Stross on the post-PC world – mostly right

Charles Stross is in good form with an essay on the post-PC world. It’s the world we’ve been expecting since Netscape Constellation (1996) and Larry Ellison’s proto-netbook (1995). That world became real for me in 2007 (yes, it was that long ago) with the iPhone and in 2008 with the Target netbook [1].

I agree with almost everything he wrote, with one big exception….

… Moreover, the PC revolution has saturated the market at any accessible price point. That is, anyone who needs and can afford a PC has now got one…

Uhhh, no. PCs are not cheap. Not at all. The iPad is cheap [3], but PCs are very expensive.

Yes, you can buy a “PC” for a pittance. It makes a crummy boat anchor though. If you want it to do something useful you need to buy internet service. Where I live that’s about $600 a year – year after year. Unless you bought a Mac, or are geek enough to go without, you need to buy antiviral software. In theory you also need to $150 or so for Microsoft Office. And good luck with backup.

But that’s not the real cost.

The real cost is that you need an IQ-equivalent of 110 or higher, and a love of debugging and troubleshooting. For most of the population, that’s absolutely unaffordable.

PCs are very, very, expensive. The iPad 2.0, or its rivals to come, can be the poor person’s computer [4].

So Charlie got this one point wrong – but it only strengthens his overall argument. My four month old quad core iMac running 10.6 is an anachronism [2]. Its era is passing. Welcome to the third era of the personal computer.

[1] I thought things would blow up in 2009. Didn’t happen! Microsoft dropped the price of XP to about nothing and crawled back enough control of the netbook to stun the market (same thing they did with Palm in the 90s by the way). It’s still going to happen, but that’s not the first time I’ve been wrong on transition times. I’ve since learned to take my time estimates for technology transitions and triple them.

[2] Charlie also omits the role Digital Rights Management (DRM) plays in driving this transition. DRM is one of the reason there’s so much good software being produced for the iPhone. Your CDs may be worth money some day.

[3] Not least because of the pay-as-you-go capped data plan. That’s as big a deal as the device. Yes, I know iPad’s require a PC-as-peripheral, but that will change within the year.

[4] Of course that’s what the original Mac was – the “computer for the rest of us”. Closed architecture. All applications were to be vetted by Apple. Strict UI standards. Heavy investments in usability and design. Single button mouse. It worked too – it really was easy to use. Much easier to use than OS X. Almost as easy to use as the iPad. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it spirals.

The Cheonan sinking: insanity or accident?

When Sarah Palin bloviates, the media goes mad. When a South Korean military vessel blows up, perhaps from a North Korean missile, things get very quiet.

This is a good thing. Evidently the prospect of WW III does concentrate minds. It’s a sign that our legislators aren’t as stupid as they look.

A recent BBC summary outlines the current public analysis…

BBC News - Seoul's dilemma over sunken warship

The 26 March sinking of the Cheonan, with 40 lives lost and six men still missing, is certainly a South Korean military disaster…

… The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat has now been winched to the surface, in two pieces, and is being examined at a naval dockyard.

The investigation team includes American, Australian, Swedish and British experts, in part, to ensure that its conclusions are seen as free from South Korean political influence.

… suspicion is mounting, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-young concluding that a torpedo attack is among the "most likely" causes.

… "If it's a torpedo firing then that's about as big a thing as you can do short of rolling across the border," he told me. "Unless you have a desire to start World War III then you don't do it…

… If it is shown to be a torpedo that hit the Cheonan, then perhaps it can be seen as retaliation for the fact that North Korea is reported to have come off worse in the most recent naval skirmish.

Or maybe it was an attempt to rally the military around the leadership of the ailing Kim Jong-il, reportedly trying to manage a difficult transition of power to his youngest son.

But others have suggested that it might be the military acting alone, a sign of a dangerous shift in the balance of power inside North Korea, and a far more worrying prospect.

So the options are …

• North Korea’s leadership is insane
• North Korea’s military is insane
• It’s a freak accident with an impossibly ancient mine

The last is unlikely, the first two are discouraging. I wonder, just based on watching humans for a while, if there isn’t a fourth explanation.

An accident. A blunder. A screw-up.

