Gmail is getting better: new features

I've been very impressed and pleased with Gmail -- despite the significant privacy issues. It's true that my maximum mailbox is no longer growing (it stopped growing at about 2.6GB, so now I've used 17% -- if it were to stay at 2.7GB I'd run out in a few years), but Google is adding a lot of interesting new features. The new RSS/mail integration model is very interesting, especially given Google's disappointing standalone RSS client. Here's the current list. Note the use of Google Tooblar to integrate the desktop with the Gmail application suite (edits, emphases, comments mine):

About Gmail

• View your favorite RSS feeds right in Gmail as “Clips” along the top of your Gmail screen. Display clips from blogs, news sites and other online sources. Pick from the latest headlines, random popular feeds, or add any RSS/Atom feed you want. [Example, RSS feed that monitors email activity in a separate Yahoo "spam" account ....]
  
• When you get Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or .pdf attachments, you can view them as a web page in HTML by clicking the "View as HTML" link right next to it.
• Gmail automatically detects addresses and tracking numbers, and displays useful information for them alongside your messages.
• Virus scanning... [of course I'd imagined they always did this. Shame on me.]
• Export your Gmail Contacts and save them in a file for back-up or to use in another account or service ... [noble]
• Saves to ‘Drafts’ as you’re composing. Never lose a half-written email again. (huge)
  
• Google Toolbar ... Search your mail or instantly go to your Inbox from any web page with just one click.
• Google Desktop lets you search your computer for files, music, photos, chats, web pages you've seen, and now, your Gmail messages too. Even if you’re offline. [jf: so read access to Gmail repository when offline -- that's big. Too bad Yahoo Desktop Search is so superior to GDS.]
  
• Gmail contacts are pre-loaded in Google Talk.
• Customize the address on your outgoing messages to display another one of your addresses instead.
• Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X even supports plug-in development.
• Gmail now gives you over 2.5 gigabytes of free space (and growing every day)! [but mine has stopped growing]
• Rich text formatting
• Send up to 10MB of photos, works with Picasa
  
• Gmail now works with Picasa, Google's free
  
• Basic HTML view lets you access your Gmail messages from almost any computer running almost any web browser. Learn more
• Free POP access and automatic forwarding
• Move all your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in just a few clicks.

Cheating on Amazon: positive reviews are far more "helpful".

Amazon.com: John G Faughnan's Home

This doesn't quite rise to the Freakononomics level, but I've written enough Amazon reviews to see a clear trend. My positive reviews are rated as "useful' far more often than my critical reviews. This may represent human limitations, but it's trivially easy for persons associated with a vendor or retailer to downrate critical reviews and uprate positive reviews. I'd say this qualifies as cheating an a reasonably impressive scale.

Of course when I look at a product on Amazon, I always sort so the most negative reviews are the top. I find that the "useful" attribute is ... ummm ... useless.

PS. Amazon did not post my review of the Digital Rebel XT -- in which I mentioned the rebate directions were rather confused. I think Amazon is getting more selective about critical reviews of top selling items. That's another sort of cheating.

Intelligent Design - a simple voice of clear reason

Ahh. The sweet sound of Reason:

Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker - New York Times

... Derek Davis, director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor, said: 'I teach at the largest Baptist university in the world. I'm a religious person. And my basic perspective is intelligent design doesn't belong in science class.'

Mr. Davis noted that the advocates of intelligent design claim they are not talking about God or religion. 'But they are, and everybody knows they are,' Mr. Davis said. 'I just think we ought to quit playing games. It's a religious worldview that's being advanced.'

The NYT claims that the Intelligent Design mask is being stripped away. We'll see. Perhaps I've underestimated the American public ...

Philip K Dick - a primer

Metafilter has a nice intro to an extraordinary thinker: The Other SF Prophet Meat | MetaFilter

In the first essay Dick writes:

...The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?"

Schizophrenia and the increased attractiveness of the non-conformist

Why is schizophrenia so common? It's a terrible disease, yet it's quite prevalent. Why hasn't evolution selected against it? How can schizophrenia have any adaptive advantages?

A single small and probably unreliable study claims a correlation between schizophrenic traits, being "non-conformist", (they say "creative", but they aren't talking about inventors and scientists) and have more sexual partners. The implication is that a mild dose of schizophrenia is good for one's mating opportunities, and that's enough of an advantage to keep the genes around in the population -- even when a full dose is horrible.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Creativity Linked to Sexual Success and Schizophrenia

Psychologist Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England and his colleagues recruited 425 British men and women through advertisements in a small town newsletter and specialty lists for creative types. The researchers surveyed this group with questions designed to measure various schizophrenic behaviors, artistic output and sexual success, among other aspects of their personal history.

