The current economic collapse is a difficult story for TV. It's a peculiar period in between an election and an inauguration. This most important story, this great-or-not-so great depression, is also the hardest for CNN to tell. I have more than enough reasons why in this late-night rant.
1) It's not a hurricane so Anderson Cooper of CNN is unable to position himself in the middle of the storm for optimal drama. In other words, TV anchors can't get wet and windblown, while viewers worry about their safety. The state of the economy is a disaster but not a natural disaster. Nobody's leaving the studio for this one. There's no place to go.
2) It's like a war and we keep losing ground each day. In the place of casualties, we have falling stock indices but it's hard to show the real damage. There's only so much you can do with oversized charts to tell a story. The war on terrorism featured a real enemy. We've just never been able to find them, no matter who goes after them. (Maybe it's not so different.) Campbell Brown ("No Bull, No Bias") should say that what the capitalism's finest did to themselves and to us was worse than any terrorist could have imagined.
3) Few CEOs, fewer economists, and almost no one in the financial industry, want to step forward and say with conviction what will happen. A year ago we couldn't get them to stop telling us what great things to expect in the next quarter. Not now. They don't know what's coming and they aren't willing to say even that much. They are MIA. Insider information is at an all-time low.
Memo to all American CEOs: don't presume in ten years' time to write business books about your leadership skills; maybe there's a gripping survival story to be told about how you held on to your job.
We want them to face the music. Even the Watergate hearings, which had a large cast of characters, were compelling to watch day after day.
4) There is not a President at the center. Bush is just not there. Like us, he's watching TV to find out what to think. Reporting from the White House doesn't have any relevance today. Moreover, the satisfaction in blaming Bush for everything is diminishing.
In addition, with the election over, reporters can't simply ask the candidates to react to the day's bad news. It seldom produced much insight anyway but it filled time. Now Obama is filling time, and he keeps repeating that "there's only one President" but there's really not a President. There's a leadership vacuum waiting to be filled by Obama. (BTW, this story is much bigger and more important than Obama's election and I think he understands that.) Bottom line is we're waiting for a central figure to emerge.
5) Real experts are hard to find, especially ones with big hair. So over-present talking heads such as Suze Orman ramble on and on in front of Larry King and others. Here's an incredible ramble from Suze Orman on CNN:
People feel they need medication because they are panicking.
It’s as if the economy right now is in the I.C.U. unit of a hospital. We are in intensive care and they are throwing everything type of medication at us to cure what is going on. They are panicking because why? Nothing is working. They tried this, it didn’t work. They tried that medication, it didn’t work. They are running out of prescriptions to give it. We are going to be in the I.C.U. unit for a while. Eventually, I don’t know when that will be, six months, a year, year and a half, we will get out, we’ll be in the hospital then. We’ll stay in the hospital for about a year or two. After another year or two we will end up in rehab and then we’ll be okay. This is a long stretch. People have to stop panicking.
CNN link
Makes me think of Amy Winehouse singing "They try to make me go to rehab, I say no, no, no." Rehab is taking place over on CNBC.
6) Where are the winning and losing teams? We have learned more about Al Queda cells and Saddam Hussein's Elite Guards than about the people in power behind CITI, Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers, AIG, etc. We know more about the New York Jets than we do about CITI Bank. Are the slow-moving Detroit Manufacturers competing head-to-head against the fast-talking Wall Street Financiers? Please tell us more about these teams as we're entrusting them with such large amounts of public money. Maybe we need to start thinking that, as with football, we care because we're betting on teams to win. We have our money at stake.
7) I can almost hear producers wondering each night if there isn't a better story to lead with. "Isn't there a story we can do on Sarah Palin? Like her or hate her, people can't get enough of her." At least that appears to be the thinking behind her getting the most air-time in the week following the election. Would you rather hear about Sarah Palin pardoning a turkey or David Gergen saying no one knows what to make of the economic mess? At least, the Palin piece will have something interesting going on in the foreground and the background.
