The straw that broke my iPhone love

It is a small thing, by itself.

Unfortunately, it is just one more bit of nasty among so many more, and it's such a quintessential bit of Apple nasty.

The maximal interval for an iPhone Calendar alert is 2 days.

This is a problem. I need to be alerted of upcoming birthdays and certain other events at least 2 weeks ahead of time. That has been possible with all the calendaring software I've used over the past fifteen years -- except for the iPhone Calendar.app.

Now here's what makes this so perfectly Apple. The iPhone development team had dozens of examples to draw from, not least the original PalmPilot. They must have consciously decided to omit this feature. I imagine the team was proud of dropping a feature few people would use, proud of their minimalist aesthetic.

Ok, bad enough, but I'm used to that. I'm way off in the extreme tail of software users. There's very little I'm really happy with (Windows Live Writer, Gmail, and Google Reader come to mind). Apple's desktop iCal software reaks about as much as their iPhone app.

What makes this straw a back breaker is not simply that iPhone calendaring is pathetic, it's that Apple forbids alternatives. Even on OS X there are a few alternatives to Apple products, but on the iPhone only Apple can use the USB cable, and vendors are explicitly forbidden to distribute alternatives to Apple's core applications. On the iPhone it's Apple's Calendar.app, or it's nothing.

It's a bad story, and, short of a revolution in Apple's attitude, it's not going to get better. Astonishingly, the Apple iPhone and MobileMe have made me miss the old Microsoft.

So I've stopped recommending the iPhone to others anyone who needs at least PalmPilot 1994 functionality, and I won't be replacing my wife's BlackBerry Pearl with an iPhone.

Which brings me to the obvious next question. If the iPhone is a dead end, is their anything better?

Not yet, but I'm going to be watching the Android even more closely, and, I've got my fingers crossed that the Palm Pre will beat very long odds, and I'm watching for the jailbreak team to add a Calendar replacement that runs against Google Calendar.

Update 2/9/09: Google to the rescue? I feel for Nuevasync. The iPhone calendar app still sucks, but I can use the WebKit interface to Google Calendar to make changes.

Update 2/14/09: Saved by Google.

White house blog blows a rabbit ears post

Geez. This stuff really isn't so hard.

The headline on the White House Blog post today is: "A few more months of rabbit ears".

Problem is, they're talking about the analog to digital broadcast conversion. That's not a problem for those rabbit ear antennae. My 40 yo (design) rabbit ears work great with my digital to analog converter.

No wonder the American public is confused. Even the White House gets it wrong.

Long live the rabbit ears!

A shameful secret shared

A shameful secret ...

Was Kevin Costner's Waterworld an ahead-of-its-time eco-parable? - By David Zax - Slate Magazine

...  I might as well come out and say it: I liked Waterworld in 1995, and I like it now...

I liked it too.

Now you know.

Natural selection and executive compensation

Imagine a world of sterile herbivores.

No predators, no reproduction.

Some are better at running, some are better at calculus, and some are better at gathering food.

Now imagine we rank the herbivores by food gathering capacity and call the top herbivore the CEO.

In the curious ecosystem of modern capitalism, do we select for executives who's primary skill is the ability to gather money to themselves?

Ok, it sounds silly, but wait a minute.

We usually define the CEO by their alleged job function -- that is, to lead, etc. They need to get the most money because ... well, they're the ... you know ... the alpha.

What if we have it backwards?

What if the primary skill of the modern CEO is "money gathering" -- the ability to, by various means, gather the most money to themselves? Since we organize corporate income distribution by corporate hierarchy, what if it's primarily the money gathering skill of an individual that determines their corporate stature?

In this case, the best "money gatherer" would, almost be definition, become the CEO.

Trust me, there's something here.

Of course it's not that simple. "Money gathering" is a complex skill, and it's associated with other skills that are relevant to the role of "leadership". On the other hand, it's also associated with traits that are perhaps not so good for leadership, judgment and direction.

Natural selection, remember, isn't about being handsome, smart, or fast. It's the statistical process of finding a local minima. In the peculiar world of modern capitalism, and given the rule that the CEO makes the most money, it may also be true that the person who makes the most money is the CEO.

So maybe we do "select", above all, for money gathering capacity -- much to the detriment of other skills.

That would explain quite a bit, wouldn't it?

Update 2/11/09: A similar post of mine from 2004.

Death of a hero - Anastasia Baburova, a Russian journalist

I hope there is some comfort for this young woman's grieving friends and family in the Economist's obituary ...

Anastasia Baburova, a Russian journalist |The Economist

... In Turgenev’s poem “The Threshold”, a young woman stands before a door. A voice asks whether she is prepared to endure cold, hunger, mockery, prison and death, all of which await her on the other side. She says “Yes” to everything, and steps over. “A fool,” cries a voice from behind her. “A saint,” suggests another.

