Greg Sanders

Preparing for Otakon: The guidebook app has social features

I was excited to discover that Guidebook now offers the ability to share one’s schedule. Two years ago, I was hoping for this social feature, and now that it’s here I’d like to exploit it. I’ve tied it to my Google+ account and am happy to connect with friends. Because of Otakon preparations and a crunch period at work, posts may be sporadic over the next few days.

In addition, I’ve slowly been getting photos up on Flickr. Check out my Japan collection to see them as they get posted. I’m also going back and adding them to older posts as I go and hope to start including them in new posts regularly.

Geo-tagging and Flickr related delays

The first trip I rigorously photoblogged was my tour of China in 2007. Back then, as now, Flickr offered a rather good deal on storage and had some helpful online tools. For reasons I do not understand, perhaps relating to the increasing size of photos or mismanagement by Yahoo, uploading to Flickr has gotten steadily harder over the years. Back in 2013, I was regularly stymied when trying to upload photos from my trip to attend Guy’s funeral. The Uploadr tool, since deprecated, would inexplicably leave out some of those photos and consulting with technical support did me little good. I’ve tried using Flickr’s new website uploading tool and found it to be slow and quirky. It simply failed to register many of my Picasa tagged photos until I’d given it ten to twenty minutes to finish processing the photos. I’m going to try a few third party apps like jUploader and slow updating for now, but at this point I’m largely sticking with Flickr for legacy reasons. If I ever get around to swapping my site to Wordpress I may find a new photo hosting solution as well.

Happily, the geo-tagging delays were playing with a new toy and not a frustrating attempt to reproduce what once was simple. On the left, you can see our first morning in Tokyo mapped out in Google Earth. Our new camera has wifi abilities and could grab geo-tags off another source, but I have not yet linked them up or worked out whether it could get these tags from my phone without draining the battery. Once I’m further along in blogging I will try to figure that out and may pick a dedicated wifi geotagger if need-be. This effort is worth it to me because I take far too many pictures (between my mother’s camera and ours we took some 9,200) and actually sorting through them and tagging them to make them usefully findable in the future is no small project. In essence, the photos regularly serve as my trip notes. Many of the more banal images are there just because of some cross-cultural or geographic detail that I wanted to remember. However, if I at least know where the photos are from, deriving many of the tags should be much easier as should jogging my memory.

The Picasa geo-tagger works with Google Earth, allowing you to do text based searching or visual scanning of the 3D map in order to find where your photo was taken.  The interface can be a little rough, you notably you cannot change the size of that tiny little window in the lower right to give you more of a photo to work with. Similarly, while you can control the number of photos being tagged on the Picasa end, you cannot shift-select once you’re in Google Earth. Tagging one or tagging all our your only option. Finally, I had a bit of false hope based on the fact that the size of the focus reticule, seen in the upper left of that picture, stays the same size at variable level of zoom. My initial naive take was that if you tagged from a greater zoom, it may somehow track that, perhaps in an error measure or just by rounding off the latitude and longitude to avoid false precision. That is not the case, so I’ll have to consult my friendly neighborhood esteemed information scientist about geo-tagging best practices.

Review: Feed by Mira Grant

Feed is a story about what happens after a zombie apocalypse, but it isn't post-apocalyptic as such. Instead humanity has retrenched behind sealed doors, protected by blood tests and automated systems. It's a world where many of our current issues have lost their salience but security threats and perhaps security theater are everywhere. It's a tale told to us by the bloggers that venture out into this world and thus has an innate appeal to those of that send our thoughts out into the net.

The story focuses on siblings Georgia and Shaun Mason, respectively a reporter ("newsie") and a daredevil ("irwin"). Together with their tech genius story writer, a "fictional" nicknamed Buffy, they get the story of their lives when they imbed with a Republican candidate seeking his party's nomination for the 2034 election. On the whole it's a good premise and a neat world. The writing was reasonable, the characters could be fun, the plotting a bit predictable at times, and the politics perhaps a trifle naïve. If the premise appeals, I think you'll be satisfied if not necessarily blown away.

