Gary Robinson's Rants

Cable News

I was stunned at how poor the Iran coverage was on cable news over the weekend. Then I saw this thought from Matthew Yglesias:

Whenever I find myself talking about new media to skeptics of an older generation who worry that the standards online are too debased, I try to remind people that the real debasing came with the rise of multi-channel cable news. In terms of the Iranian elections, the world’s top newspapers have the people on the ground reporting the main facts, and there’s lots of smart analysis from legitimate experts all over the web, but on television if it can’t be captured by two talking heads debating each other it’s like it never happened. (Hat tip to Jason Linkins, who also provided the emphasis.)

I had noticed that CNN seems to show an awful lot of discussion between experts over each event -- often much more of that than direct coverage of the event itself But I'd never thought of it in quite the way Matthew puts it. Anyway, I turned on CNN this morning to see whether, for a change, they were covering Iran.

And they were -- kind of. There was some talking head being asked about whether Obama should be taking more of a stand in favor of the protestors. The guy's opinion was that he should.

The picture is being coming clearer. Generally CNN consists of one or more talking heads in a room, taking turns talking about whether the latest news event is being handled in accordance with their personal opinion. Proportionately speaking, there seems to be not all that much actual reporting of facts.

I still don't get the reason why this is happening. Maybe it's because people find it more enjoyable than actual reporting because it's a little like gossiping about the failures of the newsmakers? Or is it that and there's a tiny bit of "human drama" when the talking heads disagree -- kind of a combination of news and reality TV? Or could it simply be that it costs less than actual reporting? (They probably don't even have to pay the talking heads, who are happy to be there to publicize themselves.)

Iran

If you've been following developments in Iran, and particularly the Internet's essential role in reporting (and supporting) events, I don't have much to add.

If you haven't, I strongly suggest you go to Andrew Sullivan's blog and starting following him now -- as well taking a bit of time to look through his posts from the last couple of days. He's been doing a wonderful job. Far better than any mainstream news outlet, with the possible exception of the NY Times' Lede. (Although the Lede doesn't present as much detail and analysis as Sullivan does -- with the help of his readers and well-chosen links to other sources.)

One of Sullivan's readers sums up the key role Twitter is coming to play:

Ahmadinejad's and Khamenei's websites were taken down yesterday - I saw the latter go down within a couple of minutes because of a DDOS attack organised via Twitter. @StopAhmadi is a good source for tweets on this. The other important use of Twitter has been distribution of proxy addresses via Twitter. This would be how most video and pictures of today's rally have gotten out.

One amazing thing is that it seems at least conceivable that the protests would not have been as successful as they currently appear to be if Twitter didn't exist.

Sullivan suggests wearing green in support of the protesters. I think that's a great idea.

Flyfi.com

Most people reading this blog will know that I am a founder of the company that makes Flyfi.com (basically a vastly improved reboot of the old Goombah site).

In the last couple of weeks we have added enormously to the site, including improved recommendations. If you haven't checked it out, please do!

Here's a note I wrote to introduce it to some high school friends who I recently reconnected with on Facebook:

Hi Everyone. You may remember me playing my guitar in the hallowed halls of B.H.S. In college I became interested in math & computer technology, and in recent years, I've come full-circle by finally merging my interests. I've co-founded a music-oriented Internet startup. Our product is FlyFi.

Our VP/Industry Relations who, in a former life, earned 10 Grammy nominations as a producer, is now dedicated to using his industry connections for getting us the highest quality free music collection on the Internet. We've got great indie artists like Ani DiFranco, some well-known, others up-and-coming. Unlike some of our competing services you don't just hear the music for free -- you can also download many tracks as free legal MP3's.

My area of focus is our music recommendation technology, which lets you type in artists you like and get music out that you'll probably also like. I love music from many genres, from the Beatles to Beethoven to John Coltrane to Leonard Cohen. But I think there are underlying commonalities in the music I most love, regardless of genre. So we have statistical algorithms that try to find music that has those commonalities for each person's tastes.

Over the last 6 weeks or so, I've been completely wrapped up in putting the finishing touches on the first full release of FlyFi (which is why some of you may have noticed that my Facebook communication flow has dropped pretty much to zero). It's out now, ready for your perusal.

So, if you love music, go check out FlyFi.com!

Best,
Gary

Tom Swifties

One of my more unusual pastimes is making up Tom Swifties. Examples of my efforts in this area include:

"She said I look like a common farm animal!" Tom said sheepishly.

and

"Those damned cannibals! They're seasoning us with lemon juice!" Tom said sourly.

The NY Times is having Tom Swifty contest this weekend. Submissions include:

"My men will never mutiny," said the Captain blithely."

In the esthetic of the Tom Swifty, I believe that significant demerits apply to those where the description of the act of speaking doesn't really match the tone of what is said, such as this Times submission:

"She's got my photo in her locket," said Tom independently.

and this one:

"What's under this green jello," Tom asked sublimely.

Here are two particularly fine submissions, from Chris Doyle:

"I'll just have to kill the king," Reggie sighed.

"May I have this dance?" Fred asked gingerly.”

Inspiration from Miles, Herbie, and John

From an interview of Herbie Hancock and John Mclaughlin; they'd been discussing Miles Davis:

HH: We're not going to get rid of problems. I think there's a great beauty to having problems. That's one of the ways we learn. This is something I learned from Miles, first. I had this experience that I've talked about a lot of times. I was playing with Miles and we were doing this concert in Stuttgart. This was one of the nights when the band was hot. The stuff was burning, Tony Williams was smoking, Wayne wasä JM: Scrambling those eggs. HH: And sweating. And Miles was just playing like God-like stuff that he played. It was just smoking. And then, at this one point, which was like a peak in Miles' solo, I hit this chord that was so wrong. It was just awful. It was in the wrong place and it was like boom, I just felt like I destroyed the music. And Miles took his breath and played some notes that made my chord right. JM: Damn. HH: I don't know where he found these notes but he just wiped away the chord being wrong. He made this chord fit. I was dumbfounded. I couldn't even play for about two minutes. He just blew me away and what it taught me was that Miles didn't hear it as a mistake. He just heard it as an event. He just trusted it and did his musician thing and found the notes that fit that thing. I said, wait a minute, this is a lesson not just for music but for life. Things that happen to you are events. It's what you do with them that determine whether they're going to be problems or solutions. This is the kind of thing that I hope to develop more in my life and spread. And it's not something for just musicians, it's something that everyone can spread. JM: I'm on your side. We've got to encourage responsibility. We're all in it together. We need each other desperately. Now more than ever.

Einstein and this blog

Er, no actual relationship there. But

a) This is one of the most wonderful short articles I have ever read. It's about one journalist's brief but enormously rich encounter with Einstein.

b) My hypothesis in my previous post has turned out to be correct; when I type my name into Google, I am the top hit again.

Google vs. this blog

This blog used to be very highly ranked on Google. But as of today, I can't find it there at all. Instead, it finds my old blog, which I haven't updated in years. But that one did get a huge number of hits at one point, due to posting some anti-spam mathematical ideas. So that may be the reason for its still having a decent Google rank.

I have been extremely busy with FlyFi, and posting on this blog has simply become a lower priority. One problem is that much of what I spend my time thinking about is business and technology ideas for FlyFi, which are not yet appropriate to share publicly!

Anyway, I was wondering whether, simply by posting this on my blog today, Google will see more activity and therefore make me findable again.

30GB Zune Deaths and Rebirths

You may have heard that all 30GB Zunes died last night and will be working properly again 24 hours later. In case you're interested, the C function that caused the problem is displayed and discussed at ZuneBoards.

Basically, somebody did a poor job of leap-year handling.

Languages I've learned in order

Another meme.

IBM Basic assembly language (for 360 Series IBM mainframes)
APL
Nomad
COBOL
8086 assembly language
PL/I
Focus
Pascal
C (and Think C, a simple OO variant)
C++
Python

Magical Thinking?

I read Andrew Sullivan's blog regularly. I respect and enjoy his political thinking on a daily basis. But when it comes to religion, he can't think straight.

Today he said:

Bill Maher attacked people of faith by making fun of those who believe in guardian angels. But according to a new study, non-believers are far more superstitious than believers.

The second link above says:

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Think about it. So, 69% of those who do never worship did not express strong belief in occult and the paranormal. But compare that to those who worship. I don't have exact figures, but I'd guess that number who believe don't believe in any such things as the "virgin birth" and the "resurrection of Christ" is low. After all, in the population-at-large, 68% do believe in the virgin birth (source: a 1994 Harris poll). The proportion who believe in that hypothesized event among those who attend services "more than once a week" is undoubtedly significantly higher.

Surely, the virgin birth should be classified as paranormal if you're not simply assuming that the Christian faith is true, don't you think? It sure isn't normal.

So, the correct way to read the data: among non-worshippers, we have 69% not having a strong belief in the paranormal; that proportion is significantly less than 32% for the worshippers mentioned in the quote.

Andrew links to Russ Douthat, who posts the quote I posted above, and sarcastically comments on the "bold, heroic rationalism of unbelievers." Perhaps he should try some rationality himself. It couldn't hurt; might help.

Photo Meme

Instructions: Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair - just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.

I think this meme may have started with Jeremy Hilton, and is now out of control...

Video debunking McCain ads -- spread it.

Here's a great video debunking some of the McCain campaigns recent distortions/lies.

I've always liked McCain for being a "straight talker." Now it looks like he's decided he'd rather lose his integrity than lose an election. And it's working.

As I've noted on this blog before, the Internet gives us the possibility of strengthening the power of a truth through viral dissemination of that truth. If people don't know something, it's not going to have an effect on their thinking.

So, if you agree that people who can't be elected honestly shouldn't be elected, please spread this video around.

Splitting a Python list into sublists

Suppose you want to divide a Python list into sublists of approximately equal size. Since the number of desired sublists may not evenly divide the length of the original list, this task is (just) a tad more complicated than one might at first assume.

One Python Cookbook entry is:

def slice_it(li, cols=2): 
    start = 0 
    for i in xrange(cols): 
        stop = start + len(li[i::cols]) 
        yield li[start:stop] 
        start = stop

which gives the exact number of subsequences, while varying the length of the subsequences a bit if necessary. It uses Python's slicing feature to get the lengths.

That was written in response to an earlier cookbook entry which had the following one-liner:

[seq[i:i+size] for i  in range(0, len(seq), size)]

I like that it's a one-liner but don't like a couple of things about it. If your goal isn't a particular sublist length but rather to divide the list up into pieces, you need another line to compute the size. And then it doesn't turn out too well. Suppose you want to divide a string of length 10 into 4 substrings:

>>> size=10/4

>>> size

2

>>> seq = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]

>>> [seq[i:i+size] for i  in range(0, len(seq), size)]

[[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6], [7, 8], [9, 10]]

(One substring more than desired.)

Try setting size to 3 to get fewer substrings:

>>> size=3
>>> [seq[i:i+size] for i  in range(0, len(seq), size)]
[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9], [10]] 

(Dissimilar lengths.)

Here's a briefer one-liner using the slice idea, which doesn't require you to compute the length, and does give the exact number of subsequences you want and with lengths that are more appropriately divided:

[seq[i::num] for i in range(num)]

The drawback there is that the subsequences are not actually subsequences of seq; seq is sliced and diced. But, all the elements are in the output and the subsequences are as close as possible to the same length:

>>> seq = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
>>> [seq[i::num] for i in range(num)]
[[1, 5, 9], [2, 6, 10], [3, 7], [4, 8]]

Hillary's Bosnia Trip and the Fate of the World

Last week I mentioned a statement out of Hillary's campaign that was so cynical I found it downright revolting. I'm following up today with a statement from Hillary herself that appears to be a blatant lie.