Fascism is alive and growing under the tyrant Putin.

As if the world, and Russia, didn't have enough to worry about.

The world needs a healthy and happy China ...

Unsurprising - the Party of Limbaugh doesn't want a stimulus package

This is not surprising ...

Talking Points Memo | Neanderthal Party

... 36 out of 41 Republican senators who voted to scrap all spending in the Stimulus Bill. All of it...

Including McCain.

Since Obama can't count on every Democratic Senator to be reality-based, he has a very tough road ahead. It's good he's good, but the odds are long.

Why am I not surprised?

The Party of Limbaugh has been denying reality for years. It wasn't just Bush who lived in another world, that has become the culture of his party. The POL is anti-science, anti-empiricism, pro-belief and devoutly Marketarian.

They don't reason, they believe.

Obama will do his best, but too much of a America is still the Nation of Limbaugh. That didn't end with his election.

Daschle and my pen collection

When Emily and I were residents, we thoroughly enjoyed our drug company dinners. Great company, great food, and, even then, the knowledge of a guilty pleasure.

It was wrong of course, and we went straight when we were in practice. Over time the primary care academies clamped down on the practice (though not on the "speakers fees" scam), and now even the pens and mugs are gone. It took years to run through all the pens we got in residency, but there's not much left of those days.

So I really had to laugh when I read of Daschle's life ...

Editorial - The Travails of Tom Daschle - NYTimes.com

... Like many former power players in Washington, Mr. Daschle cashed in on his political savvy and influence to earn $5 million in recent years, including more than $2 million from Alston & Bird, a law and lobbying firm; more than $2 million from the private equity firm, InterMedia Advisors, which provided the car and driver; and hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches to interest groups, including those representing health insurance plans, medical equipment distributors and pharmacy boards.

Although Mr. Daschle was not a registered lobbyist, he offered policy advice to the UnitedHealth Group, a huge insurance conglomerate...

The worst part is I'm sure Daschle feels he's incorruptible. Sure, feeble-minded family docs can be bought for the price of a pen, but Senators are made of sterner stuff.

I wish I was more confident that his replacement will be a real improvement. I don't think Obama is going to go for Howard Dean.

Update 9/15/09: Irony, sadness, and ambiguity.

The Obama-era CDC reaches out on the Salmonella infested peanut butter problem

I'm on some CDC lists, so I got this email today:

CDC - Social Media Tools for Consumers and Partners - Peanut Product Recall related to Salmonella Infections

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working together to provide important information about the recall of certain peanut butter and peanut-containing products that are associated with the recent Salmonella Typhimurium outbreaks.

The latest resource is the new HHS, FDA and CDC social media Web page at http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/, which provides many helpful tools in order to reach as many people as possible.

The social media site makes it easy to obtain automatically updated information on the outbreak and the product recall.  The site provides resources for both consumers and partners, including:

• Salmonella Typhimurium Outbreak Map widget
• FDA products recall database widget
• Updated mobile site content
• CDC Podcasts
• FDA Dos and Don'ts During the Peanut Salmonella Outbreak Video
• CDC Health-e-Cards
• And more!

Many of these resources are available in both English and Spanish.

Sign up to receive email updates when new information is added to the Social Media Tools page.

Information about the Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak and the product recall is also available at:

• www.hhs.gov
• www.fda.gov/salmonella
• www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/peanutbutterrecall/index.cfm
• www.cdc.gov/salmonella/typhimurium

Call 1-800-CDC-INFO (1-800-232-4636), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for up-to-date information about the recalls and hundreds of other health and safety topics.

We're in the Obama era now. It reminds me pleasantly of the days when Gore was reinventing government, and Federal sites were actually useful.

The FDA has been in desperate trouble for years; another gift from the Party of Limbaugh. The only bright spot in our latest food debacle is that the FDA is now receiving intensive therapeutic attention.

Buy.com: Queen of the named spammers

The Buy.com spam has been flowing in lately.  Amazing variety, amazing volumes. I'd blacklisted them a year ago, so I was a bit surprised. (See my personal blacklist of named spammers).

Turns out they'd gotten another email address of mine, probably scraped from the net, and their spam was flowing in from a new hole. I decided to submit a 'remove request' and see if they were any better behaved these days, but that just doubled the sewage.

So I've closed the new opening. Of course I'll never purchase anything through Buy.com. I'm disappointed that Google Checkout hasn't dropped them.

Conde Nast is the king of the named (public) spammers, but  Buy.com is a close second!

I hope they're not long from this world. Please avoid them.

Oddities of an unusual name

Faughnan is a relatively rare name, but, more interestingly, it seems to have a relatively recent origin in County Leitrim region of Ireland.

So two randomly selected Faughnans have a higher than average degree of relatedness.

