{ Honestly these AI tools are amazing, right? Even a year ago I would have Googled* to find a nice image of "Santa and his family out sailing", would have paged through about 100 of them, picked one, and then maybe even Photoshopped it a bit before posting. Now I just ask Grok or ChatGPT "draw a picture of me and my family sailing with Santa Claus" and poof it does it. If I want to tweak it ("add my nine year old granddaughter") it does so. The tool is so powerful... and it costs almost nothing. Incredible.
BTW no idea what that is under the tree ... our cat? A squirrel? A cat with a squirrel? ... but I like it. The sheer randomness of AI is one of its most compelling features 😊
* Google remember them? When we used to search for stuff, and we received a page full of links? }
keeping track ... in the archive ... check it out Checking in ... welcome to blogging in 2023.
I began blogging on Jan 1, 2003, so it's now been 20 years! Wow. Not continuously - as a quick peek at the archive will reveal, there have been gaps - but definitely more on than off. During that time I've made 3,406 posts containing 10,771 images. There are 24,965 links, of which only 912 are back to other content on this blog. (It would be interesting to determine how many of those links have died ... should be possible to do ... made slightly harder by the fact that some sites don't return a 404 when content is missing.)
At various times I've paid more or less attention to traffic; for some time now I have used Google Analytics, which is pretty good; it tells me I currently get about 500 unique visitors a day, who conduct 600 sessions, which average 1:32. So be it. This doesn't measure RSS and I actually think, based on the survey I just ran, that I get way more inbound from there than from search engines. I also get linked back from Twitter, where I post a link back to every new item; no stats on that, but I should dig deeper.
Hitting a new year means I have to roll over all those "this date in" links at the top of the sidebar - who knew I would someday have 20 of them! - and revisiting old stuff remains one of the most fun things about blogging. My flight feature gets a lot of use, at least from me (show me what I posted this day every year).
It's a little fun to remember all the stuff I used to do: frames (yikes), blogrolls (we hardly knew ya - but OPML lives on), blog roulette (pick two blogs from the blogroll and feature them), and lots of under-the-covers performance optimization from when I hosted this blog myself (it lives at AWS now). Just recently I got rid of another complication - I used to serve a skinnied down version of each page to robots (now they get what everyone gets).
And so onward in 2023 ... let's see what happens.
(Anyone care to guess whether I'll be blogging in 2043? Stay tuned!)
It's the first filter pass of the new year ... lots going on. Many (many!) year-in-review articles out there, and many (many!) what's-going-to-happen-next articles and posts, too. The big trends I see are 1) crypto is over, the pyramid is finally collapsing, and 2) tech investment has retrenched, we seem back to a more normal situation where good companies can raise money but bad companies (and non-companies) cannot.
Ars Technica: 10 best cars we drove in 2022. Eight of the ten are EVs, zero of them are Teslas, #1 was a Kia. Who would have thought?
A recurring theme in 2022 has been the governments' reactions to Covid. David Sacks retweets Elon Musk regarding Anthony Fauci. To me it seems likely that the Wuhan flu virus was synthetic, and accidentally escaped the lab where it was created for "gain of function" research. Sounds like a movie, and it stopped the whole world for a while.
Here's an interesting Tweet from Joscha Bach. I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia and never would have known this. Did you?
Taxprof Blog: The Myth of American Income Inequality. "Real income of the bottom quintile, the authors write, grew more than 681% from 1967 to 2017. The percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32% in 1947 to 15% in 1967 to only 1.1% in 2017." Economic growth has been a rising tide; all boats aren't lifted equally, but all boats *are* lifted. Definitely conflicts with the prevailing narrative, huh?
2022 was the year of many things, among them, SpaceX launches became commonplace, as well as their successful landings and subsequent reuse of boosters. Teslarati note their 61st launch of 2022 tied a 42-year-old record set by the USSR.
Panda's Thumb: Breakthroughs of 2022. "I consider a miracle to be something that I understand in some detail and know it is impossible, yet there it is in my hand for $200 – a digital camera, for example." He links Science: Breakthrough of the year ... the James Webb telescope:
BusinessWeek: How not to play the game. Yeah, the FTX collapse, etc., but there's a bigger picture, as this article points out. "What makes this problem so hard in a crypto financial system is that there are no economic fundamentals." I'm not sure there's an actual problem, there's just no there there.
Liron Shapira: So long crypto, thanks for the memories. This Tweet has been viewed 456K times. You should too, click thought and watch the video. It's dead on.
As a known "techie" my friends often ask me about crypto, and I've always said I don't get it. By which I mean, I know how blockchains work, but I don't understand how ICOs and NFTs and DAOs create value. And I still don't.
Brad Feld: What just happened. "If you're a fan of Harry Potter, think of 2022 as the sorting ceremony." He thinks 2023 will be like 2000. For crypto, it already is.
