Category Archives: Technology

I couldn’t watch Werner Herzog’s anti-texting-and-driving video; it made my heart hurt too much

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At the behest of AT&T, German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a half-hour video that shows the real-life human tragedies that texting while driving causes.

I couldn’t get through the very first story. It made my heart hurt too much. From the very first second that I saw that young woman holding her fingers out to her side, I knew that there was supposed to be a small child clinging to them, and that the child was gone.

It’s brutal. But as an updated, higher-quality film of the sort they made driver’s-ed students watch back in my day, it’s got to be effective. I hope.

So what is Amazon suggesting that Jeff Bezos buy next?

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The credit for that headline goes to our own Bryan Caskey, who tweeted it to me yesterday (playing off of my earlier post wondering why Amazon would think I want to buy “geek” merchandise). How, indeed, would his own algorithms predict his future purchasing behavior based on his latest acquisition?

What, pray tell, is the founder of Amazon going to do with The Washington Post? Does he think he can make money where everyone else has failed? Does he seek influence? Or did he buy it as a hobby, sort of the way other people collect matchbooks or the like?

From his perspective, it doesn’t much matter, since he got it at such a bargain: $250 million. Less than 1 percent of his wealth. It’s about like me buying a single copy of the Post.

Let me elaborate on that figure.

Knight Ridder paid $300 million for The State and its smaller properties in 1986. As recently as 2006, when I speculated in a column about buy the paper myself, I was figuring it would still cost hundreds of millions — balancing the decline of the business against inflation. Mind you, this was just before the bottom dropped out of retail advertising.

Now, I just don’t know what it would cost. But I do know that, historically speaking, Bezos got the WashPost dirt cheap. Since the paper hasn’t changed hands before in modern times, we should look to the sale the other day of The Boston Globe by the NYT. Twenty years ago, New York bought The Globe for $1.1 billion. They sold it for $70 million. They ate a billion-dollar loss, and for all I know, consider themselves lucky.

So what is Bezos going to do with The Post? I don’t know. I wondered the same when Warren Buffett bought Media General. From what I’ve seen and heard, he hasn’t made any startling changes in the business operations.

But Bezos is more of an innovator. Is it possible that the guy who built a new kind of retail empire from the once-novel idea of selling books online has figured out, or will be able to figure out, the new business model for the news biz? I hope so. He’s got his work cut out for him. The collapse of newspapers’ business model is based on an economic trend that’s bigger than Amazon — and one of the secrets of Amazon’s success.

Newspapers — and local TV and radio stations — are the victims of a long-term trend in marketing (dating from direct mail in the early ’80s to the increasingly sophisticated targeting of the Internet) away from advertising in mass media to going after specific, individual customers. Advertisers became less interesting in reaching whole communities, choosing to be far more picky.

Since Amazon is the ultimate direct marketer to individuals, Bezos has to understand the phenomenon better than almost anyone. It will be very interesting to see how he applies his insights to The Post, if he chooses to do so…

The joys of a real bookstore

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There was a thought-provoking little piece in the WSJ today by a bookstore owner in Tennessee:

The weather in Tennessee has been unaccountably beautiful this summer, with late July temperatures in the 70s rather than the 100s. The drive from Chattanooga, where President Obama gave his jobs speech at the Amazon warehouse Tuesday, to Nashville, where I am the co-owner of Parnassus Books, is a scenic two hours.

I wish he’d come by.

Thanks to the Amazon warehouse, there are about 7,000 new jobs in Chattanooga, many of them seasonal. But to celebrate Amazon as an employer is to ignore all the jobs that have been squeezed out of the economy as independent bookstores and other small businesses have been forced to close their doors, unable to compete with the undercut pricing the online retail giant offers. And with those shuttered bookstores go a big part of our community.

In the time-honored tradition of bookstores everywhere, our store is staffed by readers—people who want to talk about the books they love. We’re not handing out algorithms based on what books other people have bought. These aren’t widgets we’re selling….

Actually, it was more of a feeling-provoking piece than thought-provoking, I suppose. And my feelings were conflicted.

First, I felt sympathy for the person trying to operate a mom-and-pop bookstore in this age. At the same time, I noticed that this person didn’t get into the business until 2011. A former editor of mine retired more than 10 years ago and started an online used book business, so it’s not like this phenomenon snuck up on this person. This is somewhat different from the character in “You’ve Got Mail” who inherited a charming little bookshop.

Second, I felt identification with someone who would rather browse books in person than buy one online. That happens to be one of my very favorite leisure-time activities, when I have leisure time. So it is that I continue to root for Barnes & Noble to hang in there with the real, live bookstore thing.

Third, I felt guilty because, well, as much as I love browsing a bookstore, I’ve always had a preference for Barnes & Noble over the charming little mom-and-pop types. Even though Rhett Jackson was a friend of mine, I seldom frequented his shop. If I went there, it was to quickly find a book and buy it. There’s something, for me, about having the vast space and great variety of B&N to wander in, while sipping a hot Starbucks coffee. (Here’s another confession: When I go to the one on Harbison, the one I frequent most, I actually go to the Starbucks over across the parking lot, rather than getting my coffee in the bookstore cafe. Partly because I can use my Starbucks card there.)

Of course, as I’ve confessed before, I usually don’t actually buy a book at the end of those browses. But when I do buy a book — as I did just this last weekend — I buy it at B&N.

