Ideas Archives

T-Mobile loophole

How to rob T-Mobile, part 1.

On Ebay, people are selling SIM cards for T-Mobile To Go, their prepaid product.

The SIM card comes with $30 airtime! Pretty good deal. (Only 100 minutes...but you get the idea.) It's a good deal because they are selling the card for $8ish. So you can buy $30 of airtime for $8.

Except you get a new phone number every time.

Well, I just discovered a trick. Call and say "hey I lost my phone. I just bought a new SIM card though. Can I recover the old number?" They will take your $30 credit on the new phone and put it on the old account and then swap the old phone number onto the new SIM. So....you have $60 on the phone.

La la

I have been trying out La la. It's good!
* Get CDs, rip them, send them back for $1.50
* Get them with zero-touch, like Netflix. They just come off your want-list
* Get rid of your old CDs (all of which you have ripped...)
- You have to hand address the envelopes. Annoying
* The website is really fast at adding your have-list items; doesn't take hours
- Cover art - I don't want it. Why send it to me?
- Why not reusable envelopes as well as sleeves? I'm sending the music back soon anyway...

Immigrants and wages

I heard it on a mean-spirited Houston wake-up radio show about the "brown tide" some months back, and it is encouraging to see that even supercharged DJs can follow economic logic:

"Indeed, workers who are unlike immigrants see a net gain; more foreign doctors increases the demand for native hospital administrators. Borjas assumes that a native dropout (or a native anything) is interchangeable with an immigrant of the same skill level. Peri doesn't. If enough Mexicans go into construction, some native workers may be hurt, but a few will get promotions, because with more crews working there will be a greater demand for foremen, who most likely will be natives." (From the NYT Magazine article this week on immigrants' effect on wages.)

One thing I am learning as a read about Mexican culture, though, is that the following statement is far truer than people realize:

"But many Mexicans work jobs that are unappealing to most Americans; in this sense, they are not exactly like natives of their skill level either. Mexicans have replenished some occupations that would have become underpopulated; for instance, 40,000 people who became meat processors immigrated to the U.S. during the 1990's, shoring up the industry. Without them, some plants would have raised wages, but others would have closed or, indeed, relocated to Mexico."

Mexican culture values work, and in a way that our society no longer does. The general prosperity of this country has lifted even the poor to an attitude of airs -- "that is beneath me". By contrast, the rural poor of Mexico are ready to risk their lives and separate from family to work in brutally difficult circumstances (in meat plants, in orange orchards, whatever -- the jobs Americans won't do). In cities we see the luckiest immigrants, who get to work "easy" jobs in restaurants as support staff. Way off the radar is where you find the truly roughneck 'illegals'.

Conservative professions

When you go to a doctor, are you getting the best care? I think the answer has something to do with the quality of people this profession attracts. We all know the nerdy pre-meds we sat with in college. They are different people than the campus at large. And it means different people are in the profession.

On the whole and in general, of course there are many exceptions.

But I often wonder this -- was this person, my doctor, a bold leader, innovator, thinker, humanist, idealist, creator, visionary? Or a conservative, play-by-the-rules, shrinking grind?

Unforseen impacts of the new Yahoo Mail

The new Y! Mail has massively increased my utilization. I can manage spam much more easily, so I keep my inbox clean therefore usable. It is "real time" (updating on its own) so I leave it open and see what there is as it arrives. It stays logged in across multiple browser sessions, so I am incentivized to leave it open (rather than quit and login at some future time).

When people take you seriously

You should be careful when people take you seriously! Trick #1: Know when they do. Trick #2: Be careful

Digicel USA is hiring

We are hiring for a number of roles at Digicel USA, the new mobile phone service for the US market that I am working on with a number of my former Virgin colleagues. Please see http://www.digicelusa.com to learn more but also just email me.

Where was I when the Internet changed?

Morrissey has a page on Myspace, and I barely have one. In fact, they are premiering his new single on Myspace. And 100 million other users (or something).

This is the first "technology change" that has genuinely caught me totally by surprise. I have had a blog for at least 5 years, been watching video on my handheld, downloading movies, running my own web and email servers, ran my own Morrissey wiki, have been running remote desktops for ages, was on Friendster before all my friends....but this whole Myspace world, I am clueless!

How did it get so big so fast? Things they are doing way ahead of the rest of the internet
- personal publishing - blogs are exploding but Myspace profile pages are essentially super-simple personal blogs
- video publishing - ultra simple "put this song on my page" or "embed this video" behavior
- HTML friendly so supported by an ecosystem of add-on media outlets like Break.com or YouTube.com etc
- replaces IM and other messaging with its own mailbox
- Yahoo 360 is only 24 months late...but apparently that's way way too late
- the networking is way more "promiscuous" - anyone can see anyone's page, anyone can request to become friends with anyone
- there is tons of music content. Who makes pages for these guys? The indie band I get, but the Beach Boys...?
- the thing is crawling with porn stars and all kind of vain "meet me" camgirl types. It's really unbelievable

Essentially, it's something about going with the flow: On Friendster, if you were a band and you made a profile, they would delete it. They didn’t want bands on their site. If you made a profile for your company or for where you lived or a neighborhood or an idea, you’d get deleted. We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn’t stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace. Some people have fun with it, and others try to get more business and sell stuff, like a makeup artist or a band, and we encourage them to do that.

The MVNO first mover keeps exiting

Australia's Optus to buy Branson's stake in Virgin Mobile Australia - report - Forbes.com

Singapore Telecommunications Ltd's Australian unit Optus is finalizing the purchase of Branson Group's 75 pct interest in the Virgin Mobile Australia joint venture, with a deal to be announced as early as this week, The Australian newspaper reported citing sources.

Shockingly low $130/sub multiple too! Only about AU$100mm for 685K subs.

MVNO product placement

MobHappy: Boost Product Placement

Boho

Boho


Originally uploaded by asarva.

Jack Spade's bags exist for this man: aging boho creative, all black, New York, likes jazz, drinks white wine, does yoga.


It's the old guy version of hipster, but the Jack Spade bags - the cultural equivalent of the Moleskin notebook, the old boxing gloves in the attic, the Armani Exchange sweater that's just simple black crew neck but costs 300 bucks. Or other stuff sold in the margin ads of the New Yorker or at, well, J Crew.





But who else makes such frayed, bohemian yet office-safe bags for men? Not Mandarina Duck, not Kenneth Cole, not Tumi, not Manhattan Portage, not any of them

New strategy: did you find my iPod?

Radar:No scruples, No shame

Tried it on the last hotel I was at. They didn't have my iPod. Now to call the Sheraton...

Russell Beattie doesn't know wireless

I like reading Russell Beattie on all kinds of Web 2.0 topics, but he doesn't really know jack about the economic rationale of wireless operators.

Here for example, he reflects on the lousy Virgin XL product. Follow the fairly plausible economic sketch here. Then note to yourself that the average WAP-browsing revenue is actually <$0.25/month. Real user behavior varies from the hypothetical!

Russell Beattie Notebook » Virgin Mobile, Star MTV and Comedy Central Mobile

Okay, so Virgin's VXL home page is pretty scarce, which is a shame since browsing on CDMA2000 1x is a pretty reasonable experience. Basically, all VirginMobile wants to do right now is to sell graphics, ringtones and induce you to send more text messages. How short-sighted can they possibly be when it comes to mobile data services? Even if they kept their walled garden, there's no content on the site! There's no news or even sports. How many kids in the Virgin demographic want to know the sports scores, etc.? Boost mobile is *much* more aware of these opportunities with their 25 cents a day mobile access charge and decent content on the back end. Small charge, but I'm sure they're making a ton from it: If someone uses the browser every other day for a month, that's an extra $3.75 in revenue for Boost. Seems a no-brainer to me.

Interesting features around the traps

Amp'd Mobile Soft-Launches (Phone Scoop)

all plans include "no overage on mobile-to-mobile"

Also note this lack of precision:

The company received a cash infusion of $50 million from MTV earlier this week

Probably not cash

Amp'd notes

RED HERRING | The Hip Can Finally Get Amp'd

But it also costs big money to start an MVNO. Analysts estimate that Richard Branson spent $500 million to launch Virgin Mobile. SK Telecom and Earthlink’s Helio has raised $440 million.

Amp’d service cost roughly $300 million to launch, making it one of the best-funded companies of 2005.

With the MTV funds, the company has raised over $110 million, including venture money from Universal Music Group, Highland Capital Partners, Columbia Capital, and Redpoint Ventures (see Amp’d Raises $67M in Funding).

Yahoo! 360 popup bookmarklet

Yahoo! 360 bookmarklet

Amp'd

Is it right for you? Coming soon

Hurdle to free wifi

The municipal/free wifi thing is cool but I just noticed a big issue. Malicious users! Obvious of course, but here is what happened to me: I was using the "free" wifi at a hotel and sending emails. Some bounced - the receiving ISPs had blacklisted the wifi IP addresses as spam originators. What better way to send spam? Just park your laptop (running its own SMTP server) in Bryant Park and send all day.

