The Iron Yuppie

Science News Article | Reuters.com

Ask and ye shall receive I suppose. Well there you go, 3 microseconds per day faster, but that's just theoretical and is too minuscule to be measured by any of the tools we use today to measure this kind of stuff. And so a thousand sound bites are born, and overall clouding the fact that the big news is simply that there was a giant fucking earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Here's what I'd love every reporter to start their stories with:

Think about what you were doing on Sunday afternoon. Now imagine, with little more than a rumbling in the distance, being buried in 40 feet of water moving at 60 miles an hour. Now imagine that happened to you and everyone you lived with in the town you grew up with as well as the town next to you at the exact same time. And now think about the fact that (if you're lucky enough to not be dead) that you have no home, no car, no clothes and no place to go to get food, a drink of water, or even go to the bathroom, let alone suture up the giant gash in your arm or bury the 15 dead bodies in your street. Now you have a small idea what just happened in the Asia.

Please give.

I saw Meet the Fokkers this past week. It was exactly as I expected and as the previews/reviews suggested. That’s not to say you will not like it, I just thought there were only a couple of jokes and most of them were recycled in spirit or explicitly from the first movie.. My question is how much did something like that cost to put together? According to the estimation at IMDB, they say the studio spent $80 million on it, and it has taken in $80 million in date (for the math/budget challenged, they just broken even, though it is still in wide release).

Setting aside the fact that the budgets for these movies tend to be really blown out of proportion and wildly inaccurate because they use the budgets to hide a lot of other movie studio expenses, I feel like there should be another way to make movies. Actually, I think most media production today suffers from the same problem. On one hand you have a massive growth of media that has occurred in the past ten to twenty years. It seems trite to mention it, but the fundamental difference between the 3 channels available in 1980 and the roughly seven hundred available today cannot be overstated. This change has happened nearly every where in popular culture. Five big budget movies a year have now become twenty. Twenty new big label records a year have now become two hundred. And so on.

The problem I think Meet the Fokkers suffers from is that the studio basically made a bet by investing in what they consider to be a known quantity vs. all the other things they could have invested in. The choices a given studio makes seem to be because these industries seem optimized for these large budget releases. I know there are a lot of very savvy business people working there, but I wonder why a company has not come along to optimize for many small releases over the large ones. Even if a movie, for example, is massively successful, it will take in $150 million. Assuming it’s not My Big Fat Greek Wedding it’ll probably cost on the order of $50 to $75 million to make giving a profit of $75 million. Assuming they had four other pictures that were released which broke even and one which bombed (made 50% of its budget back), that gives you a total allocated budget of 5 x $75 million = ~$400 million to make ~$520 million, about a 20% return on investment. Not bad!

But think of all the dollars tied up in those movies. If the industry was optimized for smaller releases, wouldn’t it be easier to make a much higher profit? For example, instead of 5 total releases, imagine if they had 20 total releases, each with a budget of $20 million. Now these movies only have to do $24 million in business to get the same return on investment. If there are three stinkers out of the bunch the total risk the company is exposed to is much lower, considering they have invested less in those three movies combined than in one big budget stinker. Alternatively, it requires much less money to be qualified as a runaway hit (does twice the budget or more).

Of course, this only covers half of the problem, and this is not novel thinking by any stretch. There are endless other factors that need to be brought in… such as the effectiveness of publicity tours, actual marketing of the movie, the value of big budget stars and the endless other activities (in some future entry, I’d love to explore these costs further).With the new media represented by the blogsphere matures and the opportunity for more news and reviews can be distributed more broadly, I hope that these companies learn to use this extremely cheap method of awareness, and optimize their investments to letting the market decide from all the different movies what should be successful rather than a set of executives determining exactly what will appear in theaters. I cannot think of anything better than having a company release 100 movies a year and letting the ones that get the good reviews or the good word of mouth be the ones that are successful. Because, right now, with the bets that companies having to take be so large, the companies will never let the market decide anything. And what we do not need right now is another company making Meet the Fokkers.

