Outlaw Josey Wales

by Troy Snow

I’m watching The Outlaw Josey Wales on AMC. I remember seeing it when it first came out. in 1976. It was the best Western I had every seen, presenting a realism and narrative that was really astounding.

Because it followed the Western motifs but turned them inside out. The Union men were the bad guys and the rebels were the good guys. It started with the solitary man of violence we are used to, especially with Clint Eastwood. By the end, he had created a community of people who were mostly at peace.

And the humor and insight, especially presented by the wonderful Chief Dan George, is great, even 34 years later.

Many of the Westerns in the years just before The Outlaw Josey Wales were based on humor – Butch Cassidy, Cat Ballou and Support Your Local Sheriff. This one brought back the mythic qualities of the narrative. It follows a hero as he goes on a journey.

He changes the people around him and they change him, so that by the end, the entire world is different. BUt the journey is so much fun, especially the dialogue, something not usually noted in Westerns.

Eastwood was at his best in these sorts of stories. A reluctant hero, muttering under his breath as he does the right thing. His direction again and again uses old style Western topes – the hero silhouetted against the open door, the elixir salesman – but twists them into new versions.

Just a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

How the iPad changes everything

by ed100
Tonight on Fox31: Georgia TV station buys iPads for news anchors
[Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Filed under: iPad

Someone at Fox affiliate WFXL in Albany, GA must have had the brilliant insight that an iPad looks a lot like a pad of paper. That insight is going to save the TV station about $9,600 per year.

WFXL purchased 6 iPads to replace the paper scripts that their news anchors use. According to News Director and anchorman Terry Graham, the station is expected to save hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper every year. The scripts are composed in their usual manner, but instead of printing the files, they’re now formatted as PDFs and emailed to the iPads.

[More]

The Ipads will be replacing the tons of paper that the station used, permitting them to rapidly move needed information to the anchors. ANd, by leveraging social media, they can also provide the with such things as real-time twitter feed on the broadcast, polls and other direct feedback tools to its reporters.

Medicine has already started using these. Now the news media. WHat other industries will be changed?

Very cool iPad idea

Voices that Matter iPhone: One-handed iPad holder
[Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Want to hold up an iPad as you give a talk, but afraid that you’ll drop it as you gesticulate with your hands? Here’s a clever way to keep control over your device while limiting risk, as seen at this weekend’s Voices that Matter iPhone conference in Seattle. iPhone developer and author Andrew Donaho demonstrates the “iPad glove,” a simple iPad grip in the gallery at the bottom of this post.

[More]

I want one of these. It looks like a nice way to hold it with one hand and use the other for whatever. Wonder when it will be available?

iPad Apps for me

My iPad should be here on Monday so I’m spending the weekend getting together a list of the first apps I want to load. I’ll put on the iWork apps, even if they are not quite up to my expectations. I figure they will get there. And iBooks.

Starwalk will be one. As will Smule – Magic Piano, Glee, The Elements will also be something. And probably the ABC app.Netnewswire, too. (I’d love some mashups between an RSS news reader and a blog editor, as I have on my laptop but maybe this will have to wait for iPhone 4.0.

More news/photos from the Guardian Eyewitness.

And some games. Perhaps NOVA. Or Real Racing HD.

So many fun choices. Any suggestions?

Where are the lunches with real scientists?

by malias

Cooler Heads Coalition serves up tired denialist fare at Hill “Climategate” lunch briefing
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]

Climate Science Watch attended a Capitol Hill briefing April 16 on the “Climategate” e-mails, a denialist-friendly event intended for media and Congressional staffers. The briefing was hosted by the Heritage Foundation and the Cooler Heads Coalition, an anti-regulatory-minded group formed to “dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.” Speakers Pat Michaels and Joseph D’Aleo found it easy to spoon-feed misinformation to this audience without being held accountable.

[More]

As I mentioned in an earlier post Why science communication often fails, it is hard for researchers to speak effectively at these sorts of functions. They are not well skilled in the lawyerly tricks used in these sorts of discussions.

Organizations should be helping scientists here. In fact, why not fight fire with fire? It is well known that young researchers will attend almost any event if it has free food, as it seems dowillthe young Congressional staffers. Instead of having stand-up presentations by ‘old farts’ why not have get-togethers with the peer groups from each sector? Bring the young scientists together with the young staffers in order to have conversations rather than simply lectures?

