Good advice. Even better since it’s done in stop motion.
December 31, 2008
Lack of Skepticism
If there is a central problem with journalism, it is the lack of skepticism. Especially as it applies to government. Politicians and political organizations are not held to account for contradictory statements, false predictions and claims…
The Right has convinced itself that the problem is “that liberal media”, but that is obstructive rhetoric. Sure, there are a multitude of examples of media bias that favors the Left…but there are also a multitude of examples of media bias that favors the Right. People notice what they expect to see.
This isn’t a problem of personal bias; biases are unavoidable and don’t fit a left/right matrix, anyway. Ultimately, criticisms of Left/Right bias are tactical attacks against symptoms, not the problem itself. Crying “that liberal media!” delegitimizes our more fundamental criticisms.
The problem isn’t a biased media. It is a media that has lost sight of the role of journalism and reporters.
If there is even a question of whether they should be extremely skeptical of political claims, then they aren’t really a Fourth Estate at all. They’ve just become enablers of the Estates to which they are attached.
full article here.
Zuneless
Another reason to stay far away from Microsoft’s Zune.
Baffled consumers are griping about a mysterious glitch that appeared to cause thousands of Zune music players to simultaneously stop working late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
Microsoft issued the first Zune portable music player in 2006 to compete with the iPod.Internet message boards have been flooded with complaints about Zune’s 30GB models freezing, prompting Y2K-like speculation about end-of-year hardware or software problems.
“It seems that every Zune on the planet has just frozen up and will not work,” posted a Mountain Home, Idaho, user on CNN’s iReport.com. “I have 3 and they all in the same night stopped working.”
more here.
2008 Reading Tally
The year comes to an end and I’ve clocked in 47 books. I just finished the last one a few minutes ago.
# of Books: 47
# of Pages Read: 13291
Average pages/book: 283
Shortest Book: 80
Longest Book: 1152
Stats since 4/1/01 (when I started counting):
# of books: 266
# of pages: 89107
Averages pages: 335
Shortest Book: 60
Longest Book: 1152
If you assume that I started reading 30 years ago and have kept the same general pace, somewhere in the past year I read my one-thousandth book. Pretty cool. I wish I had known which one it was. Hopefully something classic like Anthem or Cryptonomicon and not something like Air Tools: How to Maintain Your Tools.
It’s an interesting little habit I have of writing down all my books and pages. Doesn’t take very long, and it reinforces to me how many books are in the average small town library, or even the average Barnes and Noble. It would take dozens of lifetimes to get through a respectable fraction of them, and those collections represent pretty much just the most popular or in demand books of the past decade or so. There have been millions of books published in just the last decade alone. How is one supposed to keep up?
Years ago I read a science fiction story about a device that allowed you to “read” (absorb, really) a book by holding a small square cube that contained the “book” next to your head for a few seconds. You could plow through several books in a day. Unfortunately, reading more than one or two per day (a process that took only seconds) ran the risk of permanent psychosis. Hmm… good thing that little device doesn’t exist now, or I might be tempted. People probably already think I’m a little crazy for keeping track.