It’s not clear at all why Google’s revenue will grow over time. Hence it’s not clear why anyone should invest in them. I mean, they’re cool, but being cool isn’t a good reason to put your money in them . . . unless you think that the whole world will be fooled for long enough that you can profit off their stupidity. And while that seems like a promising strategy, I think it also explains the dot-com crash. I’d rather not relive that.
Via Fafblog!: NPR can’t use the word “suck” on the air anymore, as part of the new crackdown on airborne indecency.
For some reason today I’ve been pointed to a number of long essays on the web. They’re pretty interesting, so I’ll put them up here as a reminder to myself (sort of like a bookmark page with annotations) and a source of good stuff for my readers:
Update: Having read the Goodman interview, I’m actually not all that impressed with her. Lots of tough questions, but no followups. Clinton comes out sounding like the one with all the knowledge, and Goodman sounds like she’s carrying an arsenal of one-liners. She’s outmatched. She’s probably very smart, and she probably avoided asking followups because she had so much she wanted to ask. But she comes off sounding combative, and 90% of the time Clinton is answering her directly and clearly. That imbalance of tone is not only disrespectful (where, if anything, I think respect implies symmetry); it’s also bad for Goodman’s own reputation — at least in this reader’s eyes.
Via BoingBoing: A provision of the USA Patriot Act makes it illegal to tell the world that you’re suing to challenge the Patriot Act (my cache). This stuff makes me physically ill.
Watching cream diffuse through a glass of cold coffee just now, and comparing it in my head with the behavior of cream in hot coffee, I realized: if I could ever completely understand a realistic model of this diffusion process (featuring all the relevant variables, like temperature, viscosity of the fluid, and odd obstructions like ice cubes), and particularly if I could simulate the differential equations on a computer, I would probably drop everything and pursue a Ph.D. in physics. Anyone who feels like nudging me in that direction is, of course, welcome to point me to accessible works on the subject that the physics-unschooled by probability-schooled student could understand.
Via Slashdot: The MIT Tech interviews former MPAA chief Jack Valenti (my cache) for 10 minutes, and in that time tries to get him to answer one simple question: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal for anyone to design a device or a computer program that cracks the CSS encryption protecting DVDs; but a lot of people want to play DVDs under Linux, and right now the only way to play a DVD under Linux is to crack CSS. Therefore anyone who plays a DVD under Linux necessarily breaks the law. There are several million Linux users nationwide. Isn’t it pretty awful that the DMCA has harmed a few million people? And what does Valenti say about that?
His evasions — returning always to the talking point of “If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, that’s wrong” — make me want to bang my head against the wall. I can’t believe Valenti ever succeeded as a lobbyist.
The front page of the New York Times today says that “The Supreme Court began hearing arguments today involving the limits of presidential power and the balance between individual freedom and national security.” Sometime soon, I intend to go off about why I think the “freedom versus security” dichotomy is an absurd canard that is immensely harmful to the cause of civil liberties. It’s almost as stupid as the “equality versus liberty” canard. My mind isn’t in the right place to attack these right now, but they really deserve a thorough treatment — which I hope I’ll be able to give them soon.
Via Kevin Drum: George Packer has a great little article on blogs (my cache) in the most recent Mother Jones. Initially Mother Jones only published the first 1,000 words of Packer’s article, leaving the rest for subscribers, but eventually — I have to presume under the pressure of Drum’s readers — they released the whole thing.
It’s a decent article. Packer’s a great author, from what I can tell by his occasional columns in the New York Times Magazine; apparently his book Blood of the Liberals is fantastic. But I think he also has somewhat the wrong idea about blogs. While it’s easy to complain about blogs’ obsessive focus on specific dustups — President Bush’s war record, specific National Review authors, or whatever — that seems to ignore the echo-chamber effect in traditional media. The traditional media pay insanely close attention to totally unimportant issues all the time; a president came very near impeachment because of the media’s flesh-obsession. And Packer attacks blogs for the echo-chamber effect? If blogs are any more of an echo chamber than the newspapers — which I don’t believe is the case — then the blame lies with society as a whole. Because if the point is that blogs are a new distributed form of media in which people can say whatever they believe without the traditional journalistic checks (and I dispute that those checks work for a democracy), then when we attack blogs, aren’t we just attacking the way that ordinary Americans think?
I’d also like to put in a word for Frank Rich, about whom Packer writes that “until recently [he] . . . wrote an op-ed column for the Times largely devoted to reviewing politics as entertainment.” While this is in some sense an accurate portrayal of what Rich wrote, I don’t think it’s nearly nuanced enough. Maureen Dowd writes about politics-as-entertainment, with all the substance that one would find in Entertainment Weekly. Rich writes a perceptive, thought-provoking piece that’s much more about the joke that politics has become under the influence of media — “politics-as-influenced-by-television” rather than “politics-as-entertainment.” There’s a huge difference, as anyone who reads both Dowd and Rich can attest.
