Date: 2011-07-20, 3:07PM EDT

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TEST SUBJECT NEEDED FOR TIME MACHINE
I have successfully built a working time machine and need a human test subject that is willing to be the first person to ever travel back in time.

Due to the dimensions of the machine, you must be shorter than 6’3″ and weigh less than 230 lbs. Also, you must be male. That’s not due to the dimensions of the machine, it’s just a personal thing. I think a man should be the first to time travel, just like he was the first to fly an airplane and to walk on the moon.

The pay is $3,000 and, of course, you’ll reap the benefits of being the first person to ever travel back in time (media coverage, endorsements, etc.). You will have to sign a waiver that mainly states:

1. I am not responsible for anything that happens to you when you time travel.
2. You are forbidden from interfering in matters that would disrupt the current timeline (i.e. killing Hitler, warning Hitler about D-Day, etc.).
3. You are not allowed to travel back in time for the purposes of tearing up this waiver before it’s been signed, thereby negating this waiver you’re about to sign. I built a time machine, I’m no moron.

As far as the danger of time traveling in this machine, we sent a dog into the past yesterday and it went off without a hitch. He hasn’t yet returned, but that’s just because animals don’t know how to rendezvous. We would like for you to bring him back, if at all possible.

Lastly, you will need three personal references. I can’t take a chance sending some unscrupulous druggie into the past because you’ll mess everything up for us here in the present. The references must be male. Again, it’s just a personal thing.

If you would like to participate, call me on my cell phone <###>

“For most, I ask whether they’re calling from past or future. They say, ‘Present.’ I say, ‘Nevermind, it obviously didn’t work.’ ”

Ouch.  This is a sudden shift, both from their strong earlier support for this API (I was personally encouraged to use it for applications by colleagues at Google), and from their standing policy of supporting deprecated services for up to 3 years.   What could have spooked them?  Why the rush? As of today, the Translate API page reads:

The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011.

Most disappointing to me is the way this announcement was released: buried in a blog post full of minor “Spring Cleaning” updates to a dozen other APIs.  Most of the other deprecated APIs were replaced by reasonable equivalents or alternatives, and were being maintained indefinitely with limits on the rate of requests per user.  None of them is being cancelled within six months, and none of them are half as widely used!

I hope that this obfuscation was an unintentional oversight.  There have been 170 irate replies to that post so far, almost all about the Translate API cancellation.  But it has been three days already without any significant update from Feldman or any mention of the change on the Google Translate blog.  Google’s response to a ZDNet inquiry was that they have no further information to provide on why they made this decision.

I am honestly unsure why they are doing this.  Google used to have guaranteed relevance to many undiscovered future innovations in translation, thanks to their excellent API work and their monopoly on reuse today.  They had a few years’ lead time on Microsoft (for instance), they could see how almost everyone in the world was using their translation tools.  Now they are giving up that guarantee and goodwill, but for what?

What was the extensive abuse?  Spammers and copycats?  What constitutes a substantial economic burden?  I can think of no abuse that could not be effectively stopped by throttling or charging for the service.  Many of the current users asked to be able to pay for their API access, but have received no response.

The open question for groups like OLPC and Wikimedia, which had considered ways to use the Translate API to provide meaningful translation of interfaces and streams, is what toolchain to use instead.   And whether to invest in making one of the current (incomplete) free toolchains much, much better.

But is this a meme whose time has come, that’s been subverted by people who aren’t hackers? How will it change over time? The proof may be in the results, but the corporate firepower lined up behind this project, and the vagueness of how its organizing takes place, make me wonder. From a recent NPR piece on the project:

Patrick Svenburg, a director for Microsoft and a co-founder of Random Hacks of Kindness, says it was a little risky at first.

“We threw all cautions to the wind, and we got a little group of people together in November of 2009 at the first hackathon in Silicon Valley,” he says. “About 100 people showed up. I didn’t get fired; nobody got fired. It was a nice experiment.”

Indeed. More than 20 cities took part in RHOK #2, so let’s hope it continues to thrive.

I’m trying to build support for continual, detailed statistics generation from Wikipedia data, possibly at the Harvard-MIT Data Center.  There is still time to come up with good ideas for lightning talks and discussion groups at Wikimania 2009 this summer in Buenos Aires.  And there is a research-related Wikimedia job available starting this summer.

