And with the first two primaries having had 4 different winners (and maybe 5 after Michigan votes today), things are really starting to heat up. But what recently caught my attention was a paragraph in an recent op-ed piece by Wiliam Kristol about GOP candidate Mike Huckabee:
He came up from modest origins. He served as governor of Arkansas for more than a decade. He fought a successful battle against being overweight. These may not be utterly compelling qualifications for the presidency. I'm certainly not ready to sign up.
What's interesting here is that Huckabee has successfully dealt with a problem that nearly a third of Americans currently suffer from: obesity. In 2005, well before announcing his run for the White House, Newsweek featured an interview with Huckabee regarding his weight loss and his efforts behind an anti-obesity campaign launched with former President Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association.
Unfortunately, Huckabee's site has no mention of his dramatic weight loss and his advocacy for a slimmer America. I would think that such an impressive accomplishment would be highlighted and used as a building block for his health care policies in general.
Candidates can argue all they want about how their health care packages will save America, but as long as high fructose corn syrup remains king, we are still going to have problems.
]]>The result? The best flight I have ever taken. I floated on and off the plane and and airport security was a breeze - no waiting for the bag to clear the X-ray machine. Just my book and me - call it air travel lite.
For those interested in in air travel hacking, Lifehacker has a guide for power travelers and as well as an"air travel tip" tag. 43folders also has a decent travel hacks wiki page.
]]>I am a firm believer that the Twitter phenomenon will eventually catch on and spread like a wildfire throughout the SMS-crazed college demographic. The big question is who will capture this market? As much as I love Twitter, I would have to think Facebook will win this.
That is, of course, if Facebook can actually make status updates more like tweets. Right now, updates are just News Feed (or as they say at Duke - stalk feed) fodder. Imagine if you said "hungry" and you were instantly sent a list of your closest friends who were also hungry. Now that would be slick.
]]>In the interest of growing the site beyond its current boundaries (i.e. me having to be seated in front of a computer 24/7/365), I'm trying something new on kottke.org. Starting tomorrow and continuing through next Tuesday, Joel Turnipseed will be editing the site.
While Joel has done a phenomenal job thus far, especially in his recent interview with Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, I don't know if I am a fan of his style. His posts are simply too long.
One of the reasons kottke.org has been at the top of my list stems from the fact that most of Jason's posts are short, bite-sized blurbs about links. He calls them remaindered links. I like to think of them as examples of what all bloggers should do: link to the interesting content while still adding something to the conversation yourself. Granted someone needs to create the longer content, but a blogger doesn't always have to create it.
So my advice to future kottke.org editors is to keep things smart and short, for the most part.
Now don't flood my inbox with requests to see a rough draft. I know how fascinating it sounds! But seriously, this topic will hopefully be worthwhile, especially since Iran seems to be the 2008 race's foreign policy focus at the moment.
Anyways, I will be blogging about my experience and any interesting readings I find on the web will find there way on to here or the linklog.
]]>I read a fairly large number of blogs. Okay, maybe not as many as Robert Scoble, but still more than the average Joe. My Google Reader stats inform me that I am currently subscribed to 74 feeds and in the past month I have "read" a little over 2500 posts. That's a lot of information.
For quite a while I prided myself in keeping up with the nitty gritty - knowing about all the different popular memes, what new company was launching, who was raising a third round of financing from Sequoia, etc... I still do pay attention to such things, but I don't find them nearly as interesting. Long gone are the days where I would read the combined daily posts of Techcrunch, Engadget, Mashable, Read/Write Web, and GigaOm, with Scoble's Google Reader shared feed and Hacker News thrown in to pick up the things the big guys missed. Today the only one I read on a daily basis is Techcrunch (and I skim most posts). Engadget with its massive quantity of posts and Mashable's recent lack of quality (i.e. 200+ web 2.0 links for web designers) have been pruned from my feed list.
