Life in Web 2.0: just don't ask for reliability

I'd imagined that the most reliable service in the Web 2.0 world would be Google. This morning I tried to do some work with Google's industrial application deployment and domain registration service, mediated by their premier eCommerce solution (Google Checkout).

Of course, this is what I got:

Google Apps - Server error
Help | Sign out
Server error
We are unable to process your request at this time, please try again later.

Much has been made of the millennial generation's lack of concern about privacy. I think another remarkable generational difference is an expectation of unreliability, and a probabilistic strategy for managing unreliable systems.

Geezers like me, who remember when most performance was highly predictable, have more trouble with things that don't work -- especially when we're short of time.

Update: Later the process goes one step further along ...

Oops! An error occurred while processing your request.

TimesSelect: Free for a .edu address

Arrgghh. I just paid about $50 for TimeSelect:

TimesSelect University E-mail Verification

...We are pleased to offer a complimentary subscription to TimesSelect. You must be a student or faculty member with a valid college or university e-mail address to be eligible for this offer. You no longer need an access code to activate your TimesSelect University Subscription.

To start the process, please provide your school e-mail address below. If it is accepted, you will receive an e-mail from NYTimes.com with a link to continue your sign up process...

How will they distinguish academics from those with alumni accounts? I qualify as faculty, so now I'm just grumpy. I wonder if the NYT prorates upon cancelation?

Foreign Policy: latest addition to my blogroll

FP Passport is the blog of Foreign Policy, a political science journal. It's excellent. I've added it to my blogroll. (I'm still using Bloglines, but if they keep updating feeds unpredictably I'll try Google Reader.)

The Measure of Things

A colleague forwarded me one of those "interesting emails" which always seem suspicious. This anonymous message was interesting, though mysterious. It consisted of a series of images beginning with the solar system and ending with the star Antares. Once I cracked the mysterious file format. I started looking around to see if I could validate the content.

My search took me to a 2006 web page, but a very interesting faculty page (worth a visit) was probably the origin for the last 3 images (they appear relatively "home grown"). I suspect the email is based on the faculty page. A reference there pointed a physics simulation site as the original source for the first 3 images. I've attached all the images below, you can click on them to see larger images.

First, some order of magnitudes examples to warm up with:

Planck Length: 10**-35 m
String Length: 10**-35m (I thought this would be a bit bigger than the Planck length actually)
Neutrino: 10**-24m (Much smaller than a quark!)
Electron and Quarks: ? (10**-15 to 10**-18 to 0 -- the concept of "diameter" may not apply)
Proton: 10**-15 m
Hydrogen Atom: 10**-10 m
Water molecule: 10**-9m
Bacteria: 10**-7 m
Red cell: 10**-6 m
White cell: 10**-5 m
Limit of human vision: 10**-4m
Human: 1 meter
Moon and Mercury: 10**6 m
Earth: 10**7 m
Sun: 10**9 m
Arcturus: 10**10 m
Betelgeuse: 10**11 m (varies)
Antares: 10**12 m
Solar system: 10**13 m
1 Light Year: 10**16 m
Milky way Galaxy: 10**21 m
Quasar: 10**26 m (distance at time light was first emitted from furthest detectable quasar)
Visible Universe: 10**26 m
Universe/Multiverse: Unknown. Around 2007 some said 10**27, but more recent speculations are vastly larger (or infinite).

The span from the Planck Length (smallest possible distance) to the Visible Universe is a factor of 10 **61. On a log scale the mid-point is somewhere around the limit of human vision. In other words, there are as many 'scales of 10' between the smallest thing you can see and the smallest thing that can exist as there are between that wee thing and the universe. As Feynman said, there's a lot of room at the bottom.

So if we treat Earth as the measure of all things, let's take a look at some of the stellar objects in the mid-range. First, though, we'll take a look at the 'string' to 'hand' scale from (Seed magazine 2007)




Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury and the Moon
Earth is only a bit larger than Venus, but Mars is a relative pipsqueak. It's roughly correct to say that Earth is to Mars as Mars is to the utterly barren Moon.


Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus Neptune and the rocky runts of the system.


The Sun and its leftovers


Sun, Sirius, Pollux and Arcturus
Arcturus is about 25 solar diameters across.


