Sorry my posts have been a little more erratic this week, or at least strangely timed. As usual in times of great need, I was called upon by the powers that be to offer them sage advice, and so found myself shooting hoops with President Obama, helping sketch out the outline of his Speech from the Throne…. er, State of the Union Address.

Oh well, not exactly. But I did advise someone how to spell Tim Geithner's name. So thats pretty close, then.

Notwithstanding the unpardonable snub of not being enlisted to help polish the President's message, I dutifully watched the speech (on the web of course - no TV). In the main, I thought it a reasonably good piece of political theatre - reacting to the threat of ebbing public support with an ambitious, job centered program, a few reminders that he inherited these crises, and some cordial jabs and soaring visionary words interspersed to tackle "business as usual", partisan rhetoric.

Its an interesting gamble.

I don't mean the various elements of the platform, though some or more might be part of future missives. I mean rather the effort to turn the knife away the jugular on obstructionist politics. This is, particularly I think in the congressional system, a very difficult task. Its a difficult task for the simple fact that reason plays little part in voters' judgement of whom to vote for, and rhetoric plays the dominant role.

In other words, a politician runs for office promising something (lets pretend…). For example, he or she promises to cut taxes. He then looks at who else got elected when he shows up in Congress, and finds himself in the minority. Maybe in the minority in a big way.

So what does he do?

If he compromises on some of his principles and speeches that he gave on the stump, he'll get killed by the other party showing him as a hypocrite in the next election. Alternately, he'll lose in the primaries to the hard line in his own party holding up photos of him embracing the other party's leaders, painting him as a traitor to the cause. In both cases, he'll get nailed with being ineffective at delivering tax cuts.

If, on the other hand, he stands on his chair and screams, opposing everything in the name of wanting nothing but tax cuts (which, if proposed by the other guy, are too small and/or badly targeted), he'll go back to his constituents a noble warlord. He can't get outflanked by his own party, and can run clips of himself sticking to his guns, "battling Washington" just like he promised his base, and so showing himself a man of principle vs the weakling, opportunist craven figure the other party dares to propose.

Who is going to take the gamble? Go negative, baby, and laugh all the way to the polls.

The voter, ironically, buys the negativity, then complains about dysfunctional partisan politics. This is the ju-jitsu (or maybe aikido) that Obama is gambling he can pull off, by channeling the anger at horse trading and ear marking and pork barreling and other body parts and animal adjectives into anger at Congress, making it riskier for incumbents to look obstructionist than to collaborate.

Its a big gamble, one that will require sustained and silvery oratory (ok, advantage Obama on that one) all the way through to the midterms. (And, most likely, will get judged on the jobs numbers anyway, in the sense that "winning" in the midterms will mean "the strategy worked", whereas it will mostly just mean the economy improved - if either happens).

Its nice to imagine a different world. A friend of mine once said:

In life, if you allow yourself to be persuaded by reasonable debate, you're a reasonable person. In politics, you're a hypocrite

This was perhaps more famously said by Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?". Thankfully, Keynes and a handful of other "great personages" did alter their entrenched views, posing sophisticated arguments to those in power and/or the electorate, when faced with overwhelming evidence that what they had believed yielded little insight into the unprecedented circumstances they faced.

Will Congress?

Just to hedge, I think I'll start learning Mandarin.

Last week, I read the obituary in The Economist of Tsutomu Yamaguchi.

I hadn't heard of Mr Yamaguchi before. His story stuck in my mind though, so I thought I'd mention it. For Mr Yamaguchi was, apparently, one of a very few <em>nijyuu hibakusha</em>, or double survivors of the atomic bomb, and the only so noted officially by the Japanese government. What this means is that he was at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were bombed.

The Independent called him "the luckiest man alive". Surviving is lucky, surviving twice is unbelievably lucky, and surviving until age 93 after two such events seems incredible. Its probably luckier, though, not to have been there at all. He writes of crossing a river "full of carbonised naked bodies…floating face-down like 'blocks of wood'" and using these bodies as a raft to get to the other side. The burden of seeing and remembering this is not lucky.

I thought the same last month reading of the deaths in 2009 of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, aged 113 and 111, respectively. They fought with the British Army on the Western Front in World War One. Mr Allingham spoke of men waiting to go "over the top" at Ypres:

"They would just stand there in 2ft of water in mud-filled trenches, waiting to go forward," he said. "They knew what was coming. It was pathetic to see those men like that. I don't think they have ever got the admiration and respect they deserved." 1

Occasionally obituaries offer insight into a life well lived, or a life of great accomplishment, or even one of great evil. Reading of these very old men, otherwise seemingly very ordinary, having lived so long to survive historic events that so few did, offers one a longer view on how people's suffering affects them, and how they move on.

All lived quiet lives, though becoming anti-war activists near the end. As I researched Mr Yamaguchi, I came across the same few <em>tanka</em> translated. This one, written in 1969, describes his burden of memory, so heavy still twenty four years after the events, and one that he bore more than forty more years until his death:

Thinking of myself
As a phoenix
I cling on until now.
But how painful they have been,
These twenty-four years past.

My last couple of posts have talked about the world as it, lamentably, is: backlash in Massachusetts and not enough experimentation in New York. I wasn't implying thats the way I like it, or the way I think it should be. For example, I live in New York, and, obviously, believe innovation can happen here. There are just some barriers that go with the benefits.

In the same spirit of looking at barriers, I thought its worth looking at what has characterized the big innovations of the past few years. Inhabiting a technology head space, I'm definitely biased here, but it seems to me that the last five to maybe almost ten years has been characterized by a set of technology "revolutions" that have focused on ease of use. Twitter is the poster child for a simple product that does just one thing and became popular, but Apple's remaking of the consumer landscape has focused around the same notion: a music player thats integrated with a store, a phone thats simple to add applications to, etc. Seth Godin, in a much re-blogged video of a speech he gave a few years ago at Google, makes the case that ease of use was what separated Google from Yahoo back in 1999 (see about minute four).

There's nothing wrong or surprising about these "ease of use" innovations being so powerful or generating so much wealth. As technology has moved from the geeks and ivory towers out into the hands of consumers and the mass market, making "one of those, but simple" could at times be conceived to be a breakthrough.

And yet…

At another level, this is somewhat depressing. As when I wrote earlier about our desire to sum up people in a bullet point, perhaps missing the Da Vincis, it feels that some potentially really cool innovations get thrown out with the bath water as we increasingly judge the new things that come up through this lense of simplicity to decide whether they are worth while. Certainly, for example, Unix is complicated - AND useful. And "Unix made simple" is the basis of Apple's resurgence, so Unix clearly retains utility in a "simple first" world.

