Luminous and ethereal.

Carly’s EP, “The Cure for Growing Older” can be purchased at iTunes. She’s an independent artist, so put cancel that afternoon coffee run and get this instead. 🙂

Enjoy.

More on Carly can be found at her website.

Emma – Carly Rhiannon – YouTube

Ezra Klein does a good job about explaining QE3 (Here’s why everyone is so excited about what the Fed did yesterday). So much so that I think you should go read it (if for no other reason, you will now know what QE3 is.)

What he does leave out is something I don’t think alot of people are talking about, and that is that the U.S. Federal Reserve is exercising new approaches to affecting the economy. I think QE3 will be either be successful or at the very least, not unsuccessful. While being successful is important now, what is just as important is that in the future, the Fed (and other central banks around the world) will have a precedent for doing the same thing again. And that is a good thing.

The head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, should have done this along time ago. I think partly he did not because of push back and fears of what this might do. But now the precedent has been set, it will not be as hard to do again in the future.

And that’s a good thing.

John Coltrane, one of the great musicians of the 20th century, was born on this day. There’s a wealth of video on YouTube you can watch to get a sense of his greatness, including this (John Coltrane – My Favorite Things Live 1965 – YouTube)

You can watch him on YouTube, but better still, go and buy some of his music.

 

 

This map was taken from here: Where life expectancy is falling (in one map). Key quote:

The areas are by and large rural and lower income. They also tend to be areas with fewer doctors, likely meaning less access to the health care resources available elsewhere in the country.

I would be interested to know obesity rates and smoking rates in these areas. Also it is noteworthy that it is concentrated in the South of the U.S. I don’t know if there is a cultural element coming in there (and it would likely be hard to measure, especially compared to concrete things such as obesity, exercise rates, smoking, etc.).

Regardless, it’s not good.

P.S. Obesity rates are here and they overlap to a great degree.

I came across these great portraits of Enrico Nagel, like this one:

via Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I wanted to know more, and I clicked through to this link, Flavorwire » Enrico Nagel’s Delightfully Strange Scanner Portraits. I recommend you do too: there’s lots of great portraiture there.

It put me in mind of this cover art from the Tragically Hip from 1992, for the album, Fully Completely

The album came with art similar to Nagel’s. Both are really good. The Hip has the benefit of coming with great music too. 🙂

While there is a focus here on white Americans, Life Expectancy for Less Educated Whites in U.S. Is Shrinking – NYTimes.com, the fact that life expectancy for ANY group in the U.S. is inexcusable. Women in particular have been hit hard. Key quote:

The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London.

It’s not a small thing: it’s comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

American society as a whole is suffering badly. This is a key indicator of it, and a signifigant sign more dramatic changes need to occur.

Exquisite.

The Civil Wars – Billie Jean (Michael Jackson Cover) – YouTube

One reason: cell phones. As this article shows, Obama’s Lead Looks Stronger in Polls That Include Cellphones – NYTimes.com, there is a big difference in polls that use cell phones in their mix and those that do not.

I think the ones that that include cell phones show better results. If they do, I also expect the ones that do not include cell phones will change their methodology soon. Or go out of business.

 

He jokes he is not a socialist, but read his comments in this article, Lloyd Blankfein’s ‘socialist’ moment – The Globe and Mail. Such comments can easily get you labelled “socialist” in large parts of Western countries. For example, some of things attributed to him in the article are:

The U.S. economy does not do a good enough job of distributing wealth fairly. The U.S. government needs to keep spending. Investment banks must accept more regulation. Oh, and bankers should be prepared for the criticism that comes with having been at the centre of the financial crisis.

Such declarations aren’t coming from Barack Obama or an Occupy Wall Street protester – they’re from Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Well worth a read.

It helps to be reminded from time to time that it is never too late to learn new things and discover new passions. In this article, How Tolstoy Learned to Ride a Bike, and Other Tales of Late-Life Learning – NYTimes.com, Chales Wilson provides a number of examples of late learners, from Toystoy to Eisenhower to Marie Curie. In Toystoy’s case

The author of “War and Peace” took his first bicycling lesson at age 67, only a month after the death of his 7-year-old son, Vanichka. He was still grieving, and the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers provided him a free bike and instruction along the garden paths on his estate. He became a devotee, taking rides after his morning chores. “Count Leo Tolstoy . . . now rides the wheel,” declared Scientific American in 1896, “much to the astonishment of the peasants on his estate.”

