Apr 2004, 7 entries

How to assign points for a given encounter with a problem:

1. Try to fix the bad side (+5)
2. Look on the bright side (+2)
3. Ignore it (-1)
4. Grumble about the bad side (-2)
5. Leave (-5)
6. Try to break the bright side (-10)

If only there were a way to scrape my daily actions and aggregate them into one of these buckets, tallying up the scores, and submitting it to a cloud so that we could get metrics by location, age, sex, tax bracket, and denomination. I think my individual score may be negative.

Tonight I started a new self-improvement program (from my list of 100 things to do before I die)—go to at least 1 show a week for at least 20 consecutive weeks. The program has the following rules:

1. show must be music-related (bands, orchestras, operas and musicals all apply, though most likely most will be bands)
2. show must cost less than $20 (I can be a little lenient on this one, but would prefer cheaper shows)
3. show must be a band/orchestra/whatever I haven’t seen before
4. I must try to persuade at least one person to go with me (though I don’t have to be successful)
5. must go to 1 a week at least
6. must write up a tiny paragraph about it
7. I must punch myself in the face, and call myself names, if I miss a week

I could call it club club. If you’re in Seattle and have a show in mind that you’d like to see and want a friend, email me. Saw Broken Social Scene tonight, I love them. Rick left early though. A really annoying guy in the balcony kept yelling for no reason and then calling them Radiohead rip-offs and then U2 rip-offs and finally started singing “Where the Streets Have No Name” when the lights came up. The audience stood up for the band. Weird guy.

A contender for club club is Air at the Paramount this Thursday, but it costs $25. Should I go? It might even be sold out, I don’t know. I need to wake up.

I also got my cookbook in the mail today. That fun will start up shortly.

I was walking to a friends house the other day and came within a block of a couple large metallic antenna-like structures that are possible radio towers of some sort. As soon as I came within a certain distance of it I realized that the probability of me climbing up those towers shot up tremendously simply because I was exposed to them. Before I came within eye distance of the base of the towers I had no chance of climbing the towers. Now, perhaps, my chances are closer to 1 in 1,000,000. Small chance considering, but imagine that by simply living in a certain place, you opt in to a million different low-probability events that would have had zero chance of happening otherwise. People can affect you this way too—simply by being around you are suddenly a lot more likely to act similarly to them. I guess I’m just trying to force myself to realize the blurry lines between our selves, our decisions, our community, and our environment. We don’t have as much control as we think. It’s the difference between building a list and choosing from the list. If you’re only doing the latter, then whatever controls the former has a lot of power.

I’m interested in how some societies move common functions into shared areas. For example, the laundromat is a good example… everyone needs to have clean clothes but not everyone has the money or space to support a full washer/drier of their own. Grocery stores, post offices, garbage collection, etc. This phenomenon is not very interesting in itself, but my recent trip to New York showed me that the more dense people live together, and the more busy they become, the more tightly dependant they become to the shared services and areas. It’s probably an inevitable part of the evolution of society that we become increasingly limited in our own abilities in order to reduce the investment required to take advantage of some simple benefit. Or something.

Is there a kind of math that doesn’t allow infinity? Ever since thinking about the universe’s computer I’ve been trying to think about what is required to start chipping away at the metaphor problems inherent in thinking about the universe as a computer. One of the more obvious ones, to me at least, is the fact that the universe must not allow for unbounded infinity. Space cannot go in all directions forever. Neither can a piece of information have infinite precision… for example, pi (as the universe sees it) cannot be irrational. If it exists at all, and is used in any way, it must be usable without resorting to approximations. The metaphor of math is flawed in its model for the concepts of infinity and numbers.