The MVNO lifecyle

First you get VC, then do a big private placement, raise high-yield, go public...and where do you go to die? Buyout or merger. VMUK is heading there.

Total Telecom

According to press reports Branson, whose Virgin Group owns about 72% of Virgin Mobile UK, said only around £25 million ($44 million) stood between NTL and a deal and claimed that the two sides were close to agreement.

Also worth observing in matters related to Virgin: the press strategy. Always quirky, always mysterious.

MVNO-it-alone?

NTL could turn into Virgin from Guardian Unlimited: Technology

Virtuall from the start I have had my doubts about the liquidity-event-potential of Virgin Mobile (USA), while admitting the UK case was a very different situation. For one, the VMUK guys managed to become a 1/5 share player in the overall market (since they were so early to launch, and the brand strong), buy out their JV partner (T-Mobile, due to quirks of the original deal), then IPO the company (to financial market yawns, but still not bad), and now perhaps exit altogether in a merger/takeover.

What's neat about the UK case is that it makes the "MVNO as fourth leg of a quadruple play" thing very real, sort of the way Big Cable's deal with Sprint did earlier this year.

But whence Virgin Mobile US? Stuck as a 50-50 still, carrying lots of high-yield, apparently financially messy (one hears, but who knows maybe they started making money), stuck as a pure prepay/pure "youth segment" player...the opportunities for exit are weaker.

Indeed the interesting discussion I had today was: maybe there is no exit at all! Sprint now owns the copy-cat Boost Mobile (100%, rather than 50%). It has been rolling Boost into all the places they sell Virgin. Is it not a matter of time before they bloody Virgin further?

Who would buy IPO shares in such an operation? With VMUK as an independent gone, can Virgin save them? Can anyone actually profit from it...but Sprint? In which case, we'd expect to see them snuff it out slowly, then take it over for a bargain price and merge it into Boost (undoubtedly the better managed company). We'll see what happens. Good luck to my old chums.

Feeds feeds feeds

Never thought much about feeds as a big opportunity, but guess what. They are.

My blogging software creates a "feed" (RSS XML that shows you the items/headlines). I have several "blogs" and they all do it: Drwn, Yahoo 360, LICNYC, and even some minor "sideblogs" that I have on this page here like that list or the Drownout Ideas list.

And then there are all those other things leaving feed trails like my del.icio.us, Yahoo Myweb, Yahoo search, Amazon wish list.

All those feeds, unformatted, hard to read, hard to do anything. Look at the feed for Drwn.

So Feedburner really seems to do something cool. For one it makes that horrible xml page more readable and usable -- adding links to "Add to My Yahoo" etc etc.

Plus you can plug in ads, create HTML dumps, format the output, intermix multiple feeds (like layer your Flickr images into your Yahoo blog into your Myweb linktrail). It's pretty neat.

And then there are all these rad readers, beyond My Yahoo which I still like: most notably Live.com and start.com but also Google Reader and their start page.

Test of numsum

This is a spreadsheet

Content MVNOs

I think the content MVNOs don't really make a ton of sense unless they can drive a major functional theme of the mobile phone. Voice is one, photos are another, music is another, and maybe games or things like that will emerge over time.

But a sports MVNO? (Or a kids content MVNO?) I have my doubts. Here is why.

This phone costs $500 (though you can send in a $100 rebate to get it down to $400, though rebates suck, assume only 60% of the value is saved). That is a lot. The Treo 650 is $350 at Sprint.com with no rebates to mail; and at Amazon.com you can probably beat that by $100-200 withe the whole mail-in rigamarole. The Treo plays movies, can be expanded by SD card up to 2GB, plays music including Windows Media, does email, does web, does attachments, has a touchscreen, and thousands of shareware/freeware apps to play with etc etc. And it's just one of your handset choices. Want to get a free Nokia? Do that instead. Or choose the "Power Vision" Samsung which is $230.

The ESPN phone has lots of this too - miniSD, music, a nice camera. But not all of it.

This phone is $500 and you can't choose anything else.

The airtime for Sprint is 400 minutes for $34.99. A sticker price of around 8.7c per minute assuming you optimize the hell out of your usage. By contrast, the ESPN phone is $65 for 400 minutes - 14.4c per minute. That's 65% more per minute.

Not quite a square comparison though (yet)

Sprint	ESPN
Any phone	The one phone
$0-$350	$500
Available high end phone	High end phone
8.7c/min	14.4c/min
Free N&W	Free N&W
Sprint's sports "channel"	ESPN's
$15 extra for "Vision" (3.8c/min)	Data apps included
Unlimited data usage	Limited to 30mb
ESPN.com content, and SI.com, Nascar, CNN, etc	ESPN content
Unclear whether this stuff is Power Vision or Vision	Neat web like Yahoo Sports
No custom handset features	Neat "scores instead of wallpaper"-type stuff

Web as "call to action"

What a great use of the web to make stuff happen in real life. Plus it's trackable. Wow.

Major media blogs

Major media blogs (like Newsweek's "business blog" or MSNBC's "news blog") miss the point of the blogs I bother to read. They aren't about anything terribly specialized, the journalist usually is fairly clueless, and they fail to match the richness and insight of the typical blog on a topic like PaidContent or Broadband or Social Networks or Search.

They also have less annoying ads - usually text ads or highly targeted, one-off deal ads through their sales departments. Because the blogger reads their own blog, the site usually doesn't have popups or annoying overhead interface stuff that the "webmasters" have pushed on them. So the site is faster and easier to use.

And yes, blogs are updated a lot and tend to be commentary. But that's not all there is to it and that's what the big media imitators are so far missing.

My Bluetooth world

I've heard about and I knew I even had it, but things just started crystallizing.

I have seven Bluetooth devices in my house: 3 mobile phones, 1 computer (Mac Mini), 1 USB Bluetooth add-on (for my Thinkpad), 1 mouse, and 1 keyboard (both for the Mac).

Just this weekend, I decided to get them all dancing together.

The impetus was the arrival of the Sony Ericsson W800 (the Walkman phone).

The Mac sniffed it immediately and offered to let me sync with it (using iSync), send files to it, use it as a dial-up internet model wirelessly, and -- most amazing of all -- turn it into a remote control for the Mac. It can control presentations (next next back...), media players (play, stop, volume, etc), or even the mouse on the screen. The phone controls the mouse on the screen! It's wild.

So then I got to thinking... my Treo has Bluetooth and I linked it to the Mac and the Thinkpad. Now I'm sync'ing wirelessly. I can also send mp3s from the huge iTunes collection onto the Treo easily. Since it's so easy to get music off there now, the Treo is a more plausible thing to play music on.

Same from the Windows-based Thinkpad side -- I downloaded ptunes and now I can take all the Yahoo Unlimited music with me if I want. Until now, I thought I'd have to just use that subscription on my PC through speakers (since I don't have a Windows music player). Well, now my Treo can be my WMA music player.

All of a sudden, all my phones play music, sync wirelessly, do email, etc etc. Things are changing fast.

Now for the last thing: I put TCPMP on my Treo too. It plays DIVX. I put a 230MB episode of Entourage on the SD card and stuck it in. Wow is that amazing. It works great. I guess I need to buy some 1GB SD cards now.

So many blogs

Despite my best efforts to keep things simple, there are so many attractive ways to blog stuff these days: Flickr, my Phpnuke site LICNYC.com, the photoblog of LICNYC, this blog on Drownout, my Yahoo blog which I can post to through Yahoo Messenger, and there are lots of other things generating RSS trails of my behavior (Yahoo myweb, Amazon wish list, etc). What to do with this complicated world! I need a personal media portal aggregator!

Learning mania

Dog Toys: Interactive

Intellibone
A dog toys that is also a puzzle! Remove and replace dog toy that challenges and develops a dog's intelligence

Help me autocomplete

Here is an obvious idea: autocomplete. Search-driven autocomplete. For Windows. When you are in the file explorers and stuff...you just start typing and it searches. That's what Mac's Spotlight does or what Yahoo Mail's address To: function does. But do it in windows. How can there not be a shareware app to add this to Windows?

Annoyances.org - autocomplete ''destroy'' :-) (Windows XP Discussion Forum)

Worst nagware ever

Norton Antivirus, the world's most annoying software. I hope someone kills Norton.

Why can't phone calls be like a Coke?

Why can't phone calls be like a Coke?


Originally uploaded by asarva.

Phone calls are pretty much sold as services. Sign up and we will bill for your use - of the service, its features, its variations. Home phone servie. Long distance - in- state, interstate, international by country, time of day, by caller class (business? residence?), calling a mobile or fixed line, and by the way do you have a feature pack or special ringer or whatever the hell else?





The great thing about a Coke is you know exactly what you are getting in that can. The unit size is definite, taste is familiar. Anything else about it you can straightforwardly judge: is it cold? leaky? old? You can read the price off the nearby sticker. You can turn it around and read what's in it, in case you happen to be from Mars and haven't seen one before.





