The Daily Show and democracy

There is currently a small debate taking place regarding whether the Daily Show is dangerous for democracy (see here, for example). The thrust of the argument against the show is that its sarcastic portrayal of politics engenders complacency by portraying all political actors as incompetent and hopelessly out of touch with reality (serious paraphrasing, here).

First, I’d like to point out that this “debate” is a rehash. The same criticisms have already been raised, though obviously not laid to rest. I’ll leave the obvious interpretation of the debate as new media sources colliding with old ones to others. But I feel the need to point out a few glaring deficiencies in the analysis.

1) More people are paying attention to politics as a result of the Daily Show. It’s a popular, funny show with a lot of political content. Regardless of whether its spin on political matters is biased or jaded, can we honestly argue that it would be better if all of those viewers that would otherwise be totally oblivious to current affairs were completely tuned out? I’d argue not.

2) Politics as a comedic subject is nothing new. What is new is entire shows devoted to political comedy that don’t fail due to a lack of interest. I’m not sure that it’s fair to fault the Daily Show for the fact that politics is a fertile ground for comedy, especially if you look at it from the right perspectives.

3) It’s entirely possible that the endless highlighting of the failings of politicians will, in the end, encourage people to hold their representatives to higher standards. The Daily Show does not view the world through a pair of disenfranchised glasses. The show is actually very laudatory of some lawmakers and thinkers. And they’re not all left-wingers — observe the relationship between Jon Stewart and John McCain, a Daily Show favorite.

It’s logically fallacious to conclude that, because the Daily Show mocks some politicians for their apparent shortcomings, its viewers will believe that all politicians are incompetent or crooked. Elections are essentially transactions in the public opinion market. Electoral rules and institutions can distort that market, making incumbency a near-guarantee of re-election, for example, or making personal wealth and fundraising far too important for the process of seeking office. I think that the Daily Show might correct some of these market distortions by forcing politicians into a constant, critical public eye that can’t be avoided by sending out glossy flyer and buying thirty second TV spots.

Californiacation redux

I’ll be in San Diego on Saturday to present a paper at the Western Economics Association conference. So if you’re in the area and you’ve been stricken with a case of seemingly-incurable insomnia, come on down, I’ll see what I can do to help.

I’m like a decapitated chicken at the moment. I knew that we were presenting a paper, but I did not know that doing so entailed my giving an oral presentation, which I haven’t done in, let’s see, three years. Naturally, I just found out about this requirement today, leaving me one day to put the whole presentation together and rehearse it in front of my bathroom mirror, which will be necessary since I’ve taken to swearing like a stevedore in the course of day-to-day conversation ever since I started working from home.

Maybe I’ll put the slides online. Not sure if I can do that without violating my self-imposed veil of anonymity.

Listening to: Free to Run from the album “Bring It On” by Gomez

Freedback: ecto and WordPress.com

Here’s a really interesting bug (?) that I’ve noticed and haven’t been able to work around: Every time I post a picture to my WordPress.com blog from within ecto, it starts out okay. The picture displays, is hosted on the server, no problem. Then, after some amount of time, I’ll visit the blog and I’ll get the alternate text instead of the picture. Sometimes this occurs after I update a post (from ecto), sometimes it happens on its own. But then, after another length of time, the picture reappears. I’m not messing with these settings, I’m not logging in and editing the post from the dashboard. The pictures just disappear and reappear on their own.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it a setting or something else that’s obvious but I’m missing?

OOo and Apple fonts

The latest build of OpenOffice.org for OS X (X11 version 2.0.3 release candidate 3) has improved font handling (when you load it, it asks if you want to use Apple fonts — maybe it has Fondu built in).

It looks a lot nicer, too:

I’m not sure what’s going on with this build, but it seems to open its own version of X11 (a different X11 icon pops up in the dock, and when I open other X11 apps like Gimp or Inkscape, the normal one pops up). Also, despite the integrated font handling, the on-screen display is still horrendous). It is, however, substantially faster than NeoOffice, and if you can’t get a copy of Office, or you have very light office software needs, I’d say it’s a good solution.

Our definitions of impatience are divergent

TeX for the impatient is a 300+ page PDF that doesn’t give you any idea how to install the program or even use it if you’re not on a *nix system. My tutorial is about 15 pages, it tells Windows and Mac users exactly where to download the needed programs, how to install them, how to use a frontend to create and process LaTeX documents, and everything else they need to know to make 80% of documents, referring them to search engines for the remaining 20%.

A lot of tutorials are like that, sadly. And they discourage learning. I think a good tutorial should be readable in about 20 minutes and serve two purposes: teach the basics and show how to go beyond them.

That’s what I went for in my tutorial. It briefly discusses what LaTeX is and how it works, then it shows in detail where to get it, how to install it, and how to get up and running, since newcomers will have no idea how to do any of those things if they aren’t Linux users. Then it covers the most common needs of technical writers: front matter, paragraphs, lists, tables, figures, annotations and equations. Along the way, it introduces packages (which vastly extend LaTeX’s capabilities, but are too numerous to quickly document) and special commands, clearly showing where more information can be obtained as users’ needs mature.

I think the advantage of short tutorials is that they make the task of learning a new system less daunting. You get the basics early on, you feel confident making most documents, and you aren’t overwhelmed with every little detail. That confidence makes you more likely to go on to learn the advanced functions as you need them.

