June 21st, 2008
Scientist finds evidence of the “selfish gene”:
In studying genomes, the word ‘selfish’ does not refer to the human-describing adjective of self-centered behavior but rather to the blind tendency of genes wanting to continue their existence into the next generation.
Dawkin’s original book, now over 30 years old, is worth picking up - if you’re a biology nerd.
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has digitized a series of donated 16mm kinescope film recordings of The Mike Wallace Interview from the 1950s:
The bulk of these were 16mm kinescope film recordings, some of the earliest recordings of live television that were possible, and that survive today. Many of these have not been seen for over 50 years, and they represent a unique window into a turbulent time of American, and world history.
Be sure to watch Aldous Huxley, Salvador Dali and the oddly compelling Eldon Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
June 19th, 2008
Illegal downloaders will be barred from broadband access in France thanks to a brand-new, immensely retarded law:
“There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.
Less you think this was a complete industry buy-out of a country’s legal process:
Under the accord, the entertainment industry will also drop existing copyright protection on French material so that music or videos bought legally online can be played on any sort of device.
This plus the Red Bull thing from earlier today doesn’t exactly make France look particularly friendly to us geek types.
Video visualizations of the Gecko rendering engine figuring out just what mozilla.org, Wikipedia and Google should look like.
Carl Ichan, Yahoo-proxy-fight-starting American billionaire, has a new blog where he rants about the problems plaguing corporate America. There’s something oddly compelling in reading the rants of a man who could buy and sell me:
Today our economy is in a major crisis. Many of our companies are incapable of competing. Additionally our banking system has issued mortgages that cannot and will not be paid back. Why did we get here? Because in corporate America there are no true elections. It is tyranny parading as democracy. It’s a poison running through the blood of corporate America.
Spornography - that is porn created with the Spore Creature Creator - is perhaps the only thing we’ve invented stranger than japanese tentacle porn. Thanks, Geoff.
Wordle is an online tool that crafts beautiful word clouds. Here’s one crafted from all the words on this page.
Lots of folks are linking to this story on Time about a movement of folks attempting to reduce their possessions to just 100 items.
“It comes down to the products vs. the promise,” says organizational consultant Peter Walsh, who characterizes himself as part contractor, part therapist. “It’s not necessarily about the new pots and pans but the idea of the cozy family meals that they will provide. People are finding that their homes are full of stuff, but their lives are littered with unfulfilled promises.”
Hopefully I’m not alone in this, but I find the entire line of reasoning behind this to be the broad side of stupid. Believing that getting rid of all your things will make you happy is just as ridiculous as the belief that buying lots of things will do the same. Instead of addressing the real problems in your life, you glance around and decide to embark on some hair-brained self-improvement regime which may start out rather liberating, but is gonna end with you making the difficult choice between an extra set of sheets and a pillow.
Just stop buying things you don’t need. Throw out items you’ve already bought that you don’t need, and for god’s sake don’t start a blog about it.
Apparently, Red Bull has finally been allowed into France, on the condition that taurine be removed from the drink.
Weren’t aware you couldn’t get Red Bull in France? Neither was I. Not surprised? Neither am I.
Advertise your desire that we “teach the controversy” of alchemy with a handy t-shirt.
The edge-notched card, a technology time has forgotten:
One handy method this side of a high-rent computer is Indecks. It’s funky and functional: cards with a lot of holes in the edges, a long blunt needle, and a notcher. Run the needle through a hole in a bunch of cards, lift, and the cards notched in that hole don’t rise; they fall out. So you don’t have to keep the cards in order. You can sort them by feature, number, alphabetically or whatever; just poke, fan, lift and catch.
Rumors Barack Obama shouldn’t try to correct:
Barack Obama is a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN. He has one HAND over his HEART at all times. He occasionally switches when one arm gets tired, which is almost never because he is STRONG.
Did you know there’s a global shortage of hops, and that it’s escalating the cost of beer worldwide?
Still no excuse for drinking PBR though.
A cancer patient shows no sign of the disease two years after being injected with his own immune cells:
Genetically altered white blood cells have been used before to treat cancer patients but this is the first study to show that simply growing vast numbers of the few immune cells in the body to attack a cancer can be safe and effective.
Nate Anderson’s interview with Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It is a fascinating examination of the conflict between closed devices and sites, and open ones, and is filled with hidden gems:
Facebook platform, Google apps, Google Gears, iPhone apps—this shows that manufacturers see the value of having the nerds coding stuff. They see the value to them, they probably see the value to society. But they now have the ability to put a huge asterisk next to it, and I don’t think anybody has yet really thought through what that asterisk could mean, especially when you see regulators waking up to the fact that they get to regulate through the asterisk.
