If you go to Byron Bay, you must try the fish and chips at Fishmongers! It's in a laneway that doesn't get much foot traffic, so you could easily miss it. And that'd be a shame, the food is fantastic. And it's cheaper than most higher-end places in the area -- basic fish and chips are only $10. You'll find the place in the laneway behind the beach hotel.
Clay Shirky's response to last year's Edge question "What are you optimistic about?". Very good I think.
Evidence.
As schoolchildren, we learn that different weights fall at the same speed. This simple and readily tested observation, first published by Galileo, refuted Aristotle, who claimed that heavy things fall faster. As Galileo put it in Two New Sciences "I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true..." We are left to wonder how people could have believed what they were told, and for two millennia at that, without ever checking? Surely the power of evidence over authority is obvious.
Except it isn't. Even today, evidence has barely begun to upend authority; the world is still more in thrall to Aristotle than Galileo. As a simple example, the time-honored advice for those suffering from bad backs has been bed rest. Only recently, though, have we discovered bed rest isn't the best treatment, and isn't even particularly good compared to moderate activity. How did this discovery come about? A researcher in the field of Evidence-based Medicine surveyed multiple databases of trials and results for patients with back pain. (It tells us something about medicine's current form that we even need a term like Evidence-based Medicine.) And why did it take so long to look at the evidence? Same reason it took so long to question Aristotle: some doctor in the distant past reasoned that bed rest would be a good idea, and it became the authoritative and little-questioned view.
In school, the embrace of evidence is often taught as if it were a one-time revolution that has now been internalized by society. It hasn't. The idea of evidence is consistently radical: Take nothing on faith. No authority is infallible. If you figure out a good way to test something, you can contradict hallowed figures with impunity.
Evidence will continue to improve society, but slowly — this is long-view optimism. The use of evidence dragged the curious mind from the confusion of alchemy into the precision of chemistry in the historical blink of an eye, but its progress past the hard sciences has been considerably slower. Even accepting that evidence should shape our views is inconsistent with much human behavior. Everything from the belief in supernatural beings to deference to elders pushes against the idea that a single person, if he or she comes to understand the evidence, should be allowed to upend a millennium of cherished human belief.
It is only in the last hundred years that evidence has even begun spreading from the hard sciences into other parts of human life. Previous platitudes about the unpredictability or universal plasticity of human behavior are giving way to areas of inquiry with names like Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Economics. (That we need a label like Behavioral Economics says as much about economics as Evidence-based Medicine does about medicine.) As reliance on evidence spreads, it takes with it an understanding of how it works. Apologists for religion often bolster their claims by noting that it is impossible to disprove the existence of supernatural beings. This argument assumes that their listeners don't understand how evidence works — it makes sense to believe in things for which there is evidence, and no sense to believe in things for which there is none. As evidence moves out of the lab and into everywhere else, rhetorical tricks like that are going to be progressively less effective. There will still be fundamentalists, of course — probably more of them, as improved evidence requires a heightened ability to shield the mind — but the oxymoronic middle ground of 'religious but reasonable' will become progressively harder to occupy.
This isn't just about religion, though. Most of the really important parts of our lives ·who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence. We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question.
Social science is expanding because we are better about gathering data and about understanding it. We have gone from a drought to a flood of data about personal and social behavior in the last generation. We will learn more about the human condition in the next two decades years than we did in the last two millennia, and we will then begin to apply what we learn, everywhere. Evidence-based treaties. Evidence-based teaching. Evidence-based industrial design. Evidence-based parenting.
There will always be some questions we can't answer, but they will be closer in spirit to "Who put the bomp in the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp?" than to "Why do fools fall in love?" There is an astonishing amount of work going on on that latter question right now, and there's a reasonable chance we'll have a really good answer, to it and to thousands of other questions once thought to be beyond study or explanation, in the coming years.
A refreshing bit of unfamiliarity: some pictures of the spectacular-looking construction in some big research facilities (along with short descriptions of the facilities).
From the San Remo website.
Tastes great!
Pizdaus, The Pics We Like.
A bit like reddit but for photos: people upload and rate them. Some pretty spectacular photos there.
Consider this situation. An institution has some worthwhile project they want to undertake, but it has huge data-processing requirements, and they just don't have the resources to fulfill them. Maybe they'd like to simulate protein folding, for medical research.
In an increasing number of cases like this, the internet is being used as a broker to enable such projects, by providing a pool of volunteer resources, either of people's computers or their own time to perform manual data-processing. There's huge pools of resources out there - a whole world of computers in homes and potential volunteers.
So far, this strategy has been quite successful, as reported in this article in the Economist.
