Archive for: February, 2009

What Twitter Is… To me…

Feb 24 2009 Published by Turk under Elections, Miscellany, Society, Technology, The Internet, Twitter

I spend a lot of time on Twitter. If you know me, you know that. I spend so much time on Twitter that I had the distinction of being labeled a “nuclear followcost” – in other words, it is really, really annoying to follow me because you’ll actually see me saying something.

So yesterday morning on my way past her office, I stopped to talk to a coworker. She mentions that she just signed up for Twitter. But, she explains, she hasn’t done much with it since she’s not exactly sure what the point of it is.

Twitter is Every Conversation Taking Place Anywhere in the World

In a nutshell, that’s it. If someone is talking about anything – from a good book they read to an interesting article in a magazine, from doing the dishes to the political situation in Darfur – that conversation is taking place on Twitter.

I like to refer to the Internet as the digital water cooler because I see it as a place to have any discussion. Unfortunately for actual water coolers, they are place and time limited. You can only have discussions with the people around them while they’re there. That puts restraints on the people available as well as the topics you might cover.

The Internet has none of that. You can consume and produce your part of the conversation at your convenience. You can read blogs, leave comments, form communities or anything else on your own terms. Twitter is the ultimate representation of that.

Twitter is Egalitarian

On Twitter, you can say whatever interests you, but you will be saying it to a very small audience because Twitter is an egalitarian society – everyone starts with zero followers.

While there is a class of people that are obsessed with the number of people who follow them, I think they miss the larger point. I think the much more relevant number on your stats is the number of people you are following.

It would say more to me that you follow 10,000 than it does that you are followed by 10,000. Twitter is a pull technology. I have to actively choose to pay attention to you. I believe the important number is the count of people you choose to listen to, not the number you can talk to.

Frankly, I don’t follow a lot of the “high value” Twitterers. I don’t buy that they have more to say.

As an example, look at this list of the 10 most influential tweeters in DC.

@PJRodriguez and I were discussing the list over lunch yesterday. He pointed out that @barackobama and @algore are almost completely without merit on this list. Why? Barack’s Twitter account has had nothing to say since the day before the Inauguration. Gore rarely tweets at all, and when he does, has little of consequence to say.

The Politico’s argument for including them is ridiculous – “that spigot could be a powerful communication tool should he choose to turn it back on.” By that standard, people not actually on Twitter could be counted as influential because of the unrealized potential of their influence. If Jesus returned to earth and started tweeting, he’d surely be #1, so why isn’t he on their list?

But What Does This Have to Do With Listening?

To me, listening is more important for three simple reasons:

  • I listen to people who listen to others – I could honestly care less about David Gregory, and much of that is because David Gregory could clearly care less about hearing from me. He has 72,000 followers, but only follows 84 people. Are you really telling me that out of 6 million people on Twitter, only 84 of them have something interesting to say? It’s elitist and bullshit.
  • I find that most people are interesting at least part of the time – I follow as many people as I can, and keep Tweetdeck running on a separate monitor. I scan it frequently throughout the day. I do so because I am constantly finding items of interest and engaging in interesting (to me at least) discussions with people about randowm topics. I would probably spend more time on the public timeline, but it’s a bit too overwhelming.
  • The information I get from “low value” Tweeters is generally more interesting than what “high value” tweeters offer – Many “low value” tweeters talk about things they find interesting. Many “high value” tweeters talk about themselves.

Are You Saying There is a “Right” or “Wrong” Way to Use Twitter?

Absolutely not. That would be like telling people there is a right or wrong way to be interesting, or to be friends, or to think. Use of Twitter is as individual as the users. I hate seeing comments like this one:

For normal humans, though, there is really no need to follow more than a few hundred people.

That’s douchebag-speak for “I don’t follow more than a few hundred people, so if you do, you must be defective.” It’s the same braindead logic that inspired this article.

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. ‚ÄúTwittering stems from a lack of identity. It‚Äôs a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity…

[A]grees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

That’s such a boneheaded thing to say. Do you apply the same logic to talking to friends? Do I only have friends and talk to them to stave off my own insecurity? If that’s the case, what does that say about these pseudo-intellectuals and their cocktail party circuit? Are they just circle-jerking each other to feel better about themselves?

Ok. The answer to that is probably, “YES!”, but you see my point.

What Twitter Is To Me

I made earlier mention of the digital water cooler and the fact that it is time and place limited. What exactly do I mean by that?

In the real world, I could pop into the office next door and talk to a co-worker about my hobbies and my interests. Or I could talk to my neighbors and the other parents at my kids’ school.

But there is a good chance that my interests won’t be their interests. There is a good possibility that their interests will bore me to tears.