Results of that survey showed that people who displayed strong evidence of "unusual experiences" and "impulsive non-conformity"--two broad types of schizophrenic behavior--had more sexual partners than their peers did and were more likely to be involved in artistic pursuits, either professionally or as a hobby. Those who professionally pursued the arts had the highest average number of partners--5.5--compared to just over four for the less creative study participants.

... the finding, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), offers some insights into why schizophrenia, which seems to be passed from generation to generation and affects roughly 1 percent of people, does not disappear from the general population. In the study, even non-creative types who revealed an urge to resist conformity had more sexual success. In short, some of the traits associated with the debilitating mental illness can actually increase a person’s desirability...

There's something about this story that reminds me of how parasites spread themselves by altering their host's behavior. Could one think of a schizophrenia gene as a parasite that spread itself for altering host behaviors? Probably not, but it's a funny similarity.

The study is pretty slender stuff, but one can imagine several ways in which "non-conformity" might be adaptive -- even beyond more sex partners. It would be interesting if schizophrenia were the price we pay for keeping some non-conformists around...

When science is rejected: AIDS and the failure of South Africa

This is the saddest news I've read in some time.

BBC NEWS | Africa | Controversy clouds World Aids Day

... South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who has long been lukewarm over the usefulness of anti-retroviral drugs, refused to back their use.

In an interview, she said that anti-retrovirals offered no cure, and that she might use food supplements or traditional medicines if she became infected.

Logic, empiricism, and science are an integrated package. When Bush endorses teaching intelligent design in American schools he strengthens people like Tshabalala-Msimang. When republican senators exempt herbal remedies from FDA safety standards required for pharmaceuticals they strengthen people like Tshabalala-Msimang.

Whatever good Prime Minister Mbeki has acheived in his entire life, it will all be outweighed by the tragedy of his HIV policies. He will be remembered as a catastrophe for South Africa.

Global climate change, not global warming

Europe is unnaturally warm given its far northern latitude. Edmonton Alberta often hits 40 below, but Edinborough gets very little snow. The secret to Europe's wamth is a warm ocean current. That current may go away in the next few decades (extensive editing below, the article was badly written and/or edited):

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Ocean changes 'will cool Europe'

... Researchers from the UK's National Oceanography Centre say currents derived from the Gulf Stream are weakening, bringing less heat north.

Their conclusions, reported in the scientific journal Nature, are based on 50 years of Atlantic observations.

... The key is the Gulf Stream. After it emerges from the Caribbean, it splits in two, with one part heading north-east to Europe and the other circulating back through the tropical Atlantic.

As the north-eastern branch flows, it gives off heat to the atmosphere, which in turn warms European land.

"It's like a radiator giving its heat to the atmosphere," said Harry Bryden from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) at Britain's Southampton University.

"The heat it gives off is roughly equivalent to the output of a million power stations," he told reporters.

... "We saw a 30% decline in the southwards flow of deep cold water," said Harry Bryden.

"And so the summary is that in 2004, we have a larger circulating current [in the tropical Atlantic] and less overturning."

... Computer models of climate have regularly predicted that the North Atlantic conveyor may well reduce in intensity or even turn off altogether ...

... if it turned off completely, Europe would cool by perhaps four to six degrees Celsius.

... The findings will have resonance beyond the shores of the UK and Europe, as extra heat left circulating around the tropical Atlantic could have major impacts on weather systems in Africa, the Caribbean and Central America.

On the other hand, warming trends might make the cooling much milder. This is why scientist don't write any more about 'global warming', they write about 'global climate change'. Even if the world on the whole gets warmer, some areas may get far colder (Europe) even as others warm up enormously (Alaska). In other areas violent weather may predominate (more warm water in the Caribbean means more hurricaines ...). We have to be ready for anything, and everything!

Seymour Hersh on what's next in Iraq

Hersh is a very well connected old-world journalist. The kind of journalist Bob Woodward was once supposed to have been.

Here he writes about how the Bush administration will manage the withdrawal of American ground forces (there's not much doubt we're leaving -- we've run out of troops [1]): The New Yorker: UP IN THE AIR Where is the Iraq war headed next? by SEYMOUR M. HERSH. Interestingly it's not clear that Bush realizes how bad things are (emphases mine):

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

...“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”

....the fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would inevitably trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas, that war has, in a sense, already begun, and the United States military is being drawn into the sectarian violence. An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were “rounding up any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them.” The officer went on, “They were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shiites,” with the active participation of a militia unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier. “People like me have gotten so downhearted,” the officer added.

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.”

Bush believes God has a plan, and Bush has a role in that plan. Any resemblance to Jim Jones is purely coincidental.

[1] Anyone remember the original plan? We were supposed to have allies. Even before the invasion it was understood the modern US military is too small to occupy a nation. Of all the incompetencies I hold Bush/Cheney responsibile for, one of the greatest was treating France and Turkey as though they were inessential. A few billions to each migh have made all the difference. Instead the Bushies gave us 'Freedom Fries'.