Finally, I felt out-bookwormed by this woman. As you would expect from someone who sells new books, she’s very up-to-date in her reading. I seldom read a book that was written in the last 10 years, or even 50 years — there’s just too great a wealth of old stuff that I’ll never get to, I have little interest in keeping up with the best-seller lists. Since I started reading the daily book reviews in the WSJ, I have gotten a little more interested in recent books — but when I get one of them, it still tends to sit on my shelves for months or even years before I actually read it. I like to let them age a little. So much of the rest of my life has been spent keeping up with the latest, and meeting deadlines. Part of the pleasure of a book is knowing it will sit there and wait for me indefinitely, and be just as rewarding when I finally pick it up.

I use Amazon for all sorts of things. Particularly phone accessories — USB cords, earbuds — which are amazingly cheaper than in a store. Or when I’m shopping for some particular item someone wants for Christmas or birthday, and I don’t immediately find it in the first store where I look — I’ll just stand there in the store and order it over my phone.

But books I want to hold in my hand before I buy.

Forget oxycodone. The most addictive drug is Google. And we’re past the point at which it’s just a ‘choice.’

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addictive

Back on this post from yesterday, we were having the usual argument about the intrusiveness of private companies vs. the government, and as usual someone said “my use of Google Maps is voluntary,” an assertion which I questioned.

My use of Google Maps and other Google products is no longer in the realm of what I consider to be “voluntary.”

Google is as much a part of the daily infrastructure of my life, and the things I need to get done, as the streets I drive on. Its services are something I rely on, in a more direct, frequent and ubiquitous manner, than I do the direct services of the police.

I don’t see how to engage modern life without it — or something exactly like it. I couldn’t get through a day of ADCO work without it, much less publish this blog. Without Google, both of my active email accounts go away, my browser (the instantaneous searches that occur when you type into the URL field, making it unnecessary to know the address of anything, is indispensable) disappears; there’s no YouTube, no really utilitarian Maps program, and then all sorts of other useful things like Google Books, Translate (no longer can I just say, Well, that’s French and I don’t understand French… no excuse), etc. Without Google Images, I have to fall back on my highly flawed memory for names and faces.

One can attempt to drop off the grid and no longer use Google, just as one can drop out of society at large — quit paying one’s taxes, go live in the wilderness off the land. Theoretically, at least.

But the cost of doing either is pretty high…

Yes, there are other services that do these things. But that’s not the point. If Yahoo or AOL had succeeded in being what Google is, or if Facebook were to succeed in being what it wants to be, then it would be the same thing; we’d just be calling it something different. And why ever use competing services for any of these functions, when the very fact that they are all knit together seamlessly magnifies their utility exponentially? I would no more want to switch platforms than I would want to try to leave the roads and drive on a railroad track in my car.

Kathryn writes, “Google is a gateway drug.”

Yes. And more addictive than most.

I always had trouble with being distracted by looking things up. It was just too seductive. A dictionary on my desk was a dangerous thing. I couldn’t look up a word without running across several other words on the way that fascinated me, and each of them led to other words, and on and on.

Fortunately, I had a good vocabulary, and seldom really needed to look up a word.

But now that I can, instantly, look up anything, I cannot stop doing it. A thought about a word or a fact that causes my brain to wonder or doubt even slightly (something I have always done, constantly; it’s just that for the first decades of my life it was harder to scratch that itch) sends me on an immediate search.

For instance, last night I watched “Looper.” Almost immediately, I wondered who the protagonist was. It looked remotely like , but the expression and even facial structure was wrong (It was him, but he wore extensive makeup to make himself look like a young Bruce Willis). Then I thought, “Isn’t Bruce Willis in this? Why haven’t I seen him?” So I checked, and yeah, he was coming up. I see Emily Blunt’s in it. Isn’t she the girl who… ? Yes, she is. She’s really something. Jeff Daniels is surprisingly good in this. What’s his character’s name again? And so forth… (By the way, the movie wasn’t very satisfying.)

OK, so most of that was IMDB, and IMDB isn’t Google. Yet. But the fact is, I often use Google to flesh out what I find in the movie database, because the info there is pretty sketchy. I like depth in my trivia. I used to do this with my phone, which is always clipped to my belt. Now, I usually have the iPad within reach as well.

In any case, now that it’s possible to look things up constantly, I can’t stop.

You can point to this as a character flaw (or perhaps an illness), and you have a good argument. But aside from the compulsive aspect, a certain amount of this is necessary to practically everything I do, everywhere I go.

Let’s say that a person only really needs to use these services a tenth as much as I do. I could concede that. But if a person doesn’t at least use them that tenth amount, he’s not going to be able to keep pace with the world and interact with other people at the pace that society demands — at least, not in anything I’ve ever done for a living. (Yes, I know that lots and lots of jobs today are still not information-based.)

That puts Google into the realm of essential infrastructure, again like the roads that are a function of government.

It at least gets us to where any assertion that one is not forced to deal with Google (or, for the sake of argument, with some other “private” entity that’s just as useful) on fairly thin ice.

Big Brother doesn’t need NSA to know where you’ve been

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Several of the most amazing things I’ve seen technology do in recent years are associated with Google Maps.

Such as the traffic feature.

Look at Google Maps on your phone, and you’ll see how well traffic is moving — or whether it’s moving at all — on the road ahead of you.

