It is the height of arrogance to think that you deserve all of the credit for your success in life. Certainly, it is usually true to some degree that a successful person has worked hard, but it is extremely likely that they also benefited from advantages that other people didn’t have and caught a few lucky breaks. For instance, even just by virtue of being born in the right place, most Americans are among the richest 5% of earthlings. Moreover, successful people invariably rely upon technology and circumstances created by the past and present work of countless other people. Society is a collective project, and it is incredibly arrogant to try to benefit from its fruits without giving your fair share back.

No man is an island. We live together. Everyone, even the super-rich, depends on the participation of everyone else in the economy in order for them to get money to buy things with. The people below you on the social ladder are essentially forced to participate in the system in order to live.  You are too, just to a slightly lesser extent. If you treat the people below you with less than complete empathy because to do so would require you to accept being a little less well off, then you are in a dangerous place should the social structures that shackle the people below you ever disappear. And a society with a large proportion of members who consider the people below them in this light, well, that is a society ripe for revolution.

Suck on that, Randroids.

This amazing cosmic conception of knowledge starts at 6:15.

Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse. And some of the matter, back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of – I think it’s a trillion suns.

Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn’t survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. (Laughter) And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe, and model, and predict, and explain, above all – there’s your reference – what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other – the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.

Now that is knowledge. And if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property. That physical objects, as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time.

So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so, far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this, or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the most important things about the physical world.

I’m not being hyperbolic. Just read http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/28/330109/science-of-global-warming-impacts/ (and maybe also the links at http://pinboard.in/u:metamw/t:global_warming), think about the cracks in the system already starting to emerge due to food insecurity, and tell me how the next 100 or even 50 years can happen without the collapse of civilization and billions of deaths.  (Then, consider what James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who has been sounding the alarm on global warming longer and more accurately than just about anyone else, has said: if we burn all the unconventional sources of oil left in the earth, we run a serious risk of setting off runaway warming that will boil off the oceans and leave Earth uninhabitable for life.)

Ultimately, until it actually happens, you can doubt whether it will; out of sight, out of mind, no need to confront ultimate despair, your cosmic impotence in the face of humanity’s mass suicide.  I am not going to respond to any arguments for denial, delay, or trust in geo-engineering that may arise in the comments as a rationalization of inaction.  I have read enough to decide that expecting this century to be anything but an unmitigated disaster is life-threateningly risky.  I have given up on humanity’s ability to wake up and organize itself in time to prevent catastrophic warming in favor of merely highly disruptive warming, and I, for one, am going to do everything I can to ensure that I live at least a natural lifespan.  If you’re not already preparing to obtain arable land at a high latitude away from population centers, you’re behind the game.  If you wait ten or twenty years, it may very well be too late.

If you are unwilling to continue further into this century awaiting the approaching collapse of normality while pretending that inhabiting whatever niche you inhabit of the system that got us into this mess is an acceptable course of action, then let me know, and we can all buy some land together and set up a sustainable, self-sufficient community.  A community, where, in the last days of the race to utopia or oblivion, maybe we can be a safe haven for work on things that have the potential to save us from ourselves, like technology that enables better forms of social organization, or superhuman AI.

Going forward, I think people who are conscious of the overriding importance of sustainable living as we face catastrophic global warming need to start using it as a litmus test.  If you are too proud of your learned ignorance or too content in your learned helplessness to admit the facts and take action, I can only regard you as a mortal enemy; you are hurting our shared future, and if I could, I would rather live on a different planet than you.  If geo-engineering saves the day in the end, you can laugh at my naiveté all you want, but if it doesn’t, and I was prepared, don’t expect me to help you.

– –

Today, vast numbers of people obtain music, movies, software, and other forms of copyrighted content in ways that don’t result in any income for the content creator, namely through online piracy or bootleg physical copies. We can expect that such piracy will continue to become more common as it becomes easier and more accepted. This trend poses a serious threat to society’s cultural health. If almost everyone pirates, eventually the price will become so high that the people who do pay will stop. If no one pays, then there is no incentive to create. It’s true that creativity is often its own reward, but certainly a large portion of the current output of content wouldn’t exist if not for the profit motive, things like major motion pictures.

For a useful discussion of this issue, it is necessary to realize that the term “intellectual property” is a misnomer. For the vast majority of human history, people would have laughed at you if you shared an idea, story, or song and then asserted the right to control its future dissemination and use. It was understood that if you wanted to keep something for yourself, you should keep it to yourself. Property is the possession of scarce physical objects that can only be obtained by stealing them from their owner. It doesn’t make sense to apply the property metaphor to digital content, which can be copied infinitely without the original owner becoming any poorer. For more about why intellectual property is bad terminology designed to confuse you, see this essay by Richard Stallman, one of the founders of the free software movement.

Intellectual property rights are thus not natural rights, but rights granted by the state in order to incentivize creativity and innovation. If people can have a temporary monopoly on an idea, so the theory goes, then they will be more likely to create things that benefit everyone, but would otherwise not be worth creating because of the risk of someone else copying their idea or creation and taking away potential profit. There is actually no empirical evidence that state protection of intellectual property rights has historically or presently resulted in a higher level of creativity and innovation than what would have existed in their absence, and some reason to suspect that the opposite is in fact true.

With the invention of the printing press, and then the phonograph, and then motion picture film, people were able to make money from content, but what they were really doing was charging for the physical medium. With this state of affairs, intellectual property worked okay for a long time, until new facts got in the way. The advent of the Internet, which makes the cost of reproducing content almost zero, upended that business model, and the content industries are still struggling to adjust. The Internet also reduces the barrier to entry for content creators and makes it easier for creators and consumers to find each other, both of which obsolete the traditional industries whose value propositions mainly consist of (a) helping finance new works, because they are expensive and time-consuming (economically risky) to create and (b) helping expose those works to a large market.

There are several possible solutions:

• Institute pervasive Internet monitoring and punishment for pirates.  This won’t do, because police states are bad, and it’s also politically unlikely and technically infeasible due to widespread strong encryption.
• The status quo.  It actually seems to work alright.  A lot of people will pay, a lot of people will pirate, live experiences like concerts and movie theaters will continue to offer added value, and the RIAA and MPAA will continue to attempt to implement the business model of suing torrenters and offering modest settlements as an alternative.
• The content industries could adjust prices to reflect the market.  Most people would like to support their favorite artists if they could afford it.  Setting prices high enough to turn a profit but low enough to make piracy unattractive could actually increase sales. former record label executive suggested that £1 albums would be optimal.
• The government (or some corporation) could set up a distribution channel for all content.  Let everyone download as much content as they want.  Artists are paid based on the popularity of their work.  This could be funded by any of several taxation schemes based on whether cultural products should be available free to all or paid for in proportion to their use.

Since I believe in freely sharing ideas for the benefit of everyone, may the best execution win, I’m going to share a couple decent non-revolutionary low-risk/low-reward ones that have been nagging me for a while now. Yell at me if I haven’t done at least one within a couple months.

1. Soulver meets Etherpad
   
   Soulver is an excellent iPad/iPhone app that I would call a “literate spreadsheet”. For probably 90% of what people use spreadsheets for, it’s much better than a traditional spreadsheet application. I really wish there was a free software equivalent, so I started to think about how to build it on Linux and then realized, why not just make it on the web? You could create a parser and calculator for the necessary types of expressions using something like Jison. 

   Etherpad (demo) is an amazing realtime collaborative rich-text editor. Why not put your web version of Soulver on top of EtherPad? It should be doable, but I sadly don’t have the ninja JS skills required.

2. Automate the production of parallel bilingual books
   
   I’m not sure how much of a market there is for this, but it seems like between academics and bibliophile foreign language learners, it should exist.Create a program that takes two translations of the same book in Markdown or LaTeX and joins them together into a facing-page parallel edition using this LaTeX package. You have a substantial number of public domain books to choose from, anything published in the US before 1923, if my understanding of U.S. copyright law is correct. The difficulty may be in finding translations also under public domain, but it shouldn’t be insurmountable. 

   Hopefully, preparation time would get down to a couple hours per book. You could make the software and source files free, sell PDFs for a couple dollars, and sell print-on-demand paper books through Lulu. You could list on Amazon through Lulu and place AdWords ads to attract people interested in specific books.

Is it wrong not to vote?

• The cost of voting is non-zero. Say it takes thirty minutes of your day to go and vote. You could instead spend that time making money in order to donate to charities that save lives, or simply doing something pleasurable with your time.
• The chance that your vote will be the deciding vote is infinitesimal. (In the case of U.S. presidential elections, this is compounded by the electoral college because it must be both that your state has the deciding electoral votes and your vote is the deciding vote in your state.) If the margin was more than one vote, you could have stayed home and nothing would be different.
• The difference in outcome between your preferred candidate and the alternatives is not at all a life-and-death matter. If you vote in your economic interest, the personal economic cost to you of an unpreferred outcome is probably at most only a few thousand dollars in extra taxes. Even if you are a compassionate person who votes based on social issues without regard for your economic interests, it’s not as if the worse candidate is going to kill a bunch of people (well, maybe they will, but it’s hard to predict, and this possibility also only occurs when the electorate is very large, and thus the chance of your vote being the deciding vote correspondingly more infinitesimal). The difference in outcome, to your life, or the life of anyone you care about, is very much finite (except in exceptional cases, like when only one candidate supports the legality of a life-saving treatment that you need).

It is plain to see that voting is usually irrational. In only the rarest intersections of small voter pools and high stakes outcomes is it rational, and most of the elections that people vote in today are not such cases. You could even make a case that voting is wrong, because you could use the time you spend voting to make money to donate to charities that save lives, but this is not a case I want to argue, because the demandingness objection to such attempts to take utilitarianism to its logical conclusions is something that is central to most people’s belief systems because it makes it possible to accept the cognitive dissonance of living in comfort without donating all of your excess wealth to humanitarian organizations when hundreds of millions of people are starving. So, I don’t want to talk about that; all I wish to establish is that not voting is not wrong.

Is it wrong not to reduce your personal carbon footprint?

I believe that global warming is one of the two most important challenges that humanity will ever face. The failure of humanity to act in the past two decades as it has become increasingly certain that we are creating a hellish future for ourselves is emblematic of everything that is wrong with humanity, and it is an existential imperative that we as a species figure out how to stop emitting greenhouse gases.

And yet, I can’t rationally justify personally limiting my carbon footprint. I do it anyway by not eating meat and not driving a car, somewhat incidentally but also because of self-image and conscience. But I couldn’t say to a person who lives a lifestyle of carbon excess that what they are doing is wrong.

• If I gave up carbon-expensive luxuries, my life would be less comfortable. Large warm houses, private cars, plentiful meat and electric appliances are all nice things that people won’t usually willingly give up.
• If I reduced my carbon footprint, it would have barely any effect on the future suffering of anyone. I comprise perhaps one billionth of the current anthropogenic carbon emissions. If I personally prevent a few more tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, what does it really accomplish? It means that the temperature will end up, say, .0000001 degrees lower than it would have been. Any affect that this will have on anyone is so small that it doesn’t even outweigh the decrease to my comfort.

Is it wrong to eat meat?

Just to contrast the collective action problems of voting and global warming with a problem where individual action is a moral imperative, consider vegetarianism. I am a vegetarian myself, not because of some idea of animal rights or human virtue, but because it follows from a simple utilitarian argument.

• The production of any meat that I am likely to have access to involves a life of endless suffering for the animal. If you don’t believe this, just read or watch any of the media that has come out on the subject of factory farms since Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1975.
• Needless animal suffering is bad. No one has seriously claimed since the 1600s that animals aren’t sentient beings with rich inner lives, the ability to feel pain and pleasure, happiness and fear. There is a gradient of sentience, and I won’t take issue if you argue that a fish is equivalent to a rock as far as ethics is concerned, but for a cow, I certainly will.
• The pleasure I derive from the taste of meat is less than the suffering involved in its production. (That doesn’t even consider the fact that it’s a pretty crummy ethical philosophy to consider the interchangeability of your happiness and another’s suffering on anything approaching a 1-to-1 ratio.)
• Economic reality is such that, by my not buying meat, a substantially corresponding reduction in the production of meat will occur. This is not at all an obvious, and I am not an economist, but I believe it is true. If a million or a thousand people dropping out of the meat market would affect production, then it can be shown by induction that one person doing so must also affect it, otherwise there would be no way for a million people to do so. The precise amount of suffering that I prevent may depend on the elasticity of meat and how consistently I abstain, but I am confident that it is roughly equal to the suffering of one factory farm animal’s life.

I’m not sure how relevant the vegetarian argument is to the point I’m about to make, but it’s useful to see that not all problems are collective action problems.

What is to be done?

People have a stunning inability to think rationally about these questions. People have told me that the above arguments justifying non-voting and personal inaction with regard to global warming scare them, because they seem excessively individualistic. In fact, I am considering the problem from the most collectivist perspective imaginable, the future of humanity itself, and it is the people who refuse to see that acts like voting are fundamentally unable to solve our problems who scare me.

The instinct to irrationally cooperate is the product of millions of years of evolution that rewarded groups whose members cooperated, but also tolerated a certain number of free-riders. People cooperate selectively, but competition is the dominant driver of human advancement. We now face existential risks that require complete cooperation across the entire human species to avoid. Collective action problems have been solved before by totalitarian goverments, but totalitarianism is bad and tends not to last. Humanity must figure out how to get everyone to cooperate without being forced to, how to replace competition with cooperation as the dominant mode of human affairs.

I used global warming as an example, but this is a more general problem that humanity must solve. If we instituted a global carbon tax, it would solve one manifestation of the problem, but not the problem itself. For instance, we would still be killing each other in unnecessary wars that benefit political and religious leaders and the owners of the military-industrial complex at the expense of everyone else. The rich would still be exploiting the poor while every poor person dreams of becoming rich.

How many people collectively have decision-making power over a large enough portion of the global economy (say 30%) that they could force the entire global economy to stop emitting greenhouse gases? I’d guess it’s a relatively small number, maybe 10,000. Global warming could be solved if these people got together in a room and agreed to a binding contract, or to tell political leaders to institute regulations. But until then, these people have a strong incentive to agitate for global warming inaction, and will only act once they see that the consequences will be full-blown within their and their children’s lifetimes, and even then, since any individual only controls a fraction of a percent of the global economy, they will be acting out of conscience, not self-interest. By then, it will be far too late.

We must develop a mechanism to make cooperation among the entire human species rational.

Edit: Some interesting discussion arose on Facebook, including Peter Singer weighing in via email.

Why don’t we have a general exchange for every kind of good that can be bought and sold?  Why should I have to search Google, Amazon, some price comparison site or Craigslist when I want something, often coming up empty-handed, when I could just place a buy order for it on a global exchange, and have the exchange find the optimal seller, if one exists, based on price, proximity, reputation, etc., transfer them my money, and tell them to mail me my item?

One might object that everyday goods aren’t like financial instruments. There’s an infinite number of kinds of goods, and the instances of one kind of good are going to differ from each other slightly or significantly in various ways that are of concern to the buyer.  This is all true, but I don’t think it’s a barrier to automated trading.  You’d just need an agreed-upon taxonomy of goods and an ontology for describing them.  Then, buyers can state the type and minimum attributes of what they want and sellers can state the type and attributes of what they have.  The exchange executes a transaction, optionally taking into consideration factors like how good the seller’s reputation is and how long it will take to ship.

Voila, Semantic Market.

• Beliefs that aren’t rationally justified should be roundly ridiculed if the person who holds them asserts even their slightest applicability to a real problem.  Irrationality is not just silly, it is dangerous and the number one thing holding back human progress.

  (This isn’t intended to be an epistemological assertion about the merit of rationalism or empiricism. It’s a pragmatic assertion about everyday life.)

• Disregard the law.  At various times and various places, within the recent past, female rights of any kind, drinking alcohol, freedom of religion, the right to live if you happen to be of a certain ethnic group, and homosexuality have all been severely punished under the law.  Many not immoral things, notably drug use (the criminalization of which, if you think about it at all, amounts to thought-crime), remain illegal even in the most free countries, and many immoral things, such as state-sponsored murder (i.e. war), are legal.

  Morality is not a collective endeavor.  Even if the state has pragmatic reasons to outlaw some things, it doesn’t reflect their moral status.  The only defensible meta-ethical stance is for each individual to come to their own reasoned conclusions about what is moral and what is not, and then act according to them, considering the law only with regard to the risk and severity of punishment for breaking it.

  A high percentage of people who think legal=moral causes totalitarianism.  It is the duty of every good citizen to disobey unjust laws to prevent this.

• Voting is stupid.  The paradox of voting is uncontroversially true.  Unless you are voting in a local election with perhaps a hundred voters, if you really consider the difference (to your, or anyone’s, life) between your preferred outcome and the other possible outcomes, in combination with the infinitesimal chance that your vote will be the deciding vote (which is the only time your vote could be said to have mattered), it never warrants spending a few hours of your time to vote.

  You might say, “but if everybody did that, democracy wouldn’t work.”  Well, that’s true, but it’s irrelevant to what one person should do. Have fun blindly heeding your evolved instinct toward group cooperation, aided by “civic duty” groupthink, uttering platitudes like “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain”. I will enjoy my Tuesdays and say that if you vote, you can’t complain, because you consent to the status quo.

• People are not born equal.  Some people are better at some things than other people no matter how how much the other people try, and there is also no a priori reason to suspect that this fact doesn’t extend to groups of people. Some incontroversial examples include: Ashkenazi Jews are almost a standard deviation more intelligent, on average, than average; East-Africans are better at running marathons; and among both geniuses and the mentally retarded, men are more common than women.

  I know that oftentimes environment can actually explain most differences between people, even those listed above.  But to hold as an article of faith that people are identical in ability, is stupid.  People evolved in different environments, and will be good at different things.  And there is genetic variation among all individuals.  It’s a shame that people like Larry Summers and James Watson get fired for even questioning the politically correct orthodoxy.

  By the way, this is in no way a normative statement about whether people should be treated equally.

  (Not to mention, you know, the inequality of being born into wealth or poverty.)

That’s all for now.  You can’t judge me unless you do this too. And if you don’t have any controversial beliefs, it’s probably a bad sign.

Then I realize that there’s really nothing special about book-length writing. I think most ideas can be expressed within a few thousand words. Even when I have occasionally read books in the past few years, books that are well-reviewed and carefully chosen as a likely enjoyable read, I have found that everything important is said in the first half or two thirds of the book, in fact often with a decent amount of redundancy.

The book is really a relic of the pre-Internet age, when people didn’t have easy access to background information about every topic imaginable and publishers’ business models centered on selling physical media and only secondarily the content they contained. It was sensible to include a lot of background information and redundancy to ensure that a book was accessible to the widest possible audience and to pad the size of the physical product, increasing its apparent value. Today, this is no longer the case. I feel that I have been much more broadly and better informed by reading thousands of blog posts, articles, and essays online than I would have been by reading a similar amount of writing in book form.

(I’m mostly talking about non-fiction books written for a non-specialist audience. I stopped reading fiction years ago, and academic tracts serve a different purpose.)

The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light, or you see the thing you’re looking at, is one of those don’t-be-philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with.  Even the most profound philosopher, sitting eating his dinner, has many difficulties.  What he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he’s able to lift by the fork to his mouth.  Philosophers that were unable to make that analysis of that idea have fallen by the wayside to hunger.

This was compiled for personal use and I didn’t adhere to an academic level of verification, so verify any links before assuming they are correct.

There is also the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which does the same thing for mathematicians using their dissertation advising relationships and sometimes more tenuous links.  It has spawned clones for various other fields; see Academic genealogy on Wikipedia.

It is the Sixth Epoch, “The Universe Wakes Up,” that is a truly fascinating idea. Essentially, after the singularity occurs (the exponential intelligence and technology explosion after Seed AI is created and replaces organic intelligence as the dominant form of intelligence), Kurzweil predicts, the new super-intelligent civilization (machine or machine/human hybrid) will expand throughout the galaxy and eventually the universe, turning matter into computational substrates, until the entire universe is one giant computer.  Quoting Wikipedia, by 2199, “with the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, A.I./human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of “life”) would have both supreme intelligence and physical control over the universe. Kurzweil suggests that this will open up all sorts of new possibilities such as doing the infinitely impossible and beyond.”