Which is why I got a kick of out of searching the NYT archive on my last name (Gordon is my middle name) and finding entries like this one ...

faughnan - NYTimes.com Search

... John J. Faughnan, 67 years old, pastor of t. Rosalia's Catholic Church of Pittsburgh and a former resident here, died last night in Pittsburgh, according t ... Feb 28, 1936...

and

TROTH ANNOUNCED OF MISS FAUGHNAN; Napanoch Girl, an Alumna of ...
Announcement has been made of the engagement of Miss Kathleen Faughnan of the Hotel St. Andrew, ... Miss Faughnan has made her home with her uncle and aunt, ...August 15, 1937

Somewhere all the stories meet ...

Dad, why do they look weird? High def Botox ...

Once a year we assemble a pseudo-hi def TV for my 12 yo's Super Bowl event. We've improved on the old rig; the VRC am has been replaced with a digital to analog converter box. The rabbit ears are unchanged; they work great.

The rabbit ears and the converter box come up from the basement. My 24" Dell LCD comes down from the study. Audio goes to the shrunken amp that normally manages our AirTunes.


It's a pretty light setup these days. The D/A converter is a tuner as well, so all I need is my Dell monitor and our ancient rabbit ears (you can see them poking up behind the TV).

The image is pretty impressive. I don't know how it compares to real hi-def, but it seems way sharp to me. Of course I'm not the most discerning TV guy.

In any case, it's sharp enough for my son to ask why the blond talking heads look weird.

He's right. There's something wrong. Their faces don't move properly. They seem flat ... artificial ... frozen.

Welcome to the hi-def Botox syndrome. Creepy -- these people could definitely pass for androids. Well, there's always a spot on any future remake of Brazil.

Slashdot - why did the comments become worthless?

Eons ago, maybe eight years back, Slashdot was required reading for geeks. The commentary wasn't bad, the closest thing we had to the primordial pre-spam days of usenet newsgroups or the pre-Internet BYTE discussion forums.

I still read Slashdot, albeit once very few days. The articles are quite good. The commentary, however, is almost worthless.

On the other hand, the tech blogs I follow are terrific. The information flow is very high quality -- as good as anything. Particularly from single-author blogs.

I don't know the entire story about why Slashdot failed -- except I haven't seen significantly better quality discussions anywhere else. Single voices, for me, are better commentary and analysis sources than communities.

One clue might be that the comments I wrote for Slashdot were never very highly rated. Perhaps they were simply uninteresting, but the same fate seemed to apply to all comments not posted within a few hours of a news item. Slashdot effectively rewarded speed over all other measures.

I don't think an unfortunate rating system was the whole story however. I suspect that personal ownership (editorial control, strong identity tie) of one's commentary stream and extended memory will always be a key ingredient of any future system -- including future systems of federated journalism. Blogs allow that, community forums don't.

For Emily - Google's "potentially harmful" flub

This morning Emily told me that every local site was displaying a security warning.

I was mildly concerned that her browser account had been successfully infected, and was thus providing nonsensical warnings.

Looking at the history records though, the problematic URL was a Google interstitial message. Looked to me like Google was having a bad hair day. It was, and it made world news ...

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Human error' hits Google search

... Google's search service has been hit by technical problems, with users unable to access search results.

For a period on Saturday, all search results were flagged as potentially harmful, with users warned that the site 'may harm your computer'.

Users who clicked on their preferred search result were advised to pick another one...

When Google has a bad hair day, tens of millions of people worry. Maybe hundreds of millions.

Why we need a reformed GOP – protectionism in the Stimulus Package

At long last I can criticize my de facto home team. The “Buy American” protectionist measures in the Stimulus Package play to the weaknesses of the Dems – and populist Republicans.

Why are they so bad?

It’s not merely the hit on our economic productivity from our unilateral protectionism.

It’s not just the secondary effects of our trading partners playing the same suicidal game.

Those are bad, but they’re not the real problem with protectionism.

The real problem with a neo-protectionist global trade war is China.

Keeping China healthy, peaceful, prosperous, and engaged in a win-win world trading system is job one for any American administration. Forget pinworms like Al Qaeda, whack jobs like North Korea, Gazan plagues, and Putin’s follies – China is what matters*. If China goes down the tubes, and hundreds of millions of young brideless Chinese men become restless, our current problems will be small tubers.

Here’s what’s happening …

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: "Buy American": A Very Bad Move in the Stimulus Package

… Even economists who strongly support the stimulus package are dismayed by the protectionist measures contained within it.

"It looks like a very bad thing in the bill," said economist Brad DeLong, who worked on trade issues in the Clinton administration and teaches at University of California, Berkeley.

"Pressure from the Canadian government saying, 'Do you really want to do this?' is important."

Canadian officials have, in fact, been working behind the scenes to keep protectionist measures out of the economic stimulus package.

