Goodbye to Discworld - Unseen Academicals

My Amazon review of Terry Pratchett's latest, and perhaps last, book:

Amazon.com: Unseen Academicals (Discworld) (9780061161704): Terry Pratchett: Books

There are two things to know before you buy this book. If you've read Pratchett you must of course by this book. Beyond the pleasure it brings, you owe it to the author.

The first thing to know is that the author is fading. Terry Pratchett has early onset Alzheimer's disease and is not expected to write another book.

The second is that this is not the Discworld book to begin with. There's no need to start at the beginning of the series, because you can enter at about any point and choose your own path. Still, don't begin here. Choose one from the early to mid-range and roam about a bit. Then, when the time comes, and perhaps with a glass of your potent beverage of choice, read this one.

Whatever your history, do buy this book now. Keep it on the bookcase, knowing it will be there when the time comes.

If you know the Discworld, you probably pre-ordered this book and have read it by now. For my part it was all the sweeter for being an ending. Standing alone it is not Pratchett's best work -- though is his best work is among the best of anything written. This work is fine enough.

The characters are more simply drawn than in his earlier books, the narrative more linear, the allegory less subtle. He has a lot of ground to cover, a lot of people to say goodbye to, and he's racing the clock. In the end I think he felt like Vetinari, who abhors slavery and carries the world on his shoulders. He has set his people free, and left their world as ordered as it might be. Glenda and Nutt shall have to take it from here ...

If by some miracle there is a future book, perhaps written from Terry's notes or with his help, I'd nominate Neil Gaiman. We haven't yet said goodbye to the Witches, and Pastor Oats came of their world.

Update: In comments Curt referred me to a Paul Kidby "blog" telling us that Pratchett is making good progress on a new Tiffany Aching (Discworld, witches part) book:

... On the up side, the progress on I Shall Wear Midnight is rapid, thanks to Dragon Dictate and rather more to the guys at TalkingPoint - the front end that makes it much easier to use - who made contact with me through this very page. I'm so impressed by it, that if my typing ability came back overnight, I would continue to use it...

Sometimes it's quite agreeable to be (most likely) wrong. I shall be buying Midnight when it comes out. Kidby's site reminds me of Gwynne Dyer's web page. It's resolutely low tech and feed free (oddly, Kidby once had a feed!)

By the way, looking at photos from Kidby's site, I'm reminded that the US hardcover edition has a ridiculous cover. It makes it look like UU is playing basketball. The UK cover is far better in every way.

See also:

• Vernor Vinge likes Pratchett: (it was only 2 years ago that I started reading Pratchett!)
• Terry Pratchett and Google Book Library with local library link
• Sir Terry Pratchett

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Contribute your Google Data Liberation suggestions

Google's esteemed data freedom team accepts suggestions through the Google Data Liberation moderator forum.

Please vote on the items you like and add suggestions. This team is one of the reasons I serve the Lord Google.

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My latest take on Twitter

A while ago a friend asked me to explain Twitter to him. I've been giving it some thought since, today I posted my most current thoughts in response to a blog post telling us that Robert Scoble's "Replacing Google Reader with Twitter is Nuts". I wrote (the following has been modified slightly from the original) ...

Twitter is a publisher and subscriber. As a publisher it broadcasts short SMS -compliant strings to any interested subscriber. It is a uniquely good fit to pre-2008 mobile phones technology.

I think of Twitter as a curious pub/sub (feed) technology that emerged because of the limitations of early 21st century mobile phones, the bizarre pricing of American SMS and MMS messaging, email spam, and the asymmetry of early PubSub technology (strong sub as in Google Reader, weak pub as in amazingly feeble blog authoring tools with one now ailing exception).

Most of those curious technological limitations are going away. Between technology change and Facebook, Twitter is very vulnerable to displacement (if Google ever got their status pub/chat/reader/Latitude/Chat strategies aligned the squeeze would double).

I can imagine Twitter changing to be more like an open version of Facebook (esp. if Google bought them), but I can't see it staying relevant in its current form.

Between Google Reader (esp. with the "Note in Reader" feature) and Facebook I've no personal use case for Twitter. There are few times I consider it, but either Reader or Facebook could seize that ground (esp. wrt Location Services, though that's bound up for me with Apple's voracious greed)...

