Decrepit Old Fool

Mom isn’t big on confrontation, but sometimes she surprises me.  We were talking about careless drivers, and she told me this:

“The worst are young women in a hurry.  I encountered one just the other day.  I got to the top of the hill and looked both ways, and there was only one car about two blocks away.  So I pulled out.  And suddenly she was right behind me, and she blew her horn and sped right around me.

I was curious, so I followed her.  She only went about one more block before pulling into her driveway.  I pulled in behind her.

Mom! You’re lucky you weren’t shot!

She said; “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to know why you honked at me.”

“You pulled right out in front of me!”

I said; “You were two blocks away.”

She said; “Well yes, but I was going really, really fast!”

And her response?

“I said ‘OK’ and got back in my car and drove off.  I don’t argue with drunks or idiots, and once somebody identifies themselves as one or the other…”

Google's new CR48 Chrome laptop. Kinda looks like a MacBook, doesn't it? That's Jon's handsome visage in the account pictures.

My friend Jon was in town for a nice visit, and to smugly show off his cool new Google laptop that he has, and I don’t.

The device looks like a Macbook if it were designed by a normal person instead of a masochist.  It’s thin and light, feels sturdy, but has nicely radiused edges for people with oversensitive hands. It’s covered with a grippy/slidey coating similar to a ThinkPad but with already some visible wear on the corners so it isn’t as tough as that.  Still, it feels good in the hands.  On the bottom surface were four rubber feet.

The screen is nice and bright, with a webcam top-center.  The keyboard is a direct copy of the Macbook keyboard, with a huge multi-touch trackpad in front.  The battery is easily replaceable.  On the left edge is a DB15 external monitor connection; on the right edge is an SD card reader slot, headphone jack, one lonesome USB port, and power adapter.  The front and back edges are clean. (Links go to close-up pictures.)

Boot-up time was just a few seconds and user-account management is via Google login. It remembers wireless network passwords between accounts though; I logged into it and connected to my home network, then logged out and Jon was able to log in and connect.

Once you’re logged into the computer, all Google office functions authenticate you – documents, photos, etc.  It played YouTube videos very well though that app took 30 seconds or so to “load”.  The sound was strong and clear.

Jon wasn’t sure if it could connect to Active Directory shared resources.  I don’t necessarily need it to join the domain – my Linux laptops are not – but it would be useful for it to open files from our servers.

The CR48 has no internal storage that you can access; it’s a cloud machine through and through.  In practice (says their introductory screen sequence) this means you are safe from steamrollers.  If your laptop is suddenly run over by a steamroller… no worries!  Unless you were holding onto it at the time; but your data is safely elsewhere.

I did appreciate that they have finally gotten rid of the CapsLock key in favor of a great big Search key in its place.  Seriously, how often do you really need the CapsLock key?  But for users who simply must have one, they do have a workaround:

The CR48 has a big Search key instead of a Caps Lock key. "If you really need the Caps Lock key so you can post AN INSIGHTFUL COMMENT ON YOUTUBE..."

NOTES:

• I also applied for one but have not heard back yet. Hey Google – I work at a College Of Business!  Business, baby! We influence generations of new corporate users.  Send me one!  I promise to test the hell out of that thing!
• Gizmodo reviews the hardware – All laptops should be like Google’s stark naked notebook

I’m an information junkie with a serious habit.  Once upon a time we subscribed to 22 magazines.  But then the Internet happened and the magazine number eroded steadily.  Today I was bagging up some magazines to take to the hospital (for waiting rooms) and got to thinking about whether to renew them.  I put subscription reminders in Google calendar so it’s easy to put in a note; “don’t bother” when they fall off the ever-shrinking list.   For the first time I wonder if the number will ever hit zero.