8) "Why can't this be happening to Russia or China? If it was only happening there, and not here, we would know how to cover it." CNN would send Christiane Amanpour there. "Live from...". We don't have visuals like people knocking down walls, rushing into the streets or standing in lines. The Fall of the Berlin Wall is the Fall of Communism, the fall of Saddam's statue -- now these are stories of new freedoms. In America today, we have a big fall without a distinctive symbol, without a video loop, without an exotic locale.
Also, how do you explain that China is providing the bail for the bailout? As David Gergen said tonight on CNN, "China's become our banker." Even harder to tell that kind of "freedom" story.
9) The problems aren't going away and there's no timeline. So, where's the equivalent of "America Held Hostage: Day XN"? Nightline evolved from a special report to become a nightly hard-news program to follow the ongoing story of Iran holding American hostages during the Carter Administration. Why isn't this economic story played front-and-center in the same way? Isn't there a TV journalist saying "Holy Christ, this is the biggest story of my career and I'm going to bring it to you every night"? Ted Koppel, Edward R. Murrow, where are you?
Here's my list of names for a new Nightline-like special series on the economy:
America's Panic Attack
The Joke's on US
Invisible Hand-Wringing
Capitalism on the Ledge
The Economy on the Couch
Future Shock & Awe
Hitting the Wall And Falling on the Street.
America Sucks Right Now
US: Out of Order
10) Lastly, the TV media is no better off than we are at understanding this complex crisis. On a gut level, viewers know what the story is, that it's about them, their future and their children's future. They have specific questions that are difficult to answer (see the Suze Orman blog on CNN where it is promised that she'll answer these many, many questions; she doesn't, of course.) and they have general worries (should I panic?) that are hard to resolve. While we try to absorb as much information as possible, we keep having the same conversation over and over:
Q. What's going on?
A. I don't know. It's hard to tell.
Ever since I was ten, Colby has been a part of me, like a small, sentient circuit board lodged in my brain. He wasn't always like this. When I first met him, he was autonomous: a Moloch Machine, a literal deus ex.
Beneath the brim of his red baseball cap, unblinking eyes bulbously stared, plunged, hypnotized.
As CES 2005 rolled around, it was clear that Gizmodo was losing the gadget blog war. ... I was ready to lose, though. Although I had been running Gizmodo for less than a year I was already about to burn out.
As I leaned back into the fake leather seat, my phone rang.
"Hey, Joel? It's Larry Cohen from Microsoft. I know it's sort of last second, but would you be interested in interviewing Bill Gates at CES?"
A few feet away was a TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, half-hidden by the ivy. ... The display glowed green in the dark. But this was the mid-1980s: one did not simply run into portable computers in the middle of the woods.
According to an article in New Scientist, global climate warming may actually suppress plagues of locusts. One less thing to worry about, eh?
Zhibin Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues have trawled through 1000 years of historical records documenting locust swarms and compared it with 1000 years of temperature, drought and flood data estimates.
image from wikipedia.
They found that the Oriental migratory locust (Locusta migratoria manilensis), which has been named as one of the most damaging agricultural pests in Chinese history, operates on a climate-driven cycle. Every 160 to 170 years, the swarms get bigger then subside again.
Counterintuitively, the timing of the largest swarms coincides with cooler periods.
"The popular view is that global warming may accelerate natural and biological disasters like drought and flood events, and outbreaks of pests, as predicted by the IPCC," says Zhang. "Our results suggest that warming reduced climatic extremes and locust plagues in ancient China."
That doesn't mean swarms won't happen. (Add this back to the list of things to worry about.) This month in Australia, drought followed by heavy rains in New South Wales has brought enormous swarms of locusts. One swarm is six kilometres long and 170 meters wide.
Here's a BBC video of the swarms. It's kind of like watching Hitchcock's "The Birds".
Today on Offworld we discovered that the post-apocalyptic Wasteland in Bethesda's RPG Fallout 3 was about to get a little bit wider, got a glimpse of what a Criterion Collection for games might look like (props for the analogy, N'Gai!), and learned that -- happily -- the world's Guitar Heroes are picking up real guitars as well.
