Is Mike Arrington Still a Dick?

It’s one of the eter­nal ques­tions that has vexed mankind since the dawn of civ­i­liza­tion. Socrates pon­dered it. Tacitus med­i­tated upon it. Aquinas prayed over it. Locke (the real Locke, not the gimp on the Island) debated it. Rand would have pon­tif­i­cated about it, but she was too busy giv­ing a “Captain of Industry” a Rusty Trombone. What is this age – old ques­tion? Is Mike Arrington a Dick?

For the first time since mat­ter coa­lesced from the energy soup that fol­lowed the Big Bang, the answer to that ques­tion has changed from “yes” to “no.” For, you see, Mike Arrington has man­aged to tran­scend the bonds of mere dick­dom and has risen to new heights of douchebag­gery.

Now, I was orig­i­nally going to state at this point that Mike had grad­u­ated from being a dick to becom­ing a cunt. But, the more I thought about it, the more I real­ized that that wasn’t fair — to the cunt. See, a cunt is a won­der­ful thing, a use­ful thing. I might even go so far as to say that I love cunts. I don’t, on the other hand, love Mike

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More on Free

Today I ran across another entry in the grow­ing list of refu­ta­tions of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. This time it’s an arti­cle from The Chronicle of Higher Education fea­tur­ing the story of Berkley Physics pro­fes­sor Richard A. Muller. In a nut­shell, Anderson uses Muller as an exam­ple in Free of a case where web expo­sure (in this case YouTube videos of pro­fes­sor Muller’s lec­tures) has trans­lated into com­mer­cial suc­cess (in this case a book deal).

The prob­lem is, Muller doesn’t agree with Anderson’s con­clu­sions. Muller is quoted in The Chronicle:

“That is wish­ful think­ing from some­one who is try­ing to con­clude that Webcasts lead to money,” said Mr. Muller. “But cor­re­la­tion is not cau­sa­tion. What Anderson says may be ‘easy to see,’ but it just ain’t so. He is let­ting his hoped-for con­clu­sion drive his analy­sis of events.”

The Journal then goes on to detail how Muller per­formed a quasi – sci­en­tific exper­i­ment to attempt to con­firm Anderson’s hypothesis:

“I have been per­son­ally con­tacted by about 1,000 peo­ple who saw my Webcasts,” said the pro­fes­sor. “When the book came out, I arranged to e-mail all of them (using Norton’s

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David Carr on Steve Jobs’ Health

I haven’t writ­ten about this sub­ject of Steve Jobs’ health issues much here, mainly because the vast major­ity of the cov­er­age of this issue has left me dis­gusted. If you’ve been fol­low­ing the Angry Mac Bastards pod­cast you know that I have been pretty vocal in my opin­ion that the cov­er­age of Steve’s issues has been tabloid – tacky at best, bor­der­ing on ghoul­ish at worst. So image my utter joy and delight to read a col­umn by David Carr in the New York Times agree­ing with my assess­ment. Thanks, David, for being a voice of decency amongst a bunch of fuck­ing vultures.

Hat tip to Daring Fireball

Sympathy for the Liver

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Behold as I now attempt to relive my youth and get ham­mered four days in a row. Consider it my trib­ute to Steve Jobs’ for­mer liver.

iPhone Test

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It looks like the WordPress iPhone app works again. Yippie!