Remember when the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians? No, that wasn’t US military policy. It was a screw-up.

We now know how crummy the Soviet military infrastructure was before the collapse of the USSR. It’s likely that North Korea’s is in much worse shape. It’s likely their submariners are desperate and ill-trained. it’s a setup for an accident, or for a crazed officer to do something very stupid.

Would the submarine officers confess to having screwed up? In North Korea that would probably be a death sentence – or worse.

My money is on blunder.

Now it’s all about China, which has huge investments in North Korea. It’s all about whether China will decide that North Korea has to end, and, if so, on what terms and timeline.

Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III.

To the right of us – Greece, Portugal, Spain and perhaps Italy and Ireland (GPSII):

How Reversible Is The Euro- - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

For a long time my view on the euro has been that it may well have been a mistake, but that bygones were bygones — it could not be undone…

…but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands…

…if Greece is in effect forced out of the euro, what happens to other shaky members?

I think I’ll go hide under the table now.

and to the left of us – China:

Andy Xie - I’ll Tell You When Chinese Bubble Is About to Burst - Credit Writedowns

“My maid just asked for leave,” a friend in Beijing told me recently. “She’s rushing home to buy property. I suggested she borrow 70 percent, so she could cap the loss.”

Sigh. It’s not over. Act I was the NASDAQ (remember the NASDAQ?) tech bubble. Act II was the property/asset bubble. Act III takes place in Europe and China.

It really does feel like a world of hurt down here, and we haven’t even hit Peak Oil (but it’s on the way.)

We all wonder why. Why now? A year ago I made up my personal list of 10 contributing causes (Feb 09) and, recently, I wrote up one way out of America’s particular set of challenges.

Since then I’ve been chipping at the list, looking for the cause of the cause of the cause (etc – go too deep and it’s all entropy). Sure we’ve got above average corruption and economic financialization, but those tendencies have always been with us. This feels like something novel, something that, in modern times, has come along every century or so. (In deep history every 2,000 years or so.)

I’m nominating two independent but self-reinforcing causes – information technology (IT) and the Rise of China and India (RCI, aka globalization).

The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible.

The IT transformation is not stopping. If anything, it’s accelerating. There are more than 350 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa.

Think about that for a minute.

In five years Africa will have at least 500 million 2010 iPhone/Droid interconnected equivalent devices, and Google’s sentence-salad English/China translation will probably work. I’m still thinking we miss Kurzweil’s 2045 catastrophe, but the prelude will be rough enough.

RCI and IT (RCIIT?) Alone each would have thrown the world for a loop. Together they’ve put us into an entirely new level of future shock.

We might as well get used to it.

Winner take all - lessons from writing

Charlie Stross has been writing a series of enlightening posts about the fiction industry. Today, after a volcano extended killer road trip, he unloads on the joys of being a professional writer ...

... I'd like to point you at this 2005 paper by the Author's License and Collecting Society, titled "What are Words Worth?, describing the findings of a study organized by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM)I, Bournemouth University. ..

...  restricting the survey to focus on main-income authors (those who earned over 50% of their income from writing) gave median earnings of £23,000 and mean earnings of £41,186.

... the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors' incomes — a measure of income inequality, where 0.0 means everyone takes an identical slice of the combined cake, and 1.0 indicates that a single individual takes all the cake and everyone else starves. Let me provide a yardstick: the UK had a Gini coefficient of 0.36 in 2009, the widest ever gap between rich and poor— while the USA, at 0.408, had the most unequal income distribution in the entire developed world. The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74...

... In addition to being a wildly unstable, lonely occupation with an insane income spread, there are other drawbacks to being a writer. Many American writers are forced to rely on a day job, or a spouse with a day job, for health insurance: health insurance for the self-employed is prohibitively expensive, especially for the self-employed poor. Those who don't have a job that provides healthcare, or a partner with family benefits, are never more than one accident away from bankruptcy. As the median age for publishing a first novel is around 34 because it takes a lot of life experience before you know enough to write something worth publishing, most authors are in the age range 34-70 — old enough that they're likely to develop chronic health conditions or need expensive treatments. (To be fair, it's not just authors who get the short end of this particular shitty stick: I suspect the US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks in general.)...

