Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

The Google office in Zurich was really, really nice. It’s hard to describe everything with words, so here’s a video:

(Amazingly, that was my first time embedding a YouTube video. Hopefully it worked.)

The video is pretty accurate, nothing is embellished with clever camera work or editing.

There is one thing that was even better than everything in the video; even better than the slide, kitchen, game room, and fire pole: the fresh juice machine.

In the cafeteria, they have a machine that takes ripe blood oranges and makes freshly squeezed juice for you. The machine casing is see-through, so you press the nozzle and see oranges fall from a hopper, get split in two, squeezed, and then juice fills your cup.

It was the best juice I’ve ever had; I think each glass took 5 oranges to make. I drank around 4 glasses a day; even when my stomach was sick from all the orange juice, I had to go back and get more. :-)

It’s the coolest machine ever.

And the micro-kitchens: bars and bars of Swiss chocolate, Swiss cocoa, mounds of cheeses, and loaves of freshly baked bread. Even when I wasn’t hungry, I’d make myself a sandwich. I mean, how often in life are you so close to pounds and pounds of Gruyere?

The micro-kitchens also had mayo and mustard. And even though it was in tubes like toothpaste (um, weird!), it was quite tasty.

I’m very tempted to transfer there, but I think I’d end up being really, really fat (or, more accurately, fatter). :-)

So this post is a long time coming… Sunday is an exciting day for me, because I’ve been closely watching and researching how Web 2.0 is altering politics (by the way, I hate the term “Web 2.0″, but more on that later). One of the web’s main disruptive forces is its ability to level the playing field. As long as the government isn’t censoring things (like in China), everyone and anyone has an equal voice online. And their popularity and ability to spread their ideas is suddenly a function of the quality of their message.

In the past, if you wanted to get a message out, you needed to have access to the mainstream media (the TV networks, the newspapers, etc.). That was, of course, nearly impossible for the ordinary person for a couple of reasons. First, the editorial boards decided what was important, and second, put simply, money talks. If you don’t have it, or have a way to make it, they aren’t interested. Yes, it’s a sad statement, but why are almost all the major political candidates either extremely rich or connected to the rich?

The Internet however, is less interested in who’s rich. For the most part, it’s democratic. If you have page views (e.g. votes), you are important. Traffic is king. And traffic comes from content.

Content is important, so if you have it, you get massive support online. Mainstream politics is all about the sound bite: that five second clip for the TV news and that 10 word quote for the papers. On the Internet though, that isn’t enough; who’s going to care about a page that just has a five second video clip or 10 words?

Suddenly now you have to explain your arguments and since your audience has vast amounts of information at their fingertips, you better have put some thought into it. After all, any idiot with a blog can point out the flaws of poorly construed ideas pretty quickly.

Now along comes a little known Congressman from Texas: Ron Paul. I first heard of Dr. Paul in college. As I became involved in numerous political organizations in college, I got frustrated that all most of us knew were the usual soundbites. But what was missing was the depth of analysis; a lot of things sound great in a 15 second proposal. But they sound stupid once you start asking the right questions.

Ron Paul, though, in all his speeches and writing demonstrated an deep understanding of the topic and always gave a clear answer on why he was doing something. He voted against the Patriot Act, against the Iraqi War, and gave strong impassioned speeches against them. He’s never voted for a unbalanced budget and is known as “Dr. No” for voting against so many things in Congress.

When I saw the announcement that Ron Paul was running for president, I thought to myself, “Finally a candidate I can vote for in the primaries.” But I didn’t expect him to do that well, and figured that at least a few people would hear his strong defense of liberty and the world would be a slightly better place for it.

But, I’m amazed at the extent that this message of liberty has spread. The grassroots support has been unprecedented and Ron Paul has embraced it as any free market supporter has: just let the people do what they want.