We also looked at a photojournalist's project that shows us what it looks like when we're immersed in our virtual worlds, read about the people who got rich off those worlds, and listened to me live on national radio trying to explain the importance of those worlds.
Please allow me to sing the praises of persimmons. Bright orange persimmons are about the last fruit to ripen in the fall. There are two main types of persimmons, and I have both in my yard: fuyu and hachiya. Persimmons come from China originally but the common varieties that we find in California are from Japan. The fuyu persimmon is round, more like an apple, while the hachiya is distinctively acorn-shaped. Fuyu are ripe now, while the hachiya ripen later. [I've changed Fuya to Fuyu.]
Fuyu
The best thing about the fuyu is that it can be sliced and eaten like an apple or not-quite-ripe pear. You don't need to peel fuyus. My favorite use for fuyus is sliced or diced in salads. Last Thanksgiving, I created a relish with diced fuyu persimmons and pomegranate seeds mixed together.
Hachiya
The hachiya persimmon is more familiar to people, and the trees are also more commonly planted. Hachiya need to be very ripe before using them. [I have not eaten one but other report they are good eating when soft.] Putting them in a bag helps to force ripening.
Hachiya persimmons are very astringent - your mouth will be unusable after taking a bite. Just don't eat them off the tree, like a fuya. Typically, this kind of persimmon is turned into pulp and then used to make a sweet bread or a pudding. I saw a recipe for a persimmon sorbet, which I'll have to try, maybe for the Christmas holidays.
In short, you can't have enough fuyus but you'll easily have too many hachiyas.
In this week's Boing Boing Gadgets review episode on Boing Boing tv, Joel Johnson reviews the T-Mobile Cameo Picture Frame, which displays digital photos but also sort of works like a phone. Joel's thumbs were neither decisively up nor down, but rather pensively wrapped around a scotch SORRY, *BOURBON* tumbler.
Below, a slide show of images submitted by Boing Boing Gadgets readers to Joel, for use in preparing this video review of the Cameo Picture Frame.
Update: Joel here. One correction from what I said in the video. There is a way to copy all the images off of the device onto an SD card at once. It didn't work for me the first time, but I then I tried it again later and it did. Don't know what I did differently, but it makes a big difference in how easy it is to get images from the Cameo to your computer.
Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel has an extremely funny and acidic post up about a viral marketer who appears to be astroturfing in our comment threads on behalf of Motorola. Boing Boing Gadgets commenters respond in kind, and a comment war of wall-to-wall LOL ensues. Go read the whole thing, please: Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments? (gadgets.boingboing.net)
Oh, and hey, Joel -- I'm so glad my boss isn't like that! I'm working for Boing Boing right now, and became a huge fan of the Yeti Robot Sex blog post genre. I especially like YouTube dance remix. It's awesome!
My friend Elizabeth Stanley writes in to Boing Boing to share the video above, which explores how the digital world "allows many Iranians access to ideas and freedom of expression they haven’t had for close to thirty years." Elizabeth explains:
Kate Tremills wrote a "video essay" script for the Digital Design department at the Vancouver Film School (VFS) several months back. They turned it into this amazing piece – which has received attention from Motionographer. Here's the link on the VFS site and on the Motionographer site.
Meant to blog this when it came out, but it's one of the funniest/creepiest things I've ever read in the Times: a really odd Q&A with Karl Rove. By the time you reach the end, you half expect the guy to bust out the chianti and liver and start hissing at you:
Have you metBarack Obama?
Yes, I know him. He was a member of the Senate while I was at the White House and we shared a mutual friend, Ken Mehlman, his law-school classmate. When Obama came to the White House, we would talk about our mutual friend.
Did you have lunch together? Talk in the hall? We sat in the meeting room and chatted before the meeting. He had a habit of showing up early, which is a good courtesy.
Are you going to send him a little note congratulating him? I already have. I sent it to his office. I sent him a handwritten note with funny stamps on the outside.