Other than following a few Twitter feeds through Google Reader, I have no current use for Twitter.

Update 11/7/09: Incidentally, the SMS bit isn't free -- at least in the US. Much of the value proposition of Twitter is the SMS/almost-IM fusion -- with Twitter paying the bill. That particular value goes away when SMS gets cheaper or becomes irrelevant.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: What can I do with Twitter, and is it CB Radio redux?
• Gordon's Tech: FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader
• Gordon's Notes: Why Twitter?
• Gordon's Notes: The best about Twitter essay
• Gordon's Tech: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Google Reader: Update with FB feed information
• Gordon's Notes: Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it
• Gordon's Notes: Explaining twitter, facebook and myspace to gomer geeks

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On vaccines

Via Daring Fireball, a superb essay on vaccines.

And that was "just" chickenpox.

Moderns have no idea of what diphtheria was like. Or, for that matter, tetanus. (I once knew a patient who'd survived "lockjaw" though -- it still happens rarely).

Update 10/31/09: Charlie Stross reminded me of a great post I read some time ago.

Midwest Skijorers Club

Fourteen years ago I authored one of the very first skijoring pages on the WWW.

Heck, it might have been the first in English. We didn't have Google back then, so it's hard to say.

My own wee bit of history.

Which is all by way of introducing another mark of the Twin Cities' greatness - the Midwest Skijorers Club.

Yes, we have our very own local skijoring club. As if our superb bicycle trails weren't evidence enough of our unequalled greatness.

Now if only it would stop $!$!%$ raining ...

Windows 7 pounds OS X: the screen scales

OS X was supposed to have had resolution independence 3 years ago. Apple failed.

I've been told by a real world user that Windows 7 resolution adjustment works pretty well. Apple's 27" iMac may look, to middle-aged eyes [1], quite a bit better running Windows 7 than running OS X 10.6.

Resolution independence. Vastly better remote control functionality. In what other domains does Windows 7 pound OS X?

[1] Note Google now scales their search screen for presbyopic eyes. On another front, in winter aging fingers don't work all that well on the iPhone touch screen either. Too dry. Jobs wears reading glasses and I bet his fingers aren't much better than mine. Denial?

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The economics of modern military action

In the modern world, large scale human military operations are quite expensive (emphases mine) ...

Kristof - More Schools, Not Troops - NYTimes.com

... For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there ...

The 1 soldier/20 school ratio is a reflection of both the cost of the soldier and the low cost of Afghan construction. It does not include the cost of operating the schools but the point is well made. Our army of one is very expensive.

This is curious because other military actions are getting cheaper. The cost of destruction (aka "cost of havoc") has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries. Even very poor people can afford very effective weaponry, command and communications infrastructure, spy satellites, and even weapons of mass destruction (an interesting variant is the low cost of climate engineering blackmail).

The low cost of certain kinds of military action may dramatically increase the cost of occupation-class operations, particularly those where soldiers can make choices. Separately, soldiering is increasingly a high skills occupation -- and one that's very hard to outsource to a low wage nation. Non-outsourcable high skills occupations are increasingly costly.

Perhaps one of the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan will be that no future nation will be able to afford the cost of occupation.

Interesting.

Will football go the way of boxing?

Football is insanely popular. It's America's top sport.

But boxing was popular once too. It peaked in the middle of the 20th century, but now it's insignificant. Even back then it was hard to ignore what happened to boxers. Mohammed Ali was the last straw.

Within twenty years, if the game doesn't change, football (that is, American football -- not "soccer") will go too ...

10 amazing truths you already suspected / Go ahead, pretend you didn't know. Pretend it wasn't obvious. (Volume II!)

... Witness Malcolm Gladwell's half-stunning, half-obvious piece in a recent New Yorker, summed up thusly: nearly every football player in America, from high school on up through the NFL -- especially there -- will suffer some level of brain damage and head trauma, from moderate to severe to early-onset dementia, even after just a year or two of play, even if he never turns pro at all...

Parents will start to discourage kids from playing high school football, and those with money will withdraw financial support for the high school game. Colleges will be successfully sued -- after all, they can hardly claim to be uninformed and they have a special responsibility to their students.

The game will have to be radically revised to lower the amount of head trauma involved.