By using Google Alerts or Twitter Search, I can find people talking about things that interest me. Bands that I like, hunting tips, movies, politics… whatever. When I want to talk about these things, I can join a conversation with others who share my interests.

That conversation could be with someone a half a world away, who I may never meet, but I will find fascinating anyway. And for the duration of that exchange, they may be the most fascinating person I know.

That, to me, is the power of Twitter. It is the ability to make deep, and yes likely brief, connections between people on meaningful topics. It serves to remind us that we’re not alone, and we all have something interesting to contribute to the human conversation.

One response so far

Fuel Efficiency and Mileage Based Taxes

Feb 23 2009 Published by Turk under Craziness, Government, Taxes, Technology

An interesting artice in the WaPo caught my eye this morning. The headline “LaHood talks of Mileage-Based Tax” made me wonder if they were actually suggesting a tax per mile you drive. As it turns out, they were. But oddly, that’s not the interesting part of the story.

In the interview, he also ruled out raising the gas tax, the primary source of transportation funding…

Revenue from gas taxes is becoming problematic as cash-strapped Americans drive less and buy more fuel-efficient cars, leaving the government with a growing hole in funds to pay for the nation’s aging highway system.

Until recently, the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax had been a steady and growing pot of revenue. Over the past half-century, it has paid for the interstate highway system, which has crisscrossed the nation with asphalt, and since 1982, it has been kicking in for transit needs…

The current system also assumes that Americans will drive more every year. And for many years that was true, with miles traveled increasing about 3 percent a year, Basso said. But when gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon last year, people began driving less. According to AAA, Americans drove 107.9 billion fewer miles in 2008 than in 2007.

Apparently, that combined with advances in fuel efficiency have led to declining revenue for transportation projects – an unintended consequence of greening our automobiles.

In what may be the shortest flight ever of a trial balloon, the government immediately shot down the idea of the mileage tax. However, there have already been pilot projects to test the idea.

As an Oregon DOT spokesman said, “[G]as-powered vehicles are going away. When that point comes, how do you collect money for your transportation system if your revenues are based on gasoline?”

Only in the final two paragraphs do they even raise the privacy concerns about this – namely the government tracking the movement of its citizens.

I suspect that the police – now aware of the lengthy record of your travels – would demand access to the data to track the movement of suspects (or “people of interest” or… well, you get it.

It is frightening to think of the implications. But it is interesting to see that while the previous administration wanted to violate our freedom for the purpose of homeland security, this one may do it just for the tax revenue.

2 responses so far

More on Lost and Improbability

Feb 19 2009 Published by Turk under Pop Culture, Programming, Television

If you haven’t yet seen the episode of Lost that just aired, you may want to stop reading right now, and come back later. Go ahead… This post will still be here when you’re done…

For the rest of you, you should digest my post from earlier today about Lost and the Infinite Improbability drive if you haven’t. I’m now more convinced than ever that improbability has a lot to do with the show. This post will expand on that earlier thought.

If you believe that the island could be a place where thoughts become reality and the improbable becomes certainty, this episode had a lot to offer.

As an example, Ms. Hawking talks about the Lighthouse station as a tool to determine “the probability” of where the island will be. So probability plays a significant role in determining the location of the island.

During the flight, Jack talks with Kate about the improbaility of Hurley and Sayid being on the same plane by coincidence.

What are the odds that Sayid would be cuffed to a law enforcement officer – the same way Kate was when the plane first crashed?

Who told Hurley to take the guitar on the plane (as Charlie did when they first crashed)?

How improbable was it that Jack would go visit his grandfather and find the pair of shoes belonging to his dad?

Finally, there’s the note. As Jack said, he kept trying to get rid of it, yet it kept returning – highly improbable to be sure. What was absolutely certain to happen, however, was Jack’s reaction to the note.

Locke knew that Jack, reading a note that said, “I wish you had believed me” would immediately think to himself “I wish I had too.”

Under the hybrid zero-point/improbability theory, that wish, in proximity to the island, would immediately be granted – though again, not in the way they expected.

No responses yet

Lost And The Infinite Improbability Drive

Feb 18 2009 Published by Turk under Craziness, Programming, Television

Anyone who knows me will eventually get the question, “Do you watch Lost?” Sadly it has become my barometer for coolness. If you are still watching, you clearly have a penchant for the strange. That is, you are cool.

I, like others still tuned in week after week, are searching disparately for something to make sense of the show, and I have finally found a theory (or possibly a pair of complementary theories) that make sense of the show.