Zittrain’s main point, in the interview and I’m assuming in the book as well, is that devices which allow for unrestricted development spur innovation and ones which don’t, even if the restriction is minimal, are dangerous. And he’s not just talking iPhones here. He’s pointing his finger at any service with centralized means of control. That includes things as simple as your cell phone, and as relatively complex as your bittorrent tracker running on an Amazon EC2 instance.
He’s careful not to impugn closed services - they obviously offer certain benefits in terms of simplicity and security - but he does seem overly worried that the time will come when it’s impossible to create dangerous ideas. Think Napster, not napalm.
As far as sounding a warning bell, OK, he has a solid point. The best advances we’ve seen have come from the margins, are often dangerous to entrenched businesses, and frequently misunderstood by our legal system. As he says:
The Scrabulous people might be hard for Hasbro to reach, but Hasbro can go to Facebook and say, “Shut it down.”
But it seems to me that the richness of the marketplace right now isn’t going away. There is, and will most likely remain, a strong enough demand for untethered platforms that there will always be an alternative. Apple can stop an idea on the iPhone, but they can’t do much about OpenMoko (should it ever actually be released). Facebook has control now, but we’re already seeing a push towards OpenSocial.
This is a cyclical thing. Every few years someone creates a new closed platform that’s attractive enough to garner geek love. And a few years later, they overplay their hand and the geeks go marching elsewhere. Even the worst of our closed platforms, the telephone system, wasn’t closed enough that the internet couldn’t be built on top of it.
June 17th, 2008
Firefox, the little web-browser that could, hit 3.0 today. And it seems they think they’ve built a better browser than Safari:
We’ve told you about what makes Firefox great, but how do we compare against Safari?
The actual “feature-comparison” is short, and thin on both tangible benefits and facts. The only true “they win” is the inclusion of anti-phising and anti-malware technologies. Safari lacks these features, and though I honestly don’t consider them necessary, some folks do, and hey, bully to the Firefox team for getting those features in.
The third “feature” is nebulous, and I can’t find any supporting evidence of it online. The fourth, an aside to Firefox’s vast array of extensions, is “fair” in that there is no official mechanism of extending Safari, but folks have made do.
But they also make this claim:
Created to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web.
What a positively weird “feature”.
Now, I don’t doubt that the Firefox team deludes themselves into believing this. And I’m sure this page is mostly deigned towards marketing, not actual factual anything. Maybe the author thought that was a cute way to sum up Firefox’s history.
But fuck me if it’s not a lie. First, Firefox actually lags behind Safari in terms of web standards support. So if it was created to promote innovation, it must be more a “do as I say, not as I do” situation. In which case, they should also claim that it was created to help cure cancer. That’d look great in a feature chart.
As for promoting openness, well maybe we can give that them. But it’s not like WebKit was created to promote closedness. And while I’d love to think otherwise, I don’t even think Internet Explorer can lay claim to that goal.
Finally, “promoting opportunity” is so completely nebulous, I’m shocked someone wrote that. What precise “opportunity” has Firefox created, aside from encouraging folks to get jobs writing code for the browser? Is there some category within Monster.com I’m missing? “Firefox entrepreneur” isn’t listed anywhere I can see.
The sad fact is, in most ways, WebKit/Safari is the superior browser. And it damn well better be. Apple caused a huge ruckus when it chose to use the kHTML engine as Safari’s starting point instead of Gecko. The long run has proven their decision was correct. They’ve managed to build a faster, more compliant-browser with fewer programmers and less glitz than the Firefox team. WebKit is increasingly being chosen as the default “browser component” for other manufacturers, from Nokia to Adobe to Google, and the recent Acid 3.0 browser-team-showdown didn’t make Firefox look particularly good.
Comparing themselves to Safari in such horrendously silly, self-congratulating, masturbatory ways is just begging for trouble.
American Apparel now carries vibrators, specifically the 25-year-old Hitachi Magic Wand Massager:
This old school hand-held massager has been around for more than 25 years, with good reason. Its low vibration works as well on your sore back as it does in the bedroom.
I can never decide if I think Dov Charney is creepy or awesome. On one hand, the guy looks like a sex-offender from the 1970s, on the other hand, anyone who can turn something as simple as t-shirts into an enterprise of soft-core pornography and skating-the-edge sexuality deserves a hat tip.
The films of Joel and Ethan Coen, condensed and overlapping.
The films of Paul Thomas Anderson, condensed and overlapping.
The films of Stanley Kubrick, condensed and overlapping.
The more money you have, the less bling you need:
Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.
