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 Sitting in the United Lounge at Atlanta airport I came across this picture, of a United Boeing 377 Stratocruiser.
I didn't know what it was, had to Google (yay, visual search), but it struck a chord. All those years ago, maybe 60 or so, that plane existed, and flew, and was full of passengers; maybe on their way back to LA from a business meeting in Atlanta.
They would have been dressed differently - nicer no doubt - and would have been thinking differently about different things. Probably carrying books and newspapers. Not planning to watch a movie. Nor blogging while high :)
They would have been chauffeured to the airport and been dropped off at the entrance, porters would have taken their luggage, they would have presented paper tickets, and they would not have suffered needless security theater with long lines and luggage scanners and taking your shoes off. No taking your laptop out of it's bag :)
The food would have been better, for sure! The service too. And the flight would have taken longer; Stratocruisers cruised at 350mph, vs 550mph for the jets of today. "It could carry up to 100 passengers on the main deck plus 14 in the lower deck lounge; typical seating was for 63 or 84 passengers or 28 berthed and five seated passengers." The whole experience would have felt more special.
Google tells me the average price of an airplane ticket in 1963 was $41, which equals $323 in today's money. I would gladly pay that amount for that experience. (Maybe with generative AI, soon I will be able! - I predict some of the first uses of a 'holodeck' will be time travel into the past...) Travel+Leisure tells us what flights used to cost in the 'golden age' of air travel. And they summarize: "Security risks are greater and security lines are longer. People don't wear their best suits to fly anymore. Deregulated, democratized, affordable air travel is very different from the glamorous air travel of those far-gone days, but at least more of us get the pleasure of complaining about it."
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On my way home from a brief business trip to Atlanta - fun to be "on the road again"; much eating and drinking, and was treated to a nice Hawks game last night - and so I am blogging from 30,000'. You have been warned...
BTW was even colder in Atlanta than has been in LA ... brrr. Spring?
In re Global Happiness: GQ: we're thinking about Happiness all wrong. Are we though? I think they confuse happiness with contentment. True they are related, but I claim they are not the same... 
 To be checked out: Microsoft bring OpenAI's DALL-E image generator to the new Bing. So now when I want an illustration for a blog post which doesn't have one, I'll just ask Bing to make one :)
Related: NVidia's big AI moment is here. Yep. They are the "Cisco during dot-com era" hardware of the moment.
Gratuitous plug for my posts about CUDA...
Related: NVidia partners with Google Cloud to launch AI instances.
 And so who ordered that? An aperiodic monotile! "The authors of a new preprint paper claim that they've discovered what’s called an aperiodic monotile, a single shape that can cover a two-dimensional space with a pattern that never repeats itself exactly." Penrose tiles were weird enough, this is beyond weird. And turns out they are an evolution in an entire family of such shapes...
 And finally, here's a cute animal you should know ... the ribbon seal!
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The indispensible Visual Capitalist today have given us:
I don't know all the details but I do know their measure of "happiness" was as perceived by the people in each country. It may mean different things in different cultures! In some, being "happy" may not be as important as others, and in some, it may be more relative than others. But anyway it is a common concept, and an interesting measure.
I've mentioned before, I think happiness comes from liking yourself. Maybe if someone was asking about your happiness for a survey about your country, you would answer based on whether you like the country as a whole, not sure. But in some sense happiness is relative to your own expectations.
Does anything surprise you here? My biggest takeaway is continents: Seems like the ranking is:
- Oceana (Australia + NZ)
- North America
- Europe
- South America
- Asia
- Africa
I'm also surprised that India - the largest country by population - isn't happier. I think of it as a happy place, but clearly its people do not. China is the second largest country, not happy, but that's not surprising. Next in size are the US (happy), Indonesia (not happy), Brazil (kind of happy), and Nigeria (not happy). Lots of work to do.
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 Yay, it's Spring! And I for one am ready. This has been a cold, wet, cloudy winter, and I'm ready for some dry hot sun.
SpaceX launches two space missions in one day. And of course, landed both boosters for reuse. So cool that this has become so routine.
In other news, I flew on two airplanes today, and both landed. Yay.
Seth Godin: Shields up. "What I want is a junkblocker. A big button on my browser that says 'shields up.'" Maybe AI will give this to us, but there will always be the problem of who decides what is junk?
Shelly Palmer: run 'ChatGPT' on your computer. "Here’s something you probably won’t do today: install a large language model (LLM) chat application on your PC. That’s okay, I did it for you – in about 10 minutes."
