Tweeting Through February 2011

Coworker: What does it mean if the Groundhog comes out of his hole, slips on the ice, and ends up in traction? Perpetual winter?

Weather channel has older white guy and young black woman anchors. Apparently still no place for middle-aged Asian transvestites.

Egyptian transformation less interesting than (lack of or occasional spurts of) corporate transformation: outcomes of latter still undefined

Weather has knocked out information systems like phones and internet in places. I guess they'll be forced to rely on their knowledge and wisdom systems.

Tuesday, groundhog day. Wednesday, Chinese year of rabbit begins. Thursday, start of chipmunk month. Good week for rodent awareness. 

Learned why penguins waddle. If they took large strides they could slip.

If ratio of personal wealth to GDP for Mubarak was the same in US, Obama would be worth $2.1 TRILLION. Mubarak is worth $70B. Egypt's GDP is $500B.

Do you know how people wildly gesture and twist in an effort to influence the bowling ball they've already released? That's parenting.

Super Bowl would be more interesting with same stakes as when Visigoths and Huns fought. Fans of winners get the women and homes of opposing fans.

Green Bay's population is 100,000 and 83,000 people are waiting for season tickets. Est. year you'd get tickets if you applied today, 2074.

Games provide flow but rarely provide meaning. Education provides meaning but rarely provides flow. Time to bring gamers into the classroom?

Riots in muddled east stem, in part, from bad job market. Economies are now limited by ability to generate jobs - not products.

Valentine's Day is to love what birthdays are to happy. At least no one sings "be romantic to her" while we stare self-consciously at a box of chocolates.

If you wanted the players to take losing seriously, wouldn't your team name be something other than cavalier?

Texting STOP It's like having a telegraph in your pocket STOP AT&T knew they'd be vindicated for holding onto the rights to that last T STOP

Shares traded on NYSE one day in 1830: 31. Shares traded 4 Jan 2001: 2 billion. Doubled every decade to 64 million times.

Catholic confession app. Assange and Jerry Springer are already funding R&D into how to hack the feed. http://bit.ly/eJP8ys

Curious. Grocery store item labeled, "restaurant quality." Didn't "tastes home made" used to be the compliment of choice?

Bad: increasingly employees face the same risk to future income as entrepreneurs. Worse: they don't share the same potential for returns.

MS wants license plate for KKK founder. I like the idea. It's an easy way for a community to tag and monitor the demented and hateful.

Walking is easy until you overthink it. At least that's what I keep volunteering to kids in strollers.

His teachers knew Abe had a great future when after electing him class president, his classmates voted to make his birthday a school holiday.

Still a little confused about whole Egyptian thing. When did the Pharaohs resign and why didn't that get any coverage?

Wonder if in the future electronic devices, instead of spending their remaining energy beeping, will just crawl over to a wall socket.

I consider myself tech savvy. For one thing, I regularly appear in 3-D.

House Republicans propose 0 budget for NPR. So awesome. For-profit news is obviously superior. Just compare BBC & PBS w/ Fox & MSNBC.

Obama presented his new budget at a middle school. That makes sense. Junior high kids can't seem to get enough talk about federal budgets.

Conclusion after full day in conference: powerpoint is to communication what hubcaps are to transportation.

The further removed you are from a situation, the more simply you can speak about it because actual situations are rarely simple.

20th century: people program software. 21st century: software programs people.

He said that he had a couple of thoughts. It sounded to me, though, like the thoughts had him.

Since 2005, the ratio of approvals for offshore gas and oil to wind projects is 4,603 to 1, about the same as ratio of inertia to vision.

Wonder how long it'll before the first NBA team has a team tattoo artist.

Caught my computer friending Watson on facebook without me. Great. Now our computers are going to start feeling superior to us.

CA - pop. 37 million / 8th largest economy in the world.Obama visits for 1 day? How about a law requiring the president live here odd years?

NFL announces that it must drastically cut players' pay and benefits in order to remain competitive with China. http://yhoo.it/hSsHNn

Interactive graph. From 1960 to 83, poor shared prosperity w/ rich. Since then? Only the prosperous prospered http://bit.ly/eN1fKn

Ever noticed? Apparent - something obvious. A parent - someone clueless.