Simply talking shop between them may accomplish more than any other method. Especially since the younger scientists also seem to have more drive to evangelize their thought than many older researchers.

Time to open a can of whoop-ass

by Yodel Anecdotal

Since we may not be able to put people away for some of the shenanigans they pulled, we should be identifying them and working to shun them or at least make sure they lose their jobs. Here are some from the Republican side:

And some from the Democratic side:

The legislative language was complex, but the vote was understood as a simple question: Should big banks be broken up so that they no longer pose a risk to the financial system?

Eight Democrats and one Republican joined Sanders, but the measure failed by a 12-10 vote. Four Democrats opposed the amendment, standing with the big banks: Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (N.D.), Bill Nelson (D-N.D.), Mark Begich (Alaska) and Mark Warner (Va.). [My bold]

Here is the purpose of the amendment:

Purpose: The amendment would create a deficit-neutral reserve fund for legislation that would break-up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that pose a catastrophic risk to the economy.   

The combination of those 4 Democrats with the 8 Republican votes on the committee made sure that an amendment – one that would prevent banks from becoming so large that their failure threatened the entire health of the US economy – failed.

Interestingly, John Comyn is on the committee, voting against the amendment with the other 8 Republicans and he is also in the video.

I wonder how much the financial lobbyists are helping him raise?

Apparently he believes banks should be allowed to swindle money from people by lying to them about risk, while making back room deals with cronies to reserve huge piles of money for themselves, and then extort money from the American taxpayer for help because they are too big to fail.

I guess he feels sympathy towards business models that are based on bilking people.

My List: John Comyn (Tx), Richard Burr (NC) Kent Conrad (ND), Bill Nelson (ND), Mark Begich (Alaska), Mark Warner (Va).

As an aside on the previous post

The really awful thing about the immoral use of credit default swaps I discussed below is that there is actually a good chance that the bankers and everyone involved will get off. There may not have been anything really illegal inlying to one group of investors while helping another make a ton of money. These guys were very careful to game the system and to make sure that no regulatory action would ever be taken.

So we might need to just close the barn door after the horses have run out and make it illegal now. As well as make it impossible to do something similar. And include tough oversight to make sure that when they want to do something ‘innovative’ again, it is vetted to make sure that people are not fraudulently sold a pig in a poke.

Somehow, ever bad player here needs to be shunned in some fashion. And we need to identify the good players, the ones who refused to do this and, while probably hurting their company’s bottom line, displayed a moral sense that should be rewarded.

Best single description of the Big Sh$#pile and how Goldman benefited

by matthewnstoller

Shocking Fraud from Financial Scum
[Via Good Math, Bad Math]

Against my better judgement, I’ve ended up writing a lot about the financial mess that we’re currently going through. If you’ve read that, you know that my opinion is that the mess amounts to a giant pile of fraud.

But even having spent so much time reading and studying what was going on, the latest news from the financial mess shocks me. Even knowing how utterly sleazy and dishonest many people in the financial world have been, even knowing about the stuff they’ve been doing, the kinds of out and out fraud that they’ve perpetrated, the latest news makes them look even more evil than I could have imagined.

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Mark not only provides a nice background of how derivatives and credit default swaps created the huge financial mess, he also illustrates the type of fraudulent behavior Goldman Sachs, and probably others, exercised.

It may very well be that Goldman Sachs purposefully created financial instruments that it sold to people, knowing that the value would decrease, all so that other clients of its could make a bunch of money on the failure. From Mark:

What the hedge funds were really doing is making it possible for the investment banks to create CDOs that were likely to fail, and then buying credit default swaps against the top tranches of those CDOs, betting that they were going to fail.

The strategy here is simple. I spend $5 million buy the bottom 5% of $100 million worth of loans that I think are going bad. I’m expecting to lose that: I’m going to be out $5 million. But, I also use another $5 million to buy credit default swaps on $60 million worth of the higher tranches of that pool of loans. Now, if the pool goes bad, I’m out $10 million – $5 million for the crap that I bought that’s now worthless, and $5 million to buy the credit default swaps. But because the whole thing went bad, I get to collect $60 million.

They wanted to crappy loans that were sure to default. Because they could clean them up and sell them to regular institutions as though they were fine. But they could then sell CDS, which are essentially insurance for failure, to hedge funds. By purposefully creating things that would fail, Goldman Sachs got money from the original sale and money from the sale of the CDS. The hedge funds made tons of money on the failure and the losers, who thought they were buying regular safe investments, were left holding the bag.

