Some fluff, some info

topics covered:

So I've added an RSS feed, at left. With an RSS reader, such as amphetadesk or RSSowl, you'll get notified whenever I update this little web site. The idea is that you just check in to your RSS reader instead of clicking through to the dozen web sites you dutifully check every morning. Like all the other crap I endorse, it's not revolutionary: you spend half an hour setting it up and reading the manual, and then it saves you four minutes of clicking per day = a full day of clicking per year. I have to admit I've only had my own RSS reader for a day, and only have vicarious raves from people who say that having one of these little news tickers open has entirely changed the way they get information and has made them finally feel that enlightenment is attainable in this lifetime. I wonder what I'll do to kill time if I can't waste it checking to see if anything new has turned up on Plastic in the last six minutes.

Asst links But there's always more (not-regularly-updated) junk to be had. In addition to the usual list of links, I offer the following, for my fellow distraction-seeker.

I'm at the World Bank today, copying data sets to my own portable hard drive. Instead of a bar crossing the screen, the little application opts for a ball that grows in size. Very cute. Almost beats the status bar from Halo.

On the desk here is a copy of Bank Swirled, the in-house humor magazine. It's filled with in-jokes and standard office humor. Representative sample: ``hello. I'm a constipated water buffallo. Is there a World Bank program to help me?''

Pocket calculator show is about 80s technology, back when things still had buttons, instead of a screen with pictures of buttons. An interesting idea, though I wonder why they don't just go all out and talk about 20s technology, when adding machines were made from brass and wood.

Equally retro but more hands on, here is a set of Infocom text games for you to download and play. These games are a paragon of good computing and bad humor, and can be run on pretty much any modern hardware (including a lot of phones).

This photographer took some wonderful photos of Thailand. Interspersed with the photos is an extensive discussion of how he went about backing up the digital photos onto both a CD and portable hard drive. The contrast is stunning.

Oh, but it gets geekier. Here is a list of numbers.

I've been very interested in alternative keyboards. I mean, you can have the most efficient software on the planet, but if you have to wave your hands around in painful ways to use it, then it's still not efficient. When I have any say in the matter, I use a split keyboard with built-in touchpad, in my lap. But I sometimes fantasize about what life would be like with these more innovative designs.

OK, time to take a stretch break.

And, of course, if all else fails, there's always cartoons, TV, or naked people.

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Here are some more fun sites. Let this entry also serve as a reminder to you that there's a news feed on the left, and a page of links. All that should keep you unproductive for hours.

The Oil We Eat: I had fun arguing with this article. Some of the facts are verifiably wrong, none have citations, and he never proposes a viable solution to the question, `how do we go about sustainably feeding six billion people?' But I still recommend it as a great read. It's the first argument I've seen that makes me want to buy organic veggies.

Generally, I (heart) Harper's RSS feed. It puts something out about once a week, but every single item that comes through is interesting. Much of it is from Harper's magazine in the 1880s. For a more current example, here is the marine's guide to Iraqi ettiquete.

The Black Table: If you haven't seen it yet, it frequently has fun.

The Polluted Internet: Most of the traffic on the Net today is worms, viruses, spam, and generally gunk. It even shows up on my web logs: this evil, bad (don't click this!) web site advertises by pinging my site, thus appearing in my logs as a referrer. They hit me every day, and I'm one obscure little site; think how much bandwidth they're taking up to plug themselves like this.

But on the positive side, Mr. PH of Seattle, Washington points out that in some ways, the Net is becoming more useful. I'd add more here, but Mr. PH has really covered all I'd have to say on the subject.

On realtors: I agree with this guy that the real estate industry is a cartel which needs to be broken up, so of course I'm gonna link to him.

Things my girlfriend and I argue about. Yeah, that's the title of the page. It's brilliant in any of a number of ways. Bought the book for the ex-girlfriend who originally recommended the site to me, with whom I argue all the time; she didn't like the book.

Mr. AZ of Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote a long (80 pages) article on the low-hanging fruit of energy conservation---the easy stuff that wastes most of your energy. It is exactly the sort of article I like: it begins with discussions of the theory and general principles, and then comes down to specific policy recommendations about saving the world. He ran out of bandwidth, so you should get a copy from my favorite file-hosting service, gmail.com, username: some.files , password: caring .

Patent of the Week: Really, half the fun of studying patents is the silly and absurd patents.

I can't tell if this site is a joke or not.

The invisible library. A catalog of nonexistent books.

A wine rating guide for the rest of us.

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More overintellectualization next time, but I've been wanting to mention this one web site for a while. Have been trying to fit it in to a real post to no avail, so let me just take some time out and gush. Trashlog is absolutely the finest site on the Web, by a long shot. I mean, nothing compares.

Here's the RSS feed, which will dump a single piece of beautifully photographed trash in your reader every day.

Now, I guess I could include some amount of overintellectualizing anyway, about making art from the random refuse of the world, or how it's a meditation on the little things that surround us every day, comparing it to my other fave (Quiet American), et cetera, but I don't have anything that the rest of you won't think up in a few seconds. I just think it's really well done and the neatest thing ever.