You pay now and you take the thing you bought on the spot. Return it if you want. If you use it halfway and are unsatisfied, try out the store's policy. Talk to the person standing right there and give them your "unused portion".





And you can market in ways that Coke does. You can multibrand a line of products to grab space in the channel using lots of "flanker" products. You can introduce a product that "pulls" through retail without much marketing support. You can sell in the most remote places - where the retailer doesn't even know what he is selling but it hardly matters since the package sells the contents.





Not so with the phone company. There is no physical commodity. Nothing to sell in a store. Nothing to fix or return or demonstate ownership. You have no clue what your actions will cost you - "I didn't know that AOL dial-up number was long distance!!"





Mobile phones are different because you have to buy the phone to use the service. So their is a product in the service. The issue is, they are still marketing this stuff as if it were cable TV. An abstraction rather than physical commodity. As phones move from being big-ticket, life-changing purchases to being cheap electronics, the service model will have to change. Less like buying a satellite dish and more like buying a camera.

The return of boxy

The return of boxy


Originally uploaded by asarva.

When we were shopping for a new old car, we were hankering for that Volvo look: long, square, 80s-robotic and above all boxy.





Here is a boxy car.





The Motorola Razr is square.





Even maybe the iPod and Powerbooks - very boxy compared to the iMac of 1999.





To me, boxy is more than a fresh contrast to the increasingly dull obloid, curvy silver "tech" look (think of what every cell phone looks like, especially the Samsungs and LGs).





It is a return to pre-plastic futurism. When the future looked like Max Headroom or Star Wars. Now the future is plastic: smooth, molded, color-dyed, computer designed. It used to be metal, square, bolted-on, shiny.

Google's RSS reader

The interesting thing about Google's new desktop search/"sidebar" app is that it is an RSS reader! The first mainstream RSS reader app. It streams Google News, del.icio.us, and my email inbox as RSS streams. And by the way the desktop search app is built in as a plugin. Pretty cool...but Konfabulator was doing it way back in the day.

The question is, how quickly will anyone adopt this silly thing. I think this smells more of "yeah whatever" a la Google News more than "earth-shaking" AdWords. Google is starting to accumulate lots of "so what" ideas. I wonder if there will be another breakthrough -- you do need to fail a lot to find a breakout idea, that much is certain -- but will you find a breakout idea by coming out with a dozen me-too apps like Yahoo IM 2, My Yahoo 2, Yahoo Mail 2? I don't think that's the right place to hunt.

The problem with collaborative filtering

The problem is that it is hard to find anything new. For example, my great new Yahoo Unlimited music service is a great way to listen to pretty much everything. I searched for a random song I saw on Indian MTV and it was there (Shoniyhe by Juggy D). It was there and I sort of like it.

But Yahoo won't recommend that to me. It keeps recommending Morrissey Live at Earl's Court, Bjork Medulla, Yo La Tengo, Pavement, Stone Roses, Cure, Moby, Pixies, Black Rebel Motorcycle, Belle and Sebastien... some of which I certainly love, some of which I actually hate because they are similar but crucially different (e.g., Cure is not Smiths) and some of which are totally predictable easy to find new albums by bands I already like.

Rarely if ever though does collaborative filtering help me find *different* stuff that I will like because the algorithm is a somewhat naive interpretation of what I already like. It is good at finding more stuff that is similar but similar is not the full set of what I like. In fact, I only like *some* (maybe most) similar stuff (e.g., new Moz album) but I really *want* something *different*. So how to find it? This system doesn't recommend Nouvelle Vague or Scissor Sister or Natascha Atlas or whatever. I can only stumble on these things in normal ways (by following what is "new").

Need a deeper mechanism. One thing that used to work for me back when such things existed was surfing users on Napster. You could see someone's library, and judging from that collection, you could determine that album in their collection (which you didn't recognize) would be good. But from some other guy's library, album Y would probably suck. Even though both guys had Morrissey and Pixies in there - the richer information let you judge one guy as a good predictor and the other as bad. If the algorithms still suck at doing this, why not make the anonymized favorites lists available to let us make those judgments?

The wiki that ate the world

Way back I thought it might make sense to start a site about Morrissey, and then I thought a wiki might be better. After all, what better way to channel the collective energies of the world Moz fans to create something lasting? And nobody else would do it, so MozWiki was needed. But I was wrong. Wikipedia is everything to everyone. It is amazing how complete it is on so many vast and wide ranging topics. Can all the world's knowledge just end up in this one huge wiki? Will any other wikis even exist?

Travels through strange lands

Started a strange trip. You never know what you find when you open certain doors. I am taking notes.

Innovation, you can go from ho-hum to gung-ho

The most valuable mantle that Google stole from Yahoo as it set out on its crusade for "pure search" in 1999 was innovation. Google was against all the commercialism and in pursuit of better search, which was the key issue after all.

A Stanford philosophy PhD named Skokowski was apparently part of the Yahoo team that made the earth-rattling decision to use Google search results instead of the crappy Inktomi listings that had been turning increasingly irrelevant.

On the one hand this was a customer-friendly decision that made tons of sense for a portal who baked few of its own delights -- news from NYTimes, payments by HSBC, servers from HP, FreeBSD under the hood, shopping from the Gap, and so on. Why should Yahoo "own" the esoteric technology in a search engine? Yahoo would bring the best of the best to bear. And besides, Yahoo can continue to play since it would take 5 or 10% of its partner as part of the deal.

Of course, in time, it became clear that the non-exclusive sourcing approach (NYT content on Yahoo News...or on nyt.com) made it all too easy for fans of a particular function to go to the partner source. In the case of search, integration apparently was the opposite of what people wanted -- Yahoo's cluttered, integrated, ad-covered, etc etc search page and results were annoying. People liked the hedgehog approach of Google's page. So they switched.

As preamble, just note that there were many effects underlying the share shifts in search. But also notice the fundamental shift in "leadership" perception. Google was making a better mousetrap and you knew it. More than likely that is still the perception of most Internet users (though it probably took until 2002 or 2003 for people to actually form this belief).

The innovation deficit against Google was a big part of Yahoo's problem. Yahoo was becoming AOL: marketer full of ad banners and things that were "easy" but probably more suitable for your intellectually-challenged classmates, not you.

The point of all this is that it is changing. Google had labs.google.com and Yahoo has next.yahoo.com. Google people are PhD's, and so are Yahoo's (including the old Skokowski). Yahoo has half a dozen research papers posted on their Next site; pure eye candy. They are trying out all kinds of goofy things - many simply silly but provocative - like Y!Q contextual search or Y! Mindset.

More importantly they are structuring their product development process around an innovation strategy -- "core search", "new technologies", "early adopters"/influencers, "defense/Google-matching"
Core search - the silly ones I mentioned plus some cool stuff like Subscriptions search, My Web and the social search in My Web 2, FareChase and Video search extending search to new vertical/content categories (Google has not done any of these -- they are pursuing different stuff which may be worth noting)
New tech - they finally launched a community/blogging/sharing application rolled together called 360.yahoo.com, RSS support is all over Yahoo News and also on Yahoo Travel (check it out, it's cool), there are lots mobile related tools (local results can be sent to your mobile with a click, mobile search, Y! Mail for your mobile phone)
Early adopters - in the battle for hearts and minds, Yahoo is aggressively supporting RSS, Firefox, Linux, Mac with all its toolbars and doo-hickeys
Defensive - they've sped up Local (to respond to Google Maps' breakthrough flash-based maps), they've simplified the search results

Can't really be semi-public

There are increasingly many things I don't feel comfortable writing about on this thing. Is my threshold changing or is the content of my activities changing?

Wiki world

When I first checked out the wiki stuff I did not foresee how far it now appears it can go. The funny thing is it has not become "widespread", but rather very much driven by the Wikimedia projects. Even so, there is a huge encyclopedia and daily news and even books. It's amazing. Check this one out.

Superfriends

Amol's technical wish list part 2,334,232

I need a super-duper-fast way to send mail in Windows. Literally one click, one second to launch. Address and send. Independent of my "main" mail app.

Who's got one?

File transfer

FTP sucks. The session breaks and you are dead. 100 tries later it's over. If the IP addresses change in the process, you can't even get it to automatically restart.

Never felt this way? Try sharing a 1GB file across a wifi network.

The filesharing guys have solved this problem. Your p2p client logs you in, checks you into the brokered environment, and resumes where you left off. All without user intervention.

But there isn't an easy solution for doing this in your own house. Limewire etc put you on the public internet. I just need to connect 4 computers so they can share movies, music, and so on. How to? Ideas? (Needs to work on Mac and PC both, unlike Grouper which is actually OK.)

Yellow pages

What took this dude from 'Searchblog' so long to think that the goal of Local search was to replace the yellow pages? wtf?. I guess he might soon come upon the idea that Citysearch is trying to do something similar.

Unpopular culture

I have this idea about "unpopular culture".

