Adapting to Minnesota's new winter

The streets were clear today, the sun was up, and the temperatures were the 20s (F). A fine day for a bicycle ride in Minnesota's year without winter.

Next winter I'll probably buy winter bike shoes and studded tires and plan to ride year round.

That's how short term adaptation works in Minnesota, where climate change is already personal. We'll be doing a lot more over the next few decades.

Beyond that, given current trends, the prognosis is poor.  I'm relatively sanguine about that. I mean, if we can't figure out something simple like CO2 emissions, then we weren't going to make it as a sentient species anyway. Might as well get it over with.

That's probably a century away though, lots of time for billions of us to experiment with short term adaptation. So, for the Twin Cities, what can we expect from our winters over the next decade? In particular, what can we expect in terms of Real Cold (RC, temp < 5F), Skiable Snow (SS, >8" base), and Skateable Ice (SI)?

Of course I don't really know. But that won't stop me from making some half-educated guesses. I expect winter in 2021 to be rather like this winter. That is no RC, no SS and no SI.

Between now and 2021 I expect 3-5 weeks total of Real Cold. We will complain bitterly -- because we'll be unused to it. I expect 3-4 winters of SS and 5-6 winters of SI.

That means we really can't rely on outdoor ice skating, sledding or nordic skiing. On the other hand, we can't dramatically reduce our snow clearing capacity because every year or two we'll still get dumped on. We can't plan on winter road work either, but some years it will be possible. Some years an exurban commute will be fine, other years it will be intolerable.  We'll still have to pay for alley snow clearance -- even for years when there isn't any snow to clear.

That's a big change. I can't estimate the economic impact, but I suspect the unpredictability will mean increased costs (but also more jobs?) from 2011 to 2023. After that, as snow accumulation becomes truly infrequent, costs will fall.

It's easier to predict what we'll need to do to adapt to an unpredictable winter. We'll do what Portland does. That means more community recreation centers with indoor soccer, indoor tennis, indoor golf and indoor swimming (all of which will increase our CO2 emissions). It means even more year round bicycling, perhaps with winter adapted bikes (corrosion-proof drive chains, internal gearing, wide studded tires, etc). Maybe more arenas ($$) and refrigerated ice rinks. St Paul and Minneapolis will invest more in clearing bike trails. Probably more of us will take holidays in other states ...

Any other thoughts on near term adaptations for Minnesota winter?

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: World without winter - Minnesota edition 1/2012
• Gordon's Notes: Keystone XL, carbon sequestration, and the tax in the closet 11/2011
• NYT: E.U. Rebuffs China's Challenge to Airline Emission System 2/2012

I particularly appreciated today's Salon article by Bill McKibben:

• Salon: Climate change denial's new offensive
  
  "... the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked...
  
  ... Of the 16 authors of the Journal article ... five had had ties to Exxon...
  
  ... If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground. 
  
  ... in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela)..."

Siri struggling

This time around, I got my 4S early in the adoption cycle. So I remember when Siri mostly worked.

Since then, Siri works, at best, about half the time. She's overloaded. Even when I get through processing seems more error prone, perhaps because accuracy has been sacrificed to manage capacity.

Since the initial results were pretty decent, I assume Siri will eventually work. We've seen this before; it has taken about two years for Facetime to become a useful solution.

For now I've learned to avoid Siri during the US evenings. During the mornings results are much better. I've also learned to break my requests into stages, allowing Siri to scope her language processing in smaller chunks. To create a reminder I start with 'remind me' ... then I wait ... then the reminder text ... then the time ... then I have to wait for the confirm.

Processing aside, there is obvious room for improvement. We need, we REALLY need, a way to tell Siri to give up and start over again. We need a way to tell Siri 'yes and confirm' so we can skip the confirmation dialog. I assume Apple omitted these commands because they don't market well - they expose the limitations of 2011 Siri. Just like Graffiti exposed the limitations of 1990s handwriting recognition. Time to give a bit so we can get better results from a useful tool.

Google and Facebook: how Chrome supports life with an dully evil corporation

Just three years ago Facebook's Gordon's Evil Score was 12, and Google was a mere 6. Today, 3 months after Google's day of infamy, I'd give Google 10, Facebook 8, and Apple a 6. (Philip Morris gets 15. Evil is relative.)

These days Facebook is less evil than Google 2.0, probably because Facebook has been on pre-IPO best behavior. Post-IPO I expect 'em to hang with Google in the gray zone of generic AT&T-style corporate badness. After all, both companies package and sell us.