I am uncomfortable with many of the details of said job posting*, but as long as its up the best people should apply.

* My discomfort stems from a few reasons:

• The focus on people with a background in commercial website research strikes me as uninportant — this is different enough that it hardly matters.
• The effort to spend money on an industry vet rather than attracting a couple insightful / innovative graduates & wikipedians doesn’t seem optimal.
• The idea of posting this first as a job rather than clearly defining roles for talented researchers in the community doesn’t scale and hides the community’s natural talents.
• There is always the overarching point that as long as the Wikimedia Foundation remains staffed primarily by noneditors and does not aggressively direct spotlights onto contributors (including the many community researchers who already answer questions such as those listed in the posting above), every increase in official staff weakens and obscures the core strength of the projects.

I also discovered a good alternate use to my next-door-street‘s name.

A good read about myths online, readership, popularity, and the results.  Nick Carr’s bit on the Great Unread, presenting what I see as the slightly-off worldview, is nevertheless excellent writing.  The recurring blog discussions on the topic, with their tinge of hysteira and self-absorption, are representative of a special flavor of our decade.  I wouldn’t dream of anyone seriously claiming that today we don’t have access to digital printing presses onlnie — until  I had seen it for the first time.  (I suppose those doing so have only the rosiest ideas about what happens when you put together the text for a document and fire up your press and then have to go out and try distributing the results.)
 

In other news : http://postsecret.blogspot.com/  is amazing.
And Superman loves wikis.  Go Supe!

Myths of lists and linear fame …

Our persimmons in Houston
are heavy, and fall off in the slightest gust of wind. Any serious
storm is enough to ruin the year’s crop. None fell off this morning; it
was just like a strong thunderstorm. 
Elsewhere : sporadic trees and branches were down elsewhere in the
city, with a localized gust of 70mph; one high-rise lost a few windows; 300,000
are without electricity.

Galveston,
too, was largely untouched.  East Texas had it worst; but Beaumont
escaped destruction.  No towns were flattened, or even mauled;
though some houses lost roofs and some buildings suffered heavy damage.

On the other hand, there was extensive highway gridlock,
with people on the roads for over 24 hours; some deaths from
heatstroke, many people running out of gas b/c of the stalled traffic
and leaving on their A/C in the 100-degree heat. I wonder if people used up the breakdown lanes…  Yesterday at
6pm, there were still people stranded on the road w/o gas, despite many
locals (in addition to official FEMA efforts) making sorties to bring gas and food to those poor souls.  Here is a typical evac experience from Dwight.

The
unofficial evacuation orders were too broad (‘everyone in the hundred
year flood plain!’), too thorough (‘everyone get out of the city’
rather than ‘everyone get to higher ground’), and too individualist
(‘everyone to his/her own car!’).

The standard evac orders were fine — here is the canonical Galveston/Houston evacuation map.
Note that even the “C” evacuation zones, for Category 4/5 hurricanes,
only come into Houston as far as the East 610 Loop (to which point the
ship channel extends).  However,

• The orders were also amazingly persistent :  ‘ALTHOUGH
  TRAFFIC HAS BEEN HEAVY AS THE TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT PLAN HAS BEEN
  IMPLEMENTED…TRAFFIC MOVEMENT SHOULD ACCELERATE. DO NOT LET THE
  TRAFFIC DELAYS HALT YOUR EFFORTS TO EVACUATE.’ was repeated a few
  times, even after the originally hoped-for acceleration didn’t happen.
• Complementary orders were not given (if you are in the following safe zones, STAY OFF THE HIGHWAY)
• “Evacuation” was not well-defined.  Do you have to drive 3
  hours out of the city?  Is it enough to get to places within city
  limits, where there is much more highway space?
• Extra mandatory evacuation orders were made up on the fly. 
  Whoops!  The mayor has tried to write it off as a slip of the
  tongue, but many officials made it.   “If you live in a
  flood-prone area…” — Houston, Pearland, and others issued such
  warnings.  Since the 2001 flood affected many areas that had never
  flooded before, this worried many people who had nothing to fear from
  flooding thanks to Rita… the city had been parched for two weeks, and
  its bayous were empty.