• The Economist: Not renewed.  I guess a news weekly seems redundant with always-on Internet.  But they have made some fantastic blunders that were obviously ideology-driven, like their ’09 cover story about how awesome Texas is – later turned out to be complete bollocks.  And with a huge portion of the world’s wealth drifting up to the top 2 percent of income brackets, the big problem for our economy is the teachers’ and policemen’s unions?  Really, Economist?   In the past they were always one of the best weekly news magazines in the world, but I’m lately starting to wonder if they aren’t just trying to please the people who read the Jaguar and Rolex ads in it.
• New Scientist: Not renewed.  Had enough sensationalistic headlines and flaky, far-out reportage.  Particularly annoyed that they take no account of the effect that some of some of their cover art has on the anti-science crowd.  We’ve already had creationists waving their infamous “Darwin Was Wrong” cover around in school-board meetings in some states.  The article was fairly nuanced but that gets lost in the translation.  Besides, weeklies are getting redundant; the Internet is much better for short-cycle news.
• Science News: “New” subscription.  I took SN years ago and it got pretty thin there for a while so I had switched over to NS.  But SN has beefed up again (and gone bi-weekly) so I guess I’ll take them up for a while.
• Scientific American: Renewed.  Their style has changed over the years but they still have some fine articles and I still enjoy reading them.
• Mother Jones: Renewed.  Good investigative reporting and analysis with environmental emphasis.  No Rolex ads.
• Smithsonian Invention and Technology: Renewed.  I really geek out on that tech history stuff.
• MIT Technology Review: Renewed.  Excellent articles about current research and tech business, with some tech history thrown in for flavor.
• National Geographic: undecided.  Lovely magazine with occasional outstanding article.  Mainly I take it to help support the NGS, which does good work.
• The Atlantic: Renewed.  Someone gave us a gift sub and it was enjoyable.
• Wired: Renewed short-term.  Occasional outstanding article, but lots of fluff.  Only the very low price (driven by tons of ads for trendy crap) saved it this time.  Will see if they improve; I can always just go online and read Gizmodo or Ars Technica.

So that’s only 8 magazines, and a couple of those are only renewed for short time.  I wouldn’t mind subscribing to premium web content from those publishers if the dead-tree line were to dry up but nobody knows how to make that work.  Hope they get on it pretty soon.  Some of these magazines have a long history of great contribution to our culture and it would be a shame to lose them.

Some may question replacement of magazines with Internet sites.  There’s nothing magical about dead trees that makes content credible; plenty of flaky magazines out there as there are flaky websites.  The reader, whether of ink or LCD, must exercise his or her baloney detector.

Google wonders: did I mean congressman?

No, Google; I meant “congresswoman”.  And the first search result is a right-wing site that uses the improper “Democrat” instead of “Democratic”,  even in a news story about an assassination.

It is not actually clear at this writing if Giffords is still alive.  At last report she was in surgery in “critical” condition.  And several other people were also shot.  The shooter was, by all we know about him now, a complete loon.

Anyway, Giffords was on Sarah “don’t retreat, reload!” Palin’s hit list.  And when I say “hit list”, I mean a map with rifle scope icons on it.  Expect Caribou Barbie to twist herself into a pretzel claiming not to have inspired the shooter. But as it says in Proverbs; “The wicked man flees even when no one pursues”.  She has already removed that map from her website, and many other right-wing websites are busy scrubbing their pages like Jules and Vincent cleaning the back seat of their car in Pulp Fiction.

But my take on the gun-toting right wing is that even if it turns out he was a total Palintologist, it will only raise her standing among them.

Giffords voted for Obama’s health care reform act, and she supported GLBT rights. Enough to put her in the crosshairs, I guess.

NOTES and updates:

• Palin, apparently lacking all sense of when to shut the hell up, suggests we all pray for Giffords.
• Pam Spaulding on Why the Right has run from its rhetoric.  (I wouldn’t guess they’ll stay away long, though.)
• Cuttlefish and Phil Plait both wish we’d hold off on the speculation.  A great thought, to be sure.  We probably would, in a political vacuum about issues that don’t matter.  But the torrent of violent rhetoric from the Right (and no, the Left has not come even close to “keeping up” on that axis) is a sensitizing factor.
• Dana Hunter, not at all shy about connecting violent rhetoric and violent behavior, asks; What did you think would happen?
• Earlier I said Palin would “twist herself into a pretzel” to disclaim responsibility.  But I had no idea how far her camp would go.  An aide has said, apparently with a straight face, that the symbols on Sarah’s map were “surveyor’s symbols”, and they never imagined anyone would think they had anything to do with firearms.   Surveyor’s symbols, really?  Seems unlikely given the wingers’ fixation on Sarah Palin with guns, big guns with scopes, and her use of the slogan, “Don’t retreat; reload!” But don’t worry Sarah, there’s enough violent Right-wing rhetoric to go around when it comes to inspiring some loon.  It doesn’t all rest on your shoulders.
• Oh, and when I say; “some loon” I must hasten to add, that only a tiny minority of loons are dangerous in any way, and this event shouldn’t be used as an excuse to discriminate against the mentally ill.  If indeed the guy was.
• Michael Moore asked on Twitter; “If Detroit Muslim put map on the web w/crosshairs on 20 pols, then 1 got shot, where would he b sitting now? Just asking.”

