Speaking of reading books slowly ... I'm only on page 39 of Bill Bryson's recent bestselling A Short History of Nearly Everything, and already I've found two significant contradictions:
- Page 25: "Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one fifty-thousandth of the way." Page 26 (the next page!): "Pluto is about forty [Astronomical Units] from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand."
- Page 30: "If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light-years of us, we would be goners." Page 36: "For the blast of a supernova explosion to kill you ... you would have to be 'ridiculously close'—probably within ten light-years or so."
Yet The New York Times calls it "stunningly accurate," Publisher's Weekly says "Bryson relies on some of the best material in the history of science to have come out in recent years," and Library Journal says it's "highly recommended for public and academic libraries." If these are professional reviewers, how carelessly do most people read? Why would anyone read science carelessly? I don't get it.
|W|P|108856357306138788|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."—Leonardo da Vinci This one, Martin Chuzzlewit, isn't even regarded as one of his best, but it contains passages like this:
Against my better judgment I've started another Dickens novel. I say it's against my judgment not because I think Dickens is bad, but because he's so good, and the damn things are 900 pages long. I read slowly—the copyeditor's curse—so even at a chapter a day it'll be three or four months before I finish the thing.
"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Mr. Slyme again. "Obliged to two strangers for a tavern bill! I obliged to two architect's apprentices. Fellows who measure earth with iron chains, and build houses like bricklayers. Give me the names of those two apprentices. How dare they oblige me!"
Mr. Tigg was quite lost in admiration of this noble trait in his friend's character; as he made known to Mr. Pinch in a neat little ballet of action, spontaneously invented for the purpose.
Now, people don't actually act like that, it's true. The common criticisms of Dickens are all valid. His characters are cartoonish, and his protagonists don't grow or change. His attempts at pathos come across as embarrassingly heavy-handed; Oscar Wilde famously said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
But I've never found another writer who could produce such a consistently inspired level of invention—who could picture the scene above ("imaging forth," Dickens called it), which so illuminates a kind of person that we all recognize, and find the words to pin it down with such wry sweet deadpan irony. I hope there is another such writer—I'd love to read him.
|W|P|108836164314004237|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis week the Senate passed the Defense of Decency Act, Dick Cheney told Patrick Leahy to "fuck off," and Orrin Hatch told the Senate Judiciary Committee that revising its agenda was "a dumbass thing to do."
Carry on.
|W|P|108828713237575663|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSpeaking of Gmail, this morning I got a note from Microsoft. I've been subscribing to their Extra Storage service for Hotmail, to permit larger file sizes and to get 20MB of space. It costs $20 a year. "As a valued MSN Hotmail Extra Storage subscriber, we will be upgrading your storage capacity to a massive 2GB with 20MB attachment size at no extra cost to you*!"
That asterisk just slays me.
"* No extra cost during your current subscription period. At the end of your current subscription period, you will be automatically renewed to the MSN Hotmail Plus subscription offering and your credit card charged at the current rate for MSN Hotmail Plus."
Let's see, Microsoft will give me 2 gigs of storage for $20, with a crappy user interface, frequent outages, delays and an overzealous spam filter, or I can use Google's free reliable service, with 1 gig of space, keyboard shortcuts, threading and searchability. For free. And it's free. Free.
Free.
To cancel the Hotmail extra storage, I had to read an e-mail, click a link, go back to the original e-mail to get instructions, click two more links in the second message, click a third link, read a help file, pick up the phone, dial an 800 number, answer four robot questions, explain to Mario that I wasn't closing an MSN ISP account, give him my e-mail address four times, explain that I wanted to cancel it today, give him the last four digits of my credit card and write down a nine-digit cancellation number.
While we were waiting I asked him if they were getting a lot of cancellations due to Gmail. "It's been steady," he said finally. "They don't tell us that sort of thing."
|W|P|108816770022209796|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The Global Ideas Bank is a clearinghouse for "social inventions"; that is, good ideas that can be adopted pretty readily by folks who believe in them. Registered users can post ideas of their own, and can vote for others' ideas that they find particularly worthy or feasible.
