PeeWee Gets An iPad

Secure Bike Parking Downtown

From Bike Pittsburgh:

A new bike parking location is open at Pittsburgh's Century Building, 130 7th St, between Penn Ave and Fort Duquesne Blvd. $100/year gets you access to two bright-green, locked shipping containers for secure bike parking. There are also bike racks under an awning provided free, covered bike racks.

The Bicycle Commuter Center is the brainchild of Bill Gatti from TREK Development Group, the company that developed the Century Building. They're trying to attract young people to live downtown, and to build foot traffic in the area.

They're not quite bike lockers, which are very cool, but this is the next-best. It's a small good thing.

Say it Ain't So, Bram

The Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Pittsburgh Penguins.
The Pittsburgh Comet.

Three Champions.

We have read that the Pittsburgh Comet may shut down.
Say it ain't so.

We'll build you a stadium.
We'll give you a sweetheart deal on the land.
We'll arrange corrupt financing.
We'll make closed-door backroom development arrangements.
We'll ignore Council and the voters.
You can ride in Burkle's jet.
We won't pay anybody a living wage.
You can put up all the digital signs you'd like.
Zoning won't be an issue.
Don't sweat the neighborhood issues.

We'll do these things, not because you'd like them, but because
they'll give you things to investigate and blog about.

Say it ain't so.

The Beaver Changes Its Name

Located twenty miles northwest of downtown Pittsburgh, the bucolic borough of Beaver PA has been known to flirt with pretensions of grandeur. Realtors™ are known to say, "Beaver is the other Sewickley". Particularly self-assured residents may even turn it around and say, "Sewickley is the Beaver of Allegheny County".

Residents of Mount Lebanon are quite confident that neither of these cute hamlets will present any challenge to their dominance.

But there's a problem with building websites for Beaver businesses: web filters and parental controls tend to exclude websites that include certain words, as today's story in the New York Times regarding the renaming of a Canadian magazine will illustrate.

In 1920 when the Hudson’s Bay Company began publishing a magazine for its 250th anniversary, The Beaver probably seemed to be a good title. The company owed much of its early fortune to the trade in beaver pelts.

The Beaver, which was initially a bit of in-house boosterism, evolved into a respected magazine about Canadian history. Last week Canada’s National History Society, the nonprofit group that now publishes The Beaver, decided that the Internet required the magazine to undergo a name change.

There are workarounds. You avoid repeating the address on every page. You can present the address as a typographic image, rather than as actual text. You can submit the site to various web screening services and hope to make the whitelist.

There may be Seven Words You Can't Say on TV, but there are many more problematic words on the web.

Finished: The Back of the Napkin

Finished reading "The Back of the Napkin" by Dan Roam. This book dealt with thinking visually and telling/selling through images, specifically sketches and charts drawn on Napkins.


Roam presents a series of thought experiments that takes the reader through his perspective on drawing. He asks, How come in Kindergarten everybody can draw, and by 12th Grade nobody thinks they can draw? His Visual Codex provides generic examples of the type of pictures you might use in different situations, determined by the interrogatives (when where who what how why) and by a selection of five dimensions that he identifies.

Roam recommends Vanity Fair Everyday napkins for drawing, but says that most any will do.

Where Edward Tufte is a minimalist and a purist, Roam is more of a generalist, more concerned with generously communicating an idea than the efficiency of how many dots are required to display meaning.

This was a very good book that I'll make use of whenever I think about how to make a conceptual presentation.

Realigning Political Boundaries

It's a sign of courage by a local politician if they advocate realigning political boundaries - merging the City and County, or doing something about the number of local political entities that once made sense but now primarily serve to maintain the status quo.

Maybe that's not enough of a change. Maybe we should think bigger.

Neil Freeman takes realignment to a higher level, and considers what the map of states would look like if they were realigned the way Districts of the House of Representatives are. Here's his view of the 50 states (click the image for his site):



In our present format, the population of states ranges from 493,782 to 33,871,648. In Neil Freeman's depiction, the population of states will range from 5.4 to 5.6 million. Major cities and their suburbs are in the same state. His map restores the historical structure of the electoral college and the political alignment of the United States' federal system.

In this image to the right, I've overlaid the existing state boundaries above our regional map in Neil Freeman's depiction.

In the areas that I'm familiar with, these boundaries make contemporary sense. Breaking Upstate New York into Erie, New England, and Susquehanna makes great sense. I think the Ohio split into North Coast and Sohio makes sense. I like the way the State of Allegheny works. I think that the States of Allegheny and Erie would be better off in the new structure than they currently are, combined in the same entity as Philadelphia.

I think we'd have better national politics with a state map like this.

Facebook's Information Bubble

Economists generally warn us about bubbles, where the pressure of growth exceeds underlying fundamentals; once speculation sets it the bubble becomes an attractive nuisance, and when the bubble pops it leaves a lot of people suffering, except for the smart ones who know enough to get out early.

Facebook has become an information bubble. It knows so much about so many people, but the real treasure is that it knows who your network is. This accumulation of glommed data is a marketer's fantasy come true. And yet, Facebook has not found a way to make money.

This week's New York Times artice, The Three Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now, is notable for a few reasons. To myself it's notable in that it's lifted, word for word, from its original position on Read Write Web. Usually the Grey Lady does not simply repurpose content from another source without explicitly acknowledging the provenance, but perhaps times are changing.

The most important thing about the article is its urgency and its degree of specificity; click this, hover there, choose this. This sort of specific guidance from a source with geek credibility is commendable.

IANAF (I am not a Facebook-er), but I've had friends show me what they do on Facebook. I haven't tried it because I'm concerned it's a lot like doing heroin, one flirtation and you're hooked. That seems to be the case among people I know.

Last week a friend of mine sent me a link to his Facebook page so I could see his avatar image. I also saw the avatars of a dozen of his friends. Being somewhat geeky, I pressed Shift/F5, the page refreshed, and I saw another dozen friends. I did that a few times and realized that anybody can sequence through all of any Facebooker's friends.

I followed a few of the links, because I know some of his friends. On their Facebook pages, I found other people I knew among their friends - these would be "co-friends". I found I could even drill down to friends-cubed, third-level friends. This is sort of the opposite of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.



The thing that concerns me is that people are loading their information about themselves and their friends into Facebook, assuming that FB is (1) benign, (2) cost-free, and (3) sustainable. The problem is that eventually, Facebook is going to have to make money.

When a guy with a forest needs money, he sells firewood.
When an Afghan farmer needs money, he sells opium.
When a company with your information needs money, they sell your information.

In his new book, Jarod Lanier writes regarding Facebook, "The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear at the time this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who might someday show up".

"The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view," Lanier writes, "is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable."

Facebook users are giving this Corporation most of their key information. Facebookers that take surveys and complete profiles give even more information that helps FB assign them to various demographic profiles.

When Facebook goes bankrupt, a few interesting things will happen. Their assets will be reorganized and used in the most financially beneficial way. What's interesting is that the Facebook privacy policy and privacy guarantee evaporate into vapor at the moment of bankruptcy. When the Facebook bubble bursts, the privacy policy pops too.

There will be a bidding war for FaceBook's database, which will become more valuable in bankrupcty (free of the privacy policy) than it ever was during Facebook's tenure.

The smartest thing for the buyer of the database to do would be to immediately reintroduce the Facebook service, encouraging Facebookers to continue contributing and updating their information, only now without the same privacy policy.

Green Pirates in a Seagoing Prius

Once upon a time, there was an alternative fuels (biodiesel) vehicle named Earthrace. She was a 78-foot wave-piercing trimaran made out of carbon fiber. She was created to break the world record for circumnavigating the globe in a powerboat while making an environmental statement. The way-cool vertical fins at the stern are engine air intakes.



After that project, she was seconded to Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which could be described as a Green Peace splinter group. She was refitted with Kevlar wrapped around the carbon-fiber hull, and was equipped with speakers capable of 9,000 watts to disrupt whaling operations. She was re-christened Ady Gil, after a Sea Shepherd sponsor. Her mission was to join Sea Shepherd's 2009-2010 anti-whaling effort and physically block the harpooning of whales.



The Japanese whaling fleet was not unprepared. Their company included the Shonan Maru 2, which is described as a "security and utility" vessel. For two days, the Ady Gil had prevented the whaling fleet from taking a single whale. The Ady Gil had announced their intention to ram the stern (disabling the rudder) of any ship that harpooned a whale. Also, the Ady Gil was towing a rope while sailing close to whaling ships in hopes of fouling the propellers. Finally, series of maneuvers culminated in the Shonan Maru2 ramming the Ady Gil. In the photo at right you can see the Ady Gil under the Shonan Maru.

There's always at least two sides to a story. Japan's Cetacean Research Institute, which supports the whaling for research purposes (I guess it's for their own good), claims that their vessel was attacked by the Ady Gil. The Ady Gil was flying a pirate's flag, and had the skull-and-crossbones painted on the hull.


One crewmember of the Ady Gil suffered broken ribs in the collision. The violence was limited to the collision; there was no shooting. Another Sea Shepherd vessel attempted to tow the Ady Gil to port, but the carbon-fiber trimaran was lost enroute.


Here's a video of the ramming, you may want to mute your speakers - language not appropriate for young audiences.



Here we have activists and industry engaging in acts of war on the open ocean. National governments once held a monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence. What makes this interesting to me is it's another indication of the diminishing hegemony of nation-states.

The true believers in the Sea Shepherd vessels are no different from their fellow travelers in other conflicts who are willing to be martyred for their cause. The industry, with shadow support from government, is the true seat of power.

Finally, it must be said that this represents another round in the geek Pirates vs Ninja internet meme (Pirates=Sea Shepherd, Ninja=Japanese security vessel). (also)

Failure to Connect the Dots

Today's Wall Street Journal carries this news about a recent snafu:


Connecting the dots, or pattern recognition, is something humans are supposed to be good at. It's an essential survival skill, and it's the subject of much research. While individuals are excellent at pattern recognition, organizations don't seem to be very good at it at all.

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On 12/23, before the Detroit attack, I blogged about alternative New York magazine covers that summarized the decade. I really liked the one that summarized the decade through an image of connected dots because that was the phrase for the failures that led to 9/11, and I thought we'd been trying to make ourselves a connect-the-dots decade.

I also liked the artist's work because it suggested that reality is a probability distribution, if you think about the dots as waves rather than particles, and at times that's a good way to look at things.

In the aftermath of the Detroit attack on NWA flight 253, an Airbus 330, and recognizing that we failed at pattern recognition in both 2001 and 2009, I've revised the artist's depiction.

original

revised

I wanted to include a video of PeeWee Herman playing "connect the dots" on Magic Screen, but for the first time YouTube gave me bupkis.

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(edit)
From cartoonist Steve Benson: