1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates was a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

We can update this simple logical framework to prove that fame is totally awesome:

1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates was a man.
3. Oh! Women are mortal, too
4. Therefore Socrates (and women) are mortal
5. Except for Ray Kurzweil… he might not be, in a little while; if he tries hard enough.
6. But besides crazy people like Ray Kurzweil who’s probability for immortal survival is low–no! No probability! This is deduction.
7. No man has in the past not been mortal—OR a woman, or women—they’re all mortal too. Although is this still because Socrates was mortal?
8. Men and women, since they have been, have been mortal—with the exception of those around now, who we are waiting to decide upon.
9. AND women up until now; AND including kids in the near future whom we will keep an eye on. 9.1 The MEAN survival rate for mortal men and women… no, that’s probability. 9.2 Men and woman, as we know them by their regular descriptions, are mortal, as we have always seen to be the case.

10. Of course there might be a man who comes along, ambitious as Kurzweil when the technology is available, who might not be mostly mortal depending on the end of the universe. 10.1 But MOST men are mortal–AND women–and MOST of the time! 10.2 There might be more time from here on out then there has been, of course, so… 10.2 Technology does tend to get around this mortality business doesn’t it? 10.3 MOST men, MOST women, almost all HUMANS, are mortal until later; without technology, are mortal. 10.4 MOST HUMANS start out non-mortal and at some point… barring technology, surgery, medicine, other things humans invent; then they are mortal. 10.5 And then, of course, there’s that universe-has-got-to-end—entropy and all that—everybody’s got to be really, seriously be mortal. 10.6 The universe ends; doesn’t matter what you did. Boom. Mortal. Everybody since and you too. 10.7. DISCOUNTING the fact that some individuals, empowered by a, like, harnessed super-massive black hole; he or SHE could do something to trump even entropy, i.e. jet out of the known universe, but the probability—no, this is deduction—no room for probability. Everyone out of the super-massive blackholes! RIGHT now! Everybody out!

11. Everybody who was anybody has got to stop being anybody at some point.

12. Socrates was famous
13. All men and women at some point are famous (for a mean number of 15 minu—no!)
14. Therefore all men and woman will be famous
15. but only eventually at some point dead.
16. Well, that’s rubbish.
17. Ergo, ALL, no wait–MOST men, most of the time (and women)–most HUMANS, most of the time, are dead.
18. Therefore, most of humans are dead and not famous, most of the time. Q.E.D.

So there you have it. For the most part you will be dead and not famous. Get over it.

So, thanks for reading, and see you soon!

Aside from the obvious reasons to do this, there is merit in it. Video games now often outsell films on their first day of sale. For not only this reason, they have become significant culturally. If you want to truly understand a culture from a particular time period, look to their pulp fiction. Video games are the pulp fiction of our day and should be preserved by libraries for that value. Also, it would really be aw3s0m3.

Health Care is not a Gambit

Honorable Senator McConnell:

Health Care is absolutely the wrong issue for Republicans to stand against. The cynicism shown by Republican leadership–to frame the issue of health care as an opportunity to hurt President Obama, is both unpatriotic and a cruel attitude to take toward the thousands of honest working Americans losing their jobs and losing their benefits.

From your own press release you state:

‘Americans certainly don’t want us to throw together some patchwork plan that nobody’s had a chance to look at, and then rush it out the door the way the stimulus bill was—just so politicians in Washington can say they accomplished something’

This is disingenuous. The stimulus package did accomplish something. Thousands upon thousands of jobs were saved and not cut from state budgets because of the stimulus package. Numerous public institutions, like the University of Louisville, were able to avoid laying off hundreds of individuals because of money from the stimulus package. I have also seen new contracts surfacing in the private sector as well; friends that are contractors and architects who are finding new work because of money from the stimulus package. And finally, any reasonable economist has pointed out that the real effects of the plan will not be seen for still some time yet. It was good that the government acted quickly and avoided delay arising from nit-picking over idealistic nonsense.

Government is never 100% efficient, but it is often necessary that it be the lender of last resort. When the country is in dire straits, we need the government to act, not wait. Delaying a bill on Health Care does far more harm than good right now. Let’s not pretend that the plan cannot be amended or reformed in the future. Let’s not pretend that a perfect plan is going to come out of Congress (they never do). Instead, let’s get started on some work, some progress, knowing all the while that we can revisit the issue while refraining from letting people suffer without medical care in the meantime. Delay at this point is apathetic at best, sadistic at worst.

Sincerely,
Russell Warner
Louisville, Kentucky Citizen (with Health Care, thanks to the state of Kentucky!)

If you agree with the sentiments in this letter, I would ask you to do a couple of things. One, write your own senator. Two, sign the petition at barackobama.com. We need to put an initial plan in place. Fiddling with details (as we have been doing for the last twenty years) is not acceptable while so many are losing medical care for themselves and their family.

My favorite metaphor so far hails from Douglas Rushkoff at the Daily Beast. In his editorial he mentions that the current desktop regime that got its start in the late 70s and early 80s was a development akin to road-makers requiring new cars and car manufacturers requiring new roads. The hardware got faster, so the software got more bloated, so the hardware needed to be faster. On that point, I would have to agree. There’s no question in my mind that some software bloat is totally out-of-control as well as overpriced—so much so that I made a concerted effort to opt-out about a year ago. To this day, Adobe’s software is the only software on my Mac that regularly (and predictably) crashes and I can’t stand that I can’t find an alternative for Illustrator even when I’ve found a great alternative for Photoshop. However, I digress.