What makes this particularly useful is that the ideas are ranked in various categories (most feasible, most humorous, etc.), and the inventor of a promising "seed" is invited to submit more information in hopes of inspiring others to participate, producing a "plant." At the moment, the top five ideas are these:
- A scheme for communities to reclaim neglected areas by recruiting the unemployed (sort of like the WPA)
- A plan to recalibrate the clocks at Britain's Manchester Commonwealth Games, to avoid delays
- A "Fat Cat Index" by which executive compensation could be indexed
- A color-coding system to identify, salt, sugar and fat content in food
- A proposal to rehabilitate inmates by training them as firefighters
You get the picture. The suggestions tend to be a little optimistic, but they do get you thinking. I suppose that's the point.
|W|P|108534001370585416|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Stop Bush Project has gathered 104 (so far) instances of anti-Bush sentiment expressed "through graffiti, placards, flyers and other spontaneous, 'guerilla' means."
|W|P|108793880357071852|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSteve Allen, of all people, was apparently a confirmed atheist—and a pretty articulate one:
- "It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."
- "One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism."
- "There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses."
- "There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians."
- "The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism."
- "To those who wish to punish others—or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters in to their own hands—the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort."
- "Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences."
- "No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible."
- "God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope."
Thanks, WikiQuote.
|W|P|108776848983079790|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEver since Google started letting Gmail users invite friends onboard, online communities have been springing up to manage the demand. Until recently, the offers were mostly frivolous bribes—if you had a Gmail invite to offer, you could swap it for:
- a video message in Sango, the tribal language of the Central African Republic
- a message in the sand in Gaudalupe
- a petrified honeycomb
- a six-course meal
- your picture hung out a window at the Empire State Building
... and so on. But now a number of alternatives have arisen that might do some real good. Two new sites, GmailfortheTroops.com and Wil Wheaton's http://www.gmail4troops.com/, are organizing invites for troops in Iraq. Gmail's 1-gig storage limit is big enough to accommodate image files and video that Hotmail and Yahoo can't accommodate, so the troops can get news from home more easily. Plus, the Gmail service is much more reliable—that's why I switched from Hotmail in the first place.
This would be a tremendous PR boost for Google if they donated a pile of new accounts directly to dot-mil addresses, or at least facilitated swaps like this directly. Anyway, I've offered my three invites on Wheaton's site. We'll see who writes in.
|W|P|108773704680674032|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
From B3ta this week: New Zealand philosophy postdoc Josh Parsons has assigned letter grades to all the world's flags, using a wonderfully thorough methodology:
To receive an F, a flag had to be so awful that its level of badness was clearly qualitatively different from that of any flag receiving a D. I had to feel that a country receiving an F had really set out to create a genuinely horrible flag, or didn't really know what a flag was. One prominent vexillologist I consulted put it thus: "Some countries' flags look like tea towels. If you'd rather be using the flag as a tea towel, and your tea towel as the flag, give it an F."
Parsons lists his assessments both alphabetically by country and numerically by grade. Among the worst are Brunei ("appears to involve a moustache sprouting from a flagpole"), Zimbabwe ("features a hawk sitting on a toilet") and Turkmenistan ("only flag to both make eyes water and induce vomiting"). Above: Libya ("did you even try?").
|W|P|108767913433004497|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Whatever our "real" reasons for invading Iraq, oil has to be our primary focus now. It's Iraq's only significant source of income, and its only prospect—apart from American taxpayers—for financing reconstruction. At the same time, oil is an Achilles heel for the United States: al-Qaeda rightly calls it "the provision line and the feeding to the artery of the life of the crusader nation." (Al-Qaeda has a thing for prepositional phrases.)
That makes the Iraqi oil infrastructure a convenient and attractive target for terrorists. The country's 4,000 miles of pipeline are now suffering one or two sabotage attacks every week, despite the presence of 14,000 security guards, and production has dropped to half of prewar levels.
Worse, if they prove successful in Iraq, pipeline attacks could be taken up by Islamist terror groups in Chechnya, Uzbekistan, China and even Saudi Arabia, whose 10,000 miles of pipe would be practically impossible to defend. To complicate matters, a democratic Iraq might threaten Saudi dominance of the oil market, so Saudis themselves are now attacking their neighbor's pipelines.
