I wanted to see George Carlin when he came through Boston a few months ago, but I couldn’t round up any friends willing to go. In retrospect, I wish I had just gone alone. I remember the first time I heard the Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television, and I felt it was the work of a genius. I still think it is.

But I didn’t appreciate, until today, how truly insightful George Carlin could be. NPR’s Fresh Air had a piece, Remembering George Carlin, where they played clips from older interviews of his. I was floored by how well-spoken, insightful, and thought-provoking he could be talking about his own intellectual development in the decades following the 1960s. In his discussions on religion, morality, humor, pain, trust and humanity, there is a lot of truth. He’s worth listening to.

As with so much in this world, I didn’t really appreciate the man until he was gone.

Democrats are pushing as hard as they can to bring the troops home, and some Republicans are jumping on the bandwagon. Meanwhile, Bush has promised to veto any spending bill that includes a timetable. Pelosi is putting her weight into this, and it looks like we’re headed for a showdown. What a shame.

Americans elected the Democrats because they were sick of the shallow ineptitude characterized by the previous Congress. If Democrats want to maintain the impressive lead they hold, they need to prove they can make real progress on domestic issues before 2008. While it’s electrifying for their base to go head-to-head with Bush over troop withdrawal, it’s not going to be a constructive debate: both sides will walk away unsatisfied and angry, and other deals that might have happened in the meantime will get scuttled.

I’m not touching the issue of troop withdrawal because I’m not sure either side has it right. But if the Democrats want the upper hand, I think they’d be better off making inroads on topics like immigration and Medicare. The political will is already there to find solutions, and if Democrats prove they can solve these problems–after years of Republican intransigence–I think they’re locked in for the 2008 elections. But if Democrats spend their political capital in a fist fight with Bush on troop withdrawal, they’ll have a serious image problem to deal with later on.

Once in the White House, Democrats could orchestrate troop withdrawal the right way, using all of the tools and resources that are only available to the Commander-in-Chief. Trying to push withdrawal through a spending bill is short-sighted; it distracts Congress from problems that are solvable today, and that will ultimately hurt their chances for a presidential win.

I don’t blog much these days; I don’t have the time. But this is worth writing about.

Everyone donated money when a tsunami hit southeast Asia; it was almost as if giving money was the “in thing”. I remember people comparing the size of their donations, sort of like you brag about how expensive your car was.

Where is everyone’s generosity now? For the tsunami, worldwide donations numbered in the billions of dollars; the UN is asking for only $550mn to cope with this tragedy. It’s not like the Internet doesn’t make donating really easy. But they still aren’t getting the money they need.

I did a few notes, because I wanted to know how much it would really take for Americans to provide the estimated $550mn needed for relief efforts. The results nearly made me cry:

GDP: $11750000000000
Population: 295734134
Labor force: 147400000
Employed labor force: 139293000

Donation target: $550000000

0.004681% of GDP
$1.86 per citizen
$3.95 per working citizen

$3.95 per working citizen. I’m no economist and I’m sure these numbers aren’t totally accurate, but it’s a ballpark figure, and that’s enough.

(For those who want to see how I got there, the code is available at http://moxn.net/~mesozoic/pakistan_quake.py. If you find any problems with the math, let me know; I’d rather be correct than be uncorrected.)

I don’t believe, for one second, that every single working citizen in this country couldn’t give up $4. The fact that our country alone has not provided the UN with the relief money it needs is, well, simply pathetic.

Anthony sent me a link to The Last Time America Lost a City, a fairly poignant writeup by SensibleShoes. As an aside, blogs like Kos normally grate on my eyes, just because they’re twinged with a bit too much bitterness. Their authors write as if, if we all just hated the other side a little more, everything would be okay. It’s not that I’m Republican; I just don’t have much patience for politicized rancor. But SensibleShoes’ post caught my eyes; it’s worth a read. (And it’s shorter than the one I’m about to write.)

