I was thinking about how I’ve changed the way that I use the internet over the years and how over time I’ve gotten a lot better at using the net for what I need. Through informal interaction with other technical people and on my own I’ve been exposed to different tools, sites and applications that have made me a lot more productive than I would otherwise be. A few of the many tools I like are Delicious, Google Reader, Firebug, Firefox, and Wikipedia. The point is that it has taken me years to really learn how to be as productive as I am today and a lot of what I’ve learned has been accidental. I think that the evolution of internet has begun to stabilize a bit to the point that some best practices should be emerging in terms of its use but I wonder if school curricula are keeping up? I wonder how kids learn to use the internet? When I was a kid we had classes that taught us how to use a library to find information. It seems like today internet skills are much more important than library skills were when I was a kid. I know that there are classes kids can take on internet research but I have to wonder how relevant they are. I can’t help but think how tough and time consuming it would be to start from scratch and learn how to use the internet. In effect this is what every child has to do. How do they learn internet skills? What’s the best way to teach someone to use the internet? What things do they need to know?
In the Midwest this occurs at about 5:31 PM Friday, February 13! Coincidence? I don’t think so. If you are on Facebook there is an event dedicated to this auspicious occasion.
I got a nice long weekend in NYC for my birthday. We went to August: Osage County, MoMA, went to the top of the Empire State Building at midnight and walked around looking at Christmas lights. Here’s a bunch of pictures from the trip. New York is nuts around Christmas. The sidewalks are just packed with people and it’s fun just hanging out people watching. Some of the store window displays are amazing and in general the street life just can’t be beat. We hooked up with Lisa’s cousin and ate at a fabulous vegetarian restaurant called Candle Cafe. Oh, one thing that was really cool was how useful the maps application on my iPhone worked to navigate through the city using public transportation. As some of you may recall, my Android submission was an application to do just that, help people use public transportation to get from place to place. With iPhone update 2.2 the maps application will not only show you the best way to drive from point A to point B, it will also show you the best way to get from place to place using the subway, bus or walking in many major metropolitan areas. I know it works in New York, and Minneapolis, but it doesn’t work in smaller cities like Ames Iowa. Anyway, it works great. When I needed to get from where we were staying down in the financial district to any place we wanted to go to, I’d just use ‘Current Location’ and type the street address to where I wanted to go and the maps application would show me the best way to get there by subway. It would also include how to walk to the nearest metro station, and how to walk from the station where you get off the train to your final destination. If all you type in is the street information, neglecting to supply the city, state, etc, the application is smart enough to fill in these details for you. It really is one of the most fabulously useful applications I’ve ever used.
I was having coffee with Pieter Hintjens talking about a bunch of crazy ideas fueled by caffeine and lack of sleep when I decided I need to become a defense contractor and build weapons. If you know me you probably scoff at the idea that I actually have something to contribute in the field of defense but read on before you judge. Before I explain my idea for a weapon I need to discuss some characteristics of what we’ll call the enemies of freedom. Enemies of freedom would be countries like Iran, North Korea, and Taliban tribal chiefs in regions of Pakistan like East Whathefuckisstan that don’t like us westerners very much. Some would say we need to defend ourselves from these enemies of freedom. We customarily use the military for this sort of ‘defense’. In a way this makes sense because someone who is dead can’t really attack your freedom. An error in judgment made by the Bush administration was that if you use the military to get rid of the despots ruling a non-free country the population of that country will welcome Americans as liberators and naturally adopt freedom (and give us their oil). Of course experience has shown this isn’t quite true, you have to kill quite a large number of the non-freedom adopters before you manage to convince the survivors that being alive and free is better than being dead and not free. Some never do quite figure this out and so we have suicide bombers. Killing people is a really bad way of spreading freedom. The people being killed tend to get pissed off if you start killing them and so it becomes easier for their despotic leaders to point the finger of blame at the nasty westerners doing the killing which takes the focus off the despotic leaders and the killing and the torturing that they do to remain in power. This tends to perpetuate non-freedom. Anyway, the non-free people really don’t care about freedom. What they really want is enough to eat, a nice place to sleep and no worries that they will be arbitrarily hauled off in the middle of the night and tortured. They don’t know that in many countries people have enough to eat, have nice places to sleep and can pretty much say whatever they want to without fear of night torture and that these types of things follow from having a free society. This is because the leaders of non-free people try really hard to control the information interchange with the outside world.
