WWVB

Pessimal, Baguettes, Metrotextual

2009-11-07T19:39:00.016-05:00

A potpourri of small amusements:

New Word of the Day (WOTD): Pessimal adjective : Describes a situation that is the least favourable or advantageous (the opposite of optimal).

The Large Hadron Collider has been thwarted again, this time by a bit of ~~sammich~~ baguette, possible dropped by a bird or left by time travelers while they were sabotaging the device.

We've been told of metrosexuals - narcisstic, ostensibly hetero men (OHM) that are comfortable using skin care products and who are open to concepts such as manscaping - think David Beckham as the poster boy - but now a London study brings us metrotextuals. Metrotextuals are ostensibly hetero men who are comfortable signing "kisses" in text messages to other (straight) men.

xxxooo
Vannevar

Titular Economy: Buying Jobs and Titles

2009-11-06T09:20:00.030-05:00

There's been some buying of jobs and titles.

for $30,000 you can buy the title of Co-Pilot with Gulfstream Airlines (see previous post)
The New York Yankees have bought another World Series title.
New York City's Michael Bloomberg has bought the title of Mayor for a third term, after buying his way out of the term limits law. We await indications of whether Hizzoner prefers to purchase a fourth term.

I am struck by this new business model of buying titles or jobs that were once earned. Why would somebody buy a job? Because the experience or influence is worth much more (to the buyer) than the salary. It's a corrupt situation ripe for exploitation. For instance, for $30K you can be a co-pilot on a Continental Connections flight with Gulfstream.

First I thought: it's terrible, scandalous, unspeakable! Then I realized, maybe I'm just being resistant to change, maybe I should embrace the new perspective. This will inevitably extend into other fields; maybe there's a lot of money to be moved in Jobs for Sale (J4S).

These Jobs-For-Sale can't be jobs where solo performance is crucial. They don't sell the pilot's job, they sell the co-pilots job. The pilot is (theoretically) the grown-up, the babysitter who ensures that the co-pilot doesn't compromise the business. The ideal Jobs-For-Sale position is that of a sidekick or team member - Robin rather than Batman, any of the seven dwarfs rather than the Prince.

I expect that other industries will soon start selling jobs. The trick, of course, is to find a willing buyer with sufficient money. The opportunity must be glamorous. The field will need to have a high cost of entry; in other words, be restricted so that the audience can't easily go out and find the opportunity themselves. It's not going to be "run a lemonade stand" - it's going to be a situation involving scarce equipment, or constrained access.

So there's:

an economy that is continually shedding jobs
a limited number of jobs that can be successfully sold
a great demand for experience and education
a wealthy older generation that indulges the younger generation

I think this is the perfect situation for a widescale rollout of Jobs for Sale (J4S) and a bidding war, eventually followed by a classic investment bubble.

To really roll out the Jobs For Sale paradigm on a wide scale, we're going to need newbie-friendly jobs that are attractive in the common culture, jobs which most people can't screw up too badly. They need to be attractive, dumbed-down jobs, what an insensitive person might call upscale "gopher jobs". They're going to be jobs that almost anybody can do, but that very few people can get to.

What jobs could industry probably sell? Remember, they need to be sidekicks, glamorous, attractive to people with money, high barriers to entry, noob-friendly. Some opportunities might include:

Attorneys
Photographers
Journalists
Batboys at Major League Baseball games

Kicking it Meta

At a higher level of abstraction, jobs have been bought and sold for a long time but the prices paid were less tangible (and off the books). The producer has the casting couch. The military says: Sell us six years of your life and you'll see the world. The Department Head says: Sell me your loyalty, and you can become Assistant ~~to the~~ Regional Manager. There are opportunities to sell integrity, dreams, and souls. We just need to convert these to cash transactions.

What strikes me about Bloomberg's situation is that he's extended the business concept into the public sector. I think there's a Pittsburgh application here. Pittsburgh has an exodus of younger people who want jobs and who'd prefer to stay here, and we have government that can't afford the payroll and the pension contributions. Ka-Ching! Maybe we can start selling city jobs. Maybe instead of doling them out as patronage, we should recognize the cash value.

