Archive for May, 2009
 We can probably agree that it’s good to have goals. In business, especially, it’s good to know where you’re going and to have some mechanisms that help you chart and evaluate your progress.
Increasingly, though, we’re presented with more and more evidence suggesting that our goal-setting can easily go awry, and with dramatically counter-productive results. If you’ve read Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s outstanding Freakonomics you probably recall their investigation of teacher-fueled cheating on standardized tests, for instance. While most of would agree in principle that our educational system should adhere to the highest standards possible, it’s clear that something went badly wrong in that system. If you know any teachers, you may also have heard (in tones ranging from quiet exasperation to unbridled rage) how goal-setting is failing in other places, as well, and for many of the same reasons. Full story »
 Since President Obama etched his commitment to nuclear disarmament in stone with his Prague speech, those opposed, as described in a previous post, are coming out of the woodwork. Among the more recent is an article on Talking Points Memo titled Zero is too much by noted communitarian Amitai Etzioni. Its appearance on TPM is yet another example of the difficulty pinning him — like communitarianism — down on the political spectrum.
Also, the title, if it’s his doing, turns the concept of “getting to zero” inside-out. What does that remind me of? Oh, the term he once coined: deproliferation. Basically, he hitched a ride on the back of “nonproliferation” to reach the idea marketplace and barter for credibility. But, in the process, he reached under the concept of nonproliferation and cut its throat. Full story »
 by Rich Herschlag and Bill Staples
We knew LA was a little weird, but we really had no idea. Not even a year out there and sweet old Manuel Ramirez from the Bronx is caught taking human chorionic gonadotropin, a female fertility drug. Soon, Manny will be studying Kabbalah, eating quiche, and opening a Botox clinic in Malibu.
This wasn’t exactly juicing. Let’s call it milking. There are boobs and there are man boobs. Now there are Manny boobs. First there was Octo-mom. Now there’s Octo-Manny. This is not Manny being Manny. This is Manny being Mommy. Just in time for Mother’s Day. And this Mother’s Day, Mom got a hypodermic needle and a syringe.
This is not so much a fifty-game suspension as it is a maternity leave. Full story »
All yours
UPDATE: As of noon on Tuesday Asobi Seksu is laying the boots to The Dreaming, 91%-9%. Still, it’s not too late for Christopher Hall & Co. to rally. Polls close Thursday night – give them a listen and cast your vote below.
____________________
Good match last week, and in the end Black Mountain defeats Bon Iver by a comfortable 60%-40% margin. They move onto round two where they’ll await the winner of this week’s especially tough match.
Our first competitor: from New York, the exceptional shoegaze/pop of Asobi Seksu.
Full story »
 Specifically, hip-hop jumps the great white shark.
3OH!3 breaks into Top 10
Boulder-based duo hits #9 on Billboard charts
A local hip-hop duo whose members hail from Boulder have broken into the top 10 on the charts.
Boulder natives Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte make up 3OH!3, and their single “Don’t Trust Me,” this week hit No. 9 on Billboard’s “Hot 100,” up from the No. 13 spot it held last week. The single has been on the charts for 21 weeks.
Yes, folks, the genre spawned by inner city black culture has now been taken over by kids from the whitest place in America, Boulder, Colorado. Don’t get me wrong – Boulder is a beautiful city and I have nothing against white people. Some of my best friends are white. In fact, white people love me. Full story »
Hot links from recent days Full story »
 The U.S. Navy is fumbling a blue and golden opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of its maritime global reach capability (and justify its phony baloney budget) in the age of fourth generation warfare. Admiral Gary Roughead, who as Chief of Naval Operations is the service’s senior officer, says sea power is not sufficient to combat the Somali pirate threat. “Pirates don’t live at sea,” he recently told reporters at a Navy League conference. “They live ashore. They move their money ashore. You can’t have a discussion about eradicating piracy without having a discussion about the shore dimension.”
A mind that astute could only have been shaped at the United States Naval Academy. Yeah, Gary: all of Yamamoto’s people lived ashore too, but you didn’t get to bomb their homeland until you sank their fleet. Full story »
Technically, Burma’s 2007 Saffron Revolution wasn’t saffron. The term was coined out of deference to the saffron-yellow robes that Buddhist monks in Asia usually wear. The robes of Burmese monks’ robes are, in fact, plum colored (the better to hide the blood?).
The Saffron Revolution was triggered by Burma’s military dictatorship when it took the International Money Fund and its trademark “structural adjustment program,” as well as the World Bank’s advice, a little too literally. In one bold stroke, the junta, which has been ruling Burma with the proverbial iron fist since 1962, stopped subsidizing fuel. Prices rose at least 50%.
Imagine the chaos that would ensue if the United States Government pulled a stunt like that? Triple the effects on a semi-impoverished state like Burma. Full story »
 Last Saturday we decided to explore these strange formations in southwest Washington State. These are large uniform mounds of earth covered in prairie. These formations also go by the name Hogwallows and appear in at least six other states and five other countries.
 No one has been able to determine the origins of these mounds, but the leading theory about retreating glaciers got a boost when Department of Natural Resource scientists presented new laser imaging of the mounds.
