Google is to build a gigantic campus in The Silicone Valley
'Silicone' Valley - that would be the San Fernando Valley where all the porn stars hang out, I guess.
I normally agree with what Seth Godin has to say, but his rules of viral spread (which have spread virally, interestingly enough) seem provably wrong:
Seth says (and note that he does not say anything about virality in his set of criteria for message sending):
"No one 'sends' an idea unless:"
"a. they understand it"
Not true. People send things when they think they understand it but don't and when they don't understand it but think they should. An example of the former is the Sokal Hoax. In fact the Nietzsche example given is perfect proof to the contrary - Nietzsche does propagate but without understanding.
This is important as it explains the mechanism of mutation of an idea into a better propagating one. If people had to understand an idea as the sender intended, the mechanisms of natural selection on ideas would be vastly different.
"b. they want it to spread"
Not true - People can actively spread an idea to solicit opposition to suppress it later - you could argue that anti-porn campaigners raise awareness of porn.
Consider Fred Durst forwarding a link to a web page showing him having sex and instructing his lawyer to sue the website to stop it spreading.
"c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind."
This can be rephrased as - nobody deliberately sends a message unless there is a reason - so what. However, importantly, people do send messages by accident - someone accidentally sending emails because their computer contains a virus does not meet any of the above criteria.
"d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits."
Not true - while it is true that people will make personal sacrifices to spread an idea e.g. martyrdom, it would be difficult to argue that all martyrdom like suicide bombing is 'beneficial'. It is true that suicide bombing may be effective in spreading an idea, but there are also martyrs that fail to propagate ideas despite huge effort. In fact the only thing that is important is perceived benefit for the sender.
In short - the whole issue of viral spread of ideas needs to ignore rules of understanding, benefit or reason in the spread of ideas. Some points in the spread of ideas are merely transmitters and not decoders.
In other words, some actors are immune hosts for memetic spread, just like with real viruses, therefore negating all of Seth's maxims.
Seth's Blog: What makes an idea viral?
The myth:
"religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society."
The reality:
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies."
Societies worse off when they have God on their side - Times Online
Full article is subcription only.
FT.com / Home UK - Track clickerati's new buzz
"It is a powerful, highly addictive drug openly peddled on street corners and in purpose-made buildings across the country. Suicide bombers get high on it and governments encourage its use. It can be hallucinogenic, destroys lives and, in its strongest doses, start wars."
Independent Online Edition >Is Gerin Oil the root of all evil?
I have always liked libraries, since I spend a whole summer in the British Library reading a massive ten volume translation of the Arabian Nights while at university.
Having tried an office in Tribeca and appointing the cats as CTO and VP of marketing, working out of my apartment I am now basking in the marble and oak glory at desk 610 in the main reading room of the New York Public Library.
Each desk space has an elegant bronze lamp and a brass plate with ethernet and power, where you can hook up your laptop and enjoy speedy Internet access for free.
Adjacent Bryant park, one of Manhattan's best public spaces, also has very good free WiFi and Parisian style folding chairs on gravel paths.
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tags: [new_york]
Following on from the acquisition of Skype by Ebay, this weeks Economist leads with a prediction that everyone would have laughed at if it had been in Mondo 2000 ten years ago:
'the rise of Skype and other VOIP services means nothing less than the death of the traditional telephone business established over a century ago... the death of the trillion dollar voice telephony market... it is now no longer a question whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so'
What other sectors are toast:
2. Retail banking - retail banks are crap, expensive, lazy and complacent. Why do I have to mail pieces of paper that look like 19th century parchment 3000 miles to deposit virtual money via a building with travertine floors and 20 foot ceilings?
3. Photography - The number of art schools in Britain reflects the requirement for large numbers of illustrators to record the conquests of the early Victorians rather than a British aesthetic taste. These illustrators were replaced by photographers. The photographers will, in turn, largely be replaced by amateurs given that digital photography achieves quality through unlimited quantity. The good photographers will survive, but the army of mediocrity that still shoot weddings on film to overcharge for the prints will be overtaken by editing the best shots from the army of guests with digital cameras.
4. The Music Industry - enough said. Except 5 years after Napster why are millions of people using iPods to spend the same amount of money to rent songs rather than own them? Perhaps those white cables lead to electrodes that slowly fry your brain leaving you as a blackened silhouette - like the billboards show.
5. Suburbia - the railways created them and cars extended them, but the donut effect will kill them. Inner suburbs will become ghettos as the young middle class populate the former inner city industrial areas and those who are older, with families hook up to broadband internet, liaise with China and India and commute a couple of days a week to the office from real countryside.
6. Realtors - An architect spends 7 years training and gets up to 16% for designing a house and then is liable for 12 years. A realtor with 3 months training, who doesn't know a cornice from a corniche, gets up to 1.5% for opening the door and opening his/her mouth without any liability. The good news is that it wont be for long, eventually cartel-like operations such as Manhattan realtors will be disintermediated by more efficient online marketplaces. Hahahaha.