This is where my weapon idea comes in. The philosophy behind my weapon is to inundate the non-free with information (and consumer goods) from the free world. My weapon consists of portable solar powered kiosks. Each kiosk contains internet enabled computers with browsers bookmarked to Amazon.com, Ebay, You Tube and a variety of popular porn sites. Each kiosk has a certain amount of store credit that can be used to purchase consumer goods and also dispense free espresso and other coffee drinks. Dozens of kiosks can be stacked inside a C-130 Hercules for rapid parachute deployment over a non-free country. The idea is that you seed a non-free area with hundreds of internet kiosks and the non-free people of the area will start using them, communicating with the outside world, buying stuff and browsing porn. The kiosks would also provide a place to sleep and the store credit could be used to buy food. If the despots leave the kiosks in place, the populous will naturally be assimilated into the consumer culture and people in these countries will soon be too dept ridden to stop working and go to war against the west. If the despots attempt to take the kiosks people will be outraged for being deprived of their porn and consumer goods and will overthrow them. In any of these cases the west comes out looking like the good guys. We’re not killing people, we are merely providing consumer goods, coffee, a nice place to sleep and some harmless diversions. Also, I’d have to think that one of my little kiosks would be cheaper than your basic smart bomb, currently a common tool used by the military to liberate people . The GBU-39 variant of the 250-pound class bomb equipped with an INS/GPS guidance system costs about $100,000 apiece. I think I could build one of these little kiosks for a lot less than that.
Last Tuesday night I went up to Manhattan to visit my friend Dmitri. Later when I was taking the train back to Princeton Junction they announced that Obama won the presidential election. The train erupted in applause and cheering. I don’t know that there were any McCain supporters on the train but if there were they were keeping a pretty low profile.
I grew up in a town that would be the cultural equivalent of Wonder Bread so one of the things I like about my job is that is that I get to know people from all over the world. I was talking to one of my Chinese friends today and mentioned something about her recent marriage ( something she said made me think she was recently married ). She corrected me saying that she had a college age daughter (which I already knew) and that I should infer from this that she had been married many years. I responded that the daughter could have been from a previous marriage. She replied she was old fashioned. Then she said ‘When you marry a dog you become a dog. When you marry a pig you become a pig’. I’m really not sure what sort of ancient Chinese wisdom she was trying to pass on but it does exemplify what I enjoy about interacting with people from other places. Every so often I’m surprised by some idiom or custom like celebrating Maslenitsa or learning how to really insult someone in Tamil.
I went to a party at a CSA farm last weekend. I knew about one person there so I was uncomfortable as hell. The premise of the party was fairly interesting, everybody brought food and helped dig sweet potatoes.
Here are some of the potatoes.
Here are some of the diggers eating.
Here’s part of the farm.
I basically get paid to think about stuff. Here’s an article from Ars Technica that cites a study that indicates that heavy mental effort leads to much bigger meals. So now I have an excuse.
Yep. No more long hair. Chopped it all off. No reason. Quit bugging me about it.
I got together for supper with my niece Kate, and her husband Archie. Kate and Archie are great adventurers who I am totally in awe of. Last year they canoed down the Mississippi river from the Twin Cities and then after they did that, turned around and walked a pilgrimage route from Spain to France. The cool thing is that they did these things with a minimum of money. They just went and did it. Anyway, I met them for supper on W. 52nd street in Manhattan for supper at the Bombay Palace. I thought since Kate is a vegetarian that an Indian restaurant would be the best bet. The food and service were great and the price was right too, appetizers, naan, two entrees and drinks for eighty five bucks. Not bad for New York.
