My son destroys 2010 Outback sales

My son singlehandedly destroyed 2010 Subaru Outback sales.

It was a considerable accomplishment. Until late 2009 the Outback had been selling relatively well.

That was before my 100 lb son, climbing out of the back seat of a show room Outback, stepped on the protruding black running board beneath the rear door.

And it popped off.

It's not a running board, it's lightweight plastic door trim held on by a few plastic clips. He's not the first person to pop the door trim.

Wow. A manufacturer who'd do something that stupid could do ... anything.

I don't think we're buying a Subara ...

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Curious world and Google Wave

For some time I've been (Google Reader) following a man named Thomas. Some months ago he liked something I liked (say that three times fast), so I visited his shares and I liked those too.

He lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I knew the place a thousand years ago, and knew some people who might live there yet. It was a quiet town then. Now Chiang Mai is a sprawling city.

Today I received a Google Wave invitation. From Thomas, with whom I've never directly corresponded.

Thank you Thomas, I'm looking forward to exploring GW.

Curious world.
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Reading my writing translated

I have knacks, but not for language. I still remember a bit of the old country however. Which is why it's neat to try to read a blog post - in French (see the drop down on the right side of this page to translate)

Some of it reads sensibly, other bits less so. Some of the word choices seem exotic.

I expect there's a knack to writing for translation. One would author a post, then do a round trip translation. Identify the parts that, on back translation, don't quite work. Do this a couple of times with your target language. Once the back translation is acceptable, you can be reasonably sure the initial translation works.

This would be fairly easy to automate. I'd like to give it a try if the tools were in place. I'm excited about machine translation, even if it's so far had less of an impact than I'd expected.

See also:

• Google reader: now with translation services

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Wanted: email redirect to google reader note shares

I'm not so keen on Twitter, but I do like Google Reader. Lately, I'm particularly keen on GRs shared posts, notes and microblogging features.

There are just a few more things we need.

For example, the latest version of the NYT iPhone app supports shares to Twitter and Facebook. Alas, not GR shared notes, even though there's an API for creating Google Reader Shared Notes. Maybe this will come to a future app, but these days lots of companies fear Google. The NYT may not want to add this particular link.

Happily, there's always email. It's the lowest common interface; the means to bridge unwilling vendors.

So we need Google to provide a way to post to the GR Notes stream via email or SMS (for email at least they can use the Blogger post secret address approach). Or we need some 3rd party to setup an email gateway that would call the API for creating Google Reader Shared Notes. Mail to a secret address, add to the GR read stream that extends my older memory managers.

This ought to be of interest to people like ping.fm.

Update: I tried sharing this on the (once) official Google Reader Product Ideas site, but it's now rejecting submissions with an error message. So I created a getSatisfaction request.

See also:

• What my blogs are for: memory management and the Google-Gordon geek-mind fusion
• Fewer posts, more shared items – Google Reader changes my memory management
• Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog
• Google's confusing social graph strategy: Google reader friends via Google Chat
• Google reader micro-blogging and changes to Gordon Notes
• Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed
• Share anything in your Google Reader Share feed
• Ping.FM: a router for status updates ... with just one small problem.

Update: Via Louisgray.com I came across an app that syncs Twitter and Reader. It's not well documented, but if it posts Tweets to reader then I can use Twitter as a Notes poster.

Update: Nope, reader2twitter didn't seem to work, and it felt too rough for the likes of me. I tried pointing TwitterFeed to my Reader Shared Item feed, but Twitter output has misplaced URL encoding. It's not the answer, and, really, I'd prefer to use Twitter as a way to post items to my Google Reader shares -- not the other way around.

Facebook has the eBay disease - the Farmville story

eBay went downhill because they made money off scams.

They didn't run the scams, but they didn't fight them that hard either. eBay's execs wanted the revenue, and they didn't worry too much about where it was coming from. Later, when eBay's reputation was about shot, new management started fighting the scams. Maybe too late.

It's hard for a publicly traded company to be virtuous. It's easy to separate revenue from sources. I give Google credit for avoiding this trap.

I think, however, that Facebook is deep in it ...

Slashdot Games Story | Scams and Social Gaming

... The article asserts that Facebook and MySpace themselves are complicit in this, failing to crack down on the abuses they see because they make so much money from advertising for the most popular games...

In Facebook you can hide people, or you hide individual apps, but you can't hide large classes of apps. On the iPhone FB app you can't hide apps at all. If you're annoyed by the social propagation of annoying apps you have to defriend the person -- who may be a family member.

Facebook gets a lot of money from apps. They don't get much money from direct ads (when was the last time you clicked on one or even remember seeing one?).

Facebook is at risk for the eBay disease. It might be too late for them already ...

Update 11/1/09: I was wrong. Facebook hasn't caught the eBay disease. In their case, it was congenital disorder. Wow. So FB's revenue stream is significantly based on getting cell phone numbers to promote phone fraud? Apparently I'm not the only one to ignore the ads.

By comparison, Google really isn't Evil.

Update 11/7/09: More on the effective conspiracy between shady apps and facebook.

Update 11/8/09: The NYT completely blows the story and Dan Lyons nails them for it. Old media fails. Lyons also recaps the story with links to all the Arrington/Tech Crunch coverage:

• Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell (play on Farmville)
• How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession
• Offerpal Tries Out A New CEO. Shukla, Queen Of Scams, Is Out.
• Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues” - such as getting users to download spyware
• “Horrible Things” Slink Back Into ZyngaScamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other Offers - "lead gen scams" explained. These trick users into paying for worthless recurring expenses like "learning CDs" and shady mobile phone subscriptions.
• Zynga’s FishVille Sleeps With The Fishes For Ad Violations: Farmville and other Zynga apps running scams make up 10-20% of Facebook's total revenue. Talk about a conflict of interest.

Bad genes, bad people and a crisis of punishment?

If every there was a slippery slope, it began the day we allowed that a two year old who'd pocketed some candy should not be sent to the penitentiary.

The rest was inevitable. We allowed that someone who didn't know wrong from the sparkly fairies whispering in their ear might not get much from the rack. Maybe it didn't make sense to judge someone who couldn't learn to read as harshly as a wall street banker*.

So now we have bad genes mitigating murder or perhaps driving violations.

Where will it all stop? Will we decide that nobody can be guilty of anything? Will we think that a fine IQ might be offset by lousy judgment, or that a miserable upbringing and an odd personality might equal the diminished responsibility of active schizophrenia?

Why if we walked this all the way back, who could we punish?! We'd only be able to treat and manage!

Unthinkable.

See also

• Diminished responsibility: the next cultural battleground
• Changing attitudes about mind and responsibility: Patricia Hearst
• Addiction and disease: My comments on the TIME Science blog
• Free Will RIP - The Economist on preemptive punishment
• How common are false convictions?
• Special needs criminals
• Using electric shocks to manage the behavior of special needs children and adults

*ok, so we're working on that one.

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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).