As the tech. world awaits Apple's announcement of an iTunes cellphone, Apple's strapline is:
"1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything," reads the invitation. "Here we go again."
In 1999 I bought a hard-drive MP3 player that fitted 1000 songs in my pocket. In 2000 I had a Samsung cellphone with built-in MP3 player.
The problem was that both these products had badly designed hardware, poor useability and bug ridden firmware.
Today I have an iPod and it suits me fine, because it is well designed.
In fact it suits me better than the first generation iPod I had, which looked better, but was less ergonomic. The design has improved.
Which brings me to a line that was oft touted by VC's during the dotcom bubble - 'First Mover Advantage'.
From the Ebay auction site, to Google search engine to Microsoft OS to Apple MP3 players, none of them suffered from First Mover Disadvantage.
Christian Exodus is a weird new bunch of religious extremists whose idea is to turn South Carolina into something that sounds like Wahabist Saudi Arabia. The leader of the cult has a blog
"ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government... The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina."
Christian Exodus :: Come Out of Her, My People
[This will be a new feature, if I can be bothered, a highly subjective news roundup with links to a few topical stories that have a different take on things or are quote worthy.]
Beauty:
"The 84-year-old Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which attracts the smartest and most beautiful women in America"
and the Beast:
"Many readers find her shrill, bombastic, and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives"
From (below) the Earth:
"Equating intelligent design with evolution could explain why Bush didn’t know where to look for oil in Texas. If he doubts that the stuff burning in our engines is the bi-product of naturally deselected dinosaurs, then he may believe it didn’t come from biomass laid down in marine sediments hundreds of millions of years ago, but was put wherever it is by God...That lays the blame for $3 gas squarely at the feet of God"
To the Moon:
"The agreement with Russia to put a Malaysian into space was part of a deal to sell the Southeast Asian nation 18 Sukhoi military jets"
To Mars:
Little green fingers on Mars: Terraforming red planet required before we understand Global Warming
"By terreforming [sic] Mars we would learn an incredible amount about how a planet responds to such drastic global changes, allowing us to better predict how global warming will affect the Earth"
Ben Trott, is clever and reasonable - and his piece on ping servers is a welcome antidote to idiots like me banging on about ping servers.
I also think that for the larger publishers/providers, making an easily accessible update stream, as Sixapart are doing, is the right way forward. But this doesn't work for the multitude of individual sites.
Secondly, Ben says:
"Google and other search engines seem to do pretty well in keeping their indexes current, even though they don't receive any pings. And they're indexing billions of web sites, while there are only tens of millions of weblogs."
Google don't allow search by date, except for news. With news search, they don't spider and index in the same way they do for ordinary websites, they harvest thousands of sites, not millions and they have to scrape headlines.
Why should news or weblog search be architecturally different from ordinary web search?
Reliable ping servers and decent specs would mean they wouldn't have to be, and we would be able to search the whole web for the most recent information.
link »
tags: [rssping]
In 1996, Physics professor, Alan Sokal tried to see if "a leading journal of cultural studies would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?" It did.
Here is a challenge - I think it would be fairly easy for a life-science professor to write a deliberately nonsensical hoax article in defense of Intelligent Design and get it published in the Sunday Times (UK or US!) - then publish a dissection of it elsewhere, in the manner of Sokal.
Every time I come back to the UK and pick up the Sunday Times (UK) it gets worse but this week's Bryan Appleyard piece was an absolute classic.
The setup is now common - place Intelligent Design as a balance to Darwinism and assume that by being somewhere in the middle you are being balanced and reasonable, then lecture about the subject using half understood metaphors and buzzwords.
This is what Appleyard has to say about evolution:
"The co-decipherer of DNA, Francis Crick, for example, once defined the “central dogma” of molecular biology as the one-way flow of information from gene to organism. This central “dogma” would stop evolution in its tracks — information has to flow back to the DNA from the organism, most obviously by its death, to tell the DNA it got something wrong."
It's not actually worth arguing against this crap - if anyone thinks that the above statement makes sense then they should go back to school.
So why bring it up? Because if this had been an article about politics, he would have been fired.
Bryan Appleyard: George Bush and the meaning of life - Sunday Times - Times Online
Time magazine asks the question which is surely on some people's minds. Has Katrina got anything to do with global warming?
The reality is probably not.
But given that:
1. global warming is a reality;
2. that its early effects will not be sudden catastrophic failure of the environment but freak storms;
3. and that people clearly won't give a shit until its too late;
- the responsible thing to do is to pretend that the Katrina storm has everything to do with global warming.