I usually skip over articles on string theory, multiverses, and so on; they’re just too much for me to follow. But here in 13 minutes of poetic language is something beautiful about the moral implications of a quantum universe:

But poetic language is at home with poetry. Like the Cuttlefish’s Star Stuff Contemplating Star Stuff:

Star light, star bright,
Ten billion years ago,
I need to ask a question
Cos I really want to know:

The carbon in our bodies came
From ancient stars’ collapse;
I’ve heard it from a poet
Or a physicist, perhaps

But is it true, as some have said
(I can’t believe it, quite),
That different stars made atoms
For my left hand and my right?

Or could it be, my love and I
Were once the self-same star,
Together for eternity
In time and space, so far?

There’s more, and the point he explores is this: we may not know now, but it’s conceivable that one day, we might.  It’s amazing what we might find out, once we stop making up the answers in advance.

Facebook's 2011 New Year's Resolution. Click image to see more 2011 corporate resolutions.

Recently I used a “Log in using your Facebook account” button on a blog somewhere to leave a comment.  I was then informed that doing so would “reset my privacy settings to Default” and on checking, it was true.  All the adjustments I’d made to my Facebook privacy settings were gone and everything was set so that “friends of friends” could see everything.  (A little math would reveal why that’s a staggering number of people even if, like me, you don’t have that many friends).

It’s always been like this: I set things the way I want them, and two weeks later Mark Zuckerberg decides he isn’t fully monetizing every minutia of everyone’s life and the privacy settings get changed again.

I’m not a super privacy freak, though I don’t put anything online that would worry me for my mother or my employer to know about.  But for some reason just using the site raises my blood pressure.  And Facebook is a closed system – a sort of walled community. Facebook wants to be the Internet and they just aren’t up to it.  I’ve worked with the Internet, Facebook; and you’re no Internet.

I need an account because sometimes I use it to access the College account but otherwise, I’m going minimal.  I’ve stripped out as much personal information from my profile as I can.  I’ll “friend” people that I actually know in some way (please don’t be offended if I don’t recognize you – sometimes context plays identification tricks on my mind).  But otherwise the profile is only required information and I won’t checking the account very often.  I’m generally much happier with blogging, Twitter, and Google Reader.

NOTES:

• This is a story told entirely in Joy Of Tech comics; I’m not trying to make some big serious point here other than that I just really dislike Facebook.  Others have gone to depths of analysis on the subject.

Two wonderful articles that I’ve found in the last week:

Global health statistician Hans Rosling’s 59-minute BBC video on statistical understanding of the world, The Joy Of Stats. Skip a re-run this week and let Rosling entertain, enrich and inspire you. Find out, among other things, why you probably have more than the average number of legs. How Florence Nightingale revolutionized medical practice with statistics. How statistics has become an immensely powerful scientific tool for understanding the universe in the data our current instruments can collect.  How public policy can be smarter, better-targeted, and more accountable because of it.  And learn how Swedish people pronounce “com-puuutaers”.

(This would be a great video to assign to gen-ed science students, BTW. Make them answer questions about it.)

Check out Wired Magazine’s What a Hundred Million Calls To 311 Reveal About New York. It’s exactly what Rosling is talk-ing.g about; a great example of the real-world improvements in quality of life that can be achieved by statistical analysis of what once seemed like random urban noise. From potholes to restaurant health inspections to helping people find that thing they left in a cab, it’s a nexus of information and analysis.  I smell maple syrup! Is it a terrorist attack? Or something more sinister..

The invisible vise

I have a nifty multi-angle bench vise, which I’d misplaced and was looking everywhere for it. I normally keep it on my inside workbench where I do fiddly stuff. Had I packed it in a utility box? Left it on the workbench in the garage? Loaned it to someone and forgotten? Over a period of weeks I looked for it intermittently, but no success. Finally I decided that I’d somehow lost the damn thing and went to order a new one on Amazon.com  It was really pissing me off because after twenty years or so, the vise still worked perfectly.

Amazon had several models available, including the identical model which I really liked, so I clicked “Add To Cart”, only to learn it wasn’t eligible for Free Shipping.  What, $17 shipping on a $26 item?  That’s crazy!  I clicked; “Cancel Order” and…

You guessed it: later that day I walked out to the garage and there it was in plain sight on the workbench.

The garage workbench also has a heavy-duty vise bolted to it but I occasionally take the multi-angle vise out to solder something or repair a bicycle part.  The mystery was that I’d looked at that bench very carefully to try and find the vise.  A shiny metal object with which I was very familiar, yet I couldn’t see it when looking right at it. How is that possible?

Well it’s pretty common, actually.  Vision takes place in the eye, but seeing happens in the brain and for whatever reason my brain just wasn’t seeing.  This phenomenon is very important to people who design system interfaces, or advertisements, or road signs,  or by extension all the rest of us too.

Those of us in computer support are all too familiar with the brain-no-see-um thing.  You’re on the phone with someone and telling them; “Click on the View menu” and they’ll say; “There’s File and Edit and This and That but there’s no View menu” and you go up to their office and there’s the View menu, right next to Edit – which they described to you over the phone.   And the user, often someone with a PhD in something like Quantum Smartness Thermodynamics, says; “Oh, I am so dumb!”  And you reassure them that it’s the interface, and not them, that is dumb.  There’s only so many thingies you can put on a screen before they start to jumble up, which is why I do most of my writing in a plain-text editor in full-screen mode.

I’m going to start calling this the “Big Red Button” phenomenon, after this post by TNW Entrepreneur; Compared To You, Most People Seem Dumb.  The author describes four incidents in which users didn’t see what was (to him) very apparent or super-easy to figure out.  In the Red Button example, he made a birthday calendar website and people couldn’t figure out how to add a birthday.  Despite the big red button at the top of the screen that said, in huge type; “Add A Birthday”.    My thought was that the button in question was big and bright enough to trigger the cluster of neurons in users’ brains that says; “This is an ad, you should ignore it so you don’t get off-task.”  Once he made the primary function big and bright enough, it became invisible.

There is an arms race between interface designers and users’ brains too: attention-getting techniques lose effectiveness quickly once they are adopted to draw people away from their primary objective to something else.  Our brains have lots of little cognitive defense subroutines like that, and awareness is a matter of hacking them like any other system.

NOTES:

• “Thingies on the screen” are what software advertisers call “Features”.   If you make software with a lot of features, it’s a challenge to figure out how to present them to real users.  A related problem is when somebody in Marketing decides that the screen needs various kinds of pretty decoration, which bleeds off cognitive focus from the task at hand.
• Designer Don Norman says; “Signs don’t work”.  When people want to go through a door, for example, they are simply not looking for a rectangle containing textual information on how to operate the door, or if they should use the other door in preference to the one they are approaching.  He also says that if five percent of users make a certain mistake using a system, maybe they’re dumb; but if seventy percent make that mistake, it’s the system that is dumb.  Or more correctly, the system designer.
• The Big Red Button is visually differentiated from the task flow so it didn’t look like part of it.  The value of a consistent User Interface is that the user need not hack every task.  A Button That Does A Thing has a certain look to it, and the cognitively parsimonious user looks first for a Thing-Doing Button, not a big red thing.  Unless that’s your consistent Thing Doing Button design, repeated throughout the UI.  Edward Tufte calls this “The power of small multiples”.
• NeuroNarrative interview with Psychologist Daniel Simons on the Invisible Gorilla Study: “The intuition that we would notice makes it jarring for people to realize that they didn’t.”