iPod education:
Go to school on your commute with these academic podcasts.
« December 2007 | Main | February 2008 »
January 29, 2008
The new Kennedy Democrats:
David Brooks writes about Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama in light of Bill Clinton's dismissal of the candidate as inexperienced.
...“There was another time,” Kennedy said, “when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier.” But, he continued, another former Democratic president, Harry Truman, said he should have patience. He said he lacked experience. John Kennedy replied: “The world is changing. The old ways will not do!”
The audience at American University roared. It was mostly young people, and to them, the Clintons are as old as the Trumans were in 1960. And in the students’ rapture for Kennedy’s message, you began to see the folding over of generations, the service generation of John and Robert Kennedy united with the service generation of the One Campaign. The grandparents and children united against the parents.
Interesting take on the demographics of the Democratic race.
Sandwich vs Sandwich:
Quiznos sponsored a video contest and the results weren't pretty for Subway. Now they're going to court and there's more than who has the meatiest sub at stake.
January 28, 2008
Who cares:
I don't care how many ex-presidents are peripherally involved, it's a neighbor dispute over a driveway in a town in another state. How this got on the front page of the Globe or how it could be relevant to that 39 year old single mother from East Boston is beyond me.
UPDATE: Oops! it's not really on the newspaper front page, just online. Never-mind.
(And speaking of small town, neighbor state news.)
Improved productivity:
I'm all for wi-fi on the commuter rail. And the reason that the T is setting it up is to increase our productivity. Hmmm. My first thought was that riders would be gouged for the service but the Globe is reporting that it will be free.
Thinking differently II:
Apparently Romney is, as I imagined, a PC guy. From a Tech Crunch interview:
[Interviewer]: I guess that brings us to the most important question I have to ask you, which is…Governor Romney, Mac or PC?
[Romney]: I have a PC. My sons have a Mac and swear by it, but I have a couple PC’s.
[Interviewer]: So one of your sons is on Mac, or most of them are?
[Romney]: 3 out of the 5 boys I believe are on Macs, and they swear by them, but I’m a creature of habit, I’ve got my PC.
So there you have it, the boxers / briefs issue of 08.
Convergence:
Checking in with the latest polls for Democrats and Republicans. Scroll down to the graphs, especially on the Republican page, to look at the history of the standings. Wild.
Your papers please:
It's the time of year to get away to somewhere warmer. So do you need a passport to visit Bermuda, Mexico or the Caribbean? It depends.
If you fly, you need a passport. If you travel by land or sea, you don't. But as of Jan. 31, U.S. adults are expected to present at least a birth certificate or other proof of citizenship, plus a government-issued photo ID, such as a driver's license, to cross these land-sea borders; children 18 and younger need only a birth certificate.
The above is excerpted from the LA Times and they have more on what to expect.
January 25, 2008
Thinking differently:
Is the Romney campaign using Apple computers? According to the Herald, a boxed iMac was taken in a campaign headquarters break-in. I would have pegged him as a Windows XP type of guy.
January 24, 2008
Super contest:
Out of control New York'ers taking cheap shots at the competition. Others threatening physical violence. And then there are the football fans.
Whiplash Wednesday:
A 600 point day! Things look better today which is a little scary considering how yesterday played out against expectations.
Pedias:
For those times when you know there's a free piece of software available but can't remember the name or where it can be downloaded, there's Downloadpedia. Definitely worth a bookmark. And here are some options to help manage those downloads.
And then there's the 'rhymes with Wickipedia' site, Chickipedia.
Thin tech:
Walt Mossberg has posted his review of the MacBook Air.
January 22, 2008
Football and politics:
If the Pats win the Superbowl, will a certain ex-governor start to play up his Massachusetts links just in time for Super Tuesday?
Romney campaign spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said yesterday that the candidate will be campaigning across the 22 states holding primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5 and has not yet scheduled any appearances in Massachusetts. But, she said, he is not taking any state for granted.