When you tell people to stop trusting their own judgment and to
trust yours, you suddenly have an enormously greater responsibility to
care for them…

As of 6pm CST tonight, mandatory evacuations are in effect for “Zone A”
of Harris County.  Mandatory evacuations of Zones B and C will
follow as of 6am tomorrow. (notice)

Our house in Houston falls under the ‘suggested evacuation’ list, because it is in a low-lying area.

Rita is getting progressively stronger — currently
passing over a warm-water region that fed the last surge in Katrina’s
strength — and likely to exceed expectations of its strength.  See Jeff Master’s weather blog for more depressing coverage. 

And freenode is relocating, too; hopefully a temporary business.

Houston evacuation begins …

An increasingly neglected minority in the United States has gotten some
of the worst of the latest storming, flooding, infection and
dehydration deaths, largely overlooked by the press : the newly
deceased..

An unspecified number of corpses in the Superdome were left there for
days.  Others were seen floating through the water by what seems
to be an entire regiment of amateur and professional reporters and
support staff.  People working with the dead feel the need to
justify their efforts — “Families need to know what happened to the people they lose,” says
one Dr. Senn, a forensic dentist from San Antonio, in a Katrina-related
interview.  I hadn’t realized leaving the dead to rot in anonymity
had become a community-lifestyle choice.

Even in a city bereft of order and shepherds, there are always alternatives. 
Even a gob of tobacco spit on a dead man’s face is a reminder that
someone saw fit to walk right up and leave a remembrance. 
Abandoning bodies to float and decay at will, even those of strangers,
is worse ignominy still.  Have we forgotten what it means to honor the dead?

Reading about the Great Galveston Hurricane reminds me that this has
often been the result of disasters; I wonder how that has played out in
other countries and times.   Certainly the 1900 Galveston
disaster, with 2 corpses per rescue worker, was a very different story
than the latest NO disaster, with a ratio of more like 1:10.

Never trust infrastructure that doesn’t provide rapid feedback –
automatic, world-readable feedback where appropriate.  Not with
anything invaluable.

Not with your life; not with critical contingency plans; and for God’s sake, not with your children or your mother’s life.

Never entrust anything priceless to a black box …

An old friend from another life died last month; brilliant, brave, full of remarkable dreams. Unrealized dreams. I hardly knew what to think at the time; we hadn’t been in touch for years. But in the weeks since I have despaired of it; I have lost myself. It has preyed on my thoughts, in a way my grandfather’s death, and even my father’s, have not.

I am not a person afraid of mortality. Death is a beautiful part of life; without constraints, freedom and art cannot flourish and find expression; without the stricture of language, we would have no spaceships. Yet there are shades of death… Recently I have slept dreamlessly, eight hours at a time, something I rarely do. There are those who might say this is healthy for anyone. I wake up each morning feeling refreshed; but as soon as I open my eyes, I feel a twinge of senseless fear which only exercise can suppress.

It is too strong and insistent to be simply fear for myself — for who am I? — but fear for continuity, for those I love, for the dreams I cherish. Or is it something beyond that? All I know is that for a while I had to resort to external hints to distinguish one day from the next; I held onto receipts, reviwed my posting and edit histories, sorted my papers and problemsets by last edit, simply to remember what I had been thinking the day (the meal!) before.

In the process I discovered two things: Wikaddiction is stronger than dirt (surely tapping the same primal urges that fuel Verant‘s success), and memorization is successful even when done as a background process. The last point I knew, but had all but forgotten.

I have neglected posting, and many of you. If I owe you apologies or regrets, please trust that I will send them. I have a small list of names here, and am working through them in roughly alphabetical order.

Taking off for a long weekend in an attempt to relax may sound wise, but in practice is generally a Bad Idea. To do it properly requires is far too expensive, and to do it poorly just wastes a few perfectly good days. Please remind me of this the next time one comes around, and sabotage my helicopter if necessary. Now I have a project draft to finish by tomorrow, and I’m not looking forward to it. And a book to finish. There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight. And tomorrow… I’m adjusting my diet, just in case.

While reading up on international 50-year ”’identities”’ the other day, and thinking about how fundamental names are (even in this post-biblical and post-$10M domain-name purchase era), it occurred to me that I should take more seriously the matter of preemptive name-conflation.