Starting with the parts I found a bit less satisfying, I'm not quite sure I see media evolving into collections of "newsies", "irwins" and "fictionals". Print and television journalism now has any number of people willing to risk extreme danger to bring home stories and who too often die in the pursuit. The lack of risk aversion of the bloggers and the licensing process were all interesting but didn't quite work for me as media critique. The overall media environment had elements that rang true - an obsession with ratings, the management of support staff, the jump from an existing website to independent operation - all of which gave the characters' jobs more solidity although I'm not quite remembering how the business model was detailed.

Slightly less plausible was Sen. Ryman's campaign. He had some good speeches and a strong staff support but I don't quite buy his rocketing to political prominence. The bloggers were accurate enough in seeing through much of the artifice of the campaign, but with one notable exception I didn't really see the horse trading or rhetorical tradeoffs that seem as relevant to the world of 2034 as the world of 2014.  Amusingly, though, one of Ryman's opponents appears to be a version of Texas Gov. Perry, which has made his official announcement for President all the more frightening.

I think the strongest of the political elements was the focus on security measures. The bloggers were a bit more necessary for investigations than seemed plausible to me, but the range of security measures, often redundant and obnoxious, all rang true. To a fair extent the zombie-terrorized world does work as our present day fears taken to a logical extreme. The best political issues of the book, like the question of how to handle animals that were large enough to zombie, stemmed from these issues. I don't think the first novel of the series full explores that theme, but it's a good start and at some point I think I'll pick up the sequel.

Origin: Gift from Kate, a particularly well-targeted one.

Image from Mira Grant's website.

Blog Hiatus: The work trip will not be live blogged

I've got my first international work trip coming up and, while less than two weeks, it's still a doozy for me. Thus, I'm putting the blog on hiatus for the next few weeks. I'm told pictures are allowed but I'm not sure about publicly posting them; regardless, still a lot to cover with Egypt.

[Update, a few grammatical fixes.]

The lack of real names isn't the problem with online comments

I had the pleasure of attending a launch celebration for Alyssa Rosenberg's move to ThinkProgress. Despite the hiccups of the new facebook based comment system, I think it's a great move and look forward to reading more from her now that she's blogging full time. Thankfully, her cordial and thoughtful comment community seems to have survived the transition to a large venue known for its trolls and flame wars.

I definitely learned a few things about serious blogging and community maintenance, but I'll try to restrict this post to a few ideas of my own that have been improved through quality conversation. When discussing problematic comments with older generations, anonymity is regularly blamed as the source of all the vitriol. There's something to that, but I've seen multiple communities with pseudonyms get by just fine. I consistently blog and comment under my name, but others lack that freedom and still can be great contributors.

The problem instead is a bit simpler: on the one hand, most blogs and the like come with comments by default while maintaining a healthy comment community of any real size takes both skill and hard work. We've developed our technology for allowing communication to a far greater extent than we have our methods for building communities. That's not really a surprise; despite problems with spam, communication has a far easier time scaling up. In fact, I'd argue that the labor requirements mean that quality moderation is often a result of necessity and not design. I've found many feminist blogs can have great discussion areas. I suspect that this is a side effect of needing to protect themselves from harassment, anti-feminist trolls, and explicit misogynists. Of course, heavily moderated communities have their own risks as the ban hammer is of course a blunt instrument and there's always a risk of group think.

On the whole, I think we do a bit better against spam than against trolls. Why is that? I think it may be that community management requires gaining and maintaining legitimacy. Thus a blog author would have a much easier time doing it than would, say, a full-time staffer. The technical ability to ban is important but perhaps not as powerful as the ability to reply directly to critics which encourages them to switch to person-to-person mode rather than broadcast to the internet mode. If larger organizations want to have safe comment communities, perhaps they should work on finding ways to give staffers the authority and discretion to build their own legitimacy as moderators.  This can be scary, but I think it may prove an better alternative than comment anarchy or simply going without.