"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." --Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008. [Democratic Underground]

Here is a photo of the actual incident:

The photo was retrieved by the Washington Post.

Here is a video (thanks to Donklephant):

I don't know what to say other than that I don't want another unmitigated liar in the White House. Especially one who seems to be running partly on the idea of being an especially smart person, but who isn't tuned-in enough to know that her lies are often of such of a nature that they can be quickly exposed by the media. (There are plenty of other lies coming from her or her campaign that I'm not taking the time to mention here.)

Which brings me to another point. As everyone knows, the Internet is a hugely important factor in this campaign. For instance, most campaign money is now being raised through the Internet.

Sometimes people explain the Clinton's campaign approach as being based on old-school politics. Perhaps, they say, if they were of today's generation, they'd be different. It may be that Hillary has simply been trained over decades that this is the only way to win an election, and that with a different experience, she would have taken a very different approach.

I am willing to hypothesize that the main difference is the Internet. For instance, in the old days, Obama's speech in response to the Wright flap would have been seen by very few people. Instead the TV networks would run a few sound bites, and spend most of the air time conducting interviews with analysts saying that the speech wasn't going to make any difference because the Wright sound bites are much more powerful than any that could be culled from Obama's speech. (Which is basically what is happening network news today.)

But almost three million people have accessed the whole speech on YouTube. It's a great speech. Some have said it's brilliant.

I'm not sure I'd classify it that way. To me, it seems more like a reasonable and intelligent person talking directly to us as if we, too, are reasonable and intelligent. And that is historically so extremely unusual in American politics that by contrast, it's as if it is brilliant, even if it's "only" reasonable and intelligent.

He assumes what the television networks do not: that Americans have an attention span that can tolerate thoughtful speech for more than 10 seconds. But that's also the speech's drawback from the old-media perspective: there aren't many (any?) sound bites that can be extracted from it. It would not have been effective in the old-media days except for those few who would go to the trouble of finding and reading the whole thing in a newspaper. And historically, that group has not been enough to reach the critical mass that determines elections.

The ability for any American who wishes to to conveniently see such a speech is a potential game-changer, particularly because those viewers have the ability to tell their friends (and readers, in the case of bloggers) what they think. The availability of such materials on the Internet (including such materials the expose of Hillary's Bosnia lie), added to word of mouth, means that the possibility for a new style of politics is here.

I believe Obama's success so far in this campaign is a result of that possibility reaching actual fruition. I believe that we may be entering an era where lies will be less commonplace and more quickly exposed. And where the result of that is that people are elected to high office who are more honest in their approach because the old style just won't work as well. People who are fundamentally dishonest will be less likely to succeed; and those who aren't won't be trained to believe that dishonesty is the only way to win.

But a key step in that equation is the word-of-mouth piece. Sound bites on the media are still extremely powerful. Most people will still not view Obama's race speech on the Internet; they'll see the Wright sound bites on the networks. So the availability of materials like this on the Internet is not enough. Word of mouth is also required. As Obama says, "We are the solution." Those who don't view the materials directly can hear about them from those who do. Hopefully they will be inspired to view the original materials for themselves. But if not, they can still be moved by hearing from those who have done so.

Either way, it's good. Anyone who shares the information is helping the process, one way or another. Obama's success so far indicates that the two factors, combined, can reach critical mass. I think it's time to hypothesize that this election is already historic, and potentially world-changing: we may be entering a time when our elected officials will be... better. To a nontrivial degree. Nothing is ever perfect and utopia never arrives. But better is good.

Think of the music industry. The Internet is truly transforming it. There is absolutely no reason to assume that the same can't happen for politics, and for reasons that are not dissimilar. It just isn't as obvious, yet, what is changing and why.