...So here's the truth about the writing lifestyle: it sucks. It is an unstable occupation for self-employed middle-aged entrepreneurs. Average age on entry is around 34, but you can't get health insurance (if you're American).... As a business, it's a dead-end: you can't generally expand by taking on employees, and the number of author start-ups where the founders have IPOd and cashed out can be counted on the fingers of a double-amputee's hands...

I've read Stross for years - in the small science fiction/fantasy world he's a modern giant. He is an extremely smart man and I believe that he works very hard. Although he's a relatively successful science fiction writer, if he wanted money he'd be working for Goldman Sachs.

Clearly Charles Stross has been cursed with the writer's obsession and he deserves our sympathies as well as our thanks. Maybe it was something he did in a past life.  I've put "The Revolution Business" on my Amazon cart today. It's the least I can do.

Beyond the dismal reality of the 21st century wordsmith, there are other noteworthy insights in the essay (read the entire work of course). I agree with Charlie that "US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks"; I think that's going to change thanks to MY President.

Most significantly for the rest of us, we know fiction writing, like acting and sports, is a "winner take all" form of work. A small fraction of writers take home a vast majority of the earnings. In an interconnected world, where work can flow easily, it's conceivable this will become widespread among all knowledge workers. Really, you do want your babies to grow up to be cowboys.

Palm/HP is still dead

A few weeks ago I said Farewell Palm. Now HP has paid $1.2 billion in cash to acquire Palm ($5.70 a share).

It's good news for those who bought Palm stock in the past few weeks, but it's no reason to consider buying a PalmOS device. Whatever Palm was yesterday, it's now being digested by a very average large publicly traded company. Palm is now HP.

An average PTC like HP can compete effectively against other clumsy but powerful PTCs like IBM, Dell, RIM, and Microsoft. HP is capable of turning out devices that are every bit as good as Windows Mobile phones of 2008.

Except it's not 2008, and the competition is not RIM or Microsoft or Dell. The competition is Google and Apple.

Google and Apple are also publicly traded companies. They are not typical however. They are very deviant. Google has an underestimated two tier ownership structure that gives great power to its founders. Apple has Steve Jobs, who in addition to being an insane genius with mind-control powers is also Apple's founder and has cult like authority over the company and its shareholders. Both Google and Apple behave like privately held companies with public money.

Palm is still dead. I don't know why HP did this deal. Maybe it was all IP, but they paid a lot for IP. I think they hope to stay in the only game in town. It won't work; there's no room for them at the table.

This is about Google and Apple. Microsoft will take 3rd place. RIM will fall by the wayside within three years. HP won't last a year. They can't compete.

Apple next: MobileMe becomes the iPad host peripheral

I've noted that the iPad will be a computer for people who are poor. I've predicted that Apple will turn on Facebook (their friend today, but so was Google, once). I've noted that MobileMe more closely resembles OS X server than it does Google Apps.

Now, for my next prediction [1] - related to all of the above.

Within a year Apple will make MobileMe an iPhone back-end peripheral. When they do that iPhone users will not need a local copy of iTunes (PC or Mac), and they won't need an ISP. After that Apple will make MobileMe into a Facebook competitor.

Next year's iPad will come with a starter MobileMe subscription.

[1] I'm a dreadful prognosticator, but it doesn't stop me. I'm often right in the long run, but usually premature.

The Obama difference - Israel and Bicycles

Act One: Obama and the the Middle East

Cohen - Beating the Mideast’s Black Hole - NYTimes.com

.... That meeting concluded with Mitchell saying: “You asked if I think Netanyahu is serious. They ask the same question. You are an expert on Palestinian and Israeli politics. They are the same. But no one in the world knows American politics better than me, and this I will say. There has never been in the White House a president that is so committed on this issue, including Clinton who is a personal friend, and there will never be, at least not in the lifetime of anyone in this room." ...

Act Two: Obama: Transportation and transparency

In the Obama administration, there's an official blog from the Department of Transportation with with a post about bike and pedestrian infrastructure highlighting a March 15 policy statement on bicycle and pedestrian accommodation:

... The establishment of well-connected walking and bicycling networks is an important component for livable communities, and their design should be a part of Federal-aid project developments. ... transportation agencies should plan, fund, and implement improvements to their walking and bicycling networks, including linkages to transit...

