Take a vacation John Hawks. Please. You’re hurting my brain.

John Hawks, professor of paleoanthropology, writes one of my favorite blogs. He’s prolific. A recent vacation meant I’d fallen over 100 posts behind.

Today, a Bloglines UI flaw meant I accidentally displayed his past 100 posts. This is an unrecoverable error, I need to either scan them or give up on reading ‘em.

I could not let them vanish – I had to scan and mark those for future reading.

Mistake.

Too much knowledge … brain hurting … overload …

Stop John.

Take a vacation so I can catch up. My brain hurts.

Google maps adds inline skating directions ...

Ok, so technically they're walking directions ...

Google LatLong: Pound the pavement

.... Starting today, you can tell Google Maps that you want walking directions, and we'll try to find you a route that's direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them. Just get directions as you normally would. If you're going 10 km or less (some call this 6.2 miles), we'll show you a link that you can click to get 'Walking' directions...

If you're an urban skater, however, these are a good guide for skate transit. (When pedestrians are present, it's not hard to either use the street or stand aside while they pass.)

If you're a bicyclist, they're a tip-off to roads that might be pleasant to bicycle.

I fully expect Google to start integrating bicycle paths into Google Maps, it's the obvious next step and we know they have a lot of cyclists on staff.

The ideal of medicine - realized in mice

The goal of modern medicine is not to extend life. It is to extend wellness.

Sirtuin activators, enhanced versions of Resveratrol, can do that for mice:

Hoping Two Drugs Carry a Side Effect - Longer Life - NYTimes.com

...Mice on the drugs generally remain healthy right until the end of their lives and then just drop dead...

Yep, that's the medical ideal. The only caveat being that we'd like a month or so of disability, so family members get to say good-bye. Dropping over suddenly is not so good for families.

Ironically, since there's no FDA approval process for compressing debility, the goal of current Sirtuin drug studies is to show a delayed onset of some chronic condition. Of course compressing debility ought to do that, even if life itself does not lengthen. If nothing else, delay the onset of diabetes and osteoarthritis.

Alas, I'm a pessimist. I suspect we'll find that these drugs reduce the onset of some diseases, while increasing others -- probably cancers. Just a hunch.

Of course I might be very willing to personally trade a 3 fold increase in pancreatic cancer risk for a 3 fold reduction in dementia risk, but the FDA isn't set up to allow this kind of swap.

A great day for justice

Karadzic was arrested by Serbian police ...

BBC NEWS | Europe | Serbia captures fugitive Karadzic

... Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's most wanted men, has been arrested in Serbia after more than a decade on the run.

He has been brought before Belgrade's war crimes court, in accordance with a law on cooperation with the Hague Tribunal, the Serbian presidency said....

This is a great day for justice.

My interview with Jon Udell

Emily knows that when I received a podast invite from Jon Udell I yipped out loud. I’m a longtime fan of Jon’s writing and thinking; it’s timeless work. His writing from ten or fifteen years ago is still very relevant today.

The podcast is online. I’m going to make myself listen to it, though I have the not unusual aversion to hearing myself speak.

John … amazing Outlook hack (and why it matters) « Jon Udell

Although I’ve conversed online with John …. since my days at BYTE, we’ve never met, and we had not even spoken on the phone until last week when he joined me on an episode of my Interviews with Innovators podcast…

Jon interviewed me under my not-so-top-secret true name, rather than my John Gordon pseudonym. So if you follow the link you can learn the name I answer to.

The odd thing about the interview is that Jon’s voice and manner seemed very familiar. He writes as he is – curious, enthusiastic, smart, open, friendly and a pleasure to talk with.

We covered a bit of ground, so I’ve tagged this post with some of the topics we discussed.

How good are the FBI's genetic test matches?

We're read similar stories over the past few years...