I'm just saying. If you're going to sell parking lots to cover salaries and pensions, why not sell the jobs?

If you'd like to suggest a job for the list of "Jobs 4 Sale", please enter it in a comment below.

New Airline / Flight School In Pittsburgh

2009-11-03T20:53:00.031-05:00

The Post Gazette brings us the story of Gulfstream International Airlines, which may reintroduce air service from PIT to Harrisburg, DuBois, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and other smallish cities. They're going to fly 19-seat Beechcraft 1900's, which are really nice airplanes.

No less a person than County Executive Dan Onorato said, "We are thrilled that Gulfstream International Airlines is interested in restoring important regional flights to our world-class airport".

On the face of it, it's more good news. It's evident that people are working hard to attract new airline service, and I applaud that. For instance, the recent incentivized/ guaranteed service to Paris, France with Delta - that was a great move.

The thing is: We know Delta Airlines.
We've flown Delta Airlines.
This Gulfstream Int'l outfit is no Delta Airlines.

Gulfstream flies as a Continental Connection carrier. You remember Continental Connection, the umbrella outfit that outsources airline passengers to low-cost contractors, like Continental Connection Flight 3407 which crashed while approaching Buffalo Niagara International Airport recently. The passenger's tickets said Continental, but the airplane and crew were Colgan Air.

From Wikipedia:

Gulfstream International Airlines has been under additional scrutiny due to three recent fatal crashes that all involved pilots that were trained at the Gulfstream Training Academy (its sister company), the last one in February 2009, where 50 died on Colgan Air Flight 3407 near Buffalo, NY.

In May 2009, the federal government issued a fine of 1.3 million dollars against Gulfstream International Airlines after the Federal Aviation Administration found that it had falsified flight time records, allowing crews fly longer hours than allowed by law, and providing below standard aircraft maintenance. The fine is being disputed at this time.

In July 1997, the airline's entire fleet of Shorts 360-300s were repossessed by the leasing company due, in part, to maintenance irregularities that included the welding of hydraulic lines
Despite its status as a mere stepping stone in the minds of most pilot employees, the company was able to keep whistle blowing in check through selective disclosure of training documents

It's not just an airline, it's an adventure

Gulfstream is not just an airline; it's a flight school. The Gulfstream Training Academy (check the site, very TopGun) teache$ people to be pilots. It's a flight school. Then the graduates can pay to be copilots on your Continental Connection flight! They pay tens of thousands of dollars, get 250 hours of experience as a copilot, and the airline pays them $8 an hour. They are, essentially, taking lessons with uninformed passengers in the back.

Here's the menu: for $25K they'll declare you a co-pilot (aka first officer) in three months; for $48K they'll declare you a pilot in five months. If you don't have any flying experience at all, for $73K they'll make you all that in 14 months. The brochure calls the time you spend flying around (pretending to be a copilot) the "first officer internship". George Orwell would be proud.

Your family sitting in the back of the Beech 1900? Priceless.

It's really a brilliant "business model". In addition to charging passengers for snacks, drinks, headsets, blankets, and checked baggage - hey, let's charge somebody who wants to learn to be a copilot, and let them ride up front!

From USA Today:

Capt. Marvin Renslow, who was at the controls when a Colgan Air commuter plane went wildly out of control and plunged to the ground on Feb. 12, trained with Gulfstream in 2004 and 2005, according to National Transportation Safety Board records. Colgan Air was operating under contract for Continental Airlines at the time of the Buffalo crash.

The copilot on a Comair flight that crashed in 2006 after trying to take off from a dark, closed runway in Lexington, killing 49 of 50 people aboard, also worked at Gulfstream, according to NTSB records. So did the two pilots on a Pinnacle Airlines flight who were joyriding in an empty jet before snuffing out both engines and crashing in Missouri in 2004.

