Ever wonder where all your energy is going?

This is a very interesting interactive graphic. It shows how much energy was produced in 2009 by various sources (e.g. solar, coal, petroleum, etc.), how it was used by various sectors (residential, industrial, commercial, transport), and how much was used vs. wasted. It's a little hard to read, at first, but stick with it.

A total of 94.5 quadrillion BTU (QBTU) was produced, of which solar was, by far, the smallest source (0.1 QBTU), and petroleum the largest (35.9 QBTU). Of these, 38.2 QBTU was used to produce electricity, with the remaining 56.3 used directly. (Though I'm a little confused -- the solar link doesn't show it being used to produce electricity.)

I think there must be some policy lessons in there, but I'm sure they won't be learned.

Le Philosophe speaks

The other day, Sidharta says to me, "In your opinion...what is life FOR?"

I thought about it for fifteen seconds. What do you answer to something like that? How do you explain that sort of thing to a kid? My first instinct was to answer something flip like "Why do you assume it's FOR anything?" My neighbor, who I told the story to later, said "It's for keeping your parents happy...that's what!"

But I held my tongue.

Instead, I said, "Why? What do YOU think it's for?"

He hesitated. "Life..." and then, I could see the wheels turning as he struggled to articulate his thoughts. "It's for learning and loving."

And I had thought about trying to answer him! What hubris!

New York Times goes paywall

Ok, so the much threatened paywall for the New York Times seems set to go in the US on March 28 (as of today, March 17, in Canada). The gist of it is that "visitors" will get free access to up to 20 articles on line per month, but after that, you will be barred from accessing articles. Except when you access them through Facebook links.

Sulzberger's letter, and the accompanying FAQ is a bit thin on the details. They don't, for example, tell us how they're going enforce that limit of 20 articles per month. I suspect that's because if they did, every script kiddie in the universe, not to mention a fair number of minimally computer-savvy readers would figure out how to circumvent it before it even gets rolled out.

I have some very fundamental questions about the new subscription based service.

Is that limit of 20 person-based? computer-based? IP address based? If it's computer based (i.e. each PC gets access to 20 articles per month), that could mean that I as an individual get access to almost nothing, if I'm sharing the computer with, say, my spouse and kids or roommates. Is that what they really had in mind? If it's individual-based, how are they going to track that I personally accessed 20 this month, without making me log in first? I can't see "visitors" wanting to register for a free account and then logging in just so they can access those 20 articles. I don't think the NYT can see that, either, so I imagine that the tracking mechanism will be minimally invasive, and therefore easy to get around. I'd have to guess it will either be cookie-based (circumvent by deleting cookies?) or IP based (which will have the unpleasant effect of limiting the number of accesses to 20 spread out over all users, but circumventable by going to a different computer -- especially good if using wireless access, I imagine).

Also, does 20 articles mean 20 distinct articles, each of which I can re-read as often as I like? Or does it mean that if I return to re-read the same article 20 times (I sometimes like Paul Krugman or Roger Cohen that much :-), I can't read anything else?

I find it very interesting that they have explicitly excluded links accessed from social media from the 20 articles/month limit. I would have to guess that there is some money flow from Facebook to the NYT -- I'd love to know what the agreement is. But the text of the letter does not provide an exhaustive list of social media sites, which would lead us to believe that it's a blanket policy.

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.

I just can't believe they'd allow something like that for Joe's Pizza and Social Networking Emporium, without some financial agreement in place. So perhaps it won't hold for some social media sites.

Guess I'd better go catch a leprechaun, to start paying for digital subscriptions!

Checks (and balances) or checks (and bargains)?

Apparently, there are plans afoot to sell off Federal government real estate assets that are not in use.

Sure thing...no problem...we're in the red...raise some cash. Couple of national forests -- who needs them? We can always grow more trees.

However, I was struck by one item in the article:

"This approach will enable us to cut through the red tape and overcome the special interests and parochial politics that have traditionally slowed or halted progress when efforts have been made to reduce government's real estate footprint one asset at a time," the official said.

(emphasis mine).

Now I've seen my share of bad processes, but in my experience, a lot of what is considered "red tape" (i.e. administrative cost and process) is there precisely to put a check on special interests and other bad behavior. Probably the best way to cut red tape, the place you'll really get the biggest bang for your buck in efficiency, is to remove all the scrutiny on the real estate transactions. That's almost certainly where the big administrative costs are. But without the oversight, special interests may have free rein to bully petty government bureaucrats into selling the real estate at just about any price they choose.

In other words, you can cut through red tape OR you can overcome special interests. I question whether you can do both. Well...OK...you probably could do both (given that the oversight processes are sub-optimal). But if I were a betting woman, I'd put money on the cut-red-tape-only solution being implemented. In today's climate.

So no one can say if the internet good or bad, on the whole?

This is a very good interview for people to read and think about.

We hear a lot about how great the internet is for freedom. Evgeny Morozov takes a very balanced view. Namely that the internet is a double-edged sword. Yes, it is used by activists to communicate the abuses and oppressions they are suffering to the world, as well as to coordinate organizing strategies. But it is also used by oppressors to monitor activists and spread disinformation about them and to disseminate propaganda.

Once again we find that computers are fabulous tools to increase productivity. For our side and theirs.

I HIGHLY recommend you read the article.

Dawn's ULTIMATE fortune

Yesterday I got the ultimate fortune cookie for me. All others will be downhill from now on.

It read

Your ability to find the silly in the serious will take you far.

I wish.

Of course, in my case, it probably means..."far, far away from civilization".

Bingle?