[A further aside, 15 March 2005: see also APOD, also a pic-a-day site, which provides celestial contrast to Trashlog's eye to the gutter (RSS; click images in the feed for giant versions].

OK, I'm done gushing; thanks for your patience. Next time, back to the usual optimally boring topics; probably statistical analysis in C again.
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I've been using del.icio.us for a while now, and it makes me happy. It's probably even more low-tech than this site here, and serves the simple purpose of holding your darn bookmarks somewhere. Every time I feel that I should be reading something, I can just bookmark it and pretend I'd read it. It's like how we used to joke that photocopying the article is equivalent to reading it.

Which brings us to the academic equivalent, CiteULike, which has the huge plus of converting your citations into BibTeX format. [Jstor should be ashamed that another site can pull this info from them and produce a BibTeX citation, but they can't do it themselves.]

Communists may prefer de.lirio.us. As the name is explicitly intended to convey, it's a del.icio.us knockoff, but it is open-source, and has an extra bell or whistle or two. Del.icio.us has a different approach: closed source, but an API which allows other people at other sites to write cute add-ons. This week, de.lirio.us is in much more rapid development; del.icio.us recently got funding from an undisclosed source with undisclosed motivations, which should also lead to more rapid development.

There is zero privacy on both of these sites, which is part of their intent. The above links go to my own bookmarks, so you can see what I've been looking at lately---in fact, if you're in serious stalker mode, there are del.icio.us RSS and CiteULike RSS feeds for my account, so you can know any time I've posted another link or article. As inflated as my ego may be, I can not imagine a single human being having any interest in such a feature, but am amused that the option exists. I was toying around with the idea of writing up an entry about what it means that somebody set up a panopticon and people flocked to it, but didn't have much to say on the matter.

Sometimes when I'm bored, I check the popular page on del.icio.us, but it consists almost entirely of reference works (which is ex post obvious) and computer tutorials.

So, an easy way to do this little festival of links would be to just send you to the del.icio.us page. Go, check the tags, see if there's anything you like.

But since that feels vaguely antisocial, let me point you to a few of my favorites.

E-cards take thirty seconds longer to set up than a standard email, but people are infinitely happier when they get them. Unfortunately, the graphics are always painfully syrupy, to the point that the only way to send them is with a bit of a smirk. I usually send sympathy cards for people's birthdays. So, here's a guy who makes greeting cards that don't suck. He uses Flash animation for interesting visual effects instead of dancing teddy bears, and thus has the first not-kitschy cards I have ever seen.

Do you think you're a geek `cause you know how to disassemble your PC when it's acting up? Whatever, dude. Dan will show you how to disassemble your frigging components. Didn't you ever wonder what's in your power supply? He's also a fan of making fun of technological quacks, which is an easy but always entertaining target. I think he's where I got this link to an enthusiastic parody of the audiophile world. [Speaking of which, I want this for my birthday. Here's Dan's RSS feed.]

While we're on the tech-side, I may as well also mention my main source for news: The Register. It's a Brit journal whose motto is "Biting the hand that feeds IT", and reports on the important developments in the IT world in an appropriately snarky manner. If you think you don't care about tech policy, try subscribing to this feed for a week and see how much you read. [The Register's RSS feed]

Notice my frequent use of RSS feeds; they really are the only sane way to keep up with sites that frequently update. I've discussed RSS in prior posts, but let me give you the e-z it'll-only-take-a-minute setup summary:
Save this file to your hard drive. It's a hand-picked list of the funnest feeds I could find.
Go to Bloglines and set up an account.
Once you're logged in and are on the My Feeds page, click Edit on the right hand side.
Click "Import Subscriptions" and then browse to the above file that you'd saved to your hard drive.

That done, you now have kilos of time-wasting sites, like the New York Times, to sift through. Bloglines also fits the panopticon theme: my own feeds can be publicly viewed (though you can turn off this option), so you can see what I've been reading on any given day.

[My own agenda in pushing for RSS readership is that I don't post very often, so you, dear reader, are more likely to maintain interest if you're notified when I put new stuff up instead of having to check every day. At this point, I'm assuming that all readers get to me through an RSS reader.]

Here's a traffic circle.

I should mention a prior post listing one auditory and two visual sites, which I find to be immensely appealing for their search for beauty and order in the world around us. [I've updated the RSS feeds since first posting it, by the way. This is my fourth reference to Quiet American; can't tell if that's enough.]

And of course, no survey of the Internet is complete without: Porn! [I dare you to click it at work.]
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[I'd promised more on IP last time. Am still working on it; apologies.]

Ten years ago, the pundits were predicting the demise of the Internet. Too naïve, they said. The infrastructure is based on an `I'll carry your traffic if you carry mine' sort of plan, and the inherent assumption throughout is that everybody should have free access.

Naïvely, I thought these claims of `too naïve' were too cynical.