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

...'The Los Angeles Times reports that an Arizona crime lab technician found two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles, so similar that they would ordinarily be accepted in court as a match, but one felon was black and the other white. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. Dozens of similar matches have been found, and these findings raise questions about the accuracy of the FBI's DNA statistics. Scientists and legal experts want to test the accuracy of official statistics using the nearly 6 million profiles in CODIS, the national system that includes most state and local databases. The FBI has tried to block distribution of the Arizona results and is blocking people from performing similar searches using CODIS. A legal fight is brewing over whether the nation's genetic databases ought to be opened to wider scrutiny. At stake is the credibility of the odds often cited in DNA cases, which can suggest an all but certain link between a suspect and a crime scene.'

The FBI's fondness for lie detectors and watch lists, not to mention abundant stories of incompetence over the past decade, gives them zero credibility. Not quite the negative credibility of the Bushies, but zero.

I believe they're guilty, and hiding their guilt. The testing is not as specific as they claim, perhaps because there crime labs are incompetent, perhaps because truly accurate tests cost more than they want to spend.

If we elect McCain, the FBI won't be reformed.

Post Mortem for a failed Silicon Valley startup

I was a part of a start-up that was technically successful (investors somewhat happy), but it really didn't meet our early expectations.

I had my own set of post-mortem analyses; I'm sure everyone else in the company had a different set.

So I appreciated a founder's review of a start-up that really did die: Monitor110: A Post Mortem, even though they probably have an element of self-protection in 'em. That's inevitable.

I'd heard one of 'em before: "Too much money." Counter-intuitive, but a common item in the post-mortems I've read and heard.

WALL-E's Starship Axiom is from Northern Minnesota

WALL-E's starship Axiom must have launched from Duluth.

No, scratch that, there are more non-white folk in Duluth than we see on the Axiom. Maybe International Falls?

It's a bit creepy. Fat and melanin deficient.

Antidotes to Data Lock: DataPortability.org and Document Freedom Day

My (lousy) experience with moving PIM (personal information manager) type data (tasks, notes, calendar, address book) from Outlook/Palm to MobileMe(ss), OmniFocus, Evernote and Remember The Milk have given me that lonely pioneer feeling. I'm even starting to miss my old Nemesis.

I feel the jaws of the Data Lack trap ...

Gordon's Notes: Software as service: watch out for Data Lock

Every method of selling software has its own Dark Side.

Microsoft's traditional model favored proprietary data formats (Data Lock), feature mania until competition died, then forced obsolescence every 2-3 years.

Ad-supported software has to get us to look at the ads. If we stop looking, it will get more and more obnoxious. Data Lock helps ensure we can't escape, even as the pain level rises.

Software as a service has technical issues (Gmail was down a few days ago - again), but, above all, Data Lock is a terribly strong temptation. At least on the desktop there are local files that conversion software might run against.

...while all three models suffer the Data Lock temptation, it's strongest in the "Software as Service" model...

I'm not completely alone though. Google not only supports Document Freedom Day, they've made some real moves towards data freedom. There's DataPortability.org, the cryptic microformats initiative, and good old OPML.

We need to push the "cloud" vendors towards the world of data freedom, or they'll make us nostalgic for the lost tyranny of Microsoft.

Update 5/15/10: Happily, we now have Google's Data Liberation Front. I have issues with Google, but the DLF is one reason they are lesser of all evils.

How did the "secret question" get out of control?

Recently I had to answer 4 "secret questions" for some investment account that controls a bit of our retirement.

Four.

All different from the usual "mother's maiden name", because so many people have hacked that answer that the questions have moved on.

Now they ask what model my first car was.

That will be hacked, and then I'll be asked a different secret question. Eventually some future AI will be able to reconstruct my entire life from hacked "secret" questions.

How did this get so out of control? When Schneier wrote this 3 years ago, I figured the stupidity would die off (emphases mine) ...

Schneier on Security: The Curse of the Secret Question

....It's happened to all of us: We sign up for some online account, choose a difficult-to-remember and hard-to-guess password, and are then presented with a 'secret question' to answer. Twenty years ago, there was just one secret question: 'What's your mother's maiden name?' Today, there are more: 'What street did you grow up on?' 'What's the name of your first pet?' 'What's your favorite color?' And so on.

The point of all these questions is the same: a backup password. If you forget your password, the secret question can verify your identity so you can choose another password or have the site e-mail your current password to you. It's a great idea from a customer service perspective -- a user is less likely to forget his first pet's name than some random password -- but terrible for security. The answer to the secret question is much easier to guess than a good password, and the information is much more public. (I'll bet the name of my family's first pet is in some database somewhere.) And even worse, everybody seems to use the same series of secret questions.

The result is the normal security protocol (passwords) falls back to a much less secure protocol (secret questions). And the security of the entire system suffers.

What can one do? My usual technique is to type a completely random answer -- I madly slap at my keyboard for a few seconds -- and then forget about it. This ensures that some attacker can't bypass my password and try to guess the answer to my secret question, but is pretty unpleasant if I forget my password. The one time this happened to me, I had to call the company to get my password and question reset. (Honestly, I don't remember how I authenticated myself to the customer service rep at the other end of the phone line.)

Which is maybe what should have happened in the first place. I like to think that if I forget my password, it should be really hard to gain access to my account. I want it to be so hard that an attacker can't possibly do it. I know this is a customer service issue, but it's a security issue too. And if the password is controlling access to something important -- like my bank account -- then the bypass mechanism should be harder, not easier.

Passwords have reached the end of their useful life. Today, they only work for low-security applications. The secret question is just one manifestation of that fact.

I think the lesson is that even when something is an "ex-parrot" humans will keep it propped up in the corner for a very long time. I used to follow Schneiers "random answer" technique, but then some sites started asking me both my regular password and my "secret question".

The idiocy of the "secret question" will never end.

Apple - with great power comes ...

Like the comic book said, 'With great power, comes great responsibility'.

Apple has the power now. Do they feel the responsibility?

Veteran Apple users celebrate Apple's rise, and Microsoft's decline, much less than the media might imagine. We remember that Steve Jobs has a history of what some might call "control issues".

Stories like this one remind us we love Apple best when their back is to the wall...

One Little Article - Inside iPhone Blog

...Unfortunately, we don't have An App Store, we have The App Store. The difference is exclusivity. With An App Store, software can be put on the iPhone through some other method. The App Store, however, is the sole way to get software on the iPhone. This leads to some major problems all around. Users who want software that Apple doesn't approve of can't get it, because it's obviously not listed by Apple in the App Store. Developers who aren't accepted into Apple's program, for whatever reasons, can't get on the iPhone at all and thus can't sell to customers. Developers who are accepted are still running into immense issues with updates, bug testing, and more. Ultimately, that's bad for Apple too, as it means those users and developers are unhappy and will aim their frustrations squarely at Apple.

Presumably, Apple has considered all this. If so, they've determined that they'd rather have complete control over the applications available on the iPhone than have more flexibility for developers and customers alike. I can see how this could be good for Apple itself - a dictatorship tends to serve the dictator quite well. I can't, however, see why developers would support it, nor customers...

Android, Please get well soon. We Apple customers need you give the gift of Fear to Apple.

The Economist's in depth review of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Outside of the obituary and Africa coverage, The Economist is a pale shadow of its former excellence. On occasion, however, it can rise to old standards.

A recent review of the American mortgage crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac | End of illusions, is the best I've seen. Of course it would have been even more impressive had they pointed out the structural problems a year or two ago!

With our newly enhanced vision, Fannie and Freddie look like a classic Ponzi scheme, effectively able to issue their own debt. Their ultimate downfall came when they figured out how to evade the last vestiges of old regulation by investing in mortgages they themselves could not hold.

The emerging consensus of the economists I read is that the financial markets are now in the biggest mess since 1932, however the rest of the economy is not expected to relive the great depression. On the other hand, the Economist article ends with a curious note:

... Perhaps it is no surprise that traders in the credit-default swaps market have recently made bets on the unthinkable: that America may default on its debt.

The pain is all in your head

Firstly, this excellent essay by Atul Gawande is a reminder of how cruel life can be.

Scratching through one's skull is an undeniable sign of way too much suffering.

Secondly, it's a story of how the understanding of perception is evolving ...