High culture is high, and always receding away from what the masses like. Always trying to draw the boundary between it and low culture, what in the modern era is called popular culture.

Mechanized reproduction and information technology have made popular or folk culture into a mass culture. There is one massive, worldwide folk who shares taste for low, folk, mass things like pop music, popular film, pop novels or whatever else.

There is another thing, though, and it has been around a long time. It is unpopular culture. Low low low culture that very few people actually like. In fact it is a revolting culture from the dank alleys and street and backs of saloons or bowels of ghettos or rural backwaters. It is jazz or hip hop or indie lo-fi cultures -- it is what Mailer identified as the pursuit of the beatnik "white niggers" and what today is called anti-aestheticism.

Unpopular culture. I have to think a bit now about how far back it goes. 19th C? 4th?

The Death of...MTV

As the Internet gets faster (more broadband penetration, faster broadband), cable TV will lose its importance for consumers.

Right now, you have to watch Internet content on a PC. Get a $200 box like the HP or Linksys or PinnacleIQ media gateways, and you don't have to.

My prediction for the first channel to die: MTV. They don't even show videos anymore. And when they do, they aren't the ones you like. By contrast, Yahoo! Launch only shows the ones you like (plus suggestions you might like...). So why watch MTV?

Second to die is news. You will get news online (you already do...but you'll phase out the TV part entirely for a push-experience via online providers). I've already stopped watching CNN on TV.

Later come the full "program" channels. That you get on-demand or on TiVo, so you don't need to sit through commercials or tune in at all. If you want to watch Sopranos, you click and there it is. (Cable has set itself up to deliver this to you through video-on-demand, but obviously the Internet is hard at work trying to deliver this to you.)

So the interesting thing is not that shows will eventually be phased out by on-demand; it is that streamed or "sit back" type programming like music videos or news will be phased out by Internet. I claim that the latter will happen before the former -- MTV dies before NBC or HBO.

Multipoint media broadcasting is here

Posted a few links yesterday to TVBrick and to Winamp's new Nullsoft TV standard (shoutcast video, essentially).

I think this is significant. Last night, this dude was broadcasting 10 channels of TV shows, anime, rock videos. Basically, he had an all content channel with no commercials. Meanwhile, AOL was brodcasting Sessions@AOL and other stuff with commercials too. Quality was very good.

Now that my old laptop is a full-time TV station, I could easily watch stuff on the living room flat panel. I have TV over broadband. It exists, it's easy to use (once you solve the location issue of PC in the TV room), it's fast, and it's pretty high quality. Plus the selection is already quite good.

I think it's going to grow fast.

Will they sue Mr. SaltyChimp.com for broadcasting old Seinfelds? I assume so. Then they will launch the P2P multicasting video service. Or they will broadcast from a few points overseas. Or they will just produce their own content (music videos, documentaries, shorts). When you can watch them as a stream, you will actually throw them up on your TV. Streaming is a lean back experience, unlike browsing. It can work on the TV, even if the content isn't great. (That is, if media clips haven't worked on the web, it's because they are too interactive. People want the lean back experience and the new stream channels provide this.)

Another brilliant aspect of the user-created content broadcasts is that it solves the bandwidth issue. It never makes sense for CNN to launch a full stream channel, b/c the bandwidth costs are too high. But for all the small users who do not actually pay per-unit for their bandwidth, it makes sense up to a certain threshold. On the same principal that makes P2P networks work, they donate bandwidth to the commons.

Set Yourself an Arbitrary Goal

Trouble with measuring your success is the arbitrariness of achievement. Once, I thought it would be a great honor to publish some writing in a major magazine. Millions of readers see Salon each month. It's far more than the New Yorker or the Nation (in pure readership). Then it happened, and now it's over, and it hardly matters.

Tonight at the Whitney Bienniale opening, I imagined what artists set out to do. Be remembered? Make an impact? How do you know if you did it? Well, you achieve something -- like getting yourself in the Bienniale or into the MoMA collection (done that one too). And then what? Well, then you have to pay the bills and buy a nice house and pay for the clothes.

An Opinion on Foreign PhDs

Anybody out there have an opinion on overseas (especially non-English-speaking regions) PhD programs?

My observation has been that there are very few non-US/UK/AU PhDs in U.S. institutions where I did my work (speaking for my disciplines, philosophy, economics, and some other humanities). Why? Are there more in engineering or hard sciences?

One answer to why might be cultural borders, the answer I had usually assumed. We mix more with the UK, and so have more of their PhDs.

Here is another answer: our universities and labs are richer and better funded, and the jobs are more desirable. Non-US/UK/AU trained people are just less capable of getting those posts.

You may have heard how quickly you can get a PhD overseas (2-4 years). Maybe the quality is lower?

Satellite works, you cable pigs!

I got satellite from Dish earlier this winter and it works perfectly. Forget all the nonsense about snow or clouds or whatever.

Amazon search

Try the "search the web" feature on Amazon.com. I was amazed -- there is something new under the sun. Two things in particular: the "new result" marking on certain page results. And the "recent searches" folder bookmarking your trail. The "new result" mark is quite useful when you are hunting around with various searches to find some particular thing -- you see what new stuff your latest search drew out.

The Guy in All Those College Snapshots

Things happen to the guys in all those college snapshots. Something sad is happening to one of them now.

Cable vs. Satellite

Naively I have just gotten 100% outfitted by Time Warner with all the cable crap I could want minus the premium channels. So I've got this:

That's a lot! So I decided to look around at the satellite options (spurred by a discussion at work).

Difference: $33 per month or 25% of the cable bill.

Possible other differences:
- Time Warner has a neat program guide with picture-in-picture, will Dish?
- Maybe I'll miss Sundance, which you don't get on Dish, but the important one (IFC) you do get

Ailing in Little Ways

Since my friend has been ill, I'm thinking about it a lot. Not just about him, but about what it means for everyone. I keep worrying about freak accidents in cars or on streets -- any of which are more likely to happen than what happened to my friend. And I worry that every rash or ache or pain is a lifelong and debilitating illness. I worry! But the weather is finer than that isn't it? Or are things really this way and one simply forgets?

Practical Politics

The conversation I have repeatedly on Wes Clark is "you have to be practical". And that opening always seems to strike people as something they just hadn't considered yet. What are they worrying about Dean vs. Gephardt when the real issue is who will beat Bush?

And on that measure, only one guy is:
- Southern
- impeccably military
- upright in character
- perceived as moderate
- perceived as a non-politician

These, of course, being the key things a guy's going to need to win.

Spam from Familiar Names

Been getting spam from names I recognize. Could be randomly generated -- but it seems too strange to have happened 2-3 times recently. The spammers are mining some kind of new source, I think, to get me to read their messages.

We want the Government...

Clark interview on TPM: Americans "want government to fix things they can't fix themselves."

An Evening with the General

I'm so geeked about the General Wesley Clark that when some friends started talking about a fundraiser, I was 100% on board. Let's do it. $100 or $250 a head for cocktails and a photo with the great man.

So here is my question for you: are you on board or what? Email me if you want to come along.

Converse Guerilla Campaign

Have you noticed the paper Converse All-Stars (with flame pattern) hanging from telephone wires in Williamsburg, LIC, and other NYC neighborhoods? Look for it. I think it's a marketing campaign. Very new! But has anyone noticed besides me? My friend Alex suggested - it could be a neat medium to try if you're bored of the usual graffiti with spraypaint or stickers or whatever.

Just $1/day

The Google ads you see on this and my related sites are netting about $1/day over the last 30 days, with about 1% clickthrough and 105 actual clicks. So $30/105 = about $0.30 per click, which is pretty good. Though that's on 1% clickthrough, meaning I'm getting $0.003 per page served. Which isn't SO bad. But it's not like minting money. Of course, my marginal cost to serve a page is zero. So the $.003 is gold.

Campaign Ad from the BBC

And a campaign ad from the NYT:

Climbing PageRank, II

I followed up to see how these guys were juicing their rank. Here's how:

Look very, very carefully. If you're reading this, you've already missed it.

Google Knows What's Powerful

Adsense note: Google does the matching, it does the bid-taking and auction-running for the keywords, it does the advertiser relationship, and it collects the data on which words caused clicks while others did not. It even tracks user information across its network. I bet, just a few weeks after launch, Google Ads have more "reach" than Doubeclick's network.

And what do I get? Some measly bucks. But can I optimize toward the richer keywords? No -- only if I use the advertiser side of Google's system (Adwords). It won't tell me "write more about mortgages and less about rentals". Which it should. Instead, it just sends the money elsewhere. Boo hoo. But they know how to stay in charge, don't they?

Climbing PageRank

Creative ways to increase your Google equity abound. One is to link heavily to pages that automatically link back to you, like Winer's blog. Apparently, some sex sites are onto it.

Seems like the old exchanging of links with other users is the best bet though, if you keep an eye on blogrolls around the traps.

