Charlie O’Donnell is doing a Super Bowl Charity Pool, wiki style. Your $10 dollars goes to charity any way it goes. But, if you win one of the quarters or the final, your winnings are donated to the charity of your choice in the following percentages:

10% to 1st Quarter Winner
25% to Halftime Winnter
15% to 3rd Quarter Winner
50% to Final Score (If game goes into OT, Final Score is final at end of game)

Hendrik Hertzberg has a blistering piece in the New Yorker on the State of the Union, Senator Webb’s response, and the President’s mishandling of the war.

And so, rather than looking for a policy that might be within our means and might mitigate the disaster, Bush is betting all his chips—all our chips—on the only choice that allows him the fantasy that in the end people will say: Bush was right. He is sending twenty thousand because twenty thousand is all he has. Next to nothing in the way of ground forces remains for other contingencies. His Presidency and his “legacy” are in ruins anyway, so he imagines he has nothing to lose. If only that were true of the rest of us.

Have you ever paid attention to the two names inscribed on the bottom of our paper currency? The one on the left is the Treasurer of the United States (currently Anna Escobedo Cabral) and the one on the right is the Secretary of the Treasury (currently Henry M. Paulson).

Interesting note: Back in 1949, President Truman was feeling pressure to appoint a woman to a prominent political position. So he appointed Georgia Neese Clark as Treasurer. A woman has held the position ever since.

Very Interesting Note: Five of the past nine Treasurers have been Hispanic women. (Thanks to Tobygyn for the interesting trivia).

Update: Huh… according to Wikipedia, Ms. Cabral is in law school at George Mason.

So after washing and drying my camera, I finally got around to getting my hands on a new camera. I am a happy boy.

This photo may or may not have been was taken by Sheila Griffin.

So says the New York Times. I don’t make much of this. Living without a spouse doesn’t mean not married or never married. I was fascinated by this stat though:

“The proportion of married people, especially among younger age groups, has been declining for decades. Between 1950 and 2000, the share of women 15-to-24 who were married plummeted to 16 percent, from 42 percent. Among 25-to-34-year-olds, the proportion dropped to 58 percent, from 82 percent.” (Italics mine)

I have written several posts about the interesting space that Netflix fills between physical stores that cannot offer a sizeable library or customization features and digital delivery with its bandwith issues and pricing problems. In my last Netflix post I noted that:

“… Netflix never saw delivery by the mails as a permanent solution to the “watching movies at home and on the go” industry. As I mentioned before, their relatively luddite service was possible because Blockbuster sucked and digital delivery hadn’t (and even with Apple’s entrance, still has not) been perfected. Like Apple, Amazon, Walmart, and a host of other companies, Netflix always planned to offer a digital service when it becomes feasible.

Well, Netflix launched its Media Center today to select customers and will be rolling it out to its entire customer base over the next six months. The Media Center will digitally deliver movies to users in a matter of seconds. According to Netflix:

The new immediate viewing feature differs from current services in that it does not require the often lengthy downloading of a large video file. The Netflix feature uses real-time playback technology that allows video to be viewed at virtually the same time it is being delivered to a user’s computer. Following a one-time, under-60-second installation of a simple browser applet, most subscribers’ movie selections will begin playing in their Web browser in as little as 10 to 15 seconds. Movies can be paused and a position bar gives viewers the ability to immediately jump to any point in the movie. In all, the instant watching feature requires only Internet connectivity with a minimum of one megabit per second of bandwidth. The more bandwidth a consumer has, the higher quality the video displayed, ranging from the quality of current Netflix previews to DVD quality with a three-megabit-per-second connection.

Download time is the major bottleneck to adopting digital delivery. If Netflix can truly solve this, they will have a huge leg up in the race. Another major problem over time, of course, will be whether users can seamlessly watch movies on their televisions through this service. I’ll watch movies on my computer, but the average citizen (read my parents) will not.

Netflix is including the service at no additional charge. Customers electing the most popular plan, $17.99 for unlimited DVD rental and three discs out at a time, will have access to up to 18 hours of online movie watching per month. This is preferrable to the a la carte pricing offered by the able companies Movie On Demand services and Apples downloading features.

Netflix seems to have its head screwed on straight here. Here’s hoping Netflix’s latest offering meets our lofty expectations.

Youngna pointed out that she had recently come to understand the beauty of podcasts. I never really got into them before. I tried The Show, various NPR offerings, and Wallstrip. But I just don’t want to see these shows every day. I prefer to stop by the site on a whim and view/listen to a few episodes at a time.

But yesterday I realized that I could subscribe to spanish lessons via podcast. Now I am hooked and wondering what other useful material like this exists in pod cast form?

What podasts are you watching or listening to?

Can someone please explain why Snap.com’s Preview Anywhere is a useful feature? People are adopting it in droves, so I must be missing something. To me, there are two major drawbacks which make the feature not worth any of the benefits.

First off, by the time I have moused over a url, I have already decided to click it. Blogs that have enabled Snap create, what I believe to be, a huge usability issue. The problem goes something like this.

1. I place my mouse over the link in order to click it.
2. Just as the browser is about to load the new page, a square box flashes in the corner of my eye.
3. My brain says “what the…”
4. The new page loads.
5. I click the back button to see what that square box was.
6. I mouse over the link and see a sreen cap of the new page I just left.
7. I click on the link again to return to the new page.

Secondly, it would be useful if I could get a preview of the actual content I am being directed to. That would be… um… fresh. But getting a screen cap of the look and feel of the site with outdated content from the last time Snap took a snapshot is… not so useful. As I mentioned above, I have already decided to click the link. This decision was mostly based on my trust in the source (i.e. the author) who has pointed me to a particular page. Is a screen capture of the site really going to cause me to second guess the author’s suggestion?

Now that I think about it, this would be an extremely useful invention for email. Sometimes I get strange spammy sounding emails from my friends and if I could preview the link in that context I would love the feature. But as implemented in blogs and other trusted sources, this feature seems intended to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.

As an aside, “free preview” cracks me up. I assume Snap means that the tool is free to bloggers to provide previews. But I always read it as they are providing me with a “free preview” of a website, which is, of course, already free.

Update: Brad Feld mentions that Snap claims to have over 40,000 users. Despite that, Feld decided to remove Snap from his blog and AskTheVC. Fred Wilson threatened to remove the feature a week ago, but hasn’t pulled the trigger as of this morning.

Did you know that if you press the ALT button and click on any word on the New York Times website a pop-up window opens with the word’s definition? The feature is powered by Answers.com.

Does anyone know when they added this feature? Not that the newspaper uses to many 10 cent words, but the feature is clean and useful. Now, if the ALT-click opened a window with a Wikipedia entry for the clicked word, that would be extrememly useful.

Update: It appears that this feature works on individual articles, but not on section pages (e.g. the homepage, business, sports, etc.)

I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article in the New Yorker entitled, “Open Secrets”.

While the article is obstensibly about Enron, Gladwell is developing a much larger theme here about the shift, in our ever more complex world, from puzzles to mysteries. Puzzles have answers and simply require more information to solve. On the other hand, mysteries do not have precise answers and more data typically makes determing a likely outcome more difficult. The article explores this theme in the realms of business, medicine, and foreign intelligence.

Expect to see Gladwell dig up some other fun applications of the theory. This is just the type of sprawling topic with broad applicability that Gladwell can turn into a bestseller (seemingly) overnight.