No wealth was really created. It was transferred (I call it stolen) from the groups that invested in the original loans, not knowing that the financial institutions. were selling them a load of crap.

Let me restate – it appears that institutions such as Goldman Sachs knowingly sold derivatives, that were doomed to fail, to groups who were assured that these were safe investments, all so it and its hedge fund partners could make even more money by betting on the failure.

And they did all this on purpose, knowing it would fail and making money on the failure:

Anyone who honestly looked at the whole CDO thing a few years ago knew perfectly well that the thing was going to collapse sooner or later. The hedge funds knew, perfectly well, that the people that they wanted to buy credit default swaps from were likely to go belly up eventually. So they wanted to be in the situation of being the first ones to collect, before the big insurers backing the CDSs ran out of money.

So they didn’t just find crappy CDOs to bet against. They went to the investment banks, and asked them create CDOs consisting of piles of specific, high-risk loans. They provided specific requirements – complaining when firms tried to put together better packages. They’d only back the true crap. They wanted shit that would go bad, and go bad fast. And most of the big investment banks went along with it. (To their credit, a few refused.)

Both the banks and the hedge funds knew what was going on here: they were creating and then selling CDOs where they knew that the things were designed to lose all of the money invested in them. And the investment banks went to their other customers, and lied! They sold these things to their customers, telling them that it was a safe, profitable investment, even though they knew that they were designed to lose all of the money invested in them!.

It is like betting against the come in craps, only with loaded dice and with the stickman in on the deal.

Then when all this blew up in their face, they went to the taxpayer to get made whole.

If this is true, then all those guys should be in prison along with every other person involved with this fraudulent behavior. It was bad enough that they were using monstrosities such as CDS but to knowingly game the system in order to make money off of the failure,. To think that this was a failure that resulted in the loss of trillions of dollars in value for the people who thought they were buying regular safe investments, is simply jaw-dropping.

It looks so cute!

from Wikipedia

Lift-off for military spaceplane
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature]

The X-37B, which has been likened to a scaled-down space shuttle, blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 0052 BST (1952 EDT).

The military vehicle is unpiloted and will carry out the first autonomous re-entry and landing in the history of the US space programme.

The spacecraft can return experiments to Earth for inspection and analysis

[More]

It looks like some smaller cousin of the shuttle. While no one really is talking about what it can do, the idea that it essentially can become a maneuverable satellite, moving to higher r lower orbit as needed and perhaps returning when it needs new equipment, is a fascinating idea.

It will be interesting to see what this unmanned ship is capable of.

Centenarian with an iPad

99 year old lady uses an iPad, calls it “addicting” [Video]
[Via Edible Apple]

When you get to be the ripe old age of 99, are you a woman, or a lady? Hmmm, we’ll go with lady. Regardless, this video of 99 year old Virginia Campbell using her first computer, an iPad no less, is pretty neat. She’s reportedly read 2 books on the device thus far while writing 12 limericks as well.

But what makes the story so compelling is that Virginia is battling glaucoma, a condition which has hampered her ability to read and write, two of her favorite pastimes.

That said, one of Virginia’s limericks was a tribute to the iPad, the “addicting” device that has helped her get back to doing some of the things she loves.

To this technical-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad pioneer

Pretty incredible, and if it brings a smile to your face, just imagine how what the folks who worked on the device over at Apple must be feeling when they see something like this.

Fox12 Oregon picked up the story as well. Check out the clip below.

via iPad watcher

[More]

Pretty amazing to think what this woman has seen in her life. This, however, was pretty neat.

She first was hovered over by the other ladies who were all trying to show her how to use it. But what was just amazing to watch was what she did with it when people left her alone. She asked questions that she answered herself. etc.

We had a earlier video about a young child getting the idea of the iPad. Here we have someone at the opposite end of her life, getting to work with her first computer, and taking to it right away. “Now I can read again.”

This is how revolutions are started.

Recreating music of the 70s, with the proper computer generated sound

Pink Floyd as chiptunes
[Via Boing Boing]

“Have you ever wondered what Dark Side of the Moon would sound like if Pink Floyd had written it for NES, instead of for a rock band?” Vidgame programmer and musician Brad Smith did, so he created a chiptune version of the entire album. MOON8

[More]

For those of us who remember the early 70s and who played 8-bit games, this is amazing. I’m not sure how long these may stay up, what with all the copyright takedowns recently, but is genius to recreate Pink Floyd in this way.

