Philonoist.net

Something ironic happened on the way home last night.

I came home late last night after spending an evening with a friend having dinner and, as always, checked my e-mail (one habit I’ll never break.):

“i find reddit to pose a quandary for myself also.

i dont have time or patience to dig around individually strenuously enough to at least be marginally aware of whats happening. to my perception the country i call home is experiencing a horrible meltdown and i dont trust the MSM. without reddit, yeah okay i would be Less Angsty but i would also be in Denial. a sheeple, much as i hate the expression.

how the hell are you going to inform yourself given the current sociopolitical climate, absent some kind of social news? who the hell do u trust?

sorry to sound angsty.”

Somebody responded to my article. Somebody I didn’t know. Somebody that wasn’t my mom. It’s a rare occurrence, so I responded to the e-mail with:

Ah yes, the “once you’ve seen our problems, you can’t unsee them” issue. I don’t implicitly trust the mainstream media, though I do find some sources more trustworthy than others, namely NPR and the New York Times: both currently appear unwilling to sacrifice the credibility they’ve earned for extra dollars in the bank. You have to remember that all news reporting, by its nature, is biased: unless it happens in your backyard (literally), by the time it gets to you, it’s gone through at least one reporter’s hands.

During the Revolutionary War, General Washington had several spies stationed in New York and at various strategic points in Long Island. Unlike his British counterparts, which favored using the material gleaned by the spies deemed most “trustworthy”, Washington laboriously cross-referenced the reports from ALL his spies, no matter his personal thoughts on them. It’s a subtle difference, but in a couple of cases, it was enough for Washington to have enough information to eke out a victory during battle.

To borrow a page from Washington, find as many divergent sources as you can: Reuters, NPR, BBC, the NRO, the Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, Reason Magazine, the opinion pages of the big dailies (NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and LA Times). Each of these is a reputable news or current affairs magazine, some centrist in presentation, others on the ends of the spectrum. Contrary to popular reddit belief, you can type dailykos into Google and skip the reddit self-fawning. You can also try some conservative/libertarian blogs. Invest in a free RSS reader: paying a little now in setup time reaps dividends quickly. Everything that’s not a cited fact or a quote can get tossed out: it’s garbage. Keep the facts and quotes and check them against each other.

Remember that the printed word is the most concentrated and effective form of communication man currently has in his arsenal. The printed word, unlike the digital or the spoken, stands for all time, and is checked and rechecked by well-established hierarchies, all of which have their bacon on the line. A printed word is worth twice as much as its online or television counterpart. Trade having it “now” in favor of having it correct tomorrow.

I make it a point to spend the 30-45 minutes I used each day on reddit reading something elsewhere: maybe it’s a piece of nonfiction in book form, maybe it’s a newspaper, maybe it’s my blogroll.

But I’m not out to destroy reddit or social news: if you think it’s the best out there and you can’t do better yourself, or don’t have time to, don’t give up on it. Reddit is obviously better than nothing. Just remember the points I made in the original post: all cops aren’t bad, all corporations aren’t evil, and being trusting and courteous without being naive can go a long, long way. Speak out in the community, punish the “vote up”ers (your blue down arrow is a powerful beast), and keep an open mind.

Good luck out there. It’s incredibly lucky that I checked my e-mail and responded before I checked my website statistics.

I’ll be honest: my first thought was that StatCounter had seriously fucked up. I also thought that somebody had used my site to test their RSS feed reader and was hammering on it. Then the sweet, delicious irony hit me. All I can say is that: I didn’t post it. I posted under JoeCollege. I have no blood karma from this. (Feel free to post this to reddit if you must.)

After spending two hours last night e-mailing my web host, being wholly unprepared for having more people visit my site in a given second than I’m used to as a daily total, I’m a bit overwhelmed.

But while I’ve no doubt there are dozens of comments on reddit.com about this article, with a wide range of thoughts and styles, I can say that I am in awe of those of you that took the time to respond to the post either in the comments or via e-mail. Many of you were motivational, most of you were well-written, even in disagreement, and all of you were insightful. Truth be told, I still get goosebumps when I read: “You inspire me.” “I want to quit too.” “How well-put. This is exactly what I was feeling.”

I didn’t set out to inspire people, of course. I’m an engineer who wears a silly hat. I wrote to my personal blog about my frustrations with the lacuna between reddit and reality, and my experiences with it. Your mileage may very vary. You may favor Ron Paul and LOLcats. I don’t blame you: they’re interesting and fascinating, and I’m glad they have a part in the human condition. But I confess, in hope and inspiration taken, hope and inspiration is given. The comments and e-mails have made me more resolute in my decision to leave.

I’m not setting out to convert the world: stay with reddit if you think it’s the best you can do in the time you’ve got. Don’t sacrifice some information with noise to get none of either. Work on your filter, use the down arrow with passion.

But maybe you, like me, think you can do better than reddit. Maybe you can disconnect from the Web and engage friends, family, and coworkers. Maybe you live in a large city with seminars, book discussions and coffee talks. Maybe you live in a small town and the Internet is the escape from unpersonable, uncultured, uneducated neighbors. But read, think, and speak for yourself and never blindly accept what is presented to you. The single greatest thing I learned from reddit was to question everything and when the community discussions were at their best were when we were doing just that. Utill that reddit returns, I won’t.

That said, someone please e-mail me if we attack Iran.

Jared Diamond, he of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame, had quite the interesting opinion piece in today’s Times:

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

Technorati Tags: Consumption, Jared Diamond

I may be late to the game on this one, but I’m super excited about the NPR media player. I’ve long loved NPR, but my days of being in the car during Morning Edition or All Things Considered are past me (for the moment). NPR has always released the material online a few hours after air, and with RSS feeds, it’s been a snap to at least *read* about the day’s topics.

Listening was an entirely different matter: NPR provided Windows Media and Real Player formats, but Windows would get clunked down in codec hell and Real Player would hang for at least 45 seconds before each clip.

Fortunately, NPR now has a really slick web-based media player, with the critical playlist functionality. I can finally queue up some clips and go about my morning, listening to the news the way it’s meant to be heard.

Technorati Tags: NPR, media player

Crocs, those ugly shoes that have even earned the hate of Maddox, have apparently worn out their welcome. Shares of Crocs, Inc. (NASDAQ:CROX) are giving back over 25% on weak earnings. In other words, if you bought a share of CROX yesterday, that share is now worth 75% of what you paid for it.

Of course, if you bought a pair of Crocs shoes yesterday, your life is worth about 3% of its original value. So go figure.

Technorati Tags: Crocs, Finance

Turns out that there’s a sweeter reason than just “saving energy” in Congress’s move to extend Daylight Saving Time by one week:

The candy lobby also played a significant role in pushing Halloween into daylight saving time, believing that extra hour of trick-or-treating in daylight would spur more candy sales but arguing that it would decrease deaths, according to Michael Downing, the author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, an amusing book about the myths and realities behind daylight saving time.

Technorati Tags: candy, Halloween

Looks like it’s a rough day across the Atlantic. “Suitable Node” errors occur when there’s a problem with the ExpressionEngine database, and are repaired through a reoptimization of database tables.



Edit: Obviously, BBC News is back up, within mere minutes of going down. I was more interested in their lack of graceful error handling than their lack of database management skills.

Technorati Tags: Suitable Nodes, BBC

Sometimes I think I could be a hotshot Hollywood producer. Though I usually come to the realization that my talents would be totally worthless and wasted.

Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a new decree that “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead”. This Neanderthal thinking comes after both Jodie Foster’s The Brave One (even though she’s had big recent hits with Flightplan and Panic Room) and Nicole Kidman’s The Invasion (as if three different directors didn’t have something to do with the awfulness of the gross receipts) under-performed at the box office recently.

Technorati Tags: Hollywood

Memo to Fox News, CNN, MSNBC:

Stop. You’re killing people.

I know you love the big story. I know you can’t resist the urge to talk for hours on end to anyone with a few lines of color on their chest or a political affiliation about a “major” current event. I know that you get a rush to your collective heads when you can use phrases like “worst case scenario” and “disasterous”. I advise you to seek counseling for this. In the long term, you may be able to fight the effects of this psychological condition of calamitism. But in the short term, think long and hard about what you lead in with on your primetime shows, about the kinds of silly questions you ask. Here’s a passage – verbatim – that I had a tough time with from The Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer’s late-afternoon early-evening CNN show (emphasis mine):

BLITZER: Before we get to New Orleans and levees, how ready you are, maybe you are, maybe you’re not, what about Florida and this first topical storm — named storm, Alberto, which could become a hurricane? Are you worried about any Corps of Engineer projects right now in Florida?

