attention to Greece; at a time of world-wide economic upheaval, it might eerily presage disturbances elsewhere in 2009.”
— Robert Kaplan - December 2008
“ Dallas Braden’s perfect game was thrilling. Roy Halladay’s perfect game was art. But Armando’s Galarraga’s perfect game was a lesson in grace.”
— Joe Posnanski on The Lesson of Jim Joyce
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.
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.
Lemon Blueberry Buckle