So why is Facebook's badness boring, and Google's badness Bad?

It's because we always knew Facebook was evil. I never gave FB anything I couldn't walk away from. If Facebook went away tomorrow, I'd be slightly sad.

Google though, Google once made me smarter. Our family uses Google Apps. My shared images are in Google's web albums. A lot of my external memory is Google dependent (so losing Google Reader shares felt like a mini-lobotomy). Google search, born in the day of the ad-infested Portal, was beautiful.

Google though, Google was going to make free the world's knowledge.

Google though, Google wants to build a sentient AI. Do we want our first sentient AI born of our bad parents?

That's why Google's Page-driven race to the Darkseid matters a lot more than Facebook's perennial villainy. We loved Google, we trusted Google,  we married Goole and made Data together -- and we were chumps. (Some of us are still in denial.)

What now? Well, Google hasn't turned into Philip Morris -- and it probably never will. They've just become as evil as most publicly traded corporations -- and a lot of us work for those. Besides, we can't completely divorce. Think of the Data. [1]

So I'm still living with Google. Yeah, I did try Bing. Have you ever used Bing? Go and give it a try. I'll wait here for a while. Right. Even EvilGoogle is better than Bing.

I'm living with Google, but I'm keeping my distance. Coincidentally (?) Chrome recently made this much easier.

Chrome now supports client-side identity management. On my Mac the Preferences:Personal Stuff menu has a "Users" section. A "User" is simply a separate identity, where an "identity" is a set of cookies, credentials, bookmarks, cache and so on. Optionally, a "User" on Chrome can be associated with a Google account, and Chrome/Google credentials and bookmarks sync between those accounts. These don't have to be Google+ accounts [2]. If you link a Chrome User to a non-Google+ account, you're basically using GoogleMinus. That's what I do.

In Chrome I currently switch between 5 Users as needed, each with a paired Google account. One user is my original TrueName "113" Google account. I deleted that account's G+ Profile, so this "User" gives me something of an old-style GoogleMinus experience. This account owns my Google Docs, my Email, my Calendar, and way too many Google properties to remember (including the remnants of Google Reader social.)

I use my G+ John Gordon identity with Blogger [3] and Google Reader (I moved GR subscriptions over to this account). I have yet another identity associated with my corporate work, another with our family domain, and then 1-2 more to make it easy to switch between the kid's Google accounts [4].

Google Chrome has made it easier to live with Google 2.0, but it's an uneasy relationship. Evil Facebook is fine -- because I don't care. Evil Google is not a good long term relationship. I'm seeing other services now, services like Pinboard.in and the shared items I post there. It will take decades, but I'm hoping true alternatives to Google will emerge. Alternatives that charge real money for their services. That's how I'll know they're worth being with.

[1] It's no coincidence that when Google turned evil, the Data Liberation team fell silent.
[2] For now, though in future that might be impossible to avoid.
[3] Google's blogs can have multiple contributors, so I just made John Gordon an admin on blogs that started with John F. as admin. Early on Google forbade pseudonyms in G+ accounts; now they only require that pseudonyms "appear" to be well formed, generic names not associated with celebrities or historic figures.
[4] All through our family domain. They don't know the passwords.

See also:

Others

• Microsoft, Apple, and Google: where does the money come from? | ZDNet 2/2012
• The ‘Eggs In One Basket’ Index - SplatF 2/2012 Google is fully dependent on Advertising revenue
• Facebook, Google, and the Future of the Online 'Commons' 2/3/2012. Fallows is soft on Google. He hasn't come to terms with the new Google.
• Against the wall – Marco.org 2/1/2012 - no illusions here
• Google's Broken Promise: The End of "Don't Be Evil" (Gizmodo, 1/2012)

Me

• Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 3rd edition 11/2011
• Google 2.0 11/2011
• Dapocalypse now: Google's day of infamy 10/2011
• Google 1.0 is dead. When did it start dying? 11/2011
• Divorcing Google - and hoping for GoogleMinus 1/2012
• Responding to Facebook’s lions: Stop friends using the apps 12/2009
• I deleted my Google G+ Profile 11/2011

Translating brain electrical activity into word sounds

Under some conditions, researchers are able to translate brain electrical signals into concepts/sounds which can be expressed using English words.

From the description I think the analysis focused on sound generation, so it was downstream from concept generation (which might express words before we were conscious of thinking them).

