As he describes it:

Our galaxy is unimaginably vast, and we really have no idea what is out there. We are discovering new planets in other star systems all the time, learning new facts about the galactic core, and even learning about whole new portions of the galaxy. This map is an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual and get people thinking about long-term possibilities in outer space. Hopefully it can provide as a useful shorthand for our place in the Milky Way, the 'important' sights, and make inconceivable distances a bit less daunting. And while convenient interstellar travel is nothing more than a murky dream, and might always be that way, there is power in creating tools for beginning to wrap our minds around the interconnections of our galactic neighborhood.

I have attempted to actually make this map as accurate as possible, where each line corresponds to an arm of our galaxy, and the stations are actual places in their proper locations. However, I am not an astronomer or astrophysicist, so there are certainly inaccuracies, gaps, and room for improvement. If you have a suggestion, comment, or criticism, please to do not hesitate to contact me by emailing arbesman at gmail dot com.

(Thanks to Shareable.net for this one!)

At a recent COMDEX, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon."

Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement: "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"

I was abruptly put in mind of this old joke when reading the latest news about Toyota's crash-prone cars, because some of the fatal problems now appear to be based not in the mechanics of the cars, but in their software. The New York Times today reported on the story of 77-year-old Guadalupe Alberto, who died when her 2005 Camry accelerated out of control and crashed into a tree; "the crash is now being looked at as a possible example of problems with the electronic system that controls the throttle and engine speed in Toyotas."

The point is, cars have gradually employed more and more software as control systems, to the point where, as the Times notes ...

The electronic systems in modern cars and trucks -- under new scrutiny as regulators continue to raise concerns about Toyota vehicles -- are packed with up to 100 million lines of computer code, more than in some jet fighters.

“It would be easy to say the modern car is a computer on wheels, but it’s more like 30 or more computers on wheels,” said Bruce Emaus, the chairman of SAE International’s embedded software standards committee.

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised if Toyota winds up wrestling with bug-caused crashes. Once software grows really huge, its creators are often unable to vouchsafe that it's bug-free -- that it'll work as intended in all situations. Automakers have a vested and capitalistic interest in making sure their cars don't crash, so I'm sure they're pretty careful. But it's practically a law of nature that when code gets huge, bugs multiply; the software becomes such a sprawling ecosystem that no single person can ever visualize how it works and what might go wrong. Worse, it's even harder to guarantee a system's beahvior when it's in the hands of millions of users, all behaving in idiosyncratic ways. They are the infinite monkeys bashing at the keyboard, and if there's a bug in there somewhere, they'll uncover it -- and, if they do so while travelling 50 miles an hour, possibly kill themselves.

The problems of automobile software remind me of the problems I saw two years ago while writing about voting-machine software for the New York Times Magazine. As with cars, you've got software that is performing mission-critical work -- executing democracy! -- and it's in the hands of millions of users doing all sorts of weird, unanticipated stuff (like double- or triple-touching touchscreens that are only designed for single-touch). Let's leave aside the heated question of whether a manufacturer or hacker could throw an election by tampering with the software. The point is, even without recourse to that sort of skulduggery, what I found is that the machines so frequently crash, bug out, or just do head-scratchingly weird stuff that it's no wonder so many people refuse to trust them.

So what's the solution? Well, in the world of election software, many have suggested open-sourcing the code. If thousands of programmers worldwide could scrutinize voting-machine software, they'd find more bugs than the small number of programmers currently working in trade secret. And theoretically this could improve public confidence.

Would the same process improve automobile code? Should the software in our cars be open-sourced?

Consider the case of voting machines. Every time Diebold or ES&S or whatever issued a "patch" to fix problems in their software, the patch had to be submitted to the federal authorities -- a process that could take several months to scrutinize it. Why? Well, they naturally want to make sure that the patch doesn't make things worse. Again, I'm leaving aside the question of whether the federal authority regulating voting machines does it job competently; back when I was researching this, it certainly didn't look like it. But let's assume for the sake of argument that the regulator is top-notch. It's still going to take weeks and maybe months to verify that a new software patch doesn't b0rk an existing system.

So the upshot is, if you buy a piece of voting-machine software with even middling complexity, you're probably going to discover bugs that need patching in the months and years to come. Some those might be really really bad bugs that can screw up elections. But the public's interest in regulating the industry makes it understandably slow to fix problems when they emerge. Keep in mind, you're going to have this problem even with open-source software; Linux and Apache and Firefox are patched all the time when security bugs are discovered. Indeed, one benefit of open-source software is precisely that you can discover more bugs, more quickly.

Now, I don't know much about the regulatory regime for automobile software. Maybe it's more flexible, faster, and able to authorize patches more quickly. (If anyone reading this knows, please comment!) But then again, do we want software patches rushed more quickly into cars, when they might do more damage than good? My big takeaway from the voting-machine story was: Man, you really ought to keep the software incredibly simple and stripped down from the get-go, to minimize bugs in the first place. Because holy moses can it get harder and harder to fix things if they spin out of control.

Of course, the libertarian response might be simply to not regulate automobiles or voting machines at all; if the regulations are getting in the way of fixing the code, aren't the regulations the problem? And sure, that solution has at least the benefit of elegance. But the historical record of unregulated industries engaged in work critical to the public weal is not all that great, so I'm gonna go with the need for some regulations here.

But it's interesting to see how tangled things get as complex software takes control of life-or-death matters, eh? I suspect we'll hear a lot more about this in the months to come, at least as far as Toyota is concerned.

UPDATE: My friend Tom Igoe, a physical-computing pioneer at New York University, DM'd me on Twitter to point out a flaw in my argument here:

you're making some assumptions about code bloat that aren't always true for embedded systems code. Most embedded systems have no OS. So the problems are still relevant, but different than what you're inferring. IT'd make for a good article explaining the difference

He's right ... I should research that and write it!

