Category Archives: random

Baseball, politics and Palin vs. Biden

I’m up at hollyhock for open everything, having an amazing time. Fantastic people and unbelievable conversations. In addition, want to say thank you to the emails and text-messages(!) asking me to blog on Palin. Okay, but be careful what you ask for…

There is a long and glorious history of baseball analogies in American politics. Among the most famous was during Jim Hightower’s 1988 Democratic convention speech when he roared: “George Bush was born on third base and decided that he’d hit a triple.”

More recently, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland rifted of this line at this years Democratic Party Convention, saying “You know, it was once said of the first George Bush that he was born on third base and thought he’d hit a triple. Well, with the twenty two million new jobs and the budget surplus Bill Clinton left behind, George W. Bush came into office on third base. And then he stole second.”

Playing along this theme, I’ve got a baseball analogy that sums up my thinking of the Biden and Palin VP nominations.

Biden was a good, safe hit. Probably a solid double. Nothing fancy – that’s for sure. But no baseball player will ever complain about hitting a double. No points scored, that’s for sure. But runners are in scoring position.

Selecting Palin was more like a bunt – specifically a squeeze play bunt. No one expects it, the defense isn’t ready for it. In this case, the crowd certainly wasn’t either.

Most critically the squeeze bunt is a low odds play. It’s only used by a manager desperate for some points on the board or worse, by one who has poor judgment. Is McCain desperate? Definitely. Has he exercised poor judgment? He’s definitely taken a serious risk but his judgment will be determined by the results.

The upside, regardless of all this, is that the choice got the fans excited. There is no doubt that we are all focused on Palin. The only question is… for better or worse?

Ultimately, we are about to witness an amazing race: Can Palin’s charisma and buzz keep her ahead of the scandals and baggage that are chasing her? The right wing blogosphere, seeing only the charisma and conservative bona fides, says yes. The left wing blogosphere, seeing only the scandals, says no. My sense, is if the republicans can keep her appearances completely managed – if she can avoid a single press scrum – she will be a dangerous weapon. The only Democrats who underestimate here, are those who’ve already forgetten they’ve been beat for 8 years by a man they repeatedly labelled the dumbest president in history. That didn’t stop him from beating them. Twice.

At some point Palin is going to explode – the only question is, can the republicans shape her to detonate against the democrats in an effective, populist attack, or will she explode while still in their camp. Either way, It’ll be fun to watch.

Sorry for no posts

And the olympic winner is… the Soviet Union?

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With the Olympics wrapping up many countries will be looking at the final ranking and assessing how well they did. Already the spin wars are brewing. A few American newspapers are trying to talk up a favourable story for the United States by emphasizing certain aspects of America’s medal tally: more gender parity in its medals, lots of team medals which only count for one even though lots of athletes get medals.

Others – including some other American newspapers and the official Olympics Medal Standings – recognize the dramatic rise of China and prioritize rank according to Gold Medals won.

But for all the talk of the rise of China and its challenge to the United States, one simple fact remains, much of this jostling for position is made possible because the USSR has been wiped off the map.

Indeed what is amazing – and has gone relatively ignored – is how well the USSR would have done at the Beijing games were it still intact.

Admittedly it would still have trailed China in Gold Medals won – 44 (USSR) to 51 (China) – but it would still have bested the United States 36. However, it is over in total medals won where the USSR would have crushed everyone. Combined, the countries of the former Soviet Union won an astounding 175 medals in Beijing, leaving both America (110) and China (100) far in its (theoretical) wake. Indeed even using the New York Times scoring system (gold = 4 points, silver=2 points and bronze=1 point) the mighty USSR athletic machine would again crush the competition 353 points to China’s 274 and America’s 256.

What makes this feat all the more impressive is that their combined population has not grown (indeed it is in decline in most places), nor, I imagine, has funding for sports likely improved all the much. If anything, things are likely more difficult vis-a-vis funding – particularly in relation to the sums invested by the Americans and the Chinese. A sporting generation has passed since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 – indeed many of those competing probably can’t even remember those calamitous events 17(!) years ago. What keeps the USSR a formidable Olympic contender? Is it the social capital of trainers, coaches and professionals, is the the legacy of physical infrastructure or a political culture that rewarded athletic excellence? It would be interesting to know – somehow a centrally planned approach for creating Olympic success has survived its apparent balkanization and decent into decentralization exceedingly well.

The table below, and so much of the work for this post, was done by Richard Dice who tabulated all the data and kindly forwarded it to me. Thank you Richard.

Current Rankings		Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
USA	1	36	38	36	110
China	2	51	21	28	100

Soviet Republics Rankings		Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
Russia	3	24	21	28	73
Ukraine	9	7	5	16	28
Belarus	13	4	5	10	19
Kazakhstan	19	2	4	7	13
Azerbaijan	27	1	2	4	7
Lithuania	27	0	3	4	7
Georgia	31	3	0	3	6
Uzbekistan	31	1	2	3	6
Armenia	31	0	0	6	6
Latvia	51	1	1	1	3
Estonia	57	1	1	0	2
Kyrgyzstan	57	0	1	1	2
Tajikistan	57	0	1	1	2
Moldova	69	0	0	1	1
USSR		44	46	85	175

Hypothetical Ranking by Medals		Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
USSA	1	44	46	85	175
USA	2	36	38	36	110
China	3	51	21	28	100

Hypothetical Rankings by Golds
Country	Golds	Ranking
China	51	1
USSR	44	2
USA	36	3

Hypothetica NYT Rankings
Country	Medal Points	Ranking
USSR	353	1
China	274	2
USA	256	3

Software for frequent flyers

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For those who fly too much (and I fly WAY too much) you may find this little utility handy.