This is amazing: Scientists Make Progress in Tailor-Made Organs – NYTimes.com. It’s still in the early stages, and it is possible that the more complex organs will not be that easy to grow (e.g. parts of the brain). It’s worth reading, as well as worth thinking about.

There may come a time when people get their organs changed like they were shoes or tires on cars. When the difference between rich and poor will depend on the ability to swap out organs.

The future is here, all around us, happening while we look elsewhere.

 

This is a great success story that few are talking about. AIG could have gone under during the financial crisis of 2008, and if it had, it had the potential of taking down the global economy. Instead, it was rescued by TARP. Not only was it rescued, but the American government is going to make a profit from it and sell off most of their shares. Key take aways from this Globe and Mail story:

It’s not easy to celebrate the anniversary of the financial meltdown. American International Group, however, is providing reason for a muted cheer. Uncle Sam is ceding control of the giant insurer four years after a rescue that eventually put taxpayers on the hook for $182-billion (U.S.). The planned sale of AIG shares should net a profit, too. But exuberant political messaging would create the wrong impression about bailouts…..

Over the weekend, the U.S. Treasury said it could sell as much as $20.7-billion of its AIG common shares if underwriters exercise an overallotment option. That would slash the government’s stake to 15 per cent from the current 53 per cent – and 92 per cent in the aftermath of the crisis. Given the horror show AIG was, it’s a turnaround nearly impossible to have foreseen at the end of 2008.

It seems to me whoever wrote this article has gone out of their way to downplay the success of this. Ignore the tone of the article: this is a big success.

It is a shame it is not going to get touted more, but it won’t. The Republicans hate TARP and would hate even more to play up the success of it. And the Democrats don’t want to be associated with bailing out a Wall Street firm as big and terrible as AIG.

Still, this is remarkable.

This week the great Janelle Monáe was in Toronto and among other numbers, she performed this classic:

Janelle Monáe – I Want You Back, Live @ the Nobel Peace Prize Concert 2011 – YouTube

I love love love her, but this is a version….well, it’s a bit too fast.(Still great though.) To see what I mean, here’s the ultimate version, performed by the Jacksons themselves, on Soul Train, no less:

Michael Jackson with The Jackson 5 on Soul Train I Want You Back – YouTube

Eiher way, it is an exceptional song.

Bonus: if you, like I, think this is one of the great songs of the 20th century, let the young ones you know listen to this:

Chances are they know this show, and they will groove to this version. And if they do, your work is done.

Victorious I Want You Back Music Video HD with lyrics – YouTube

There’s been a number of people (see articles Brooklyn Is the Second Most Expensive Place to Live in the U.S. | Observer and Brooklyn is No Longer the “Budget-Savvy” Alternative to Manhattan – New York – News – Runnin’ Scared) commenting on the report from the Council for Community and Economic Research that shows that Brooklyn is the second most expensive place to live in the U.S. (Manhattan is number 1). I joked that this is good news for Queens, but apparently it is number 5. 

Some thoughts on this. One, this is a tale of two Brooklyns. Sure, some parts of Brooklyn are very expensive, but other parts are not. New York has always been about rich and poor neighborhoods as long as I can recall. Once it seemed like outsiders only talked about the neighborhoods of Manhattan, but now this has expanded to Brooklyn. And Brooklyn has many neighborhoods, from Williamsburg and Greenpoint and Park Slope (the trendy ones) to Canarsie and Flatbush and Brownsville (the less trendy ones). If Mayor Bloomberg is successful in leading the charge of making New York a center for development and growth of new businesses, I suspect even the less trendy neighborhoods will start to become hip destinations and they too will become more gentrified and expensive.