It is clear why some consider this brand of futurism akin to a religion.  Nonetheless, the staggering implications of this possibility are worth considering.  For instance, if consciousness is just an artifact of sufficiently complex systems, when the universe “wakes up” will it be a conscious being?  A woken up universe would surely bring a new meaning to the word pantheism.

But why has this not already happened?  Just as Fermi asked why, if intelligent life is (as we suspect) abundantly common in the universe, we have not encountered it, it seems puzzling that we are not enveloped in Kurzweil’s sixth epoch now.  This fact leads to the conclusion that at least one of the following must be true:

• We are the most advanced intelligent life in the universe.  If we are not the only intelligent life, then this is statistically highly unlikely, because if there are any other civilizations in the universe, even if they are vanishingly rare, we are only one of countless such civilizations.
• Faster-than-lightspeed travel is impossible.  Perhaps the most likely, but unless the above was true, we might expect to see astronomical evidence of civilizations that have already reached their singularities waking up their home galaxies.
• Technological civilizations which approach or reach the singularity never last long enough to start waking up the universe.

It is undeniable that Facebook offers many benefits in a time in which the network is ubiquituous, devices are always on, and people are always connected.  The benefits can mainly be categorized as features that allow us to maintain a larger social circle than we would otherwise be able to.  I have 460 Facebook friends, and probably at least 450 are people I remember, know how I know, and can put a name and face to.  I would say that having anywhere from 350 to 600 Facebook friends is about normal for most college kids I know–some high school friends and some college ones. Many of these people are people I have not interacted with much in a year, two, or more, and would probably have forgotten had I not occasionally seen their name on my Facebook newsfeed.  Sociological research indicates that the human brain is naturally limited to about 150 contacts, but this is a consequence of our ability to have only that many relationships, not our ability to remember only that many people.

My first issue with Facebook is that it favors breadth over depth in social relationships, and this leads to a reduction in quality in our relationships.  I would not argue that by having hundreds of Facebok friends we are necessarily cheapening our relationships with our true friends, but it certainly introduces a lot of noise that we have to filter out to get to what really matters.  Also, any time we spend communicating with friends online, whether it be realtime or not, is time that could be spent having real interaction with our friends, in a physical setting, which is surely much more healthy and naturally satisfying.  Online interaction tends to be much more fragmented and have much less meaningful discussion.

One example of the cheapening of real social interaction that I was reminded of today is the birthday wishes users commonly post on friends’ walls.  While there is nothing wrong with posting such a message, I think these posts are largely meaningless and I refrain from making them.  You have a list of people who have a birthday today, so you don”t have to actually remember your friend’s birthday, and it takes only seconds to post a short message on their wall.  If I want to say happy birthday in a meaningful way, I tell them personally (as many people do in addition, of course).  If they are someone who I wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell personally, then either they are someone who is a good enough friend that I would call to wish a happy birthday, or, frankly, they are someone who I don’t need to be wishing happy birthday to.

There is a lot of noise, but I think we still pretty effectively filter it out to get down to the important things.  However, it is still a major waste of time, and that is my second major issue with Facebook.  Of course, people, myself included, who spend too much time on Facebook (the sort of people who always have Facebook open in a tab), have none but themselves to blame for any wasted time.  It’s just such a perfect time sink, because it plays into our natural human desire to connect with people, but, that connection, as I said, can be somewhat superficial, and certainly Facebook rarely results in any productive output.  (Though I must say that Facebook groups and events are an amazing effective way of mobilizing committed groups of people when you have such a large pool to draw from.)  We should all consider how much we use Facebook, and if it seems that we spend an amount of time on it disproportionate to the real benefits we derive from it, we should limit our usage.  It seems to me that the most effective usage pattern is to check Facebook maybe once or twice a day, respond to messages and wall posts, and then sign off.

Perhaps the most troubling impact of Facebook is that it fosters a disregard for privacy.  I think we have seen a remarkably rapid change, mainly generational, in societal attitudes about privacy due to the large proportion of high school and college-aged kids who seem to put their entire lives on facebook.  Think about it: if you had told someone even just ten years ago that many people would be posting frequent status updates about their lives and nearly every photo they take for every one of their hundreds of “friends” on Facebook to see, I think that they’d have thought you were describing some far off future.   This is not even to mention the significant minority who make their profiles available to the thousands of people in their college network, or even in their entire geographical network.

Most people have recognized for a while that it is highly inadvisable to make their information, most importantly photos, viewable by anyone who they are not explicity friends with.  Kids are worried about stalkers, parents about child predators.  But I think by focusing on this we are overlooking the fact that there is something wrong with even just making all your photos public to your friends.  Likewise, the mere existence of a “Wall” on which your friends can write and their messages can and will be viewed by any of your other friends seems fundamentally wrong to me.  There is no reason one wouldn’t send most wall posts as private messages using that feature on Facebook, and yet people don’t.  It’s as if there’s peer pressure to make everything public, or that by making a message public you want people to be privy to all your mundane or not-so-mundane personal communications.  Doesn’t anyone value privacy any more?  We are living in an orgy of publicness, and I think we are taking the natural human tendency to tell people about ourselves too far.  It’s better to keep some parts of ourselves private.  At the moment I can’t think of a good way to expand on this sentiment, but it’s something that I feel strongly.

Lastly, Facebook is bad because it is a proprietary walled garden.  You can’t generally access your profile information, photos, or statuses from outside of Facebook.  This stifles competition and innovation when one company, as Facebook does, controls a virtual monopoly on the social network market in some demographic markets.  Facebook is the only service that everyone is on in many places in the U.S.  Many people still have MySpace profiles, and in some areas of the country, MySpace is still more dominant, but Facebook is basically ubiquitous among young people right now.

As a consequence of the walled garden, for example, it is, as far as I am aware, impossible to backup your content on Facebook in compliance with the terms of use, which are also subject to change at any time.  Facebook also owns the copyright to much of the content published on it.  This whole arrangement could lead to a very troublesome situation in the future.  If people, as they perhaps already do, come to trust a private company to control all of their social graph and content, then it could be very bad when, in the future, more important things start being digitized within the context of social networks.  It would be much preferable if everyone could host their own profile and content on their on website or on a provider of their choice, and the people in their social graph could be on any service, since there would be a universal standard.  A user’s social home page could then pull in updates from friends on multiple servers.  In the microblogging arena, this sort of thing already exists, with laconi.ca being an open-source implementation that can pull in status updates hosted on another server; the proprietary Twitter, though, is and will remain the monopoly in microblogging because users aren’t technical enough and don’t care enough, and the same will go for Facebook.

So, in summary, Facebook has undeniable benefits, but I believe that the negative effects outweigh them, and we should really think about limiting our Facebook usage.

Today, however, WebMynd has released a new version of its plugin which incorporates a sidebar into the major search engines containing information from various sites such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and YouTube.  The ability to see YouTube videos and the beginning paragraph of Wikipedia articles next to your search results is invaluable.  I had been using the Google Extra GreaseMonkey script to do this but I will probably switch to WebMynd, and I highly recommend one of the two for everyone.

I switched to Thunderbird for accessing my Gmail mail many months ago because I realized that I was willing to sacrifice some of the convenience of Gmail’s interface for offline access.  I may switch back to using Gmail now that I can have both offline access to my email and its superior interface and design.

1. Content.  Your Twitter page’s content and presentation should induce people to want to follow you.  It is important not to give the impression of being a spammer or unidirectional marketer who is not interested in their followers as anything other than an audience.
   • Have an icon – lack of an icon is a dead giveaway of a spammer.
   • Use your Twitter account details shown on the top right to link to your webpage, and include an interesting bio about your company or self that doesn’t sound spammy.
   • You should initially have at least half a dozen or so tweets, so they reach the bottom of the browser on most monitors, lessening the impression of being new to Twitter.
   • Your tweets should be engaging and interesting, not spammy, and it is especially good if they invite @ replies.  It is also good to have some @ replies in your tweets to indicate community participation.
2. Following the right people.  To maximize the effectiveness of your time, you need to find people who have a high probability of following you back and/or would be a valuable follower.
   • Follow high-profile Twitter users such as @guykawasaki and @chrisbrogan who follow nearly everyone who follows them.  There are various websites with lists of the top Twitter users.
   • Obviously, follow everyone who @ replies to you or otherwise mentions you in a tweet.
   • Search Google on site:twitter.com for as many keywords you can think of that people who would be interested in you or your company/product would be likely to have listed in their Twitter bios.  For example, I searched for at least a dozen occupations and hobbies related to the company I was doing the work for, and variants of those words.  Add anyone for whom you think there is a remote chance of them following you back, i.e. anyone with a followers/following ratio of less than 10.
   • If you or your company/product have a geographical focus, use the location toplists at Twitter Grader to find top Twitter users in your area to follow.
   • As a last resort, you can find people who are mentioning related keywords on search.twitter.com.  This is initially what I tried but I found the noise level to be far too high.  You will have to sift through a lot of unrelated and bot tweets to find people tweeting about what you want, and this method is not a very effective use of time.
3. Managing your following/followers ratio.
   • This ratio is probably the single most important aspect of your Twitter page.  If most Twitter users see you with a low ratio, they will assume you are a spammer and not return your follow.  Try to avoid letting this ratio get below 2/3 early on.  Once you have hundreds of followers you can probably afford to let it get a little lower, perhaps to 2, but avoid a difference in the number of digits of followers and following – I think it has a subtle pyschological effect, like the price of something being $99 instead of $100.
   • In order to avoid a low following/followers ratio, you need to be constantly unfollowing people who have not reciprocated. One to two days is probably a good amount of time to wait before unfollowing someone, depending on how impatient you are.  However, if you notice someone who has tweeted since you followed them (except if their tweet was from a mobile) and has not followed you back, unfollow them as long as it has been at least 15 minutes since you followed them (you can assume they checked their email and decided not to follow you back).
   • If someone follows you on their own, follow them back.  It still decreases your ratio, and if you did not reciprocate they would be more likely to unfollow you at some point in the future.  You are most likely not a celebrity or famous website (otherwise, you wouldn’t need to do much to get followers), so you can’t expect to have a ratio over 1.
   • If you are not on a deadline, a good way to do this is to follow a batch of people once a day, perhaps 50 or 20% of your follower count, whichever is higher, and then unfollow the ones who didn’t reciprocate before you do the same the next day.
   • Use SocialToo.com to automatically unfollow those who unfollow you.
   • Don’t unfollow any of your followers unless they are extremely offensive; doing so is considered bad Twitter etiquette.