In the months before the 2008 election, rumors were circulated by everyone from right-wing bloggers to Fox News and members of the McCain campaign about a secret tape containing alarming statements by Barack or Michelle Obama. David LaFontaine at HardNewsIncsummarizes the events as the "secret tape" turns into a classic Spanish Prisoner / Nigerian 419 scam with a $150,000 price tag. "The Mountain Sage" deserves most of the credit for putting all the pieces together. One note: it's still unclear to me whether $150,000 was *actually paid* to Nigerians, or whether they just demanded this much. Either way, it was a massive kerfuffle.
* VIRGIN AMERICA LAUNCHES IN-FLIGHT WIRELESS: Our wireless tech reporter pal Glenn Fleishman was on the first Virgin America flight with airborne WiFi service. BBtv caught up with him over video chat from a Virgin America Airbus A320 aircraft (named "My Other Ride Is A Spaceship") 35,000 feet above San Francisco. Also joining us: Jack Blumenstein, the CEO of Aircell, the company providing the "GoGo" air/ground 3G connectivity. The bottom line: no content filtering on Virgin, so you can visit any blogs you like, and they will not block streaming content or video. But, voice over IP will be blocked because the general consensus among airlines and travelers in the US seems to be that nobody wants other people on the plane to be talking on the phone when you're all confined to close quarters. Disclaimer: we really like Virgin America, in part because they carry Boing Boing tv in their in-flight entertainment system.
* BB COMMENT THREAD POETRY CONTEST: Teresa Nielsen Hayden, aka She Who Disemvowels, announced a fun game/contest recently -- write some poetry inside the comment threads using "natively BoingBoing" themes. We can has a winner.
Below: a snapshot from that Virgin America WiFi flight. I spy Brian Lam of Gizmodo, and Glenn Fleishman, and a few other familar blogging faces!
UPDATE: Hey, what kind of sites exactly was Gizporno's Brian Lam websurfing on that plane? Zoom in a little... wait.. there we go. AHA. Below, the reveal.
In anticipation of the great food holiday of Thanksgiving, I'm going to post several food-related items. I'm not necessarily suggesting these items for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner but they all come from a late Autumn harvest. We'll start with the humble but hot horseradish root.
The Horseradish Plant
Last spring I planted horseradish in the garden. I planted a section of root and its green leaves, tightly bunched, grew over summer. With colder weather, the leaves died off and the root can be harvested. This past weekend, I dug out a small piece and set out to make my own prepared or preserved horseradish.
The Peeled Root
You can see the root at the top of the photo. First, I cleaned and peeled the root. It is a lot like a cross between carrot and parsnip. Then I diced it. Wondering how it tasted raw, I chewed a small piece of the root. It was like a flash of white lightning. Very sharp, coming on in a sudden burst, a bit like wasabi but different. I spit it out, and then immediately regretted doing so. It's cool-hot like a radish, but it really is a horse of a radish.
The Prepared Horseradish
Next I put the diced horseradish root in a food processor, added cider vinegar, and gave it a whirl. That's all it took. As you can see from the photo, the result is milky white.
Next time, I will try to grate the horseradish instead of dicing it. The chunks of the horseradish from the food processor were a bit too coarse.
Now, this prepared horseradish can be tasted as is, and it is tasty. I could also add the horseradish to ketchup with some lemon juice for shrimp. Honestly I could skip the shrimp altogether and just lap up the horseradish sauce. It's a nice ingredient to add to salad dressings, especially Asian style dressings. Of course, it's an ingredient in Bloody Mary mix. My favorite horseradish application, though, is on a good piece of beef, like prime rib. I don't know how it would mix with turkey but I might just try it. Let me know if you have any ideas.
According to horseradish.org, Dagwood Bumstead enjoyed horseradish regularly in the popular comic strip, "Blondie," created originally by Chic Young in 1930.
