A handful of weeks ago Dreamhost, my hosting provider, detected someone trying to exploit some known vulnerabilities in the out-of-date copy of WordPress that powered ghotifish.net. Helpfully, they disabled the site and notified me. Unhelpfully, I didn’t do anything about it till now.

But look! I’ve now upgraded to the latest, indestructible version of WordPress! Helpfully, WP 2.7.1 happily sucked in and upgraded my old database so all the posts, comments, etc. are still here. Unhelpfully, it didn’t know what to make of all the little custom stuff I’d fiddled around with — i.e. the site theme and photo pages. Also, and inevitably, some part of the import/export/upgrade process screwed up all my pretty quotation marks. I’ll see what I can do about that bit. For the others, please enjoy, for the time being, the default WP theme and my flickr page.

The sharing plans include not just Paris’s Vélib’, with its 20,000 bicycles, but also wildly popular programs with thousands of bicycles in major cities like Barcelona and Lyon, France. There are also programs in Pamplona, Spain; Rennes, France; and Düsseldorf, Germany. [...] The shared bicycles in Barcelona, Lyon and Paris are heavily used, logging about 10 rides a day, according to officials in these cities.

If we take those numbers at face value, that’s 200,000 Parisian bike trips per day that might not have happened otherwise. And what do the cities have to show for it?

Officials in Lyon, one of the first cities to institute a large technology-driven bike program, estimate that bike-sharing has eliminated tons of pollutants since its inception in 2005. But more than that, they say, it has changed the face of the city.

“The critical mass of bikes on the road has pacified traffic,” said Gilles Vesco, vice mayor in charge of the program in Lyon. “Now, the street belongs to everybody and needs to be better shared. It has become a more convivial public space.”

(I wonder if “critical mass” was an intentional word choice, or just an artifact of translation?)

Unfortunately, that point is going to be underappreciated because there aren’t any sexy statistics to go along with it. But it’s an important one. Calmer streets are safer streets, streets that people feel more comfortable using for things like walking, shopping, and dining. That could translate into a real economic benefit — but only for an area dense enough, and with land use varied enough, to realize that benefit.

So: could this work in America? There’s a program in D.C that hopes to find out. I suspect that it can if it is targeted correctly. In Minneapolis, I’d be optimistic for such a program that focused on Downtown, Uptown, Midtown, the University and near Northeast. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I’m not sure that, outside of those areas, the city has the density to provide enough short bike trips to allow a sharing program to succeed.

And, regarding the picture accompanying the article — are they STILL working on that damn cathedral?!

[A]ds for Obama’s presidential campaign have been spotted in Electronic Arts’ high-octane racer Burnout Paradise. An EA spokesperson today confirmed for GameSpot that the Xbox 360 version of the game has been playing host to Obama billboards since October 6. [...]

The EA representative said that the ads would appear in only 10 different states, most of them contested battleground states. Paradise City residents in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin are being targeted by the campaign. In the 2004 presidential election, all of those states except Wisconsin went to Republican incumbent George W. Bush.

Apparently, McCain approached Hasbro regarding the possibility of buying ad space in Scrabble but was turned down.

But seriously, I think this is genius. It’s cheap advertising aimed at increasing voter turnout among a group that is (by conventional wisdom, and likely by campaign research as well) already pro-Obama, targeted at states where this will make the biggest difference.

The ads themselves are clearly tuned for the medium and for the audience: the screenshot in the article shows a billboard with a headshot of the candidate and simple, non-issue message: “Early voting has begun / voteforchange.com”. Including the URI was of course a no-brainer; the rest of the message shows some thought. I suspect that the Obama campaign views gamers as likely supporters who see voting as a chore to be avoided — in no small part because of the (perceived) necessity of getting up early and standing in long lines at the dumpy old VFW. Instead of simply offering Rock the Vote-style encouragement (and the accompanying guilt!), the ads attempt to remove some of those barriers.

There’s one other interesting thing going on which may not have been intended by the ad’s designers but which nevertheless works in their favor. Video games of all genres have a strong history of encouraging exploration and experimentation on the part of the player — racing games will often reward inquisitive players with hidden shortcuts, and even a straightfoward sports simulation might include humorous easter eggs. Instead of just “Vote For Obama,” which offers nothing new, the ads say “early voting has begun” — a bit more coy, but more importantly it provides an opportunity for discovery: a game-playing, Obama-supporting unlikely voter might initially visit the advertised site (especially when it is a quick alt-tab away!) merely out of curiosity about this “early voting” (is it better than the crappy VFW kind?).