... transportation agencies should give the same priority to walking and bicycling as is given to other transportation modes. Walking and bicycling should not be an afterthought in roadway design

... children should have safe and convenient options for walking or bicycling to school and parks..

... DOT encourages bicycle and pedestrian accommodation on bridge projects including facilities on limited-access bridges with connections to streets or paths... 

..Current maintenance provisions require pedestrian facilities built with Federal funds to be maintained in the same manner as other roadway assets. State Agencies have generally established levels of service on various routes especially as related to snow and ice events...

... The Secretary shall not approve any project or take any regulatory action under this title that will result in the severance of an existing major route or have significant adverse impact on the safety for nonmotorized transportation traffic and light motorcycles, unless such project or regulatory action provides for a reasonable alternate route or such a route exists." 23 U.S.C. 109(m)....

There is a difference between Obama and the GOP alternative. A vast, huge, multifaceted, every day in every way difference.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is a willing servant of Rupert Murdoch, owner operator of the Wall Street Journal and Fox news.

History is fractal - IOT the Zulu nation

Melvyn and Shula do not have the best chemistry in during the In Our Time program The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. I can see why Melvyn was peevish, but it's a bit of a shame. I'm sympathetic to Marks' notion that the emergence of Shaka Zulu was more chance than destiny; a contingent result of swirling change and disruption driven, fundamentally, by the technologies of innovative agriculture and consequent rapid population growth and Malthusian collapse.

That, however, was too much subtlety for 15 minutes of Shaka, for there was a lot of ground to cover in one 48 minute program. Even in this quick overview it's clear the history of the consequent fallings and risings of the Boer, Zulu, and British is immensely complex, full of chance and personality and mostly unknown.

So it is with history. Endless stories, of which we know only a tiny number. There must be many more, perhaps more grand and sad than any we know, lost in deep time.

Lost, but, in a sense, not unknown. History is fractal. The stories we know in detail are similar to those we know in outline are similar to those we know in myth, and are very likely similar to those we don't know at all. If we are wise enough to realize that history is fractal, we can study closely the history we know and learn universal truths. If we are foolish enough to believe our stories are unique, we walk the path of willful ignorance.

Gordon's Laws for software and service use

CrashPlan gets great press and even a Tidbits Take Control recommendation, but when I used it I ran into numerous fundamental flaws. Clearly, I can't rely on reviewers.

From that and similar experiences, here are Gordon's Rules of Engagement for software and services.

Desktop software

1. Is there obnoxious DRM? (Some DRM is understandable, but it shouldn't be obnoxious.)
2. If distributed on CD, can the product be used without the CD running?
3. Look at the installer. Drag and Drop is fine, but if it needs an installer it better be Apple's installer.
4. Inspect the uninstaller. The best apps don't need one - just delete the app. After that look for something built into the app. Then look for something that downloads with the app. If there's no installer stop immediately.
5. If it's software, is there an full feature trial period? Limited feature trials are worthless. I need at least a month, or, better, 10 days of use (which may take me months).
6. Who makes the product? What's their support site like? Can you find downloadable fixes?

Cloud services

1. Is it obvious how to delete your account and all data and services?
2. Do they want your Google credentials? If so, run and bar the door.
3. Do they support Oauth? Do they allow you to have multiple Oauth credentials associated with your account? Extra points for each.
4. Do they require a security question? If so, they're stupid. (Yes, even Google is a bit stupid these days - but they don't REQUIRE it.)
5. If your storing something precious online (ex: backup data), what's the password reset policy? "Industry standard" practices means losing control of your email will cost you ALL your backup data. (for example)
6. Can you get your data out in a useable way? If not, run, run, run.
7. If there are annual renewals, is there an option to request approval prior to renewal?

Desktop or Cloud

1. Is there a high quality manual and/or help resource? It doesn't matter whether you're going to read it or not. Products with good manuals are almost always good products. It's a very reliable quality measure.
2. Is there a blog? Are the developers proud of their work?

