Electric Josh

K
Oh, man. Just when you decide to leave your childish, lefty paranoia behind comes news of a vast, right-wing conspiracy to privatize the whole stinkin government. Can someone please tell me why lobbyists have any power at all? Does it maybe have something to do with each elected official's need to repeatedly fund exorbitant campaigns? Good lord.

Pynchon said it best: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
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7% short
So the moveon.org primary is over, and HD managed a pretty strong plurality of the votes, but not the majority that would have resulted in a wholehearted endorsement.

It seems to me that this "primary" is kind of a significant development in the country's political history. We have here a big, money-bearing, political decision being made:

• using a cheap, distributed process with few authors,
• early in the campaign cycle,
• with momentum and publicity generated mostly independently of large, central media outlets.

A debate was had (somewhat), and a large, raw measurement of opinions did subsequently get taken.

The most notable excerpt:

In just a little over 48 hours, 317,647 members voted, making this vote larger than both the New Hampshire Democratic primary and Iowa caucuses combined.

Contributing my vote cost me a total of maybe as much as ten minutes, including registration. I'm incredibly lazy, but I was easy to organize anyway. That's compared with---how much time?---to register for (then, later, to go vote in) a real primary or election, whose results will have been determined largely by expensive TV ads anyway. There's one danger, of course: people who bothered to vote online may not bother putting their beer long enough to go vote in person.

Not that this exactly heralds the arrival of some utopian computer-mediated age of highbrow communication, but wasn't this supposed to be the (!) original promise of the public internet? That people could communicate directly with large numbers of other people, and with no middlemen filtering the message? No BigCo advertising firms nor disgustingly well-funded campaigns artificially swamping the message we thought we were sending?

I don't know. But the fact that the importance-to-cost ratio (both measured in dollars) was so low here is pretty damn cool, as is the fact that it all happened as publicly as it did. When we were kids, this is the sort of thing we thought computers would someday let us do.
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Call
Some jerk selling something called us at 9:40 PM the other day, so it is with even more delight than normal that I note the arrival of the National Do Not Call Registry, which is apparently swamped, leaving us to try what appears to be the same site here instead.
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Zero
Cursor (in the sidebar) points us at an article from the Federal Reserve of Dallas about Money Policy in a Zero-Interest-Rate Economy. Included is a bit of comparison between the US today and Japan 10 years ago. Go edify.
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Ads
For those of you with websites (Lib?), here's a fun hack that lets you see what Google's adbot thinks of your (or any other) site. I tried this space's address and ended up only with ads for John Kerry, various weblog tools, and a group called Students For War (I'm too cheerful a person ever to make that up), which would constitute a frame for this space that I'm unwilling to view.

Apparently this works as a Get Rich Slowly scheme, too:

Google analyzes the content of your pages and searches for relevant ads and returns them. Everytime someone clicks on an ad, Google pays you 50 cents (although this amount appears to be decreasing).

The social ramifications are sort of interesting. If you maintain a free site about $OBSCURETOPIC, you don't have time to woo advertisers, take their money, run an advertising system, give them statistics and reports, etc. But you do have time to add a dab of HTML to the page and wait for Google to mail you a check.

Clicking on ads from the above link causes Google to send Aaron money. Do what you will.
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ac
Boston's unending, wet Spring, which is easy to bitch about, has given way to Boston's totally overwhelming humidity. Dick and I put the air conditioner in, so now the bedroom, once entered, can't be left. Might just have to get a second air conditioner for the kid's room, or move to somewhere drier.
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Donuts
Holy crap! There's a Krispy Kreme Donuts in Medford! Now continue with your day...
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Spike
You'll have to trust me on this one, but when Spike Lee sued to stop TNN from changing its name to SpikeTV (or something), I said to my lovely wife, That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I wonder what Spike Jones [or Spike Jonez, for that matter] has to say about this?" Well, sure enough, Spike Jones has spoken up from beyond the grave, calling Lee's assertion "scary." Hear, hear.