D

I love vacation... I get to catch up on all the magazines that were sitting around next to my bed. I always feel a little bit guilty throwing out these magazines (New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly) because every time I pick up a copy, I always come across something that is so interesting that I feel embarrassed that it took me so long to read the damn thing in the first place and learn it.

Particularly interesting for me is that it gives me a snapshot of what people were thinking just a few months ago. You’d think that you have a fairly accurate picture of what you’re reading from the magazines and remembering what you read, but looking back I find myself extra sensitive to bias and components that may have since been proven wrong. I think the amazing thing is how neutral the writers really are. Well, neutral may be a bit strong, but certainly there are not passages you come upon where the author says “A this clearly points to a Bush victory” or “This will ultimately cause Bush to lose.” At the time I was reading most of these magazines (which I think fairly securely fall into what people would call the liberal media, a term which is not only wrong, in my opinion, but nearly slanderous/libelous considering how far I think those in most media organizations bend over backwards to be unbiased), I actually felt like most of them were guaranteeing Kerry victory… just goes to show that the human mind has a terrible capacity for accurate and unbiased memory (though I suppose it could just be me).

D

I have heard at least a few people comment that the apocalypse is upon us, what with the earthquakes/tidal waves, locusts and hurricanes from 2004. My feeling is probably that it is just random bad luck, and the human mind combines these events together to think that this time is different that all the previous times it happened (either in recorded or prerecorded history).

One thing that I was particularly irritated by was the concept that the earthquake “changed the rotation of the Earth”. Come on. A: What the hell is that supposed to mean and B: even if it meant that it lengthened or shortened the days for the rest of the Earth’s lifetime, by how much could the quake have affected it?

It irritates me that newscasters (I saw this on Foxnews, but I’m sure plenty of other agencies also reported this) felt the need to augment the description of terrible event with such a ridiculous description. Watch, I’m going to alter the rotation of the Earth right now!

Stage direction: Dave jumps into the air

Sorry I had to do that everyone… I had to prove that it was absurd. All the hyperbole and exaggeration causes something that is already amazingly large to be lost in the reporting.

One thing that the earthquake and tidal wave reminds me of is exactly how small and insignificant we really are. The Earth and Universe have been having these types of events occur since the beginning of time; this earthquake, which is not even the strongest in the last 100 years (though it was 100x stronger than the one that hit Seattle in 2001), is just par for the course.

Nonetheless, I strongly encourage everyone to donate money, time or whatever you can to help those in need. Based on Joel’s endorsement, I suggest OxFam. 50,000 dead at current measure… it’s more than I can even comprehend.

D

Bush plans GPS shutdown in national crisis - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Oh this is smart. What a good idea to shut down things that will help people navigate during a time when they might need it the most. I'm aware that it's designed for military operations, but they could simply re-induce the level of error that was previously there (I think it was something on the order of 10-30 meters).

Forget 3G. I'll take 4G (aka: Why WiFi is dead) | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

I'd love to think that the better product always wins, and that all wireless will be done through a simple (and single!) technology, but this is not going to happen anytime soon, despite the endorsements of the authors. The premise above is that 4G will soon replace Wi-Fi because it is technologically superior, faster, more secure, etc but the technology marketplace is littered with countless examples of this not being the case. I'm a great example. In 1997, I bought a DSL line because everyone said that it would be faster, more reliable, etc, yet cable beats DSL today by a large margin (and I've since switched back). Basically, Cable companies were faster and more flexible (they did not have to deal with the FTC as much I believe). 4G sounds like a great idea, but carriers are notoriously slow... Sprint still has not upgraded their systems in Seattle, one of the most tech savvy groups anywhere! What the experience is like in implementation (rather than in theory) and which the consumers can get first in quantity are a much clearer signs to future success than the merits of the underlying technology.

[Updated: Improved the flow of the first sentence.]

