A recurring example of the self-defeating nature of political handling of economics is the looming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. Like energy issues, the problems have been identified for decades but political will favors short-term spending to gin up reelection support at the expense of long-term planning. So the government borrows against the programs’ surplus during flush times to support present concerns such as corporate subsidies and defense spending, leaving the difference to be made up during someone else’s term. The demographic event of Baby Boomer retirement will also strain the system precisely when incoming payments will see a dramatic decline. The current projection has Medicare insolvent by 2019 (Social Security will hold up until something like 2041), and the growth of the two programs would eventually consume all federal revenue (a parallel to the growing weight of interest on the national debt). Yet any proposal to address the underlying factors by raising taxes, reforming health care, restricting or delaying benefits, or rolling back subsidies or other spending all have unpleasant political consequences, hence the characterization of Social Security and Medicare as the ‘third rail’ of politics.

The $53 trillion asteroid

The comments to the article fall into two, largely partisan groups – those who place the blame on Republican spending and rail against the establishment, and those who blame Democratic spending and call for tangential conservative planks such as expelling illegal immigrants, repealing the Teachers’ Union, etc. More instructive are comparative discussions of programs in Canada and Australia and how they’ve dealt with their own respective shortfalls.

The March selections are a bit delayed as I decided to switch from a mid-month to end-of-month posting schedule, which meant going over 6 weeks of additions in total since February’s picks. March alone had 12,312 new albums posted. So, took a little while.

One helpful addition is the album page’s conversion of sound samples for all tracks from m3u files – which required playback in a separate program like iTunes, cluttering the library – to an inline player that lets you listen to the 30-second samples individually or together in sequence. This is diverting enough that I’m almost tempted to script a background player that chains together groups of albums for ambience, like an audio screensaver.

Last month was also the introduction of eMusic’s Test Your Music IQ. Despite missing a few I should have known and guessing a few I shouldn’t, I was satisfied with an honest score of 120/180 along with its rather hyperbolic assessment: (more…)

Movie & TV News @ IMDb.com – Studio Briefing – 7 April 2008

“Jericho, the CBS television series that was canceled because of low ratings, then revived following protests from fans, then canceled again because of low ratings, may be revived a second time, the New York Times reported today (Monday). The newspaper said that CBS may follow NBC’s recent example with Friday Night Lights in which it sold the DirecTV satellite service the right to air the series before it goes on network TV. The Times said that CBS is considering a similar option in negotiations with cable provider Comcast. Meanwhile, although DirecTV executives have expressed confidence that the Friday Night Lights deal could drive new subscribers to their service, some analysts are expressing skepticism about its ability to do so and forecasting that the DirecTV episodes will wind up being pirated on the Internet.”

This sounds like Comcast would effectively underwrite the show’s production in return for first-run rights. The twice-over cancellation of Jericho is already a testament to the lag between current media trends and viewer metrics that in turn drive advertising buys. CBS cancelled after the promised 7 episodes of season 2, citing low ratings, while also noting high consumption via non-broadcast channels including DVRs and online streaming which are not factored into Nielsen shares. This plus the creative “Nuts!” campaign that led to the second season point to a dedicated, evangelistic audience as represented on fansites like Jericho Lives. It may be that Jericho would do better on a cable network in any event, with more targeted demographics, smaller share requirements, and potentially less network restrictions on story points.

With all the hoopla surrounding the recent experiments with online distribution by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, the videogame Rock Band’s store expansion may represent a less heralded future venue. In contrast with the aforementioned big names which can trade on years of old-industry promotion, the Rock Band store has already provided a way to break new artists such as Paramore. Individual songs featured in the related title Guitar Hero 3 also showed sales spikes after the game’s release, similar to the Apple halo effect provided to Feist and Yael Naim after featuring their tracks in commercials. The game’s very name and history under the Guitar Hero franchise may suggest that the potential is limited to strictly rock acts, yet prior GH games have already highlighted alternative, electronic, indie, and pop artists including unsigned bands offered as unlockables.

The question remains, however – how exactly does a band get a song programmed for the game and loaded into the Rock Band store, and who are the gatekeepers? 