My grandfather played me a bunch of Spike Jones the (aforementioned) summer I turned 20. It's pretty damn funny stuff, even if Levon Helm cain't take the way he sings.
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Primary trouble
The moveon.org server seems to have slashdotted itself. D'oh! Update: Everything's fine now. If you registered, check your email for your ballot and go vote.
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Al
So Weird Al is on VH1 doing a fake interview with Eminem, and lamenting that he wouldn't allow Al to do a video for the song parody he did allow. At any rate, Al is now listening to the song and reading the paper. They didn't play the entire song, but that's what videos should be! I smile inside, because since I was about eight and we first noticed that MTV was on cable (this was something like 1982, y'all) I know that when I got big and became a rock star, my videos would consist of me (or possibly, instead, a ridiculously hot model or porn star or something, although I didn't think of that until I was considerably older) sitting in front of the camera and listening to the song in front of some bitchin speakers. The whole video would be a single camera angle; no edits at all. It'll completely rule.
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Jim
Last one. Recently the 2nd anniversary of Jim Jeffords's switch from Republicanism passed mostly unnoticed. He himself, having faded from headlines, said, addressing the National Press Club, ...The reasons for my switch, while apparent to me then, have become painfully clear to me now. Go.
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.iq
Okay, so one more. Apparently I was so intent on watching Howard on Meet The Press this weekend that I failed to notice Gen. Wesley Clark the previous week commenting thusly:

CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."

RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"

CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."

Well, there you have it.
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Howard
All things Dean:

• Register to vote for Dean in the moveon.org primary.
• Attend a virtual rally.
• Give Howard money.

Go!

Now back to our usual, less overtly political mode...
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philg
Greenspun makes it to the sidebar. Read up, especially about the chinese car.
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Party
Excellent birthday party. K got me a new digital camera, so this space will become more pictorial. Cool!
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29
Kara sings to me, in a mocking falsetto, "Only a couple more hours/Of being in your twenties!" So the summer I turned twenty I was at my grandparents in Indiana thinking, boy, time seems to be passing a little more quickly than I thought it was supposed to. They laughed at me and said, "Josh, wait until you're our age. A year takes about three weeks." So yeah. I was at UVM having the time of my life and learning crazy math.

Ten years before that I lived in Oklahoma, and spent the summer as an only child just graduated from fourth grade, visiting my mom in Washington. Holy crap! Van Halen had just turned into a pop band by letting Eddie play keyboards. Nice.
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Does this mean a long commute for me and Kara?

See for yourself here. (Update: it seems to be moving along fine now. Odd.)
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Time
So one artifact of the Globe being owned by the Times is that we get articles in the former that sound like (and, indeed, are authored by the staff of) the latter. Case in point: War of the Weeks. Concluding thoughts include:

You are free to ignore daylight saving time or set your watch locally to the noonday sun. But then how will you arrive on time to meetings, or get your children to school before the bell?

I've tried doing this for the last year or two, and am creeping toward success. The end of daylight savings every fall always seems like a plot hatched to make me tired, and to hide the sun from me. One comes home one day to find that he's missed sunset already, and soon one wakes up, goes to work, and returns from work all in the dark. The sun, it is rumored, continues to rise most days, but this does no one who has an indoor job any good. So I start setting the alarm an hour early, promising myself I'll go to bed an hour earlier, maybe go for a run or something in the evening before the sun, which I'll presumably get to see for an hour, goes down. I have not yet made it through to March.

On the other hand, parenthood is going to make it all completely pointless, what with babies not knowing much about daylight savings, nor the existence of nighttime, nor the joy of sleeping in (nor through the night), and so forth.
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D
Total neophyte (non-)economists like myself just completely freak out when we hear stuff like this, by William Greider in the Nation:

Some financial insiders are not persuaded by the official statements. One told me that only three or four of the key decision makers on the nineteen-member Federal Open Market Committee take the deflation potential seriously--those who closely followed the slow-motion unwinding of Japan. By comparison, the more visible fiscal debate in Congress is utterly out of sync with present reality, since both parties are dodging the "d word" and its implications. The White House, I am told, is deeply worried in private, but won't say so for fear of adding to the public's anxieties.

