Trivial quibble with Getz/Gilberto's Corcovado

With my new earphones I could hear what sounds like a splicing error in Corcovado at 2:57 ... anyone else hear it?

Retailers criticizing Mountain Equipment Co-op

This is an email I sent in response to a Vancouver Sun article [LexisNexis] I saw mentioned in the Wikipedia post on MEC.

Dear Don,

Your Apr 27th article on MEC ("Gear-without-guilt co-op now a Goliath") does a good job of explaining private retailers' complaints concerning MEC, and the article begins in a way that sounds sympathetic to the co-op.

But your article fails to explain what co-operatives are in the first place, why co-ops should have tax-free status, or any other substantive, positive differences that co-operatives have over for-profit companies. Anyone reading your article without prior knowledge of what a co-operative is would come away no wiser at all.

You fail to mention, e.g., that while at MEC's consumer base dictates who runs the company, consumers have no say (save their dollar) in the management of outfits like Trailhead. And you paint the positive work that MEC as 'feel good PR', which would make sense if there were shareholders or owners of MEC making millions of dollars, but that's not the way the incentive structure is organized at MEC, or at any other co-operative for that matter. All these vitally important points are missing in your article, which looks as though it was written at the behest of Vancouver Sun advertisers. If this is so, it is poor journalism indeed.

Finally, who cares if outdoors goods retailers can't hack it? MEC isn't for-profit: if it were the only retailer in town it wouldn't engage in monopolistic pricing because there's no one to reap the fruits of such a pricing policy.

-[me]
(Canada native)

P.S. You also fail to mention that while for-profit retailers have every incentive to be dishonest in their representations of the 'feel-good' things they do, MEC has in fact the opposite incentive. MEC has a better track record than any other retailer in Canada (and probably the world) for ethical sourcing, environmental sustainability, transparency, honesty, employee treatment, the development of extremely high-quality goods, and the encouragement of energy conservation. If this is what it means to become a 'Goliath' then I hope we see many more of them.

P.P.S. I wonder how many private retailers would respond to an email as comprehensively as MEC does in the following interaction.

(perhaps it should have been written in the past tense?)

After seeing an interview with MEC CEO Peter Robinson I was surprised to see that Patagonia and Nike are actually pretty good corporate citizens to which MEC is trying to aspire (in at least some respects).

'Infocrack'

I tried to come up with a term that described the addictiveness of a certain kind of information -- the kind that's bite-sized, oh so yummy, and instantly available. I settled, in my own head, on the term "infocrack" ... and then, as I always do with neologisms, punched it into Google to see what came up.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we are seeing the birth of a new concept (and associated word)!

Out-and-out propaganda

This is pretty scary ... I wish CNN's Gupta would do a 'factcheck' on this bit of Faux News.

'Opposed to the war'

There's an article describing the 'Biofuel Oasis' which I visited with some friends while in Berkeley for a concert. The authors do a pretty good job describing their clientèle, saying that many who bought fuel from there were ...

"strongly opposed to the war in Iraq and want to sever any link with a conflict they believe is motivated by desire for oil, and with a government they say is closely tied to the oil industry".

While if forced to choose I'd say this accurately describes me, but I take issue with the notion of being 'opposed' to the war. I suppose it boggles my mind that anyone would be 'for' war. I mean, I highly doubt even Dick Cheney wants people to be dying in Iraq right now ... so isn't everyone, at least at this point 'opposed' to the war?

I mean, what would it mean to support it?!?!

'Creatures of habit'

New Scientist has an article on some work done by MIT researchers who put 'black boxes' on people and record how people behave over the course of a typical day. They focus on how it shows people to be mechanical and habit-driven, but I think it can be looked at completely differently ...

... I think it is another indication that psychology and cognitive science are moving from trying to determine large aggregate 'laws' of human behavior to seeing how individuals actually behave, a development which I think will be very illuminating (and probably also unsettling). Science has heretofore focussed on 'shared', and therefore talked-about, concepts (which consist almost wholly of the kinds of thing that matter socially and in communication). That is, we only put words to the things that matter for our cooperation and social success. This has constrained the language we use, making it nearly useless for dealing with matters that are socially/communicatively/cooperatively irrelevance. This rise of the 'subjective' in science is probably the necessary first step in beginning to understand thorny issues like 'consciousness' (which at present can only be talked about using words developed for an entirely different
purpose).

The mainstream media: when they're not sensationalizing anti-Democrat propaganda

... they're hiding Republican crimes.

Mr. Yost,

After reading your article I have to say I feel more confused than before as to what the issues are and where precedence lies. I am politically savvy, a PhD student in cognitive science, and scored high on my verbal SAT but I _still_ can't make heads or tails of your article.

For instance, your article implies that Cheney's lawyer managed to get the visitor logs designated as Presidential Records, subsequently removing them from public access ("Such a designation prevents the public from learning who visited the vice president.").

But the PRA ensures that said logs _are_ kept public -- that Cheney's logs be designated as presidential means they must not be destroyed, must be archived and can be released per FOIA requests. The above quote is either false or misleading.

The rest of the article is similarly obfuscatory. The crying shame, however, is that this kind of article needs to be even clearer than the rest, given that the US VP might be breaking the law, which is presumably of vital national and international interest.

Yours sincerely,

[me]

UC San Diego