Notice there's nothing in here about features, reviews, price, performance, etc. They only matter if a product passes the above screening tests. In fact it's rare for a product to pass all of the relevant tests and then be fail due to bugs or performance. A vendor who can do the above can usually do the product as well.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Requiem for a gerserker - Gordon's Laws of Geekery
• Gordon's Notes: Gordon's 4 rules of acquisition

Macroscopic quantum mechanics

In Greg Egan's Teranesia [1] one story I can't currently locate (h/t Mel Anderson, comments), the protagonist is fighting the ultimate infection. It seems impossibly mutable. Turns out it has evolved to exploit quantum effects, and it's finding the perfect mutation by exploring all the many worlds of variation.

That wasn't the only science fiction story of the past decade to imagine that biological organisms, operating at atomic scales, might exploit quantum effects. Alas, science fiction memes don't last long these days. Protein exploitation of quantum effects has become a mainstream research topic. This Nov 2009 Sci Am news article is a good overview of the underlying physics; note especially the resolution to the old debate about how the quantum/classical transition happens ...

How Noise Can Help Quantum Entanglement: Scientific American

... In the modern view that has gained traction in the past decade, you don’t see quantum effects in everyday life not because you are big, per se, but because those effects are camouflaged by their own sheer complexity. They are there if you know how to look, and physicists have been realizing that they show up in the macroscopic world more than they thought...

... This work suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, entanglement can persist in large, warm systems—including living organisms. “This opens the door to the possibility that entanglement could play a role in, or be a resource for, biological systems,” says Mohan Sarovar of the University of California, Berkeley, who recently found that entanglement may aid photosynthesis ... In the magnetism-sensitive molecule that birds may use as compasses, Vedral, Elisabeth Rieper, also at Singapore, and their colleagues discovered that electrons manage to remain entangled 10 to 100 times longer than the standard formulas predict...

A quick search on scholar.google.com finds many references on how quantum effects might alter molecular behavior in neurons.

It's a small, small world after all.

[1] See also: Mind expanding books: a list and my comments there on Egan's Incandescence.

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Do knowledge workers burn more cerebral calories?

Our brains burn a lot of the calories we eat [1]. So are knowledge workers working out?

Alas, probably not ...

Appraising the brain's energy budget (PNAS 2002)

... In the average adult human, the brain represents about 2% of the body weight. Remarkably, despite its relatively small size, the brain accounts for about 20% of the oxygen and, hence, calories consumed by the body (1). This high rate of metabolism is remarkably constant despite widely varying mental and motoric activity...

Later articles suggest that while brains use a lot of calories, and are thus a very expensive evolutionary development, they don't use the calories for thinking. Brain calories are primarily consumed in "intrinsic activites" unrelated to environmental stimulus -- presumably maintenance functions of some sort.

So we knowledge workers don't get any caloric credit for thinking, and since we usually think while sitting (very bad) we're really pro blubber.

[1] We also know human brains are smaller and probably more efficient than they used to be. Of course, so are computers.

Update: I suppose memory formation might be energy intensive, so maybe forming more memories could burn calories?

St. Paul (MSP) AT&T iPhone voice service now intolerably bad

Something has changed over the past year with our iPhone voice services around our home (Macalester-Groveland, St Paul, Minnesota) and, to a lesser extent, along my commute (St. Paul to Roseville).

Voice services have gone from mediocre to intolerably bad. The “bars” are meaningless; even with 3-4 “bars” connection failures and call drops are ubiquitous. We can’t reliable make or receive calls from our home, which is rather a problem since we don’t have long distance landline service.

Curiously data services (3G) are doing well. We’ve tried turning off 3G services at home (EDGE only) to see if voice connections improves, but that doesn’t help enough. I suspect local AT&T carrying capacity is the problem, not wireless signal.

We rely on our iPhones for a lot of things, but we need voice services.

I understand that iPhone-class technology, and the absurdity of flat-rate data service pricing, has put a great deal of strain on AT&T’s networks. I understand that our community is resistant to installing new cell towers. That understanding does not translate into sympathy. Our family is paying, I’m chastened to confess, thousands of dollars for services AT&T is not delivering.