Which doesn't conflict with what they were saying at the World Economic Forum last year. Maybe a Ph. D. in economics would be fun. Oh, wait, I can't afford not to work...
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Milton
They must be kidding. Surely the Globe has published a joke article. Consider that each of these people worshipping a window in a suburban hospital parking lot drives, and can vote!
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Light
After a pleasant, week-long vacation, waking up to a beautiful day and having to read about sunlight's effect on the people, it's completely unfair to have to go to work. Alas.
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Flying again
Back to normal in 14 short hours...
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Tunes
The usual nerd site points us at a piece of the PBS News Hour site containing a Q&A about music and file sharing featuring law professor Lawrence Lessig (one of the good guys) and a lawyer from the RIAA (the bad guys), who says, at one point, astonishingly, "When you buy a CD, you should feel free to consume the music." See if you can spot the lawyer's contradictions (too many to enumerate), begged questions ("Given the increased cost to produce and distribute copyrighted works, Congress has..."), and lies: "It's not legal, ethical, or cool to copy someone else's CD for your own use."
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Genes
Just discovered that my grandmother had worked for years irradiating and breeding Drosophilae for Nobel laureate Hermann Muller at IU. She was there when he won. How cool is that? (How did I make it almost to 30 without knowing that?)
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Clinton
For no reason at all, the 42nd President's wife is in the news. It is reminiscent of when his mistress was in the news a lot. Bizarre.
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FCC redux
While we're thinking nervously about the disappearance of independent voices from the press, the Atlantic points us at three pieces from its archives:

1. The Media Barons and the Public Interest: An FCC Commissioner's Warning (1968)
2. The Television Overlords (1969)
3. The American Media Baronies, a modest Atlantic atlas (1969)

Like Thomas Pynchon said: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
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School
The Globe tells us about super-homogeneous classrooms in Cambridge---that is, intentionally mixing kids of all abilities into the same class. This is a horrible idea. They tried this on me in Oklahoma when I was in fifth grade. I was thrown onto a group project with one smart and two really stupid partners. The other smart kid was so offended that she left the classroom (a well-behaved ten-year-old walked out and sat in the principal's office!) rather than suffer the indignity of being grouped with kids who could barely understand the assignment, leaving me to my first teaching experience. I learned nothing about the assignment itself (something about what passed for word processors on 1983's computers), but learned a little about how to pretend to be dumber than I actually was, too late not to make the other kids feel bad about themselves.

For this reason alone, I'd never, ever move to Cambridge unless I could afford to send my own kids to a decent private school.

The goals of heterogeneous classrooms are laudable, aimed at reversing a pattern in which Cambridge's white students -- the minority in the school -- were succeeding while African-American and Hispanic students were falling farther behind. But the process is a painful one, with teachers grumbling, retiring, and just plain quitting. Bright students are bored. Lagging students are lost. Parents are grousing, and some who can are turning to private schools.

Well, duh! Note that the best way to narrow the academic gap between students is to get the smart ones drunk, or medicate them, or confuse them on purpose; ergo, narrowing gaps between students is not its own worthwhile end.

I'm actually getting mad reading this article.

Lang's biggest complaint is the one that's echoed around every school -- the unevenness of the teachers. Some of the older teachers came to heterogeneity having taught either the honors track or lower level students, and now they're struggling to teach both at once. "The worst are the ones who try to teach to the middle," says Lang. "Because there's no one there."

