Gordon's Notes: Proof that Google is mortal - Gmail Contacts: "The proof of Google's banality is the current version of Google Contacts, and particularly Google Contact Groups."Here's more. Picasa Web Uploader for Mac has been around for at least a year.
Interesting summary (but caveat below) ...
A Century of Flu Pandemics - Health Blog - WSJ
... There was the Spanish Flu of 1918, which this historical overview from the feds calls “the catastrophe against which all modern pandemics are measured.” Some 30% of the world’s inhabitants fell ill; there were an estimated 500,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.
The other major pandemics of the century were less severe. In the Asian Flu of 1957, some 70,000 people in the U.S. died. In the Hong Kong Flu outbreak of 1967, about 33,800 people died in this country.
Yes, those numbers are high. But consider this: In a typical year, some 36,000 Americans die of regular, garden-variety flu, and hundreds of thousands are hospitalized. Those are useful figures to keep in mind for a sense of context as the confirmed cases of swine flu continue to rise...
That's a reassuring number, but slightly misleading for several reasons.
It's worth remembering that influenza does kill a lot of people every year, but that shouldn't make us think that Hong Kong outbreak of 1967 was nothing special.
Via Ride Boldly: Alan Snel's: Let's Bust The Bike-Commuting Myths. The title is a bit misleading, it's a set of tips to mitigate common issues with bicycle commuting. Here are just a few of my favorites:
...3. It's too far
-- Try riding to work and taking mass transit home, then alternating the next day
-- Ride to a coworker's house and carpool to work......7. I have to dress up
-- Keep multiple sets of clothing at work; rotate them on days you drive
-- Have work clothes cleaned at nearby laundromats or dry cleaners
-- Pack clothes with you and change at work; try rolling clothes instead of folding...8. It's raining
-- If you are at work, take transit or carpool to get home; ride home the next day...
There were a few silly ones however ...
9. The roads aren't safe
-- You are at no greater risk than driving a carand
...Trips of 5 to 7 miles in urban areas take the same or less by car...
There is absolutely no way riding a bicycle on unsafe roads is as safe as driving in a car on the same roads. That's just nuts. Also, the 5-7 miles claim is only true in highly congested urban areas; where I live a 7 mile car trip is about 1/4 the time required to transit from door to desk (Ok, so Lance Armstrong results may vary).
Can't get enough news about the latest pandemic wannabe? The Wall Street Journal has your number: Swine Flu - WSJ.com.
I'm surprised it doesn't have a feed and tweeter. Maybe tomorrow.
You'd think after the SARS experience we'd have spent more money trying to figure out why the "same" virus [1] can be so lethal in some places (Hong Kong, Toronto) and so relatively benign everywhere else.
[1] One might debate if the word "same" is meaningful when applied to something as mutable as a virus (or a river, for fans of Zen).
Them’s fighting words …
Doctor Shortage Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals - NYTimes.com
… Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Finance Committee, said Medicare payments were skewed against primary care doctors…
“Primary care physicians are grossly underpaid compared with many specialists,” said Mr. Baucus, who vowed to increase primary care payments as part of legislation to overhaul the health care system…
“Grossly underpaid” is rather strong, especially from the chairman of the Finance Committee.
There is an elephant in the room of physician compensation. The primary care physician supply can be increased by paying these physicians substantially more, but it can also be increased by paying specialists substantially less.
There are plenty of applications for medical school, and plenty of physicians entering practice. If we really want a different mix, we can do that fairly cheaply.
The Netbook news has been boring lately. Lots of junky $500 machines running XP – viral fodder basically. Heck, that’s in range of a used MacBook. No news there, except that $25/machine XP licensing has torn a hole in Microsoft’s profit. Instead of making an insane profit they’re only making an obscene profit.
Things only get interesting when the crummy little buggers fall below $150. Anything else, short of a $250 5” diagonal iTouch from Apple, is boring.
So this report is interestingly only because it’s a marker of the drive to $150 …
Report: First Android Netbook to cost $250 | Crave - CNET
The Alpha 680, as the laptop is known as, is going through final testing at Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies, Skytone co-founder Nixon White told the site.
The Netbook uses a 533MHz ARM 11 CPU and sports a 7-inch LCD screen, keyboard, touchpad, and built-in Wi-Fi, according to the report. However, the Alpha 680's 2-cell battery will last only two to four hours while surfing the Internet, much lower than the expected 12 hours.