Sorry for the long down time everyone... this new site should improve things.. (with luck)

D

Fool.com: Sex, Lies, and Ticker Tape [Commentary] December 15, 2004

Article about what makes stocks go up and down in the short term. There is a long standing stat that every summer the stock market does nothing and every winter the stock market rallys. While I am well aware of the dangers of using this causality vs. causation, I would love to take the earnings and dividends for companies for the past hundred years in 6-month chunks (similar to the season changes) and see if there is a correlation between ups and downs in those measures and the stock price that is stronger than the one you see here for the seasons. The stock price is supposed to represent the value of the underlying company but, much in the way a $120 pair of Nikes is not significantly more valuable than a $20 pair of Arizona sneakers without society to apply that value, I question whether or not it is all just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the total amount of people who actually hang onto stocks long enough to realize the amount they paid for the stock in dividends or dispersals (after the company breaks up for example) is vanishingly small, using this as the way of measuring underlying value seems to be almost arbitrary. Yes if you DID hold onto it for that long, it WOULD pay you x, but you’re not going to so why not value it on what it will do for you in the next 6 years (or however long you’d like to hold onto it). It is like befriending someone because you think they’ll give you money and leave you in their will when they die. I anxiously await the economists to chime in on how I’ve gotten this very very wrong.

Slashdot | Emergence

Terrible review, but very interesting subject. I got in a fairly decent discussion the other night with a friend of mine about this subject, though we did not use the term "emergence". Quick sum up, Emergence is when large behaviors can be seen (for example, an anthill being built) from small individual behavior (each ant feeling like the right way to get in and out of the hole is with a certain basic body movement) rather than some centralized order (the queen ant dictating that an ant hill must be built). Logically, I love this thought and I think it shows up everywhere. In fact, this is exactly the kind of behavior that I think tends to cause traffic, polution and any number of other ills. Of course, it also provides endless gains as well... the Internet and all the resources it provides is a great example of that. If I had one thought, it would just be that people understood that very small behaviors can cause great effects, either for good or for bad.

Storing Data in Nanodiscs and Nanorods May Increase Storage Capacity by One Thousand Fold

My only question is at what point will it get too small to shrink it any further. Will we be able to control the spin of quarks? How small is it still possible to store some form of data?

Black hole projects

I love this. Currently I have on my door this which I feel is pretty accurate for most enormous projects. My two problems with the above list are 1) that there is no way to determine which diamond in the rough is actually a superstar project which actually will end up working (though these are few and far between) and 2) people will think that only MS suffers these enormous black hole projects. While I concur, they have plenty, it's also because they just have an enormous amount of developers, so odds favor that they will have more. Whether or not they have more per capita remains to be seen.

The New York Times > Science > PlayStation 2 Shortage Frustrates More Than Buyers

This could be the turning point for this generation of consoles. No one knows when the next version of the Xbox or Playstation is coming out, but this Christmas, it's going to be Xbox or nothing. I am really really surprised about this since they suffered the exact same shortages in 2000 when the PS2 came out and they've screwed up again. Of course, this time they have both Nintendo and Microsoft breathing down their necks. Honestly, I am very surprised it even matters. Yes, the new PS2 is thinner, but it's the exact same machine... I would have assumed that everyone in the world who wanted a PS2 would have already had one. I guess not!

Google Suggest

WOW! This is so great. This is beyond great. I'm using this as my sole search engine page from now on until someone beats it. I LOVE search as you type!

Ladies and Gentleman, I bring you the Viking Range of mixers (MoCo Loco: DSM7). Great design, but SO much power. 980 watts and 7 quart bowl? I think you could grind up your murder victims afterwards and make a nice gazpacho. Do not buy this if you need a mixer. You do not need it. I promise you. It's a work of art, sure, and you can buy it for yourself as an accessory, but it's not valuable as a mixer. Trust me.

Okay, We Lost Ohio. The Question Is, Why? (washingtonpost.com)

I found this kind of amusing. They look at every possible aspect of why the Democrats lost Ohio, and basically the reason was that the Democrat's message was not good enough. This is the one hope the Democrats have for winning next time. Message counts! Whether or not the Republicans painted an accurate picture of the Democrats (my opinion is they both tried smearing, but the Republicans were just much better at it), the Republican message resonated more thoroughly and won them the election. Rather than saying the message changed people's minds, however, I believe it was 9/11 and the incidents thereafter which changed people's minds, and the Republicans crafted a much more straightforward platform about what to do about that, though I fully believe that if Gore had been elected and faced 9/11, he would have had similar policies in place (except possibly Iraq) and would have been just as effective leading with the "I have stopped terrorism" message. Whether or not this leads to the disbanding of 527 organizations is fairly open. Certainly, they must transform into smear machines rather than just get-out-the-vote machines. Because, like it or not, message matters.

