McCain's shtick wasn't exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.

Requiem for a Maverick : Rolling Stone

When I grew up in the 1970s, the idea of the "corporate ladder" was still very much alive. The standard plan was to try to get into a good college, from which one would be drafted into some organization and then rise to positions of gradually increasing responsibility. The more ambitious merely hoped to climb the same ladder faster. [1]

But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size.

The High-Res Society

The Economist:

The World in 2009 is the 23rd edition of The Economist's annual collection of predictions for the year ahead -- with views from journalists, politicians and business people.

The World in 2009

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers. Mediabistro’s TVNewser broke the story.

CNN Cuts Entire Science, Tech Team : CJR:

Worth Less or Worthless?

Deflation is going to end before too long, so investors shouldn't get overly comfortable.

Avoiding inflation after so much stimulus will be like avoiding acceleration after having pressed the gas pedal flat to the floor in a truck that has now swapped going uphill for going downhill.

...the trick will become avoiding hyperinflation of the kind that kills currencies, as happened in the Weimar Republic.

You just need to know that we're about to do a three-step, from inflation (earlier this year), to deflation (now), and back to inflation again (a year or so from now). It's going to be neck-snapping.

Trying to protect my meager personal assets in the midst of this crisis, I feel like I'm in the middle of the pacific in a small sailboat during a massive storm, with swells reaching tens of feet above me.

Prepare for Your Money to Be Worth Less - The Daily Beast

IBM:

Unveiled today, the third annual "IBM Next Five in Five" is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years:

* Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
* You will have a crystal ball for your health
* You will talk to the Web ... and the Web will talk back
* You will have your own digital shopping assistants
* Forgetting will become a distant memory

The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible.

From the archive:

Forget, for a second, the image of fat-cat plutocrats walking away with taxpayer money.

Also:

Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters.

From way back:

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years

Partitioning takes this notion a step further, by allowing you to distribute portions of individual tables across a filesystem according to rules which you can set largely as needed. In effect, different portions of a table are stored as separate tables in different locations. The user-selected rule by which the division of data is accomplished is known as a partitioning function, which in MySQL can be the modulus, simple matching against a set of ranges or value lists, an internal hashing function, or a linear hashing function. The function is selected according to the partitioning type specified by the user, and takes as its parameter the value of a user-supplied expression. This expression can be either an integer column value, or a function acting on one or more column values and returning an integer. The value of this expression is passed to the partitioning function, which returns an integer value representing the number of the partition in which that particular record should be stored. This function must be non-constant and non-random. It may not contain any queries, but may use an SQL expression that is valid in MySQL, as long as that expression returns either NULL or an integer intval such that

MySQL gets table partitioning.

MySQL :: MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual :: 18.1 Overview of Partitioning in MySQL

INRIA:

Peer-to-peer locality has recently raised a lot of interest in the community.

Indeed, whereas peer-to-peer content distribution enables financial saving for the content providers who do not have to maintain a dedicated infrastructure, it dramatically increases the traffic on inter-ISP links. To solve this issue, the idea to keep a fraction of the peer-to-peer traffic local to each ISP was introduced a few years ago. Since then, peer-to-peer solutions exploiting locality have been introduced. However, several fundamental issues on locality still need to be explored. For instance, how far can we push locality for a peer-to-peer distribution without impacting its robustness?

In this paper, we perform extensive experiments on a controlled environment with up to 10,000 peers to evaluate the impact of locality on inter-ISP links traffic and peers download completion time.

In particular, we show that high locality values enable up to two orders of magnitude saving on inter-ISP links without any significant impact on peers download completion time.

Pushing BitTorrent Locality to the Limit

This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism's strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

I never recommended this article but I keep coming back to it in my thinking. Its a bit too partisan to the point of being unfair, but its interesting nonetheless. I've certainly been confronted with many conservatives who seem to take the position that if you don't agree with their views that there must be something wrong with you. Serious factual objections are just laughed off rather than engaged. Political positions are to be agreed with, not seriously discussed. Its not about the ideas. Its personal.

There are also Liberals who act this way, but the medium is the message, and there may be a connection between this perspective and the conservative preference for radio.

Perhaps in some respects this is what makes living in Atlanta more tolerable than living in San Francisco. Partisans generally conclude that I am the opposite of whatever they are because I'm always critical of their ideas.

Conservatives who assume I'm a liberal don't feel the need to change my views. They think I'm an idiot, and they don't bother talking to me about politics because they are looking for confirmation and are not interested in having a persuasive discussion, particularly with an idiot like me. I am therefore free to continue to be an idiot with only mild annoyance at the fact that I am so perceived.

Liberals who assume I'm a conservative, on the other hand, believe that I am at least complicit with and possibly personally responsible for disease, oppression, genocide, poverty, death, and the general plight of man. I am the enemy, and it is absolutely necessary to change my views so that I stop oppressing people. I am not just to be ridiculed but I am to be hated, and I cannot be left alone to my evil ideas. This tends to make living around liberals a great deal less comfortable.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism?

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world's oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.

Oldest Marijuana Stash Found: Discovery News