And another thing . . . If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam? (Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.) And he's got a 10mbps cable modem connection, while I'm out here in the boonies with glitchy dial up over a barbed wire and boogers telco system. It's a good thing that sites like Salon are mostly crap since I'm not missing anything by avoiding them....

An earlier post, Liberal Myths, investigated the idea of a liberal arts education, a generalist ability to think with some clarity and learn continually as life requires. It applied some of Timothy Burke's thoughts on the subject to a particularly bad NYT article. The article was so bad, such a good example of bankrupt journalism, that another post, Myth Makers referenced it too. But there's still more defects in the article which Branden Berg reveals. Back in January, I questioned Mark Bittman's claim in the NYT that Americans consume on average 200 pounds of meat per year. I've found data from the USDA on loss-adjusted food availability--that is, edible parts actually available for consumption and not known to have spoiled or otherwise been wasted. . . Total loss-adjusted weight (after adjusting for consumer-level losses) is 83g/52g/14g, or about 120 pounds per year. . . Of the 2680 loss-adjusted calories available per capita for consumption each day, only 375, or...

Tyler points to Saletan on science. Researchers are breeding mutant cows that make low-fat milk. After a farm accidentally produced the first such cow, milk-company researchers "bought her from her owner for $300 … and moved her to a secret location for further testing." Then they bred offspring that carry the trait. The milk is 1 percent fat instead of 3.5 percent, and it has omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for your heart. The next step is to identify how the gene causes the milk so this pathway can be directly engineered. Milk-company spin: It's natural! Cynical view: It's the "accidental" product of constant breeding, and now we're going to engineer it worldwide. All milk has omega-3 fatty acids, but the percentage and balance with omega-6 fats varies depending on the cow's diet as well as genetics. A grass diet yields milk that is much higher in omega-3 than does a grain diet. The amount of total fat...

One of my pet peeves is ignorant journalists. When utter nonsense is expressed with some competence and polish it is more offensive than if it had been brayed in gutter patois. IN A conversation today, someone averred that several characters in the book we were discussing had failed in a fundamental way because they had failed to be true to themselves; their other flaws were simply manifestations of that basic rift. By looking to the outside for validation, they had set themselves up for tragedy. It's a common sentiment. But is it right? On the one hand you know yourself best. But as James Surowiecki ably demonstrated in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, the collective judgement of the group is more likely to be correct than a single opinion. This provides an evolutionary explanation for why human beings are herd animals. Humans are not herd animals, we are pack animals. Failing to know and make the distinction is...

Tyler me-too's Nick's praise of Jonathan Rauch. In a world in which political discourse tends to veer from insane overstatement (think Ann Coulter) to plodding conventionalism (David Broder) to barely disguised partisanship (Paul Krugman), Rauch's independence of thought is incredibly rare. Whatever the topic, he consistently engages (and typically dismantles) the conventional wisdom. For example: The Convenient Truth [C]limate change is real and deserves action, but that the problem is nowhere near as overwhelming as the rhetoric commonly suggests, and the solutions nowhere near as difficult. As problems go, in fact, climate change appears to be one of the most convenient that humankind has ever faced. . . The convenient truth about global warming, then, is that radicalism is as pointless as it is impractical. Slow-but-steady is not only the easiest approach; it is also the most effective. Just as conveniently, the most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon...

The Hollywood version of the American southwest after the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier - and much earlier in Texas - is of rough, vigilante justice meted out by flawed heroes. The truly bad were tracked down and summarily dispatched with a minimum of fuss or passion. All in a day's work. There's some truth in that but it was as likely to be solid citizens as flawed heroes who did the deeds. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. That's one of the reasons that Bush was applauded for his initial handling of the event. I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11....

Like many blogs the Institute for the Future's Future Now does "links posts", short lists of pointers to other pages worth noting but not commenting about. A recent one was to a short essay by Hari Kunzru, Futurecasting, from a few years ago. I remembered having posted about it a couple of years ago, so I read my own old post. That post was critical of the failures of "the old hippies" at GBN and the whole concept of scenarios as useful planning tools - the Art of Long View and the whole Peter Schwartz "remarkable people" concept. Instead it spoke of a “Science of the Long View” which elevated futurism above pure speculation by adding a requirement that scenarios and models be testable. It's worth noting now that Kunzru also faulted Schwartz for sliding over to the dark side. . . . in writing The Long Boom, Peter Schwartz has crossed the line from disinterested futurism to political...

A pair of posts by Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek highlight one of the difficulties of public debates about important issues: figures lie and liars figure. In The impact of immigration Roberts takes apart an NYT article. There's nothing in the graphic that questions whether these numbers are accurate. They're presented as facts ("Reduced Wages") with no disclaimers about the statistical techniques or assumptions that went into them. Borjas is quoted in the article but no skeptic is quoted about whether these estimates are reliable. The numbers are about the impact of legal and illegal immigrants even though the article is about illegals, a smaller group. And there's nothing about the impact on the immigrants themselves from coming to America relative to the country they've left behind. But what's really misleading and bizarre about the chart is that there's no visual benchmark for these decreases. Your eye can see that 5.0 is almost twice 3.1. But is 5% a...