Emotionally pithed. Just back from Old Globe. Saw Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Miller was a genius. No wonder Marilyn fell for him.

Rush Limbaugh says that first lady is no swimsuit model then announces a new endorsement deal with speedo.

I confess. I want 3-D sound.http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/what-perfection-sounds-like/8377/

Writing: the process of banging your brain against the page until words come out.

Saw gas at $3.99 /gal. Oil by barrel is only $2.35. I think I'll just start making my own gas at home.

My brain hurts.

Presumably it is with some measure of guilt that the San Diego weather gods have returned us to our regularly scheduled program. Gorgeous.

It's great that they came up with the Oscars so that movie stars could finally get some praise and attention.

The distinction between best dressed and worst dressed seems so arbitrary. Everything cool eventually looks geeky and vice versa, no?

http://twitter.com/#!/iamrondavison

What if Twitter & Facebook Were Revolutionary?

When we listened to just a few, we listened a long time. Politicians and pundits were expected to go on at length - speeches and programs of 30 to 60 minutes, essays and books that were hundreds of - or even a hundred thousand - words.

But today's model is less about spending time with a few respected voices than spending time with lots and lots of friends and friendly - or not so friendly - voices. Even if we double the time we spend collecting news and opinion, we have to fragment it over more and more people. This necessarily forces concision, forces us to condense our thoughts into fewer words. 

Brain cells continually communicate with each other, but they are very efficient at it. These cells tend to communicate by exception, minimizing the "I'm here" signal. The brain already burns an enormous amount of energy even with this minimalist model. This efficiency is the only way to allow billions of cells to be connected. 

Facebook status comments, tweets, and texts seem to be moving us towards this model of communication over a broader net of people - a truly distributed model that doesn't dispense long messages outwards from some central point (like radio or TV) but instead sends lots and lots of short messages between nodes, or people. This model is not about hierarchy; it is about connection. 

For centuries, the progression in the West has been towards dispersing power outwards rather than concentrating it in a few. It seems as though we are now rapidly evolving a communication and reporting model that supports this more than ever. 

Stay tuned: power follows the flow of information and communication. Our old institutions that place power at the top - from church and schools to governments and corporations - are going to rapidly evolve as the communication structures that hold them in place shift. In fact, they used to call this kind of thing revolutionary. This could get really interesting. 

The "Oh Nothing" Decade Is Ending

Last decade was the 90s. The decade before, the 80s. This decade just ending? We ought to give something phonetic to the 00s. I suggest the Oh nothings.

First we had the Y2k bug. Computers would crash! The market would crash! Airplanes would crash! We spent billions converting computers and software. Wait a minute. You mean all the computers are fine? What is it? Oh, nothing.

In 2000 we heard, it's a new millennium! Everything will be different! Everyone will be rich with tech stocks. Robots will bring your slippers. It'll be wonderful! Wait? What is it? Where are my millions? Where are my slippers? What did the new millennium bring? Oh, nothing.

When George W. Bush was sworn in, there was a measure of excitement. We have a new compassionate conservative! We're bringing morality back to the White House. A non-partisan approach. Leadership and wisdom. Wait? What? What is he saying? What is his IQ? Oh, nothing.

9-11! Terror! The world is ending! Lives are in danger! The economy will collapse! Wait. No more attacks? What are is Osama doing now? Oh, nothing.

Invasion of Iraq! Our troops may face fierce resistance. We'll find WMDs! Wait? What? You've found ... oh, nothing.

Blogging was going to give everyone a voice. Make us all famous. Allow the little guy to hold politicians accountable. It was going to change .... oh, nothing.

Rebuilding Iraq. A light of democracy in the middle east. Peace at last. Prosperity for those poor Iraqis. We'll give them ... oh, nothing.

Obama won the election. He was going to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Close GITMO. Get the economy going again. End greed on Wall Street. Change the world as we know it. He was going ... what is that you said? Troop surge? Unemployment in double-digits? What has he changed? Oh, nothing.

