(cross posted to Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech)
Google Reader shares are gone.
I'm not going to switch to sharing via G+.
I will, however, be sharing via Twitter: John Gordon (jgordonshare) on Twitter.
That Twitter stream used to consist of feed-generated tweets from GR shares. Now it's the closest thing I have to an archive of those shares.
Now it will be the primary place I share -- with the help of the Twitter share bookmarklet.
I'm processing Google's day of infamy. I've written my Dear Google letter. So what lessons do I take away from this?
Here are a few ...
I'm sure I'll come up with a few more.
I shared thousands of articles through Google Reader.
They were a part of my extended memory. I often searched that repository.
This evening they are gone.
I had expected bad news, but I didn't expect the entire shared story repository to vanish.
Yes, there's a JSON export. I will do it of course, but Google is not providing any tools to navigate or transform that data set. The export of data in a non-useable format is no export at all.
Dapocalypse now. Google, I want a divorce.
Update: The JSON export links aren't working for me.
Kiyoshi Tanimoto was a Christian minister who survived the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. My son was asked to write about his life.
In the course of research we came across a 1950s television program called "This is your life: Kiyoshi Tanimoto". The program included Reverend Tanimoto meeting the man who piloted the Enola Gay.
It starts with a realtime advertisement for cleaning products and cosmetics, though, mercifully, the sponsor omitted some later commercials. They did manage a nail commercial after the conclusion of the most intense part of the program. "Not a chip anywhere ... Hazel Bishop long lasting nail polish ...".
The word surreal was created to describe this program. 1950s America was both yesterday and a very long time ago.
Great review of how Minneapolis became a bicycle town following the Dutch model of bike/car separation, with very encouraging news from St Paul ...
Behind the Bicycle Boom - JAY WALLJASPER
People across the country were surprised last year when Bicycling magazine named Minneapolis America’s “#1 Bike City” over Portland, Oregon, which had claimed the honor for many years....
... This year the city is adding 57 new miles of bikeways to the 127 miles already built. An additional 183 miles are planned over the next twenty years. By 2020, almost every city resident will live within a mile of an off-street bikeway and within a half-mile of a bike lane, vows city transportation planner Donald Pfaum...
... it boasts arguably the nation’s finest network of off-street bicycle trails. It was chosen as one of four pilot projects (along with Marin County, California; Columbia, Missouri; and Sheboygan County, Wisconsin) for the federal Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, which aims to shift a share of commuters out of cars and onto bikes or foot...
... Minneapolis features two “ bike freeways,” that are the envy of bicyclists around the country. The Cedar Lake Trail, and the Midtown Greenway both connect to numerous other trails, creating an off-road network that reaches deep into St. Paul and surrounding suburbs. Intersections are infrequent along these routes, which boosts riders’ speed along with their sense of safety and comfort. In a good sign for the future of biking in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis engineers recently reversed a stop sign to give bikes priority over cars where the Midtown Greenway meets 5th Avenue South...
... While only a quarter of riders are women nationally, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reports 37 percent in Minneapolis...
... Since the 1970s Dutch planners have separated bicyclists from motor vehicles on most arterial streets, with impressive results. The rate of biking has doubled throughout the country, now accounting for 27 percent of all trips. Women make up 55 percent of two-wheel traffic and citizens over 55 ride in numbers slightly higher than the national average. Nearly every Dutch schoolyard is filled with kids’ bikes parked at racks and lampposts.
The Dutch also that as the number of riders rises, their safety increases. Statistics in Minneapolis show the same results. Shaun Murphy, Non-Motorized Transportation Program Coordinator in the Public Works Department, notes that your chances of being in a car/bike crash in the city are 75 percent less than in 1993...... Steve Elkins, Transportation Chair of the Metropolitan Council, highlighted his efforts as city council member in suburban Bloomington to push the idea of Complete Streets--meaning that roadways should serve walkers and bikers as well as cars...
..City workers clear snow from the off-road bikeways just the same as streets, sometimes doing them first. Studded snow tires and breakthroughs in cold-weather clothing makes year-round biking easier than it looks, Clark said...
.. Local bicyclists would have howled at the idea of Minneapolis being named America’s best city 30 years ago. It was a frustrating and dangerous place to bike, crisscrossed by freeways and arterial streets that felt like freeways. Drivers were openly hostile to bike riders, some of them going the extra step to scare the daylights out of us as they roared past. Bike lanes were practically non-existent at that time....
I wager Portland cyclists are happy we took the crown. I suspect their officials were getting complacent. Maybe they'll win it back, but that will only motivate Minneapolis. It's the kind of battle nobody loses.
Really, Portland's not a natural bike town either. It's bloody icy and hilly in January. So the success of Minneapolis and Portland shows the power of the Dutch model of bicycling, amply championed by David Hembrow and Mark Wagenbuur.
Alas, though the distinction seems academic beyond Minnesota, I can't claim to live in the promised land of Minneapolis. I'm a St Paul resident, the older of the Twin Cities. We're not quite as advanced. So it was good to recognize how much Minneapolis has changed in 20 years. With the help of the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition, and the example of the younger Twin, we might get there yet.