The first thing that changed my mind is referrer spam. It's one thing to put spam in a place where a human being is expected to see it, like an email inbox, but in a computer-generated log, mostly designed to be read by other computers? It's so much like those advertisements in elevators: everything is so plastered with crap already that they have to think real long and hard about where to put still more crap, and we all know that the elevator and the referrer log aren't the end of it.

[Yes, the reason is ostensibly because there are four blogs out there that still autopost their referrers, but I think even if those went away we'd still have referrer spam.

Another digression about spam: my Bayesian filter was smart enough to let all my mortgage info through when I was buying my house---and more about low! low! rates!. When I was heavy into writing my book about MSFT, all those emails got through, along with loads of ads for WinXP for cheap. The filter has turned indiscriminatory noise into the sort of perfectly focused and targeted advertising vendors pay top dollar for. Maybe it's just apophenia on my part.]

This week, I had my first personal experience with the Usenet. Usenet was around well before the World Wide Web. People post emails on a topic, and then your little text newsreader would pull down the posts. All very low-tech; just people writing to other people in a semistructured thread. Much of it is very helpful: person A posts a question, and person B wants to be helpful and posts a reply. Since it gets indexed by search engines, I can just copy an error message off the screen into the search box, and the first hit is very likely to be somebody who did the same on Usenet four years ago and the next hit will be the somebody explaining the solution. All very wonderful.

In addition to being so frequently helpful, the Usenet is the font of bad karma. The question is: why do people help others? There are a hundred answers, and most are virtuous, but the list includes such motivations as a need for incessant attention, a need to prove that you're smarter than everybody else, and even a desire to passive-agressively pick a fight.

I won't claim that there are more such malintentioned individuals on the Usenet or `Net in general than here in the real world. But the fact remains: it takes just one asshole to ruin the party. You've been to that party, and know the problem. You know that that one person has to get kicked out, but you need to do it in a way that doesn't kill the buzz, and in the end the party just winds up dissolving. You try not to invite the ass to the next party and hope they don't find out. Bars handle this by having a bouncer.

But the `Net is all-inclusive. Nobody is barred, and if they're barred, they can just change their IP address and try again. And so, using the Usenet is an exercise in suffering bad karma.

I announced Apophenia on the Usenet. Apophenia is exactly what I've needed in life: glue for the GSL and SQLite which I can easily call from my simulations. I want help and new contributions, and thought others may find it to be useful, so I announced it on the sci.stat.math newsgroup. My goal was to announce, explain my motivation, and maybe get one or two interested parties.

I knew that it would be karmically painful, and it was. At the moment, there are 32 posts on the thread. Most are individuals generally trying to be helpful, maybe with a snarky comment or two. Five are from me, explaining more about what I have in mind. Twelve (about every other post) are from one guy who is the harbinger of bad karma. I won't summarize his sins, but the malintentioned motivations are clearly there---this guy is there for himself, not to help. Minus him, this would have been pretty productive, with a lot of good references thrown my way, and clarification in my mind of how Apophenia should be shaped. With him, it is painful to read.

Now, there are two reasons why it's painful. The first is that the guy's an ass, and nobody likes to be around such people. It's like a pornographic pop-up ad: just annoying and æsthetically displeasing.

The other reason is that I too am an asshole. Reading this makes me want to rant back. The Usenet term is `flamebait'---he's just waiting for me to reply angrily so he can yell back louder, and there's a guy in a little red suit poking me with his pitchfork telling me to post back, that I can totally yell louder than this idiot and that I will be delighted when he's vanquished. Screw helping others, I want to hurt this loser. I want to be that asshole.

It's not just that bad karma is unfun to be around, it spreads. It takes all my effort to just write a little journal entry complaining about this guy instead of posting entry number six arguing back. The Usenet law says `don't feed the trolls', and it takes everything I have to not do so.

By the way, when somebody does take the bait (as one person did on this thread), when somebody does feed the troll and an all-out flamewar commences, it's not nearly as unpleasant because nothing about the bickering makes one want to join the fray. There are two losers being idiots, and you can peacefully observe as an uninvolved third person. But it still sucks relative to a world where people show some frigging restraint, and is still noise that you have to filter out. Who wants to be in a restaurant where the next booth is having an argument in all caps.

And that, dear reader, is why I'm not a libertarian. Places with a bare minimum of societal constraints exist, and it sucks to be there. Without social norms keeping the trolls under control, there's risk that assholedom will spread, and even if not, that one guy is still ruining the party. The only way to really enjoy being there is to either accept that you will constantly be stepping into something and constantly on your guard, or to take up arms, throw mutual aid to the wind, and jump into the fray.
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I'd like to discuss the question of how technology has changed personal relations. That'll come next time. For now, let's look at a specific, vaguely related question:does the link structure of the Net mirror the link structure of human networks?

Back when Alta Vista was the highest view in Internet search, a few IBM and Alta Vista researchers did a rather detailed study of the Web's structure (1). They, as with many others, found that the distribution of links on the Net looked a lot like the distribution of human links. There is a power law distribution where there are a few sites that are linked endlessly, and a long tail of sites that only have a few links.