I think a lot of people don’t see the failings in traditional media as clearly as they ought to. Blogs belong to the same Internet-era phenomenon that gave rise to GNU/Linux: the distributed production of a socially valuable product. People who focus on the little failings in blogs are missing the bigger picture, in the same way that pointing out the UI flaws in Linux — while valuable — ignores the towering edifice sitting right in front of your face.
That said, Packer has a lot of interesting comments about how blogs don’t work as well as traditional journalism, but gives us no idea why this might be. Is it just that traditional journalists have more training? Sure, so that’s a check on one side of the ledger. But what do blogs give us that newspapers don’t? To read Packer, it would seem that the answer is “not much.” Which is sad, because it means that he’s missing a lot of what makes this new medium great.
I can’t decide whether to be really happy or really sad that I’ve not read any of the books on the short list for the Orange Prize, and that I’ve only heard of one (Margaret Atwood’s):
The short list for the Orange Prize has been announced.
Margaret Atwood — Oryx and Crake
Shirley Hazzard — The Great Fire
Andrea Levy — Small Island
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Purple Hibiscus
Gillian Slovo — Ice Road
Rose Tremain — The Colour
If I were happy about this, it would be because there are still about a billion books that I’ve not read, and another billion that I’ve never even heard of. If I were sad about it, it would be because there are still about a billion books that I’ve not read, and another billion that I’ve never even heard of.
Can anyone point me to any scholarly works on the economics of substitutability? What got me thinking about this is that Krugman’s book will soon be released in paperback, and the paperback will cost a couple dollars less upon release than even used copies of the hardcover edition. Some people will still opt for the hardcover out of a preference for that format; most, though, would presumably buy the paperback if both were available.
My goal is to model the maximum market-clearing price for a substitute good (in this case, used hardcovers as a substitute for new paperbacks). This is quite practically useful: when you post an item for sale on Amazon, Amazon proposes a sale price to you — presumably based on its experience selling many other used goods. The question for Amazon is where to set that price. That’s my question as well. If anyone has any citations ready-to-hand, I’d love to hear about them.
Paul Krugman makes another great argument about the Bush administration (my cache), particularly its policy of hiding everything from the public that it isn’t absolutely, positively required to reveal:
What Mr. Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn’t obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public.
Not long ago I would have thought it inconceivable that the Supreme Court would endorse that doctrine. But I would also have thought it inconceivable that a president would propound such a vision in the first place.
The “Krugman is shrill” meme ran its course a while ago, it seems. So I ask: has anyone found any examples where Krugman really is shrill, rather than just accurate and scared about what this administration is capable of? He sounds eminently reasonable to me.
Kevin Drum posts an essay by John Perry Barlow (of EFF and Grateful Dead fame) on what could possibly be inspiring the foreign policy that Dick Cheney seems to be in charge of. Barlow relates his experiences lobbying against Cheney’s seemingly insane nuclear-weapons policy from the 1980’s. It’s a good interpretation of what looks from the outside like sheer lunacy.
Eric Schlosser (of Fast Food Nation fame) has a great op-ed on marijuana decriminalization (my cache) in today’s New York Times. It’s well worth the read, as is Fast Food Nation. (I can’t speak to Schlosser’s other book, Reefer Madness, having never read it.) In concert with drug researcher Mark Kleiman’s post about the huge drop in the street price of cocaine and heroin since 1980, one has to wonder what the point of this drug war is.
(This is the sort of post that makes me wish Blosxom allowed multiple categories per story: this one could just as easily go under sports or books. For no good reason I’ve assigned it to books.)
I’m in the middle of reading a couple books on baseball, including the 1983 edition of The Hidden Game Of Baseball. The subject of that book is the statistics that baseball fans use to quantify players’ skill, including RBI and ERA. The traditional statistics suffer from not isolating a player enough: a pitcher may have a high ERA (Earned Run Average — how many runs he allowed batters to score) if his defense is very good; contrariwise, his defense may mask his poor performance. A batter may have a low RBI because he comes early in the batting order and thereby doesn’t have a chance to score with many people on base.
The book does a decent job presenting the failings in these statistics, and does a subpar job explaining how one should interpret the new statistics that the book’s authors, and others like Bill James, have proposed. One such statistic is Linear Weights, which professional statisticians will utter a loud “Duh!” upon discovering: Linear Weights models the total number of runs that a batter is responsible for as a linear combination of stolen bases, bases the runner was caught while trying to steal, home runs, singles, doubles, and triples. The question is: on average, how many runs does a home run cause? How many runs does a single cause? How fast a runner do you have to be before it becomes worth it to steal bases?
