Category: Thoughts

Ol’ Rupert is angry that Google keeps linking to him and sending him valuable web traffic.

“Google devalues everything it touches,” he said. “It divides content quantitatively rather than qualitatively.”

That’s wrong in so many ways I hardly know where to begin. On the one hand, Google’s algorithyms do indeed have an amazing knack for judging the likelihood that people will be interested in a particular set of data. On the other hand, to the extent that Google doesn’t make value judgements, that’s beneficial to News Corporation. If Google were able to truly judge the quality of News Corporation properties, nothing Rupert Murdoch produced would ever sully my search results again.

Michael Arrington: “Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.”

I beg to differ. Finding the balance between your ideas of what users ought to want, data-driven research about results and usage, and subjective user feedback is what makes you a winner. Too much dedication to any one will lead to failure.

It’s not fair to judge the level of national discourse by blog or newspaper comments. I know this.

And yet I can’t help but make broad generalizations when something that is basically a complaint about cliche and exaggeration in political writing draws a comment like this:

I got it I find I queation my own mind the Obama in office I see him trying to bankrupt the country I see him wanting to put our kids education camps It not just financial its every thing My family just loves him I tryed but I cant I hope I am nuts because our country seem be in deep shit.Free trade worked all this long I hate this new world order They will have to drag me I think he is a communist.

Megan’s friend John knows a guy whose parents have a farm west of town with a few head of cattle. They’re pastured, grass-fed, not pumped up on anabolics, generally not drugged unless they need it. Uncertified organic, if you will. Every year, John and a few of his friends pool their money and buy one of them, and split it five or six ways – they butcher it locally . If you’ve got a deep freezer it’s a serious bargain.

Of course, delivery is a little tricky. John’s schedule didn’t match up with ours, so he gave our share to his friend Giovanni who lives in Newton, and we planned to go by his place and get it, but put it off til the next weekend, and then the next, and the next.

And then Giovanni got laid off. I guess he’s on an H1B visa, because he’s now moving back to Italy with his family, and selling his appliances on Craigslist. He had an offer on the freezer, so I had to go get the meat right away. Midweek rush-hour driving in Boston isn’t exactly my idea of a great way to spend a Wednesday evening, and of course I got totally lost (I’ve learned Somerville’s little warrens of one-ways and missing street signs, but Newton?), but now I have seventy-some-odd pounds of grass-fed local protein.

And a sore back from carrying it.

And a sinking feeling about the global economy.

Gas prices down.

The big question is: Euro or Dollar?

I keep thinking of signing up for a class at Harvard Extension or wherever, maybe in economics or statistics – subjects I sort of wish I’d learned more about in school. But you know, I just don’t want to deal with the homework. I think I’ll go for Academic Earth and Wikibooks.

Oh, right. Planet Murdoch. It’s been five weeks! How come he hasn’t fixed the economy yet? Maybe because you can’t fix in five weeks what nearly a decade of your abuse has wrought?

Message to the denizens of the WSJ editorial page: You had your turn. You were proven to be lying, cheating, scumbags. And now you’re blaming the good guys for failing to fix your mistakes instantly. Shut up and go away.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says Obama is “more analytical” than Bush.

Pardon me for saying so, but DUH.

Check out this transparency from Good, illustrating the size and impact of mass transit systems around the world. At first it looks pretty bad for Boston, illustrating fewer riders and less track than anyone but San Francisco.

But Boston’s a smaller city. Of course Tokyo transit serves over a billion riders a year: It’s the hub of an enormous metro area. It’s probably a better system, but how much better? How much more useful, per capita? We don’t really know, at least not from this chart. A better reflection would be annual passenger-miles charted against the population of the entire metro area.

I’m guessing Boston would still come up a little short there: We really could use a more extensive transit system, something which is pretty clearly reflected in the chart. But we might not come up as short as this chart initially suggests.

The other night on the way home, I walked over the Charles/MGH stop on the T and saw that police had parked an SUV and a cruiser from the K9 unit on the sidewalk by the entrance. Inside the station, they had set up a bomb-scanning/inspection station on the left side of the information booth and were inspecting random passengers that walked past them.

So I entered on the right side of the information booth, where there were no inspections.

Not sure what they managed to accomplish, aside from just standing around being intimidating.