Author: Jeff Milner

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Bush Best President Since Clinton

This month’s Rolling Stone magazine reports on the United States’ worst president ever:

According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever—with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush—sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that “prosperity is just around the corner”—insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

Last weekend I went to Drayton Valley to celebrate Easter with my sister and her family. I car-pooled with my parents for the 6 hour drive and had a chance to talk about the American national debt problem with my dad. (It’s one of our favourite recurring topics of discussion).

I wondered what will happen to the highly dependant Canadian economy if/when the American dollar/economy collapses. Carrying the tremendous weight of almost $8.4 trillion, it seems to me only a matter of time before somebody (maybe China?) comes asking for their money back. And if it’s not the other countries that have money invested, maybe it will be a large portion of the population that come to the realization that, “hey the government can’t actually back up those bonds for my lifesavings — maybe I should try and get it now before it’s too late!”

It’s obvious that such a scenario would be catastrophic for the States, but I was curious how it would affect “The Great White North”. I’m guessing the biggest impact on the Canadian economy (other than lost money invested in the States) will be the inability to sell our products to the massive consumer giant to the south. In turn, massive layoffs; then an economic depression. Simply saying it’s going to be ugly really doesn’t approach the magnitude of hardships we’re going to be up against.

Attempting to save the world, one dictator at a time aside, the economic decisions of the United States affect everyone, and it’s something that is cause for grave concern. Luckily, China and the US are on such great terms. Oh, wait… never mind.

(Rolling Stone link via Waxy)

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Make Me Watch TV

Make Me Watch TV, is a site where you get to force me, (well actually not me, actually Aric McKeown), watch whatever TV show you please.

Internet viewers vote on what shows Aric should watch and then he blogs about it. More fun than actually watching the crappy shows he has to endure—he’s actually quite entertaining.

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The Vector Trout

For your viewing pleasure, here is some original artwork I did for an online stock photo place, but unfortunately it got denied because I did it in Photoshop instead of Illustrator and well, long story short: it’s the wrong format.

But what’s bad for me is good for you, because now I’m just going to post it here! Enjoy:

Vector Trout done in Photoshop

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How Selfish Acts Benefit Everyone

Within any collaborative effort, participants do their part giving so that there might be some kind of benefit reaped out of the collective work of the project. Derek Powazek proposes that perhaps the participants need not even be aware of their contributions in order for a system to form benefitting the perverbial greater good. Read about it in his post, Design for Selfishness.

As I read it, I started to think that as powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo continue to pull the web into one easily accessible medium, a dissection at different levels of the internet can be very revealing. For example, on any given community driven web page the creator may have big plans for the users input of finely crafted content but may or may not be actually offering anything for it. As Powazek points out there has to be a reason for the user to contribute, “If you’re making a product that’s asking users to do something—anything—that is going to add value to your company, ask yourself why anyone would bother.” There are plenty of not so good reasons that get passed off all the time: “Because it’s cool!”, “Because they contribute to Wikipedia/Slashdot/Whatever, and we’re just like that!”, or “Because we enable them to use their voice.”

But he goes on to explain that there are some good answers too:

Because we solve a problem they have. Because we give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Because we enable a kind of communication that’s unlike anything else. Because we make their lives more convenient. Because we give them, or save them, money. Because we enable them to do more with less. Because they told us they wanted to.

The whole scenario reminds me of the concept presented in Richard Dawkins famous book, “The Selfish Gene”. The book’s thesis is that in any living creature the genes that get passed on are the ones whose mutations serve their own implicit interests, not necessarily those of the organism, much less any larger level.

Let me use tagging photos as an example (I know this is the same one Powazek used, but it’s the best one). Within Flickr.com users have the ability to put tags on their photos. This helps them to find their own photos quickly and easily when they search by tag, but it also benefits the flickr community at large because they are able to search everyone’s photos by their tags.

The same is true within the context of the blogosphere as a whole. Here individuals write about specific topics and whatever their motivation the result is we are provided with a vast expanse of searchable content.

