Among other things, my research looks at how people find information online. When I conducted in-person observations of people’s information-seeking behavior on the Web, it was interesting to see how well Ask Jeeves had done in marketing itself as the search engine that answers people’s questions. Even respondents in my study who otherwise relied on Google for almost all of their queries would go to Ask Jeeves to find the answer to the question about what steps they would have to take if they lost their wallet. People would type in their query in the form of a question even though in most cases - and especially if not specified with quotes, which is something few users do - including “what” or “where” in a query does little to improve the results of a search. It was an interesting example of how a search service could position itself in the search engine market by a particular marketing approach. The results to users’ queries on that particular search engine were no better than the results offered by other services, but due to the type of question people turned to that service regardless. Now I have come across something that seems quite unique to Ask Jeeves among the most popular search engines in terms of actual services rendered, for the moment at least.
Reading the Search Engine Watch blog I found out that using Ask Jeeves can cut down on the number of clicks required to find the answers to simple factual questions. Ask Jeeves will now give you a little box with the answers to some of your questions without having to click through to one of the results for the information. For example, wondering about this year’s date for Passover, I typed in when is Passover in 2005 and was given the exact info right there by Jeeves. (Yes, of course it’s enough to type in passover 2005 to get the same result, I was just playing along.) The service seems to cater to more popular forms of information. It will give you information about some celebrity birthdays (e.g. walter matthau birthday) and the names of Academy Award winners (up until 2002 for now, e.g. academy award best actress 2002), but it won’t display the names of Nobel Prize winners directly (e.g. see results for chemistry nobel prize 2002). It will be interesting to see to what other topical domains they expand the service (some geographical information is also available this way already). For now, other search services such as Google and Yahoo require additional clicks to find answers to the above questions. Perhaps in time they will come out with their versions of instant responses.1
1 Yes, I realize that Google has been supplying answers to some questions directly for a while. That’s what Kieran relied on in this post.
Since Christmas never changes (and a good thing too!) I’m reposting my Christmas Eve post from my blog last year. I did plan more work on it, but haven’t done any (story of my life). Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and a happy New Year to everyone (at least everyone who uses the Gregorian calendar).
CP Snow once said that most ancient British traditions dated back to the second half of the 19th century. The same idea recently popped up in the London Review of Books, with Stefan Collini referring to thesecond half of the 19th century, the palaeolithic age of so many British cultural institutions. Christmas provides an ideal illustration of this.
All the central features of Xmas date back, more or less exactly, to this period, including Christmas pudding, mince pies and cake, Christmas cards and Santa Claus. Although Dickens’ 1843 Christmas Carol, tiresomely readapted every couple of years since, presents a ‘traditional’ Christmas, it is much more accurate to see him as The Man who invented Christmas and his book as a work of invention.
If Christmas was pretty much fixed by 1900, its become immovably solidifed since then. Even the complaints about Christmas (commercialisation, losing the true meaning, secularisation, the loneliness of people with no family, the misery of people forced to endure family gatherings and so on) haven’t changed in decades.
The Australian Christmas is, of course, a bit different, but it’s equally stable as one merges into another and no-one can recall if it was 104 in the shade in 1966 or 106 in the shade in 1964 (I’m quoting from memory from The Complete Book of Australian Verse
The only new(ish) complaint has been about multiculturalism, with the inclusion of the Jewish Hanukkah in a generalized ‘holiday season’, particularly in the US, and the downplaying of explicitly Christian aspects in various public celebrations. But even this is old stuff by now.
Its arguable that Christmas is the rule rather than the exception. Despite the claims of postmodernism and the breathlessness of books like Future Shock, increasingly large areas of opur culture seem to characterized by stability amounting to stasis rather than change. Trends in popular music, for example, used to have a half-life measured in weeks; now, it’s more like decades. Men’s clothes have changed only in subtle details in the past century (take a look at a picture from 1900 and the men are wearing a slightly more formal version of what they would wear today. Go back to 1800 and the change is dramatic).
I’m just about to knock off for Christmas1, but I have to get ready for a conference at Queensland Uni of Technology early in the New Year where Larry Lessig will be the main speaker. I’m giving a very short presentation, and struggling to improve my understanding of all this, in particular the relationship between the technology of the Internet and notions of social capital. I haven’t come up with anything earthshattering, but I have had some thoughts on which I’d welcome comments.
Lessig stresses benefits of networks with intelligence at the ends rather than the centre. I want to think about this with respect to the network as a device for disseminating innovations, as well as for communication. In a centralised network, any innovation is automatically available to all users, so the dissemination problem is trivial. On the other hand, only those in charge of the network have the capacity to innovate. In a network with intelligence at the ends, innovators may need to take positive action to share their ideas, and can easily conceal innovations or restrict access if there are incentives for this.
This is reflected, I think in the disappointing returns to the vast amounts or money and effort poured into customer-service innovations of various kinds during the dotcom era. Everything was proprietary, and often patent-protected2. So even if the parts of a good idea were all there, they were unlikely to come together.
To make innovation work in an end-oriented network, we need the kind of social capital, and also the kinds of technical protocols that encourage and facilitate sharing. What these are is a topic for further research.
1 Despite work intensification and so on, Australia still shuts down almost completely for a couple of weeks.
2 I had my first experience of One-Click shopping at Amazon the other day. I’m sure I’d get used to it in the end, but I must say I found it rather unnerving. One click to place the order and one to confirm it suits me rather better.
Via Slashdot, news that the FCC has voted to allow wireless internet on flights, something that’s been available outside the U.S. here and there (e.g., on Lufthansa, I think). On the upside, this is one amenity that they’ll have a hard time restricting to first and business class. But the realm of Court Cases You Will Hear About Soon on the Volokh Conspiracy now includes the one about the guy who started browsing pornographic sites a couple of hours into the flight. My prediction is that the first offenders will be in business or first class, where they’ll think they have enough room to chance it.
It’s interesting to see how Web sites may alter their presence this evening to deal with their anticipated traffic. Earlier today when I visited Zogby International they still had all sorts of graphics on their front page. Now they just show their predictions on a text-only page. I’d be curious to hear if people have come across other sites that have altered their homepage content in anticipation of unusually large traffic tonight that they are not otherwise prepared to handle.
BoingBoing is telling us that George W. Bush’s election site is blocking requests from non-US IP addresses. This seems pretty weird - there could be some reasonable explanation (preventing some kind of DoS attack???), but according to BoingBoing the Bush campaign’s media people aren’t telling. Does anyone have any idea what is going on?
