As long as Tumblr blogs like Obama is Checking Your Email exist, we can at least know that the internet will meet government efforts at surveillance with a hefty dose of snark.
Dang, at least W. tried to be subtle about it.
If Paul Revere were alive today, Redditors would have turned him into a meme before his horse had even gotten up to a trot.
The revolution will be at least partly in lolspeak.
(Written in October 2012, not published until now.)
After watching Argo, the new thriller about a daring rescue during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80, I could not help but ponder how different the story would have been had any of the characters had cell phones. (SPOILERS AHEAD!!!)
For starters, those Iranian guards at the airport would have had to do far less running. If I had to guess, I would say about 40% of the dramatic tension of the film was related to someone trying to call someone else on the phone, but that person had stepped away for one reason or another. Argo is practically a collaborative commercial for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
“This guy is going to go to Val Verde with you, and he’s going to call us every 20 minutes from the in-flight phone. So don’t even think about breaking his neck, covering him with a blanket, and sneaking off the plane during takeoff.” (Via theoneliner.com.)
At any rate, modern technology has rendered more than a few classic films moot. Had Sully possessed a cell phone in the 1985 epic Commando, then the chase scene that provided much of the film’s backbone (prior to the final mass carnage montage, of course) would have been unnecessary. Rather than run to find a pay phone with Schwarzenegger on his tail, he could have texted “kill girl” to the other bad guys, and the movie would have been over within the first 45 minutes.
Here are some other films made redundant by cell phones:
Google is shutting down its Google Reader service on July 1, 2013, I recently learned. I have used Google Reader for all my RSS feeds for over a year, and have liked it far more than any other similar service that I have used. It works particularly well with an iPad app called Flipboard, which arranges posts in a style reminiscent of a newspaper. Apparently, Flipboard will allow its users to transfer Google Reader subscriptions directly to its service, to the gratitude of many users. I’m pretty sure Flipboard did not have to do that, just like Google does not have any obligation to keep Reader going. The reason for that is that I, and as far as I know everyone else in the world, do not pay for the Reader service, or for Flipboard.
As my friend Kevin said (or quoted), if you are not paying for a service that you are receiving, you are not the customer. You are the product.
Google has no obligation to continue offering a service that does not make it money, even if everyone loves it. Google makes money from its online services by selling advertising, just like nearly every other internet service that does not charge a fee directly to users. You, the user, are the recipient of that advertising. Google’s revenue is based on how it can monetize your online behavior. The company has an interest in keeping users happy, because it needs us to keep coming back to the site, or any other site plugged into Google (which is probably most of the world’s websites by now.) Its bigger concern, though, is keeping those advertising bucks coming in and keeping costs low. If a service costs enough that it impacts the acceptable profit margin, it goes. If you are not a Google shareholder or an actual customer, you ultimately have zero clout in influencing the decision to discontinue a service.
Google Reader is not an essential service for me, but rather a convenience. My life will not suffer for a lack of centralized RSS feeds in a handy newspaper-style format. At worst, I’ll have to get used to a different way of reading the news/blogs. The convenience offered by Google Reader/Flipboard is not something so important that I think it should be a public service. I do think that other services that benefit the public much more directly need to remain public, for the very reason that public service, not profit, should be the primary motivator. Prisons come to mind. So do roads and sewer mains.
I would consider paying something for a service like Google Reader. Maybe no one else would anymore. Maybe that is the problem.
Photo credit: svilen001 on stock.xchng.
I’m going to be honest here: I’m not really feeling it this year. I suspect that is approximately 100% due to the fact that I moved into a new house at the beginning of this week, and am experiencing the associated anxiety and odd depression that always seems to come with that. Don’t get me wrong, I love our new house. It’s just that I also sort of hate it at the moment.
It was in the midst of this chaos that I embarked on my second year as a badge holder at SXSW Interactive. Once again, I don’t really have a clear notion of my goals, other than to meet people, learn more about tech, blogging, and social media, and just be around talented, interesting, and occasionally self-important people. I’m sucking at the “meeting people” part so far, but being at the Austin Convention Center in a relatively festive atmosphere is a welcome reprieve from a week spent mediating between furniture deliveries, movers, and contactors. (Also, the purchase of a house with enough repair needs to quickly burn through most of our money, but let’s not go there just now.)
I took the Capital Metro rail for the first time, parking where I’m probably not supposed to park and riding the train to the final stop just outside the Convention Center. I don’t know if the train is usually that crowded, or if that is a SXSW effect, but it was a decent ride. It certainly beats trying to find parking downtown.
Since I don’t do much late-night partying anymore, I was able to arrive downtown at about 9:30, give or take, and it took a mere 5 minutes to get my badge. I remember last year needing about 20 minutes, but then seeing that the line had circumscribed the Convention Center later in the day. This would be an example of the hipness of being square – less time waiting in lines, or something.
I spent much of the morning catching up on work, and found the environment to be oddly conducive for work. Maybe there was some osmosis of creative power, or maybe I was just determined to finish so I could move on to fun things.
By the time I broke away from the siren call of legal-blogging-for-hire, I was not sure where I wanted to go. I considered catching a shuttle to a different venue for a panel on the business potential of animated GIFs, but ran into a friend who was going to a panel on disaster relief.
Disaster: The Future of Crisis Communications addressed how the Coast Guard has made use of social media and other technologies in disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Irene. Very interesting stuff. Much of what they said seems obvious at first, but when you consider conditions after a disaster, you understand their importance, and how easy it might be to overlook them. In sufficiently serious crises, the very network we rely upon for information might be out of commission. How would we get information without our smartphones? Yes, many people still use things like radio or newspapers, but social media allows responders to get information out in, to use a cliché, real time.
Teaching Cheetahs: Disruptive Education in Africa was the only other panel I went to this day, partly because it sounded interesting, and partly because I didn’t have to change rooms. A group of panelists included two executives from a nonprofit that funds scholarships for top students from African to study at American universities, the founder of a Kenyan startup that provides tablets to students loaded with school curricula, and the director of an organziation that produces documentary videos highlighting educational needs. There was far more than I can justifiably summarize here, but the overall theme was “African solutions to African problems.” I just read an article the other day about well-intentioned but catastrophic efforts at aid to Africa, most of which amounted to dumping America’s leftovers in rural Africa rather than supporting infrastructure and education. It is also generally annoying that people in the U.S. often refer to “Africa” in a unitary sense, when in reality it is a continent with 54 countries (I think that’s the right number), about 1 billion people, and a wide diversity of culture, history, and language. It’s also more than twice the size of the U.S., so it’s big. Here are the organizations and companies represented, and I’d say they are worth checking out:
After that, I went home to assemble IKEA furniture.
Other highlights of the day included getting my picture taken in the Iron Throne…
…and also with Clifford the Big Red Dog…
There was also this odd display by 3M, which I call 3M’s 2D Hottie.
The Garabogazköl Basin is a large body of water in Turkmenistan that connects to the Caspian Sea via a small strait. It is very shallow and, according to Wikipedia, ridiculously salty, with a salinity level of 35%, compared to 1.2% in the Caspian Sea and 3.5% in the overall ocean. This makes it the second-saltiest body of water in the world outside of Antarctica (saltier than the Dead Sea). While Turkmenistan harvests salt from the area (obviously), it sounds like a place that is not terribly interesting.
Except for what I will call the Rectangle. On Google Maps, what would otherwise be an unassuming, albeit huge, lagoon, with a total area of about 6,900 square miles, has a large rectangular area that is either much more shallow than the rest of the lagoon, is somehow obscured, or is just not photographed as well.
Via Google Maps
There is a very large, probably 40 mile by 50 mile, rectangular area in the lagoon, with an odd shadow in the top right corner. This time, my attempts to Google my way to an answer only yielded confirmation that this is, in fact, a mysteriously obscured or incomplete area. In all likelihood, the area looks different because there is no point in going to a lot of trouble to take satellite photos of the middle of a lagoon filled with water that is too salty even for sore throat sufferers.
Still, maybe something unusual is going on. Google Maps has been known to obscure areas for security purposes.
For my part, I still hold out hope it is a breeding and training area for a new race to inhabit the oceans, sort of like Sea-Monkeys but more science-fiction-y.
No, not *that* kind of sea monkey! (via jaxgraphix.deviantart.com)
At least one night a week has been relatively sleepless, for unknown reasons so far. Since I am not one to allow a single waking hour to go unwasted, though, it seemed like high time to play around with the auto-fill function on Google. All of these are 100% and and happened between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. today.
Let’s face it: people are posting too many pictures of their food to social media sites, especially Instagram. I know, I know. I don’t have to look at the pictures, and no one is suggested imposing a legal ban on food pictures (so keep your First Amendment rants to yourself, thank you much). It’s just an irritating trend. In fact, pictures of food topped BuzzFeed’s list of “11 Things No One Wants to See You Instagram.”
That said, I will freely admit that I post pictures of food on occasion. On. Occasion.
The world needs to know that these exist. I regret nothing.
I am not a prolific poster on Instagram. I may post to Facebook every five minutes, according to some who probably wish they had my type of ADHD, but I try to limit photos to things that are interesting, unique, or for which I have an awesome caption. I do post pictures of food from time to time. Just this week, I posted a picture of the beignet pancakes I had at Kerbey Lane, because how often does anyone get to eat beignet pancakes? How awesome is the very concept of beignet pancakes??? Beignet freaking pancakes!!!!!!!
(I also reserve the right to post pictures of ridiculously overblown chili cheeseburgers and absurdly large cinnamon rolls. The common thread is a unique mix of superlative qualities and hyperbole.)
Apparently, some people have taken amateur food photography to a whole new level, according to the New York Times:
There are the foreign tourists who, despite their big cameras, tend to be very discreet. There are those who use a flash and annoy everyone around them. There are those who come equipped with gorillapods — those small, flexible tripods to use on their tables.
There are even those who stand on their chairs to shoot their plates from above.
People, get over yourselves. I mean, I know this is all taking place in Manhattan, the home of pretension those of us in the provinces can scarcely imagine, but really, gorillapods?
The solutions some of these restaurants have found, however, might be even more annoying than the food photography: Continue reading
An ironman triathlon swim would not make it halfway across the *width* of this thing.
The imaginative possibilities are nearly endless. The thing is located in the Lop Nur basin, a dried-up salt lake and nuclear test site in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of western China. It doesn’t seem to be near much of anything, except for one road. Several straight lines, which appear to be canals, extend north out of the pools for miles. In the industrial complex, which is probably huge but seems tiny compared to the gigantic pools, are two large cooling towers, often seen in nuclear power plants.
Somewhat disappointingly, the actual answer was not that hard to find. Even more disappointing was that I partly found it on Wikipedia.
Well, I found the publicly available answer, anyway. If the history of government subterfuge has taught us anything, it’s that the truth usually isn’t any more interesting than the cover story. I can’t say that this is a “cover story,” but let’s cling to what little intrigue we can.
I’ll spare you any further dramatic tension: it’s a fertilizer plant. Yes, this giant complex of pools in the middle of a vast desert is there to exploit sylvite resources in the area to extract potassium chloride to make potash fertilizers. I had hoped that it was a training ground for human-fish hybrids, in preparation for colonization of the Pacific floor, but really, a fertilizer plant covering around forty square miles of desert is pretty impressive, too. NASA describes the site as follows:
Located in China’s resource-rich but moisture-poor Xinjiang autonomous region, Lop Nur is an uninviting location for any kind of agriculture. It sits at the eastern end of the Taklimakan Desert, where marching sand dunes can reach heights of 200 meters (650 feet), and dust storms rage across the landscape.
Yet for all it lacks in agricultural appeal, Lop Nur offers something valuable to farmers the world over: potash. This potassium salt provides a major nutrient required for plant growth, making it a key ingredient in fertilizer.
The discovery of potash at Lop Nur in the mid-1990s turned the area into a large-scale mining operation. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image of Lop Nur on May 17, 2011. The rectangular shapes in this image show the bright colors characteristic of solar evaporation ponds. Around the evaporation ponds are the earth tones typical of sandy desert.
An earlier picture of the site appears on the German-language Wikipedia page, with this somewhat-broken-English description:
The world’s largest potash fertilizer production base in the size 10 to 21 km is built in the former Lake Lop Nur, Xinjiang, China. The first phase of the project which has an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons was put into operation on Dec.18, 2008. The second phase with an annual capacity of 1.7 million tons has been launched 2009 and will be operational in 2014. The 3 million program will make Lop Nor the largest potash fertilizer production base in the world. The Project of Development and Utilization of Sylvite Resources in Lop Nur region employs the technique of producing potassium sulphate through magnesium sulfate subtype brine, which filled a technological gas of this kind and made China among the fewer countries that could produce potassium sulphate from brine directly taken from salt lake. The satellite picture is taken 2009-10-12.
I guess it’s hard to keep big things secret anymore, although I’m still not sure if this was ever meant to be secret. I found another picture of what appears to be a separate site in the area, described as a “salt field”:
China, Xinjiang, desert Lop Nur. Satellite picture of the Lop Desert with the Basin of the formerly sea Lop Nur. You see the Salt field by the Lop Nur Sylvite Science and Technology Development Co. Ltd.
Based on some archived articles, China began the process of extracting sylvite from the region in 2001, expecting to find reserves of up to 250 million tons. The country made a “major breakthrough” in techniques to extract at use the mineral in 2004, and it began setting up the facility around the same time. The first phase of the facility became operational on December 18, 2008, with a capacity of producing 1.2 million tons of fertilizer per year. The second phase, which will produce 1.7 million tons annually, is supposed to go online this year.
On the other hand, it could be a prototype for China’s first ringworld, to test out ocean structures…
Photo credits: “Lop Nur, Xinjiang, China” by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon (NASA Earth Observatory) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; “Kaliumchlorid-Feld in der Wüste Lop Nor” by NASA. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; “Lop Nur and the potash fertilizer production plant 2009” by NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; “Salt field in the Lop Nur Desert” by NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Blackberry 7800, via mrgadget.com.au
I purchased my first Blackberry, a 7800 model, in 2005. Even with a contract, it cost about $350. The phone could barely connect to the internet on a good day, and I can’t remember if it had wifi connectivity or not. I owned four different models of Blackberry after that first one, all with increasingly bad-ass names: the Pearl (not very bad-ass), the Curve (am I being graded on my choice of phone?), the Bold (now we’re talking…), and the Torch (oops, there go my pants!)
There was only one problem: beginning in about 2007, the cultural influence and general bad-assery of my phone steadily declined against that snotty upstart, the iPhone. I, like most Blackberry loyalists, didn’t see the allure. Why would I need an app to order pizza? I can do that with the part of my phone that sends my voice through the air to a cell tower, then across fiber optic lines and into someone else’s ear. I also appreciated the fact that the Blackberry still allowed you to type on actual (albeit tiny) keys, rather than ethereal spots on a touchscreen. During my lawyering years, the Blackberry seemed like the tried and true, wise choice for a professional. All of this changed one clumsy summer day.
BlackBerry Torch 9810, via Wikimedia Commons
In July 2012, I caved and bought an iPhone 4S. (I don’t care that I could’ve gotten an iPhone 5 if I’d just waited a bit. In the tech world, you can always get something newer and cooler if you’d just wait.) I got an iPad last year (an iPad 2, if you must know, a few months before “The New iPad” came out.) In August, I bought a Macbook. My journey to the Apple side is complete, although I still maintain that I can get by without 90+% of the apps.
The Blackberry holdouts have now come to resemble the dogged Apple loyalists of a decade ago. Except that Blackberry shows no signs of a miracle resurgence. You were good to me, Blackberry, but I guess I’ve moved on.
Photo credits: Blackberry 7800, via mrgadget.com.au; “BlackBerry Torch 9810” by TonyTheTiger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
The group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has, by all appearances, a worthwhile goal, which is to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. To accomplish this, it often puts pressure on private companies to divest from Iran, both directly and through any subsidiaries or affiliated business that might do business there. By and large, this is clearly the free exercise of economic power to try to bring about social change, something I generally support. I could say a few things about the long-term wisdom of tarring an entire nation of people with a history and culture spanning millennia based on the oft-psychotic behavior of a 33-year-old regime, but let’s focus on UANI’s latest campaign instead.
According to a UANI press release dated September 18, 2012:
On Tuesday, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) launched its World Wide Web campaign, and called on both the Internet Corporate for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE) to disconnect the Internet access of sanction-designated Iranian entities such as its Central Bank and its military’s engineering arm.
ICANN is the nonprofit corporation that has the authority to designate and assign domain names on the World Wide Web. RIPE performs a similar service in Europe. UANI sent letters to both agencies on September 7, demanding that they cease providing services to “sanction-designated Iranian entities.” This may work as a public relations move, but it has multiple problems, not least of which is the fact that ICANN and RIPE can’t just turn off a spigot and cut Iran off. UANI seems to be suggesting cutting off specific Iranian entities included on the sanctions list, but it could never work that way. John Levine, a writer for the internet technology journal CircleID, calls the idea that ICANN or RIPE could just cut Iran off “ridiculous”: Continue reading