So, according to this article, Google has figured out that Bing uses Google as a subroutine. Specifically, when you do a Bing search, Bing essentially performs the same Google search, and combines the results with its own indexes, and outputs results that incorporate Google's results. (You may get a different order of items, or some items may be different, but it's essentially using Google as one factor in finding and ranking results.) And it seems that part of what may be making this possible is a kind of eavesdropping that IE 8 does, that allows it to send home to the mother ship people's search results and the links they choose to pursue.

It was very clever how Google figured this out: they apparently rigged things in their databases for a set of nonsense searches, so that they would find a specific totally unrelated site. They then tried Bing on the same nonsense searches, and lo and behold, what should come up, but the exact same totally unrelated site. More details are here.

Microsoft does not deny the claim. They tried to shrug it off as Google is just one among 1000 factors. Which is probably true. The question is: is it closer to factor 1 or to factor 853? I think we can all guess the answer to that one.

I doubt this is against the law, but it's certainly cheesy.

Netflix and the Death of the DVD?

Netflix has essentially killed Blockbuster, which itself killed the mom-and-pop video store business. And now they're saying "we're going to stop doing DVDs". You will get only online "Watch Instantly" access to movies.

Interesting bait-and-switch.

The first article I read about this was a bit alarmist. It turns out that the switch will happen over a number of years. Apparently Netflix hasn't even peaked, yet, in the DVD space -- that doesn't happen until 2013, according to projections. Nevertheless, I find the predicted shift interesting.

I see a few drivers for the shift away from physical to online:

1. Decrease costs associated with physical management of the DVD media -- mailing costs, storage costs, replacement costs, etc. And it's not just about DVDs, either. Remember videos? 33 1/3 LPs? Tower Records? Who wants to be stuck with the world's largest collection of DVDs, when Gra-ray(tm) comes out?
2. Better control over copyright issues. Personally, I believe this is the main driver. It's easy for customers to copy DVDs, and the RIAA is probably breathing down Netflix's neck about doing stuff to prevent this. With Netflix controlling delivery of the content via the Watch Instantly functionality, they may be able to make it harder to copy movies. I'm not saying they'll be able to control it completely (this is unlikely), but they'll be able to make it hard enough for all but the most determined to make copies, so that from their perspective they'll be making a sizable dent in the "copyright infringement" problem.
3. Better control over your commercial experience. This is probably another big driver. We see this sort of thing already -- when you watch The Daily Show or Colbert Report online, you are not permitted to fast-forward through the commercials, and even more annoyingly, unlike your TV (which you couldn't fast forward either) they are REALLY LOUD, so that you are forced to hear them even if you try to escape them in the bathroom. Netflix will be able to sell this capability to advertisers or sell you premium commercial-reduced service. Great for improving revenue stream either way.
4. Finer-grained customer profiling information. I would have to bet that online viewing offers some interesting data-mining opportunities, including stuff like how often you watch a particular movie, what times of day you watch it, which segments you watch over and over, etc. You know...the kind of stuff that would be great for targeted advertising.

Of course, without physical media, and customers' complete dependence on online providers, it will be interesting to see what happens to prices and diversity/availability of content. But for the reasons I've listed above (and probably others, too) I'd say that the writing is on the wall.

Another conspiracy theory? Or more proof we're too stupid for democracy?

I find it a bit disturbing that the Department of Justice appears to be investigating Rop Gongrijp, among others, on the Wikileaks thing. Specifically, we know that it has subpoenaed Twitter for records about Gonggrijp, as well as Assange, Manning, and Birgitta Jonsdottir (an Icelandic MP), in connection with creation of the video "Collateral Murder".

What disturbs me more about this than I am already disturbed by the whole approach to addressing Wikileaks is that Gongrijp is also one of the main investigators involved in a study that exposed weaknesses in the electronic voting system used in India.

So far, no one has been talking much about the connection, but call me a conspiracy theorist...I have to wonder how much they'll "accidentally" uncover while poking around his stuff. One of the big bones of contention in the India study was that the investigators refused to reveal who was the source of the machine they used in order to test for weaknesses. One very brave scientist, Hari Prasad, was in jail for nearly a week over this issue last August. If the DOJ has subpoenaed email accounts, as well as Twitter access, with as broad wording as the Twitter subpoena, there could be a lot of information in there relevant to the voting machine study, and it could be child's play to accidentally run across the identity of the voting machine source while examining Gongrijp's emails. Once this identity is found it would be simple to (perhaps illegally, but nevertheless surreptitiously) pass the information along to the Indian government.

As of this posting, the only thing we know the DOJ has subpoenaed was Gongrijp's Twitter posts (which seems rather silly, since they're public). We know this because Twitter actually informed him that the request had been made. We don't know what else they may have subpoenaed. And though IANAL, the Twitter subpoena looks rather broad to me...it does not restrict information requested to that relevant to the Wikileaks investigation (which surprises me a bit). It does cover a restricted time period (Nov. 1, 2009 to the date of the subpoena), but this time period also covers the time in which the Indian voting machine study was going on.

If I were the source of the test voting machine, I'd be a little extra nervous, just now. And having him/her punished as a by-product of the Wikileaks investigation would be unfortunate collateral damage, in my opinion.

Too stupid for democracy?

I was driving home from dropping my mother off at the train station on Jan. 2, and turned on WPRB, to hear this operatic voice singing something about "every four or five years they play a little game, saying 'You can pick your leader, take your choice". You know I was going to tune in, then! Turns out the piece was "Too Stupid for Democracy" by Eileen McGann. It's quite amusing...take a listen, if you haven't, already.

I only recently discovered WPRB, while station surfing in my car...they have some good stuff. As does WKCR (to which I have a sentimental attachment).

Great way to start off the new year!