Thinking about all the posts and topics I’ve written about, I hope you, the good readers of this site, find something useful here.

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Virtual Appearance != An Actual Appearance

Ray Harryhausen and his Armatures

For the last couple weeks I have been looking forward to hearing legendary visual effects artist Ray Harryhausen speak tonight at the University. I was hoping to take my camera and get a few shots of his stop motion armatures. I even picked up a couple of extra tickets for my parents, whom are going to be in town tonight—this was going to be a source of some much needed excitement. The only catch is, Mr. Harryhausen isn’t actually going to be here.

I first thought something was odd last week when I read on the tickets, “A VIRTUAL APPEARANCE BY RAY HARRYHAUSEN”, but I figured it had something to do with the title of the lecture, Grand Illusions. Upon re-reading the lecture description it hit me like a ton of bricks that the real grand illusion was the fact that Ray Harryhausen would only be making a virtual appearance, as in live via satellite from Los Angeles.

Skeleton Armatures

I hate to be a stick-in-the-mud and I’ll see what my folks think but I’m probably not even going to go. Frankly, I wouldn’t be much more disappointed if I’d just discovered they were merely showing a DVD interview with Mr. Harryhausen. Why would they bother paying him to speak, if they couldn’t afford to actually bring him here.

I’ve been to virtual lectures before, and they really leave a lot to be desired.

Now I know why there were so many tickets left over; I now also know why they are free. You get what you pay for I guess.

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Gladwell Offers an Anatomy of Explanations

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker review on Charles Tilly’s new book “Why”, I had one of those eureka moments in tracing back and understanding the deterioration of an old relationship. I hope you’ll glean some insight as well.

Though I haven’t read it, Gladwell summarizes the book’s breakdown of the types of reason-giving we give into four categories: conventions (social formulae), stories (common sense narratives), codes (legal formulae) and technical accounts (specialized stories). Depending upon the type of reason we give, we run into trouble because of the unspoken message that is sent by our choice.

Imagine, he says, the following possible responses to one person’s knocking some books off the desk of another:

  1. Sorry, buddy. I’m just plain awkward.
  2. I’m sorry. I didn’t see your book.
  3. Nuts! I did it again.
  4. Why did you put that book there?
  5. I told you to stack up your books neatly.

The lesson is not that the kind of person who uses reason No. 1 or No. 2 is polite and the kind of person who uses reason No. 4 or No. 5 is a jerk. The point is that any of us might use any of those five reasons depending on our relation to the person whose books we knocked over. Reason-giving, Tilly says, reflects, establishes, repairs, and negotiates relationships. The husband who uses a story to explain his unhappiness to his wife—”Ever since I got my new job, I feel like I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t had time for us”—is attempting to salvage the relationship. But when he wants out of the marriage, he’ll say, “It’s not you—it’s me.” He switches to a convention. As his wife realizes, it’s not the content of what he has said that matters. It’s his shift from the kind of reason-giving that signals commitment to the kind that signals disengagement. Marriages thrive on stories. They die on conventions.

As I usually do with Gladwell’s writing, I highly recommend you check out this article, “HERE’S WHY“.

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Suspended Spherical Tree Houses

When I was a kid, one of the things I really wanted was a tree house. I seem to recall my dad insisting that the tree in the back-yard wasn’t big enough yet—I’ll remember that excuse for when I have my own kids—but now I that I have a real house, one in a tree doesn’t seem to have the same draw it used to, at least that was until I saw the beautiful tree spheres created by Canadian craftsman Tom Chudleigh.

Suspended Spherical Tree House

Tom’s “Free Spirit Spheres” evolved when his original plan to build a boat didn’t pan out, and instead he put what was effectively the cabin up in a tree in his native British Columbia. Since completing the first prototype called Eve, which was made out of yellow cedar wood, Tom has perfected his techniques. Now, he also constructs the spheres out of fiberglass, fitting them with plumbing, wiring and the all-important windows. Folks with more money than I can buy their own, prices start at around US$45,000.

See freespiritspheres.com for more photos and information.