But they failed to stop the House version of the bill from including a provision banning the use of anything other than American-made iron and steel in projects funded by the stimulus package.

The Senate version of the bill would require that everything it funds use only American products.

The White House could try to convince the Democratic leadership to strip the anti-trade measures from the bill, both before it is voted on by the Senate and during the conference to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the bill.

If that fails, then Mr. Obama could issue what is called a signing statement saying the "buy American" provisions of the bill violate treaty obligations. That might effectively veto the measures

If there's little excess capacity in the U.S. steel industry--so that the price of steel is high enough to induce people to look outside for suppliers--then a stimulus won't be much needed. If there's a lot of excess capacity so that a stimulus is needed, then steel customers should be able to bargain prices down to marginal cost--in which case foreign producers will have an extremely difficult time competing on price given that steel is heavy and distances are great. "Buy American" seems mostly designed to allow the steel producers to collude and push their profits up--at the expense of American taxpayers.

Could Obama add a signing statement to the stimulus bill stating that the "Buy American" provisions conflict with our NAFTA and WTO treaty obligations and hence are void? I am not a trade lawyer, but my suspicion is no: neither NAFTA nor the WTO are self-executing, so any actions they call for or block are supposed to be implemented through duly passed acts of congress. Of course, NAFTA and the WTO are also treaties that are supposed to be kept.

If Obama did declare the "Buy America" provisions null and void in a signing statement, people could sue in U.S. courts to carry them out--and IMHO likely win. Then foreign governments could take the case to the NAFTA and WTO dispute-resolution forums--and IMHO certainly win. Better to strip the provisions from the bill now, or in conference.

A reformed GOP would be strongly against Protectionist suicide – and would listen to military advisers warning of the importance of a peaceful, prosperous China. Alas, the POL (Party of Limbaugh) is probably pushing this stupidity alongside the Dems.

* What about India? I have, maybe undeservedly, far more confidence in the resilience and health of India.

Human lifespan may not be easily extended

There’s been some guarded optimism among scientists that it might be possible to find drugs that slow human aging, and either extend lifespan (slow aging does not extend lifespan if you die young of cancer) or compress debility. A contrary opinion is that most humans operate near the limit of our biology, and that lifespan is largely randomly determined.

The reference for most of the drug studies are the known lifespan extending effects of caloric restriction. Known, that is, in worms, flies, some monkeys, and rodents.

Alas for the guarded optimists, caloric restriction may only work for humans who are fat (emphases mine) …

Restricting calories may not extend lifespan for everyone: Scientific American Blog

Scientists have long known that severely cutting food intake may lead to a longer life. But new research shows the phenom doesn't apply to everyone – or, should we say, to every mouse. A new study recently published in the online edition of the Journal of Nutrition found that reducing caloric intake only seems to prolong the lives of fat mice with low metabolisms.

"There has been this kind of settled paradigm that caloric restriction universally extends the life span of animals, [and] some have implied that it also applies to humans," says study lead author Rajindar Sohal, a pharmacologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angles. But he notes that he and his colleagues found that "extension of lifespan by food reduction will occur only if there is an energy imbalance [caused by a low metabolism]."

Scientists have known for more than 70 years that slashing caloric intake by an average of 30 percent to 40 percent extends the lives of animals as diverse as rodents and monkeys. But this effect is not seen across the board, according to Sohal. Some breeds of mice, for example, live 25 to 30 percent longer when their caloric intake is cut by 40 percent, while other breeds experience no benefit from shrinking calories.

Suspecting that metabolism (the speed at which calories are burned) might explain the discrepancy, the researchers compared the metabolic rates of two strains of mice: C57BL/6 mice, which are known to enjoy the life-extending effects of dieting, and DBA/2 mice, for whom dieting has been found to have no effect on life span. They found that C57BL/6 mice had much lower metabolisms than the DBA/2 mice, regardless of how much they consumed. C57BL/6 were also, on average, beefier. 

These findings suggest that calorie restriction does not have the same effect on every animal. In other words, going on diet won't prolong the lives of mice with high metabolisms (who are likely to be thin, anyway), but it could help obese mice with low metabolisms. Sohal speculates that humans will respond the same way, but notes that such studies aren't practical in people. "You can't put human [study subjects] on caloric restrictions all their lives," he says, but adds: "There is no reason why it couldn't apply to humans."

The next step is pinpointing the cause of these metabolic differences, Sohal says: "What I would like to know is, what are the specific genes that determine the difference in metabolic rate?"

Human obesity is associated with shortened life spans. So it may be that “beefy” humans will benefit from, say, Resveratrol, while skinny humans will not. One might even imagine that slow metabolizers who manage to stay thin will tend to age slowly and live longer.

Or not.

There’s a lot of marvelous science to be done, but investments in Sirtuin drugs remains highly speculative. Techo-optimists should not book their tickets to the 22nd century Singularity.