Figure One: Junior high class photo. That's me on the far right.

To give an example of a power law, here is a graph based on data from junior high classes. The most popular student is on the X-axis at the far left (at X=0), and was nominated as a best friend by a mean of 9.75 other students (over 88 classrooms in the sample). Over on the other end of the X axis, the 25th through 35th ranked student in the classroom was nominated as a best friend by a mean of less than one other student. So you've got a few very well-connected students and a lot of students who have no connections at all.

We see this pattern in social networks of all scales, and among Web pages. The nomination count graph is typically a little more curvy than this one, with even more of a steep slope down from the most popular members of the group and a longer tail at the other end.

It sounds like the WWW as interpersonal network metaphor is working OK, but two caveats: first, there is much debate as to whether the best fit for the link distribution of the Web is a Negative Exponential, a Gamma, a Zipf, or a variety of other distributions that all look identical to a non-expert. Unless you hope to study this stuff seriously, you don't have to care about this caveat and can just call it a power law. The best fit to the student data is a Gamma distribution, by the way.

Second, human networks are pretty symmetric, in that there are few face-to-face contacts where one party is ignorant of the other. This is true of celebrities, whom we know but don't know us, but we can throw those out and have a reasonably symmetric set of acquaintance links. The popular kids may not want to hang out with the unpopular ones, but they know them nonetheless. But with Web pages, it happens all the time that a page makes no indication of what other pages are linking to it.

Figure Two: The Insidious Bowtie of Nyroth\ae{}nim, aka The Internet.

Broder et al found that this asymmetry occurs on a grand scale. They divide the Web into a giant Strongly Connected Component (SCC) comprising about a quarter of the Web; these are sites that interlink with each other. Then there's a quarter that only links in to the SCC but does not receive links. That would be blogs from losers like me. Then there's a quarter that is linked from the SCC but does not link to anything in particular, comprising corporate sites that just go in internal circles and things like online books and manual pages that are informative but not filled with links. The final quarter, they called <span class="airq">tendrils</span>, indicating a trail of limited links that doesn't readily fall into the first three categories. Thus, because a web page is not a person, the symmetry of human networks does not map to web links.

Another important distinction is that the whole small world game, where we try to find a chain of people from a guy in Katmandu to a guy in Omaha, does not work for the Net, because if you start on the right side of the bowtie, you can not get to the left side. For humans, you can almost certainly find a chain, and it'll be well under ten people in almost all cases; for the Net, you only have about a 25chance of being able to form a chain from any randomly selected site to any other randomly selected site. E.g., try getting from This haphazard site in Canada to this site here (hint: you can't). When you can form a chain, say from the in-feeding region to the SCC region, then it can still be hundreds of nodes long if one element is well-buried in a subculture.

Now, with human networks, we can distinguish between acquaintance, which is almost by definition symmetric, and friends, which is depressingly unidirectional, typically from low-status to high-status. I don't believe this metaphor is particularly well-studied, but it doesn't work very well. The net receivers of links for the Net are not high-status pages, but pages that just provide information (corporate, technical, whatever).

But getting back to the part of the metaphor that does work, there are two characteristics to both networks. First, there's a cost to linking both socially and online, because you need to find the subject of your interest and know them. Second, there is a cost to searching for new links. An immediate corollary to expensive search is a principle that the rich get richer: the easiest way to find new links for your own personal address book is to ask others for their contacts, so well-linked people/sites are more likely to get more links.

More on this next time.

(1) @articlebroder:net, title = "Graph Structure in the Web",
author= Andrei Broder and Ravi Kumar and Farzin Maghoul and Prabhakar Raghavan and Sridhar Rajagopalan and Raymie Stata and Andrew Tomkins and Janet Wiener,
journal = "Computer Networks",
volume = 33,
year = 2000,
pages = 309-320

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The best-of

• “It's both fluffy and informative!”
• “He spell-checked it!”
• “I replaced my copy of Esquire with this, and thanks to all those charts and graphs, now my houseguests think I'm smart or something!”
• “Much more accessible than his book on statistical computing!”
• “It's a triumph of semantic markup!”

And if you're a publisher, take this as a prospectus. Quirky books by economists are hot these days.

The readership

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The title is the OED definition of the word.

The post from last time about the US Trade Representative was originally about boycotting Yahoo!. I realize now that the whole thing is probably best entitled `my immense disappointment with the software industry', but I'll get to that next time.

As you may know, Yahoo! voluntarily gave information to the Chinese government identifying three Chinese citizens (that we know of) who promoted democracy on Yahoo! web sites. Their finger-pointing led to their conviction and ten years' imprisonment. Software is not real, the Internet is nothing but æther, but ten years in a forced-labor prison is as concrete as it gets. Yahoo! had a real, tangible influence on fucking up three people's lives.