I keep running across other SJ’s on the web (some of whom don’t even know how to pluralize or punctuate “SJ“), so I thought I’d just clear up some of my private identity crisis by keeping tabs on them all. After an early on-wiki attempt to do this, I realized there were enough instances to warrant a separate story on the issue. I hear some people have entire sites devoted to people with their name… but that seems like overkill.

If you find (or ARE) a particularly compelling version of me out in the rest of the world, ping me and I’ll update the list. I think the only reason I never did this before was my abiding shame that a nutrition doctor name Samuel Klein was vastly more popular than I… but his clever SEO schemes could only hold out for so long.

Somewhere between my machine and Google [and a whole chunk of domain
names], something in the vicinity of DNS went wrong.  I
don’t know how widely or by whom or since when, but since yesterday
night, I haven’t been able to access any of a wide variety of google
IPs from my machine without an explicit entry in my hosts file.  
 Labs.google.com worked, for instance, but google.com, www.google.com,
 google.us, google.co.uk, google.de, google.fr, etc. have not. 
Neither hotmail, aim, gmail…

The annonying thing about maintaining my own hosts entry for google is
that it changes… 216.237.57.99 worked earlier today, but now it
doesn’t.  Right now I’m using 216.239.59.99, a subtle
difference.  Now google itself works, but if I accidentally follow
a link to google.de, my browser times out unless I actively ping
google.de and then insert a new line for it into my hosts file..  What’s going on?  Clearly DNS itself is working, since ping and whois can resolve their IP addresses…

Google HACKED ?! …

Two men came to repair my kitchen ceiling yesterday morning. 
Second time in three years that ceiling had to be fixed.  Last
time it was a professional, three-day job.  This time it was a
hack job, two days of patchwork followed
by a week of half-finished ceiling and another day of patchwork. 
Now the ceiling looks like a failed home-deco experiment, with seams
where the repair took place, but you have to look twice to notice.

These men were two of the laziest people I have ever met in the confines of a city. 
They moved slowly, came to decisions slowly, talked slowly except when
yelling at high volume (and even then the process of argument was slow,
only the words were staccato and fast).  Their tools never worked, and they had to leave on two occasions to buy replacements from a hardware store three miles away.

They also had no common sense, so perhaps retiring to the countryside
wouldn’t solve all of their problems.  They started work with a
tiny tarp and no ventilation… and began to sand.  No wait, they
opened the basement door for ventilation.  They turned on a fan
while sanding (“to blow the dust towards the wall”), and got a fine
layer of plaster-dust all over the room and the one next to it before I
stopped them. 

Meanwhile, a friend’s apartment complex in central square burned terribly,
damaging many of his things..  I remember the last time there was
a big fire in that part of town in an apartment complex…  it was
just across the road from Upton St where I was living, and I happened
to miss it by being out of town.

How easy it would be to lose everything.  I think of the hundreds
of years of labour put into building beautiful monuments, opulent
houses, glorious fortifications, which were later targeted not even for
theft and recycling, but for destruction,
because of their quality.  And of the millions of years put into
building beautiful biomes, life-forms, other crystallizations of order, which are inevitably disintegrated, wiped out, crushed into the simple chaos of their component parts.

Our world is built on such layers of dust.

If you want to see the world through some disturbing and deeply tinted glasses, there’s always Jihad Unspun, a flashy site featuring columns by proudly pro-terrorist journalists, and others by Americans (like Steven Backus, professor of English at a university in Minnesota).

Here’s an exceprt from an article explaining how recent beheadings of captives by terror groups in the middle east jibes with the dictates of the Koran.  There are some one-liners in here that would have seemed like hilarious MadLibs five years ago.

Seymour Hersh revealed that young Iraqi boys were sodomized and shrieking while… being filmed as souvenirs for the friends and relatives back at home. When the Pentagon showed the pictures and videos, implicit references were made to executions and Necrophilia… If this were not an American phenomenon, why else did Arnold Schwarzenegger recently abolish Necrophilia in California?  The abuse is not confined to Abu-Ghraib [1]. 

Beheading a handful of captives is far less painful than being tortured to death as acknowledged by Nick Berg’s father. Even… degrading sexual torture can be worse than beheading. However, that only applies to those who have some degree of self-respect and honor. Sexual abuse inflicted on Lyndie England is unlikely to constitute punishment but rather a kind of titillation… Islam is indeed very different from the secular fanaticism of ‘freedom’!

Phew. Maybe someone can market this site as a diet drug.

