Month: November 2012

Bill Clinton Wants to Put “Big Brother” in Your Computer

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A blast from the past today if you click here and peruse the Dole/Kemp website from 1996. A highlight about the Internet:

Bill Clinton believes in bureaucratic micro-management of the information economy.

  • Within his first 100 days as President, Bill Clinton proposed the Clipper Chip — a secret government-controlled encryption algorithm — and a companion key escrow system where two government agencies would hold a copy of the keys for every Clipper user. Since then Bill Clinton has released updated versions of encryption proposals which insist that the government hold a key to individual’s private data communications.
  • The Clinton Administration’s Internet Task Force has proposed legislation that would reduce the rights of users of copyrighted material if that information is used on the Internet. Their infamous “NII White Paper” ignored important court decisions which balance the rights of information users with those of information creators.

Funnies aside, this was an interesting aside note about this site:

The Dole for President campaign today launched its general election Web site — the first political Web site to individually-customize itself for each user’s interests, home state, and last visit.

When users first visit the site, they are given the option of setting up a custom Dole Web page. Each custom page contains a personal tool bar that welcomes the user by name, alerts them to an electronic “In Box” containing any new press releases or other campaign materials posted since their last visit, directs them to briefing papers on issues in which they expressed interest, and offers a home-state icon for local information about the Clinton record and the Dole agenda in that state.

This was in response to this Bill Gates quote: “There’s no doubt we’ll look back at Web sites today and basically say … that they were quite primitive. They don’t customize what they present to the viewers’ interests. They don’t remember: Have you been there before? What have you seen before? And that’s got to change.”

James Balog’s Photographs of Ice and Vanishing Glaciers

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In an effort to provide concrete visual proof of climate change and its devastating effects, photographer James Balog embarked on a years-long project that spanned the northern reaches of the globe. He set up cameras from Greenland to Alaska in order to capture horrifying—yet undeniably beautiful—time-lapse photos that reveal the unprecedented rate at which glaciers are receding. As the award-winning Chasing Ice, which chronicles Balog’s monumental endeavor with his Extreme Ice Survey, hits New York on November 9, Vanity Fair showcases breathtaking photographs from Balog’s Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers:

Chasing Ice.

See the full gallery here. The Amazon link to the book is here.

On Discovering and Treasuring New Music

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Mike Spies, writing in The New Yorker, remembers the days of going to the flea market or a record shop and carefully selecting the one item he would take home:

I’m trying to describe an intricate process, crucial to forming a lasting, meaningful relationship with a piece of art. Because if I was going to buy a CD, back when I bought them, I had to eke out some time, and even pray for a little luck, as I could spend hours in a dimly lit store, and leave with nothing.

But with the advent of Spotify and other online music listening stations, we are living in a different world. It doesn’t require much curation on our part: we just hit next. Here is Spies:

We seem to have created an environment in which wonderful music, newly discovered, is difficult to treasure. For treasures, as the fugitive salesman in the flea market was implying, are hard to come by—you have to work to find them. And the function of fugitive salesmen is to slow the endless deluge, drawing our attention to one album at a time, creating demand not for what we need to survive but for what we yearn for. Because how else can you form a relationship with a record when you’re cursed with the knowledge that, just an easy click away, there might be something better, something crucial and cataclysmic? The tyranny of selection is the opposite of freedom. And the more you click, the more you enhance the disposability of your endeavor.

How many of you echo this sentiment? I know I do.

From Eye to iPad: The Technology Behind Paper

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FastCompany has a profile of the iPad app Paper (by FiftyThree) and the technology behind it:

What vaulted FiftyThree over a hot pile of math was a major insight gleaned from two dead German scientists named Paul Kubelka and Franz Munk. In 1931, they published a paper called Ein Beitrag zur Optik der Farbanstriche, or “a contribution to the optics of paints,” which showed that this color-space question predated computing by several decades. The paper laid out a “theory of reflectance” with an equation which could model color blending on the physical experience you have with the naked eye. That is, how light is reflected or absorbed by various colors.

Today, computers store color as three values: one for red, green and blue, also known as RGB channels. But the Kubelka-Munk model had at least six values for each color, including reflection and absorption values for each of the RGB colors. “While the appearance of a color on a screen can be described in three dimensions, the blending of color actually is happening in a six dimensional space,” explains Georg Petschnigg, FiftyThree’s cofounder and CEO. The Kubelka-Munk paper had allowed the team to translate an aesthetic problem into a mathematical framework.

 Moving from a three-dimensional color-space to six dimensions was the difference between old drab color-mixing and absolute realism. “What creates the shades you see between paints is this interplay of absorption and reflection,” says Petschnigg. “Compare red nail polish to red ink: both are red, but the nail polish will be visible on black paper because it reflects light. The ink won’t be, because it absorbs light.”

Paper is one of the most beautiful apps on the iPad. I highly recommend getting it (the basic version is free) if you don’t have it.

How Barack Obama Won the 2012 Presidential Election

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The New York Times has a good piece on how the President clawed back in the final month of campaigning after a miserable showing in the first debate:

Mr. Obama, who had dismissed warnings about being caught off guard in the debate, told his advisers that he would now accept and deploy the prewritten attack lines that he had sniffed at earlier. “If I give up a couple of points of likability and come across as snarky, so be it,” Mr. Obama told his staff.

As his campaign began an all-out assault on Mr. Romney’s credibility and conservative views, the president soon was denouncing Mr. Romney’s budget proposals as a “sketchy deal” and charging that the Republican nominee was not telling Americans the truth.

Mr. Obama recognized that to a certain extent, he had walked into a trap that Mr. Romney’s advisers had anticipated: His antipathy toward Mr. Romney — which advisers described as deeper than what Mr. Obama had felt for John McCain in 2008 — led the incumbent to underestimate his opponent as he began moving to the center before the debate audience of millions of television viewers.