There are things AT&T could do. They could end their insane flat-rate pricing, and institute pay-per-use bundles with similar value but user-aligned incentives. They could provide us with a free AT&T 3G MicroCell (aka femtocell) along with discounts for use. They could give us substantial discounts on their mobile services pending a fix.

They’re not doing any of these things. Instead of providing free MicroCells and discounted services, for example, AT&T charges for their femtocell solution.

I miss the days when it was possible to initiate class action lawsuits for failure to deliver contracted services.

If some other company gets iPhones in June our family will switch. We have only one under-contract iPhone and we can sell it and pay the AT&T penalty.

If no other company gets iPhones, I will find out how good Droid really is.

Update: A computer generated (location customized) AT&T response has some relevant details:

… We see that the coverage around your home is considered to be our best coverage and it includes 3G service.   We also see that there is a planned tower about 2 miles from your home at Osceola and Lexington Parkway S.  This tower is slated to be operational mid August 2010…

…Please contact Customer Care at 611 from a cell phone or at 1-800-331-0500 from landline phone if the problem persists.    Have your wireless device available to allow for proper troubleshooting if problems persist…

So even though our coverage is failing on multiple phones, AT&T considers it to be pretty good. There’s something wrong there.

The 3 miles tower is too far away to help us directly, but it’s close enough to reduce the burden on our proximal towers. On the other hand by August we’ll have the 2010 iPhone and the 3G iPad – so any additional local AT&T capacity will be swamped.

If you do try to phone the 800 number, check the gethuman recommendations:

Press "1" at the system asking for your phone number, and then press "0" at next prompt.

Things are unlikely to improve.

The new history is deep history

When we think about science, most of us think of dramatic breakthroughs. We think Darwin and Wallace, Einstein and Bohr, Copernicus and Curie and we imagine everything changed overnight.

Most science, however, develops in bits and pieces, twisting and turning, waxing and waning, until, after thirty years, things are new. Even the dramatic shifts, like natural selection, took decades to get from radical to mainstream.

If you’re at all curious about things, you notice this in a single lifespan. Consider deep history; the story of humans from 150K to 3K years ago. In the past 30 years discoveries from genomics, climate research, linguistics, plant research, translation, anthropology and archaeology, combined with the revision of old biases, have dramatically changed our understanding of deep history. In each case, of course, computation has been a fundamental driver. That’s how it works – new instruments make new science.

It’s been growing slowly from all directions, but the sum is a very different world from what some of us learned in the 1970s. The human brain is evolving and changing far more dramatically than we imagined, and that evolution has not slowed with modernity. Our concepts of human speciation are being transformed; there were many “species” of human coexisting into deep history – and, like dogs and wolves, they probably crossed often.

Pre-agricultural humans were far more populous and widespread than we once imagined; the large populations of pre-invasion (early agricultural and hunter-gatherer) North America probably reflect worldwide pre-agricultural patterns.

Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?

What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have. They seem more … Neandertal.

Fascinating times, and there’s much more here than I can address in one post. That’s why I’m adding a new tag (label) for this blog -- “deep history” in anticipation of much more to come.

For now see also:

• Dienekes' Anthropology Blog- Paleolithic flax fibres from Georgia (Kvavadze et al. 2009)
• Multiregional evolution lives! - john hawks weblog
• Why Humanity Loves, and Needs, Cities - Economix Blog - NYTimes.
• In Our Time, Babylon
• In Our Time, Akhenaten (He reminds me of Kim Jong-il)
• In Our Time, The Library at Nineveh
  

Update: What does the Antikythera mechanism teach us about deep history? It cannot be the only anomaly of its kind in all time.

Update 8/21/2010: Brad DeLong says I don't pay enough attention to the fragility of culture and technology without writing and location persistence.

How bubbles destroy software - the story of Broderbund

My kids need some typing software. I remember a "Broderbund" "Mavis Beacon" product from eons past, so I started looking into the current state of the product. It took me a while to sort things out; and along the way I was reminded of how much was lost in the tech bubble of the 1990s.