Password imperfect - page 2 | Tech News on ZDNet

This just in... 'abc123' is no longer a good password. Actually, the interesting part of this article is that 'B91(87Ate@' probably isn't a good password any more either. Two factor will only work if it's super easy to do... I do not want to have to scan my thumb 15 times to try and log in when I forgot to print something before a meeting. I use two factor from home right now, and it's not bad, but it's still much slower than just a password. Ah the price of security.

"Detoxification" Schemes

In relation to the earlier comment about toxins, this was a fairly interesting page summing up the variety of different detoxification schemes. I actually like fasting (once a year anyway); it puts me in a very different state of mind during (which I suppose is basically attributed to starvation). However, I have never felt healthier before, during or after the fast, and I suppose this is why. Logically, I did think that the human digestive system was much more like a system of pipes where there could be eddys or currents that would trap stuff for an extended period of time, but I suppose, thinking about it now, that's pretty much absurd. The body is an exceptionally well designed machine and to think that it would carry around "5 lbs. of undigested red meat" or "gum you swallowed when you were 10" is fairly absurd. That does not really explain why, though, we carry around filth in our lungs for our entire lives if we smoke (nasty picture). What's up with that?

Yahoo! News - "Cars" Garaged Until 2006

I hope they're able to make this something interesting. I'd hate for Pixar to ruin its record, especially since the movies that it puts out are always among the best of the year.

TOXMAP - All Facilities

Well this is fairly depressing. Check out how you are being exposed to toxins in your area. And these are just the ones that report!

I believe that environmental concerns are certainly one of our top issues because I believe that evolution has given us bodies that are designed for a certain kind of environment and when we alter that substantially, our bodies do not really know what to do (my other top issue is oil which I feel undermines our economy, foreign policy, environment and is a general choke point for everything we do). The interesting thing about this map is that I'm not very concerned about the organizations you see there. They're reporting, and theoretically observing, local standards. The real problem comes in John Q. Public's garage. Johnny goes out and decides to paint his armoire. First, he strips the original paint, which a couple of flecks get into the lawn. Then he primes the wood and a few ounces evaporate. Finally, he paints the wood and a couple of drops roll down the driveway and into the gutter. Super super small, but if you multiply this times 1,000 people doing it a week, you have gallons and gallons of crap flowing into the system. It seems clear to me that identifying the risks at the beginning of the system, when everything is concentrated, is the only way to make substantial progress. In this case, encouraging paint companies to design environmentally friendly paint would be one way to try and eliminate the risks in the above example.

Instapundit.com -Self-defense in Britain

Fascinating aspect about the difference in burglaries between the US and England/Wales is not the use of weapons in the US. It's actually just the possible presence of weapons that deters the criminals. In the US guns cause 100 times more deaths per 100,000 people than in England and Wales. In fact, the ideal, though logically impossible situation, would be to both have guns in every home and not have any guns at all. I am pro personal ownership of guns, though I have always been very concerned with the culture of guns in the US. They seem to be nearly too ubiquitous... how else would so many people be killed every year by them? Though always hesitant to believe Michael Moore, I was fairly intrigued with the Bowling for Columbine stats regarding Canada v. the US. Canada appears to have as many or more weapons per capita than the US yet suffers less crime and less gun deaths. Exactly why this is, I have no idea. If I had one thought, I would prefer that handguns & assault weapons be limited and only rifles and shotguns to be used more broadly. I just do not see a use for private ownership of certain types of weapons. You can defend yourself pretty well in your home with a shotgun... handguns and assault weapons just seem to be recipes for disaster.