I wonder what other 70s progressive tunes would be amenable – Yes – South Side of the Sky, Siberian Khatru, or Perpetual Change; Jethro Tull – Thick As A Brick, Cross-eyed Mary; ELP – Karn Evil 9; Genesis – The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Return of the Giant Hogweed; The Moody Blues – Tuesday Afternoon, The Story in Your Eyes; Procul Haram – Whiter Shade of Pale; Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody, Killer Queen; Rush – Working Man; Supertramp – Dreamer; Uriah Heep – Easy Livin’

Big day for Apple

Apple’s $242 billion market cap surpasses Microsoft
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple’s market cap hit $242 billion Thursday, making it the second-largest company on the S&P 500 and pushing it ahead of Microsoft, which finished the day with a $239 billion market cap.

[More]

Who would have predicted this 10 years ago? Certainly not MS. About 10 years ago, Bill Gates said that Jobs could not win.

Yet the market place made the final decision and, at least for now, Apple has won. Let’s look at the stock prices since 1998.

A little hard to see but the blue line is Apple and the red is Microsoft. Here is a zoom of the right side of the graph:

Now, MS looks really bad compared to Apple but it doubled in price in 12 years, giving it an annualized return of about 6% (using the rule of 72). Not bad through the worst economy in a generation.

Apple, on the other hand, went up almost 8000% or 80-fold. This represents 6.32 doublings (okay, I used my Mac calculator. Sue me). So 6.32 doublings in 12 years is 0.52 doublings a year or 1.9 years per doubling. The rule of 72 would give us an annual percentage return of about 38%!!

This fits with the rates shown in the table at Wikipedia. However, the table also shows that the rule of 72 overestimates the actual interest rate when doublings are low and becomes more inaccurate as doubling times become more rapid. The table actual suggests that the rule of 69.3 is a better estimate.

So 69.3 divided by 12 yields a rate of about 5.8%. Still not too bad. And Apple’s becomes almost 37%. Annually. Wow.

Apple’s price surely can not keep on this trend. To double again by 2012? Reach over $500? Well, I might not bet against that, as long as Steve continues be a winner.

The amazingness of the world today

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln, in the heat of a Presidential campaign, before he was even a nominee for his party, spoke at Cooper Union, producing one of the greatest speeches in American History. It perhaps sealed him as the Presidential candidate. It dealt with the question of slavery.

But he gave it in front of a room of fellow partisans, of Young Republicans who were aching for a fight. And he gave them one. However, only those who could fit in the room actually heard him talk.

Today, President Obama returned to Cooper Union to give a speech that will likely not be seen as one of the greatest in history. Financial reform does not have the historical cachet as slavery. But he was also not in front of a ‘friendly crowd’.

The really big difference, the one that demonstrates how amazing our Age is, does not strictly arise from the President’s words. It comes from the way they are delivered to those interested in watching – through the Internet.

There were a ton of live feeds of the speech. C-Span, USAToday, almost every cable news program, and many others.

Even 10 years ago, you might only have been able to see the speech live if you were sitting in front of a TV and the channel made a decision to show it. If not, you were screwed.

Today, you can sit anywhere with a computer and actively seek those places that have a live feed. I found USAToday. You can carry on realtime conversations with your friends who are all watching the same thing.

Tomorrow it could be at the beach with an iPad or similar.

For me, the truly fun part and something few of us would have been able to do even 5 years ago, was to simultaneously follow what was written beforehand and what he actually chose to say. This is because the Internet also provided the speech as prepared for delivery.

It is very interesting to follow what the teleprompter is most likely displaying and what someone chooses to actually say. When you do so with President Obama, you find that the prepared speech is often more a set of guidelines than a rote presentation.

He changes words, he modifies sentences, sometimes he actually talks himself into a semantic corner, only to escape with a novel turn of phrase.

As an example, he replaced balance with kilter in this sentence:

There has always been a tension between the desire to allow markets to function without interference – and the absolute necessity of rules to prevent markets from falling out of balance.

Kilter evokes a much different sense than balance. One that I happen to like. But one he certainly seemed to add on the fly, as he did with so many of his changes.

Anyway, being able to watch the speech from the comfort of my work computer, where I can listen and do other things, or follow along when he gets to an interesting part, is truly an amazement of our times. Directly hearing someone’s words rather than having to f hear them filtered through someone else is incredible.