It turns out there's now a Mac-only "Mavis Beacon" product sold by "Software MacKiev" (Ukranian Mac contract software development) and another product (XP/Mac) sold by "Encore Software". The Encore Mac product is buggy and unsupported, the MacKiev version sounds a bit more promising.

it seems the current products are both descendants of a common ancestor that passed through a number of corporate labels including Software Toolworks / Mindscape, Broderbund, and The Learning Company .

What a mess. How did that happen? For that matter, what happened to all of the pretty good educational software produced by all of those companies? How did it all die, without true replacements (the closest things today are Flash apps on commercial sites that do child marketing)?

Part of the answer is that these companies had a good skillset for computer gaming, and that was a much bigger industry. Another part of the answer comes from the the wikipedia article on Broderbund (1980s history here) [1], (emphases mine, remember those who got cash were the winners) ...

... Softkey ...purchased The Learning Company for $606 million in cash and then adopted its name...Brøderbund was purchased by The Learning Company in 1998 for about US$420 million in stock...

In a move to rationalize costs, The Learning Company promptly terminated 500 employees at Brøderbund the same year,[16] representing 42% of the company's workforce.

Then in 1999 the combined company was bought by Mattel for $3.6 billion ... Jill Barad, the [Mattel] CEO, ended up being forced out in a climate of investor outrage.

Mattel then gave away The Learning Company in September 2000 to Gores Technology Group, a private acquisitions firm, for a share of whatever Gores could obtain by selling the company. In 2001, Gores sold The Learning Company's entertainment holdings to Ubisoft, and most of the other holdings, including the Brøderbund name, to Irish company Riverdeep.[19] Currently, all of Brøderbund's games, such as the Myst series, are published by Ubisoft...

This kind of churn is death to software. Software needs continuity to survive. The cycle of acquisition and 'rationalization" creates zombie software that staggers on, brainless, for years ... then dies.

The tech bubble made a few people rich, and it destroyed a lot of good products. Not to mention costing Mattel's shareholders quite a few pennies.

After the tech bubble burst came 9/11, then the great asset bubble and, not least, the Bush administration. One, two, three, four. No wonder America is reeling.

[1] At one time Mavis Beacon was sold under the Broderbund name, but by that time Broderbund might have been owned by Riverdeep. I include this story as an example of all the things the tech bubble killed.

Update 4/30/10: I bought the MacKiev product. It came with a solid, richly photographed manual with the name "Broderbund" on the front cover. This team is proud of their work. The manual included some interesting background on how Software MacKiev ended up doing their own OS X version:

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was created more than twenty years ago, and was first published in 1987. Software MacKiev’s involvement goes back to 1998 when our company developed version 9 for the Macintosh — both the US and UK editions. Then, a decade later, we had the opportunity to get involved with Mavis Beacon again — this time as the developer and publisher of a new generation of Mavis Beacon software for Mac OS X. We are so pleased and proud to be bringing the kind of quality you’ve come to expect from the creative labs of Software MacKiev to this new edition.

Update 6/8/2010: I've received a few more details. The "Encore" versions of Mavis Beacon for OS X are arguably fraudulent. They're not designed for the current OS. Looks like "Encore" bought up some discarded software assets ...

... Software MacKiev develops and publishes only the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 2008 and 2009 Deluxe, International, and School Editions for Mac OS X. The previous versions of Mavis Beacon were made for really old Macs with OS 9 by a company called Broderbund. A company called Encore has since taken over the broderbund.com Web site and continue to distribute the outdated software, which — as you point out — doesn’t work as it should...

Exercise, weight loss and dementia

It's not that exercise doesn't work as a weight loss method, it's just inefficient ....

Weighing the Evidence on Exercise - NYTimes.com:

... When researchers affiliated with the Pennington center had volunteers reduce their energy balance for a study last year by either cutting their calorie intakes by 25 percent or increasing their daily exercise by 12.5 percent and cutting their calories by 12.5 percent, everyone involved lost weight. They all lost about the same amount of weight too — about a pound a week. But in the exercising group, the dose of exercise required was nearly an hour a day of moderate-intensity activity, what the federal government currently recommends for weight loss but “a lot more than what many people would be able or willing to do,” Ravussin says."

An hour a day would be wonderful -- if my kids were grown.