Update: Michael Froomkin links to a story suggesting that georgewbush.com suffered a DoS attack on Tuesday.
Update2: Joi Ito suggests that the site has been timing out if you tried to reach it from Japan or elsewhere since August. Curioser and curioser …
Here is another tidbit in the CBS memo saga, but with a different twist: a case of mistaken identity.
My name is Robert Strong, and I am indeed a college professor. I am not, however, the Robert Strong who spoke to CBS. I never met Killian, I never lived in Texas, and I never served in that state’s Air National Guard. But on the Internet none of this matters.Ever since the 60 Minutes broadcast, I have been getting angry e-mails from Bush supporters who are sure that I am a key player in a vast left-wing conspiracy bent on diminishing the president’s not extraordinary record of military service.
How did I become the enemy du jour of all those spiteful Republicans? I guess it has something to do with Google. Last week, if you typed the words Professor Robert Strong in the popular search engine, a webpage that happens to be about me appeared at the top of the list. For those who have been filling my e-mail inbox with vicious vitriol, that was apparently evidence enough. CBS says that its Bush-bashing documents have been authenticated by Strong; Google tells everyone on the Internet that I am Professor Strong. That’s it. I am guilty as Googled.
At first, I found all of this a bit funny. Here I was in the midst of my 15 minutes of fame, and it was just a case of mistaken identity. But the more e-mails I read, the less amused I became. The meat they contain is more raw and distasteful than any spam I have ever encountered.
Read the full article for more. (Access to the article does require registration, I’m afraid.)
Timberite and internet expert Eszter Hargittai is quoted in this interesting Washington Post article about improving access to the internet in low-income, urban communities. People are setting up Wi-Fi accounts which can be shared by a number of families. Cool stuff.
Ahead of next week’s federal election in Canada, Michael Geist has a revealing piece in today’s Toronto Star that compares the positions on Internet/technology issues of the main Canadian parties. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa and Digital Copyright Canada surveyed the Liberals, NDP, Conservatives and Greens on their views on IP protection, file-sharing, open source, identity cards and use of Internet materials in education. The results are not what a classic right-left divide might predict.
The parties in the middle (Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) firmly favour rightsholders’ interests over those of users and service providers when it comes to IP, and the Conservatives and Greens support a much less heavy-handed approach.
Several explanations come instantly to mind:
(1) Most political parties don’t understand technology issues well enough to figure out where they really stand on them, so ideology isn’t a good predictor of policy in this area. Secondary point; tech issues are too minority to really matter in a general election.
(2) IP/open source issues typically pit homogeneous, well organised, connected and funded user groups against heterogeneous, poor and largely latent user groups, meaning government policies benefit the well-organised few at the expense of the mostly apathetic many. These results may tell us more about who the rightsholders bothered to lobby, rather than what the parties themselves might think.
(3) Centre-right parties are unpredictable on tech issues, depending on whether their libertarian or authoritarian streaks are in the know or the ascendent. Social democrats can be fooled into thinking any policy with technology in it is a good thing, especially if it ‘encourages innovation’.
(4) My understanding of the Canadian left-right divide may be less than comprehensive….
Full responses to the CIPPIC questionaire and links to other organisations’ responses are available at http://www.cippic.ca/election2004.
It turns out that not one but two of my students now have Gmail accounts and I — I, what sits on their dissertation committees! I what gives them papers to grade! — do not. Appalling. I am investigating whether I can become a co-author on both of their Gmail accounts despite having done nothing to get one of my own. There’s a lot of precedent for that kind of thing.
Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Two readers generously emailed with invitations: Alex Halavais was first, so I took up his offer. Thanks very much, Alex and Brad. For my next trick I will publicly sulk about not having enough $50 bills.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has revamped its Web site making it easier than ever before to find interesting and timely reports about people’s Internet uses. They have organized the site by topic so you can jump directly to reports of particular interest. They usually do not go beyond binary analyses when writing up the findings, but it’s a helpful first cut at the material. Moreover, they are making some of their data available for secondary analysis so others can jump in and see what the deeper stories are. There are few data sets that are publicly available with this type of information so the Project has been doing a real service to this research community for quite a while. The Pew Project is run by a group of great folks, do hop on over and check out their work! (Check here for some additional data sources on the topic.)
I resisted temptation for a while, but have finally launched into a project on blogs with two graduate students in our Media, Technology and Society PhD program, Jason Gallo and Sean Zehnder. We are focusing on political blogs in particular. This raises a whole set of methodological questions. A big one has to do with sampling. We have decided that we would not focus on a random sample of blogs, not only because that is just about impossible to achieve, but more importantly because that is not our focus. We are interested in the most widely read political blogs. (Yes, there remains the question as to what counts as a political blog in the first place, that is just one of the many questions we are grappling with.)
One way of finding prominent political blogs (or prominent blogs of any type) is to look through the links of prominent blogs we already know about. However, since linking is one of the questions we are interested in, it seems problematic to rely only on that method to find blogs relevant for our study. The same concern applies to using Technorati as a method for finding prominent political blogs. Another idea is to run searches on certain political topics and “blog” or “weblog” and see what we find. Of course, in such cases we are left wondering how widely read the particular blogs are, especially if they do not have comments turned on (and in any case, number of comments is a very limited measure of how widely read a blog may be). Other methods we have thought of is to look at directory listings (such as Yahoo!’s) of political blogs for ones we may have missed using the other methods.
So to sum up: What other approaches should we be using to identify political blogs? What methods do people recommend for identifying “top” political blogs?Also, if people know of political blogs that don’t seem to get mentioned here much, please feel free to post away. I realize this method of collecting information mirrors many of the shortcomings mentioned above, but hopefully by using all these approaches, we can get a reasonable sample (or dare I say population) of the most widely read political blogs. Thanks!
Just a quick note to the fairly large proportion of our readers who also run weblogs. The photographs of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured are important historical documents, but the faces of those being victimised are not particularly important details. Nothing important is lost by linking to a version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved rather than one in which they are clearly identifiable. While some of the torture victims were extremely nasty people, many weren’t (apparently, many of them had been picked up simply by mistake), and in any case it is not good form to condemn the practice of humiliating prisoners while simultaneously disseminating pictures which increase the humiliation.