Flying Fish is a free program that calculates the air miles one will accrue on any flight. For such a small piece of software (500K!) it is jam packed with features, however, its basic functionality remains wonderfully simple: just type in the airport codes (e.g YVR=Vancouver) for a trip involving anywhere from two to 10 cities you are traveling between and it will tell you the number of status miles you will earn. You can even search for Airport codes if you don’t know them.

For example, anyone looking at my sidebar travel can see that in September my itinerary looks like this:

YVR-ORD-DCA-ORD-YVR-BOS-YYZ-YAV-YYZ-DCA-YYZ-PHL-PHX-YVR

Which, assuming I fly on Air Canada, United or US Airways will, according to Flying Fish, accrue me 13334 status miles (20001 airmiles once bonuses are factored in). Flying fish is great for learning if or when you’ll make status or to ensure that an airline is crediting you the miles you earn.

Is this a must have program? No. But it’s free and fun to play with and hey, I just felt its author, Ryan M. Yadsko, deserved the shout out.

As an aside, given how many times I’ve written about the evils of Air Canada some of you might be surprised to see how many miles a log with them. Well it is pretty much the only gig in town. But maybe that’s just an weak excuse. Richard D. believes I suffer from stockholm syndrom. I think he might be right. Yesterday, I got some more of those virtually worthless blue upgrade certificates and I still booked a flight on aircanada.ca…

Google Walk

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No it is not the swagger of a recently bought out start-up founder, it is the very cool new feature google map just threw in.

Normally, when you get directions on google maps it assumes you are in a car, so shows you the fastest route as if you are driving. This means that it takes detours around one way roads and the like.

Now, there is a “walking” function so google maps computes the fastest route as though you are on foot. Very cool. Now, what would be really nice is if it “balanced” distance with vertical height so you could pick the flattest walking route. I tend to gravitate to railway tracks. Cool thing about railways is that they can never exceed a 3.5 degree grade (or so I read somewhere once) so I always like walking tracks cause it means I know I’ll never hit too steep a hill.

Very excited to try this feature out. For an avid walker like me having this feature in my blackberry is key. Very psyched.

H/T to Jeremy V for emailing me the link.

www.reformtheUSgovernment.com

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So it seems that more and more interesting internet driven projects, designed to reform the US government, keep taking flight.

My man David B., fully aware of my own passion for reforming the Canadian voting system recently connected me to a great site called whytuesday.org. The simplicity of their approach is genius, asking people, elected officials, and pretty much everyone in between: Why do we (or Americans that is) vote on Tuesday?

Do you know the answer?

(clue: the reason is REALLY archaic)

(hint: the answer is here)

Why Tuesday?’s goal is bigger than changing the day of the election – but it the simple question is a great entree for getting people to think more broadly about electoral reform more broadly. Best of all they have allies on “the inside” (of Congress), one of whom is even acting as a correspondent! Very cool.

My only critique of the site is that I could not find any information supporting their claim that voter turnout would increase if elections shifted to the weekend. Maybe it’s there – but I couldn’t find it.

The other great project I’ve been following is Change Congress started by one of my heroes, Lawrence Lessig. Obviously lots going on with this project. But what really struck me as clever is how Open Congress has been telling its supporters to “tag” their donations to congressional candidates so they know they are receiving money because they took the open congress pledge.

So how do you “tag” a donation? You simply make sure that it ends in .09¢. Neat eh?

I only wish Open Congress had a list of all the candidates who’d taken the pledge (as opposed to just recent pledges).

Social Media Cartoons that are ha ha funny

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Rob Cottingham – friend and all round wonderful person – has had his cartoon Noise to Signal syndicated on ReadWriteWeb.

I encourage all geeks and non-geeks who need a laugh (and frankly we could all laugh a little more) to go check it out.

You might also pop by the Social Signal website where two of the coolest kids in Vancouver are transforming companies (and the world!) through social media.

mobile version of eaves.ca now available

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All you readers with crack blackberries, iPhones and web-enabled cell phones, good news!

I’ve enabled a mobile version of eaves.ca! Just point your mobile browser to my blog and presto! a scaled down, simplified version of my blog will appear. The software seems solid and appears to get about 99% of the formatting right.

Of course, I can’t imagine there are a ton of you who need to get your eaves.ca fix while on the bus, but hey, I’m all about choice!

For those without such mobile devices, fear not. This will not affect non-mobile viewing of the site in any way – the site will identify if you are logging on from a mobile device or a computer and will tee up the appropriate code accordingly.

A big shout out to our friends over at WordPress mobile for making this possible.

Happy Canada Day

Friday laughs – Dulles doesn't strike and Graphs are funny

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So a few weeks ago I blogged from Dulles International Airport where I’d missed my connection and transformed at four flight 36 hour journey into a four flight 42 hour journey.

This week Forbes published the list of the 100 worst most time consuming airports and shockingly, Dulles does not make the top 10 (although it does squeak in at 15). Two things I’d like to point out though:

First, why does the list start at 100 and work its way down as opposed to starting at 1 (which should be the most time consuming) and work its way to 100 (least time consuming)? This feels all counter-intuitive and topsy turvey. I don’t think Forbes’ list of the 100 most wealthy people starts AT 100 and works its way down to the least wealthy (relatively speaking, of course) person being number 1. Just checked, it doesn’t.

Dulles Lunar Buses Second, I challenge the survey’s methodology. My gripe about Dulles definitely isn’t covered – that being that at Dulles the only way to get from terminal to terminal is on these weird lunar buses (see photo to right). It makes getting around unpredictable and SLOW – especially when landing from an international flight. But poor infrastructure doesn’t factor in on the survey… so I believe Dulles isn’t getting the bad rap it deserves.