Google does this by — Edward Snowden and the ACLU should brace themselves at this point — keeping track of all the Maps-equipped phones traveling on the road. Not only that road, of course, but all roads, all of the time. In real time.

Now, we see that law enforcement can do, and does, something similar by tracking license plates:

The spread of cheap, powerful cameras capable of reading license plates has allowed police to build databases on the movements of millions of Americans over months or even years, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report released Wednesday.

The license-plate readers, which authorities typically mount along major roadways or on the backs of cruisers and government vehicles, can identify cars almost instantly and compare them against “hot lists” of vehicles that have been stolen or involved in crimes.

But the systems collect records on every license plate they encounter — whether or not they are on hot lists — meaning that time and location data are gathered in databases that can be searched by police. Some departments purge information after a few weeks, some after a few months and some never, said the report, which warns that such data could be abused by authorities and chill freedom of speech and association…

You have to pity the ACLU, Rand Paul, et al. They are doomed to worry themselves to death. Because this toothpaste is not going back into the tube.

I liked the way it was put in an explainer of the Google traffic function:

So how does Google know what traffic is like on the roads, nearly all the time? From our smartphones, of course. Whether you like it or not, “telephone companies have always known where your phone is,” Dobson says, because cell phone companies need to use location to appropriately charge customers for calls. That means the companies are constantly monitoring location based on the strength of signal to a cell tower, which allows the phone to switch towers as it travels. Since 2011, the Federal Communications Commission has also required that phones come with GPS, so between the triangulation with cell towers and the GPS requirement, your phone is a marked man….

Now, this has stirred up some controversy about whether the process is an invasion of privacy. But both Dobson and Zhan Guo, a transportation policy professor at New York University, nearly laughed when asked about privacy concerns. That ship has already sailed….

Indeed. One might as well laugh.

Some will say that a private company keeping tabs on your every move, for its own greater profit (and utility, of course) is preferable to the gummint doing so.

I don’t think either is necessarily preferable, just different. And either way, ultimately inevitable.

‘I’m not just drinking beer; I’m making us more energy-independent’

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Just had to share this, courtesy of the Daily Mail:

Mobile phone owners could soon be able to give their batteries a boost with their own urine.

British scientists at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory have developed a way of using urine as a power source to generate electricity and claim to have created the world’s first microbial fuel cells (MFC) powered mobile phone.

While many people might turn their noses up at the energy source, the researchers said that it is the ‘ultimate waste product’ and does not rely on the erratic nature of the wind or the sun….

You have to wonder — is this for real, or is the Mail taking the p___ out of us?

Spam of the Day: ‘Your dog had been 100% appropriate’

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Sometimes I read the spam comments before deleting them, because I enjoy their wonderfully eccentric use of language. This one today was particularly pleasing:

My cousin encouraged I’d personally possibly this way web page. Your dog had been 100 % appropriate. This particular blog post really designed this morning. Anyone can not consider only how the ton period I had created wasted for this information and facts! Thanks!

Judging by the URL, it was some sort of porn site. And no, I didn’t click on it. You can catch something doing that. But in any case, I doubt there was anything there as diverting as that cockeyed attempt to make me think I was dealing with a fan.

That seems to be the usual approach of these things, something like, “Your site am delicious. Me come back many time.”

Does it ever actually work? Are some bloggers and website hosts really that desperate for praise that they’ll go, “This person really LIKES me! To the point that he’s rendered incoherent! I must in return check out his site…?”

Of COURSE we trust the NSA more than Facebook

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Someone over at Slate seemed to be marveling over this “contradiction:”

One big reason why Americans aren’t that outraged by the revelations that the U.S. government runs a massive online and cellphone spying operation: People already assume they’re being tracked all over the Internet by companies like Google and Facebook.

Yesterday’s Washington Post/Pew poll showed that 56 percent of Americans view the NSA’s snooping as “acceptable,” while 45 percent think it should be allowed to go even further. Contrast that with a 2012 AP-CNBC poll that found only 13 percent of Americans trust Facebook to keep their data private, while another 28 percent trust the company “somewhat.” The majority had little to no faith in the company to protect their privacy.

The numbers aren’t perfectly parallel. But they suggest that the average American is more comfortable with the government’s spying than with Facebook’s control over their personal information…

Well, duh. Of course we trust the NSA more than we do Facebook. The NSA, the hysteria of recent days notwithstanding, works for us, and is constrained by the laws of this country and the elected and appointed representatives who have oversight over it, and who ultimately answer to us. Yes, that’s the way it actually is, contrary to all the “Big Brother” hyperventilating from the likes of Rand Paul.

Whereas Facebook works for Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t elect Mark Zuckerberg. Nor did I elect anyone who appointed Mark Zuckerberg, or in any way keeps an eye on him and holds him to account in my behalf.

And in fact, after pulling us in with the headline, “People Trust the NSA More Than Facebook. That’s a Shame,” the Slate writer acknowledges some of the reasons why that would be so:

From a selfish perspective, that makes some sense: Most Americans assume they’ll never be the target of a terror investigation—and that the government has little use for their information otherwise. Facebook, in contrast, relies on the personal information of all of its users. It doesn’t intend to prosecute them for crimes, of course—just show them personalized advertisements. But for many people, the fear of having an illicit relationship, a racy photo, or personal communications unintentionally revealed to their friends and colleagues is more visceral—and more realistic—than the fear of being wrongly prosecuted for a crime. And whereas most people can appreciate the NSA’s interest in monitoring their communications, they have a harder time seeing the upside to Facebook’s data collection. It’s not like Mark Zuckerberg is going to use their old status updates to prevent the next terror attack.