But how can it be otherwise? I think infinity can exist in only one way—bounded by time or space. For example, time can go on forever, but only if it is generated as it goes and doesn’t exist all at once beforehand. In this way, space can also be potentially infinite if it is tied to time—meaning that you can go as far as you want in a certain direction, but that space will be generated as you go in that direction. Also, measurement cannot allow for infinite precision because that would make it impossible to work with. However the universe uses measurement, it must use it in such a way that it has discreet packets (doesn’t it?). Those can be really tiny packets, but they have to be packets, don’t they? I am still using some computer metaphor language, but I want to only use it so far as it is useful… if anyone thinks that the metaphor has been taken too far, and can talk about it in another way, let me know.

What if every person had their own copy of space and time? These copies communicated with one another, and remained somewhat in sync, but each copy was optimized for the person that was using it. If I never went to Italy, my copy of space and time doesn’t have Italy. When you go you Italy and place a rock on a certain wall, that information is updated in other peoples’ copies when it is requested, but no sooner. It’s a lazy distributed universe. The amount of data required to run this universe would be much smaller (assuming a relatively small number of active copies: ~6 billion at any given time, unless animals and plants get their own copies too) than one that just had a single copy but which had to maintain every corner of the universe in infinite directions at all times. Of course, this would require that there be some concept of active agent in the universe that the entire system is working to support, rather than just the less anthropomorphic idea that we just happen to be thinking dust in an otherwise dusty dustball.

A famous anecdote between Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein was the debate they had in Bertrand’s study about whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room. Bertrand claimed that Wittgenstein would not budge even after hours of debate and looking under tables, desks, chairs, and behind bookshelves, curtains, and paintings. Wittgenstein claimed that it was impossible to know, for certain, that there were no rhinoceroses in the room—no matter how hard you looked. Over time, this anecdote has probably been embellished a bit (Did Bertrand really start looking around the room for a rhinoceros? Did they really debate for hours and hours about this single topic?), and the people in them have become more like archetypes for philosophical ideals rather than simply two people who spent more time thinking about abstract things than is healthy, but for some reason I still love this story.

I imagine a slightly different scenario where Wittgenstein invites Russell over to a specially made studio, say a yellow room, for the purposes of asking him this question again, “Are there any rhinoceroses in the room?” Because this studio was made explicitly for the purposes of asking this question, Russell has to take into consideration that maybe there actually is a rhinoceros in the room—planted by Wittgenstein. Maybe it is a trick question. If Wittgenstein gave Russell the opportunity to bet on either answer, which would he choose? What if the stakes were life and death? Wouldn’t you be stuck in a constant loop of doubt thinking that maybe Wittgenstein is a bit more clever than you and has tricked you into thinking that there is or is not a rhinoceros in the room when in fact the opposite is the case? The Princess Bride “which chalice has the poison” problem. If your opponent has a possibility of being smarter than you, is there any way to be certain?

When I listen to the radio in the car there’s this certain level of volume that I always like to exceed… it’s that level where the music ceases to be simply playing on the radio and suddenly seems to be surrounding you from all angles, you are immersed in the sound.

I think regarding most things involving certainty, there is a similar threshold… where the “certainty” of a certain fact for a while has a distant, third-party-ish, feel to it… it seems true but it doesn’t feel true. And then, after a certain amount of thinking has occurred, or a certain amount of investigation, and enough doubt has been wittled away, the volume of the fact becomes loud enough that it surrounds you and feels real. And that, I think more than anything else, is when we stop doubting and when we say we are “certain”. Unless you’re Wittgenstein. Because, really, this isn’t certainty so much as benefit-of-the-doubt combined with some strong pattern-matching and a weird bulb in our heads that goes off when something qualifies as worth adding to our list of assumptions.

This is interesting because Amazon decided to announce this via a blog rather than a news source. I wonder how that will work. If successful, I wonder whether or not this will become a more common tactic. It certainly has that holy grail of viral marketing component to it.

The story broke here, on John Battelle’s blog: A9, Amazon’s Search Portal, Goes Live: Reverberations Felt in Valley He seems to be a big fan, and thinks that this will up the stakes for Google. (technorati cosmos)

A9 Revealed @ novaspivack.typepad.com. He’s mentions the personalization aspect of it, and I think he’s right. A9 is a much better beta of personalized search than Google’s lame attempt a week and a half ago.

