Craigs List In Space

Tip to Michael Baseley for this:

Forget China. If you're an Internet company seeking to reach a vast, new, untapped universe of users, follow the lead of craigslist.

In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream....

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:37 PM | TrackBack

PodCasting: the next big thing

I was in Silicon Valley last week, and the word on everyone's lips is podcasting. Think of personalized, time-shifted radio (or TIVO for audio).

SiliconBeat is reporting on an early (though not first) major effort:

Now that podcasting has been validated as a growing phenomenon, the race is on for business models. On Thursday, we talked to San Francisco consultant Sam Curtis Coutin, who's launching a network Monday of sports podcasts. Coutin will seek sponsors for the shows and take advertising on his web site.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:34 PM | TrackBack

Posing as a Journalist

I believe the quote "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death you're right to say it." is attributed to Voltaire. I was thinking of that when I saw that JustOneMinute uncovered this item from Editor and Publisher:

..."The bottom line is that none of us are comfortable with Jeff Gannon posing as a journalist," Hutcheson stated. "But none of us are comfortable with changing the system to keep him out."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 08:18 PM | TrackBack

Simpson References Hidden at Staples

I'm filing this under Art and Culture because hiding pop cultural references in corporate URL's is an art form whose time has come.

Anyway, Aubrey Turner found this:

I was fidding around looking for a printer stand and came across something interesting on the Staples website. Take a look at the highlighted GET parameter in the URL of the search results:

    http://www.staples.com/catalog/search/Search_Sum.asp?
    PageType=2&SearchPageType=2&cromulent=
    &Keywords=printer stand&image1.x=0&image1.y=0

For more on the etymology of cromulent, try here, here, or here.

Of course, there is also a perfectly cromulent blog.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 01:58 AM | TrackBack

Mideast Peace - round and round

Another bomb blows in Tel Aviv. Hizbollah makes its presence felt, there is little Abbas can do, even with support from Sharon. It all goes downhill from here. At least that seems to be the takeaway message at Matthew Yglesias:

Naturally enough, the string of good news (Iraqi elections, Palestinian elections, Lebanese protests, Egyptian political reform) out of the Middle East couldn't last for long before being shattered by a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. This is the trouble, of course, with Israel/Palestine peace plans. They all look so good on paper and tend to collapse as soon as one of the radical groups decides to start murdering someone.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 01:36 AM | TrackBack

Spring Cleaning in Syria

Over at Captain's Quarters, Ed notes this AP item:

Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syrian authorities had captured Saddam Hussein's half-brother and 29 other officials of the deposed dictator's Baath Party in Syria and handed them over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture.

It seems like Assad, now that Lebanon is heating up, is trying hard to head off a two front war. He wouldn't seem crazy to think that the Iraqi's, backed by America, are looking for any excuse to make his life miserable.

On the other hand, it seems pretty miserable already. Ed continues,

Lebanon has slipped away from the Assad regime, and no amount of force and diversions will get it back. They can try delaying the inevitable, but the American troops in Iraq will continue to trump all of Assad's cockeyed political ploys.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 12:50 AM | TrackBack

Digital Photos Survive Tsunami

Instapundit points us to a CNN article about a couple killed by the Tsunami at Khao Lak, Thailand. Their digital camera was found, and the photos were recovered from the memory card.

That the card survived the Tsunami is not too surprising. The BBC reported last august on tests that were done by Digital Camera Shopper magazine. The lead for the story is spooky, in light of later events:

Holiday-makers capturing precious memories on digital cameras need not worry about losing their snaps.

They go on to describe the tortures that the digital memory cards could survive:

They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.

Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests.

Most of them did fail to get through two additional tests - being smashed by a sledgehammer and being nailed to a tree [as in the photo to the right].

Even then, data experts Ontrack Data Recovery were able to retrieve photos from the xD and Smartmedia cards.

It turns out we are now all traveling with our own personal black boxes.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 02:10 AM | TrackBack

Blogs and Classical Music

I am in Los Gatos at Mom's house reading her San Jose Mercury (on paper!), and catching up on the news. Mom says, "Brad, read this." and hands me the A&E section of the Feb 20 Merc, with the article Champions of music claim new cyber-turf.

Great backstory on lots of classical music blogs, none of which I'd ever heard of. A few are absolutely going on my blog roll. My favorite so far (and not just because he has given raves to NYFOS): Alex Ross ("Classical Music is the New Underground") at The Rest is Noise. A totally cool sample on Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia:

Greil Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces that Adorno's assaults on mass culture are punk-rock rants at heart; the Minima Moralia EP brings that conceit to hilarious, dubious life. Davis plays squalling guitars; Dawn Unwanted drawls the lyrics. The pick hit is "Every Work of Art Is an Uncommitted Crime," one of my favorite lines from the Meister's writings.

