The Bad News Is That Good News Isn’t Free
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 7, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Rupert Murdoch wants his two dollars, and my hometown newspaper is better off dead.
Rupert Murdoch’s plan to start charging for online news is an interesting test of the theories laid out in the recent bestseller Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Remembering Hiroshima
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 6, 2009 by admin in Politics
As far as I’m concerned, the only good thing that came out of World War II was the 80′s song Enola Gay by OMD.
 The Bikini Atoll Test |
Albert Einstein, whose letters to FDR are credited with inspiring the race to build an atomic bomb, later said “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, upon seeing the results of the Trinity Test, said “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds“, quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Ken Bainbridge, the test director on the project, is quoted as saying “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” None of this stopped the actual dropping of the bomb on August 6, 1945. And scientist and Truman advisor Karl T. Compton’s 1946 Atlantic article If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used – while a realistic assessment – probably did little to absolve any of these men of their guilt and remorse in the coming years. I’m just glad a generation has been able to grow up without the ever-present threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, a concept that definitely drained my enthusiasm for living until my mid-twenties. We live in a much hipper era now, one in which we can play games to pick our own apocalypse, and in which the Mayor of Hiroshima can call for support of an ‘Obamajority’ that believes in nuclear-free world. Until that day comes – if it ever does – I think we owe it to ourselves to keep fresh an awareness of the horrifying devastation of nuclear war. Boston.com has a compelling photo collection documenting the bombing of Hiroshima, and the widget below lets you pick a city and see what affect various nuclear weapons will Read the rest of this entry »
What Are The Odds?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 5, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Although 72.3% of all statistics mentioned in casual conversation are inaccurate, I’d say the odds of you commenting on this are less than 1 in 30,000.
I’ve always said that 72.3% of all statistics mentioned in casual conversation are inaccurate. I’ve also always felt that paying attention to statistics is silly, because in spite of all the sophisticated math, there’s no way to tell when and where that 1 in 10 million chance of being attacked by a shark will occur. For instance, In 1985 NASA estimated that the probability of an accident occurring with the space shuttle was 1 in 100,000. But the 25th shuttle launch exploded after take-off, and the 113rd mission exploded on re-entry. Does that mean the next 198,998 missions will be accident-free? I just wasted an hour of my life at NationMaster.com, which has an amazing array of facts and statistics, and cross-references them in a way that I’d say creates a 33.3% chance that you’ll spend at least ten minutes on the site. Like, did you know that Russia has almost twice as many judges and magistrates as the United States, while the United States has 8 times as much crime? Or that America has the most McDonalds restaurants per capita, AND the highest number of obesity-related deaths? Coincidence? You decide. The NSC has some dry but interesting stats too. It’s hard to Read the rest of this entry »
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part II
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 4, 2009 by admin in Music
Well, since your music probably sucks, you might as well plan on getting naked.
 If you play your cards right, you could end up as happily successful as this fellow! |
If you really have an interest in succeeding in pop music, there’s one way to avoid having to do many of the things we’ll suggest in this piece: be an absolutely f***ing brilliant songwriter with solid musicians to play your broadly accessible music. Then some top-notch management will find you, and your only battle after that will be not getting screwed by all the deals you’ll be offered. Since you almost certainly don’t have that particular set of attributes in your possession, ask yourself a few more questions about why you’re seeking to promote your music: Do you want to make a living at it? Are you convinced for some reason the world just needs to be exposed to your genius? Do you think you might have some reasonably marketable music, and wouldn’t mind getting paid for it? Have you been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard again? The fact is that even the established music industry has one of the highest failure rates of almost any business, and you’ll be entering one of the “noisiest” markets on the planet, alas, with a “naked” product. For some interesting thoughts about the new marketplace, check out Digital Music Can’t Be Marketed, which points out that you can’t really package and Read the rest of this entry »
Feeling Down? Think Positive!
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 3, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
But research suggests you may be wasting your time. Maybe you should just go shopping.
Probably one of the dumbest things you can say to someone when they’re unhappy is “Cheer Up!”. So why would we think it would work on ourselves? It only takes a little common sense to realize that the reason Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character was so funny, or that Demotivator posters became so popular, is that we instinctively know that telling ourselves to feel good isn’t necessarily going to make it so. In spite of millions of copies of books like The Power of Positive Thinking