One of my favorite web comic artists does Full Metal Alchemist fan art

I consider this to be a very good thing. I won't pitch the series at this point, but for those that are fans here's the art.

• Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye (with not necessarily canon pairing)
• Winry
• Izumi

Generally speaking I do recommend Faith Erin Hicks' LJ which has samples from a nice mix of her work. Here's a mix of her comics. Her current online strip is Super Hero Girl which tells the story of an up and coming young superhero working off a grant from the Canadian government. It manages to be unusually true to life in some ways without sinking into dark depths of angst.

Newsrob for the Droid outdoes Google Reader

If you're a high volume RSS feed consumer like I am, managing all that comes in can get to be a real problem. I manage it by having a few topical folders, a favorites folder which draws from all topics, and a skim folder. Generally speaking, I want to glance at everything in the favorites folder while the skim folder often just gets reviewed on the basis of title.[1]

The trouble is that it's hard to go fast through the skim folder. Hotkeys help of course, but mark all read is quite a blunt instrument. Newsrob Pro is my droid reader of choice in part because it has two key tools that help:

1. Mark read until here. This marks all items above the current one as read. This is a vast improvement over Reader's options to mark all read or to mark items older than a week or two read. Now it's easy to clear out my skim folder in bite sized chunks rather than dealing with whole folders at a time.
2. Pin an item. Pin adds a third status to read/unread. The key point of pin is that ignores mark all as read and mark read until here. So if you're just looking to clear out items fast you can pin the ones with interesting sounding titles and then just mark read everything else.

Together, these have left me in the bizarre situation that I find my phone app has more functionality than the one I use via my web browser. Maybe that just means that I should switch to using my email client as a reader. I'm not claiming that Newsrob had these features first, so if anyone knows where they were invented let me know in comments and I'll update this. Similarly, if you know how to pull this off in reader please let me know. However, for now, Newsrob Pro makes me happy and I'm glad I dropped the fiver or so it took to get the full version. One caveat, you do need to login to your google account via the app and I know that's a legitimate concern for a lot of people.

 

[1] Admittedly, I do have some feeds that make both the favorites and the skim folder. These are ones that I like but are higher volume than I have appetite for. Also, most of what I get through friends' shared items goes in the skim folder.

Google Buzz is making me wonder if I’m over-sharing

In this case, I mean sharing items in Google Reader. I reciprocated a few people who were following me and for a bit I felt drowned in pretty good shared content. By adapting my skim folder I seem to have dealt with that problem, but I’m now trying to figure out what the appropriate level of sharing is.

So, readers, any thoughts? I know for me, sharing can work best as a filter for blogs I enjoy but that aren’t quite good enough fits for me to follow. In addition, it can bring in unique items I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

I figure I should aim for 5-10 shared items a day, but aim for the best stuff. It’d be nice to have some feedback stats for how many of one’s shared items get read, although obviously that should only be gathered with permission.

In any event, if you like, let me know what sharing works best for you, if you follow my buzz account that is, and I’ll try to accommodate.

Blog roll addition: Hathor Legacy

Hathor legacy is a cultural criticism site with the tagline “in search of good female characters.”  They recently revamped things by consolidating their multiple feeds into a single one (they also have a LJ feed), so this seemed like a good time to link.  The design of the core site doesn’t excite me, the text is a little big and you need to read more to get the details on any post.  However, that’s not an issue with the feeds, so I don’t really care.

My favorite discussion has been one by guest author Audra on Laura Roslin, the female President in Battlestar Gallactica.  The write-up does a good job of both addressing her strengths and acknowledging that she does make a fair number of iffy decisions.  The discussion went off topic some, but added more analysis and kept the things interesting well after the initial post.

A second post I enjoyed was one I disagreed with put up by Kris Ligman.  She thought Portal did more to advance female protagonists than Mirror’s Edge because the latter’s marketing was really driven by its main character.  Loving both games, I disagreed, as did other commenters, but while the discussion was a bit harsh on Kris I think she handled herself well and updated her views as new info came to light.  Potential for good discussion really is key in my view to a good criticism site.  Another fun series by the same author is a salutary set of pieces on the women of Metal Gear Solid.