The genie is out of the bottle, obviously (thanks to quite scandalous insensitivity on the part of the world’s newspaper), but we can at least show willing ourselves. This will be doubly important, obviously, if and when the currently “secret” (and apparently much more distressing for the victims) photographs become public.
Update: When I rather loftily said above that “nothing is lost by linking to version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved”, I assumed that I’d be able to find such versions pretty easily, but apparently not. I’ve tried all sorts of search terms, but can’t find a single instance of publication of the photos in which anyone bothered to blur the faces. Christ. Did literally nobody stop to think about this last week? Last time I take a holiday.
There has been much hype about how the Internet and especially search engines (need I name the one in particular?;) are giving everyone everywhere access to anything and everything. I’ve already commented previously about why this simplifies matters (even beyond controlling for mere access issues), but let’s limit our discussion to people who are quite skilled at online information-seeking. What remains – or may increasingly become – hard to access?
Here are some examples. I’d be curious in what other instances people have encountered or perhaps expect to encounter roadblocks at some point.
I have previously discussed the problem of closed systems with respect to course syllabi. Increasingly they are posted on password-protected sites making them hard to access on the open Web. I also continue to be amazed at how few academics post e-copies of their publications on their Web sites. Is it wrong of me to be especially surprised when the academics in question study the Internet in particular? Sure, my academic institution subscribes to many of the publications (although certainly not all) in which academic articles get published, but such subscriptions are only available to a tiny fraction of Web users. (I know, I know, probably only a tiny fraction of Web users are interested in academic publications in the first place, but still, these are examples of gated content.) Many magazines also do not make their articles available to users who are not subscribers.
How about controversial materials? With increasing pressure from various actors (e.g. groups representing commercial or political interests) will we see more material censored or made harder to access? Already Web sites about certain topics are less directly accessible than one might think. (Is it really mere popularity and linking structure that leads to safersex.org as the first hit when you search for sex on Google? Granted, a search for porn seems to lead to more general sites at the top of the list, although I didn’t click through to verify.) And remember the Friendster are not indexed by search engines as far as I know (and people likely use all sorts of nicknames anyway).
Google – to name just one search engine – has some code-dependent limitations built in that makes certain searches difficult. For example, it only allows for a maximum of ten terms in a search query. If you are looking for exact phrases, this can be limiting at times.
In what other cases have you faced search challenges or expect things to get more difficult as time goes on and more materials become proprietary or get hidden due to contoversial status? Do you think I am exaggerating the difficulty of the cases mentioned above?
For Ph.D. students, it’s not too late to apply to Webshop ‘04
where graduate students interested in the intersection of technology and human behavior meet with leading experts for [a week] of seminars, discussion, and social activities that promote the production of high quality research.The WebShop is committed to promoting scientific research and collegiality between young scholars to understand the transformative effect—both positive and negative—that the Internet has on human behavior and how the emerging persistent behaviors enable and constrain activities, understanding, knowledge, and culture.
Students get help with travel expenses and room & board is covered by the program. It’s a great opportunity!
The Washington Post reports on the interesting - but problematic - approach of Virginia to prosecuting spammers. Authorities in Virginia have arrested three suspected spammers from North Carolina. Their basis for asserting jurisdiction: that the spammers ‘went through’ servers in Virginia in order to disseminate spam.
Although all of the suspects are from North Carolina, Cantrell said, “they went through a server in Virginia, and as long as they go through Virginia then we can prosecute them under our Virginia statutes.” Northern Virginia is a major hub for Internet traffic, and because of that Virginia has an opportunity to snag many more “spammers,” Cantrell said.
It’s not clear from the newspaper article how close the spammers’ relationship is with the server in Virginia - whether this is a server that they themselves used intentionally, or merely a server that their mail passed through en route to its final destination. But it certainly sounds as though Virginian authorities are asserting a general right to prosecute spammers (and jail them for up to twenty years), on the basis that their emails pass through Virginia at some point in their travels. Since roughly 50% of world Internet traffic passes through Virginia, that’s a very far-reaching jurisdictional claim indeed. Of course, it’s nice to see spammers getting walloped with serious penalties (although 20 years of jail time would be a bit much). But it’s not at all clear to me that Virginia state authorities should appoint themselves arbiters of the world’s Internet traffic, with extraterritorial reach. If nothing else, it’s likely to lead to competing claims for jurisdiction from other authorities, in the US and elsewhere, and an incredible mess for individuals and firms trying to determine their legal liabilities. As Michael Geist observes, jurisdiction on the Internet is murky enough as it is. It looks as though it’s about to get a whole lot murkier.
It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for Jew instead. (See Norman Geras for more details).
The WTO has just handed down a preliminary ruling that Internet policy wonks like myself have been waiting for with considerable impatience. Last June, the Caribbean island state of Antigua and Barbuda took a WTO case against the US for restrictions of trade. The issue: various US laws that have been applied to stamp out Internet gambling, with unpleasant consequences for the Antiguan economy. Antigua has just won in this first stage of the process.
The case is interesting because of what it says about the ways in which Internet regulation is changing. It used to be that people thought that the Internet would allow private actors to displace states, and create a libertarian utopia. What’s happening today is quite different - states, far from giving way to private actors, are pressing them into service. This is leading to a variety of secondary disputes about extraterritorial action.
A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the Internet was going to undermine the power of states, and empower private actors (firms, individuals) in their stead. Sometime Conspirator David Post co-wrote a classic paper arguing that because the Internet crossed national borders, it would be very hard to apply traditional nation-state based law to it. Instead, we’d likely see individuals creating their own forms of law-like order on the Internet, through self-regulating groups and the like. This isn’t a very popular argument these days - critics (including Dan Drezner and I) point to an abundance of evidence that states are still in the driving seat.
Still, the jurisdictional problems that David Post and others talked about haven’t gone away. States still have problems in regulating certain Internet activities, because they disagree on fundamental issues of regulation. In the case at hand, the US banned its citizens from Internet gambling. However, because Antigua and other countries didn’t join the US in banning it (they saw it as a way to make lots of money), US citizens with access to the WWW could evade the law by gambling at offshore locations. For various reasons, it’s exceedingly difficult for the US directly to block access to these sites.
Faced with this problem, certain authorities within the US decided on an unorthodox solution. They couldn’t shut down offshore gambling sites or prevent US citizens from accessing them. What they could do was to hold credit card companies and banks - which had been a crucial intermediary between gambers and offshore gambling sites - responsible as accessories. The New York state attorney-general’s office was especially zealous in prosecuting financial intermediaries, although in fairness, many banks and credit card agencies were happy to comply for their own reasons. US credit card companies started to refuse transactions with offshore gambling websites. This sent Antigua’s gambling industry, which relied heavily on US customers, into a tailspin. Hence Antigua’s successful WTO action against the US (which is about to be appealed to a disputes panel).
