Six degrees of this is old now

Joe Stiglitz, Zhang Ziyi, and myself all share a birthday.  That day is today.

We're not actually all the same age.  And I haven't yet won a Nobel prize or starred in a film outside of a grainy cellphone cam from a back alley behind a bar.[1]  So there's really nothing connecting us except the peculiarities of the Gregorian calendar.

[1]  Get your mind out of the gutter, perv.

UPDATE: John Walker Lindh and I have the exact same birthday.

Troubles in Europe. Gee, that's never caused problems before.

I have nothing serious to add to the commentary of Simon Johnson on the problems of sovereign default in Europe, but I will say if the Eurozone breaks up because of this there will be no end of crowing on the American right, who love to see Europe fail at anything because shut up that's why.

Clearing tabs

• Cellphone-driving bans may be ineffective, possibly because they mostly don't ban using your cellphone while driving.  All they do (in all the jurisdictions I've seen) is ban using your cellphone with your hands, which does nothing to address the problem of an inattentive driver.  Kind of like banning driving drunk, unless you're loaded on scotch.
• Big Dog Goes to War!
• The Supreme Court is always and everywhere a political institution.  Cope.
• If America actually lets its foreign policy with the rest of the world be determined by their interactions with Iran, it really is going to keep doing stupid things.

Could locked-down tablets be good for us?

Argh, I promised I'd stop writing about the iPad, so consider this a more generic question about an entirely-hypothetical tablet computer with more limitations than power users are used to, made by an entirely-hypothetical company. Whose name rhymes with "Snapple".

Here's my thinking: with devices like iPhones, etc. there's a benefit to the user for a lot of functions that might happen through a browser on a desktop (gmail, youtube, google maps) to become their own apps: less intensive resource use, and faster results for the user. Even if the picking and choosing of apps is open and transparent (i.e., not "Snapple") the fact that the UI is app-based naturally predisposes the user to choosing apps instead of the theoretically less constrained Web.

The result, if I'm right, is that the Web becomes something more like TV: a limited (though still very large) number of channels instead of a limitless field to wander in. (If the web was ever really like that in the first place.) Furthermore, browsing the web from something like a dedicated browser becomes, in the scenario where mobile tablets become the norm, something akin to using your computer through a command-line interface: sure, you can do it -- but why?

So why would this be good for us? Simply put, we may be running out of neurons for the firehouse of information that is being sprayed at us. W. Russel Neuman et al (PDF):

Our key conclusion is drawn from Figure 10. Indeed, it represents another growth curve, in this case the simple ratio of media supply to media demand. Such a curve follows, naturally enough, from the disjuncture of a nearly exponential growth in supply paired with a linear growth in consumption. But it is worthwhile to pause briefly to consider the actual metrics we have been at some pains to calculate. Take the ratio of supply to demand in 1960. It is 98. That represents the number of media minutes available in the typical American household in 1960 divided by number of minutes of actual consumption. It represents the fundamental a metric of choice. And it is a human scale choice. ... But if we take the ratio of supply to demand in 2005, we find a very different metric. The ratio is 20,943 – over 20,000 minutes of mediated content available for every minute to be consumed. In our view that is not a human-scale cognitive challenge; it is one in which humans will inevitably turn to the increasingly intelligent digital technologies that created the abundance in the first place for help in sorting it out – search engines, TiVo’s recommendation systems, collaborative filters. We see this as a historical variant of Beniger’s widely cited “crisis of control” in the 19th century (1986a, 1986b). Briefly, Beniger argued that the growth of automated intelligent control systems in transportation and manufacturing were not just a technical artifact but a necessary development as mechanized process speeds and complexity challenged the capacity of individual humans to control them. He cites frequent train crashes in the late 19th century resulting from human error as a particularly dramatic exemplar. We may not be confronting equivalent dramaturgy in the realm of media flows, but it represents nonetheless a critical shift in how individuals will negotiate the mediated world.

Neuman et al don't explicitly mention iPhone-like interfaces, but it seems to me this is very much part of the evolution of the web: using it in a way that narrow down the options to something humane.

Today in "No, that severed horse's head was always there" news

Keith Urban, having been visited by the lawyers of his employer, issues grovelling reversal of his previous "I don't care if you download my music" statement.

