I'm writing code while the CNN idiots are chattering about nothing behind me. They're talking such nonsense that it doesn't interfere with my concentration. It's relaxing.

If you understand how programming works that means they're not saying anything my cerebral cortex needs to focus on, and I have no expectation that they will say anything I have to listen to with my intellect. I can focus fully on the program runtime environment.

In the rebooted system I'll have Nate Silver and people he listens to, talking behind me. I won't be able to write code while that's going on. (Or write a blog post.)

Will Nate's live video stream come via the settop box or via the FIOS connection? Who cares? The net effect is exactly the same.

I'll be doing that for sure in 2012. We're almost there now.

PS: It's been a long time since I've watched cable news. I watched the World Series (love the Giants), and now I'm "watching" election returns. Only thing notable that's changed is the political ads appear to new fears about China. Maybe the Koch Brothers are preparing for World War III?

 11/2/2010; 7:16:28 PM.   .

There's been a trickle of other blogs picking up on the idea.

Great mockup on TiPb.

Why??

Why would Apple want to do this? To create as large a market as possible for IOS apps.

Why do they care about that? Well, they make a lot of money selling those apps. That's a pretty good reason all on its own.

But even more important, for Apple, any developer energy that's applied to an Apple platform is energy that isn't applied to a Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Blackberry, Nokia platform.

I probably left someone out. Oh yea. The web.

 11/2/2010; 4:32:51 PM.   .

Krugman is a Natural Born Blogger.

You can tell just from reading his blog. It's especially important because he's blogging at nytimes.com. In that sense what he's doing is very subversive because he's an expert writing without interpretation by a middleman, a reporter. There's no one between him, the expert, and me, a person who wants access to his expertise.

He's a Source that Goes Direct.

I especially go for his angry pieces (like this one). What makes Krugman angry is the same thing that gets me going -- ignorance.

Ignorance is the practice of ignoring. To be ignorant is not the same thing as being stupid. Albert Einstein was surely ignorant of some things.

We all do it. The world is too big and complex to pay attention to everything, no matter how smart you are.

Ignorance becomes negative, however, when you ignore things that are important. Ignore the pedestrians in the crosswalk as you drive through it -- that's seriously ignorant, for you and for the pedestrians. Ignore that a weak dollar must be balanced by a strong currency somewhere is ignorance. It's just math. There's no way around it.

The same kind of reasoning applies to various systems. The news system is rebooting. That's the premise of a lot of my thinking. The political system is not rebooting the way I hoped it would. We're still voting against our interest, we're still giving money to people who use the money to buy votes so that they can take even more money etc etc We'll see tomorrow how bad it is, but they say it's going to be pretty bad.

I think the systems are linked. The smarter the news system is the smarter the political system can be. And the converse is true as well, until the news system gets smart, the political system can't. That's why the smart anger at a leading news place like the Times is a very positive sign. Krugman himself is good news.

We have to care enough to not be ignorant of our interests. We're not there yet. But there are hopeful signs.

 11/2/2010; 11:13:32 AM.   .