That last question is particularly intriguing, and Linear Weights seems to be a decent way to address it. If the leadoff runner steals a base successfully, then he’s just made it a little bit easier for the next batter to get another run; if the leadoff runner gets caught stealing, then his team gets an out and his team has lost an opportunity to score a run. The question is: when does the expected benefit of the stolen base exceed the expected loss when the runner is caught stealing? The book doesn’t go into detail about the derivation, but it seems to be using computer simulations to estimate the coefficients on the summed variables; by this estimate, a stolen base contributes 3/10 of a run on average, and getting caught stealing loses 6/10 of a run. So unless you’re a very consistent base-stealer, it’s not worth your while to run. Presumably baseball players know this already, but maybe that’s an unreasonable presumption.
The book’s main point, which it makes well, is that the whole point of the statistics should be to estimate how many runs you produce for your team, or if you’re a pitcher how many runs you foiled. Everything else is academic, since the whole point of baseball is that the team with the most runs wins.
The trouble is that the statistician who coauthored the book with a sportswriter apparently didn’t chime in as much as he should have; the parts where the book talks about rigorous statistics are absolutely execrable. Those of us who know some statistics will be as aghast as I was, I hope, when they see the book’s treatment of the data. Yes, most people will only be interested in the results — .3 runs for a steal, -.6 runs when caught stealing, etc. — but the derivation and the justification is what’s important. I’d like to see some graphs comparing the model to the data, for one thing. Maybe some r2’s here and there. The book tries to provide rigorous statistics in the footnotes at the end of each section, but those footnotes are often worse than having no explanation at all: without explaining why, the book says that two statistics are computed iteratively, and that they’re intertwined, and gives the iterative formulas. It’s not clear why they ought to be iterated; part of my brain tells me that these statistics are using Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares, but the book never bothers to tell us that. This is a pretty common failing, I’ve found: pretend mathematical rigor that ends up saying more about the author’s failings than about the data.
Perhaps this is all beside the point, given that I think the book’s intended audience does not include the statistically minded. Perhaps I should dig into the technical papers (some of them from operations-research journals) that the book refers to. Other than its failings of rigor and technical exposition, the book is actually quite good; it manages to intrigue me into playing with the data.
I’m not quite done the book, but my other complaint about it is that it focuses too much on the past: using the data to figure out who the best hitter of all time was, or whatnot. That’s not especially important to me; my interest is in finding the most undervalued players now, and assembling them on a team that will make the best use of them. Apparently this is the point of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball — how the coach of the Oakland A’s assembled a great team on the cheap by looking more closely at the numbers. I look forward to reading Lewis’s book.
All of these books, by the way, come to me from my local library, which I’ve switched to (from buying every book) out of sheer financial desperation. It’s a good habit to get into, though, so maybe eventually I’ll be like my friend Seth in yet another way: not buying another book for years, yet still reading more than anyone around me.
A little post about Latin plurals really makes me want to learn Latin. I’ve wanted to for a while, along with Ancient Greek. All in due time, I guess.
P.S.: Thanks to Bill Poser for his highly informative followup, which points us to a guide to Latin plurals used in English.
I’m reading the Aimster decision right now, written by the redoubtable Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit. It doesn’t actually seem like much of a big deal to me: Posner sets out what seem to me to be very reasonable guidelines for when a software company is guilty of contributory infringement. I’m not totally clear on all the nuanced legal issues, but I’m reading a bit. Basically, Posner’s big contention seems to be that the burden of proof is on Aimster to prove that their technology does not contributorily (or would it be vicariously?) infringe, and that they’ve not presented any evidence that their technology has substantial noninfringing uses. It’s one thing if the technology could, theoretically, be used for noninfringing purposes; it’s another if no one actually uses the technology in a noninfringing way.
I say this isn’t a big deal because there are lots of general-purpose technologies that could easily take Aimster’s place. From what I can tell, no one has yet accused Kazaa of infringing, or Gnutella or FreeNet. For that matter, AIM itself is a perfectly usable general-purpose technology for distributing media of any sort. And in the long run, I suspect that people sending MP3s to their friends — iPod to iPod, AIM client to AIM client, web server to web browser, or whatever — is a more socially productive sharing service than Aimster or Napster. The goal is to create communities, get people more interested in music, and not lock down any technology that might blossom into something great. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that lockdown point, and to my untrained eye it doesn’t look like Posner takes us there, either.
P.S.: I am concerned, though, at Posner’s insistence that Aimster’s use of encryption is evidence of contributory infringement — argument being, as far as I can tell, that Aimster used encryption so that it would specifically not be accused of contributory infringement; Posner accused Aimster of an “ostrich-like refusal to discover the extent to which its system was being used to infringe copyright”, which is “merely another piece of evidence that it was a contributory infringer.” The logic here escapes me. Why need the use of encryption suggest any such thing? Posner says earlier, regarding this same claim:
Our point is only that a service provider that would otherwise be a contributory infringer does not obtain immunity by using encryption to shield itself from actual knowledge of the unlawful purposes for which the service is being used.