Actually, he probably can take Massachusetts for granted.
Get going:
More than 20 days in, and the new year workout plan is still just a plan? Here, via WWD, are some geek tools for getting into shape. Or not.
Core incompetencey:
Microsoft is getting into virtualization. Apparently VMware and Juniper are making money and Microsoft wants to steal that market from them. The same goes for advertising and Google. Microsoft says it will become an advertising company, jealous of all that money Google is making.
It would seem to me that Microsoft would be better off spending its time improving its core products, Vista and Office, before someone (Apple, Google) steals that market away from them.
Odd man out:
Stocks are expected to drop today (apparently we've gone from "irrational exuberance" to "indiscriminate panic") and after last night's debate, John Edwards' stock looks like it, too, is in freefall. In coverage of the dust-up between Clinton and Obama, he got this mention:
The third candidate on the stage, former North Carolina senator John Edwards, broke in to ask: "Are there three people in this debate, not two?"
Not good.
January 18, 2008
Highly charged:
Laptop battery life has improved over the years but you still won't make it across the Atlantic. This might be changing. 40 hours of battery life would get you from Boston to Beijing and back.
Working at home:
More and more people do some work at home and this time of year the question of deductions for home office equipment comes up. Here's a thumbnail version of how it works.
Betting the house:
One more campaign post: In Nevada, Obama is being portrayed as a moral opponent of gambling. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to put Deval Patrick out front.
Losing it:
There's an obvious upside to Bill campaigning for Hillary but the downside, increasingly, is his temper.
"Pandering to moderates and independents":
The Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party, if it even exists anymore, will apparently go unenthusiastically for Romney rather than for Huckabee or McCain according to these statements.
January 16, 2008
One day later:
We have the answers: In Michigan it was Romney by almost 10 points over McCain. It's not over for McCain with South Carolina coming up. And Romney isn't out of the woods yet either. How does this sound for a prediction, a Romney / Huckabee ticket on the Republican side?
For Apple, the big product announcement was a paper-thin laptop. Very cool. But first I may spring for the Time Capsule; a terrabyte of wireless home network storage. Very practical.
And finally, for the State of the City, the mayor announced that it is "stronger than ever." Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but did the Globe not cover the speech this morning? On line, there's a story limited to the Fire Department angle but the rest of the speech seems not to have made the paper. Strange.
January 15, 2008
An eventful Tuesday:
It's a big day in Michigan for the Republicans. A loss for Romney could doom his candidacy and a poor showing by McCain could hurt his momentum and raise questions about his electability.
It's also a big day in San Francisco where Apple chief Steve Jobs will make his keynote speech introducing new products. Warm up those credit cards.
And closer to home, tonight is the State of the City speech.
The answer, my friend:
One of the last hurdles facing the Cape Cod wind farm has been passed. Good. It could be operating by 2011. Opponents are still likely to pull a trick or two out of their bag but momentum is clearly on the side of the project now.
Free flow:
I suppose I should thank all those people who worked from home yesterday. Despite the heavy snow, it was a faster commute than usual. Let's see how today stacks up.
Makes up the shoemaker:
Here's another sighting of one of my photos, this time on a Chinese language blog. Roughly translated, it's a description of the occupation of shoemaker in Singapore who apparently can make about 300 a month.
January 14, 2008
Unveiling:
I've decided to switch from Moveable Type to Wordpress and do a site redesign. I've been frustrated by the lack of comments and some persistent technical glitches on the MT site that have prevented me from editing my main pages. I've started fooling around on a design here. The comments work so let me know what you think.
Patriots haters:
Better the Colts than the Chargers, I suppose, although I'm afraid that I'm setting myself up for a huge case of 'be careful what you wish for'. Laurel Sweet searches the web for Patriots haters and finds a few. In this case it's a good thing that no links are provided.
January 9, 2008
Round two:
Clinton as the comeback kid? So much for the polls. And yesterday makes two losses for Romney who's strategy was to win the first two. But it's still early. Neither party has a clear frontrunner, which will make things exciting but will strain the candidates. Oh well.