The Chinese court that convicted one of these individuals pointed out that Yahoo! was instrumental in the arrest of one Chinese dissident. I'd detail the lives these folks led after their inevitable conviction, but it's so common that you already know it: beatings, psychological abuse, deliberately inferior conditions to ensure that inmates are unable to sleep or maintain good health, and of course the forced labor.

And so, in the U.S. courts, there is a federal lawsuit against Yahoo! claiming that its actions have violated the Alien Tort Statue and the Torture Victim Protection Act.

Why'd they do it? Because Yahoo! is big in Asia. It cares deeply about maintaining is position as a major advertiser and content provider in Asia--especially China. Of course, so do other `Net conglomerates like Google and MSN, but those guys have managed to operate without ratting out their customers. Google's apologia for censoring its web results in China states: “No, we're not going to offer some Google products, such as Gmail or Blogger, on Google.cn until we're comfortable that we can do so in a manner that respects our users' interests in the privacy of their personal communications.” Chinese folks can use blogger.com, whose servers are located in the USA, and can safely expect that Google will not aid the Chinese government in prosecutions based on what is stored on those servers. That's a fine approach, and I'm sure any of the big three conglomerates have more than enough lawyers to make it work.

The Yahoo! shareholder's meeting was a few weeks ago. A large shareholder named the City of New York requested that the issue be addressed. Here is item #1 on the six-point list that the City proposed: “Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.” Notice how this basically matches what Google says it has in place right now.

And the board responded that “certain of the standards suggested by the proponent would give the Company insufficient flexibility in responding to applicable legal requirements.” So it looks like the board comprehends exactly what the proposal was intended to do. Other proposals by other shareholders met a similar fate, in the way of `Oh, we already have enough checks and balances in place'. This is an awkward statement given that shareholders care exactly because there don't seem to be any checks.

What we get here is that Yahoo! is not merely complying with Chinese law, but is actively working with it, even in policies that we consider to be downright unethical. This makes Yahoo! money, because it continues to make billion-dollar deals to expand its conglomerate within China's borders, and those deals only work if they have active government support.

Yahoo!'s board was handed an opportunity to apologize for their hand in sending two people to prison for writing words, to give shareholders and customers a half-hearted signal in the way of `oops, won't happen again :)'. Instead, they chose instead to signal to the Chinese government that they remain free to comply next time they are asked to send somebody to jail.

Censorship

In the USA, by the way, Google has a preeminently amusing approach to corporate censorship: if a company demands that they not post search results that the company dislikes, then they post the takedown notice instead (via chillingeffects.org), thus making the complainant look like even more of an ass, and leaving the URL available anyway, since it has to be in the takedown notice. Ha ha.

But back to China, let's not delude ourselves that the only way for a Chinese person to get information is to search via Yahoo!, Google, or MSN. There are several hundred other search engines, and although google.cn is filtered, google.com is much slower but not filtered. And hey, you can always use tor to get around all this. So I take censorship as a lesser evil than cooperating with police because there are easy ways around it. Although this isn't strictly true, censorship feels passively unethical while volunteering a person for torture is actively unethical. Of course, you can decide for yourself whether you agree (and post in the comments if you don't).

Walking away

And while I'm on child porn, it provides a nice metaphor. Is there a corollary to Goodwin's law that all Internet discussion eventually winds up at child porn metaphors? Go type “sex tourism” into your favorite search engine; there are parts of the world where the prostitution of children is so commonplace that you could argue that the local government condones it. This is a direct clash between the ethics of U.S. citizens and the participants in these businesses elsewhere (though I can only guess the extent to which the citizens of a sex tourism destination condone it all). So what do U.S. businesses do about this moneymaking opportunity? They walk away and leave what they consider to be unethical activity to those who don't consider it unethical. It'd be nice to have a hand in shutting it down, but walking away is certainly the minimum threshhold. Above, Google decided it would comply with the censorship requests, but walk away from any business that may lead to the torture of its users.

For my part, I'm walking away from Yahoo!. Let me note that I'm banging this out on a Microsoft keyboard, my backup PC is an IBM Thinkpad, and I generally understand that a company, an artificial entity consisting of thousands of people, is neither good nor evil. See prior essay. But the Board of Yahoo! is only a few people, and for my tastes, they are being a bit too blatant in their efforts to support what I consider to be unethical. So I'm giving up on them. Which is not to say that I'm switching to Google; the author of an alternative search engine blog challenged his readers to go a day without Google, and to help us along, offers a list of 100 search engines that are neither Yahoo! nor Google nor MSN. I'm not sure why, but I'm personally partial to Clusty.

Of course, Yahoo! is a conglomerate, not a search engine. I canceled my Yahoo! email account, which was just a wasteland of spam anyway, but then that means that I can't get into my flickr account, because flickr sold out to Yahoo! a few years ago. And so it goes.

More next time.

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• Use the imperative tense:. Nothing makes you sound like an authority faster than the imperative tense. Sites like Lifehacker, LifeDev, LifeClever, which are aggregated by by LifeRemix, post a dozen imperative-tense posts per day; if you want to be linked by them you'd better sound like an authority.