[Updated] My favorite new conspiracy theory starring Verizon, Microsoft and McAfee

by State Records NSW

The Microsoft Tax: McAfee correctly identifies Windows as malware; Macintosh unaffected
[Via MacDailyNews]

Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world got stuck repeatedly rebooting themselves Wednesday after [a McAfee] antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a virus,” Peter Svensson reports for The Associated Press.

“About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms,” Svensson reports.

[More]

I wonder if this had anything to do with Verizon’s email servers being down nationwide yesterday. A third of the Windows computers at the University of Michigan’s medical school were down. Same with hospitals in Rhode Island. Police computers were off line.

All because the anti-virus software saw parts of Windows as malware. So it bricked the computer. Or at least that is what some people are saying.

And the fix is something that really only a tech-savvy person could easily do.

Wouldn’t it be awe-inspiring if Verizon has some Windows machines sitting in mission critical locations in the email server network. The McAfee software identifies Windows as malware and reboots. Thus starting a chain reaction as the Windows machines continually reboot, resulting in the servers themselves going down.

Not only could it take some time to identify the problem but also a lot of time applying the fix. Thus why it took 4-5 hours to resolve the problems.

I know this is unlikely.

But then I read that Intel was hit also and I started to wonder if my improbable might be possible. It would certainly explain why the Verizon email network seems to keep having such problems with outages. The ultimate irony would be that our Internet could possibly be brought down not through cyber terrorism but a stupid software glitch.

I can think “If only they had Macs.”

[UPDATE] Someone pointed out that Verizon has a deal with Mcafee to provide virus security for its users. So there actually is a connection there. And this Engadget article indicates that McAfee put the boner update on their commercial servers at 6 am PST. My last email before the outage was at 7:13 am PST. Coincidence?

The great thing about good conspiracy theories is that even random things can be made to sound ominous. I wonder if ATT uses Mcafee and Windows?

Tabloids do what tabloids do

by PinkMoose

Write and Wrong
[Via Doc Searls Weblog]

When Gizmodo reported on the next-generation iPhone that had come into its hands, I was as curious as the next geek about what they’d found. But I didn’t think the ends justified the means.

The story begins,

You are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.

“We got it,” they said. How?

[More]

Doc gives a very measured response here. My response is not quite as measured, as I am one of the people sites like Gizmodo targets. I’m a customer.

And, now that I know what kind of site it really is, I will not visit it purposefully again.

I refuse to support entities whose business model embraces the purely tabloid approach to information dispersal. ‘Sensational is more important than factual.’

Perhaps Gizmodo did not do something illegal. For me, that does not matter. It did something I believe is unethical, something that I will result in my refusal to support their business. And then, when called on this by many people who had been its readers, Gizmodo inserted itself into the story, publishing a long line of self-justifying rationalizations. Just like other tabloids.

Too late. By its actions, it revealed itself for the tabloid publication it is.

Here is a similar scenario regarding dealing with immoral and possible unethical lines. Say a photographer took pictures of an actress sunbathing nude in her backyard. She has a reasonable expectation of privacy, seeing as how the nearest house to her secluded one is hundreds of yards away. But the photographer used a long telephoto and got the fuzzy pictures.

So, he shows up at a reputable paper, saying he has these pictures. What does a reputable paper do? Their business model is news, not sensationalism. Without some compelling public interest, they would decline the offer. They surely do not pay him for the pictures. It would hurt their business model because it would repel many of their readers.

‘Paying for pictures that are purely salacious. That is what tabloids do.’

Tabloids pay for the pictures and run them. Sometimes they get sued for going to far but the moral line they come up against is one I find very distasteful. So I refuse to give them my business.

By making this a story, Gizmodo revealed itself as purely a tabloid site, reveling in sensationalism over facts. And, then Gizmodo revealed even more about their lack of moral compunction, by invading the privacy of the Apple employee, publishing his name for the internet to see.

Again, the morality for a tabloid is whatever sells, not what is right.

Fine, that is a useful business model for some. Tabloids can be quite successful.

But I refuse to read the tabloids because I do not like the moral lines they cross all the time. Engadget came up to the same line and, for whatever reasons, refused to cross it.

I don’t have time to deal with sites that are not really interested in providing information, where ‘bright, shiny, and rude’ is more important than the facts.

Now I know where Gizmodo’s moral line is. It has lost my interest, my business and I will be sure to tell people just what I think of it.