I have been following this research from a distance, and I knew the 'lie detectors' were getting pretty good, but this genuinely surprises me.

Science fiction writers are now frantically revising works in press. Charles Stross is probably banging his head on the wall right now.

Stunning, really. I'd been hopeful that I'd avoid the inevitable Singularity*, and that my kids would have good lives before it hits. Now I'm less optimistic.

* My favorite explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

Peak Oil 2005?

FuturePundit: 2005 Seen As Oil Supply Tipping Point:

Commentary in Nature: Can economy bear what oil prices have in store?

Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy.

That's the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in the current issue of the journal Nature (Jan. 26) that the economic pain of a flattening oil supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels.

"Given our fossil-fuel dependent economies, this is more urgent and has a shorter time frame than global climate change," says James W. Murray, UW professor of oceanography, who wrote the Nature commentary with David King, director of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The "tipping point" for oil supply appears to have occurred around 2005, says Murray, who compared world crude oil production with world prices going back to 1998. Before 2005, supply of regular crude oil was elastic and increased in response to price increases. Since then, production appears to have hit a wall at 75 million barrels per day in spite of price increases of 15 percent each year...

In 2007 I thought we'd started a long rise in gasoline prices, but today's gas pump price in MN is pretty much the same as in May 2007. (US consumption is, I believe, lower than it was in 2007.) We're still years away from $7/gallon gas in the US.

Even then I didn't imagine we'd hit a production wall in 2005; when I've written about "peak oil" I've meant simply that increasing demand will outstrip increasing supply of light 'sweet' crude.

Murray and King's prediction is far more severe than anything I've considered.

World without winter - Minnesota edition

Our yearly nordic ski event has run aground. Today's City of Lakes Nordic Ski Foundation newsletter wins the brave face prize...

... With minimal snow and warm temperatures last week, today and more predicted for this week, the Loppet has moved all festival events to Theodore Wirth Park...

... Obviously, everyone involved wishes that this winter was more winter-like.  But we at the Nordic Ski Foundation are truly excited for this weekend.  With a shorter loop, spectators will have ample opportunity to cheer on their favorite skiers.  All the action will be in close walking distance - with all the things you love about the Loppet right at Wirth Park. This will be the one weekend when the community can celebrate a real Minnesota winter...

... a hiking Luminary Loppet allows for more interesting terrain and a more woodsy and intimate experience. Hikers will enjoy over one thousand ice luminaries, the Ice Pyramid, the enchanted forest, fire dancers, hot cocoa, maple leaf cookies from Canada, s’mores, and, new this year, a ten ounce pour of Surly beer...

I imagine weeping Loppeters pounding Surly while drafting this email.

Not coincidentally, NASA has released a wonderful and terrible animation of 130 years of global temperature variation. It's easy to see how I caught the Nordic bug in the 1970s -- a colder than average time in North America. Temperatures rise and fall around the world -- cold during WW I, warm during the Great Depression. Then, in the last 30 years, the world changes.

We'll still get snowy winters of course. Last year was fairly warm in The Twins, but it was wonderfully snowy. This year is warmer, and much drier. Maybe next year will be in between.

We'll be adapting in ways big and small. Last week my family took a 3 day Nordic ski vacation at Mogasheen Resort on Lake Namekagan near the home of the Birkebeiner and the resurrected Telemark Lodge. We picked the optimal date for snow cover -- and we got what might the only 4 days of top-grade skiing they'll have. This week it's melting.

So next year we'll look at making two reservations. One at Mogasheen, and a fallback near the Keweenaw Peninsula's Swedetown trails or up Minnesota's far Gunflint Trail. We're also going to have to learn how people in Iowa and Missouri make it through their long, dull winters. Tennis anyone?

What I do

I have written about 10,000 blog posts, but I've not said much about myself. This is an exception. Please feel free to skip it.

I'm writing about myself because a classmate from eons ago asked me what I do now, and in particular how I use up my brain reserves.

First of all, I'm a father and a husband. Emily and I have 3 children and we share our home with a dog (Kateva of kateva.org) and a school rescue-gerbil (Kangaroo). For reasons I won't go into here our parental duties are very rewarding but also above-average demanding. Running over, around and into some of those challenges uses up a good bit of brain space.

Then there are hobbies, of which the most intellectual one is blogging and reading and sharing and so on. Excluding sports teams I write on three blogs including tech.kateva.org and notes.kateva.org.

Lastly there's work. This comes in a minor and major flavor. The minor flavor is that I'm adjunct faculty at the U of MN Health Informatics department. This has involved teaching courses over the past decade, but more recently we've a full time teacher who has taken this on. So its pretty light duty at the moment.

The major flavor is my work for a publicly traded corporation that, among other things, develops software products that are used by physicians and nurses. There I am a variable mixture of a working informatician (industrial ontologist I used to say), a domain specialist (less so as my aging medical knowledge obsoletes), an executive (more or less), a knowledge worker (more), a manager, a designer, an analyst, a project manager, an inventor, a cautious* disruptor, a fixer, a product owner, a librarian and whatever else is needed. It's a good job for anyone who gets bored easily and likes solving problems**.

In a past life I was a country doc. Emily and I worked in the same practice.

I have worked in the bowels of a publicly traded corporation for over ten years; longer than I've worked anywhere else. I do not think of myself as a very corporate person, and I find my continued survival bemusing and a bit puzzling. To a significant extent I have persisted there because it's been a great fit for our parental joys and obligations.

And that's what I do.

-fn-

* I learned the cautious bit the hard way, but still I am. Corporations are interesting entities.
** One of the most important lessons of my professional life was learning the difference between problems that are mostly important to solve and problems that are mostly interesting to solve.

GTD: Email to task with Toodledo

There are a lot of things I don't love about Toodledo. I really, for example, dislike their lack of full text search.

It's good then that they do some things very well. Import and export for example.

It's even better that they do one very important thing extremely well. You can mail a task into Toodledo.

Ah, you're not impressed? You think other task management services do this?

Perhaps, but so far only Toodledo does it right. I use this all the time. When I email someone and I want to track the response, I BCC my secret Toodledo task address. I create tasks from just about anywhere I can generate an email.

Creating tasks by email is a killer feature.

See also:

GTD series:

• GTD: Introduction to a series
• GTD: Create appointments not tasks
• GTD: Creating a project vs. editing a persistent task
• GTD: grouping tasks into Projects using Context with ToDo.app and Toodledo

and elsewhere ...

• Gordon's Tech: Toodledo gets it 8/2008
• Gordon's Tech: Toodledo: How you can give me the search I need with your current architecture 9/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Email to Task: Remember the Milk gets it wrong, Appigo and Toodledo do it right 10/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Tasks from Palm to iPhone via Toodledo 9/2009
• Gordon's Tech: Using Outlook Tasks: a mini-tutorial 8/2008: I don't use Outlook for personal tasks, and I switched from using Outlook tasks to focusing on creating Appointments - but that's a longer story. Work and home are different; I need a task list at home because they are small and opportunistic.

GTD: grouping tasks into Projects using Context with ToDo.app and Toodledo

Emily and I started using Appigo's ToDo.app on our iPhones years ago. In those days Toodledo didn't have an iPhone app and ToDo didn't have a web app.

Now both Toodledo and Appigo market both web apps and iOS apps. Alas, Appigo hasn't figured out how creating tasks by email should work, and I don't like Toodledo's iOS app. So I still use ToDo.app with Toodledo. It works pretty well, and now that Google has turned Evil I'm happy to avoid their world.

It works pretty well -- except when you want want to group a series of tasks as a project. The project models for Toodledo and Todo don't mesh.

Most of the time this doesn't bother me -- I like to edit and move forward tasks rather than create small projects. Sometimes, however, a complex project deserves a set of tasks.

Since the Toodledo and Todo project models don't sync, I instead steal the "Context" feature - which both ToDo and Toodledo manage similarly. A "Context" is supposed to be a location or environment for doing a task; but I've never found this "Getting Things Done" idea very useful. These days I have a computer everywhere, and that's the context for most of my tasks.

So instead of a list of "Contexts" I have "Projects" that group tasks. The UI and views are very efficient for this purpose, and synchronization works perfectly.

See also:

• GTD: Introduction to a series
• GTD: Create appointments not tasks
• GTD: Creating a project vs. editing a persistent task

GTD: Creating a project vs. editing a persistent task

Both Appigo ToDo (app/web) and Toodledo Pro (app/web) have the idea of a "project" that can contain subtasks.

For small projects I don't bother with the overhead of project creation and task maintenance. Instead I create a single task that I edit when I complete a 'step' in the project. It lasts the life of the project.

Each time I complete a step, I edit the task to add a new "next step" and I date stamp the completed step. I also keep short notes in the body of the task note.
For example, if the task is "Update Passport" I might have the following my "notes" section:

• schedule photograph
• download form
• complete form
• schedule appointment .. etc.