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Google’s consumption of the mapping industry

Wilson Rothman (Gizmodo) has a great essay on Google’s consumption of TomTom, Garmin, and the map data industry. It isn’t just the new Droid-only Google Maps Navigation (Apple’s App Store non-rejection is pending). It’s also that Google has built their own US (and Canada?) map database. Google no longer needs the data they were buying from “Tele Atlas” and “Navteq”.

Presumably Apple or someone else will buy up the remnants of the mapping industry.

Google is a disruptive company. Per Rothman …

… This is not an attack of Google's business practices, but an explanation of the sort of destructive innovation that has made them so huge so fast … Though predecessors like Microsoft experienced similar explosive growth, and grew a similar sudden global dependence, we've never seen the likes of Google. The GPS business isn't the only one that will be consumed by its mighty maw before it's had its run…

Rothman is a bit too confident about Google’s ability to take down Office (Google Apps aren’t that good), but he’s right about things like Google Voice.

Next up? Chrome OS beta is out already. I expect to see the Google branded netbook within the next few months. We’ll see if they hit my $150 predictive WiFi price point (free with a Verizon/Google 2 year bandwidth-adjusted data contract).

Fermi Paradox: life is extremely rare

My preferred Fermi Paradox solution is that technological societies have only a short-lived interest in roaming the physical universe. A more common explanation, now that rocky planets seem ordinary, is that life is extremely rare. I liked the way this physics professor came to that conclusion ...

Information Processing: Evolution, Design and the Fermi Paradox - Stephen Hsu

... What is the time scale for evolution of complex organisms such as ourselves? On Earth complex life evolved in about 5 billion years (5 Gyr), but one can make an argument that we were probably lucky and that the typical time scale T under similar circumstances is much longer.

There is an interesting coincidence at work: 5 Gyr is remarkably close to the 10 Gyr lifetime of main sequence stars (and to the 14 Gyr age of the universe). This is unexpected, as evolution proceeds by molecular processes and natural selection among complex organisms, whereas stellar lifetimes are determined by nuclear physics.

If T were much smaller than 5 Gyr then it would be improbable for evolution to have been so slow on Earth...

Basic Bayesian reasoning, and a new perspective for me. Good one Dr. Hsu!

Update 10/29/09: Some nice comments, but, above all, Charlie Stross drops the hammer. It's an intellectual tour de force from someone who gets paid to think about these sorts of questions. Charlie flips the question around, and shows that waiting-time-for-stuff-like-us is actually very short. He doesn't fess up to his answer to the Fermi Paradox though.

Update 10/29/09b: Through some back and forth in Charlie's comments section, I end up searching on his treatment of the FP in Accelerando -- and one of the top hits is my 2006 Amazon review of his book. He's very much in the church of "post-singular societies don't go a wandering" (me too), but he explains why. According to Charlie Stross, life without bandwidth is intolerable ...

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Progress is not guaranteed

With the past week I needed to put a personal web page and I had to work with a problem best managed by a cross between an Outline and a database.

For the first task I wanted the equivalent of Front Page, a powerful document centric wysiwyg authoring tool from the previous century. For the second task I needed GrandView, a DOS app from the 1980s (if I had a Mac at work I'd use today's OmniOutliner Pro).

It's not just old software tools that vanish; current tools are losing advanced functionality. iTunes Smart Playlists are withering and the smartest parts of OS X are falling away.

On the bright side, I'm not getting any smarter either. So maybe software is simply getting ready for my future self.

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That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.

Despair, Inc: Adversity: "That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable."

Love 'em.

I'm with the ancient Greeks. Embrace tragedy.

Apple does things differently

I've read this before. Apple has very small, very productive, engineering teams ...

/dev/why!?!: The loss of ZFS

...I recall having a discussion with the head of a university FS team who was discussing the FS he was working on. He was pitching it to a group of Apple engineers. It was some interesting work, but there were some unsolved problems. When he was asked about them he commented that they didn't have enough people to deal with them, but he had some ideas and it shouldn't be an issue for a company with a real FS team. It turned out his research team had about the same number of people working on their FS as Apple had working on HFS, HFS+, UFS, NFS, WebDAV, FAT, and NTFS combined. I think people don't appreciate how productive Apple is on a per-engineer basis. The downside of that is that sometimes it is hard to find the resources to do something large and time consuming, particularly when it is not something that most users will notice in a direct sense...