The software got more bloated and sloppy and especially-so among some camps but it didn’t have to. There was very little market pressure in the OS industry and that really just made for a feature-focused attitude (read: Vista), rather than a fine-tuning attitude. Snow Leopard (Apple’s latest Mac OS version) will actually decrease the memory footprint of the OS, as well as speed it up during wake up and shut down. So it’s not by necessity that software-makers let their software get bloated, it’s that the bloat stems from misplaced incentives. When your the dominant player in the market, the incentive is to use your economy-of-scale (read more coders) to out-pace the other guy in innovations and features, not clean house. Google won’t escape this incentive. People have already hinted that as the company as moved away from its core technological expertise (search!) the search results are not as good as they used to be.

But this positioning of Google Chrome as an OS, and it’s focus on the network, still overlooks the fact that people view their own media as valuable (and as property) and keeping all your photos on Flickr is not as good as sharing photos on Flickr while still having them in some file archive on a local machine. I would predict that’s never going to change.¹ However, I also don’t think that the netbooks that Google Chrome will most likely end up on are any different than iphones (with the exception of being much, much less slick)—they’re not anyone’s first and only computer–they’re certainly not going to become the hub of the media center in a household. And just like with the iPhone and iPod, the model that naturally evolves is a cloud-desktop hybrid. There are layers of privacy to these sorts of hybrids and as people become more and more aware of threats to their media, they will want more protection. That means that some stuff, meant for my eyes only, stays on my computer, in my vault, while other material (like my twitter messages) gets pretty much permanently embedded online.²

I think the metaphor that best suits what will happen because of the Google Chrome OS is not really much of a metaphor at all. It will be a component in an iTunes-like world. I have my music (without DRM now) all on a personal machine. I can back that up. Occasionally, I allow some of it to be streamed to others in my office. I can move it up to an online back-up resource or I can move it to my iPod. (I even occasionally—with the permission of the artist—host a file for Blip.fm.) It’s not all in the cloud. It’s not all on the desktop. It is however rarely on only one device.³ Google wants to run software through the browser and that makes some sense. I think it will force software developers to re-consider their design strategies and worry more about reliability and speed and be more tentative about new features (though I hope they learn how to come out of a beta phase). But I don’t think that will at all change the fact that people will run want to run programs offline. I see no point in an online version Illustrator where I create my art (in utero) entirely online. I don’t want anyone looking at my work in its middle stages. I will want to store things locally and only locally and I don’t think Google plans to stop them.

I think there must be a basic equation (and mine may not be it) spelled out something along the lines of:

Energy consumed + Energy output = Health

I think this deserves a little bit more thought, but I can see the parallels to economic concepts of utility and budget, where rather than talking of utility, we’re talking about health. The point is that there is solid balance available to us relating these three terms, and this is most easily explained through the example of my newly outfitted bike and also primitive human behavior. Back in the day we had to forage and hunt for food. I don’t think that the evolution of our physical bodies has changed much in the intervening 100,000 years (or so) and neither our metabolisms. Having to work to get food is pretty much how we’re built. And in that somewhat ideal evolutionary scenario it is a good thing that someone spend as much energy as it takes to get them the food that they need to get up the next day and find the food. ¹

The problem with going to the grocery store in your car is that you aren’t expending that much energy. And you are also polluting the environment that makes that food that your are buying. The shipping of the food to your grocery store is also polluting the environment that makes the food that you are buying. (And let’s note here that pollution, referred to as a negative externality by economists is not helping your health any.) This sort of recursive thinking goes on and on. And then, you didn’t grow the food, till the fields, pick the crop, etc. You didn’t expend any energy (proportionately) getting the food. But since you did get the food and ate the food, and then sat at a desk for eight hours, a lot of the energy (i.e. calories) seems to be collecting on you.² So you go to the gym. You burn fuel (not your own) and pollute the environment to burn off calories that wouldn’t be there if you were working to get the food! And again, this sort of recursive thinking goes on and on, and can seem a bit depressing.

Variety is the spice of life. It’s awfully nice that we can have mangoes in Kentucky and oranges in Maine and I’m not sure that I have a problem with that. This is not a back-to-basics argument in the hippy sense. This is a back-to-common-sense argument of looking at yourself as an individual that consumes food and needs to expend energy in ways that industrialized (or should I say informationalized) jobs don’t. At some point, we, as a society, saw it as convenient that we should drive to work and drive to the grocery store; everything laid out before us. But then, the calories available in even an apple started to increase due to technology and yet the fuel efficiency of our vehicles has not improved congruently and before we know it, there’s a tug on our health as well as our GDP and problems with the environment.

Now let me say that I like my computer, my air conditioning, and my apartment. Again, I’m not advocating a back-to-basics attitude (the commune or the collective farm or otherwise). I’m advocating a focus on the Energy output aspect of this equation. There’s an awful lot that we as individuals really can do to help with the environment, and the bonus is that there really is a payoff for you. We tend to think of these crazy, huge environmental and government problems as beyond our control, an yet, this is easily within our means to personally repair, all the while reaping benefits. It’s the American way! What benefits me, is good for everybody. We just have to slightly adjust our attitude toward what is “beneficial for me,” from convenience to health. Not hard, I think. We’re halfway there; we just need to think in terms of the equation above in order to reasonably measure the cost and benefits of our actions.

By the by, my favorite part of that broadcast is the fact that the DOW closed at around 2600. Oh yeah. Those were the days.

—Winston Churchill