  Now, when it comes to organizing, your experience is dubiously better than anybody else's. I mean, if you're writing about how to implement cubic splines in n dimensions, the odds are good that you are an expert relative to your reader. But every last one of your readers has had to face the task of improving their productivity. Some would think that they should save the imperative tense for the points where they're an authority and use a form like “In my experience, I have found the following to be helpful...” when only a step or two ahead of the reader. But Lifehacker and the other thousand sites like it ain't gonna link to you with an attitude like that.

  I was visited by a guru the other day. I'm looking for roommates again, and one of the applicants was raised on a relatively impoverished farm in India (“We only had a black-and-white TV.”). While most people ask me about the utilities and cleaning schedule, he opted to spend the hour speaking on the importance of good breathing (“The body follows the mind, and the mind follows the breathing.”). It was a good strategy, in that he was pretty interesting, and built his own world around him that swept you in. He spoke with comforting authority. I have been more focused on my breathing during my continuing search for a roommate.

• Use new products to reduce clutter: The great and wonderful irony of the minimalist lifestyle is that it requires purchasing heaps of stuff. The little foam wedges to put between your wine bottles that replace your wine rack with twenty foam wedges, the designer knife block for your minimalist set of six knives, and of course the binder carousel for all your binders--all of these are essential for the minimalist life. It's hard to be a minimalist traveler if you don't have a laptop bag, a day bag, a backpack, and a carry-on bag--which means you'll need to have a bag box at home.

• Use new organizational products to reduce organizational clutter: Just as a simple tupperware under-bed box won't do for holding your clutter, don't expect people to keep their data organized until they have several competing tools with which to do so.

  Your home PC will need an address application, a calendar application, a notes manager, as will your work PC. You will need a telephone with its own address/calendar/notes features, an online address/calendar/notes system for when you're away from your home/work PCs and your telephone, and maybe a system of 3X5 card management for when you want to use a pen. You might also want to buy 43 folders (one for each month, one for each of 31 days), so you have a place to put all your future-relevant papers. The next step is to get a series of syncing systems, which you'll need to check in on daily, to make sure everything is organized. Maybe put it all in a revision-control system just in case.

  Bill Gates, a CEO of Microsoft explains that he has three big-ass screens, with several Microsoft products simultaneously running, like a project manager, email, et cetera. Marissa Meyer, a VP at Google, uses Pine.

  The consensus among the superproductive--and I know the consensus because I'm writing about it and am therefore an authority--is that they put all their information in one low-tech bin, like a plain old text file. Your haphazard notes, your phone numbers and addresses, your to-do list, are all plain text. From there, just use your text editor's search feature to find the person or detail you need right now.

  Some folks threw together a few scripts to help you put your to-do list in a text file, which I find to be convenient, though it's only marginally easier than just directly editing a text file. I keep things a bit more structured by keeping an entire notes directory with a few per-project files; I use grep to search them all at once when necessary.

  If that's too much effort, maybe buy a notebook.

• Write about not putting things off: It seems simple enough, but think of the bullet-points you could mine from this one: act on every email so you can keep your inbox empty, get papers off your desk as quickly as possible, don't put off making a decision if it won't be any different tomorrow, keep an eye on how much time you spend procrastinating by reading about how to not procrastinate.

• Use bullet points: Bullet points have a feel of value-for-money. The thesis sentence and essay structure take time to get through before you can get to the take-away final points. People don't have time for such things. Bonus tip: describe what People want, because distinctions about how different people have different goals only obfuscate what's going on. Further, one thesis sentence can easily be rewritten as ten bullet points, so readers will feel like they're getting a full page of information, not just a single concept. Would you rather read the single sentence “productivity enhancers tend to just turn into more clutter” or three bullet points offering lengthy elucidation?

[PDF version]

The Net seems to be full of amateur (and occasionally professional) designers who've all got advice for ya.

I've complained before about how usability to many people means `how well could a lobotomized person operate this device?' And hey, the lobotomized are legion. If I want my toy to be the next iPod, then I can't have more than five buttons on the thing--wait, wait, iPod digression! How is it intuitive that you turn on an iPod by holding down the menu button? If I recall right, holding down play/pause turns it off. Why do people praise this as so perfect and intuitive when there is no way to know how to turn the darn thing on without having to RTFM?

These posts by designers, and the sporadic email sent to me, often begin sentences with “People want ...”. Does this mean that if I don't what the current design community consensus then I'm not a person?

This came to mind from a post about the interface for a wget GUI. It's a hideous mess of buttons and checkboxes and, well, seems pretty useful to me. I've actually been paid for a couple of wget scripts, which I guess makes me a professional wgetter. I have the manual for wget open on another screen every single time I use that program, because there is so much to tweak. As a substitute for the man page, this application works great. Good job guys. As a substitute for, uh, Internet Explorer, it's goin' nowhere, but nobody intended it to be an IE replacement. A colleague embarrassed me the other day by downloading a set of sets using DownThemAll while I was still trying to get wget to accept cookies. DTA wouldn't have worked in the cases I was paid for above, but in this case wget's endless command line switches totally lost out to a system with virtually no switches at all.

