NFL Films takes an in-depth look at the tradition of pre-game flybys, including some insight into exactly how precise the pilot crews must be to get the timing right and avoid land-based obstacles.  Awesome stuff.

Even today, I think there are few things more powerful (and emotional, as was the case just after 9/11) than a demonstration like this that galvanizes people and serves as a rally cry for Americans.

Turns out the swapping a car that gets bad gas mileage with one that gets decently good gas mileage is better than replacing a car that gets decently good gas mileage with one that gets outstanding mileage, and the numbers bear it out.

This very interesting article in Science, “The MPG Illusion” by Richard P. Larrick and Jack B. Soll at the Fuqua School of Business in Duke University (Vol 320, June 20, 2008, p. 1593), points out the mathematically obvious truth that gas used per mile is inversely proportional to miles per gallon, which means that you have a steeper slope at lower MPG ratings, and diminishing returns at higher MPG ratings.

My rough calculations corroborated this (albeit not as succinctly) when I recently was deciding on a new car. Unfortunately, this is likely lost on most people, hence the exodus from many types of cars to hyper-MPG cars like the Prius. I think there’s an element of overcorrection here, which is entirely human.

(via kottke)

Is it time for Batman to tone it down a little?

Here’s a great discussion thread over at MacRumors Forums about real-world (i.e. non-journalist) iPhone 3G reviews. Let the early adopters speak.

You’re about to listen to two voicemails by Dmitri, the reigning king of douchebags.

Story basically goes like this: douchebag approaches girl outside of bar, talks her up, gets handed a business card and a hint to call her.  Douchebag calls her.  Girl doesn’t call back.  Douchebag, clearly mentally unstable, leaves two priceless voicemails for girl, which quickly get posted to the Internet for our amusement.  Douchebag gets pwned.

Real or fake, this is some classic work.

George Bush at the G8 Summit in  Japan:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

He’s as successful a comedian as he is a president.

Update: this story is even more amusing when you consider the cat picture immediately underneath this post.

(via Cyn-C)

(via clusterflock)

The first iPhone 3G reviews are in, courtesy of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

General verdict: worthwhile upgrade, especially for new iPhone customers. iPhone 3G is an iterative upgrade over the original iPhone. Some major features still missing (MMS, cut-and-paste, voice dialing, video recording, improved camera). 3G speeds impressive, if a bit taxing on the battery. The GPS functionality is impressive. The real star of the show, however, is the iPhone 2.0 software, which can be had for free on any first-gen iPhone.

As I’ve said all along, the iPhone 2.0 software marks the end of the iPhone as a solitary device and the beginning of it as a mobile computing platform in earnest. If you think the iPhone ecosystem is good now, just wait until what the development community comes up with over the next six months.

AppleInsider reports that Microsoft, fed up with Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign, is planning a major anti-Apple advertising blitz to help build the image of Vista, Redmond’s flagship OS.

This is amusing on several levels, not the least of which is the fact that a push like this is roughly a year late. And Vista has turned out to be a fairly nauseating disaster and users are begging for XP to hang around. And Microsoft has actually created a Vista SKU that’s a downgrade license to XP but can still be tallied as a Vista sale. Aside from those, yes, Vista’s woes are all about insufficient advertising. When in doubt, blame marketing. Is this what happens when Bill is gone?

Some key quips from the AI article:

The company’s VP of Vista marketing, Brad Brooks, told attendees at a Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday that the next few months will see a major advertising push that promises to “free the people” through what Vista has to offer and that Microsoft wouldn’t take Apple’s repeated attacks on Vista reliability without a fight.

Okay Brad. Free the people? Really? Does anyone know what that even means? And what exactly prompted you to start fighting back on Vista’s behalf a year into reams of bad press and unprecedented Mac marketshare/mindshare gains?

The people have been freed, and they’re making personal technology choices that don’t involve Microsoft.

Hate to say this, but I think it’s pretty clear Vista’s going down without much of a fight. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t have so much talk about Windows 7 already.

“You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it’s time to take our message forward,” Brooks warns Apple. “There’s a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it’s just plain awful. We’ve got to get back on the front foot.”

My god. Let’s see, you have a tired Pearl Harbor cliche, some management horseshit about ‘taking a message forward,’ a trendy reference to the modern word-of-mouth marketplace where companies don’t get to tell us what to think about their products anymore, and finally some more meaningless management speak.

Hey Apple, are you listening? Are you? Well we’re sick of your shit! We’re sick of Justin Long and John Hodgman! We are gonna place ads, boy, and this here sleeping giant who is, um, no longer sleeping is going to grab a quick coffee and take our message forward! We’re going to take it forward right up your ass!

