Entries for April 2007
Ken Graney’s Roomba has broken the three laws of Roombotics. “The first law states that the device ‘must not suck up jewelry or other valuables, or through inaction, allow valuables to be sucked up.’ The second law prescribes that Roomba ‘must obey vacuuming orders given to it by humans except when such orders would conflict with the first law.’ The third and final law authorizes a Roomba to ‘protect its own ability to suction dust and debris as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.’”
Regarding the recent Google news (YouTube, DoubleClick, Dodgeball), Fred Wilson tells us it’s time to pour a little malt liquor on the ground and say goodbye to the old Google, the Google that we all know and love, and welcome the new Google, a big company, for better or worse. “Google’s lawyers are going to become their most important asset and when lawyers are more important than engineers to a company, you lose.”
Feast your eyes on the new design for the US passport. “They’ll never go for this…it’s too over-the-top.” “Perfect!”
Kate Spicer writes about her experience with an extreme diet in an attempt to drop to size zero in six weeks. “The next day I get up and run for an hour and feel really fat. The truth is, the more weight I lose, the fatter I feel and the more I want to lose weight. I lie in bed in the mornings feeling my hipbones and wanting to feel them more. I want them to jut out.” A documentary featuring Spicer and other female journalists is showing on Channel 4 in the UK on April 22. Spicer previously ran the 150-mile, seven-day Marathon des Sables across the Sahara in 2006.
Update: UK singer and TV presenter Louise Redknapp recently went on a similar diet for another TV program. (thx, leanne)
Dodgeball founders leave Google and that leaves Dodgeball probably dead. Then why did Google buy Dodgeball exactly? Not for the founders…they left. Not for the tech. To build it up into a profitable company? (Nope, they didn’t put any resources into it.) To kill it before some other company (Yahoo, Microsoft) got their mitts on it? For the PR value? Why did they even bother?
Update: Official thumbs-down announcement here. “It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I’m actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.”
Duncan Watts on the results of a study which show that a cultural product’s popularity is partially determined by inital social adoption patterns. “This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous ‘butterfly effect’ from chaos theory.” The effort to explain why popular things got popular is probably impossible…working your way back from effect to cause in non-linear systems is tough.
Google buys Doubleclick for $3.1 billion. My assertion more than four years ago that Google is not a search engine isn’t looking too shabby.
A list of possible Red Sox-inspired wines. Matsusake, Two-Buck ‘Tek, Coco Cristal, and Big Papinot Noir all sound delicious.
Matthew McGough tells the story of his first day as a NY Yankees batboy. “The game starts in about two hours and I need you to find me a bat stretcher.”
Longish detailed interview with Chris Ware about comics, which he calls “the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them”.
Detailed hand-drawn Dungeons and Dragons dungeon map. See also maps drawn from memory.
Update: The map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from the “original mini-computer” version of Zork, then called Dungeon. (thx, everyone in the world)
How many uses does it take for a reusable cup to surpass a disposable paper or styrofoam cup in terms of energy usage? You have to use a single ceramic cup more than 1000 times in order for it to be more energy efficient than using the same number of dispoable styrofoam cups. Of course, this doesn’t take into account anything outside of the manufacturing or washing processes…like the cost of shipping all these foam cups and what happens to them after you’re done with them. (via thoughtwax)
Microscopic auto-origami. Just add water! (And they fold right up.)
How to foil bank robbers: excessive friendliness. “The premise is that an overdose of courtesy will unnerve would-be robbers and get them to rethink the crime.”
Update: Heard from a reader that Apple Store employees are trained in this technique to deal with theft. Even if someone has stuffed a MacBook under their overcoat, employees chat with them happily as if they’re interested in purchasing it.
Citing the resource-hungry iPhone as the culprit, Apple announced that they’ve pushed back the launch date for the new version of OS X (codename: Leopard) from June to October. “iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team.”