Two, this problem of Brooklyn (or at least parts of it) becoming trendy and expensive is a good problem to have. Cities like Detroit would love to have this problem. It is not a problem anyone would have anticipated in the mid 70s when New York almost went bankrupt (What Happens When City Hall Goes Bankrupt? : NPR). It says something of the health of New York that it is such a mecca for people to want to go there and live there, in spite of the costs.

Three: the division of New York into boroughs for this study is a bit disingenous. New York City is expensive. If Manhattan is first, Brooklyn is second, and Queens is fifth, it seems to me this is as much a nature of that large metropolis as it is the nature of the individual boroughs. If Manhattan was first and Buffalo was second, and the other boroughts way down the list, that would be one thing. But the New York boroughs share many things that makes all of them will expensive (e.g., infrastructure). I don’t know where the Bronx and Staten Island were on that list, but I suspect they would be up there too. Dividing the boroughs up is artificial. What it really highlights is that it is tough to have your cake (live well in NYC) and eat it too (live cheaply).

No big deal, just a music legend, with a guitar, in the stacks, having a beer, and performing one of the greatest hits by one of the best bands of the 20th century, bar none.

Mick Jones sings ‘Should I stay or should I go? at the Rock and Roll Public Library – YouTube

Speeches are great. They get people excited and give them something to talk about. Conventions are grand and theatrical. It’s not suprising that they get alot of attention.

Elections, however, are about numbers. Here are two sets of them.

The first set comes from the great FiveThirtyEight Blog on the NYTimes.com, run by Nate Silver. Right now, Silver has the probabiliy of Obama winning at 74.8%. That could change of course, but right now it is very strongly in Obama’s favour.

Here’s another set of numbers from the blog The Mischiefs of Faction.

What it shows is that Obama’s campaign has a much better ground game in the swing states. Perhaps Romney can win overcome this, though that seems unlikely in a supposedly close election.

In short, right now Obama is more popular in the swing states and he has a better ground game in those states.

Of course the election is many weeks away. But I am trying to see how Romney wins this, and right now the only way I see it is if something suddenly goes horribly wrong with the economy. Let’s see.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for a pointer to this second blog.)

 

According to Forbes, Bruce Willis may be suing Apple over his right  to bequeath his iTunes library.. A key quote from the article is this:

…under iTunes’ current terms and conditions, customers essentially only ‘borrow’ tracks rather than owning them outright. So any music library amassed like that would be worthless when the owner dies.

This restriction may seem ridiculous to alot of people, but I have often seen it as something in the terms and conditions (Ts and Cs) for software. For software, the Ts and Cs will sometimes state that you are actually purchasing a license to use the software: you are not purchasing the actual software. For the purchasers, this doesn’t matter too much: no one is going to bequeath their old copies of DOS or Lotus 1-2-3 to anyone in their will, and the software companies likely aren’t going to try to prevent you from doing it if you do.

I am speculating that the same legal Ts and Cs that were used for software migrated over to music. The problem, of course, is that music is much more personal and has a much longer shelf life than software. The same too goes for digital books and any other digital material that comes up in the future.

I expect this will become a much bigger legal issue soon. I also recommend anyone selling digital media start thinking long term and how that could affect their company over time.

What’s this? Why it’s one of the recipes for a beer they brew at the White House! There’s also an ale, but I am partial to porters so I have included this one:

However you can get the recipe for the ale, as well as further details on how they make it, here: Ale to the Chief: White House Beer Recipe | The White House.

Cheers!

Is this one: real disposable personal income (as shown in this graph).

As you can see, it has recovered almost to the peak of where it was just before the start of the Great Recession. What this means is that while people will say the economy is still bad, what they are able to save or purchase has recovered signifigantly in the last four years. I think that may make them less resistant to changing government than political analysts may think based on other numbers (like the unemployment rate). Time will tell soon enough.

P.S. I got this from Matt Yglesias (https://twitter.com/mattyglesias) who wrote about it in the context of the Bush signs stimulus bill of 2008.That stimulus accounts for spike in 2008. Then the Great Recession strikes and things drop dramatically. This was followed by further stimulus, including payroll tax cuts.

