Blayne Sucks

I bought an iPod Mini several years ago. Like many iPod owners, I was simply blown away. As a skeptical purchaser of anything, I rarely pay attention to the hype surrounding products, but it was hard to find any review of an iPod that didn’t smack of the typical hype-talk surrounding new technologies. After buying one, I knew why. It really is quite simply the perfect thing. It has achieved immortality as a cultural icon of its time and deservedly so.

Steven Levy’s book The Perfect Thing is an account of how the iPod came to be ubiquitous. I actually read this book a couple months ago over spring break, but didn’t have time to blog about it then. However, this book is too good not to mention and recommend.

I originally heard about it on a podcast interview with Steven Levy. I was already interested in reading it because I had previously read Crypto and found it to be fantastic. However, one part of the interview really sold me on reading The Perfect Thing. They were talking about the organization of the book. One the things that defined the iPod was its shuffle feature. Steven Levy decided that he wanted to build this into the book in some way. Thus, the chapters in the book are ’shuffled.’ Thus, if you go to a bookstore and pick up two copies, the chapters will be in different orders. It’s really quite fun to flip through different versions just for the novelty.

The book is similar to Crypto in that both of them involve a lot of very colorful people doing groundbreaking things. The excitement of the time is conveyed palpably. There are few business ventures and technologies that become as successful as rapidly as the iPod. Reading about these people, their excitement, their eccentricities, and ultimately their success was greatly enjoyable and made for a wonderful vacation book. If you are a technologist, a business nut, a music lover, or simply looking for something fun to read, I really encourage you to pick up a copy from the bookstore or the library.

Despite all the preparations, it appears that the Dallas bid won the right to host the 2011 Superbowl. Although, I understand that there is a strong football tradition in Dallas and in Texas in general, I don’t think that a football tradition really matters much when it comes to the Superbowl, which is less and less about football and more and more about parties, media days, and advertising. The bottom line is that the NFL’s decision was based entirely on money and had virtually nothing to do with football, which truly bothers me as a fan.

Though, perhaps I should also be upset with the media. They lambasted the NFL’s decision to reward smaller markets like Jacksonville and northern markets like Detroit who have recently hosted Superbowls. Today on ESPN’s FirstTake, Skip Bayless claimed that the Superbowl should be a ‘reward’ for the players and said that as such it should be played in San Diego, Miami, New Orleans, or Honolulu.

Personally, I think that’s what the Pro Bowl is for and that the Superbowl should be a reward for the fans. Maybe I’m just biased since I’m not a part of the media elite that gets to go to the Superbowl every year. As a reward for the fans, I think it is important to make it accessible to the fans. This should mean that it goes to new cities as often as it has been over the last several years. Of course, Dallas has never hosted a Superbowl, so I can’t really be too upset on this criteria.

However, the one thing that really bothers me is that smaller markets have a lot of trouble building stadiums that can compete with larger markets. For example, the new Lucas Oil Stadium will cost $675 million and would be able to seat roughly 70,000 for a Superbowl. However, the new Dallas Stadium is now estimated to cost $1 billion and will be expandable to roughly 100,000 seats for a Superbowl. That’s 30,000 more seats at 500-1,000 bucks per occupant. This sort of disparity makes it very difficult for a smaller markets to build new stadiums. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Indy would never have been financially able to build this stadium without their pull in hosting NCAA Final Fours.

This is seriously detrimental to the league as a whole. Although the NFL can adopt revenue-sharing policies, it is almost certainly impossible to properly compensate the NFL cities for the lost revenue from a Superbowl. This revenue is commonly used in discussions as to how a city can help pay for a new stadium. Over the course of that one weekend, millions of dollars would flow through the city.

Every time a small market tries to build a stadium and uses the promise of hosting a Superbowl, but then fails to deliver on that promise the chances of that team’s owner pushing for a move to a larger media market increase. While this might make good business sense, it is devastating to the fans. Anyone from Indy or Baltimore should be particularly aware of just how possible this reality is, particularly with Los Angeles in the perpetual hunt for an NFL franchise.