He acknowledges, however, that Vista’s rough launch has cost the company significant ground and that the ads will as much be about damage control as touting the brand. In a rare glimpse into Microsoft’s own view of the launch, Brooks recognizes that Vista “broke a lot of things” and triggered “a lot of pain” in partners trying to support the newer Windows edition.

Oh, absolutely. I think this is a stellar approach. An OS with an admittedly ‘rough start’ that ‘broke a lot of things’ and ’caused a lot of pain’ will yield an ad campaign that will be about ‘damage control’ and ‘making up lost ground.’

Nothing like ‘touting your brand’ when you’re already a few miles underwater.

I have an idea, Microsoft. Hear me out. Instead of announcing that you’re going to do something, how about you just do it and dispense with the saber-rattling? Because honestly, at this point along the Vista adoption curve, nobody worth his salt is taking you seriously.

No knee-jerk dreaminess here, but rather, a cogent long-term plan:

• First: dump a strategic amount of US-drilled oil reserve into the market to immediately punish the speculators who bet on the rising cost of oil and American’s unwillingness to break its OPEC addiction.  Right now, it’s theorized that a majority percentage of today’s gas prices are due to speculative markets.
• Second: look for oil where we know it is but nobody in our government wants to talk about.  Right now, we have in Rocky Mountain shale oil three times what Saudi Arabia has.  The Brazilians just found two reserves of oil so large that it went from 10B to over 90B barrels of capacity.  Today, these areas, as well as many others, are illegal to prospect for oil.
• Third: maximize the development of alternative fuels.  Flex-fuels, gas-electric hybrids, hydrogen fuel cells: the only way to truly move to the next energy economy is to develop something that eliminates our dependence on oil, foreign and otherwise.  (My fear, of course, is that once we announce new supply into the markets and our price pain eases, Americans will forget about the long-term plan and go back to buying their Escalades.)

As a citizen of suburban Detroit, I can personally attest to exactly how badly the city is managed and its atrocious condition today.  Shameful.

For anyone out there who is considering moving to the iPhone 3G from a BlackBerry (as I am), check out this discussion.  If you are considering such a move or have done it in the past, I’d love to hear your comments.

As a backdrop, waterboarding is the technique Dick Cheney said wasn’t torture, but rather an accepted interrogation technique.

Recently, the outspoken Christopher Hitchens was asked by his employer, Vanity Fair magazine, if he would voluntarily submit to a waterboarding session so that he may better craft a feature story about the controversial activity. Despite being 59 years old and a heavy smoker, Hitchens accepted.

In the resultant piece entitled Believe Me, It’s Torture (Vanity Fair, August 2008), Hitchens describes his (admittedly very, very short) time on the table:

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.

Hitchens’s experience was videotaped, and you can watch it here.

The debate about whether or not this is torture is out there, as is the debate about whether the US was justified in using the technique to interrogate prisoners involved with the 9/11 atrocities. While I’ve heard some release some emotional steam by vehemently stating that those who committed 9/11 are getting off easy by ‘merely’ getting waterboarded, there’s a bigger issue we need to consider that involves who we are as a country. Hitchens concludes:

One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they had been tortured and maltreated or not. Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true? I had only a very slight encounter on that frontier, but I still wish that my experience were the only way in which the words “waterboard” and “American” could be mentioned in the same (gasping and sobbing) breath.

(via kottke)

The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh believes we may be closer to war with Iran than anyone thinks:

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh believes that the United States may be closer to armed conflict with Iran than previously imagined. He writes about Congress’ funding of covert military operations in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker.

As if this country’s political morale wasn’t bad enough, we’re off looking for the best way to enter another armed conflict in the Middle East. Happy 4th!

I just had a pretty scary piece of spam show up in my inbox. It appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, and comes immediately on the heels of the US tax season. All in all, very well socially-engineered.

Long story short, it’s spam, but you need to be careful. There’s more where it came from.

More details here.

When I first began this place, I was obsessed about stats. I would check my hit counter several times per day, and I’d rejoice when I saw a mere 20 hit jump. I remember writing a relatively stupid, amateurish post and having it get me almost 28,000 hits in a single day because it got promoted to Digg’s frontpage. I was ecstatic; I thought it meant my arrival for certain.

I suppose the traffic goal is part of the novelty and learning curve when one starts to blog. If you’re writing, you want to see people reading; the desire for an audience is natural and unapologetically human. But after a while — for me, at least — a larger charter appeared.

Since I’ve been writing GF, I’ve had dozens of offers for ad programs, link swaps, paid plugs, whatever. Thankfully, early in my writing career, I emailed a few of my favorite bloggers (John Gruber in particular) and asked their advice on the art. Their answer?

