Street view's biggest revolution?

I love Google Street View. The thing that fascinates me most is what happens if they (or someone else) do this kind of thing for 30 or 50 or 100 years. Imagine the historical value of an archive of photographs showing most of the country on, updated every year or two. The potential research value is incalculable. Sociology, economics, anthropology, urban development... Pretty much every social science field could find something of value there. It will be like a time machine. The only down side is that it's just now getting going.

Being pretty good can be a dangerous thing

You've looked at different ways of doing things and can confidently dismiss them. After all, you're pretty good at this. Maybe when you were new, these ways would have helped you get started. You don't need training wheels anymore. You've been doing this for a while. You've smoothed out some of your rough edges, gained some new skills, and become more seasoned. You've got a number of successes under your belt; this isn't just your ego talking. Clearly you must know what you're doing, right?

Sure, you make a few mistakes from time to time, and sometimes you bark up the wrong tree, but you're only human. These things happen. You've read about structured, formalized techniques for avoiding those errors, for making sure yours efforts aren't wasted. They seem all right on paper, but in the real world? In your world? There's just no way that would work for you. It's not like it would help that often, either; you're pretty good at this. And it would just slow you down. And besides, they sound so boring. They take all the craft and artistry out of it, and if you're not a craftsman and an artist, you're just a cog in a big machine. Those things are for people who aren't naturally pretty good. It's for little people, people without vision, who are fine with being cogs in big machines. You've got a knack for this, a real instinct.

You know what? You're right, people who aren't naturally as good as you probably need those things to be as good as you. That does not mean you should not also do them. You're pretty good without them, but you'll be even better with them. And who doesn't want to be better? Oh, right; the people who'd rather live comfortably in the delusion that they're already as good as it is possible to be.

I've seen this in many different places in many different ways for a long, long time. It makes perfect sense. It's not human nature to fix what isn't broken. Introspection is not in most people's natures, at least not in a moderate sense. They are plenty of people who introspect unproductively, of course, and get caught in the quicksand of depression or narcissism or any number of things. There's a small region of sanity between insufficient introspection and too much. That's where you need to stand.

Sure, you're pretty good. But are you perfect? Obviously not. So open your mind. You can be better. Once you get to be pretty good at something, you stop having such frequent conflicts with reality. You stop getting forced to change by external things. Most people find it hard to replace that with an internal drive. Once they're no longer forced to learn, they don't learn at all. Lots of people think of themselves as open-minded constant learners, but that's easy and not all that valuable. This isn't learning in the sense of acquiring additional information. This is about changing how you think and how you operate.

Try something different. Try it for real, without judgment. Fully immerse yourself in its modes and idioms, so you can see it from the inside. You can't speak German by translating an English sentence and translating it word by word. It'll get you there, but it'll be awful. It's not enough just to have surface knowledge of it. You can learn HTML in 21 days, but it's going to look like Geocities circa 1997.

Now, as we've discussed, you're pretty good. You're especially good with Thingamabangle. It's great at frobnication, but not so hot at dezmodessing. That's not a big deal because you don't do much dezmodessing. You can usually make do with frobnication, and maybe a little bit of chamazote. It's not like dezmodessing is all that useful anyway; you were forced to do it a couple of times, and it was so much harder than the frobnication and chamazote you would have used otherwise. So what if Thingamabangle is bad at something useless?

One day you're lunching with a friend, and he's raving about this Whizzaboo. He's just going on and on about it. So you give it a try. Wow, Whizzaboo sucks at frobnication. It's okay at chamazote. The big selling point is that it's great at dezmodessing. But you've seen dezmodessing; it's just not a useful technique. Whizzaboo is a waste of time; it's not nearly as good at Thingamabangle at the stuff that matters. Who cares how well the pointy-headed ivory towerians can make it dezmodess? You can't waste your time with this. So you stick to your Thingamabangle. You never even learn about Whizzaboo's benbillying. You never learn how dezmodessing with a little benbilly can do everything your frobnication and chamazote can do, but in half the time. You never learn that nobody who uses Whizzaboo cares about its poor frobnication, because they never ever half to deal with it. You just looked at the surface, which confirmed your prejudices.