Overall though, the NFL has done well in the past with regard to these decisions, but it remains to be seen how the small market – large market battle plays out under Goodell. Houston, Jacksonville, Detroit and Arizona have all built new stadiums and been able to host a Superbowl within a decade after building them. Kansas City and Indianapolis are the two small market teams hoping to host a Superbowl in their new stadiums in the coming decade, but I think it’s safe to say that as their stadiums get older it will be harder and harder for them to win the bid. The next four years will see Arizona (1st), Tampa Bay (4th), Miami (9th), and Dallas (1st) host the Superbowl. There are certainly those who want to see the interests of the small market protected, but I think the reality is (ironically) best stated in an article from the Dallas Morning News, which said:

But is there enough support from the small markets to deny North Texas? The winning bid requires 75 percent of the vote. After two ballots, the low vote-getter is eliminated. After three ballots, a fourth ballot would require just a simple majority.

There are 32 votes. Most of the NFL owners are successful businessmen. When money talks, they listen – and no one in the NFL talks money better than Jerry Jones.

As a JFK assassination buff, I have read several long books about the JFK assassination. However, there is a new book out there that I seriously doubt I will read. This 1632 page long addition to the mass of JFK assassination books is called Reclaiming History and brought to you by the author of Helter Skelter. The New York Times book review is a hilarious account of how long the book is.

The reviewer of the book mentions that some of the length comes from the over-the-top coverage of the topic, which he claims is required because of the fact that the public wasn’t satiated by the Warren Commission report. As I mentioned in my last post, I simply don’t think more exacting coverage will help in this case. People can’t make things add up when something like this happens.

The reviewer also compares Oswald’s age to that of the Virginia Tech shooter, but I think there is also a comparison of the two tragedies in terms of acceptance. People try to find some way to balance the scales when something horrible happens. In the case of the Virginia Tech shooter, they look to blame the school administration, the gun shop, gun control legislation, violent video games, or whatever else comes to mind. Bruce Schneier sort of mentions how silly this blame game is in his latest article on Wired.

The bottom line is that in life, there are things that don’t add up. Humans aren’t good at dealing with incredibly rare or seemingly impossible realities. There’s a similar argument made for randomness. Steven Levy covered this well with respect to the iPod and it’s shuffle feature. Being able to take a step back from things and understand that the human reaction you might have to something like the JFK assassination is important to being able to accept it.

There’s a new analysis that made some news on MSNBC. Basically, there’s a former FBI metallurgist and a couple of Texas A&M researchers who think that the bullet fragments deserve more analysis with newer techniques. Slashdot picked up the story and some of the comments are really amusing. I thought this was the most insightful.

Personally, I think stories like this will keep coming up as new techniques come along. The assassination just has spawned too much controversy for people to ignore new techniques that could have provided a clearer picture of the event in 1963. To me it just re-emphasizes the imbalance between a random ‘loser’ like Oswald and a king-like president like JFK. People want there to be something else to help explain how someone like Oswald could assassinate someone like JFK. People can’t understand the simple explanation and keep seeking a technological reason to explain away their confusion.

The story also made me realize that I never posted my comments about my trip to Dealey Plaza. My initial one-sentence impression of the Dealey Plaza was that it is much smaller and more eerie than I thought it would be. Dealey Plaza itself is no more than 2-3 city blocks large and at least half if not more than half of it is not what you would consider a part of the “crime scene.” Basically everything that happened was contained within a distance of about a single city block, probably less.

Another implication of the smallness of all of this is that I truly believe if Roger Clemens was standing in Oswald’s sniper nest he probably would have been able to seriously wound JFK simply by throwing a baseball at him. Hell, I could have probably hit him at least once with a baseball from there given a couple throws. The total distance involved amounts to not much at all. It just seems so much larger when all you see are sketches and drawings with perfectly straight sight lines, sweeping landscape shots or overhead maps of the parade route and plaza. It’s extremely hard to get an idea of the perspective of the place with just pictures.

I also mentioned the eerie feel of the place. This is also hard to capture. I can say things like “The buildings haven’t changed.” or “The plaza looks almost identical to what it did back in 1963.” or even “It would be easier to tell you the few things that have changed than to try and tell you what has not changed.” — All of which are true, but even knowing this didn’t prepare me for the feel of it. It’s just strange. It’s an itch in the back of your mind.

You can walk through the pedestrian crossing under the triple underpass and just get a feeling that this is the tunnel where Jackie would have seen the true extent of the damage to her husband’s head. Maybe that’s where she flipped his skull fragment hanging onto his scalp back up to cover what was left of his brain. You just don’t know, but it itches at your mind that something unnatural happened to someone here.

The place is surreal. If you are ever in Dallas and have an extra hour, go to Dealey Plaza and walk around. If you have two hours, get a ticket to the museum. The stuff on the walls isn’t really anything more than what you can get from a book, but you can go see the sniper’s nest and look down on the street from the window next to the one Oswald used. It gives you a truly unique perspective on the whole thing.

I recently finished reading Brave New Ballot this week. Truly, it is an excellent book. Although dealing with both technology and politics, which each have their own confusing vocabulary, the book comes across as extremely easy to read and understand. Also, at 304 pages, it is a quick read. I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered if their vote really matters.

One of the things that I took away from this book simply is that it is incredible how little attention has been paid to voting technology. As I was reading, it struck me how fundamental this problem is. I’m stunned at how little most people I knew were and are talking about it.

There are a two very important quotes that highlight this profoundly. The lead-in quote for chapter 10 is from Joseph Stalin who said, “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” I had previously run into another quote that I didn’t see in the book and was frankly surprised by it’s absence because it addresses the topic so well. Tom Stoppard said, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.”

It is inextricable that democracy depends on fair elections. I would highly encourage everyone with even a passing interest in politics to read this book. Also, for those who are interested in e-voting, this book is utterly essential. Finally, there are many, many resources available online about this topic, but I highly recommend this book as a starting place for those who are confused.

Somehow, I am not entirely surprised by the Teachers who Cheat article on SFGate.com. It’s a pretty obvious result from linking funding to standardized test scores, and similar things have been reported in the past. Any testing agency must be independent, and remain that way if they wish to continue to be a testing agency. If they have a stake in the results of the test, they are, by definition, a stakeholder.

It seems to me that No Child Left Behind has proven to be one of most disappointing educational programs in history. I am not an expert, but I have been through public schools and taken a standardized test or two. I have generally done well on them, but I have never felt as though the results really mattered all that much. Most of the well-known standardized tests I took only vaguely resembled the things they were trying to test.

Once a teacher has a stake in tests like these one of two things can result. A teacher can cheat, as was reported in this article, or a teacher can teach to the test. The first problem can be solved by not tying test performance to school funding. The second problem can be mitigated by removing the vast amount of standardized testing.

The point of standardized testing is generally to measure the level of education someone has at a point in time. Of course, most people only test things that have an unknown quality to them. Thus, the simple fact that there is more testing shows me that the American educational system has less knowledge about the quality of their students now than previously. I can only attribute this to a lack of trust in their educators.

Of course, I wouldn’t trust people to perform satisfactorily a job as difficult as education with the meager wages they receive in compensation. They are either desperately cutting corners, or really, really dedicated. If you are willing to spend all this money on more standardized testing, why not raise their wages and simply pony up the money the position deserves?

As posted on his blog, Robert Love has left Novell. This was something that was picked up in a highly speculative article on Slashdot and a similarly speculative Digg posting. A lot of the comments were about whether or not it was “fair” for Slashdot to take a speculative stance, but this is missing the bigger picture.

There’s a really great opportunity for Linux here. Robert Love is truly a great hacker and teacher. I think his book on Linux Kernel Development is an excellent resource. He’s going to be doing something somewhere and I bet it’s going to be very cool.

This is one of the impressive things about Open Source Software. It handles change amazingly well. Even if Cringely is right and the deal is simply meant to disrupt Linux, it is destined to fail. Mostly because great hackers would flee from such a thing instinctively.

It seems that every time a deal is made between Microsoft and a company with great hackers or with great hackers themselves, things fall apart rapidly and usually with the resignation of the hacker. For example, when Daniel Robbins went to work for Microsoft as an open source software guru, he ended up leaving rather shortly afterwards. Now we are hearing about Jeremy Allison and Robert Love resigning from Novell shortly after the announced deal with Microsoft. Truly, this is speculation on the level of Slashdot, but maybe it’s justified to some degree.

The cool part about this is to see what’s next for those folks. Great hackers rarely sit idling around doing nothing. They are control freaks that generally want to get their hands dirty and solve real problems. It will be very exciting to see what problems Robert Love addresses in the future.