Annals of Medicine: The Itch by Atul Gawande for The New Yorker

...This may help explain, for example, the success of the advice that back specialists now commonly give. Work through the pain, they tell many of their patients, and, surprisingly often, the pain goes away. It had been a mystifying phenomenon. But the picture now seems clearer. Most chronic back pain starts as an acute back pain—say, after a fall. Usually, the pain subsides as the injury heals. But in some cases the pain sensors continue to light up long after the tissue damage is gone. In such instances, working through the pain may offer the brain contradictory feedback—a signal that ordinary activity does not, in fact, cause physical harm. And so the sensor resets....

The ideas aren't quite as novel as Gawande suggests. I recall fifteen years ago veteran physicians, with lots of experience with intractable pain and chronic fatigue, had begun to think the problems were "all in the patient's head". By which we meant, with intentional irony, that the problem was "malwiring" of the brain.

The good news is, the brain is plastic. We can't easily alter it directly, but we can slowly reprogram it through the mind. That's how the mirror-box therapies Gawande describes work, and presumably that's how exercise therapy works for chronic fatigue syndrome (albeit both imperfectly).

We'll get better at this 'rewiring by programmed experience' techniques, but we're also going to have to sometimes rewire directly -- with microfilament implants and with the grosser neurosurgical techniques sometimes used for intractable seizure disorders.

(original link via FMH)

Power boosted bikes for low cost, low carbon, commuting

Sci Am has a nice review of a $2,000 50lb LiOn battery power assist bicycle.

Recharge times are six hours. It's a pure assist system, there's no power regeneration. A computer controlled transmission system adjusts energy input.

I like this idea. It's not hard to imagine a $1,000 version in a few years better optimized for higher speeds (drop bars, recumbent design, etc.). A recumbent tricycle version with some shielding could make rain or snow conditions tolerable for the average reasonably fit person.

Development is active in Europe and China; but if our gas prices go to $8 a gallon we'll be doing development here too.

Giant has a web site view.

The 2004 national cholesterol guidelines have no clothes

A pending board exam has forced me to review the 2003 NHLBI, ATP III Lipid management guidelines. I don't see patients, so I haven't had to really contemplate these before.

They're not a pretty sight.

Ok, so they're not quite as bad as a naked middle-aged emperor, but they still hurt the eyes.

The problem is they try to reconcile two different risk models. One risk model attempts to stratify people based on their similarity to a large population study - the Framingham model.

Another risk model is based on different research data sets, and tries to estimate risk based on a changing set of predictive "risk factors", such as Diabetes mellitus, and family history of heart disease.

Problem is, those two latter two big risk factors weren't a part of the Framingham model. In fact the Framingham model doesn't incorporate LDL cholesterol directly, it estimates it from Total and HDL cholesterol.

The two models look like this (table stolen from my obsolete online medical notes, this part was updated):

Item	Risk calculation model	Risk factor approach
Age	x	x
Gender	x	x
Total Cholesterol	x
HDL Cholesterol	x	x
LDL Cholesterol		x
Smoker	x	x
Hypertension	x	x
Family history		x
Diabetes		x

The guideline writers try to glue the two models together in a way that seems logical, but they really don't work that well. For example (LDL level in this table is the level where the statins start).

LDL Level	Risk Factor	Framingham 10 yr risk
> 100	CHD or "equivalent"*	> 20%
> 130	2 + (ex. 46 yo male smoker)	10 - 20%
> 160	2 + (ex. 46 yo male smoker)	< 10%
> 190	Treat based on LDL alone.

I played around with the online calculator, it wasn't hard to create a plausible patient with a Framingham risk of < 10% but a Risk Factor Model if CHD equivalent (basically a healthy diabetic patient, the right answer is clinical judgment with a bias towards treating if either of the risk models meet criteria. So treat if column A + either (B or C).

We really need a single integrated model of risk, not trying to juggle and compare two different models that can give contradictory answers.

Of course it may turn out that this single integrated model doesn't lend itself to memorization, but needs to be implemented as an electronic tool. Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.