Graph: Real Disposable Personal Income (DSPIC96) – FRED – St. Louis Fed

First the BBC produced A History of the World. Now it looks like New York is following suit with A History of New York in 50 Objects.

Here’s hoping that other places follow through. (Hey, CBC, can you get on that? :))

It is a fascinating way to study history. I have the book that accompanies the BBC series and it is very good.

What happened to lard? You can still find it: I recently found it on the very top shelf in the grocery store I was in. But try finding a recent recipe with it as an ingredient: I haven’t seen one in ages.

Why this is can be seen in this fascinating history on lard, here: Who Killed Lard? : Planet Money : NPR. As you can see, quite a few things combined to displace lard from the pantries of North America.

Now if you want to try it again – and if you make pie crusts, you must give it a try — here’s a recipe to get you started: Cooks.com – Recipe – Lard Pie Crust. Enjoy!

Originally Paul Ryan was on record as saying he’s run a sub-3:00 marathon.

There was investigation done and Ryan backtracked and said, no, it wasn’t sub 3, rather it was more like a 4 hour marathon. (How Fast Can Paul Ryan Run a Marathon? : The New Yorker).

As his excuse, he said it was 20 years ago. It just so happens I ran my first marathon 20 years ago and it was around 3:47. Since that time I’ve run a number of marathons and half marathons, with the fast marathon time being around 3:24 and the the fast half marathon time being around 90 minutes.

In my opinion, it is easy to make a mistake and be off by a few minutes, but I can’t conceive of being off by an hour. Indeed, Ryan said he ran a two hour, fifty something, so he was talking as if he recalled.

Furthermore, the difference between a 4 hour marathon and a 3 hour marathon is huge in terms of fitness.  Even the difference between a 3 hour marathon and a 2 hour and 50 minute marathon. Go to a marathon sometime and look at the people lined up at the 3 hour mark versus the 4 hour mark: the 3 hour people all look like they have been running along time (because they have).

There’s nothing wrong with running a four hour marathon. In fact, I suspect it is a fairly typical time for alot of first timers. I think it is great whenever anyone tries and succeeds to run their first marathon race.

I think it is less than great to boast 20 years later that you ran it in under 3 hours, though. It’s almost as bad as cheating. Maybe Paul Ryan wants to be the male version of Rosie Ruiz.

Whatever drove him to do this is something to watch for, since it might come up in other, more important, instances.

Spike Lee has a new film out now, Red Hook Summer. The reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are split. Generally I got the impression that it was a rushed, low budget production, and that these aspects of it affected its quality. I think it will still be worth seeing, even if it isn’t his best.

Speaking of his best, this article, When Spike Lee Became Scary – Jason Bailey – The Atlantic, has a great retrospect of one of Lee’s finest films, if not the finest: Do The Right Thing. It’s a great essay not only for it’s analysis of the film, but of the reaction to the film and Lee in general. It made me want to see out and see it again.

As a guideline, if you are buying shoelaces, it is recommended that for

• 3-4 eyelets, get 24/27 inches 61/69 cm
• 4-5  eyelets, get 30/36 76/91
• 5-6 eyelets, get 40/45 102/114

 Good advice, but hard to remember.

Instead, multiple the number of eyelets by 8.5 and you will get the right size.

In Cape Breton in the 1920, there were long battles between the miners and the miner owners over wages and living standards. Among other things, as it says in the The Canadian Encyclopedia,

The 1925 strike lasted 5 months and culminated in a bloody battle at Waterford Lake, where coal miner William Davis was killed by company police on 11 June 1925.

Growing up in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, we honoured William Davis annually on Davis Day, decades after the event occured.

It’s some of the things that I thought of when I read about South African Police Fire on Striking Miners in NYTimes.com. The South African tragedy was much worse, with 18 miners dead.

I hope cooler heads prevail and that the miners get much better treatment. There is nothing that can be done to reverse the terrible death of the miners, but there should be great efforts made to comfort and compensate the families of them, not to mention changes put in place to prevent this from happening again.

Mining is tough enough underground. Above ground, it should not be tougher.

This video is superb: classic song, sweet performance, excellent outfits, wonderful dancing….even the comments below the video are good. For example, I learned that the “guys behind the singers are actually the Hondells who had a big hit with “Little Honda” in 1964. They seemed to where those sweaters a lot”. I always love when people post rare clips like this from the 50s and 60s. Who knows if alot of that material will be lost for all time? Enjoy it while you can.

Dixie Cups – Iko Iko (Rare clip) – YouTube

 

ITbusiness.ca has a good rundown of all the products that Google has killed over the years: Google’s Graveyard: 15 products Google has killed- CDN Slideshow.

It is quite a list, and also a good reminder that just because it is from Google, there is no guarantee that it is going to be around for along time.

Just one …

of a number of great photos of Penelope Cruz in W’s September 2012 issue.

Worth a visit.

This video is packed with beauty: the song is rich and complex and dreamy, the imagery is gorgeous, and Ms Jackson is looking her finest. Here’s Janet Jackson – Got ’till It’s Gone

P.S. I tried to come up with something intelligent regarding cultural appropriation in this video (visually for Africans, and aurally for Canadians), but I couldn’t. I think she does a great job of taking the work of that Canadian icon Joni Mitchell and making a beautiful new song from it. As a Canadian, I have no issue with talented Americans like Janet doing that. I leave it to Africans (South(ern) Africans?) to comment on the use of African imagery.

It’s just starting, but what-if.xkcd.com is already great. I would argue that the post about SAT Guessing is mathematics and not physics. Then again, I think part of the fun of this new blog is the debate that these What Ifs will bring on. (Although the arguments will be at a smarter level then mine.)

Enjoy!

M.I.A.’s “Baby” is here.

Frank Ocean’s “Thinking ‘Bout You” is here

And Ms Banks and her “Neptune” is here

Thanks to Tim at Letter To Jane for compiling such a wonderful playlist. All three artists have superb songs to listen to…perfect for summer….enjoy!

Let’s say you have your own GIT repository on one AMI. You want to communicate with it from another AMI. In this example, you want to clone the repository. Also, for this example, you are able to login to both AMIs and have public and private keys for both. The repository is located in /var/git/clientXYZ.git. Your public key file is named myPKfile.pem.

The GIT AMI has an elastic IP address associated with it (e.g. 23.1.2.3) and it is running Ubuntu. If it wasn’t an AMI, you could enter a commend like this:

git clone ssh://username@23.1.2.3/var/git/clientXYZ.git to get the information.

This git clone command will not work on the AMI. Instead, you should  create the following file: ~.ssh/config and add the following lines

Host gitserver

Hostname 23.1.2.3

User ubuntu

IdentityFile ~/.ssh/myPKfile.pem

 The assumption is the the myPKfile.pem file is already in the .ssh directory. Also, instead of gitserver, you can use any nickname you’d like.

 Once you have this set up, you can then enter this to clone the directory:

git clone ssh://gitserver/var/git/clientXYZ.git

Bonus: you can also ssh gitserver to get to the other AMI

For more good details, see Custom identity file (id_rsa.pub) with git client / Dev-Articles / DracoBlue.

The Toronto Star has a good video here on how you can do this: Beating the Heat for $20 – thestar.com. The video is straightforward, and the DIY skills you need are minimal. If you are dying of the heat, and fans are no longer doing it for you, try this

Some things to note:

• this will be cheaper in terms of power usage, I think. A fan uses less power than A/C
• if it is really hot, expect the ice to melt quickly. Not too quickly: the styrofoam container should help keep the cool in. But still, you can expect to change the ice for fresh ice sooner than you think.
• You will need to keep making ice. Consider buying a few extra ice cube trays when you get this stuff, and devote a section of your freezer just to ice.
• this is not going to change the temperature in your whole house. But if your house is terribly hot, it can give you an oasis of cool without having to leave and go to some place that does have A/C
• be careful with the size of the hole for the fan. You don’t want to have the fan fall in the wet ice. If it did, grab the cord and unplug it first before you reach in and pull it out to reduce the risk of getting electrocuted!
• try to get a fan strong enough to blow air such that it will leave the box, but not too heavy that the box won’t support it

Here’s two live recordings of Brooklyn based Chairlift.