And that doesn’t just make sense “from a selfish perspective.” It makes sense, period. As this piece notes, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t going to prevent the next terror attack, nor is he expected to. His job is making money for Facebook. Leave him to it. That’s his business, not ours (unless we’re one of the saps who jumped at his IPO).

If we trusted Facebook more than we did the NSA, now that would be a shame. It would mean that our whole system of representative democracy was failing. Which it isn’t.

HD images that weren’t meant for HD

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spock

I find it interesting to view old TV series and other works from the pre-HD era in HD.

It’s strange, for instance, to look at “Star Trek” — the original series — on Netflix on my iPad, with its Retina display.

We just weren’t meant to see every detail of Mr. Spock’s makeup, or count the pores on his face. With the TVs we had in 1966, we were lucky even to be able to tell it was Mr. Spock.

As unemotional as he was, I think even Spock himself would regard this phenomenon as… unsettling, Captain…

spock2

NSA data-mining vs. actual invasion of privacy

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I thought the WSJ made an interesting point in an editorial this morning:

The NSA is collecting “metadata”—logs of calls received and sent, and other types of data about data for credit card transactions and online communications. Americans now generate a staggering amount of such information—about 161 exabytes per year, equal to the information stored in 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Organizing and making sense of this raw material is now possible given advances in information technology, high-performance computing and storage capacity. The field known as “big data” is revolutionizing everything from retail to traffic patterns to epidemiology.

Mr. Obama waved off fears of “Big Brother” but he might have mentioned that the paradox of data-mining is that the more such information the government collects the less of an intrusion it is. These data sets are so large that only algorithms can understand them. The search is for trends, patterns, associations, networks. They are not in that sense invasions of individual privacy at all.

If the NSA isn’t scrubbing vast amounts of data, then it can’t discover who is potentially a threat. The alternative to automated sweeps is more pervasive use of lower-tech methods like wiretaps, tracking and searches—in a word, invasions of persons rather than statistical probabilities. The political attack on data-mining could increase rather than alleviate the risk to individual rights.

3D food printer, circa 1956

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On my previous post about space travel and 3D printers, mention was made of the Star Trek “food replicator.”

But I seemed to recall that sci-fi had imagined this device much earlier than that.

Indeed, in the 1956 classic “Forbidden Planet,” starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, there is a robot that has a sort of miniature 3D food printer built into its torso.

I couldn’t find a clip showing that from the actual film, but I did find this promotional short in which the robot explains how it is able to replicate food of any kind, in any amount. All that is needed is a small sample of the food — which I suppose makes it more of a 3D food copier than printer.

But whatever. I thought I’d share it. Also, I refer you to a story Burl brought to our attention, about how a 3D printer saved a baby’s life.

This is just astounding technology…

Robbie the Robot, a pre-comedy Leslie Nielsen, and pre-Honey West Anne Francis (who showed her gams a LOT in this one).

Robbie the Robot, a pre-comedy Leslie Nielsen, and pre-“Honey West” Anne Francis (who showed her gams a LOT in this one).

Why does Google’s so-called “All Access” service not want my business?

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Pandora accommodates me with an iPad app. Why won't Google All Access?

Pandora accommodates me with an iPad app. Why won’t Google All Access?

The moment I heard that Google was starting a music subscription service, I decided I would do with this one what I had not done with Pandora or Spotify: Pay for it.

Well, not right away. I saw that I could get it free for a month, and then pay at the discounted rate of $8 a month thereafter. If I didn’t like it the first month, I just wouldn’t pay.

But I figured it’s Google, right? So I’ll probably like it. Anyway, it would probably be integrated with my gmail and my YouTube account and everything else, so it would be convenient. Just yesterday, I used Google’s Hangout for the first time, for a three-way conversation that worked pretty seamlessly within my Google+ iPad app. There were glitches, but so far I like it better than Skype.

So I was all set to sign up when I saw this AP review:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Google Inc.’s new music service offers a lot of eye candy to go with the tunes. The song selection of around 18 million tracks is comparable to popular services such as Spotify and Rhapsody, and a myriad of playlists curated along different genres provides a big playground for music lovers.

The All Access service represents Google’s attempt to grab a bigger piece of the digital music market as more people stream songs over mobile phones. Such services are also meant to further wed smartphone users to Google’s Android operating system, where the search leader makes money from advertising and transactions on its digital content store, Google Play.

For a monthly fee, All Access lets you listen to as much music as you want over an Internet connection. You can also download songs onto mobile devices for smooth playback later when you don’t have cellphone or Wi-Fi access.

It’s worth a try for the discounted monthly rate of $8 if you sign up by the end of June. Those who sign up later will pay $10 a month, the same amount charged by the main competitors, Spotify and Rhapsody. Either way, you get the first month free and can cancel at any time…

Sounds good, right? Then I got to this part…

All Access works on the free Google Play Music app for Android devices and over Web browsers on computers — but not on the iPhone. (Spotify and Rhapsody work on both Android and the iPhone).

And not, as I read elsewhere, on my iPad, either.

I’ve got some news for Google…

According to Google’s own Analytics, more than a fifth — 22.48 percent — of this blog’s readers read it on a smartphone or tablet.