You can't just dip your toe into learning something new. You have to embrace it fully, for weeks and even months. You have to be in there long enough that you think in the new way at every level instead of translating from the old way. Otherwise you're going to come to the wrong conclusion. It's quite possible that your snap judgment was right, and it's not the right thing for you. And even if you're wrong, nothing terrible will happen because of that. You won't get fired, you won't lose your house, you won't be embarrassed by your peers. You'll just go on the way you've always gone, until one day the way you've always done things just doesn't work anymore. Maybe that's okay with you. Maybe you're fine with being good enough. Maybe you're fine with putting off change until life slaps your face and kicks your ass. That's your choice. But you could be missing out on something great.

Anti-social networking

There's something disturbing about the way online tools enable a passivity in social interaction. Mass emails, blog posts, Facebook statuses, Twitter tweets, etc. are all ways to announce things to people as a group, without taking the extra initiative and personal touch of communicating with the individual. It's sort of like the passive bribe often depicted on screen. "I'm just going to leave this money here, and if it's not here when I come back...."

Everything is either a broadcast or a reply. People seem a lot less willing to initiate direct, person-to-person communication, and we're losing something because of it. It's perfectly understandable why it happens. It's a lot less effort to send out a lowest-common-denominator message. There's no risk of being ignored or rejected when you're announcing something to the world at large.

It takes out some of the risk, but also some of the sincerity. And it puts the onus on other people to respond, which may be safer, but also reduces your chance of meaningful communication. I guess a lot of people prefer to increase their chance of failure if it means they can blame others rather than themselves. That also encourages them to participate in the same fashion, because your reply does not itself demand a reply, so when there is none, you aren't wounded. Furthermore, since someone else has chosen the topic and established the thread, it's a lot less effort for you to chime in. Of course, it's a lot tougher to have a meaningful, thoughtful communication that way, but it's certainly easier and leaves you less vulnerable.

I also sense an element of narcissism in some cases. The broadcast is inevitably about the one thing that is common to the group: you. Whether it's something about you, in your life, or of interest to you, it all comes back to being about you. Nobody sincerely asks about a friend's well-being this way, after all. And then it validates your ego when the other people take the initiative to reply to you, even if a reply doesn't demonstrate the the same interest. Passively soliciting replies it enables you to continue to see yourself as the star of your own show.

Of course, the world doesn't work like that, and it impoverishes your interactions with other people. Other people will sense that you don't think them worth the effort of a direct, personal message, and all the indirect, impersonal messages in the world won't fix that. Indeed, they'll actually make it worse, because they'll create a stark contrast between what is and what should be.

The upshot is that you should only broadcast things when they make sense to broadcast, and don't let these broadcasts take away from individual emails. If it's a message that's trivial or entirely about you, then it makes sense to put it in a broadcast tweet or something similar. After all, half the reason those tools exist is to tell people about yourself.

Send things to group lists when it's an interest group, rather than just an assortment of people that you know. If there's something that would be of interest to multiple people you know who don't know or care about each other, then send a separate message to each one. If that's too much effort, then maybe it's not as valuable a message (to them or to you) as you assumed. It takes very little thought or effort to add someone to a CC list, and everybody knows it. If you add me to your 43-strong recipient list for your "Happy Diwali" list, can you really truly say that it's important to you that I have a happy Diwali?

Broadcast messages have their uses, but they should be kept to those uses. Make sure you take the time to communicate personally and directly on an individual level. That's how you show you care. And if you don't care, it'll be obvious. In fact, it already is.

On heroism

The word hero is one that is overused and misused to the point of no longer having any meaning in popular parlance, like terrorist or producer. An act can be heroic if and only if:

1. It comes at some substantial personal cost. Whether it's the risk of physical injury in breaking up a fight, or the risk of losing your job by refusing to certify an unsafe product, it cannot be heroic if it comes too cheaply. An inflammatory blog post, for instance, costs nothing at all.