(You can't take that too literally, of course. For example, a recent Tristan at the Met was arguably a work of Art, but as a crime it was most certainly not uncommitted).

Anyway, what I like most is the sense of adventure I get from these blogs. There is so much boundary stretching going on the world of classical music, it is a shame the NY Times has decided to go pop.

Other cool finds from the article:

• Twang Twang Twang by Helen Radice,
• Iron Tongue of Midnight by Lisa Hirsch.
• Trrill, this was billed in the Merc as "A Seattle chorister's insights into the art of singing." However, the tag line from the web site is actually "florrid passages from queer opera zealots". You go, girls!.

Art should be grateful to have such dedicated protectors.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 01:23 PM | TrackBack

Homeland Security Alert Colors

Disaster News Network has this quote by Salman Rushdie.

I'm not sure what these various rainbow-colored alerts are supposed to do: How does one react when the alert goes from yellow to orange? What does one do to deal with orange danger that one would not do in dealing with yellow danger? How do you relax when the level drops? The only purpose of these alerts is to scare people. When you have a scared population, it becomes easier to do things on its behalf that it would not otherwise tolerate.

As DNN notes, he did have a price on his hand, which might skew his perceptions slightly.

In related news, Blogalicious is talking about how legal warnings (e.g. "This area is known by the state of California to contain materials that cause cancer.") serve lawyers very well, but serve the rest of us very poorly. PCPitStop made an offer in their User Agreement (EULA) to compensate any user for simply sending an e-mail listed in the EULA. It took four months for anyone to bite. The lucky winner got $1000.

Of course, the reason I'm tying these together is that I think the Homeland Security Alert policy is basically a cover-our-tusch ploy. I don't get its value, but it does allow the President to say, "look! we're doing something".

Posted by BradRubenstein at 03:02 PM | TrackBack

Buy Books, Support School

Here's a good cause, if you are in the Santa Clara area, go to my sister's Book Fair.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 12:48 PM | TrackBack

More on BlogCarnival

My friend Steve Damron and I have spent the weekend on our BlogCarnival venture. We're in what I would describe as softlaunch mode. Links below for your viewing pleasure. This is what happens when you throw taste to the wind, and listen solely to SEO analysis. If you're interested in investing, we're not taking money right now, but thanks.

• A Consumer Reports ... -- Consumers report on products from all over the web. Plus the latest info on credit cards, interest rates, mortgages, car loans and debt.
• Penis Blog -- News and information on the penis. Funny stories and vital information about the male organ.
• Holiday Gifts -- Helping you find holiday gifts or birthday gifts for the special people in your life.
• Office Max Blog -- Office Max and other useful resources for business. Helpful, up-to-date information on how to start and operate a business. Places to get business services and office products.
• Fast Cars -- News and information about fast cars - high performance stock cars and racing cars.
• Hurricane Blog -- Hurricane news and information. Hurricane and weather science.
• Personal Injury Resources -- Latest on class action and personal injury suits. News on claims and awards from medical malpractice, car accidents and asbestos.
• Skin Care Blog -- Skin care and healthy living. Plus, news on diet and workout plans, plus those simple procedures to look and feel younger.
• Music and Entertainment
• TravelBlog
• NewsBlog -- All the News that's fit to blog

More on the way!

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:40 AM | TrackBack

More on Hunter

I also noticed that Tim Blair has a great roundup of Hunter Thompson links and quotes.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 05:25 PM | TrackBack

Blogging Clogging Google

The Register is reporting that Google is looking at ways to separate out blogs from its main index. Apparently they are causing quite a problem.

Google has strived in vain to maintain the quality of its search results in the face of a blizzard of links generated by a small number of sources. (Google searches 3,083,324,652 pages as of 4PM PT today. Assuming there are one million bloggers, and generously assuming they have a hundred pages each, that amounts to 0.032 per cent of web content indexed by Google. Recent research by Pew put the number of blog readers as opposed to writers, as "statistically insignificant").

However, through dense and incestuous linking, results from blogs can drown out other sources.

