Ancient Rome in a nutshell

One of my weekly pleasures is writing up adapted history notes for a special needs high school student. I love doing it; his 9th grade history book (Ellis and Esler, World History, Prentice Hall) is well written and lines up fairly closely with the adult material I consume, including In Our Time's superb history curriculum. The exercise is filling the background gaps in my spotty knowledge of today's version of world history.

It's not hard to write the digests in a form he can use with his assignments. I'm surprised there aren't adapted versions of these school texts. Perhaps someone will do them using Apple's new iBook toolset for the creation and distribution of low cost textbooks. Heck, I'd do it, but the list of things I need to do is rather long.

I particularly enjoyed Chinese history, until that exercise it had seemed impenetrably complex. This week was Ancient Rome. I was struck by the role of population growth, climate instability, large scale migrations, public health breakdown and epidemic spread, and economic inequality and government corruption in the fall of Rome. Nothing familiar about that!

For your reading pleasure -- the adapted version of 9th grade Roman History in a medium-sized blog post. It's more or less written for something between a 3rd and 5th grade reading level.

Ancient Rome: 500 BC to 500 AD

Key Ideas

• Rome was and is a city in a region we call the Italian Peninsula.
• Long ago the people of the city of Rome controlled many lands. We call all of this ‘The Roman Empire’.
• Rome is still around today! It is the capitol of modern Italy.
• Christianity started in Rome
• Today’s Europe was very influenced by Rome’s Empire
• The Romans took over from the Greeks. Rome became powerful as Greece was getting weaker.
• We divide Roman history into 3 parts:
  • Republic: 500 BC to about 0 AD. The best part of Roman history. Good government, healthy culture.
  • Empire: 0 AD to 200 AD. Rome is very powerful, ruled by dictators (Emperors). Rome depends more and more on slavery, stops developing new ideas.
  • Decline: 200 AD to 500 AD. Rome is powerful but troubled and falling apart.

Geography

Rome’s Empire included everything around the Mediterranean sea and then all of modern France and the southern part of modern England. Rome was the center of the Empire, it is in the brown box below. Today we call that land Italy.

Major Achievements of Ancient Rome

Rome had a very great impact on the history of Europe and the Mediterranean.

Rome learned a lot from the Greeks. When Rome conquered Greece it did not destroy Greek knowledge and culture. Rome admired the Greeks. They preserved Greek knowledge and spread it around. They made Greeks Roman citizens and helped Greek scientists and doctors.

Rome had many great writers. Rome developed the Stoic philosophy.

Roman developed their own style of Art and Buildings (architecture) and learned how to make big and strong bridges and buildings and roads. Romans invented ways to carry water into Romain cities and how to get rid of human urine and stool (plumbing).  This meant Roman cities could grow large with less disease.

Romans learned to make very good maps, and to avoid the spread of diseases.

Rome developed a strong system of laws. Roman laws are the basis of American, European, and other legal systems today.

The Roman-Jewish religion of Christianity spread all over the world and continues today.

The Growth of Roman Christianity

Christianity started in a Roman land called Judea, the land of the Jewish people. It started as a Jewish sect (cult) based on the idea of a Savior or Messiah called Jesus Christ born around the year 0 AD. Our calendar is based on the year of Jesus Christ birth.

Christianity grew because it allowed non-Jews to join. Christians were supposed to protect one another and when it developed there was a lot fighting and danger. So it was safer to become Christian.

Christians believed it was important for rich and powerful people to help poor and weak people. Even slaves could become Christian. There were a lot of poor people in the Roman empire after 100 AD so Christianity grew quickly.

Christianity also took some ideas from Roman Stoicism, so many powerful Stoics liked it.

Why did the people of ancient Italy (Rome) build a lasting empire?

An Empire is a large area with many languages and cultures controlled by a single nation for many years. Rome controlled one of the largest and most long lasting Empires in human history.

There were several things about of Rome’s geography, neighbors and culture that helped them build a big empire.

Geography: The Italian Peninsula (land of ancient Rome) is a long narrow region of land surrounded on 3 sides by the Mediterranean with a mountainous area in the North. It is protected from invasion. In the peninsula there is good land for growing food. The peninsula is easier to travel across than Greece.

Neighbors: The people of Rome were the Latins. They came to the Italian Peninsula around 800 BC. They learned a lot from the Etruscans who were there before. They learned how to write and they learned Etruscan engineering. They also learned a lot of things from the Greeks.

Government: The Romans invented a system of government that worked well for hundreds of years. Even if a powerful ruler died, the nation of Rome would continue. Their system balanced the power of the rich and the power of the average person.

Culture: Roman women were still limited by male power, but they could contribute more to society than Greek women. Roman society made better use of the talent of women. Unlike Greek girls Roman girls learned to read and write. Even poor Romans learned to read and write.

