consumers hooked on oil? please.

I don't agree with Peter Maass' assessment that

"because when you kind of get down to it, American consumers do want to have their gasoline."

As a consumer, I'd love to spend less on gas. One practical example of how I could do this is to telecommute to work (not every job can do this, but some can), but most corporations don't believe this is an option. How about WebEx meetings instead of business travel? Many don't believe this is as good as face time and are willing to pay for air travel. There are many other alternatives I could list that either require unacceptable tradeoffs or drastically reduced standards of living or drastically higher expenses to support alternative energy. The infrastructure for what he wants simply doesn't exist yet.

So what are consumers going to do? Of course they're going to want their gasoline because there is no way to make a living without it. Give us an alternative before accusing us of inaction! Personally, I think rising gas prices will ultimately motivate alternative energy. As alternative energy becomes cheaper than oil, consumers will be happy to switch, as will the corporations and markets that connect them.

But Maass' premise is insulting. He thinks we can afford it and we're just being petulant. Instead, he should be focusing his energy on the existing economic system that was built on oil. Of course we want to get off oil dependency as soon as possible and move towards sustainable energy, but Maass wants the consumer to single-handedly bear the cost of switching without any help from the structure of corporations or governments.

Most of us can't afford that and Maass is forgetting where the consumer's power to spend money comes from in the first place: the ability to earn money and spend responsibly within that structure, not apart from it.

Ben Ward says "Link to it!!"

Ben Ward's post about the difference between web-like rich applications and real web content is awesome.

I think it pins down some distinctions that have been brewing for a while, and solidifies several of my own thoughts about it.

For example, his statement:

"If you want to build the most amazing user interface, you will need to use native platforms."

This is the fuel behind java applets, Flash, SVG, VRML and every other extension to the web developed so far. It's about presentation. It's something the W3C does exceptionally poorly, and I think they shouldn't attempt to do it at all. It's also something that every tools company has struggled with: the only way to extend kick-ass native platforms into the browser is to create a new plugin. The only way to get a new plugin recognized is ubiquity among the user-base. Flash arguably won that battle, but it's a losing war in the long run because now it's Flash or nothing. The other "open" alternatives are attempts that are valid in their own right, but have never been quite ubiquitous enough. And HTML5 simply shuffles a bunch of capabilities from plugins to the browser, which certainly makes those capabilities ubiquitous, but doesn't necessarily make them better, or even more open (as Ben points out about H.264).

But Ben also makes a brilliant case for content:

"Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else."

This idea, the linking of content, is exactly what the W3C has always excelled at. It's awesome, the idea that I can simply link and connect pieces of content from all over the world and make my own connections and conclusions and in turn become a piece of content for someone else. This was Tim-Berners Lee's original vision of the web and I agree with Ben, it shouldn't be lost. We should fight for it. Maybe the real problem is that presentation and content have gotten so tangled and confused that we've forgotten the difference?

This galvanizes me to talk about some experiments I've been doing recently to make simple websites that make the distinction VERY VERY clear. Let me show you an example:

This semester, I had to produce "mini-sites" for class homework assignments. These mini sites had to basically run as static html because they had to be viewed from the local filesystem of a TF after being zipped up and submitted. They had to be viewable on the wide range of platforms used by the TFs, which effectively meant vanilla HTML/CSS, but I didn't want to have to code a TOC by hand either. What I came up with was an xml file tuned exactly to my content.

Take a look at the finished html page: writeup.html

This was generated from a handcrafted xml file: homework.xml. (You'll have to "View Source" to see the xml if you're in a XSLT capable browser like FireFox because it will automatically render the HTML for you). There are very few presentation aspects in this xml file, and quite a few "new" custom elements I created that are specific to the structure of my assignments. It's small and ad-hoc, which is fine. It's basically a micro-format without all of the extraneous divs.

I render it with xslt using this file for the presentation layer: homwork.xsi. This file contains all the rejiggering and mucking about that presentation layers require. Even so, I tried to make it as clean as possible by utilizing CSS where I could and getting creative with XSLT. It can even provide microformats-compatible semantic markup in the generated div elements -- the best of both worlds! Finally, I generated the static html file using a very simple ruby script: genhtml.rb.

Sure it's rough and simple (I didn't have a lot of time), but it highlights what I want to show: we don't need fancy web platforms or standards to separate content from presentation. We can do it right now, today, with the tools we have, it just requires the right mind-set.

I'd love to see WebGL, Processing and Flash sites that have separate RESTful urls that flay out all their internal content in browseable xml or JSON microformats, easy to link to, easy to transform and include in other pages or references. (btw, Processing already does this somewhat by putting links to the source code in the applet page -- brilliant!)

I'd also love to see brilliant new presentation layer technologies form, like WebGL, Processing for the web, javascript, Flash, webkit, etc. because I want to innovate and create that new killer interface and interaction model for my content that no one has thought of before and no one else has implemented before!

