For those of you who missed the SNL opener this evening, I think it’s safe to say that McCain admitted he was going to lose when he showed up for a guest appearance.  This wasn’t a funny skit, and in fact it showed him as quite unpresidential.  The jokes were very self-deprecating, and some of them really played poorly.  In fact, I could almost hear one of the aides assuring him that it would play well “with the young people.”  We’ll see what Tuesday holds, but if he manages to win, his self-portrayal as a duddering, senile old man with a geriatric audience probably won’t stand the test of time.  I am on record as an undecided registered Republican.

Just when you thought that technology had advanced the human conversation as far as it could possibly go, the leaders of the esteemed CNBC network give us their newest innovation.  First called out as the Octobox by Jon Stewart, he brought the new and improved Decabox to our attention this evening.  Having seen this concoction in action, I am at a complete loss as to how this “feature” made it through any semblance of a design review.  Two or three talking heads, coupled with the host, is generally sufficient to guarantee a cacophony bordering on the unintelligible.  The mere suggestion that the addition of heads four or five should have been an offense worthy of dismissal, but 10 heads.  Really?  10?  Really?  I now refer you to Garrity’s Law:

The intellect of individuals in a group decreases exponentially as the number of individuals in the group increases.

This holds true for a meeting of any kind, especially one where television cameras and a national audience are involved.  Yeeessh…

That’s right, I’m a PC.

I wear no suit. I build amazing products. I enable software developers to realize their deams. I’m a PC.

I don’t understand this one.  The good people at Kellog’s seem to doing the ham handed offer for the young ones.  Due to the pressure resulting from coverage of youth and obesity, some of the formulations have changed.  Even the packaging has changed.  There are 12 grams of sugar in every serving of Fruit Loops.  Good times for the rambunctious child, and the parents who mind them.

I always loved digging around in the cereal box to get the toy that came with it.  Most times they were interesting enough to dig, and sometimes they sucked.  However, putting a step counter in a box of sugar laden cereal, sponsored by Adidas no less, is sort of confusing.  I get it…I understand they are trying to say that they take children’s health seriously, but this just seems a little odd to me.  Maybe I’m just getting old.

Irvine, California — August 15, 2008 — Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced, in Beijing, that American swimmer Michael Phelps was served notice that he was in clear violation of the terms of use of it’s award winning massively multi-player online role playing game, World of Warcraft. The violation, according to the company, is that Mr. Phelps’s actions at the 2008 Summer Olympics show strong indication of gold farming activity originating from within Chinese borders.

“Gold farming is one of those things about which we are very vigilant,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment.  “Long known to be an issue with some of our international players, gold farming detracts from the overall experience of the game for all of the players in the World of Warcraft universe.  We take it very seriously.”

As defined by the uber-authoritative source Wikipedia, “Gold farming is a general term for an MMORPG activity in which a player attempts to acquire (”farm”) items of value within a game, usually by exploiting repetitive elements of the game’s mechanics. This is usually accomplished by carrying out in-game actions (such as killing an important creature) repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker. More broadly, the term could refer to a player of any type of game who repeats mundane actions over and over in order to collect in-game items. An organization which organizes farmers is known as a sweatshop.”

As anyone who has even a modicum of swimming knowledge is aware, following the black line on the bottom of the pool for hours and hours on end is easily one of the most mundane and repetitive tasks known to man.  While Blizzard has taken steps to reduce instances of gold farming, they were incapable of slowing down the unprecedented, and some say unstoppable, force known in game as “Baltimore Bullet.”  By some accounts, Mr. Phelps has been said to be swimming for upwards of 8 hours at a time.  Initial research into the activity led some at Blizzard to think that a bot was being employed.

Mr. Phelps was last seen exiting a raid, pulling another gold medal, and adding to his already astounding total of 12.  Mr. Phelps was unavailable for comment.

In a related story, the US Olympic team was also served notice for organizing an entire team of gold farmers, and thus being labeled as a sweatshop guild.

*** this is a total joke, but I thought it would be funny to write.

I was sent an email by a family member about how to impact gas prices.  It started off with quite a come on:

THIS IS NOT THE ‘DON’T BUY’ GAS FOR ONE DAY, BUT IT WILL SHOW YOU HOW WE CAN GET GAS BACK DOWN TO $1.30 PER GALLON.

This was sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. If you are tired of the gas prices going up AND they will continue to rise this summer, take time to read this PLEASE.

I should have known we were in trouble when I saw that engineers were involved with this economics shenanigan.  I say that in jest since one of my undergraduate degrees was in engineering.  I was curious about this one since most of the ideas revolved around not buying gas for a day.  Bill O’Reilly certainly had this plan a while back, and it seems to come up every now and again.  Of course, it has proven completely ineffective as no one signed up for the plan.  People need gas in their cars.  However, this plan promised to have a new twist on the problem, so I read on:

With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action.
The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.
How?

How indeed?  The premise here is that the consumers are in control of the market, and that we can act in some manner to effect maybe one player, and not all, in an effort to impact the price of gas.  Hmmm, I’m not sold, but I want to hear more.