Leadership: When Rome conquered a country they let the people live and manage their affairs. The people could become Roman citizens. They learned the Roman language. Rome took taxes but protected them.

Why did the Roman Empire Decay and Fall?

After about 0 AD Rome was ruled by dictators (Emperors). This form of government has problems. People got to be Emperor by military power or friends or family, not because they were good at governing. Good Emperors were replaced by Bad Emperors. Emperors could do what they wanted, nobody could prevent bad choices.

Emperors took money and gave it to their friends and family.  They used more and more slavery.

Rome had more poor people and more slaves. Instead of improving things and trying new ideas they used more slaves. Rome needed more money and slaves to keep going, so Rome conquered more lands.  Even as Rome got bigger it was getting socially weaker. Rome depended on slaves now, but slaves did not like Rome.

At the same time human populations were getting bigger around the world and the world’s climate was also changing. It changed a lot between 250 and 500 AD, sometimes hotter, sometimes drier, sometimes colder. There were some years with good weather and good harvests, then years with bad years and bad harvests. During bad years lots of people would move around looking for better lands.

Growing numbers and changing weather meant lots of people were forced to move from the North and East of Europe and Asia into Italy, looking for land and food and a place to live. They were constantly invading the Italian Peninsula even as Rome was getting weaker.

In the Italian Peninsula more migration and more population and less government meant it was easier for diseases to spread. Huge plagues, like the Black Death, attacked Rome.

PS. OS X Pages pastes very well into MarsEdit!

Apple's Potemkin Parental Controls (iOS edition)

When the NYT's NYT's Tedeschi admitted to me that he'd missed the boat on iOS Parental Controls I was hoping for a correction to his NYT mobile porn article. He'd written "For parents who are uncomfortable letting children browse such content on an Apple device, the first step is to tap the Settings icon... Enable Restrictions and ... switch Safari to Off..".

Of course this doesn't really work. Last week someone I know discovered the joy of porn videos as viewed through Flight Update - with Safari and YouTube restricted. He finished off his 200MB data allowance in two half hour car drives.

How did he do it? It's not hard. In Gate Guru, for example, the 'legal' page has a link at the bottom. Tap on the link, and you get an embedded WebKit browser. Tap again to get to USA Today, from there it's a couple of taps to Google search.

This isn't a new problem. The WebKit back door has been in iOS since Apps came on board. Most non-Apple Apps have these back doors, including many educational apps. Almost any app that accepts advertising will link to an external site. The safest approach is to only allow Apple's software, but in practice many non-free games are fine.

I suspect most kids are very familiar with using this backdoor; I've seen children with 3rd percentile IQs find and exploit these loopholes in a few minutes. Adults have more trouble, it took Bob Tedeschi a few tries to find the loopholes. I suspect we're more bound by preconceptions of what's possible. (Who'd think to hide explicit emails in the Spam folder, for example?)

Apple's Potemkin parental controls are really only effective at placating parents. It seems to work though, I've been the only one complaining.

See also:

• Apple's iPhone parental controls are completely broken 9/10
• NYT's Tedeschi misses the iOS Porn story 1/12
• Parental Controls on iOS and OS X: what we do now 2/2012. Lately we have better results on OS X. The key was to block Google completely.

Update 3/5/12: Just demonstrated this with liveATC.app, which my son would love to use. There's a twitter share icon. From that it took me a couple of taps to the twitter blog. That's  rich source of links, so from there I hopped to Amazon and from Amazon I had the web. All with Safari disabled of course.

Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'?

Newt Gingrich has written many Amazon book reviews. One of them was on a physics book I'd read, maybe Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos -- though I don't see the review there now.

I don't remember which book, but I remember Gingrich claimed he'd finished it in a few days of easy reading. Given Gingrich's historical record he's either the world's smartest fool or a master of bull poop. Modern physics books are a hard slog for the non-genius, non-physicist. I've read a few of them, and I'm always impressed by how much work it is to integrate the concept space, and how insane the working scientist authors are to write these complex tomes.

Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? The guys an untentured Caltech theoretical physicist -- he's supposed to be cranking out grants and papers. I mean, I love the book, but this isn't survival behavior. His blogging is sinful enough, but the book is another level.

Part of the reason might be getting some of his personal theories more attention. Carroll believes cosmological inflation, while "true", simply "begs the question". That is, while cosmological inflation explains some properties of the observable cosmos, it raises even more questions about the state of the pre-inflationary cosmos. Carroll believes the physics of entropy is a possible key to that puzzle. In today's physics community this seems to be mildly heretical and probably not a great way to get tenure. [3]

So frustration with the establishment is probably a part of his compulsion, but it's not all. There's a clue to the rest buried in the footnotes [2] ...