As a result, his supporters have, among lots of other things:

• Launched a blimp (at a cost of over $250K)
• Arranged numerous airplane banner ads over major sporting events
• Self organized to an extent never seen before (nearly 88,000 Meetup volunteers, compared to 5,600 for Obama).
• Organized a campaign to send a handwritten letter to every voter in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And they are almost done.
• Minted gold coins with Ron Paul likeness. And when the Fed raided and shut down the place, they created chocolate coins.
• Taken out full page ads in the USA Today

And, remember how money talks? Ron Paul supporters have organized fundraising campaigns completely independently of the official campaign. The November 5th “Money Bomb” was independently organized and raised $4.2 million in one day. And so far this quarter, Ron Paul has raised over $12 million, which is more than any Republican raised in all Q3.

The money is coming from ordinary people, not fatcats and lobbyists like the Hillarys of the world. According to RonPaulGraphs, his $12.1 million raised (so far) came from 140,000 people. This means that average donation was $86.

So normal people are the ones that are supporting this message and more and more people are trying to learn more about him. Check out this graph of people searching for Ron Paul on Google compared to the other candidates. The same forces that govern popularity online are translating into “the real world”: ordinary people can make a difference.

History has a handful of inflection points where something big happens, everyone stops takes notice, and the course of history changes. I think Sunday may be one of those days. Ron Paul supporters are using the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party to launch another 24 hour money bomb. I think that the millions that will be raised, the rallies held all over the nation, and the expression of the will of the people will surprise people. And they will take notice. And the world may change.

And just in case, if this is one of those important days in history, remember where you are on Sunday. One day your grandkids may ask you, “Where were you during the Tea Party of ‘07?”

One thing I really like about the status feature in Facebook is that it forces you to write in third person. In college, I had way too much fun writing AOL away messages in the style of bad Roman mythology with myself as the mythical hero. No really, I referred to myself as “our hero”. :-)

For example, from Dec 11, 1999:

Our hero, upon returning from the Nickerson hermitage, is shocked that the wise had absolutely nothing of value to say to him, though his kids were cute and funny. Our hero, after devouring his cold veggie sandwich, attempted to land himself a mole in the Beezer empire. However his contact was less than brilliant and let our hero muttering nonsense about the b-school and the lack of a good educational system in democratic nations. So our hero decides to quit procrastinating and attempt to use his special powers to find the secret bio decoder ring. Will our hero find the ring to slay the Elgin and Pakrasi tag team in Monday Morning Madness? Are will he choose to seek refuge in his EE Design Project? Stay tuned…

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), I only saved a handful of these writings. The rest are nothing more than lost bits and bytes in the vast universe of electrons.

And in case you’re wondering:

• Jackson Nickerson was the professor of Management 100 class that I was the TA for. I think I was referring to a dinner we had with him and his family.
• Cold veggie sandwiches were one of my staples in college (there wasn’t that much vegetarian dorm food).
• Beezer is my friend Bryce, who for literary purposes was one of my many antagonists.
• The reference to educational systems in democratic nations was likely some research I was doing for my column in the student paper. I wrote about geopolitics. I’m sure some of the old columns are floating around the web, which is unfortunate since I was a really bad writer back then. (Yes, even worse than now.)
• The decoder ring is a reference to an ongoing joke since high school, about how you need a decoder ring (like the ones in cereal boxes) to understand difficult topics.
• I don’t remember much about Monday Morning Madness, except that it was significant.
• Elgin and Pakrasi were the team of professors that taught our biology course (Bio 297, I think)
• EE Design Project is a reference to the really complicated EE projects we had. They were great for procrastinating on other school work.

Anyway, this got me thinking about cool plug-ins and apps for Facebook that I should build, but I’m sleepy so I’ll have to discuss them some other time.

As social networking online goes, LinkedIn just isn’t cutting it for me. It’s too sterile and all I get out of it are the occasional job opportunities. These are neat, but I already have a good job.

So I decided I’d go where all the fun is: I finally got on Facebook. As of now, I have 2 friends, so it’s not too exciting. But with Facebook’s development API, I suppose the sky is the limit.

I wonder what silly Facebook app that I can write and sell for millions. :-)

I came across this really interesting graph from Business Week of Internet demographics broken down by age and class of activity:

It was mostly what I expected, with my age group leading the wave of technology adoption. For us, email and IM are very mainstream, but social networking sites started just after we left college. So those of us on Facebook or MySpace tend to be either still in school or using them in conjunction with dating websites. On the other had, for my little sister and her friends, social networking sites are very mainstream.