"The main problem with blogs is that, as far as Google is concerned, they masquerade as useful information when all they contain is idle chatter," wrote Roddy. "And through some fluke of their evil software, they seem to get indexed really fast, so when a major political or social event happens, Google is noised to the brim with blogs and you have to start at result number 40 or so before you get past the blogs." We'd noticed.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 05:23 PM | TrackBack

Buy my Blog

John Ellis comments on the NY Times acquisition of about.com.

In fact, the deal is an embarrassment of overpayment and reveals a kind of strategic ennui. The "metro" strategy of marketing the newspaper has failed. The television strategy has failed. The great Internet opportunity of 2000-2001 has long since passed (the NYT company could have acquired Yahoo! for a relative song in 2001). Having failed to even comprehend the turbo-dynamics of Blogger, the NYT Company now throws $410 million at 500 weblogs.

It seems that in Manhattan, there is a buyer at any price. I just didn't think it would be the times. I don't think they can afford such vanity.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 05:12 PM | TrackBack

Hunter Thompson Dead at 67

Hunter Thompon shot himself in the head today.

CNN has an obituary.

My friend Michael reminded me of this gonzo quote:

"The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight — assuming it was straight in the first place."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 04:38 PM | TrackBack

I hereby Claim my Weblog

Posted by BradRubenstein at 04:24 PM

Findory is Cool

Findory is a cool recomendation engine for Blog readers. It was developed by Greg Linden in Seattle, who came from Amazon (the king of recommendation websites). Here is a good review of the site.

The site works in part by using a traditional method of content analysis, detecting similarities among articles based on keyword and subject. But more significantly, Linden said, the technology is able to present any given user with additional suggestions based on articles that have been viewed by other people who have displayed similar interests.

This process gets you out of the traditional recommendation pit, where the moment you look at a topic, you only get recommendations on that topic.

The Social Tools weblog predicts Findory will be a rising star as

everyone becomes a sender, receiver, and noise at the same time.

Joho notes that Findory "is provided in cooperation with Memigo."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 10:30 AM | TrackBack

Bush On Tape

I always wanted to know how Presidents go about crafting their message, but I now think, like laws and sausage, it is better left unexamined. Oh, I can't help it. From ABC News: Author: Bush Tapes Not Meant for Public:

"Do you want your little kid, to say, 'Hey daddy, President Bush tried marijuana; I think I will?'" said Bush on the tapes. "That's the message we've been sending out. I wouldn't answer the marijuana question."

"The cocaine thing, let me tell you my strategy on that," Bush said on the tape. "Rather than saying no … I think it's time for someone to draw the line and look people in the eye and say, you know, 'I'm not going to participate in ugly rumors about me and blame my opponent,' and hold the line. Stand up for a system that will not allow this kind of crap to go on."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 12:10 PM | TrackBack

A Great VoIP Idea

I liked this idea by Tom Keating for what is effectively a VoIP cost optimizer:

What I'd like to see is a cordless VoIP system that allows you to define multiple SIP registrars (Line 1=Vonage, Line 2=Packet8, Line 3=CallVantage, Line 4=Vonage 2nd account) and then the device would perform least cost routing to choose the cheapest provider to initiate the call.

Note that, even with flat call rates, there is still room for competition among multiple lines on many axes: call quality that varies with time, geographic preferences, balancing the minutes per billing period, etc.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 07:36 PM | TrackBack

SHA-1 Crack - Conspiracy Theories

Lots of news on the spectacular work out of Shandong University in breaking SHA-1 (here is the original paper, here is Bruce Schneier's excellent summary).

There seems to be a lot of agreement that the news represents a fascinating theoretical crack, but no need to panic. Financial Cryptography notes:

But the crack doesn't quite get there. 69 bits is still too many. It's even more than MD5 had at full 64 bit strength. This all sounds like a replay of the fabled Skipjack case, where the algorithm had so many interesting artifacts that cryptographers expected it to break ... but try as they might, they couldn't quite get there.

However, Schneier reminds us:

But there's an old saying inside the NSA: "Attacks always get better; they never get worse."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 07:14 PM | TrackBack

Folk Music Saved by MSN

In 1948, Moses Asch founded the Folkways Label, which went on to create "one of the richest treasure troves of recorded Americana", according to Ben Sisario at the NY Times. When Asch died, the Smithsonian purchased the collection. In Smithsonian's Song Catalog Is Available for Sale Online, Sisario writes:

Much of the original Folkways collection has been released on CD, but a majority of it has not been commercially available because the demand is so low. Of the roughly 40,000 tracks in the catalog, only about 5,700 have been commercially released, said Atesh Sonneborn, the label's assistant director. Smithsonian Folkways makes copies of anything from its collection on request, and now every track will now be available on MSN Music.

