GLOBADOM

It’s been 10 days. All I do is cough.

Things I learned from Wikipedia: the Mc Donnell Douglas F-4, a wildly successful example of brutalist warplane design, had pretty much the coolest collection of nicknames ever accumulated by an airplane.

My favourite is “Luftverteidigungsdiesel,” of course.

A quick bit of beer-tasting silliness, hopefully soon to be joined by some things-to-see-in-Victoria posting:

Anything by Unibroue is still great.

For some reason, I have drunk both of the chocolate-flavored beers the LDB stocks. The made-in-BC Phillips Double Chocolate Porter is very tasty. But from the UK, the Young’s Double Chocolate Stout is even better. Both are nice beers, not just chocolaty confections, and neither is especially sweet, thus avoiding alcopop syndrome.

Carpay is in town tomorrow night, so I’ll be trying the Phillips Surly Blonde Belgian Triple for the first time. Why not?

In late 2006, reasonably well-known blogger Jacqueline Passey (often known by her four-barreled name, as seen in the title), wrote a post about her dating criteria, more or less.

I shall not revisit the ridiculous bunfight that set off, though blog commentary on that post continues to be the main thing that comes up when you Google Ms. Passey’s name.

Out of rather idle curiosity (she used to be the girlfriend of Not Johnny Chan, who I have sort-of known since SFU), I looked her up, and found that her blog had . . . disappeared.

Well, you know the usual steps: wayback machine, a little study, no big mystery. She announced her retirement, declared that having a job and a steady boyfriend was better than having a blog, and good for her.

Though it’s surprising that someone like her was willing to not only throw over the blogging itself, but after less than a year, has let the domain lapse. I can only assume that work, school, and private life are in order, and wish her well at all of that.

Though I am curious that the requiem for her blog posted on a friend’s site has also been taken away. That site using fairly sequential post numbers, we can see from both the archived link on Ms. Passey’s site where the post should be, and a little poking around determines the existence of posts 30 and 33, but 31 and 32 have been deleted.

And thus the interesting part. Not her reasons for not blogging or letting her domain lapse, but the surprisingly fast first-person disappearance she has made from search results, and the ephemeral nature of the web.

Of course, some very smart people have spent a lot of time figuring out plans for persistent web entities that wouldn’t suffer from link rot. I fear that the Web Archive is about the best solution so far. Link rot never sleeps.

I’ve worked fairly hard to make my online presence persistent. It’s almost comforting to know how easy it is to fade into the background noise. And to get a real life.

Very, very good.

I know, you don’t understand that link. Even I barely understand it. Okay, I don’t understand it at all.

But, I do understand this: in lots and lots of normal team sports (not cricket; I totally don’t understand the scoring system(s)), net points is an excellent proxy for team performance. That is, almost every team’s position in the standings is closely related to its standing in (points scored – points allowed).

There are exceptions, but very few. Sometimes you’ll hear that a particular team is really good in close games; that is, they win a lot more 1-goal games (to jump to hockey as an example) than they lose. This is usually a statistical anomaly, and the longer you watch such teams, the more likely statistical gravity (aka the law of large numbers) will reassert itself.

Well, that was a long runup, right? I just wanted to point out why I’m fascinated by the net points scored by the New England Patriots.

Note that they have more than double the points of the Steelers, second-best in that stat. (254 net pts. vs 124)

Note also the total distribution of this stat: The Steelers have 124, followed by teams with 119, 106, and 100. Then there’s a big drop to 57 net points. The three worst teams in the league have -110, -108, and -91 points respectively. Everybody else groups somewhere in the middle, and this is of course a net zero-sum stat, since every point scored by a team is a point scored against some other team (their opponent of the day, of course).

So every team in the NFL has between -110 and 124 net points, except the Pats, who have 254 net points.

Yes, I know they’re running up the scores. But no other team has demonstrated this kind of ability to score at will and in such volume. As in, maybe no other team ever.