None of this would be happening if the United States weren't addicted to oil. That's undeniably the root cause of all this trouble, and arguably even of the Saudi hatred that originally fueled the 9/11 attacks. At least there was a stable equilibrium in that region before the war; now it's just a bunch of teetering dominoes.
|W|P|108302736915171116|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology."—David Hilbert
|W|P|108749058061124714|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Last week Future Publishing launched the first online-only consumer magazine, Broadband Now! Downloading one issue costs $1.50. Publishing director John Weir told Media Week, "I stand to be corrected, but we believe this is the first paperless consumer magazine that anyone has actually tried, certainly in terms of a mass-market consumer mag."
That's a little disingenuous; there are skajillions of self-styled online magazines. He means that this is the first one that's trying to capture the "look and feel" of a traditional print magazine. Traditional customers are wary, but Weir says he's encouraged by the reaction of some progressive advertisers.
They will avoid the shrinking display space on today's newsstands, but competition is even fiercer online. Any economy organizes itself around its scarcest resource, and online that's not money but human attention. For five years I've been banking that magazine publishing will move online significantly, but even I doubt that anyone will ever make a killing at it. The barriers to entry are too low (no more paper and postage costs), and the competition is too great. But for consumers, that's a win-win.
|W|P|108302845022903826|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comToday the prospect of George W. Bush winning 450 electoral votes in November dropped to an all-time low. That's not according to any poll or superstition; it's the collective judgment of the futures traders at Tradesports.com, the Irish betting exchange.
Betting on election results may seem strange, but in principle it's no different from betting on the future price of a commodity. The Iowa Electronic Markets, operated by the faculty at the University of Iowa, have already been shown to beat opinion polls in predicting future presidents. All evidence suggests that online betting exchanges will be even better, since real financial stakes are used, increasing the participants' motivation to accumulate and interpret relevant information. And Jan Snoen notes:
The range of political bets is quite astonishing. Combining TradeSports and Betfair, you currently can bet on the U.S. presidential election, including VP nominee and winner in every single state, control of the Senate and House of Representatives, British, Canadian and Australian parliamentary elections, Tony Blair staying on as Labour party leader, bin Laden being captured or killed, the sacking of George Tenet or Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Security Alert Level (perhaps a proxy for terrorist attacks) at the end of every single month for the rest of the year, the transfer of power in Iraq, the establishment of a Palestinian state and Israeli eviction of Arafat.
The immediacy of online betting amplifies their efficiency, so that participants in online markets have proven particularly responsive to evolving conditions. It's for this reason that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last year was planning to invest $8 million in its own market on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks.
Unfortunately, Congressional outrage followed, led by senators Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who wrote, "Surely, such a threat should be met with intelligence gathering of the highest quality—not by putting the question to individuals betting on an Internet website."
That's an ignorant and short-sighted view, IMO. These things are useful, and are only likely to become more popular. DARPA's plan may even have saved some lives.
|W|P|108699968044157917|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Even in the current conservative climate, you don't hear much about flag-burning these days. But the Bush administration is on record supporting an amendment prohibiting it.
This is silly on its face: The flag is a piece of cloth, a symbol. You could burn 10 million flags and not hurt the freedoms they represent (and anyway one of those, conservatives must admit, is freedom of expression).
But what makes this absurd is that about a year ago, at a Michigan rally, Bush himself autographed several flags for supporters. Under existing law, for that act, he's already guilty—it's illegal to put "any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature" on the flag.
I think there are really two problems here. First, it's impossible to define "flag." Under the U.S. Code between 1968 and 1989, it would have been illegal to set off a red, white and blue firecracker. Presumably advocates feel that would be unpatriotic.
But even more troubling, it's impossible to define "desecration." The American Legion and the Boy Scouts burn thousands of flags every year in retirement ceremonies. Are they guilty?
Warren Apel points out that, ultimately, the only difference between a flag-signing politician and a flag-burning protester is the content of his thoughts. And it would be very scary indeed if we started policing those.
|W|P|108533999820122638|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWow, Google's been busy. In addition to ordinary web searches, it now works as a calculator, dictionary, phone book and spell checker. And it can access UPS tracking info, U.S. patents, news, stock quotes, street maps and airport delays. I really hope they don't start to suck with the IPO.
|W|P|108699968631080087|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAmazingly, C-SPAN is providing live coverage of Reagan's casket—because, you know, he could bust out at any minute and do the macarena.