I’ve used Bank of America to do my online banking in the past and their SiteKey “technology” always irritated the hell out of me because it led me to believe that Bank of America thought I was:
a) a criminal
and/or:
b) an idiot
instead of:
c) a customer
The basic idea behind SiteKey is that when you log in to your account, you’re shown a photo of, say, an orange kitten before you enter your password so that you know you’re not on the site of a phisher who knows nothing about your orange kitten but wants to collect your login info. In addition, the site makes you verify your identity with a security question — like “what’s your favorite food?” — before using the site from a new IP address, which means if you’re on a cable or DSL connection, this happens every couple weeks when your current IP expires…or whenever BofA feels like they should throw up another virtual pane of bulletproof glass between you and your account information. For those who don’t fall for phishing scams — by accessing sites directly through bookmarks or by typing URLs into the location bar — SiteKey is nothing but an irritant and a deterrent and there’s no way to switch it off.
On Tuesday, Christopher Soghoian and Markus Jakobsson published a clever method by which password phishers could get around SiteKey. The method takes advantage of a simple hole in the logic concerning SiteKey…that anyone who knows your account’s login name and state of residence can see both your SiteKey image and any challenge questions, no password required. All the phisher has to do is ask for the login name and state of residence, send that info to the BofA site (via a script running on the phisher’s machine), get back a security question, display that, send the answer to the BofA site, get back the correct SiteKey image, display that, and collect the person’s password, all while presenting a nearly seamless Bank of America-like experience to the user.
Hopefully this gaping monster of a security hole will convince BofA that not only does SiteKey security not work, it’s not even security and they’ll soon be rid of it.
Update: Here’s an even easier SiteKey exploit.
I have your password. I did this with a freakin’ Bachelor of Arts degree. It took me about three hours of messing around to get the basics set up, and another few hours to spit and polish. It’s a couple of dumb HTML pages with a few snippets of PHP, and a pinch of Javascript thrown in. There is nothing sophisticated here. I don’t think this even qualifies as a “hack.” I think you should be concerned.
Good vs evil foosball table, featuring Mary Poppins, Gandhi, and God on the good squad and Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, and Caligula on the evil team.
Loving article about the little-known transcontinental burrito tunnel linking San Francisco and NYC. “By the time they reach Cleveland the burritos are fully heated through and traveling uphill at about twice the speed of sound.” (via seriouseats)
From Lee Iacocca’s new book: “The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?”
The headline blares that “NYC Blamed for 1% of Greenhouse Gases”, which puts it on par with small countries like Portugal and Ireland, but they buried the lede on this one: “With 2.7 percent of the country’s population — 8.2 million of 300 million — the average New York City resident contributes less than a third of the emissions generated by a typical American.”
Even though I wasn’t that familiar with the whole Jim Jones/Jonestown story, I felt like they rushed through the early parts of the story…might have worked better at 2 hours than at 90 minutes. The ending is great, a well-paced mix of personal narrative, photography, audio, and video from the last fateful day of over 900 people. After the movie ended, I was trying to imagine what would happen if Jonestown (or to a lesser extent, the Branch Davidian thing or Heaven’s Gate) occurred today. Religious cult leader brainwashes all these people and then kills 900 of them in the South American jungle, including a United States Congressman? CNN, et. al. would got nuts for a start…I don’t know if 72 pt. type on their homepage would be enough. The blogosphere would probably go supernova as well.
The American Experience site has more information about Jones and the film. Check your local listings as well…you might be able to catch the film on PBS sometime in the next week or so.
Audio demonstration of how two Nickelback songs released two years apart are actually, to a rough approximation, the same song. “You bastards, you’re taking advantage of those tone deaf MTV brainwashed twats who are too thick to notice you’re releasing song that are EXACTLY THE SAME as ones your recorded earlier.”
In a money game with anonymous rich and poor players, rich players will give up some money to help the poor but poor people are more likely to spend their money to make the rich players less rich. Reminds me of the ultimatum game in which people reject free money when they feel like they’re getting a raw deal in comparison to someone else.