Mars - ice, ice everywhere

If historians look back at our time, they will be puzzled by many things. One of the oddest puzzles will be the curious lack of interest in the stunning discoveries being made on Mars.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Radar sees ice deep below Mars:

Mars Express has become the first spacecraft to detect reserves of water ice beneath the surface of the Red Planet, experts have announced.

The Marsis radar experiment carried onboard appears to have discovered water ice 2km into the subsurface.

It is thought the greatest reservoir of retained water on Mars could be found beneath the surface, perhaps providing a habitat for microbial life.

... Underground layered deposits at the planet's north pole have an upper unit thought to be dominated by water ice. This water ice is believed to be nearly pure, with only about 2% contamination by dust.

Beneath this ice layer is a lower unit containing sand cemented with water ice...

... Chryse Planitia is thought to have been shaped by the outflow of floodwaters from the Valles Marineris region and other areas of the northern highlands.

The radar should be able to detect liquid water if it exists in that form beneath the Martian surface.

'We have found no convincing evidence of liquid water yet,' said Jeff Plaut, Marsis principal investigator at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The science team will begin using the radar experiment to search for liquid water in late December.

Emphases mine. I suppose Europe was the same way when the first reports came in of mysterious lands across the ocean. There was a lot going on and the ocean seemed very wide. It was hard to imagine what the future impact of the news would be.

I note the word "convincing". I wonder what Plaut meant. Late December is not far away ...

Ice or not, Mars has water. Lots and lots of water. If anything like us is around in a hundred years, it will live there.

Fundamentalism fun: open barrel, insert fish

If we weren't ruled by incompetent fundamentalists I'd resist the temptation to link this Skeptico post.

Skeptico: Putting the fun in fundamentalism

... My favorite has to be ... November’s post of the month:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

A powerful argument. Still, I’m confident that sooner or later scientists, working diligently, will locate and identify this external source of energy that provides light and heat to planet Earth. Quite a day that will be.

The site Skeptico refers to is: Fundies say the Darndest Things!. Caveat: the posting quoted here seems a bit too perfect. I wonder about a setup ... Not everyone posting on an fundamentalist web site is necessarily sincere. It might be hard for college kids to resist the temptation to see how far they could push the envelope and not get caught.

GOP will win on Roe. If they want to ...

BBC NEWS | Americas | US abortion rights in the balance?

Update 12/4/05: This was an accidental post, I'd meant to put it in as a draft and edit it later. Nonetheless, it (oddly enough) received a comment, which was quite well written. I recommend clicking the comment link and reading Pidgas' post.

I thought the BBC news article was pretty well done, though the title is misleading -- as Pidgas suggests. It's Roe vs. Wade that may fall in the next year or so. As I've noted elsewhere the growth of genetic testing, and the desire of American parents for genetically optimal children, will enure continued use of abortion across all economic, cultural, and religious groups.

The more interesting question is whether the GOP really wants to defeat Roe vs. Wade. I rather suspect they'd hate to win that fight. It wouldn't end abortion, but it would cause them a great deal of political misery as the abortion fight moved into the legislature (where it does belong).

On the other hand, I suspect the Dems have finally recognized that Roe is a fight they can't win. It's an albatross for the Dems and funding stream for the GOP; the best strategy is to sit back and watch the GOP go into panic mode as victory becomes inevitable.

Earth belongs to the bugs

To a first approximation earth is the world of the archaebacteria. To a second approximation it is the world of the bugs:

A Pair of Wings Took Evolving Insects on a Nonstop Flight to Domination - New York Times - Carl Zimmer

A little over 400 million years ago, their six-legged ancestors came out of the water onto dry land. They have evolved into an estimated five million living species - dwarfing the diversity of all other animals combined. Even if you throw in all the known species of plants, fungi and protozoans, insects still win.

Insects are also a success in terms of sheer biomass. Put all of the insects on a giant scale, and they will outweigh all other animals, whales and elephants included.

And insects are also ecologically essential. If all humans decided to leave for Mars, taking all the vertebrates with them, the disruption to life on Earth would be incomparably less than the catastrophe that would ensue if insects disappeared. Forests would probably collapse, rivers and oceans would be poisoned, and many other animals would starve...

Carl Zimmer's blog is fantastic, btw.

Google, privacy, and outsourcing Total Information Awareness

The NYT has an OpEd on Google's privacy policies. There are no surprises there; one should always assume anything done online is public knowledge. Only the very sophisticated have any privacy now, and even they may be tracked by textual analysis software that can match text to identity based on idiosyncracies of expression (and, presumably, of thought -- giving new meaning to the concept of "thought police").

In general, privacy is very 20th century. I tried to fight this, but eventually I realized this was a losing battle -- especially after 9/11. Humans lived most of our existence in small communities with very little privacy; that is the world we've returned to.

