I appreciate a clear un-ambiguous apology that leaves no wiggle room.

So – to repeat: the guys who did the demo of this are clearly not bozos; the only bozo in this situation is me, for screwing it up so badly, on so many levels. I sincerely apologize for calling them bozos and mocking them. I made a whole series of really stupid errors, and took an unreasonably long time to recognize that fact.

Good Math, Bad Math : The Real Bozo Attempts to Atone: Why the DDWFTW Car Works.

Um, isn’t gender one of the first boxes you complete on the form when documenting an animal?

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) — Puzzled zookeepers in northern Japan have discovered the reason why their attempts to mate two polar bears kept failing: Both are female.

Zoo solves mystery of celibate polar bears – CNN.com.

I’m totally unsure how to classify this headline.  The article is not a game review or some fan-boy slash.  Its actually talking about things that some government agents claim has happened.  So I’ll suspend judgement and just let you absorb the article as best you can

Mythical Female Snipers Stalk Russians

…

As the story had it, these stone-cold, blue eyed killers were said to be from the Baltics — or Ukraine. They were sometimes described as Olympic biathletes recruited as mercenary sharpshooters by Chechen commanders.

The Return of ‘White Tights’: Mythical Female Snipers Stalk Russians | Danger Room from Wired.com.

A great write up on the basic idea of how we use data and how those things change when the amount of data increases by a couple orders of magnitude.

If I were to convert the storage on my cellphone to floppy disks on my old Apple clone, it would require about 57,000 disks. That would be a stack of floppy disks almost 500 feet high.

…A gigabyte is a billion letters. What does that mean? We just don’t think about it.

Good Math, Bad Math : Scale: How Large Quantities of Information Change Everything.

A really splendid letter from an Eenigneer at Honda about why Honda works and what that says about how to be successful.  Makes me want to run out and start a business.  Please, take some time to read the whole thing.  Its well worth it.

Try and picture this. On my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table.

Letter to a Young Engineer from a purported Honda employee – Boing Boing Gadgets.

If you make political discourse sufficiently negative, more people will become cynical and stop paying attention. That leaves more space for special interests to pursue their agendas, and that’s how we end up with drug companies making drug policy, energy companies making energy policy, and multinationals making trade policy.

-Barack Obama

The New Yorker

From Douglas Rushkoff.  A spot on restatement of what we heard in Obama’s acceptance speech.

…we must take Obama at his word: the moment is now, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The election of Obama is itself a cue. It’s a cue that America can elect a smart, capable, and caring person as its leader. That we are capable of transcending the logic of short-term self-interest, fear, and even racism. And if we are capable of doing this, it means we are better than we act most of the time. This moment is the bang of the starter’s pistol – an awakening, an opportunity.

Douglas Rushkoff » President Obama.

Can’t think of a better one than the paragraph from Barack Obama’s speech last night that captured what I had been feeling.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there’s so much more to do. So tonight let us ask ourselves, if our children should live to see the next century, if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as [106 year old] Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

Today´s quote will take a little explanation. I am reading Freedom of Expression by Kembrew McLeod. It is a well reasoned treatise on the madness that is our current copyright law. As he is making the point about the history of culture and how it relies heavily on building from previous works he makes this observation about the family of Martin Luther King Jr and their quest to monetize the Reverend King´s legacy.

I’ll never forget the bolt of anger I felt when I first saw the Cingular cell-phone commercial that digitally doctored footage of King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech. As the camera pans across the Washington Mall, the entire crowd has been erased, and King is speaking to no one. “Before you can inspire,” went the voice-over, “you must first connect.” I’d like to connect my foot to whoever’s ass approved this commercial. It would be inspiring.

Exactly right.

Comes from the fine folks at PvP.

If you’re in the process of writing me an email asking me to keep my politics out of your ha-ha time, you can stop right now. I’m not going to read it. I don’t live in a vacuum. I write about what I know and what I feel in my heart. Normally, that’s about watching Ultraman as a kid and how awesome Patrick Stewart truly was as a casting choice for Charles Xavier. But every once in a while (it would seem 3 times so far in 10 years), my brain considers who might be the next President of the United States.

Amen brother!  If you live in the U.S. and haven’t voted already, make sure you do so tomorrow.

PvPonline » Archive » Politics and Comics.