7. Walmart - Walmart has Woolworths written all over it. As a portal into the People's Republic of China staffed by Mexicans, its a pretty weird place to be frequented by people from Kansas. Its demise wont have much to do with the Internet, except in that it epitomises the last hurrah of the way things were in retail. They should buy Amazon.
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tags: [predictions]
'If a flood of Biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans, Joe Suhayda has a good idea how it would happen. A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water on the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. "There's concern it would essentially destroy New Orleans," says Suhayda.'
Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid quote Suhayda again, in a Weather Undergroud piece:
"A catastrophic hurricane represents 10 or 15 atomic bombs in terms of the energy it releases...Think about it. New York lost two big buildings. Multiply that by 10 or 20 or 30 in the area impacted and the people lost, and we know what could happen."
"Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn't be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins."
"Amid this maelstrom, the estimated 200,000 or more people left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or infirm to leave the city. Others will end up in last-minute emergency refuges that will offer minimal safety. But many will simply be on their own, in homes or looking for high ground.
Thousands will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising water. Others will be washed away or crushed by debris. Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape and little food or fresh water, perhaps for several days. "
Most chilling of all are the projections that the Red Cross had if enough people hadn't been evacuated:
"emergency officials' worst-case scenario: hundreds of billions of gallons of lake water pouring over the levees into an area averaging 5 feet below sea level with no natural means of drainage.
That would turn the city and the east bank of Jefferson Parish into a lake as much as 30 feet deep, fouled with chemicals and waste from ruined septic systems, businesses and homes. Such a flood could trap hundreds of thousands of people in buildings and in vehicles. At the same time, high winds and tornadoes would tear at everything left standing. Between 25,000 and 100,000 people would die, said John Clizbe, national vice president for disaster services with the American Red Cross."
This is a from an NPR transcript from September 2002:
DANIEL ZWERDLING: "The federal government has been cutting money from hurricane protection projects. Partly to pay for the war against terrorists... Do you think that the President of the United States and Congress understand that people like you and the scientists studying this think the city of New Orleans could very possibly disappear?
WALTER MAESTRI:"I think they know that, I think that they've been told that. I don't know that anybody, though, psychologically, you know has come to grips with that as-- as a-- a potential real situation. Just like none of us could possibly come to grips with the loss of the World Trade Center. And it's still hard for me to envision that it's gone. You know and it's impossible for someone like me to think that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone."
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tags: [environment]
A potential perfect storm is brewing, just like all weather forecasting it's not 100% certain how big the storm is going to be, but despite what some conservatives say the risk is too great to avoid, and despite what some liberals say a storm buster may be available.
Global warming, Global energy supply and Globalization - the free flow of energy, its availability and its effects - are changing on a global level, combining to produce a real threat to our everyday lives.
Oil supply problems and the switch of industrial economies away from industry to services based economies are linked. Current oil prices are largely due to increased demand rather than supply problems. Service based economies are doing well because they are outsourcing production to cheaper industrializing economies like China but in doing so they have created a rival with a growing appetite for oil.
One problem with the principal products of services based economies - ideas, is that they do not have tangible scarcity and therefore are difficult to protect. This is the tragedy of the virtual commons. In 30 years one could imagine a potential war with China if it decided to counterfeit America's principal intellectual property based exports on a large scale while holding the US to ransom over manufactured imports - you cannot make things like vacuum cleaners cheaper than China, but you can make limitless copies of music, films, software and some drugs, for almost nothing.
Hurricane Katrina although not Global Warming related demonstrated very clearly the link between the weather and oil prices. The real effects of global warming may be subtle at first, but economically devastating - providing added instability and risk through higher than average incidences of storms which break the risk models of insurance companies and hinder the free movement of energy and trade and therefore, growth in GDP.
Doomsayers say that the principal supply of portable energy or source of 'negentropy' that underlies all growth in GDP is reaching peak production, after which costs will inexorably rise. It doesn't really matter whether we believe the Doomsayers or not, however, because the storm that is brewing is such that most spare oil capacity in an area which is politically unstable, where we are fighting a war, while the switch to service economies has outsourced industrial production to countries like India and China which have almost limitless potential to soak up oil as their economies switch from agrarian to industrial as the world's supply of industrial labor has doubled within a few years.
So what are the elements that point to there being a possible cloud buster?
1. As economies such as Europe and the US switch from agrarian to industrial to post-industrial, they temporarily subsidize industrial production to produce a smooth transition, but they produce seemingly permanent farm subsidies. Most European or American farming is not currently viable in a capitalist economy.
2. There is a difficulty for politicians in any capitalist democracy to win popular support for large scale constructive initiatives which involve government spending which inevitably leads to increased taxes or deficits. Because things which invoke fear and anger are more dramatic and simpler to base a course of action on, it is easier to raise money to go to war than boring, complicated and possibly unnecessary programs even if they create long term stability and may help prevent war in the first place. The best way to initiate large scale government spending is to direct it at the most conservative sector of society and at a time such as now, when the effects of something like weather or energy prices cause understandable fear anxiety and anger and to channel the funds through an area that already has a precedent for subsidy.