Kottke’s response. (technorati cosmos)

a9 is launched @ pc4media. “It isn’t revolutionary, but it offers some nice improvements.”

Technorati cosmos for BoingBoing mention.

Metafilter’s take.

Slashdot’s take.

Google gets Bamboozled – Amazon’s Search Engine is Now Live!. “[T]he curveballs that Amazon throws at the Search Industry, are some new usability features and a toolbar with so much information to offer that it may as well be it’s own browser.”

5pm A news article, neat! Amazon-owned company launches search tool. He compares the privacy issues with Google’s Gmail service, saying A9 and Amazon are “a lot less intrusive from a privacy perspective.”

7:30pm a9’s UI and how it relates to Amazon’s brand “A9 just does not fit into the amazon style.” I agree—but it’s really a separate company so that makes sense (you don’t want to share infrastructure, code, and brand if you really want to be a separate company).

10pm News.com article, Amazon unveils search tool

Funny how most of the links to this are merely 1-liners, ala low-threshold links. It’s like the nervous system has been triggered and we’re in “get the message out” mode. Later tonight I suspect the longer, more thought-out, posts will be crafted. News articles will hit shortly thereafter.

Common comments:

• Some disagreement on whether or not Google should be scared by this move.
• Their use of redirects breaks the back button if you try to back out of the site. That’s not good.
• The Google search is somewhat crippled. Safe Search is on and you can’t turn it off… all of the secondary Google query tools (like calculator, local search, image search, etc) aren’t available.
• The Amazon search is crippled too. Books only.
• The colors/fonts sort of suck.
• The Toolbar’s Diary feature is interesting in an e-quill sort of way. It could be interesting in a del.icio.us sort of way with a bit more work.
• The history stuff is interesting, though has some drawbacks too. Some people like the idea of using this data for personalization purposes, others cringe at the fact. To me, this is the most interesting part—well, maybe second after getting the Diary feature working with weblog APIs.
• Typing “a9.com/your search term” into the browser is a good shortcut for search results (probably better than having to install a toolbar, but not as good as having direct browser integration).

Things people haven’t commented on yet:

• Will the prominent “site info” link lead to people reviewing websites more often? How would it change the way people search and browse the internet if there were highly visible customer reviews for websites?
• The inevitable privacy firedrill. Will A9 and Amazon share purchase and search information? Will they sell/share your data with spammers?
• Are the Alexa + Google search results better or worse than Google results alone?

April 15th Update:

There are way too many posts and stories about this today to really do a summary any justice, but here are a few more good places to start if you’re interested in keeping up with the story:

Blogdex for a9.com, and blogdex for Battelle’s post.

Tara Calishain’s excellent response.

John Battelle’s post continues to have the most interesting discussion, I think.

4pm Amazon.com steps on Google’s toes @ thestandard.com. Focuses on the privacy aspect and makes the interesting comment that the popup blocker gives you a popup to accept or reject the popup, thus sort of undermining its own purpose. Pretty funny.

4:30pm A9’s “personalized search” Greg makes a good point—A9’s search results can’t be considered personalized yet, since the results do not change based on who you are. Perhaps it’s the site itself (or the general experience) which is personalized, since they allow you to see a different search history depending on who you are, but until the search history has an active part in ordering or clustering the search results (or there is a separate “recommended websites” area), personalized search is still not solved (unless you consider Google’s lab work).

Amazon’s A9 Search Engine Launches @ searchenginejournal.com. Mostly a rehashing.

9pm Search turned Find with launch of the A9 Beta @ christianlindholm.com. Very smart analysis. Includes some information about usage on mobile phones, as well as the secret meaning behind the name “A9”.

Joi Ito’s comments. “Considering how ‘meta data savvy’ Amazon is and how easily they can connect search to their core business, I can see A9 giving Google a pretty good run for their money.”