August 10, 2009 by vortmax.

Clicking around, one stumbles upon some interesting tidbits.  I found this on a USA Today commenter’s profile:

The Two Wolves

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.

One is Evil: It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good: It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The young grandson thought about this for a minute or two and then asked his grandfather ….. “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee replied simply ….. “The one you feed!”

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February 13, 2009 by vortmax.

I have a very negative view of journalism nowadays.  However I couldn’t put my finger on why, or express my displeasure in an understandable way.  Today, another person has framed how I feel exactly.

Daniel Eran Dilger runs Roughly Drafted, where he spews his opinions both profound and silly on the world of computing (and sometimes politics).  Today, he wrote about “The iPhone Multi-Touch Patent Myth,” where bloggers and journalists are raising a fuss over what they believe is Apple stifling innovation by patenting the very idea of multi-touch on computing hardware, thus locking out anyone else from using it on their hardware.  As Mr. Dilger points out, Apple patented specific ways multi-touch can be used on a computing interface, not the very idea of multi-touch itself.  Thus he exposes these”journalists” as merely uninformed individuals spewing misinformation and half-baked opinions, just like the SNL character Emily Litella.

But the gem of the article, the part that really hit home, was his summary of journalism as it is now:

Back when we only had a few channels and news came out daily written on paper, we had editors with journalistic integrity who looked over what their writers said in order to prevent their publication from being shamed out of business. Today, with web traffic earning impressions per eyeball, there’s no shame in printing profoundly uninformed conjecture or even straight up lies, because it can supposedly be corrected at some point in the future, doubling the potential for inadvertent audience ad clicks.

Look at the Fox News website, using opinion-littered headlines like “Senators Reach Tentative Deal on More Than $800B Economic ‘Spendulus’ Bill“, or politically leaning websites like Huffington Post, Town Hall, or Reason (sorry Surly).   True journalism is dying.  This is the age of the eye-grabbing headline, the opinionated rant, the click-generating controversy.  Each article designed to be grabbed by the avid forum poster and spread through the internet forums with the proclimation “SEE! THIS IS FACT” when it obviously is not.

I used to trust one source for my information.  I used to believe that if I read something from ABC, CBS, Reuters, AP, et. al. that it was a fair and unbiased reporting of the matter.  I no longer have  that trust.  I feel obliged to read at least 3-4 takes on the matter from both obviously biased and not-so-obviously biased sources in order to hash out what I feel is the real story.

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April 11, 2008 by vortmax.

While reading my morning tech news, I stumbled across an article that gave me real enlightenment by providing a reason for the fanaticism I see not only among the Mac and Windows users, but among people in general.  It’s an excerpt from the book “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.”  Here’s a tidbit that should whet your appetite:

 On issues we’re passionate about, we all tend to think our own views are essentially reasonable, Ross explains. Thus when a reporter, editor, news network, or pundit mentions the other side’s arguments, it stings. 

“If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it’s partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,” Ross says. “You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.”

I highly encourage reading the whole excerpt in the article.  I plan on picking up the book. 

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September 24, 2007 by admin.

Changed the domain, now I have a “real” blogsite. Here’s hoping I can manage this thing.

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September 24, 2007 by admin.

I gave up on iWeb being my blog authoring tool.  It was extremely clunky to upload a new post, as I had to upload the *entire site* if I updated anything.  Not only that, but iWeb was extremely inefficient in it’s space allocations.  That said, the rest of my posts will be on this site.   I may change the format, but now I don’t have to keep a local copy of my massive site as well.

More to come….

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