But Unix couldn't have gotten out of the gate in this world. As Unix (and its derivatives/friends/flavors/brothers/whatever, the Linuxes and the BSDs) was growing, getting ironed out, being taught to be scalable and debuggable, etc, Unix was legendarily difficult to use. Even windowing systems in the Unix world were awesomely complex, requiring a three button mouse, combination key strokes, massive setup, and frequent reversion to arcane commands on the command line. You could indeed do anything - if only you could figure it out.

For a while, this retarded the growth of Unix in the marketplace (though, I'd argue that Unix had to wait until the hardware to run it was cheap enough, which took at least as long as the inventions that made Unix easy to use). It didn't, however, slow the rate of innovation in the Unix world, where the platforms and derivatives grew, were ported, stabilized, expanded, and made more useful in a variety of settings. Everyday Unix users (Mac users most notably, but certainly Linux and BSD users) now benefit enormously from those innovations: one Linux server I run in the Amazon cloud was just rebooted for the first time since November of 2008 last night (and that was, it seems, involuntary :)).

So what? Well, how many geeky complicated would-be Unixes are hiding in the heads of potential inventors and entrepreneurs, languishing in a world where investors and early customers will judge them first by sub-second installation times, or whether or not they need to read the manual? While, of course, direct-to-mass-market consumer innovations have tended to be in those categories, how much has that conditioned our evaluation criteria for new ideas to come? Furthermore, does the "ease of use" vein of innovation remain infinitely, or at least sufficiently, fertile to be the starting point for the next wave of innovations?

I'm no ease of use guru (and I use OpenBSD and Emacs and similar arcana daily), so perhaps this is sour grapes. It would be nice, though, if the next wave of cool startups got beyond "And THEN, you can add all your friends - AND SEND THEM A MESSAGE!"

I'm sure this wave will pass. But sometimes, economy aside, it all seems soooo 2007:

1

A few days ago (yep I'm slow) I was reading @fredwilson's remarks on why you should start a company in New York city. Fred covers a lot of ground in a limited amount of space. In the full text of the interview, he discusses the "bullshit factor", which I think is an important point:

Here in New York, when you go to your kid's soccer game on the weekends, I'm the only VC for sure and there might be one other person that works in the technology industry and everybody else works in lots of other industries. And so, there's a little bit of a groupthink that goes on out in the Bay Area –"social media is going to take over the world" or "mobile is going to take over the world"–or whatever the big thing is and everybody's focused on that and you get this kind of echo-chamber groupthink.

I think this is a very good point. Silicon Valley is indeed a kind of echo chamber, where everyone is marketing to each other and convinced that some things which no one has heard of outside the valley are fascinating and world changing. I remember Techcrunch going on and on about how great FriendFeed is, for example, or continually contrasting twitter and… Jaiku? No, plurg? No, identi.ca? No, it was another one… which sank like a stone and is no longer remembered. These things just had no traction in the public mind, and no one outside the valley thought they did. The data point of "indifference" can be a valuable one for entrepreneurs and investors - to avoid spending too much time in a cul-de-sac that they'll never get out of. (Yep, I've inhabited a few cul-de-sacs. Nice places - not much traffic though :)).

There is a flip side to this, though. In the early experimentation face of building an idea, it can be very difficult just to get people to play with it. That is, when you know that its early, its not right, and nobody yet wants it, but you're trying to get it to work and experiment with a goal to refining and achieving what Marc Andreessen memorably calls "the product-market fit".

The great advantage of Silicon Valley in this phase - or, probably, of being twenty and/or living in a dorm room - is that the community has a lot of people willing to play with a lot of early things, and search for the nugget hidden in the dross.

…and almost everything starts as dross.

One reason, for example, that fortysomething's "don't get" social media is that their friends don't get it. Its very hard to jump in to explore a product like, say, foursquare, (or its antecedent, dodgeball) and be able to find any sense of value in what is at its heart a social platform if you cannot convince some of your friends to try the social platform out. People in the dorm room have nothing better to do, so they'll join in and play with it - sometimes resulting in phenomenal growth (see Facebook). People working in law firms and investment banks in New York have a lot to do, and are used to shooting down finished, polished pitches for finished, polished products. They have little sense of the culture of "time wasting" experimentation with half finished products that characterizes Silicon Valley.

Of course, there are subgroups for which this is not true. There are people playing with technology in New York - and in Toronto, and London, and probably for that matter in Greenland. But there is much less of the mass of experimenters that help you get your product ironed out.

In a world where a one in a thousand adoption rate is phenomenal for a new idea, you need a lot of early tire kickers to figure things out. Unfortunately for New Yorkers (and Torontonians, Londoners, Greenlanders, etc), Silicon Valley still remains that place.

I suppose I too must weigh in on what the plunging polls and Massachusetts election results mean for Obama, or America, or at least the midterm Congressional elections. I'm not sure I know, though, so instead I thought I'd reflect on the center of gravity of American politics.

Like most people, I think, I tend to assume that a certain set of opinions are widely held. When expressing those opinions, I think I'm not "being political", I'm just stating things that are close enough to be facts as to have almost the same weight as facts. For example, if I say, "genocide is bad", I wouldn't expect to be taken to task for expressing my political beliefs. Its true that there are likely a few wingnuts around who think "genocide is good" or "sometimes genocide is quite a nice idea - depends on the circumstances" - but broadly speaking, I'm likely to be able to assume that this statement is virtually fact and therefore safe for nonpartisan public consumption.

On the other hand, some topics are famously controversial. Abortion and birth control can cause a nice heated conversation in many parts of the world, even if one is "triangulating" - such as Clinton's formulation that "abortion should be safe, legal, and rare". (I always associated this with Hilary's remarks in the primaries, but apparently, Bill used this formulation in 1992). Gun control is quite controversial in America, particularly in the South and West. As a result, many people realize they need to evaluate where and to whom they are speaking before commenting on this subject, unless their ambition is to have a debate.

I mention this as one's perception of the center of gravity of opinion shapes how and what you think you need to debate, vs what is essentially "obvious". I grew up in Canada, where the current Democratic party would probably be viewed as center right, and the Republican party as far right (parts verging on maniacal, from the Canadian point of view). I haven't lived there since 1998, so my finger might have strayed from the pulse, but I'm think I'm still mostly correct here. Canada, from a European - or at least Western European - standpoint, aside from being a nice, big, cold, dull place with bears - is probably viewed as to the right of center, part of the "Anglo Saxon obsession" with free markets.