I have noticed a distinct difference as my own personal wealth has grown. I spend far more money on services than on assets these days. Now, it could be that I have nearly everything I need already. But it feels more honest to say that I’d rather spend money on fleeting experiences than permanent ones. The fleeting experiences - meals, theater, vacation - seem of better value, strangely.
“If you want to live like a billionaire, buy a $12,000 bed,” says a financial-planner friend of mine. You can’t park a mattress in your driveway, but it will last for decades and you can enjoy it every night.
June 16th, 2008
The ideal penis size according to women.
Performance reviews considered harmful:
Most people think that they do pretty good work (even if they don’t). It’s just a little trick our minds play on us to keep life bearable. So if everybody thinks they do good work, and the reviews are merely correct (which is not very easy to achieve), then most people will be disappointed by their reviews. The cost of this in morale is hard to understate.
June 15th, 2008
Legal drugs kill more people than illegal ones:
An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.
Of course, in both cases it’s not the drugs that kill you. It’s abusing them.
Nielsen’s apt description of the online reader: “Users are selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don’t actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don’t see what you need, you’re gone.
Trust me, I’m taking notes.
10 things I hate about Web 2.0, which is really just ten things he hates about blogs:
The sophomoric conceit that “The Conversation” is two-way. To quote Fran Leibowitz, “The opposite of Talking is not Listening. The opposite of Talking is Waiting”.
Trends in web design, so far, for 2008.
I confess to using/liking no less than three of those clichés.
Nicholas Carr asks if Google is making us stupid:
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
Drinking with friends on Friday, I made light of a similar problem. Whereas I used to be able to recall specific entries in texts I’d devoured, I find myself struggling to recall even basic information. “My brain’s become Google-dependent. It’s like I’ve outsourced my memory.”
Carr speaks more to how we digest information than how we store it, how he worries that he’s become a skimmer, increasingly unable to read deeply. I haven’t found that to be the case. Given the right material, I can still easily get lost in the text. Of course, most of my reading is done on planes and in buses, places where my options for entertainment are limited. Focus comes easier when there’s little else to jump to. I imagine if I had access to my feeds 24/7 in those places, it’d be a different story.
Larry Rother, writing for the New York Times, examines Obama’s protest of the South Korean trade agreement:
“Two facts are not in dispute,” Mr. Goolsbee continued. “Japan and Korea retain rules that prevent imports of U.S. beef, rules that other countries don’t have, and in countries that don’t have those rules, U.S. beef exports have returned to higher levels than before. So you’ve got to be highly suspicious at the outset.”
Obama is often described as a populist and not in a fuzzy good way. His speeches, which often seem to preach the ridiculous protectionism we’ve come to expect from democrats, might be misleading. When pressed for details, Obama often seems to push less for the erection of barriers and high tariffs, but instead for the equalization of trade rules and the opening of foreign markets to American goods.
His disapproval of the South Korean trade agreement strikes as a perfect example. Instead of protesting the import of foreign goods, Obama is protesting the inability of American manufacturers to export theirs. Rhetorically, the sentiment is the same, “Foreigners are costing you jobs!”, the rally cry of the anti-globalist movement, but the reasoning is technically pro free-trade.
Interesting.
LS9, a start-up in Silicon Valley, has created a bacteria that produces oil as its waste (its poop!):
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us.
Giving a child a laptop won’t necessarily improve their education. It could do quite the opposite:
It turns out that kids in households lucky enough to get computer vouchers spent a lot less time watching TV—but that’s where the good news ends. “Vouchered” kids also spent less time doing homework, got lower grades, and reported lower educational aspirations than the “unvouchered” kids.
As counter-intuitive as it may be, given how we’ve spent the last decade being lectured on how technology engenders learning, Malamud and Pop-Eleches’ research seems correct. While a laptop provides access to a wealth of information, that access is only valuable if the child is either pre-disposed to reaching out for it or is in an environment where he’s forced to. And most kids would rather be on MySpace than Wikipedia.
June 12th, 2008
A wealthy family hires an architect to renovate their apartment. The architect decides to build an elaborate scavenger hunt mystery into the apartment, without mentioning it to the client:
One day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr. Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:
We’ve taken liberties with Yeats
to lead you through a tale
that tells of most inspired fates
in hopes to lift the veil.
What followed was an intricate series of puzzles and challenges that sounds so convulted I’m betting the guy’s behind Myst are working on their own adaptation:
… the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels …
Be sure to check out the slideshow. The sheer detail and beauty of the puzzles is breathtaking.
June 11th, 2008
Rasmus Fleischer, Swedish historian and founder of the massively illegal file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, makes so many fantastic points about the dangers of the escalating online copyright war that I fear quoting just one. So I’ll use the same one Reason did:
The real dispute, once again, is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don’t believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties.