Of course, the technology of the day was fairly primitive, and the U.S. was a much poorer country. No doubt we could move more quickly today.

It touches on something I ranted about to Brittney this past weekend when I’d drank a lot of coffee (but she didn’t really listen). I think modern technology is making it harder to communicate high priority information.

Now that we have email, voicemail, fax, priority mail, regular mail, intra-office mail, intra-bureau mail, secure email, system alerts, inter-system alerts, statistical red flags, television broadcasts, newspaper reports, radio communications, instant messaging, and… cough

So what do most people do when something is really important? You send it via multiple mediums, of course: fax it to the affiliate branches, send out a company-wide email, publish bulletins on the intranet, put up posters on the walls, and make some phone calls to some other people you know. And that is exactly what Doris the office manager does to remind you that next Friday is Hawaiian Shirt Day.

Modern communication networks make it hard to indicate priority. When you want to get in touch with someone, do you write a letter? Write an email? Make a phone call? Is it urgent enough to leave a voicemail? If you see them on IM and they’re away, how many “hey call me back” messages do you leave?

For two friends trying to figure out dinner plans, this overhead is negligible. But when you scale it up to the organizational level, and you impose the additional constraints of large bureaucracies and complex alerting systems, you get a system in which chains of command get broken and people don’t do what they need to do. If everyone has to invent their own best practices for culling critical information from non-critical information, then communication as a whole slows down.

So beyond the fact that FEMA and DHS are bureaucratic nightmares, it’s harder for people to organize in time-critical situations. Whether you’re going up the chain of command or down, you have a wider range of potential communication media, all of which have different strengths, weaknesses, latencies, and points of failure.

In 1908, when something happened, you got on the phone and the radio and you yelled uphill. It’s that simple. What’s the response? Contain the situation and wait for further instructions.

Today, there simply isn’t any way to press the big red “PANIC” button and let the people uphill know that you’re really in trouble and you don’t know how to handle it. Organizations can’t do that anymore. They have to send emails, make phone calls, stamp and fax documents, open support requests in a tracking system, and trigger a number of other conditions within their byzantine mix of computer systems and communication workflows, before the whole organization starts to move.

It means that instead of taking hours to dispatch the National Guard, it takes days. It means analysts and journalists who shout upwards about the dangers of a hurricane don’t get heard by the right people. It means police, guardsmen, and FEMA officials can all visit a convention center where people are starving to death, at different times on the same day, and each time assign responsibility to one of the other three groups (then drive away).

What’s the solution? Damned if I know. I’ll just keep on doing what I do now: act irate and uncooperative when people send me email at the wrong address.

Everybody grab your shovels, put your bikes back in the garage, and don’t plan any outdoor picnics for a while. Spring is coming, and so are the cicadas. Alert Charlton Heston; with this many locusts out at once, we might want to do a sequel to The Ten Commandments.

I was in Chicago for an emergence of the 17-year cicadas. Nobody really told me about it, so one day it suddenly just happened – the world started to crawl with these white, pulpy insects. They were everywhere. You couldn’t step on the grass without feeling something either crunch or squish underneath your feat. At the base of every tree, you could see a huge pile of squirming cicadas. The birds even stopped eating the berries in our yard, there were so many of these crunchy little things everywhere. (I remember it became popular to eat them; I heard a radio DJ giving a recipe for cicada pie.)

And to make things worse, these bugs are dumb. They’re programmed to crawl out of the ground, climb up, screw, and die. Ideally, this involves climbing up a tree, so that their offspring will have some roots to eat for the next seventeen years. But these bugs will crawl up the first thing they find, which could very well be your fence, your house, or your leg. Once they get to the top of whatever it is they’re on, they just sit there and wait, which means after a week or two there are loads of dead cicadas sitting everywhere: railings, stairs, fences, cars, and maybe your leg (if you don’t bathe regularly). When they all start to rot, they smell abhorrently foul.