This lens therefore informs how I interpret poll results. Much of what the Democratic party is proposing is "obvious" (used per the formulation above) from the Canadian point of view (or my interpretation of it! Epistemology bedevils us again…), so when speaking with friends of similar background, our wails and lamentations might have to do with how the Democrats keep embracing timid right of center proposals rather than going to (our) center, or how the party is proving to be undisciplined in Congress and thus seems weak in pushing its agenda. Its in this light that we'd interpret poll results: people are frustrated with the pace, the method, the candidate, the message, or something along those lines.

If I'm being a little more self aware and intellectually honest, however, I might have to admit that their set of proposals is not "obvious" to the American populace. There are many in America who think, for example, that pure free markets will drive lower costs in health care (the greatest reason for opposing health care reform is "too much government involvement", notwithstanding the US having the most expensive healthcare with some of the worst results and the least government involvement today in the OECD), or that countercyclical spending during a recession is a bad idea (probably as they have little faith that the government will cut debt in the future… true since 1980, excepting, ironically, under Clinton). Those people are not questioning the methods of the Obama administration and Congress; rather, the substance.

Its not clear to me what the Democrats should do here. Shifting their proposals to the right, as their base would say they have been doing, loses them support on the left (though its not clear where those voters are going to go, other than stay home). Shifting to the right also makes them more vulnerable to their right leaning voters switching to Republican proposals - proposals that appear increasingly similar to Democratic ones, but less vulnerable to the "I hate whoever is in office because I'm out of work" type of voting.

Clearly, the American center of gravity that shifted right with Reagan is still there. If the jobs outlook turns sufficiently by the mid-terms, the Democratics may retain enough control of Congress to deliver on programs that help push that center to the left. If not…

…maybe I'll move to Norway :)

Today I went, as I do almost daily, to the local grocery store to get a few things - juice, pasta, etc. In other words, I went on a pretty ordinary journey.

In line for the checkout, I noticed a sign taped on the cash register "Donate to Haitian earthquake relief". I thought about what a good idea this was: you simply round up your purchase, and/or add a dollar, and the collected funds are sent to Haiti. It links a small, everyday action to global relief efforts. I had blogged earlier in the week about texting to give $10 to the Haitian relief effort, and this seemed like a great incremental way to contribute.

As I got closer, I saw that the donations went to a particular faith-based charity, however, and began to have second thoughts.

Why?

It wasn't because of an intrinsic opposition to faith based charities, or because it wasn't a charity or faith that I belonged to. But the charity in question, beyond (I guess) supporting Haiti, supports, due to their faith, a few things in society that I strongly disagree with, and that, in my view, cause particular harm in the developing world.

If they were the only charity available, I'd view that the short term necessity of getting aid to Haiti surmounted the longer range harm of the organization's policies.

But they're not the only organization available. In particular, the Red Cross is available and very engaged in Haiti. I consider the Red Cross (together with the Red Crescent) to be as straightforward, non-partisan, and secular in their global work as organizations can be. They're particularly appropriate for suggesting to broad segments of society, as the White House has done, and as the ads interspersed with the football games do. They're effective, active, and on the ground in Haiti.

So why does the grocery store tie itself in with the faith-based charity? I can only guess its because they support the organization's broader, perhaps more controversial, goals, as well as the immediate goals in Haiti.

As a result, I said "No, thanks" at the register, and endured the icy stare of the cashier and people around me. In a small way, this makes each trip to the store less pleasant. I can protest and say "No, I give to the Red Cross" nice and loudly - but that seems self-aggrandizing.

Maybe instead I'll just shop elsewhere.

No charity organization is free from baggage, and none are perfect. Its unfortunate, however, to think about how many organizations will use this fundraising occasion to bring in funds for purposes unrelated to the cause at hand.

Earlier today a friend of mine posted a story on Facebook (yep, can't link to the closed world of Facebook) about a cruise ship docking at the company's private peninsula in Haiti. There was much disgust from passengers on the ship, and in the comment thread on the story, that the cruise line would do this. Perhaps this will become a big story, and Royal Caribbean will do a nice round of public mea culpas.

I, however, don't understand why.

That is, I understand why in the symbolism sense: people hear the story, and construct for themselves a vision of the cruise ship passengers bathing in champagne while bodies pile up around them and the starving beg them for scraps. This is not whats actually happening, though.

Whats happening is that the ship is docking on a private peninsula, and donating all of the proceeds from docking there to Haitian relief. They are also, apparently, bringing relief supplies.

Its quite possible that they are bringing a small amount of relief supplies. Its also possible that there are Haitian locals who need to report into work to assist the ship, and this is distracting them from helping in the relief effort. As far as I can tell from a quick check on Google Maps, Labadee, Haiti is 140km or so from Port au Prince, close to the epicenter of the earthquake, so its unlikely that in a poor country like Haiti, especially after an earthquake, anyone can make it 140km to the epicenter to assist in a meaningful fashion. But its possible that this is occurring.

None of these aspects were part of the criticism in the article, though. What the article criticized was people vacationing near poverty and despair. This feels somehow wrong, and, as I said at the top, surely overt display of luxury right in the face of suffering would feel very uncomfortable.

And yet - we do this all the time. We do it when we step over the homeless person in front of the grocery store on our way in to buy luxury groceries for a dinner party. We do it when we go to a business meeting in, say, Kuala Lumpur or Johannesburg, and the hotel limousine takes us by miles of shantytowns on our way to the Four Seasons. We do it in New York, enjoying the latest night life around the corner from housing projects.

And I'll maintain that, for the most part, we'll continue doing it.

Why? One part of my thinking has to do with the question of the degree of our duty to assist others vs enrich ourselves. The second is the weight that proximity should have on this duty.

Part one is a difficult question. There are great people throughout history who have taken the position that they cannot sit idle without trying to remove suffering from the world. In modern times, one can think of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, elites within an underprivileged group who chose, rather than a quiet life of complicity with the system, to champion the rights of others, and, by so doing, changed the world. Or, lesser knowns heros like Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of thousands of Jews in occupied Europe, only to die in a Soviet camp after the war. Or even one time acts of individual heroes, like Pete Goss, who sailed forty eight hours into an Antarctic hurricane to rescue fellow competitor Raphael Dinelli - an act for which he was greeted, at the finish line in La Rochelle, by a million fans shouting "Peter the Great!", and rewarded the Order of France.