I go back and forth on whether file-sharing should be tolerated, banned or just stigmatized. As a believer in, and supporter of the arts, I want to see artists compensated for their work and to flourish. As a developer, I know that there’s little way to guarantee that without fairly heinous consequences, just as Fleischer points out.
I don’t think the answer lay at either pole of the debate though. I do think the answer will inevitably be a technological, not legal one. I have no idea what that answer will look like of course. If I did, I’d be rich enough to live my dream: paying Lou Reed to provide a live, improvised and constant soundtrack to my life.
David Gentleman created amazing covers for the complete New Penguin Shakespeare back in the 1960s.
Fantastically simple premise for a blog, Blank is like blank. Example:
Shopping at Ikea is like returning to therapy:
It feels like the right thing to to do, but then you get there and realize you aren’t adequately emotionally prepared.
Larry makes a fantastic point about the jingoistic sentiment that “programmers from country blah suck”:
It’s not the nationality of incompetence that’s depressing me, nor is it necessarily the scope of the incompetence embodied in a single person, it’s how common it is that I encounter people who have no respect for this activity that I love.
Many so-called developers know very little about development. Their country of origin is irrelevant. Folks think that if they can google-up a code solution, they’re engineers. Which is a bit like thinking that if you can google up a great quote, you’re a writer. It’s fantastically sad how many folks I know write code for a living and haven’t the foggiest fucking clue what real engineering is. And a vast majority of them are American.
As a follow-up, watch these videos of a successful programmer who traveled to India to try to get his outsourced job back.
Ever the vigilant bitch-slapper, Warren Buffet points out that trying to “beat the market” does very little good in the aggregate and that your broker is a bit of a douche for convincing you otherwise:
A record portion of the earnings that would go in their entirety to owners— if they all just stayed in their rocking chairs— is now going to a swelling army of Helpers. Particularly expensive is the recent pandemic of profit arrangements under which Helpers receive large portions of the winnings when they are smart or lucky, and leave family members with all of the losses— and large fixed fees to boot— when the Helpers are dumb or unlucky (or occasionally crooked).
Seems “Snow Leopard”, Apple’s sixth version of OS X, is going to be light on user-facing features and heavy on fundamental technologies, like solving the massive cluster-fuck that is developing for a multi-core machine:
“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”
If you’re not a developer (and thank god if you aren’t), this might be a bit much for you, but the gist of it is that future computers are going to have more chips instead of just faster ones. And it makes life hard on the geeks.
Imagine if tomorrow, the most senior, most experienced member of your company quit, and instead of hiring a new one, your company hired 8 interns to replace him. Your task is to delegate work to these 8 fools, while managing to get the old guy’s work done faster. It’s a management nightmare. That’s multi-core development. Handing out lots of small tasks to lots of less than great workers, keeping everyone in sync, and making sure no one is doing extra work. Hell, if you’ve ever had to manage one intern with actual work to do, you should be able to sympathize with our plight.
A few things make this important. It’s a clear signal Apple is going to be moving towards consumer-level products with more than just two cores (the geek and rich-designer targeted Mac Pro and the closet-targeted Xserve are the only shipping Apple product with more than that). And I’m betting it won’t be just be iMacs.
The reason Apple isn’t currently tossing quad-core processors into iMacs is probably double-fold. First, price. A quad-core processor is expensive. Second, value. Right now, very few applications are optimized to use anything above two cores. Hell, you could probably count the number on one hand. Since application’s aren’t gaining any performance benefit from having another six cores to play with, the common case is to just give each running application one core in it’s entirety. Your email is using one core, your web browser another. This helps with multi-tasking, but it is does nothing for most users who have a handful of applications running at once.
However, if Apple can abstract away, or otherwise solve the delegation problem, more applications will play well in a multi-core environment, actually getting faster at their tasks. And that means multi-core chips are of actual value to your email and web surfing mother.
And as the price of those quad-octo-core chips comes down, we’ll start seeing them creep into cheaper machines. And user’s will actually notice the difference.
Trust me, it’s exciting stuff.
Places American’s can’t, but should, go. I’ve wanted to visit Iran for the last two years, and the description of the process is so abbreviated, it’s comical:
Visas are hard to come by, as Americans wishing to travel to the theocratic state must have a sponsoring Iranian travel company that first gets approval with the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This hurdle makes independent travel essentially impossible, and the wait for a visa can take months.
What sticks out most is that three of the places are off limits less-so because of real restrictions, and more so because any American would most likely either be kidnapped or murdered.
No mention on how Canadians would fare.