This last year, we heard that the economy is going to crash. We'll have a Great Depression! Banks will fail! Everyone will be homeless! Wait. The economy dipped a few points and then started to rise again? What is going to happen? Oh, nothing.

In the end, the events of the decade seemed like those teaser leads the TV news uses to bring you back from break, hoping that by the time the commercials are over and they tell you the actual story you won't realize that it was ... oh, nothing.

Processed News in its Purest Form

On a flight home the other day, I put down my book (Michael Connely's Scarecrow) about an investigative reporter losing his job to watch a movie (Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck in State of Play) about an investigative reporter being demoted before coming home to read an article about the death of investigative reporting(The Story Behind the Story by Mark Bowden in this month's Atlantic).

Where the individual was once left to form an opinion about well researched stories, the news outlets have seemed to leap past all that nuance and boring litany of facts and endless prose. Instead, the modern media just provide you with an opinion with minimal time spent investigating or actually reporting.

Well, I've lived on the coast long enough to know that it's easier to ride waves than fight them. So, if investigative journalism is dead, maybe it's time to just go with this trend and offer media 3.0: all opinion, no news.

The point would be to simply provide the reader with their reaction to the news events, without hassling them with all - or any, really - of the facts. Like processed food that skips the actual food to simply provide you with fats and sugars, this news would skip directly to opinions. It might work like this.

Obama's Health Care Plan: you're outraged. (And it's true, really. Whether you can't believe what he is proposing or the opposition he's facing, you're outraged.)

Asian typhoons and tsunami earthquakes: you are so saddened by this.

Iran's plutonium enrichment program: outraged.

Toyota's recall of 3.8 million cars: shocked!

Potential reversal of Jon and Kate's divorce: outraged

.

These would not be headlines that are followed by stories. These would be the stories.

You get the idea. The one real weakness, of course, is that people may begin to realize that they have a fifty percent chance of not needing the service if they simply choose to be outraged at all the news. But for those readers who want to spend 30 seconds finding out just what ought to outrage them today, it would be an invaluable service.

This might just be the future of journalism. [Oh, and for the record? You should be outraged.]

TV News Offers an Escape from Reality

The other day I'm on the treadmill and I'm watching the TV monitors hanging from the ceiling: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox were all on. As I watched the odd behavior and even odder reporting of the talking heads, I became convinced that the news has changed.

There seems to have been a time when the purpose of the news was to get us in touch with reality, report on what is happening.

After watching Fox report on how Obama is losing so many jobs (in a recession that began before Obama was even nominated by his party) and CNN speculate on whether Michael Jackson's ex-wife will sue for custody of kids we average Americans would not recognize even if they ended up on our porch selling cookies, I can only conclude that reality has become too much. Now even the news has to perform the task previously reserved for TV sitcoms, soap operas, and movies: it has to give us an escape from reality.

Color me strange, but for all my day dreaming, I've always kind of liked reality. Too bad the TV producers don't think I can handle it anymore.

Sex and Nudity in the News!

In local news, my wife Sandi's school is having Hawaiian Day tomorrow. All the kids are dressing up. I like the idea of giving other states a turn. How about Utah Day? I can picture the 8 year olds in white shirts, name tags, and neck ties going up to different classrooms and asking, "Have you thought about becoming a second grader?"

Hillary Clinton fell yesterday, breaking her elbow. Just a couple of weeks ago, Sonia Sotomayor fell and broke her ankle. Lesser bloggers would, in an "I'm not sexist but" tone, point out that politics at this level is perhaps a bit too rough for the ladies. I would like some acknowledgement for refraining such a cheap and easy shot.

Sirius XM radio now has an application for streaming 120 channels directly into the new iPhone. Sadly, though, listeners cannot get NASCAR radio in this version. Why does that strike me as something as relevant as McDonald's not offering wheat grass?

David Letterman told a joke that offended Sarah Palin. Now protesters are asking for him to resign. I think that should be the new standard for deciding whether or not a comedian has employment: do his jokes offend Sarah Palin?

