The thing that catches my eye: that the “Education” category has the highest proportion of paid apps. You might think—if you had no experience with the educational publishing industry in our country—that educational applications might be made freely available more frequently than games, financial or photography programs, just to name a few. Sadly, anyone that’s had to pay tuition and/or buy publications like textbooks, journals or (ahem…) magazines from educational institutions know that’s not the case: the educational publishing industry somehow manages to rip-off everyone in an age where content is becoming cheaper and cheaper in every other sector, and where you would think the primary creators and consumers of the content (educators and students) would be the most willing to freely share their knowledge. To be honest, I can imagine a bunch of explanations, but I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. This is just one more example of the trend though.

Three filmmakers, Jonathan Bricklin, Bill Mack and Franck Raharinosy, have teamed with Andrew Gordon, a former investment banker, to open a 12,800-square-foot table tennis and social club on Park Avenue near Madison Square Park. The filmmakers became accidental promoters when they put a table in their loft office for their own amusement a couple of years ago.

“People would come over all the time to play us,” said Mr. Mack, 35. “Our then-girlfriends got tired of it and made us limit it to one night.”

That night became an unexpected hit, attracting the likes of Owen Wilson, Salman Rushdie, 50 Cent, the Beastie Boys, Jimmy Buffett and as many attractive people as there were lightweight hollow balls.

They decided to build on that success and convert a former Mattress King into a large club. Spin New York will open in March.

Back in the day, my friends and I would spend countless hours in our basement playing ping pong. I like to think I was a decent player. If grad school doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll just move to New York and turn pro.

(via eszter)

On Aug. 31, 2007, Marilyn Hedstrom, who appeared to be in her early 50s, walked into a run-down store-front where anarchists hung out on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis.

She introduced herself as Norma Jean.

Asked by a man at the Jack Pine Center why she was there, she said she had issues with President Bush and the Iraq war. “I told him I was interested in helping the cause and interested in participating in the protesting,” she later wrote in reports reviewed by the Star Tribune.

What she did not tell him is that she was a deputy sheriff for the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office.

[...]

The sheriff’s investigation cost about $300,000, Fletcher said. He’s asking the city of St. Paul to reimburse his office from $50 million in federal funds for convention security.

Their findings? They made “occasional references” to damaging property, but emphasized not hurting people, most of the meetings consisted of boring, practical things like finding places to stay and there was lots of internal disagreement between anarchists (I know, anarchists disagreeing!). I mean, you could spend $300,000 and violate civil liberties to learn this, or you could read anything ever written about how such groups work. Jeesh.

(via jesse)

In many ways, Twitter is a re-incarnation of the old Unix philosophy of simple, cooperating tools. The essence of Twitter is its constraints, the things it doesn’t do, and the way that its core services aren’t bound to a particular interface.

It strikes me that many of the programs that become enduring platforms have these same characteristics. Few people use the old TCP/IP-based applications like telnet and ftp any more, but TCP/IP itself is ubiquitous. No one uses the mail program any more, but all of us still use email. No one uses Tim Berners-Lee’s original web server and browser any more. Both were superseded by independent programs that used his core innovations: http and html.

What’s different, of course, is that Twitter isn’t just a protocol. It’s also a database. And that’s the old secret of Web 2.0, Data is the Intel Inside. That means that they can let go of controlling the interface. The more other people build on Twitter, the better their position becomes.

O’Reilly also talks about how a large number of Twitter users use Twitter to update their Facebook status, which is exactly what I do. In fact, if you just look at my Facebook page, it looks like I’m fairly active on Facebook, until you realize that almost every thing in my profile is pulled into Facebook from other services like Twitter or this blog (via Wordbook). Thanks to the demise of Scrabulous, I pretty much only go to Facebook any more to approve friend requests and respond to people who comment on my Twitter status inside of Facebook instead of in Twitter.

I’m not sure what a Facebook that tried to untie its data from its interface like O’Reilly recommends would look like though. But an even more interesting thought experiment is this: what about a Facebook-like social networking system that works like laconi.ca, a Twitter-like piece of software where the data itself is decentralized on individual instances of the software but where the social networking & communication can occur across each instance. This gets around both the centralization of interface, but also the centralization of data, which is really a much bigger problem!

tell application "QuickTime Player"
	new audio recording
end tell

Just save it as an application for frequent use. I’ll give you one guess how to record a movie. [1]

Or, if you prefer the command line:

osascript -e 'tell application "QuickTime Player"' -e 'new audio recording' -e 'end tell'

You learn something new every day…

Footnotes

1. I was going to give you two guesses, because they don’t pick the obvious word, IMHO, to describe said visual recording, but that last sentence was a hint!

I had to watch this part like five times:

“I think this is from biting, actually. (Bites guitar.) In fact, I know it is.”

Update: I had the clip embedded, but it was set to autoplay, which is annoying. I tried to add a parameter to to the embed code to turn this off but failed.

For the podcast, Smajda interviewed the author of a fall-issue article about why people choose to vote and asked the author what his opinions were on the outcome of the presidential election.

I did not interview anybody: Jesse and Arturo are the on-air talent and they do the interviewing. For the Contexts Podcast (also in iTunes) I’m just a lowly audio engineer, webmaster and “crack research team member.”

• Fleetwood Marx
• Goffman Turner Overdrive
• Death Cab for Cooley
• Gans n’ Roses (or, for local flavor, Uggens n’ Roses)
• System of a Durkheim
• Foucault Fighters
• Crosby, Mills and Nash (Crosby, Mills, Nash and Jung)
• Bill Haley and His Comte’s
• Simon and Garfinkel
• Karl Mannheim Steamroller
• Bellah and Sebastian
• Chris and Coser
• The Mighty Mighty Boss-Tonnies
• A Tribe Called Joel Best
• Arendt in Chains
• Twisted Simmel
• Better Than Elster
• and my personal favorite…The Rolling Stinchcombes

(via donncha)

The primary advantage of a shell script: it makes it easier to ssh into a computer remotely (in my case, my iMac at home, where I keep my iTunes library) and run the script via command line. Yes, you can use the automator command, but any interactivity with Automator still goes through the GUI, which obviously won’t work when you’re connecting remotely to a Mac via the command line. Yes, you can pass variables into the automator command to address this, but…look, I just wanted to do it without Automator, ok? And now I have!

With the exception of mp4tags for setting ID3 tags on the mp4 audio files (which you can get here or by installing the macports package mpeg4ip), this script uses only built-in commands available with OS X 10.5. It takes one argument: a plain text file with the text you want to speechify.

#!/bin/sh
 
# Set a working directory 
# I use the Trash, but this only makes sense if you have iTunes copying 
# new files into your iTunes folder for you
workdir="~/.Trash"  
 
 
### give help for empty command
if [ -z "$1" ];
    then
        echo "Speak text file using 'say', set id3 tags and import to iTunes"
        echo "Takes one argument: a plain text file."
        echo ""
        echo "USAGE: "
        echo "  $0 [file]"
        echo ""
        echo "DEPENDENCIES: "
        echo "  mp4tags command line tool"
        echo "     - a part of mpeg4ip. Info: http://mpeg4ip.sourceforge.net"
        echo "     - 'sudo port install mpeg4ip' with macports"
        exit 1
fi
 
# id3 variables
artistname="Text to Speech"
albumname="Text to Speech"
 
# the name/trackname for the new file is $trackname
echo 'Name the file/track:'
read trackname
 
# the file to convert is $thefile:
thefile="$@"
 
# the new .m4a and .aiff files
aiffile="$workdir"/"$trackname".aiff
m4afile="$workdir"/"$trackname".m4a
 
# create aiff
echo "Creating aiff file..."
cat "$thefile" | say -o "$aiffile"
 
# convert m4a
echo "Converting to AAC audio..."
afconvert -v -f "mp4f" -d "aac@22050" -s 0 -q 127 -b 64000 "$aiffile" "$m4afile"
 
# set id3 tags with mp4tags
echo "Setting id3 tags with mp4tags..."
mp4tags -s "$trackname" -a "$artistname" -A "$albumname" "$m4afile" 
 
# add to itunes
echo "Adding to iTunes..."
osascript < <EOT
set foo to posix file "${m4afile}" as alias
tell application "iTunes" to add foo
EOT

So my normal use of this: ssh to my iMac that holds my iTunes library, open vim, paste in whatever text I want to turn to speech (make sure you set your terminal to UTF-8 if you have problems with garbled characters) and run text2itunes mytextfile.txt. It will prompt you for a track title and then do its work.

Note: for some reason the “<<EOT” in the 4th-to-last line of the script is being printed with a space between the <’s. There shouldn’t be a space.

Because I was a member of a delegation that included CEOs, I got to spend several days with the CEOs of Protector and Gamble and of Boeing, and I met some others. I found them extremely hard working people. They worked long days, often taking work home, and traveled constantly from one plant to another, from one meeting to another, with little rest in-between. I cannot imagine that anything could make them work even harder –or, for that matter, that their business would benefit if they took even fewer times out. Nor can I figure out what one would buy—with, say, that last million dollars. An eighth house? Another sports car you have no time to drive?

The answer takes us to Frank and the theory of relative deprivation. Most CEOs use their compensation figures mainly as a measurement of prestige, a statement of their standing compared to other CEOs. They are keen to make more than the next guy or doll. (Indeed, this is the reason European executives, who on average make much less than Americans ones, are just as content as American ones, because their reference group are other European executives.)

A cap on executive compensation would not only save millions for the financially strapped corporations– and be fair to the tax payers who help these corporations stay afloat– but would also provide the executives with a new reference point. Anyone who makes the max allowed will have made it. No more need to try to outdo the other, money-wise. Such a ceiling would leave the CEOs free to do what is best for their corporations, the economy, and families– rather than focus on ways to jack up the price of their stock each quarter.

People love Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on the Lincoln presidency, “Team of Rivals.” More important, for this moment in American history, Barack Obama loves it. The book is certainly fun to read, but its claim that Abraham Lincoln revealed his “political genius” through the management of his wartime Cabinet deserves a harder look, especially now that it seems to be offering a template for the new administration.

“Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet,” is the way Obama has summarized Goodwin’s thesis, adding, “Whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was how can we get this country through this time of crisis.”

That’s true enough, but the problem is, it didn’t work that well for Lincoln. There were painful trade-offs with the “team of rivals” approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.

According to a 2006 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a third of white evangelicals believe the world will end in their lifetimes. These mostly conservative Christians believe a great battle is imminent. After years of tribulation—–natural disasters, other cataclysms (such as the collapse of financial markets)—–God’s armies will vanquish armies led by the Antichrist himself. He will be a sweet-talking world leader who gathers governments and economies under his command to further his own evil agenda. In this world view, “the spread of secular progressive ideas is a prelude to the enslavement of mankind,” explains Richard Landes, former director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.

No wonder, then, that Obama triggers such fear in the hearts of America’s millennialist Christians.

No, actually, I think this is a cause for lots of wonder. Along with many other forms of incredulity.

The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they’re not nuts: “They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared,” Staver says.

…yes, one that is still flat-out nuts.

Is there any belief so crazy that right-wing Christians will actually be called on it instead of being treated like some quaint cultural trivia that may be a little whacky but ultimately deserves respect and preservation? Or do they have to be black urban preachers before that sort of criticism comes out?

(via)

However, one thing about fixed width fonts: they look drastically different at different sizes. Here’s Monaco 11, for example:

It just feels so much w i d e r, which makes reading chunks of text difficult, IMO. Anti-aliasing also comes on by default at 11 for Monaco, which makes the font look fat and fuzzy, especially on a dark background like this (which is how I like it). Turning anti-aliasing off doesn’t help: Monaco 11 looks nasty and jagged that way:

Most of the time, this isn’t a problem: for most tasks, I like Monaco 10 just fine. For reading and writing code, I find it nice & crisp and easy to look at:

Writing papers is a different matter though. It’s a different kind of reading and writing and I find Monaco 10 is often just too small in these cases, especially as I like to stretch out on the couch with the laptop in my lap, which puts it pretty far away from my eyes:

And, as I already mentioned above, even bumping it up 1 pt size just makes it ugly:

The fuzziness and the wideness, while not a huge problem with code, is a big deal when you’re reading paragraphs of text at a time. It’s just too hard to read. And so I’ve been searching like crazy through collections of fixed width fonts. I think I finally found one I like, though I’ve got to work with it for awhile before I decide for sure. Lekton 14 (download link):

It’s big, but narrow & not as fuzzy as Monaco at big sizes. It would drive me crazy to look at that php code above in this font, but for writing things like papers and dissertations in LaTeX, it seems to work quite well.

By the way, to make MacVim (or any GUI Vim, I’d guess) use this font only when opening LaTeX files (and defaulting to Monaco 10 for all other files), these two lines do the trick in ~/.gvimrc:

set gfn=Monaco:h10
autocmd FileType tex set gfn=Lekton04-Thin:h14.00

Okay, I’ve now had my fill of taking screenshots and obsessing over fonts. Time to actually get some writing done.

We also learned that there are two Souths. There is a “New South,” which includes Virginia, North Carolina, and, to a lesser extent, Georgia. In this South, which has lots of suburbs, transplants, and younger college graduates, Obama and other Democrats won or ran well above the norm for their party. In the older South, which has more small-town and rural voters, fewer transplants, and a more downscale electorate, Obama actually performed worse than Kerry.

In general, in the higher-growth segments of our country, Republicans lost ground, prevailing only in small towns and rural areas. When Democrats win the suburbs, Republicans are in trouble.

Republicans have lost an enormous amount of support among upscale voters, basically just breaking even among those with household incomes above $50,000 a year, a traditional GOP stronghold. Similarly, McCain’s losing to Obama among college graduates and voters who have attended some college underscores how much the GOP franchise is in trouble. My hunch is that the Republican Party’s focus on social, cultural, and religious issues — most notably, fights over embryonic-stem-cell research and Terri Schiavo — cost its candidates dearly among upscale voters.

The question now is whether Republicans will quickly learn from their mistakes — retooling and rebranding their party soon, putting themselves in a position to capitalize on the missteps of the Obama administration and the rest of the Democratic Party — or will languish, reduced to waiting for the Democrats to collapse and for GOP candidates to win simply because they aren’t Democrats.

My evil vision for the GOP: there’s no hope of resolving the division between the two wings of the party. One side has to win control: either the traditional big-money, fiscally conservative & socially moderate wing of the party takes back control, or the conservative Christians win out.

If the theocrats win, a good chunk of the fiscal conservatives would pretty much fit right in with today’s Democratic Party. Others may try to start a new party, and while they can certainly fund it, do they have the votes to get anywhere? I mean, there’s been a Libertarian Party for a long while now & they’ve not had much success. A Republican party taken over by the Sarah Palin wing of the party would probably continue the Republican party’s descent into being a nationally weak regional party.

On the other hand, I’m hard-pressed to bet against the wing of the party with the money. If the fiscal conservatives take back the party, what happens to the social conservatives? One possibility: isn’t it odd that the U.S., for all its religiosity, doesn’t have a major Christian Nationalist third party? I think they’d probably win some offices in the South and in rural parts of the country. As we’ve seen during the Bush years, they know how to run campaigns and win elections, which is more than you can say for most other third parties in this country, even those that have had some success.

I can’t decide if this hypothetical situation makes me happy or scared. On the one hand, I suspect it’d ensure Democratic dominance at a national level. On the other hand, if the Republican Party is unable to reassemble its coalition as in either of these two scenarios, there’s a decent chance of continued Democratic dominance in the short term no matter which side wins out for the Republicans: each wing is just too weak on their own. I’m also scared silly at the possibilities of an unchecked theocratic party gaining power throughout much of our country.

A more realistic scenario is that the Democrats win big for the next few years, but make enough mistakes that Republicans manage to settle their differences and win back some power. However, demographic trends suggest that this would ultimately lead to a weakening of the influence of the Religious Right has in the party, which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if leaders of the Religious Right try to go for broke with a third party strategy in the next few years.

Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes “immortality,” improvement becomes “perfection,” the screening for disease genes becomes “designer babies” or even “reshaping the species.” The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.

A major sin of theocon bioethics is exactly the one that it sees in biomedical research: overweening hubris. In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President’s Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers “taking over” like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.

Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances.

set wildmode=list:longest "bash-like tab-completion
set title "terminal title to filename
set scrolloff=3 "keep 3 lines context when scrolling

• Newsweek’s Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, a long behind the scenes look at both campaigns that you’ve probably heard about elsewhere. I think all together it’s like 6+ hours of audio, which is kinda silly, but I listened to it over the course of several days worth of commuting & chores. If you’re in election withdrawal, it’s a good way to go over the election again.
• Welcome to the Party, a review of Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of Angels by Paul Starr. The basic argument is that increasing partisanship and increasingly clear divisions between the two major parties isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
• Geek Pop Star, a profile of Malcolm Gladwell. Like a lot of people, I find Gladwell’s work a bit too cute sometimes, but I still read them & enjoy them, even when I get annoyed with them. This is an ongoing interest of mine: how does one present academic research in a public-friendly way without some degree of oversimplification? Put another way: name one “public intellectual” who has written a popular book that hasn’t been torn apart by insiders in their field for oversimplifying things. Some of my favorite books in recent years have been by experts in other fields writing books that aim to translate the findings of those fields for a wider audience. (And, of course, this is our job at contexts, as well.) Gladwell’s a journalist though, and this profile takes a look at how that shapes the way he presents ideas.
• Does Religion Make You Nice?, by Paul Bloom. An essay in Slate magazine that argues that it’s the community aspect of religion—not the belief part—that contributes to a “happiness gap” between the religious and atheists…at least in the US. This is pretty much the argument virtually any sociologist would guess at, but it’s probably a bit surprising to many & this is a good read. (Bloom’s book Descarte’s Baby is one of those research-made-accessible books I referred to above.)
• The Misunderstood DMCA. The DMCA has been widely vilified for instituting draconian intellectual property laws, but at the same time, this article argues that another provision of the DMCA—which gave ISPs and services immunity for intellectual property violations of their users—has been central to the flourishing of “Web 2.0″ as we know it.
• The Genius Behind Steve, a profile of Apple COO Tim Cook in Fortune. An interesting read for us Apple Fanboys.

Footnotes

1. My current method is a little different though: instead of going from the clipboard to Automator, I’ve found it’s better to paste into a plain text file first and then pass the file to the Automator script using the automator command line tool. I’m actually close to having a bash-only way to do it, but I don’t want to post it here until I get some kinks worked out first.