Erdos Had The Number First

So, I’m listening to the Kojo Nnamdi show (well, a podcast of it at any rate), and they are interviewing a woman who is running for some political office. I don’t remember what office, but when they asked her how the mayor was doing, and how he had handled his term she responded that she didn’t want to do a “post revisionist review”.

First off: What the Crap does that mean?

Second: Is this what political speech has degenerated to? you don’t even have to be coherent anymore, just string some buzzwords together and you’ve made your soundbite?

I like Kojo Nnamdi, most of the time. But sometimes he lets stuff like this go and I just want to write him a stern letter. I know his hearts in the right place, but MAN! how do you let that kind of thing slide? Check out his podcasts, and his show if you live in the area. And remember, this is not a post revisionist review of his show. Rather, we are building synergistic expressions of how Kojo is winning the war on Terror and Strengthening the Homeland.

Kirkville – Why Haven’t Online Newspapers Gotten it Right?

I think he’s got one big point, the rest of the article being just sort-of folk-remedy right.

And that last point is the one that makes online newspapers pale copies of their paper originals. Leafing through a paper newspaper, one sees headlines on each page, and may end up reading stories that would not be likely to show up when customizing a web site by subject and keyword. Instead of receiving a “customized” version of the news, you get all the news that’s fit to print (to coin a phrase). In this time of fragmentation, people tend to seek out media sources that fit their point of view, whereas a paper newspaper, by its very nature as a source of news for all readers, has to include as many viewpoints as possible. Nowhere is this more obvious than on the editorial pages of any paper.

This is, at it’s core, a usability issue. Now, I don’t normally agree with the Usability People but sometimes I do. This is one of those sometimes. The fact that people have well-developed strategies for reading a lot of information that are not effective online is a problem that online media outlets don’t seem to care about.

They should. And until they do, there will be a lot of failed web-sites that could have been successful.

So, I went to Kitchen-25 with the American Red Cross.
K25 was a feeding operation based in Lafayette, LA. I met a lot of people, and had an incredible experience.

I haven’t blogged about it, largely because I’ve not yet processed all of the information yet. It will take some time, I suspect. But now, a small (and largely empty) conflict has broken out between one group of X-k25s and another. The biggest problem is, I don’t know which side is which. It amazes me that we ever got along at all, really, when I read the angry emails thrown at me.

I will, almost certainly, not understand the current situation. I will not know what caused it, and I do not know how it will end. The only thing I (think) I do know, is that they know what caused it. I just wish I could get them to tell me.

Honestly, when I heard that the MTA Union was really going to strike, I figured that the President would injunct the union from striking due to the problems that it would cause.

Taft-Hartley Act – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Considering the Dept. of Homeland Security would have an terrible time if someone blew up a bridge during the strike (since security was almost certainly lax during that time). Transit strikes also endanger a city because, should a crisis occur, the transportation system is not functional. Evacuation would be impossible.

He didn’t though, and I don’t even know if the white house has released a statement about it. I suspect they’re too wrapped up in the problems surrounding the leak of the massive and illegal surveillance program.
Too bad, they could have saved Bloomberg’s Christmas.

I really thought that software rentals were pretty much dead. But then I clicked on a hosted email add and found myself looking at IBM, renting software.

IBM – On Demand Business

The whole ASP thing came and went during the bubble. one of the biggest problems that they encountered was the fact that people really weren’t ready for it. Well, most people anyway. However, rising costs and an exploding small business segment means that maybe the coffin lid wasn’t closed as well as I thought.

A huge problem for these services is ‘what about my data’. One of the biggest deflections of this is “What about it?” People are starting to realize that their data is as safe on someone elses exchange server as it is on their own. Especially when they don’t know how to admin an email server. I’ve seen many offices where someone was the IT person, even though they didn’t know/care/desire it.

Couple these admissions of infrastructure realities with services like BaseCamp and I start to sound like a sales pitch for ASPs. With mobility and platform issues, a well run ASP starts to look more and more like a sounds solution. As always, lets look at the numbers.

Basecamp Plus, with Time Tracking sells for $49/month. MS Project, without Project server is approximate $558 per seat. You have an $80,000 dollar project that lasts six months and uses 4 staff + yourself (the PM) full time. Everyone must have full access to the project plan, though only you need to make changes. Everyone needs to submit time sheets. Two of the four staff are really subcontractors. The other two work in your office.