In Iran, where citizens prove their society is less developed than ours by protesting a lack of democracy rather than protesting comedians' freedom of speech, they have a Supreme Leader. A Supreme leader sounds so much better than our Regular or Mid-grade leaders. And if Sarah is unable to get a position determining which comedians get work, maybe she could get a position on Iran’s Guardian Council.

The GOP continues with its outreach program, doing what it can to attract minorities by showing a fun sense of humor.

"Wednesday, flanked by members of the NAACP, Columbia GOP activist Rusty DePass apologized for the Facebook remark that likened first lady Michelle Obama’s ancestors to an escaped Riverbanks Zoo gorilla. On Tuesday, Mike Green, an employee with Lexington GOP consulting firm Starboard Communications apologized for an online joke about President Barack Obama taxing aspirin 'because it’s white and it works.'"

One can almost picture GOP leaders frantic to understand blacks watching rap videos for clues about the right things to say and do.

[Okay. I admit it. There was neither sex nor nudity mentioned in this post but I was shamelessly trying to get your attention.]

Weekly News Opera

What if the backstreet boys got back together to lampoon the news in a mock-opera style? Okay, so other than every Sunday morning talk show, what would you have? That's right - you'd have this.

Reality Again Trumps Your Blogger's Feeble Imagination

In the media's race to be first with the breaking news
Judging from the timing of the reports on it, it would seem that the most remarkable thing about Obama's first 100 days is that it took considerably less than 100 days.

Swine Flu
As if the Wall Street crowd did not have enough grief, what with bankruptcies, bad credit, collapsed portfolios and bad press surrounding tax-payer subsidized bonuses, there is now an influenza virus that seems to be aimed directly at them. Fortunately, what seems to be the most obvious symptom - a blue face mask - also works well to hide shame.

And speaking of Republicans
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has become a Democrat, leaving Democrats one former SNL comedy skit writer away from a filibuster proof majority. Obama's approval numbers are running at about 37.5x Bush's approval ratings in spite of his spending billions a day. And consumer confidence rose by more points in a single month than the Detroit Pistons managed to score in their series against Cleveland.
Remember when you wondered how the Republicans could seem to get away with re-electing George W.? They didn't. Time rarely sides with madness.
On a related note, in an attempt to boost sagging revenues, Fox News has begin to take bids from Americans competing to be the first to take up Sean Hannity on his offer to be waterboarded.

An Air Force of None
Air Force One was flown over ground zero in New York as part of a publicity photo shoot. Panicked New Yorkers emptied out into the streets. Obama has promised that this will not happen again. He explained that this distraction from the economy was planned before the threat of a pandemic had already seized headlines. As part of his stimulus package and plans to restructure the military, Obama is nonetheless moving ahead with plans to promote the sale of anti-aircraft guns to neighborhood watch groups.

Sarkozy's Bold Plan
The French, showing themselves more innovative than us in concocting stimulus packages, have announced that X-rated photos and videos of Carla Bruni - their first lady - have been stolen. The media coverage surrounding this material could, alone, be enough to stimulate the economy. Or at least economists.

I Have Something to Tell You With This Tomato
Russ Douthat, who I used to think of as an interesting writer, suggests that Cheney should have run for the presidency so that Americans could have judged his record. It might have made more sense for him to have sat in stocks for week so that the country could have expressed its appreciation.

Psychic Finds Airborne Chihuahua
And in what must surely be a metaphor for the times, fierce winds in Detroit actually blew a six-pound Chihuahua about a mile away from its owners. (Who had taken the dog to a flea market. Isn't that just asking for trouble?) As if that was not enough oddness for one story, the dog's owner's contracted the services of a dog psychic who led them into the woods to their dog.
And then the psychic made blowing sounds, began to flap her arms and seemed to "glide away" from the stunned couple.

The Momentum of Tradition in the Media - Or Why You Hear So Much About Political Unrest and So Little About Business

Listen to NPR and you’re more likely to hear news about Palestine than what is going on in the corporate headquarters of your area’s largest employer. If the news offers a context for daily life, this suggests that the news is moving towards irrelevance.