I think Ben's post and my experiments show a way that we can have both of these things at the same time as long as we don't get confused and tangled up in the standards war or the RIA platform war and forget the difference between content and presentation.

OReily's Internet Operating System FTW!!

I'm glad OReily wrote his post "The State of the Internet Operating System." I agree with it a lot.

I said this years ago. In fact, I'll repeat the idea here: just like early video devs went through hell writing to non-standard graphic card memory models, early web devs have had to struggle with non-standard serialization and presentation formats.

And just like back then, a crop of "device drivers" slowly formed (first from DOS systems like Miles Sound System, etc. then later via the OS) -- well it's happening now: people fed up with the conflicting standards of the w3c and webdev-hell have had it and are starting to create "web-standard" independent "drivers" -- like webkit, like jquery -- that don't care what version of HTML browser or CSS you really have, that degrade gracefully by offering "hardware abstractions" (or in this case browser and w3c standards abstractions!) And javascript is rapidly becoming the language of the new platform because no-one else is moving fast enough.

In my mind it's time to put the W3C to bed where they belong -- leave them as keepers of a data standard to the semantic web, but for crying out loud, give the presentation devs a standard platform we can actually code to with the solidity and flexibility of postscript or renderman!

IMHO, the next steps (great leaps forward) are standard serialization formats. Who gives a flying &#&#@ if you are doing a GET or a POST or a JSON or an xml, or java-to-javascript, or what the hell have you -- SERIOUSLY, it's as insane as memory management was before contiguous memory controllers (does anyone remember those days?) -- it's all state serialization, it should have a freakin standard way of writing and reading no matter where it comes from or where it goes to -- I'm not talking implementation details, I'm talking raw syntax.

ActiveRecord and JSON begins to get close to this, but we've got a LONG way to go before I can just say "give me an address from the database and post it to that RESTful service and write it to a memory cache over there -- and it's all the same damn syntax! Why reinvent the wheel 80 bazillion times?

/rant off

risk management implies socialism not capitalism...

I've been hearing several stories on NPR recently that question the ideas of an unregulated free-market economy given the recent financial meltdown. The argument is that laissez-faire markets have been shown "not to work," there are now new doubts about whether markets are the most efficient system for managing resources.

Ok, so why is this disturbing? Because I think a critical distinction is being lost in the debate between free-markets and controlled economies. The critical distinction is a concept of risk.

Unregulated free markets work. They work well. They are extremely efficient. Nothing I've seen disproves that. However, they can be extraordinarily brutal -- usually when speculative bubbles pop. The free-market theory has been that less regulation will allow these bubbles to pop sooner and smaller -- but as recent experience has shown, that's not necessarily the case. A free-market's ideal is in information that represents actual value, but it's entirely possible for prolonged periods of speculation to exist and even grow, fueling such bubbles. When large bubbles pop, huge sections of the economy may be at risk. If this were allowed to happen, the results would be catastrophic, but they would ensure a quick demise to everyone who touched (and fueled) such speculation. This doesn't mean the concept of free-market is broken, or it's not efficient. It is cruelly efficient, but what we are really talking about is risk, not the free-market!

In fact, let me make a bold thesis: all forms of risk management move away from free-market capitalism towards socialism.

I'm not necessarily against socialism, but let's look closely at this new distinction that is absent from the current dialogue: if you embrace risk management, it means ultimately that you are diffusing risk to other areas, you are in effect damping all the wild fluctuations of the market into a smooth, level field. Hedge funds did this by intricately linking and amplifying thousands of previously unrelated investments. The bailout did this by spreading the losses over all American taxpayers. The extreme end of this arrow is zero-risk: zero development, zero capital, zero life. The extreme end of the free-market arrow is maximum-risk, which could be heaven or hell, or likely both over time.

The math of hedge funds and derivatives is fundamentally unstable - in every place it has been used, the results have been unpredictable and disastrous from the beginning of the very first hedge fund to use "zero-risk" maths, which lost billions of dollars in a few months. I believe this is because people are missing the connection between risk-management and socialist-economics. One implies the other automatically. This becomes painfully obvious if you look at the basic premise of hedge funds: to create zero-risk investment instruments... how is such a thing possible in a capitalist system which is built on risk? It would be like trying to build a casino where there is zero-risk... would you call it gambling?

Realistically, we will always have a mixed economy in some respects. The question is not whether one socio-economic system is better than another, it's how much do you want of one or the other. Or put simply, how much risk can we afford? I don't think zero-risk is necessarily a good place to aim, because we've seen exactly how that turns out.

Avatar is Awesome!

With all the awesome effects I was worried that the story might have floated off like one of the mountains in the movie -- however Cameron knocks it out of the park by providing a solid and emotionally compelling story that touches on humanity and forgiveness over greed and destruction.

