Strangely met in night: a blog I’ll never read …

A google search took me to a caustic discussion of a Hofstadter book:

The New Skeptic: I Am a Strange Loop: Gödel's Loop

…Continuing my review of I Am a Strange Loop, today I get to tackle metamathematics. Hofstadter tackles it too, and finds it rich in philosophic insight. Strangely rich, actually.

I suppose I ought to explain who Kurt Gödel is and why he is a hero of many, many nerds today (I am among those ranks). And that tale doesn't start with Gödel, so stay patient while I explain the background…

Caustic and opinionated, but interesting. I started to look at the archives. Should I grab this feed?

Then I saw the “links of note”:  national review, weekly standard, rush… savage … beck …

On closer inspection, the stranger in the night wears a necklace of human noses.

Backing slowly away …

Thank heavens for the link list – who knows what horrors I might have been exposed to!

Bayes theorem and the anthropic principle

Years ago I used to teach Bayes theorem to informatics grad students.

I was reassigned to other lectures though. Truth is, I had a hard time focusing on the boring stuff we were doing with Bayes. It just seemed like there was a deep weirdness about the Bayesian model of probability, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I was sure someone who understood it deeply would justify my queasiness.

Since then there's been a bit of a renaissance in thinking about Bayes. In Our Time even did a recent programme with a good bit of Bayes. Physicists are all over Bayes these days, and the Bayesian vs. Frequentist combat is out in the open (I knew this stuff was weird).

These days, I could assign students this essay to read:

PHYS771 Lecture 17: Fun With the Anthropic Principle

... So if Bayes' Theorem seems unobjectionable, then I want to make you feel queasy about it. That's my goal. The way to do that is to take the theorem very, very seriously as an account of how we should reason about the state of the world...

Of course that assignment might also shrink the class size ...

Apple fails the crisis test as MobileMess blows up

David Pogue is a sympathetic journalist, but even he has lost patience with Apple’s MobileMess flop. I hope Microsoft gets some kicks in, Apple clearly needs more pain.

In addition to seeing Apple’s executive failures in motion, we more education on how disastrous synchronization bugs can be.

Apple’s MobileMess - Pogue’s Posts New York Times Blog

… a strange note showed up on the MobileMe support Web site: “1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. We apologize for this service interruption and are working hard to resolve the problem.”

Now, even if 1 percent is accurate, Apple has 2 million .Mac/MobileMe customers. So that’s at least 20,000 people…

… For most of them, the e-mail features of MobileMe just don’t work. The online Mail program at Me.com shows up empty; mail you try to send from your e-mail program never goes out; and messages sent to you get bounced.

For a few, it’s a lot worse. “This morning, I woke up and turned on my computer,” wrote one reader. “Happily, it seemed that the MobileMe e-mail service was back up. However, a few seconds later, when my computer synced with .Mac/MobileMe, ALL of my e-mail — every single e-mail I’ve ever sent, received, and filed on .Mac — disappeared. Every e-mail file on my hard drive (in the Mail library) was gone. I immediately went to Me.com to make sure that all my e-mail was still saved to Apple’s server. It wasn’t. All of the mail was gone.”

Apple escalated her case and dedicated top technicians to it, for which she was grateful. In the end, however, they recovered only 43 messages. The rest are gone forever…

… MobileMe tech support, my correspondents tell me, is nearly impossible to reach; the recording says that the support team is “unavailable due to the overwhelming interest in MobileMe.” (Somehow I doubt that “overwhelming interest” is the problem.) When you do reach them, they’re apologetic but can do nothing to help.

…the real problem is how Apple is responding. For a company that’s so brilliant at marketing, it seems to have absolutely no clue about crisis management…

…This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”…

I wonder if people who’ve lost all their email have grounds for litigation. A nice class action suit might concentrate Apple’s mind. I also wonder how many of the victims are running an older version of OS X desktop (ex. 10.4).

Unlike Apple’s victims, I have backups, and I haven’t dared active Mail.app email synchronization. My trial account simply forwards any MobileMe email I get.

Apple needs to grovel, and they’re not good at groveling.