These little moments amuse me. This, however, will be the one and only time I blog about Keith Urban, unless of course it intersects with my passion for stealing from poor, benighted artists with the limitless power of my capped 5Mps DSL line.

No, really, they're actually monsters

Ever think the rich and powerful might -- gasp! -- hold different standards for proper conduct in others than they themselves follow?

Once we become socially isolated, we stop simulating the feelings of other people.* As a result, our inner Machiavelli takes over, and our sense of sympathy is squashed by selfishness. The UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has found that, in many social situations, people with power act just like patients with severe brain damage. "The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior," he writes. "You become very impulsive and insensitive, which is a bad combination."

Of course, we live in an age when our most powerful people - they tend to also have lots of money - are also the most isolated. They live in gated communities with private drivers. They eat at different restaurants and stay at different resorts. They wear different clothes and skip the security lines at airports, before sitting at the front of the plane. We shouldn't be surprised that they're also assholes.

Still got it

Bill Watterson gives his first interview in 20 years:

How soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope?

Immediately. I'm going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.

Thanks, Bill. I'd forgotten what it was like to snort tea out my nose.

A sick joke, right?

The CBC would like us (apparently everyone, including lowly bloggers) to pay to "license" content we (in Canada) already paid for?

There are a variety of reactions I have to this, but they all involve profanity and anatomically questionable imprecations.

Oh man

I just cried a little.

So, what do I like about the iPad?

...I'm going to shut up about this, but I feel like I should point out that I'm not exclusively a hater.

1) The design really is slick. If it were possible for me to make a baby with this thing, I'd be all over it like a fat kid on a smartie.

2) The dock-keyboard combination is more difficult than it needs be, but is otherwise a good solution to the whole problem of IDing what, exactly, this device does: a little bit of everything, and it can be a desktop if you need it too.

3) People are complaining about the screen size, but it wasn't that long ago that I thought widescreen monitors looked weird, and it works for reading pages, so I say yay to that.

4) Highest kudos to Apple for not reinventing the wheel with the ebook format. Seriously, I complain about Apple selling locked down crippled toys for the rich, but going with ePub is a really good move. Good to see the ebook industry starting to seriously consolidate around a format for text, finally.

About books: here's the deal. I'll buy a high-end e-reader when someone offers me the following service. I box up and mail to you all of my old paper books, and you mail me a DVD-ROM with all of them in unlocked, DRM-free ebook files. I'll buy two ereaders if that's what it takes. But the attachment I have not just to books, but to a library I can lend out to friends, is pretty substantial.

Anyone think we'll see anything like that?

Further thoughts on the iPad

1) I felt momentarily bad when, after hearing the word "iPad" I immediately thought of feminine hygiene products. It turns out the entire Internet thought the same thing. Relief.

2) Jobs took a swing at netbooks in his speech yesterday, but seems to have not considered that the reason the market for a device between a laptop and a smartphone is so small is because the niche itself is so small. If I were in the market for a new laptop, I'd at least take a look at a netbook. If I were in the market for a new cell phone, I'd look at an iPhone or Droid. If I were looking at a tablet PC, I'd have to be looking for a tablet PC, and thus far I can't see why I'd prefer something as disabled as the iPad to a laptop.

3) I've been hearing about the death of the desktop OS for, oh, 15 years or so. I'm not yet 29. Draw your own conclusions.

4) Games are a nice value-add, but I'd bet not even a "casual gamer" is going to buy this for the games. They've already got Popcap and the Wii, for much less money.

5) I can't say how this will play with the general consumer, but Lord Almighty could Apple not have opted for simplicity, just once? The "dock" for something like this need not be anything more than a 4-port USB hub. But no, we've gotta have twee little connectors for everything.

iPass

So Tablet Jesus descended from the heavens today, and it seems like kind of a damp squib.

I keep waiting for someone to make a tablet that will work well, but it won't be Microsoft, and
Apple annoys me by making a tablet that's far more locked down than anything Gates would dare ship. There's a lot that I almost like about the iPad, but I can't get past the deliberate, malicious crippling.

In about 6-9 months, there'll be a passel of Android-powered devices of similar price and capability. We'll see how they run, and if they're any less hegemonic.

God knows I'm not a representative sample. Maybe 18 months from now we'll all be running the damn things.