Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye (and Foot): No Technology Edition

Happy Music. One of our excursions during the break was a couple of days at the California Worldfest music festival at the Grass Valley fairgrounds. We went up to see one of our favorite bands, the pioneering UK-African fusion group Baka Beyond. We greatly enjoyed their two sets, which concentrated on their more danceable numbers. We also try to pick up on at least one new artist each time we go to such an event. This time it was the Masanga Marimba Ensemble. This is an LA-based group headed by a CSU-Northridge world music prof and staffed largely with ex-students, playing Zimbabwean marimbas with a mix of traditional tunes and unique covers. A set of videos of a club gig can be found here. You can't listen to this music and stay in a crabby mood. Also shout-outs to Haitian artist Emeline Michel and the Bay Area based Euro-goulash Fishtank Ensemble. Also happy music.

In praise of the 5th Amendment. Don't talk to the police. This links to a tremendously effective lecture by law professor James Duane. It's well worth it for the substance, but it's also a good exhibition of the use of the medium to inform and amuse at the same time. (Hat tip: Maggie's Farm.) There's a follow-up piece from a police investigator as well.

What have capitalists learned? While Fukuyama got it glaringly wrong that the collapse of socialism would lead to the end of civilization level conflicts, you'd think there ought to be some takeaway lessons from that, and the rise of the global economy. Guy Sorman has a useful summary of what economists have learned that should be a basic grounding for economic and policy discourse going forward. I'd have made the final point stronger, but that's a quibble. RTWT.

Making light of the anointed one. There have been a lot of cracks about the 'Obamessiah' in the rightosphere, but it takes the Brits to really do the job right. Gerard Baker of the London Times comes up with a tone-perfect parody. I'm not sure which came first, but there's also a YouTube of Baker reading his piece - equally droll. More substantively, the Iraqis apparently just waited until he was out of town before back-channeling their lack of faith to their friends in the media.

Got any old Pokemon toys around the house? Here are some seriously strange things to do with them. It's art, not technology, 'kay?

Recuperation, Phase Two

I've been taking a few weeks holiday from the tech scene and blogging, partly to devote some more time to rehab'ing from my broken leg of now six months ago. I've been able to discard in succession the walker, the crutches and cane. However, I'm still walking with a noticeable limp due to limited range of motion in the relevant ankle joint, which got all sorts of crud dumped into it as a result of soft tissue damage from the break, and the ensuing surgery. This is slowly improving with a routine of physical therapy sessions and exercises that alternate between painful and boring.

What you don't realize until it happens to you - particularly if you're of the 50+ set - is just how debilitating being stuck on your behind for 4-5 months really is. I'm once again out and hiking, but the two miles with a few hundred feet of climbing that I did yesterday felt like eight and a couple thousand feet would have before. At least the the obvious connection between damage and activity - and immediate pain feedback - means that I've been easing back onto the trails deliberately. It's easy to forget that when restarting other activities. A couple weekends ago I went back to the shooting range, to see just how far my skills had eroded due to the time off. Not too badly, fortunately, but having fun and doing well caused me to ignore warning signs produced by the rather contorted back positions sometimes assumed while target shooting. Not a good idea, since I then spent most of a week down with lower back pains. Lesson: It's not just the limb and muscles that were injured - everything is weaker and stiffer, and you have to restart carefully.

There's at least one pleasant surprise. I'd assumed the same period stuck indoors would leave me a pasty Joe White-boy. Fortunately, 20+ years in the California sun has built enough of a base tan that it's not been a problem, given a little discretion. Yup, I know that'll mean an occasional skin cancer screening in the future, but you pays your money and you takes your chances.

The Roving Eye: Carlson Curves Updated, Troubled Metro WiFi, Tasty Media Bits

The Pace of Genomics Learning. Rob Carlson revisits and updates his charts on gene sequencing learning curves. Carlson is commendably modest about this effort: "I have cautioned both the private sector and governments from attempting to use this data to forecast trends." However, that's overlooking a collateral benefit of well-defined learning curves such as Moore's Law: They serve as a synchronizing vision among current and potential creators and users of a technology. Users start working on applications in advance of economic feasibility, with a fair amount of comfort that time will fix that problem. Innovators and infrastructure creators on the sell side proceed with greater confidence that new demand will appear to reward their efforts in reducing costs. Carlson uses a 'Thousand Dollar Genome' as a way to think about the possible consequences and limits of demand. While that's undoubtedly useful, it has some risk of falling into the 'Who needs an IBM machine in their home?' trap from the computing world. Make the technology cheap enough, and all sorts of uses pop up that defy the original idea of how it should be packaged. (Note Carlson also has some interesting but less well established curves for gene synthesis. Well worth watching for futurists and would-be biotech investors.

WiFi not so fine. A lot of the Bay Area's attempts to turn 802.11 into a metro access solution are shutting down. WiFi's ubiquity and consequent low costs got a lot of people, from engineers to investors to city councils, excited about the possibility of bending it to a use for which it was never designed. While I've seen some ingenuous attempts at things like meshing and remote management, the crux of the matter seems to be operations, which is often overlooked by those who've never run a network. Earthlink, at any rate, has been finding out the hard way that running an outdoor WiFi access network is a bit tougher than remotely managing racks of modems in Telco central offices. (Via Jeff Nolan.)