The reason why we think these people are great is that they chose to dedicate themselves, for a lifetime, or for a short period in which they risked their lives, to saving others, often at a great cost to their own wellbeing. The rest of us remain (in the rich world) working through our simple and personal issues, helping our friends and families, donating when we can, in an essentially grey zone between complete altruism and complete selfishness - with, if we were frank, the needle often much closer to the selfishness than the altruism side. Realistically, most of us spend 95-99% of our resources (time and money) on ourselves and, if we have them, our immediate families.

Is it right? Its probably not right. Peter Singer, in Famine, Affluence, and Morality, argued more cogently than I might that it is immoral for those living in relative luxury not to reduce the suffering of others when to do so would have little impact on themselves. Notwithstanding Singer's views, this affirmative duty of care (ie the idea that you must help) is not widely held by philosophers, or in society today. Instead, we celebrate those who help, privately wishing we had more conviction and would ourselves do the same.

What does this have to do with the cruise ship? Well, those passengers are the same as us. They've purchased their luxuries, and given (probably) very little of their overall wealth to strangers. To the extent that they've given money to the cruise line which will in turn contribute it to Haitian aid, they may well have, inadvertently admittedly, given more to Haiti than the rest of us: 5% (my guess) of their $3000 cruise is $150, considerably more than the $0.67 per American than private individuals have donated so far (based on the American Red Cross receiving $203 million from a population of 304 million).

Which brings me to the second part of my point: the real difference between us and them is symbolic. They are closer to the dispossessed than we are, and so, perhaps in our own guilt about not doing more from afar, we think they should do more from close up. And our idea of that "more" is to remove the symbolism of doing nothing, by refusing to have the ship dock in Haiti.

And if they refuse to dock in Haiti, what happens? The donations go elsewhere. The aid goes elsewhere. The salaries and tips that would have gone to local Haitians, if any, go elsewhere.

In other words, the Haitian people are harmed, but in our outrage, we feel better. We give Haiti $10 via texting to 90999, and move on to rail about others' selfishness.

I was thinking a little today about rudeness, and etiquette.

"People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones!" you begin to admonish me…

Letting aside my own imperfections… I wonder about the small rudeness of everday things (kind of like the Design of Everyday Things. A new book perhaps?) Like the people that stand at the top of an escalator to discuss their next move, blocking everyone behind them. Or like people that don't move their groceries to create space for the people behind them to set theirs done, thus forcing people to carry heavier things for longer. Or like slow moving groups of people that walk in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking traffic.

I could go on. (Note these "petty" things and contrast them with eg these Victorian rules of etiquette. How many of the small faux pas detailed therein are commonplace actions today? Imagine going back in time, opening the lid of hostess's piano, and instantly being dropped from the social circuit as a boor…)

The particular one that strikes me more and more recently, however, is electronic rudeness. I don't mean outright flames - those are usually in the context of heated debate, or from the various psychos that troll on-line fora. I mean the rudeness of non-response.

We've all experienced this, and probably all done it. Hopefully, those of us perpetrating it are aware, and try to do it less over time. At the risk of taking a rosy view of the past, though, it seems to be that in earlier times a failure to respond to a written note would be deemed the height of rudeness. In fact, elaborate rules governed just how a letter should be written.

In our age of instant, free, electronic communication, we no longer bother to write elaborate replies. We rarely even send personalized cards for holidays and birthdays (getting instead a Facebooked "Happy Birthday" - a message so trite and so obviously generated in response to an electronic tickler that its almost more insulting than receiving nothing).

In fact, in our age, we don't even reply at all.

Perhaps non-replying is the new "yes" or the new "I've got it" or the new "I agree". I think, however, instead that its the new "plausible deniability". By not replying - when really we're thinking about it, failing to act on it, ignoring it, or looking for a better offer, as the case may be - we buy ourselves time to say later "Oh, I didn't see that - must've gotten lost in my spam folder".

Maybe it did get lost in your spam folder. That's the reason to reply - so that the sender knows you received it.

There are, of course, reasons to ignore some email. Some are spam. Sometimes you need to delay - in a negotiation, perhaps, where some alternatives are being evaluated or maybe a little posturing is being done.

Many times, though, a simple reply is the faster route: "Thanks for the link!" takes only a few seconds longer to write than simply pressing the delete key. (In fact, I recall a few years back when I was in the speech recognition business someone (I can't find the link! help somebody!) giving a demo of replying to his email using speech macros: he would say, for example, "Bugger off!" and the email text "Thanks for your note. At this time, however, we don't have a need for one of those" and so on, would be sent)

We're all busy. Its hard to keep up with correspondence. Perhaps, though, we'd all be better off taking a leaf from how Nabisco treats communications:

"Why respond to every résumé when that’s clearly not necessary?" someone asked.

The Nabisco manager smiled and replied, "Because — everyone eats cookies." 1

At some level, life is a reference business.

Ok, it was really five days ago. I couldn't resist the headline, though.

Five days ago, I was at an event here in New York that I mentioned when discussing texting 90999 to help Haiti. We all started playing with foursquare, the hot app du jour. I must say I was a little surprised how many people at the event were checked in on foursquare (and how few at the next day's event - none in fact…. Demographics, it appears, are the answer to everything).

foursquare is mobile local social networking with a kind of gaming twist. On foursquare, you "check in" to the venue you're at, and can immediately see a list of other's who are checked in. You can also "shout" out a message to the assembled multitudes. By visiting different places, you can get promotions (like a free coffee nearby) and you can collect points and badges to compete with your friends by seeing who checks in the most. Lastly, which is I suppose the app's primary utility, you can see where your other friends are (as long as they're members of foursquare).

The app has a few flaws. Its a little slow, and I, at least, constantly forget to check in. The promotions are a true Holy Grail of local apps, but will require a lot of partners or a large sales force to pull off. Also, as evinced by the differential usage in the back to back events I went to, there may be a thin demographic slice that is out running around and bouncing from venue to venue to chase down different friends.

All that aside, I think its a pretty cool idea, thats obviously both early enough and popular enough to grow considerably. As my friend Peter Propp has noted, there is a lot more in the concept that foursquare and/or other companies could do to grow the concept: we were all in the room on foursquare, but there was no opportunity for us to interact with each other or with, say, the sponsor's brand. We just looked at each other's pictures, collected some points and badges, and moved on.