Definitely worth keeping in mind as we advance into the new year. Some things like crypto are passing fads, others, like AI, are new things which genuinely create new value.
Ands RealClearPolitics note: Chase the American Dream in 2023. "People across the United States share a positive and hopeful narrative about the American Dream. In 2022, most Americans said they either have achieved or are on their way to achieving the American Dream. Only a small minority, 18%, said it is out of reach. Notably, this trend was consistent across age groups, race, education, and income."
Just got back from the gym. First workout in ... I actually cannot remember. "I wish I hadn't made time to work out", said nobody ever. Onward!
Learning: Air Pods are amazing for working out.
Perfect call: VeloNews awards 2019 cyclist of the year to Mathieu van der Poel. Not only did this guy win races on the road, cyclocross, and mountain biking, but he was nearly champion in all three. And Amstel Gold, my goodness, the attack of the century.
Thoughts from the Ammo line (from Powerline): why free college is a bad idea. "The students have no skin in the game; the colleges have no skin in the game; and the taxpayers who are skinned alive have no say at all." Agree entirely. Subsidizing anything makes it more expensive.
John Saddington: On taking credit. "The cure, of course, is to just give away credit as much as you possibly can, all the time"
And the bookend: On Blame. "Most of the things in life are outside of our control and what we really are control over is how we respond to those things."
This morning I got up and [like everyone else on Earth] watched the Rose Parade. Wow. As usual the floats were amazing, the bands were great, and the sense of pageantry and tradition was strong. A perfect way to warm up for a day of doing nothing and watching football (and for a year of doing ... a lot).
As I was watching this - amazed and delighted - I couldn't help wondering about how this might be received by some of the other people watching this, people in other countries, other cultures, who might be astounded that we have so much excess bandwidth that we can worry about creating 100' long parade floats with surfing dogs. In order to promote a philanthropic organization that exists to spay and neuter pets, so we don't have too many of them. What a time to be alive.
Onward, into my day of doing nothing and watching football. I'm picking: Wisconson over Western Michighan in the Cotton Bowl, Iowa over Florida in the Outback, USC over Penn State in the Rose Bowl (sorry, Kevin), and ... Oklahoma over Auburn in the Sugar.
Bloggin' in the new year ... it's 2017, which means it is fourteen years since I started blogging, way back in the bad old days of early 2003. That means I get to add another "this date in:" link to my sidebar, and I get to add another row to the summary grid at the top of my archive. There you will find links to 3,282 posts. I can't believe how much time I've spent blogging, and yet... I can't help feeling that it was time well spent. It was fun, for one thing, and educational, and through blogging I've met many of you, some of whom have become good friends and a few even business partners. And I must confess I do like being able to see what I was doing and thinking this time in each year; I am probably the biggest user of my Flight link, which makes that vertical cut.
Weirdly and unusually, I have not redesigned my blog; it looks almost exactly as it did fourteen years ago. I was an early pioneer with drop shadows, image maps, a right-side nav, and a chronological archive. And may I say, my site has stayed fast; flat teeny compressed HTML, baby, with no client-side crap. I was also wrong about a few things; frames, we hardly new ya, blog roulette, cute but useless, and blogroll, no longer a thing (sadly). I do still have a cool, fast, simple search, and have held on to those greatest hits in the sidebar, although they don't get many clicks. I didn't get RSS at first, and even thought aggregators are not good, but soon saw the light; I continue to think RSS is amazing, and it enables me to follow over 200 sites and blogs every day; click my OPML feed to see what I see. And way back in 2009 I started Tweeting links, and echoing posts to Facebook.
So what's new for 2017? We'll have to see. I have no immediate plans to change anything about my blog, but I most definitely plan to start blogging again. I have a backlog of about 200 items to share with you, and will dribble them out among new things of interest. A lot of space stuff - it's been a good year for space! - and a lot of tech as usual, and of course a little social and political commentary, but I promise only a little.
(At right: This was NASA's tribute to Prince, after he died on 4/21/16)
Hi everyone, Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful December celebrating whatever you celebrate, and hanging out with whomever you hang out with. Yep, I did, thanks for asking.
I'm very busy with eyesFinder of course, the little visual search startup I started a year ago, but I'm slowly getting caught up on blogging. In addition to posting about all the cool stuff that's been happening - wow, more every day - there's all my opinions to share! Wow, more every day :)
The start of each year happens to mark my blogiversary, too. I started blogging on January 1, 2003, so I am now entering my thirteenth year of blogging! During that time I've made nearly 3,000 posts, incorporating over 9,000 images. I get about 5,000 visitors each day, mostly directed here from search engines, and serve about an equal number of RSS feeds. I'm always astonished by the amount of hotlinking that takes place*, and by the vast diversity of inbound links. Random message boards, Facebook posts, and Tweets form the bulk of the referrers.
* hotlinking refers to linking to images instead of the posts which contain them, a generally a frowned-upon practice, and I while I have hotlinking protection in place it doesn't seem to keep people from trying to do it anyway.
My most popular post remains The Tyranny of Email, which was posted a mere three months after I started blogging. It was linked by Dave Winer and subsequently slashdotted, and that early momentum has apparently kept it going. (That, and the fact that email remains tyrannous!) My second most popular post is IQ and Populations, and the third is The Law of Significance. All in the first half of my blogging career...
You guys might know, this blog began as a way for me to write a book called Unnatural Selection, about this idea:
Once upon a time the fittest, smartest people were the ones having kids. Their kids were fit and smart, and each generation was smarter than the last. But that stopped happening a long time ago, and these days, less fit, less intelligent people are the ones having kids. So their kids are not as fit and not as smart, and each generation is less and less intelligent. This is Unnatural Selection.
I never did write this book, although I think about it all the time. Maybe someday...
Over the years a few things have changed, but not much; my blog looks and feels pretty similar to the way it did back in 2003. I'm marking this blogiversary with a biggish change, at least under the covers; I've switched hosts! For the last fourteen years this blog has been running on an old Pentium 2 stashed in a closet, running RedHat Linux 7.3 ("Valhalla"). It's a rock solid platform and has served me well. Back then, it was rather unusual for people to run their own servers, and in the meantime it became quite common and then again rather unusual, as virtual hosting services have taken over. So as of today I am hosted at Amazon. Should be faster and more stable, and open the door to some new stuff.
Thanks to all of you for reading; this is an ego-powered blog, and if it wasn't for all you guys I wouldn't do it. Cheers and best wishes for a great 2015!
There's little doubt Amazon have changed the world; their are the canonical Internet retailer, as envisioned by Jeff Bezos twenty years ago, and have become "The Everything Store". But the thing they've really done is eliminate books. Well maybe not eliminate them entirely, but largely. How long has it been since you bought ... an actual book? Unless it has beautiful color illustrations or is really old and/or hard to find, there's no practical reason not to buy the Kindle version, right? You pay less for it, it will last forever, it takes no storage space, and you can read it anywhere, easily, on your Kindle, or your iPad, or even on your phone...
I prefer reading on my Kindle during the day, especially outside, and on my iPad at night (my Kindle isn't backlit), but I'm amazed at how often I end up reading on my iPhone. Standing in line at the store? Waiting for someone? Eating alone? I whip out my iPhone and poof! I'm reading. Maybe it's not the perfect experience, but it's quite good enough, and certainly beats the alternative; who carries a book with them everywhere, in case you have a few minutes to fill?
When the Apple iTunes App Store first opened for business*, there was soon a funny little saying: "there's an App for that". Which became somewhat jokingly, "your product, there's an App for that", as camera and GPS sales plummeted. Which became somewhat less jokingly, "your company, there's an App for that". Now we can say, "your industry, there's an App for that"; as physical books go the way of records and CDs and videos and DVDs and all other media content.
I'm eagerly anticipating becoming a Glasshole (getting a Google Glass :), and wondering what reading on a Glass will be like?
* Hard to remember now, but the original iPhones didn't have third-party Apps; it wasn't until Apple enabled this capability that smartphones truly took over the world.
I'm tempted to say a lot about 2011, but it's late, and I'm ... well ... let's just say I was at a friend's house and we celebrated with a little wine tasting. So maybe I'll just say best wishes to all of you for an amazing 2012.
We can't change the past, but we can make the future whatever we want it to be. Choose wisely!
And so it is a new day - of a new year - Happy New Year! Weird how marking a particular point in our annual trip around the sun causes us to take stock of where we are and where we're going… but it is so. Last year was amazingly eventful for me and I can't wait to see what this year will bring.
Do you make resolutions? I do ... and I have two this year, first, I'm going to sleep earlier, and second, I'm going to under-react to things. These are both pretty challenging for me I must tell you, and we'll see how I do. If I can do them both I believe this year will be [slightly] better than otherwise.
One of the joys of blogging is a personal record, and I was looking at posts from the end of last year, and it occurred to me; I had no idea whatsoever what 2010 was going to bring. I had some idea I had no idea however, because I wrote "the future is cloudy but bright". The song remains the same!
I had two resolutions last year - to spent more time coding, and to remain optimistic. I failed miserably at the first; I abandoned programming and spent most of 2010 wearing marketing and business hats. I succeeded at the second, however, and it was great; optimism breeds success and more optimism (and friends!) And I am most optimistic about 2011... onward!