It’s a nice case-study in the modern politics of the Internet. Private actors - in this case, the online gambling providers in Antigua - were able to cock a snook at US laws, raking money in from US gamblers while remaining outside the jurisdiction of US law enforcement authorities. US authorities responded, not by direct action, but by using their influence over other private actors to get results. Antigua responded in turn by invoking multilateral trading agreements, and complaining to the WTO. In a world where jurisdictions are increasingly messy and contradictory, some states are able to extend their reach extraterritorially, by using key private actors (banks, Internet Service Providers and others) as what Jonathan Zittrain calls ‘points of control.’ Other states, which don’t have this kind of clout, are invoking multilateral rules which weren’t designed to deal with these kinds of issues. In this case at least, the weaker party has won. One can safely predict that there’ll be many similar disputes over the next several years. It’s good grist for the mills of IR scholars; we’re really only beginning to come to terms with the complexities of state-private actor relations, and disputes like this one provide us with interesting and important evidence.
Caoine is feeling remarkably generous. She has decided to donate her 2004 Amazon referrals income to a charity, but can’t decide which one. This seems like a good opportunity to ask blog readers who might know something about this, which charities do provide good value for your donated dollar? I’ve always thought Oxfam was good value, but my evidence for that isn’t entirely overwhelming. (I remember Peter Unger did some investigations and decided they were worth supporting, so that’s some evidence, but that was one data point several years ago.) If anyone has any better suggestions, or reasons why Oxfam isn’t really as good as I’ve always thought, I’d be happy to hear them.
It seems “googling” is now used by many as a synonym for online searches just like kleenex is used to refer to a tissue or xeroxing to using a copier. I have yet to see empirical evidence that suggests Google is used by the majority of Internet users, yet many people talk about it as though it was the only existing search engine. References to Google as the be-all and end-all of search engines abound at least among journalists and academics, and perhaps it is not surprising that such people know about and use Google. But not everybody does although you’d be hard-pressed to know that judging from the rhetoric.
I have a small piece in this month’s First Monday in which I discuss this issue and why it is problematic to assume everyone uses a certain service when that is not necessarily the case.
Actually, I only mention one concern in that piece. Another that I do not bring up there but have alluded to elsewhere is that it is problematic to have so much riding on a proprietary service. We do not know where it is headed and since the details of its algorithm for displaying results are not transparent to the public we should not depend on it to guarantee equal access to all types of information indefinitely.
For a country with a better than average social welfare safety net, Britain still seems to enjoy plenty of social entrepreneurship. These days the UK is a seething hotbed of activity aimed at opening up the political process to the masses.
MySociety has just launched a blog-based website called Downing Street Says. It strips out into a readable format each topic covered in the Prime Minister’s spokesman’s daily Q&A with political correspondents, and allows the public to add comments. (BBC story here.)Official transcripts of the daily Q&A and the PM’s monthly press conference are available somewhere on the UK government website. But they’re difficult to find, published in long clumps of text, and of course have no comments sections. Downing Street Says has been put together by volunteers who simply want to make the process more open to the public, and it makes for an interesting read.
I’m still a bit on the fence about how much these initiatives really improve democracy, but hats off to the people who’ve used their spare time and talents to put this together. Also worth looking at is faxyourmp, and a whole slate of projects that MySociety is currently fundraising for. James Crabtree at VoxPolitics is an excellent source of information and opinion about developments in this field.
Now if only someone would take on Hansard…
CT doesn’t have many of these posts - lots of links with little analysis. Most of the following are horror stories of various kinds.
Val Plumwood on surviving a crocodile attack. I like the ending. As Dylan said, death is not the end. You’re still someone else’s food.
Brian Leiter quotes a long letter from a very observant soldier in Fallujah. Lots of telling analogies, as well as a sense of just how dangerous it must be for the people on the ground right now. (Hint: It’s slightly less bad than being in a crocodile’s death roll. Slightly.)
Brad DeLong on the latest reason why Bush, Cheney (and one supposes Ashcroft) should be impeached. I’m obviously biased, but I find the way this administration has treated citizens of allied countries (esp Britain, Australia and Canada) to be their most disturbing characteristic. For this bunch, that’s saying a lot.
Here’s a little blog quiz. How many conservative bloggers will we find condemning the administration for shipping an innocent citizen of an allied country to an objectively pro-terrorist government for the express purpose of having him tortured on the basis of next to no good evidence? How many will argue this is a lower crime than lying about sex? Personally I’ll be disappointed if no one from the administration ends up in jail over this.
Two stories about travelling in the South. A scary story about driving from Atlanta to Baton Rouge (via Sappho’s Breathing) and a much more enjoyable story about holidays in New Orleans. As I might have mentioned before, I’m going to Baton Rouge and New Orleans next month, so I’m lapping up these stories right now.
If you’re looking for some comedy after all that, I highly recommend Homestar Runner to the 3 of you who haven’t seen it before now.
I was in Israel this past weekend and was trying to describe to my cousin the size of Lake Michigan. (This was in the context of telling him about my new surroundings in Chicagoland.) I realized I don’t know the actual size of the lake so I thought we’d go online and check. I did a search on Google for “lake michigan” map size. No more, no less. The top result was a map of Israel and Lake Michigan superimposed on each other. Thanks, Web. This was certainly an effective way of explaining to an Israeli the size of Lake Michigan.:) (I realize the question of a map of Israel can be a tricky issue. I am not posting this to start an argument about that. I thought from a Web-search point-of-view, this was an interesting/amusing case worth sharing.)
Before I leave, I thought that I would string together a list of links and quotes from non-political humor sites. Enjoy.
Seanbaby on a serial horse penis mutilator:
Criminals have rights, but I don’t think anyone’s going to argue too much if the cop that finds this one opens fire. The police captain will call the officer into his office and scream, “You’re a loose cannon, Fizketti! The mayor is not going to stand for any more of these lone wolf shootings from this precin- wait. What? He did what to four whats? Jesus Christ, I hope you washed your gun after you shot him.”
