Live from Austin!

I just listened to the This American Life episode Another Frightening Show About the Economy, a followup to their earlier show The Giant Pool of Money. The earlier show explained the mortgage crisis in terms anyone can understand. The new show explains how the problems of the mortgage industry have spread to the rest of the economy.

In particular, it explains:

• What a Credit Default Swap is, and how it turned from something harmless into something disastrous;
• What the commercial paper market is;
• Why AIG nearly collapsed and needed to be bailed out, and how the bailout was carried out;
• How the rest of the financial system nearly collapsed;
• Why the original $700 billion bailout plan was terrible, and how the new one (the one made into law) is slightly better in that it at least allows the right thing to be done;
• That the total failure to regulate a risky credit default swap market, bigger than the entire global stock market, was a totally bipartisan fuckup.

If any podcast is essential listening, this one is.

Sony has revised the terms of service for the PlayStation Network. The new TOS says:

You may not provide anyone with your name or any other personally identifying information other than your own Online ID

As it happens, I broke the new TOS twice at the weekend without realizing it at the time. I’ve told people in Team Fortress 2 and Burnout Paradise both my name, and the fact that I live in Austin, TX.

I can see a case for prohibiting disclosing someone else’s identity. (Key words being "disclosing" and "someone else’s".) However, if I want to tell people online where I live, I don’t see how that is any of Sony’s business. Furthermore, since my PSN ID is just my name with a random number appended, does that mean I need to change my ID? That’s awkward, as Sony’s system doesn’t let you do so. Perhaps I should send an e-mail to customer support?

A couple of weeks ago I saw a new Thai place had opened up a few blocks from our house. Today I was bored of my usual lunch fare, and decided to check it out.

It’s called thaifresh and is at 909 West Mary, in the same block as Café Caffeine. One wall is occupied by Thai groceries. Opposite that is the kitchen area, and in front is a cabinet with the dishes on offer. It’s cafeteria style, you can buy a 1- 2- or 3-item plate, or get takeaway. Apparently they also offer cooking classes.

I tried the red curry with summer squash and tofu, with brown rice. It was good–rich and creamy, and just hot enough to give a gentle afterburn.

Last night I dreamed about MIT.

Texas Instruments had finally decided to build an RPN-based calculator, and for obvious reasons had chosen MIT for a major promotional event. I had been browsing the MIT bookstore and had seen a promo kit, so I snuck in to the labs to see the hardware in action.

It was "landscape" format, like the classic HPs (12c, 15c, 16c), but had a wide bitmapped display that could show 20 digits easily. It wasn’t just a calculator–they had taken ideas from the mobile phone world, and added a camera with extra low light sensitivity, a Zeiss lens with macro focus, and high speed motion capture, so you could record your experiments with it too. Oh, and it ran for something like 60 hours on two AA cells.

Pondering whether to buy one, I sat in a nearby cafe. The barista asked why I was so excited, when I could be visiting New York or Harvard or something. I explained that for me, MIT was where it had all happened, but in my excitement the only name I could think of was Marvin Minsky. When I mentioned him, the barista snorted, and said he was a hack.

I think this is quite possibly the geekiest dream I’ve ever had. I think it’s all because I was looking at R6RS yesterday.

Inspired by an awesome FARK thread:

Today I spent three hours tidying my desk and going through paperwork. This included going through the entire filing cabinet, removing obsolete documents. Then I shredded old information until the shredder literally burned out, emitting an unpleasant melting plastic smell. Ah well, I’d been thinking of getting a better shredder anyway, preferably one that can shred CDs.

Now I’ve traveled to the coffee house with rothko and fixed their Internet.

I was lucky enough to get on the beta list for LittleBigPlanet for PS3. I’m probably not meant to reveal too much about it, but I will say that right from the opening credits, it is utterly delightful. The kind of cute yet rich game that I would expect Nintendo to come up with. It’s basically an old-school platformer, with state of the art 3D graphics used to depict a 2D world made up of photorealistic real-world materials. Level editing tools are built in, and you’re encouraged to share your created levels with the community.

The tools seem as though they will allow people to create a wide variety of worlds. You can construct backdrops and objects from various materials (wood, polystyrene, rock, padded fabric); add various canned objects that you collect by playing the game; decorate with paint and stickers; and make everything come alive with switches, generators, string, motors, and so on. The narrator for the tutorials is Stephen Fry, some of the music is pulled straight from cult BBC show "Vision On", and there’s a Green Submarine that bears a remarkable resemblance to a famous submarine of another color. If it were any more up my alley I’d have to move it aside to wheel the trash bin out.

I’m wondering if I can build a LittleBigPlanet that resembles my desk…

I skipped the presidential debate, but I think I might watch the VP debate. If Caribou Barbie really is as bad as rumors say, there could be lulz.

About 7 or 8 years ago I ripped all our CDs to MP3 and stuck all the music on a house media server.

I used what was, at the time, a good MP3 encoder: LAME, with the --r3mix preset that had been tweaked by the members of an online forum for MP3 enthusiasts.

MP3 encoder quality has made some strong progress since then, and disk space has become even less of an issue. Accordingly, I’m re-encoding my favorite stuff using the latest copy of LAME and --preset standard --vbr-new. Even on my office Cambridge Soundworks speakers, the difference is noticeable. I figure this will be the last time I do this, in a couple of years I’ll just rip everything lossless.

iTunes also got much better at encoding with version 7. So if you ripped your favorite album to MP3 some years ago, it might be worth re-doing it and giving yourself a free audio upgrade.

(To my ears, LAME encodings still sound better than iTunes, but iTunes 7 is way better than earlier versions. That said, there’s a free friendly Mac audio ripper/encoder front end called Max that will call LAME for the encoding.)

"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers." — Ron Paul.

"The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries. [...] The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens." — "Constitution" Party platform.

During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".

This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.

People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

[...]

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

Emphasis mine.

So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.

The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.