LT. GEN. CARL STROCK, U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: No, I wouldn’t say any of our projects. There are really not up in the area where we expect to have landfall. There is some concern about Lake Okeechobee on the part of the some of the locals down there because it’s an older dike that was built in the ’30s. But we’re very confident that Okeechobee can handle any rainfall that might arise from this storm.

Huh? This is Florida you’re talking about: land of the perpetual hurricane. This may be a valid question if the storm is hitting New Orleans or Biloxi (and think of that media field day!) or if the storm were 60% more powerful. But the factor in a tropical storm is never the wind damage, but the large amount of rain that comes with these storms.

The response isn’t much better: why even mention Lake Okeechobee? For those unfamiliar with the geography of the Sunshine State, it’s on par with asking how Philadelphia is holding up when there’s rain in DC. Governor Jeb Bush and the correspondents at FoxNews also talked extensively about the Okeechobee dams and levees. Bush also gets the quote of the day award: “Good God. You know. Who would have thunk it?” said Jeb.

And yet, this storm passed. A plane accident, resulting in one fatality, was attributed to bad weather from the storm. 20,000 (a far cry from the million plus of Katrina) evacuated to shelters, to higher ground. The hell of brush-fires has been extinguished by the high waters of another tropical storm. Do I personally count my blessings? Yes, of course. I, my parents, most Floridians (especially Tampans) know this wasn’t the storm, the next in the list after Andrew, Katrina, Hugo, Camille that we talk about, that we fear, when there’s a disturbance in the Atlantic or the Gulf. My pool needs an extra chlorine tablet this month, the branches in the front yard probably need picking up. And when an event the magnitude of Katrina occurs, where millions are displaced and homeless, we saw the effect, the power, the media can have. Without extensive, 24-hour coverage, Michael Brown would still be director of FEMA.

But this very same power is overused with events like Alberto. This is a story, but not the top story. Because in a week, or a few days, when the media reports on “cleaning up from Alberto”, people will look and say “it’s not that bad”. Of course, it’s not that bad because this storm wasn’t that bad. But the next one could be. Or the one after that.

The point here is the classic one: Don’t cry wolf, especially when it’s just a poodle. Don’t pretend this is the end of days. Don’t suffer from your egregious calamitism. Because we, the residents of the Gulf, fall asleep, lulled into disregarding your false warnings, your overpuffery. And when Katrina v2.0 comes around, we might not realize it until it’s too late.

I grant you: you do not, cannot decide for us when it is our time to go, when to stay. But you control the flow of information, the path that gets what we need to hear to us. So, when you trump up what we need to hear (evacuation orders, bridge closings) with what you think sells (Levee bursting, Price gouging, Murderous mayhem over the last bag of ice) that confuses us. That puts us in danger. Not to mention it disrespects our intelligence. So stop. You’re killing us. Both literally, and figuratively.

Technorati Tags: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Alberto, media, hurricane, wolf blitzer

“Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fielding questions regarding bird flu and our preparedness regarding hazards associated with this illness (and other associated illnesses.) As a participating member of Needham’s Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC); Olin and Olin’s Crisis Management Team have assembled tools and resources for emergency response and management. Both the team and the LEPC continue to prepare for (and would respond as necessary to) pandemic flu outbreaks/incidents.”

Good news from the land of Kamen (as in Dean Kamen): Two devices, one that creates power from any burnable source, and one that decontaminates water. The electric generator is powered by an easily-obtained local fuel: cow dung. Each machine continuously outputs a kilowatt of electricity. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to light 70 energy-efficient bulbs. As Kamen puts it, “If you judiciously use a kilowatt, each villager can have a nighttime.”

The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water – even raw sewage — and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine’s waste heat.

Naturally, it’s good stuff like this that made me want to be an engineer. And for Kamen, it makes up for that pesky Segway.

Technorati Tags: power, water, engineering, Dean Kamen