Re: The Compete Idiot’s Guide to Beanie Babies
Finally, a book about collecting lobster-shaped beanbags without all the genius baggage. Because let’s face it, before the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beanie Babies came out, every time you bought a book teaching you how to collect stuffed animals, you looked like a pompous asshole. The clerk would ring you up, ”That will be $19. 95, and I guess you think you’re better than me, jerk. Maybe I could get you an extra bag to help carry out your ego.”
Sample Lyrics:
From his Top 20 hit, “There’s Nothing My Love Can’t Fix”: “There’s nothing my love can’t fix your ya babeeeeeaahghh-agghhhh-ahhhh-ahh.” Judging by that line, I either accidentally reviewed the Joey Lawrence Funny Noises Outtakes Album, or at the end of the first chorus, something is crawling down Joey’s throat and doing its best to kill him.
On Kathy Ireland’s book, Powerful Inspirations
Kathy does sneak a lot of uninteresting autobiographical stories in, but they all at least try to advance the message of how Jesus Christ is her best friend. He, our Lord, was even there with Kathy while she was being fired as the sexy school nurse on Saved By The Bell because she “didn’t feel like she was connecting with her character.” I found this story so moving that I incorporated it into the ending of the only Christian poem I know, “Footprints”:
“Jesus, why during my most troubling times, is there only one set of footprints in the sand next to this sexy me-shaped crater?”“My child, when you got fired from Saved By The Bell, I was laughing so hard I dropped you.”
“Positive Movie Reviews” on Eyes Wide Shut
Kubrick was pressured by the MPAA to digitally insert black robed men in front of some of some of the hottest action in the orgy. Oddly enough, it turns out now that this scene is actually just taken from the early 1970s Marilyn Chambers hit “Behind the Green Door,” with Kubrick just sort of going nuts and digitizing in people all over the place, including the Tom Cruise character. Some speculate that this was just a project for Kubrick, around which he had to build the Cruise-Kidman plot. Apparently, he had privately been inserting computer-generated baseball players into scenes from Bangkok Bangers 3, and was hoping to get Brad Pitt and Neve Campbell to star in the 8-page, 4-hour film to be structured around this.
Positive Movie Reviews on James Bond Will Die Another Time!
LET’S face it: England’s on a roll. First they won the Falklands War, then they successfully killed that troublemaking princess, and now a new James Bond movie - Die Another Time! This is the second Bond movie (the first was The World Is Not Enough for James Bond!), which now means that it is tied with Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream as the longest-running film series in history. And this movie is so good that one is tempted to believe that this is one series that will have legs. Though of course, I said the same thing about Blacula, not realizing that it was about to be wiped out by Asianstein and Bride of Asianstein…In Die Another Time!, Halle Berry continues the tradition of recent Oscar-winning actresses becoming Bond girls. The World Is Not Enough for James Bond! featured performances by Best Actresses Julia Roberts (as Selfa Grandizement) and Hilary Swank (as Ann Drogeny), but Halle Berry (as Jinx) is the most jubilant Bond girl ever. When she first rises up out of the water in a bikini, clutching her Oscar over her head, then breaking into tears and dedicating the award to everyone from Dorothy Dandridge to Jada Pinkett-Smith, you realize that this is a Bond film that plans to do something a little different. Bond then has sex with her.
From Old Man Murray’s review of the video game “KISS- Pycho Circus”
I say, if you’re going to go through all the trouble of hiring a lawyer to license KISS, you might as well suck it up, act like a f***ing man for once in your life, and put KISS in the game. Instead, all Psycho Circus contains are lots of itty-bitty coy references to KISS. Trouble is, (1) the word “KISS” is in the title, and (2) the box has a picture of KISS on it. In other words, the man wearing the cat makeup is out of the bag….Off the top of my head, I can think of one million ideas for the KISS game that are better than the ones Todd McFarlane came up with. Here they are in the order I thought of them:
1. You are KISS.
2. KISS has been kidnapped by punks. Rescue KISS!The list sort of peaks with #2, so I’ll leave it at that. But you get the idea.
And Pointless Waste of Time’s Eight Things You Didn’t Know About the Return of the King. Not work-safe, unless you work in a gay bathhouse.
Did anyone else get the Nigerian Spam email from “John Adams” of the “Senate Committee on Banks and Currency”? I thought at first it would be moderately amusing, perhaps suggesting I get involved with something obviously fraudulent like purportedly buying the Midwest for pennies per hectare, but it turned out to just be a regular fraud letter with the grammatical mistakes fixed. I haven’t been following these letters for a while (thanks Thunderbird spam filter!) but it might be fun to see if they evolve a little.
A piece in the Financial Times contains the following startling claim:
Webroot, a small US security software company that provides spyware blocking software for Earthlink, estimates up to 18 per cent of computers could be infected with keystroke loggers or RATs. Its estimate is based on results from 300,000 people who in November used its “spyware audit”, a free internet-based program that detects whether a computer has been infected.
18 per cent sounds like a crazily high number to me — the sort of number people come up with when they have a commercial interest (you know, “piracy is costing the music industry $40 trillion per nanosecond”). But it would be interesting to have some indication of how widespread the problem really is.
I just acquired a Handspring Treo 600, which is a rather nice bit of kit to have and certainly beats both my old Palm m100 and Nokia 8210 combination. I used to read email with those by using the infra-red connection between the two but once spam started reaching its current extent it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Now I’d like to use the Treo to read email from time to time but I need a decent IMAP-enabled mail client to take advantage of the server-side installation of SpamAssassin on my university mailserver. Any recommendations?
Like everyone else I’m plagued by spam. Since 1930 gmt on Saturday I’ve received 17 legitimate emails and 353 spams. The good news is that using Mozilla Thunderbird ‘s spamblocking software I’ve filtered out nearly all of it (and the latest version of Mozilla Firebird is very good at stopping annoying pop-up advertising). People who use different (better?) operating systems may have better options, but for those of us condemned to Windoze, those two programs may be the best mail and browser options.
The Economist reports that Google is planning to go public next spring. “All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google’s algorithms. That,” the story says, “is power.” But how to make money from it? Meanwhile, The New York Times says that Microsoft might like to buy Google, or alternatively bump it out of the way. As the story in the Economist notes, “Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google’s share listing.”
Google is interesting because it functions more like a giant public utility than a company with a particular product. People trust it to deliver results that are honest as well as accurate; it’s the site that makes the Web’s vast interconnectedness real for users; and its stripped-down interface reinforces the idea that it’s providing a basic service. So how is Google going to make money for its shareholders? It can hardly become much more dominant in the search business. Bolting things on to the basic service (Google Ads, selling the algorithm to third parties) doesn’t seem like a route to long-term growth. Maybe they have some new ideas we don’t know about.