Of those, more than three-fourths — 75.8 percent — are reading this on an Apple device.

So, unless my audience is unrepresentative of the larger world (or unless, ahem, Google Analytics is wrong), right off the bat, Google is saying it only wants the business of less than one-fourth of the mobile/tablet market.

How stupid is that?

Does anyone at Google really think that satisfied iPhone and iPad users — who know, according to Google’s own Analytics, that their platforms are the current standard for which most software will be written — are going to switch to what they consider to be a lesser product just because they can sign up for a music service? When they can already get Spotify and Pandora? And when they know that an iTunes subscription service is in the works?

This speaks to a larger problem in the tech world: I thought the people at Apple were insane when they came out with the iPhone 5 without Google Maps. It really irritated me that they weren’t smart enough, humble enough to realize that Google did maps best, that it was way out ahead of anything Apple could do to imitate it, and if they really wanted their customers to have the best, they would serve them up Google Maps, as they had done with the iPhone 4. YouTube, too.

Fortunately, I was immediately able to download those Google apps for both my phone and my iPad, so no harm done.

And I see in this report from Wired that a third-party iPhone app that will give me Google All Access is in the works, too (although, when I tried to get it from the Apps Store just now, I was told it still doesn’t work for the new service).

But why should I need workarounds? Why can’t Apple recognize that Google does maps better, and Google recognize that Apple does phones and tablets better? Or, at the very least, recognize that three-fourths of the market out there believes it does, and isn’t going to use your product unless it is accommodated?

I just don’t get these people and their proprietary hubris…

Would you like a 3D print of fries with that?

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star-trek-food-replicator

We don’t have flying cars yet, or time travel, but I’m encouraged to see that NASA is at least working on this…

NASA can send robots to Mars, no problem. But if it’s ever going to put humans on the Red Planet, it has to figure out how to feed them over the course of a years-long mission.

So the space agency has funded research for what could be the ultimate nerd solution: a 3-D printer that creates entrees or desserts at the touch of a button.

Yes, it’s another case of life imitating “Star Trek” (remember the food replicator?). In this case, though, the creators hope there is an application beyond deep-space pizza parties. The technology could also be used to feed hungry populations here on Earth.

Texas-based Systems and Materials Research Corp. has been selected for a $125,000 grant from NASA to develop a 3-D printer that will create “nutritious and flavorful” food suitable for astronauts, according to the company’s proposal. Using a “digital recipe,” the printers will combine powders to produce food that has the structure and texture of, well, actual food. Including smell…

Obviously, the food would not be created out of thin air. The “toner” on this copier would have to consist of the chemical building blocks of the actual food items. The story doesn’t really spell out why that’s such an advantage, but I’m guessing it’s because powders containing those compounds are more easily stored.

But still… you would have to have the water that would flesh out the food, and… I don’t know why this would be an improvement over Tang.

But it sounds cool.

Personally, I want a 3D printer that would print diamonds out of coal dust. Or make a really convincing 3D print of Christina Hendricks. Just as a for-instance. I think that would be highly marketable.

aria130517_cmyk.8x1ka4jp8k9mgw4ogk04owco4.6uwurhykn3a1q8w88k040cs08.th

Blaming media, Nobel for rise of modern terrorism

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Probably for the same reason I got a second major in history in college, I enjoy when someone takes a step back from events to provide a bit of historical perspective, as Max Boot did this morning in the WSJ on the history of modern terrorism.

And just as Eli Whitney revived the cotton industry and therefore slavery in this country, Boot (I love that guy’s name; sounds like a character Arnold Schwarzenegger would play in  a movie) says three things helped launch a wave of terrorist groups around the world about a century ago: the inventions of dynamite, the telegraph and the high-speed newspaper press:

AlfredNobel2

Nobel

It is no coincidence that the era of modern terrorism began at almost the same time that Alfred Nobel invented dynamite: 1867. There had been a few isolated terrorist gangs before then—which is to say, groups that murdered civilians in order to further a political or religious agenda. The Sicarri, the Jewish dagger-men who killed Roman collaborators in first-century Judaea, come to mind. So do the Assassins, the Shiite sect that terrorized Middle Eastern leaders in the Middle Ages. But such examples are few and far between, whereas the late 19th century saw the flowering of the first age of international terrorism, featuring such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, the Irish Fenians, the Russian Nihilists and the anarchists who operated in both Europe and the Americas.

Their growth was greatly aided by the invention of portable weapons such as breech-loading revolvers and especially dynamite, which was 20 times more powerful than the gunpowder that Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators had used in an attempt to blow up the British Parliament in 1605.

Just as important was the invention of the telegraph and the high-speed printing press, which made possible the rise of cheap newspapers and magazines—the world’s first mass media. Terrorism is above all an act of communication, insofar as terrorist groups are too small and too weak to fight conventional armies in the open field. Unlike guerrilla groups, most purely terrorist organizations don’t even attempt attacks on security forces; they prefer to strike “soft” targets such as the Boston Marathon, where they know that their actions, the more heinous the better, will attract widespread publicity. (Note, however, that many insurgencies use both guerrilla and terrorist tactics, striking both security forces and civilians, as the Irish Republican Army and the Viet Cong did.)…

There’s one flaw in this explanation, as it applies to the most recent incident: The pressure-cooker bombs used in Boston may have used black powder, rather than dynamite or plastique.

Still, I like a good theory.

Anyone know what’s happening to these pictures?