And so I spent today as most New Years Days*, eating and watching bowl games with friends. I had so much chips, guacamole, salsa, tamales, chili, and Dos Equis that I can barely move. A perfect start to the new year. A bike ride tomorrow seems indicated. (Assuming I can still ride, which is in question :)
In the marquee matchup, TCU narrowly beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, a failed late-Q4 two-point conversation was the difference. (Arguably, a missed field goal in the first half was the difference, too.) It was well played and rather fun, but I had to invent a rooting interest in Wisconsin. Tell me again why we didn't have a Pac-10 team in the Rose Bowl? I get that Oregon is in the BCS Championship, but why couldn't Stanford have played Wisconsin? Blech.
This you must watch: The digital story of the nativity. Extremely clever and delightful. I love the "avoid Romans" checkbox in Google Maps :) thanks Jared!
[Update: yes here it is on YouTube! yay check it out 11 min... having watched it, I cannot imagine how this could have become a *German* tradition, but I love it... same procedure every year :]
* When New Years Day falls on a Sunday, as it will next year, the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl are held on the following Monday, Jan 2. In years past this meant the other New Years bowls also moved to Monday. The tradition began with avoiding a conflict with church (!), and has continued avoiding a conflict with NFL games. With the BCS Championship everything is all messed up and I have no idea what will happen. Stay tuned :)
Today I rode my first "ultra" of the decade, the PCH Rando 200K. I've done this ride in previous years, too, but this year they added some serious climbing; a total of 5,700' spread over 127 miles. Yikes. It was great fun. I managed to do it in 8:00 elapsed, 7:20 riding time, which is pretty good for that much climbing. Out of 70+ riders, I think I ended up fifth, yay me. I am completely blown and hobbling around the house, but very happy. There is no feeling quite like successfully riding an ultra...
the "teeth" at the 55 mile mark are the climb around Lake Castaic
routemap courtesy of the awesome ridewithgps.com
(note automatically generated profile)
a little excitement at 70 miles (Carpinteria), broke a spoke
was sure I would end up "tacoing" the wheel, but although it was wobbly it made it
thank you Mavic
the view of Santa Cruz Island, 20 miles offshore
the wild beauty of the ocean is a feature of this ride
obligatory shot of the space park at Point Mugu
nice tailwind here, but it was a headwind all the way back to Moorpark
at the finish
one tired puppy, could barely smile, but happy inside :)
A great way to start the decade. One of the best things about long rides is the think time; you are concentrating on nothing, your mind drifts, and it is such a luxury. My typical days are go go go always focused on doing something. Maybe that's why I ride? I can't say I solved all the world's problems, but I did at least contemplate them for eight hours :)
[Update: thanks to Bill for pointing out this New Yorker cover; that is exactly what goes on in my head while riding...]
I didn't ride yesterday; too busy eating and partying and watching football, but in 2008 overall I did manage 206 rides for a total of 7,577 miles. That's an average of 37 miles per ride, and 146 miles per week. Yay, me.
Looked at another way, that's about ten hours of riding per week, which is about 7,000 calories, or about 1,000 calories per day...
I'm pretty sure I could never get that much exercise any other way. I had to find something I liked to do - anyway - and in so doing trick myself into getting a workout. Cycling is not for everyone, some people like to run, or swim, or whatever... one thing for sure, it beats walking to the 'fridge :)
I've been thinking a lot about how to deal with Unnatural Selection. It's happening, and it's a problem, but the solutions are tough.
To review, there are three components to the birth rate of a population, 1) choice, 2) generation length, and 3) death rate. The solutions I've been focusing on recently involve making having children less desirable, so as to affect choice (having fewer kids) and generation length (having them later). Peer pressure among young women is strong; if you could make having fewer kids cool, that would be good, and if you could make having kids later cooler, that would be good, too.
I toyed with the idea of starting a meme that "having kids makes you less attractive". I don't know if it is true, but it isn't obviously untrue, which makes it believable. Still there is something distasteful about this message; I sense it might be rejected by women who are already mothers, including the mothers of young women, and that could backfire. (A lot of social mores are propagated by older women.) Also a lot of kids are conceived in the heat of a moment, without much prior planning; in such circumstances a consideration like "this will make you less attractive in the future" wouldn't have much weight.
The meme I like best right now is "the pill is cool". It isn't as distasteful as "having kids makes you ugly", and might even appeal to mothers of young women, as it has the virtue that it advocates something preventative. If a women is already on the pill, she doesn't have to be smart in the heat of a moment, or think at all; it will keep her from having kids regardless. There is a religious / moral objection in that going on the pill reduces the deterrent effect of avoiding a possible pregnancy. I don't know how strong that is, but I do know that if more young women went on the pill, there would be fewer unplanned pregnancies and fewer abortions (let's face it, abortions are really birth control after the fact).
Anyway that's what I'm thinking about right now... it sure makes working on the book more interesting to focus on possible solutions than to merely report a problem.