… manufacturers attempt to drive the price of Netbooks to around $200 or less…
The Alpha 680 will be quickly forgotten of course. The big one will be the Google branded netbook debuting at $180.
I’ve been looking for this one for a while, but turns out it was right in front of me, one of the first releases on my YouTube Monty Python feed ..
… "Oooooh, we used to dream of living in a corridor. It would have been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish [heap]. We got woken up every morning to having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us. House? Uh!"
"Oh, when I said house I meant a hole in the ground covered by a piece of twig. It was a house to us."
"We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in the lake!"
"You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road."
"Cardboard box?" …
Interesting lesson on memory. I remembered one of the four lived in a river, but it was a lake. I also remembered someone brushing their teeth with barbed wire, but that’s a complete miss.
Wonderful.
Update: There are references to other versions of the skit in the YouTube comments. So maybe there was a river and barbed wire somewhere ...
I’m not a fan of American pseudo-Christian marketarian fundamentalism. I do, however, sympathize with many of the priorities of parents who would call themselves social conservatives.
For example, we use their home schooling materials when our usually good but occasionally whacky public school fads fail our kids. We also appreciate their media reviews.
Consider Common Sense Media. They come across as pretty neutral, but I still suspect a social conservative undercurrent there. Where else, however, could I get a review like this one …
Hotel for Dogs Rating and Review For Kids and Families | Common Sense Media
… I work as an advocate for children who are coming from homes of Domestic Violence and I often take children to the movies when there is no school. After viewing the trailer the children decided it would be a fun movie to see (ages 8 & 12). I took them thinking it would be a silly pointless movie, only to find it was full of things that are all to real in my line of work. The children I had taken to the movies were recently removed from their mother and placed with grandparents, but have easily been those kids on the screen. I think the movie would have been great for "normal" happy children, but I wish somewhere in the previews I would have known the plot....now I know to check this site…
Exactly. By some miraculous intervention our #3 child (adopted) missed seeing this movie today. So, chances are, she won’t need emergency counseling. #2 (also adopted) was delighted by the film and appeared unfazed by a high-intensity emotional stress test for children with a history of personal tragedy. #1 is harder to read, I’ll have to watch how he does with it.
It’s not a bad film, even though they sure do yank the old adoption/abandonment levers that movie makers live for. It’s just a very tricky film for children with certain histories.
You don’t get that from typical movie review sites, but CSM has the key information.
Next time we’ll check CSM before we go.
My iPhone Wall Street Journal app means I read the WSJ for free.
The “free” is important. The WSJ editorial pages are blithering madness assaulting civilization and reason. If I were to pay for the WSJ’s excellent news pages, I’d be funding WSJ editorial attacks on my children’s future. If I’m not paying for the editorials though, I can get the excellent journalism guilt-free.
So I came across a moderately contrarian opinion on the usual descriptions of the Geithner bailout (emphases mine):
Why the Wall Street Bailout is Working - David Weidner - WSJ.com
Anyone who takes tea with friends will tell you: The parties are painless. It's the gossip that hurts.
In the same way, today's antitax, antispending movements aren't the problem, it's the dangerous misconceptions they spread about the government response to the financial crisis.
Their argument -- that huge tax hikes are coming or have been implemented to pay off bailouts for banking fat cats -- betrays a lack of understanding of the government's approach to solving the financial crisis. When protesters or critics complain about the $10 trillion-plus spent on the Wall Street bailout, you can understand how their estimates of the number of protesters in the streets last week were slightly, well, inflated.
The truth: No one's paying new taxes directly related to the bailout. And most of the government rescue packages offered to the banks have gone untapped or are being repaid…
… Make no mistake, U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for a lot of money. The government has spent or expects to spend about $2.4 trillion in the next few months to keep the financial gears moving. It's a stunning amount of money made worse by rage-inducing missteps such as the bonus debacle at American International Group Inc. and the initial lack of direction for the Troubled Asset Relief Program…
… If the economy does recover within a year, we'll have spent a lot to rescue the financial system, but nowhere close to the 14-digit figure flogged by tea party protesters.
In fact, there's no way the government will spend that much, because many of the 26 bailout programs aren't being used much, according to Federal Reserve and Treasury Department statistics. For instance:
Banks have tapped the FDIC's Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program for $297 billion so far. That's about 20% of the total $1.5 trillion allocated. This is the biggest of the government programs, and banks pay 0.5% to 1% interest for the right to borrow the money depending on how long they keep it.