This is just how to rapidly add followers.  Once you have them, you have to come up with a strategy to keep your tweets interesting and engaging, and you may have a few unfollows a day, so unless you are generating organic follows by then, you will occasionally need to follow some more people.

• Read 50 books.  Recent discussion about the effect of web-surfing on the brain’s text-processing made me realize that I don’t read books much anymore.  The ability to quickly skim one-page articles online and gain a brief understanding is good, but I think it is important to retain the ability to process the in-depth arguments of book-length writing (and plot, but I won’t be reading fiction, except perhaps for a few classics if I’m in the mood).  Books are still the best method for conveying big ideas and supporting them with great detail.  I’m starting off with On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot, Blown to Bits, about privacy in the digital age, and The Bill of Rights by Akhil Reed Amar, who coincidentally seems to have originated the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  I will be posting reviews of the books I read.
• Increase my content and software production.  I have, so far, been mainly a consumer of information (RSS junkie, etc.) and a user of software, perhaps with the exceptions of my relatively unimportant Wikipedia articles and several-year-old calculator programs.  In 2009, I resolve to blog regularly, even if only book reviews, and to get involved in free software in a significant way, be it creating GNOME themes, writing a small application based on one of my frequent ideas, or contributing to a free software project that I use.

Unfortunately, tonight, I was writing a paper, and when I had finally got working for an extended period of time, and when I switched to my browser to look something up, I involuntarily was sucked into Facebook because I had the tab open.  This also happens a lot with Wikipedia; you can read chains of linked articles and end up reading about something entirely irrelevant.

To remedy this, I envision an application, possibly a browser addon, that, when you have a word processor open (and it could do some checks to see whether the document you are editing is likely a paper, such as by seeing whether you have a standard MLA header, for example), compares the text of your document to the text of the tab(s) you currently have open, and closes it/them if there is insufficient relevancy to indicate that what you are browsing is related to your paper.  I believe this is necessary because one can unconsciously procrastinate when web-browsing, so a strategy or tool such as this is a useful counteraction.

This post was a method of procrastination.

Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr. is listed at age 5 in the 1930 Census with his parents M. George, 33 and Marion, 31, and brother Richard, 1 11/12

Robert M. Wurzelbacher SSDI 299-16-8180 b. 23 Nov 1924 d. 10 Jan 2004 (last residence – Cincinnati)

Obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Wurzelbacher . Robert M., beloved husband of Dorothy Wurzelbacher (nee Homer), dear father of Barbara Arndt, Mary (Phil) Hogan, Carolyn Streight and Robert (Beth) Wurzelbacher Jr., and step-father of Christine Wilson, Joan (Jim) Knox, Carolyn Chambers, Douglas (Barbara Valliere) Wilson, and Kathi (Cary) Kindberg, and brother of Dr. Richard (Dorothy) Wurzelbacher. Also survived by 12 grandchildren. Suddenly. Saturday, January 10, 2004. Mass of Christian Burial will be held at St. John the Evangelist Church, 7121 Plainfield Rd., Thursday, January 15, 2004 at 10 A.M. Friends may call at Geo. H. Rohde & Son Funeral Home, Linwood & Delta Aves., Mt. Lookout Wednesday from 5-7 P.M. Family requests memorials to the charity of choice.

Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr.’s obituary indicates that his parents did not have any other children after the 1930 census, so if Samuel Joseph “Joe The Plumber” Wurzelbacher is related to Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Jr. by closer than a second-cousin relationship, he would have to either be:

• a son of Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Jr.  This can pretty much be ruled out because he would have been about 19 at the time of Joe’s birth (1954 to 1973).
• a son of Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr.  He is not, because he is not listed in his obituary.
• a son of Richard Wurzelbacher.  A DailyKos diarist has dug up a company profile for a Wurzelbacher Brothers company whose line of business is “Water/Sewer/Utility Construction Plumbing/Heating/Air Cond Contractor Repair Services” and whose owner is Richard Wurzelbacher.  Is it the same Richard Wurzelbacher who is Robert Wurzelbacher’s brother and, as it seems possible given the lines of business, is this Richard the father of Joe?  And wouldn’t that mean that the other brother in the business would have to be Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr.?OpenSecrets.org shows Republican campaign contributions for a Dr. Richard Wurzelbacher in Key Largo, Florida, who is likely the same Richard Wurzelbacher, but it seems that it would be difficult to prove that he is the father of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.  Also, news reports said Joe said he had lived in Florida at some earlier point in his life.