The site was started by Jennifer Kesler who both gets a nice mix of writers and wades into comments as a moderator when appropriate, which is key to getting the commenting community that I enjoy.

Light posting

I'm headed out to Illinois for family reasons, so posting may be a bit light this weekend.  Sorry about the lightness earlier this week as well, but that should at least have interesting results soon.

Opposition Addition: The American Scene

The American Scene is a group blog, my favorite writers on it are Noah Millman and Reihan Salam (I also read a fair number of Peter Suderman's reviews).  Since it's a group blog with a changing cast it's no surprise that it can be a bit uneven at times, so caveat emperor there as with any group project.

I'd been meaning to add them for a while and a Millman piece I liked just came up, so now's as good a time as any.   He's responding commenting on the debate resulting from a Damon Linker post:

Linker’s whole project – “the liberal bargain” – rests on the proposition that absent a neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments you inevitably get social conflict. I pretty much disagree with that proposition whole-hog – I don’t think liberalism is (or can be) a wholly neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments (indeed, I think this partly because I agree with some of liberalism’s metaphysical commitments); I don’t think such an arbiter would enable you to avoid social conflict (what would compel the loser to abide by the verdict?); and, for that matter, I think you can have devastating social conflict without any real disagreement about metaphysical commitments (those metaphysical commitments themselves may in many cases be “superstructure” rather than “substructure”).

Myself, I would like to see a liberalism that is both more confident and more humble about its own truths. More confident: don’t defend the sexual revolution by saying, “why not?” but by saying, “here is what we have gained – here is the positive good, here are the virtues of the life we now lead.” Don’t attack creationism by saying, “that’s smuggling sectarian religion into the public square” but by saying, “science is a magnificent human achievement that you are defacing, and science matters too much to me to stand idly by while you do that.”

I tend to agree with this in no small part because Linker's argument cuts both ways.  Here he is criticising the particularly argumentative brand of new athiests (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.):

The most thoughtful atheists--let's call them liberal atheists--have always understood that the impossibility of negative proof is a crack through which the gods, no matter how ruthlessly banished from the human world, forever threaten to return. These atheists--whose ranks include Socrates, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Albert Camus, and Primo Levi--responded to their lack of certitude, to the invariably provisional character of the beliefs by which they oriented their lives, in a supremely philosophical way: with equanimity. Accordingly, they did not go out of their way to act as missionaries for unbelief.

I'm no fan of Dawkins or Hitchens because I disagree with some of their arguments and because they're fraking obnoxious.  However, I can't see why athiests evangelizing is any worse than any other set of beliefs seeking to spread itself.  They can obviously go to far, but so can everyone else and everyone else has a longer tradition of being obnoxious.  I think the need to exclude such evangelism comes from having a pluralistic civil religion as the neutral arbiter Millman refers to above.  I think that approach has its uses as kind of a shorthand that saves us from having to argue from first principles every time.  Nonetheless, we must be able to make those arguments; I rather strongly believe Millman's closing point:

Cultivation of skepticism and doubt will never be enough; you’ll need actual alternative certitudes to push against to be sure that you actually know anything. And, if you’re really a liberal, you have to leave open the possibility of being convinced that one of your liberal truths is actually, well, false.

That's part of my rationale for having an opposition blogroll.

Poll experiment

First off, as a house keeping note, simple html should now work in comments.  Also there may be less prove you’re a human challenges, I apparently had it on always challenge for some odd reason. 

Anyhow, I’d been meaning to add polling to this blog for ages.  I always liked livejournals polling implementation, but that doens’t work on other blogs.  I did some checking around on the typepad sight and Vizu offers a polling widget.  I’ve put one up over on the left hand side.  I can either put it in a column or just directly in a post.  So, if you please, let me know which you prefer.  If you’ve got any other suggestions, feel free to pass them on.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Update:  Note that the poll won’t show up in feeds, you’ll have to go to the site.  To be expected really.  Also, there’s now comment feeds available for each post, so if you want to subscribe and see if anyone replies to your comment, there’s a way to do it without check back.  Emailed follow-ups are better, but I don’t know how to do that with typepad.  Oh, also, technological reasons.  Poll text is tricky to change.

