Read it.

New York Magazine has a long profile of Sarah Palin up right now. Its focus is more publicity, personality and celebrity, than politics. The profile reduces my probability that Palin will make a serious run (as opposed to a pro forma one) for the highest office in 2012. It also leaves me impressed by how quickly and efficiently she’s leveraged her celebrity and gone from moderately upper middle class** in income (and in serious debt due to legal bills after the 2008 campaign) to wealthy. Some Republicans are apparently worried about her becoming the “face of the party,” something that crops up now and then in the media, but it doesn’t seem like they really have to worry that much unless the party has no real substance and is rooted only in style and the need to get elected. As for Sarah Palin, whatever you think of her politics or personality, she’s offering a concrete product distributed through the private sector. The article mentions that her book was a major reason that Random House generated a profit last year! Whatever criticisms one might lodge, she’s not getting rich by being a rent-seeker, as so many of our public and private sector elites have become. In fact the article points to a whole industry of liberal critique which has emerged around her, so she’s not even capturing all the wealth that she’s responsible for (spillover effects).

Doing well by doing good.

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Stephen Brust, despite being a Benighted Socialist, is one of the best writers of the English language alive today. (Read any of his Vlad Taltos books and you’ll agree. Better yet, read the brilliant fanfic Firefly episode he wrote.)

His Significant Other just had a radical mastectomy and they’re fund-raising to pay for it. Follow the link to participate.

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Lots of commentators, including yours truly, have pointed out the ways in which modern environmentalism is like a religion. For last week’s Earth Day festivities, economist Paul Rubin had a provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal detailing the ways in which environmentalism confers group identity on it adherents. In this way, it functions more like ancient tribal religions than like universal religions such as Christianity that transcend the tribe.

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Slow news day.

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Police said the man and two accomplices had been armed with a knife and a firearm when they approached pupils outside the secondary school in Umbumbulu, near Durban in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal province.

It is claimed the trio tried to rob the youngsters of their mobile phones and money but fled when the students began pelting them with stones.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Gates of Vienna takes a fairly deep look into the way the Crust thinks.

It is not a pretty sight.

Read it.

A fascinating look at where you would be if you had bought a piece of the action rather than a mere product.

Read it.

This is the girl Prince William ought to marry.

Check it out.

Well, that’s what it looks like.

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Faster, please.

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We report, you decide.

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Ronald Wayne’s 10% share in Apple would be worth £13.6bn

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

And a bad one.

Watch it.

This is Jeff’s ‘lecture’ at Tedx NYED. Jeff is the first person I’ve ever encountered who sees, as I do, modern schools as ‘factory schools’, and has a lot of exciting ideas about how to fix that. His most exciting idea is a modern school designed like Oxford University: Get the best lectures in a subject from online repositories like MIT (and have a quasi-market system to determine which is best), and then provide students with tutors to guide their intellectual journey. We have a tremendous number of tools available for people to find stuff out and practice useful skills, with more being developed every day. Let’s get to work.

An Informative Chart.

Read it.

How else are we going to keep Medicare solvent?

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A perhaps not unbiased perspective.

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The Oregon Supreme Court ruled that a state worker who used pot to relieve pain and nausea could be fired for drug use even though he had had a state-issued medical marijuana card.

This strikes me as a very odd decision. The employee wouldn’t be fired for using a prescription drug, properly prescribed, for a medical condition, even though using it without a prescription would be illegal.  He effectively had permission from his employer, the state, to use marijuana for a medical condition. I can see where he would be liable to arrest under Federal drug laws, but not how he can be liable to termination.

An informative cartoon.

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I’m not one to get uptight about extramarital sex. But I am not president of a country where one in five adults is infected with a still-fatal sexually transmitted virus. Mr. Zuma has rubbed South Africa’s nose in the fact that he racks up as many sex partners as he can, and he doesn’t use condoms.

How is that a good thing? Well, it allows us to say the unsayable: countries get the HIV epidemics they deserve.

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Read it.

Read it.

The iPad by itself would be just another physical product living in a nearly linear world. Doubling revenue would require Apple to double the number manufactured; and that would mean roughly doubling labor costs etc. It could be profitable, and there are advantages to building at scale, but not in the greater-than-linear leveraged manner that software or content can deliver. As Apple well knows, a business built on that model builds enterprise value linearly with unit sales. But… the iPad as a distribution channel for fungible goods reasserts the non-linear leverage that Microsoft enjoyed back in the day.

One interesting twist is how the iPad combines network effects and constrained distribution. The bright shiny object design of the iPad leads to network effects at the app store which in turn drives more consumers back to the device itself. Then to the degree that those two forces hold consumers in thrall of the device, Apple can use the device as the point of sale for content worth more than the device itself. The leverage is linked – the first leads to market presence, and then the market presence makes for stronger monetization opportunities in the device-hosted channel.

Read it.

I had a night like that in college. Fortunately nobody in my entryway spoke Klingon.

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Hint: No, he prolonged it. As Obama is doing now.

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Jeez, I’m only doing five of these. I am SUCH a slacker….

Freeberg boils it down.

What they all think of as some kind of Utopia — on my planet, and Ike’s planet, we call that “jail.” That is what we need. A special jail. Part of the reason 2010 is shaping up to look like a promising election year, after all, is this growing feeling that there are indeed two cultural halves of our country, and the wrong half is being driven underground. And this seems to me to be why everyone is so pissy right now, liberals & conservatives. The folks in charge don’t like to deal with reality too much; they’d rather be in jail, although they don’t realize it.

So let’s go the other way. We should have one single Supermax prison for the entire country, and put all these people into it — the stoners, the gang-bangers, the feminists who are upset that Michelle Obama is being made to look like a proper, effective and content housewife. The peaceniks, the enviro-weenies, the socialists who don’t want to be called out as socialists. They don’t like freedom anyway, so they’d probably be happier that way.