It seems there are several different cycles, so the ones I saw in my youth are probably not the same cycle (I think it was around 1990). But I’m willing to bet they’ll be every single bit as disgusting as the last ones were. I plan on spending as little time as possible outdoors until these things die off.

It’s absolutely horrible. I know, I remember, that words aren’t nearly enough to express the emotion that follows such a senselessly violent act. Nevertheless, my heart goes out to Madrid, to Spain, to all the families, friends, and lovers who have been affected by this savagery.

There is never an excuse for the murder of innocents. Never. Whether Basque separatists, Arab militants, or simply deranged psychotics, there are people in this world who do not value human life. We will never rid ourselves of them, but we can, must, and always will fight them. Those who would achieve their goals through fear and terror should be given no respite, however brief.

To every sympathizer who makes excuses for these criminals, to every pundit who defends such acts of barbarism as a political statement, to every last person who argues that the willful and intentional destruction of innocent lives — regardless of race, nationality, or faith — can be justified, for whatever reason… damn you.

History holds no glory or reverence for terrorists, and the future holds no pardon for those who defend their atrocities. Nor do I.

Why can’t Americans have elections like this?

BBC News reports that sales of music downloads are exceeding sales of CD singles. So my question is, Who didn’t see this coming?

For a long time, the record industry has decried online downloading as a harbinger of doom. “We can’t compete with free,” they cry, “and so we need to chase these evil music pirates with all we’ve got.” It’s obvious none of these record execs has ever really used Kazaa, because otherwise they’d know the truth: piracy sucks.

Downloading music online is an exercise in patience: the files are never named properly, can contain defects or missing sections, and are a pain in the ass to manage. Having seen countless MP3 collections on friends’ computers at college, I can attest that they are a jumbled mess of misnamed files and bad-quality rips.

The RIAA sometimes reminds me of the companies that made fortunes selling multigraph machines, enormous contraptions used for printing, only to be steamrolled by Xerox — and all because these firms dismissed and ignored digital copiers. They couldn’t see the next evolution in their own business.

The average consumer used to only have two choices when it came to purchasing music:

1. Spend gas money, parking fare, and lots of money on an overpriced (but perfect quality) CD.
2. Take your chances (and waste your time) downloading music illegally.

Now iTunes, Napster, and a plethora of other services are offering consumers a third option:

3. Pay a reduced rate to download good-quality music legally.

Fast. Cheap. Immediate. What’s not to like? Even MTV is getting into the game. For a while the record labels believed they could all run their own services, exclude other firms from using their music, while at the same time strictly limiting how consumers could use their downloads. The result was dismal failure.

Welcome to reality, chums. Consumers are more than willing to pay for content, but they really want two things: selection and flexibility. The reason iTunes was, and continues to be, such a success is that it addressed both issues. The selection of music is non-exclusive, meaning they did not turn themselves into just another outlet for Bertelsmann or Sony. The flexibility is unprecedented; you can transfer songs to multiple computers, burn them to as many CDs as you like, and it’s all bundled as part of what is hands-down the best music player available.

It’s time for record companies to stop scaring themselves over online piracy and realize that consumers want to download music. The more music is available online, the less consumers will flock to piracy. It’s time to stop serving subpoenas and start serving entire music libraries — from Britney to Radiohead to those thousands of bands you’ve never heard of.

I hate piracy. It’s slow, dirty, unreliable, and illegal. I, the consumer, am more than willing to pay a reasonable price to download music, but you have to play by my rules. Most importantly, you have to stop threatening to sue my little sister every time she downloads something off Kazaa that she can’t buy on iTunes. Stop treating your customers like potential criminals, give us what we want, and we’ll keep supporting your business.

So is the recording industry ready adapt to a shifting marketplace, or will they let themselves be swept aside by those who understand the new rules of the game? It’s time to find out. Play ball.