All of this advice about reaching the largest audience by choosing the lowest common denominator doesn't appear in other fields besides graphic design/usability. Imagine somebody writing advice for musicians that they should make sure that they not write anything more challenging than Coldplay, or a writer who advises other writers that they must only write about sex, puppies, and shiny objects.

Figure one: If you write about anything but shiny puppies, you run risk of losing your audience.

Andrew Gelman is a statistician who is big on this sort of thing as well. The linked article, like just about all of his article reviews, opens: “First, I'd replace the tables by graphs.” Have you ever tried citing a plot? `Quantmael [1814] found that the regressor for wheat consumption was significant with, oh, uh, maybe 98% confidence, I think. Give or take.' The entire concept of the metastudy is based on the fact that journals publish tables. Does this mean plots are evil and all have to go? No, but they provide and hide different information from the tables. It's fine to use plots as well as tables, but to propose plots instead of tables is to propose hiding information.

From Gelman and Hill[2007], p 254: “As we move on to more complicated models, we present estimates graphically but do not continue with formulas...” This guy is sooo not invited to my parties.

Also, graphics can be fun. Have a look at the splash on this page of visualizations. But then, text is fun, too.

If everybody absorbed information and learned in the same way, life would be pretty easy for the world's teachers, but instead we've got all kinds. Visual learners are the majority, but many people are not. Auditory learners--I think of myself as one--want text, because it turns into a mental dialogue with the page, while a diagram does not. At the extreme, blind computer users are as common as blind people, and whether they are visual or aural learners, they still rely on screen readers that pass over graphics as blank space.

Now, if you are a design professional, then the odds are pretty darn good that you're a visual learner. Further, the majority of humans are primarily visual learners, so the design professionals who pound the pulpit and insist that you must design for visual consumption are right that you must if you want to reach the majority and be the next Coldplay. But this is the classic case of the tyranny of the majority, because these pulpit-pounders are saying that you should design for the majority at the expense of the minority who want other forms of information and feedback. Some people want text, but the design world says that text like the wget GUI is clutter. Some people want kinetic action to the extent possible with a screen and keyboard, which means turning pages and tabs, but the design world says that as much as possible should be visible from one static view.

The correct solution is a balanced presentation of all types of learning technique, including visual, textual, spatial, haptic, and I don't know what else. Which is not to imply that striking that balance is in any way easy--people devote their lives to that balance. And yeah, I probably post too few graphics.

But the need for a balance isn't coming through in the infovis world, which is still in love with being able to produce graphs that were impossible a decade ago. So let me offer some balance: people (by which I mean me) want text. People acquire language skills early in life--as I understand consensus, the ability to learn and use language is innately wired into the brain--and use language to communicate with alarming regularity. Use that in presenting information. Text, people. It's great. Yay, text.

Relevant previous entries:
A previous, more general discussion of designing for dumb people

@book{gelman:hill,
author = "Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill",
title ="Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models",
publisher = "Cambridge University Press",
year=2007
}

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OK, Ms ABR of Washington, Columbia asked me to write about Google's new browser, so here goes. I'm typing fast, editing lightly, and posting on an odd-numbered day.

Google's browser is an attempt to shift the position of a long-running search for balance, over where work is to be done. So this discussion of the browser has to start with a brief history of networked computing.

We begin with your mainframes of old, like before we were born old, which often had terminals attached. Terminals, like the terminus of a railroad station, were the end of a line out of the central system, where the end in this case has a screen and a keyboard attached. You would send requests from your little end of the line, they would go to the mainframe, and then it would send results back down the line. Thus, these terminals were called dummy terminals, because they did no thinking, just relaying keyboard presses and displaying the output.

This is why the personal computer revolution was so interesting: you now had terminals that looked like dummy terminals (like the TRS-80) that were capable of doing things on their end of the line. So home users, who had no mainframe to attach to, were increasingly using these little terminals to do independent work that the dummies could never do.

Now, put a mainframe capable of math on one end, and a terminal capable of doing math on the other. The key question for the rest of the essay: who does the processing?

To make this more concrete, jump forward to the Internet age. You type in a web address, and the server sends back a big block of text. That's dummy terminal mode, where your computer is doing minimal thinking. Now say you go to a site with silly Flash or Java games. You go to the site, you get a bar that says `loading' on the screen for a minute, and then you play your game on your screen, without really talking to the server. Now things are reversed: the server just read your request and dumped back data, and your PC does all the work.

Or say you go to Gmail. It has a `loading' bar like a Flash game. But the server is active, because it's trying to find your new mail, starred mail, spam count, and so on. But your PC is active, because it's opening and closing window bits without talking to the server, autocompleting and highlighting things when your mouse is in just the right place, and so on. There's a sweet spot between work on the server side and work on the client side; a lot of people think Google has hit it. No citations today. But try typing 'Google sweet spot' into, uh, a search engine. Me, I think Google has missed it: my email should not need a `loading' bar, but that's just opinion.

