What's important here, however, is not that Google sucks up our data like a rabid vacuum cleaner in the sky.  The critical thing is that this be a two way street.  Google learns about us, and we learn about Google.  Or, put into more broad terms: Institutions collect our data and we get access to it as a result.  We need to become shareholders in the data market.   Information, and more importantly its organization into meaningful equations has never been so close to the surface before.  Never before has the human race had the opportunity to gather and interpret such large samples of data about itself--and that opportunity would be a shame to overlook or give over solely to those who collect the data.  

  Toward that end, Google has recently introduced a tool that has the potential to take the power of search and visual data manipulation to the largest data sets in the world.  Google Public Data Explorer gives the user access to huge (albeit limited at the moment) pieces of data on all kinds of subjects.  The potential here for census information, government data, educational data, research data, and so much more is hard to overstate.  One of the more dissapointing problems in education is the translation and interpretation of the primary sources, often just data, into a meaningful lesson--one that is often not the only interpretation or even the correct one.  This tool makes cutting out that interpretive middle-man incredibly simple, putting the student in control of how that data gets arranged.  Tangentially, learning to arrange and interpret large sets of data is a crucial skill this tool could help teach to the generations who are going to be exposed to it from day one.  

  The tool is more of a toy now, lacking enough data sets to make it truly powerful.  But if Google keeps feeding this library of data sets we might some day have a repository for the human condition by the raw numbers--for everyone to see and extrapolate from.  

MLB At Bat app for iPhone

  Now that Olympic Curling has come and gone, the Lakers have things well in hand, and there are 32 days until the Major League Baseball season opener, it's time to get this fantastic app for your iPhone or iPod Touch.  Yes, it's more expensive this year, $15, but it was a steal last year at $10.  For $15 you get every regular season game (geographical blackouts excepted) live with streaming video, audio, stats, news, and push notifications.  It is without a doubt the best example of an excellent iPhone OS app I could think of.  

Bad News:

Apple sues HTC over everything

  Apple is suing HTC, a leading smartphone manufacturer, for 20 patent infringements.  This is the idiotic result of a terribly broken patent system and Apple not having the class and dignity to let their competitors compete.  

Good News:

 Virgin America moves to HTML5

   This is excellent news because it shows that you can move to an open standards based platform and still compete.  It's also good news because it means I'm still right to think that Adobe Flash is the bane of the internet.   

Bad News:

We're Doomed

"I studied journalism, my college degree there in communications. And now I am back there wanting to build some trust back in our media. I think the mainstream media is quite broken and I think there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there — that’s why I joined Fox. Fair and balanced, yes. You know because, Jay, those years a go that I studied journalism it was all about the who, what, when, where, and why, it was not so much the opinion interjected in hard news stories," - FNC pundit Sarah Palin.

Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan for catching this one.

Good News:

Valve cleverly announces Steam for Mac...maybe more?

The one downside to using OS X is that many quality game manufacturers have long refused to build their games to run on both Windows and OS X.  The reasons for this are many and they mostly have to do with Windows having the marketshare that it does.  However, as Apple's marketshare continues to rise, these game developers are throwing away larger and larger pieces of potential profit by ignoring OS X.  Well, it looks like Valve, perhaps the second greatest game developer of all time, will be making an announcement soon regarding their future on the OS X platform.  Call me giddy.  

Good News/Bad News:

USPS to end Saturday delivery

Hard to quantify this as anything other than something they should have done nearly a decade ago.  In fact, as soon as we all decided that this internet thing was here to stay, they should have dramatically overhauled their services.  So much correspondence, and more importantly, advertising spam, has been replaced by e-mails that it's not at all surprising this institution is losing money.  The bad part is, it's hard to see how any of the jobs that will inevitably be lost are going to be easily replaced.  

By the time my flight pushed back from the gate it would have taken a severe and sudden loss of altitude to pry that book from my hands. When the plane landed I had read roughly 300 pages and the book was finished before I slept that night.  It hooked me, to put it mildly.  What I was hooked on was a story that I had never read before.  Unique in so many respects, Daemon held a genuinely original plot based on science fiction that was more science than fiction.  The story moved at a rapid pace, carefully weaving a nearly overwhelming amount of real world technology into a fantastic narrative which left me with that sublime realization, "This could happen!  No.  This is happening."

Daemon presents a world in which a distributed artificial intelligence, a piece of intelligence that is not sentient but instead is more akin to the world's most complex Choose Your Own Adventure book, begins to slowly change the world we live in through the power it can wield via the internet and our networked systems--whether we like it or not.  It manipulates our infrastructure as well as society with the calm logic that only a computer program can muster.  The classics like Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey suggest that the real threat is artificial intelligence.  Daemon suggests that instead the threat comes from a "smart" infrastructure in the hands of human intelligence with a powerful will to manipulate it.

A few weeks ago Suarez's much anticipated sequel, Freedom™ arrived and I immediately purchased it as an audiobook and began listening.  Freedom™ picks up exactly where Daemon left off, but the whole of the reader's perspective on the events in Daemon and the characters embroiled in the conflict is turned on its head.  Suarez makes it increasingly difficult to determine right from wrong and the good from the bad in this future where the real civilizations of the world meet the contrived civilizations of World of Warcraft or Everquest.  In fact, it is hard to tell where the fall of one society ends and the rise of another begins--and even if you could spot that line, Suarez makes it difficult to rest a moral judgement upon it.  

The two books together form an engrossing example of a future.  A future in which our technology coexists with us in a symbiotic relationship.  As an unabashed futurist I find the ideas in these books fascinating and even compelling.  Others may find it horrifying.  In either case, it is a future worth reading about, if only because it is a future not very far off at all.  

Also, this is an excellent piece of video on the State of the Internet and how we use it.

Also, this is exactly why the younger generations communicate via text messages and Facebook.

Also, this Pew study on news consumption gives Americans more credit than they deserve, I think, but it's a start.  Particularaly if that participatory number, 37%, is at all accurate.

Also, I have a curling hat.  It is awesome.

Unfortunately, because of the high volume of Apple users in the New York City area, this repair is likely to take all week. I am now in my third full day (79 hours and 3 minutes) without my computer. To be honest, I thought this would be harder. For a device that typically only sleeps when I do, it seemed it's absence from my routine would be pretty disruptive. In fact, all its removal has proven is that I can and will engage in 90% of my normal computing activity on my iPhone--including drafting and publishing this entire rambling post.

There are a couple of things that this forced detention from my normal work surface has brought into sharp relief and are worth mentioning if you're a monumental computer geek:

Workflow: This is the first thing I noticed and the last thing I suspected would be a real issue when working at other computers. Just like sitting behind the wheel of someone else's car is unnerving and requires far more brain power than sitting behind your own wheel, sitting at a computer that has not been customized just the way you like it can be frustrating. More than just the keys on the keyboard being in the wrong place, whole programs and folder scripts are missing. Key combinations that invoke specific actions are no longer there. My desktops are not arranged as always and navigating them is a different set of muscles than my lizard brain is used to operating. I had no idea how far I had taken my user experience away from the default and into my own.

Outlook: I'm no big fan of Windows, but for the last few days I've been using an XP workstation at the office and it's reminded me that while's still ugly, convoluted, and has more pop-ups than a High School football team at a whorehouse, Windows is a pretty decent operating system. However, I have been using Outlook for the first time as a mail client, and it's making me want to weep tears of sorrow for the millions of people out there who suffer through this day in and day out. I never liked Mail, Apple's email client for OS X. I've long thought it could use some powerful features it lacks and improvements to the UI. Now that I've been using Outlook for 24 hours, Mail is the program I miss most. Everything about Outlook is an affront to good design, productivity, and humanity. It's as if someone designed a mail client based on the worst Geocities websites of the early 90s--everything is a button and most of the icons make little or no sense, if you squint long enough to see what they are. Contact's addresses don't autofill. There are three--THREE!!--search bars at the top. Sure, they all call out their seperate functions, presumably to avoid confusion, but why not consolidate them? Why can't I search for contacts, mail items, or help topics from the same box? It's not likely I'd need to do more than one of those things at a time! Weeping tears of sorrow for you. Honestly.

Dual Monitors: I'm used to having two working surfaces. I'd probably have three if it didn't mean yet another adapter and not being able to see anything past my desk. Having only one these last two days has convinced me that in the future we will make more and more surfaces available for the data and interfaces we use every minute of every day. As graphics processing and LCD screens and projectors become more refined and cheaper the need to consolidate information will decrease and the ability to make it viewable in locations other than your own private workspace will become the norm. Multi-purpose displays in the common spaces of homes and offices, networked to the computers of their inhabitants makes complete sense to me. Find a recipe? Throw it on the kitchen monitor. An article your coworker should read? Plaster it on the 42" flatscreen in the break room. Got a livestream of all the RFID tagged inventory passing in and out of your warehouse? You could put that up on the vertical displays in your shipping department, like a departures/arrivals kiosk at the airport. Sure these things would be expensive luxuries now, but I suspect that in the next decade or so we will see the concept of the single or even just dual video outputs on a computer dwindle and die away.

There's something about this sport.  Forty-two pound granite smart-bombs, space age brooms, indiscriminate screaming, and strategy that is a hybrid of chess and billiards combine to fascinate even the most casual observer.  Curling's ability to grab one's attention and freeze it is a testament to its originality, and even more impressive considering what an inscrutable sport it is.  The first curling match I ever watched was so foreign to me that I spent the entirety of the game with my jaw agape, staring at the TV screen and completely unaware of what was going on, who was doing well, who was losing, or how on Earth either team scored points.  But I was hooked.  

At first I was intrigued by the apparatus.  Granite stones from a specific quarry in Scotland and milled to exacting specifications and weights, with built in electronics to prevent cheating.  Polycarbonate brooms built to be light weight, fast, and customizable.  Painted sheets of ice with hand-prepared surfaces.  And yelling.  Over time I even understood the purpose of the brooms--sweeping the path of the rock allows it travel farther and straighter--and all the yelling: on a sheet of ice 150 feet long, telling the sweepers how hard, or not, to sweep requires yelling--A great deal of yelling.  

As the curling accoutrement became familiar territory and still I was obsessed with curling my fascination centered on the strategy.  The truth is that there is a great deal of strategy in any given curling match.  Each team gets eight stones to throw in each end and only the stones left on the ice at the end of all throwing can potentially score any points.  The tactics behind any given shot are determined by whether you can afford to leave an opponents stone in play or whether it might be more prudent to lay a trap for your opponent with his next stone.  Then the scoring presents strategy of another kind; do you use your last stone advantage or blank the end and keep it on the hopes of scoring more points in the next end?  Do you throw your stones to force your opponent to score so as to gain the last stone advantage in the next end? Each end of every game presents unique tactical conundrums for the team to solve.  

What really keeps me, and others, I suspect, attracted to curling is its unique team-sport qualities.   Most competitive sports are either measured in an individual's achievements or in the collective achievements of a large team and their coaching staff.  Curling is unique in that while it is a team sport, each member contributes equally and has to perform the same feats as every other member of the team.  Also unique is the manner in which decisions are made.  A curling team will stand amidst the stones in the house and poll each other on how best to approach the next shot.  Few strategic decisions, if any, seem to come from a coach and all members of the team are encouraged to weigh in.  In short, it is a friendly, democratic sport that welcomes strategic thinking in which no players are pawns and no serious advantage is handed to the physically gifted. 

It's unlikely that curling will ever achieve the fan base or acclaim of any of the major sports in this country, but it is an easy sport to become enamored with and I believe it has huge growth potential here in the United States.  If the amount of coverage--and therefore critical advertising--the sport is getting from NBC and the press during these winter Olympics in Vancouver is any indication, curling clubs across America will see significant rise in membership in the coming years.  

Such is the case with those behind the insidious Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA.  The goal of this internationally organized treaty would be to further the interest of corporations whose only chance of continuing to survive as they have in previous decades is to ensure that they can treat their customers as criminals first and consumers second.  ACTA has received little to no attention in the mainstream American press because it has not yet been completed and is much more complex than the 45 second sound-byte today's media affords such topics.  What has been leaked from behind the closed door negotiations is almost exclusively bad.  First and foremost, this trade agreement is designed to give intellectual property owners the ability to shut down users it claims are stealing their property, without the burden of proof or an appeal to the judicial system.  ACTA would also compel signatory nations to enforce border crossing searches for intellectual property infringement.  Want to go to Canada?  Better not have any of that Eve 6 album you got off of Napster in 8th grade on your iPod!  "Canada would never do that, eh!" you say, "they're just too darn nice!"  Of course they would.  These trade agreements are designed such that those member nations that did not participate in proactive searches for IP theft would suffer trade penalties, while the overall incentives built into the agreement put nations who do not sign the agreement at a significant disadvantage.  In short, ACTA puts a huge asterisk right next to the Fourth Amendment.*   

The worst part about this isn't what's in ACTA, it's how ACTA works.  ACTA is a product of corporate lawyers and lobbyists from multinational corporations with access to the highest levels of the world's governments.  It does not protect people.  It doesn't even protect nations.  All that ACTA does is protect those entities whose interest is not in the civil foundations set down in the constitutions of the countries they operate in, but in the market share and margins they can maintain by keeping you locked into their product line--by force, if necessary.  Worse still, there's really not a damn thing you can do about it.  The representative body of our government, and specifically the Senate, is unlikely to get involved.  An executive trade agreement does not require Senate approval, and whether or not the Senate even has the power to review or terminate such an agreement is a constitutional grey area.  Which is exactly why this trade agreement is being negotiated in secret and not being passed as domestic legislation in this or almost any other country--Singapore being the only exception I am aware of, but they're already essentially a fascist state.  Political and public support for such draconian IP protections has been weak to non-existant, so the corporations who refuse to adapt to modern technologies and cling to their pre-Internet business models have decided to make an end-run around the legislative bodies of the world's nations and simply engineer a trade agreement--through the inertia of their powerful friends and large bank accounts--that implements the tools they need in its provisions.  

President Obama's administration has been poor to awful on this subject, and simply pointing out the unlikelihood that any other administration would act less callously doesn't make it right.  Our media has failed to warn us, and frankly I don't think there are enough Americans actively paying enough attention to make a difference even if they had raised the red flags and rung all the bells.  If ACTA moves forward with these provisions and the US signs, then it will be one more shudder in the death rattles of representative government by the people and a shot in the arm to government by fiduciary responsibility.  

*Actually, there's already a huge asterisk next to the Fourth Amendment thanks to the Dept. of Homeland Security and the search provisions they put in place regarding travelers entering the US and their digital property.