In practice I don't usually write out all the next steps. I just write out the one that's up next. For A tasks I may schedule a calendar appointment too.
Similarly I don't bother with repeating or recurrent tasks. I create one task, and just reschedule it as needed. My "pay visa bill" task has been moved forward one month at a time for years. (Periodically I delete the list of dates I paid to shrink the notes section).

See also:

• GTD: Create appointments not tasks
• GTD: Introduction to a series
• Appigo Todo.app and Todo Online: best solution for most
• Toodledo: power user solution, best import/export/integration. Lacks full text search (!).

 

CSS was a terrible mistake

It is fashionable to talk about the "wisdom of crowds" and the power of crowd sourcing.

There's always a flip-side. That's the madness of crowds.

That madness comes to mind as I contemplate the wreckage of Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010 Wiki conversion. How did this happen?

Part of the explanation is that Microsoft is a dying company, and SP 2010 was never finished. Microsoft redid their rich text editor, moving away from the IE embedded Word-like editor [1], but they didn't finish the conversion tools. Many formatted SP 2007 wiki pages cannot be edited in the new environment. (Apple does this stuff too, but with SP 2010 Microsoft has exceeded Apple's appallingly low standards.)

I think there's another factor though, and that's where the madness of crowds comes in. That was the decision made in the late 1990s to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the layout of web content.

In retrospect CSS layout was a dreadful mistake, a madness of crowds "bridge-too-far" class mistake. Table based layout worked back when 100MB was a lot of memory. Mixing table models and CSS and style sheets is too much. Humans can't scale to this level of complexity; and browsers struggle mightily to reconcile multiple formatting and layout rules.

We are going to be paying for the CSS mistake for a very long time. We would be wise to at least recognize that we blundered, and try to understand why.

[1] Chrome and IE 9 are equally bad at editing our 540 or so partly-converted wiki pages.

CEO Compensation: Apple and more

Apple's Tom Cook isn't the worst example of excessive CEO compensation, but his huge stock option grant is bad news all the same.

It's bad news because it tells us that Apple 4.0 is becoming an average publicly traded corporation even more quickly than expected. This kind of compensation demoralizes employees who deal with tight budgets, even as their CEO earns a year of their pay in a day. Perhaps worse of all, when you pay a CEO a hundred times what their star employees receive, they imagine they're 100 times better than those employees.

An overpaid CEO is a CEO on chronic meth - intoxicated by the inarguable evidence of their perfect brilliance.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: What are the consequences of extreme executive income? 11/2011
• Gordon's Notes: Natural selection and executive compensation 2/2009 - we've established an ecosystem that selects for internal predation, not wise leadership
• Gordon's Notes: Performance-based compensation and novel financial instruments: an explosive combination 1/2009
• Gordon's Notes: Will winner take all work? 9/2006
• Gordon's Notes: Mass disability and the middle class 9/2011.
• Gordon's Notes: Where has the money gone? To the very American oligarchy 2/2006
• Gordon's Notes: Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2001

Wisdom summarized - Elders speak

Most "wisdom" essays are pretty obvious, but this one has some science to it. Curiously I agree with much of it, but I can see how some recommendations are really personality specific.

Elderly ‘Experts’ Share Life Advice in Cornell Project:

... Maintain social contacts. Avoid becoming isolated. When an invitation is issued, say yes. Take steps to stay engaged, and take advantage of opportunities to learn new thing...

My takeaways:

1. Some recommendations are in conflict. "Do what you love" as a career may well contradict "spend more time with your children".
2. "chose to live each day as if it could be my last" is Jane Brody's personal one. Nobody else said that. Emily and I do something a bit different. We live as though our world were fragile and transient; both for us individually and for all we meet and know.
3. Embrace aging, don't fight it. Yech. I suspect this is a form of denial. Physical/cognitive aging sucks. "Embracing" sounds like Stockholm Syndrome.
4. Travel when young. Yeah, that's right. Good advice. Don't wait. Spend the bloody money; a fancy wheelchair isn't worth it.

Do whipworms make dogs eat dirt?

The canine whipworm (Trichuris vulpis) is a common dog parasite.

The juvenile form of the parasite develops in dirt; it's transmitted by eating dirt (geophagy). It may be particularly common in dog parks [1]

Some dogs eat dirt.

Many parasites change the behaviors of their hosts to facilitate their life cycle.

