Cyclist Bradley Nakatani was killed in Kirkland yesterday, less than five months after a John Przychodzen was killed on Juanita Drive. I’ve been reading about Bradley Nakatani and he sounds like an incredible guy.

Unfortunately, I also just read that the reckless driver who killed John Prezychodzen was fined $42 for an “unsafe lane change”. That’s just infuriating. Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me whether the driver was stoned, intoxicated, on the cell phone, yelling at his passenger, or just a horrible driver, if he endangers someone’s life, he needs to pay a steep penalty (monetary or otherwise). Until we, as a society, stop giving a free pass to such horrible driving behavior, the needless carnage will continue.

Driving is not a right, driving a privilege. I know that’s a cliché, but really think about what that means. A driver is hurling a 3500 pound chunk of machinery down a road inches away from unprotected pedestrians and cyclists—that’s scary! They probably wouldn’t let someone other than a professional stuntman do something like that on a Hollywood studio, yet it happens every day on the roads in America and every day people die because of it.

Take away people’s right to drive when they screw up. Illegal lane change? Remove their license for a week. People don’t need cars and it’s time our laws reflect that.

Here’s an explanation how how á la carte television can and will work. After some discussion of this on Yglesias, it is clear to me know that people aren’t thinking out of the box enough.

First, the basic, obvious, and incorrect, view of á la carte is that each television channel gets sold separately. Well, duh, we all know that some channels effectively subsidize other channels, so that wouldn’t work. We’d just see all these channels suddenly disappear, even if some of the content would have been profitable individually. So that whole discussion becomes a myopic and messy and filled with strange regulatory discussions that are really missing the point.

Here’s the problem—people forget to think beyond channels. Channels are a historical technological necessity, and should not be concept we cling to. The concept exists because that happened to be the way that content could be distributed. But hey, this ain’t the 1950s anymore. Content can be distributed digitally in any bundle that we want it to. I could download a single show, a whole season, five seasons of shows, or subscribe to all of Sony’s content. Technologically, it doesn’t matter. So think of content bundles, not channels. In practice, a content bundle might be an App that you download on your AppleTV, or it might be subscription to Netflix, or might a single show you download from Joe-content-creator’s website. It doesn’t matter what form it takes, but either way, it’s a content bundle.

Perhaps it’s now obvious, but a true á la carte model, is really a content bundle model. By definition, any content owner is making a profit, or they won’t be around much longer. Thus, in total, their collection of content does make them money, even if every individual show does not. So what’s their á la carte model? They could bundle their entire collection together and sell it. Or not. Maybe they’ll find that wouldn’t maximize returns, so they divide it into smaller profitable chunks, each targeted towards different audiences. Don’t forget, there’s no reason that the same show couldn’t be offer in five of the different bundles. This is the digital age, they could bundle it in anyway they wanted.

The other benefit to this model is that smaller content creators have a more even footing. Suddenly, I don’t have to be a big conglomerate to reach a large audience. My website or my app could be used to sell the single show I created. If it’s popular, I make some money. Small and large business thrive in this model.

The other point is that I think this will happen. It’s inevitable. As it stands, those smaller content creators (individuals hosting their own websites, creating apps and that sort of thing) can’t exactly get their content to end users by having their own TV channel. So, the channel model was never an option unless they happened to be picked up by a conglomerate. However, with the internet as a distribution platform, smaller content shops can (and probably already are) making money selling their content more directly. This will eventually threaten the existing business model. But, even more, I’m already putting my money where my mouth is and only watching content in this manner. I don’t have a cable television subscription and all of my content is consumed with Netflix, AppleTV or other similar means.

My point I tried to make in response to Yglesias, was that this model is the same as the magazine model. Magazines are just bundled content and while individual articles may not be profitable with viewership, the bundle as a whole must be.

Here’s a quick recipe for producing relatively high quality movies from Matlab.

1. Output a series of high resolution images to a folder. Check out this sample code for how to do that. In the example I set the resolution of the figure to be 1280 x 720, a fairly typical high definition resolution. I also scaled the images to be output at 4 times this resolution (they will be scaled smaller later.)

2. Stich the images together with Image2Movie. Download the Image2Movie application, open it up, and drag images to the empty table. From the popup menu, select “Fit into 1280×720 pixels”. This will automatically rescale the images to the lower resolution. Finally, click save movie.

3. Export to other codecs and resolutions. Open up the saved movie using QuickTime Player then choose ‘Export’ or ‘Export for Web…’ from the File menu. This will export to the movie to a more standard codec, H.264 in most cases, and at more reasonable bit rates. I will build this into Image2Movie at some point.