[T]he exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

Absolutely. I love their point that the character and conduct of his campaign as a whole, and his ability to run such a campaign, was just as influential in their decision (in fact, I think they imply it was more so) than any specific issue therein — exactly the kind of thinking that eludes the typical American analysis. My sense is that an external viewpoint is even more valuable in this election than others.

I’ve also removed the old Ghotifish Galleries page. As nice as D’s old photo code was, I’m moving the pictures over to flickr since the extra simplicity will (hopefully) get me posting more stuff to look at. Also, you can now go there and subscribe directly to my photostream.

What the country doesn’t want is to remain dependent only on oil — to lose the urgency to develop alternatives. It happened once before. After the gas lines of the ’70s, Jimmy Carter declared that solving our energy problems was the moral equivalent of war. Then, in the 1980s, Americans forgot.

…because oil prices plummeted and Joe “The Plumber” Sixpack went back to worrying about the Russians. There’s no way Congress is going to stay interested in solving the problem if voters aren’t yelling about it. And anyway, even if they do try to play the hero by identifying and subsidizing development of the next big thing, they are not going to get it right:

… even if politicians act with the purest of motives, there are simply too many possibilities … (fuel cells, nickel-hydride or lithium-ion batteries, natural gas, biofuel from wood chips and oil itself) to know which will prove the most feasible.

Sure, they could (and, I suspect I would find, are) just try to fund all the possibilities, but part of the game is that we need to be able to quickly jettison the ideas that aren’t panning out, and expand our investment in those that are. Good luck getting that to happen without having to wait a few election cycles. No, this sounds like a job for the private sector. The trick is to make alternative energy technologies a good investment — and keep them that way — so that America’s captains of industry will naturally join the hunt and Congress can get back to filming the next season of CSPAN. To do this, Lowenstein suggests

… [dusting] off an idea that Gerald Ford once proposed: a tax on oil. Ideally, it would kick in only if the price fell back to, say, $70 a barrel. The beauty of this tax is that, very likely, no one would have to pay it. The tax would merely serve as a floor — a new lower bound.

I met an RV-driving Texan campground host in Glacier National Park who proposed the same thing two months ago, when gas was still $4/gallon. I should have asked her to run for Congress. She probably knows how to field-dress a moose.

For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

When my mother disapproves of a TV show, or of TV in general, she shakes her head and says, “this is why there will never be another American revolution.” It’s really a pretty good point (if applied a little selectively), and one that I think Gil Scott-Heron missed. No one’s going to show up for his party because he scheduled it for a Thursday and they don’t want to miss the new Grey’s Anatomy, which is better than his silly revolution because the people are more attractive and you can skip out for a beer during the commercials.

Or perhaps that’s exactly his point, but if he wants to do something about it he should look for some sponsors and maybe think about voting people off the revolution every week. Potential tie-in with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Maybe we can TiVo the revolution?

But that’s not really the point of the essay. The point is that perhaps we are finally coming up with something more constructive — more of an investment — to do with the surplus:

…if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

But there’s still a whole lot left:

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

I will paraphrase that for emphasis: if every American stopped watching television for a year, we would have enough time to recreate the entirety of Wikipedia 2,000 times over. (Of course, we would have to leave out all the articles about Desperate Housewives.)

Right now, though, its just a frame, some wheels, and a big pile of parts. More details as I start to put it together.

“This city is exploding downtown. Are all these people in high rises going to drive everywhere? We have to promote bike commuting,” Armstrong said Wednesday, gazing up at the towering 360 condos rising next to the site of his new shop. “This can be a hub for that.”

He’s opening a bike shop with the explicit goal of encouraging and facilitating bike commuting and general bike transportation in central Austin. Crucially, it’s trying not to be just another clearninghouse for high-end Treks: the location is a remodeled 50-year old downtown building, which should help to draw attention to the type area where bike commuting can be most successful. I’d be interested to see how well this part works out:

Showers and a locker room will allow commuters who don’t have facilities at their offices to ride downtown, store their bikes at the shop, bathe and catch a ride on a pedicab or walk the rest of the way to work.

Read more, and check out pictures and video (mostly of Lance, of course), in the Austin 360 article.

Oh yeah — it’s going to be called Mellow Johnny’s!