So what am I reading these days? Thoughtful analysis. According to my stats I have read 100% of the posts from the following blogs: Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Signal vs. Noise, Rough Type, Scripting News, PMarca, A VC and last but not least Publishing 2.0. These guys add stuff to the conversation. They don't regurgitate news, they offer perspective. Sure sometimes there will the occasional news post of which I am already aware, but these guys, with a witty one liner, can make the news worth hearing about again.
Analysis is what's interesting, especially in an age where we are increasingly connected to information streams. We need media to give us better perspective through interviews and investigative reporting.
]]>In the real world, there are few, if any, times when a person has to do something completely from memory. If someone wants to know the date the Treaty of Versailles was signed, they will simply Google it, not try to recall it from the days of 10th grade Western Civ. I am not saying that learning how to commit things to memory is not important either.
I think Seth is right on when he says:
Here's what just about every exam ought to be: "Use Firefox to find the information you need to answer this question:" And as the internet gets smarter, the questions are going to have to get harder. Which is a good thing. Until teachers get unstuck, our kids are going to be stuck and so will we.
America's schools should be focused on empowering students to find information on the Web, not memorize soon forgotten facts from a history textbook. Function over form people.
]]>What is? Well, now I can actually use my iPhone's email feature. No more endless POP3 streams of already read messages. I feel so alive.
]]>As for the Patriots, well, they are a perfect 7-0. Tom Brady continues to show he is the epitome of a franchise player, throwing 6 touchdowns in Sunday's 49-28 rout of Miami. The only question is: do you want a baby goat with that?
And Duke Basketball 2007-2008 season officially started today with an open practice session. Life is good.
]]>While I definitely see such a move as a positive for teachers working in poorer schools, I worry that the program could lead to a step backward in students' education. When compensation is linked directly to higher test scores, teachers have more incentive modify curriculum based on testing requirements. While not always a bad thing, such teaching for a test can definitely inhibit students' intellectual curiosity and excitement to learn.
Futhermore, the system doesn't necessarily reward an excellent teacher, but rather, one who has had the good fortune (whether through great teaching or sheer luck) to have his or her class earn high scores.
This case reminds me of the classic store salesman model: commission vs. salary . The commission-based salesman has more incentive to sell you the highest priced product and protection plan, even if it is not the best one. The salaried salesman, who gains nothing from pushing the inferior high-priced product, is much more willing to share his own opinions, leading the customer to better value. I know it's not exactly the same, but I think there is a connection.
At the end of the day, I hope the program works out for best, even though it has me a little bit wary. At least Bloomberg is engaging the issue instead of avoiding it.
]]>While the overall minimalist theme hasn't changed all that much, the design is somewhat different. Three columns rather than two, adding some navigation, using an actual grid-based layout - all of these are big improvements over the previous version.
I would like to thank a number of people for their help in making the design happen: Blueprint (grid), 37 Signals (link color), and most importantly Rob Goodlatte for lending me his copy of The Elements of Typographic Style (and all the other advice).
]]>I was actually quite surprised by how easy it was to build it. It took me only a couple of hours. I guess FBML. for all its limitations, forces you to focus on content and functionality rather than design.
I would also like to thank the Pear PHP people as well as anyone who contributed to the Facebook Developers Wiki.
]]>And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.
Luckily for me, I have had a couple of excellent professors who still place value on such material.
Looking at Brooks' Wikipedia entry, it's interesting to see that he was initially a liberal after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1983. It was only after being intellectually demolished by Milton Friedman in a televised debate did he start the process of switching sides. Brooks on the experience:
The show was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point, and then me sitting there with my mouth hanging open, trying to think what to say. That didn't immediately turn me into a conservative, but....
Talk about the power of rhetoric. And they say that debates will never convince anyone of anything.
On a side point, it's needless to say that I was quite excited last week to watch the New York Times Select pay wall disappear. Now I can share of Mr. Brooks and Thomas Friedman on a regular basis. Exciting times (pun intended) lay ahead my friends.
]]>