Here's a summary of the details
Automated data-processing
Using the spare processing cycles on people’s home computers (and other devices, like Playstation 3’s).
Folding@home - simulating protein folding and mis-folding -- a cause of diseases such as Alzheimer's.The BOINC platform has been developed to support such processing.
In September, had combined computing capacity one petaflop--a quadrillion mathematical operations per second--something supercomputer designers have dreamed of for several years.
SETI@home - analysing data for signs of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilisations
Galaxy Zoo - volunteers help astronomers to classify the shapes of galaxies from powerful telescope images. "Thanks to the exquisite pattern-recognition capabilities of the human brain, amateurs with just a little training can distinguish between different types of galaxy far more efficiently than computers can."The BOSSA platorm (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation) has been developed to support such processing.
Had more than 100,000 volunteers classify over 1 million galaxies in a few months.
Stardust@home - volunteers spot the tell-tale tracks left by microscopic interstellar dust grains in tiles of porous aerogel from a probe sent into space.
Enlisted some 24,000 volunteers, who in less than a year performed more than 40 million searches (about 1500 searches / person).
Herbaria@home - volunteers document plant specimens from images drawn from the dusty 19th-century archives of British collections. Already, some 12 000 specimens have been documented.
Africa@home - volunteers extract useful cartographic information -- the positions of roads, villages, fields and so on -- from satellite images of regions in Africa where maps either do not exist or are hopelessly out of date. This will help regional planning authorities, aid workers and scientists
documenting the effects of climate change.
Distributed Proofreaders - volunteers help to proofread OCR'd scans of pages from old books (not metioned in the Economist article, but in a referring slashdot article).
Last year, Dharmesh Shah wrote some posts on the topic of simplicity in software, trying to distinguish between good and bad types of simplicity (as I mentioned here).
The other day, he wrote a pretty good followup. It's main point is that
The goal for software developers should not be to make things simpler just by reducing features. The goal of software should be to make it simpler for the user to do what they are trying to do.and the post elaborates on what this means in practice.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States.
The TextMate text editor looks quite good. I haven't used it -- my laptop runs Windows, and it's only on Mac -- but going by these screencasts, it's got some nifty features and overall seems quite impressive. Looks like it might provide a nice way to edit structured data like XML, while still retaining the free-form feel of a text editor -- see this screencast.
If you watch that screencast, you'll notice that it's often difficult to tell exactly what the person is doing to perform the operations they show, because they're using some sort of keystroke combination to invoke the operations. That made me think that software for recording screencasts could have a feature to add a 'virtual keyboard display' to the video, showing a little display of a keyboard in the video, showing which keys are being pressed as things happen.
That is, user can record their screen cast as per usual, and while they are doing so, the recording software keeps track of what keys they pressed and when. Then, it adds a little animated keyboard picture somewhere in the screencast recording, that shows when different keys were pressed.
If I want to send an SMS to confirm a lunch appointment, I'd like to be able to do the following. Pick up my phone, unlock it, and say to it: “SMS Joe Blogs, Lunch at 1pm at the usual place, question mark”.
To which it would display the text “Lunch at 1pm at the usual place?” on the screen and present me with the prompt “Send this SMS to Joe Blogs? Yes/No”.
That’d be a much more direct way of doing things.
This seems technically feasable, so I’m wondering if any phones can do this?
As far as I can tell, the non-screw-top caps on premium beers are simply pretentiousness.
Screw top caps don't make much change to the bottle's look (cap on or off), and don't -- as far as I know -- have any impact on the beer's quality. They can't be more expensive for companies to use, either, as you find them on all the cheaper beers.
Non-screw-top caps seem to be there to convey an air of class. There's nothing wrong with that goal, per se. But I think it's a shallow attempt at class, to forego an alternative with real benefits just to use an older-style of cap mechanism with no real distinguishing features aside from its inconvenience.
[...]
Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person.
Cars are a good example of why. It's possible to buy expensive, handmade cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there is not much point. Companies make more money by building a large number of ordinary cars than a small number of expensive ones. So a company making a mass-produced car can afford to spend a lot more on its design. If you buy a custom-made car, something will always be breaking. The only point of buying one now is to advertise that you can.
Or consider watches. Fifty years ago, by spending a lot of money on a watch you could get better performance. When watches had mechanical movements, expensive watches kept better time. Not any more. Since the invention of the quartz movement, an ordinary Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. [13] Indeed, as with expensive cars, if you're determined to spend a lot of money on a watch, you have to put up with some inconvenience to do it: as well as keeping worse time, mechanical watches have to be wound.
[...]
The same pattern has played out in industry after industry. If there is enough demand for something, technology will make it cheap enough to sell in large volumes, and the mass-produced versions will be, if not better, at least more convenient.