Small Dead Animals perhaps the time has come to send sports reporters to war zones. It seems to be one of the last refuges of journalism in which a) reporters have basic knowledge of the subject matter they're assigned to, and b) they're expected to report the details and outcome of the race, even if a contestant is injured or dies during competition. It's astonishing that the same country that still celebrates the envelope pushing performances (and near-death experiences) of the "Crazy Canucks" downhill ski team, hasn't figured out that covering a war in the context of body counts is the sports journalism equivalent of limiting Olympic coverage to the daily injury reports of the various countries in competition. You must read the rest of the post to fully grasp this insight....

Lots of Google bashing lately. Most of it is bog standard enmity toward BIG, the dingbats even liken Google to Microsoft and Wal-Mart in a sort of guilt by association ruse since they are all, well, BIG. The wing nuts have been nibbling Google for some time now to little effect but the opening of a Google portal in China, which was then subject to PRC regulation, has provided a new wedge for the wing nuts to hammer. There's also a not-entirely-bogus counterargument, that Chinese citizens with access to a censored Google are still more powerful, relative to their government, than Chinese citizens with no Google at all. Though this claim seems a bit, er, convenient, it may still have a grain of truth to it. The experience of empowerment that the Internet provides seems to affect people in ways that go beyond specific issues, and make them less tolerant of bossiness elsewhere; the more Chinese surf the Web,...

I have jaded tastes, a contrarian's eye for the obscure and unusual, and little patience with hustlers, grifters or fan-boys. "Popular" is an insult, usually a badge of mediocrity, and in those few instances when this isn't so, it isn't the most interesting attribute of whatever is popular. So naturally I have little use for popular blogs, the ones that are famous for being famous. I've read them, they're sort of unavoidable, but I always go away with the sense of having gone nowhere, seen nothing and done nothing. When a group of them decided to do a joint effort of some sort it barely registered. So what? Will a group of bland bloggers be more or less bland than the individual blogs of the members? Who cares? I was wrong. There is something interesting about the project. It has been a resounding bust and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, blood on the tracks, but not...

One of my disappointments with the net is the proliferation of politicized pseudo-science sites. They have the same relationship to science that economic think-tanks have to economic policy. In each case they are advocacy organizations that use the concepts and language of a discipline to promote a purely political agenda. They are rife with sins of commission and omission, especially the tried and true techniques of selective use of data, selective citation and quotation, and biased exaggeration. One of the sites I've criticized for this before is SciDevNet and the editor David Dickson. The site claims: The overall aim of the Science and Development Network (SciDev.Net) is to enhance the provision of reliable and authoritative information on science- and technology-related issues that impact on the economic and social development of developing countries. But it never delivers as promised. Instead it provides unreliable information selected to advance a political agenda. A previous post, Hedonic Materiality, criticized Dickson for this intellectual...

The foolishness of opposing GM food and fiber crops from an environmental perspective as well as a human health perspective has been pointed out in many previous posts. The list of benefits is long, everything from reduction of wilderness converted to cropland, to reduced use of toxic chemicals. In each case both the environment and humans, especially agricultural workers and rural residents, benefit. So, why do environmental posers work themselves into fits about GM? Some apologists claim that their motives aren't environmental so much as anti-capitalist. They oppose companies such as Monsanto or industrial agriculture. Their misdirected and ineffective opposition fails to consider that GM crops can and are being developed by many suppliers, not just large agribusiness companies, and the benefits accrue to even the smallest farmers, perhaps even disproportionately benefitting them compared to large factory farms. Other apologists claim that the role of environmental groups is to be negative, not positive. They exist to find fault. Environmental...

One of the factors contributing to the demise of the environmental movement is junk journalism, close kin of junk science. It is part of the sad state of journalism in general and related to the intellectual and ethical poverty of journalism in political matters. The environmental movement isn't about the environment, it's about politics, so this isn't surprising. For example, consider this interview of junk journalist Michael Pollan, unfortunately Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley so his disease is being transmitted to a new generation. [via The Poser] It appears I have a kind of corn obsession. I'm like that character in Middlemarch, Professor Causabon, who thought he had the key to the universe, the key to all mythologies. In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain... If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it – and what we eat is mostly carbon – comes from...

A point made in the previous post Bad Idea deserves emphasis. The New Deal socialism lite trend reversed in the 70s and 80s. During that era those who lacked scope and scale in their vision and analysis of society, who drive looking in the rear view mirror more than through the wind screen, saw only the extremes, the noisy surface of society, and concluded that the US was following Europe down the path to a centralized, stratified, authoritarian society fragmented into economic, social, racial, ethnic and gender interest groups who all looked to government to manage tensions between them and provide treats for the faithful, and in which there was not just a separation of church and state but a separation of church and society, where religious people were shamed and encouraged to practice their perversions in the closet. That isn't what happened because Americans didn't want that kind of society. What they saw was a world sinking into...

In the comments of the earlier post Compared to What? there was some discussion of the futility of attempting to draw conclusions about world events, such as the war in Iraq, from press reports. In a new post Timothy Burke, a key participant in that earlier discussion, has more to say. He develops an analogy using the firing of a sports team manager to demonstrate the Knowledge Problem, and then attempts to apply it to more serious issues. I’m going on at length about this because it seems to me this is how a lot of what we know comes into being. There is really very little we know from direct or eyewitness experience. Nor is it clear that being a direct participant yields information or knowledge that absolutely trumps all other kinds of knowledge. We know very well from recent research, for example, that witnesses to crimes frequently get some very basic details of their experience wrong. Eyewitnessing...