Then there’s Microsoft. The contrast between attitudes towards the two companies is instructive. They both dominate their respective markets, but while people fear and doubt Microsoft, they love and trust Google. The possibility that the former might buy the latter would horrify many Internet users. The more likely prospect that Microsoft might try to leverage its dominance on the desktop to muscle Google out of the way. Microsoft-haters might hope that its inability to write good software would pre-empt this, but the odds are that you’re not reading this using Netscape.
“Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.”
Next week the body that oversees the technical co-ordination of the internet, ICANN, meets at Carthage in Tunisia. The top item on the agenda, for anyone who cares about privacy and freedom of expression, is the WHOIS database. This is the set of data of domain name owners which was originally collected so that network administrators could find and fix technical problems and keep the internet running smoothly.
Of course no collection of personal data can remain long without various interests campaigning to open it up to a variety of unintended uses. In this case, those interests include IP rights holders, law enforcement, oppressive regimes, stalkers, and of course spammers.
While the first two groups have some legitimate interests in this data, the others clearly do not. (I’ve blogged before about the unholy alliance of law enforcement and IP holders on this issue.) But instead of pushing for proportionate lawful access requirements, the latter are demanding that the entire database be policed for accuracy and published on the internet for all to see. Which means that if A.N. Other wants to publish a website, he/she must be content for his email and postal address to be made completely public. There are plenty of good and legitimate reasons to want to publish a website anonymously (and you don’t have to be a Chinese dissident to think of them), and proper lawful access requirements should not impede police and IP lawyers from doing their jobs. But this balanced and moderate approach is being set aside in a way that will harm not just the internet but, much more importantly, the people who use it.
If you want to do something about this, read the letter below (in English; French or Spanish versions also available) to ICANN chief Paul Twomey, and send an email supporting it to chlaurant@epic.org .
——-Original Message——-
From: Cedric Laurant [mailto:chlaurant@epic.org]
Sent: vendredi 24 octobre 2003 00:01
To: Recipient List Suppressed
Cc: Cedric Laurant
Subject: EPIC ACTION: Worldwide Coalition Signon - Letter to ICANN on WHOIS Privacy
Importance: High
Hi all,
Please check the letter below.
We are trying to get as many groups and organizations as possible to support this letter.
Thanks for forwarding to people/groups/mailing lists/web sites/blogs that may have an interest in this letter in your country/region.
Deadline to sign on is October 26.
Send your e-mail to mailto:chlaurant@epic.org.
Thanks a lot for your consideration.
Cedric
—————————————————-
ENGLISH VERSION
Dear Friends,
In less than a week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) will hold meetings in Carthage, Tunisia. The
meetings will include discussions of WHOIS, a database that could
have a significant impact on privacy, civil liberties, and freedom
of expression for Internet users. The WHOIS database broadly
exposes domain registrants’ personal data to a global audience,
including criminals and spammers.
We believe that ICANN should work to ensure that network
administrators have access to accurate information in order to
contact domain registrants and combat fraud and spam. However, this
also requires the establishment of corresponding privacy safeguards,
including reduced access and minimal data requirements, in order to
encourage the submission of accurate data. In addition, users of
domain names have a legitimate expectation of privacy and right to
free speech, which should be protected.
We have drafted a letter to the President of ICANN, Paul Twomey,
asking him to ensure that strong privacy safeguards, based on
internationally accepted standards, are established for the WHOIS
database. We would sincerely appreciate it if you would join us in
this statement to ICANN. Domain registrants should not be required
to submit extensive data that could lead to fraud victimization or
political persecution.
If you agree with the statement below, please send an email to
mailto:chlaurant@epic.org with your name, email address, and
organizational affiliation before October 26.
Thank you for your help with this.
Marc Rotenberg
Cedric Laurant
Frannie Wellings
——————————————————————————————————-
28 October 2003
Mr. Paul Twomey
President and Chief Executive Officer
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6601
United States of America
Dear Mr. Twomey,
We write to you, on behalf of many consumer and civil liberties
organizations from around the world, regarding the significant
privacy issues surrounding the WHOIS database and the need to ensure
that strong privacy safeguards are established. ICANN has moved
aggressively to establish accuracy requirements for domain name
registrants, but has failed to establish corresponding protections
for personal information that is provided. As representatives of
Internet users around the world, we are keen to ensure that the
policies developed for the WHOIS database respect the freedom of
expression and the privacy of every individual who registers
Internet domains.
Many organizations, consumer advocates, and technical experts have
advocated strong protection for privacy interests. Those privacy
concerns have not thus far been adequately addressed. We hope that
our comments will be given due consideration during the WHOIS
workshop at the upcoming ICANN meetings in Carthage, Tunisia.
1. The main purpose of the WHOIS database should be to resolve
technical network issues, the most important being spam.
The WHOIS database was originally intended to allow network
administrators to find and fix problems to maintain the stability of
the Internet. It now exposes domain name registrants’ personal
information to many other users for many other purposes unrelated to
network access. Anyone with Internet access can now have access to
WHOIS data, and that includes stalkers, governments that restrict
dissidents’ activities, law enforcement agents without legal
authority, and spammers. The original purpose for WHOIS should be
reestablished.
One of the most important technical problems that threaten public
use of the Internet today is spam. A sensible WHOIS policy would
improve contact-ability and data accuracy for network
administrators. It would not make personal information more widely
accessible to third parties.
2. The use and management of the WHOIS database without adequate
data protection safeguards raises risks for domain name holders’
right to privacy and freedom of expression.
Users of domain names have a legitimate and reasonable expectation
of privacy. There are many users, particularly in the
non-commercial world, who have valid reasons to conceal their
identities or to register domain names anonymously. Although there
are some domain name registrants who use the Internet to conduct
fraud or to infringe on other people’s or companies’ intellectual
property rights, we believe that a sensible privacy policy for WHOIS
must protect the legitimate privacy expectations for domain registrants.
First, for domain name registrars to compel registrants to
disclose personal information, even information related to domain
registration, poses dangers to freedom of expression and privacy on
the Internet. Many domain name registrants—and particularly
noncommercial users—do not wish to make public the information that
they furnished to registrars. Some of them may have legitimate
reasons to conceal their actual identities or to register domain
names anonymously. For example, there are political, cultural,
religious groups, media organizations, non-profit and public
interest groups around the world that rely on anonymous access to
the Internet to publish their messages. Anonymity may be critical
to them in order to avoid persecution.
