Month: July 2006

Some timely news for the anniversary of the founding of the Republic

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic (07/03/06):

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president’s statement.

Bush told prosecutors he directed Cheney to disclose classified information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.

I’m not sure “I told him to “git ’em” but I didn’t say how. So I’m off the hook, right?” will work as a defense. But this comes from a guy who has never been held accountable: perhaps it’s time.

I mean the heritage of independence, of problem-solving, of actively creation and craft. A boutique acoustic maker — they supply kits and schematics for high-end speaker systems — is going out of business and a big reason is, for lack of a better phrase, the dumbing down of their market. They spend more time and effort on simpler, more basic questions than before.

The Size of the Market is Getting Smaller: (you have to scroll or use the search option: no anchor tags)

One thing I have noticed about the speaker building community the last few years is that it contains far fewer young people than it did in the early 90’s when North Creek began. I have thought about this a lot and the conclusion I have come to is that it is all about the vanishing ability of the average person to build things with their hands.

I attribute this to reliable cars.

Before about 1990, cars and particularly used cars were so fantastically unreliable that every guy I knew had a tool box in his trunk and was capable of changing a tire, a water pump, an alternator and its belt, etc. This stuff broke all the time, and the ability to work with one’s hands was practically a requirement to get through day-to-day life. In fact, by the time I was working for Apogee Acoustics and had the income to afford my first new car, I bought a Volvo. At the time it was considered a very expensive car, probably more than I could afford, but I bought it because it was the most reliable vehicle made. I had come to resent having to work on my old Impala every other weekend just to keep it running and safe. So I bought the Volvo, kissed the Impala “good bye”, and from that moment on my days “under the hood” were over.

Today, even the lowest price new car on the market is far more reliable than my trusty old Volvo. What this means is that the average young person today has no need to be knowledgeable about how to fix their car, hence limited need to use hand tools, so those skill required to build a cabinet and assemble a crossover are rare. This is the primary reason why we encourage our Echo and CM-7 loudspeaker kits for educational purposes, and why we will continue to offer them to educational facilities in the future.

An interesting observation: how close are we to a world where no one knows how to do anything, where a button with instructions but without a pictograph is a mystery? Or are mass-produced things so good that no one needs to build anything anymore?

Comments welcome (as always, of course).

From the gaggle of gabblers at the concert last night, I caught a different take on this:

The Seattle Times: Glaring gap in Sea-Tac security:

When William Maddox pulled into Sea-Tac Airport to drop off his daughter for a flight, he had no idea he was about to expose a hole in airport security.

The cherry farmer was waiting in his truck for a spot at the Southwest Airlines curb. It was a busy Saturday in March. Traffic cops asked him to move. Accounts about what happened next vary wildly. Police say Maddox ignored them, then got hostile. Maddox says he pulled over and cooperated.

In the end, Maddox was pinned and tasered. His daughter says she was beaten with a baton. An officer says he got punched in the face.

Was it a case of unruly passengers? Or thuglike cops?

There was an obvious way to sort it all out. Just look at the tape from the security cameras.

When Maddox’s attorney asked for the tape, what he heard back astonished him.

There was no tape. That’s because there is no camera surveillance of the airport’s arrival or departure drives.

These are the curbside areas of one of the busiest airports in the West. Where 20 million people pass through lugging bags each year.

I couldn’t believe it, either. Last week I wrote how the Auburn SuperMall — which despite its name is a run-of-the-mill oval of outlet stores — had been declared “critical infrastructure” at risk of international-terrorist attack. It scored a digital-camera system at taxpayer expense.

According to one of the dads in the group, the Real Story is that the father was picking up his daughter and her unapproved boyfriend to make sure she came home with dad rather than the boyfriend. The raconteur claims the dad was a little loaded and got into it with the cops as a surrogate for the boyfriend and the daughter ended up in the clutches of the dreaded paramour.

So a lack of reviewable surveillance tape at a busy airport takes a backseat to a bit of soap opera drama. The newspapers of course totally missed the story, in the eyes of some.

All the dads in the group looked like well-compensated professionals — lawyers, software execs, salesmen (one was loud and glib enough for that) — so the fixation on a triviality like that was baffling.