So everyone’s heard about the video Eminem made for the upcoming election, right? Mosh. It’s a bit about portable mosh pits for expressing anger,
a bit about getting out the vote, and a bit about sticking it to the president really, really hard. In one five minute video, Slim Shady manages to:

• reprise the scene from Fahrenheit 9/11 where Bush sits reading to elementary school kids while the second plane flies toward the Twin Towers;
• suggest that Bush knew about the attacks
• suggest that Cheney et al are behind the Bin Laden videos
• encourage a recalled soldier to rebel against the administration (yelling ‘Fuck Bush!’ and putting a combat knife through Bush’s head in effigy) and against his fellow soldiers (fooling them long enough to let protestors turn a firehose on them)
• encourage massive civil disobedience, including storming government buildings — though in the end, ha ha, it turns out to be in order to vote in an orderly line.

I’ve always wondered whether and how large companies coordinated touting for their products in online fora. I remember fake Amazon book reviews going back to 1998; even today, most books get so few reviews that it pays to throw in a few fake reviews from friends of the author.

For years, it seemed as though only individuals bothered to do this — again, see the small number of reviews for most products. But they’re wising up; just today I ran across someone who is clearly now a professional “Yahoo movies” reviewer, trained in the ways of Writing Like an Enthusiastic Average Joe, Proper Mispellign, and Mimcking a Hard-core Fan. His Yahoo user profile lists just three reviews, two of them terrible, but I’d guess that this person has a hundred accounts just like it… and I wonder what a review like his Alien v. Predator review is worth.

It reads like a film-industry pro who’s had just enough training not to give it away — mentions “the Novel”, the director, and the movie names by abbreviations that few fans use, but that someone who uses the term hundreds of times a week might. And, hmm,

I strongly believe that there will be an extended version on DVD
but that’s just a thought of mine, so don’t take it as a fact.

by the same articulate guy who then closes with

My Final thought!
I’M GONNA WATCH THIS BABY 5 MORE TIMES!!

And the film he’s writing about? Right, Alien v. Predator. About which real reviewers tend to say things like “you can just burn a ten dollar bill and get more enjoyment out of that then sitting through this horrible movie.” (damianisnice)

He’s not the only toadie out there. And there must be lots of reasons to be a toad other than being paid for it. But Damian makes the good point that anyone who gives AvP high marks is likely associated with the film somehow, and there are a *lot* of A reviews for this one; check out the list and you’ll find some reviewers with… unusual histories. Some traits shared by the best of them:

1. no personal information; only a few sporadic reviews; could be one of a long list of dummy accounts… OR lots of detailed personal information, w/conflicting information coming out in individual reviews to make the reviewer fit more squarely into the target audience (See chickmagnet, below);
   

   For instance, chickmagnet, whose profile says hes “19″ and heading into the Air Force, but who claims to be 15 when reviewing SpongeBob Squarepants.

2. lots of A+/F movie reviews the day/weekend a movie is released (don’t forget that an F review for the other movies in your space is almost as good as an A review for your own)
3. PR speak in the middle of a rambling, misspelled teenage post.
   

   this battle between the Queen and the Predator and scientist is much more fast-paced, suspensful and action-packed, that is actually the way the whole movie was compared to other Alien and Predator films, more fast-paced, slightly more suspenseful, and much more action.

4. Combine detailed knowledge about backstage details (never EVER misspell the director’s name) with atrocious orthography.
   

   The way Paul W. Anderson created the story was just fenominle. (bushead)

5. Don’t forget to hype the DVD. “I can’t wait for the DVD!”, “I hear there’s going to be a director’s cut DVD, that would be so cool”, etc.
6. Don’t forget the hype, period. “This was, without a doubt, one of the best movies I have ever seen.” “i don’t care what others say it the best movie i’ve ever seen!”
7. Compare favorably with a recent major success (“I, Robot” seems to be the fave here)

Perhaps the most interesting upside of this look at the AvP reviews, is what it suggests about other recently-touted films — Fahrenheit 9/11, Punisher, and Spiderman 2 tended to get similar boosts…

You always knew it was possible. Now people are working on metrics to describe how well, for how long, with what reliability and detail. But couldn’t they find researchers with good faces?

And don’t forget that they’re already implanting chips in schoolkids in Japan…

Implanted channels …