So do whipworm infested dogs find dirt particularly tasty?

The association between geophagy and worm infection has been studied in humans, but a PubMed query on geophagy and trichuris vulpis in dogs produced no hits (PubMed includes veterinary literature).

I'm sure someone is studying this even as I write this post. I'm hoping for an article within the year.

[1] I don't know how hard it is to study this. A visit to the local dog park might be the basis for a great high school science experiment.

Rule 34 by Charlie Stross - my review

I read Charlie Stross's Rule 34. Here's my 5 star Amazon review (slightly modified as I thought of a few more things):

Rule 34 is brilliant work.

If Stross had written a novel placed in 2010, it would have been a top notch crime and suspense novel. Charlie's portrayal of the criminal mind, from silence-of-the-lambs psychopath (sociopath in UK speak, though that US/UK distinction is blurring) to every day petty crook, is top notch.

Stross puts us into the minds of his villains, heroes, and fools, using a curious 2nd person pronoun style that has a surprising significance. I loved how so many of his villains felt they were players, while others knew they were pawns. Only the most insightful know they're a cog in the machine.

A cog in a corporate machine that is. Whether cop or criminal or other, whether gay or straight, everyone is a component of a corporation. Not the megacorp of Gibson and Blade Runner, but the ubiquitous corporate meme that we also live in. The corporate meme has metastasized. It is invisible, it is everywhere, and it makes use of all material. Minds of all kinds, from Aspergerish to sociopath, for better and for worse, find a home in this ecosystem. The language of today's sycophantic guides to business is mainstream here.

Stross manages the suspense and twists of the thriller, and explores emerging sociology as he goes. The man has clearly done his homework on the entangled worlds of spam and netporn -- and I'm looking forward to the interviewers who ask him what that research was like. In other works Stross has written about the spamularity, and in Rule 34 he lays it out. He should give some credit to the spambots that constantly attack his personal blog.

Rule 34 stands on its own as a thriller/crime/character novel, but it doesn't take place in 2010. It takes place sometime in the 2020-2030s (at one point in the novel Stross gives us a date but I can't remember it exactly). A lot of the best science fiction features fully imagined worlds, and this world is complete. He's hit every current day extrapolation I've ever thought of, and many more besides. From the macroeconomics of middle Asia, to honey pots with honey pots, to amplified 00s style investment scams to home foundries to spamfested networked worlds to a carbon-priced economy to mass disability to cyberfraud of the vulnerable to ubiquitous surveillance to the bursting of the higher education bubble, to exploding jurisprudence creating universal crime … Phew. There's a lot more besides. I should have been making a list as I read.

Yes, Rule 34 is definitely a "hard" science fiction novel -- though it's easy to skip over the mind-bending parts if you're not a genre fan. You can't, however, completely avoid Stross's explorations of the nature of consciousness, and his take on the "Singularity" (aka rapture of the nerds). It's not giving away too much to say there's no rapture here. As to whether this is a Rainbow's End pre-Singular world … well, you'll have to read the novel and make your own decision. I'm not sure I'd take Stross's opinion on where this world of his is going - at least not at face value.

Oh, and if you squint a certain way, you can see a sort-of Batman in there too. I think that was deliberate; someone needs to ask Charlie about that.

Great stuff, and a Hugo contender for sure.

If you've read my blog you know I'm fond of extrapolating to the near future. Walking down my blog's tag list I see I'm keen on the nature and evolution of the Corporation, mind and consciousness, economics, today's history, emergence, carbon taxes, fraud and "the weak", the Great Recession (Lesser Depression), alternative minds (I live with 2 non-neurotypicals), corruption, politics, governance, the higher eduction and the education  bubble, natural selection, identity, libertarianism (as a bad thing), memes, memory management, poverty (and mass disability), reputation management, schizophrenia and mental illness, security, technology, and the whitewater world. Not to mention the Singularity/Fermi Paradox (for me they're entangled -- I'm not a Happy Singularity sort of guy).

Well, Stross has, I dare to say, some of the same interests. Ok, so I'm not in much doubt of that. I read the guy religiously, and I'm sure I've reprocessed everything he's written. In Rule 34 he's hit all of these bases and more. Most impressively, if you're not looking for it, you could miss almost all of it. Stross weaves it in, just as he does a slow reveal of the nature of his characters, including the nature of the character you don't know about until the end.

Update: In one of those weird synchronicity things, Stross has his 2032 and 2092 predictions out this morning. Read 'em.