There was one slightly interesting point raised in the article, though in reality it has little to do with Google:

What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade - New York Times

The government can gain access to Google's data storehouse simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages. If the federal government announced plans to directly collect the sort of data Google does, there would be an uproar - in fact there was in 2003, when the Pentagon announced its Total Information Awareness program, which was quickly shut down.

This is not new, in fact even I've written about this over the past few years. The Feds discovered during the 90s that the best way to deal with inconvenient legislation was to route around it by outsourcing key functions; the FBI in particular outsourced many of their information gathering functions in the 90s. More recently, of course, our wonderous government has routed around inconvenient prohibitions by outsourcing torture. In the same manner Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness" didn't "disappear" (silly idea), it merely changed names and was outsourced.

Google isn't an outsourcing tool for the TIA project, but it the Patriot Act has made Google and other online services unwitting accomplices.

Will Americans' ever catch on? Not if the media continues to completely miss the real story. I'm saddened and amused to read of privacy legislation that targets government rather than corporations. Really, it's a total waste of paper.

If Americans did catch on, what could be done? We can't stop TIA now, privacy really is history. We could, however, make the corporations implementing TIA and other programs legally liable for errors. If we don't learn lessons of the utterly incompetent 'do not fly' list program, thousands of Americans will be injured by these outsourced program. We will then be living in Gilliam's Brazil.

The singularity and why you should be very nice to your children

Like most geeks, I have a bit of an interest in 'The Singularity' (insert appropriate theme music). I don't buy Kurzweil's thesis that we boomers will all be uploaded (Eternity plagued by the boomers? Lord help us all); but I can just barely imagine that today's children might live a lot longer than I will. So it was interesting to read this interview with Siggi, a German gentleman of roughly my age:

The World According to Siggi

Talking about immortality, do you think the information tracks we’re leaving online will be resulting in an infinite life of sorts? Or is this accelerating our decay and we’d fare better engraving our thoughts into stone?

Assuming the storage media won’t be failing on us, we’ll have many tracks be around for a long, long time. One day this will make it possible to reconstruct a person up to a certain point. Considering that you can only hope for many of the teen bloggers to never stop blogging. Paradoxically enough that’s the opposite of what you feel when you’re reading them.

I commented recently on Brin's blog that I thought a similar theme could be turned into a neat short science fiction story. Who would want to digitally resurrect a deceased boomer? Well, the boomer's children might be so motivated. So if you want your digital doppelganger to bear any resemblance to yourself, be sure to leave lots of artifacts .... :-).

Also, be nice to your children. To paraphrase an old Pat Benatar song: "Hell is for the parents of vengeful post-singular children". Ok, so that needs work.

PS. I think it's a part of Mormon theology that when one is 'saved', one can retroactively 'save' all of one's ancestors. Maybe that could be worked into the story ...

Freedom, China and a suggestion for young American -- volunteer editors

Kaikaisagirl of Harbin, China was reading Gordon's Notes (she'd searched blogs for English language comments on Harbim). She added a comment to my posting on the Harbin benzene spill. We've corresponded via the blog comments and recently she updated her blogger profile: Kaikaisagirl (she is). Her recent comments provide an interesting perspective on the 'new old world', China reborn (I edited lightly):

It's totally safe to post whatever I like in English on a foreign website ... I don't have the habit of writing a blog, especially an English blog. I have to try very hard to write an article readable to native speakers on an English blog site, every time I finish an English article, I find it flat and void :(

I'm raised in China; it's hard for any Chinese to have an excess interests in politics. A lot of people, like me, do care about what's going on domestically and internationally, but to be safe you can't become an activist in China...

... Harbin is not as bad as it sounds in the news, maybe it's because I live on campus. People have so many inconveniences without tap water. Although it will resume this evening, most of us still are skeptical of the water quality since benzene is difficult to get rid of -- and we don't trust the government.

I hope Kaikaisagirl is right that she can post these things in an English language blog. Reading between the lines it seems that one can be a bit of an activist in English outside of China.

Once upon a time (1982), in another life, I was peripherally associated with long forgotten minor Montreal based Chinese dissident movement called "China Spring". I have a vague sense, from then and now, that the Chinese government distinguishes between activism among intellectuals and activism that involves the masses. The former is sometimes permitted, but the latter is dangerous.

China is an exciting nation. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the challenges we and China face, particularly when America is led by incompetents. Still, words from Harbin cannot help but be encouraging. There is hope.

I hope Kaikaigirl does continue to post to her english blog. I've added it to my feeds. It's very hard to post in a foreign language; I wonder if there's a role in these types of international blogs for 'local language editors'; native speakers who could lessen the burden of english grammatical and stylistic quirks. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this evolve. It would be a real contribution that smart American high school students could provide, and it wouldn't look bad on a college application either.