That seems like an altogether different point: using crypto is no defense against contributory infringement. Fine. But in the “merely another piece” sentence, Posner seems to be suggesting that the crypto is itself evidence of contributory infringement. And is there any evidence that the sole point of Aimster’s encryption was to evade responsibility for infringement that it knew was happening? Or was that just a happy side-effect?
Having finished the decision, I’m a little more concerned than I was before.
I should mention that I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 earlier this week, and absolutely adored it. It completely makes up for Kill Bill Vol. 1, which I loathed. I saw Vol. 2 with Adam Kessel, who wrote a review of it with which I wholeheartedly agree — particularly the part about wishing to build a film course around all the references that Tarantino drops in Vol. 2.
My trouble with Vol. 1 was that it seemed all style and no substance — lots of flash with no story. Maybe that was the point; I’m coming to the conclusion that quite often Tarantino is paying homage to his forefathers, without necessarily adding anything to what they did. He’s just a joyous filmmaker. And while I appreciate his joy, and wish him continued happiness, I find myself quite often bored by films with no story.
In contrast, Vol. 2 is all story, presented with style as an accomplice. It is graceful, its cinematography is perfectly in line with all that it’s trying to accomplish (I might single out the aspect-ratio switch when Kiddo goes into the coffin), it’s noir in all the best senses of that term, and we grow to love its characters; I, for one, grew to care about Kiddo and Bill.
I’m now excited to see where Tarantino goes from here. I hope his next film is as lovely, nuanced, and enrapturing as was Kill Bill Vol. 2.
A little baseball-math question for y’all: if a team A beats a team B with probability p, and team B beats team C with probability q, what is the probability (call it r) that team A beats team C?
Offhand, I’d assume that the curve is very oddly shaped: if p and q are both near 0, then I’d assume r is also very near 0. If p and q are near 1, I’d assume r is also near 1. How about toward the middle? If p and q are near .5 (meaning that A and B are evenly matched, as are B and C), should we expect that r will be near .5 (A and C are evenly matched)? How about elsewhere in the curve? Any good guesses? Better yet, any good data? I still need to dig into the data that Jason pointed me to.
Unrelatedly, I watched the Sox cream the Yankees tonight, 11-2. The Yankees’ Contreras appears to be an awful pitcher. A-Rod still isn’t all that impressive: I keep hearing that he’s the best player in baseball, but it’s not really coming out yet. Which scares me: it will probably happen that the Yankees come back later in the season and whup the Sox one more time; the Yankees and the Sox have come in first and second place, respectively (my cache), within the American League (or maybe AL East) for six straight years — a record unmatched in any other professional sports league. It’s frustrating as hell.
Meanwhile Hideki Matsui ambles up to the plate and consistently gets the job done. The guy seems to have the inevitability of an approaching stormcloud, and I get a little tug of fear every time he comes to bat.
Yes, the OCD is doing fine, thank you.
Not that I was likely to watch a TV movie featuring Britney Spears’s creative influence, but I’d like to ask a general question inspired by it: don’t we get tired of seeing exactly the same story again and again and again? This time, it’s the story about the poor girl who makes good, encountering meanies along the way and vanquishing them one by one. Oh, and she gets the nice handsome guy by the end. In other movies you’ll find the one about the man who returns home to find his city taken over by ruffians, and destroys them. The list of things which will not appear in my movie features a lot of these, but by no means all of them.
I’ll grant you that these stories can often be done well; Romeo and Juliet obviously didn’t invent the boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-can’t-be-together story. But when there’s an infinity of stories, why stick with the hackneyed ones? Among today’s movies, there’s normally not a jot of originality in their treatment of the old stories; they’re not Shakespeare, nor were they meant to be. They treat the old stories because they can’t think of anything better.
There’s a substantial middle ground, I’ll grant you: High Fidelity is just a story about a guy’s history of breakups. The story of people breaking up is a very old one (perhaps the oldest?). So what is it that makes a story like High Fidelity different than the trash that’s directed at teenagers? Part of it is, I think, the real humanity in High Fidelity’s treatment of its characters; these are people, not just stock formulations of old, tired clichés. It’s the same story, but made completely new by the way we relate to its characters. I’m beginning to think that one key to a lot of great literature (where a great film is “literature” here as well) is that it takes the individual and makes him universal: we feel for Cusack not because of any gimmicks like cheesy music or forced tears, but because we all know what it feels like to have been in his shoes. The story is new in every one of us.
So why do so many people get into movies that are purely recycled from any number of other films in the same genre, without adding anything new about the characters and very little style? Don’t we get bored? I know that I do. I’m curious what the allure is for other people.
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