The American Mind

Gee, I’ll be going to Wisconsin next week but will miss watching the qualifying for Miss Beer Cart. A competition featuring driving a golf cart through an obstacle course, mixing bloody marys, and other “talents”? Why can’t ABC put this on television instead of Wipeout?

I admit a subscription to Runner’s World doesn’t seem like a bad idea…and I don’t run.

“Palin Does Runner’s World Photo Shoot”

UPDATE: I suspect Runner’s World will have one of its best traffic days ever with the Palin photoshoot. And being a member of the “respectable” media, I suspect the magazine will never admit it.

Wikipedia is a treasure-trove of information. Being such a rich source is due to the many people writing and editing entries. Much credit is due them. However, there are some Wikipedia editors who need to grow up and understand their “information wants to be free” philosophy can have detrimental consequences.

For months while a NY Times reporter was held hostage in Afghanistan Wikipedia administrations played a cat-and-mouse game to keep the news of the kidnapping under wraps. An anonymous editor griped after the reporter escaped , “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.” In this case being factually right before David Rohde’s escape could have made his situation worse. It’s easy for a Wikipedia editor in Florida to scream about the free flow of information. They didn’t have anything at stake, unlike the NY Times and Rohde’s family.

“Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia“

Once Facebook makes status updates more easily public it will create even more incentive to maximize friend numbers and make one’s profile a more broadcast-like medium. If Facebook doesn’t make it easy to adjust privacy settings the possibility for an intimate collection of friends–Facebook’s foundation–will be diminished. Depending on how the company handles these new changes this could be Facebook’s most dramatic change yet.

“Facebook Takes Aim at Twitter: New Publisher Makes Public Status Updates Easy”

As I’m slowly entering the world of the Mac (but not giving up my Windows machines) I’ve already found it surprisingly easy to move my music from iTunes on my Windows desktop to my MacBook. I transfered the files with an external hard drive then simply dragged and dropped the music into iTunes. The Mac does all the hard work of organizing them nicely on my hard drive, finding the album art, and arranging them into the iTunes library.

Here’s an all-important question to any die hard Green Bay Packers fan: Who was the better quarter back: Bart Starr or Brett Favre? Starr has the titles while Favre has the numbers and the amazing plays.

For me, I go with Favre. A lot of what made the legendary teams Starr was on was coach Vince Lombardi. He had an uncanny ability to find talent and motivate them to play their best. With Farve you had to always watch, because you never knew what he’d pull off. Sure, he broke your heart, but he did things mere mortals shouldn’t be able to do on a football field.

Who’s your choice? And if you say, “Randy Wright” you’ll receive enteral mocking from me.

[via Cheesehead.tv]

While I think the role of Twitter in activating, informing, and energizing the world has been overblown, the democratization of online tools to launch cyber-attacks on governments deserves plenty of interest. Matthew Burton, who took part in distributed denial of service attacks on Iranian web servers, writes,

e can assume that from now on, something like this is going to happen every time a citizenry butts heads with its government. (If there was any doubt, the creator of the DoS tool made the code available on his site; the target sites can be easily modified.) It’d be silly to think that we could contain it by declaring it invalid. Still, we–the technopolitics community–need to consider the morality of this tactic, as our collective ability to spread the “Attack!” message is not inconsequential.

“On The Weaponization of the Collaborative Web” [via Danger Room]

It’s not that I don’t want an iPhone with more memory (up to 32 GB), faster downloads, and the ability to record video. I’d love it. It’s just that I bought my iPhone 3G in January, and according to Apple and AT&T I’d have to fork over up to $499 for an early upgrade. Sorry, Apple, I’ll be waiting for a while. Until when prices go down I’ll enjoy the soon-to-be-released iPhone 3.0 upgrade.

For an eCampaign angle imagine the real-time neighborhood canvassing and GOTV applications that can be built with the greater download speed, Google Map integration with apps, and push technology? If I were on a campaign next year I’d brainstorming possibilities and looking for quality iPhone developers.

“iPhone 3G Users to Pay $200 Premium for Early Upgrade to iPhone 3G S“

Auburn, NY got a famous visitor from a few thousand miles away. Gov. Sarah Palin came to Auburn to celebrate it’s famous resident, William Seward. It was he who arranged for Alaska to be bought from Russia.

The Associated Press reports 20,000 came to the New York state town to hear her speak.

Here’s a Flickr album from the day’s events. And Conservatives4Palin.com posted Palin’s remarks on YouTube.

“Palin Helps NY Town Celebrate Alaska Anniversary”

I guess people who play in softball leagues knew something the rest of us the rest of us didnt:

Researchers at Granada University in Spain have come across a discovery that will undoubtedly please athletes and sports enthusiasts - a pint of beer post-workout or match is better at rehydrating the human body than water.

Professor Manuel Garzon, a member of Granada’s medical faculty, made the finding after tests on 25 students over several months. Researchers believe that it is the sugars, salts, and bubbles in a beer that may help people absorb fluids more quickly.

“It’s Better To Drink Beer After Exercise Than Water” [via Steven Taylor]

Digg announced their attempt at making ads a more useful part of their social news site. Users will be able to digg or bury ads that appear in the news stream. The more diggs an ad gets the less the advertiser pays, but the more buries an ad gets increases the cost to the advertiser. Zee at TheNextWeb.com looks at the problems with this experiment:

Whilst both interesting and inspiring in many respects, Kevin Rose & Co must realise the blatant loopholes within the system. Aside from potential competitors burying ads, they’ll need to deal with Apple fan boys who’ll instinctively bury Microsoft ads, marketing agencies who will simply give up in frustration unable to create ads Digg users are satisfied with and all that aside, each ‘ad’ is likely to have to deal with the masses of typical Digg commentary slating every aspect of it and the company behind it.

Since my area of expertise is conservative online politics I’m not thrilled at this ad idea. Outside of Rep. Ron Paul’s devoted fans conservatives have had a hard time getting any traction on digg. If I had an ad budget I’d take a few chances on these digg ads. But I’d have little patience trying to grok the proper tone for digg’s audience when there are advertising alternatives like BlogAds, Facebook, and Google AdWords.

“Digg Gets More Diggable. Digg and Bury their Ads.” [via Techmeme]

Fred Siegel obviously isn’t a fan of H.G. Wells. He declares him the “Godfather of American Liberalism.” I wonder where Woodrow Wilson fits?

For centuries patience and rejecting instant gratification have been known as keys to success. Now, we have Joachim de Posada offering experimental proof.

Such virtue would help ease a lot of our current problems.

Courtney Cox’s latest show is disturbing:

But that’s what happens when decent shows like Dirt (guilty pleasure, I know) didn’t cut it in the ratings.

[via Parcbench]