This just after Google announced in December that they would be begin digitizing the contents of five large library collections (Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, NY Public, and University of Michigan), and make them searchable online.

Of course, Google picked a different price point for offering this archival material to the user (i.e. free).

I can't wait to start browsing both collections. Thanks to Long Tail for pointing this out.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 07:27 AM | TrackBack

Happy St. Valentine's Day

The New York Times is getting all sappy today. To wit:

After all, hard work and commitment are much better indicators of marital stability than are passion and that fickle thing, romantic love. The divorce rate is slightly down, to about 50 percent from a high of 52 percent in the early 1980's. Virtually no one believes anymore that the potential "self-fulfillment" that might come from leaving a less-than-satisfying marriage could in any way outweigh the harm that divorce does to children. Indeed, for many couples these days, staying married is not so much the definitive sign of their love for each other but the ultimate expression of their love for their children.

But does this virtuous child-centeredness equal family happiness? Apparently not. For although the divorce rate has gone down, the percentage of couples saying they're in less-than-happy marriages has gone up. According to the National Marriage Project, fewer children are growing up with happily married parents today than a generation ago. From 1973 to 1976, 51 percent of children under the age of 18 were living in a household in which the parents' marriage was rated as "very happy," the study found. From 1997 to 2002, only 37 percent were so fortunate.

How romantic.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 03:16 PM | TrackBack

Oops, Not What We Thought

I was actually impressed by the speed and seriousness with which the Energy Secretary set in motion a shut-down and shake-up at Los Alamos when it discovered last July that two disks full of nuclear secrets were missing.

Four were fired, one resigned under threat of dismissal, seven received various formal reprimands, and the budgets for the labs were cut by $5.8 million.

Well it turns out there were never any missing disks. In Sci-Tech Today: U.S. Admits 'Missing' Los Alamos Disks Never Existed (mentioned by Instapundit).

In the end,

But the official said the episode had helped discover and fix serious security breaches at Los Alamos, and therefore the department had no regrets.

"When the big search was going on they found other people not doing their jobs," the official said.

Does it sound to any else like a kind of WMD fiasco? Shoot now, construct justifications later. The justifications are not unreasonable, but there seems to be reasonable argument as to whether they were worth the cost.

Not that the two situations compare, obviously.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 10:13 PM

Mesothelioma, Trial Lawyers, and Haliburton

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:58 AM | TrackBack

It Pays to Shop Around

The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq changed the national currency to the New Iraqi Dinar in late 2003. You can show your support for the Fledgling Democracy by buying 100,000 Dinars for US$175 right now at betoniraq.com.

The official rate from the Iraqi Central Bank would value those 100,000 Dinars at about $68 today.

A recent Wired article ("Dinar Brokers Boom in Iraq Chaos") makes the obvious point:

Still, no one's calling the dinar a risk-free investment. Given that the Iraqi dinar is not yet traded on major global currency exchanges, there's no guarantee that buyers of the bills will be able to easily sell them.

"This is an extremely speculative investment -- there's no question about that," said Richard Lyons, a finance professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

But not so fast you brick-and-mortar money currency traders. The liquid market in dinars is on the internet. I see 8 pages of recently completed transactions on EBay: I'm seeing sales of 100,000 dinar lots in the past few days for $75 (the winning bidder was "tax_man_ky", a disturbing thought) to $152.50. Of course, you have to add shipping: after all, this is EBay.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 01:42 AM | TrackBack

Posing

Alert the media! Marcia Cross of Desperate Housewives is coming out by appearing on the cover of the Advocate

Desperate Housewives star Marcia Cross is set to reveal she is a real-life lesbian by posing for a gay mag.

Let's be clear, folks. One "poses" for Playboy. Posing for the Advocate is like posing for Newsweek (or maybe People). Or perhaps they meant "posing" in terms of "playing the poseur".

In any case, As they'd say at Sky News, "It just isn't done."

Tip to Brian, who pointed me to ICUxbridge, who said they got it from The Sun. Of course.

UPDATE: Marcia denies it all. She's straight. Will The Sun print a correction?

Posted by BradRubenstein at 09:11 AM

Mindset Lists

I'd seen these before, circulated via e-mail, but I never knew where they came from.

Every fall, Benoit College publishes a Mindset List® to remind its faculty of the mindset of its incoming students.