Full story »
 The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is running an advertisement at the Washington Post and The Hill websites which makes the following claim: 72% of opinion leaders support coal electricity. The ACCCE touts this claim repeatedly at their various websites, but there is so little information available about the study that produced this claim that it’s literally impossible to verify. However, given the number of inconsistencies in what little information is available, we can make an educated guess as to the accuracy of the 72% claim.
If you click on the “America’s Power” advertisement (screen shots shown at right), you’re taken to this page, where the ACCCE claims “it’s easy to see why 72 percent of American opinion leaders support the use of coal.” On this page, however, there are four links on the page that all go to the same press release that describes the ACCCE study that produced this 72% number. Full story »
 by Josh Catone
This past weekend saw the online release of the first non-spoof, fan-created film set in the Lord of the Rings universe. That by itself is fairly unremarkable, but a number of things set The Hunt for Gollum apart from your standard fan created fare. It’s long (about 40 minutes), it has better than average acting and writing (think direct-to-DVD caliber), it features incredibly high production values despite a meager £3,000 budget, and it is based on canon. That last bit especially, had some wondering if Gollum would run afoul of rights holders at Tolkien Enterprises.
Where most fan art uses original characters and story lines, The Hunt for Gollum‘s writer and director Chris Bouchard based the script on appendices to Tolkien’s original work. That the film uses Tolkien’s actual story could have spelled trouble for the entire production. There are two understood rules in the world of fan art: don’t use official material (like logos, music, and to a lesser extent known characters), and don’t try to make money off your creations. Full story »
 Oh, the sheer deliciousness of it all. Manny Ramirez has been busted for using.
The word is that ManRam didn’t actually use steroids.
However, two sources told ESPN’s T.J. Quinn and Mark Fainaru-Wada that the drug used by Ramirez is HCG — human chorionic gonadotropin. HCG is a women’s fertility drug typically used by steroid users to restart their body’s natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle. It is similar to Clomid, the drug Bonds, Giambi and others used as clients of BALCO.
This may be even sweeter, for a couple of reasons. First, this line: “…typically used by steroid users to restart their body’s natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle.” Outing Manny for roid use would have been great, but the next best thing is the lingering shadow of suspicion that’s bound to follow him around for the rest of his career (and, with luck, well into the latter years of his Hall of Fame eligibility). Full story »
Like music? Got Twitter? If so, you might have a look at this expansive catalogue of musical acts on Twitter. There are a lot of bands you may have heard of, lots more bands you haven’t heard of (but might want to investigate, should you be so moved), and the whole thing is nicely organized, extremely searchable, etc.
by Terry Hargrove
I don’t regret any of the formal education I’ve received over the years. It’s unlikely I ever would have invented an alphabet on my own, and math has come in handy every now and then, especially the part about negative numbers. I use those a lot these days. But there are many lessons that I had to learn on my own, from the world, and that knowledge was gained through great physical and emotional pain. I know that water balloons don’t belong in church. I know that when The Dad told me to go get a switch (after I took the water balloons to church), I shouldn’t have dragged back a tree limb as a way of making a statement. Because The Dad used that tree limb to make his own statement, and at the end of the day, his statement was far more memorable. I know it’s a bad idea to try and make a pet of a goat. Poor, poor Hargoat. Let’s not go there.
The best thing about learning lessons on your own is that the world is constantly trying to teach us stuff, even when we’re slouching in the back of the room trying to sleep. Full story »
Greg Mitchell, award-winning author and editor of the news industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher, brings four decades of journalism experience to his incisive media analyses in his E&P column “Pressing Issues” and on The Huffington Post. He was on the ground covering the bloody 1968 Democratic National Convention and, in the 1970s, became the senior editor of the legendary rock/political magazine Crawdaddy, where he helped write and publish the first magazine article about Bruce Springsteen. Full story »
 As the poet Robert Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.” The common military iteration of the sentiment says that no plan, however well devised, survives contact with the enemy. And former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson explained, in the least poetic fashion possible, that everybody’s got a plan until you bust him in the mouth.
There’s a lesson in here for businesses, even those that aren’t involved in actual combat: Nothing wreaks havoc with strategic planning quite like hard times. We’ve all got a plan, a vision, a dream, but these plans have to navigate whatever reality throws at us, and the more adverse the conditions the harder it is to stick to the course. Full story »
Have a guess
Behind the jump is the reverse of the plant
Full story »
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is well known for producing strictly non-partisan, tightly controlled and pretty conservative (as in careful not to overreach) economic forecasts for the effects of legislation on the national economy. These forecasts are usually quantitative in nature, giving dollar estimates for costs, benefits, savings, growth, and so on. Which is one of the reasons why last week’s release of the CBOs Potential Impacts of Climate Change in the United States was relatively unusual – it’s remarkably quantitative for a body whose products are usually numbers.
Perhaps more unusual, however, is the fact that the CBO produced the summary in the first place. Scientific summaries are usually the domain of the National Academies, NOAA, NASA, et al, not the budget office. But this time Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, requested that the CBO produce “an overview of the current understanding of the impacts of climate change in the United States,” with an emphasis on the uncertainties surrounding those impacts and the policy difficulties that fall out of the difficulties. Full story »
|