Only the Colts seem to have given the Pats any serious challenge this year (actually, they darned near beat them!), and I think it’s fair to guess that the only plausible challengers left on their pre-playoff schedule are Pittsburgh on December 9th, and themselves on December 29th, that being their last regular-season game, and having an extremely high chance of being completely meaningless except for the Perfect Season.

Item: Michael “Rands” Lopp writes a resonant description of nerd behaviour. Item: Wyn describes a new sitcom featuring nerds which may not suck. I feel the need to point out here that “nerd-human relationships” is a nice coinage based on my hackneyed self-description as a person working in the field of “nerd-human relations.” TLO and I are happily working on our nerd-human relationship, however. Item: I read two sports column/blogs regularly. One is Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a football column that interrupts discussions of the negative value of most punts to discuss the details of how hedge fund managers’ incomes are taxed. The other is devoted to tracking the latest details of sports uniforms. Item: I spend more time thinking about new ways to reconfigure bicycles than I do actually either working on bicycles or riding them (oops). Item: I loaded the washing machine today with an eye towards whether my new technique for getting the clothes from the hamper to the washing machine was faster (probably not).

Oh, and then there’s this. Cal’s marching band doing a medley of video game tunes while…acting out pixels in formation?!

Nerdiness at criticality. Evacuate area.

I’m relaxing.

Per this response to something I didn’t read (which I learned about at Daring Fireball, I thought I’d comment. Because I am smart and all those full-time pundits are not! Arrogance is fun!

At the risk of getting pedantic, the iTunes Music Store (whoops, now it’s just the iTunes Store) has de facto “exclusive control” of the downloadable music market. Given their market share, I don’t think you can deny that.

Here’s a primer on US antitrust law.

Of course, what causes government intervention in these cases is not monopoly control of a market, but rather abuse of monopoly powers to consumer disadvantage.

Apple’s profits largely exist on the iPod side of the business, and Apple’s monopoly power largely exists on the iTunes Store part of the business, inasmuch as using iTunes-purchased music on non-iPods is tricky (but far from impossible).

Of course, the fact that Apple has been working hard with its suppliers to REDUCE the restrictions on using Music Store content (ie DRM-free iTunes+ songs) and the fact that you can use many, many other sources (CD, any other DRM-free music source) to get music onto the iPod both grossly undercut cries of abuse of monopoly power.

The hilarious irony with Apple’s situation is that they didn’t get where they are because they used the iPod to leverage the market position of the Store (you do remember that the iPod predates the iTMS, right?), but rather because (and I’m pretty happy with this assertion) both the iPod and the iTunes Store were best-of-class products in their respective categories. Were, and still are.

Besides, if legal relief is sought on this matter, the first thing Apple will suggest is that its store be required to turn off DRM on all songs. And about the only thing anyone could want them to do on the iPod side is to open up the sync interface. Of course, the former is forced upon them by their record label contracts, and the latter, well they just do that because they want to. It’s the only place, arguably, where Apple would be vulnerable to an accusation of abuse of monopoly market share.

Hands up everyone who thinks these changes would cause a noticeable drop in either iTunes Store or iPod sales. Zero? All 20 of my readers are very smart!

Earlier this week, I bought a refurbished MacBook (right in time for Apple to update their offerings, so there you go).

Have you ever seen a photo of Apple’s product packaging? Of course you have. It’s so pretty nobody can resist.

Beautiful! Too bad I didn’t get to keep this one. You could almost use that box as a carrying case.

Even the inside of the box is pretty. You’ll have to trust me on this, but the MacBook (“MacBook Amateur”?) uses virtually the same packaging, in terms of quality and layout. Form-fitted styrofoam, nicely packaged accessories, a cute little well for the disc and documentation package.

So, what about a refurb–I’m sorry, Certified Reconditioned Product?

Very…brown. And gray.

So, the form-fitted foam inside?