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It is often taken as a given that the web is benign - that it allows the truth to emerge from an army of fact checkers. But what if, there was an inherent tendency for it to spread infectious and dangerous ideas. From conspiracy theory discussion groups to the spread of Islamic extremist ideas via the web, there is evidence that this may be the case.
Remember the mysterious 'Piano Man' - found on a seashore, unable to speak, no identity, autistic genius who communicated only through his virtuoso piano skills?
It was a story that reverberated around the blogosphere, in particular - could the power of the web unravel the mystery?
Well, it seems that the truth is he could speak, was not autistic, could only play one note on the piano, and his identity has been revealed.
The real explanation followed Occam's razor, being the most simple and statistically likely while the blogosphere version followed the telephone game (Chinese whisper in the UK) theory of memes - that the explanation which is most likely to be passed on (reblogged or linked to) will dominate, like a game of telephone where each person whispers in multiple ears.
In fact the process of reblogging will mutate the story such that the most successful variant survives.
This has two important effects:
1. It means that weblog driven news which is many to many instead of broadcast news which is one to many will have the biggest divergence between Occam's razor and the telephone theory of memes i.e. weblog news will tend to b e inaccurate for stories where there is a strong element of seductive mystery rather than boring facts.
2. Because web reputation is based purely on link reputation successful memes and meme drivers increasingly dominate search results. An example of this that I have come across is searches for 'entropy, life' flood results with creationist attempts to challenge evolution, which look superficially plausible but are provably wrong. To read genuine research you have to do the same search on Google Scholar, where pagerank which biases towards the blind, meme driven, reputation is replaced by the better reputation system of peer review from chosen peers.
One would like to think of this as a meritocracy of ideas - and it is. But it is currently a meritocracy of memes rather than the truth.
link »
tags: [religion]
There is definitely a tendency for certain people to despise wealth and consumption itself rather than its effects.
There is no word for this that I know of, schadenfreude is close but not quite right- lets say armenfreude (poorhappy).
The armenfreude are the people that like it when everyone can't drive fast cars and buy fancy goods, not really because it will damage the environment and squander resources, but because they possess that dour puritan streak that runs through Anglo-Saxon culture secretly wanting to pee on people's parades.
This is the kick-off for Steven Levitt's attack on Peter Maas' piece on peak oil - that one should be skeptical of doomsayers - indeed.
But then Levitt's single explanation of why peak oil is not a problem is that everything will be OK because markets are self correcting.
I am no economist, but this looks like horseshit to me, it sounds less like a 'Fisking' than a 'Hitching', i.e. doing the Christopher Hitchens thing of being deliberately contrarian without really believing what you write.
1. The oil market is one where demand has been shown to be remarkably resilient to price, until the point where it hurts the overall economy.
2. Every US recession has been prefaced by rising oil prices.
3. From the Roman Empire to the Danish in Greenland, the biggest threat to civilization has consistently been problems with resources.
4. The US government has said that it cannot sign the Kyoto Treaty because it would 'wreck the economy' - the effects of the Kyoto Treaty would be the turning down of the dial on the air conditioner and the spendthrift use of the car that Levitt talks about.
5. We are at war because of access to oil, people are dying.
6. There are countless examples of economic systems that don't correct through market forces, anything taken to breaking point won't, such as the Irish potato famine.
My real issue is that there appears to be evidence that two things are potentially a real problem of global importance worth investing in protection against even if the risk is teeny tiny - and it isn't.
These issues are Global Warming and the lack of an imminent solution to Oil Dependancy.
But we don't need to succumb to armenfreude to tackle them, in fact technological progress may be more important now than ever.
We need some air-bags for our fast car economy and its effects, even if, as we hope, they will never be used, they will be worth it.
link »
tags: [peakoil]
Jeff Jarvis reports on the fact that Google are selling: 14,159,265 shares (the value of pi being 3.14159265...)
There's a pun there somewhere - pi in the sky?
After Om Malik's excellent piece on Google buying dark fiber, I wonder if their pie in the sky plan really is to fill it with ad supported free wireless.
This would really make sense, pulling the rug from under Microsoft's feet by making the battle for the home page at a lower level than the desktop - Internet access itself.
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tags: [news]
The Olympics is obsessed with its identity and making money out of its brand. Except that its identity is entirely schizophrenic it can't decide whether it is capitalist or socialist, and as such bears the hallmarks of party member vs citizens syndrome.
Wannabe diplomat IOC members fly around the world drinking and eating indigenous food samplers and trampolining on 5 star hotel beds, to test them for Olympic springiness standards.
