Yostivanich

“When you watch Fox News Chan­nel, what you see is the advance­ment of that agenda through a media organ that seeks to turn reg­u­lar peo­ple against their own inter­ests — the bet­ter to enrich the cof­fers of Mur­doch and his heirs — and that actively orga­nizes those whose para­noia it has fed with lurid and untrue tales.”

“So, I’d make organ dona­tion opt out, pub­lic reli­gious obser­vance opt in, newslet­ters opt in and smart finan­cial choices opt out. Any­thing that tricks a con­sumer into pay­ing for some­thing ought to be dou­ble opt in. And with­out a doubt, email (and com­mer­cial trans­ac­tions of all kinds) are opt in. Smart for both sides.”

“And yet, it would be a mis­take to equate what Olber­mann and Mad­dow do with what Fox “News” does. There are many impor­tant dif­fer­ences. The pri­mary one is that they pro­vide fac­tual news with opin­ion instead of pre­sent­ing opin­ion as fac­tual news. Yes, view­ers are going to hear exactly what Olber­mann thinks about each and every news story. But he is not merely mak­ing things up to manip­u­late his audience.”

“The patent sug­gests that “the mod­i­fi­ca­tion to an excerpt per­formed by the syn­onym sub­sti­tu­tion mech­a­nism may not sig­nif­i­cantly alter the mean­ing of the excerpt to a human reader,” which sounds just like the some­thing that some­one who doesn’t actu­ally write in human lan­guages for a liv­ing might sug­gest. Per­haps we should sug­gest we should go into this soft­ware engineer’s code and swap some of the code around. Oh, sure, it might not sig­nif­i­cantly alter the mean­ing of the code. But then let’s run it and see where it gets us.”

“Actu­ally, as we said in our recent arti­cle about the impact of cap-and-trade on employ­ment, offi­cial fig­ures from the government’s Energy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion show that under the House cap-and-trade bill, future job growth might be con­strained by between 388,000 and 2.3 mil­lion jobs – in the year 2030. The agency drew up 11 dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios based on vary­ing sets of assump­tions, and the 2.3 mil­lion fig­ure was attached to the case in which noth­ing goes right. But EIA also said that this scenario’s unre­lent­ingly gloomy assump­tions are “inher­ently less likely” than the mixed pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive devel­op­ments assumed in all but one of its other scenarios.”

“As I have said here many times, peo­ple have the right to believe in what they want. How­ever, I think they should at least try to edu­cate them­selves on the way the Uni­verse works so they don’t leap to the wrong con­clu­sions (as Richard Fey­mann once said, sci­ence is a way of not fool­ing our­selves)– and cer­tainly the jour­nal­ists out there have an oblig­a­tion to do a lit­tle research when report­ing on such events.”

“Astronomers have con­firmed that an explod­ing star spot­ted by Nasa’s Swift satel­lite is the most dis­tant cos­mic object to be detected by tele­scopes. In the jour­nal Nature, two teams of astronomers report their obser­va­tions of a gamma-ray burst from a star that died 13.1 bil­lion light-years away. The mas­sive star died about 630 mil­lion years after the Big Bang.”

“In prepar­ing this post, Erick asked me, “Is Apple is a media com­pany?” I thought about that and the answer is really that Apple is what media com­pa­nies are miss­ing. The miss­ing part of the puz­zle is what made media con­glom­er­ates such jug­ger­nauts in the past. Namely, dis­tri­b­u­tion. The inter­net is strip­ping them of their con­trol over the how their prod­ucts are dis­trib­uted. Media com­pa­nies used to be able to cre­ate scarcity merely by delay­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of their prod­ucts across dif­fer­ent channels—theaters, pay-per-view, DVD, cable chan­nels, net­work TV, and so on. The inter­net dis­rupts this abil­ity to cre­ate media scarcity. It is such a huge dis­rup­tion, in fact, that it threat­ens the fun­da­men­tal profit engine of the media business.”

“Expe­ri­ence is just another word for los­ing hope.”

“Com­put­ers per­form cal­cu­la­tions in quite a dif­fer­ent way from the meth­ods that humans use to do arith­metic – and that means that they habit­u­ally come up with the wrong answer.”

“I’m going to force­fully sodom­ize your edi­tor.” Direct quote from John Mayer in response to this ques­tion: “You don’t always have to rhyme, though.”

“Yes, how inap­pro­pri­ate that counter-terrorism mea­sures, which are pitched to “us” as being about defend­ing rights and free­doms, should be con­ducted in a way that avoids human rights vio­la­tions. … So you’re say­ing folks with less rel­a­tive power and priv­i­lege along gen­der lines can’t be killed in ter­ror­ist attacks, can’t be the vic­tims of ter­ror­ism, and are prob­a­bly ter­ror­ists? Are only the most priv­i­leged cis men the vic­tims of terrorism?”