Aaah! It burns! My eyes bleed!

I haven’t shown the cardboard insert that sits atop this foam for holding the accessories, but it was even worse: nothing sat in it properly, and the smaller accessories actually rattled around, hidden from view in the folds of the cardboard insert, when I first opened the box.

Now, why is Apple doing this? The obvious reason is that it’s a bit cheaper, and probably more universal for the short runs of refurb stuff. I think the rather generic cardboard box could hold almost any Mac from a Mini to a small iMac. And costs should matter: they offer a pretty generous discount on refurbs (more than their restocking fee, for example).

But I think this is also a marketing decision: buy the new product, get the nice box. Buy the refurb, get the crappy box. I suspect there’s lots of subtle little marketing pressures that are being put on people to say “hey, you can buy this product, but here’s lots of little almost-reasons not to.”

Cheap people like me get punished in all kinds of ways. Some are simple and cruel, like buying a $2 vernier caliper at Princess Auto and finding out it’s off by about 0.7mm. Some are complicated and funny, like my year-long quest for a power adapter after I bought a really nice bicycle headlight for $5. This Apple technique is fairly special: it’s obvious and harmless.

I’ll take it!

Today, I was joking to one of my co-workers that at first, we were going to replace him with a computer, but then we decided instead to replace a computer with him.

Alas, I think “mechanical turk” schemes don’t have much life left in them, while the age-old fear of replacing more people with computers (more or less) is realistic.

The short version of this argument is that Software as a Service, as a model for pushing certain activities outside of a company, is becoming more and more compelling. Sure, it’s just another step in the whole push to use computers to automate and streamline business activities, but it’s a pretty big step.

Moreover, more and more of these services are being sent out to a very few class-leading players in these services. Lots of organizations (including my employer) have dumped their web search needs on Google, while Yahoo! picks up scraps, and Altavista (I’m probably dating myself by even knowing of their existence) gets left by the wayside. In-house search engines? Let’s put it this way: I routinely use Google to search websites with built in search functions (IMDB, Drupal, and even Wikipedia) because Google has faster, more accurate search results (useful hint: I typically do this by typing the name of the website, followed by the query (eg imdb joseph cotten).

That’s a few examples among many. Locally, Darren Barefoot outsources his email provision to Google, thus solving his spam problem. Everybody in the world uses YouTube as their video host of choice, and it just works.

The common thread here isn’t even the outsourcing. That’s fairly old hat. The interesting thing is how quickly momentum seems to gravitate towards single (owing to a lack of greater precision, I’ll call them “best”) solutions. I think that before ubiquitous webification (and heaven knows, remembering even that is starting to date my existence; note that first-year college students this September were typically born in the same year I had my first Internet email account; they never knew a world without the Web, more or less), these best solutions were not as easy to distribute, as easily compared, nor was their superiority as easily communicated. In short, even when stuff got outsourced, it often got outsourced to stinky inferior solutions. This still happens a lot.

At any rate, something (and I may well have the essential mechanism wrong) means that it is much easier for class-leading solutions to a problem (or implementations of a new concept) to come in and just win all the marbles. And it’s also easier to install this stuff. It’s no longer a case of buying the server that runs the system. Indeed, it’s no longer a case of renting the maintained server share and putting the application on it. Now, it’s often a case of renting the service, and nobody knows what the server is. Or even what software revision you’re on. Or where the IT department is.

I think in the long term, this means that a lot more job functions will simply disappear from businesses. You’ll just see bigger and bigger companies decide not to bother with in-house email systems, because hey, email (and especially spam) is hard. Some of this is just greater computer literacy, to take only my narrow field: just as computers made functional typing ubiquitous, and ended the need for typists who could take dictation, SaaS and general network literacy is making the remaining necessary IT knowledge ubiquitous, and we don’t need IT departments that can manage servers.