Do you remember OK Soda?

I’ve been reminiscing about soft drinks, particularly OK Soda. I used to have a pool by my house and my brother and I would hang out there on hot summer days. OK Soda was sold at the vending machines (along with sour candy that I would eat until my tongue hurt). I really liked OK Soda, although I’m pretty sure I’m still paying for my childhood affinity for cola in physique. But then it just disappeared. Turns out Denver was an area where it was test-marketed in 1994, but it did very poorly so was abandoned. What a shame. I still remember the 1-800-I-FEEL-OK campaign.

OK Soda – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

OK Soda had a more “citric” taste than traditional colas, almost like a Fruit Punch version of Coke’s Fresca. Some reviewers described it as “slightly spicy”. Others likened it to a combination of orange soda and flat Coca-Cola. In contrast to earlier beverages from the 1980s also noted for their marketing campaigns, such as Jolt and Red Bull, OK Soda’s caffeine content was not emphasized. A 12-ounce serving of OK Soda had only 40.5 milligrams of caffeine, slightly less than Coca-Cola itself (45.6 mg).

Many OK Soda fans have attempted to recreate the taste of OK Soda from memory. Though the actual formula is unknown, a generally accepted recipe for the approximate taste is:

* ¼ orange soda
* ¾ semi-flat Coca-Cola
* a splash of Dr. Pepper

Lazyweb request

I want a Firefox extension with the following specs:

• When Firefox is opened, I am asked whether I want a timed session
• If I say yes, then I enter the time limit for my session
• When the limit expires, a window pops up asking me if I want X more minutes, where X is a value that I set (like a snooze alarm)

We can call this FocusFox and I completely give my idea to you if you implement it.

Support is the new black

Seems like everyone’s keeping themselves afloat by offering support for otherwise free products these days. At first, this struck me as odd and not viable in the long term — make a product, give it away for free, but make money offering technical support. But then I realized that this isn’t really that much different than selling computers. From what I understand, it isn’t the computer or the bundled software that makes money at big box stores, it’s the $30 cables.

Of course, as someone who’s much more likely to give than need support, I’m a total free-rider with a mile-wide smile.

I don’t think about business very much, but support has to be fairly profitable. It’s ongoing — even well-built products need tweaking now and again, even if they’re working fine. And the race-to-the-bottom effect probably isn’t as substantial. For example, you can replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org at your company and say “it’s good enough.” There’s no “good enough” support in a lot of cases (pure speculation here) because when you have reached the point of willingness to pay for support, you are already signaling that good enough is not good enough for you/your company — you want it done right by experts [*].

I like the idea of free software developers making money by offering support. First, it means that they will keep developing their software, since their financial base depends on loyal users. Second, it means that their lives get easier as the software gets better, so they have an incentive to code smarter. Third, it keeps the software itself open-source and free, with all of the attendant benefits (integration with other products, standardization, volunteer testing and patching, etc.).

[*] I just finished reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, so I’m still thinking about all the ways that firms are sneaking price discrimination under my door. The people that pay for support for software would have been the big corporate customers anyway. Nothing lost by giving it away for free to people that would have (a) done without or (b) pirated it. In fact, a lot is gained in terms of network effects (more people use it so more people are comfortable with it, the file format is widely accepted, name-recognition, and so on).

So sadly true

Via Coding Horror.

The internet is a bikini-clad blond and a dinosaur wearing party hats and eating cake, as well as some airplanes doing stunt maneuvers.

Update: Fuck it. I don’t know what the problem is, but the picture keeps getting deleted. Either it’s an ecto thing, or maybe someone’s trying to tell me not to post pictures from other people’s websites. I’m not sure. Just click the link. God, I just got back from an eye exam and I feel like I’m looking at the screen through an ice cube.

More on equation editing in Word 2007 Beta

[Disclaimer: I know, I'm obsessed with equation editing. Sorry.]

After some additional investigation, I’m really impressed with the equation editing functions. For the first time ever, equation editing has been completely and thoughtfully integrated into a standard word processing application.

To insert an equation, you just hit alt+=. From there, you can use most LaTeX commands. For example, typing

\sum_i^n

creates the expected LaTeX expresssion:

You have to mess around with the arrow keys to get Word to understand where arguments go relative to operators, but this is true of LyX, too. The \frac{}{} command doesn’t work. Instead, when you want to type a fraction, there’s a small dropdown menu on the right of the equation box, from which you can select Professional or Inline to set the fraction style. I’m sure that there are other idiosyncracies that will be frustrating at first (or maybe forever).

Still, setting aside programs designed specifically for scientific composition (like LaTeX or LaTeX-based systems such as Scientific Word and LyX), the new equations implementation in Word is the best I’ve seen. It allows those that know LaTeX to quickly enter and edit formulas, but it doesn’t lock those who don’t out by scaring them with a markup language (ala OpenOffice.org). The only obvious improvement that I can think of would be to include a “view source” function to allow tweaking and ture expert editing (ala every graphical HTML editor ever made, including the one I’m using to type this post). But then again, I think every graphical application should have a view source mode (wouldn’t it be nice if you could tweak the source in Word to like it was HTML?).

I can’t wait until the next version of Office:Mac is out. I hope I get to beta test that, too.