Competitors sweat it out on the track and field and 2 star Olympic village barracks, to fight for a single gold coin to dangle round their neck.
Words banned by the Olympics for brand infringement:
Olympic motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius/Faster, Higher, Stronger, games, medals, gold, silver, bronze, 2012, sponsor, summer
Words that could be posted by Bloggers to mess up search engine results:
Shittius, Citius, Altius, Fortius, Faster, Higher, Stronger, more drugs, games, tired, old fashioned, medals, gold, embezzlement, silver, bronze, 2012, Olympics, sucks, waste of money, world cup is better, sponsor, summer,
Everybody now: "it's coming home, its coming home, synchronized swimming's coming home".
link »
tags: [news]
Genealogy is the second biggest hobby in the US after fishing, in terms of money spent.
The size of this market and its rapid increase due to online Genealogy (like the startup I worked on before Moreover, Origins.net) has stimulated the use of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome tests to create family histories.
What has long been suspected is now being shown - that a real number percentage of people's fathers are not who they think. This latest test (which is based on paternity claims data and therefore is high) suggests an incredible 4 percent.
Even conservative estimates of illegitimacy rates suggest that if you trace your roots back over 100 years (not unusual for a genealogist), your family tree is probably inaccurate.
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If Darwinian life was triggered by a huge influx of free energy, then perhaps the Darwinian system of the free flow of capital, through trade and subsequent free flow of ideas was also fueled by the ultimate flexible, portable energy source - oil.
If one plotted the number of books written per year against energy consumption there would surely be a correlation.
We are now at a stage where the flow of ideas across the ether as bits and bytes uses far less energy than physically moving things.
Like the intangible, ideas based, industry of marketing that drives the sales of Nike sneakers in the US that are physically made in South East Asia, the buck for this non scarcity based economics currently stops in a traditional manufacturing economy based upon scarcity.
I wonder if the change to 'services' based economies are enough to produce growth without oil, growth of culture and ideas not energy expenditure or whether the buck always stops with energy.
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Theories of life tend to involve a spark - a lightning flash that provides the trigger for self replicating molecules.
This theory provides a bigger bang - that life originated near meteor craters.
I have a hunch that what matters is not so much the chemical details of meteor impact sites, but the fact that these impacts create a disruption that creates a system of thermodynamic non-equilibrium.
In other words they provide a sudden increase in free energy or negentropy that dissipates unevenly through the formation of systems that feed off negative entropy - life.
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tags: [entropy]
Intelligent Design creates a horrible moral dilema that traditional creationists don't have.
By going some way to acknowledging the process of evolution, while saying that its guiding hand is God, the fact that every perfectly adapted species on earth is the result of the cummulative suffering eons of less well adapted forerunners, begs the question: 'whose fault is this'. Intelligent design points this question at God.
I have a new theory - Unintelligent Design, which is the same as Intelligent Design, except that the creator is either a moron or Satan.
This theory has no less evidence to support it than Intelligent Design, since its mechanisms are identical.
This theory is more compatible with religious teachings in that it proposes that suffering happens to creatures made by the devil.
This theory is more compatible with Darwinian evolution in that species change through mistakes and random bad design.
Above all it changes the Darwinian view of evolution which acknowledges that the suffering of those that were less adapted is the innocent result of an amoral process, by saying that all imperfect creatures were made by the devil.
For humans it would literally add insult to injury by suggesting that the genetically disabled had some association with evil.
But it is demonstrably a better theory than Intelligent Design since it does not lay the blame in God's hands.
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I've been working on a simple standard to merge RSS style metadata with pings, with Matt Mullenweg of Ping-O-Matic and Wordpress, called RSSPing.
Combining metadata or full content with a ping allows for truly real-time indexing and search.
Click on the logo to view the specs.
The first version of RSSPing is designed to be as simple as possible to implement.
RSSPing aims to be a step towards what is envisaged by ideas such as Feedmesh.
(I'm Blogging this at the exact same moment that the Space Shuttle is landing safely - congrats to NASA and my friend, James, who was computing lead for the repair and worked through most of last week with no sleep)link »
Am wondering:
Is there a format for lists of iCalendar file subscriptions - seems like an ideal thing to use OPML for?
What's the best way to include links and images in syndicated iCal.
It's the 60th anniversary of the first A bombing, an event whose impact eclipsed the forgotten months of firebombing beforehand.