(That photo above is from the New York Times' photo essay on Guadalupe Alberto, which is really well-done, and worth checking out!)

I was recently assigned to review the book by Bookforum, and that review is now on the newsstands. It's an omnibus analysis of three books, loosely bungee-corded together by their common concern for how the Internet is changing the way we think, write and communicate. I had been looking forward to Lanier's book in part because I really enjoyed his provocative 2006 essay "Digital Maoism", and more importantly because I've interviewed him once or twice and thought he was an incredibly thoughtful guy. (What's more, he's a musician, and I often find I like the way musicians think.)

Unfortunately, You Are Not A Gadget is pretty dreadful. It has flashes of absolute genius, but is ruined by a flaw common to most woe-is-the-digital-age books: They begin by claiming the Internet is filled chiefly with either completely idiotic culture or nasty, meanspirited, anonymous commentary -- but they offer almost no evidence to document this. So you spend the entire book listening to Lanier explain why the Internet is such a dreadful place, without ever being convinced that it actually is. (I am currently sketching out an upcoming blog entry where I rant about this literary trend at numbing length.)

In contrast, the other two books I reviewed were written by academics who wondered about the impact of the Internet on society, but who actually decided to collect some data on it; not coincidentally, they came up with conclusions considerably less apocalyptic, and considerably more nuanced, than Lanier.

Research! It's not just for breakfast any more.

Anyway, the review is online here for free at the Bookforum site, and a copy is archived below!

Floating Signifiers
The Internet hasn't killed the English language -- yet
by Clive Thompson

In the late 1870s, the advent of the telephone created a curious social question: What was the proper way to greet someone at the beginning of a call?

The first telephones were always "on" and connected pairwise to each other, so you didn't need to dial a number to attract the attention of the person on the other end; you just picked up the handset and shouted something into it. But what?

Alexander Graham Bell argued that "Ahoy!" was best, since it had traditionally been used for hailing ships. But Thomas Edison, who was creating a competing telephone system for Western Union, proposed a different greeting: "Hello!," a variation on "Halloo!," a holler historically used to summon hounds during a hunt. As we know, Edison -- aided by the hefty marketing budget of Western Union -- won that battle, and hello became the routine way to begin a phone conversation.

Yet here's the thing: For decades, hello was enormously controversial. That's because prephone guardians of correct usage regarded it (and halloo) as vulgar. These late-nineteenth-century Emily Posts urged people not to use the word, and the dispute carried on until the 1940s. By the '60s and '70s, though, hello was fully domesticated, and people moved on to even more scandalously casual phrasings like hi and hey. Today, hello can actually sound slightly formal.

While there's an increasing amount of video in our daily communications diet, the majority is still text. This has given our own whither-the-language tech debate a particularly literary undertone. Opponents of hello worried that it would coarsen human relations; but opponents of Internet culture worry that it's eroding the fabric of language itself. In virtually every op-ed bemoaning the kudzulike spread of Twitter or texting, the critic mocks the loopy short forms, misspellings, and grammatical barbarisms. "Texting is penmanship for illiterates," John Sutherland complained in the Sunday Telegraph. "The changes we see taking place today in the language will be a prelude to the dying use of good English," a London Sun journalist moaned. Teachers complain that teenagers gormlessly employ instant-messaging truncations—like r for "are," LOL for "laugh out loud," and, more risibly still, emoticons -- in academic essays, unaware that this isn't good usage. Above all this hovers the fear that tools like Facebook are making us preeningly narcissistic. "Who really cares what I am doing, every hour of the day? Even I don't care," Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist, wrote of Twitter.

You could dismiss this carping as the reflexive posturing of curmudgeons. As an enthusiastic user of Twitter (and texting and Facebook), I often do. But I admit that I, too, have occasionally worried about the state of language. As a writer, I'm sealed in a bubble along with other people who are pretty handy with prose, so I don't always have an objective sense of the Internet's effect on communication. After digesting reams of op-ed bloviation, I was happy to consult a crop of actually well-researched books that tackle the question, Are the critics merely alarmist --  or r they write?

• • • • •

Naomi Baron's answer gives language purists grounds for cautious optimism. Baron is a professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, DC, and her book Always On, recently released in paperback, offers a mostly—and refreshingly -- noncranky view of language in the digital age. She's well aware that the way we write and talk has changed throughout history, especially when propelled by technology. (My tale above of hello comes mostly from her book.) And she's even more aware that Chicken Little naysayers have been bemoaning the imminent death of literacy for a millennium now. "Distinguishing between language change and language decline," she writes dryly, "is a very tricky business." Baron is also one of a small group of linguists and sociologists who in recent years have collected actual data on how writing by young people -- the Patients Zero in our Ebola-like outbreak of Netspeak -- is changing.

Or isn't, as it turns out. In one of her studies, Baron collected the transcripts of twenty-three instant-messaging discussions and 191 text-messaging communications between her students. These pithy vehicles for chat are usually regarded as the chief culprits in linguistic decline, being the most chronic abettors of short forms and cryptic code.

Yet Baron found that the bulk of the students' IM prose wasn't much worse grammatically than their traditional, "formal" writing. For example, out of nearly twelve thousand words, Baron found a mere ninety LOL-like initialisms and only thirty-one short forms, like cya for "See you." Straightforward misspellings occurred once every 12.8 words; this rate of error kind of shocked me, but Baron regards it as "not bad" given that instant messaging is an inherently rapid-fire, live form of writing. ("My students' essays sometimes show poorer spelling," she adds.) But it was also clear that IMing and texting were different from formal writing in a few central ways: The students used far less punctuation, and the utterances were shorter. She found that similar distinctions held when she looked at other types of online writing, ranging from blog entries to "away" messages.