Here’s a more serious rendition they did for a Black Cab Session

And here’s a fun but well done cover of Beyonce’s “Party” (skip to the 1:00 mark or so to get to the song)

Enjoy!

 

I like food. I like eating it, making it, talking about it, and using social media to talk about it (e.g. Bernie Michalik’s posterous site).

However, to be frank, I am an amateur when it comes to food. No matter how much I do in this area, it will never be in the same league as people who are cooks and writers in this area.

I also love Twitter. I like how it is an open forum, and that people who are from very different backgrounds can come together and follow each other and share comments and links. You can ask people questions, give them feedback, share what they said with others, and more.

However, I think that openness is part of the problem. I think for alot of people, they like the Twitter platform, but what they really want is the ability to be exclusive. I noticed this in a number of exchanges with food professionals, where I got the impression that while they were tweeting generally, their comments were really directed at a specific audience that they had in mind. (I am sure this happens with other professionals as well, and I am sure there are some I.T. people, for example, who must think some of the comments from people who think the Mac is the pinnacle of computing technology are asinine.) The more I thought about it, the more I thought it must be ridiculous to get comments on food from someone who has limited ideas on it compared to a professional.

Now, part of the problem is me. 🙂  Not only do I love food, but when I see tweets from people talking about food, well, I want to tweet back to them! But the more I think about it, the more I think that that is the problem with Twitter. It encourages that give and take, regardless of whether or not tweeps really want it.

This is where Google+ comes in. The circle concept makes sense for alot of people. They could have circles where they just have professionals in it, and they could direct comments to them specifically. And likewise it is ease to follow people without really following them. You can just put them in a circle, call it “Fans” or “Audience” or “Amateurs” and from time to time you can share things with them without having to see everything they share in real time.

True, you can do this with Twitter lists, and I have done this to some degree with political folks and writers and IT people (not to mention famous people and funny people and now food professionals). They are all people I don’t want to forget about, but not really someone I want to follow closely, nor do I expect to engage much with them. The problem with lists however, is that Twitter makes it very hard to create them and update them. In comparison, Google+ circles are a snap to set up.

Sadly, I hate the way Google+ works. Not as bad as Facebook, but almost as much. Whatever else I saw about Twitter, it is fun to use and very concise. Google+ is about as fun to use as Google itself, and it is the opposite of concise. That’s a shame. If it it were more concise, I could see me doing alot more with it. If I could “skin” it and limit the amount of information it provided, I would be using it alot.

I think if Google+ could become more like Twitter, or Twitter could become more like Google+, we’d have a winner. We would end up being less social, but that might not be a bad idea. Maybe the technology needs to become less social and less inclusive: perhaps that would result in better communication over more. I know there are lots of times when I think about tweeting something technical, but I think: who wants to hear about IBM pSeries servers on HACMP or IT architecture patterns? Very few people. If Twitter had circles, I could tweet those comments to IT people. Also, because there are no limits, there tends to be oversharing on Twitter. While with Circles, you are more likely to choose with whom you want to share information, rather than broadcasting it to everyone.

Using this: Mechanical License Clearance by Limelight. It may not work for every song you want to cover, but it is worth investigating if you are producing something that does cover previous work.

Thanks to ‏@carlyrhiannon for pointing this out.

 

A perfect pick you up for a midweek, start of summer night:

Thanks to @adamschwabe on twitter for this.

This was just posted: Linkedin password statistics – Pastebin.com. Stefan Venken used easy to access tools (“HashCat / Jtr and publicly found wordlists on a customer grade laptop”) and turned it on the 6.5 million linked in passwords and it turns out “1.354.946 were recovered within a few hours time”.  No special software, and no massive hardware. (Of course he knows what he is doing, but so would anyone determined to access them).

It would be ideal if every site had strong security methods to protect passwords: you need to assume the opposite and take steps to make your password strong, as well as making sure you have different passwords for different sites (especially for sites that are strongly associated with money or your identity).

For more on hashcat, go here: oclHashcat-plus – advanced password recovery