Microsoft-owned Nuance adds GPT-4 to its medical note-taking tool. This is a perfect application for GPT, I predict this will be huge. One to watch.
 Powerline: why wind and solar will never work. "They produce electricity less than one-half of the time, a fact that will never change." If you think batteries are the answer, they have some statistics which make you think otherwise.
So, what's the answer? Last Energy signs deals worth $19B for nuclear plants. Nuclear energy is the only one we have.
Kottke: The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are. The gap keeps getting bigger. My "how old you think you are" hasn't changed that much for many many years...
 Russell Beattie: Quick thoughts on Mark Twain's travelogues. "Seriously, if you haven’t read anything else by Twain except Tom Sawyer, you need to do yourself a favor and read his non-fiction. It's all truly fantastic. "
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Have you ever reflected upon bad product names? We are surrounded by them. Why is naming products so hard?
Especially bad are names associated with things that have variations. Like models of cars.
The product people know too much, and they assume we know more than we do. We barely recognize the name of the company, let alone the product, the model, or the latest variation on the model. I get it; you need to have differentiation. So do that, but don't hope that we are tracking every zig and zag of your development.
 Take Lucid cars. (Please!) The "brand" is Lucid - and you can be forgiven if you've never heard of them. They are an electric car company founded by engineers who used to work at Tesla. Their car model is the Lucid Air. They also have a Lucid Air Pure, a Lucid Air Grand Touring, and a Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance. And another model called Sapphire, which is a Lucid Air too.
They all look more or less the same, and are distingushed from each other by various features like battery capacity, engine power, and of course price. Lest you think the latter is a detail, the most expensive of these options is approximately double the cost of the least, even though they are for many purposes the same car.
From everything I've read, the Lucids are great cars and have a real shot at being Tesla competition. But they're too young and too unknown to have so many different models and names. Confusing.
Some companies give up on names and resort to numbers. The Nimbus 2000! I get it, names are hard, and numbers are easier. Also, numbers have a sequence, so perhaps customers can figure out that a Nimbus 3000 is a better or newer model.
But where do you go from there? You can add letters. The Nimbus 2000LX! The RX! The LRX! Not to mention the LRX+! It all gets very confusing very fast.
 Don't be afraid to keep the same name. Just because it's new, just because it's got a new feature, if it's the same product - the same value proposition - the same name is okay. In fact it's good, because it's stable, and people get to know it.
Tesla has had a Model S since 2012 but the car you buy today is pretty far advanced from the Model S of then. Yes, there have been a few variations, but Tesla have kept them to a minimum.
Apple are another company which have kept names simple. Macintosh. iPod. iPhone. iPad. Apple Watch. Etc. They have resisted the urge to rename with every new feature and version, and we their customers thank them. (Yeah, they do do that "Pro" thing from time to time...)
Concepts like "this is a product", "this is a new version of a product", and "this is a feature of a product" are helpful. But the real thing is to keep your customers in mind. Don't assume they know anything - they probably don't - and try to help them.
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  I spent this afternoon with my granddaughter (7) at the delightful Santa Barbara zoo.
It's not a big zoo, which makes it perfect for an afternoon with a little kid. You can walk the whole thing and see just about every animal in a couple of hours. They don't have every kind of everything, but they do have some kind of everything: the amazing staples like giraffes, leopards, gorillas, etc., plenty of beautiful and amazing birds, snakes (!), even jumping spiders (!!). And it's pretty; you don't get that "big animal in a small cage" feeling of sympathy for the residents.
  And also, lot of good signage, including detailed descriptions of each animal, where they are from, how they live, what they eat, etc. My granddaughter is a great reader and delighted in informing me of all the details of each animal, while I tried to find them. We made a great team.
Zoos are one of those things which bring up conflicting emotions; should we capture and display wild animals? Does this help us learn more about them? And does this help us educate each other about the wider world in which we live?
Those are tough questions; but an easier one is "do they make for a great afternoon"?
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(sigh ... bad thing about an offline posting process is when you forget to sync ...)
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Yay, it's St Patrick's Day, hope you enjoy it. I'm celebrating by recovering from a cold (cough, cough).
David Sacks comments on Bank of America's balance sheet: look what VCs did now!
Sarcasm aside, I think the key was not their balance sheet - it had problems, but so do many, many other banks - but rather the coordinated sense of panic on the part of their depositors. The vast majority of BofA depositors are blissfully unaware and will happily leave their money on deposit.