In a single night in 1945, 100,000 Tokyo civilians were deliberately burned to death, on the justification that this would help end the war in the East, in similar fashion to the deliberate fire bombing of German civilians in cities like Dresden by the British. This pattern of destruction was carried out in dozens of cities before the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.
"At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning," he later told Australian broadcaster ABC. "I couldn't eat anything for two or three days."
On this 60th anniversay I am extremely thankful to be part of generation which did not have to fight in a war - a generation which is in the minority and has a responsibility to try all the harder to avoid being seduced by its unmentionable glamour.
"Youngsters do not understand the horror of war," agrees Mrs. Suzuki Ikuko. "When the Iraq War started I couldn't watch it on TV. It was too painful. But my grandson said he though it was cool. He said it was like a videogame."
tags: [war]
Currently, news/blog search and regular web search have completely different architectures and user experiences. News search allows search by date or relevance, web search only the latter.
There are only two things that matter for search: freshness and relevance. Pinging adds the former and improves the latter. It is therefore critical.
1. As the web gets older, search by date returns more relevant results.
2. Crawling can never produce real-time indexing for search engines.
3. Pinging with content allows sending metadata to search engines, giving information not necessarily on the page.
4. Pinging with content allows sending just the relevant content not all the other stuff such as sidebar links etc. to the search engine to produce more relevant content.
5. Pinging potentially allows a reputation system to be built to rank and categorize sources to allow searching within a topic or accross reputable news sources.
link »
tags: [rssping]
1. AltaVista - a better search engine than Google even when there was tech cred in saying Google was better. Cause: Digital constrained it, CMGI killed it with portal mania and lack of focus. Culprit: Digital/CMGI
2. Octopus - Better than any personal portal or RSS aggregator and started when MyYahoo was terrible and RSS aggregators were twinkles in techies eyes.
Cause: Investors panicked over it as a consumer application and jumped on the idiotic enterprise bandwagon.
Culprit: VCs
3. Wired - It had one of the first search engines and content businesses on the web.
Cause: Selling off the online bit at a time when a magazine about the web seemed more valuable than anything on it.
Culprit: Wired
4. Paypal - should have brought down half of the anachronistic, check writing, retail banking system.
Cause: Swallowed up in an organization (Ebay) that can't take risks because it has to protect its borders from whenever they breach.
Culprit: Ebay
5. Backflip - shared bookmarks years before the current batch.
Cause: simply too early, no buzzword like tags to pretend that keyword categories are different and probably too much money, small ideas become big if you don;t drown them in cash and over-inflated expectations.
Culprit: Dotcom money.
6. Egroups - No matter how much people go on about blogs, forums keep coming back.
Cause: Egroups grew because anyone could create the equivalent of a Usenet group. It failed to take over the world when Yahoo bought it and didn't even bother to allow people to search it.
Culprit: Yahoo
7. Blox - An online spreadsheet tool where every cell connects to web services. This is the way spreadsheets will eventually work, and something that Microsoft haven't done much about.
Cause: It was almost too good a product, it had the kind of interface that isn't being done yet by the Ajax cult. I'm sure the details of what went wrong were complicated, but I suspect it was just too innovative for the type of people who use Office to get.
Culprit: Micorosoft Office Users
Joshua Marshall on how out of step fundamentalist evangelicals are with both a modern society and the vast majority of other religions.
"Most mainstream religious groups have long since made their peace with evolutionary theory. As in, most Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church, Judaism in its Conservative, Reform, and most Orthodox groups."
And as one of his readers points out, Nasa's current focus is the search for life:
"The creation vs science question has a major bearing on a rather visible government program:
Isn't the primary rationale for most of the space program to learn more about the origins of life? Some would say that exploration of Mars and the moons of Saturn will help us shed light on these eternal mysteries. Others would point out that all we need to know can be found in the book that's available in every hotel room."
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: July 31, 2005 - August 06, 2005 Archives
According the comments, I don't know how to make a bed properly.
I also don't know how to properly:
Stack a dishwasher
Fix a car
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"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Some ideas are better than others.
The idea that you go to heaven if you blow up innocent people is nauseating. This idea is extremely dangerous even if it is taught to a small number of people.
A global education system, where ideas that have no supporting evidence or predictive ability are taught as fiction but never fact would help erradicate the word of ideas like those above.
Because the defense of Intelligent Design is not on its own merits, but the merits of teaching different ideas, it creates a bad precedent.
It may seem ridiculous to create the analogy, but just as separation of church and state is important, separation of church and science is too.
KRT Wire | 08/01/2005 | Bush endorses teaching 'intelligent design'