links for 2008-12-11

"Still, if there is car tsar he will have a huge advantage over other tsars: namely the threat of handing the whole mess over to someone with real power—a Chapter 11 bankruptcy judge, and nobody wants to face the sayonara tsar." Oh, /The Economist/.

"That began to change in 1962, when Dr. Milner presented a landmark study in which she and H. M. demonstrated that a part of his memory was fully intact. In a series of trials, she had Mr. Molaison try to trace a line between two outlines of a five-point star, one inside the other, while watching his hand and the star in a mirror. The task is difficult for anyone to master at first.

"Every time H. M. performed the task, it struck him as an entirely new experience. He had no memory of doing it before. Yet with practice he became proficient. 'At one point he said to me, after many of these trials, "Huh, this was easier than I thought it would be," ' Dr. Milner said." I first read about H.M. last year, and feel sadness at his passing.

"Hockenberry may be correct when he suggests in his letter to Steve Jobs that it’s incumbent upon Apple to make the App Store a better place to shop, but I think he’s missing the bigger picture. As I said in June, developers who want to get ahead on the App Store can’t take the approach used by Ray Kinsella, Kevin Costner’s character in the movie /Field of Dreams/: Build it and they will come. Developers need to be much smarter than that." I think this is *flat wrong*. To suggest that Iconfactory, a long-standing Mac developer, doesn't know how to market themselves is absolute horseshit. The iTunes App Store is the problem here, not the Iconfactory's chops.

Random rambles like this are one reason I feel a particular kinship with Bryan.

"In fact, senators appointed to fill midterm vacancies have fared rather poorly when it came time for the voters to give them a verdict. Over the past 25 Congresses, there have been, by my count, 49 senators who selected by gubernatorial appointment in midterm (this excludes cases where a senator-elect acceded to office a few days early to gain seniority on his colleagues, a once-common courtesy that is becoming less so.) Of those 49 senators, only 19 — fewer than 40 percent — won their subsequent special election." Fun analysis.

"At worst, we lie: both to ourselves and to others.

"We play this pantomime game where we continue to offer contemporary life’s default level of extraordinary personal access to anyone who seeks it — even at the times when we have no intention of, or ability to, do anything about what people use that access to ask of us. And, that’s a small but telling lie."

"Two days before the [1916] election [Woodrow Wilson] had a sealed letter, which he had typed himself, hand-delivered to the secretary of state, who was then third in line of succession to the presidency. Wilson wrote that if he lost he would immediately appoint his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, secretary of state, and then he and his vice president would resign, making Hughes president at once. Wilson said he was proposing this plan because those were not 'ordinary times' and 'no such critical circumstances in regard to our foreign policy have ever existed before.'"