The upshot, Baron concludes, is that online writing -- particularly messaging -- is a mongrel form: It is like formal writing that's been pulled in the direction of speech. When we craft messages online, we're more grammatically and stylistically proper than we are when we talk, by far; but we're not quite as careful as when we're writing traditional stuff, like articles or papers or letters. A neatly revealing comparison point that Baron discovered is contractions: In spoken conversation, we usually contract about 95 percent of the words that are contractable, using can't instead of cannot. But in instant messaging, the rate was only 65 percent.

So if you like your glass half full, this is the way to look at it: The Internet hasn't wrecked the craft of writing yet. Indeed, in one sense online communication has helped revive the written word in an otherwise rampantly postprint culture. Because young people conduct a huge chunk of their socializing and self-expression online, they are generating far more prose than any generation before. But because most of the writing is social, it takes on conversational qualities: not quite a transcript of speech, if not quite a pithy op-ed. "The idea that everyone under the age of twenty-five knows an entire new language is simply poppycock," Baron writes.

Still, she worries about a subtler form of linguistic decline. As we continue to produce a torrent of words online each day -- quickly, on the fly, and conversationally -- we might start redefining "what is ephemeral and what is durable." And if we read and produce so much nonformal, conversational prose, it might become harder to appreciate the value of truly formal writing. For writer and reader alike, elegant, formal prose is both a catalyst and a medium for certain types of thinking. If the Internet encourages us to write primarily in "informal spoken language," Baron fears it is bound to affect our thought as well. She dislikes Wikipedia for precisely this reason. Prose written by a collection of writers might be factually strong, but it's stylistically dull -- and dull writing is neither memorable nor engaging. Baron is also concerned that other online tools corrode our mental abilities, ranging from the crutch of the spell-checker to Google's always-on-tap trivia stream. Why bother to remember a fact if it's a quick search away?

Speed, ultimately, is Baron's deep concern. If you pick up the pace at which it's possible to write and read -- and at which it's considered normal to write and read -- do you inherently damage the processes? Has hastening the rate at which writers create text undermined the attributes of written culture, especially the cognitive depth that writing and reading can bestow? She fears so.

• • • • •

Many of Baron's concerns are reasonable, and I agree with most of them. But here again, history is instructive. Baron's worries about Google are weirdly similar to those that cropped up in Gutenberg's day. If everyone could read books and write stuff down, detractors of mass printing worried, wouldn't they stop committing everything to memory? Worse, if everyone owned a Bible, wouldn't the priestly class lose power? Well, sure, those things did happen. But it turns out many people were considerably happier under the new regime, and books proved staggeringly useful as memory aids. But because books are now so familiar as our fallback idea-delivery system, we forget what a shock it must have been when they were the hot up-and-coming technology.

You could argue that the online arena has given birth to some quite nifty literary and cognitive styles. Blog for a day or two and you might wonder what the point is, but blog for five years and you wind up with a map of your obsessions that can be revealing even to yourself. As for Twitter, critics regularly mock the brutal 140-character limit -- what can be usefully said in such a short space? But as anyone who's written a sonnet or a haiku knows, limitations are a source of creativity. (I've suggested that Twitter is training millions in the compressive skill of newspaper-headline writing -- ironically enough, at precisely the moment when actual newspaper-headline writing seems at the point of vanishing.) And consider the odd literary function of the link: a tool that lets you compose a status update that's suggestive and intriguing but incomprehensible unless you follow the link itself, at which point the sentence's meaning is revealed.

This conceit -- that new tools for writing can promote, and not erode, fresh literary style -- is at the core of David Crystal's book Txtng: the gr8 db8, now in paperback.Crystal, also a linguist who has long written about the fate of written English, focuses on mobile-phone messaging, and he is straightforwardly enthusiastic. Like Baron, he discovered that when you actually study the prose used in texting, it's far more normal than aberrant: His research found that only a minority of texted words -- from 20 percent to as low as 6 percent, depending on the study -- were WTF-like abbreviations.

If anything, Crystal appears to wish that people would use even more acronyms and truncations, because he regards them as a playful and clever evolution of everyday language. He argues that short forms such as ur ("you are") and gr8 ("great") are similar to rebuses, in which the puzzler must decode strings of letters that at first glance are little more than gibberish. ("YY UR YY UB," which translates as "Too wise you are, too wise you be," is a classic of the genre.) Rebuses go back centuries -- the word comes from the Latin phrase non verbis sed rebus, "not with words but with things" -- and Leonardo da Vinci used to doodle them. But until texting came along, nobody had ever used rebuses in everyday language. Why would they? Rebuses require extra mental effort to decode.

Which is exactly Crystal's point: Shorthand in texting and online isn't lazy or sloppy at all. It takes an often ridiculous amount of work to generate the short forms, and texters appear to be keenly aware that these forms violate normal diction. (Some of the more abstruse acronyms are generated, Crystal discovers, when two chat partners egg each other on to produce ever-longer strings of text; this is probably how LOL -- "laughing out loud" -- gave birth to ROTFLMAO, "rolling on the floor laughing my ass off.")

Crystal sounds only a few mild notes of concern. He mentions, for example, a study that found that descriptions written by young people who text were shorter than those by their nontexting counterparts. But overall, he's pretty doubtful that the Internet has been around for long enough to corrode our language culture. And for her part, Baron believes that if students today aren't as careful with their grammar and style as previous generations (a view that she herself subscribes to; she's noticed the linguistic competence of her students degrade over the years), there are plenty of culprits to blame other than the Internet. Specifically, schools: Baron writes that by adopting the otherwise laudable goals of encouraging cultural diversity and self-expression, schools have necessarily abandoned the idea that there is one proper, formal way to write. Or to put things another way, both technophobes and technophiles might be overstating how much power computers and mobile phones have in shaping culture.

• • • • •

In this context, longtime computer maven Jaron Lanier is kind of a heretic. In his new book, You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier argues that we are being mentally enslaved by the online tools we use each day. Twitter, Facebook, and the like aren't merely destroying language: They are training us in an anti-human way of thinking.