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The way the azaleas really looked.

The way the azaleas really looked.

I raised this question on a previous thread, but I decided to post it separately with actual images of the problem…

I had originally intended to run my little post about the azalea explosion two days ago, when I shot it. But when I went to do so, I saw that my free trial of PhotoShop Elements had run out. (Long story. I got a new laptop several months ago, and it’s wonderful in every way except that I’ve been unable to transfer the very old copy of Photoshop I had on my old laptop to the new one. And the disk is long gone. So until recently, I kept using the old one for blogging, because I had to have something to work pictures with.)

I didn’t want to deal with that right then, so I set the matter aside.

Then yesterday, I went ahead and paid the 100 bucks (technically, $99.99) to buy the PhotoShop Elements (having determined that while it was not full PhotoShop, it did the things I needed — the main thing being, allowing me to quickly reduce the size of picture files).

So, having emailed the azaleas picture to myself from my iPhone, I called it up in my newly purchased application.

And the color was all screwed up. That rich, deep color you see above (quite accurate) was totally washed out to a sort of light lavender or something. I fiddled with the color settings, and lightness and darkness and contrast, and couldn’t make it look anything like reality. Then, I started flipping through other pictures in that folder, and all were sort of weirdly off. Mostly, they were too dark, or had too much contrast. But on some the colors were off, just not this dramatically.

Then I realized that when I called up the azalea file in Windows Live Photo Gallery, the colors were similarly distorted. Which made me think it was something in the display settings of my laptop. And I remembered that I had noticed a similar phenomenon a few days ago when I had transferred photos from my phone, but had been busy and forgot about it.

But… here’s where it gets very weird… when I viewed the emailed azaleas picture within gmail, it looked fine. On the same laptop.

Then… I realized that those distorted-looking pictures I was calling up in the folder where I put photos for the blog on my laptop — pictures I had recently posted — looked fine on the blog itself.

So, I decided to completely ignore the fact that the azaleas picture looked like a color negative or something, and just resize the picture and post it, as an experiment.

And I did. And it looked fine on the blog. It had magically turned back to normal.

So, it looked fine when I sent it to myself, including on the laptop. But if I called it up in the Windows photo viewer, or in PhotoShop, the exposure was distorted to a bizarre degree. But if I didn’t do anything to it and went ahead and put it on the blog, it was back to normal.

Anybody know what in the world is going on? Because I’ve just wasted a lot of money on PhotoShop if I can’t realistically see color and contrast and make adjustments. A hundred bucks is a lot to blow on just being able to take an image down from 36 inches to 16…

The way they looked in PhotoShop Elements.

The way they looked in PhotoShop Elements.

Cindi Scoppe’s righteous rant this morning

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Cindi had a column this morning on the new post of cybersecurity chief that the Legislature is adding to the state payroll (maybe the title could be, “Officer in Charge of Closing the Barn Door after the Horses have Run Off”) — or rather, on the outrageous fact that they want this person to be immune from firing by the governor.

As she correctly points out, we have too many state employees like that already — people who don’t really “work for” anyone, since no one can fire them.

There is zero reason to make this particular person independent — unlike, say, the attorney general or the inspector general. Arguments can be made for those. Not for this new post.

Cindi and I have been fighting the Legislature’s aversion to accountability for a lot of years now. So she can be forgiven for winding up into a bit of a rant at the end:

Frankly, I’m willing to trust that politics will keep the governor in line on this one. It’s tough enough for a governor to have to explain that 6.4 million individuals’ and businesses’ Social Security numbers and bank records were hacked because her agency director either didn’t know about or ignored concerns from his own IT people. She certainly doesn’t want to have to explain that we had another breach because she fired the state cybersecurity chief, or cowed him into backing off basic protections.

Truth be told, I’d be more concerned that a governor wouldn’t be aggressive enough if a cybersecurity chief gets out of control.

As much as some legislators are fond of saying that no price is too high to secure our personal information, the fact is that there is always, always more that can be done to provide security, be it for our computer networks or our cities or our businesses or our homes. The fact is that some prices are indeed too high, and it’s the job of our Legislature and our governor, or whoever a cybersecurity director reports to, to balance the risk against the cost, in money and in time.

If you’re going to give union-style job protections to the cybersecurity chief, then why not give them to the governor’s lobbyists — since she might not like it if they tell her that legislators don’t like her? Or to the prison director — since she might not like it if he tells her how much it’s going to cost to keep the prisons safe?

In fact, why not just go back to the way we did things when I moved to South Carolina, when the governor couldn’t fire the directors of any state agencies? When those directors reported to part-time board members who, even if the governor could appoint them, couldn’t be fired.

For that matter, if S.C. governors are that untrustworthy, maybe we ought to go back to the old system whereby the Legislature elected the governor. After all, what’s the point of bothering voters with the matter of electing a governor if the governor has no power to carry out the agenda those voters elected her to carry out?

Or maybe, just maybe, we could decide that government officials should be held accountable for their actions. Maybe we could decide that it’s better to trust that a governor won’t abuse her power over powerful officials than it is to risk that those officials will either get too comfortable in their jobs or else let their power go to their heads, and be less aggressive, or more aggressive, than they ought to be, because they don’t have a boss — and they know they’ve got a job for life.

Amen to all that.