273. What would be even better is if some young person read this book, became convinced this was a serious problem worthy of our attention, and went on to solve it.... if you end up finding an explanation for the arrow of time that becomes widely accepted within the physics community, please let me know if this book had anything to do with it.

The work of puzzle solving goes on, from one mortal generation to the next. That's our little way of poking a stick in the Eye of Entropy.

[1] The unrelated Sean B. Carroll is another working scientist author of popular biology books.
[2]  Consecutively numbered - brilliant. Wish everyone did this instead of renumbering each chapter. After reading the core book, go back and read the footnotes. I made the mistake of borrowing this book from the library -- and blowing through multiple renewal periods and fines and so on. Finally, with 30 pages to go, I gave up and bought the sucker. If Carroll ever does another edition though, he ought to include a concept glossary as well.
[3] Most serious books of lay physics, including Greene's work, has this element. Like Greene and other working physicists, Carroll sticks with establishment physics for 90% of the book, then lays out his own ideas with clear warnings that "dragons are here". It's a good practice and it's part of what distinguishes books by reality-based physicists from the flaky side of the cosmos.  Of course in modern physics "reality" is profoundly unreal.

See also:

• BBC IOT - Theories of Everything With Brian Greene 9/2007
• Mathematical universe: the softly spoken premise of string theory 1/2008
• Carroll on Time: emergent or fundamental? 9/2011
• Entanglement and the realness of time 8/2011
• Sean Carroll: Blog Posts - Carroll's favorites
• Cosmic Variance's Sean Carroll on the arrow of time 6/2007
• Inflation isn't what it used to be (cosmologic version) 10/2011
• A quantum state eternally evolving in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space 11/2008

Bexarotene clears amyloid plaques in ApoE4 defective mice - and an Alzheimer's review

While it's true that we can cure just about anything in mice (at least once), this is still remarkable ...

BBC News - Alzheimer's brain plaques 'rapidly cleared' in mice

... Scientists at the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio were investigating ways of boosting levels of ApoE, which in theory should reduce levels of beta-amyloid.

They tested bexarotene, which has been approved for use to treat cancers in the skin, on mice with an illness similar to Alzheimer's.

After one dose in [genetically engineered mice with dysfunctional ApoE4] young mice, the levels of beta-amyloid in the brain were "rapidly lowered" within six hours and a 25% reduction was sustained for 70 hours...

What's remarkable is the speed of the result, and that the drug is already FDA approved for another use. That means, although as chemotherapy agent for mycosis fungoides it has nasty side effects, Bexarotene will be very soon studied in humans with advanced dementia. We may find, however, that the drug is primarily useful for people who have remarkably poor ApoE4 directed amyloid clearance.

The role of amyloid in Alzheimer's dementia was well described in a 2010 NYT review ...

Insights Give Hope for New Attack on Alzheimer’s - NYT 12/13/10 - Kolata

... most people with Alzheimer’s seem to make perfectly normal amounts of amyloid. They just can’t get rid of it

... Researchers have also found that amyloid, in its normal small amounts, seems to have a purpose in the brain — it may be acting like a circuit breaker to prevent nerve firing from getting out of control. But too much amyloid can shut down nerves, eventually leading to cell death. That means that if amyloid levels were reduced early in the disease, when excess amyloid is stunning nerve cells but has not yet killed them, the damage might be reversed....

... With Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Bateman discovered, beta amyloid is made at a normal rate, but it hangs around, draining at a rate that is 30 percent slower than in healthy people the same age. And healthy older people, in turn, clear the substance from their brains more slowly than healthy younger people...

... beta amyloid seemed to be part of a nerve cell feedback loop. A nerve will start firing, but under some conditions, the signal can get too intense. Then the nerve releases beta amyloid, bringing the signaling down to normal levels, at which point the nerve stops releasing beta amyloid... [especially in the 'default network']

... There may be another way to protect nerves from too much beta amyloid, and it involves a different protein linked to Alzheimer’s. Problems with it show up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients later, after there has already been a buildup of beta amyloid.

The protein is tau, an integral part of normal cells. It becomes tangled and twisted in Alzheimer’s, after cells are already dying, looking like strands of tangled spaghetti...

... New studies by Dr. Lennart Mucke, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease there, and others suggest that tau facilitates beta amyloid’s lethal effects. In genetically engineered mice and in laboratory experiments, the researchers found that without tau, beta amyloid cannot impair nerve cells...

...Amyloid was in ...  the default network. It is used not only in daydreaming but in memory and in the sense of self...

... The default network is costly for the brain to run, using huge amounts of glucose, Dr. Raichle said. And one indication that a person is getting Alzheimer’s is that in scans, the brain’s glucose use is markedly lower. The observation that Alzheimer’s attacks the default network, then, explains the observation that a low use of glucose by the brain is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

... Beta amyloid synthesis increased when they were awake, when the default network is most active, and decreased when they slept...