The two-fer Tarantino/Rodriguez movie Grindhouse is going to be broken into two films for release overseas and possibly in the US. “There have been reports that many film-goers have been confused by the movie’s structure - mistakenly assuming that there was only one film on offer and leaving the cinema en-masse after the Rodriguez section.”
Denny McLain has been contributing to the Britannica Blog for the last month or so…his most recent post is about NYC’s demanding baseball fans and the difference between A-Rod and Derek Jeter. McLain was the last pitcher to win 30 games (probably the last ever) and had one of the best seasons in baseball history in 1968, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA and winning both the MVP and Cy Young awards.
Hip-Hop Pop-Up combines pop-up web advertising with product mentions in hip-hop songs. “For example, at 2 minutes and 38 seconds into the song Big Poppa when Puffy asks Biggie, ‘How ya livin Biggie Smallz?’ his reply, ‘In mansion and Benz’s Givin ends to my friends and it feels stupendous’ would then pop-up the URL www.mercedes-benz.com.” To try it out, be sure to disable your browser’s pop-up blocking first. (thx, jonah)
Publishers Weekly’s summer books preview, with new stuff by DeLillo, Chabon, and William Gibson. (via rebecca blood)
David Shipley and Will Schwalbe have written an email style guide, an Emily Post for the cubicle set. I can’t abide by the endorsement of excessive exclamation points, but maybe the rest of the book is more useful? Send is available at Amazon.
When I saw the title for this article — ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times’ Newsroom Apart — I said, hey this is going to be pretty interesting. But then I click through and it’s The Onion. Which is funny and all, but I’d rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications.
Paul Graham: Microsoft is dead. And by dead he means increasingly irrelevant.
Re: parking meters being too cheap, some companies pay millions of dollars a year in parking tickets. “‘It’s a business decision. Is it cheaper to pay the ticket, or is it cheaper to pay the guys working for me to spend time looking for a legal parking space?’ McMillan pays his workers about $80 an hour and said risking a parking ticket often wins out. ‘I don’t like it, but we’ve got a job to do, and we have to get our guys in there to work.’” (thx, matt)
In the high stakes game of making restaurant reservations in NYC, restaurants and their patrons are engaged in attempting to outflank one another in vying for tables at prime times. “I have a well-connected friend in the entertainment industry, and I often say I am calling from his office in order to score a weekend reservation at a crowded restaurant. If NYC restaurants are going to play the game this way, we have no choice but to play along with them.”
While working for the FDR administration in 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange took the following photograph:
You’ve likely seen it before…it’s called Migrant Mother and it’s one of the more famous American photos. When she took the photo, Lange neglected to note the woman’s name (or other details) so her identity remained anonymous while the photo went on to become a symbol of the Great Depression. In the late 1970s, Florence Owens Thompson revealed herself to be the woman in the photo after she wrote a letter to her local paper saying that she didn’t like the image. In an AP story about the ensuing flap, Thompson stated:
I wish she hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”
In addition to not taking her subject’s name, Lange got something else wrong. Thompson and her family weren’t typical Depression migrants at all; they’d been living in California for almost 10 years. Like all photographs, Migrant Mother is neither truth nor fiction but somewhere in-between.
Short interview by James Surowiecki of Nassim Taleb about his new book, The Black Swan. “History is dominated not by the predictable but by the highly improbable — disruptive, unforeseeable events that Taleb calls Black Swans. The effects of wars, market crashes, and radical technological innovations are magnified precisely because they confound our expectations of the universe as an orderly place.” Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article on Taleb for the New Yorker in 2002, which Taleb said “put too much emphasis on the far less interesting, more limited — and rather boring — applications of my ideas to finance/economic, & less on the dynamics of historical events/philosophy of history, artistic success, and general uncertainty in society”. See also an interview in New Scientist, a NY Times op-ed, and a long piece on the Edge site about the black swan idea.
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