Chaos Program

I had a slightly weird encounter yesterday with Google Social Search. This is a beta product (which in Google-land doesn’t really mean anything) that shows you results from your search that are found via your “social circle.” I ran a search and noticed this new and unusual thing at the bottom of the first page of results.

At first, I thought it was amusing. Then I thought it was creepy. Then I decided it was just annoying. Let’s examine the meaning of this service by going through each of these points in turn.

Amusing: My search was a catch all for material on an academic subject. It doesn’t matter which one. School’s out but I’ve been gong to school so long, sometimes my brain just gets in that mode. I had already tried searching Google Scholar and found some interesting stuff, and a lot of other stuff that I could not afford to buy. The ridiculous price of so many scholarly and scientific publications is a pet peeve of mine (I don’t mind them making a buck. I just mind that they jack up the prices so high that published research is effectively hidden from most of the world, especially me). So since I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to shell out for a very few articles that might or might not be relevant, I decided to broaden the search and see what regular Google would bring up.

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The big tech story of the week is the one about Google making people mad with it’s new “Buzz” service. The most interesting aspect of this story is that everyone seems to have gotten it wrong.

Here’s the short version of the story: Google has some new social media application that makes all your email contacts into “friends” in the social networking sense and a lot of people objected to that, claiming that email contacts should be kept private, not advertised to the world as a friends list. This is stupid on so many levels – Google, their users, all the “analysts” – it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start at the beginning as far as I knew it.

The other morning, as I do most mornings, I brought up my gmail account and glanced to see if there was anything new. There was some kind of banner or thing about something called “Buzz.” I immediately thought “Hmm. Could this be a whack at Yahoo’s boring Buzz bookmarking service?” But no. I saw that my boss had already been there and made a comment. I also saw that to reply to his comment I had to create a “profile” that would make all of my email contacts into friends who I could then get Buzzy with, or some such thing.

I decided not to create the profile because I don’t use my gmail account for general email purposes. I have a yahoo account for that. My gmail account is mostly for poetry and other writing. I use it to communicate with the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a lot of editors and a few close friends and family. It’s the kind of account – intentionally – receives the kind of joke emails that people forward all the time. In other words, while it’s a public address, I tend to use it for more private purposes.

Weirdly, Buzz shows that I have 6 followers, including 4 who do not have public profiles – which I also do not have. How do you follow someone who does not have a profile to follow? And if you don’t have a profile, how is it possible to follow someone else without a profile? What the hell is going on here? read more »

If there is meaning in life, then there must also be poetry. Whether you like it or not.

Some of us like it more than others. Many of us were brought up to think of poetry as an inaccessible creature, something belonging to smug self-involved intellectuals who dressed badly and had even poorer social skills than the average computer geek. (Completely unrelated question: Do computer security geeks – like me – count as being more or less geeky than regular computer geeks?)

High school has a way of making people think that way. It turns out that a large part of this may be the result of the way poetry is taught, rather than the poetry itself. It’s just a fact of life that many of us, particularly males (and, according to a survey I read once, political conservatives) are more likely to enjoy Rudyard Kipling than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet English teachers are far more likely to use the second as examples of great poetry than the first. Such is life.

So we learn that poetry is for the elite. Those of us who don’t belong to the elite probably won’t understand the stuff anyway, so why bother?

That sort of disconnect from literary poetry was the subject of a terrific blog post I found the other day at the Poetry and Culture blog about Dashiell Hammett and poetry (here). Since I’m a poet (these days) and Hammett is one of my favorite authors, I had to read it. The post gave several examples of Hammett’s main character expressing less than positive feelings about not just written poetry but the entire idea that there is anything poetic in life.

Well, a hard boiled detective might find life’s poetry to be a bit rough around the edges, wouldn’t he?

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There’s already a new chapter in the story of the alleged confession that Russia was behind the cyber attacks on Estonia in 2007. (See http://www.chaosprg.com/blog/2009/03/the-coming-cyberwars/) for previous discussion. In that post I discussed the (improbable, I thought) claim of a Russian official that his assistant had started the attacks for purely patriotic reasons. Now there’s a new story that the previously unnamed assistant has come forward and said it’s true, and added some fascinating details.

In an article by Charles Clover in the Financial Times (Kremlin-backed group behind Estonia cyber blitz), the assistant in question, a Mr. Konstantin Goloskokov, is quoted as claiming not only that he started the attacks but – and this is the really interesting part – that he enlisted members of a group called Nashe to carry them out. He insists that the decision to do this was spontaneous, not something prompted by orders from the Russian government and that there was nothing illegal about it. It wasn’t a denial of service attack, it was just more service requests than the Estonian servers could handle. The article does not say if he used air quotes or an “end sarcasm” tag when explaining this.
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Where I make snide – I mean informative – comments about stuff that caught my attention, instead of the usual long-winded ranting. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because often I see something, think of a paragraph or two, then get bored and wander away. But maybe sometimes a paragraph or two is enough! First up:

New Test For Detecting Fake Organic Milk

I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this one. You mean there’s a problem with knock-offs of organic milk? Of course there is! Damn that supply and demand! People are willing to pay extra for a product they can’t identify, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when there are distortions in the market. That’s what art fraud is all about, after all. Tell a collector you’ve discovered a brand new Vermeer, then sit back and watch the bucks roll in because even the experts can’t tell the difference! (It happened during World War 2. See The Forger’s Spell)

Here’s a thought: If you can’t tell the difference, then maybe it’s not worth the extra money.  (The milk, anyway. The fake Vermeer’s in the book I referenced were terrible. The experts were idiots, which is a lesson we’ll go into at great length some other time)
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I was going to do an update to the previous post about schizophrenia today. There have been several interesting findings just since I wrote that post (here). But instead, I found an interesting thread about something else schizophrenic: A story at Techcrunch that has the text of emails about why people left Google  (Why Google Employees Quit).

Google carefully cultivates a reputation for being the best and for hiring the best. On the other hand, they just had a layoff (story here) so, best or not, they still have to function in the same economy as the rest of the world. And apparently with the same lame practices. Full disclosure: I’ve been laid off several times and this has probably contributed to my general lack of respect for business “leaders.” read more »