I really do applaud the people trying to rebuild air service. But I've got a message for Dan Onorato: we'd be better off with MagLev. Or Greyhound. Or anybody where the co-pilot isn't an intern, paying for the experience.

Related Posts: 30 Years of Outsourcing Safety.

Google: Exordium and Terminus, aka 2525

2009-10-29T00:01:00.005-04:00

On Wednesday Google introduced two new concepts. Concept One is that the beta Android operating system contains free Google mapping. Stock prices for Garmin and TomTom (people that sell GPS mapping) are down. Another industry based on selling arcane information on a retail basis challenged by the Google the Category Killer.

Concept Two is Music Search: when you type a song title into Google, you'll get four results that are Google's attempt to let you hear that song.

I wanted to test drive this, so I Googled the title of a favorite song from my youth: 2525. The song is really titled Exordium and Terminus, by Zager and Evans, but I tried the more obscure '2525' just to see what Google did. (Exordium means beginning, and terminus means end.)

Google returned two videos of the song, and two videos of a television show called "Cleopatra 2525". Not bad in the way of search results.

One of the links was this excellent video, made decades after the song was recorded, and I thought I'd include it here because (1) it's a value-added update to an old fave, and (2) it connects to my previous post about Wired For War.

Without further ado, here is
Exordium and Terminus by Zager and Evans:

Finished Wired For War

2009-10-28T00:08:00.004-04:00

Today I finished reading Wired For War : The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, by P.W. Singer. This was an excellent book that took me an uncharacteristically long time to read, because every few pages I felt filled up with the implications of what Singer is talking about and I'd need to set it down and let it percolate.

Progress is accelerated during wartime, and the country has been at war for 8+ years in two countries, and so logically we should be seeing remarkable technological advances. We are, and mostly on two fronts: improved survival rates of combat injuries, and increased use of automation in the forms of aircraft (mostly in unmanned aerial vehicles {UAVs}) and surface robots.

There's going to be long-lasting social changes because of these wars, and I believe they're in stealth mode because to a large extent the war is not evident to civilians. Demographically, we're building a new generation of wartime veterans (which is a great result from a lousy process), and we're also generating a new generation of wounded vets.

There are remarkable advances being made in aviation, automation, navigation, robotics, telemetry, real-time systems, and weapon systems. Google's new Android operating system, for instance, is being used in the Raytheon Android Tactical System (RATS). Soldiers will be able to see each other's location in the "battlespace".

Just as rifles permitted a soldier to kill an enemy at a new range, today's gear allows a "pilot" in Nevada to kill an enemy in Afganistan. Singer does a great job of teasing out the moral implications of this technowar. For instance, is a contractor operating a Predator drone an illegal combatant? Does that justify an enemy's attack on a Nevada shopping center? When killing becomes a real-world video game, are we producing the same child warriors that we decry in Africa?

I highly recommend this book.

Pittsburgh Gets Google Street View's 2nd Squad

2009-10-26T22:04:00.005-04:00

A copy of the official press release follows:

Mountain View, CA. (AP) Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced that Street View's 2nd Squad had been selected for digitizing Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Chicago.

Google's Street View™ technology is used to present "person in the street" views of what communities, people, storefronts, and houses look like along streets mapped by Google.

The decision was greated with dismay by some civic boosters, who hoped that a more leading-edge GoogleCar or GoogleTrike would be used to capture the essence of Pittsburgh's diverse, contemporary, sustainable cityscape.

"Not everybody gets the Trike", said Ulna Pratesh, Street View route manager, somewhat peevishly. "It's a question of resources. The 2nd Squad will do a fine job with Pittsburg. Then they'll move on to Youngstown and Cleveland, then Buffalo and perhaps Chicago."

The Mayor's office had suggested using the Google Trike to digitize only certain development properties suggested by the FOL¹ Renaissance Project, and for the infamous 2nd Squad to cover the North Side, the East End, and other relatively unimportant regions. City Council had been split on the Mayor's proposal. Councilman Bill Peduto twittered:

¹FOL = Friends of Luke

Original concept by: @Jetpack

Pittsburgh needs a PGH Top Level Domain (TLD)

2009-10-26T00:01:00.002-04:00

This post conveys a serious suggestion for the City of Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh needs a TLD, and only city government can accomplish this.

