Putting things in context

Surprisingly good survey article in the NYT about the oncoming disaster of global warming. Sample extract:

“The heart of the problem is carbon dioxide, the main byproduct from the burning of fossil fuels. When the atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide, heat is trapped, producing a greenhouse effect. Most scientists believe the billions of tons of carbon dioxide released since the start of the Industrial Revolution are in part to blame for the one-degree rise in global temperatures over the past century. Carbon dioxide concentrations are now 30 percent higher than preindustrial levels.

With rising living standards in developing nations, emissions of carbon dioxide are increasing, and the pace of warming is expected to speed up, too. Unchecked, carbon dioxide would reach twice preindustrial levels by midcentury and perhaps double again by the end of the century. That could force temperatures up by 3 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, according to computer models.

Because carbon dioxide is colorless, odorless and disperses immediately into the air, few realize how much spills out of tailpipes and smokestacks. An automobile, for example, generates perhaps 50 to 100 tons of carbon dioxide in its lifetime.

The United States produces more carbon dioxide than any other country by far. Each American, on average, generates about 45,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. That is about twice as much as the average person living in Japan or Europe and many times more than someone living in a developing country like Zimbabwe, China or Panama. (Even if the United States achieves President Bush’s goal of an 18 percent reduction in the intensity of carbon dioxide emissions by 2012, the output of an average American would still far exceed that of almost anyone else in the world.)”

Nothing will happen, of course — at least not with the current Junta in power in the US. But it does rather put other things in perspective..

British Library will now archive UK websites

According to this BBC Online story, “the British Library is now able to store web pages and e-mails in its archive after a legal change.

The library had pushed for electronic items to be included because of the rise in web-based publishing.

“This new legislation will now mean that a vital part of the nation’s published heritage will be safe,” said MP Chris Mole, who supported the move.

The archive will comprise selective “harvesting” from the 2.9 million sites that have “co.uk” suffixes.

The new law was given royal assent on Friday.

The library already has six legal deposit archives which hold a copy of everything published in the UK since 1911. The new formats – which also include CD-Roms – will join these archives, and be available for future study.”

Some people don’t like Amazon’s ‘Search Inside’

The Seattle Times has a report that trade book authors (many of whom do pretty well out of Amazon) don’t like the new Search Inside facility because it might enable users to get the key piece of information they are seeking without having to buy the book. “The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find “the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon” or “where to find the best airfare to Cuba” by using Amazon’s search feature instead.

The new feature may have other problems: Each search allows the user to see the full-text of the page where the keyword appears, plus two pages forward and two backward. But savvy searchers can actually read more of the book.

In an e-mail to its members, The Authors Guild, the country’s oldest and largest society of published authors, said it was able to print out 108 consecutive pages from a best-selling book by using key search terms.

An attempt to use the method yesterday successfully called up more than 150 pages of a travel book.”

Yeah! And I can also dig my garden with a teaspoon.

Update:According to Wired, “Amazon.com’s new book-searching feature does not allow users to print pages from within books, soothing authors who feared the tool could give users too much free content at the expense of book sales.”

Microsoft trying to buy Google?

Yep. The NYT is reporting that “According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft – desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business – approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.”

There will be a lot more of this as Google moves towards a stock market flotation. The obvious thing to do is for Google to auction its shares to Internet users rather than going down the usual corrupt route of letting merchant banks corner huge blocks of shares — enabling their clients to make easy killings and control of the company to pass to Redmond in due course.

Lovely piece in today’s Economist about Google. Nice cartoon too.

Image (c) The Economist 2003, naturally.

Why does an audio CD hold 74 minutes’-worth of music?

Must be some technical reason for it, surely? Not at all says the NYT:

“In the early 1980’s, Sony was helping to develop a new digital music technology. Mr. Ohga, then the company’s president, insisted that no matter what else, the new format had to be able to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony without interruption. Mr. Ohga, you see, had been a classical vocalist before getting into electronics.”

A lovely trick — from Tim O’Reilly

From a Wired report. Quote:

O’Reilly said the old idea of stand-alone software — the unconnected word processor or spreadsheet — is becoming passé. Even the idea of making a distinction between software platforms — Mac, Windows and Linux — is starting to no longer make sense.

“The platform is no longer the box sitting at your desk,” O’Reilly said.

To illustrate his point, O’Reilly asked how many people in the audience of Mac OS X programmers were Linux users. Several raised their hands. But when O’Reilly asked how many used Google, there was a unanimous show of hands.

“Ah,” O’Reilly said, “you’re all Linux users.” Google is a Linux application running on the world’s largest Linux cluster, he explained.

What a wonderful rhetorical trick. Must use it sometime soon in a lecture.

Well, whaddya know — the US Army is switching to Linux

According to The Register, ‘the US Army has abandoned Windows and chosen Linux for a key component of its “Land Warrior” programme, according to a report in National Defense Magazine. The move, initially covering a personal computing and communications device termed the Commander’s Digital Assistant (CDA), follows the failure of the previous attempt at such a device in trials in February of this year, and is part of a move to make the device simpler and less breakable. According to program manager Lt Col Dave Gallop this is part of a broader move towards Linux by the US Army: “Evidence shows that Linux is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to Linux-based OS.”‘

Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and…

…and, er, red wine*

[Both pictures taken last Sunday at Nicci and Sean’s place in Suffolk.]

*But not, alas, from my own vineyard, as an eagle-eyed reader pointed out! Sigh! One cannot get away with anything on the Web.

Google sells out

Google is going public with a stock market flotation. It’s the beginning of the end for what was a great company and a terrific service. Or so says Vic Keegan.

Amazon’s Really Big Idea

A searchable archive of all its books — where you can search the text. And there’s a prototype already working. See this report. Quote:

“Amazon’s new archive is more densely populated than the early Web was, but it’s still far from complete. With its 120,000 titles, the archive has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new territory suddenly opens up.

The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I’ve recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York’s most famous pillager of public money. Manber types “Boss Tweed” into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.

From the Hamill reference, I link to a page in the afterword on which he cites books that influenced his portrait of Tweed. There, on the screen, is the cream of the research performed by a great metropolitan writer and editor. Some of the books Hamill recommends are out of print, but all are available either new or used on Amazon.

With persistence, serendipity and plenty of time in a library, I may have found these titles myself. The Amazon archive is dizzying not because it unearths books that would necessarily have languished in obscurity, but because it renders their contents instantly visible in response to a search. It allows quick query revisions, backtracking, and exploration. It provides a new form of map.”

Update: lovely piece by Steven Johnson on the implications of this.