Lanier notes that most contemporary online accessories force us into incredibly restrictive boxes. Whereas the first crop of hand-built, do-it-yourself websites in the '90s were genuinely creative and expressive of identity (if also insufferably ugly), today's glossy, clean-cut pages on social-networking sites reduce your personality to a set of bullet points. "I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process," he writes. Meanwhile, projects like Wikipedia and Google celebrate the "hive mind," denigrating the importance of individual vision; and the ability to post anonymously has turned online conversation into a septic cocktail of snarky, angry drive-by attacks. The best lack all conviction, and the worst are out there talking all manner of smack.

At the heart of Lanier's concern is the notion that software designers often make shortsighted or profit-motivated decisions when they conceptualize their work. We might later realize that the tools are limiting our ability to express ourselves -- but by then it's too late, because those design decisions are locked in, and other software is designed around them.

As a key illustration, Lanier describes how MIDI emerged in the early '80s as a format for letting people compose and play music on computers. At first, MIDI excited him; Lanier is, in addition to being an accomplished programmer and scientist (he helped invent the concept of virtual reality), an enormously talented musician. He recounts how he helped build a MIDI program for early Apple computers, and he and his peers marveled at how easy it was to create and alter songs on the fly, harnessing oodles of virtual instruments. But MIDI's many limitations soon became clear. MIDI represents notes in the black-and-white half-note style of a piano keyboard, so it's not good at replicating the messy, in-between, semitone sounds of, say, a note bent on a guitar neck or through the reeds of a harmonica. Plus, MIDI is robotically precise and therefore discourages tempo changes, as well as the sort of irregularity that traditionally forms part of a musician's personal style. But because MIDI was so useful, it didn't matter. As more and more people employed it, it became, Lanier notes, something of an industry standard -= and pretty soon, producers and musicians began adapting their music to its rigidities. It became the "lock in" mode for creating songs; as Lanier sees it, MIDI has stripped personality and weirdness out of music for the past twenty years.

Plenty of people have made this complaint before, of course, but Lanier has actually conducted informal and clever research to demonstrate it. He plays people songs from the past sixty years and asks them to identify the decade they came from; while they can easily identify music of the 1940s, '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, they can't quite place music from the 1990s or 2000s. For Lanier, this is proof that the creative, organic spark has been drummed out: Musicians now merely recycle the sounds of previous ages. It's a neatly delivered and convincing argument.

Alas, it is pretty much Lanier's only such argument. The rest of his manifesto is maddeningly vague and nearly incoherent. Lanier maintains again and again that the design decisions behind most Internet tools -- the facilitation of anonymity, the database style of social-networking sites -- reduce us to ciphers. But he almost never offers a scrap of evidence for his assertions, which make them hard to assess. He contends that online discussion has devolved to "collective ritual hatred" yet spends barely a page buttressing this point by rehashing a few already overanalyzed cases of online harassment. He sighs over the "endless stress" that young Facebookers face, having to constantly and anxiously monitor their online reputations -- yet if he actually talked to any of these supposedly ground-down youngsters, he doesn't quote them. He writes that online, "insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity carries a lifelong taint." What in God's name is he talking about? I can't tell you, because again he fails to give any empirical support for his sweeping claim. (And many other pundits, of course, argue completely the opposite: that young people are too confessional online, and not guarded enough.)

But there's a bigger philosophical problem here. Lanier's critique of online life has a strong whiff of the "false consciousness" dicta that gained currency in the aftermath of the New Left. Lanier assumes people are essentially imprisoned by the software around them and are so witless that they aren't aware of how impoverished their lot has become -- Facebook as the high-tech iteration of Plato's cave. Now, it's certainly true that software can influence our behavior; Lawrence Lessig nailed this point down a decade ago when he coined the phrase "Code is law." Plenty of people have observed how, for example, the different designs of Twitter and Facebook lead to different behaviors. Because most Twitter accounts are "open" for anyone to read while Facebook accounts are private by default (or were, anyway), social networkers tend to use Twitter to burnish their professional reputations while leaving their Smurfette cosplay photo sets on Facebook.

But it's also true that users aren't so easily controlled. Indeed, the history of technology is full of people using software in ways the designers never intended or even imagined. Texting is a good example. As Crystal notes, twelve-button mobile phones were never designed for alphabetic communication. On the contrary, they're ergonomic nightmares. Typing a letter as common as s requires four pushes of the 7 button, and n and o are on the same key. What's more, the carriers' wireless networks weren't designed for texting; carriers originally just set up a little back channel of data so they could ping a phone and make sure it was operating. So when they decided to allow messaging on the channel, it was only capable of relaying 160 characters at a time. But it turned out that consumers liked the cheapness and convenience of texting (since you can do it surreptitiously, unlike a phone call), and mobile-phone companies really liked milking new revenue out of this previously unused channel. And because this format -- and Twitter's still-shorter variation on it -- proved so incredibly restrictive, people suddenly found themselves harnessing ancient rebus formats in daily conversation. It's certainly true that ill-considered design decisions from thirty years ago affect how people communicate today on Twitter and SMS. But they haven't exactly locked in a single style of expression or of thought.

You can pity the poor language purists. As the long-ago case of the telephone proves, they've been fighting an uphill battle for ages and probably always will be. Perhaps fifty years from now -- with ESP chips implanted in our brains, involuntarily live-streaming our chattering thoughts to one another every millisecond -- we'll be pining for the slow pace and stylistic elegance of a well-turned tweet. Hello, indeed.

Ah, but the scaly-foot gastropod has its own tricks. To fight back, it long ago evolved a particularly cool defense structure: It takes the grains of iron sulfide floating in the water around it and incorporates it into the outer layer of its shell. It it thus an "iron-plated snail".

Oh yes way. Scientists discovered Crysomallon squamiferum in 1999, but they didn't know a whole lot about the properties of its shell until this month, when a team led by MIT scientists decided to study it carefully. The team did a pile of spectroscopic and microscopic measurements of the shell, poked at it with a nanoindentor, and built a computer model of its properties to simulate how well it would hold up under various predator attacks.

The upshot, as they write in their paper (PDF here), is that the shell is "unlike any other known natural or synthetic engineered armor." Part of its ability to resist damage seems to be the way the shell deforms when it's struck: It produces cracks that dissipate the force of the blow, and nanoparticles that injure whatever is attacking it:

Within the indent region, consolidation of the granular structure is observed within and around the indent. Localized microfractures exhibit tortuous, branched, and noncontinuous pathways, as well as jagged crack fronts resulting from separation of granules, all of which are beneficial for energy dissipation and preventing catastrophic brittle fracture. Such microfracture modes may serve as a sacrificial mechanism. Upon indentation, inelastic deformation will be localized in the softer organic material between the granule interfaces, which allows for intergranular displacement and friction while simultaneously being compressed down into the softer ML. Shear of iron sulfide nanoparticles against the indenter surface is expected, in particular since penetrating attacks take place off-angle rather than directly on top of the shell apex, and can be facilitated by intergranular displacements during yielding of the OL. This provides a potential grinding abrasion and wear mechanism to deform and blunt the indenter (since biological penetrating threats are in reality deformable as well) that will continue throughout the entire indentation process.

Beyond awesome. This is Darwinian evolution mixed with, like, Burning Man.

Being scientists of biomimicry, the authors surmise that if it were possible to reverse-engineer the entire shell -- it's not just the outer iron layer that's cool; there are also two inner layers with gooey nougat that are equally important in defending the snail -- they could produce superstrong materials for military defense and "load-bearing".

Fair enough. But personally I'm satisfied just to have more pure science that proves, yet again, the inexhaustible Weirdness Of The Briny Deep.

Iron snails, people! Iron snails.

(Thanks to the Eco Tone blog for alerting me to this one!)

That's because chess software doesn't need to analyze the game the way a human does. It just needs to do a "brute force" attack: It calculates all the possible games several moves out, finds the one that's most advantageous to itself, and makes that play. Human grandmasters don't work that way. They do not necessarily "see" the game several moves out. Indeed, they can't -- as Kasparov points out, chess is so complex that "a player looking eight moves ahead [faces] as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy."

Instead, people who are truly great at chess use the peculiarly human qualities of understanding, insight and intuition: They study oodles of games, encode that knowledge deeply in their brains, and practice incessantly. "As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees," as Kasparov concludes, the real answer is: "Just one, the best one." We like to think that artificial intelligence is replicating human smarts, but in reality it does something quite different. One doesn't learn much about human intelligence by examining the way computers play chess, just as one doesn't learn much about computer intelligence by examining the way humans play chess. They are fundamentally dissimilar processes.

But this gave Kasparov a fascinating idea. What if, instead of playing against one another, a computer and a human played together -- as part of a team? If humans and computers think in very different ways, perhaps they'd be complementary. So in 1998 Kasparov put together an event called "Advanced Chess", where humans played against one another, but each was allowed to also use a PC with the best available chess software. The chess players would enter positions into the machine, see what the computer thought was a good move, and use this to inform their own human analysis of the board. Cyborg chess!

The results? As Kasparov writes:

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

This stuff really fascinates me, because so much of our everyday lives now transpire in precisely this fashion: We work as cyborgs, using machine intelligence to augment our human smarts. Google amplifies our ability to find information, or even to remember it (I often use it to resolve "tip of the tongue" moments -- i.e. to locate the name of a person or concept I know but can't quite put my finger on). Social-networking software gives us an ESP-level awareness of what's going on in the lives of people we care about. Tools like Mint help us spot invisible patterns in how we're spending, or blowing, our hard-earned cash. None of these tools replace human intelligence, or even work the way that human intelligence works. Indeed, they're often cognitively quite alien processes -- which is precisely why they can be so unsettling to some people, and why we're still sort of figuring out how, and when, to use them. The arguments that currently rage about the social impact of Facebook and Google are, in a sense, arguments about what sort of cyborgs we want -- or don't want -- to be.

What I love about Kasparov's algorithm -- "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and ... superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process" -- is that it suggests serious rewards accrue to those who figure out the best way to use thought-enhancing software. (Or rather, those who figure out a way that's best for them; people always use tools in slightly different, idiosyncratic ways.) The process matters as much as the software itself. How often do you check it? When do you trust the help it's offering, and when do you ignore it?

(That photo above is by Elke Wetzig, and released for use under the GNU Free Documentation License!)

If you like the column, go check out Anil Dash's excellent blog post "Life on the List". He describes what it's like being put on Twitter's "Suggested User" list -- i.e. the list that Twitter publishes that recommends interesting people to follow. Those who are put on the list quickly begin amassing thousands of followers a day, which is precisely what happened to Anil, who now has over 327,000 people following him. And Anil encountered precisely the phenomenon I described: He didn't like it, and thinks it partly ruined his experience of Twitter.

Anyway, read on! (That picture above, by the way, is the lovely illustration by Helen Yentus and Jason Booher that appears in the print copy of Wired.)

In Praise of Obscurity
by Clive Thompson

When it comes to your social network, bigger is better -- or so we’re told. The more followers and friends you have, the more awesome and important you are. That’s why you see so much oohing and aahing over people with a million Twitter followers.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the downside of having a huge online audience. When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down.

Then, in 2007, she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another, or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels.

Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following -- who once seemed proximal, like a friend -- now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops.

Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun -- but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.

The lesson? There’s value in obscurity.

After all, the world’s bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight -- in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. They’re willing to experiment with risky or dumb concepts because they’re among intimates. (It was, after all, small groups of marginal weirdos that brought us the computer, democracy, and the novel.)

Technically speaking, online social-networking tools ought to be great at fostering these sorts of clusters. Blogs and Twitter and Facebook are, as Internet guru John Battelle puts it, “conversational media.” But when the conversation gets big enough, it shuts down. Not only do audiences feel estranged, the participants also start self-censoring. People who suddenly find themselves with really huge audiences often start writing more cautiously, like politicians.

When it comes to microfame, the worst place to be is in the middle of the pack. If someone’s got 1.5 million followers on Twitter, they’re one of the rare and straightforwardly famous folks online. Like a digital Oprah, they enjoy a massive audience that might even generate revenue. There’s no pretense of intimacy with their audience, so there’s no conversation to spoil. Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals. It’s the middle ground -- when someone amasses, say, tens of thousands of followers -- where the social contract of social media becomes murky.

Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity -- that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Or what if they warned us when our social circles became unsustainably large? Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.

According to data gathered by the web site hunch, these two aspects of your life are "almost perfectly inversely correlated": The more advanced your degree, the less time you spend staring at the tube.

Here's the background: Hunch is web site that gives you customized recommendations based on you answering questions about what you do and don't like. (After parsing my replies to several questions, it advised me against buying an Apple tablet, for example.) In theory, the more people use Hunch, the more Hunch knows about our preferences and the smarter its recommendations get. So to gather even more information about people's preferences more quickly yet, the site has a section called "Tell Hunch About You", where you can answer oodles of survey-like questions about your demographics, your likes, dislikes, habits, patterns of consumption, beliefs, etc.

Over 66,000 people have answered questions about both their educational level and the amount of TV they watch. When the Hunch folks assembled the numbers, here's what it looked like, according to their blog:

It turns out that increasing educational level is almost perfectly inversely correlated with daily TV consumption. Of the 22% of Hunchers who completed no more than a high school education, only about 12% of them watch no TV but a full 25% watch 4 hours or more each day. On the other end of the spectrum, of the 26% of Hunchers who have completed at least a PhD, about 17% of them watch no TV and only about 16% watch 4 hours or more each day.

Here’s another way to look at the data. For 3 the groups of Hunchers who completed no more than 2 years of college, about half of each group watches 2 hours or more of TV each day. But that’s true of just 44% of those with a 4 year degree, 37% of those with a masters, and 35% of those with a PhD or higher.

If you follow the links they have some nice graphs to illustrate the numbers. Of course, assuming these data hold up (anyone know how well it compares to other studies of the same thing?), it's still an open question as to which is the chicken and which the egg. Does having higher education make TV somehow less attractive as an activity? Or are people who already don't like TV more likely to pursue higher education?

Me, I stopped watching TV in college, largely because when I moved out of home and into a rooming house in dowtown Toronto, I didn't own a TV -- and there was no common room in my building, i.e. no dorm-like place where everyone would hang out and watch. Since you often solidify your leisure-time habits in your teens and early twenties, I never resumed watching TV regularly even after I left college. (The sheer metric tonnage of stuff I've missed is kind of amazing: I've only seen about three episodes of The Simpsons, for example.) It's not that I don't like TV; I actually love it when I do see it, in part because the quality of TV has become so spectacularly high in the last decade. These days, I usually follow one show at a time -- Mad Men right now -- so I watch an hour a week. (However, in a somewhat cosmic irony, I actually married a TV critic, so I also catch lots of snippets of different shows while she's reviewing them.)

The point is, while I can correlate going-to-college with stopping-watching-TV, the relationship seems in my case to be entirely circumstantial. I don't think there's anything in my educational makeup per se that would turn me away from TV -- at least not the sort high-quality dramatic or comedic stuff.

What about you guys?

(By the way, Hunch has so much data on its users that it has found all manner of other fascinating correlations, which they're reporting on the Hunch blog. Check out their profile of "birthers", what your video game system says about you, and what Hunch users think about global warming.)

(Thanks to Caterina Fake's tweet for alerting me to this one, and to dailyinvention's Creative-Commons-licensed photostream for the picture above!)

A pretty awesome value, eh? Indeed, it's excellent enough that RPGNow has raised, as of today, a remarkable $132,325.00 for Haiti. (That total includes direct $5-to-$10 donations made through the site, too.)

It's a cool enough story on its own. But there's also some interesting economic behavior here, too, on the part of the game designers. On the one hand, they're giving copies of their stuff for charity -- i.e. forgoing possible profits. Or are they? Since there's no additional costs in making more PDFs, the question of foregone profits hinges entirely on whether the creators think the folks buying the $20 pack might otherwise be prospective customers. As Greg Stolze -- a game designer who donated some of his own work to the project, and who alerted me to this sale -- pointed out in an email, the project ...

... highlights the plasticity of an idea's value in an internet market, that's for damn sure. I stuck my book eCollapse in the bundle: It hadn't been much of a mover, so I don't think I've lost even hundreds of dollars of sales by throwing it in, and it's probably the same with almost everyone else. No one's really taking a serious hit because we don't have to risk sunk material costs, just abstract potential profits.

It puts me in mind of Chris Anderson's argument in Free, which is that when the cost of something goes to zero, it evokes new economic phenomena: Consumers become more experimental, and creators can focus on the free (or near-free) mass distribution of their works, while making money off other stuff -- like add-on services and goods, customization, or the like. In this case, the game designers can feel proud that they're helping raise a lot of money for a good cause while also possibly expanding the universe of people who know their work, and might be likely to pay for new works in the future.

Stolze, I should point out, pioneered one of my favorite new economic models that leverages digital-age behavior: The "ransom" model of publishing. Back in 2005, he announced on his blog a concept for a new game he was designing, and told his audience that he was accepting donations for it. If he reached $600 in pledges, he'd design the game and release it as a free PDF for anyone to download. In other words, if enough of his hard-core fans decided they were willing to pay for the game, anyone could get it. It thought it was a brilliant concept, and as it turns out ...

... it's so brilliant that it's roughly the model behind Kickstarter, a web site that launched last year offering precisely the same service: Anyone can announce a project, set a financial goal, and see if enough people are willing to support it! Fittingly, Stolze is using Kickstarter to pursue the ransom model again -- this time to publish short fiction. Check his page out!

And if you're into RPGs, seriously, go buy that $20 pack for Haiti. It's a crazy value for the money.

(Thanks to TYWKIWDBI for this one!)

But what happens when you ask it a metaphysical question? I tried the query above -- "Does God exist?" -- and cracked up at the answer:

I'm sorry, but a poor computational knowledge engine, no matter how powerful, is not capable of providing a simple answer to that question.

Good to know Skynet's on board with the non-overlapping magisteria, eh? Interestingly, this is not a stock answer that the engine kicks out whenever it cannot parse a question. (Actually, the stock answer seems to be "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure how to compute an answer from your input" -- which is what you get when you ask, for example, "Why is Nickelback so awful?") No, the God question was clearly anticipated by the Wolfram people, who inserted this nice little easter egg. (No pun intended. No epistemological allegory intended?)

It also turns out Wolfram Alpha has a number of other great easter eggs. For example, if you ask it "How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?" the result is pretty awesome. (I got this latter example from Mashable, which compiled a list of the best 10 they could find.)

I also enjoyed typing in my name -- Clive Thompson -- at which point Wolfram Alpha assumed I was asking about the town of Clive in Iowa and the town of Thompson in New York; it described their relative populations, plotted them on a map, and calculated that it would take 1 hour and 50 minutes to fly from "Clive" to "Thompson."

The first is that it uses no electricity: Instead, water is drawn up through the wood and evaporated into the air. According to the designers -- the Japanese firm Okada -- this process evaporates water six times faster than if you left in in a glass. At that pace, it'd be quite effective.

The second reason, of course, is how unbelievably gorgeous it is. Okada calls the device the "Mast"; it's supposed to look like a sailboat. Google's translation of the Japanese site selling the Mast is pretty mutilated, but it's poetically mutilated, so I'll use it:

Like a yacht sail (mast) the wind, the natural moisture to dry air liberality, also allows them to subtle and refreshing fragrance of cypress. Its appearance, we thought a yacht floating in the cool water and soft drinks will also give a visual sense.

How to use: Please put the water on the boat portion of the mast.

Absorbs water and sails made from scrap parts of the Seeds of cypress, cypress and give a faint fragrance of Hodoyoi natural moisture.

I want one! They're only $70 US, though I bet the cost of shipping would be brutal.

(Thanks to the Design Less Better blog for finding this one! They're the ones who called it the "zen humidifier".)

In the final minute of the broadcast, though, we speculated on an interesting question: What'll it be like 30 years from now when US has a president who grew up playing video games?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let me ask you the big cultural question here. If, in fact, video games may become the largest form of home entertainment in America within the next year, in terms of dollars spent, how will that change the culture?

CLIVE THOMPSON: I certainly would hope that this breeds -- particularly if we get more inventive forms of games -- a type of a cultural mindset that’s more interested in the complexity of the world and complex systems, because the one thing that you do when you play a video game is you sit down in a state of total ignorance. You don't know what you’re supposed to do. You don't know how this game works.

And the process of figuring out what to do is really what is fun about the game. In fact, people often stop playing the game once they've figured it out. And that’s a great inquisitive mindset that video games quite uniquely tap into.

So, you know, 30 years from now, imagine a president who did this, you know, as their primary cultural activity for 25 years.

I don't know if this is actually true. I like to think that game-playing -- of all sorts, ranging from Uncharted to backgammon -- leaves you with some useful mental habits, but I know far less about what's genuinely useful in a presidential mindset. But either way, we're eventually going to find out: A 20-year-old today who runs for president in 2040 will have spent his or her entire life playing games, I'll bet.

I found this while doing research for a story about automated "question answering" systems. I was reading through the work of James Allan, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, and read his paper "A Case for Shorter Queries, and Helping Users Create Them" (PDF here). In it, he and his coauthor Giridhar Kumaran conducted an experiment: They took the query Define Argentine and British international relations and ran it through a search engine. (They don't specify which one they used.) Then they ran various similar queries that used fewer words -- "sub queries" -- such as define britain international argentina or define britain relate argentina. Each time, he graded the relevance the search engine's results, expressed as their "average precision" on a scale of zero to 1.0.

So which sub-query produced the best results? The shortest one. It was only two words long -- britain argentina -- but it scored 0.626, quite a lot better than the original, full-sentence query, which scored only 0.424.

Why would short queries work better than longer ones? Possibly because they contain fewer "noise terms" -- common words like define or and -- which might muddy the search results. Human language is filled with ambiguity; one of the big challenges for a machine is taking a human question and figuring out what, semantically, it's actually asking. In that sense, using fewer words would reduce the number of potential ways the machine can misunderstand you.

Except the truly strange thing in that example above is the question was asking about British and Argentinian international relations -- yet the best results came from removing the words "international" and "relations". I'd have expected those to be important words, no? But that's precisely the point Allan is getting at here:

Sub-queries a human would consider as an incomplete expression of information need sometimes performed better than the original query.

This suggests, of course, that the best way to get results on a search engine is to radically strip your query down even further than you think is useful. Or maybe start with a regular query, and if you don't like the results, try making it shorter and shorter.

Then again, it's hard to know if this would really work. I'm not privy to what's going on behind the hood of most search engines today. Allan's paper discusses several ways for question-answering systems to have the computer automatically shorten a query before feeding it into the knowledge database; but his paper is a few years old, so maybe these techniques are already common amongst search engines -- maybe they already reformat our queries into semantically shorter formats.

What do you guys think? Anecdotally, have you found that super-short queries work better than longer, sentence-like ones?

Two years ago, New York City bet it was the former. The city government passed a law requiring all fast-food chains to display the calorie count beside their food listings, right next to the prices. The theory was that if you forced people to see how many calories they were consuming, they'd make healthier picks. But did it work?

Apparently so. A group of Stanford University professors got Starbucks -- one of the chains that began listing calorie counts -- to give them the records for 100 million transactions at stores in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, over a 14 month period. Boston and Philadelphia do not have a similar law in place, so they were the control group. Sure enough, when the scientists compared consumption patterns at Starbucks in the three cities, New York's law appeared to have had a small but significant impact: People made lower-calorie orders. As their paper -- "Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants" (PDF here) -- concludes:

We find that mandatory calorie posting does influence consumer behavior at Starbucks, causing average calories per transaction to decrease by 6% (from 247 to 232 calories per transaction). The effects are long lasting: the calorie reduction in NYC persists for the entire period of our data, which extends 10 months after the calorie posting commenced.

Here's what really intrigued me, though: At Starbucks, people behaved differently with food than with beverages.

When they calorie postings went up, customers quickly switched to lower-calorie Starbucks foods. But they didn't switch to lower-calorie beverages. The scientists found calorie intake from food dropped by 14%, while the drop in calories for beverages was "negligible." Indeed, the majority of the overall calorie reduction -- that 6% drop -- consisted of customers simply deciding not to order any food while at Starbucks. But when it came to drinks? They barely changed at all.

This is rather surprising, because some of those Starbucks drinks are insanely high-calorie. Say you order a Venti "Caramel Brulee Creme" with nonfat milk? That's 480 calories, 70 of which are fat. Or how about a Venti "Double Chocolaty Chip Frappucino Blended Creme" with whipped creme? Friend, you just inhaled a whopping 670 calories, 200 of which were pure fat.

Given how fattening these drinks are -- and, frankly, how nauseating they are; I have no idea how anyone can gag back these syrupy cocktails -- why wouldn't customers, when presented with the calorie count, pick something healthier? Some of these things are like pouring rendered tallow directly down your throat. (I'm actually not kidding: If you ate a half stick of butter you still wouldn't come close to the calorie count of Venti "Pumpkin Spice Frappucino Blended Creme.") Who drinks these revolting concoctions? I mean, "Mint Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino blended creme with Whipped Cream"? Even the whipped cream has to be chocolate-flavored? These customers do realize that there's probably a corner store only a block away selling actual, regular, normal coffee for like 50 cents, right?

Okay, I'll calm down now. The question is, why did the calorie information change the way Starbucks customers ate -- but not stuff they drank? The researchers don't speculate. But I think it's because of the psychology of Starbucks itself. People who go to Starbucks are motivated primarily by the desire for a drink, not a piece of food. So even if they're forced to confront the calorie count on their favorite, hideously repellent bucket of candied snot (sorry, I can't stop myself here), they're probably not going to change their mind. They'll just decide to forgo the chocolate graham crackers.

Indeed, if you want further proof of this, consider another fascinating bit of data the scientists discovered: Starbucks customers actually overestimate the amount of calories in their favorite drinks. Before the enforced nutritional-posting law came into effect, the scientists polled Starbucks customers and asked them to guess how many calories were in their beverages. Amazingly, fully three-quarters of customers overestimated the amount. They thought the drinks contained 90 calories more than in reality. So that helps further explain why the labeling didn't shift the customers' drinking habits: They already knew the drinks were bad for them, and they didn't care. Heck, some of them were probably relieved to discover they were drinking a mere 680 calories, instead of 770. Woo!

I should point out that the New York Times ran a story today that suggests the calorie-labeling law may prove to be a dud in the long run. Apparently the trend line for Starbucks customers went in a U-shape: After the law came into effect, their calorie intake dipped significantly, but then began creeping up again, and holiday binge-eating brought it entirely back up in line with Philadephia and Boston. Still, I have to say I'm impressed that New York managed to get a 6% reduction at all.

Maybe they should just hire me to stand outside various Starbucks locations and hector people. Yeah, that'd work.

(The photo above of that totally gross Peppermint Mocha Twist drink comes via stephenccwu's Creative-Commons-Licensed Flickr photostream!)

Anyway, I started reading through Pennebaker's academic papers and hit upon this really fascinating one: The effect of testosterone on word usage.

Pennebaker knew that many studies have linked increased testosterone levels to aggression, negative moods, increased sex drive, and even things like improved
spatial skills and impaired verbal ability. So that got him wondering: Does higher testosterone affect how we use language?

To test this, he found two subjects who were undergoing testosterone-injection therapy: A 60-year-old man who was getting the injections to restore his upper-body strength, and a 28-year-old biological woman who three years into a transgender program to become a man. Pennebaker got writing samples -- like email and journal entries -- from the subjects before and after the injections.

The results? As Pennebaker wrote in a summary of the study:

Overall, testosterone had the effect of suppressing the participants’ use of non-I pronouns. That is, as testosterone levels dropped in the weeks after the hormone injections, the participants began making more references to other humans ... One function of testosterone, then, may be to steer people’s interests away from other people as social beings.

On the one hand, that matches up with traditional claims about increased testosterone -- that it makes you into a kind of gently sociopathic, type-A jerk. But the really interesting thing is that Pennebaker did not detect any other big changes in the subjects' emotional states. "Contrary to commonly held beliefs," he writes, "changes in testosterone levels were unrelated to linguistic markers of mood state, aggression, sexuality, achievement, and references to perceptual or cognitive processes." So maybe some of the stereotypes about testosterone need to be revised.

Of course, it remains to be seen if Pennebaker's findings hold up; with only two subjects, the results are very provisional. If you want to read his paper -- "Testosterone as a Social Inhibitor: Two Case Studies of the Effect of
Testosterone Treatment on Language" -- it's online free here.