Content. Focus on content and eventually popularity, to whatever degree it might be, will come. Without quality content, you’ve really got nothing compelling to offer readers for their time and attention, and in this attention-economy we’re all playing in, that means you’re upside down. Stay there too long, and you won’t last.

Blogging is hard work, as evidenced by all the blogs who never got past their first post, and blogging quality stuff is even harder. Thankfully, I’ve paid enough attention to those who do it right and my own gut feeling that I’ve been able to make a fair cut of it.

These days, traffic doesn’t really matter to me. I’ve had this feeling for a while, and I’ve noticed myself not really caring where my stats are anymore. It’s not for a lack of concern or effort, it’s just that if I really wanted traffic, I’d have done some stupid stunt to get it, and since I haven’t, I realized I wanted a more refined, educated, select audience. Even if it meant I didn’t haul the big numbers.

Today, Robert Scoble has a post that nearly perfectly captures what I’ve been thinking for several months now:

Who is winning the race to get more traffic?

This 14-year-old kid, Fred. He’s gotten MILLIONS of views! 45 million at last count.

This is what happens when you try to simply be entertaining.

If traffic is your goal, here’s the formula. Do something really stupid that’ll make people laugh.

Me? I’ll stick with having a few thousand people passionate about learning more from innovative technologists and other leaders.

Why not get into the traffic race? Because I’d rather be in the race for a smart, focused audience. That’s where the real action is.

As a counterpoint, understand that silly does work: I Can Has Cheezburger, Failblog and other sites do silly well. They’ve found a niche and have monetized it to some extent (and yes, I realize those two blogs are in the same network). But they are who they are; their brand is established. Traffic, in their case, helped them become who they are, and it’s safe to say that the guys who run Failblog are going to suddenly switch their gameplan and try to be a kottke instead.

The moral of the story is that while traffic is a reasonable metric by which you can measure your online presence and traction (as is Twitter followers, your FriendFeed universe, etc.), it’s not the only one. If traffic is your ultimate goal, and you’re being Mr. or Mrs. Serious On The Internet, go back and read Scoble’s traffic formula. You’re probably doing it wrong.

On the other hand, if your goal is to attract a bright and interesting audience with whom you can engage in interesting conversation about a variety of topics that you love, just write quality content. The rest will do itself.

The greed of mobile phone companies and their willingness to fuck their customers at every turn never ceases to amaze me.  Somewhere, up on high in some boardroom, a bunch of clueless idiots come up with these plans, laugh their bloated laughs, and think about their bonuses.

Know what?  Fuck you.  Take a swim in some seriously hardcore negative word-of-mouth.

Fuck You Rogers: An Online Petition

also

Check out the signatures and comments

Update: behold the beautiful power of word-of-mouth.  Go interwebs.

(via DF)

TED has a very good talk by Tony Robbins about what shapes our behavior, what drives us to do what we do, and what fulfillment is all about.  Very much worth 20 minutes of your life, even if Tony Robbins conjures up too much motivational blowhardery (which he insists he’s not, BTW.  And by that I mean he insists he’s not a motivational speaker.  I don’t know about blowhard.)

(via Unfiltered)

I found an interesting spam email in my inbox this morning that’s basically a personalized approach that hints at a risk to an online trademark (domain name) due to a foreign application being made for the trademark name in country-specific versions (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.).  It looks valid enough to hook a reader at first glance, and only when some research is done do you discover what it’s all about.

This approach is obviously personalized to the owner/manager of a commercial Internet brand and hints at risk to our online trademark (miproconsulting) due to a foreign application being made for our trademark name in country-specific flavors (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.).  Being the nice foreign domain registrar they are, the sender of this message, SK Holdings, is asking us if we want to do business with them and secure all of the miproconsulting variants listed below so that we can protect our Internet brand from this foreign applicant.

This is pretexting: it takes a known fact or truism about an individual or business and uses that piece if information to get someone to divulge information or carry out some other action.  In this case, the spammer wants the victim to purchase the extended domain names before the foreign applicant does, thereby allowing the victim to protect his Internet trademark.  Not exactly the most aboveboard way to do business, but it is clever.  I’ll grant them that.

(crossposted at clusterflock)

George Carlin was never very optimistic about who really controls this country, our rights as citizens, the chances of Americans actually waking up from buying neon-lit sneakers with credit cards, and any form of leadership. He was particularly skeptical of the corporations and government, the entities he claimed “owned” the United States.

Along other lines, artist Brian Romero invested many hours to create the monetary vehicle we’ll all need if things keep up at this rate: the zero dollar bill.

Embiggened version here, and it’s very worthwhile. Check out the detail, typography and signatures.

Carlin would have loved it — the satire, the stinging cynicism, the shreds of truth underneath it all. RIP, George. My father turned me on to you, and I’ve been a fan since that day.

(via clusterflock)