For example, from 2002 (I'm just picking my favorites, the complete list is here):

• They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era, and did not know he had ever been shot.
• Black Monday 1987 is as significant to them as the Great Depression.
• Their lifetime has always included AIDS.
• Most have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels, nor have they seen a black & white TV.

Or this from 2007 (complete list: here):

• Bert and Ernie are old enough to be their parents.
• There has always been a screening test for AIDS.
• Directory assistance has never been free.
• The Jaycees have always welcomed women as members.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 05:22 PM

Fashion on the Rocks

Manolo says, "Behold the Prada Hiking Boot!"

Posted by BradRubenstein at 05:50 PM

To Thine Own Self Be Fabulous

Now that I have a bit of a commute, I am reading more on the subway.

Today's journey was accompanied by a fascinating debunking article on Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth in Scientific American. Apparently since Deukmejian and Vasconcellos set up their "Task Force on Self-Esteem" in the late '80s in California, some new research has come to light.

The original premises are still alive at places like the National Association for Self-Esteem, whose mission statement is a blast from the past:

The purpose of our organization is to fully integrate self-esteem into the fabric of American society so that every individual, no matter what their age or background, experiences personal worth and happiness.

They offer a rather long apologia to self esteem, including:

...behaviors that might be described as egotistic, egocentric, conceited, boasting or bragging, bullying, taking advantage of, or harming others are defensive behaviors indicative of a lack of self-esteem.

You might worry that this would all get bogged down in semantics, and untestable hypotheses, and other such pseudo-scientific rot, but the Scientific American article does an admirable job of teasing apart the variety of different studies that have been done, and concludes things like this:

• Bullies, contrary to popular perception, do not typically suffer from low self-esteem. Neither do those who become sexually active at an early age, nor do those prone to abusing alcohol or illicit drugs.
• Raising self-esteem is not likely to boost performance in school or on the job.

I feel better about myself already.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 05:37 PM

The Homosexual Agenda

It's not easy keeping up with the The Homosexual Agenda.

How do they do it all on 7 hours sleep? That's what I want to know.

(Thanks to Turtle for the pointer).

Posted by BradRubenstein at 04:17 PM

Rebooting Crashed Cars

Steve is talking about automobiles failing because of software bugs, referring to this recent New York Times article. The money quote is:

David E. Cole, president of the Center for Automotive Research, a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., says electronics may be the cause of a third of warranty claims.

There was a joke a few years back:

At a computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release (by Mr. Welch himself) stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuver such as a left-turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would have to reinstall the engine.
4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought 'Car95' or 'CarNT', and then added more seats.
6. Apple would make a car powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five per cent of the roads.

So what should car makers be doing that they are not doing? BMW is already offoffering "intensive training sessions" so that users can understand the clumsy user interface of its iDrive automobile control system. But that seems to just be (arguably inefficient) damage control.

Perhaps it won't be long before GM will be making money selling software-free cars to its budget and safety conscious customers.

Perhaps car dealerships will start having computer repairman on site.

Perhaps computer nerds will start maintaining their friends' cars, just like they now maintain their computers for them. (I have no idea how a non-computer-savvy user can own a computer and stay sane, even an Apple). I have written before about "easter eggs" on the new Prius, you certainly aren't going to find out about those from the manufacturer...

Update: It's not just cars, CNET has a great article on software problems in cars, mobile phones, and VoIP. I've written previously on VoIP hacking.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 06:44 PM

One Illness away from the Poor House

This just in. A new Harvard study suggests that about half of the 1.5 million personal bankruptcy filings in 2001 were caused by medical illness.

"Unless you're Bill Gates, you're just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," said Dr. David Himmelstein, lead author of the study and associate professor of medicine at Harvard. "Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick. Health insurance offered little protection."

The insurance aspect is most troubling. Three quarters of the people who declared medical bankruptcy in the study were insured when they first got sick. And, incredibly, those who initially had insurance, on average, had higher out-of-pocket expenses than those who didn't (largely because they lost their coverage during their illness).

Were they all underinsured by accident? Because they couldn't afford adequate protection? Even with insurance, a cancer diagnosis will set me back $35,878 (the study average). Can I afford that?

This is an important caveat to the argument for universal health care. There's no point in declaring victory when everyone is covered, if the coverage doesn't keep you solvent through a crisis. It's probably worse, because of the false sense of security it creates. At least with "social security", people now know not to take the "security" part too seriously.

For their next study, I'd like to see the reverse question: what proportion of medical (say, cancer) diagnoses lead to bankruptcy (say, among the insured). I'm scared at what they may find.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 10:39 AM