We all have to chip in, though, to make it happen. And that's why I am posting this today.

Apple tacking subscription fee onto iPod/iPhone?

There have been rumors making the rounds that Apple has been looking at offering a music subscription service as an alternative to its so-called “a la carte” model where iTunes customers pay a flat fee for every song they buy. Naturally the a comparison with RealNetwork’s Rhapsody service comes to mind.

But now there’s a report from the Financial Times that suggests that Apple is instead looking at another model: Charge an extra premium for the iPod or iPhone device, and then offer consumers full access to the entire iTunes music library. It’s similar to a deal from phone maker Nokia. But the FT says the big difference is in scale. Nokia is said to offer a pot of money that amounts to $80 per device, and then divide the pot among the record labels according to market share percentages. Apple’s proposed rate is said to be closer to $20, which makes a lot of sense. Of course they’re pretty far apart on what constitutes a reasonable rate.
...
Meanwhile, I can’t help but remember that Steve Jobs years ago derided the idea of “renting” music. He often hates something before he loves it. Remember when he said music was a background activity and that as such video wouldn’t make sense on the iPod? It wasn’t long before Apple launched TV shows on iTunes. Yeah. It’s like that. This story is probably true. [BusinessWeek]

In a post entitled "Steve Jobs vs. Subscriptions" I once argued on this blog that a subscription model is superior, and that despite statements to the contrary from Jobs, it was for temporary, tactical reasons that Apple wasn't already moving in that direction.

I listed a number of reasons the subscription model is superior. The first comment to that post was from someone purporting to be Steve Jobs who said "And here's one reason it isn't superior: when I stop paying all the music goes away." (Personally, I see no reason to think it wasn't the man himself; that's something he has said in other contexts as well.)

My response was: "But, unless you were planning to stop buying music piece-by-piece, you'll be spending money in the future on music anyway. And I, for one, have no such plans. So, I don't see how the 'when I stop paying all the music goes away' has much merit in the real world."

I subsequently heard from some folks who claimed that they never needed to buy signficantly more music than they already bought in college, so in fact, they said, the Jobs argument was true for them. I find it hard to believe anyone is really like that, but I suppose some people are.

Others argued that subscriptions cost too much. My reply was basically that that was an illusion, undoubtedly brought on by the high price of the first subscriptions services. There was no reason that subscriptions had to remain that high -- if you thought they were going to, you just weren't thinking ahead enough. One solution, I argued, was to have different tiers of service.

The model of tacking $20 onto the price of an iPod/iPhone fulfills that promise in a big way -- although it's so cheap it even eliminates the need for different tiers. According to the BusinessWeek article, folks in Europe tend to buy new cell phones every year, so at least for that group it's equivalent to a $20/yr subscription fee.

But, more likely, the music access would be time-limited and when it expires, Apple would offer a renewal on an annual basis.

I don't know if Jobs is able to do a deal with the labels that really gets the pricing down to that level. But if he can pull it off, it will be a huge step forward. (At least for those music lovers who also like Apple hardware! A group I happen belong to -- my family owns two iPhones, three actively-used iPods, two Apple TV's, and three Apple laptops.)

Update: It looks like it's not actually going to happen in the near future, but the idea is being "kicked around":

According to a story in the Financial Times, Apple (AAPL) would charge enough for iPod and iPhone devices to cover the cost of licensing entire music collections. It would use that premium to create a pool of revenue, a portion of which would be divided among the major music labels, the newspaper said.

Trouble is, no such talks are under way, according to people familiar with Apple's plans. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment. Insiders at major music labels were similarly dismissive. One person familiar with the matter said the idea of subscription plan has been "kicked around" for about a year, but said there have been "no meaningful discussions" on the subject. [BusinessWeek]

I continue to think that the long-run outcome will probably be some kind of iTunes music subscription service. This recent "kicking around" is a first step.