2. The benefits flow to others. If you gain from your act, it's not heroism.


3. Nobody would fault you for doing less or even nothing. I wouldn't think less of you if you didn't run into a burning building. This is in some ways the reverse of (1); you should not face substantial personal cost from failing to act, or choosing a less heroic alternative.

One thing you may note is that this definition basically invalidates every sports "hero" ever (especially due to (2)). That is no accident, because they're not really heroes.

An example that clearly fits the definition is the passengers aboard United 93 who stormed the cockpit on September 11. The personal cost? The highest price of all: death. The benefit to others? Everyone on the ground who would have been killed by the kamikaze run. And doing nothing was exactly what they were supposed to do in these situations.

A somewhat more uncomfortable one is that this definition disqualifies certain acts that are nonetheless highly admirable. Take for instance the pilot who managed to (relatively) safely land his crippled aircraft in the Hudson. There was no personal risk or cost to him, and he gained from his actions. If he hadn't done what he did, he would have been just as dead as everyone else. It was still an extraordinary accomplishment, but that landing wasn't heroic. However, that he stayed aboard to make sure everyone else got to safety first at least brushes the heroic. Maybe that is trying to have it both ways, but he could easily have rushed out in the general panic to save himself.

Focus on the edges and the middle will take care of itself

I wonder if that applies to more things than just buttering toast.

The timeout placebo

I'm not sure the timeout works as a technique for encouraging proper behavior in young children. What I'm starting to think is that its main advantage is what it isn't. It might not achieve much, but at least it's not actively harmful like spanking or some other kind of physical punishment might be. It allows parents to they feel like they're doing something, while protecting children from their parents, and parents from the consequences of their bad decisions. If only for that reason it's worth doing.

Children change your life

In discussion with a (childless) friend of mine, I said that having children doesn't have a huge impact on your disposable income. What it does hit, coining a term that I rather like, is your disposable time.

A contributing factor to social apathy

One of the disappointments of adulthood has got to be how little interest other adults have in talking about anything real. Even issues of significance tend to be only attended to in superficial terms, with the repetition of whatever canned narrative fits their prejudices. I think part of it is a lack of time, and another part of it is that people are more set in their ways. That makes "stimulating discourse" less likely to be pleasing and more likely to cause discomfort and friction. I think a lot of people aren't actually shallow, but have learned to behave shallowly in order to blend in better. Just because it makes sense doesn't mean I like it, though.

Free engraving on iPods

I wonder if that's just a clever ploy to reduce the resale market. I'm sure a vast majority of iPod buyers will take the free engraving because why wouldn't you? It's free. Then that iPod is just a little bit harder to sell.

Fundamental vocations

I've taken tests before that purport to help you find a career. I thought they were useless because they didn't ask the right question. It recently occurred to me that there are certain fundamental aspects of jobs that exist over all fields and specific jobs. These come down to the fundamental roles that exist in varying degrees in different jobs, and that have varying degrees of appeal to different people. Thus far, I've identified (hoping they don't sound too AD&D or like the Hindu Trinity):

• Arbitrator/Judge


• Artist


• Builder


• Caretaker


• Checker


• Destroyer


• Discoverer


• Fighter


• Fixer


• Guardian


• Leader/Motivator/Coach
• 
  
• Negotiator/Deal-maker


• Organizer (of people)


• Persuader


• Teacher


• Thinker

A software developer is 3 parts Builder, 5 parts Fixer, 1 part Discoverer, and 1 part Artist (all depending on the particular job, of course). An accountant is a mix of Checker, Custodian, and Guardian, with a forensic accountant also adding a shot of Discoverer to the mix. A plumber is mostly a Fixer and partly a Builder, and, on a bad day, Discoverer. A nurse or doctor is Caretaker, Checker, Fixer, and occasionally Discoverer. A police officer is an Arbitrator/Judge, a Fighter, a Guardian, a Persuader.

I'm sure I'm missing a few fundamental roles. I'm also not completely satisfied with the ones that I have. Leader/Motivator/Coach either is poorly named or is asking to be split up. How does that role square with Organizer and Persuader, not to mention Negotiator/Deal-maker?

Some days matter more than others

You've probably seen statements like "most of the gains on stocks in 2005 game on 4 days." No? Ok, then look here (it's in Part III). That's not the point of this post or that guy's post. Instead:

Guys, remember that time when you were 24 and you were on the subway, and you saw that girl with the glasses reading a book wearing a black leather coat, and you were obsessing over whether to go up to her or not but then your stop came, and you were like, screw it, she'll probably mace me, so you got off and went to the library to study for your chem exam?

You chose wrong.

Most days are like other days. A few days are different. Those days have the potential to be the best days of your life. You won't know when those days are coming, but after they happen, you'll recognize them. A chance encounter. A surprising conversation. Those few days can change your life, but you have to be ready for it. If you don't take chances, you won't take the chance that will change your life.

Bubbles begetting bubbles

To me, it is apparent that the cause of the current financial crisis is the Federal Reserve's attempt to avoid a recession after the collapse of the dot-com bubble. They weren't able to avoid it, only delay it, and now the bill is coming due, with interest. I am concerned that the current interventions may repeat the mistakes of the past, and avoid substantial hurt now only to cause greater hurt later.

Unlike my esteemed colleague, I don't think that government intervention by itself is the source of the problem. It can cause numerous problems, but I don't think government intervention in the markets is the source of bubbles. I would be less worried about catastrophic hurt further down the line if the hurt today is severe enough. That means primarily two things: property values have to at least fall back to long-term trends (possibly as measured by the ratio of household income property value), and the banks have to see a lot of their shareholder value evaporate. That can be due to bank collapses, share price collapses, or, more likely, some combination of the two.

I can't find the link, but I read an analogy of the financial crisis to forest fires. Under normal circumstances, forests have fires on a semi-regular basis. That thins out the trees, burns out all the accumulated underbrush, fallen branches, etc. It's generally not a big problem, in aggregate. However, when there are humans in the equation, they put out the fires. The trees grow more thickly and the combustible elements have a chance to build up. The forest fires aren't avoided so much as delayed. What happens in the end is a catastrophic fire that rages and burns everything down.

That's sort of how I see the current situation. I want the fire to burn long enough to thin out the trees and to burn out all the flammable underbrush. I don't want it to wipe everything out. There needs to be enough destruction to purge all the crap that has accumulated over the last 2 decades since the last "real" recession, in the early 1990s. Obviously, I don't want to see the whole world burn. Another analogy that I won't belabor is chemotherapy. You have to suffer a lot to completely kill the cancer; you don't want to just wound it, because then you've injured yourself, but you haven't actually fixed anything.

All the news that's fit to print, after some consideration

I want to see a news publication that only covers events at least a week or a month old. There's too much noise in the news. It's distracting. A news organization that waited a week or a month before it even started writing would have the perspective to tell what mattered and what was just the vacuous jabbering of attention-seeking idiots (not that it's necessarily hard to tell the latter). They'd save massive amounts just on printing costs. And my head wouldn't be filled with so much junk.

Fewer family names over time

I realized in the middle of the night that the total number of family names in the world is decreasing. I am not aware of anyone coming up with any new family names. New personal (first) names, yes, but not family names. It's also clear that some family names are dwindling. In most cultures that I am aware of, children take the family name of just one of their parents. In some cultures, children use their parents' family names to build their own compound family name, but there's a pruning process there as well, as otherwise their family names would get infinitely long. Since some names are disappearing, and no new names are appearing, the net result is fewer names over time.

None of the above seems wrong, but it sure is a weird thought to have.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

As proverbs go, that one is truer than most. It isn't, however, all that helpful by itself. The only advice you can take from it is not to try to help anyone, which is quite a steep price. After years of meditation standing on one leg in a Bhutanese lamasery gift shop, I have discovered the key.

You cannot let yourself think good intentions permit you to do something that is otherwise wrong. The ends don't justify the means. Too many people believe otherwise. Sadly, they're also already familiar with the idea that some people believe otherwise, so they're inoculated against that truth, even with its piles of supporting evidence. I also don't think this is where most people go wrong.

The more significant and subtle point is that the value of help is determined by the recipient. Your friend who's having relationship troubles with the guy that you think isn't good enough for him? You're not helping when you advocate a break-up. I could lose a few pounds, but don't steal my Ben & Jerry's. Cleaning someone's house for them is a great favor, but if you put everything in the wrong place, you've just created more work. An overly-aggressive evangelist may think he's helping me by badgering me to Jesus, but he's really just being a pain in the ass.

That's the part that I think most people don't get. They want to feel like they're helping, even when the recipient of that "help" is worse off as a result. If you're truly sincere about helping someone, you'll make sure you're not imposing your own agenda. You'll make sure you're seeing things from their perspective. And most importantly, you'll make sure that you're actually improving the situation. Otherwise, your "help" is just an act of selfishness.

In denial about Wikipedia

5 years ago, you would have been completely justified in being skeptical about Wikipedia. About.com was an example of what was considered better. It was controlled. The authors and editors were qualified and authoritative. Wikipedia seemed like a ridiculous exercise in utopian naïveté.

7 years into the experiment, it's clear that Wikipedia is a success. Wiki works. What was healthy skepticism increasingly looks like denial. Mostly it's just verbal sniping, but there are a number of projects that attempt to "fix" Wikipedia by restricting authorship to appropriately qualified "authorities."

Citizendium requires real names and requires all articles be approved by their group of "experts." They're not different enough nor do they have sufficient critical mass to catch up. They don't appreciate what it is that has made Wikipedia such an unstoppable force.

Conservapedia aims to fix Wikipedia's "liberal bias." What they will do about reality's known liberal bias remains unclear. Their misguided aims doom them from the start; I imagine it will be no more successful than Air America Radio.

Mahalo tries to avoid authorship altogether. They provide no information directly. It's like they took the corresponding Wikipedia article and stripped out everything but the "References" section. Their compelling advantage is thus that they provide less information and require you to do more work. Good luck with that.

Finally, Google has entered the arena with Knol, which encourages anyone to post an article on anything, and let the search algorithm sort out who's best. I thought that approach was useless when it was called Squidoo; apparently Google likes the idea, as well as the idea of giving it a dumb name. Assuming people use it, you'll end up with dozens of different pages on a single subject, all incomplete in different ways. You also cannot make a small edit to an existing article; you have to build the whole thing yourself. Just like one feature does not make a business, a single correction does not make a useful Knol.

The one fly in the ointment for Wikipedia is Google's control of the dominant search engine. Thus far, they've been true to their "don't be evil" motto in their index; if their Wikipedia jealousy causes them to pervert their search results, people will just stop using Google and go directly to Wikipedia. I already do that for many of searches (Firefox's keyword searches are indispensable). And that doesn't even get into the shrieks of delight that will echo from Redmond (Microsoft) and Sunnyvale (Yahoo) as Google's competitors contemplate what the DoJ will do in response.

Every one of these alternatives throws the baby out with the bathwater. Wikipedia's genius is how it manages to be both centralized and decentralized at the same time. What's centralized is the collection of information, something Squidoo, Mahalo, and Knol cannot match. Besides the obvious advantage of having a one-stop shop, they ignore the importance of the snowball effect; to produce a better lens or Knol, you have to start from scratch. I would be surprised if any of my regular readers has never even once made an edit to Wikipedia.

The decentralized part of Wikipedia is of course the army of authors and editors, namely, the entire population of Internet users. It turns out that really matters. Conservapedia rejects anyone who doesn't share their set of biases (i.e., most of everyone) while Citizendium puts barriers in front of anyone who might want to contribute. If there's anything we've learned in 15 years of the Web, it's that everything you put between a user and an action, no matter how seemingly trivial, chips away at the number of people who will actually bother.

These sites may improve on Wikipedia in certain narrow ways, but those improvements come at such a cost that none of them will be able to defeat Wikipedia. Wikipedia certainly could stand a few improvements. Vandalism is generally contained, but still occurs frequently. The cabal of moderators occasionally gets unhinged. Wikipedia's markup has gotten increasingly complicated as the project has adopted more sophisticated conventions for formatting and organization, restricting what a casual editor can do. Those are all real problems that Wikipedia has yet to solve. Some day, something better will come along, but these guys ain't it.

The Peacock's Tailpipes

A luxury car is a way to advertise earning power. Only people with a lot of money can afford to waste so much of it on something so useless. It's like the peacock's tail; only the supremely fit can afford to expend so many of their resources in such a display.

Much like the peacock, luxury cars' tails display wastefulness. Cheap cars get good mileage. Luxury cars get bad mileage. More fuel consumption means more exhaust. Ordinary cars have a single, smaller tailpipe. Some pickup trucks have two, or one larger one. Luxury cars usually have 2 and often have 4. They advertise that their owners don't need to worry about the cost of gasoline; they can burn as much as they want.

We as a society conserve only because we have to. Conservation is otherwise contrary to our values. Luxury cars demonstrate what we truly aspire to, and that is to waste. Waste is the ultimate luxury. One day, perhaps there will be high-mileage luxury car. When that happens, you'll know that we've found something even better to waste. I hope it's something we can afford.

Addendum: I am aware of high mileage exotic cars like the Tesla. Those exist in such small numbers that they don't matter.

MS CS

Every now and then I toy around with the idea of getting a Master's degree in Computer Science. There's a lot to recommend it. I'm the least educated person in my family. My mom has two bachelor's degrees, my dad a BS and MS, my sister two bachelor's degrees and an MBA, and Jessica a BS and MA. I just have my lowly BA. It's not even a BS even though it's CS. Rice didn't offer the BS until my junior year, at which point changing course would have required at least another semester, which, at $10,000 a pop, was a bridge too far.

There are a number of important topics in computing where either my initial degree was weak, or the last 8 years has allowed my earlier knowledge to atrophy. Compilers, for instance. It's a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem with learning those things on the job, as jobs that use those skills require you to already know them. To some extent I can learn those on my own, but I would benefit from a more structured program for some of the more challenging and/or abstract subjects.

UT has a Software Engineering Master's degree program. I went to an information session for that a few years ago, and concluded that I'd rather have a proper MS CS. The SE Master's is a lot more vocationally-oriented, and the covered material either things I've already learned or could more easily learn on my own than the harder-core MS CS material.

On the other hand, there are lots of reasons not to attempt the degree. The most significant is the opportunity cost. It would take at least 3 years and $35,000 (at 6 credits/semester), at a time when my presence at home is pretty important. I don't think it would grant me a whole lot of earning power directly, though I should not discount the opportunities made available to me by knowing what I previously did not.

I would definitely like to have the knowledge, but it's not just about what I want anymore. My time and money are limited and already spoken for. It will probably be easier in 5 years, but it won't be as valuable then. That's one of the things I've realized. Getting older means that the opportunity costs of changing direction go up and the benefits go down. When you're young, opportunities multiply as time passes. At some point around age 20-25, things change. Now the passage of time means more doors close than open. Maybe it reverses yet again later when the kids get into (or leave) college, but that's a long time from now.

My Law of Ranking

If someone tells you that they're a top N something, and N is not in the set (3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, etc.), then they're the N-th. For example, my manager just pointed out (knowing how silly it sounded) that Bank of America is a Top 2 bank. This applies for other things. For example, if some coal mine claims they've had only 2 deaths in the last 323 days, you know a dozen people died 324 days ago.

Nobody makes you mad like your kids

Especially if that kid is 3 years old. I think I figured out why. With everyone else, you can always say, "screw this," and leave. You have no escape from your kids. I have learned a huge amount of sympathy for single parents.