Oddly, the theory starts with my former barometer of cool – whether you have read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which despite the term trilogy now runs to five novels now with a sixth reportedly due later this year.)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide featured a spaceship called the Heart of Gold. The Heart of Gold operated on the Infinite Improbability Drive. The second book in the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, describes it this way:

The Heart of Gold’s Improbability Drive made it the most powerful and unpredictable ship in existence. There was nothing it couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would ever happen.

When the improbability drive is operating, the spaceship passes through space based on the odds against something happening. As two of the books characters are drifting unprotected through open space, at the last moment before they die, the spaceship Heart of Gold picks them up. The odds against them being saved and the improbability field around the ship pass the same point of improbability and the two are rescued.

So what does this have to do with Lost? Well, the idea of the island as some sort of improbability field occurred to me as I was reading Doc Jensen’s theory of Lost and zero point energy.

There’s a whole bunch of Men of Faith ‚Äî fringe thinkers, mostly ‚Äî who believe that zero point energy is like magic. It can be mentally directed to make stuff happen (a.k.a. mind over matter), or even grant a kind of omniscience that could allow a person to experience past, present, and future all at once…

Remember the scene in this season’s second episode in which Neil (a.k.a. Frogurt) died? Now, I am convinced that this scene is actually a coded message pointing toward zero point theory. The scene begins with Miles Straume hauling in a dead boar. Then, Neil starts yelling at Sawyer for calling him Frogurt, emphatically reminding us that his name is Neil. Now, earlier in the episode, Neil carried on about the utter pointlessness of their survival struggle. Why work so hard to build a new camp or start a fire if the time flashes will basically take it all away? His cynical consternation reaches a crescendo in his death scene, when Neil rants about their inability to produce simple, conventional energy (”We have no fire!”) before getting killed by a flaming arrow of irony.

I actually saw that differently. I don’t see that as a flaming arrow of irony, I see it as a flaming arrow of improbability. As Neil is ranting about the absence of fire, the combination of zero point energy and improbability come together to provide fire, but not in the way Neil would like.

For other examples, you don’t need to look very far. In last week’s episode, Locke and the crew arrive at the Orchid station. Juliette says, ‘What are the odds this thing would be here at this time?’ A time shift immediately erases the station.

In season one, Walt is reading a comic book featuring attacking polar bears, and the crew walking to the radio tower the next day is attacked by a rampaging polar bear.

How about the odds the heroine addicted Charlie would stumble upon a heroine laden plane?

And don’t even get me started on the long odds against winning the lottery and Hurley’s connection to the numbers.

Could zero point energy and improbability create a field where whatever you thought, no matter how improbable, could blink into existence?

The theory isn’t without precedence in science fiction.

In his 1936 story Evolution, John Campbell described the Probability Time Wave:

“Their PTW tube caught and displayed every possibility that was ever to exist. And somewhere in that vast sweep of probability, every possible thing existed. Somewhere, the wildest dream of the wildest optimist was, and became fact.”

So what if the island is essentially a focal point for energy and improbability? It would certainly explain a lot of the oddities surrounding the island.

Jack’s unresolved feelings for dad? Bing! Christian Shepherd starts walking around the island. Michael wants to get his boy off the island? Done! He just needs to screw his friends first. The island is providing everything people want, but doing it with strings. You want fire? Ok! But it’s going to kill you.

Now this theory may cover the “funtional” aspects of the island, but it does not even begin to address questions about the storyline of Lost. However, I expect improbability to play an important part in the answer.

No responses yet

A Critique of NRO’s Top 25 Conservative Movies

Feb 18 2009 Published by Turk under Conservatism, Movie Reviews, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture

A friend and colleague pointed out this list of the “Top 25 Conservative Movies” as determined by the National Review. I enjoyed his take on several of them.

Forrest Gump is “an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s.” Uh, yeah. You know the character is mentally retarded, right?

I have to agree with his general assessment that by these standards liberals hate everything about America and its values. But looking deeper, there’s something much more troubling about the list – the fact that most of these reviews gloss over significant flaw with their own argument.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m committed to the concept of small government, fiscally responsible conservatism. I’m not an adherent to social conservatism (whether by big government or small) because social conservatism is all about telling you how to live your life. I consider that antithetical to small government conservatism.

I’m also a huge film buff, and don’t appreciate the people who try to look for hidden political agendas in film. We get it. Liberals are in charge of Hollywood. That doesn’t mean they accidentally make pro-conservative values movies.