3. Despite the ideals of free trade and its clear economic benefits, countries that succeed best go through periodic cycles of being open or closed to the rest of the world. Even if there is a trend towards globalism on a macro scale, country by country, there are natural oscillations. While a country is developing it may open its borders to immigrants, as did the US in the 19th Century but as its internal development reaches its furthest reaches it increases its trade with other nations, while reducing immigration. At the same time the Until the 1930's the US was almost entirely isolationist, GDP growth coming from internal expansion. Later as a country becomes richer it needs immigration to provide a cheap work force for the jobs that people who can earn a living elsewhere won't do (as has been happening with the blind eye often turned to Mexican immigration into the US), and it creates trade sanctions to protect its existing workforce (e.g. the US steel industry). This cycle is periodic and despite preferences for one way or the other from people on different ends of the political spectrum, it is probably better that a country switches occasionally between an open or isolationist stance. Given the US' reliance on increasing foreign energy and foreign labor and the problems on the horizon, now would be a good time for the US to return to a more isolationist mode till things stabilise. To do this and transition smoothly to an economy based less on new growth, but one which can enjoy and re-use its existing assets, it will need to produce a portable energy source domestically.
4. People like to make their own decisions and enjoy freedom. No matter how cheap or efficient public transport may be, all things being equal most people like cars. In America, where a significant percentage of the population was actually conceived in a car, cars are both a symbol of personal freedom and a concrete example of how portable energy benefits growth as opposed to energy per se. In short, cultures with a large availability of portable energy will usually do well.
5. Smooth changes are better than abrupt ones, and luckily with cars there is an alternative to the ideal but not yet viable hydrogen fuel. Modern diesel engines are quieter and have similar performance to gasoline ones. In addition diesel engines can run off a plant/mineral oil mix that allows for gradual increase of the plant oil component with no abrupt change in your car or the way you fuel it.
6. Plants remove carbon dioxide, the principal green house gas, from the atmosphere, while they are growing. This is a natural process, therefore its side effects, are likely to be less than other greenhouse gas reducing solutions such as plankton fertilizing with iron dust. Because they mop up CO2 while growing, a regularly harvested crop may absorb more CO2 than a mature forest (obviously, those plants whose oil is burnt as part of the mix in a diesel engine mean that there is a net increase in polluting gases, but still less than a traditional engine whose plants last mopped up CO2 millions of years ago).
7. OPEC members benefit if oil prices are high, but not if they are too high. If prices are too great, then alternative fuels become more cost effective. Oil prices are now at the point where certain alternative sources are attractive, particularly plant-oil based bio-fuels.
8. People are more receptive to genetically modified crops that are not used for food. Genetically modified bio-fuel crops could dramatically increase their potential energy output. Highly technological countries like the US are clearly in the best position to develop the technologies required for efficient bio-fuels, rather than existing suppliers such as Brazil.
I believe that you could mitigate the worst effects of the combination of energy supply problems, global warming and too rapid globalization by focusing on having the US turn the entire mid-west into a CO2 removing renewable crop some of which is used for oil in place of foreign imports. No matter what the efficiency gains elsewhere in the economy through other alternative forms of energy it is unrealistic to think that people are not going to want cars, so even if bio-fuel methods are not the most efficient form of energy for power, for cars it seems to make most sense. Specifically I think it could be sold in such a way that it would appeal to both sides of the political spectrum.
Specifically this would involve:
Dramatically increasing existing US farm subsidies, possibly even allocating the money as part of a strategic defense budget (based upon a weighted risk measure based upon reduced exposure to conflict in oil producing areas), and channelling this into greening a vast area of the mid-West which is predominantly rural and Republican.
Making the US turn full circle into being a net reducer of CO2 and having the US use its position as a superpower now able to fight on the side of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to help prevent emerging industrial economies such as China, offsetting the balance.
Providing large scale funding for research and development into non medical life-sciences to provide highly efficient genetically modified bio-fuel crops.
Increasing trade tariffs and protectionism in strategically important areas, to make the US isolationist in terms of energy but not in terms of trade in manufactured goods..
Encouraging a large scale switch from gas to diesel engines for cars.
tags: [peakoil]
Dawkins and Coyne point out the serious side to silly creationism - that even as religion it is bogus, because it is immoral.
They say that the seemingly reasonable demand that both sides of an argument should be taught "would be the end of science education in America"
One side, Intelligent Design has no supporting evidence other than pointing to a few gaps in another theory, evolution, which has hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating pieces of evidence.
The logic of allowing ID to be taught would justify the teaching of Holocaust denial for which there is no supporting evidence other than normal gaps in another version of events, which has hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating pieces of evidence.