There is a next step, though, that they're perhaps pointing the way towards: I think now that we're all on Facebook (our friends and family), LinkedIn (our business connections) and, to a degree, Twitter (our personal news channel, in my opinion), there still is room for a fourth kind of connecting: contextual connections.

These contextual connections are not really friends - they're just acquaintances for the duration of an event, or maybe a set of events. You and Bob to your left and Sally to your right at the ball game don't really want to "permanently" link up via Facebook; you just want to cheer together at the ball game, share the uplifting experience of the walk for breast cancer that you're doing together, get a free shot of vodka at a bar promotion, or get your name entered in a draw for visiting all four booths of a company or consortium at a trade show. You may decide to add each other to your permanent list, but your initial connection is more fragile: its a shared experience, a fleeting connection.

This is not quite what foursquare is doing. At the moment, at least, foursquare offers you really Yet Another place to create a list of friends, and, probably, one that will be narrower (and perhaps more transient) than the other three above as it consists of those friends to which you are always happy to broadcast your location.

Smarter investors that I are hot about foursquare. For my part, I'll look forward to the app with the contextual friends list, and all the exciting business constructs that can come out of it.

Wednesday night I went to an event in New York about technology.

At that event at the end, the organizer noted we could text 90999 to send $10 to help the Haitian relief effort (US only I'm sure, but there are likely others in many other countries). There were 55 people checked in on foursquare, so I'm hopeful there were enough mobile groupies to make a contribution here. I know I did.

Photos are filtering out from news agencies of tremendous suffering. This one from the New York Times caught my eye:

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There's a lot of other stuff going on in the world and our lives.

And one could argue that the US government, like many, is already mounting a relief effort.

But these efforts always run out of funds, especially when it comes time to rebuild. This is a quick way to send some help directly, while all other approaches get organized. Please participate, and/or retweet if you can.

For some reason, capturing (and managing) todos seems to be a difficult problem for technology tools. Every once in a while, my brother and I wind up going on about this. I'm not sure if this is a technology problem or a people behavior problem, but for whatever reason, the right tool always seems elusive.

Years ago, I used a piece of paper. The top left was short term todos, the top right was people I needed to call, and the bottom was longer term projects I was focused on. I'd edit, scribble, and mark over, then when I could no longer read the page, I'd rewrite it, which was a good time to clear out junk. This system worked pretty well.

Then I got a Palm Pilot. One of the original ones, back in 1993 or something like that. (In fact, I re-tried it a few years ago and it still worked! Even the 13 year old software worked on Windows. Take that!, Microsoft-haters!). It was fine for calendar and contacts, but useless for todos as they took too long to enter.

Thats more or less been the history of it: RememberTheMilk, or ReQall, or (gasp!) even Org-Mode seem to be good for a kind of work, but not for all of it. Why?

Sometimes its that old data entry problem again. ReQall fixes this somewhat as you can enter items via speech, but I've found it seems to "forget" my todo status at times. If your todo program doesn't remember, um, what good is it?

But leaving that aside, I think the problem is one of definitions. There are todos we really intend to do ("Pay Mortgage"). In fact, some we're really wasting our time writing down as we won't forget them anyway ("Get downpayment for house"). Some are aspirational ("Go for a swim") - we might do it, or we might not, and there is no project that depends on them, so they tend to sit, accumulate, and clog up the todo list. So then we delete 'em. So much for those todos.

Other todos are transient - effectively they expire. "Build Snowman" doesn't work well once the snow has melted. We don't know when its going to melt, but, before it does, we want to build one. When the snow melts, the todo has expired. Can't it just go away and stop clogging up the todo list? (In fact, some bookmarks and contacts are like this: they're related to something we're doing near time, but after trying to find a plumber or research a todo tool, we no longer need the contact/bookmark: Can't they just go away? Has anyone invented one of these?)

Some todos are kind of floating ideas ("Install new todo software"). We do intend to do it, sometime, when we've got spare time. But not actually now. We're busy now. We don't want to delete them, because life would change somehow, if we ever did it. But….

These todos also clog up the todo list.

There are probably others. But I think this taxonomy of todos is the real problem, regardless of the product (or system, for GTD advocates).

Thats why a piece of paper works so well for all those unforgettable, or aspirational, or floating, or transient todos.

I was thinking a little about DaVinci lately.

Nope, not The DaVinci Code (a book with a stunning lack of literary talent, but thats another subject). The other DaVinci - the one who put the "man" in the phrase "renaissance man" - artist, inventor, scientist, perhaps the most talented man who ever lived.

He was renowned in his own lifetime for his many achievements. At his death, it was said that Fran&ccedil;ois I, the King of France, cradled him in his arms.

In 1499, at the age of 47, he fled to Venice from Milan, and was employed as an engineer constructing machines to protect the city from attack. At the time, other than in a letter to the Duke of Milan in 1482 about his capability to do things other than paint, Leonardo's reputation was solely based on his skill as a painter. But they let him try his hand at engineering.

This may have been wartime exigency, or Renaissance humanism at work (they tended not to see the gap between the arts and sciences that we do now). It made me, however, wonder how life would have worked for DaVinci if he were alive in our time, and out there, in this horrible economy, looking for work.

Imagine DaVinci, with a few drawings (perhaps, to modernize it, some web sites, showing good use of Photoshop and Flash) in his portfolio, show up at, say, GM, a company, like Venice in its day, under siege.

"So, you're applying to be a web designer?" says CEO Ed Whitacre.

"Not so much. I hear these electric vehicle things are going to be a big part of your future, and I have some thoughts on the matter," middle-aged, out of work DaVinci replies.

Imagine the ensuing conversation. Leonardo blows his meeting with Ed (not sure how he got it, but anyway…) and goes to an executive coach.

"Whats your personal leadership brand?" the coach asks. "You have a nice portfolio here, but you're trying to tell people you can do everything. Really you need to sit down and focus on one core strength that will be your brand. 'Coke adds life'. 'Ford builds tough trucks'. You know - that sort of thing. Maybe 'Leonard DaVinci makes great flash websites'?" the coach adds helpfully. "People are busy - they don't have time to try and sort through all the things you say you can do. Make it simple for them."

This is indeed the mantra of our age: "make it simple for people". In the attention economy, the supposition is that people don't have enough time, and everything must be made simple. A strong simple brand image describes products. No manuals or instructions should be needed for any web sites. Everything must be fabricated for the person in a hurry to consume in a hurry, like a cup of coffee they can slurp quickly on the road while doing other things. A minimum of thought and attention must be required.