So, let’s approach it from Joe Wurzelbacher back. An Intelius search (mentioned by another DailyKos diarist) shows as the relatives of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher: Jennifer P Wurzelbacher (his wife), Phyliss Kay Wurzelbacher, Frank Edward Wurzelbacher, Robert Lee Wurzelbacher, and Kay Wurzelbacher. Some of these names may be slightly inaccurate (who knows whether it’s Phyliss’s middle name or initial that is K, and Kay Wurzelbacher could be the same person), but let’s see where we can get.

Ancestry.com public records (subscription required) show a Frank E. Wurzelbacher, born Dec. 1957, who has resided in Holland and Toledo, OH and Tuscon, AZ.  A Frank Edward Wurzelbacher, presumably the same person, is listed in the Florida Marriage Collection as being married on 2 Jan 1982 in Okaloosa, FL.  Joe Wurzelbacher was born in Dec. 1973, so it is possible but highly, highly unlikely that Frank is his father (he would have been 16).  Maybe a brother? (EDIT: Upon further examination, the marriage record lists Phyllis Kay Bloomfield or Phyllis Kay Johnson as the wife; same as the person below.)

Ancestry.com public records (subscription required) indicate Phyllis E./K. Wurzelbacher was born in Dec. 1954 and has lived in Holland, Toledo, and Tuscon.  Again, she could be his mother, but it seems more likely that she is a sister or sister-in-law.  There is also a Phyllis C. Wurzelbacher, born 1934, who lived in Cincinnati.

Ancestry.com public records (subscription required) indicate Robert L. Wurzelbacher, born Aug. 1975 has lived in Holland, Toledo, and Tuscon.  Most likely a brother.  He is filing for bankruptcy with his wife Kelly Jean Wurzelbacher.

This is all I’ve got for now, and I’ve mainly brought together what other people I’ve linked to have already found.  Perhaps someone with better skill at researching public records can take this further and see whether Richard Wurzelbacher is Joe Wurzelbacher’s father.

UPDATE 1: Interestingly, Richard’s wife Dorothy (yes, both Robert M., Sr. and Richard apparently had wives named Dorothy) seems to be a genealogist, as we can see from the snippet on Google Books of an entry of hers in Everton’s Genealogical Helper in 1999, listing her address as 62 Marlin Ln., Key Largo, which is the same address from which Richard Wurzelbacher’s 2008 campaign contributions come from.  This confirms that the Richard Wurzelbacher in Florida is the brother of Robert M. Wurzelbacher.

Interestingly, Robert M. Wurzelbacher also has a book listed called The Graying of the American Parish, but there is not a single Google result for that title.

I think we should keep in mind that there are actually quite a few Wurzelbachers in Ohio and that Toledo and Cincinnati are relatively far away from each other, and that they may just be very distant cousins.

There are many decent notetaking programs for Linux, including NoteCase, KnowIt, BasKet, Wyneken and others; other solutions such as a wiki, text-file, Tomboy notes, or sticky notes can be used. However, none of them are built specifically for educational use, and it would greatly increase the productivity of students to have an information manager that was.

Most note-taking programs currently have a sidebar on the left which contains a hierarchical note tree. I believe that this outlining model is actually unnecessary for students, and I find that I tend to just have top-level notes for each of my classes and then a flat sequential collection of notes for each class one level below. It would be better to have the program store a flat series of notes for each class, get rid of or make temporarily viewable the sidebar, and have buttons for each class aligned horizontally at the top of the editor. For students, I think doing away with the tree structure of notebooks is a good tradeoff for the added simplicity and space in the UI. Notes could be scrolled through chronologically using back and forward buttons, and they could be renamed or re-ordered with a preferences dialog rather than in a tree view. Notes could automatically be named by date (this is similar to how Wyneken currently operates), or a name could be prompted for upon creation.

The ideal notetaking software for students needs to be WYSIWYG and, importantly, have a way of making bulleted lists that does not require any clicks (perhaps with a keyboard shortcut or by recognizing the “*” character as a bullet).

Task management programs such as Tasque and gtodo have the same problem of not being designed for student use and so being less than ideally useful. To enhance usability for a student, task programs should know what homework assignments and larger projects are. They should also get rid of almost all the manual preference setting required, and have the student only need to enter a title, optional description, and optional due-date, and select a class for each task.

The notebook and task list for each class could then be shown side-by-side in one application.

UPDATE: In September 2008, I discovered TakeNote, which is almost the ideal notetaking application – it does what you want it to do and nothing more.  However, I later switched to Zim Desktop Wiki, which is fairly popular in the Linux world, because it seems a little more polished and its linking ability could be useful.

I think much of the media narrative about the minimum wage is framed as whether to prevent corporations from exploiting their employees if there is no collective bargaining or if they are undocumented and thus fearful of asking for higher wages, but we should more often consider the possibility that some jobs which today do earn minimum wage could never pay minimum wage in a free market.

• Amazon to Target $5.5 Billion Textbook Market with New Kindle?, TechCrunch
  
• E-Textbooks — for Real This Time?, Inside Higher Ed

I would tend to think that new formats and distribution methods for textbook e-books are more important than new devices to view them on, considering most college students use their laptops a lot, probably even in class often.