Out with the old, in with the new..

Out with the old... Good bye Bush II!

In with the new... Hello new little one!

Today I should be a grandfather. I sit here in the hospital waiting. Daddy (newly become a citizen, this is his first election) stopped to vote on the way to the hospital. Priorities seem right to me :)

Update: I AM a grandfather.

And McCain's concession speech was high class.

Reframing

A picture frame
Image via Wikipedia In US politics this year, as always, we have seen a fair number of attempts to change the subject. The McCain campaign, when asked some difficult questions, seems at least in part to have focused on Obama's involvement with Stephen Ayers instead. The Obama campaign, when asked some difficult questions, seems at least in part to have focused on such things as Sarah Palin's incipient grandchild.

This is reframing things. When presented with a question, answer something else. Or better yet, make a charge that is entirely unrelated.

It's a particularly effective technique, and a particularly insidious one. When you're losing... change the subject. Accuse the other side of something else. If it's scandalous enough, it doesn't even matter if it is completely irrelevant to the question at hand

If this sort of behaviour were confined to US politics alone, we could brush it off... politics as usual. But it's not. Reframing happens in everyday life as well. Look hard enough and you'll find it in your walk of life too, I bet. And woe be to you if you're the frame-ee rather than the frame-er. It can be quite hard to get the question back where it belongs.

So watch out for that.

Know of any examples of reframing? Let's hear about them

Finger pointing

Barney Frank
Image by Getty Images
via DaylifeSo the bailout failed. Count me in the glad camp, maybe now a second try will come up with something more reasonable, something that really gets after the problem. Taking up toxic paper and leaving taxpayers holding the bag wasn't going to solve this mess.

But in among the finger pointing for the failure going on here (and there is a lot of it going on isn't there?), where is the finger pointed at Barney Frank? I think most agree this mess is due in large part is the vast number of bad loans given out during the housing bubble. Bad money drives out good, and when you had Fannie May and Freddy Mac competing against private lenders, but using loose underwriting standards, it only caused investors to clamor for other lenders to do the same...

Frank's irresponsible comments and actions to sabotage reining in the two GLCs are among the causes of that cause. His attempts to deflect inquiries into that by harping on CEO pay ought to be treated as what they are... BS. If you want to know the root cause, start by looking into which lobbyists gave which legislators how much, and when, and what the effect was on bills that would have required GLCs to follow the same standards as private companies.

You're no doubt tired of hearing it, but my party was against this well before it was fashionable.

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• Fannie Mae's Patron Saint :: WSJ
  An editorial giving more detail on my allegations of Mr. Frank's irresponsibility
  

Is this the best we've got?

Joe Biden explains something
Image via Wikimedia CommonsRecently , when interviewed by Katie Couric, Joe Biden was quoted as saying:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed,"

Look, I'm not really a big fan of either of the duopoly parties... or their candidates (my guy is Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and yes I know he's not going to win) but I just have to wonder... how well did Joe Biden actually pay attention in history class?

• The big crash was in 1929, before FDR was president
• In 1929 TV was just an experimental idea, not really something that presidents spoke on. (the first president to even be seen on television was Truman, in the 40s, and it wasn't until 1951 that a president spoke nationwide)

So maybe we have a VP problem regardless of who wins?

Now I can retire...

My image of Taliesin West
(from Wikimedia Commons)

Previously, I have written about how Encyclopedia Britannica introduced a free access scheme for bloggers. Nifty. But this flows both ways. EB is also moving to make use of resources available to it.

Point in case, the image at right.

As I am sure other people do, I periodically search for my own name using Google's search capabilities. Well, the other day, on the second page of the search (may not still return results) I found this link ... Turns out that EB chose to use my image to illustrate their article on Taliesin West! (Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA from 1937 until his death in 1959.)

So now I'm rich, right? Well no. That image, as you can see, is freely available on Commons, for anyone to use, as long as the license (in this case the GFDL 1.2) is honored. Which it is.

So am I upset? Nope! I'm delighted. This is how it's supposed to work. Free images are made free so that people can USE them. EB has properly atttributed the image and thus is free to use it as they see fit.

Maybe it's a bit ironic that EB is using a free image FROM a WMF site to illustrate an article which is supposedly better than the same article on Wikipedia. (which by the way, currently uses someone else's version of basically the same composition)... and, better or not, clearly is in competition.

But it's nifty! Got any other examples? I wonder who else has been honored this way?

By the way, here are both articles, you decide which is better:

• Wikipedia's version is here.
• Encyclopedia Britannica's version is here.
  

In all honesty, I have to say EB wins this one. What do you think?

LEGOdometer

Image at right is from Brickshelf...

I'm slow. This has been buzzed up already, and I'm late to add my raves. But for the benefit of my paltry readership, if you like LEGO at all, you need to go check this out. Read the LUGNET posting.

Shaun Sullivan of NELUG has built a LEGO based odometer for measuring distance that trains run on exhibition layouts.

Note that an odometer was used at the PNLTC Guinness record attempt but it was electronic.

This one is purely mechanical. It's testimony to Shaun's addiction that he chose to do it this way... but ironically used significant computer time to calculate the gear ratios needed to get to within 8 feet per mile of accuracy in his measurements.

Signal to Noise, part II

Robot Moderator?
Image via Wikimedia CommonsA while back, in my post Attacking the noise, I described ROBOT9000, automated moderating technology introduced at one of xkcd's IRC channels as an interesting experiment. Apparently the idea has legs.

While reading a very interesting New York Times piece on trolling, The Trolls Among Us (which, by the way, "outed" several trolls, giving their real life identities or information sufficient for a determined person to track them down.... perhaps more on that later... the topic has come up on various WMF wikis and discussion groups) I ran across the tidbit (on page 7 of the piece), that ROBOT9000 has come to 4chan.

Sure enough, there is now a moderated subforum at 4chan called ROBOT9000 (or /r9k/ ).

Dan must be proud!

I for one welcome our new robot masters, if they can improve signal to noise...

Do you?