... the less active the person’s brain, the less beta amyloid it made. That made the researchers ask whether something similar was happening during sleep — the default network was less active, so perhaps less beta amyloid was being made. If so, the implication, which Dr. Holtzman is studying, is that people who are sleep-deprived might be at greater risk of Alzheimer’s.

I am prone to believe in the sleep loss/dementia connection, I wrote about that in 2008 and more emphatically in 2010.

The role of ApoE4, exercise and dementia was also highlighted two weeks ago in the NYT ...

How Exercise May Keep Alzheimer's at Bay - NYT 1/18/2012

... Most of those who carried the APOE-e4 gene displayed much larger accumulations of amyloid plaques than those without it.

Unless they exercised. The carriers of the gene who reported walking or jogging for at least 30 minutes five times a week had plaque accumulation similar to that of volunteers who were e4-negative. In essence, the APOE-e4 gene carriers mitigated their inherited risk for developing Alzheimer’s by working out. Or, as the study authors wrote, a “physically active lifestyle may allow e4 carriers to experience brain amyloid levels equivalent to e4-negative individuals.”..

... An overwhelming majority of the people in the study were sedentary, and for them, an inactive lifestyle seemed to be accelerating the accumulation of amyloid plaques. Those with the e4 variant who rarely or never exercised had the most plaques, putting them at heightened risk for the memory loss of Alzheimer’s in the years to come.

From another angle, another recent article points to a prion like spread of malformed tau protein as a critical component of Alzheimer progression. (see tau references in the 2010 article) ...

Alzheimer’s Spreads in the Brain Like a Virus, Studies Find - NYT Kolata 2/1/2012

Alzheimer’s disease seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell, two new studies in mice have found. But instead of viruses or bacteria, what is being spread is a distorted protein known as tau...

The studies, done independently by researchers at Columbia and Harvard, involved genetically engineered mice that could make abnormal human tau proteins, predominantly in the entorhinal (pronounced en-toh-RYE-nal) cortex, a sliver of tissue behind the ears, toward the middle of the brain, where cells first start dying in Alzheimer’s disease. As expected, tau showed up there. And, as also expected, entorhinal cortex cells in the mice started dying, filled with tangled, spaghettilike strands of tau.

Over the next two years, the cell death and destruction spread outward to other cells along the same network. Since those other cells could not make human tau, the only way they could get the protein was by transmission from nerve cell to nerve cell...

... beta amyloid, which accumulates in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients, forming hard, barnaclelike plaques. But beta amyloid is very different from tau. It is secreted and clumps outside cells. Although researchers have looked, they have never seen evidence that amyloid spreads from cell to cell in a network.

Still, amyloid creates what amounts to a bad neighborhood in memory regions of the brain. Then tau comes in — some researchers call it “the executioner” — piling up inside cells and killing them...

... it may be necessary to block both beta amyloid production, which seems to get the disease going, and the spread of tau, which continues it, to bring Alzheimer’s to a halt...

These are exciting times in dementia research, particularly given the discouraging state of the art only three years ago.

Alas, good news can't come fast enough for the 40+ set - our brains start running downhill fast at around age 45 [1]. While we wait to see if anything will come of this, our take away lessons are ...

• Avoid head injury.
• Exercise. If somehow you know you have problematic ApoE4 this seems utterly essential. Probably good for all of us.
• Sleep 8 hours a night. (Speculative, but I bet this will be true).

[1] Yes, raising the retirement age is a sick joke.

How nations die: GOP mandates 2+1=4

The modern GOP is in the final stages of a form of political dementia:

Bruce Bartlett: Tilting the Budget Process to the G.O.P. - NYTimes.com

On Feb. 3, the House passed H.R. 3582, the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012...

... The legislation would require that the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation do a “dynamic” analysis of major legislation – defined as that with a gross budgetary impact greater than 0.25 percent of the gross domestic product. Such an analysis would calculate the impact on real G.D.P. growth, the capital stock and labor supply.

The dynamic calculation would be supplementary and not replace the current official scoring methodology, but the obvious long-term goal is to require official revenue estimates to incorporate “Laffer curve” effects in order to make it easier to cut taxes and harder to raise them...

... this fits into a pattern – since getting control of Congress in 1995, Republicans have often abolished institutions that they couldn’t turn into puppet organizations for promoting their agenda...

... Republicans don’t really care about accurate revenue estimates; they just want them to show that tax cuts pay for themselves, so they can pass more of them without constraint. As my fellow Economix contributor Simon Johnson has noted, the corruption of the agencies that produce budget data is a crucial cause of Europe’s debt crisis.

For the modern GOP, Orwell's 1984 is an operations manual.

We're living in a race condition. Which will die first -- America or the GOP?

If it's the GOP, there's a good chance it will be reincarnated as a rational party. If it's America, not so good.

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 (!).