Does anybody out there read ‘terms and conditions,’ ever? If not, it gives me hope…

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I almost ignored the essay in the WSJ today about simplicity, because it started out with something about Henry David Thoreau. I’ve never been a fan. I don’t like anything about Walden. Life can indeed be simple if you isolate yourself from society — simple, but not worth living. (I say this as a person who is given to self-absorption, but that’s not a quality I like in myself, which causes me to react viscerally against Thoreau.) Also, it’s hard to avoid snorting in contempt at anyone who thought “modern” life in the first half of the 19th century had too much hustle and bustle in it.

But my interest was engaged a few grafs on, when I got to this bit:

Do you know anyone who stops to read “click-through” agreements on websites in the middle of performing a task? One company, PC Pitstop, deliberately buried a clause in its end-user license agreement in 2004, offering $1,000 to the first person who emailed the company at a certain address. It took five months and 3,000 sales until someone claimed the money. The situation hadn’t improved by 2010 when Gamestation played an April Fools’ Day joke by embedding a clause in their agreement saying that users were selling them their souls…

For a long time, I’ve meant to write a post asking, “Does anybody out there ever read those ‘terms and conditions’ agreements that you have to click ‘Agree’ to in order to proceed?” I tell myself that no one does, but I was a bit leery of posting the question because everyone might respond, “Of course we do,” at which point I would know for sure that what I’ve often suspected in the past was true: I’m on the wrong planet.

If it turned out everyone else was reading them, it was going to make me feel guilty every time I clicked “Agree” without reading all that crapola. It wasn’t going to change my behavior — I’d rather go to Room 101 than read a single one of those monstrosities. But it would make me feel bad. A little.

Those things always come up when I’ve already been substantially inconvenienced, having been forced to go through unanticipated steps in order to get on with whatever I was trying to do when the process started. You know those nightmare traps, in which you’re trying to do A, but realize that you can’t do A until you’ve done B, and then it turns out that B can’t be accomplished without first having completed C, etc. Those 20,000-word masterpieces of unreadability only come up when you’re fuming your way through G or H, and you’ve had it.

Besides, I couldn’t read one if I tried — not if by “reading” it, you mean get anything out of it. The surface of every letter in such documents is polished, then coated with grease, so that my brain can’t grab ‘hold of them. I can only read them on proofreading level. I don’t know if everyone experiences this or only someone who’s spent a lot of years as an editor, but there’s a certain level of reading on which I can catch spelling, punctuation and even grammatical errors, but when I’m finished, I can’t tell you what I just read. That’s as deeply as I can go into those kinds of documents.

The authors of the essay in the WSJ note with justice that much of the unnecessary complexity of life — the sort that’s too much to deal with — is caused by lawyers and technologists. On the one hand, lawyers try to protect their clients by covering every base to an absurd degree. Then there are those people who think everything can be quantified — people like “Clive,” a character created by John le Carre, of whom he wrote, “He believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them.”

But you know what? If everyone else — or at least a goodly proportion of the populace — clicks through all those things without reading them, it gives me some hope for the world.

I tend to lump in this sort of complexity with the lack of trust in the world. I wrote a column back in the ’90s that was sort of my Unified Field Theory of public life. I said everything that was wrong with society resulted from the fact that we didn’t trust each other. Overly lawyered, too-complex-to-read contractual agreements are monuments to this problem. As I wrote in 1995, “A lack of basic trust of each other explains why… We have so many laws, and so many lawyers. We trust nothing to common sense…”

One of the great ironies of this is that so many people come to hate government because they get fed up with bureaucracy and overly complex rules. And yet the reason we have all those excessive rules is that someone insisted that we add them because they didn’t trust government just to use good judgment.

But I just realized something about those agreements I click on without reading: They show that I trust the entity that posted the agreement. I know I’m not signing away one of my grandchildren or my house or whatever, because I know that society wouldn’t stand for that. I know that if the agreement for this software that millions of others have downloaded meant that I was selling myself into slavery, I would have heard about it. Society, that thing too many of us distrust, wouldn’t have stood for it. So, even more than the entity that drafted the agreement, I’m trusting society as a whole. I’m trusting the village, or the wisdom of crowds, or whatever you choose to call it.

Which makes me feel better about the world, and about myself. And about everyone else who clicks on “Agree” without reading the agreement, and gets on with life. It makes me feel better about the world I live in.

REALLY? Netflix thinks these are ‘like “Zero Dark Thirty”?’

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netflix

Some fret that the algorithms that surround us know too much about us. I don’t. Not yet.

Over the last few years, I’ve rated 2,383 movies on Netflix — so I really think I can claim to have given this thing a chance — and the service still doesn’t have a clue what I’m likely to like.

I guess there are just too many variables in what makes a motion picture enjoyable.

I find that Pandora does a somewhat better job of throwing me an occasional song I haven’t heard before, but like upon hearing. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not batting 1.000 or anything. But every once in a while, something I didn’t ask for makes me think yeahhh. It manages this more often than Netflix does. At least it seems that way. I haven’t kept a spreadsheet on it or anything.

Really, I like Netflix very much. It’s a great service, for what it does (both the DVD and instant sides). But what it does not do is understand my preferences. And I hold out little hope of it achieving that feat when it doesn’t have a clue what sorts of movies are “like ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “Universal Soldier?” “Batman Forever?” “Kinky Boots?”