The NYT article has the complex details. The effect of exercise on weight varies by age and gender, and between individuals as well. In general, however, it's not a good way to lose weight. Diet is more efficient.

On the other hand exercise seems to be essential to keeping weight stable after a weight loss diet. How and why? Nobody knows for sure.

Sitting turns out to be really, really, bad. We've had hints of that over the past years, but now it's getting pinned down. We don't know why, but sitting promotes obesity.

Incidentally, it's all harder for women. But you knew that.

Elsewhere in the NYT, Olivia Judson deepens the cheer with claims that obesity causes brain damage. She's a bit below her par though; she obscures correlation with causation in the interests of more hits(she well knows the difference, so two demerits to her). It is likely that obesity is associated with early dementia, but it's also associated with lower socioeconomic status, lower IQ, and the anger of the gods.

For a contrary opinion, see Gina Kolata (also NYT) in 2007.

On the other hand, there's a weird association between exercise and brain function, even though I didn't believe it years ago. Exercise seems to help the health of neurons associated with cognition and memory in various animals -- for no particularly good reason. Since exercise is associated with lower obesity (in both directions) this further murkens the muddies.

Exercise also seems to help sleep, and I do suspect that sleep will turn out to be very important for brain health. Since obesity does impact sleep quality there may be an effect of obesity on the brain both by diminishing interest/ability to exercise and by worsening sleep quality.

Lastly, the idea that brain activity (bridge, crosswords, etc) slows dementia seems to be, at long last, good and dead. It doesn't work. Forget the bridge, forget the crosswords, go for a walk.

To sum it all up, my best guess at how this will all turn out:

• Sleep is more important for brain health than we've imagined.
• Exercise is more important for brain health than I thought 4-7 years ago. (I like to exercise, so it wasn't a prejudice against activity. It's just weird science.)
• Exercise helps both sleep and brain health - so it's a double good. It doesn't lead to weight loss, but it's essential to maintain a stable weight.
• We all need to diet all the time, so we need cultural and industry changes to make that very hard activity easier.
• Obesity is almost inevitable in a food rich world, especially when we eliminate smoking and increase sitting (at computers). We need a miracle drug, we need cultural changes, we need mobile devices, we need gas to hit $10 a gallon.
• Sitting is oddly bad for us. We should all be standing and walking.
• Try not to get a concussion (but almost all enjoyable exercise increases head injury risk :-). Don't let your kids play football (which will eventually go the way of boxing).

See also:

• BBC NEWS | Health | Creatine 'boosts brain power' 2003: Right. This went nowhere. A good reminder of how worthless most press releases are. We're still hearing about the huge onslaught of cognitive enhancer abuse, but it's mostly media imagination.
• Obesity increases dementia risk: Winner of stupid medical article of the month 2005: Early reports on the obesity/dementia causal relationship. I'm very skeptical then. I still am on the obesity side of things.
• Exercise and Alzheimer's: How to fix the demented media 2006: I really didn't believe this particular correlation, but since then it's shown up in more persuasive animal studies.
• Alzheimer's: there's not much you can do about it 2006: Head injury avoidance remains important -- but also lifestyle constraining. We all die one way or another!
• Exercise and cognition - I'm still skeptical 2007: I'm starting to wonder if I was wrong to dismiss a causal relationship between exercise and brain health
• Skinnies burn fast, plumpies less demented 2007: In this study the elder skinnies became demented faster than the pleasingly plump.
• Delaying the inevitable onset of Alzheimer's: exercise is the new best hope 2008: When I admin that it does look like exercise is oddly good for brain health.
• Wasting money: Ginkgo biloba joins the pile 2008 - Anyone remember when Gingko biloba was going to help dementia? Fail.
• Dementia is normal - and what that means: 2009 - We're beginning to realize dementia really is inevitable -- though there's still hope to push it back. (Death and homeliness are also inevitable)
• Avandia (rosiglitazone) for Rat Alzheimer's Prophylaxis?! 2006 - It didn't do too well in human trials. It also promotes obesity, which is kind of interesting.
• Dietary supplements stop dementia in beagles? AAAS proceedings 2004 - Nothing came of this!