Gaza and Egypt, together at last?

One seemingly straightforward idea to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be for Israel to return Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan.  Bolton proposed it the other day and Marc Lynch tore the idea apart.  Short version neither Egypt nor Jordan are interested, here’s the specifics on Egypt:

The Mubarak regime has been doing everything possible to separate from Gaza, not to return to it.  As Steve Cook recently pointed out, there is no upside for the Egyptian regime in this crisis. Why would a sclerotic regime obsessed with the "threat" of the Muslim Brotherhood at home and consumed with a difficult transition from an aging President take on responsibility for an enraged and devasted Gaza population which blames Egypt for enforcing the blockade on behalf of Israel?

After reading this, I noted that the objections on the Egyptian side seemed mostly centered around Mubarak (or a likely dictatorial successor).  Gazans weren’t to happy with Egypt either, but that anger may be focused on the regime rather than the people.  So I was wondering whether a more democratic Egypt might change the situation, at least pending a resolution of the West Bank.  Via a request thread, I asked that of Matt Yglesias.  His short answer: nope.  Whole post is worth reading, but here’s an excerpt.

I can’t speak from a great wealth of personal experience, but I do think it’s a mistake to look at the Middle East as just a big ol’ sea of generic Arabs who can be shunted from one country to another…  But think of Alaska. Notwithstanding the fact that Alaska shares a border with Canada along with a language and broadly speaking a “culture,” Alaskans are still Americans. And, indeed, as we’ve seen from Sarah Palin they’re capable of manifesting an ugly brand of American nationalism that’s totally incompatible with being Canadian.

An interesting related issue that can only be speculated about is to what degree would we see much closer political integration between Arab states if he had more political democracy. There are efforts, of course, to coordinate Arab policy through fora such as the Arab League. But in practice it’s extremely difficult for authoritarian states to cooperate in a deep way.

Some commenters with first hand experience with the Egyptian people confirmed that there was no real interest in taking Gaza.  Here’s some details from ST who was kind of enough to allow me to quote:

Like Dody, I live in Cairo. I’m a non-Arabic speaking expat American. Given those limitations, my impression from talking with Egyptian professionals as well as blue collar types (my housekeeper, drivers from work etc.) is that most people here do not want Gaza to be part of Egypt. They are upset about what is happening but think Hamas picked this fight and now wants Egypt to come solve it for them–and they do not want another war with Israel. My housekeeper thinks when the border security was lifted last year the Palestinians came in and bought everything in the Sinai, driving up prices for poor Egyptians and causing a lot of problems. She and others feel that if Egypt took over Gaza or opened the border they would inherit responsibility for a lot of social problems among the Palestinians and there are enough poor people here in Egypt to care for already. There are certainly some who feel that Egypt should be doing more, but the idea that Egypt should just annex Gaza is not even considered by those I have talked with and dismissed when I brought it up.

Caveat, those likely to speak to Americans in this case are more interested in staying in the good graces of the U.S.  So, my current view is that a more democratic Egypt is unlikely to offer even an interim solution to the political limbo Gaza is in.  That said, there probably would be closer economic cooperation with Gaza and perhaps less willingness to uphold a blockade.

Finally, just wanted to say thanks to Matt Yglesias.  I’ve dealt with him a couple times by email and comments and he’s been consistently gracious.  I appreciate that on a personal level, and on a practical level it means he’s got to be devoting a reasonable amount of time to dealing with bloggers and wonks far lower on the totem pole than he.  And thanks again to ST for filling in some details on the ground.

Slow posting for a week or so

I’m doing some field study of the American health care system and so am going to be posting fewer entries for the next week or so.  Might have some guest author posts, depending on the availability of my fiancee and friends.