Madonna, The Gap, Crash and Burn

Madonna and Missy Elliot are in an ad for the Gap. They wear Gap-simplified looks and dance to a medley of Madonna's new stinker "Hollywood" + Missy doing her thing (not sure if it's an album track from somewhere) + Madonna's "Get into the groove".

So the Gap advertising company's creative guy was like "how can we get Madonna to do an 80s hit for us? We want to be 80s retro right? Well, we'll have to let her do a contempo non-hit, which our paid advertising will promote. And Missy, well that will let Madonna feel like it's a TV event while we use it to keep hitting the 'Gap is not just for white people' theme we've been working for a while."

Does anyone else see it this way?

Ads by Google

To the lower left you will see the new commercial dimension of this site: Google ads.

Like all things, I am doing it to learn. Never mind the hundreds or thousands of dollars available for the proper exploitation of this scheme. Never mind it! (The most valuable ads on Google are for buying things. Google searches lead to buying only sometimes. You don't always search with the intent to $pend. Indeed, sometimes you browse with the intent to spend. It recently came to my attention that cosmetics or other long-term usage products are like this. Women read fashion magazines to see what the stars are using, what the "women just like them are using", and they talk with each other or post online to find out what real women "just like them" are using. Men do it too, I'm sure -- I'd never search for "good car" and then actually click a link to buy one! I'd be looking for advice. Well, advice is content and content is somethign Google doesn't have much of, though I encourage you to read the newsgroups on Google Groups sometime because they are pretty useful. The web seems to be where content comes from. Now, when you are getting some advice about X, Y, Z -- well, that is the time that we need a relevant and appropriate ad. Just as I say "I recommend Bindi skin care products", voila! There is a Bindi ad on the left of the page. You get me?)

Money-making aside, however, there is the charm of thinking how Google is developing. But let's leave that aside too. (Google started with search driven by relevance, and built a 100k advertiser network from it. Now what to do with the network? Find new places to send their ads.)

The really interesting question is about who precisely is going to read and click on these ads. You may be under the impression, dear reader, that Google and I are partnering to capture your clicks and sell you things. But I ask you, who is the #1 reader of this site? Not you. It's Amol Sarva, that's who. And if you consider the next question, you will be further shocked. If Google's ads are custom designed to match the content and topics discussed here, well those ads will be very interesting to people reading this blog. Indeed, they will be very interesting to the schmuck writing this blog. I am quite certain I'll be reading this bloody thing a few dozen times more than anyone else -- and that I'll be clicking like mad too.

A kind of circularity follows. I will collect a small commission every time I click on one of these ads and it will be mostly me who does the clicking. Insane, really.

Copyleft

Support Lessig's new Eldred campaign. Instead of letting all copyrights last in simple perpetuity, at least let those that have been abandoned lawfully fall into the public domain for creative uses by new authors. Lessig proposes doing this by asking copyright holders to pay a nominal $1 fee to renew copyrights every 50 years. The petition.

A Statement of Hostility toward The Matrix Franchise

Some of the things that attracted me to philosophy were things like Rawls' "veil of ignorance", Plato's cave, Putnam's "brain-in-a-vat" skepticism, David Lewis' time travel metaphysics, Descartes' "malevolent demon", Hegelian dialectical idealism, Kantian noumena/phenomena, Hume's "causation is a constant conjunction" not a fact of nature, Chomsky's "there are many English languages", Popper's disconfirmation-never-confirmation, and various other deeply counter-intuitive and anti-democratic theories of knowledge, metaphysics, and mind. Even modularity is like this -- you don't know what you know.

Anyway, The Matrix is a poorly-acted exceedingly shallow film that takes Putnam's "am I a brain-in-a-vat?" idea as a foundation. It then proceeds to do absolutely nothing of interest with this really appealing and tricky worry.

The Matrix says, "yes, now fight the evil mastermind!" There's nothing of complexity at all in the Wachowski's telling. Compare, for example, to David Lynch's Blue Velvet.

What is the difference between a film that was "entertaining" or "yeah, it was cool" and a film that's really good you might ask me. I'm not just being curmudgeonly. Films like this one are boring, predictable, completely mundane and uninventive. They are reruns of Friends episodes. Yeah, you watch them when they're on at 11pm. It's the same as with the newst, latest movie featuring Ben Affleck or the Bruce Springstein album or NBC's new Tuesday night or America's Favorite video game or the New York Giants. But please don't tell me it's worth going anywhere to see when there are so many other things worth seeing or renting or downloading or whatever. Show me something amazing, memorable, unearthly, superhuman or dully intrahuman. Instead. Gopnik's review.

Games That Make Your Smarter

Some children's games make you smarter. Here is my partial list:
- Tangrams
- Memory (with the matching tiles)
- That peg game you find in some restaurants where you jump pegs...
- The alphabet game you play on road trips. Say a word, ends in B. Next person has to say a word starting with B. You have to say one that picks up their ending letter.
- The memory game where you keep chaining items together starting with letters. Apple, Banana, Cookie...

General categories:
- vocabulary
- word selection
- memory for words
- memory for images
- memory for sounds
- visualization and performance of object rotations, etc.
- basic math operations (doing them really fast)
- planning many steps ahead in a game-theoretic or sequence-theoretic fashion

Play such games with your kids! Don't play games of chance, since they are pretty much a waste (unless you couch them in frequency terms rather than probability terms, they will not properly understand the odds).

A Vision of Yourself and Your Role in the World

I'm reading a little about the consulting firm McKinsey and its culture. It's a powerful thing to be seen and understood in the light of a definite framework of ideas. But part of it is just brand-name worship.

"it feels good to work for McKinsey and with McKinsey because all problems have their solutions"

Read the rest - from an 'anthropological' study of McKinsey by a French business student.

"Most Vegetarians Are Hypocrites"

By far the most popular dismissal of vegetarianism (or a person who is a vegetarian) that I have observed goes like this: Sally is a vegetarian. She will not eat my roast. Though, I think I saw her wearing leather Bruno Magli shoes. So I don't know what that's about. [Quizzical expression.]

People really say this. Maybe you do too.

The point is supposedly that Sally is a hypocrite, and therefore her vegetarianism is somehow not so virtuous.

I think it's a reaction to the vaguely self-righteous feel people get from "do-gooders" like vegetarians. Imagine some people hanging out at the coffee machine in the office after a holiday. Where did you go for the break? Florida...Arizona...France. And then one person says, "Instead of buying plane fare, I donated $500 to the local shelter and spent the week building houses..." You're like, "What the fuck?" And then you start looking for flaws in this persons purity of intention or execution. "If you really wanted to help, why don't you just open your home up as a shelter? Why don't you donate more than $500 since I know you can afford it? Is this the only time you've volunteered? Got something you're feeling guilty about this year? Etc."

But that feeling of being preached to by vegetarians arises because most people think they are probably right that eating animals that have been mistreated and slaughtered is bad. But Sally isn't so good after all...she wears leather. That makes it better, since Sally doesn't have one up on you anymore.

I say all this to offer a simple answer that people don't seem to consider. Most arguments for vegetarianism are just about lessening suffering. Since eating meat or wearing leather involves the mistreatment and slaughter of animals, doing less of it is better.

If a vegetarian eats less meat than you, they are causing less suffering than you. And if they carry on with the same amount of leather-consumption, well so what? In fact, I pledge to reduce my overall meat consumption by one meal per week...I've already started doing something good.

You don't need to be a total vegetarian to reduce the amount of animal suffering you cause. Less is better, even if none is best.

Peter Singer on Animal Liberation at 30 in this week's NYRB. He has me convinced -- though I'm not a vegetarian! Some other time, I'll explain why. (Short version: there's no reason to be moral all the time. Carnivory, lying, murder...they happen.)

European Meat vs. US. Singer on factory farms:

These modest gains are dwarfed, however, by the huge increase in animals kept confined, some so tightly that they are unable to stretch their limbs or walk even a step or two, on America's factory farms. This is by far the greatest source of human-inflicted suffering on animals, simply because the numbers are so great. Animals used in experiments are numbered in the tens of millions annually, but last year ten billion birds and mammals were raised and killed for food in the United States alone. The increase over the previous year is, at around 400 million animals, more than the total number of animals killed in the US by pounds and shelters, for research, and for fur combined. The overwhelming majority of these factory-reared animals now live their lives entirely indoors, never knowing fresh air, sunshine, or grass until they are trucked away to be slaughtered.

The situation is better in Europe, apparently, and you can tell just by looking at or tasting the meat. Singer talks about some of the detailed differences, but this confirms something I've been wondering about since I read Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and that series of NYT Magazine articles on meat/health/Singer last year.

You should look at some pictures from factory farms.

Funny Quotes about Philosophy

From the department's t-shirt campaign a few years back, suggestions:

Once is philosophy, twice is perversion. --Voltaire

This fellow isn't crazy. We were just doing philosophy. --Wittgenstein

...Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. --Hume

In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is at best a learned fool. --Bill James

Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. --Henry Brooks Adams

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve. --James A. Froude

Philosophy triumphs easily over past and over future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy. --François de La Rochefoucauld

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. --Henry Ward Beecher

Philosophy is the science which considers truth. --Aristotle

It is easy to build a philosophy--it doesn't have to run. --Charles F. Kettering

Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it. --Francis Bacon

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain. --Epictetus

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously. --Bertrand Russell

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically. --Jean-Paul Satre

The Greek philosophers began by asking fundamental questions about the nature of life, the universe, and thought itself. They soon discovered that the answers to these questions were not forthcoming, nor likely to be. But in time, they made a greater --Tom Weller (Cvltvre Made Stupid, 1987)

[W]hen people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid. --Bertrand Russell (Theory of Knowledge)

"We are in the business of trading in implausibilities here." -A certain Stanford Philosophy Dept. faculty member, said during core

By Callicles in Plato's Gorgias:

"If one spends more time with philosophy than he should, it's the undoing of mankind."

"My own reaction to men who philosophize is very much like that to men who speak haltingly and play like children . . . it strikes me as ridiculous and unmanly, deserving of a whipping."

"It's typical that a man of philosophical bent, even if he's naturally well favored, becomes unmanly and avoids the centers of his city and the marketplaces -- in which, according to the poet, men attain "preeminence" -- and, instead, lives the rest of his life in hiding, whispering in a corner with three or four boys, never uttering anything well-bred, important or apt."

"Practice the sweet music of an active life and do it where you'll get a reputation for being intelligent. Leave philosophical subtleties to others -- whether we should call them silly or outright nonsense -- which will cause you to live in empty houses, and envy not those men who refute such trivia, but those who have life and renown, and many other good things as well."

"I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death." -- Plato (Phaedo)

What Schools Are For

Bollinger's statement on the future of the Journalism School is interesting to me since I have been following this debate, in part because it plumbs the very reasons for having great universities at all. Journalism is still a discipline on the periphery of the academy's projects.

It's interesting to read his essay and think of business or medicine or law or even philosophy as you encounter "journalism". MBAs are still in question -- what's the point? What do you learn at business school? People say this all the time.

The most interesting part of Bollinger's comment is to distinguish sharply between mere skill-learning and the longer and deeper enterprise of a professional school: the principles, history, tradition, values, ethics, future path. You don't learn those if business school is focused only on Microsoft Excel or how to create a presentation or networking.

It also answers a question I've always had. Why give out PhD's for free? They say it's because the profession doesn't adequately compensate people such as to justify the best students' attending graduate schools. It's probably true. And it is justified. Except when crooks like me do the PhD then decline to continue with the profession. Of course, that kind of marauding is a major cost to a university that subsidizes its students in the name of the public interest.

As much as people cynically treat universities as selfish businesses, a very great deal of what they do is deeply in the public interest, hardly profitable, and very long sighted. It's amazing that such institutions even exist at all.

Lights in the BNF

See more at Amol's Paris.

The Death of Google

The end is nigh, Google, and you must know it. For a long time now it has been evident that search was not a secret alchemy after all. The code Google cracked was equally worked over by Teoma, Wisenut, Raging, and a list of others. Now Yahoo has deployed it. Their results no longer say powered by Google, and they will soon have no need for Google after their Inktomi acquisition is digested. It may already be.

The other little usability gimmicks: cached page, similar pages, minimal UI, no graphic advertisements, image search? All copied easily. And Yahoo has upped the ante slightly with their "open in a new window" icon.

The other side of the puzzle is advertising, where Overture has Yahoo over a barrel. Yet Google shows how the search engine can be free of such concerns. Open it up to private advertisers with credit cards. Price per click. You're done.

Is there anything more to Google than that? Not really. And remember that Yahoo and MSN are already better integrated into PC desktops, MSIE, mail and other personalizations. They are more sticky. Google is not at all sticky. The instant a site becomes more practical than Google, you stop using Google and forget that it ever existed.

Liberty is a French woman

[Middle English liberte, from Old French, from Latin lberts, from lber, free. See leudh- in Indo-European Roots.] (Like many of our dearest ideas, this one dates from 1066.)

News from Other Sources

I am still thinking about the ideas about the monolithic nature of our media. By every medium, we are hearing very similar information. The main innovations of the competitions are technical -- more footage, more geographic coverage, more live-sited reporters, and so on. Where is the news that surprises the Pentagon or openly contradicts the official line? I suspect I could get the same information from reading the daily summaries of Pentagon briefings plus some dissenting commentary ("Why are we still fighting in the South after 5 days?").

I'm looking for non-American sources. Some provocative ones include:
* Source with military expertise: Iraqwar.ru. This analysis of the first 9 days form a Russian site that claims to rely on Russian military intelligence in part. There is some very persuasive analysis in this article; and some of the quoted lines seem too-good-to-have-come-from-major-media, i.e. they must be from intelligence sources. (The cyrillic alphabet is still scary to me. Look at this map.)

* Middle East: Al Ahram from Egypt (where you can read Noam Chomsky's latest), Saudi Arab News, and Debka from Israel.

* Blogosphere: Brad De Long's list, and TPM

* French media and opinion: Le Monde, Le Figaro, Liberation

* I agree with the observation in this NYT look at recent blogging that actual news is increasingly the content (though it has been the real grist of political debate for a while, but mainly in the form of debunking or deep analysis of superficial claims floating in the press).

Internet Traffic Accretions

One day I should look more into this phenomenon, but traffic to this site (drownout.com, france.drownout.com, blog.drownout.com, and related sites) has increased 10x in the last 5 months. In November 2002, maybe 50 unique visitors would hit it daily. Now it's 500. My first guess is "there are more pages about more topics" and "they have been indexed". But it suggests that people out there in the world are thinking about all kinds of similar stuff. But still, there has not been a 10x growth in number of pages.

Philosophy and War, Part 782

Amazingly (really, amazingly!) enough, some idiotic commentator on BBC News today invoked Isaiah Berlin's venerable contraposition: the fox and the hedgehog. Amazingly, truly. I cannot tell you how stunned I was to hear this.

Bush, this man said, is a hedgehog, not a fox.

He took this to be elucidating because the "fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing". And he referenced the philosopher, Berlin.

Well, I don't know what to say except that this is laughable. Here is Berlin's list of hedgehogs and foxes: Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.

Thing is, for all we can tell, this commentator's familiarity with this idea is pretty much limited to the single first sentence of Berlin's essay, which references the greek poet Archilochus's line "the fox knows..."

The big idea, though, of that essay is not to say that stupid people who know only one thing are hedgehogs. (Bush is a hedgehog, apparently, because he does not know anything about the details of the war or of diplomacy or anything else, but he does know that "Saddam is evil". Bravo.)

The point is that some writers, thinkers, people have large, universal frameworks or ideas. Others have a great diversity of disconnected, diverging notions. Noam Chomsky, in contemporary political life, is one of our great hedgehogs. The world is a complex, interconnected conspiracy of American powerbrokers (nearly). Bill Clinton is a fox. A man who is not associated with some one particular crusade or set of ideas, but a brilliant master of many idiolects. So there you are.

The Right Currency for War

Daryl Press in the NYT tabulates what I think are the relevant numbers. How many dead? What kind of images? He doesn't quite draw a conclusion about the good sense of the campaign, but the implication seems clear: there won't be all that many US losses, but the images will be absolutely horrifying. And we all know that the images are more important than the reality.

Not Very Smart

Here is a way to attack Bush's "not very smart" reputation:

Weak economy, he cut taxes. It did nothing.

Evidence before 9/11, nobody caught it. Disaster.

Fingered Osama, has not caught him.

Iraq is evil, yet he convinced nobody to join us. Total isolation.

Pressured Turkey for cooperation, but bungled it. Didn't get it.

Predicted quick victory in Iraq, didn't get it. Lots more US casualties.

Said North Korea could be intimidated. It wasn't. They have nukes.

What other stuff is there for a list like this? There must be many smaller items.

Certainly some "big" decisions where we won't know the consequences for a while:
International Criminal Court, Snowmobiles in Parks, Logging policies, Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming, Ending stem-cell research, General diplomacy with foreign countries, Doha round of WTO, China brinksmanship, Japan policy, Europe, India policy, Long-run terrorism war, Tax policy effects on Social Security and Medicare.

War and Philosophy, Part 8

The POW images now broadcasting on Middle Eastern satellite actually ran briefly on CNN International, and apparently not at all on US TV. The administration has called them humiliating to prisoners, and therefore "disgusting" and in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Regardless of legal basis, there is a moral argument underlying the objection. It's not only in violation, it happens to be disgusting. Is it disgusting because these people were wearing military uniforms when captured? I don't think that it is.

I would agree that it is disgusting. But because it humiliates their dignity as persons to be used as bait and ridicule for other Americans. It is horrible to look at a body of a soldier they have killed -- but it's wrong because of the disrespect to that person, not because it makes me feel bad.

But the irony is Guantanamo Bay, where people have been installed for 1 and 1/2 years, in what were reported to be dog cages, without any right to consult with either lawyers or their home state, etc. No matter how bad those people in Guantanamo are, they are still human persons deserving certain basic levels of treatment. There are hundreds of them there, if I remember right. Some were handed off to other countries for torture, some were mildly tortured by the US.

Surely this undermines the moral thinking and moral authority of any claims about POWs on Iraqi TV.

It looks more like military bullying against the network inclination to show frightening, public-morale-diminishing images. At least we have Kazaa. The video of Edgar and Shana in particular is really frightening. I can't imagine something more horrible than being captured by the enemy in the middle of a desperate war for their survival.

Philosophy and War, Part 131

Last night in Kuwait, somebody threw a few grenades into a command tent, hurting a number of troops and killing one. The news services were immediately reporting that the military was calling it a "terrorist attack".

During a war, the troops conducting the attack, are attacked in their barracks with a grenade...and that is terrorism? It makes a mockery of any attempt to distinguish lawful military action from terrorism, precisely at a time when the lawfulness of that military action is in question.

War and Philosophy, Part 332

Philosophy job at the Naval Academy?

At least they discussed what distinguishes terrorism from US military action. But you'll agree, I think, that the sophistication of the distinction is rather limited:

But no matter how they may justify their actions, if they refuse to accept any rules of war, they forfeit the right to be regarded as warriors.

This comes after properly noting that terrorists often see themselves as legitimate combatants, "freedom fighters" or what have you. Of course, it is clearly wrong to say that there are no rules among these groups.

There are slippery logics about suicide bombs in the occupied terrorities vs. in Israel, for example. I'm sure Al-Qaeda attackers saw the US economy as a central source of its power, and the WTC as implicated in this. (The present US campaign sees power plants, oil wells or shipping ports as military targets as well. At the moment, troops are busy liberating oil wells.) The 9/11 terrorists also attacked the Pentagon and aimed for the Commader-in-Chief at the White House, mind you. Those seem like military targets (the British in 1812 would have agreed).

And on the other hand, Hamas or Hezbollah would probably say that the West does not follow any rules of war. I think it's difficult to say that Ariel Sharon et al.'s march on Beirut in 1982 was a civilian bloodbath far removed from the most horrible butchery possible. And from what I can tell about bulldozed houses etc. in the present day Occupied Territories, it's not quite as polite as the US smart bombing apparently is.

The business about rules has to be what separates terrorists from lawful soldiers. But I don't know that our moral virtue is so sharp. I am certain that the terrorists are bad people. It's just that I wonder whether our military operations shade into bad actions carried out under good intentions.

Intentions vs. consequences could have been another route to distinguish good guys from bad guys. Everyone causes bad stuff, but we do it with the best intentions. Of course you see how quickly that leads to a self-confirming logic. The stuff about rules seems to suffer from the same flaws.

I don't think most philosophy of just war etc. would agree with me about this stuff on collateral damage as intrinsic to the act (implicit here and more explicit in my last post on this). Here's the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophyrounding up some views.

Philosophy and War, Part 567

The debate about war in Iraq was stunningly theoretical - about moral bases and not much about the crudités of petro-interests. Fine. I think it was a tactical decision of the Bush handlers, personally, since "Saddam is evil" is an easy argument to win and "Peace at any cost" is not a popular one.

Just war
Just wars, once you raise them as an issue, have a self-confirming logic (I think). People like to say things like, "Well, I think there is such a thing as a just war. And if there is such a thing, then surely this is such a thing!" Comparisons to philosophical gem examples like Europe in 1936 follow. "Surely you would oppose Hitler at the rise of his belligerence....well, this is no different."

People who talk about just wars seem never to highlight cases of unjust wars. That is the job of peaceniks, who sound as if no war could be just.

There have been some very stupid arguments. Here is one: we should promote democracy. Democracy is good. So let's use war to do it. I will not even bother explaining why I think this argument is dumb. I will only ridicule it.

Up until 2002, though, I think people would rule out declaring war on a country that has neither attacked you/your allies nor evidently prepared to do so. That's what we are doing in Iraq. There is no evidence that they are preparing big attacks. Not even little terrorist attacks. Instead, Saddam Hussein is the kind of guy that would attack us. And therefore we must pre-empt, etc etc.

I think that even the "imminent attack" basis is a big fishy -- it's just not concrete enough. And moral matters require clear measurements. Who is to judge that North Korea is "about to attack"? Surely they are being provocative...but who cries foul if the US declares this a preparation for attack, then nukes them. If wars can be just just, surely that is a just war....

Torture
The Economist discussed torture a few weeks back and recommended that Bush avoid torturing the terrorist-suspects he caught, for a few reasons. One of them was the argument that torture does not work (as in the case of some famous torture victims/conspirators, like Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot). This week, Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, weighs in against this weak argument.

No doubt the Economist intended this one argument to at least weight against the relentless utilitarian logic of the "torture Osama to find the ticking nuke". Hertzberg is right to say, of course torture works! If it didn't work, it's own logic would not justify it. He should add that making the argument on these grounds, themselves utilitarian, puts us at mercy of the economists/war planner/decision-makers to decide whether something is worth it or not. And unfortunately, I doubt the harm of torture plays much role. Just torture the guy (incur the -5 points), and look at the info. If the info might possibly save 1,000,000 people...well, the 1% chance that is would have been useful has justified the minus score. Assess the information once you have it.

But what other argument can their be? Here's HH's argument:

In war, valor is possible; comradeship is possible; heroism is possible. Even terrorism and assassination can offer scope for an ugly kind of courage. But, just as the victims of torture are utterly helpless, the perpetrators of it are utterly debased. Like capital punishment, torture is abhorrent not only for what it does to the tortured but for what it makes of the torturer. It is the perfect opposite of what we like to think our country has stood for. It is surely not what we wish to become.

I think these are true statements, on the whole, but what's the point? Torture is a dirty business? "Who will we become of we become torturers?..." I don't think is much of an argument, unfortunately. Especially if you think you're defending the land of the freedom fries and home of the brave, etc.

The Economist insisted on calling the prohibition on torture a "taboo". It evokes a consensus, and there is one. But what are its reasons?

Let's start with something: it is wrong to do harm to others. Let's say we all think this is true, without saying that it is absolutely prohibited on all cases etc. It's just wrong. Other things are also wrong. And we have to balance them sometimes.

Torture is a really focused case of doing harm -- when you kill someone they usually feel far less pain than if you simply torture them. Torturing purely for purposes of punishment seems out of the question in this case. But how about torturing for information?

This question is usually biased by ticking-bomb cases. You think, "with lives on the line...of course!" Think of less dire circumstances.

You catch a shoplifter and think she's part of a ring. She refuses to name any collaborators. The shoplifting ring is costing merchants a fortune. You have strong reasons to think she knows the others (some film of her in a group). Do you torture her for the info?

What about if it's pedophile ring? What if they are smuggling immigrants into the country? Drug dealers? Kidnappers? What if she's not even a criminal? You just pick her up off the street because she has some info. Can you torture an otherwise innocent person for info that you need?

Let's say someone saw a mafioso plant a bomb, but won't talk because of fear that the mafia will take revenge. The bomb is ticking, do you torture the person? They are innocent and innocently afraid of consequences. Yet "our" interests are weightier than his one life (or family's lives). I think the answer should be no you don't. Though I'm afraid everyone will say "yes". The person has made the wrong decision (a sensible person would just talk), and we really can't sit there waiting for this idiot with a timebomb in the mix. I'm sure you would not agree to this logic if you were the idiot, though.

These cases point to principles that we generally accept. People have basic rights. These often trump utilitarian calculations. Regarding torture, apparently, civil society think it is totally impermissible on any basis. It's just foreign enemies that we torture, at the moment. (Though they ought to have all the same human rights; it's just that they threaten greater harm, usually.)

Anyway, all the messy ethical reasoning around the war is interesting. More later.

The Terrible Calculation

Jack Straw said today to the press pool, "it's a terrible calculation, you have to make" that "innocent civilians will be killed". "We cannot recoil from that. We mustn't wrap it up in euphemism. But what we say is that the number of Iraqi lives saved by this military operation will exceed the number of lives, sadly, lost."

A few seconds later, CNN cut to a live reporter in Jordan with a fresh story about a Jordanian truck driver who had stopped at gas station. He was on the phone near the fueling area (calling home?). A missile hit the fuel tanks and killed him. I guess he's one of these sadly lost civilians.

Now, there is no way in hell I'd be in Jordan or anywhere nearby right now. So my first thought is, well, maybe he deserves it for being an idiot? Of course that's silly. He's obviously some dude who lives and works in Jordan. I think it's like saying you must be dumb for having agreed to work at Cantor Fitzgerald in the WTC. It's nonsense. The truck driver is as innocent a victim as there is. That's in the first hours of this; 80 missiles were launched, most of which went places where there are no CNN reporters.

