Raw Meat

"There are families in which the gather will say to his child, “You’ll get a thick ear if..."

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:30:05 -0400

“There are families in which the gather will say to his child, “You’ll get a thick ear if you do that again,” while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, “Now, darling, )is_ it kind to Mummy to do that?” And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first? The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power.”

- George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”

"…on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise."

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:27:40 -0400

“…on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

- George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool”

"Since I started drinking at 30 it’s been Jameson on the rocks, though the Jameson ad campaigns..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:47:37 -0400

“Since I started drinking at 30 it’s been Jameson on the rocks, though the Jameson ad campaigns on the subway have made me think maybe I should switch, since those ads clearly convey that if you drink Jameson you’re an asshole or a corporate tool. Or perhaps I’m being dense and this was the way I was supposed to discover I’m an asshole and a corporate tool.”

- Ira Glass

"mothers are recruiting another life-form to baby-sit their baby"

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:23:30 -0400

“mothers are recruiting another life-form to baby-sit their baby”

- NYT trend piece

Why Apple Doesn't Deserve Your Trust

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:51:00 -0400

At Apple’s antenna press conference yesterday, Steve Jobs asked:

Apple’s been around for 34 years. Haven’t we earned the credibility and trust from some of the press to give us a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, of our motivations, the fact that we’re confident and will solve these problems?

In many ways, I think the issue here is not the crime but the coverup. In the grand scheme, the antenna issue is not such a big deal. It hasn’t affected many users, it can apparently be resolved with a simple piece of plastic. But from the beginning, Apple’s response has been denial, misdirection, and outright deception.

On June 26, Steve Jobs emailed someone to say:

There is no reception issue. Stay tuned.

On July 2, this became official Apple policy:

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. […]

In other words, there is no reception issue, just a display issue.

And yesterday, at the press conference, they admitted that there was a reception issue, but tried to claim that other phones all had it too. What’s revealing is that even Apple’s own antenna page belies this argument. For every other phone, there is a big yellow circle labeling where the antenna is. For the iPhone 4, there is an arrow pointing at one tiny weak spot. Obviously the iPhone 4 is different.

Perhaps there’s a reason for the difference. But as John Gruber put it, Steve never used the word “trade-off”. Instead, he refused to take any real responsibility.

If Apple wanted to gain people’s trust, it should have started by being honest about what was going on. And the first step on that would be dropping this whole “number of bars” nonsense and showing the raw signal strength numbers.

If Apple had ever shown this simple chart, it would have been totally clear what was going on. If, on the other models they compared the iPhone 4 against, they had shown the actual dBm (the generally-accepted measure of signal strength) lost by “holding it wrong,” we could have fairly compared their issues to the iPhone 4’s. But instead of having a debate about signal lost — the real issue for users — Apple has consistently tried to distract people with the issue of bars shown.

This can’t be an accident. Those advanced phone testing facilities must keep full track of actual dBm — it would be ridiculous to try to test a phone based on how many “bars” it had — yet, even after a talk supposedly about “hard data,” Apple still hasn’t once shown us a real dBm number on any phone!

Like Nixon, Jobs refuses to admit they did anything wrong. He issues a series of bogus cover stories, demanding they be believed based on the credibility he thinks he deserves. When they’re not believed, he lashes out at the press for making a big deal out of it. And each attempt at coverup makes the situation much worse, since it leads to another flurry of stories about intentional wrongdoing, which cause much more damage than the original problem ever could have.

This antenna issue could have been dead weeks ago had they simply admitted what was going on. But with this latest press conference, it’s now a legitimate story, deserving of response and rebuttal from all the aggrieved parties. And so the debate grinds on.

It seems unlikely “Antennagate” will cause Apple any lasting damage, but their prideful response sure isn’t helping.

This has to be the weirdest puff piece ever. It also claims that Brooks became a conservative...

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:47:18 -0400

This has to be the weirdest puff piece ever. It also claims that Brooks became a conservative because the hookers he met in Moscow were too smart.

beautiful and intelligent-looking…[seeing them] illustrates the tremendous waste of human capital [under Communism]. These women should be selling real estate or running ad agencies.

What crazy examples to pick! Whatever you want to say about hookers, at least they actually provide a service to people. Whereas real estate sales and ad agencies seem like classic examples of the huge socially-useless waste of talent required under capitalism.

Great Moments in Juxtaposition

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:43:45 -0400

Matt Taibbi on True/Slant called Brooks, among other things, a “spineless Beltway geek” on a “pencil-pusher’s eternal quest for macho cred” who “looks like a professional groveler/ass-kisser” and is “the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley look-alike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back.”