So let’s look at a few of the NRO choices from a different perspective:

  • 24. Team America: World Police – There’s really nothing I can say that Parker and Stone haven’t about this. Yes, the movie is brilliant in its satirical depiction of the American left. Anderson’s synopsis, however, glosses over what the creators have said – that just as dangerous as liberal philosophy is that “overzealous” defense of America. The movie clearly regards those “defenders of freedom” as inept and likely to cause as much or more damage to the world they’re trying to save. The movie actually makes a broad point about the happy middle, and should be regarded as the #1 Movie for Moderates.
  • 20. Gattaca – Contrary to the Wesley Smith’s take on the movie, Hawke’s inability to become an astronaut is not due to lack of “enhancement” it’s due to his congenital heart defect – a defect which could have been ‘fixed’, not ‘enhanced’ genetically. The “calamitous results” described are not caused by his theft of Jude Law’s genetic identity, they’re caused by his lies and decption. To hear Smith tell it, though, we should cease all medical advancement and rejoice in disease and deformity. To me, that’s not a conservative ideology.
  • 16. Master and Commander – Underlying quite a few of the pics on this list is something almost diametrically opposed to Smith’s Gattaca review – a sense that everyone should know their place, and not aspire beyond it. We’ll see that again in “Blast from the Past” (more in a bit), but it’s best summed up by John J. Miller’s use of a New York Times quote. “It imagines the [H.M.S.] Surprise as a coherent society in which stability is underwritten by custom and every man knows his duty and his place.” Since when is “knowing your place” a conservative principle?
  • 12. Batman: The Dark Knight – this review seems to be justification for violating constitutional rights of the innocent citizen in pursuit of safety. “Batman has to devise new means of surveillance, push the limits of the law, and accept the hatred of the press and public.” Andrew Klavan goes on to explain that the things we liked in Batman we hated in GWB. True enough. I don’t mind a ficititious character eavesdropping on fictitious citizens of Gotham. I surely do mind them listening to my conversations in a nation protected (at least theoretically) by the constitution. Since when did conservatisim entail ignoring the document that specifically spells out our freedoms? If we ignore that, then the freedom we’re defending is an empty myth.
  • 9. Blast From The Past – Clearly the message here is the 1950s were a wondeful time, women should just be happy being housewives, and should spend most of their time self-medicating with champagne cocktails the way Sissy Spacek does. James Bowman needs to rewatch that movie sometime. Spacek is miserable being “trapped” in that life. She’s drunk throughout the movie and yearns to be free to wander and experience, but is literally locked into childcare by the man that seals her in her living tomb. Yet Bowman holds her up as the model of the idyllic woman’s life. My very conservative wife would take issue with that.
  • 7. The Pursuit of Happyness – This may arguably be only one of two movies on the list that I would include in my own Top 25 conservative films. However, I don’t think that drive, determination, pride, and an overwhelming desire to provide for your children are uniquely conservative. I have a lot of liberal friends that want to get ahead without handouts and provide for their kids. They work damn hard and also identify with this movie.
  • 6. Groundhog Day – As Paul said when we discussed this list, Bill Murray’s problem wasn’t that we was pursuing the fads of modernity. His problem was he was a jackass living only for himself. He was forced to relive the same day over and over until he learned that there was a world beyond himself and that he needed to be an active participant in it. If anything, I would list this movie as one of the Top 10 liberal movies of all time. It’s clear message is to deny oneself for the common good or you’ll be fated to an unsatisfying life.
  • 5. 300 – I’m not even sure that Michael Poliakoff and I watched the same movie. This is more a story about a vastly outgunned group of insurgents defending their home against foreign invaders intent on toppling their leaders. Keep in mind that the people of Sparta were also not exactly adherents to democracy – estimates are 80% of the population of Sparta were slaves. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we were the invading force. In both cases we told their populations, the world, and ourselves that we were doing it for their benefit. Xerxes would likely have said the same.
  • 2. The Incredibles – This would be the other of the two films I think may actually belong on this list. There is a clear message that being a standout in society is frowned upon. There is a clear message that overly litigious trial lawyers are ruining the world. There is a specific sense that homogeneity is bad. However, there is also the same recurring theme that being “supers” is a protected class and only those born to it can belong. Syndrome’s sin is that he aspires to greater than his station. He’s not content being a deckhand on Mr. Incredible’s HMS Surprise. This just reinforces the recurring elitist theme on this list – just be happy with your lot in life.

Now maybe I’m a film fan first, and a political junkie second. I think that may flavor my perception of this list. However, I think the NRO list reinforces the stereotype of conservatives as elitists who believe the 1950s were some sort of panacea; that women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen; and achievement is something you should be born into, not something you aspire to.

It’s kind of surprising that this list would perpetuate those stereotypes since their antithesis, in the form of Sarah Palin, got such high marks from NRO.

No responses yet

Older posts »