As Jack Straw said, the operation was begun with 100% certainty that there would be such deaths. And there have been. Of course the military tries to avoid killing people. Drunk drivers also try to drive home safely once they behind the wheel. Doing dangerous things carefully doesn't innoculate you from blame.

That's what the military types seems to think, though.

This matters because terrorism is a concept without any meaning besides targetting civilians. The Just War calculus has to permit terrorism, since terrorism has the same utilitarian logic. Counting bodies makes it okay to pile them, whoever be the player.

Record Keeping

One way to be remembered is to do great things. It will be hard to forget, say, Daniel Kahnemann now that he's got a Nobel prize for his work on psychological rationality anomalies.

The other way is pointed out by the historian everyone loves to love, Louis Menand, in this week's New Yorker (in a passage where he meditates on the special troubles of historian's work):

Your knowledge of the past--apart from, occasionally, a limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor--comes entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can't observe historical events; you can't question historical actors; you can't even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance--even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

The straightforward conclusion is to avoid troubling yourself with great works, and instead leave a great record. Note scrupulously, you will float to the surface.

Blogging Privately

My new employer has chosen a new boss. I haven't started there yet, and one of the things I'm wondering about is how to carry on with blogging. You see, I quite like reflecting here, semi-publicly (on the assumption that only friends are reading this regularly, and that strangers are probably just passing through). My most excited reader, of course, is me. It's lots of fun to go back to a month and read about what was happening and what I was thinking.

I wish I had done it back at Virgin or Gobi (though re-reading old emails is a window onto those experiences). But the content of blogs is are more suitable - it's written with that in mind.

So how to blog the ins-and-outs of my work life? It's a problem.

I've already put it off actually. During the "case interview" process, I learned a lot about how it all works. And I would have liked to post it all right online: a guide to getting the top consulting jobs, as it were. But, you know, I don't want to get canned for something idle like that. I mean, say I put the actual questions online, they find out, and decide that I shouldn't have done that.

Of course, it would be even worse to post private or competitive information about clients or even about the firm itself. Competitors could be reading!

Pragmatically of course, they aren't and couldn't really benefit if they were. But paranoia is part of how things work.

So I'll solicit your ideas on this. I'm not decided. Thoughts?

Getting Geeked - Browsers

I've been checking out alternatives to MSIE lately. What is wrong with Explorer? It's the little things.

Opera:
- really cool bookmark manager
- bookmark "keywords", so you can type "nyt" in the address bar and go straight to the NYT
- bookmark super-fast search. So when you have the bookmark bar open, there is a little text field. Start typing letters, "dro...", and it instantly filters all your marks to only the matching ones
- keyboard navigation - Hit z or x to go back or forth. F8 for the address bar. Tab through the links.
- mouse gestures - When surfing with mouse in hand, you don't need to shift back to keyboard or use menus to open new windows, go back, forward, etc.
- tabbed browsing - Sometimes I actually like it. The windows bar gets so crowded when you've got Office, Windows Explorer, FTP stuff, etc open.
- page magnifier - Really handy when leaning back in your chair and reading stuff. Some pages are just too small. Font-size screws up page layout; this just magnifies.
- email client - it's actually cool. I use it to send quick messages, though it won't replace my main one.
- search in address bar. It's better implemented here. Use any search engine you like.
- nav bar customization. You can change anything, and do it much more easily than in MSIE.
- Drawbacks: actually loads a bit slower; problems launching helper apps sometimes; some pages are buggy b/c MSIE has quirks (like launch.com's music player); it has crashed on me; costs money unless ad-supported; fewer plugins (e.g. google toolbar's pagerank button); terrible "wand" or password keeper;
[- duplicate pages. Sometimes you want a popped up window to be in a full page. Duplicate lets you do that.
- linked pages - opens a page which is the target of links in this page. When you are browsing a page of images, for example, this opens the photos in a different window and preserves your index.
- amazing pop-up blocking.]

Mozilla/Phoenix:
- "type to find links" - Automatically has "in page find" turned on. So if you start hitting keys, it starts finding links on the page. Neat.
- loads really fast.
- pretty good side panels - perform faster than MSIE's.
- good search integration boxes on the nav.
[- pretty smart password keeper.
- drawbacks: not-so-hot keyboard commands (is there some option I'm not seeing?); crappy popup blocking (though innovative); slow-ish performance on form-text and graphical update issues.]

[Conclusion: Opera rocks. Mozilla sucks. IE is there for backup. We're going to dual boot.]

We'll see if I make the switch. But MSIE>Netscape really ended all mainstream browser innovation. MSIE has not changed in years, and now it is actually starting to suck.

Question for you: when will Microsoft crush Google? They have already defeated Apple, IBM, Sun, Netscape, AOL, Yahoo, Sony (see today's news on Xbox Live)...is there another technology doyenne with an X on its back? Google. If you think there is no "threat", just wait till you hear the next new direction for .Net. You heard it hear first.

When you enjoy what you are doing, it is pleasant, no?

The electrician was a really amiable guy. I told him how hard I'd been working on my thesis for the last few days, and he said, "Ah, but when you enjoy what you are doing, it is pleasant, no?" He must have been enjoying his work, though, because it took him 2 hours to "install" the little space heater. This was a process that seemed to involve nothing more than attaching an extension cord to the thing. So I guess licensed electrician is a cool job here in France.

Though when the wall socket buzzed back and blew out my Linksys wifi router, well, that was a bummer.

Names from the Future

Continuing from previously.
- Starck
- Savan
- Marat
- Kallan
- Lazlo
- Pon
- Meda
- Thierre
- Zahn

What are the 90s?

80s is easy enough, but I wonder what we'll think of as 90s. Classic 90s style: grunge (a la Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain) is already in style in Western Europe among the recent Eastern immigrés; slacker, surely, will be back, where that means sneakers, jeans, t-shirts, retro-style indie looks with heavy frame glasses, occasionally dyed hair, a la lead singer of Green Day, absurdly enough; New Economy Office, meaning khaki pants and checked-shirts but no ties or jackets. What else?

Experiment

I've been experimenting with Vonage for a while now. Even works great transatlantic.

P2P Network Publishing - HipHopHistory

Kazaa is doing something neat - keywords. They created a neologism, "kreate", which is highly unlikely to appear in any extant file on the network. Then they encouraged people to publish files with that word in their file ID. Month by month topics, like Travel or Art, create a kind of network-wide magazine.

This gives me an idea.

I've just read George Nelson's excellent Hip Hop America and taken the opportunity to learn more about the musical influences of old school and contemporary hip hop. As Nelson talked about a sample or beat and how it was used by such-and-such MC to create a new track, I went and downloaded the various elements. I listened to how the production strategy lifted key elements from soul, R&B, funk and disco tracks to fuel the movement of old school, gangsta, new jack swing, ghetto fabulous, West Coast, p-funk, and other hip hop sound aesthetics.

For example, consider the Incredible Bongo Band's track "Anthem". Listen to that instrumental drum and occasionally intstrumented rhythm line. You will instantly swim through an incredible déjà vu for dozens of nameless hip hop singles from your memory banks of radio listening.

Listen to Chic's "Good Times", then put on Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" - the first rap single to be recorded, and a major chart hit. You can see what pissed people off about it - the musical track is so deeply indebted to Chic's piece so as to be larcenous. Yet, it is hotter. Or, Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" is so unmistakably superior to Stevie Wonder's sleepy, preachy "Pastime Paradise" that one feels a democro-capitalist liberation in hip hop's resampling. A song is not enslaved to the limited-inspiration of its owner.

Anyway, I've been downloading all kinds of hip hop singles and their source tracks. I've decided to package it into an anthology. But I won't publish a CD. Instead, I'm going to rename all the tracks to include HipHopHistory in their file IDs. I'll start doing it tonight. These songs are popular downloads, so they should spread on the network on their own. Then, after a while, you should be able to find them just by searching "HipHopHistory" on the major filesharing newtorks (I'll distribute it over Kazaa). Happy listening!

Best Paris Guide

The best Paris guide online, in French (sorry, try using a translater). This is the kind of site I always dream of making -- so well organized, photo-documented, site by site, illustrated with maps. It rocks!

I'm going to use it to work through the arrondissments.

Good For You

My new attitude on the expression "good for you" or "good for X" is that it's condescending (:. rude), and thinly veiled jealousy (:. ignoble).

X: I just bought a new car. It's so cool. I love it.
Y: Wow, that's great. Good for you.

There's this subtext in Y's comment. Here's what it is, "Man, I am so jealous. You jerk." See? That isn't very nice. Or even if it's not that...it's sort of standoffish. Good for YOU, not me.

What do you guys think?

Google This, sucka

DNS is a nifty thing, and here is my latest idea.

Type in google.drownout.com/QUERY -- where QUERY is any search word. If you want to have multiple words, you can type WORD1+WORD2+etc. Or you can use quotes, I think.

It's a search.

http://google.drownout.com/philosophy+mind