Chris Boese's Weblog

Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking!

And look! The whole Errol Morris film on A Brief History of Time is up on Google Video! (I loved that movie...  just hearing the opening bars of the incredible Philip Glass score sets me off).

You know, this is probably awful, but you know what I miss? The newer computer voices have more inflection than that early computer voice that I just always associated with Stephen Hawking.

Even with other voices to choose from, I always picked the one that sounded like Stephen Hawking, just so I could pretend that I had the famous physicist talking to me inside my computer. I just like having him around!

I used to listen to the NOAA weather repeaters on my scanner as I drove around the country too (until they changed the voice), because I wanted Stephen Hawking giving me the weather report. I could just pretend he'd tell me about the tornado watch, and then after, give a short discourse on entropy or black holes in the hearts of tornadoes. Or maybe past tornadoes that existed at that particular point in the space-time continuum.

Is there another "French Revolution" looming behind this Icelandic volcano?

 

Eyafallajkull: subglacial volcanic eruption.  Zoom on lightning caused by electrical discharge within the ash column.

Link: SwissEduc: Stromboli Online - Volcanic and glacial landforms of Iceland.

Link: How an Icelandic volcano helped spark the French Revolution | World news | The Guardian.

Smoke and steam hangs over the volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland. Volcanic ash drifting across the Atlantic forced the cancellation of flights in Britain and disrupted air traffic across Europe.

Photograph: Jon Gustafsson/AP

How an Icelandic volcano helped spark the French Revolution

Profound effects of eight-month eruption in 1783 caused chaos from US to Egypt, say experts

Just over 200 years ago an Icelandic volcano erupted with catastrophic consequences for weather, agriculture and transport across the northern hemisphere %u2013 and helped trigger the French revolution. The Laki volcanic fissure in southern Iceland erupted over an eight-month period from 8 June 1783 to February 1784, spewing lava and poisonous gases that devastated the island's agriculture, killing much of the livestock. It is estimated that perhapsa quarter of Iceland's population died through the ensuing famine.

[...]

OTOH, this FB link from my friend John Voelker points out (with link to carbon chart illustration):

So the Icelandic volcano actually produced a major net reduction of atmospheric CO2 by grounding European aviation. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

Jonathan Zittrain warns: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms

Link: Zittrain: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms - GigaOM.

I love it when Jonathan Zittrain weighs in on things. Loved his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and mostly what he says here expands on ideas in there, focused on the platform side of things, and the growing lack of "generativity" and openness in the newer platforms coming out, like the iPhone and Kindle.

So if you haven't read the book, here's some pithy bits as summarized by Liz Gannes:

Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice.

You don’t truly own the toaster — rather, according to Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, “You entered into a service relationship with a breakfast-oriented provider.” That’s the tragic and giggle-worthy analogy Zittrain uses to illustrate his worry that the cloud computing model gives too much control to platforms, which must be trusted to do good.

[...]

His audience included co-panelist Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, a company Zittrain pinpointed as being at the center of the problem.

For instance, Zittrain called Amazon’s Kindle a device with “an operating system crying to get out.” To an even greater degree than with Apple’s iPhone, programmers can’t get direct access to develop on the Kindle platform, he noted. And Amazon retreating on the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature and zapping of U.S. customers’ copies of “1984″ — despite a convincing apology by Jeff Bezos — show the company can beam itself down to make the device less useful when it chooses.

[...]

Zittrain also pointed to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people can be put to near-automated work that makes them effectively zombies for largely non-useful purposes such as giving five-star reviews for devices they’ve never used. In this case he thinks government regulation, like the FTC’s new blogging disclosure policy, could be a good thing — at least in the sense that it pressures Amazon to police tasks on its platform.

[...]

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking make beautiful music together

Link: YouTube - Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed).

You know you want to watch it!

Frank Rich exposes the limits of Beltway insularity, and the pundits who eat their own dogfood

Link: Frank Rich - They Sure Showed That Obama - NYTimes.com.

Rich gloats a little, perhaps presumes too much schadenfreude over what was neither a major fail whale NOR a big victory, but in the first month of a new administration, everything tends to get blown out of proportion.

Sort of like how the first year's grades for college freshmen cause such large swings and swoons in the old GPA.

But I enjoyed reading this too much not to pull out my favorite and most pithy bits. Rich surely does have a nice turn of the phrase. My most fav bits are in bold, emphasis mine.

Op-Ed Columnist

They Sure Showed That Obama

By FRANK RICH

Published: February 14, 2009

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

[Yeah, there's that schadenfreude dance... naaaah nah-nah boo-boo. Nothing like a little taunting between friends.]

[...]

“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” [campaign manager David Axelrod] said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself.

[...]

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

[After living steeped in a world bent on underestimating and condescending to the broader audience of American people-- TV's cable news lowest common denominator programming-- can I just say the fact that someone would actually SAY this out loud is such a wonderful breath of fresh air, I almost don't know what to say! I mean, I tried to say such things to editorial managers and in editorial meetings, and was almost universally dismissed out of hand as someone whose credibility and expertise was in question for even suggesting such a thing. The conventional wisdom was that no one ever lost ratings or got fired for UNDER-estimating the intelligence and discernment of broader audiences.

What does it mean, if, at the highest levels of this president's administration, they are NOT assuming Americans are stupid "Joe Six-Paks," or even "Joe the Plumbers"? Wow. This is a massively radical shift on so many levels. If it is more than lip service (and we have also seen the first prime time presidential news conference where the first question asked gets a 7-minute response, a response that not only consisted of complete sentences, complex sentences, but also PARAGRAPHS. Hey, I've been an English teacher, so I can go a step further. They were well-developed and crafted paragraphs! I wrote about it in a previous post on this blog: BRAINS ARE BACK!) then the American people are being "called into" (think Louis Althusser) higher engagement and intellectual processing, right at the time when we need their smart engagement most.

Somebody needs to be noticing what a radical change this is, a change in faith, in belief, not just in democracy (small-d), but in ordinary people. Rachel Maddow has been going around talking about not talking down to audiences too, in interviews. It goes against mass comm theory, against programming wisdom, against years of Nielsen Ratings, and yet, they are saying it. Must be nice to be a big enough 800-pound gorilla that you don't get snarked out of editorial meetings for saying and believing something that goes against decades of conventional lowest common denominator programming wisdom. YO! Let's change these damn theories! Let's prove those wags WRONG! Let's actually RESPECT audiences!]

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s.

[...]

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

[The guffaws should have been widespread with that last number. It is the most bizarre kind of historical revisionism of the non-reality-based universe to even attempt to bring off such a claim, let alone to fan out and spread the word to the freepers and astro-turfers with a straight face. I'm not one to trust the American school system quite that much (having taught writing to college students, and knowing what they can readily pull out of their heads and what they can't), to assume that FDR's New Deal turnaround is common wisdom and an authoritative trope. I believe in Americans and their brains, I most certainly do, but I also know school systems at all levels have failed them, and badly, as well as universities where I have worked.

Obi Wan Kenobi may be our only hope, but it is the brains of ordinary people which will have to bring us back from this brink.

So the black-is-white, up-is-down crowd is out chattering on teevee as if the rules of the game had not changed, as if talking points revisionism could change reality just like in the old days, so why the hell not try to spin out the con job that the New Deal CAUSED the Great Depression?! Yeah, there's the ticket!

What was it Hitler's (whoops, stumbling on Godwin's Law) propaganda minister said? That little lies can't be counted on to get the job done. What you needed was the "Big Lie." Yeah, I'd say claiming FDR's New Deal CAUSED the Great Depression certainly qualifies as a "Big Lie."

Funniest thing to come out this past week, while the Stimulus was passing despite the GOP obliviousness was a web site called the GOP Problem Solver. Go type your problems in there! Try it. Too much fun.

The other bizarre thing to come out this week, tucked away in an obscure CSPAN Congressional interview, a legislator revealed while talking about something else that the U.S. had been just 3 hours from total economic collapse on September 15, 2008, when the shit was hitting the fan. Somehow, these two things go together. Go bookmark both of them, and ponder deeply during your yoga or meditation session or whatever.]

[...]

Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

[...]

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.”

[...]

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.”

[That was one of the most HILARIOUS TV clips of the week, I have to say. Steele may well turn out to be another one of those gifts to late night comedians.

I gotta add my own shot here, at the peculiar drama with Sen. Judd Greg (R-NH) pulling out on Commerce Secretary, even as the Obama administration claims he was the one who threw his hat in the ring. What was up with that?! SOMETHING was going on behind the scenes, I feel certain of it. He surely didn't think he'd be allowed to gerrymander the Census to lock up Republican districts or something, did he? I mean, eight years of stupid doesn't mean you assume stupid is the rule, and Obama was not born yesterday and clearly his grandmomma didn't raise no fools.

What was up with Greg? My guess? The GOP goose-step organizers shifted hard obstructionist in the past two weeks, even since Greg put his hat in, and they had something on him and forced him, not only to back out, but to promise not to run again in New Hampshire (a friend in NH tells me he had already been making those noises, tho). So Crist wouldn't cave to the top-down GOP organization, nor would those three GOP senators willing to vote for the stimulus, but Sen. Arlen Spector (R-PA) admitted that more senators would have come over, but that some HARD orders appear to have come down from on GOP high. I'm thinking those hard orders reached Greg too.

The scorched earth Republicans, the K-Street whips, the our-way-or-the-highway types, are stepping up party discipline, to their own clueless detriment, as Rich so eloquently points out. But what are they using for leverage? They don't have the patronage goodies to pass out anymore. Their pay-to-play system is unhinged with a new sheriff. All they have are their banker cronies, and those folks WANT the bailouts, so long as they are as crooked and full of loopholes as they can keep them.

I'll have to revisit these questions again, as they are worth pondering, as it all plays out. Rich meanwhile is taking his own shots below, and they hit the target bull's eye, so I'll let him play us out. This is really one of his best editorials.]

[...]

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets.

[...]

But, as he [Pres. Obama] said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

What gives me the most joy about the presidential election

It was hard to detail all the things we lost as eight years of cronyism and anti-intellectualism, the disempowering of expertise, research, studies, and specialists began. But isn't it fascinating, now in hindsight, to look back and compare the different outcomes from the radically different worldviews?

I know postmodernists like to take potshots at the Enlightenment, but like literacy, the Enlightenment gave an important base for the pomos to branch off FROM. The Bush "post-rationalists" were a nightmare of authoritarian relativism, and I am of great hope that some good academic types will spend  time exploring all the various aspects and contradictions and ironies embodied in authoritarian relativism, not just in its thought processes, but also in its outcomes, in the thorny knots in public affairs it tied us all up in.

Like "proving" absence, as when the U.S. demanded Saddam Hussein "prove" he didn't have WMD. I've revisited this conundrum recently, while listening to Ron Suskind's "The Way of the World" and "One-Percent Solution" on audio book. Suskind of course was the one who first clued us in on how deep the post-rationalist thinking went, with his famous quotation about the Bush Administration's loose association with the so-called "reality-based universe."

But the demand on Saddam to prove absence, which left me gasping at the time for its unabashed fallacious thinking, is made even worse when we see in "The Way of the World" that the British spy agency had turned an internal security officer high up in Saddam's government, an officer who was offering detailed and highly credible information about Saddam's WMD programs before the war started, but it wasn't the information the Bushies wanted to hear, so the source was blown off, not even used as an intelligence asset DURING the war.

And of course, Cheney's twisted logic that gave us the "one-percent solution" remains probably the most logically tortured post-rational policy in the history of the modern world.

But now... BRAINS ARE BACK! Yay!

Link: Goodbye, Anti-intellectualism. Brains are Back! | Newsweek Voices - Michael Hirsh | Newsweek.com.

THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON Michael Hirsh

Brains Are Back!

After eight years of proud incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, we now have a leader who values nuance and careful thought.

Published Nov 7, 2009

For two days now Americans have celebrated the idea that we may have atoned finally for our nation's original sin, slavery, along with its long legacy of racism. We have rejoiced in the world's accolades over the election of a multicultural African-American to the presidency after nearly eight years of cringing in shame as the Bush administration methodically curdled our Constitutional values and sullied our global reputation as a beacon of hope. Every once in a while, it seems, we Americans do manage to live up to our ideals rather than betray them. Hooray!

I am just as happy as everyone else over all this global good feeling. But there's something else that I'm even happier about--positively giddy, in fact. And the effects of this change are likely to last a lot longer than the brief honeymoon Barack Obama will enjoy as a symbol of realized ideals. What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemy and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.

I'm under no illusion that Barack Obama will turn out to be Barack Panacea. In terms of holding major office, he's the least experienced president in memory. He'll probably screw up a lot of things, especially at first. The problems he faces – from the economic crisis to Iran's nuclear program – are just too hard. And I occasionally worry that in his eloquent eagerness to empathize and reach across cultural barriers, Obama may overreach in the opposite direction from Bush, stumbling into the appeasement of adversaries like Iran (whose buffoonish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, practically invited him to do so this week by sending him the first letter of congratulations from Tehran since 1979). Obama must also guard against the sort of intellectual arrogance that characterized the "best and the brightest" of the Vietnam era.

But, frankly, these are all risks worth taking after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn't seem to care much about what is "left," "right" or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew. It's no accident that Obama is the first Northern Democrat to be elected president since John F. Kennedy. The "Sun Belt" politics represented by George W. Bush – the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism--"has for the moment played itself out," says presidential historian Robert Dallek.

[...]

One tragedy of the Bush administration is the amount of American brain power and talent that went unused, the options that went unconsidered, because they were seen to lack ideological purity. That era is over as we confront a desperate landscape—a serious recession and two prolonged wars. While he hasn't yet invoked Franklin Roosevelt, Obama seems to be embracing FDR's pragmatic approach in 1933 -- knowing that what the country may need, economically and politically, is not so much an organized program but a hodgepodge of bold experiments like the New Deal. "It is common sense to take a method and try it," FDR said back then. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

[...]

And finally, we won't have to pretend any more, for the sake of civil conversation, that invading Iraq was a rational act. George W. Bush cited not a single study to justify such a dramatic move, nor did he convene a single strategic meeting to discuss it. (Did it ever occur to anyone to ask where the conceptual linkage between the rise of al Qaeda and the lack of democracy in the Arab world came from? The answer is: nowhere. No such study exists.) In order to sell this neck-wrenching and nonsensical shift away from the actual culprits of 9/11—al Qaeda--to the American public, Bush then broadened the grim and necessary war in Afghanistan into the strategic monstrosity we now routinely refer to as the "global war on terror." Because this became the official ideology of his administration, and because so many major media pundits and Democrats also persuaded themselves it was valid, we've all felt compelled to pay deference to it.

[That will be the hangover from the Bush Administration, all the various ingrained media genuflections to anti-logic by repetition and party-line marching, almost like a series of verbal tics that suddenly and radically become absurd posturing, in an instant, in a blinking of an eye, as the exposed spin-fiction no longer holds power, no longer carries force beyond the exigencies of currying favor with an Emperor's New Clothes administration no longer in power.

I wonder if some in the media will even notice that they are waking up from a bad dream. I imagine there will be some, the true sophistic media relativists (as opposed to the authoritarian relativists on the right) who will simply move their tape recorders to the other side of the political spectrum and transcribe as faithfully from that power group as it did from the anti-intellectual power group, without parsing that arguments are now supported by real studies, by policy papers, by entire meta-ethical schools of thought that have been subjected to critical review, replicable data, and comparative historical outcomes. There will be some in the media, I suppose, who won't even notice the difference. But some will.]

But now President-to-be Obama, who first came to national attention back in 2002 arguing that Iraq was a "dumb" war unrelated to the real fight against al Qaeda (a fact now borne out by the resurgence of the Taliban in the only battlefront that ever really counted, Afghanistan and Pakistan), will dictate a new reality in Washington. The "media elites" who've managed to escape whipping for their strategic blindness will have to quietly acknowledge this reality, even if they can't bring themselves to admit their errors. Victors, it is said, write the history. Obama is now about to write America's new history. Unless I mistake my man, its theme will be that reason and sense and that cardinal American virtue--pragmatism--are going to rule once again. And that's really something to celebrate.

This shouldn't surprise anyone... but it's still appalling

I am happy that this kind of information is coming out more and more. The trickle should turn into a flood, once the more corrupt folks get out of office and the appalled people who had contact with them start speaking up.

Cancer in the White House, indeed. And a Justice Department that's turned into a strong-arm wing for patronage and political vendettas.

What I really want to know is why no one is talking about this and K Street and other Bush Administration behind the scenes maneuvers as it appears to me: the blatant rebirth of overt machine politics.

Link: Ex-surgeon general faults White House - Los Angeles Times.

Ex-surgeon general faults White House

Richard Carmona says the administration 'simply buried' his scientific data on such issues as stem cell research and teen pregnancy.

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff Writer
July 11, 2007

WASHINGTON — President Bush's first surgeon general testified Tuesday that his speeches were censored to match administration political positions and that he was prevented from giving the public accurate scientific information on issues such as stem cell research and teen pregnancy prevention.

"Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried," Dr. Richard H. Carmona, who was surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, told a congressional committee. "The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation — not the doctor of a political party."

Early in the administration, when the issue of federal funding for stem cell research arose, Carmona said, he felt he could play an educational role by discussing the latest scientific research. Instead, he said, he was told to "stand down" because the White House already had made a decision to limit stem cell studies. He said administration appointees who reviewed his speech texts deleted references to stem cells.

Carmona's remarks were the latest in a series of complaints from government scientists about what they say are administration efforts to control — and sometimes distort — scientific evidence in order to support policy decisions.

NASA scientists have complained, for example, of political pressure to tone down warnings about global warming. Environmental Protection Agency officials have complained that technical information on such subjects as power plant emissions and oil drilling have been ignored.

Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently dissented from the administration's position by saying its restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research were holding back progress and should be lifted.

Scientists outside the government also have complained about what some call the administration's "war on science."

[...]

Is Facebook like crack for applications developers?

Marc Andreessen makes the point in his blog post below that Facebook platform application success (the Holy Grail) is either a very steep high-velocity on-ramp to the fast lane, OR like jumping from cocaine to crack (both metaphors mine, not Andreessen's... I dunno if he would agree with me or not).

I do know one thing. Facebook appeals to me in a way that MySpace NEVER did. You couldn't pay me to go on MySpace, ever. These days, I may not check in on Facebook as often as email (which is ubiquitous, for me, fairly like breathing), but I am starting to FEEL toward my Facebook connections the same way I used to feel toward email (as something to look forward to, rather than a backed-up workload to dread).

Here's some key pithy bits from Andreessen:

Link: blog.pmarca.com: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in.

Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

On May 24, Facebook launched the newest version of the Facebook Platform, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience.

In this post, I provide an overview and analysis of the Facebook Plaform and what we have learned about it in the three weeks since it launched.

To start, my personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry.

Here's why:

Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.

Definitionally, a "platform" is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

In contrast, an "application" is a system that cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.

The classic example of an application being vanquished by a platform was the Wang word processor versus Microsoft DOS-based personal computers.

Wang word processors -- the application, in this case -- were highly evolved, fantastically successful dedicated word processing systems that owned their market, until the general-purpose PC came along. While the PC at first was inferior at word processing, within a few years of its launch the fact that outside developers had built thousands of applications for it -- like spreadsheets -- that closed Wang word processors could not match, coupled with steadily improving PC-based word processing software like Wordstar, had all but killed the Wang word processor. Wang -- one of the most succcessful technology companies of the 1970's -- went bankrupt not long after.

This is a story whose moral has historically not been embraced by the web industry to nearly the extent one would have thought.

[...]

[What's interesting to me, in reflecting on the ancient history of word processors as remembered by Andreessen, was some advice given to me by a brilliant friend years ago, advice I did not take. There isn't a day that goes by that I am not OVERJOYED to have discarded that advice, which, as delivered by my brilliant friend, was  so emphatic as to be obvious and brook no argument whatsoever.

Wang word processors were the hot tech tool to have, back in those days, but I couldn't afford one anyway. My brilliant friend was a high school classmate who had taken an eighth grade punch card programming class with me, an after school enrichment thing that was fun, even if we did have to punch out the holes one at a time for this great clacketing monster of a punch card computer at the junior high.

That friend was far better at it than I was. Both of my best friends were. I pretty much sucked at thinking about binary code, math, and programming languages. By high school, another friend and I started playing with a Radio Shack TRS80, laboriously typing in that funny Basic program ELIZA, the computer shrink. Both the punch cards and the Basic typing brought out the dyslexic monster in me, however.

Meanwhile, as my brilliant friend was finishing college with a 4.0 science degree in just three years, I was deeply in lust with the new Macintosh computer, announced for the first time in that historic Super Bowl ad in 1984. I wanted one. I wanted one badly. I talked about it all the time, even to my brilliant friend.

I really didn't need the validation. Both of my parents were deep into Apple II culture, my mom teaching her third graders to program on those machines. I just needed the money. But my friend pooh-poohed me. She said it would be a total waste of time for someone like me to blow my hard-earned money on an expensive computer, when I was was just a writer and photographer anyway. I didn't do REAL stuff on the computer, she meant. Get one of those Wang word processors and be happy for what you have, she said. She basically called me frivolous and said I was falling for a silly marketing campaign. She was so absolute and certain. And she was absolutely wrong.

See, I got my classic Mac, once I could afford it, and my dyslexic brain exploded. Whole new activities and careers unfolded in front of me, aptitudes I didn't know I had. I plunged in and never looked back. Years later, I'd even find myself hanging out with engineers, and loving it.

That silly Wang word processor, glorified typewriter that it was, would have kept me in Vonnegut-imagined (Player Piano) writer/photographer ghetto with all the other mushy thinkers my scientific friend evidently didn't think were deserving of computing power.

So there, Wang. Good riddance. Let's get back to Andreessen.

In a nutshell, the Facebook API enables outside web developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook environment.

After signing up for a developer account on Facebook, the developer writes a web application (in the simplest case, a piece of web content; in the most advanced case, a full fledge web application with deep functionality) and hosts it on her own servers. The developer then registers her application with Facebook, and then users can add that application to their Facebook user experience in several different ways, including within their Facebook profile pages.

Viewed simply, this is a variant on the "embedding" phenomenon that swept MySpace over the last two years, and which Facebook prohibited.

However, what Facebook is now doing is a lot more sophisticated than simply MySpace-style embedding: Facebook is providing a full suite of APIs -- including a network protocol, a database query language, and a text markup language -- that allow third party applications to integrate tightly with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information.

And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.

[...]

Metaphorically, Facebook is providing the ease and user attraction of MySpace-style embedding, coupled with the kind of integration you see with Firefox extensions, with the added rocket fuel of automated viral distribution to a huge number of potential users, and the prospect of keeping 100% of any revenue your application can generate.

The leadership that the Facebook team is showing here rivals anything that the large and established software and web companies have done in this decade.

You may also notice the irony of Facebook leapfrogging MySpace on embedding at the same time that MySpace seems to be getting substantially more restrictive, in some cases even shutting down third-party widgets.

[...]

[Here's the bit I want to think about the most, how the Facebook Platform creates crack cocaine for developers used to more ambulatory on-ramps to success.]

Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, when your application takes off on Facebook, you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up.

Let me explain.

I already described Facebook's viral distribution mechanism by which users became instantly aware of which applications their friends are using, can with one click start using those applications, and automatically spread them to their friends.

This is happening in an environment with 24 million active users -- active users defined as users active on the site in the last 30 days. 50% of active users return to the site daily. 100,000 new users join per day. 45 billion page views per month and growing. 50 million users, and a lot more page views, predicted by the end of 2007.

An application that takes off on Facebook is very quickly adopted by hundreds of thousands, and then millions -- in days! -- and then ultimately tens of millions of users.

Unless you're already operating your own systems at Facebook levels of scale, your servers will promptly explode from all the traffic and you will shortly be sending out an email like this.

ILike was the first third-party application to get serious lift-off on Facebook.  Quoting from ILike's blog shortly after their launch:

"In our first 20 hours of opening doors we had 50,000 users sign up, and it is only accelerating. (10,000 users joined in the first 12 hrs. 10,000 more users in the next 3 hrs. 30,000 more users in the next 5 hrs!!)

We started the system not knowing what to expect, with only 2 servers, but ready with backup. Facebook's rabid userbase chewed up our 2 servers almost instantly. We doubled our capacity to catch up. And then we doubled it again. And again. And again. Oh crap - we ran out of servers!! Although iLike.com has a very healthy level of Web traffic, and even though about half of all the servers in our datacenter were sitting unused, idle, as backup capacity, we are now completely maxed out.

We just emailed everybody we know across over a dozen Bay Area startups, corporations, and venture firms in a desperate plea to find spare servers so we can triple our capacity for the continued onslaught. Tomorrow we are picking up over 100 servers from different companies to have them installed just to handle the weekend's traffic. (For those who responded to our late night pleas, thank you!)"

Yesterday, about two weeks later, ILike announced that they have passed 3 million users on Facebook and are still growing -- at a rate of 300,000 users per day.

They didn't say how many servers they're running, but if you do the math, it has to be in the hundreds and heading into the thousands.

Translation: unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it -- networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. -- and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition.

This is a "success kills" scenario -- the good news is you're successful, the bad news is you're flat on your back from what amounts to a self-inflicted denial of service attack, unless you have the money and time and knowledge to tackle the resulting scale challenges.

Will every Facebook application go through this?

No, of course not.  The ones that nobody uses will not have this problem.

But the successful ones all will.

[...]

The term "partial birth abortion" is a right-wing political invention, a "scam"

Why believe me? It's right there below in the words of the founder of Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion group.

It's about a political movement (and it's well-paid PR and marketing professionals) forcing its rhetorical framing devices on an uncritical and under-funded media class.

Link: AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: How Media Mistakes Fueled the High Court Abortion Ruling.

How Media Mistakes Fueled the High Court Abortion Ruling

By Gloria Feldt, Women's Media Center
Posted on April 21, 2007, Printed on April 23, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50788/

[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but [also] a public relations goldmine. ... The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it. -- Randall Terry

So said the founder of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-choice group that blockaded abortion providers, in 2003.

Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision (Gonzales v. Carhart) upholding the federal abortion ban is the fruition of that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right.

Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court's majority, in addition to using the inaccurate term "partial birth abortion," also referred to the "abortion doctor" repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as "doctors," or "ob/gyns"? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to "tonsillectomy doctor" or "hysterectomy doctor"? Of course not. But those who want to take away entirely a woman's human right to make her own childbearing decisions have used the term "abortion doctor" for so long as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to adopt their language.

Such bias is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle over what losing plaintiff Dr. Leroy Carhart has called "partial truth abortion." There is no such thing as partial birth abortion. The term will be found in no medical book. It was coined in 1995 by Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right-to-Life Committee, and former Congressional representative and current Florida appeals court judge Charles Canady explicitly to confuse, horrify, and deceive -- to manipulate language with the intent of sensationalizing the abortion debate.

[...]

An almost identical abortion ban was found unconstitutional by a different Supreme Court in 2000.

[...]

Now we have a landmark Supreme Court decision, built upon the counterfeit foundation of a made-up term that the media accepted and used uncritically, and that has propelled the highest court to issue a ruling permitting a law that at a minimum:

1. Does not provide adequate exceptions for a woman's health, which means that a fundamental legal principle of the primary importance of women's health has been overturned.

2. For the first time upholds a federal law that steps directly into the physician's exam room and tells him or her what medical technique cannot be used even if the physician's judgment is that it is the safest to protect a patient's health and future fertility.

3. Will not reduce the number of abortions but will over time, according to the doctors who know women's health best, cause an increase in medical complications, and possibly even deaths.

The public relations goldmine of those who aim for nothing less than to eliminate reproductive justice at all times from all women has paid off for them. Language, after all, has consequences too.

Gloria Feldt is the author of "The War on Choice"  and "Behind Every Choice Is a Story."  She is currently at work on a book with the actress Kathleen Turner, entitled "Take the Lead, Lady!"

"Alarming" Supreme Court Abortion Ruling

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sums up today's grim ruling quite succinctly:

''Today's decision is alarming,'' Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. She said the ruling ''refuses to take ... seriously'' previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.

Ginsburg said the latest decision ''tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.''

Read the details of the decision below, and weep, especially for women whose health may be compromised by circumstances of their pregnancies.

Link: Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Abortion Procedure - New York Times.

Ban on Abortion Procedure Upheld by Supreme Court in 5-4 Ruling

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

Filed at 10:30 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act ''have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases,'' Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court's conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush's two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how -- not whether -- to perform an abortion.

[...]

More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States each year, according to recent statistics. Nearly 90 percent of those occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not affected by Wednesday's ruling.

Six federal courts have said the law that was in focus Wednesday is an impermissible restriction on a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The law bans a method of ending a pregnancy, rather than limiting when an abortion can be performed.

''Today's decision is alarming,'' Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. She said the ruling ''refuses to take ... seriously'' previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.

Ginsburg said the latest decision ''tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.''

She was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

[And this was a STRONGLY split court. But for the two recent Bush appointments, it would not have gone through (there's the bone thrown to the religious right). Notice that ALL FOUR justices who voted against the ruling all signed on to Justice Ginsburg's written dissent.]

[...]

In 2000, the court with key differences in its membership struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortions. Writing for a 5-4 majority at that time, Justice Breyer said the law imposed an undue burden on a woman's right to make an abortion decision.

The Republican-controlled Congress responded in 2003 by passing a federal law that asserted the procedure is gruesome, inhumane and never medically necessary to preserve a woman's health. That statement was designed to overcome the health exception to restrictions that the court has demanded in abortion cases.

But federal judges in California, Nebraska and New York said the law was unconstitutional, and three appellate courts agreed. The Supreme Court accepted appeals from California and Nebraska, setting up Wednesday's ruling.

Kennedy's dissent in 2000 was so strong that few court watchers expected him to take a different view of the current case.