Rock Band meets iTunes, opens built-in music store

Beginning with the understated observation that “The web is turning writing into a conversation,” Graham expands on Shirky’s themes on online communication. One consequence of dialogue is disagreement, which outpaces agreement online by a sizeable margin. He sets out a hierarchy of disagreement, stepping from the base of name-calling through layers of common fallacies (ad hominem, appeal to authority) on through more rarefied forms to ultimate direct refutation.

How to Disagree

After years of seeing the same patterns of low-grade argument used in email, Usenet, forums, and now blog comment threads, it would be gratifying to see any evolution of disagreement along the lines Graham describes.

(The related articles – “The Age of the Essay” and “What You Can’t Say” – are also both interesting reading.)

Subtitled “The power of boring technology,” referring to the tiered distribution of new technologies and how they achieve their greatest impact once they’ve passed from the ‘cool’ stage to ubiquity. Shirky argues that the current wave of communications technologies are working to flatten hierarchies, expand communities of interest, and re-cast the media divide from the prior broadcasting model.

Ars Book Review: “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky

The review is followed by an interview with Shirky, including more on the concept of the ‘Coasean floor’ and its intersection with ‘the Long Tail.’ I’m also heartened by the recognition of interdisciplinary study as a catalyst for creativity.

Although it falls into that gray area of ‘conceptual’ art, frequently maligned alongside modernism as "it’s not Art if I could do it," this setup – two computers locked in an endless loop of dueling ‘out of office’ auto-responders – is immediately evocative. Beyond the mundane, it speaks of practical infinity, loop logic, meaningless marked time, and a kind of electronic ennui. And yet, by their absence the purported recipients have achieved a kind of escape from the soulless, flickering-fluorescent barren that is life constrained by the Outlook inbox.

VWork 2 »

I wonder if there exists a category of open source concept art – examples like this one that you can re-create yourself from the original blueprint. The future of home fabrication, e.g. FabLab, even further dilutes the notion of ‘original.’

If ProgressQuest is akin to a line stretching to infinity, "Permanent Vacation" is more of an Ouroboros. 

Simultaneously an epic undertaking, a staggering display of wit and craft (and patience), a useful reference to the huge collection of featured bands, and a paragon of flash reviewing as featured in Kevin Kelly’s "short is in". Earlier examples included the oft-hysterical Movie-A-Minute and Book-A-Minute reviews and the experimental "Mad Ape Den" three-letter-word writing project by an earlier GeekLife. Also, don’t miss Albert Eistein’s Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less. 

Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s by Paul Ford – The Morning News

As you might expect, the snarky comments ("Someone’s been eating Hall and Oatesmeal.", "Five seconds of music 120 times.") are much more entertaining than the complimentary. And yet when someone who has taken the time to listen and encapsulate 763 songs in a row then says "I’ve listened to this thirty times" it speaks volumes.

You can also grab the torrents and grade them yourself, but just like college radio, be prepared to swim through a lot of Meh to find the Awesome.

Combining today’s themes of hoax and time travel, Google Australia has launched the gDay(tm) feature – “search tomorrow’s web, today!” – powered by MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapoloation). The modification to the PageRank algorithm is naturally called SageRank.

gDay™ with MATE™

The methodology (“mashup of…recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast”) bears some similarity to Asimov’s psychohistory. Their FAQ also touches on some interesting questions about second-order prediction: if everyone has access to tomorrow’s (90% likely) scores, Lotto numbers, share prices, etc. what does that do to established markets? And could you read, say, of your impending demise and act to prevent it, creating an epistemological paradox?

And to make the most of the limited range, can you combine gDay with Gmail’s Custom Time to send gleaned details further back in time (all the way back to 4/1/2004 per their FAQ)?

This flash-short fiction by Desmond Warzel is a brilliant mix of Ballard-esque ‘invisible literature’ in the style of a message forum, the juxtaposition of wikian impermanence with reality, historical Eurocentrism, flamewars, moderator pedantry, and time travel tropes – “everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.” Paradoxes figure predominantly, including a reverse ontology projection (“if we kill Hitler then time travel won’t be invented”) and an oblligatory Grandfather Paradox. This must also be a singular exception to Godwin’s Law.

Abyss & Apex : Fourth Quarter 2007: Wikihistory

I have a particular weakness for futurist pseudohistory (fiction written as future historical document, such as The Dune Encyclopedia – not to be confused with the related cryptohistory, sensationalist dogma masquerading as fact such as Holocaust denial) and this prompted fond memories of reading The Complete Time Traveler.