Blogroll addition: Ross Douthat

With Democrats on the upswing, I figure now is  good time to be magnanimous in victory.  I’m adding an “opposition” category to my blog roll for those I read on the other side.  I may add a few more or switch over a couple writers, as any furtive alliances with libertarians may well breakdown once Bush is out of office.  Anyways, if someone is their, take it to mean that I consider them worth reading don’t impute their views to me.

Anyhow, my main disagreement with Douthat is that he’s a social conservative, although to my knowledge he’s never said anything against same-sex marriage.  Primarily he focuses on being opposed to abortion rights.  He recently had an op-ed where he argued that opposition to abortion wasn’t what sank the GOP ticket in 2008.

The public is amenable to compromise: majorities support keeping abortion legal in some cases, but polling by CBS News and The Times during the presidential campaign showed that more Americans supported new restrictions on abortion than said it should be available on demand. And while some pro-lifers would reject any bargain, many more would be delighted to strike a deal that extends legal protection to more of the unborn, even if it stopped short of achieving the movement’s ultimate goals.

But no such compromise is possible so long as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remain on the books…

But so long as the Supreme Court remains closely divided, and a post-Roe world remains in reach, the movement’s basic political task must remain the same. Not because pro-lifers are absolutists who reject compromise, but because any real compromise will always depend on overturning Roe.

Kevin Drum agrees that seeking to ban abortion didn’t sink the ticket, but adds an important caveat.

The truth is more prosaic: pro-life activists have done exactly what you'd expect them to do. They've pushed for the most restrictive possible laws they can get away with, and in many states they've succeeded in making abortion de facto unavailable. If Roe were overturned, compromise would be the last thing on their minds.

That said, while they’ve managed to drive doctors willing to perform abortions out of South Dakota, Denise Ross over at TNR looks into why they keep failing to pass a ban, regardless of whether it would pass constitutional scrutiny.

While it's generally agreed that South Dakotans haven't dramatically changed their view of themselves as "pro-life," Rhoden isn't the only one who thinks the well is poisoned. Blanchard, the political science professor, contends that the rapid-fire repeats of the issue have hurt pro-life efforts in South Dakota. "By making the [2006] bill so extreme, they made the right-to-life movement look like a bunch of nuts," he says. "Coming back two years later without any rest from the issue and producing a more moderate bill--but only a little more moderate--they may have permanently altered people's view of them as just a bunch of busy bodies."

Practically speaking, if at some point Roe vs. Wade proves unsustainable I do think people like Douthat would be willing to make some sort of good faith compromise.  That said, I don’t trust many of his compatriots whose eagerness to also take out contraception shows that they’re basically in a zero-sum game with feminists.  That said, the abortion rights movement is best off not compromising aside from safe, legal, and rare and trying to push the medical technology as far as possible so that if Roe breaks down it will be as easy as possible to provide services to poor women in restrictive states.

Another link round up

Busy day.  The one person I’ve heard back from said definitely keep up the commentary on them, otherwise what’s the point.

• Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle suggest a way that the print media to save the mainstream media’s business model: extortion.
• Kevin Drum notes that unions are there in part to keep teachers from having to work twelve hour days and become heroes in movies about troubled students.  I find that convincing.  Teachers don’t need to be driven by social conscience to go well above and beyond normal duties, they’re already probably in a lower income field because they’re teaching.  Our video game industry is of a size that it can get ridiculous amounts of work out of its reasonably well paid people because they really want to make games.  That doesn’t scale up to a nation wide education system.
• Also Kevin Drum’s mom house seems to attract cats the way a Japanese harem comedy guy attracts girls.
• Yglesias notes that moderates don’t necessarily want a smaller government, but instead want an effective government.    Trimming bloat is of course one way to get a more effective government, but if there were easy political wins they’re isolated to recent programs or have been made long ago.
• According to Barron YoungSmith of TNR, the talk of appointing Hillary Clinton to State may be related to assuaging potential feminist backlash from appointing Larry Summers to Treasury.  Can’t say that idea excites me, I much prefer Sen. Clinton’s domestic policy to her foreign policy.
• David Shorr discusses how we could move towards nuclear disarmament.  I think he’s absolutely right.  With the fall of the Soviet Union, there’s no reason we’d ever need to worry about being conventionally overwhelmed on the defense and thus needing a nuclear first strike.  Meanwhile the non-proliferation regime basically has broken down and nukes are slowly spreading.
• Obama is standing firm against torture.    Good.  Hopefully he’ll also take the next step and be sure to gather preserve evidence that may be needed for future war crimes trials.
• CVS is now selling DC Metro Smarttrip cards.  Thank goodness, I’m tired of having to evangelize the things just so my traveling companions don’t slow me down. (Hattip: Greater Greater Washington).