Seriously, why is there no tape running at the curbside? No one has to watch it live but having it to refer back to would be useful, dontcha think?

The comments on this should be informative. Some allusions to the ideas of The Creative Class (“tolerance for experimentation” can be applied to arts and culture) here.

I think it’s OK to mention luck, but it’s often said we make our own luck (“Chance favors the prepared mind,” as Pasteur said).

Why Do Innovation Clusters Form?:

Recently I attended a very interesting conference about high-tech innovation and public policy, with experts in various fields. (Such a conference will be either boring or fascinating, depending on who exactly is invited. This one was great.)

One topic of discussion was how innovation clusters form. “Innovation cluster” is the rather awkward term for a place where high-tech companies are concentrated. Silicon Valley is the biggest and best-known example.

It’s easy to understand why innovative people and companies tend to cluster. Companies spin out of other companies. People who move to an area to work for one company can easily jump to another one that forms nearby. Support services develop, such as law firms that specialize in supporting start-up companies or certain industries. Nerds like to live near other nerds. So once a cluster gets going, it tends to grow.

But why do clusters form in certain places and not others? We can study existing clusters to see what makes them different. For example, we know that clusters have more patent lawyers and fewer bowling alleys, per capita, than other places. But that doesn’t answer the question. Thinking that patent lawyers cause innovation is like thinking that ants cause picnics. What we want to know is not how existing clusters look, but how the birth of a cluster looks.

So what causes clusters to be born? Various arguments have been advanced. Technical universities can be catalysts, like Stanford in Silicon Valley. Weather and quality of life matter. Cheap land helps. Some argue that goverment-funded technology companies can be a nucleus —and perhaps funding cuts force previously government-funded engineers to improvise. Cultural factors, such as a general tolerance for experimentation and failure, can make a difference.

Simple luck plays a role, too. Even if all else is equal, a cluster will start forming somewhere first. The feedback cycle will start there, pulling resources away from other places. And that one place will pull ahead, for no particular reason except that it happened to reach critical mass first.

We like to have explanations for everything that happens. So naturally we’ll find it easy to discount the role of luck, and give credit instead to other factors. But I suspect that luck is more important than most people think.

We all went to the Indigo Girls show @ Woodland Park Zoo tonight, with mixed results.

I have to ask why a group of a dozen of so adults would pony up for their tickets ($28 each) just to chat and gabble through the whole show? Why not just have a barbeque and run the CDs? Less stressful, as your kids are not running around in a crowd, for one thing.

My guess is that moms really wanted to go and make a family outing of it: next time, ladies, leave the kids and dads at home and have a better time.

But the Girls were good. Hadn’t seen them in a long time and they sounded great, in good voice with lots of energy. They had an opening act who was a bad fit: she had a more country sound and her material was very down-tempo where the Girls are almost always driving pretty hard with their stuff. So it seemed to drag a bit.

Bonus appearance by local girl Brandi Carlile covering Hallelujah. Nicely done, though I’m not sure everyone knew it. She came out for one more song as we were leaving with the Girls. She’s worth keeping an eye on.

This was the first Zootunes show I have been to with a beer garden and it was doing a brisk trade. Some people snuck in their own refreshments, only to have security confiscate them (seriously people, can you not get through a couple of hours without a drink? Again, why not just have a BBQ at home?).

Our last Zootunes show, I think. Too crowded, too much feeling like we were guests in someone else’s living room. Shame really, but it might just have been the booking itself. Just ‘cuz they’re folkies doesn’t make the Indigo Girls a family act, perhaps.

4th of July Screensaver:

In the spirit of the 4th of July, here is a great fireworks screensaver called Skyrocket. The fireworks are rendered in 3D.

Be sure to turn on the sound (and tweak other features) by clicking on the Options button under the preview screen in the Desktop & Screen Saver system preference.

This breaks my heart, but it’s Mac-only. 🙂

needs a classical simulcast to make it complete but you can provide that with iTunes.

Pogue’s Posts – A Handy Tip From a Reader on Flash Drives – Technology – New York Times Blog:

Freaky reader mail of the day:

“I read with some interest your article on running software off of flash drives. It is indeed quite handy, and you may not be far off in your vision of a future in which us normal folks don’t have to worry about computer ownership and maintenance.