Like all sectors, the media is as defined at least as much by tradition as current reality. A free press grew up coincident with the evolution of modern democracies. The major story of the free press was politics and that remains the main story, the meta-narrative.

This can be good during a time of elections and political crisis. But it rests on an implied assumption: issues played out in the political sector matter and are the biggest determinants of quality of life for the average person.

If you live in Darfur or Palestine, this assumption is valid. In such places, it is not obvious that anything has more impact on quality of life than political issues played out through policy or battle. But if you live in a place like Germany or the U.S., this assumption is not so obvious. I would argue that quality of life for the average person in the developed world is more determined by corporate policy and strategy.

If you live in a democracy, it is obvious that changes in fiscal or monetary policy or laws DO make a difference. But this difference is secondary to what happens at work. If your employer makes a decision to radically change health coverage, needs to consolidate operations and layoff, or is expanding and has great opportunities for promotions, you will notice a real difference in levels of stress, income, and hope. Reducing taxes by 5% does little to offset a loss of job.

Yet business news still tends to be a side note, whereas real news is inevitably focused more on disasters and politics.

But it is time for business news to become more central to the main stream media. Issues like environment, quality of work life, income growth, and benefits coverage ought to be covered within the context of policy implications. What kinds of corporations do we want? What balance of environmental and economic concerns should they navigate? What sort of work experience do we want for our kids? For ourselves? Political reporting is invariably made within such a context, the context of what should be as an overlay to what is. There is a great deal of debate about the ideal political policies, but the press and readers have real ideas about what kind(s) of government and policies ought to be pursued. By contrast, it seems as though most business reporting is done as if one were reporting on the weather: these are facts (e.g., layoffs or expansion) that simply need to be accepted, seems to be the subtext.

The time for the mainstream media to cover business policies and issues as a more central part of the news is long past. If we want our media to help shape a better world - and for hundreds of years it has - it has to shift its attention to the new constraint to progress. What is central to progress now is significant change in the corporation; believe it or not, this will make even more difference to the life of the average person than will additional changes to government policy.

Newsweak

Pundits report the news before it happens and then authoritatively explain why it didn't happen as predicted. Hillary Clinton's campaign is over. So they say. They call themselves conventional wisdom and when they are wrong, they can all say, "We don't know how conventional wisdom could have been so wrong." When I get big, I'm not only going to talk about myself in the third person, but I'm going to refer to myself as some large and impersonal entity. ("Yes, dear, but conventional wisdom had been dead certain that you would love the real green dress.")

If you are willing to move to Kathmandu, there is an opening for a living goddess. It sounds like an interesting position, but I imagine that being the incarnation of Kali would leave one little room for personal self-expression.

Like an angry diner on a bad date cursing the waiter ("I did not order this heart break!"), the political machinery in Washington continues to try sending back the recession it did not order. But reality has its sense of humor, insisting that a prolonged recession is the perfect "cherry on top" for Bush's 8 years as leader of the free (for all) world. Proposing that his tax cuts be made permanent, Bush insisted that the problem was not government spending but was, rather, insisting that the government must pay as it goes.

It turns out that John McCain is "soft" on immigration because he is himself, an immigrant. John was born in Panama on a military base. Ralph Nader decried this as yet one more attempt by Republicans to eventually outsource every job in America.

The press has decided that they've lulled Barack Obama sufficiently that his expression of hurt surprise once they turn on him will make for priceless pictures and videos. Expect all favorable coverage to come to a sudden halt on Wednesday.

Crude oil prices continued their rise past $100 a barrel; sophisticated oil prices, by contrast, had already slipped past $150 a barrel months ago.

News and Trends You May Have Missed

My children are fifth generation Californians, but even I have to admit that I find this state surprising at times. LA now has marijuana vending machines. Why is this surprising? It's obvious that a product like this should have been introduced in the Bay Area - San Francisco or Santa Cruz.

A mayor in a small town in Arkansas suddenly resigned, revealing that he was really an Indiana preacher who had abandoned his family in 1980 because satanists had abducted him and brainwashed him to erase memories of a murder he knew about. Thanks to truth serum, his memory and old identity have now returned.