Jay Cost looks at the voter profiles on the Democratic side and finds that Hillary won using a reliable formula, the 'Mondale Model', while Obama ran more in the tradition of Gary Hart or Bill Bradley. (I don't remember any of these guys as president, but I guess that's beside the point.) This strategy may prove even more potent for her in the coming contests. Interesting.
McCain didn't, as many assumed, lose all the independents to Obama. They came out strong for him in New Hampshire for a decisive win. But he's been this far before. Romney isn't finished and Huckabee is praying for a resurgence. The next month will be interesting on both sides.
January 8, 2008
Counting votes:
It's only ten minutes since the polls closed and we're talking less than 1000 votes, but still, Clinton is leading. After listening to an afternoon of 'forgone conclusion' commentary about an Obama win, that is a surprise.
I hit the refresh button and the 1000 votes became 600, so the ending hasn't been written yet.
McCain is leading Romney by about 2000 votes at this point.
We'll pick this up in the morning.
Form and function:
It looks like the last new site design at the Herald was transitional. There's an even newer, simpler layout up today. I was just warming up to the old new Herald site but I do like the new one. Or I like the way it looks. Functionally everything is still two or three clicks away. That's where the Globe site shines: simplicity. It's not fancy looking, but you can see the whole paper on one page and everything is a single click away.
Please hold:
Waiting on hold to resolve a credit card problem can be a pretty aggravating waste of time. A reader at Consumerist has a solution: Use the 'outside the US' number and call collect.
When the credit card thinks that they are paying international collect call charges, they do NOT put you on hold - they take your call right away!"
Brilliant.
New outlook:
If your New Years resolution was to be more organized and you use Microsoft Outlook, here are a few tips to get started.
January 7, 2008
Outlook good:
PC World uses a magic 8-ball to predict the tech trends for 2008.
History, then and now:
Of 43 presidents, only Kennedy and Harding moved directly from the Senate to the White House. Of the 54 presidential elections, only 15 were won by current or former senators. Voters in presidential elections historically prefer candidates with executive experience, usually governors.
So where does that leave us with the current slate of candidates? Richardson is the only Democratic candidate with executive experience and he's not the likely nominee. On the Republican side there's Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney. All have a shot. So, unless McCain gets the Republican nomination, it looks like it will be a Democrat with only Senate experience running against a Republican with executive experience.
No one likes historical determinism in politics but past trends favor a Republican in 08. Of course nothing is written in stone. There are three very strong candidates - all current or former senators - running on the Democratic side and maybe we're due for an exception to the rule.
And, there's Bloomberg, who could really throw a monkey wrench into the historical record if he decides to run.
Rabbit ears:
Both Alex Beam and Hiawatha Bray weigh-in on next year's conversion from analogue to digital TV. It's not too soon.
New-fangled:
Pollsters don't generally call cellphone-only voters. Are they getting the full picture? As more young people eschew landline phones for mobiles, there is a concern that the polls are skewing towards older, more traditional voters. (Strangely, to illustrate this point, the Globe highlights the cellphone-only demographic of a 35 year-old Republican operative who reveres Nixon.)
In any case, the proof will be in the pudding, and the Iowa polls were right on the money. Looking at this, who would you put your money on?
If you really want to avoid pollsters, set them on silent ring.
Changing times:
Last year around this time we read about a heroic rescue from the subway tracks. Another year, another subway platform rescue -- this time to save an iPhone. A lot can change in a year.
January 6, 2008
No one at the wheel:
I took a few months off from everyday blogging and a strange thing happened. My stats went up. Dramatically.
Actually most of the hits arrived from searches for photos in the archives. And, my Google rating is pretty high (thanks Google!) so search engine hits in general are responsible for most of the traffic.
Still, it makes you wonder. It's almost as if the driver got out of the car but the car kept on going, driving better and faster.