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AT&T surprise charges with added lines and phone switch

When we first switched from Sprint to AT&T I catalogued all the extra fees and surprises. Recently I switched Emily from a BlackBerry Pearl to an iPhone 3GS (very successful move) and added one child to our family plan ($10/month – in theory).

These were the surprise charges this time around:

• $18: “one time charge for upgrade fee” for Emily’s BB to iPhone switch
• $26: “activation fee” for my son’s added line

By AT&T standards these are minor hits. They annoy me, but I’m more annoyed that I have to pay for SMS and MMS messages I can’t block. (I’ve written my representative about those, every time I get these charges I send off another email to a federal legislator.)

We get a “national account discount” (many large companies negotiate these plans). I confirmed Emily is still receiving it after the switch, but I didn’t see it on my son’s plan. So I’ll follow-up on that with the AT&T corporate service number.

I also need to inquire if the “national account discount” should have covered the “upgrade fee” and “activation fee”.

Incidentally, when I reviewed our online account settings I discovered new options to opt out of AT&T’s despicable SMS spam.

See also:

• A deal with the Devil- We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone
• How to unlock the BlackBerry Pearl (AT&T)
• AT&T A List feature
• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear

H1N1 - things new to me

I have an average physicians knowledge of H1N1, so most of what I read is uninteresting. This MinnPost article by a local physician, however, had some real gems. Osterholm is a national expert on pandemics living in MN. His predictive record is imperfect, but he has some interesting observations (emphases mine) ...

MinnPost - Tapping Minnesota’s top H1N1 expert: Michael Osterholm

... Osterholm chairs a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored panel that tracks emerging influenza infections. This year's meeting included a group of virologists and influenza experts that Osterholm considers to be the best in the world. "And every one of them said without a question that if this H1N1 acquires a certain PB2 gene, we're in big trouble," Osterholm recalled. "Well, it did it [acquire the PB2 gene] in the Friesian islands off of the Netherlands this August, and we didn't see that. Everyone was holding their breath, but at least, so far, nothing has happened with that. And so we don't understand in many instances what components of the mutt are really critical, which ones are important and which ones don't make any difference."

... I have been concerned from the beginning about over-promising and under-delivering on this issue. Just knowing this vaccine and what it takes, when they put the 140 million-dose estimate out that would be here in mid-October, I just knew that that was going to be a great overreach....

... I find it remarkable that we have as much as we do as early as we do, given the timeline..."

Long before the arrival of the novel H1N1 virus, Osterholm and other infectious disease specialists were lamenting our country's antiquated vaccine production system, which he points out relies on 1950s technology that's slow and unreliable. And even the way in which influenza vaccines work is a little bit murky.

"On Monday, I'm giving the keynote address to the NIH vaccine research meeting," he said. "I'm actually using H1N1 to highlight the many problems we have today with the vaccine industry. It's a simple as, 'You know, we don't have a clue what protects you in a flu vaccine.' So we measure hemagglutinin [the 'H' in H1N1] using outdated measures for antigen [a molecule on the surface of a virus that our immune system uses to key in on it], but we don't really know."

"When the CDC did their sero-survey looking for hemagglutinin antibody to novel H1N1 in the elderly, they found about 30 percent of them having pretty good titers to the H1 N1 virus," Osterholm recalled. "But the bottom line is, the protection we're seeing in the 65 and older age population far exceeds 30 percent, and the point of it is that there is probably a huge part of cellular immunity that's tied to protection with the flu vaccine, and that's something we don't even understand....

... The one thing I do feel pretty good about is the safety issue. It's not because we know it from this vaccine, but from the time-tested seasonal flu vaccines we've used over the last 30 years."

So the vaccine will get here when it gets here, but do you have a sense of when the peak of infections will be?

"You know, I don't. As I said at the flu summit six weeks ago, I thought that by mid-October we'd be seeing what I call 'peak activity,' which is what we're seeing right now. That's how I thought it would build. What I don't know is how long this is going to last. Is it basically going to go into retreat for a while and then come back again in, say, December or January? We're burning through a lot of central people right now, meaning the rate of new infections is growing at such a rate that I think that we're not going to have that many [unexposed] people left in November, December or January to get a second wave...