Peter’s Blog

Neither party needs to be present to get married in Montana: Trading Vows in Montana, No Couple Required - New York Times

BBC NEWS | Americas | Bush vetoes interrogation limits

US President George Bush says he has vetoed legislation that would stop the CIA using interrogation methods such as simulated drowning or “water-boarding”.

Classy move, George.

“More then 1 in 100 American adults is in prison, report finds” - International Herald Tribune

For the first time in history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. An additional 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

I’m reminded of this scene in Three Kings:

Games Without Frontiers: Going Gunning With My Imaginary Friends

Videogames, in effect, are beyond Turing. As Simon Bart, a sociologist who studies videogames at Concordia University in Montreal, put it in a recent paper: “The solo game is posthumanistically social.” It’s about the pleasures of hanging out with machines even when you’re aware they’re merely machines.

“Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business”

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added” subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see wired.com/extras for a complete list). Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

Great feature piece in Wired’s latest issue by Chris Anderson on why everything is becoming free. What Anderson says here about the media business model being applied to more and more industries ties in a lot with what Tom Foremski has been saying about Silicon Valley becoming Media Valley.

And walking the walk, Wired is giving away the print version of the issue (to the first 10,000). US addresses only, or otherwise I would have signed up. Though I got a year’s subscription to Wired free once with my $20 subscription to Salon, so I’ve already benefited. =)

Note: This is based on the European January 19-25 edition.

p.14 I was surprised to read:

“It [America] has much to learn from Europe. Best of all, set a carbon tax, which is less susceptible to capture by business lobbies than a cap-and-trade system.”

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I thought The Economist preferred a cap-and-trade system. But, as they point out, the European system has been largely ineffective and is easier to game than a simple tax. Unfortunately for both them and the US, it’ll probably be a cold day in hell before an aggressive carbon tax gets real headway in Congress. Given that cap-in-trade was invented in the US, it has another thing in its favor.

p.23 I like the line, “ If Napoleon’s armies marched on their stomachs, American ones march on bandwidth.”

p.24 Wow:

“A single Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft flying over Afghanistan can eat up several times more satellite bandwidth than was used for the whole of the 1991 war against Iraq.”

The whole war!

p.41 Did I miss something? Apparently Obama’s admitted to doing cocaine. Bill Clinton, W, and now Obama (and I’m sure most of his fellow Presidential candidates): everyone’s ‘experimented’. It just goes to show that my friend smoking a joint while in Amsterdam and didn’t want their photo taken because of potential problems in the future has nothing to fear.

p. 71 According to research by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh, “Prostitutes [in Chicago] are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one.”

p.78 A mystery indeed:

“Who knew that … the rarely seen $2 bill still accounts for 1% of all American notes printed? (Where do they all go?)”

What if we thought of stag tourism as actually a subtle form of currency arbitrage? It’s not like any of the things purchased are significantly different – they’re just cheaper, and specifically in a less-valued currency.

Is morality innate? Is there a biological basis for it? Is it universal? The NY Times Magazine has a very interesting piece called“The Moral Instinct” covering these questions.

Patrick Smith, the author of the always excellent “Ask the Pilot” column on Salon, has a good post on the NY Times website called “The Airport Security Follies”.

BLDGBLOG has a really nice interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. A lot of the interview talks about utopian ideas and how he’s continually tried to rehabilitate them in his writing. Some early examples, and not mentioned in the interview, are the books in his Wild Shore trilogy. I read and enjoyed Pacific Edge, and the other two, The Gold Coast and The Wild Shore, also look good. Speaking of KSR, Escape From Kathmandu is also quite good.