Clayton Christensen, famed guru of innovation, predicting Apple's inevitable failure - in 2007. Emphases mine ...
Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain
... Who or what do you think will disrupt Google (GOOG) or Apple (AAPL)? It's hard for me to see what will disrupt Google. I think they've got a pretty good run ahead of them. Chapters five and six of The Innovator's Solution describe how at the beginning phases of the industry, in order to play that game successfully you really need to have a proprietary, optimized, end-to-end architecture to your product.
Apple sure has that. That's why they've been successful. But just watch the [competitors'] advertisements that you hear for the ability to download music onto your mobile phone. Music on the mobile phone has to be downloaded in an open architecture way from Yahoo! Music or someplace else [other than iTunes]. Which means it's clunkier, not as good. Mobile phones don't have as much storage capacity, nor are their interfaces as intuitive [as iPods]. But for some folks, they're good enough, and the trajectories [of people using their phone as a medium for listening to music] just keep getting better and better.
So music on the mobile phone is going to disrupt the iPod? But Apple's just about to launch the iPhone. The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won't succeed with the iPhone. They've launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It's not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited."
History is now hiding in a closet, afraid to show its face.
Years later, Christensen said - "There's just something different about those guys. They're freaks."
Exactly. Apple has been a freak. The corporation that crossed the speed and inventiveness of a private firm with the capitol and reach of a publicly traded corporation.
Now we're in the Apple 4.0 era. Without Jobs, perhaps Christensen will be right, and Apple will become a normal dismal failure. Or maybe Apple's corporate structure, and its training programs, will be Jobs last and greatest innovation. Apple 4.0 won't be Jobs Apple, but if it manages to be merely abnormal it may be the cure for the ailing American corporation.
The GOP is morally and intellectually bankrupt -- and they're likely to get another chance to finish off America.
This is, of course, the fault of the GOP voter. They deserve blame for that. History will not be kind to them.
History should give them some credit though, maybe even let them out of purgatory a bit early.
I mean, look at the leaders.
A black man is leading in the (vote free) polling. This isn't the same getting real votes but it's something. I wouldn't have predicted older white male GOP voters would give the man an audience. Sure he's balm for their guilt -- but the mere fact that they feel guilt is impressive.
Meanwhile, the man pundits favor to win isn't a Christian [1]. Goldberg said it well - Romney is culturally Christian, theologically not. Yes, GOP voters are having trouble with this, and with his total lack of credibility, but even so Romney is always close to the lead. I didn't think GOP voters would tolerate a heretical President.
Then there's the maroon. Perry is what I expected, a dimmer version of George Bush. I think he'll be the nominee; in the end Romney won't be theologically acceptable.
I might be wrong though. The GOP base is surprising me. They have abysmal judgment, but in a strange way their bad choices are a good sign.
[1] To me Mormonism seems as good (or bad) as most religions. I think people should be more worried that Romney is a fan of Battlefield Earth.
Facebook is getting seriously weird.
Ok, I'm not a FB expert. On the other hand I've created and managed four different Pages and I'm a regular reader. It's true I don't use FB apps, but I'm not a total FB newbie.
Even so, I don't get it.
I'm genuinely interested in tracking the activities of various orgs that use Facebook Pages -- but with the newest UI tweak they're not showing up. They appear in a scrolling layout on the right side that's difficult to navigate, and the main page is limited to a very few recent posts. Facebook is beginning to remind me of Netflix, another company that thought it knew what I wanted. (I feel evil joy every time Netflix's share price drops another 30%.)
The good news is that Pages have RSS feeds. So I could simply start following them with Google Reader, and "unlike" the Pages so FB just shows my friend's activity.
Except that Google Reader isn't in the best of shape either...
Update: Well, that was quick. My usual FB page behavior is back; I can scroll to past pages. I wonder if I was seeing a new UI experiment or a service outage. In any event I have moved 14 Pages I followed into Google Reader and I've "Unliked" them. Their output is a much better fit to GR than to FB, and now I can share and manage what I learn outside of the FP straightjacket. One page had an invalid RSS feed, no idea why.
I barely got my head around the inflationary universe, and it's already passe.
Sean Carroll starts us off with his debut article in Discover -- Welcome to the Multiverse. That's just a warmup though, his blog digs a lot deeper. ...
... it is crucial to note that in conventional non-inflationary cosmology, our current observable universe was about a centimeter across at the Planck time. That’s a huge size by particle physics standards. In inflation, by contrast, the whole universe could have fit into a Planck volume, 10-33 centimeters across, much tinier indeed...
... “essentially all” — models of inflation lead to the prediction that inflation never completely ends. ... inflation will end in some places, but in other places it keeps going. Where it keeps going, space expands at a fantastic rate. In some parts of that region, inflation eventually ends, but in others it keeps going. And that process continues forever, with some part of the universe perpetually undergoing inflation. That’s how the multiverse gets off the ground — we’re left with a chaotic jumble consisting of numerous “pocket universes” separated by regions of inflating spacetime...
... thinking about black hole entropy has led physicists to propose something called “horizon complementarity” — the idea that one observer can’t sensibly talk about things that are happening outside their horizon. When applied to cosmology, this means we should think locally: talk about one or another pocket universe, but not all of them at the same time. In a very real sense, the implication of complementarity is that things outside our horizon aren’t actually real — all that exists, from our point of view, are degrees of freedom inside the horizon, and on the horizon itself....
Sean ends by sending us back to read a 2007 article than runs through stories of pre-inflationary creation ... How Did the Universe Start? (April 2007)
That's a lot to digest, but the very next day Sean features a rant by Tom Banks, a fierce physicist who must put coffee in his Ritalin ...
Guest Post: Tom Banks Contra Eternal Inflation | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
A lot of research in high energy theory has been devoted to the topic of eternal inflation. More and more, over the last few years, I’ve come to regard this as an enormous waste of intellectual resources and I’ve chosen Cosmic Variance as a very public way to make my objections to this theoretical mistake clear...
... We also discussed a solution to Einstein’s equations which was a black hole with de Sitter interior embedded in this homogeneous isotropic cosmology. In the paper referred to above, we have found an exact quantum model, satisfying all the consistency conditions of HST, which corresponds to that solution. There is a one parameter family of models corresponding to the choice of dS c.c. We can also find approximate solutions of the consistency conditions corresponding to two or more such black holes, separated by a large distance...
... So we can construct models in which there are many values of the c.c. depending on which black hole interior one resides in. Each mini dS universe will be stable, unless it collides with another...
I didn't get much out of Tom Banks essay -- it's aimed at someone who knows something. I'm left with a vague sense that we're on the wrong side of a black hole and we know it as our universe. Of course since we have black holes in our universe, it's presumably holes all the way down. Maybe we're computational ghosts replaying whatever fell in from the other side.
Fortunately I've read Greg Egan's Permutation City so this feels pretty comfortable.
Carroll thinks we'll get this figured out sometime in the next 30 years or so. I hope I live to see it.
Setting aside the "simulation" thesis for the moment, and inspired by Egan but unconstrained by knowledge or data, I'll make a guess as to how it will all turn out. For the fun of it, because, after all, this is my blog.
I think the infinities will go away and that everything everywhere will all sum to zero.
I think when this theory is explained to someone like me, physicists will use the analogy of a granite cube 3 meters on a side. They'll say that in this cube is every shape and form there could ever be, all atop one another, waiting to be revealed by the sculptor.
Or they'll show how two sounds can produce silence, and tell us that in silence is every sound, every word, every signal and thought that could ever be. All at once.
With 3 adopted kids including two born overseas and different parental last names [1], we suffer when it's time to renew our passports. For reference, here's the procedure we follow as of Nov 2011. Average adults might try renewal by mail, but I don't trust that process.
Note government web sites are usually outsourced to contractors. Every time a contract changes all the links break. You'll usually need to search on key words to find current links.
References
Recommendations and notes
[1] America really, really, really wants women to adopt the last name of their husband. This is not changing.
See also:
I've been using Apple's Pages and Keynote for a few modest projects.
They're functional span is very good and the price is excellent.
Quality though, that's a problem. Once you move outside of the basic functionality there are big unfixed bugs and half built solutions.
I'm somewhat used to this from Apple. Their software quality is only as good as it has to be -- and their customers are notoriously compliant. (Though years of poor quality Aperture releases probably cost Apple the professional photography market.)
I'm used to Apple's poor quality software, but I don't like it.
We're into the Apple 4.0 era now. There are reasons to expect Apple's elegance and share price to decline. i'm good with that. I'd trade 20% of Apple's elegance for better quality products.
I reader recently asked me to resolve a bad link in a post I wrote 7 years ago about the book "Straight and Crooked Thinking'.. I had no memory of the original, but my personal Google Custom Search found it in seconds.
I found the original article in what I suspect is a modern splog. I didn't want to give that any link love, but I will grant that the splog is the only remnant of the original work.
Instead I found a terrific synopsis of rhetorical devices in a Wikipedia reference: Straight and Crooked Thinking. From that article there are links to memory and cognitive biases. It's altogether a true Wikipedia tour de force.
Beyond that, the 1953 edition of the book is available as a well done PDF. I've added it to iBook for later reading.
I love the web.
Five years ago, when China's manufacturing quality was at its worst, I used the crummy toaster crisis as a missing-middle example. It was easy then to find cheap goods that were crummy, and with difficulty one might find luxury or industrial goods that might be reliable, but the market for quality goods at a reasonable price had evaporated.
A cheap toaster might cost $25, but a $75 toaster wasn't any better.
Since then, a few things have changed. With the Lesser depression Americans started to pay attention to how long things lasted. China's own internal markets have, I suspect, become more demanding. I think the quality of manufactured goods is better than it used to be.
About two years ago a small repair business started selling a Wide-Slot Automatic Pop up Toaster Made in the U.S.A. for about $350. Now it's down to $265 for an "introductory price". Clearly, this is a luxury good purchase.
Still, the price is coming down. Perhaps a large scale manufacturer will pick it up, particularly as China's currency (mercifully) appreciates against the US dollar. Perhaps one day a $150 US made toaster will sell as a luxury good in China, and a quality good in the US.