Virtual machines

Second, it relied on a virtual machine (VM) that never ran as well as we'd have hoped. Sun promised to write a VM for any device (telephone, Windows box, Linux box) that would handle the guts and details, and then you'd write a program in one language--Java--that runs on all these machines. But the VMs were all a little different: at the least, your telephone has buttons that your PC doesn't and vice versa, so how do you write something that works in both places? But the big virtual machine difference was between Sun's virtual machine and Microsoft's. Microsoft's Java machine was designed to be incompatible, as recorded in a ton of court documents. You'll recall the press about the Microsoft antitrust case, which was mostly about Microsoft killing the Netscape browser, but the real crux of the case was about how the browser carried a Java VM, and Microsoft felt it important to kill the VM.

So once you download a Java program, it might not run. Running from a virtual machine instead of native to the hardware, it might run slowly. And finally, there was the downloading issue: a Java program is too much for a guy living in 1995 with spotty AOL dialup to use without frustration.

But the virtual machine idea was a good one. It's a fabulously attractive idea to have a code-running box that manages all the low-level work, so programmers can do the high-level stuff. It's so fabulous that Microsoft does it: their .NET framework basically allows you to write in any language, then translate it to their .NET machinery to run on a Windows box. This is exactly the abstraction Java did, but .NET is written around Windows machines. The virtual machine idea predates Java. Infocom games, like Zork or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, were data files for a virtual machine. The Infocom VM is easy to rewrite; I could get one for my telephone.

Your browser is a virtual machine. Every browser can read JavaScript (whose code has no discernable relationship to Java--the naming similarity is pure advertising), and can run Flash, and load Java programs. That's why Google's mail program can run on basically any machine as long as you have a browser to interpret its Javascript.

The family tree

The process model gives you stability, because the children are only vaguely related to their parents (mostly via carefully-controlled interprocess communication), and if the parent has issues, then they won't affect the child, and vice versa. It's the operating system's job to make sure that this is the case, and to make sure that the processor gives fair time to every process running, where by `fair time' I mean access to the hard drive, the processor, and other physical resources the OS is taking care of.

So back to Firefox, which does not spawn child processes (to speak of). It's one monolithic blob to the operating system, not a family, so, e.g., if one blob of Javascript fails in one place, then all the others will also be stuck.

Google Chrome is prolific: it is designed to spawn lots of children. For every web page you have open, you should have a separate process. So let's review: you have a Javascript program (aka a web page) in one tab, and that tab is its own process that the operating system treats equally to every other program. Yup, sounds like a standalone virtual machine to me, exactly like the Java VM or Microsoft's .NET.

So Google has taken those last steps to make our typical programming languages of the Web exactly the languages you need to write standalone programs for any operating system. With a few lines of Javascript and HTML, you can write and distribute a standalone Windows program.

Or to put it more directly: the operating system now gives equal treatment to Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

Critique and politics

In fact, Google has made their code available under a relatively corporate-friendly member of the family of free software licenses (BSD). Why? Because they don't care about vending VMs, they want to make sure that absolutely everybody has such a VM, so that it's feasible to write for the Google VM rather than for .NET or whatever other toolkits might be hanging around. How getting people to choose Javascript over .NET will turn into $$$ for Google is left as an exercise for the reader.

Oh, here's one hint (along one of several threads): go back to the problem of balancing work on the client and server ends of the cable. If Google gives you software that grabs more processor time on your PC for Google Docs, then it can redesign things so that its servers in California don't have to think so much. Google doesn't have to spend cash on new servers--they just use more processor time on your PC. Google is thinking maybe you can pay the darn electricity bill for once.

Further, mainframes are not particularly smart. From my own experience buying servers for research, the big boxes are designed to push lots of data through a pipe, hold a big database, mesh together into an army of servers, and otherwise handle lots of little requests. But the processor on some servers is identical to the processor on a high-end PC, and ten cheap PCs would easily run circles around one blade of a server. So the only way that Google could feasibly make a million instances of Docs smarter is to push work out to the clients.

As a digression, all this processor-seeking touches upon one of my personal pet peeves: VMs are slow. As I type, I'm waiting for Amarok to add an album to my playlist. This is not something that should require waiting for (op--it's done), but Amarok is written in Ruby, which allowed for all sorts of nifty widgets that would take longer to write from scratch. Hey, just click a performer and pull up their Wikipedia page in your music player, all while you're waiting for their music to actually play. So I'm not sure if we can expect too much richness from Google's new virtual machine, though maybe for once the promises that it'll be better with next year's faster processors will actually come true.

But that's all the critique I've got. Google has taken that last step to turn the web pages of the type in which they specialize into bona fide applications that the operating system treats as such. That's nifty, and means that we can expect our web pages to turn increasingly complex and to increasingly take advantage of the processing power on our end of the cable.