January 5, 2008
Calculable:
Physics is in kind of a mess these days. Scientists do have a detailed mathematical knowledge of how things work but physically no one has a clue why things are the way they are. Quantum physics does a good job of describing things at the atomic level and Relativity covers the big stuff, out to the galaxys. But these solid and exhaustively proven theories tend to contradict each other. String theory, which was promised as a solution, seems to be going nowhere and there have been several significant and mysterious discoveries in recent years that are challenging basic assumptions about the universe .
Along comes Brian Whitworth with an unnerving theory that seems, at least on it's surface, to address many of the existing mysteries. That's the good news. The bad news is that his theory is that our universe is a computer simulation and ours is a virtual reality. Here's a link to his paper. It's 14 pages and digestible for non scientists.
Follow the money:
I didn't read most of them but I did notice that The Globe seemed to have an article nearly every day in the Business section about Alpha Omega. I knew it was a jewelry store that went bankrupt around Christmas. But given the ink, there must be more to it. Maybe the paper was unravelling a connection to international politics or terrorism. Or maybe there was a link to one of the presidential candidates. So I decided to take take the time to read this morning's article.
Alpha Omega owes roughly $30 million to more than 100 parties, including The Boston Globe, whose claim exceeding $1 million makes it the largest unsecured creditor. ...
Ouch. Now I get it.
January 4, 2008
Surprise, surprise, surprise:
Actually, not many surprises in Iowa, at least relative to the polls in recent days. I thought Romney could have done better, and Clinton, but Iowa is Iowa. Guliani in single digits (3.5!) wasn't good for his campaign, though.
Best of all was this Herald front page. On the up side, just think how funny Saturday Night Live could be with this guy as President.
Pravda means Truth:
Somewhere on my stats page I stumbled on a link to this news story on Pravda. Check out the photo bottom right. (Click on the image for a closer view.)
Apparently we've formed a business partnership, Pravda and I, in which they publish my photos to illustrate their news articles and, well that's it. No notification or compensation. At least there's attribution. The only problem is that the photo used to depict a "Texas Mall" was taken in a mall on Orchard Road in Singapore. Close, I suppose.
The original Pravda was formed by Leon Trotsky but, according to Wikipedia, the online version is not related. Apparently they just inserted the name.
Bad money:
The Consumerist is asking you to confess your money sins. Do those stories sound sadly familiar?
No more fruit salad:
Mr. LeBovidge sounds like an able no-nonsense manager and maybe he can turn the Turnpike around. But why is he inheriting an agency that is broke? Where did all the money go? The Turnpike should have been making money, not losing it.
Maybe the best solution is no Turnpike Authority. Let the DPW take over.
Hang up and speed up:
Talking on the phone (texting, checking email, surfing the web, etc.) while driving is not only dangerous it's also slowing us all down. That's according to a new study:
Motorists yakking away, even with handsfree devices, crawl about 2 mph slower on commuter-clogged roads than people not on the phone, and they just don't keep up with the flow of traffic, said study author David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah.
If you commute by car an hour a day, it could all add around 20 hours a year to your commute, Strayer said.
So while you're using minutes you're adding hours. Not a good deal.
January 3, 2008
Early glimpse:
it's almost 9:30 in Iowa and it's Obama, Edwards and Clinton in that order but all within a few percentage points of one another. On the GOP side it's not so close with Huckabee more than ten points ahead of Romney who's ten points ahead of Thompson. McCain is a weak forth.
And they're OFF!
I'm really waiting for New Hampshire to get the ball rolling, but my predictions for Iowa? Thanks to this Des Moines Register poll, I think I'd have to say Obama and Huckabee.
The money is on the table:
He (the Governor) knows that they (legislative leaders) know that he knows that they have no intent of letting a gambling bill get passed, but they won't say that and will pretend to be studying the matter until we all forget about it. It's high intrigue.
So this is good. Patrick is going to try to break the logjam. Let's see what happens.