Well, it's a new year; the holidays are over... the tree was un-decorated and dragged to the curb, all our Christmas stuff was put away, the lights were taken off the house (once again I successfully avoided falling off the roof), the reindeer were garaged, and all the other signs of celebration were extinguished. Sad in a way, but nice to have it over with (if 'twere done when 'tis done, 'twere well it be done quickly). I was able to get in a nice ride today, Rockstore, done in a relatively sedate 1:56; the foggy cold weather slowed me down as did all the food I've eaten recently (!), but it was good to do it anyway. And I was able to think about work a little; today was nominally a working day but in actuality an extension of the holiday week.
Meanwhile, the world has started the new year, too...
One more link from the Economist's year-end issue: Why we are, as we are; a terrific example of how Darwinism can be applied to the problems of our day. I find it amazing that a mainstream publication like the Economist would apply these principles so freely, delightful, but amazing. This article could have been written by Daniel Dennett :)
Techdirt: On staying happy. "As we move into 2009, there are plenty of things to be worried about, but look around at what progress has brought to us already, and look at the trends and the obvious direction in which technology is taking us - there's so much to look forward to, it's hard to let any depression seep into the discussion at all." Amen. [ via Slashdot ]
Bet you didn't expect this: Music sales up 10% in 2008. Online single-track sales grew by 27%. All of the growth was digital, online. See!
BTW wasn't it excellent to see the Doobie Brothers at halftime of the Orange Bowl? They even looked good :)
I loved this Sailing Anarchy article about Ragtime's entry in the Sidney-Hobart race. In addition to being the coolest and only American entry, they won their class and came to the rescue of a fellow competitor during the race. Awesome!
IE market share drops below 70%. Wow, that's amazing. Who would have thought? But then again who would have thought Netscape would ever become irrelevant? Right now the darling is Firefox, but what's next, Chrome?
Rogers Cadenhead: The Sarah Connor's Great-Grandparents Chronicles. "Why does Skynet keep sending Terminators after Sarah Connor? Or even John Connor, for that matter? Why not go back a hundred years, or two hundred years, and kill her great grandparents?" I see a new show in development, a Western, maybe? I would be seriously interested in John Wayne vs the Terminator :)
I am still really enjoying the Industry Standard's video replay of Steve Jobs keynotes from Macworld. I love his remarkable focus on critical features, and his showmanship. And I continue to be struck by the amazingly rapid pace of PC technology. Ten years was a lifetime:
SFGate: The Wave Hunter... in the Potato Patch outside the Golden Gate.
"'As we approached [the South Patch], I remember hearing this really low rumble,' Raymond recounts. 'I looked up and there was this wave, a perfectly shaped Hawaii 5.0 wave, breaking a mile out from us. It was maybe 50 feet, 70 feet on the face, just Hawaii 5.0ing down the line,' he says. 'It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen.'" Wow...
[ via the Horse's Mouth ]
So Aperio had a good year, and celebrated by gifting each employee a spiffy new iPod touch. To say they have been well received would be an understatement. Right out of the box the iPod Touch is an amazing little device, with some great capabilities; I've enjoyed my little iToy quite a bit, and spent the New Year's weekend watching football and figuring out how to display big digital slides on an iPod touch, under Safari. (More on that if I ever get it to work :)
However did you know you can install third-party applications on it? Yes indeed! This helpful article explains how to do it – you end up with a fully functional iPod Touch which is also a computer with a new application called Installer, from which you can install various third-party applications. There’re a ton of games, utilities to change the look and feel, a word processor, a spreadsheet, graphics editors – you name it. There’s even an eBook reader and various eBooks available – including the Bible, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Godel, Escher Bach. (Heck, there’s even the apache webserver – yes, you can actually run a website from your iPod touch!) My favorites so far are Summerboard (which modifies Springboard, the iPod’s launcher), Mobile RSS, and iRadio, which lets you listen to Internet radio stations! The instructions are mildly technical and the whole process takes about an hour.
The term for modifying your iPhone / iPod in this way is called “jailbreaking”; a reference to the fact that as the device comes from Apple it is closed, or “in jail”, and by making these changes you make the device open, by “breaking it out of jail”.
Here’s what mine looks like right now:
Of course you don’t have to do anything – you can just enjoy it unmodified as a wonderful little device. But what would be the fun of that?
So Yahoo bought Flickr. These acquisitions are usually great for shareholders, sometimes great for employees, and rarely great for users. In fact, this is what not taking care of the customer looks like:
Isn't that special? Here's what's really going on; Yahoo bought Flickr, they tried to merge the authentication systems (for marketing reasons), and didn't think through all the possibilities. I am not trying to create a new account, I am not trying to access a Flickr account, I am simply trying to display an image. And if they think I am going to do anything at all to figure this out or fix it, they are mistaken. Kiss this user goodbye!
P.S the "= fail" is shamelessly stolen from uncov, one of my new favorite blogs, which irreverrently skewers startups that do stuff like this with the simple exclamation: fail.