No smooth jazz ID3 tag

Jazz and smooth jazz are very different things. People who like jazz very often dislike smooth jazz. (Frankly, I can't stand it, though I listen to jazz quite a bit; for example John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" is one of my favorite recordings of all time.)

Or as Wikipedia puts it:

The term "Smooth jazz" seems to inspire controversy. Normal jazz purists contend that smooth jazz is, in actuality, not jazz of any kind, regarding it as a misleading marketing buzzword that represents an attempt to hijack the ostensible prestige of jazz in order to sell what is really a form of "elevator music". They consider the smooth jazz genre uninspired, lacking the depth of expression, harmonic and rhythmic sophistication, and complex improvisation that are hallmarks of traditional jazz; substituting, at times, trite and hackneyed musical phrasing.

But there is no ID3 tag for smooth jazz. Id3 tags include one for Rock, and also distinguish many different kinds of rock (Southern Rock, Hard Rock, Progressive Rock, etc.). Many of those rock subgenres share fans much more readily than jazz and smooth jazz do.

This seems to me to be a significant oversight in the ID3 tag definition.

If any readers know who to lobby to change this, please let me know -- I think this could be a helpful change for music software.

Has she no sense of decency?

I've been keeping politics out of this blog lately, but this just takes the cake.

Howard Wolfson, Clinton's chief spokesman, said during a conference call with reporters that Clinton would not pick a running mate who has not met the “national security threshold” — as Clinton’s military advisers and Wolfson put it on the call — but that it is possible Obama could meet that threshold by this summer's Democratic convention.

In other words, if she gets to be the nominee, and she needs him as VP in order to harness his enthusiastic supperters, he'll magically gain enough experience to be President. Honestly, I find the brazenness of her cynicism amazing, astounding, and revolting.

She undoubtedly thinks that's the only way the Democrats can beat McCain. But the fact is, Obama came out of nowhere and is doing pretty darn well without stooping to such depths. It's possible to do. She just can't do it herself.

Predicting personality based upon musical tastes

Interesting research showing very positive correlations between musical tastes and certain predicted personality traits:

While videos and photos are good for assessing conscientiousness and extraversion, music preferences beat them in allowing observers to predict the participants' own ratings of their agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. In all, observers' ratings of participants were positively correlated with 14 different personality traits, including those listed above, as well as others such as forgiveness, imagination, and positive affect. [Cognitive Daily]

Python-safethread

I haven't posted in quite some time, for several reasons. First, I'm working really hard and it's been hard to find time to post. Possibly a bigger issue is that when I'm posting much less often, I find that I lose the blogging mindset. Yet another thing is: I think all day about my company's technology and plans, but can't post about those because they're secret for the time being!

In any case, I ran across a project called python-safethread today. Its intention is to make a version of Python that does without the GIL and has modern constructs for concurrency. Its home page lists some of its major features:

• Exceptions from threads propagate naturally and cause the program to shut down gracefully.
• No memory model is necessary. All mutable objects are safely contained with monitors (similar to Concurrent Pascal's monitors, but different from Java's monitors.)
• Deadlocks are detected and broken automatically.
• Finalization is thread-safe (and uses a much simpler mechanism at a low-level.)
• Most existing single-threaded code will continue to be correct (and in good style) when used amongst threads. Some boilerplate may be necessary to share module and class objects between threads.
• The GIL is removed. Each additional thread should run at or near 100% throughput. However, the base (single-threaded) throughput is only around 60-65% that of normal CPython, so you'll need several threads for this to be worthwhile.

The author says that he's aiming to make it an alternate CPython version ala Stackless, but hopes to incorporate it into mainstream CPython at some point. Right now it's at a very early state of development.

It sounds like a very interesting project, and I thought it was a good item to post about after all this time.

Math Joke

Theorem: Consider the set of all sets that have never been considered. Hey! They're all gone! Oh, well, never mind... [Dr. David Batchelor, hat tip to Eric Postpischil]