Second, WHOIS data should not be available to anyone with access to
the Internet. It is well known that broad access to personal
information online contributes to fraud such as identity theft. US
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advises consumers to protect
themselves from identity theft, and generally from Internet-related
frauds, by not disclosing personally identifiable information. The
mandatory publication of WHOIS data is contrary to the FTC’s advice.
We urge ICANN to consider the views of consumer organizations
and civil liberties groups on the WHOIS. At a minimum, we
believe that adequate privacy safeguards should include the
following principles:
- The purposes for which domain name holders’ personal data
may be collected and published in the WHOIS database have to
be specified; they should, as a minimum, be legitimate and
compatible to the original purpose for which this database was
created; and this original purpose cannot be extended to other
purposes simply because they are considered desirable some
users of the WHOIS database;
- The most relevant purpose for collecting WHOIS data is to
combat spam;
- The amount of data collected and made publicly available in
the course of the registration of a domain name is limited to
what is essential to fulfill the purposes specified;
- Any secondary use that is incompatible with the original
purpose specified requires the individual’s freely given and
informed consent;
- The publication of individuals’ personal information on the
Internet through the WHOIS database should not be mandatory;
it should be possible for individuals to register domain names
without their personal information appearing on a publicly
available register; amnd
- Disclosure of WHOIS information to a law enforcement official
or in the context of civil litigation must be pursuant to explicit
legal authority set out in statute.
Such a policy would not frustrate lawful criminal investigations. It
would instead establish necessary privacy safeguards, and reduce the
risk that the widespread availability of WHOIS information will lead
to greater fraud, more spam, and jeopardize freedom of expression.
Respectfully submitted,
Signatories:
Š
cc: Š
——————————————————
REFERENCES:
Memo from ICANN President Paul Twomey concerning WHOIS, 18 September 2003.
ICANN Carthage WHOIS Workshop Agenda, 30 September 2003.
ICANN WHOIS Privacy Steering Group webpage.
ICANN, Staff Manager’s Issues Report on Issues Related to WHOIS, 13 May 2003.
Public Internet Registry, Letter regarding WHOIS to Chairman Lamar Smith, United States House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, 16 September 2003.
Public Interest Registry, Comments to the Final Report of the GNSO Council’s WHOIS Task Force Accuracy and Bulk Access, 17 February 2003.
Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), WHOIS Privacy Issues Table, 14 August 2003.
GNSO WHOIS Task Force, Final Report of the GNSO Council’s WHOIS Task Force Accuracy and Bulk Access, 19 February 2003.
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Minority Comments to the Final Report of the GNSO Council’s WHOIS Task Force Accuracy and Bulk Access.
EPIC WHOIS webpage.
EPIC WHOIS Privacy Issues Report, 10 March 2003.
EPIC and Privacy International, Privacy and Human Rights - An international Survey of Privacy Laws and Developments, 2003.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data.
< http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/9302011E.PDF> (English).
European Union, Directive 1995/46/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on the Protection of Individuals with regard to the processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of such Data (“EU Data Protection Directive”).
European Union Article 29 Data Protection Working Group, Opinion 2/2003 (WP 76) on the application of the data protection principles to the Whois directories, 13 June 2003.
International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications, “Common Position on Privacy and Data Protection aspects of the Registration of Domain Names on the Internet” (adopted at the 27th meeting of the Working Group on May 4-5, 2000 in Rethymnon, Crete).
United States Federal Trade Commission, National and State Trends in Fraud and Identity Theft (January 2002 - December 2002), January 22, 2003.
I just got spam for generic Viagra that began with this salutation:
ego jackknife blest lachesis piotr catholicism cavemen calcify bedfast bile creedal introduction
I’d imagine that it’s a device to get through the fearsome AOL spam guards, but it’s almost beautiful in its way.
Commenting on the whole Erik Rasmusen thing at Indiana, Dan Drezner and the voice in his head write:
… the cure for promulgated ideas that are believed to be offensive or wrong is more speech, not less. … What need there is for a review beyond that is truly beyond me. … [Wait, wait, you forgot the ritual denunciation of Rasmusen’s views on homosexuality.—ed. That’s completely irrelevant to this question. … however, it’s worth highlighting a fact that Louis Menand pointed out in The Metaphysical Club:One of the triggering events for the emergence of academic freedom was when a Stanford University professor was fired for making a speech that contradicted co-founder Jane Stanford’s views on the matter. The professor made a eugenicist argument against Asian immigration.
Looks like one of those irregular verbs that used to come up so often on Yes, Minister. In this case we get:
I make provocative analogies.
You draw inappropriate comparisons.
He is an idiotarian fixated on moral equivalence.
We’re having a good old back and forth slagging off each other’s music tastes and calling each other fascists in the comments section at John Holbo’s site. As you can see, the issue of “whither the music industry in a world of reduced intellectual property” is bound to bring out a lot of interesting opinions; I think this is because a) we don’t know what the heck will happen b) we’d all like to believe that the answer will involve us all owning loads and loads of fantastic music for next to no cost but c) we all suspect that it probably won’t. As you can see if you follow the link, my role in the debate appears to be partly to snipe about obscure, irrelevant and probably wrongly remembered points of price theory and partly to act as the de facto defender of the music industry as she currently stands. I’m not sure that this reflects my genuine views, but in all similar discussions, I have historically ended up in it because of a number of points on which I think people are badly misunderstanding the economics of the music industry. I don’t want to start on a five thousand word thesis which will never be finished on this, so I’ll try to list my points of disagreement one by one in a series of posts. Starting with the easiest point and the one on which I’m most sure of my ground; micropayments are not going to happen any time soon.
It’s an attractive middle ground for a certain kind of reformist position on the Imagined Future Music Industry; one in which the removal of copyright (or its substantial undermining) doesn’t lead to us having to imagine a world in which music recordings are free, but one in which they are just very cheap indeed; say, anywhere from a few cents a song to a dollar an album. Making this sort of assumption allows you to do calculations of the sort “say 100,000 albums at a dollar a pop, figure 50 cents production cost and the musician earns a decent wage assuming that there are no packaging, promotion, legal and other suit-related costs” and come up with a “cottage industry” model of the music world which is often pretty palatable to people who like the kind of bands you hear on college radio - local heroes who might sell 100,000 albums at a pinch and are young enough to be happy with the idea of living the musicianly lifestyle on a low but survivable income.