Arcturus, Rigel, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Antares
Ten Antares, laid side by side, would span our solar system. An individual human is to Antares as Antares is to our galaxy.


Update 2/4/11: The universe is much bigger than when I wrote this.

Update 5/3/12: Now what we used to call the Universe is merely the Visible Universe, which is some infinitesimal fraction of the multiverse. This Scale of the Universe app (Flash, damnit) is fun to play with. There's a lot of nothing between neutrino's and the quantum foam. I had made some egregious arithmetic errors in my original post and I just corrected them.

The mystery of the apple keyboard

I took the kids to the Apple Store tonight, and did some email on a beautiful 30" display attached to a very powerful desktop machine -- and a completely miserable keyboard.

Why are Apple's desktop keyboards so lousy? Their laptop keyboards are reasonable, it's only the desktop kbs that combine great looks with miserable performance.

Oh, yes, I know, keyboards are personal and Apple's kb gets four stars on Amazon. Bah. Show me just one geek who likes that kb (excepting Andrew)!

If Apple were to combine the cosmetics of their cheapo kb with the functionality of $9 PC kb, they'd dramatically increase the sales of their desktop machines. Trust me on this. I'm sure large numbers of XP users walk into an Apple store, type, and figure everything about Apple must be as bad as the keyboard.

Maybe it's all a plot to sell more laptops ...

Another longtime reader abandons the Economist: Crooked Timer

I abandoned The Economist last year because it seemed to been infected by the WSJ Editorial Page brainworm. It wasn't completely demented, but it was getting there. So this CT post caught my attention. I'd love to know what Fallows thinks of today's Economist. He was writing during their glory years! (Emphases mine)

Crooked Timber: Cringe and whinge

I came across James Fallows’ 1991 piece on The Economist (to which my subscription has just lapsed), The Economics of the Colonial Cringe, and thought it pretty interesting. On the one hand, this seems a little dated:

In functional terms, The Economist is more like the Wall Street Journal than like any other American publication. In each there’s a kind of war going on between the news articles and the editorial pages. The news articles are not overly biased and try to convey the complex reality of, well, the news. Meanwhile, the editorials and “leaders” push a consistent line, often at odds with the facts reported on the news pages of the same issue.

If there’s any marked difference these days between the line touted in the editorial pages line and the perspective of the news articles, I can’t detect it. The WSJ seems to still have a firewall between the two (although in fairness its editorial pages are also far loopier than those of the Economist)...

I agree. The WSJ editorial pages read like meth fueled ravings of brains debauched by mad cow disease, but their news pages are excellent. The Economist editorial pages are only moderately prion infested, but the disease has spread throughout the "newspaper" (their term).

Senator Tim Johnson is recovering

Tim Johnson's survival following a December stroke (SAH) gave the Democrats the senate. Talking Points directs us to some encouraging photos from his website.

Senator Johnson's survival and recovery must bring immense joy to his loved ones, but it has also brought immense relief to America and most of the globe. Rarely has mere survival, much less recovery, been so important to the world.

Karl Rove and the one party state

Is Karl Rove the greatest threat to American democracy since the civil war?

All roads lead to Rove | Salon.com

...Two academics, Donald C. Shields of the University of Missouri and John F. Cragan of Illinois State University, studied the pattern of U.S. attorneys' prosecutions under the Bush administration. Their conclusions in their study, "The Political Profiling of Elected Democratic Officials," are that "across the nation from 2001 through 2006 the Bush Justice Department investigated Democratic office holders and candidates at a rate more than four times greater (nearly 80 percent to 18 percent) than they investigated Republican office holders and seekers." They also report, "Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops." Thus what the 85 U.S. attorneys who were not dismissed are doing is starkly detailed.

If the Democrats hadn't won the midterm elections last year there is no reason to believe that the plan to use the U.S. attorneys for political prosecutions -- as they have been used systematically under Bush -- wouldn't have gone forward completely unimpeded. Without the new Congress issuing subpoenas, there would be no exposure, no hearings, no press conferences -- no questions at all.

The replacement of the eight fired U.S. attorneys through a loophole in the Patriot Act that enables the administration to evade consultation with and confirmation by Congress is a convenient element in the well-laid scheme. But it was not ad hoc, erratic or aberrant. Rather, it was the logical outcome of a long effort to distort the constitutional framework for partisan consolidation of power into a de facto one-party state.

If his plan had succeeded, we'd have taken another large step towards a one party state, a state in which the GOP would transform the law into a means of suppressing dissent.

Rove. Cheney. Bush. There is nothing so dangerous as the righteous.

Friedman and the summer of war

Excerpted from a longer post, I particularly appreciated the zing on Friedman and the "summer of war" metaphor:

Egregious Moderation: Andrew Northrup on the Journamalism of Tom Friedman

... Of course, this is the same Tom Friedman who was telling us at the time that we needed to invade Iraq because we just had to kill some Arabs. We just had to, OK? Something about a bubble or something, too - you had to be there, man, it all made perfect sense. I know it seems weird now, man, but it was this magical time, like the Golden Age of Athens or some shit - The Summer of War! - when we all just knew we were going to change the world. All that stuff our parents told us about Vietnam and all that shit? We were just going to blow that away, man, just tear down their world and build it all up new, like better than ever, like nothing you’d ever seen before! Reynolds was the man, and den Beste was the brains, and everybody was in it together, for freedom and shit. It was great. And the music … well, the music kind of blew, actually. Nickelback was big. And the drugs were pretty crappy. No sex to speak of. But the blogs! Man, you shoulda seen the blogs! Outtasite!

And where are they now? Steven den Beste has stopped illuminating the great cycles of human history, and now writes exclusively about porny Japanese schoolgirl cartoons. Reynolds never got past that summer, never learned how to change with the times, and now he’s Kid Charlemagne. I don’t know what happened to Friedman - he’s behind the Times Select wall now, probably writing about globalization or whatever, or whatever anime den Beste was into 6 months ago. Funny how everyone grew up.

The past really is another country. I would like to bomb it.

The trajectory of some of these neo-con bloggers is noteworthy.

In a related post, a former neo-con invade-Iraq culture warrior blogger virtually flagellates himself and the world of the blogs. I'm ok with the his flagellation, but I think he should have limited his blog-attack to the ones he reads.

The "surge" turns into a prolonged commitment

The increased US troop presence has improved life in Baghdad (based on my reading of my relatively trusted sources). If it continues to do so, it will be sustained ...

WIRED Blogs: Danger Room:

...When the troop 'surge' in Iraq was initially being discussed, it was billed as a temporary increase in forces -- a matter of months. That never seemed all that credible to me. Now, 'the day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq' is owning up, recommending 'that the heightened American troop levels there be maintained through February 2008,' the Times reports. Count on an admission, pretty soon, that the surge is going to take a lot more than 21,500 troops...

I'm sure the experts knew the "surge" would become a permanent fixture if it seemed to be working, and a "surge" if it was failing. I suspect if it starts to fail it will again be called a "surge". It there are positive results though, we'll need many, many more troops. I wonder where they'll come from.

Breaking a network: first kill the cadets

I think there are lessons here for corporate downsizing as well as for fighting insurgents. If you want to destroy a cooperative, don't focus on the leaders. Take out the communicators that cross boundaries:

WIRED Blogs: Danger Room

... "Networks are hard to break," Lieutenant Colonel John Graham announced. Then he smiled and said he was going to show us how.

... there are three major vulnerabilities in networks:

1) Density nodes: people with many immediate connections, e.g. leaders
2) Centrality nodes: people with fewer immediate connections but who serve as crossroads in many relationships, e.g. financiers
3) Boundary spanners: people with few (maybe just two) connections but who span long gaps between chunks of the network, e.g. liaisons or messengers

Assuming your resources for attacking a network are limited -- and in the real world, they always are -- who do you hit? Graham asked. Using his own department as an example, he advocated killing just three of the dozens of members. Surprisingly, none were examples of density or centrality, since those were all situated in the meaty middle of the network. The network had enough redundant connections to quickly repair itself after their demise. What Graham wanted to do was hit the network where there were no redundancies, so all of his targets were boundary spanners. By taking out three spanners, Graham showed how you could isolate relatively homogeneous chunks of the network, rendering it stupider and less adaptive than before.

Funny thing is, the spanners in Graham's department's network were mostly low-ranking members such as cadets...

When corporations downsize, I suspect they get rid of a lot of their "spanners". Not intentionally, but because they don't know who they are. They then founder, but never understand why ...

