Airbus A380

Jeff Nolan pipes in with his opinion on the Airbus A380 and the claim that it will have "lots of room for lounges and shopping":

It's an unnatural act for the airlines to do anything but pack as many sorry SOBs shoulder-to-shoulder as they can into this flying beer can. Maybe Paul Allen's A380 will have a lounge and a gym, but I can sure as shit guarantee you that the one I will be on won't.

Lego Han Solo in Carbonite

Is there anything you can't do with Legos?
Lego Han Solo in Carbonite

San Jose Grand Prix

The city of San Jose is going to be holding a CART Indycar race through the streets of downtown July 29 - July 31. This has already been causing disruptions - Almaden Blvd was completely repaved to smooth out the road and seal the manhole covers. It should be interesting although I fully expect that the entire city is going to be shut down over that weekend. I would still prefer to see the World Rally Championship take on the roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains but you have to start somewhere...

Safari 1.3 breaks feed protocol

I recently installed the Mac OS X update 10.3.9 (which includes Safari 1.3) and now clicking on links that use the feed protocol (which used to launch the installed RSS Aggregator) launches ... an advertisment for Safari 2.0 (which supports RSS and is part of the $129 Mac OS X 10.4 upgrade). It would be one thing if Safari 1.3 supported RSS but it doesn't - and even if I do upgrade to Tiger, I likely won't be reading RSS feeds in Safari anyway. It's sort of like making yourself the default web browser when you install - you should ask, especially if it's part of an OS update. According to Dave Hyatt, this is a bug, not part of some master plan - riiiiiight. They added / localized a dialog to tell you to update to 10.4 as a bug. I've also has problems with CMD-Tab not working in lots of cases which apparently is a feature (and is something I really rely on alot), and a 3rd party search plugin was crashing on startup and required removing it (irritating but not a big deal). I'm going to take a Safari "vacation" and try Firefox on Mac for a while. Switching browsers is pretty easy on the mac so no doubt I will back using Safari sooner or later.

Open Sourcing books

Lawrence Lessig has been arguing pretty vehemently that copyrights should expire within a reasonable amount of time and require some action (like paying $1) on the copyright holder to extend protection. This would prevent the problem of many works being lost because no one can find the copyright holder to find out if they even care anymore and allow the public domain to continue to grow while still protecting Mickey and freinds. Sadly, the powers that be don't want even this kind of rational restriction on their copyrights and won't be happy until it's "foreever less 1 day".

Given this glum outlook, it's great to see that some people are actively releasing their older books into the public domain. Lessig has been releasing some of his books openly with a Creative Commons license and is using a public wiki to edit the next version of Code and I recently came across the following:

• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt from IEEE - a classic text on Economics
• Wall Street by Doug Henwood - a disection of how Wall Street really works

Flaky Statistics

This is why I don't pay attention to polls and most "reseach" you get in the popular press / interweb. It's crap because no one knows / cares about statistics enough to do any due dilligence on their methodology. Pew Internet Research put out a study indicating that 6 million people (out of all people have iPods/MP3 players) have listented to podcasts.This was widely reported in the press but if you read further, they asked 200 people and 60 of them said they had listened to some kind of internet broadcast (which is not podcasting). So the conclusion they drew from their own data is wrong in the first place, then you have to consider what the errors on extrapolating from 60 -> 6 million is based on the standard deviation of the original data. And then there is statistical bias in the way they collect the results. For example: How did they reach the people? Telephone? You can't do surveys on cell phones so you have to correct for that bias of people who don't have land lines or aren't home in the evenings (which you really can't do) and include it in the error for the final result - which you'll notice they didn't give. This is all a lot of effort and if anyone really was going to do this for what is a pretty stupid survey in the first place, I'm sure they'd conclude it wasn't worth the trouble.

Monitor Art

From Gizmodo. In a completely unrelated story, Gizmodo is looking for an editor.

Killed for shoes?

When I was a kid, I remember hearing all these stories about people being killed for their Air Jordan sneakers. Apparently, it still happens which is pretty disturbing. I've never been robbed for my shoes personally but if I ever am, I think I'll just hand them over and live to wear shoes another day...