Wow, the first day back to reality. The New Year has started. All the Christmas decorations are put away, the garland is thrown out, the tree is dragged to the curb. The lights are taken off the house (and it is windy - of course - maximizing my annual chance to kill myself by falling off the top of a 25' ladder). Sad, yet somehow invigorating. What will the new year bring?
One thing the new year always brings is retrospectives on the old year. And with the web and blogs, everyone gets their two cents in... you'd think we never had a year before :) Earlier I mentioned a few of the high points in tech, and the low point (Vista), but I should also have mentioned the tech enigma of the year, which is Twitter. Do you twitter? Do you know what it is? Do you care? My answers are no, sort of, and kind of. So many people think it is important, that I think it should be important, but I can't figure out why or if it actually is. An enigma to be sure. If you can shed light on this, please do.
National Geographic: Top ten photos of 2007. Way cool. My favorite is the cute little rare long-whiskered owlet at right, although the crocodile with the veterinarians hand in his mouth is pretty amazing. (Even more amazing, the hand was reattached successfully!)
As you know, if you're a Macist or simply a nerd, Macworld takes place in two weeks. This is our biannual chance to guess what Mr. Jobs has in store for the world (pun intended), and to appreciate superior demomanship. The 'net is alive with the sounds of speculation including new teeny Macbooks with iPhoneular screens (and touchpads) and of course the breathlessly-awaited third-party developer API for the iPhone. And there are other angles: Fortune discusses How to cash in on the Macworld keynote effect.
Malcom Gladwell is one of my favorite authors (Tipping Point, Blink), and a blogger, and he recently he wrote an article for The New Yorker about IQ and Race: None of the Above. He works hard to discredit IQ scores - leaning on the Flynn effect, for example - and makes some progress. The article wasn't accurate in all respects however, as Steve Sailer notes; in particular he completely missed the point of The Bell Curve, by Murray and Hernstein, that measured IQ correlates to many things. Why is it, when discussing The Bell Curve so many people fail to simply read the book? It's a good book, and even if you don't agree with all or any of it you should at least read it before criticizing...
So oil has hit $100 / barrel. [ via TTAC ] Is this peak oil in action? "Ira Eckstein, president of Area International Trading Corporation, says you ain't seen nothin' yet: 'This market is really gonna fly.'" At some point this is going to reduce consumption and increase incentives for alternate energy sources, both good things, but in the short term this is going to make everything more expensive and slow the economy, both bad things. Stay tuned.
Is it just me, or is spam getting worse and worse? Yeah, I didn't think it was just me. Computers keep getting faster, network bandwidth keeps increasing, and software gets smarter, but it is hard to think that this is sustainable. I could get 5X the amount of spam I get now and probably nothing bad would happen. (I get around 750 spams per day.) Maybe 10X, but that would be pushing it. Certainly 100X the spam would cause problems; at that point it seems likely my entire computing infrastructure would be doing nothing but filtering spam. And what about 1,000X? Yet there seems nothing to prevent spam from increasing without limit, since the marginal cost of sending it is [essentially] zero. I don't know the answer, but whoever finds it will make $big.
I haven't found any candidates I like for President yet, but on the eve of the Iowa caucuses I'm shopping. Glenn Reynolds linked to this video from Fred Thompson:
I watched it, and I must say I liked it. Not only what he said, but how he said it, and that he said it; a 15 minute video like this tells me a lot more than a 60 second attack ad. (That means you, John McCain, your negativity is showing...)
Coincidentally I found Glassboth on Digg. This is a little website that asks you what you think is important, and then asks you some "position" questions, and suggests the candidates you will like (from both parties). In my case, the best fit was - ta da - Fred Thompson, followed closely by John McCain. (I guess I've become a Republican!) Here are the results:
The biggest difference we have is over immigration. I strongly oppose a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, while Fred "opposes blanket amnesty programs, but [is] willing to consider allowing some illegal immigrants to earn citizenship without being unfair to those here legally." That sounds far apart, but I suspect we aren't really; earning citizenship is fine with me, too, as long as it takes more than showing up to earn it. My parents came to the U.S. from The Netherlands and earned their citizenship, and so I'm from Missouri on this one.
Related: Powerline reports No Buses Necessary. "A prominent canard in the debate over illegal immigration is the claim that, should we begin to enforce our immigration laws, we would be faced with the prospect of deporting 10 million or more illegals--an impossible logistical task, according to many pro-illegal immigration commentators. The conservative response has always been that no such deportation would be necessary; that if we enforced our laws, illegals would return across the border the same way they came." Absolutely.
Anyway it looks like maybe I'm a Fred Thompson supporter. I'll continue to monitor; it should be an interesting election...
I don't know what to say about the Tsunami news; it is just horrible. The death toll has passed 155,000, and will doubtless continue to climb... Australian Tim Blair has posted a great summary of the situation, including a gruesome scoreboard of the 7,000 tourists killed, by country. Amazon's donation counter for the American Red Cross now stands at $12.6M, from 157,000 individual donations. Wow.
Michael Dorf explains Why It's Unconstitutional to Teach "Intelligent Design" in the Public Schools. You'll have to read it, but the essential argument is that ID is not a scientific theory, and hence it amounts to teaching a particular religion's views. I think this is exactly right, ID is a religious view - even its cagiest proponents do not disagree - and as such has no place in public schools. [ via Panda's Thumb ]
Carl Zimmer discusses The Whale and the Antibody. "All of the living animals with an antibody-based immune system descend from a common ancestor, and none of the descendants of that common ancestor lack it. That means that the antibody-based immune system evolved once, about 470 million years ago." Cool. Now that's a scientific theory in action.
The New and Improved SETI, courtesy of space.com. "The new year is sure to be memorable, as glossy new instruments come on-line. Success in SETI depends on speed: how quickly can you check out large expanses of celestial acreage? Well, SETI is about to seriously crank up its speed, and metaphorically trade in chariots for jets." Among the new instruments is the Allen Telescope Array (pictured), which will have 350 antennae, each 20' in diameter.
The Economist: Meritocracy in America. "Whatever happened to the belief that any American could get to the top?" The problem is the point of view. This article and many observers assume that social mobility is the key to meritocracy. Instead, we have intellectual mobility. As our society has become more "efficient" at sorting based on skills, classes are increasingly stratified by intellectual standing. And since - wait for it - intellectual standing is substantially hereditary (whether generic or socially transmitted), this intellectual stratification is largely self-perpetuating. Both ends of the bell curve are moving away from the center. [ via John Robb, who notes "Societal ossification in the face of extreme global competition (from both economic and system competitors) is bad, bad news". But the good news is that the intellectual stratification effect is mitigated by immigration, and hence global competition actually works against it. ]
Josh Newman finds a terrific analogy to explain his new Long Tail Releasing project: escape fire. "As you readers doubtless know, it's far too late. We movie folks can't put out a fire so readily embraced by our customers. We can't even make it safely past some legislative crest. Instead, we have to use that same fire ourselves. Only by leveraging technology, by tearing down the assumptions about how the movie business works, about how movies make money, and starting from scratch, does a film company have any chance of making it through." I love it.
Check this out - the Quzzle. The Economist (!) says it is a "hard, simple problem". You just have to get the pink block to the upper right corner by sliding. It's simple. And it requires 84 moves...
When I encounter a puzzle like this, I give it ten minutes. If I can't figure it out, I write a program to solve it, which is more fun anyway :)
Of course if you get bored with that one, here's one called Super Century which requires 138 moves (to get the pink block to the center/bottom). I love the Internet.
Finally, here we have the homemade tank. Click through to watch a video of this thing in action; it appears to have some serious horsepower. I am not making this up. [ via Engadget ]
I just read John Grisham's The King of Torts. Now, I'm a Grisham fan, going all the way back to The Firm. This is his worst book by far. The setup is great, the characters are great, everything is going along - and then the book ends! What!? I was eagerly anticipating one of those patented Grisham plot twists, where he ties up all the loose ends in a nice bow. Nope. Skip this one.
Ever wonder how this happens? There's this artist you really like - author, musician, playwright, painter, etc. (or winery!) - and they are so consistent, and so great, and then suddenly it's like they just give up. They get bored or something and put out low quality work. How disappointing is that! Do they know? Or is it just me?
Check out this terrific speech by author Michael Critchton, given at Caltech about a year ago. He takes on "fake science" in many areas, including SETI, nuclear winter, global warming, and second-hand smoke. Really thought provoking - especially for those trying to figure out the Future of People :)
Mark Kleiman comments, including especially his thought that while models are indeed imperfect (as claimed by Critchton), they are important, as the future cannot be known any other way. As usual the truth lies in the middle; models are imperfect, and they are important. How imperfect or important depends crucially on the model, the timeframe, and the phenomenon of interest.
This is good news - U.S. to visit N. Korea nuke site. Not because we'll find something, or because we won't, but because any interaction with NK is helpful.
You knew I was going to link this - the Miss Digital World pageant is a beauty contest for digitally-rendered women. I love it! [ via Cory Doctorow ] My vote goes to Dr. Aki Ross in Final Fantasy.
Add Philips to the long list of vendors making "media hubs" for connecting home entertainment centers to PCs. It does video as well as audio, and includes a wireless networking adapter for your PC.
Meanwhile, up in space, NASA's Stardust space probe has successfully passed through the shimmering tail of the Wild 2 Comet, collecting dust samples and taking photographs in the process.
And tomorrow night the Spirit Mars Rover lands! It sure is great to have all this space exploration activity going on.