Brooks says he agrees with some of the criticism. “Often you’ll read a commentary about the column and think, That’s actually correct,” he says.

(David Brooks puff profile, NY Mag)

"Mr Perkins poses an extreme risk to the market when drunk"

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:34:04 -0400

““Mr Perkins poses an extreme risk to the market when drunk””

- UK Financial Services Authority

Robert Langer's Hedge Fund

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 19:33:51 -0400

I sat near Robert Langer, the MIT scientist, on a plane recently. He was apparently on a tour to raise funds for his hedge fund. He explained how he was trying to keep the hedge fund thing quiet, since it would hurt his chances of winning a Nobel Prize. He explained that it was seen the way starting a for-profit corporation was seen a generation ago — as a distraction from real science.

This seems like a worrying trend.

Web standards == Safari?

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:33:00 -0400

Web standards == Safari?:

Pretty brazen that Apple’s site promoting “web standards” uses browser sniffing so that it only works in Safari. I think it’s a fairly minimal definition of standard to require that it work in more than one browser. It’s especially silly since so many other browsers (e.g. Google Chrome) are based on WebKit and so should render things pretty much identically to Safari.

You can open it up in Chrome using:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app   --args -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/590.19"

and you’ll see that while some things don’t work (mostly the 3D), all of the apps are designed to degrade gracefully and don’t show the options that aren’t supported by the browser or display a polite message if the page can’t work at all. This seems like a much better example of web standards than simply blocking everyone but Safari.

"Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a recent statement that..."

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:20:00 -0400

“Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a recent statement that “I am pleased to call Fred Malek my friend,” and that except for his experience compiling a list of Jews for Nixon, “he has no record of being anti-Jewish.” Both [Malek’s spokesman] and a spokesman for the ADL declined to say whether Malek had contributed money to the group.”

- Washington Post. I also love US News’s spin: “as a mid-level aide in the Nixon White House [Malek] made, as he himself has for some time admitted, an error in judgment.”

"Attribute the best possible motive consistent with the facts."

Mon, 31 May 2010 22:24:57 -0400

“Attribute the best possible motive consistent with the facts.”

- Nel Noddings (Noddings’ Razor?)

The power of Twitter.

Wed, 26 May 2010 10:48:47 -0400

The power of Twitter.

"One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and..."

Sun, 23 May 2010 15:43:30 -0400

“One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?””

- Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., University of Arizona College of Medicine; quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted by Tufte

"Erdogan has recently discovered why Israel-bashing is the recreational drug of choice for Islamic..."

Thu, 20 May 2010 19:07:48 -0400

“Erdogan has recently discovered why Israel-bashing is the recreational drug of choice for Islamic political leaders - it’s cheap, it makes you feel good and you can fit in with the crowd. But it does have side effects and you do tend to find yourself doing it over and over again instead of getting on with more productive work.”

- BB

Who controls the Web?

Mon, 17 May 2010 18:41:00 -0400

Gruber writes:

Adobe co-founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke:

In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web?

The Macalope:

This is not the question at all. Is the iPhone OS the Web? No. That’s ridiculous.

No, the question isn’t whether Apple gets to control the World Wide Web. The question is whether Adobe gets to. If Adobe gets to define the Web as including Flash, then they get to control the Web — you can only claim you support the Web (as Apple’s TV ads got in trouble for claiming in the UK) if you follow Adobe’s rules. It’s not surprising Adobe’s cofounders don’t want to give that up.

"Karl Marx knew little about penguins, but he did acknowledge, in the sexist terminology of 1852,..."

Tue, 11 May 2010 23:04:15 -0400

“Karl Marx knew little about penguins, but he did acknowledge, in the sexist terminology of 1852, that ‘Men make their own history’”

- John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, 261

Thanks a lot, Dictionary.com

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:33:00 -0400

Usage Note: Affect and effect, each both noun and verb, share the sense of “influence.”

(Dictionary.com Unabridged, Based on the Random House Dictionary)

Usage Note: Affect and effect have no senses in common.

(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Both quotes from the Dictionary.com page on affect. And ADMAU somehow doesn’t even treat the subject. Real helpful, guys.

I know this is crazy, but it really sounds to me like Leonard Cohen is covering Don Henley with...

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 11:44:00 -0400

I know this is crazy, but it really sounds to me like Leonard Cohen is covering Don Henley with “Everybody Knows”. I guess that’s Sharon Robinson for you.

"I think we have a hard enough time coping with the world. We don’t have to be answerable to it..."

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:52:00 -0400

“I think we have a hard enough time coping with the world. We don’t have to be answerable to it too.”

- Richard Rorty, “Rorty v. Searle, At Last: A Debate,” Logos, 47