TLD is a TLA (three letter acronym) for Top Level Domain. A Top Level Domain is the segment of a web address furthest to the right. Examples of TLDs that you've seen are .COM , .GOV, and .NET - maybe you've seen .MIL for the military, or .EDU for schools. These are all assumed to be US domains, which the rest of the world finds somewhat arrogant.

Internationally, you'll see country names ( .DE , .FR , .UK, .CN, .IN, .JN). Here's a world map with country-based TLDs represented by spatial orientation and by the relative size of the domain:

The tiny island sovereignty called Tuvalu happens to be assigned the .tv TLD, which they have subleased to people interested in URLs that relate to television. This is quite profitable for them.

There are moves afoot to establish many more TLDs, and there are benefits and fortunes to be found in running a new TLD. For instance, when .biz became available, there was a bit of a geek land rush to secure URLs.

What brought this to mind was a NYTimes article about how two groups are competing to establish and operate a new TLD, .GAY. They'd be able to sell names within that domain (such as Philadelphia.gay, or vacations.gay for instance) to the highest bidder. That would be a lucrative TLD to operate.

TLDs have previously been distributed nationally, but cities are just beginning to get into the game. If you subscribe to the Richard Florida worldview of city-based economies, it makes sense to extend TLDs down to the city level.

New York City has convinced ICANN, the people who approve or deny requests for TLDs, that it's appropriate for cities to develop their own TLDs, and they're on the verge of getting approval for .NYC. link1 link2

Pittsburgh should establish .PGH as a Top Level Domain. In this case, we're not interested in profits from administering the domain as much as we're interested in extending the regional brand into the web. We want advertisements and logos to say Steelers.PGH, DollarBank.PGH, etc. We want out-landers to see those URLs and think, "that's a city that gets it".

They'll still keep their .COM URLs, and they'll still resolve to the same websites, but it'll be a very low cost web marketing initiative for the region.

Here we go DOT P-G-H, here we go!

Two Tickets to Paris? Nice!

2009-10-25T00:01:00.010-04:00

The Post-Gazette is carrying advertisements for free airfare to Paris. Winners must complete their round-trip travel by December 31st.

UGMT (usually, generally, most of the time) when a city or airport is giving away tickets between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it's because either (1) they'll lose the service if they don't get a certain number of passengers per year, or (2) they've guaranteed a certain number of passengers a year, and they're trying to make good on the guarantee.

Does this mean that passengers and revenues have not met the levels that the County agreed to guarantee?

So now the County is going to have to make good on the difference between the guaranteed passenger revenue and the actual money, and so the County is giving away free seats (that ~~they're~~ we're paying for anyway)?

Could there possibly be a more unfriendly URL than http://www.flypittsburgh.com/Win_Round_Trip_Air_Fare_For_Two_to_Paris_Courtesy_of_FlyPittsburgh_com_and_Delta_Air_Lines ?
Couldn't there be a more Pro-Pittsburgh tagline - "From the Paris of Appalachia to that other one over there"?
I'd like to clarify that I think that it was a good move for the County to guarantee a certain activity level in order to reestablish international flights. It was a smart thing to do and a legit risk.

Two Tickets to Paris. Nice.

Windows Vista 7 : Trust Me

2009-10-24T20:36:00.004-04:00

It is remarkable that a lot of the geek pundits proclaiming the qualities of Windows7 were the same people who once announced that Vista was the cat's meow.

John Dvorak is to be praised for his objectivity. One blogger refers to the new product as Vista 7.0 (Written via XP).

NWA188: Perspective on Small Passive Mistakes

2009-10-23T16:20:00.001-04:00

Thursday afternoon I had a lot of things going on and my routine was broken by events. They were all good. Instead of driving home I planned to meet my wife at the Honda dealership to deliver our car for maintenance. I had the rendezvous written in my planner, I had remarked on it in conversation, and I had exchanged texts with my wife confirming the plan.