Right wing hack hit and run - caught by a bicyclist

Robert Novak, a cruel GOP hack, runs down a pedestrian and takes off.

That's fine of of course -- nobody should be walking. Problem is, he gets caught. Worse problem, the victim is a K street lawyer. Humiliation is, Novak's car is stopped by a bicyclist.

It's hard to imagine greater GOP humiliation than being caught in the course of crushing the weak by a bicyclist -- who's also an attorney. Emphases mine.

Novak cited after hitting pedestrian - Jonathan Martin and Chris Frates - Politico.com

...The bicyclist was David Bono, a partner at Harkins Cunningham, who was on his usual bike commute to work at 1700 K St. N.W. when he witnessed the accident.

As he traveled east on K Street, crossing 18th, Bono said "a black Corvette convertible with top closed plows into the guy. The guy is sort of splayed into the windshield.”

Bono said that the pedestrian, who was crossing the street on a "Walk" signal and was in the crosswalk, rolled off the windshield and that Novak then made a right into the service lane of K Street. “This car is speeding away. What’s going through my mind is, you just can’t hit a pedestrian and drive away,” Bono said.

He said he chased Novak half a block down K Street, finally caught up with him and then put his bike in front of the car to block it and called 911. Traffic immediately backed up, horns blaring, until commuters behind Novak backed up so he could pull over.

Bono said that throughout, Novak "keeps trying to get away. He keeps trying to go.” He said he vaguely recognized the longtime political reporter and columnist as a news personality but could not precisely place him.

Finally, Bono said, Novak put his head out the window of his car and motioned him over. Bono said he told him that you can't hit a pedestrian and just drive away. He quoted Novak as responding: “I didn’t see him there.”...

Novak is wealthy, but it's bad luck to run over a lawyer on K street and be witnessed by another lawyer. His best defense will be to plead dementia. He's on record as hating pedestrians, I bet he's not to keen on bicyclists either.

Update: Novak has a brain tumor. Which may explain a lot about why he hit a pedestrian, and why he behaved irrationally afterwards.

Data Lock: 661 MORE 3.1 documents keep me in 10.4

My guess is that MobileMe and iPhone 2.0 will never work properly with OS X 10.4.

So I need to upgrade my iMac to 10.5. I'm a little apprehensive because this is a PPC machine and I'm not sure how well behaved 10.5 is on PPC. Still it works well on my MacBook. Anyway that's not the real problem.

The real problem is that my ancient copy of MoRu tells me I've 661 MORE 3.1 documents on this drive. MORE 3.1 needs MacOS 9 Classic, and 10.5 doesn't run classic.

I looked at a few of my old files. There's a lot of knowledge in there I don't want to lose.

Inspiration and OmniOutliner Pro will open these as outlines, but both will lose presentation graphics. Brad Pettit's free XML converter will switch the files to plain text XML, and I think it might be able to process multiple files at once. Otherwise I can open each one and save it to another obsolete file format, or I can use CUPS-PDF to create a PDF output classic can see.

This is going to hurt.

Which is why I use Nisus Writer Pro as my word processor. The file format is RTF, and Word can read it. I'll transition to an Open Document Format in a year or two.

This is why I'm averse to adopting Evernote until they have an export tool.

Try not to avoid these traps!

Our communication and computing costs are comparable to our gasoline costs

A few people have commented on a blip in gas prices over the past few months.

Much is made of how gas prices are becoming a significant portion of many people's budget, reducing money for food, medicine and entertainment.

Less mention is made of rising communication and computing costs.

We recently did a quick back-of-the-envelope comparison. The sum of our internet, mobile, and landline costs is pretty impressive, and the mobile costs are going to take another big jump.

If we add in purchasing a $1,000 to $3,000 of hardware every year (average), plus software, services (MobileMess and probably 5-7 other recurrent service bills) and infrastructure costs, I suspect our communication and computing budget is larger than our gasoline budget (though smaller than our total transportation costs).

My sense is these costs are rising at least as fast as the cost of gasoline. Sure, so are the capabilities, but in general the capabilities don't have direct revenue attached.

It puts the gas price rises in a slightly different light -- there are many new expenses competing for the modern household budget.

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.