Russia's top investigator is claiming that their wartime foes, the Georgians, deployed a cadre of female snipers from Ukraine and Latvia. The shooters sound an awful lot like the mythical "white tights" -- the exotic, stone-cold, blue eyed, Olympic bialthete killers of Chechen war lore who were said to pick off hapless Russian conscripts.
I just posted some oddly haunting old photos from an FBI file covering a 1971 blue box bust in Montana at blog.historyofphonephreaking.org. I thought you might enjoy them, especially the telephone handset with the evidence tag on it, which seems like somebody ought to be able to use for some cool art project!
In doing the research for the "Bailout Nation" book, I needed a way to put the dollar amounts into proper historical perspective.
If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.
People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.
Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:
Someone's got to reproduce these 1966 "phone scramblers" in all their silky, chunky plasticky glory, leaving all but one tiny corner hollow, filling that tiny corner with a modern crypto device.
This scrambler keeps private phone conversations safe from wiretappers and eavesdroppers. Fitted to an ordinary handset, it needs no electrical connection, has its own power source. To hear, a person needs an unscrambler coded identically. Delcon Division, Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., sells it for $275, keeps your name and code locked in its vault
MAKE's put my latest column, "Selectable Output Control," online -- it describes a proposal to the FCC to allow broadcasters to shut down parts of your home theater while you're watching their channels, and the consequences for Makers.
Chances are, you haven't heard of Selectable Output Control (SOC), a proposed digital TV technology that would allow broadcasters or copyright holders to tag their video with a list of receiver-outputs that were allowed to carry it. That's because it's an insane idea.
Picture this: you power up your home theater, an near-incomprehensible tangle of game-consoles, AV switchers, cable boxes, PVRs, DVD players, 5.1 speakers, amps -- maybe a home theater PC or a projector, too. After some fiddling and locating the correct remote, you start to surf up the dial. All good. Then you hit MTV and the gorgeous, perfectly balanced sound stops. Why has it stopped? Because your cable-receiver has received a SOC flag from MTV disallowing high-end audio unless it has some obscure DRM that isn't compatible with any of your gear (especially not your beautiful hand-built tube-amp). MTV doesn't want you digitizing the songs that accompany the (increasingly rare) music videos they play, so if you want sound while watching MTV, you've got to turn on the tiny internal speakers that came with your TV.
You flip up the dial (get up again and turn off the internal speakers), and flip to HBO and your screen goes dark. That's because HBO is showing a movie that has been flagged as "no analog" -- which means that your beautiful, 42" plasma display won't work because you connected it via the composite analog video cables coming off the back of your AV switcher, rather than via the DRM-locked HDCP output. To watch the movie, you'll need to move the entire shelving unit (remember to take down the family photos first, doofus, otherwise you risk shattering the glass if they tip over), disconnect the analog cables, find the HDCP cable that came with the TV (or was it the cable box?) in the garage, and rewire your set. When the kids want to play a couple hours of Paper Mario on the Wii, you're going to need to move it again and reconnect things. (Coming soon to a Make issue: HOWTO put your home theater on wheels for easy rewiring).
Stanford Magazine reports on the applications from psychological research Carol Dweck's work, which uses careful experiments to determine why some people give up when confronted with failure, while others roll up their sleeves and dive in.
Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure–and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.
Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions–why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use...
...[S]ome of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information–we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy–something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type–faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”
Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while–so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized–and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated–that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”
ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG. Nipper, a Counterstrike map-hacker, has devised an incredibly detailed reproduction of the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World, a ride so fine I wrote a novel about it. Nipper's packed a jaw-dropping amount of detail into the map, even down to various behind-the-scenes sections, and has creatively improved some of the slacker moments in the ride, such as a set of Eschereqsue staircases to one side of the otherwise boring stair-climb. The only thing that could make this better would be modelling ALL the backstage areas, so you could tear through the break rooms and maintenance areas with your giant guns, hunting your fellow players.
Boing Boing Gadgets celebrates the bottomless creativity of the Pearl River Delta with this pocket-watch that's also a miniature train set. Chugga chugga chugga chugga choo choo!
Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we told stories.
John recounted how 
Have you met 