Hey, I want one of these! For auction on eBay, a Star Wars scout walker. Currently going for $19,000...
Matt Haughey writes users have figured out how to hack the Gateway connected DVD player. Notably, they're now able to stream DivX movies.
Jim Fawcette posts Challenge to Open Source, Innovate, Don't Copy. But Tim Bray thinks Fawcette Doesn't Get It. Read them both, you decide. Personally I think Open Source projects have an impressive track record of innovation. And the implication that Open = Free is misleading.
I saw LOTR the Two Towers today with my daughter Alex. Man, what a movie! Awesome.
John Doerr has written an interesting piece in the latest Red Herring, arguing strongly against requiring companies to expense stock options. During the past couple of years, as the momentum for expensing options has gathered, I've found myself ambivalent. One part of me thinks expensing options is "the right thing to do", another part thinks it would stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. John is a VC legend, and he makes a strong case.
Have some thoughts about turning over software? Please share.
Many of you are programmers, like me. One of the hardest problems we face is turning over software.
A big part of the joy of programming is the act of creation. Your code is uniquely yours, a work product which is intensely personal. It may solve a business problem or automate a tedious task or otherwise do something useful, but it is also a work of art, a personal creation. You know what I mean, I know you do...
But it is critical that someday each piece of code be turned over to someone else. Programs are not static creations like buildings, they are more like gardens. They have an initial plan and form and implementation, but they require ongoing care and maintenance, and enhancements. If you don't turn your code over to someone else, eventually you will spend all your time caring for your existing code, and you'll be trapped.
In order for programmers to be productive and happy, they must feel a sense of ownership. This is why when you turn code over to someone else, you have to give it to them completely - it has to become theirs. It is tough enough to work on code someone else wrote without feeling like it is someone else's code.
There are two things you should do to make turning over code easier on you, and easier on the new owner:
Finish it. Now no code is ever really finished, but it should be at some reasonable state of completion. Things should work, or at most there should be a well-defined list of bugs to be fixed. The code should be feature complete, or at most there should be a well-defined list of enhancements to be made.
Stay out. Really. Let the new owner be the owner. They must have the freedom to change things, even stylistic things that have no actual functional effect. It's like selling a house - you can't tell the new owners how to decorate. This doesn't mean you can't answer questions or be helpful, of course.
Note that one of the things is not "document it". I don't really believe in internal documentation. There should be copious and accurate comments in the code, of course, and you should turn over whatever specifications and user documentation exist, but writing new documentation for the purpose of turning code over is time-consuming and rarely helpful.
The turnover itself should be a well-defined moment in time. All the source should be turned over at once, if possible, along with whatever documentation exists, and along with bug lists and enhancement descriptions. Give the new owner a 10,000' roadmap - do this in person, interactively, at a whiteboard if at all possible.
If relevent or possible, build the code with the new owner, and go through a sample debug session. This gives them the end-to-end knowledge they'll need to actually "do" development. You might think it is simple - just a Visual Studio project to be built - but do it anyway. You'd be amazed at all the little things which come up during development ("oh yeah, that header file is in this directory"). Debugging is even more idiosyncratic. During the course of development, you figured out the best way to do it, and this is part of the campfire knowledge which should be shared.
It is good to identify some simple first tasks for the new owner to perform, to foster familiarity with the code and overcome the intimidation factor. Be as helpful as possible for these first tasks, and give the new owner as much credit for performing them as you can. You want them to feel a sense of accomplishment right away.
I've spent much of last year building some code which I'm going to turn over in the next few weeks. I'm not looking forward to it.
Hi everyone, Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful December celebrating whatever you celebrate, and hanging out with whomever you hang out with. Yep, I did, thanks for asking.
Over the years a few things have changed, but not much; my blog looks and feels pretty similar to the way it did 
There's little doubt Amazon have changed the world; their are the canonical Internet retailer, as envisioned by Jeff Bezos twenty years ago, and have become "The Everything Store". But the thing they've really done is eliminate books. Well maybe not eliminate them entirely, but largely. How long has it been since you bought ... an actual book? Unless it has beautiful color illustrations or is really old and/or hard to find, there's no practical reason not to buy the Kindle version, right? You pay less for it, it will last forever, it takes no storage space, and you can read it anywhere, easily, on your Kindle, or your iPad, or even on your phone...
I didn't ride yesterday; too busy eating and partying and watching football, but in 2008 overall I did manage 206 rides for a total of 7,577 miles. That's an average of 37 miles per ride, and 146 miles per week. Yay, me.
I've been thinking a lot about how to deal with 
As you know, if you're a Macist or simply a nerd, Macworld takes place in two weeks. This is our biannual chance to guess what Mr. Jobs has in store for the world (pun intended), and to appreciate superior demomanship. The 'net is alive with the sounds of speculation including 
You knew I was going to link this - the 