Read up before the it vanishes behind the paywall.
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WiFi
So Mom just bought herself her first new computer in several years, a nice little Toshiba laptop, and I spent the day helping her configure a new wireless hub. On Windows it ain't easy. We got the thing home and found no wireless connectivity, so I:

1. Wired the existing computer to the WiFi hub and loaded up a web site, to demonstrate that the network worked,
2. Got my laptop out and connected to the hub, to demonstrate that the problem wasn't with the ether,
3. Screwed around in mysterious Windows wizards that insisted that your broadband connection should already be configured to no avail,
4. Accompanied Mom back to Best Buy, where they:
   1. Ascertained that they had failed to bother installing the WiFi driver into the new laptop (which isn't done at the goddamn factory!?),
   2. Installed the driver,
   3. Refused to test the connection because they don't have a WiFi network set up to test computers against, despite selling WiFi cards, computers, and hubs of all stripes,
5. Got the thing home and got it running in five minutes.
6. Spent 45 minutes debugging the other Windows machine, which turned out to have a zombie network connection that all the shuffling of networks activated, resulting in an IP address conflict that I resolved by digging through that machine's mysterious network wizards.

Grunt. (The first time I tried this with a Linux machine it took under ten minutes from the time I opened the boxes.)

Now I can sit on the deck overlooking the valley and surf. I could work (do my job) from here, if I were so inclined...
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On
The GYWO Players in: Cavalcade of Knock-Knock Jokes.
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Yellow
Well, FDR told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, so I'm flying out to Marin. Mike's back from the desert. Adam's graduating. Nice job, kid. Wicked excited. [Update: arrived.]
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Thursdays
Watched Martha graduate today. For some reason, high schools seem to think that Thursday in the middle of the day is a convenient time for graduation ceremonies. To be fair, following an academic calendar puts one into a little microverse wherein time stops being important after exams at the beginning of June, and family members are obviously on the same schedule. Next week Adam is graduating on the other coast, also a Thursday, it's a good thing that California is sunny and wonderful this time of year, especially in comparison with the sucky (non-)summer we've had so far in New England. But I digress...

Twelve years ago (!!!) Emmett and I were gearing up in precisely the same house for precisely the same ceremony, and I remember it being a pretty big deal. Friends and relatives appear out of nowhere, people are pleased, one's own collection of crap that will trail him through life starts accumulating in the guise of "dorm necessities." Suddenly one is about to not live at home anymore.

Long time ago. The intervening years have treated this space well. It now feels old.

Congratulations, Marf. Excellent job.
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Ted
A surprise following yesterday's bad news about the FCC allowing media to homogenize, it seems Ted Turner, of all people, opposes the FCC here, too.

If these rules had been in place in 1970, it would have been virtually impossible for me to start Turner Broadcasting or, 10 years later, to launch CNN.

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Ms. VT
Okay, no fascist court should be allowed to block anything that promises to be as morbidly funny as Tucker Max's account of his relationship with a former Ms. Vermont. A flavor of the case, from the Times article:

Ms. Johnson's site is www.katyjohnson.com. Mr. Max's is www.tuckermax.com. Both Ms. Johnson and Mr. Max sell T-shirts and the books they have written on their sites. Ms. Johnson's book is "True Beauty: A Sunny Face Means a Happy Heart." Mr. Max's is "The Definitive Book of Pick-Up Lines."

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TV like the radio
So it's now legal for a really really really small number of people to own everything you hear and everything you see on TV. Including the news. Bad bad bad. Cursor is on it for the most part.
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Bill and Al
O'Reilly and Franken, that is, arguing (link from TMW). This is like when Howard Stern used to hassle Larry King all the time, except that this one's political. Kind of hilarious, if sad. Fox's own account. The local Fox outlet's local "news" program reported it deadpan, but somehow managed to quote O'Reilly's "Shut up! Shut up!" while omitting Franken's "This isn't your show."
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Art
A recurring theme in the lives of people like me is that the ability to draw is something to be envied. It's like being able to sing, play a musical instrument, tell vivid stories, so forth. One can use this talent for good, evil, sobriety, humor. My talent is to point you, gentle reader, at other things to enjoy. In that spirit, I direct your gazes at the manifest absence of context, The Unh! Project, inexplicable frames of comics containing (mostly) grunting. I feel enriched already.
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Howard
The Times talks about Howard Dean, and doesn't seem sure what to say.
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