Indeed,

By the end of the 30 days, after Air Force One carried Mr. Obama on an almost round-the-clock series of rallies, the president had reverted back to the agent of change battling the forces of the status quo, drawing contrasts between himself and Mr. Romney with an urgency that had been absent earlier in the race. Mr. Obama had returned, if not to the candidate that he was in 2008, as a man hungry for four more years to pursue his agenda in the White House.

Not to be discounted: Hurricane Sandy and Romney’s (negative) portrayal of federal relief in national disasters.

The Most Retweeted Tweet of All Time: “Four More Years”

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Shortly before midnight on Tuesday night, Barack Obama sent out this tweet. Since then, it has been retweeted almost 800,000 times and is on pace for 1,000,000 retweets. It’s the most retweeted tweet of all time:

Megan Garber at The Atlantic puts Obama’s tweet in perspective with other most retweeted tweets in Twitter’s history.

Could Posting an Instagram of Your Ballot Land You in Jail?

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I voted today. One thing I didn’t do: take an Instagram photo of my ballot. The poll workers asked everyone to turn off their cell phones before they entered the voting area, and I wondered why they were asking people to do that.

According to the Citizen Media Law Project’s Web site, some states, including, Georgia (where I voted), Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, and Texas, “expressly prohibit the use of photographic and recording equipment inside polling places.”

Additionally, according to All Things D,

The state of Wisconsin is taking an even harder line, with the Government Accountability Board telling voters that posting completed ballot pics to Facebook or Twitter constitutes election fraud under the state’s law — a Class I felony. (It’s also not the first time the Wisconsin GAB has warned of this.)

My suggestion? Take an Instagram of your voting place or your place in line. This way, you are still documenting an important part of history but aren’t breaking any laws!

The Rationality and Virtue of Voting

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An interesting post from Steve Randy Waldman on whether it makes sense to vote (and whether it is virtuous to do so). He invokes in an interesting analogy and moves on from there:

All of these arguments are right but wrongheaded. We don’t vote for the same reason we buy toothpaste, satisfying some personal want when the benefit outweighs the cost of doing so. Nor, as Winecoff and Arena effectively argue, can we claim that our choice to vote for one side and against another is altruistic, unless we have a very paternalistic certitude in our own evaluation of which side is best for everyone. Nevertheless, voting is rational behavior and it can, under some circumstances, be a moral virtue.

Let’s tackle rationality first. Suppose you have been born into a certain clan, which constitutes roughly half of the population of the hinterland. Everyone else belongs to the other clan, which competes with your clan for status and wealth. Every four years, the hinterland elects an Esteemed Megalomaniac, who necessarily belongs to one of the two clans. If the E.M. is from your clan, you can look forward to a quadrennium in which all of your material and erotic desires will be fulfilled by members of the other clan under the iron fist of Dear Leader. Of course, if a member of the other clan becomes Dear Leader, you may find yourself licking furiously in rather unappetizing places. It is fair to say that even the most narrow-minded Homo economicus has a stake in the outcome of this election.

Still, isn’t it irrational for any individual, of either clan, to vote? Let’s stipulate that the population of the hinterland is many millions and that polling stations are at the top of large mountains. The cost of voting is fatigue and often injury, while the likelihood of your casting “the decisive vote” is pretty much zero. So you should just stay home, right? It would be irrational for you to vote.

Read the rest here.

Japan, Blood Type, and Superstition

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It is a widespread belief in Japan that character is linked to blood type, as this BBC Magazine story details:

According to popular belief in Japan, type As are sensitive perfectionists and good team players, but over-anxious. Type Os are curious and generous but stubborn. ABs are arty but mysterious and unpredictable, and type Bs are cheerful but eccentric, individualistic and selfish.

About 40% of the Japanese population is type A and 30% are type O, whilst only 20% are type B, with AB accounting for the remaining 10%.

This seems crazy:

A whole industry of customised products has also sprung up, with soft drinks, chewing gum, bath salts and even condoms catering for different blood groups on sale.

Seems to me like you can revel in or excuse your personality traits on your blood type. When it is working for you, great. But when something bad happens, blame your blood type.

Go Against Your Instinct

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Dustin Curtis recently had a friend who went into cardiac arrest during a session at the gym. This event forced him to evaluate his reason for being. The post is excellent:

Humans are by default hopeful and optimistic creatures. We usually think about the future as though it will occur for us with absolute certainty, and that makes it hard to imagine death as a motivation for living. But knowing that my friend could potentially never wake up forced me, unexpectedly, to contemplate my personal drive for existence. Why do I do the things I do every day? Am I honestly acting out my dreams and aspirations? What’s my purpose? For a long time, when I was younger, I waited to discover my purpose. It was only very recently that I realized purpose is something you are supposed to create for yourself.

After my own comparatively minor brush with death a few years ago, when I was 22, I pledged to live my life as fully as possible, as though I had nothing to lose. For a few months afterward, I consciously tried to fight against the status quo. It’s so easy to get stuck in the waiting place, putting things off until later, even when those things are vitally important to making your dreams come true. But the truth is that, in order to make progress, you need to physically and mentally fight against the momentum of ordinary events. The default state of any new idea is failure. It’s the execution–the fight against inertia–that matters. You have to remember to go against your instinct, to confront the ordinary, and to put up a fight.

Does the statement below ring a bell for you?

It used to confuse and fascinate me how so many people with great dreams and great visions of the future can live such ordinary, repetitive lives. But now I know. I’ve experienced it. Doing something remarkable with your life is tough work, and it helps to remember one simple, motivating fact: in a blink, you could be gone.

Complement Dustin’s essay with Steve Jobs’s vision for the world.