8 year old twins in Ohio invented a special pair of boxer shorts that make it nearly impossible for the wearer to be given an wedgie. Their (apparent) response to bullying got them to the finals of the state inventors' competition this year.

The ratio of Latinos in Iowa to the number of full-time farmers is 7 to 4.

There are nearly 10,000 distinct and separate religions in the world - with two or three new ones created every day.

Soft drinks are now the leading source of calories in the average American diet, accounting for almost 1 in every 10 calories consumed. (In the early 1990s, white bread was the leading source.)

Women outvoted men 54 to 46 in the 2004 election. Women outnumber men in college by about 57 to 43 percent. The estimated ratio of straight women to men is 53 to 47.

1/4 of the U.S. population that has lived only under presidents named Bush and Clinton.

10 percent of Americans say they are willing to have an Internet-access device implanted in their brains.

Another Day, Another Batch of Headlines

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili drew an angry response from Russia on Thursday and faced growing censure from supporters in the West after he quashed opposition protests and imposed emergency rule. The response from Bush was more confused. "Georgia has a president,? Does that mean I'm governor there?" he asked aids.

Here in San Diego, Marines have put their drill instructor on trial for being abusive. Seriously. If they lose this trial, said their defense attorney, they're going to appeal on grounds that the judge was judgmental.

In New York, a restaurant is offering a $25,000 dessert. It includes 28 different cocoas, 5 grams of edible gold, and medical coverage for any health complications resulting from obesity. McDonald's has announced that they'll begin selling fries that include stents for only $12,000.

Yesterday, in Texas, a man set a record by sitting in a tub filled with 87 rattlesnakes. The stunt did two things for him. One, it gave him the Guinness record. Two, it substituted for a normal election. The voters in his district said, "Okay! You've proved it. You're ready to sit in congress."

Televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani, surprising observers who thought Giuliani's support for abortion would make it difficult for him to win the support of the evangelic community. Robertson said that he'd prefer to support a candidate who would not only fight for the rights of the unborn but be willing to bomb the cities of the born, but if he had to choose, he felt like he had to go with someone willing to bomb the born.

A couple driving near Chelan, Washington had a cow fall out of the sky and onto the hood of their minivan. I have no clue about how to embellish this.

Today's Headlines - Another Look

Ron Paul raised $4 million in one day, breaking Mitt Romney’s one day record for fundraising. If he’s unable to win the election, he plans to use his newly discovered fundraising skills to raise the money to simply buy congressmen.

The writer’s strike has shut down TV productions all over town. Love of Life and Scrubs is said to be taking advantage of this lull in script production to film scenes for their foreign markets, showing actors gesturing and talking emotionally. The reasoning is that they can dub in the foreign language dialogue later, once the strike is settled and the writers are able to inform the actors of what it was they were saying. Rumor has it that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a similar plan.

In spite of the fact that Mukasey refused to denounce waterboarding, he’ll likely be confirmed by the Senate as the new attorney general. Bush said he doesn’t understand the fuss. He’s no fan of snowboarding either, but no one has brought that up.

Rosie O’Donnell is reportedly finalizing a deal with MSNBC to start her own TV show, doing political commentary. Donald Trump was outraged. “What makes executives think that anyone would want to watch an obnoxious personality prone to juvenile fights?”

Bush called Musharraf’s firing of the Pakistani chief justice and closing down of TV stations a mistake. Apparently, Musharraf now says that he had only meant to turn off his TV, not actually shut down TV stations.

NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system. Citigroup and Countrywide have already announced new subprime mortgage program for investors interested in buying real estate there.

The Pentagon is having trouble meeting its recruitment goals, so it is planning to lower its entry requirements. “As it turns out,” says a Pentagon spokesmen, “having been arrested for carrying guns or fighting does not make a person unfit for military duty.”

Researchers have recently discovered one difference between men and children. Breastfeeding raises the IQs of children by 7 points. By contrast, the mere sight of breasts actually lowers the IQs of men by 14 points.