1-28-12 Hodgepodge

Facebook Junior

Google CEO Larry Page has evidently decided that he is not running a search company, but a social network.

Now, a source tells us that CEO Larry Page, who seems to be hell-bent on competing with Mark Zuckerberg whether it's the right thing for Google or not, had this to say to employees at a Friday staff event after the Search Plus Your World launch: "This is the path we're headed down -- a single unified, 'beautiful' product across everything. If you don't get that, then you should probably work somewhere else."

Perhaps there's more money to be made that way, but, as Sarah Lacy indicates, this is money from a completely different kind of customer -- unless Google makes it easy to not use its (soon-to-be former?) products as mere features of a "new Facebook".

[T]hat's very different from the Google of the mid-2000s. This was a company that agonized over adding even a single additional word to the stark white homepage, lest it detract from the search box and the core mission of the site to provide the most relevant results. 

As a customer who, if he wanted Facebook would already have an account there, I certainly "get that": I see that I need to watch these developments closely and perhaps become prepared to go elsewhere for what I actually want from Google.

Weekend Reading

"Verbal assaults by anti-capitalists like Gingrich, Perry and Santorum rely not only on Marxist and Christian prejudices against money-making but also on populism..." -- Richard Salsman, in "Mitt Romney's Uphill Battle Against Anti-Capitalist Conservatives" at Forbes

"To think that genuine criminals reform themselves is largely a fantasy borne of ignorance about how these kinds of people actually think." -- Michael Hurd, in "Some Minds Are Beyond Help" at DrHurd.com

"[R]ent controls have never worked: they create shortages and decrease the quality of housing." -- Michael Berliner, in "Why Rent Control Is Immoral" at The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

"... I maintain that I'm a trader when I'm wrong and an investor when I'm right, ..." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Distinguishing Trades from Investments" at SmartMoney

My Two Cents

I am hardly a fan of Mitt Romney, but have to agree with Richard Salsman that his status as anti-capitalist lightning rod is very revealing of the rest of the GOP presidential field. Were he only equal to the task of taking advantage of the opportunities the other candidates are giving him (and Barack Obama will give him), this election would, alone, present the public with a much-needed dose of clarity about capitalism and the proper scope of government.

Living off Craigslist

A man from Portland, Oregon has turned buying and selling things through Craigslist into a full time job. The whole thing is interesting, but I like the fact that he even manages to be a sort of traveling saleman.

In addition to being able to support my family, this job has a flexible schedule and I really can do it anywhere there is a Craigslist. I can even work when I’m on vacation in places like Hawaii (where I am right now). I also love the thrill of the hunt!

It's as if he has delegated storing an inventory to the local Craigslist users wherever he happens to be!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Clarified a sentence in first section. 

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Friday Four

1. I saw Mona Simpson's eulogy for Steve Jobs recommended very strongly at HBL recently, but didn't expect it to be as moving as it is. If you haven't already read it, do so now.

2. Natural selection in a flask... A laboratory reports that it has succeeded in solving a very difficult problem -- getting a single-celled species to evolve into a multicellular form -- much more easily than many in the field thought possible.

An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days.

Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life's progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn't duplicate prehistoric transitions, it could help reveal the principles guiding them.

"This is actually simple. It doesn't need mystical complexity or a lot of the things that people have hypothesized -- special genes, a huge genome, very unnatural conditions," said evolutionary biologist Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota, co-author of a study Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [minor format edits]

The whole journal article can be found here. It is amusing to compare the amount of time this took to the duration of the demonstration in the next item.

3. Slower than molasses. The world's longest-running lab demonstration was started in 1927 and is continuing today:

The pitch-drop experiment -- really more of a demonstration -- began in 1927 when Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, set out to show his students that tar pitch, a derivative of coal so brittle that it can be smashed to pieces with a hammer, is in fact a highly viscous fluid. It flows at room temperature, albeit extremely slowly. Parnell melted the pitch, poured it into a glass funnel, let it cool (for three years), hung the funnel over a beaker, and waited. Eight years later, a dollop of the pitch fell from the funnel’s stem. Nine years after that, another long black glob broke into the beaker.

The demonstration languished in storage for years until a faculty member learned of it and persuaded his department to display it again. Today, it can be viewed on webcam, but the last time a drop fell, there was a camera malfunction, so nobody has, to this day, gotten to watch a drop fall.

4. What are the benefits to rising early in the morning? Some of these I don't or can't take full advantage of, but I have definitely noticed a few since shifting to waking up at 3:00 a.m. for my personal projects. The writer's advice on how to become an early riser is sound, although, in my case, I simply made the shift all at once/quit sleeping until 5:00 or 6:00 "cold turkey".

-- CAV

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Egypt's GOP

Over at Salon is an article that likens the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Republican Party in the United States.

[T]he Brotherhood is a free-market party led by wealthy businessmen whose economic agenda embraces privatization and foreign investment while spurning labor unions and the redistribution of wealth. Like the Republicans in the U.S., the financial interests of the party's leadership of businessmen and professionals diverge sharply from those of its poor, socially conservative followers.

While I disagree with Avi Asher-Schapiro that the economic interests of wealthy individuals and poor individuals differ, I think this writer has a point. Since privatization, as the term is too-commonly used today, does not necessarily even really mean "privatization", and many people who are said to be "free market" are not really pro-capitalists, but advocates of a less government-controlled mixed economy, I think that the article is right to note that each political party is a coalition between such "free market" types and theocrats. (I wouldn't tout either party as "pro-capitalist".) The article clearly depicts this as a bad thing for the wrong reason: Asher-Schapiro seems to regard any vestige of capitalism in post-Mubarak Egypt as a bad thing.

What is actually bad about this is that Islam (like Christianity) is, in fact, ethically incompatible with capitalism. These businessmen are already soothing foreign investors: If their economic policies really do represent a loosening of the economy, the theocrats in their coalition will be in a position to falsely gain credit when, as often happens, the loosening of state economic controls brings about an economic boom. The "free market" part of this coalition is, like that of the GOP, serving as "useful idiots" for the theocratic part of the coalition, and will, ultimately, either have to leave the coalition or lose after the theocrats entrench themselves and some choice has to be made between businessmen remaining wealthy (or free to enjoy their wealth) and the dictates of Islam.

In the meantime, watch for other unwarranted or premature sighs of relief from the West.

-- CAV

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Graham on "Resourcefulness"

Venture capitalist Paul Graham considers why it is that, in hindsight, the most successful and least successful start-up groups stand out in two seemingly unrelated metrics:

[T]he startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say "they can take care of themselves." The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is.

However,

[T]he least successful startups ... all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.

Graham resolves his conundrum by making the following connection:

It turns out there is, and the key to the mystery is the old adage "a word to the wise is sufficient." Because this phrase is not only overused, but overused in an indirect way (by prepending the subject to some advice), most people who've heard it don't know what it means. What it means is that if someone is wise, all you have to do is say one word to them, and they'll understand immediately. You don't have to explain in detail; they'll chase down all the implications. [italics added]

Equally interesting are Graham's and one of his partner's thoughts on why some people are not wise (or, as Graham calls it "conversationally resourceful").  Graham sees the absence of wisdom as denial, while his partner sees a more passive, semi-automated process at work.

I think either or both can be at work in any given situation, with active denial being a moral flaw and the semi-automated process falling into the realm of the psycho-epistemological. Some of the unwise may well be unaware of that aspect of their thought process, but they can be made aware of it, and they can change their habitual mode of function through effort and self-monitoring. That said, someone who, "desperately tries to munge [possibly good advice from a clearly good source] into something that conforms with [his] decision" will have his work cut out for him.

-- CAV

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Trivializing Honor

With the recent death of Joe Paterno comes a great deal of speculation in the sports media about whether his legacy as a collegiate football coach is tarnished by a great failure on his part: He did not adequately follow up on an eyewitness report by an assistant of his of a child rape at a facility under his control, and allegedly committed by someone he worked with closely for years and who was still permitted regular use of those facilities. Regardless of whether Paterno was guilty of poor judgement, cowardice, or, morally, of knowingly harboring a child molester, something has become clear to me this morning: Despite his reputation for honor and his success as a collegiate coach, Joe Paterno either did not really understand (or care that much about) either. He couldn't have.

I base this on his motto: "Success without honor is an unseasoned dish."

Really? Honor is a mere seasoning, and not part of what makes success possible at all? And success is possible without virtue? While it is true that most people utter things they do not fully understand, we're talking about someone who held himself out as a mentor, as someone who accepted the charge of instilling virtue in the next generation. Apparently, he said this all the time. Most people in his audience surely lapped it up: To someone who hasn't thought much about virtue or success, this might sound good. Most people do confuse the trappings of success with the real thing. Most people do regard virtue as morally good, but unconnected to success. Most people will be guiltily relieved on some level to hear that honor is a nice, optional extra, and that they can go on pursuing their goals without worrying too much, so long as what they're doing is "working".

Most people who fall for this also won't bother themselves to ask questions like the following:

• If you get by in your job by taking credit for other people's work, how will that "success" translate if you lose that job tomorrow or the people you are taking advantage of leave? 
• If you achieve some personal health goal by adopting a regimen you hear great things about, but don't really understand, how do you know you aren't in the process of causing yourself a health problem?
• If you haven't done an honest day's work in your life, and somehow get away with robbing a bank, what will you do when the money runs out?

In every one of the above cases, someone has achieved what most people would regard as success, but without honor. Some form of deception, if even only of oneself, has been involved at minimum, and the "success" isn't real, in the sense of having been earned by understanding and applying knowledge of reality. Conversely, the person who does his own work, who makes sure he knows what he's doing, and who develops the skills he needs to survive -- as opposed to hoping to win one of life's lotteries, or sponging off or stealing from others -- can, and eventually will really succeed.

After considering Joe Paterno's motto, it hardly surprises me that, on some level, he regarded it as unnecessary to pursue the new information he obtained all those years ago about (in his context at that time) either Jerry Sandusky or Mike McQueary much more aggressively than he did.

-- CAV

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Identity and Causation in Politics

Approximately a year ago, I said the following of the so-called Arab Spring":

[S]ince Islamic totalitarians are so strong in the Middle East, I have a hard time imagining anything good coming of the unrest over there.

Two interesting historical parallels come to mind on the subject, though. (1) Tunisia's last ruler was installed after a popular uprising decades ago, showing how useful it is for people to revolt absent a coherent (and substantially correct) theory about the proper purpose of government. (2) Swap Islamic totalitarians with communists and consider how many such uprisings simply resulted in communist dictatorships during the Cold War. [minor format edits]

The people of Egypt have, sadly, proved me right. This isn't really a surprise, given that people act based on the ideas they hold true, and what most Egyptians regard as true. The people there voted as they were. Sadly for the dissenters, they, too, will get what the majority deserve to get as a result.

Final results on Saturday showed that Islamist parties won nearly three-quarters of the seats in parliament in Egypt's first elections since the ouster of authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak, according to election officials and political groups.

The Islamist domination of Egypt's parliament has worried liberals and even some conservatives about the religious tone of the new legislature, which will be tasked with forming a committee to write a new constitution. It remains unclear whether the constitution will be written while the generals who took power after Mubarak's fall are still in charge, or rather after presidential elections this summer.

In the vote for the lower house of parliament, a coalition led by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood won 47 percent, or 235 seats in the 498-seat parliament. The ultraconservative Al-Nour Party was second with 25 percent, or 125 seats.

The Salafi Al-Nour, which was initially the biggest surprise of the vote, wants to impose strict Islamic law in Egypt, while the more moderate Brotherhood, the country's best-known and organized party, has said publicly that it does not seek to force its views about an appropriate Islamic lifestyle on Egyptians.

I wonder how long it will be before some Islamist politician says something to the effect that Islamic law isn't being crammed down anybody's throats since such a huge majority wants it. Such will be the fruit of the United States promoting "democracy" in the Middle East, rather than pursuing its national self-interest, and, along the way, standing up for government that protects individual rights, including against misguided popular will.

So now, our press is calling the Muslim Brotherhood, whose motto is, "Islam is the solution", "moderate"? All I will say about that at the moment is this: Even more wishful thinking isn't the answer.

-- CAV

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1-21-12 Hodgepodge

New (as in Coke) Google

Farhad Manjoo hits the nail on the head when he discusses Google's tampering with search results in the name of turning everything into a social network.

For more than a decade, Google search wasn't "social" in any way. When I searched for a new car or a European hotel or the best way to plunge a toilet, Google would give me results that reflected the collected view of all Web users. That worked really well!

Not once during those years did I get to a Google results page and lament that I couldn’t see my friends' ideas about the car I should buy or the hotel I ought to book. While my friends are thoughtful and knowledgeable people, their views on the tens of thousands of large and small inquiries that I bring to Google every year are almost always irrelevant...

And, much later:

Google just broke its search engine. It did so under the guise of an improvement, an effort to mesh traditional search results with stuff from your social network. Within hours of announcing the change, Google took fire from tech pundits and competitors. Most of the criticism focused on implementation: Instead of drawing content from many different social networks, Google’s new results will lean heavily on its own network, Google+. [link removed]

Years ago, before Google became popular, I randomly discovered it when I noticed how bad most search engines were. (One kept changing what "AND" meant between narrowing its results to having BOTH terms and expanding its results to include EITHER term.) What caused me to adopt it as my search engine -- and tell other people about it -- were its simplicity and the fact that I knew what I would be getting out of it would be based on (a) my actual query and (b) relevance to most people, and not just a possibly biased group of people.

Maybe it's time to start looking around for a search engine again.

Weekend Reading

"Charles Dow's original stock index wasn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but the Transportation Index, first calculated in 1884 as a leading harbinger of the economy." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Playing the Rally in Transport Stocks", at SmartMoney

"... I frequently suggest that couples start with separate sessions, rather than meeting me as a couple." -- Michael Hurd, in "Does Couples Therapy Work?", at DrHurd.com

"If we wish to continue enjoying the benefits of capitalistic innovation, we should regard 'making a profit' as praiseworthy as 'creating value,' and give those who earn honest profits the respect and gratitude they deserve." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Why Is Creating Value Good, Profits Bad?" at RealClear Markets

"[T]he fact that bad people can misuse a technology does not justify restricting the freedoms of honest users." -- Paul Hsieh, in "SOPA, Guns, and Freedom" at PJ Media

My Two Cents

Michael Hurd's column has several choice quotes about how the question for which he names his column often arises for the wrong reasons. I also found his discussion of what he calls "triangulation" interesting.

Call triangulation, "the bane of the second-hander", since the very problem someone who does this needs to solve is getting in the way of him solving it.

And the winner is ...

KompoZer. A couple of weeks ago, I blegged for ideas on HTML editors. I was leaning towards the first suggestion I got, which was a Chrome plug-in, but saw lots of complaints about its latest version on its web site, so I dug a little more and found something that works well for me.

Note to Google: Using Chrome as the browser sped things up very nicely, and the new Blogger editor would be okay -- except that it drives me crazy that when I'm done with a paragraph and want to skip down a line, I have to hit a down arrow after hitting ENTER. Also annoying: When I type something in bold, like the title of this section of the post and then skip down a line to start writing, why does your editor (a) assume I want the paragraph in bold even after I toggle bold off, and (b) make me switch to the HTML view to fix it.

With KompoZer, I have restored order to the computer-aided editing experience: I tell my computer to do something, and the computer does it.

-- CAV

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