Vodkapundit: How to lose the entire Middle East with this one weird trick. Sigh.
 Shelly Palmer: Web3 is really here! Woo hoo, we have a new connection type, web3://. And so it's all decentralized and secure, right? Independent of Web2 infrastructure? Um, no. It's centralized, just as insecure, and dependent upon Web2. Do not ask and so then what are the advantages...
Elon Musk: It’s exciting to see more & more public figures engaging in active dialogue on this platform! (Referring of course to Twitter.) Indeed.
I've found myself on and following Twitter way more than pre-Elon.
Also Elon: Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31. Wow. Super transparent but also, a great way to improve the algorithm!
Also Elon: Engineering is true magic. Yes.
 Holy cow: landing an airplane on a helipad on top of a hotel. Do not try this at home.
Razib Khan considers Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later. A remember reading it with great excitement, but probably because I was already a student of Dawkins and Dennett, finding it a bit anticlimactic. I think their works were actually more groundbreaking, especially Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
 Clive Thompson: the rise and fall of dot-com foosball. Heh. Time was, whenever I joined a new company I would buy them a new foosball table. Did this four times. Not sure I would do it again - virtual foosball is not really a thing, right? I did find it great for team-building and breaking up a day sitting at a keyboard with a little activity.
 Berci Mesko on FDA regulation of AI/ML, "adaptive algorithms". This is going to be tough for everyone; the FDA regulates static systems and the processes for modifying them, in discrete increments. Regulating a dynamic process will be quite different.
Dave Winer: on reflection, it's amazing I wasn't killed in my teens. Heh. I have a great friend who was at one time a colleague, and another colleague asked him: "how have you managed to live so long?"
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Huh, checking the archive I see I recently passed 3,500 posts. That's kind of cool. It's not exactly a "round" number, 5 x 7 x 10 x 10, but it's round-ish. For those of us with 10 digits it's sufficiently round to mark a moment and trigger some reflection.
 Back in January I marked the new year by checking in after 20 years; at that time, I had made 3,406 posts containing 10,771 images, and 24,965 links, of which 912 were back to blog content.
All through that time, as I've enjoyed blogging, I've reflected on why it is fun, and come up with various answers, including introspections on what it means for something to be "fun". It's definitely fun to look back and see what the world was doing and what I thought about it at previous points in time. For example, three years ago the world was shutting down! A time of big change, and who knew what was going to happen.
 (This infographic from Visual Capitalist remains interesting!)
So what comes next? We have AI coming to the forefront, a big political divide which seems to be getting bigger, concerning financial news, and big social changes partially caused and mostly exacerbated by the pandemic, like hybrid work. It does feel like things are happening faster; we live in exponential time, for sure.
Anyway I'm going to keep blogging for a bit longer, and hopefully you'll keep reading. Cheers and onward!
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 So, the Ides are upon us. Did you know:
The Romans did not number each day of a month from the first to the last day. Instead, they counted back from three fixed points of the month: the Nones (the 5th or 7th, 8 days before the Ides), the Ides (the 13th for most months, but the 15th in March, May, July, and October), and the Kalends (1st of the following month). Originally the Ides were supposed to be determined by the full moon, reflecting the lunar origin of the Roman calendar. In the earliest calendar, the Ides of March would have been the first full moon of the new year.[3]
We of course know of the Ides via Shakespeare, who had soothsayer Spurinna warn Julius Caesar about them.
I've already had a terrible, horrible, not so good month, so the warning is late. Onward.
When you read about Chat GPT 4 and things like this, do you feel things are happening too fast? Jason Kottke notes Ezra Klein's use of the phrase "exponential time". There are more and more things happening faster and faster, it's hard to keep track. Best way I've found is to follow blogs as filters :)
 Reid Hoffman: Last summer, I got access to GPT-4. It felt like I had a new kind of passport. Huh, sounds interesting.
Powerline note: Biggest victim of SVB collapse? The Climate, of course. "What hasn't received as much attention is that Silicon Valley Bank was particularly important to the climate-tech sector. More than 60 percent of community solar financing nationwide involved Silicon Valley Bank." Hmm.
Scoble: Google should win everything. Are they victim's of the Innovator's Dilemma? Time will tell.
 xkcd: flatten the planets. "I don't know why NASA keeps rejecting my proposals to improve the Solar System." hehe :)
 Blackberry, the trailer. "Picture a cellphone and an email device, all in one thing." Supercool. Can't wait!
BTW, could YouTube be any more annoying? Just when you think they've reached peak cruft, they prove you wrong.
Onward, hope you have a good Ides!
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 Big trends in healthcare are wellness, consumerism, and wearables. These things come together in various kinds of monitors which you wear, which tell you, as a consumer, how well your doing. These include smartwatches, various bracelets, and rings, and a leading ring monitor is the Oura. I've had one for about eight months, and after eight months ... meh, not sure what to think.
Yes, I did register a 98 sleep score once, but I actually did not sleep for 10h 26m and honestly didn't even feel like it was a great nights' sleep after...
The Oura "works": insofar as it measures various vital signs and tracks them, and let's you view the result. Heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, etc. And it's comfortable, has reasonable battery life - charge about once a week, for an hour or so - and it's attractive (I have a black one). It sort of makes a statement: I'm wearing a smart ring, I care about my wellness, I'm hip, etc.
 I do wonder about the value though, on an ongoing basis. I can't say that anything the ring tells me has changed my behavior. It's more like I check the ring scores to see if they're right :) If you took it away from me I wouldn't fight hard to get it back.
There is a preventative medicine aspect to these devices; if something changes or goes wrong, you will know sooner and can alert medical professionals to take a closer look. That might be valuable. And if a physician wanted to see my heart rate history or something like this, then I would have it, and that would be valuable.
I'd say this is a transitional technology. Someday we'll have implanted monitors and they'll be more comfortable, more accurate, and more useful. For now, they provide a reasonable excuse for a blog post.
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 So, it's a wrap! The top ten mushers have finished, and the rest of the field are at various stages of making their way to Nome.
Congrats to Ryan Redington, 2023 Iditarod Champion, pictured at right with his lead dogs!
Here's the current situation, as seen by the flow tracker:
Following Ryan, Pete Kaiser opened up a lead on Riche Diehl for 2nd, and Matt Hall had a strong final run for 4th. Note Jessie Holmes run - he passed Kelly Maixner at Safety to finish 5th. Eddie Burke won the three-team race for 7th and also top rookie, outmushing Matthew Failor and Mille Porsild (who was top female musher). Wade Mars continued his late sprint to beat Hunter Keefe for 10th. The psychology for the remaining teams is interesting; with the top ten already in, many are taking long rests. At this point it's more about finishing strong than finishing fast.
At the other end of the field sadly Eric Kelly scratched at Shaktoolik, leaving a big group there "competing" for the Red Lantern. It might be a few more days before they make it to Nome. I'll leave the tracker running and you can check in on their progress.
With this post I'll end the 2023 Iditarod saga; here's an index of all my posts:
Just wanted to note an interesting story in GQ (!) about Dallas Seavey: The Saga of the World’s Greatest Dogsledder - and the Fight Over the Future of the Iditarod. The absence of Dallas and many other top mushers certainly hung over the Iditarod this year. Taking nothing away from Ryan - he beat Peter Kaiser, a former champion - the field was definitely much reduced this year, and sparked conversations about whether the race will continue in its current form.
Finally wanted to close with this pic, which captures the spirit of the race:
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 Do you have a stock "question you like to ask"? I do (but that's not it :); mine is "what's interesting?"
I've managed a lot of people over the years, and conducted a lot of one-on-one meetings, and it's good to have a way to get the conversation started ... :)
I asked DALL-E "create an image which illustrates the concept of interesting-ness; this is the result :)
I claim interestingness comes from surprise. We find things interesting if they contradict or modify our preconceptions, if they fill in the blanks between our defaults, if they expand our understanding, if they are unexpected. We are curious creatures and curiosity is that desire for interesting-ness.
Conversely, things which confirm what we already know are uninteresting. The expected is not compelling.
A related concept is attention. We give our attention to things we find interesting. Attention can be thought of as how we choose to spend time: We invest our time in interesting things.
For this reason, being interesting is a matter of communicating unexpected or contradictory things. This has to do with the audience; what do they know and expect. When you meet someone you don't know much about them and you have few expectations, so almost everything about them is interesting. As you get to know them better, their degree of ongoing interesting-ness will be related to their capacity to surprise you :)
I find the whole concept of interestingness to be quite interesting!
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 Happy π day! Although it was not a happy day for me, bad things happened, and I feel bad about them. Sigh.
It's also Albert Einstein's birthday, quite a happy coincidence (what are the odds? 1 in 365 :), so we might call it e=mc2 day, too.