An interesting thing from the graph is that the “critics” who comment on blogs and write reviews are older than the majority of the creators who write blogs and post to YouTube. It looks like the critics are more college aged and the creators are high school aged. It’s a minor numerical difference between the two categories, but I imagine the difference is that in college your social circle expands a lot, so you spend more time on other people’s sites.

I was also surprised that the “collectors” (people who use RSS to aggregate information) are spread out very evenly across all demographics. I would venture that this is a indication of poor adoption, as the use of RSS for Youth and Gen Y is very small relative to the general Internet usage.

The last thing that is interesting is the generalized age demographics. For the most part, if you had a particular technology available during your technological “formative years” (high school and college), you’re more likely to use it. That’s what we see right now, where the leading adoption curve is roughly matched with the age group that was in college when it was released.

We haven’t yet seen yet is if there is an age when people stop using social networking sites. I understand the advantage of staying on Facebook for a long time, since it will have your built up network. But I imagine as people get married and have a few kids, they get busy with “family” stuff and will have a lot less idle time to spend on those sites.

If that’s the case, forty years from now, the usage graph would have a similar shape. Though, instead of older user groups not ever using the services, the decreasing curve would be us kids growing up and decreasing our social network site usage.

I noticed two things of interest on my drive into work today. The first was that it is the middle of June, yet it was 52 degrees and rainy. Stupid Seattle weather!

The second thing I noticed is that my car horn is in a strange place on the steering wheel. If you look closely at the picture, the place you press to honk the horn is the same place that the airbag comes out. I’ve never been in an accident where the airbag is deployed, but if I am, I imagine my hand will likely be pressing the horn because some guy just cut me off.

So what would happen to my hand? I assumed that the smart engineers at Honda thought about this, but then I read this from one of those ask the experts forums:

[It is recommended] that drivers use caution not to have any portion of the arm, hand, or fingers over the airbag module at any time while driving … in particular, a maneuver to sound the car horn or brace against the steering wheel or dashboard just prior to an anticipated collision places the car occupants at particular injury risk.

If that’s true, you shouldn’t use your horn, because if that airbag goes off it’s going to hurt. Seems like bad design to me. The car horn buttons were placed where they are before airbags were invented, so it wasn’t a problem with the initial design. Rather, no one updated it when they added airbags. It seems smarter to have steering wheel triggers buttons for the horn, that you can honk without having to move your hand near the airbag.

If I ever design a car, that’s what I would do. That, and the car would fly, have auto-pilot, and an in-dash nachos dispenser. :-)

Blogs are really useful because they give anyone the forum to talk about whatever they want, and the popularity and influence of the blog is generally determined by the quality of the material they produce. After all, most people don’t want to read junk.

Since blogs are usually informal, you need to learn to forgive typos and minor errors, but too many or just bad mistakes can really take away from your message. For example, just today I read the following in different posts, “Education is emenselly over-rated” and “Their is even language in their for …”

I just can’t get past those mistakes. In the first case, it’s a really bad misspelling and an unnecessary hyphen when talking about education being overrated (that’s good irony). The second sentence uses the wrong “there” twice in six words! I ended up missing the message of posts, because of the distractions.

And yes, I openly admit that I’m a typo-intensive writer and I’m generally to lazy to go back and edit my posts (it’s a blog after all). I just hope that I don’t come across as stupid because of any of my typos.

Recently, I noticed that I’m more likely to make a typo with smileys. A lot of times, I write :-) instead of :-(. This is awkward if I write something like, “Sorry I’m busy that night, so I can’t see you when you’re in town :-)”

Someone should write a spell/grammar checker that will catch those mistakes. I can guarantee you’ll have at least one customer. :-)

For my birthday (way back in November), Crissy’s parents gave me a very large and generous gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. And finally, after neglecting it for a few months, I used it and bought myself a very belated birthday gift:

• Lord of the Rings Box Set (Extended Editions) - The extended versions of this trilogy was been on my “want” list for a long time and when Barnes and Noble emailed me a 15% any item coupon, it seemed like a no brainer to get it. Of course, I now feel the need to seriously upgrade my tv and sound system in order to fully enjoy the movies. :-)
• Gandhi (Anniversary Edition) - I learned about this edition’s recent release from a “products you may be interested in” email from B&N. Since it had a really good sale price (woohoo!) and I remember the movie being excellent, I ordered myself a copy. And it’s another data point to support those “products you may like” emails.
• Sir Thomas More’s Utopia - I’ve read lots of discussion, never the original work, about More’s fictional island society where everything is uniform through the country’s many cities; whether it’s religion, customs, or education. The island has no concept of wealth, and everything is distributed equally with all property being communally owned.
• Plato’s Republic - “What is justice, and why should we be just, especially when the wicked seem happier and more successful?” are the central questions to this classic. This work is considered one of the greatest works ever produced for it’s profound impact on Western thought. If you ever watched me debate (NFL Lincoln Douglas) in high school, you would know that this is one of my favorite topics to discuss. Senior year, all my cases used “justice” as a core value, regardless if I assigned to be for or against the resolution. :-)
• Aesop’s Fables - a lot fables have similarities across cultures and religions, so I’m looking forward to comparing the stories of Aesop’s Fables with the stories in my copy of the Panchantantra.
• Machiavelli’s The Prince and Other Writings - this is another work that I’ve read lots about, but haven’t really taken the time to read thoroughly. I generally disagree with Machiavelli’s assertions about human nature and the “ends justify the means” political philosophy, so I’m excited to learn about more it.

The books that I bought are part of Barnes and Noble’s Classic Series. They are a nice package with the original work and lots of supporting material (biographies, discussions, and comments by other authors). Plus they have good binding, most have a hard cover, and they all have a low price.

The downside to this purchase is that it significantly increases my “to read” list. And, since the books I borrow from the library generally get read first (they need to be returned in 3 weeks after all), who knows when I’ll get around to reading these. :-)

One good thing about running my own website (instead of using a free blog site) is that I can use any statistics analysis tool I want. So, aside from the interesting things like where the people reading my blog are (apparently, I have regular readers from Petaling Jaya and Kadıköy), I can see other traffic patterns.

Some are obvious, like when I stop posting, people stop visiting. That seems to be make sense. :-) Others are a little more subtle. When I updated my blog title, the search engine crawlers came by to recrawl all of my pages since they all showed updates. From that data I could see which engines crawled my site when, and who did the most thorough job.

And just recently, when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1, the source for my pages changed, the crawlers needed to return for new pass. Of course, this is a pretty unscientific study (since I have all of two data points), so I won’t tell you which engines were the fastest to come by and update their index. But, the results didn’t surprise me. :-)

Speaking of which, what’s up with Ask.com? Ask is all over my WinFS related blogging, but is unwilling to crawl my blog, even though they crawl a bunch of sites one hop away from this one.

Stupid Jeeves.

And while we’re on the topic of ego surfing, I was looking into how the “Suggestion” feature in search engines work. Take a look at the fourth thing that Yahoo suggests when you search for my “vijay bangaru”:

I’m so amused. :-)

Like I said yesterday, I spent most of last week in the Bay Area on business. And I discovered a another potential downside with travelling: I have a backlog of TV to watch on my Tivo (really, I have a Windows Media Center PC, but no one outside of Microsoft knows what that is, so I call it a Tivo).

Even though it’s really just 5 or 6 hours of missed TV, it feels like a lot more and it gets to be more of a chore than a pleasure. I really don’t want to sit and watch all of it. While I don’t want be confused by next week’s shows, it’s not worth wasting the time sitting on the couch watching it.

So I discovered a great way to deal with the problem: watch the shows as fast as possible. So if the show is Prison Break, I just skip over the subplots that bore me. Or if it’s Beauty and the Greek, you can just skip over all the unnecessary pauses used to heighten the dramatic effect and repetitive parts. I already fast forwarded a little bit. But a few nights ago, I did it really aggressively and must have covered almost 5 hours of TV in about an hour. And I think I got the same value (which says something about the quality of those shows).

I’ll probably do this as much as possible from now. :-)