I suppose this is where I should admit I fear that the entire field I work in will disappear before I get a chance to retire. That may well be true. But I am sanguine. The heroes of IT will always have jobs, because those server farms, however concentrated, aggregated, and outsourced, haven’t gone away. But just like the erstwhile auto workers, the rest of us will somehow find jobs, because it turns out when the burden of managing IT infrastructure becomes a lot lighter, the companies that shed their IT burdens will now be more productive.

The medium-term effect is that we’ll all get jobs working hard on whatever thing our organization actually is best-of-class at. For locally-oriented organizations, this may largely reflect a lack of global competition (at least until a smart global competitor figures out how to encroach on that service…), and for global organizations, well, take heart from the lesson of IBM: death sometimes comes slowly. For everyone else: get really good at something, anything, and make a go of it.

And at the risk of showing myself a fool in short order, I see this as a slight thematic re-emphasis here at Wired Cola. As part of our mission to be more Cybermorphic every day, I’m hoping to figure out how technological trends are going to affect ordinary people in the future (and I’ll take that as meaning anything from “it’s already happened, you just didn’t notice” to the end of living memory), and explain them for a lay audience. I often joke that my day job is “nerd-human relations,” so the theory is that might actually be what I’m good at. Let me know how I’m doing.

This year, Al Gore Jr. had a best-selling book, and won an Oscar* and the Nobel Peace Prize. Tyler Cowen asks, has anyone had a better year?

Excellent nominations from the comments:

Tim Allen’s 1994: #1 TV show, #1 grossing film, #1 on the NYT best-seller list.

Einstein’s 1905: one paper that ultimately won him the Nobel Physics Prize, and three others that merely transformed modern physics in their respective (and quite diverse) fields.

Newton’s 1687: Newtonian Laws of mechanics and Theory of Gravity, but I think the claim for calculus has to be diluted by his shambolic publication and precedence war he undertook.

Bob Fosse’s 1972: he won an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony for three different works in that year.

Various athletes, most notably Mark Spitz (1972 Olympics, 7 gold medals, each one a world record performance!), Steffi Graf’s 1988 (all four tennis “slam” tournaments, plus Olympic gold).

I think what’s most interesting is people who won for multiple achievements. By that light, Graf has a not-very-interesting year, because all she did was win four tennis tournaments. Spitz had two great weeks, and in multiple swimming events.

Einstein, even though he confined himself to physics, published four hugely diverse papers. Tim Allen and Bob Fosse effectively won each of their accolades for separate works, which should count for more.

Gore’s accomplishment is tricky. I think you could credibly argue that he got all his awards for the same work (or at least the same theme), and that asterisk is up at the top of this post because technically, Gore didn’t win the “Inconvenient Truth” best doc Oscar: that’s a producer’s award. But this is rather like saying Hitchcock didn’t win the Oscar for Rebecca: true, but beside the point.

Here’s my sporting nomination for best year: Eddy Merckx’s 1972: Tour (plus points jersey), Giro, 10 stages, four major one-day races, hour record, Super Prestige Pernod, etc.

With Eddy, the biggest complication is that you could also choose any other year between 1969 and 1974: of these, 1974 is notable for Giro-Tour-Worlds-Super Prestige Pernod and more.

But I think I have an absolute winner with Sir Winston Churchill’s 1953: Knight of the Garter, Nobel in Literature, and he was the sitting Prime Minister. He also published a collection of speeches and (probably) the final volume of The Second World War, which I assume was a best-seller, though I can’t find explicit reference (the publication date is also a bit iffy).

Churchill basically won the knighthood for long service (most notably during WW II), the Nobel for “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values,” the Prime Ministership he held as a result of a comeback triumph in the 1951 election, and he was still publishing major literary works.

That’s a pretty good year!

So I’m looking for other nominations. The thing that we’re seeking (for whatever reason) is a certain diversity of triumphs. The ultimate would be something like world-class sporting, political, scientific, and artistic achievements all in a single year.