During its first month, the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, has only financed $4.7 billion in consumer debt, far below the $1 trillion allocated. In addition, participation is declining with each new funding cycle.The Money Market Guarantee Program, aimed at insuring money-market funds against losses, hasn't spent a dime. It covers up to $3.8 trillion in money-market debt. This program is actually making a small profit, because participating funds are required to pay a fee.
Other than the stimulus bill, the program with the biggest outlay so far is the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. More than $570 billion has been committed, but less than $400 billion has actually left the Treasury Department. Like most of these programs, it's unclear how much of this money will be repaid, but most banks say they're either ready or capable of giving it back. If not, they have to pay a 5% annual dividend to the government. In just the first three months of this year, the government has collected $2.52 billion in TARP interest.
You get the idea. Most of these programs were designed as backstops and as proof that the government stands behind the country's private financial system. The government is extending its own credit line to banks until the private sector can repair its own.
Recovery, when and if it occurs, will render many of these programs obsolete. The actual cost to taxpayers will be either negligible or drastically less than the most dire forecasts suggest.
Of course, taxpayers stand to lose more if the economy worsens and the financial system losses deepen further. It's not hard to imagine a scenario in which high unemployment leads to bigger loan defaults, setting off a domino effect of lower home prices and bank failures. Americans have $2 trillion in credit-card debt, and banks are holding that, too.
If that scenario comes to pass, financial companies could tap every dollar of the government's massive credit line.
The International Monetary Fund on Monday projected banks world-wide will need an additional $875 billion in capital by next year to get reserves to precrisis levels. That means most banks will need to raise cash through the public and private markets -- or, failing that, from the government.
But potential losses aren't the same as real ones.
Our national debt already stands at $11 trillion. Most of that debt was run up in the last eight years, when government spending outpaced declining tax revenues. The Iraq war is close to costing the nation $1 trillion. Hurricane Katrina cost us about $110 billion.
We ran up a huge tab for our kids well before the bailout, but it's unlikely that such an inconvenient fact will be the talk of the next tea party.
This is in line with the DeLong line, and somewhat opposed to Krugman (though his concern is not so much that money is being tossed out, as that it is not being spent where it should be).
I’ve seen comparison made elsewhere to the vastly smaller S&L bailout. It cost much more than was imagined early on, but much less than feared. My hope, prayer and hunch is that we’re in the same ballpark.
The vast deficits our children will inherit will not be the result of government bailouts, they will instead be driven by bad policies (Bush/GOP) and demographics (aging population).
Incidentally, the solution to the American demographic problem is just north of Minnesota. Canada has pioneered the exchange of Canadian citizenship privileges for the economic output of the world’s top producers. The US could do the same; we just need Obama to keep making America a more appealing place to live. Health care reform will help.
Google Latitude inherits ideas from Google’s abandoned “Dodgeball” product. It lets you use your cell phone or computer to track people who’ve agreed to share location information. It plays some sort of role in Google’s chaotic/emergent/incoherent/diabolical social networking anti-twitter anti-facebook strategy.
Like Gmail SMS and Google Voice SMS and Google Talk messaging SMS it includes some … SMS, this time bundled with iGoogle (which I thought was iDying).
Ohh, and Google Profiles are in there too … somewhere (http://www.google.com/profiles/me). Profiles no longer have only numeric IDs like 113810027503326386174 [1], they can have vanity IDs too, like http://www.google.com/profiles/jfaughnan.
Phew.
Anyway, with Google Mobile | Latitude you can …
It’s designed for use on a mobile phone, but it can also work with an iGoogle gadget. I’m pretty sure it can be added to Gmail as well (where I’m more likely to use it) given the Gmail Lab widget insertion option.
On the computer I can manually specify my location ( the new IE Google toolbar will compute location for sites that have Wifi based on large databases of Wifi network locations [2]). On supported phones the location is dynamically update.
Emily and I share location now. Handy if her phone gets stolen! Her Blackberry Pearl doesn’t support GPS so it’s all cell tower triangulation.
On the other hand the iPhone still doesn’t support Latitude – months after we were told it was “coming soon”. Looks like the problem is a big one …
… Steve Lee, Product Manager for Google Latitude explained, "We have an iPhone version, working on that to make it available. One thing to note about iPhone version: The magical part of Latitude, even when it's in your pocket, it can report your location…It's not typical user behavior to pull out your phone out of your pocket and check in."