But it’s just not possible. The fundamental error is in assuming that “cheap” and “free” are close cousins when they’re not; they’re fundamentally different ways of organising your microeconomy. The difference being that once you’ve decided that you aren’t going to operate on the basis of freely provided goods with an abundance of everything for all, you need to have an entire supporting infrastructure of institutions designed to make sure that everyone pays for what they’re taking. And that’s actually surprisingly expensive (I seem to remember that someone wrote an article in the Guardian in the 1980s which argued pretty plausibly that if we knew that everyone in the country was completely honest, roughly half of the workforce would have no jobs to do. Not just policemen but checkout operators, bus conductors, accountants, etc, etc.
You can’t ignore these costs; they’re important. And this is a problem if you’re thinking about a “micropayments” system for transactions of twenty cents to a dollar; the costs of providing a secure payments network have the unfortunate characteristics of rising pretty much in line with the number of transactions (not too many economies of scale) but being pretty fixed with respect to the size of each individual transaction (so they are a much higher proportion of the total cost of making a micropayment). There seems to be a systematic tendency for people to underestimate these costs.
Here’s a pretty representative price sheet for dematerialised credit card transactions. If we ignore fixed costs (setup costs and monthly flat rate services like billing), which is a reasonable assumption as we would hope to be amortising them over a very large number of micropayments indeed, we only need to take into account the “transaction fee” of $0.20-0.50. This is, to quote, “the costs of the datacenter, network usage, etc”. Let’s assume that there is an element of monopoly rents in here (the big card networks are in general very cagey indeed about the true costs, but it’s such a small oligopoly that the pro tanto assumption has to be that there are substantial rents) and that the true average cost of providing network and data storage costs is 10 cents. But on the other hand, we have to take into account that this is not marginal cost pricing; it’s an “average marginal” cost set by the providers to ensure that data transmission costs are covered on the whole. It’s highly likely that within the system, customers who send a small number of high value payments subsidise customers who send a large number of low-value ones. My guess is that the true marginal cost of a micropayment might be $0.20. So immediately, we see that “a penny a song” is simply impossible. It costs more than that to send the payment message.
Why so much? Email costs fractions of a cent to send, after all. But (see above) email’s free. Free things are much cheaper to administer than things where you have to keep accurate and exact records of who paid what to whom. In principle, the guys behind various Digicash operations reckoned that they’d solved this with “blind signature systems” (basically complicated protocols not unrelated to public key cryptography, for generating special numbers that would be difficult to forge), but they all tended to founder on the fact that when you tried to take the money out of the Digicash economy and turn it into a real bank deposit, all the book-keeping overhead that you thought you’d dodged ended up catching up on you. And even without book-keeping overhead, any payments network has to be many times more secure than ordinary email. I am willing to be convinced otherwise (though be warned, some big names in the business have tried and failed in the past) but it is my current opinion that it is not technologically possible at present to run a payments network materially more cheaply than the credit card companies, without compromising on security.
And the irritating thing is that just because you’re making micropayments, doesn’t mean you can reduce security. As an important plot point of the film Superman 3 illustrated, if I can reliably steal a penny from you in the certainty of not being caught, and if I can automate the process of doing so, then I can steal arbitrarily large amounts of money a penny at a time.
It gets worse. There’s also the ad valorem charges of the card processing networks. These are levied to defray the cost of sorting out fraudulent or mishandled payments (sort of an insurance premium). They’re usually only 2-3% of the transaction, but it’s likely that they would be much higher percentages for micropayments. That’s because the cost of sorting out a mispayment comes in two parts: checking that it was in fact a mispayment, and making the customer whole. The second of these obviously depends on the size of the disputed transaction, but the first is a fixed cost. I don’t think it makes sense to assume that nobody will care about mispayments of small amounts (if they do, they’re making themselves vulnerable to the kind of fraudster discussed above), so we could be talking about much higher percentages.
Bottom line; I’d be surprised if you can send a secure payment over the web at a cost of less than 30 cents, all in, even with the best will in the world and no profits. I’d be interested in any examples of someone offering the service for less, but would tend to suspect that they’re subsidising it from some other source of funds. Which means that the smallest “micropayment” worth bothering with would be about $2. That’s not really all that micro anymore.
Stay tuned for this occasional series; I think my next target will be a few assumptions about what it is that record companies actually do for their money.
There’s an old law of software development that says every application expands to the point where it can read mail. A little-known corollary is that Google can always do more than you think.
For example, try searching for expressions like 213 * 718, or 76 kilos in pounds, or even (G * mass of Earth) / (radius of Earth^2). Amazing. Wait till Brad DeLong hears about it.
Update: Naturally, the google calculator also knows the answer to life, the universe and everything. (Hat tip: Geek Notes.)
I’d like to point out that if you’re not reading the “Pointless Waste of Time” Newsskim, you’re missing out.
ASTEROID TO END CIVILIZATION IN 2014……says scientists after discovering what NASA has labelled “God’s Flyswatter.”
All nine Democratic Presidential candidates have held press conferences blasting President Bush for leaving the Earth vulnerable and “naked in the dark Detroit alley of the cosmos,” (John Kerry) and for “transforming the planet - through a series of irresponsible tax cuts for the rich - into a virtual Meteor Magnet,” (Howard Dean).
The Bush Administration, meanwhile, has assembled a $60 billion emergency task force made up of NASA and military officials to devise a way to deflect the oncoming Democratic criticism. Their first pro-Bush advertisements are expected to be deployed by Spring of 2004.
…
Action star Charles Bronson died of pneumonia over the weekend to the delight of hack comics everywhere, who are now able to use the approximately 167,933 Death Wish play-on-word jokes they have been stockpiling for decades….
Subsequent performances in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Battle of the Bulge and The Dirty Dozen cemented Bronson’s legacy as the ugliest man ever to have a camera pointed at him for the purposes of showing others for money. Acting without the benefit of a “Tom Cruise smile,” a “Brad Pitt chin” or even a “Kevin Spacey mild presentableness,” Bronson proved that a disturbingly ugly man can make it to the top in Hollywood, then die of pneumonia.
In other news, Kieran has previously noted that my pro-Stalin agenda has come under blistering attack. In my defense, I’d like to point out that fluffy bunnies are adorable.
All right, I’ve lowered the tone enough. Sorry.
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