The technology allowing the actors to transfer their performance to their synthetic counterparts is amazing. In that respect, this movie reminded me of Jurassic Park -- on one level you're talking about genetically engineering dinosaurs -- but on another, they really created compelling animated dinosaurs!

Well, in the same way, Avatar shows people transferring consciousness to synthetic alien/human hybrids, but on another level, Cameron really developed the technology to transfer the actor's "consciousness" -- their performance to the CGI models. Like Jurassic Park, that's nothing short of amazing.

ontological paradox...

Noticing today's RocketBoom on the Ontological Paradox made me start musing about one of the examples, specifically:

On his 30th birthday, a man who wishes to build a time machine is visited by a future version of himself. This future self explains to him that he should not worry about designing the time machine, as he has done it in the future. The man receives the schematics from his future self and starts building the time machine. Time passes until he finally completes the time machine. He then uses it to travel back in time to his 30th birthday, where he gives the schematics to his past self, closing the loop. Of course, the schematics must have come from somewhere.

There might be a simple way around the problem of where the information comes from if you accept the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics:

• Let M be the multiverse, or the set of all universes.
• Let u be a universe in M where the man successfully develops the time machine on his own.
• All he has to do is find any other universe u' in M such that the current time in u' is equal to a previous time in u (i.e. 30 years ago).
• If, technically, he travels across universes from u to u' (as opposed to really traveling in time in his own universe) then the information (the plans) really come from u, not u', so there is no spontaneous generation of information.
• The fact that the plans generate a "time" machine which allows the loop to "close" is completely accidental since "time" travel would in reality continually travel to another universe (e.g. once in u', he would need to find a u'', etc.)
• Also, because he is traveling between different universes (as opposed to traveling backwards in time) he doesn't break any known laws of physics.
  

There are some problems with this way of thinking about things though...

If there are universes "in the past" and there are no limits to how far we can go "back", it implies that there is always at least one universe right now that is undergoing the very first instant of the big bang. I don't think "many worlds" allows such a juxtaposition. It's probably not a given that a universe u' can always be found.

You might say that this doesn't matter, because he's only going back 30 years... however, once the loop is "closed", it might easily execute more than n = (the age of the universe/30) times... if you imagine it takes n universes (u₁...u_n) to perpetuate this cycle, then the last universe u_n in the chain must have been undergoing the first instant of the big-bang when he left his original universe u.

"why do we seem to only know about one universe"

There has always been another weird problem with the multiverse interpretation... supposedly, different event probabilities create different universes in which each probability actually happened. If that's true, then why do we seem to only know about one universe -- i.e. why does our consciousness seem always to travel with this particular branching path and not one of the others?

Then I realized this isn't such a problem after all: we might only remember this universe because at any given moment our memories are the sum total of our experience along only the path we are in. Our other "selves" would likely have different memories, but all similarly self-constrained to their paths.

There's no way to "peek around the quantum veil" as it were.

journalism in crisis...

A while ago I had heard Bill Moyers speech regarding "Journalism in Profound Crisis". I knew the dangers, but today the full weight of his speech hit me while reading a very tame and completely unrelated "news" article linked from a friend's facebook account.

The story, which appeared on the headline Business section of MSNBC.com on Sept 20th, outlines how a family recovered from $100,000 debt in 5 years to be debt free and happier and more responsible than they had been. At first, I thought it was just an uplifting story... but then I started to notice some odd things about the story: for one, it was copyright by CreditCards.com. Second, the story disclosed that the family had won a PACE award which was judged by one of CreditCards.com's senior reporters.

Since when do private credit card companies hire reporters?

"How many other news stories are really embedded corporate press releases?"

The story explains that the family was holding even until "credit card companies [began] raising their interest rates" even though the family had been current on all their bills. Credit card companies proactively raising their rates has been described elsewhere as a response to the Card Accountability and Disclosure Act (CARD) and the state of the economy in general.

CreditCards.com identifies itself as a broker between consumers and credit card companies. So it has a vested interest in protecting the interests of credit card companies who are it's customers.

While other stories have focused on the unfairness of raising rates for consumers who have always paid their bills on time, the CreditCard.com story quietly bypasses whether the rate increases were fair or just, and just commends the family for paying their debts without raising a fuss.

This is brilliant marketing, but is it news?

What's shocking isn't the story they wrote, or that they are one of MSNBC's advertising sponsors, it is that their "story" appeared as headline business news on MSNBC.com, a company that touts itself as "one of the most honored news organizations." Ordinarily this kind of PR story appears (or is credited) exactly where it belongs, on PR Newswire. The fact that it was published as a story subject to the same journalistic integrity that MSNBC.com is so proud of is deeply disturbing.

How many other news stories are really embedded corporate press releases?

Bill Moyers wasn't kidding about the threat to journalism. The internet gives us a lot of power to write and read stories almost as they happen. But it also gives corporations the power to pretend to be journalists without fully disclosing their motives.