Posts from — April 2007

An excerpt from Lee Iacocca’s new book Where Have All the Leaders Gone?:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you’re eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to—as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I’m going to speak up because it’s my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I’ll tell you how I see it, and it’s not pretty, but at least it’s real. I’m hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don’t vote because they don’t trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

It’s on my reading list now. The Democrats aren’t looking that great, either.. it’s a bigger problem than one party.

“Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.” (Kurt Vonnegut, Commencement Address, Lehigh University, May 2004)

At what amount would the price of gas affect your transportation habits?

It’s about $3.30 here, and it hasn’t really affected me. Since I got my bike I’ve been biking to work most days and doing errands on my bike when possible, but that decision isn’t really financial. I guess I don’t drive enough right now for it to really matter that much.

I’m finally getting better at python. I was working on a script today that generated a histogram, and it had to do all sorts of things with long lists of numbers. The python ways to do these things are much more concise.

For example, let’s say I have two lists:

>>> a = [2, 5, 9, 12, 19]
>>> b = [1, 5, 3, 8, 14, 21, 8, 5, 2]

I might want to generate a list the same size as a where the value of each element is equal to the number of items in b that are less than the corresponding value in a. In other words, the first entry would be the number of elements in b that are less than 2, the second element would be the number less than 5 and so on.

If you’re thinking in C, it’s certainly not hard, just two for loops. In python, you can do:

>>> [len(filter(lambda x: x < y, b)) for y in a]
[1, 3, 7, 7, 8]

How does it work? Well working from the outside in:
The [* for y in a] makes y iterate through every element in a. filter(lambda x: x < y, b) returns all the elements in b that are less than y (which is the current value from a). Getting the len() of this list tells you how many elements are in the filter output, i.e. how many items are less than y. There are a bunch of other ways to do this, and in real life you’d want to make it a bit easier to read, but it’s cool to be able to express operations like that.

Hopefully this makes sense to someone.. my explanations aren’t too good.

In other news, I got a book on Ruby on Rails recently, which I’ve already read a lot of via PDF, but I’m looking forward to spending more time with it.

This is quite a cool service: imgred.com

I often like to add pictures to my blog posts, but copying them out of somewhere else and hosting them on LJ is somewhat of a pain, especially when they’re generally not central to the post. Using an off-site URL is considered a bad practice online, plus some sites will block it. Imgred makes it really easy to include offsite images. If I want to include an image from http://www.a.com/b/c.png, all I do is put an image in my post with the source: http://www.imgred.com/http://www.a.com/b/c.png. It automatically fetches and caches the image for me, transparently. Granted, I can’t be sure that the site will be up forever, but for non-critical images, this is definitely worth it.

Billionaire and now newspaper owner Samuel Zell wants newspapers to fight online news aggregators. Probably not the best way to make it to the future, in my opinion. The best quote is:

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”

Apparently he’s never used google news, since there are NO ADS on it.

Full article here, worth a read, even though it’s really bad reporting. See this for a point-by-point refutation of most of it.

If these are the types of people doing decision-making for newspapers, they’re in more trouble than I thought. In the refutation piece, Jason makes a good point that most newspapers are acting as aggregators anyway.. taking news stories, photos, columns and comics from national sources and combining them into one document. Of course, there is a reasonable collection of original content, but since the Internet can provide aggregation so much more efficiently, the value of the paper has decreased.

It seems like in 5 years the newspaper industry will look very different or will be largely irrelevant for public discourse. I’ll probably write more about this later..

Note:
I haven’t been writing any sort of disclaimer about obvious conflict-of-interest on these, since the people who read are mostly people who know me anyway, so it seems unnecessarily formal. Maybe that’ll change, though.

If you’re planning any air travel and like to use a laptop on the trip, check out the AirPower wiki. It tells you about power socket and wifi availability. I’m starting to plan some trips for the next couple of months, and the site is really helpful. There’s a good chance I’ll schedule some of my trips through Las Vegas because of this.

putative adj. “commonly put forth or accepted as true on inconclusive grounds”

This is awesome..

Store your bagel in a CD spindle:

Obviously you should wash it ahead of time.

(from Lifehacker)

While the media paid attention to the 15 British sailors and their 13-day captivity in Iran (which is worth covering, certainly), 20 American soldiers died in Iraq during that time period.

Here are their names:

March 23rd, 2007 - Spc. Lance C. Springer II (IED), Sgt. Greg N. Riewer (IED)

March 24th, 2007 - Lance Cpl. Trevor A. Roberts (combat)

March 25th, 2007 - Sgt. Jason W. Swiger (IED), Cpl. Jason Nunez (IED), Pfc. Orlando E. Gonzalez (IED), Pfc. Anthony J. White (IED), Spc. Sean K. McDonald (IED)

March 27th, 2007 - Sgt. Curtis J. Forshey (non-combat), Staff Sgt. Marcus A. Golczynski (combat), Master Sgt. Sean M. Thomas (combat)

March 29th, 2007 - Sgt. Joe Polo (IED)

March 30th, 2007 - Unnamed (non-combat)

March 31st, 2007 - 1st Lt. Neale M. Shank (non-combat), Spc. Wilfred Flores Jr. (IED), Two Unnamed (IED), Four Unnamed (IED)

April 1st, 2007 - Pfc. Miguel A. Marcial III (non-combat), Staff Sgt. Jason R. Arnette (IED)

April 2nd, 2007 - Unnamed (combat), Unnamed (IED)

See U.S. Casualties in Iraq for more information, read the “Casualty notes” for caveats inherent to any such list.

(from Don Park, mostly copied)

It’s less than two months until the 2 year anniversary of Cheney’s declaration that we’re in “the last throes of the insurgency”.

Here are some more numbers:
- Americans killed in Iraq in March 2005: 36
- Americans killed in Iraq in March 2006: 33
- Americans killed in Iraq in March 2007: 86

This isn’t an outlier for the year, too, as February had 87 and January had 92.

I’m not trying to make a specific point, I just thing these things are worthy of your consideration.