Lee continued, "On all those four platforms I mentioned, they allow applications from the background and multitask and report the location; and iPhone, that's not the case, and Apple just announced their 3.0 software and it appears that's still not the case. It's unfortunate for applications like Latitude…
I’ve no idea how this will all turn out. By the way, my money is on “incoherent” over “diabolical” for Google’s social strategy.
[1] Amazing how much stuff Google is breaking lately btw. The ID is still mine, but the original “sharing” URL is broken without even a polite error message. The current correct URL is http://www.google.com/profiles/113810027503326386174 vs. http://www.google.com/profiles/jfaughnan. Now that I’ve enabled the latter option searches on my true name (not John Gordon) include a link to my profile at the bottom of the results page.
[2] If that doesn’t unnerve you then either you have no imagination or you’ve already accepted the transparent society.
The defining moment - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.comMy personal lesson was a little different. I now have far less respect for confident experts and expert consensus. There's an empirical basis for this skepticism - a confident famous expert is less reliable than a random choice. (Technically, this rule applies to Mr. Krugman, who is both confident and famous.)...The Bush administration was obviously — yes, obviously — telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did — and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.
For me and many others that was a radicalizing experience; I’ll never trust “sensible” opinion again.
Cuddlin' With Evil / Obama shakes hands with people we're supposed to hate. Are we all going to die? (Morford)I know that anyone who attains the presidency must, by historical precedent, be at least half-mad.... Obama was the leader to watch because he did that most rare of things among major world leaders: He listened. More than that, he heard. More than that, he did not insult, demean, degrade, patronize, scold. He shook hands and spoke cordially with everyone in the room, including supposed 'enemies' like Hugo Chavez, a clever pipsqueak of an America-hating media slut who is zero threat to the U.S. but who normally dominates the TV cameras anyway, but who was so disarmed by Obama's effortless, high-road calm that he suddenly had no footing, no audience, no stage from which to bluster and spit. Go figure.
As reported by the Miami Herald:
"[Obama] listened with an extraordinary patience, and he was intellectually elegant in his responses." - Chilean Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez
"I can't recall a U.S. president who has sustained such an open-minded dialogue with the region." - Argentinean Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana
Naturally, all this articulate, respectful diplomacy means one of two things.
One: We are blindly kowtowing to all sorts of scummy, evil forces of the underworld and undermining America's godlike supremacy, and soon will be overrun by drug lords and baby rapists and fat, sweaty, cigar-chomping socialists who love to coddle baby-raping drug lords. This is known as the "Fox News angle." Also known as the "Hysteria Special," and also, simply, "The Limbaugh."
Option two: We are about to make extraordinary progress in the world, as we set a new tone of intelligent cooperation in our foreign policy, restoring much of the respect and international goodwill Bush so grossly destroyed, as we finally step back up to the adult's table, not as the domineering father figure everyone fears for his drunken, violent tirades, but as the kind of elegant intellect and influential peacemaker everyone wants to emulate.
That last thing? About emulation? I think that's the most potentially transformative thing of all.
See, we all know the idea of how Obama's raising everyone's game. It's barely 100 days in and already people speak glowingly of the Age of Obama, how the calm, constructive vibe he exudes like a beacon is actually changing people's everyday behaviors, redirecting our attention from violence and rancor and overconsumption toward something a little bit lighter, smarter, less fear obsessed, more respectful or even just simply nicer. The bastard...
Another reason to fear the cloud.
Google Calendar is getting slower ... and slower ... and slowweeerrrr.
It's barely useable on the web. Fortunately the slowdown doesn't affect my iPhone Calendar. It syncs via Google's exchange services, so any delays occur in the background.
Now I have a lot more events and calendars than most people, so hardly anyone will share my experience. Even so, this is important. The air is getting bad and the canary is going down. You may be next.
Why is Google's Calendar performance tanking?
I'm guessing they've cut back on their infrastructure spend. A reasonable choice in current economic conditions. Problem is, when a cloud company does this everyone is affected. There's no way to opt out.
So if I were a profitable company, for example, I'd be sharing the same pain as Google and other less profitable companies.
The Cloud makes everyone equal. Too equal.
Fear the Cloud.
Update 9/24/09: Blogger has an undocumented 5000 post limit. Prior posts cannot be searched or edited. Google has no fix four months after copping to the bug. Fear the Cloud.
183 - Paul Krugman - NYTimes.comMonsters.
... now no way to view the people who ruled us these past 8 years as anything but monsters. We had all these rationalizations of torture over the “ticking clock” and all that — then we learn, for example, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month...