California ablaze. It's a tragedy for those caught up in the wildfires, but it can also make for some stunning photography.

You say you'd prefer a somewhat damper location? In the Navy.... Those waves are breaking over the equivalent of a six story building.

The Science of Scotch. The New York Academy of Sciences hosts a podcast with the brew master of Laphroig, one of my favorite tipples. Turns out the flavor is due in part to ancient seaweed. Here's some music to go with your wee drop.

The Roving Eye: Special Legacy Media July 4th Edition

(Occasionally my little tours of the web seem to develop a narrative thread all on their own. This is one of those days.)

Boob tubers not so nifty over fifty. (Sorry, but it's Variety, I had to try.)  The average TV viewer is now eligible for AARP.  The primo demographics have migrated elsewhere, and a lot of ad revenue will go with them.

Who are those graying gazers? Crooked Timber isn't my usual hangout, but one of its contributors has run a nifty study on blogging and political participation and alignment. Well worth reading the whole thing, but what caught my attention was this graphic of 'ideological scaling' by media outlet. Seems that NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and PBS are all splitting the audience of aging liberals and lefties, while the sole outlet with the remaining right of center crowd is... guess who? Rupert Murdoch may have joined the AARP crowd long ago, but all of his brain cells are still working.

The inherent biases of the medium, rebuked. The ever valuable Strategy Page list came out with the following, embedded in an article that's otherwise about the progress in Iraq:

"Most people just take what the news gives them, but it’s becoming more popular to pursue other versions of events via the web. Checking the way [past] wars were reported at the time is one of them. But doing this makes you realize that you cannot trust the news to get it right for wars going on right now. That’s because the news has to report exciting “news” events in order to remain competitive (and profitable). Many people in the news business are constantly bitching about this, especially the entertainment techniques that often creep into the presentation of their reporting. But everyone realizes that the audience demands news that excites and entertains. News that simply informs, loses money and cannot survive, except on the web." (Emphasis mine.)

Given that the audience for that entertainment version of news is literally dying off, the survival and reinvention on the web is exactly what really counts for the long haul. I'm reminded of what has been one of my own touchstones for thinking about new media, Jerry Mander's 1970s work Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Mander was a McLuhen with actual experience in the medium, and you didn't have to share his politics to agree that it constrained and skewed its content, and was ultimately damaging to democratic discourse. (Reread that bit about news as entertainment.) It's a great pleasure to finally begin to see some of this harm remedied - by competition and not fiat. It's also high irony, considering Mander's leftism, that it's the liberal media that are the first butts of the joke. (Although Rupert might be well advised to sell high.)

The thousand cuts get deeper. Meanwhile, back in the dead tree media, the layoffs and cutbacks continue. Tribune is stripping itself of assets like its Chicago and Los Angeles real estate, Wrigley Field and the Cubs, to service the $13 billion debt it took on to go private. Apparently that's enough liquidation to cover it through 2008, but the scrapping will have to resume to survive in 2009. You've got to wonder: Real estate will bounce back eventually, and even the Cubbies might win the Series again, but it's hard to see how Tribune's core business survives in anything like its current shape and size. Meanwhile, loan covenant default may be approaching for smaller publishers such as Journal Register and MediaNews Group. I coincidentally picked up a copy of the Palo Alto Daily News freebie near my office yesterday, and found that it had eliminated its Monday edition and cut newsroom staff. (The PADN is a MediaNews Group pub.) Out of curiosity, I also grabbed another of the local freebies, and compared their coverage. Nearly every article was identical. No wonder, consider the following from the story above: "The paper's emphasis on local news changed. A recent edition contained only three locally bylined stories but more than two dozen wire service articles." If anyone's paying attention to Jeff Jarvis' ideas about 'hyperlocal' as the salvation of newspapers, they sure don't have influence at MediaNews. The PADN used to drive the big local San Jose Merc batty by stealing local advertisers. It didn't take MediaNews very long to destroy that.

The Blogfaddah - um - blogs. Glenn Reynolds comes out with an uncharacteristically lengthy post on the newspaper implosion, including some pithy reader interaction, wherein he's accused of displaying 'glee' about the industry's troubles. 'Glee' isn't really appropriate when an entire industry gets itself upside down. Anyone who grew up in the Midwest, as I did, has seen what that can do to ordinary people who have little control over the bad decisions and competitive landscape. The management and editorial staff responsible for turning their franchises into debilitated and biased mockeries are another matter. I find it pretty difficult to get worked up over the impending early retirement that awaits people like this. Mr. Saluto is welcome to have a 'humble' 4th of July; he's got a lot to be humble about. Myself, I plan on having one that's happy and free, and hope you do the same.

Update: Eric Raymond, who is blogging again, posts along similar lines. He gives the media's malfeasance on Iraq a more central place in their decline that I did.