Here are some movies I would say are actually like “Zero Dark Thirty:”

  • “Black Hawk Down” — A true story featuring U.S. Special Forces troops in action.
  • “Body of Lies” — Also fictional, but it involves dusty, gritty intelligence work on the ground in the same region. It even has torture scenes, as I recall.
  • “Green Zone” — Much in the same genre as “Body of Lies.”
  • “Homeland” — OK, it’s TV and not the big screen, and fictional, but the main female character has a lot in common with the lead in “Zero,” and may actually be based on the same real-life woman.
  • “The Hurt Locker” — Same director, also set in the region, very similar feel (and a better movie, although “Zero” is good).

See where I’m going with this, Netflix? Probably not. Anyway, I see little reason to worry, based on this at least, that machines are reading my mind…

So there’s something we can DO about asteroids?

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asteroids

Last week, we saw quite an array of celestial events. First, lightning struck St. Peter’s Basilica only hours after the Pope shocked the world by announcing his retirement, suggesting that Someone preferred to keep such decisions to Himself.

Then, on the same day that we smugly expected an asteroid that we knew would come closer than some man-made satellites, but miss us, a smaller one that we weren’t anticipating didn’t. Miss us, I mean. It put on a light show and did spectacular damage in Siberia, injuring more than a thousand people. (Apparently, meteors hate Siberia more than tornadoes hate trailer parks.)

It’s like the heavens were mocking us and our belief that we have a handle on things.

Speaking of which, I thought I’d pass on this interesting piece that I saw in The Guardian from ex-astronaut Rusty Schweickart. He said that we need to know more about these smaller asteroids, and that we can, if we invest in new telescope technology. But the most surprising thing he said was that if we spot these rogue rocks early enough, we can actually do something to keep them from hitting us. Excerpts:

Spaceship Earth just took two celestial shots across its bow as, first, a meteor struck Russia, showering the Chelyabinsk region with fragments and reportedly injuring several hundred people, and second, as Asteroid 2012 DA14 whizzed past on 15 February. Traditionally, a torpedo across the bow is fired as a warning to change one’s behavior – and this coincidence of events should be a warning to humanity that meteors are not always as benign as “shooting stars” and that the next asteroid might not miss! Will we, the crew of SS Earth heed this warning?…

Nevertheless, the Earth is hit by one of these relatively small DA14-sized asteroids about once every 300 years, on average. And “small” is far, far from insignificant. The DA14-like asteroid that hit Earth in 1908 did so in a remote region of Siberia, where the explosion (the equivalent of about 250 Hiroshima nuclear bombs going off at one time) destroyed over 800 square miles of the countryside. This disaster zone, superimposed on any city in the world, would have wiped it and all its residents from the face of the Earth. I refer you, as a graphic reminder of the power of such explosions, to the post-facto Hiroshima bomb pictures readily found online.

The second way to view DA14 is to realize that, until just about a year ago, it was one of about 1 million similarly sized, near-Earth asteroids, which we know are out there, statistically, but that we haven’t yet seen. Consequently, until we find them in our telescopes, we are like sitting ducks in a shooting gallery with nothing more than luck to prevent a disaster. Regrettably, the Earth-based telescopes we’ve been using to discover and track these objects have, practically speaking, reached their limitations for finding the vast majority of these cosmic torpedoes.

Why do we care about finding them if there’s nothing we can do about it? Because, unknown to most people, is that if we have adequate early warning, our current space technology is sufficiently advanced to deflect these asteroids. For smaller impacts, even a last-minute warning of several days could enable a local evacuation and save many lives.

Deflection, however, will generally require several decades of warning. Fortunately, due to the relatively pure nature of space dynamics, forecasting an asteroid impact 100 years in advance is possible once its orbit is well known. The sine qua non, therefore, is finding them…

He goes on to make a pitch for the Sentinel telescope. He’s involved with a nonprofit that wants to build this thing and save the planet. Which is good of him.

What he does not to, to my frustration, is explain his claim that we can deflect these things. However, Stuart Clark, also writing in The Guardian, answers my question:

“There are three ways to deflect a dangerous asteroid: the gently pull, the swift kick and nuking it,” says Fitzsimmons. Which method is best depends on the asteroid’s size, composition, orbit, and crucially, how much warning we get. Typically, warning times of a decade or so would be required.

With plenty of warning, the gentle pull may be all that is needed. In this scenario, you send the heaviest spacecraft you can launch to “hover” close to the dangerous asteroid. The tiny gravitational pull that the spacecraft produces on the asteroid then adds up over many years to shift it off collision course. It’s a concept known as the gravity tractor.

The swift kick actually involves a collision. You hit the asteroid with a heavy spacecraft that instantaneously changes its orbit. The more warning you have, the smaller the kick you need to give it. Observations can quickly show whether the method has worked or whether another kick is needed.

Finally, if things are desperate, nuke it. This can provide the biggest kick of all. But don’t shatter the asteroid. The last thing you want to do is break it up. That turns a cannonball into buck shot without significantly changing its orbit.

Instead, a nearby nuclear explosion would evaporate the surface layers of the asteroid. As the vaporised rock jets into space, the asteroid would be pushed in the opposite direction.

But — correct me if I’m wrong — in order for us to do any of that, our space program needs to be more advanced than it is now. The gentle pull, anyway. To be able to intercept an asteroid decades away from us in time to gradually pull it off course sounds to me well beyond our current technology. Seems that we might want to step up our game a bit. As Clark quotes Larry Niven as saying, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space programme.”