“While I was quite happy to see that you included open-source software in your list of programs worth trying to install on the flash drive, it is well worth noting that in the field of software on flash, Linux has been way ahead of Windows. Entire Linux distributions [versions] exist that take up less than 50 megs of space (see http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ for a popular example), allowing you to run an entire operating system off of your flash drive!

“And because it’s Linux, worries about security, viruses, and spyware from plugging into someone else’s computer are minimized.

“Of course, one can still mount the Windows drive from within linux, thus accessing any files on the host computer, and with a good Windows emulator, it should be possible to run much of the Windows software as well.

“Now, these Linux distributions aren’t quite ready for the mainstream — the software that comes with them isn’t as spiffy as Microsoft Office, and mounting a Windows partition takes a bit of know-how (using the command line most folks shy away from). But they do provide a fully functional minicomputer on a flash drive, safe, secure, and ready to go. Most include a browser, document editor, email client, spreadsheet software, and music and video software, even if they’re not top of the line (it’s not easy squeezing that much stuff on a flash drive, let alone in only 50 megs). I carry DSL linux on my flash drive in a bootable form, so that I can even use computers that are password protected. Pretty handy stuff.”

Handy–and mind-blowing.

Thumb drives are as large as 4Gb now: how long before they are large enough to run an OS, applications and store documents? The disk in the iBook is only 30Gb (way too small): is a 32 Gb flash drive that far out? How small will a laptop become when the disk goes away? The limitations will be the screen size and any CD/DVD drives. And I suspect power consumption will do down as well.

The new mantra in high-end application development is that RAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape: it’s been established practice for years to avoid touching the disk subsystem if you want speed, but flash drives offer some interesting possibilities.

In the comments following Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: Conservative pundits reveal murderous plot by the Travel Section of the NYT!:

Maldoror said…
The NY Times editor should just offer the Bush Administration this:

As of tomorrow, the NY Times will rename itself, the American Times.

All content will be reviewed, and, if necessary, rewritten by the OSP.

All current staff will retain their jobs and bylines, but article content will be whatever the Bush Administration wishes.

However, we will only allow this if the administration’s version can turn a profit.

Yeah, that’ll work.

Interesting little tidbit. How confidential can the origins of the macaroni be? If I know (as I have made my own for years) that pasta is wheat and either eggs or water and someone won’t tell me what they make theirs out of, why would I eat it?

We learn more from what they don’t or won’t tell us than we might have from anything else.

In contrast to the more than $15 billion in direct marketing spent in the U.S. to exhort children to buy food and non-food products, children often don’t get very far with the companies when they start asking questions. Olympia, Washington, teacher Michi Thacker assigned her elementary students to write food manufacturers to raise questions, such as where the macaroni comes from. Most larger companies like Kraft suddenly had little to say. Kraft told one student via email that “the information you are seeking is considered confidential.” Gatorade, Frito Lay, Campbell’s and Post had similar nonanswers. Nancy from Nancy’s Yogurt of Eugene, Oregon, on the other hand, responded personally to students with the names of the producing farms and the origins of ingredients. Rethinking Schools contains 13 articles about how children learn about food, including the costs of local and imported food, corporate food distribution networks, connecting food and heritage, and what an earthworm (in contrast to a PR firm) can teach you about eating right.

There are a couple of threads in there to pick out. One, that large food manufacturers do all kinds of things in their labs/production lines they would just as soon keep from us, and two, scale plays a role in this. I suspect Nancy has no interest in getting big like Kraft or Campbell’s: her bio makes her sound almost too good to be true (Ken Kesey‘s brother owns the creamery?!). I’m sure any number of people in a small business can say what goes in a given product, even if they don’t have a hand in every part of the process.

Even if the kids you know don’t watch much TV or read magazines (have you seen some of the kids magazines?), somehow that $15 billion is reaching some of them. Assuming I can read a table, it looks like there are 70 millions kids (19 and under). $214 per kid? That seems a little high, but who knows? Advertising/direct marketing takes many forms.