Here’s the idea: For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one),EXXON and MOBIL.  If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

I suggest that we not buy from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $2.00 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK. 

So, this is where the plan completely falls apart.  On the surface, this plan feels like it should work, right?  Unfortunately, a study in basic economics will prove that not only will this plan not work, but due to unintended consequences, the exact opposite could occur.

The first problem is that this plan doesn’t actually have a net impact on demand in the marketplace.  By not buying from Exxon/Mobil, they will certainly see demand for their product go down, but the demand will go elsewhere.  Logic would dictate that Exxon/Mobil would have to lower their prices, right?  Wrong.  The issue now becomes that gas, which is a limited resource, will now have it’s net market supply impacted by having Exxon/Mobil removed from the marketplace.  As such, the increased demand to the other stations, for their now more scarce supply, would cause their prices to go up.  Assuming that there are rational buyers in the market, the pricing at Exxon/Mobil, without any changes, would now appear to be cheap, and the demand would flow back to them.

Now, assuming the demand could permanently be removed from Exxon/Mobil, their supply is completely out of the market and the price of gas would have to go up.  You see, Exxon/Mobil can’t simply lower their prices to what the “market” defines as fair.  The current price is what the “market” defines as fair.  If we are to assume that a lower price, say $2.00, is OK to allow people to return to buying from Exxon/Mobil, they will see a run on their stations, which will cause their supply to disappear, again causing the supply demand imbalance with the other stations.  Exxon/Mobil will have to raise their prices.

Rationality in the marketplace is all fine and good, but there is another dynamic which further complicates this issue.  Exxon/Mobil, as refiners and marketers of gasoline, sell their gas from their terminals to the highest bidder.  Sure, they sell gas to stations which they have branded (some owned by them, many are not), but they are happy to sell that gas to a distributor or jobber at a higher price if the market will allow.  The station owners really only make a penny or two on gas, so the people getting hurt by this plan are the station owners, who are not Exxon/Mobil employees.  This narrow margin on gas is why the pumps at the stations are so slow.  Those mini-marts make far more in terms of profit for the station owner than the gas.

To sum up, supply/demand is really simple.  For a given supply, there is demand, and that determines price.  Without removing demand, but actually removing supply, the price will go up for the resource, not down. 

It’s not often that I see a demo (a video of a demo no less) of something and get excited about it.  I can think of very, very few in recent memory: Spore, the CompuTrainer with HD Video, and now the WorldWide Telescope.

As some may recall, this was the same product which brought a tear to Robert Scoble’s eye when he did the interview with  Curtis Wong.  Scoble finally has his exclusive video up, and all I can say is “wow.”  I can’t really explain it in a way that does it justice.  Watch the video.  The camera work is awful, and Robert needs to learn how to do interviews of this format a little better.  To his credit, he does get really smart people on camera, and that’s what makes his videos so interesting (specifically this one).

Having two young children has given me the opportunity to start dreaming again.  Dreaming about possibilities, about how my kids will view the world, and the types of tools and technology they will have available to them to do some exploring.  My wife was amazed the other day when my daughter used her trackpad on the computer to move some things around the screen.  My wife said “I’m 35 and still can’t get this right.”  The beauty of being a kid is that they don’t know any better, and so they don’t have any mental barriers keeping them from doing amazing things.  A tool like this will surely spur incredible amounts of interest in what is possible, not just in astronomy, but with inter-spacial relational photography (**I made that phrase up).

I believe that I am a closet astronomy nerd wanting to break out of some artificial confines I have erected over the years.  Whenever I get near a telescope, or somewhere where I can see the night sky, I really wish I knew more.  Sometimes I even hear the drunk/stoned freshman saying “like, the universe is expanding, but what’s it look like at the edge???”  <insert Keanu Reeves “whoa.”>  I have actually started to let that nerd out a little bit in the last couple of weeks, and plan on doing more.  Having this desktop app will really make it easy.

As I said, it’s hard to communicate the awesomeness that is what these guys at Microsoft have built.  The sheer amount of data is mind boggling.  Being able to weave it all together into a seamless tapestry of near infinite resolution is simply incredible.  I am not sure how much of the land based photography will be in this product as well, but the Yosemite footage made me say “wow” yet another time, and with an increased level of incredulity.

I’m not sure this was enough to make me cry, but my money is on the notion that this app could zero in on Scoble from space and find that tear.  I really, really want access to this app…now.  Good on Microsoft, and good on Scoble for sharing.

What I love about this new blog is that I am going to write about anything and everything.  So many people think that the only reason to have a blog is to either a) write about your kids, or b) write about some niche topic about which you are are the supposed expert.  Well, not me.  This blog will be a peek inside my brain; the topics which interest me.  What better way to really get things going with a video which all but encompasses every reason why I have kids.  Enjoy.

By the way, if you are wondering, yes, the parents were playing a joke on the poor boy, and yes, they actually did give him the XBox 360.