Looking back through old blog posts, this was an eventful date for me in many years. Beware the ides of March!
 Wired: Pi is hiding everywhere. It does show up in a surprising number of places, in math of course, but also physics.
I like the picture - and it does contain a circle - but what does it have to do with pi hiding? Anyway.
Jason Kottke: kottke.org is 25 years old today and I'm going to write about it. "When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely." Jason was one of the original bloggers - a co-founder of the blogger service, with his then-girlfriend and later-wife Meg Hourihan - and continues to be a great one.
I had a similar epiphany 'round about 1998, when I joined Digital Insight. It's hard to express today how different it was in that world, with dial-up modems etc., to be able to communicate world-wide simply by sitting at a keyboard. It's not hype to say the Internet has been the single most world-changing technology ever.
 Retweet fatigue: Robert Scoble is an interesting guy, a former blogger (he used to work at Microsoft, and used to give those outside of Microsoft great insight into what was happening there), sometime vlogger (he was early and big into video), and now a prolific tweeter. But he's also a too-prolific re-tweeter. Following him is like drinking from a fire house. It would be so much better if he selected the most interesting tenth of all that stuff...
This is one of the great things about Jason, he blogs only occasionally, but when he does, it is invariably interesting.
Well: Open AI released Chat GPT 4. How interesting that their description of this incremental advance is "safer and more useful. Safer. So apparently there was some feedback that Chat GPT 3 was somehow un-safe.
Time and experiments will tell if they've deprogrammed some of the political correctness that was so grating in the previous version.
Harsh Makadia: I did GPT-3 vs GPT-4 side-by-side comparisons.
How long before someone asks GPT-4 to do the comparison? :)
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Welcome to day nine of the 2023 Iditarod; today we will have a winner, and unless something weird happens, it will be Ryan Redington, with 6 dogs left in his team! (the others have been left at checkpoints for the "sprint" to the finish...)
Congrats to him, that move to keep going right through Elim paid off. He's now through Safety and just a few hours from Nome:
note: predict times enabled, and sorted by predicted finish
I'm proud of the predict algorithm; it's had Ryan finishing in first at about 1:00PM today for several days. Looks like Peter Kaiser will outsprint Riche Diehl for 2nd. Matt Hall is solidly in 4th. And Kelly Maixner has pulled ahead of Jessie Holmes for 5th. Mille Porsild is in 8th right now, finishing her "8" in White Mountain, and the tracker predicts she will finish 7th, just ahead of Eddie Burke, who will be top rookie. The tracker predicts Jessie Holmes will finish 9th despite being the 7th to leave White Mountain. (Based on average speed and run/rest times.) And rookie Hunter Keefe with round out the top ten. This all will be fun to watch, early tomorrow morning...
Ryan Redington and team, in the Nome stretch
Heh ... from the Iditarod Outsider
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 Hi all ... hope you enjoyed bank run day! Fortunately we have the government to save us, whew. I'm pretty conflicted because I think the SVB collapse was bad governance, not our nor the government's fault*, so part of me would like to see them fail. But confidence in our financial systems is important too. Onward.
* government *are* responsible for inflation due to spending more than we create - Covid recovery, "inflation reduction" (aka infrastructure spending), etc., and that caused rates to go up, but bank managers should see these things coming...
Check out the shadow cast on Superstition Mountain, at right. How cool is that? And more than a little spooky...
 Vivek Ramaswamy posted this list of working groups at Silicon Valley Bank. Note the "Risk Group" ... focused on ESG!
So you look at this list and think, "should we [the federal government] bail them out?"
Brent Simmons: "The complaints about the time change have for years been worse than the time change itself." Heh.
Philip Greenspun: how did Jamaica get to be so dangerous? "When Jamaica gained independence in 1962, the murder rate was 3.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest in the world. In 2005, Jamaica had 1,674 murders, for a murder rate of 58 per 100,000 people, the highest murder rate in the world." Yikes.
 This is awesome ... and scary: Whole Mars Catalog: Golden Gate Bridge on Tesla Full Self-Driving beta. It's speeded up, which makes it scarier, but overall quite impressive. Can't wait to have it myself!
 David Burge on Forbes: it's the Sports Illustrated curse, for con artists. It's not easy being so consistently wrong!
Interesting: Facebook and Instagram are officially done with NFTs. They were never that engaged anyway; there's just no there there.
Tomorrow is Pi Day ... we'll see what else happens!
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Fairly recent posts (well last handful, anyway):
For older posts please visit the archive.
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