Jeremy Olshan, Market Watch:

Passbook – which allows tickets and loyalty cards from a variety of outlets to be delivered to one iPhone app – proved to be an instant hit with fans, Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB Advance Media, tells MarketWatch. In its test run with four teams for the final two weeks of the season, 1,500 e-ticket buyers (12%) chose Passbook delivery. “That adoption rate really floored us – there is no question our fans want digital tickets,” Bowman says. “Fans can use the tickets, forward them to a friend, resell them, or even donate them to charity – and they never get lost or left at home.”

Interestingly, Olshan notes that traditional ticket stubs accounted for less than one-third of all single-game tickets this season - with next season’s total expected to drop below 10%. This news, coupled with the continued improvement of MLB’s mobile apps, leaves no doubt that the league is on top in terms of technology. Now if they could only do something about blackout rules and the new stupid, one-game playoff farces.¹

Speaking of PBS, Jimmy Fallon has a little fun.

Mister Romney:

Now kids, don’t worry, this puppet feline isn’t real. Look. This is Bill, he’s a union worker. You pay him with your tax dollars so that he can crouch down with a sock on his hand and make silly voices.

In 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before a Senate Committee - Chaired by John Pastore - to argue against a 50% cut in funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that was proposed by Richard Nixon.

The CPB is allotted $445 million in the FY2013 budget, which totals $3.8 trillion. In other words, CPB - including PBS - accounts for a mere 0.012% of the Federal budget. Don’t you think it worth $12 out of every $100,000 we spend to ensure children, especially those without access to cable television, are guaranteed the educational ideals espoused by Mister Rogers?

I encourage you to watch the video, but mainly I hope Mitt Romney watches it. Politics aside, the initial repayments to the out-of-control spending spree - perpetrated by the “adults” running our country over the past decade - shouldn’t be billed to our children.

Suzette Laboy, Associated Press:

The winner of a roach-eating contest in South Florida died shortly after downing dozens of the live bugs as well as worms, authorities said Monday.

The prize, a free snake.

(via: Jason Snell)

Joe Berkowitz, writing for Fast Company, details how John Hodgman knows everything - and how you can too:

John Hodgman is unique among know-it-alls. Most earn this title based on attitude and a tendency to correct others during casual conversation. Instead, Hodgman took the much more direct approach of writing an entire trilogy of books containing the totality of world knowledge. Although some of the information in those books is not actually true–indeed, some of it is based on imagined hobo best practices of the 1920s and ’30s–the author still knows the information. Then again, as he explains, some of what we all know to be true is just generally agreed-upon stuff that somebody else made up.

Casey Newton and Roger Cheng, writing for CNET about Motorola reneging on their promise to update particular smartphones to the latest Android operating system:

Every few months, it seems, we hear a new version of an old story: the maker of an expensive smartphone announces it won’t be upgraded to the latest version of Android, and consumers cry foul.

But this one is different. First, Motorola told customers they would upgrade the phones for 18 months after they came out, a statement that drove sales of the devices. Second, Google owns both Android and Motorola, making it all the more puzzling why the business units didn’t work together to make an upgrade happen.

Finally, there are signs that for some Android devotees, Motorola’s abandonment of its year-old phones is the last straw.

If I were a Motorola customer who based a purchase decision on this promise, I’d be pissed off. Is there any doubt that Google simply bought Motorola for their patents?

A thought-provoking article from Patrick Stokes:

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

This is relevant given the rise in false equivalency perpetuated by the modern media. Hell, some even advertise their existence on this flawed notion.¹

(via: Ryan May)

A year following his death, I still get goosebumps listening to Steve Jobs narrate “The Crazy Ones”:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

In the end, this version never aired. Jobs instead opted to have Richard Dreyfuss narrate the commercial. The “Think Different” ad campaign was a seminal piece of Apple’s resurgence under Jobs, with this ad being one of the most popular.

Also, if you weren’t aware, the lyrics appear on the TextEdit’s icon in Mac OS X.

The Economist discusses the media’s enthusiasm to publish initial scientific findings and their lack of follow-up reporting:

If the hypotheses reported in the original studies had stood the test of time, then such short journalistic attention spans would not be a problem. But as Dr Gonon has shown, 80% of the papers in the study turned out to be either wrong or questionable. Failure to follow that up risks leaving even attentive readers with a false impression of progress in the field.

Robert Krulwich, NPR, discusses the mysterious black spidery areas visible in photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

What are those things? They were first seen in 1998; they don’t look like anything we have here on Earth. To this day, no one is sure what they are, but we now know this: They come, then they go.

Intriguing.