The Trouble with Tethering - Features - features.engadget.com

This is posting a fairly interesting rant on "tethering"... the process of tying an add-on product to the base product you bought. Of course, way back in the day, this was called the "razor/razor blade" model, but the concept is the same.

You buy some underlying piece of technology. Then, when you want to use/refill that technology, you have one place to go. This is endlessly irritating in a number of areas (cell phone batteries, laptop rechargers, Voltron), but from the engineer's perspective, it makes a lot of sense.

If someone wants to add something on after the product is released, let her look at the design of the product and design it herself. From the original designer's point of view, it's tough enough getting the product out the door without taking into account the after market. Plus, allowing full design freedom up front offers endless flexibility for the designer to manage the details of her product. If she had to worry about the 0.1 V difference between the "standard" charger and a capacitor she needs to add, her product would ultimately suffer.

The benefits tend to break down when it comes to software. The effort required to snap pieces of software together is much lower than creating a product in bulk that uses real materials and getting it working with an existing product. The majority of the work to prevent two pieces of software from working together resides with the producer of the original software rather than the follower. Some people build entire businesses out of getting things software to work together (Windows is basically a small program with a very large amount of work in getting other things to work on it) while some people and businesses spend an enormous amount of time making sure nothing can work with their products (as in the article, Apple and Real... those copy protected music CDs are another example).

The logic for the business is very sound (they would prefer that people buy their products rather than after market add-ons) but, unfortunately, the customer can suffer higher prices and reduced choice as well as tying herself to the fortunes of the company. However, if the company continues chugging along, providing all the services that customer requires at a reasonable price, she is unaffected by the lock-in. At that point, the customer only suffers if she changes technology. I am not sure how frequently the former scenario happens.

As for the latter, I believe people switch MUCH less than they think. I've always gotten the impression that people have no idea how frequently they change anything (houses, brands, coffee makers, spouses, etc), either on the low or the high side! Very frequently people look at the openness of a product (especially in the computer world) with the expectation that they’ll be doing a thousand different things and may need to change brands at any moment. Yet it rarely happens. And because people are constantly afraid of getting locked in in that way, they frequently will pay a premium for the services which free them from that lock in. This premium is usually a complete waste of money.

First, even if you buy something that supposes to offer portability, the products rarely work without some degree of work. This usually negates the "savings" the consumer paid for upfront. Second, people never really look at how much of a product they actually use. To the linked example of the coffee maker, I’d be willing to bet that in two year’s time, the thing is in the corner gathering dust because the purchaser either a) has a new one, b) it broke c) he does not use it any more or d) all of the above. For those of you driving around in SUVs that have all that extra room because you never know when you want to pick up a credenza at a garage sale, I invite you to do the following math:

$20,000 car + 1000 gallons of gas (for 30,000 miles traveled) @ $2.00/gallon + $49/day for a rented pickup truck * 3 days + $49/day for rented SUV for off-roading * 3 days

vs.

$35,000 SUV + 2000 gallons of gas (for 30,000 miles traveled) @ $2.00/gallon

I’m not against big vehicles; I am just for people buying what they need based on actually what they need rather than what they think they need (since they are very rarely accurate about predicting what they need).

Everything Funny dot Com presents News from Iraq with subtitles

This is really funny stuff. But it actually highlights something I've always thought... I think it is fairly insulting to put subtitles under someone who is speaking English. ESPECIALLY in a movie or taped program. If you are going to have the character speak English, why don't you have them rehearse a bit? Otherwise, why don't you have them speak their original language and put in subtitles?

Where will it end? - Autoblog - www.autoblog.com




No idea how they spin. In fact, I'm not sure anyone even looks at the speakers while they are playing music. If you're buying after market add-ons for your after market add-ons, I am not sure you have your priorities straight.

Defamer: Spanglish: For Your Consideration



Oh my. So snarky. So very snarky. Note to self, never become famous.

Slice: America's Favorite Pizza Weblog!

Oh man, if you ever get a chance to go to NYC, I invite you to go to Lombardi's on Mulberry downtown. Man, that is so good my mouth is watering right now. *sniff* I still miss NYC. Enjoy the blog about their delicious pizza. (subscribed!)

MSNBC - New credit card for Jews won't work on Sabbath

COME ON. Why would there ever be a market here? Do you really need a credit card to enforce this? Anyone who can have a credit card could have another credit card that would work. And further, this only works with stores that are closed, since all stores have this wonderful thing invented about a hundred years ago called carbon paper as a backup. Ultimately, this just comes down to self control. Or, as I just mentioned to my friend, "I know I could stay out of the fridge if I just did not go in the room, but instead, would you mind attaching this shackle to my ball sack?"

Activists Dominate Content Complaints

Apparently, Mr. Powell is among the politicians I mention earlier who do not bother to do any kind of detailed analysis of data. 99.9% of of the indecency complaints are by a single agency! Nice that such a small percentage of the populace are dictating to the rest of us what we can watch, listen to and see.

My favorite is this quote:

Even as some question whether the FCC should let the views of 23 people lead to fines, others take the agency to task for routinely failing to account for many of the complaints it receives. “Over 4,000 people filed a complaint against Married by America. Where do the complaints go?” asked the PTC’s Mahaney.

If the FCC does not keep accurate count, how would she know how many people filed complaints against the program if she (or someone in her organization) was not filing the complaints herself? And if they are, unless they have an organization of 2.55 million people, she represents less than 50% of the people who watched the program. Which means she does not get to say shit (literally or figuratively I suppose).

Seagate Ships 400-GB Drive

I think this may be the first time that a drive has come out new that has cost less than $1 per GB when new.

Man disk space is cheap. I've started ripping all my CDs in lossless format, because otherwise how would I take up all that space? While the space is nice, it's kind of like a hammer. It's not really useful until someone figures out how to use it all. What that will be, I do not know.

At 128 kbps you could store about 900 hours of straight sound.
Average movie converted to digital is a couple of GB... so here you could store 200.

And so on... if you're doing a lot of data work, this is great, but I'm still not sure what the average user would use this for (besides porn).

Stuffo: Movies. Games. Web. World Domination.

Turns out what I was talking about here was actually called the "Uncanny Valley". I love the extension of the uncanny valley to behavior as well as looks. It's totally accurate; the person on the other end of IM sounds like a real person, until they ask "how does that make you feel" for the hundredth time.

I've been doing a little math (and a lot of formatting) and I was fascinated by the floor effect of the current electoral vote system. This would not have affected the past election, but it certainly would have affected the strategy by each of the teams.

                              