Some of this information dieting is simple self protection, if you believe studies claiming things like the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of information a day. At the same time, if we're going to claim that innovation will be one of the ways that wealthy nations like America will claim, reclaim, or continue to claim leadership in the coming century, we're going to have to identify ways of getting ourselves to figure out how to pay attention, delve down, and digest complexity and ambiguity a little more regularly.

What's at stake? Well, innovation comes from people, most specifically from find the "best" people and empowering them. If we build a culture focused on not taking the time to consider people's whole range of talents, and instead simply focus on the leadership brand and the bullet points, we're missing the most talented, the DaVincis of our own age.

Of course, there's a reasonably good chance that you or I, or the people we're interviewing, are not DaVinci. However, we're probably pretty good at a couple of things. In fact, whatever "greatness" we have may be as a result of the combination of things we're good at, not the individual ones. It takes time to learn and understand this about a person. But this is the whole point of talent. After all, specialization is for insects.

This is probably a little late, but I've been meaning to weigh in on the discussion about whether or not those accused of the 9/11 attacks should stand trial in New York.

A common thread of those opposed to this seems to be that the terrorists "shouldn't get the rights of Americans and the benefit of a criminal trial in an American civilian court".

These people frighten me with their ignorance. America applies the rule of law to those accused of committing crimes (or, its supposed to). This is one of the things that vaunted American Constitution thing talks about. No lettres de cachet, no bills ex post facto, application of habeas corpus, right to a trial by your peers, innocent until proven guilty, right to counsel, etc etc etc.

These rules don't just apply to American citizens!

Do these critics believe, for example, that a Mexican or Canadian caught in, say, New York, and accused of stealing your car can just be drawn and quartered, whereas an American citizen would get a trial?

Pity if they do.

It means that, whether through simply the viral spread of ignorance in America, or knee jerk hysterical responses to terrorism, the understanding of human rights which has hitherto underpinned political thought in the Western world, is already grievously eroded.

It will surprise few who know me that, while assembling this blog, I decided to do it in kind of a weird way.

Yep, hard to believe, huh?

A little history sort of explains why. At liketribe, we experimented with using Vox first. It was an ok tool, but the privacy settings (for when we were in stealth mode) proved fairly difficult to manage. Once our site went live, we installed Wordpress on our server, along with a couple of plugins.

I found Wordpress a little annoying as its kind of a heavy install. You need an actual database installed. Posting, then testing the post, is also a little annoying, as you have to be web connected when writing, or cut and paste, then if you use multiple servers (say, one for testing and one for production), you need to cut and paste between them (so far as I know).

So when I put up mail2.im, I thought I'd go way simple and try tumblr. Tumblr works pretty well, and has a nice clean look, with options to post from many places. However, since its meant to be simple, its not that configurable. It also has the problem that if you're experimenting with the blog (say, its look and feel), you more or less have to do that "live". I must also confess that, notwithstanding tumblr's popularity, I wonder whether its really too similar to what people do on Facebook to really continue to matter.

Which brings up Facebook. I guess one can sort of blog there, but you really have little control over the look and feel, and have to play with weird privacy settings to get your blog world readable.

So what to do? I'd been intrigued by the idea of people using static blog generators, like jekyll. Jekyll is kind of "back to the future": they basically say "You have a site anyway, and it has pages anyway, so why are you managing the ones that happen to contain blog content differently?". With jekyll, you basically define a framework (essentially say "An empty post will look like this), then run the tools to generate the pages every time you post. Most people use a version control tool, like git, to move the content up to the server to publish.

This approach works well for me (though its gorpy and finicky to set up). You can write locally, when offline. You then generate the site and test it locally. When you're connected, you post it. Simple.

Except…

Except I'm too weird to just do that! For the better part of the past year, I've been increasingly using Org Mode to organize my thoughts. Org-mode is a bizarre tool in many ways (it runs in Emacs), but its amazingly flexible.

In Org-Mode, you just make a bunch of outlines. You then can tag headings in the outlines as todos. You can do elaborate tagging and workflows with todos, then when you want to see your todos, you can define different agenda views for them (eg "Everything this week" to as complex as "Everything concerning my client Bob for which I'm waiting on Cindy"). You can use the outlines as a memory tool (for example, to capture a quick note, or, using a bookmarklet, to remember a web page you're viewing, or even to create a to-do linked to the email that generated it). Whats really cool is that these outlines can be in many different files, and Org-Mode will pull the agenda views across the files. "Everything for today" can therefore pull from your main todo file, as well as twelve different outlines that are in various stages of completion as final documents and so contain todos. More recently: you can even view the todos including your different agenda views from your iPhone using MobileOrg!

Speaking of final documents: in Org-Mode, you create a final document by publishing your outline. You can do this in arbitrary and complex ways (for example, you can make a certain subsection publishable to a slide presentation, but the rest to HTML), but in the main I've found I tend to publish to a PDF (via LaTex), to HTML, or to a wiki (via translating the html to the wiki mode in question using html2wiki - very handy if you're dealing with multiple wikis using different back ends, which you might if you interact with different people on different projects where they've each picked their own wiki flavor). You can more or less back convert to PDF to Word using tools like this, if someone really demands a Word doc.

It therefore seemed reasonable to look at using Org-Mode to publish a particular file as a blog, rather than as a PDF or plain HTML or whatever. I discovered blorg had aspirations of doing this. Despite the author saying he'd shelved it intending to rewrite it, I thought I'd give it a shot.

How's it working? Well, the results are mixed. For some reason, blorg is indeed incredibly buggy. Sometimes it will not generate links correctly, for example, then moving a TODO within the file results in the next run generating a link. These are weirder problems that I've experienced with any other tool - even ones I've had to fix myself (like, in fact, blorg, which I've added some features to, which, ahem, might occasionally be the source of the bugs).

Leaving aside the bugs :), it works well. I can stay in Org-Mode, the "simple" tool I'm increasingly using for everything I do. I publish, run a simple command, and the blog is posted, everything is pinged (via Ping Fm), and I'm off to the races.

Would I recommend it? Well……… tell me how you like Org-Mode first, then lets talk about the rest :)

On a serious note: anyone with any interest in how to set up the above, let me know and I'll be happy to help.

I had another post planned for today, but came across this cartoon, from the Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth, in the New York Times Week in Review round up of cartoons:

Quite.

Last Saturday I went to Vimy Ridge in France.

I've had a longstanding interest in World War One, and was really interesting to see the Ypres salient earlier in the week, then make it down to Vimy.

Vimy has a history as a kind of birthplace of Canada as a nation, as it marked the first time all four divisions of Canadian troops fought together, and also the first time Allied troops on the Western front had actually overrun an entrenched position (more than three years into the war). It has been a much studied battle for Canadian nationalists, but also for military historians, trying to absorb what the battle taught, and why it took so many years and lives to learn it.

My interest is more in the individual in the battle. I've been fortunate enough not to have to have endured war personally, but I am fascinated by those who confronted those situations. In short, the psychology of the soldier in the trenches amazes me.

I cannot comprehend sitting through a bombardment, standing on the fire step, waiting for the whistle, then jumping out of your trench with 80 pounds of equipment and walking through machine gun fire to the other guy's trench, to then have to battle it out with bayonets assuming you survive the journey.

People did this for years.

At Vimy, they've left the shell marks and mine craters intact, though of course they are now overgrown with grass (and in some cases trees) to prevent erosion. Seeing this moonscape extending so far in each direction further makes one imagine the terror of the conflict.

On a plaque in one of the cemeteries at Vimy, it said that in the British Commonwealth, 750000 people died in World War One, of which 300000 were never found. (Modern figures claim 1.1M deaths in the British Imperial Forces) The cemeteries are filled with markers reading simply "A Soldier Of The Great War".

Humbling.

Before Christmas, a friend of mine posted this article about an innocent man freed after 35 years in jail.

Its beyond difficult to imagine what it would be like to be convicted for something you didn't do. Kafka wrote about it, but really about the bizarre and byzantine trial, not the aftermath of sitting in jail everyday wondering why.

There was much debate on the article on Facebook (can I link back to a Facebook discussion? I don't think so…). In short, the nature of the trial encapsulates my bottom-line rationale for my opposition to the death penalty: My opposition is fundamentally epistemological.

Advocates of the death penalty suggest that its possible during the trial phase to be "sure that we're sure". I'm not so sure we can be sure that we're sure :). In this case, for example, the man was convicted on eye-witness testimony. Leaving aside deliberate lying or coercion, here is one disturbing factoid about eye-witnesses:

At the same time, numerous psychological studies have shown that human beings are not very good at identifying people they saw only once for a relatively short period of time. The studies reveal error rates of as high as fifty percent — a frightening statistic given that many convictions may be based largely or solely on such testimony. 1

Hard to believe? Well, what color were the eyes of the pizza delivery man last week? How tall was he? Did he have a gold tooth? Maybe you remember (or, about which more in a moment, you believe that you remember), but do you really think everyone does? Particularly an event from long ago, perhaps in poor light, viewed from a distance, a night, perhaps a rare event where you "cannot believe its happening"?

Maybe. But this notion of what we know, and how we know that we know it, and how we can define the degree of certainty of our knowledge, is what epistemologists try to work on. And its not easy.

Try describing something you're certain about. Thats pretty easy. Now describe how you know you're certain. Thats not too hard, usually. Now, try describing how you define the type of knowledge that gave you that level of certainty. Harder.

This is something we're just not generally that good at. We don't often think about how good our knowledge of something is, and how we'd define the type of goodness that our knowledge has. In fact, we struggle to find the right words to describe these types of problems. At least I do, as you can tell reading this!

Thats what led me to think about language. Can we express ideas we don't have words for? Noam Chomsky famously argued yes, with Benjamin Lee Whorf on the "no" side. I had always thought that Chomsky was viewed as the winner about linguists, but a look at cultures very foreign to ours with very different linguistic structures makes one wonder:

Tuyuca [a language of the eastern Amazon] requires verb endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga-ape-wi means "the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)", while diga ape-hiyi means "the boy played soccer (I assume)". English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know 2

I'd assume Tuyuca-speakers are much better epistemologists than us. Unfortunately, there are fewer than 1000 of them left.

Time to bring them up here for training as judges?

Its Russian Christmas Eve (apparently) and I'm in Swindon, UK, with flight plans for 5pm today.

Who cares? Perhaps nobody but me! But they've got N inches of snow (where N keeps climbing, and seems essentially to be "greater than we're able to manage"), so I'm on pins and needles wondering if I'll actually make it out. Heathrow Airport is showing flights leaving, though some BA flights and particularly flights to Scotland seem cancelled. The traffic details for M4 seem to be improving. Of course, the last 1km could be blocked and I wouldn't be able to make it, but this is all a good sign.

Still, when not worrying about my flight, this all got me thinking about risk and rare events. Essentially, the attitude in the UK (and in Belgium when we were there) towards winter snowstorms seems to be: "We get a couple a year. Its cheaper to shut the country for a few days until it melts than buy snow equipment". When I was growing up in Saskatoon, in the bleak wintry expanses of the Canadian plains, the attitude was: "We never close anything. Ever".

Of course, there was a lot more snow in Saskatoon, so it wasn't a rare event, and make sense to try and budget for.

It nonetheless made me wonder if in our computerized age there isn't a midway point. For example, in the UK, they must have enough information by this point to be able to predict what load they can handle, given the limited snow equipment. Taking just the example of flights of out Heathrow, the constraint seems to be deicing equipment for the planes (which is run by the airlines). If any flights at all are moving, then it means that they're able to get snow off of the main runways. Perhaps there is a limitation of how many gates they can open too, but lets pretend there isn't for the moment.

Using my above example, British Airways for example might be able to predict with 90% confidence that they only have enough de-icing equipment for 50% of the planes to take off. Obviously, the triage could begin by removing from scheduling those planes flying to airports which they can predict will be closed (ie it appears Glasgow and Aberdeen are not open today).

The next step might be to predict which planes are the most reasonable to run. This is probably based on customer satisfaction, cost of rebookings, etc. Would it also be possible to send people emails or texts the day before saying "There's a very high probability of heavy snow tomorrow. Would you prefer us to book you for the next day (no cash from us or you), or you want to gamble on leaving when you planned?" This would give further information to rescheduling algorithms, and probably make people a little happier. For example, if you're two hours drive from the airport in good conditions, you might get realistic and simply rebook.

With all this data, they could then rerun the scheduling algorithm and decide which planes to cancel in advance, based on which customers would prefer to rebook, which can be rerouted, which planes won't go anyway given the destination airport's probable status, and so forth.

I wonder if anyone has done this? The real issue, of course, may be that its not worth doing from the airlines point of view. They may well view their customers' time as "free" and therefore prefer you sitting in the airport on the chance they can move you than have you reclining in comfort at home with beer and potato chips, watching the storm pass through. Like many businesses, they may have the marketing department spending millions on brand image and customer acquisition, but not look at operational improvements and day to day interactions with the company (and therefore the brand) as, effectively, part of "marketing".

So the question: is the problem unsolvable, or simply not worth solving?

I sympathize with "old media". I really do. I read several newspapers and weeklies, and periodically I even try to find them online.

And that would be the problem.

Because these people are in the content business and hire lots of skilled writers and researchers with budgets to fly around and see things first hand, we're able to get information about, say, a breakthrough at a lab in China, or a human rights issue in Darfur. This is great stuff, and an area where bloggers are unlikely to break through to make their mark soon.

However, everything else we read on the web is searchable and linkable. To protect their content, newspapers and magazines are often not linkable, and not searchable unless you go to their specific site. When I want to find, say, that interesting article I read somewhere about charter schools using video games to teach, I wound up ultimately finding it here.

Not on the original Economist site, because I thought I had read about it in the Times, and so searched there. And not on Google, because Google doesn't index these guys. If no other bloggers had written about this subject, I may never have found the article.

And when I include the link here, people can only read the article headline.

Whats the answer? I don't know, but once again I think traditional media is cutting their own throat. Being searchable and linkable is the currency of influence on the web. If these players can't find a way for us to find and refer to their articles, they'll decrease their own relevancy - which will bring about bankruptcy even more than their decaying business models.

I thought I'd write up a little about home exchanging, in the spirit of all those "what I did for my summer vacation" essays one was compelled to write as a child. More seriously, I had been "home exchange curious" for years but never quite got around to trying it until now. The verdict? While I haven't made it all the way back to my apartment to see if my exchangers stole the TV and the cutlery, this was a very good experience and a good way to visit a new place.

What is it: You trade houses with a total stranger you meet on the Internet. Sounds weird, huh?

How it works: In my case, I used the site HomeExchange.com. You upload pictures of your place, write a catchy description, and - oh yeah - pay 100 bucks to join for a year. This is refundable if you don't get an exchange within the year, so if you're wondering whether your toxic waste dump in the Nigerian Delta can be exchanged, there is no risk (apparently) in listing it and trying.

This then proceeds a little like online dating. You look at other places and write them notes, they look at your place and write you notes. HomeExchange.com doesn't do anything from here on in: you receive requests and replies to your notes in whatever email box you registered, and manage your own process. This was slightly tedious, as I got about 50-60 inquiries (apparently Christmas in midtown Manhattan is a popular choice), and there was a lot of email back and forth to work on details, prioritize, and select between different possibilities. Some people seem to come back and say things like "I also have this other place. Would you like it?" which struck me as a little strange. For me, I was more comfortable responding to inquiries concerning a posted property, not some other thing which they hadn't posted. Whether this was a scam on their part, or an attempt to save money, I'm not sure, and so cannot offer further advice on.

Our exchange wound up being negotiated fairly late in the day (late November for a December 22nd swap), so in the end a number of criteria like travel costs and flight times ventured in to the final selection. In the end we selected this place near Ghent, in Belgium. Why? It was easy to get to from the UK (by ferry and car, which turned out to be a lucky choice as our travel weekend was the weekend of a huge snowstorm in the UK - the tunnel and Heathrow were both closed!). We wanted a house, so we'd have space to relax in and not feel the need to pound the streets 24x7. And, in addition to all the "normal" sites in Belgium (museums in Brussels, designers in Antwerp, beautiful medieval town of Bruges, Ghent itself, restaurants, beer, mussels, chocolates, and fries…), I have an interest in World War One and wanted to visit some battlefields near Ypres/Ieper as well as the Vimy memorial in France.

How it went: Very smoothly. We got in touch via email, negotiated the details, and on a snowy Monday showed up in their driveway. We chatted for a while, went over all the details, and Born and Lotje (the home owners) grabbed their things and headed out. We exchanged a few emails and one phone call (when the dishwasher looked like it might be flooding), and otherwise had a simple, relaxing time, got to see the country differently than we would have otherwise, and, of course, saved a significant amount of money compared to if we'd had to spend money on a hotel for the period.

My advice: This seems to be a great way to travel. Obviously, it depends on how you are able to write up the place you've got available to exchange: good photos (like you're trying to sell your place), and a good write up emphasizing whats interesting will really help, I should think. Also planning in advance for popular dates (Christmas, Easter, and August for Europe, for example) is required. Its worth looking at what others include: for example, those with homes not in dense city centers tend to offer their vehicle as well. If you don't feel comfortable doing this, it might make your place less attractive.

Would I do it again?: In a word, yes. If only I could arrange my plans to see a few months in the future, I'd be planning April's exchange now!

One challenge anyone trying to create something new has is assessing its risks. I've heard it said (plausibly) by the electric car crowd, for example, that internal combustion engine vehicles would never be approved today. They're probably right. Imagine the warning:

Contains gasoline. May explode and burn you to death. Emits fumes that are poisonous. May poison the earth as well. Requires substance from far away places that are frequently politically unstable. Can be used to propel vehicle to speeds causing maiming or even death to vehicle occupants or bystanders. Requires extensive training to use. Must redo national road infrastructure, signage, and create a gasoline distribution network.

Wtf? Who would want one of those?

On the other hand, consider this warning:

Irritating to the skin and eyes on contact. Inhalation will cause irritation to the lungs and mucus membrane. Irritation to the eyes will cause watering and redness. Reddening, scaling, and itching are characteristics of skin inflammation. Follow safe industrial hygiene practices and always wear protective equipment when handling this compound.

This is, in fact, the MSDS warning for using sugar.

Good to know we're safe, though :)

Whew! Well, I had what I think was a catastrophic media failure which took my laptop effectively offline for the last two weeks. That hasn't been 100% bad, since I've been busy touring around Belgium and doing holiday stuff, but its certainly impeded a fair number of my activities.

I'll blog about the demonic technology involved at some point, for those who care about the gory details, but for now let me just say: Happy New Year! 2009 won't go down in my memoirs as my favorite year, as I am sure so many, like so many friends of mine, have had such a hard time these past twelve months, but - hey, we made it, and its basically 2010 now.

Best wishes to all for the New Year!