Retirement benefits:
During his later years at the Globe it seemed to me that Paul Szep was loosing his edge, which was too bad since for most of my life he defined the idea of political cartoonist. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that in retirement he's producing some great work. Check out his take on an Iowan dilemma, as featured in the Huffington Post.
Topping off:
The one good thing about hitting $100 a barrel, at least in comparison with the spike in oil prices in the late 70's, is that it happened gradually. But that won't be much consolation when the heating bill comes in. Right now I can hear the furnace banging away against the early morning cold.
January 2, 2008
On the turnpike again:
More Turnpike follies. What is it about an authority that just can't keep themselves out of the negative limelight? If it's not a toll increase or a grab for money through tickets, it's an infrastructure issue.
View Larger Map
From the bench:
Frank Morrissey, judge in the BMC and friend of the Kennedys, is in the obits this morning. He was 97. I'm sure he was a good guy and he certainly had influence in politics, locally and nationally. But as a judge? Well, let's just say it was interesting to watch him dispense justice.
Second act:
According to the LA Times, William Shatner has been hawking Pricline for 10 years now. How did he get the job? Apparently it was down to him and Bill Cosby and he won because he was "futuristic".
After listening to this you might even say, spaced-out.
Calling all curs:
There's a story in today's Globe about a new phenom: dog washes. Not so new, really. The Stooges were all over this concept way back in the day.
Question of the year:
The Edge question for 2008 is up and it is, What have you changed your mind about? This particular question tends to focus the contributors to respond within their areas of expertise (and there is a lot of that) rather then generally. I think that makes the excercise more interesting and more informative. For example, from neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, on memory...
...[E]ach time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. ...
Very interesting. And here's Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, who now says that good, quality, old stuff is really no good.
Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers' market, preferably), this-year's laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs.
There's expert opinion on evolutionary biology, the latest in physics, artificial intelligence, cosmology, computer science, philosophy, psychology, the disappearance of the dinosaurs and something I hadn't heard of before, neuro-economics. James Geary:
The stock market is filled with patterns. But the vast majority of those patterns are meaningless, at least in the short term. The hourly variance of a stock price, for example, is far less significant than its annual variance. When you're checking your portfolio every hour, the noise in those statistics drowns out any real information. But our brains evolved to detect patterns of immediate significance, and the nucleus accumbens sends a jolt of pleasure into the investor who thinks he's spotted a winner. Yet studies consistently show that people who follow their investments closely earn lower returns than those who don't pay much attention at all. Why? Because their nucleus accumbens isn't prompting them to make impulsive decisions based on momentary patterns they think they've detected.
I'm less than halfway through and my head hurts. In a good way, of course.
Bloat:
In the early 90's Microsoft was the fast moving upstart, eating a lumbering IBM's lunch. Nowadays, Microsoft looks like IBM did then and Apple like Microsoft. So does that mean that Apple will someday be a bloated old company churning out substandard products? My guess is no, but this list of the 5 most annoying programs on your computer does contain an Apple offering which should be a wake up call for Cupertino.
2 of the five are Microsoft products, by the way. The other two are from Real and Adobe.
January 1, 2008
Retrospective:
There were a few notable books this year. In fiction, some of the heavy hitters came out with new stuff.
Phillip Roth's Exit Ghost finished off his primary alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. The book sent me back to Roth's introduction of Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer, written in 1979, for a interesting comparison of Roth's writing, then and now.
Ian McEwan released On Chesil Beach. Short and bittersweet, it was a good read that begged for more.
Falling Man was Don DeLillo's 911 novel. Much more conventional than I had expected, it would have been a great novel by a lesser writer but slightly disappointing coming from DeLillo.
I didn't get around to reading Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (nor have I read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read) but I did want to note B. R. Myers' blistering review of Johnson's book. It's the attack review of the year, beating out even Christopher Hitchen's puritanical review of Roth.
In music, some favorites from 2007...
Fountains of Wayne's