Then I got in my car and followed my routine instead of my plan, drove the wrong way for 11 miles, realized on the exit ramp that I was driving home instead of to the dealerships. I reversed course, got back on the highway in the other direction, passed my job, and went over to the dealership. On the way back I called my wife when I was five minutes out from the dealership and told her I was back on course.

I got there a few minutes late, but it was really no big thing. Just human error. My good wife, who has seen and forgiven many foibles, took it in stride. No biggie.

I'd like to use this true story to consider Wednesday's path of Northwest flight 188. You can click on the map below to see the flight's ground track.

Reports are that the aircraft flew past the airport at high altitude; the flight controllers were unable to raise the flight on the radio. The crew got back in touch, descended and got back into the line of arrivals and landed. It takes a while to descend out of thirty-some thousand feet.

Back in the day, passengers sat in the back uninformed. When they were partially informed, it was a nuisance; see the hijacking scenes from 1937's Lost Horizon. Now the passengers have their GPS and their iPhones and their laptops connected to the onboard WiFi, and they think they know as much as the flight crew.

This was not a big deal. People were concerned; maybe something was amiss. All was well, and it ended well. We don't know what happened. The authorities will figure it out, but it seems like a lot of uninformed noise over a non-event.

It's not like he landed a 767 on a taxiway. That was Monday's event. (See James Fallows on the relative risk and media coverage).

These things have been happening for decades. People wonder how they persist in spite of all the modern techno bells and whistles. I'm not so sure they don't happen because of all the modern marvels, if we haven't become passive in the presence of assistive technology.

Final thought: the Northwest MSP flyby and the Delta 767-taxiway story actually involve the same airline, since the NWA-Delta merger. Which, ahem, is a bit of a stretch.

Hyperlocal News Buzz: Newsday Follows PG+'s Lead

2009-10-22T23:25:00.013-04:00

Long Island (lohng-eye-land) newspaper Newsday will move their website to a $5/week subscription-based model on Wednesday. Most of their content will go behind the wall, with some minor content (home page, school closings, weather) available to all.

If you subscribe to the dead-trees Newsday, or get your cable service from local ISP Cablevision, you're in for free. The cable company crossover is an interesting crossover that gives them 2.5 million "subscribers" from Day One — although they're all passive, no-marginal-charge accounts that are likely to artificially inflate the numbers like a Vietnam body-bag count (now in XML format!)

What's most interesting to me is that they're flogging the hyperlocal news buzztheme:

"We are excited about this model because in addition to a unique ability to immediately reach about 75 percent of Long Island households, we believe the hyper-local approach is right for Long Island," said Debby Krenek, Newsday managing editor and senior vice president/digital.

The Washington Post just shut down their hyperlocal news experiment in Loudoun County, Va.

“We found that our experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model,” said Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for the Washington Post Company. “Updating the large amount of special features and technologies” on the site, which was run by Post staff members, proved unsustainable...

To a certain extent, hyperlocal news is the news industry's dot-com bubble: the industry is failing and both legacy powers and new entrants are throwing money into a possible web front with no indication of probability. If the bubble collapses in a progression of mergers, the last man standing may have enough eyeballs to either save a local paper, or drive the local paper out of business.

The nascent hyperlocal news bubble will give legacy players something to do while they're burning through their cash reserves, it'll keep the outsourced web shops busy, it'll give the new journalism grads a casual dress sort-of-job while they're working on their screenplays, and in the end the hyperlocal news fad will probably be another nail in the coffin for newspapers.

Features that would be truly game changing would be Google Earth mashups with local crime and accident reports and real estate - in other words, co-opt the CraigsList ads and the OpenGov movement - but that's already a crowded webspace without an established path to profitability. It's going to be very hard for a local newspaper to cost-justify building their own geo-news service, so the national startups may have a foothold: the legacy papers have the local touch, and the national players have the applications.

