The Wired 40 and Amazon

I got this month Wired Magazine a few days ago and I saw that this was the Wired 40 issue. Wired's definition of it is the following: They're masters of technology and innovation. They're global thinkers driven by strategic vision. They're nimbler than Martha Stewart's PR team. They're The Wired 40. Now, it's pretty easy to imagine the companies at the top: Google and Apple. They have all of the buzz in the world of technology. Last year (before I had a subscription to the magazine) I bought a copy in an airport and I saw that Amazon was number two on the list. There's no doubt in my mind that it was because of Search Inside the Book which I believe is the most inovative thing Amazon has ever done. Now, I realize that it's sorta not cool to root for one's own company and it's especially not cool to be happy that your company is at the top of the list of cool companies, but it still makes me feel good. When I saw that we were number two last year I was like: Fuck Yeah!

I always read magazines backwards so I started at number 40 and worked my way up the list hoping to see Amazon. I was really surprised that we weren't in the bottom 30 because I thought that we were still on the list of 'cool' companies but I thought we had lost all of our buzz so there was no way that we could be in the top 10. To my surprise we were number 4. Now, this list doesn't say anything about how cool or interesting work is inside the company. There's some really interesting work that's going on in distributed systems at Amazon, but it's all happening behind the scenes. (when someone deep down in the comments section of a slashdot article posted something on Gurupa I was sooooo excited, yes, I know I'm a dork.) I don't think that employees have a good sense of what people outside of the company (excluding significant others) think about it. Most of my friends are either Amazon employees, ex-Amazon employees, significant others of Amazon or ex-Amazon employees, or friends of several Amazon employees, so their opinions are highly biased. My guess would be that we're completely self-centered and we think that Amazon is the center of the universe and everyone else in the world thinks so too. So, I tend to second guess my assumptions of our coolness. But showing up as number 4 on that list is sort of an external validation of my job.

Tiger

Ars Technica is running a really good article on Tiger (OS X 10.4). Just like the author's previous articles on all of the OS X releases going back to the public betas, this article is very long and detailed. I finally finished reading all 21 pages this morning and it has really made me excited about the new operating system.

While the finer grained kernel locking changes, the addition of better 64 bit support, and a finalized system API are important and interesting on their own, the thing I've been more exicted about is the change to the graphical subsystem. The thing that really got me interested was the rumor talk that all of the pixels on the screen were going to be rendered by the graphics card. Pages 13 and 14 describe how the system worked in previous version of the OS and how it works in Tiger. They have pretty muched moved all graphics work to the video card where it should have been put in the first place. But the amazing advancements in video cards are made for video games and difference between a $5 video card and a $500 video card isn't apparent unless you play video games. Most of the time all of that extra computing power goes to waste. Apple has slowly been moving over the work to the video card making everything snappier and reducing the load on the CPU. I think that this work is pretty amazing, especially considering that it's completely transparent to the application which has no idea whether its graphics commands are being done by the video card (for newer computers) or by the CPU (for older computers).

What really amazes me is that OS X keeps on getting faster and faster. You'd think that everytime a company releases a new revision of an operating system it's gonna get slower because they keep on adding features. Well, that's the way Microsoft does it with Windows. I've always thought that Microsoft was conspiring with hardware vendors like Intel to make their OS and programs slower so that people would need to upgrade every couple of years. And you really are forced to upgrade Windows because of something that the old OS doesn't do. Windows 95 added real multitasking, Windows 2000 crashed less and was much more secure, Windows XP worked a hell of a lot better with your digital camera. But each time you needed to buy a new computer. It seems like Apple is trying to keep you from buying new hardware. If you think to yourself: "Hmmm, I think I need a new computer because my computer feels slow" you just need to wait a bit for a new rev of OS X and bang you have a faster computer. Apple made a huge gamble when it decided to throw away its old OS codebase and start from scratch, and this time they are winning. I really can't imagine Microsoft catching up now.

Apple seems to be firing on all cylinders right now. They are kicking so much ass. The have it just like Google. I'm a technology whore and I'll follow the best technology wherever it comes from, but I'm still rooting for Apple.

T-Mobile Coverage Map

Wow, this map is pretty cool. You always know that some parts of the city have better coverage than others, especially in a hilly city like Seattle, but I never expected the cell phone companies to admit to having bad coverage. Now I guess they have. Man, no wonder I have such awful coverage in the front of my house. I think part of the hill is acting as a shadow to the tower on the top of the hill.

Emergence (part 2)

I finished reading Emergence last week and I wasn't so impressed. The book started off making me very excited to learn about what he was describing but he never went into too much detail with the slime mold. He did go into detail describing Ants, which really sparked my interest and now I want to read all 732 pages of The Ants. He also discussed how cities have patterns that seem to come out of nowhere. That's another thing that I'm very interesting in, but again he didn't go into as much detail as I wanted. But he did mention two more books that I now want to read: The Image of the City and The City in History.

Another thing I didn't like about the book was that it was writen in the style of a magazine article, which is certainly reasonable for a magazine article, but doesn't work so well in book form. It's similar to, but much better than, Thomas Friedman (who turns what would be a 10 page magazine article into a 300 page book).

While the book wasn't as great as I had expected it was certainly worth reading, especially since it was a quick read. It made me start thinking about higher order patterns again. So I'm now ready to pounce on some juicier papers and books.

Desease as an Advantage

You know what I was just thinking about? Desease, especially when people are old, is an evolutionary advantage. Well, it's actually death that's the advantage, and any way to cause the death will help out. Before humans had the intellegence to fix stuff with their brains they needed to evolve, and you can only evolve as fast as the turnover rate. Species that can turn over very quickly, that is, reproduce and then die, are able to evolve much faster than species that have slower turnover rates. And organisms that reproduce and then live much longer afterwards are of no direct benefit to the species as a whole in this scenario.

Unintelligent Design

Here's a pretty funny story about intelligent design.

Canvassing

Wow, I just had the weirdest experience. Someone was going door to door canvassing for the Sierra Club and I do my normal routine and tell them that I support what they are doing but I don't give money to people who ask for it directly. I only give money to places that I goto directly when I feel like it.

He responded to that with an attitude asking me if I would rather support credit card companies instead of the local Sierra Club. Wow, I can't believe he said that. I wish now that I had told him that "yes, I do want to support the credit card companies". While I really hate the credit card companies for tacking on fees for everything and sending me so much junk mail, they do provide a service that I really like. I use my credit card for everything. It sounded like he was anti-business, I hate people who are anti-buisness. They seem to think that the world would be a much better place if everyone lived on a farm and grew their own food. What I can't comprehend is why those people live in cities if they think life in a village farming is so great.

Why do those people seem to think that you need to be anti-business to be
pro-environment. I'm for the environment, but I'm also all about cost/benefit analysis. If the benefit from drilling an ANWR is greater than the cost of destroying a beautiful wildlife refuge, then fucking drill away. Fortunately, that's not the case. Adding an incremental amount of oil to the reserves to postpone the inevitable need to move to a different source of energy doesn't even come close to outwaying the cost of destroying something that can't ever be brought back.

Well, I'm slightly off-topic. I meant to talk about canvassing. I can't stand canvassing. I hate it when people bother me at home when I've just gotten home from work and I just want to rest. They thrive on the fact that we all just want them to go away as quick as possible and that usually means giving them money. I understand why they might need to do it, but I won't give money to organizations that I don't know too much about. And a ten minute talk with someone at my door isn't going to tell me the possible negative aspects of an organization. I'm not saying that the Sierra Club is bad, if I didn't have to give my money I'd certainly rather see them get money than credit card companies, but I'm just not going to give money without some research.

Am I cheap? Hell yeah I'm cheap. Could this just be a rationalization for me just not wanting to give up my money? Hell yeah it could be. But, I always vote for tax increases. I don't mind paying more money if everyone else has to, but I can't stand paying more money to save the environment than someone else. I guess it's just that I can't see the benefit right away. The Sierra Club is an organization that cries wolf a lot (I may be wrong, but that's my impression) so most asshole conservatives don't listen to them. If they disappeared I don't know what would happen but it doesn't seem like we would all of the sudden become Bolivia (with trash on the ground, and cars that spew smoke, and residents who think of their own country as a trash can).

Now, KEXP provides immediate benefit to me. I don't know what I'd do if it disappeared. They fucking rock!

Ok, I'm sorta joking about the Sierra Club, but it still pisses me off that they bother me at home. Why don't they cross the Cascades and bother some people in red-ass-Spokane or something.

Oh yeah, I got off-topic again. What I meant to write about was that this dude was so persistant. I've never experienced that before. He just wouldn't leave. I kept on explaining to him that I don't give money to people who come to my door no matter how much I support them, but he just kept on coming at me. I got pissed and raised my voice a bit and he still stuck around. I was seriously ready to just shut the door one him. I kept saying "I'm just not going to give you money" over and over again and finally after about 10 minutes he left. Holy shit!

Your Man in India

This is really cool. Outsourcing on a personal level.

Great Momments in Pundentry

Last night on the Daily Show's Great Momments in Pundentry clip from Hannity & Colmes I heard something that reviled who Colmes really is. After Hannity made some non-PC remark Colmes said something like "as a liberal, I believe that it is wrong to label them as...". Wow, it sounds like Colmes is just playing the part of liberal but doesn't actually believe anything that he's saying. I reminds me of those racist actors from the early part of the 20th century who used to put tar on their faces and pretend they were black. Then they would dance around and talk in a way that took the stereotype to an absurd level. That's who Colmes is. He's an actor with tar on his face. What a dipshit.

The Garbage Patch

It turns out that there's a floating island of garbage in the Pacific the size of Texas. The Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch is in a subtropical gyre which means that it gets very little wind and there's very little current so it's like a black hole in the ocean. Stuff can come in but it can't leave. Well, that's not completely true, it turns out that there's a "leak" and that leak sends the trash to a certain beach in Hawaii where the trash stands 10 feet high.

Wow, we're so nice to this planet.

Access Control

Ahhh.... access control.

Scary Shit (for me at least)

I was checking my apache access logs for bad stuff and I found something that I didn't like. I was getting lots of traffic from a robot called "ia_archiver" which made me think: Internet Archive. And guess what? That's exactly what it was. It wouldn't have been that big of a deal if it was just crawling my blog, but I saw that it was crawling photos that I had at my root directory that I created for a friend and only she should know about them. How is the crawler getting at those photos? I think my friend's User Agent has a clue:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Alexa Toolbar)"

Could it be that the Alexa Toolbar is gathering personal web surfing habits from its user and sending them back to Alexa's crawler? Oooooooo that's nasty. Hmmmmm... What are the Terms of Use? Yuck Yuck Yuck.

I wouldn't mind if I knew only my friends could view the photos but I'm weirded out by the complete loss of privacy that comes with having your personal stuff searchable by anyone in the world. It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of putting my somewhat personal thoughts on the internet. But I'm not at the point where I feel comfortable putting photos of myself and my friends on the internet.

Well, I searched around for info on how to get my stuff off the archive until I can secure the pages that I don't want archived and set it up so hopefully by the time you read this my stuff will be off the archive. I also searched the major search engines for my site looking for stuff that shouldn't be there and thankfully I didn't find anything. But I did find out that one of my photos on flickr is on someone's favorite list.

Emergence

I just read the first three pages of Emergence and I have to stop reading and write about what I just read because I think it's so awesome. The author describes how slime mold (with no centralized brain) can solve a maze problem. And here's something that's so interesting that I'm going to quote it in full:

The slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single-celled unites, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which then begins its leisurely crawl across the garden floor, consuming rotting leaves and wood as it moves about. When the environment is less hospitable, the slime mold acts as a single organism; when the weather turns cooler and the mold enjoys a large food supply, "it" becomes "they." The slime mold oscillates between being a single creature and a swarm.

That's so fucking amazing. I used to think a lot about stuff like this. When I was young my dad planted a seed of thought into my brain about Gaia Theory and I spent many years thinking about whether or not we were just cells of the larger organism of Earth or whether or not our cells where aware of the larger being that they were apart of. I also used to think of Mitochondria and whether they were some other creature that just happened to be living a symbiotic relationship with us. Wow, it's amazing how the scientific daydreams of a ten year old boy sound a lot like the musings of a stoned college student.

Karl Rove

I just finished watching this week's frontline on Karl Rove. I knew before that he was an important person but I didn't know how powerful he actually was. He turned around the Republican party. He went to Texas, which was a strong Democratic state, and
turned it into a strong Republican state. He pretty much destroyed the Texas Democratic Party.

When I first started hearing about George W. I thought that he was a decent person. All of the news reports about him started all at once and kept saying that he was a moderate Republican, much less conservative than his father. We all know that that was bullshit. It turns out that that's exactly what Karl Rove wanted. He made sure Bush made peace with the Democrats in Texas so that he would look like a moderate during a future presidential campaign. It's amazing how far ahead people in politics seem to think. Karl Rove built his empire up over 40 years, he 0wnz0rs politics in the United States.

The Catholic Church

I was watching Charlie Rose the other night and one of his guests brought up a point that brought chills to me (this is paraphrased):

The Catholic Church is the oldest bureaucratic organization in existence. It's pretty much the only thing left of the Roman Empire. The positions within the church all still have the names of the bureaucrats in the Roman Empire and they still speak Latin.

It made me think. Could we say that the Roman Empire didn't actually die, it's still around in a form that is pretty much guaranteed not to change? Maybe some people saw that the empire was dying and knew that religious dogma was the only way to save the organization. So, maybe religion itself wasn't the cause of the downfall, but the last minute effort to save at least a bit of the old empire. I guess I need to continue reading Gibbon, I'm a third of the way through the 1300 page long abridged tome.

Lots of Questions

When I was little I asked questions all of the time. I know that most children do the same thing and the standard reply from parents who are tired of answering questions is "just because". Unfortunately my parents couldn't answer every question. But now, when I have a question I can goto wikipedia or the straight dope and get 99% of my questions answered. The rest can almost always be found by spending ten minutes searching google. I came across the straight dope about a year ago and it seems to answer everything, even politically incorrect questions. You no longer need to live your life without knowing what the difference is between white eggs and brown eggs.

Common Citations

Amazon Book Detail Pages now includes links to other books that are cited in that book. It would be very interesting to find the common books that I haven't read cited in all of the books that I have read. I wonder if AWS includes that API? I'm too lazy to look it up right now.

Framed and Mounted

This morning the framing people mounted the drawing in our living room. It looks amazing!
Unfortunately the photo doesn't show how really large the piece is. The frame is just under seven feet wide. Total cost: $2100.71. $652.80 for the restoration and $1,447.91 for the framing. It was actually quite a bit less than I expected.

The bench underneath it is from henrybuilt.

Sorry for the crappy color of the photo, I need to adjust it.