Went to the Reykajavik Calling show at Neumos last night and had a great time. This was sort of a last minute deal because we ended up with a babysitter and were looking for something fun to do.

We missed the first set, apparently, and walked into a packed venue just as Gudrid Hansdottir and Tomo Nakayama started their set. I thought they were a great duo, playing and harmonizing really naturally together. Gudrid has a beautiful voice that really caught our attention. Check out Gudrid Hansdottir‘s stuff on iTunes.

Next up was David Bazan and Snorri Helgason. Both of these guys were okay, but not great. I heard what I thought was a really good sound from David Bazan that might be good under different circumstances, but for this particular show it didn’t go well. Snorri had what I might call a classic folk sound that can be really awesome at times. In their defense the audience was restless and sound was messed up for a few songs, so that didn’t help.

At this point, being parents who don’t get out much, it was well past our bedtimes and we were ready to head home—fortunately we stuck it out a bit long. Sean Nelson and Kyle O’Quin did an excellent, really fun set with a pop rock sound. Sean Nelson is quite the entertainer and I was hooked within 20 seconds. That was a blast.

Finally, we heard two songs from Ólöf Arnalds (iTunes) before retreating for the night. I wish we could have stuck around longer, because she was definitely entertaining. She started with an unmic-ed a-cappella of a poem that was both strange and awesome. And followed with a Nirvana cover of Polly, in homage to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. She totally destroyed it, but had a lot of fund doing it :-). She says she first picked up a guitar in order to play their Unplugged album, and learned all the songs straight through. Definitely wish I could have heard more from her.

I’m mesmerized by this wonderful graph at the NYTimes showing the share of the nation’s income earned by the top 1 percent. The most obvious feature is that the current income distribution reflects where we were right before the onset of the great depression. The other thing striking, to me at least, is the range of graph. 40 years ago the richest 1% had barely one-third of the relative wealth they do today. They represented less than one-tenth of the nations income, but today represent nearly one-quarter! That’s an incredible change.

The annotations on the graph really suggested that this change in distribution could be attributed to the dramatic changes in the top marginal tax bracket. Time to increase taxes in the top tax brackets.

It’s interesting to note that Siri, Apple’s new AI/voice recognition software, came to the iPhone first, and not the Mac.

If you think about it, most features that came to the iPhone first in the past have been related to the unique hardware and mobile platform, but there haven’t been really any major software features that aren’t available on Mac OS X. Think about maps, music, email, word processing, various games — all of those were on the Mac first in a similar form. Yes, of course there are some applications unique to the iPhone, but generally those are applications that take advantage of the iPhone’s unique hardware and/or form-factor.

Now think about Siri. This is a very processor intensive piece of software which would run without issue on the Mac. Software companies have been putting this kind of software on desktop computers for decades. Most macs have built-in microphones, so this technology would have instant utility. Yet, Apple chose to release this on iOS first—and maybe even exclusively. It’s easy to argue that Siri is more useful on a mobile device, but it’s obviously much more of a technical challenge to implement (apparently some of the processing is done on remote servers) and could easily have been running on Mac OS X long before it was released on iOS.

If a NYTimes headline reads Obama’s Jobs Bill Fails in Senate in First Legislative Test, it would be reasonable to assume that the bill failed to get a majority of votes. Of course, the reality is that this is not how things work in America anymore. It has become routine to use procedural techniques to effectively require a 60 vote majority. Indeed, the byline reads,

The vote of 50 to 49 to open debate on the measure was 10 votes short of the 60 needed to overcome procedural objections…

Doesn’t anybody actually like this supermajority reality? Of course the minority party likes this reality…for the time being…but when they become the majority, do they really still think it’s a good idea? Yes, yes, yes, I understand that government needs to operate with checks-and-balances and therefore the process will be slow, but this kind of crud is ridiculous.

A friend sent me a Gizmodo link to an incredible time lapse video by Dustin Farrell that I absolutely recommend watching. It’s just incredible.

I’m absolutely crushed to hear that Steve Jobs died today. He was truly inspirational and I believe that the world is a better place because of him. I know it has been quoted many times already, but during his 2005 commencement address to Stanford, he gave a very nice perspective on death:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Here’s the scenario: you have a large collection of various small value stamps, $0.01, $0.04, $0.24, $0.41, and so on. Now you need to pay some postage on a package valued at, say, $3.64. How do you figure out which stamps to use?

The algorithm proceeds like this,

1. Use google to find someone’s else implementation,

2. Use their postage stamp calculator.

3. Drink a beer instead of wasting your time writing an algorithm someone else has already written.

Yay!