Back

Sorry about the period of absence, had and am now increasingly recovering from some major health issues that I’ll be vague on since this is a full public venue.

Anyways so expect a series of dozens of entries in short order to make up for... ha, no. I’m going to try to get back in the daily posting habit sooner rather than later though and might even get a little help with that.

Blogroll additions: Brad DeLong

Brad Delong is a prominent liberal economic blogger that I’ve been reading for several months now. He covers a range of economic and political topics, including some in depth class notes and analyses that honestly I typically skim but make me think his classes would be pretty dang interesting.

I’m including him because I’m on a blogroll adding spree and to celebrate his attempt to get formal proceedings started against another Berkeley professor and prominent torture apologist, John Yoo. Spencer Ackerman (who I’m also intending to add in the near future, wrote up this story for the Washington Independent and includes a brief summary on his blog, Attackerman.

Good hunting Prof. DeLong.

9/11 Jenga!

From a cute new blog by Francesco Marciuliano

Remember the innocent joy of watching one move transform a tall, rectangular structure into a heap of bricks?

Well, no more! That’s because the new 9/11 Jenga is as strong as our nation’s freedom and as resilient as America itself. First each wooden brick is hot-glued to one another. Then the entire tower is encased in form-fitting Lucite, permanently affixed to your kitchen table with a steel spike and patrolled by a phalanx of 4,000 army figurines, model helicopters and Estes rocket launchers, all under the watchful eye of 600 cameras posted around your house without your permission or prior knowledge. The result is a childhood classic you and your family can once again safely enjoy if not approach or touch.

Estimated completion date: 2049.

This is #9 in his list of unfit toys. Other’s include the Hardy Man Mysteries and Black Market Operation. Go check it out.

Slight change in blog format

For some time now, I’ve noticed that I tag far more articles and websites for potential blogging than I ever actually discuss. So, I think I’ll make it a little easier for myself by defining a few broad categories of what I do, and thus what I don’t blog about.

• Reporting: Travelogues, event write-ups, reviews, etc. This will probably be my most original content.
• China: I may broaden this to Asia, but for now I’m trying to keep things narrow.
• Rights: Democratization, feminism, discrimination, inequality, etc.
• Data: Solid non-anecdotal data on topics that interest me.
• Pet issues: transit, public diplomacy, contracting, whatever I’m working on at the moment, that sort of thing.

I may end up assigning a day to each of the topics, we’ll see. I figure the advantage would be having a day to do link round ups and such and provide a bit more predictability for my readers. In the short term, I might just break up my shared article feeds to make each of them more focused and thus more useful.

Hello World

Greetings,

I plan to use this blog to link to interesting things I've read and provide my thoughts on them.  Professionally I tend to find long-term trends, international relations, U.S. politics/policies, technology, and East Asia quite interesting.  Personally I'm also quite fond of science fiction, comics, action movies, and a fair amount of anime.  Sports-wise I follow the Baltimore Orioles, but if you're looking for insightful sports commentary, keep looking.

I'm a think tank researcher by trade, although a low ranking one.  Everything I say here reflects my own opinion and not the venerable yet nameless institution that gives me a biweekly paycheck.

Here's a few random favorites so you can judge my taste:
Food: Indian
Comic Character: Amanda Waller (of DC's Suicide Squad)
Action Movie: Raiders of the Lost Ark
Random historical event: The defenestration of Prague (the second one listed on the page)
International Relation: Peace