The article on the Kindle e-book reader I recently referred to starts like this
"Technology," computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "is anything that was invented after you were born."I like that, it’s nicely put. We are keenly aware of that which is different to the usual stuff we take for granted. We take older technologies for granted, so new technologies seem quite different.
So it's not surprising, when making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, that we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book.Given their point about not taking things for granted, what they say next is very ironic
It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.)No instruction manual needed. Unlike computers, or cars (people need to get instruction to learn how to drive) or other modern technology. Except that's a kinda silly statement to make, that takes our reading skills for granted.
Another bit of The Future may be about to click into place. E-books have been talked about for a long time, and we may finally have a viable alternative to printed books: the Kindle e-book reader, about to be released by Amazon.com.
NewsWeek has a – rather wordy – article on it. (The second half of the article goes into how pervasive ebooks might change things. e.g. people might use advertising in books, and books could be updated w/ errata).
Amazon has got the major publishers on board, and 88,000 titles will be on sale at the Kindle store on launch.
The reader’s specs are:
- has the dimensions of a paperback
- weighs 290g (10.3 ounces)
- sharp screen
- as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours
- doesn’t run hot or make intrusive beeps
- can hold about 200 books onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon.
Kindle has wireless connectivity for downloading books, and
you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process. And once you buy, the Kindle does its neatest trick: it downloads the book and installs it in your library, ready to be devoured. "The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos.You can also
[Update: the page can now be found here]
Here’s a nice example of information graphics done well.
So you know there's many different types of baseball pitches, but can't tell your cutter from your slider or changeup? Well help is at hand in this visual catalogue, showing each type in a simple graphic that intuitively captures it essential character.
Here's a rather rambling bit of sketching out some thoughts:
Bruce Schneier says:
Since 9/11, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves from terrorist attacks. Stories about the ineffectiveness of many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions of why they are so ineffective.His explanation, in short:
much of our country's counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from criticism when another attack occurs.which he refers to CYA (cover your ass) security.
It happens not because the authorities involved -- the Boston police, the TSA, and so on -- are not competent, or not doing their job. It happens because there isn't sufficient national oversight, planning, and coordination.That is, he ends up putting it down to insufficient national oversight, planning, and coordination.
People and organizations respond to incentives. We can't expect the Boston police, the TSA, the guy who runs security for the Oscars, or local public officials to balance their own security needs against the security of the nation. They're all going to respond to the particular incentives imposed from above. What we need is a coherent antiterrorism policy at the national level: one based on real threat assessments, instead of fear-mongering, re-election strategies, or pork-barrel politics.
Sadly, though, there might not be a solution. All the money is in fear-mongering, re-election strategies, and pork-barrel politics. And, like so many things, security follows the money.
CYA also explains the TSA's inability to take anyone off the no-fly list, no matter how innocent. No one is willing to risk his career on removing someone from the no-fly list who might -- no matter how remote the possibility -- turn out to be the next terrorist mastermind.Am I just saying this to assign my own blame to "the general population" for having this attitude? No. I think that to address this problem, we need to create greater awareness of the attitude. It seems so common for people to attribute responsibility poorly like this, and no one seem to blink an eye, so we need some consciousness-raising about it.
Another form of CYA security is the overly specific countermeasures we see during big events like the Olympics and the Oscars, or in protecting small towns. In all those cases, those in charge of the specific security don't dare return the money with a message "use this for more effective general countermeasures." If they were wrong and something happened, they'd lose their jobs.
Using speed dating as an experiment, some economists and psychologists examined what males and females look for in a partner (as reported in this relatively brief Slate article). Mostly, it confirmed what they had expected, though there were some surprises.
The 37signals guys say they don't design software to meet the needs of 'Personas' representing 'typical users', they design it for actual people -- themselves, mostly. Read the post for their justification.
If you've now read it, I just want to note that I think it's an example of how central high standards are to ‘creative’ tasks. The problem with the ‘personas’ is they’re too vague, and thus don’t provide stringent enough critiera or standards for judging what you've done and what you should do.
I think success in creative tasks is primarily a matter of having high-standards or strong evaluation criteria (though my point here is mainly just to make a 'mental note' about this example rather than to try and properly justify that larger point).
[Update: a copy of the illusion can be found here, from this page containing many examples of optical illusions. Some details of how the illusion works can be found here]
Have a look at this very cool visual illusion. On the left is the face of an angry man, on the right is the face of a calm woman. But get up, and walk three or four meters from your screen and look at it again -- the image is exactly the same but the faces have swapped positions. Walk back towards the screen and see them magically switch again.