More Dyer articles online - and 9/11 conspiracies

Dyer has several new articles online. Still no RSS feed!

Gwynne Dyer 2007:

February 19	Peter Pace's Choice
February 22	A Quick Fix
February 26	Blame the Iraqis
March 1	What's Wrong with Italy?
March 8	Loose Screws

The last of these, Loose Screws is required reading. It's about "Loose Change", a "documentary" film alleging the WTC was destroyed by explosive charges, not an airplane collision. Dyer is no friend of Bush, but he has no patience for this whackiness:

I cannot absolutely refute the lesser conspiracy theory [jf: Dyer doesn't believe that one either], but I find it extremely implausible. The greater conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is just plain loony -- and yet more and more people are falling for it in the West, where it was once the exclusive domain of people with counter-rotating eyeballs and poor personal hygiene. You cannot overstate the impact of a well-made film.

It sounds like another degree beyond the "JFK" movie. On the one hand I empathize with the impression of vast, powerful and mysterious forces moving the world, but if one abandons logic and reason there's really no stopping point. Maybe invading nanites from Betelgeuse blew up the WTC, or perhaps it was Satan's minions.

I wonder if we'll see even more of this sort of thing as the world gets faster, stranger, and more complex ... I like Dyer's conclusion, and the half-serious comment that the film's biggest beneficiaries are probably Cheney/Bush.

... In normal times you wouldn't waste breath arguing with people who
fall for this kind of rubbish, but the makers of "Loose Change" claim that
their film has already been seen by over 100 million people, and looking at
my e-mail in-tray I believe them. It is a real problem, because by linking
their fantasies about 9/11 to the Bush administration's deliberate
deception of the American people in order to gain support for the invasion
of Iraq, they bring discredit on the truth and the nonsense alike.

You almost wonder if they are secretly working for the Bush
administration.

Gonzales is gone: another man who knows too much

Rove won't wait for an impeachment trial that would drag in people like Harriet Miers. Gonzales is another man who knows too much. They'll find something profitable for him to do. Emphases mine, and congratulations to Newsweek!

Overblown Personnel Matters - Krugman - New York Times

What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an “overblown personnel matter.”

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats.

... One of the fired prosecutors was — as he saw it — threatened with retaliation by a senior Justice Department official if he discussed his dismissal in public. Another was rejected for a federal judgeship after administration officials, including then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, informed him that he had “mishandled” the 2004 governor’s race in Washington, won by a Democrat, by failing to pursue vote-fraud charges.

... We now know exactly why Mr. Iglesias was fired, but still have to speculate about some of the other cases — in particular, that of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for Southern California.

Ms. Lam had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. (Mr. Foggo was brought in just after the 2004 election, when, reports said, the administration was trying to purge the C.I.A. of liberals.) And she was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee.

...What we really need — and it will take a lot of legwork — is a portrait of the actual behavior of prosecutors across the country. Did they launch spurious investigations of Democrats, as I suggested last week may have happened in New Jersey? Did they slow-walk investigations of Republican scandals, like the phone-jamming case in New Hampshire?...

Krugman is my hero. Now we all want to know what Carol Lam had on the Mr. Lewis, former head of the House Appropriations Commitee...

Exercise and cognition - I'm still skeptical

I've been skeptical of articles purporting to show a relationship between exercise and cognitive performance. It's not that I don't like exercise (I love it), but I just couldn't see the evolutionary physiology -- and I don't have much faith in case-control studies.

Now I'm moving from more to less skeptical, but I'm still skeptical

Study shows why exercise boosts brainpower - CNN.com

... Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells [in response to exercise] in a brain region called the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that is known to be affected in the age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most humans.

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging scans to help document the process in mice -- and then used MRIs to look at the brains of people before and after exercise.

... They recruited 11 healthy adults and made them undergo a three-month aerobic exercise regimen.

They did MRIs of their brains before and after. They also measured the fitness of each volunteer by measuring oxygen volume before and after the training program.

Exercise generated blood flow to the dentate gyrus of the people, and the more fit a person got, the more blood flow the MRI detected, the researchers found.

"The remarkable similarities between the exercise-induced cerebral blood volume changes in the hippocampal formation of mice and humans suggest that the effect is mediated by similar mechanisms," they wrote.

"Our next step is to identify the exercise regimen that is most beneficial to improve cognition and reduce normal memory loss, so that physicians may be able to prescribe specific types of exercise to improve memory," Small said.

I'm still skeptical, but a bit less so.

It was a pretty small study, and it would be hard to separate the effects of exercise and sleep (since sleep improves due to exercise). On the other hand, it's almost plausible that a mechanism that evolved for muscle learning might secondarily benefit other dependent processes (such as recall) ... but it still seems fishy to me.

It might turn out that the benefit is a one time plus for people going from unfit to fit, and then it's done. Or it might turn out that you need to learn new motor actions to benefit, so for most of us taking up snowboarding would help but bicycling wouldn't.

If there is any effect, I'm betting it's small and that sleeping 7+ hours a night is more important.

On the other hand, if my dementia progresses any more quickly every activity will represent new muscle learning opportunities.

Canada and immigration: the undiscovered laboratory

My limited recollection is that between 1950 and 1980 the province/nation of Quebec switched from a theocratic government, devout Catholicism, an average family size of over 5 children, and economic dominance by an ethnic minority (anglo-english) to a secular government, a secular society, an average birthrate of about 1.7, and the relatively silent emigration of that ethnic minority (including me).

That's a rather impressive amount of social transformation, and yet I suspect it's not well studied. Canada is the "dog" of sociology -- a remarkable species that has been falsely assumed to be "ordinary".

Now another experiment is playing out. Canada is a wealthy nation with, compared (only) to the US, a relatively even standard of living with limited pockets of severe poverty and a relatively intact social safety net. That may be why it has a birth rate similar to Italy, Japan, or Denmark -- very low (of course then one might ask why evolution allows relative wealth and prosperity to end reproduction!). Unlike Japan, which seems destined to slowly fade away (Korea's birth rate is too low to provide immigrants and every other nation is too "foreign"), Canada has returned to its historic roots as a nation of immigration.

There's one key difference, however, between Canadian immigration and the US model. Canada has been aggressively managing its immigration stream, with an almost "eugenic" policy of selecting the most economically productive immigrants. This is why I believe Canada will not have a social security crisis. More below ...

CANOE -- CNEWS - Canada: Census: Immigration critical to Canada

OTTAWA (CP) — Two-thirds of Canada’s population growth over the past five years was fuelled by immigrant newcomers...

The country is on track to becoming 100 per cent dependent on immigration for growth...

... That point won’t be reached until after 2030, when the peak of the baby boomers born in the 1950s and early ‘60s reach the end of their lifespans.

... Canada’s net migration, per capita, is among the highest in the world. According to the OECD, Canada’s net migration of 6.5 migrants per 1,000...

Canada’s influx offsets a flacid national birthrate of about 1.5 kids per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 and just below the OECD average.

The United States, by way of example, accepts only 4.4 immigrants per thousand but has a fertility rate 25 per cent higher than Canada.

... A candidate for the ADQ in the Quebec provincial election was dumped by his party on the weekend after telling a weekly newspaper that native Quebecers need to “boost their birth rate, otherwise the ethnics will swamp us.”

... Ontario’s population... increased 6.6 per cent...

...Newfoundland, meanwhile, is on a three-census slide and has seen its population fall to a level not seen since the late 1960s.

Quebec’s population climbed 4.3 percent ... another slight decline in the French-speaking province’s overall share of the Canadian population. [jf: see comment below]

With the federal government poised to bring down a budget next Monday that is expected to reconfigure equalization payments to the provinces and address a so-called fiscal imbalance in the federation, population shifts are of critical importance.

... The census shows that Toronto remains Canada’s biggest metropolitan area, with 5.1 million people.

Montreal, at 3.6 million, and Vancouver at 2.1, were next among megalopoli...

About 35 per cent of Canada’s total population lives in these three metropolitan regions — and they attract more than 80 per cent of immigrant newcomers.

There's a lot here. The writer was careful to steer clear of the extremely sensitive, but inescapable, conclusion that Quebec's "ethnic Quebecois" population is in steep decline, with a birth rate, I suspect, comparable to Japan. Newfoundland is emptying out, rather like North Dakota and much of the American plains states. The nation is becoming very urban, though one should note that all of Canada's cities would fit into a single anonymous urban center in central China.

Canada is one heck of a laboratory. A future US president might learn from this.