So they don’t want a real jail, of course. What they want, is a place where they can surrender all of their freedoms without being reminded that is what they’re doing. Maybe all the walls should be painted pink instead of gray.

Read it.

When reading science fiction, I can’t really believe in an alien species unless they are at least as strange as the Japanese.

Read it.

Another SWPL toy. Let’s see whether it lasts.

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Very thorough and cold-blooded, but overall positive.

The best way I can describe picking up, holding and using the iPad is it feels like it was built for you. Whenever someone on Star Trek TNG walked around with a tablet, it was always natural and they always seemed able to do whatever it was they needed to do on it. That’s the iPad. As an added bonus, you don’t have to wear a terrible jumpsuit to use it.

So, yes you can run old iPhone apps, but no you wont want to. What you will want however are shiny new iPad apps that run at full res. Unfortunately these all seem to start at $9.99. I don’t even want to know how much I’ve spent on apps in the past few days, and most of them aren’t even that good. They each just fulfill some specific need that the iPad doesn’t otherwise do on its own. This is the strength of the platform, but the pricing just feels wrong.

An Entertaining Fable.

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Nick Verron started breathing independently after his mother Sue said a final goodbye to him. She also gave permission for the drugs keeping him alive to be stopped.

Mr Verron, 26, opened his eyes and within weeks he was able to sit up and talk again. He is now recovering from the injuries he suffered when he was stabbed in the head with a screwdriver in an unprovoked attack in Bournemouth, Dorset, on July 4 last year.

Read it.

What these folks are ranting against, or at least gnashing their teeth over, is progress – or, more precisely, progress that goes down a path they don’t approve of. They want progress to, as Bray admits, follow their own ideological bent, and when it takes a turn they don’t like they start grumbling like granddads, yearning for the days of their idealized Apple IIs, when men were men and computers were computers.

If Ned Ludd had been a blogger, he would have written a post similar to Doctorow’s about those newfangled locked-down mechanical looms that distance the weaver from the machine’s workings, requiring the weaver to follow the programs devised by the looms’ manufacturer. The design of the mechanical loom, Ned would have told us, exhibits a palpable contempt for the user. It takes the generativity out of weaving.

Read it.

Never touch the stuff, myself.

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Bryan Caplan scratches his head.

Gates of Vienna hits the nail on the head.

Barack Hussein is not the disease. Barack Hussein is the symptom.

Read it.

Not with the taxes that Obama will stick us with. Give us eight years of a tax-cutter President like Reagan, and maybe we can afford it.

Read it.

Where can we get a blow-up Obama?

Read it. And the blog post it references.

This is an interesting topic that deserves more thought.

Read it.

Looking back, one of the striking revelations of the past two years of recession is that the pattern of real-estate development and capital investment in America has been driven for two decades and more by a very peculiar system of finance — one that depends on an intricate infrastructure of speculative debt; one that is enabled by modern technology and wedded to abstraction and formula; and one that, it turns out, can only be maintained, in a pinch, by intervention from the state.

The modern mind broke down on account of its infatuation with abstraction. That mind is singularly susceptible to falsely imagining that ideas are more real than men. The power of the lapidary theory over the modern mind has been often remarked. The whole of the twentieth century was marked by calamitous wars driven by the imperial impulse of what Edmund Burke called “armed doctrines.” Armies, impelled by their doctrines, rolled over half the earth, leaving behind blood and smolders.

Ann Althouse is scratching her head.

IN SHORT: It’s a medium size, medium weight device that has some use, but it’s a distant third in usefulness after the laptop and the iPhone.

Eric Raymond is scratching his head.

The Newton was a fascinating technology demonstration, but it sank almost without trace because nobody ever found a real use for it. It was too large to fit in a pocket and underpowered for replacing a real computer…like the iPad. And the thing that has me scratching my head, two days after the iPad announcement and knowing it has sold 300K copies in that time on the strength of Apple’s brand, is that I can’t find a real use for it either.

Joe Wikert has seen the light.

It only took a couple of hours of iPad use to realize I’ll never touch my Kindle again.  Ever.  All my Kindle books are now on my iPad.  Do I mind that the iPad’s backlit display isn’t as easy on my eyes as the Kindle’s?  No.  I read off that iPad display for about 10 hours on Saturday and my eyes felt the same as they did the day before.

The iPad has certainly killed any desire on my part to own a Kindle.

Read it.

He said that Mr Brown had not looked him or any other servicemen in the eye at a reception in Downing Street in November 2008.

Then in Westminster Abbey during the Remembrance Day service last November he said the Prime Minister was “fidgeting and moving” during the two minute silence.

“I’ve got head and back injuries that put me back in hospital in a lot of pain quite regularly, so if I could do it there’s no reason he couldn’t,” he said. “It was very rude.

What a guy.

Read it.

I’d vote for him.

Geoffrey Pullum is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

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Why is writing software not like engineering? The answer lies in a single fundamental difference with far-reaching ramifications: engineering is constrained by the real, physical world and software is not. While obvious, this is the crucial difference that explains why software development is harder to get right. The next few sections explore these ramifications.

Gina Trapani speaks for me.

Next year’s iPad will be faster, cheaper, less buggy, and have better apps and worthy competitors. Let all the deep-pocketed Jobs apostles be your canaries into the iPad coalmine. Give developers time to fix their apps to work well on the iPad. Give Apple a year to lower prices on faster hardware and fill in all the gaping feature holes. (Remember how long early iPhone owners lived without copy and paste?)

Hear, hear.

Read it.

A distillation of all the things you know unconsciously but probably never had the inclination to put together. We do these things so that you don’t have to.

Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion.