Quis custodiet…?
Nice quote from Krugman.
Catherine Rampell comments skeptically on Peter Orszag’s call for delegating more policy to panels of nonpolitical experts. I’d add that this is an odd time to make such a proposal. Yes, the political world is deeply dysfunctional — but what’s equally remarkable is just how terrible the judgment of the supposed experts has been. It’s not just the complete failure to foresee this crisis. Fancy international organizations have been persistently offering disastrous advice, counseling austerity and interest rate hikes just as the recovery, such as it is, stumbles. Politicians say dumb things about monetary policy — but so does the ECB.
The point is that what we need are the right ideas, not the right sort of people. Madmen in authority come in all forms, and the dignified men in suits are often no better than the rabble-rousers.
P***words
My Observer column about passwords has prompted some witty conversations and emails. Many of the latter pointed to this lovely xkcd cartoon. The punch line:
“Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess”.
Amen.
Zuckerberg’s Law
This is the notion, promoted by Facebook’s founder that the amount of stuff that people share roughly doubles every year.
Good piece in the Economist about Zuckerberg’s latest move to control all human personal information.
The social network is certainly doing its utmost to ensure that folk end up revealing more about themselves, whether they like it or not. On September 22nd Facebook, which now has over 800m users, unveiled a couple of significant changes designed to get people to share far more about their life histories and their interests in music, film and other areas.
The first shift involves people’s profile pages, which hold biographical details about them. In the next few weeks Facebook plans to roll out a redesign of these pages. The new-look profile, dubbed Timeline, will allow users to keep far more of the material they share over the network in an easy-to-use historical format and to add photos and other content from their past more easily. Facebook’s goal is to get people to create a complete online archive of their lives that they constantly curate.
At the same time, the firm is promoting a new generation of “social apps”. Users will be encouraged to report to their friends in real time via these apps that they are, say, listening to a piece of music, cooking a particular kind of meal or watching a specific film. Their friends will then be able to click on, say, a music app and listen to the same piece of music. The company has been working with a group of firms, including Spotify, an online-music outfit, Netflix, a video-streaming service, and a range of news organisations (including the Washington Post and The Economist), to flesh out the offerings it will need to make this new feature take off.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the Economist itself is participating in this farce.
Since Spotify is one of the signed-up ‘partners’, does that mean that Spotify users will have to use their facebook login to, er log in to Spotify?
UPDATE: The answer to that last question is “yes”. Just read this statement from Spotify:
“To us, this is all about creating an amazing new world of music discovery. As most of our users are already social and have already connected to Facebook, it seemed logical to integrate Spotify and Facebook logins. We already use Facebook as part of our backend to power our social features and by adopting Facebook’s login, we’ve created a simple and seamless social experience.
From today, all new Spotify users will need to have a Facebook account to join Spotify. Think of it as like a virtual ‘passport’, designed to make the experience smoother and easier, with one less username and password to remember. You don’t need to connect to Facebook and if you do decide to, you can always control what you share and don’t share by changing your Spotify settings at any time.
We’re constantly trying new things, always looking for feedback and we’re always going to listen to our users, making changes based on this feedback wherever we can.”
I’m reminded of Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language”, and in particular of this sentence:
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Yep.
Cultural norms
The floral dance
You see, it’s like this…
Vint Cerf explains something to Nigel Shadbolt, High Table, Balliol, September 22, 2011.
Vint Cerf, Joi Ito and Christopher Michel
At the Oxford Internet Institute’s 10th anniversary celebrations on September 22, 2011.
Friedman impaled
Deliciously savage Review by Andrew Ferguson of Tom Friedman’s new book
‘That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back” is a landmark in American popular literature: It is the first book by Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and mega-best-selling author of “The World Is Flat,” “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” and so on, in which an alert reader can go whole paragraphs—whole pages, in a few instances—without fighting the impulse to chuck it across the room.
As a writer, Mr. Friedman is best known for his galloping assaults on Strunk and White’s Rule No. 9: “Do Not Affect a Breezy Manner.” “The World Is Flat” & Co. were cyclones of breeziness, mixing metaphors by the dozens and whipping up slang and clichés and jokey catchphrases of the author’s own invention. (The flattened world was just the beginning.)
And,
Mr. Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer. He announces that “America declared war on math and physics.” Three paragraphs later, we learn that we’re “waging war on math and physics.” Three sentences later: “We went to war against math and physics.” And onto the next page: “We need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both.” Three sentences later: We must “reverse the damage we have done by making war on both math and physics,” because, we learn two sentences later, soon the war on terror “won’t seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math.” He must think we’re idiots.
As someone who’s on record as describing Friedman as a master of the catchy half-truth, I’m not his greatest fan. But I wonder if some of the asperity in Ferguson’s review has anything to do with the fact that it appears in the Wall Street Journal and Friedman is a star columnist on that paper’s deadly NYC rival, the New York Times?
Believing in neutrinos
Nicest Tweet of the morning came from Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147 on Twitter):
Favourite neutrino joke so far: To get to the other side. Why did the neutrino cross the road?
Backstory: Wired sums it up thus:
If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light.
In fact, the result would be so revolutionary that it’s sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. “I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments,” says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, “I’d be delighted if it were true.”
The data come from a 1,300-metric-ton particle detector named Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA). Lurking in Italy’s subterranean Gran Sasso National Laboratory, OPERA detects neutrinos that are fired through the Earth from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. As the particles hardly interact at all with other matter, they stream right through the ground, with only a very few striking the material in the detector and making a noticeable shower of particles.
Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.
Hmmm… I’ve always been fascinated by neutrinos, and often use physicists’ belief in them as evidence that religious fundamentalists aren’t the only people who believe implausible things. Just ponder this passage from the Wikipedia entry on the neutrino:
Most neutrinos passing through the Earth emanate from the Sun. About 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth.
What this implies, for example, is that a neutrino can pass right through the earth without noticing the obstacle in its path. Now I know (pace Rutherford’s famous experiment) that atoms are mostly empty space, but still… Makes you think, doesn’t it? It makes me think of JBS Haldane’s famous suspicion that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”.