State           Population	EV	EV/Pop      Vote

Texas           22,118,509	34	0.0000015    Rep

California      35,484,453	55	0.0000015    Dem

Florida         17,019,068	27	0.0000016    Rep

New York        19,190,115	31	0.0000016    Dem

Illinois        12,653,544	21	0.0000017    Dem

Michigan        10,079,985	17	0.0000017    Dem

Pennsylvania    12,365,455	21	0.0000017    Dem

Georgia         8,684,715       15	0.0000017    Rep

New Jersey      8,638,396       15	0.0000017    Dem

Ohio            11,435,798	20	0.0000017    Rep

Virginia        7,386,330       13	0.0000018    Rep

Indiana         6,195,643       11	0.0000018    Rep

NC              8,407,248       15	0.0000018    Rep

Arizona         5,580,811       10	0.0000018    Rep

Washington      6,131,445       11	0.0000018    Dem

Maryland        5,508,909       10	0.0000018    Dem

Wisconsin       5,472,299       10	0.0000018    Dem

MA              6,433,422       12	0.0000019    Dem

Tennessee       5,841,748       11	0.0000019    Rep

Missouri        5,704,484       11	0.0000019    Rep

SC              4,147,152       8	0.0000019    Rep

Kentucky        4,117,827       8	0.0000019    Rep

Oregon          3,559,596       7	0.0000020    Dem

Minnesota       5,059,375       10	0.0000020    Dem

Colorado        4,550,688       9	0.0000020    Rep

Oklahoma        3,511,532       7	0.0000020    Rep

Alabama         4,500,752       9	0.0000020    Rep

Louisiana       4,496,334       9	0.0000020    Rep

Connecticut     3,483,372       7	0.0000020    Dem

Mississippi     2,881,281       6	0.0000021    Rep

Utah            2,351,467       5	0.0000021    Rep

Arkansas        2,725,714       6	0.0000022    Rep

Kansas          2,723,507       6	0.0000022    Rep

Nevada          2,241,154       5	0.0000022    Rep

Iowa            2,944,062       7	0.0000024    Rep

New Mexico      1,874,614       5	0.0000027    Rep

WV              1,810,354       5	0.0000028    Rep

Nebraska        1,739,291       5	0.0000029    Rep

Idaho           1,366,332       4	0.0000029    Rep

Maine           1,305,728       4	0.0000031    Dem

NH              1,287,687       4	0.0000031    Dem

Hawaii          1,257,608       4	0.0000032    Dem

Montana         917,621         3	0.0000033    Rep

Delaware        817,491         3	0.0000037    Dem

Rhode Island    1,076,164       4	0.0000037    Dem

South Dakota    764,303         3	0.0000039    Rep

Alaska          648,813         3	0.0000046    Rep

Vermont         609,890         3	0.0000049    Rep

DC              574,096         3	0.0000052    Dem

Wyoming         495,304         3	0.0000061    Rep

.

Yes, these are not voting populations, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that an equal percentage of voters vote in each states. Because each of the states must have a minimum of 3 electoral votes, citizens in very small states have a much greater effect on the election than those in large states do. For instance, my vote is worth (in electoral votes) roughly 1/2 of a person's vote in Delaware, almost 1/3 as much as someone from Alaska and nearly 1/4th as much as someone from Wyoming! It is possible to say that those from smaller states (14 out of the bottom 20 least populous states voted Republican) have far more a say in the election than those in the top ten in population (5 out of the top 10 voted Republican). It did not make a difference this time (a reweighted measure came up with 279 to 259 (approximately, due to rounding error)), but it certainly does make an interesting case for electoral college elimination/reform. It also says that in the current environment, simply writing off a large amount of the smaller states (which the Democrats did) is a real mistake.

UPDATED: Added a link, some grammar and the caveat about voting population.

UPDATED AGAIN: Needed to fix layout in IE.

Jim Blizzard's Blog - Google - it's my *desktop*

Looks like someone agrees with me. It's search for your desktop, not your browser!

Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet

Oops, make that two people :)

Revel in the graphics that are Half-Life 2

What primal urges must humans have such that picking up a radiator and heaving it at a character in the game is one of the most satisfying things ever? And how much more disturbing is it that heaving it at another human player is exponentially more fun than chucking it at the computer controlled characters? Maybe it's just me.

Amazon.com: Books: Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel via TMQ

I've thought that flying cars would be upon us any number of times. And certainly now that we're in the 21st century, you'd think we'd be flying everywhere! However, due to any number of problems (mostly engineering I would imagine), we have yet to walk out our door, get in our car and fly to work. However, this is an interesting book on the subject that posits that by 2010, we'll have door to door aircraft flown by professionals.

Two quick comments on this. One, why are big things always predicted to happen in years ending in zero? This is usually the first indication that a prediction is, as we like to say in the scientific realms, pulled out of one’s ass. If 2009 rolled around and the necessary developments had been made, do we really think they would not launch? Are the necessary improvements really five years and one month away? I’d be much more comfortable making a prediction on how long it would take manufacturing to ramp up, even if it meant that the prediction was going to happen in 2011 rather than the nice big round number.

Two, people need to understand how fundamentally personal flying cars will change security as we know it. Today, prisons, nuclear reactors, military bases, etc all have large open areas surrounded by miles of razor wire and fences. Which is fine, as long as you do not have a way to (fairly cheaply) get about 15 feet up in the air. Once you can fly in and fly out, what is to prevent some crazy person from staging a mass prison break? Or flying into a military base? Are these facilities going to be manned with aa guns or surface to air missiles? Suffice it to say, if you add the third dimension to things you need to care about in regards to security, the problems you now have to worry about grow exponentially.