If you bought the whole team copies of Proj. it would cost about $2,500. You’re not going to do that, because only you need to make changes, so it’s only one copy. At this point, Basecamp is more expensive.
However, you need do whole lot more work using Project, so the hours cost makes Basecamp a winner. And now for the kicker, if you already owned project, basecamp is way more expensive but you can’t give the client easy viewing access to your project info with Project like you can with Basecamp.

I’ve gotten WAY off topic.

My point here is have a niche market right now. But, if I were a betting man, I would say that niche will only get bigger.

Bush Accepts McCain’s Ban on Torture – Yahoo! News

All I can say about the anti-torture thing is that it is about freeking time. I think a CIA exception sends the wrong message to the world.

There are things that are worse than being destroyed. There are some principles that are more important than anything else. The ‘ticking time bomb’ example that is often used is a straw man argument. For one thing, Al Quiada isn’t stupid, they know about compartmentalization of information as much as we do. Their operatives are highly compartmentalized, and aww crap, I’ll just give you a scenario:

Who: 9 man team.
What: plants low-yield radiologic device with some plutonium scavenged from an SS-24 (RT-23) MIRV
It is possible that an entire, and intact, warhead is in place, though this is thought very unlikely.
Where: somewhere in NYC.
When: to detonate in 5 days
Why: Cause that’s what the badguys do

But there’s been a break, four of the team are captured, one is killed. That leaves three bad-guys in custody. A team of interrogators shows up and starts working over the bad guys. The torture works, and all three spill the beans. The problem is they now have two possible locations, since two gave one location and the third gave another. Strike teams are dispatched. Less than one hour after the bad-guys have confessed, the teams find not one but two radiologic devices. They are, however, not powerful enough. Each has less than a kilo of Plutonium and are, after careful analysis, decoys. This kind of duress code is often used in high-security situations. Multiple bmobs are an Al Queida MO, so the men with the dental tools all nod knowingly and realize they have a problem.

The bad guys have been watching the decoys, though, and now they know they’ve been made. So they blow the bomb early. This time the intelligence was correct. approximately 10 kilograms of Plutonium are blown up in a super-bouncing-betty-radiologic bomb. Plutonium dust is all over Hoboken. The city goes positively bat-shit.

That torture the prisoner crap only works in the movies. In real life the enemy will adapt, overcome. The only way to win in these situations is to make sure they don’t get to this point. I’m probably going to jail for just writing this post.

But it’s not. A Canadian girl frickin DIED when her boyfriend kissed her. He had, nine hours before, eating peanut butter on his toast. BBC NEWS | Americas | Girl dies in peanut butter kiss
She, it seems, had a startlingly severe peanut allergy. She went into Anaphylaxis, and then died. Now I’m afraid of peanuts.

I even have proof.

I don’t know how it happend. I think at some point in Bschool I just realized that I don’t want to buy anything, or sell anything, or process anything. Ocaml, programming language of the future.

This is great, as long as they allow busses to operate on the toll roads for cheap/free.

A Future Free From Gridlock, For a Price

This would encourage mass transit and pay for it all at the same time. The problem is that it would require a massive change in attitudes both about driving and about roads.

It would also probably create some wicked backlash if the companies proved to be poor stewards of the roads (imaging that).

Richard Pryor died this weekend. He was not the funniest man who ever lived. He made a series of poor career moves and bad life choices that left him and his 8 marriages and 7 children the worse for wear.

An Authentic Life: Richard Pryor’s Official Biography

But he accomplished things that few could even dream of. As a pioneer in the entertainment industry, he was not a caricature player nor a minstrel. He inspired many people of color to pursue acting and comedy and proved to the world that funny transcends skin color.

He said painful things and made people laugh about it. He was a man of conviction and talented writer. He reclaimed the N-word and then ,after a trip to Africa, vowed to never use it again. These are things few people know about him.

He had suffered from MS for many years, and the disease had taken him out of the limelight. Now it has taken him out of the light completely. Like many pioneers, the road he blazed has become a highway. This highway, often traveled but seldom considered, is merely one aspect of his legacy. Even though he said that “We are all born the same”, his life showed that, clearly, some of us are not.