Saturday Links for the Week – March 3, 2007

It’s Joost Entertainment: I’ve been saying that the media serve two functions — information and entertainment — and that the mainstream media have more or less abandoned the former because the latter is cheaper, easier, and more corporate advertiser-friendly. Rob Paterson has been talking about Joost (screenshot above), the startup which promises to integrate television into the Internet, so you can throw the boob tube away and just focus on one screen. But that assumes that those who now get their information on the Internet and their entertainment on TV want them integrated. Even more, it assumes that the millions who have turned off the TV in droves to spend more time online aren’t discovering that the best entertainment, like the best information, is inter-personal, one-to-one, and face-to-face. Joost technology and simple interface looks interesting, but other than some stuff from public broadcasters, I can’t imagine any content it could provide that would cause me to go there. I rarely watch TV or movies anymore, and having the content of 5000 junky ‘cable’ channels on my computer screen is unlikely to make me any more inclined to watch crappy content.

Making it Easy to be Good: This might be a scam, and it might be economically unworkable, but it’s a great idea, one whose imaginativeness we need to study as a model for what needs to be done. The idea of giving the customer an energy-saving device free, and pocketing the energy savings as compensation, is an example of making it easy to be good. And until there is no alternative but to be good (socially and environmentally), the only way we will make the world a better place on any scale is by making it easy for billions to do so.

Americans Stick to Their Values, No Matter What: An op-ed in the New York Times reviews a long-term survey of American attitudes on a variety of subjects (click the ‘multimedia’ box for the slide show) that suggests Americans are getting, on average, more liberal, more fearful, and more unhappy. But the problem with these surveys is that they ignore significant cores of people who never change their mind on anything, and other ‘swing’ groups whose uninformed opinions blow in the breeze. I think if you could isolate the size and views of these cohorts you’d have a more useful, and frightening picture. Frightening because I think the major changes are more due to generations dying and new generations reaching the age of majority, than actual changes in worldview, even over a lifetime.

More Evidence Complex Systems Confound Us: Another recent phenomenon that no one can explain is the sudden disappearance, over the past year, of billions of American bees (more than half the national total in commercial hives), essential to the honey industry and to the pollination of more than half of US food crops. Like the challenges of the global warming and the epidemic of chronic auto-immune diseases, these complex system phenomena cannot be predicted or analyzed to definitively ascertain cause or cure or to prevent their occurrence. There are just too many interconnected variables. This is what happens when we mess with things we don’t understand. Fortunately nature will, in the end, clean up our mess andput things back into balance.

Lakoff Uses the ‘N’ Word: George Lakoff, commenting on the not-so-secret US plans to bomb Iranian nuclear installations and to develop new ‘mini-nukes’ and a new kind of nuclear bomb, reminds us of the consequences of nuclear confrontation, escalation and brinksmanship. We never learn.

Correcting an oversight: I should have acknowledged Phil Jensen and Charles Hall for pointing me to the articles that inspired my recent post on Peak Oil. Thanks guys!