Reagan died on Sunday, and his death has dominated the week's news. Why? People die. Reagan has done nothing particularly newsworthy since he left office 16 years ago, and in recent months he's been alive in only the most technical sense. In May his wife said, "Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him." So when the end came, The Onion's headline was most accurate: "Reagan's Body Dies." But still people line up to see him. Why? It's ghoulish to wait six hours to view a casket. And what does "pay one's respects" even mean? What does this accomplish? Whom does it serve?
Anyway, John Ashcroft must be happy that his refusal to release administration torture memos didn't get wider news play. The memos reportedly discussed legal defenses for the torture of detainees. Ashcroft offered no legal principle for his refusal to release them, and they're not classified. Democrats threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress.
What I want to know is, what does the Mideast make of this? We've been singing the praises of constitutional democracy ... but back here at home it's kind of a selective thing, isn't it? Our rules are optional. How would Ashcroft explain his decision to the people of Iraq, and to their new leaders?
|W|P|108698706616812818|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A government that remembers that the people are its master is a good and needed thing."—George H.W. Bush, New Orleans, Aug. 18, 1988
|W|P|108713295644101365|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis is an expert system, a computerized means of applying rule-based knowledge systematically. Try it. This one is pretty simple, but it's smart enough to know the difference between a violin and a viola, it can guess correctly even when given some bad data, it's "self-tuning" to a changing user base, and it's learning all the time.
Doctors don't use these.
Doctors typically try to keep everything in their heads, with often fatal results. Medical mistakes are now cited as a leading cause of death. Some people are beginning to suggest that the principles of bioinformatics be applied here, to make more effective use of the explosion of available medical information. Danish researcher Johan van der Lei writes, "The sheer amount of data and knowledge available in the medical domain necessitates computer-aided interpretation."
Some of this is finally turning around, with products like Tripath Imaging's FocalPoint, which is being trained to examine Pap smears for signs of cervical cancer. If they were implemented more broadly, systems like these could spot rare illnesses and ensure that a tired or distracted clinician is thinking straight.
"We are standing on the threshold of a new era," writes van der Lei. "We desperately need computers not only to store the data we collect, but also to store, verify and expand the partial interpretations we are constructing of those data."
|W|P|108666036750355966|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Monkey Shakespeare Simulator simulates a huge number of monkeys (1.52789 * 1022, at the moment) pounding continuously on virtual typewriters. The current record is a rather amazing 16 letters ("KING RICHARD. OlazZtssi0cwX?QDjqkP9r]xfaBmlVU]e...")—amazing because there are about 80 keys on a typewriter, so the odds of getting even two consecutive letters right is 1 in 6400.
Somewhat less interesting is the Million Monkeys Internet Search Engine, which randomly generates website names (e.g., gvnotroqftsmwigttatc.com). I'm not that bored yet.
|W|P|108655622853314698|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHey, my Atom feed works now! The Bloglines aggregator wasn't resolving before; they must have changed their spec, or Blogger changed its feed. It anchors properly and everything.
|W|P|108655613032682276|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Forget anything I've written here criticizing Last.fm. I've been running it almost continuously lately, and all the bugs seem to be fixed.
Last operates as a sort of trainable online radio station. I can tell it I love certain songs, or ban them forever, or just listen. Over time it develops a profile—I'm not sure how that algorithm works, but generally I'm getting some reasonably good hits lately. I think the key is to be really discriminating; in the beginning I was getting lots of ambient stuff, but now it seems to understand that I want a strong melody.
The best feature is that it integrates automatically with Audioscrobbler, so all this training informs my profile there, which means I'll be able to get recommendations there using the same data, once they implement that feature.
I still haven't fallen in love with any new artists (except maybe Saosin), but Last is commercial-free, which makes it far better than radio and less work than downloading. That also makes me think that it's illegal, since the publishers aren't getting performance royalties. Still, even if they're eventually taken offline I'll still have the data.
|W|P|108654272575455022|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com