My PG Plus Wishlist

Here's what I'd like the Post Gazette Plus to do for me - help me to visualize the hyperlocal news within Pittsburgh's somewhat unique geographic context. Pittsburgh is a hodgepodge of overlapping backwater municipalities, and although I've been consuming local news since I moved here in 1985 I still end up wondering "where is that, exactly" when I see a news story about Lincoln-Lemington or Blawnox. I'd love to see box-in-a-box imagery that shows me, on maps, where these stories are happening. Stratification by niche neighborhoods isn't exclusive to Pittsburgh - I think about Dumbo, for instance, in Brooklyn - but it is an established attribute of Pittsburgh that the web channel could exploit.

Post Gazette Plus 10/21/09

2009-10-21T21:59:00.004-04:00

The Future Ate My Particles

2009-10-18T11:03:00.016-04:00

Interesting NYTimes article about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. The LHC, you'll recall, is supposed to accelerate particles to incredible speeds and then crash them together, demonstrating in a very scientific way what little boys with toy cars know instinctively: it's great fun to smash things together, and if you can get an explosion out of it, well, so much the better.

The LHC is the biggest and most expensive science project ever. Scientists believe that the collisions will provide (at a macro level) a simulation of the first moments of the universe, and (at a micro level) particles known as the Higgs boson. There is also a small theoretical possibility that the experiment will generate a black hole that will destroy all life on Earth and swallow up the solar system, but hey - you want to make an omelette, you got to take a few chances.

Between Sept. 10 and Sept. 19, 2008, the LHC was powered up and operational, until an explosion in the supermagnets and power couplings shut the thing down. Since then the LHC has endured a series of unexpected technical difficulties.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan — two brilliant scientists, affiliated with prestigious institutes — have published papers (paper1 , paper2) suggesting that maybe the problems getting the LHC running again aren't technical - maybe the future is interfering with the effort.

From the NY Times: This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs boson, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

There are two theoretical scenarios which Nielsen and Ninomiya suggest.

In the first case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one. In this scenario, which admittedly requires time travel, our future scientists are trying to keep our present scientists from blowing up the universe.

In the second case, when events in the current reality present a choice - A or B - both choices occur, each in their own new quantum reality. And so in some realities, which are really probability densities, the black hole did swallow the solar system - we just don't know about that because we're not living on that thread. In the thread we are living in, the happy circumstance of the magnet failure allowed us to continue, and in the future we realize the tremendous risk and take steps to ensure the project fails.

Wow.

People may say, how does all this theoretical physics really improve my life? I mean, scientists in the Apollo program gave us Velcro and Tang back in the day, but what has the lab done for me lately?

The young boys with the toy cars would know how to use this bold new theory.
In the 60's we said: the dog ate my homework.
In the 90's we said: Windows ate my homework.
In the 00's we said: the Internet ate my homework. (the netscuse)
In the 10's they'll say: the future ate my homework.

Google Trike Suggestion: Great Allegheny Passage

2009-10-17T17:03:00.006-04:00

I've previously written about the Google Trike using StreetView technology to present bike trail images in Google Maps. Now, Google is soliciting suggestions (until October 28th) about where the Google Trike should go next.

If you'll click https://services.google.com/fb/forms/streetviewussuggestions/, you'll see Google's solicitation of the next area for the Google Trike to map.

I'd like to respectfully request that you click that link, and suggest that the Google Trike goes to:

Category: Trail
Suggestion: Great Allegheny Passage
City: Pittsburgh and Cumberland
State: PA and MD

This would encourage tourism in the Pittsburgh-DC corridor and give more national visibility to a positive Pittsburgh attribute.
Kudos to: Paul Wiegman for passing this around.

Google Trike: My Perfect Next Job

2009-10-12T00:12:00.003-04:00

I've had indications of what my perfect next job could be - I could be a bicycle guide along the Great Allegheny Passage. I could run a pedicab hauling passengers between Station Square and Southside. My latest ambition somewhat diminishes those other possibilities: I could work for Google Maps.

I've only ever seen a Google car once, but there are Google vehicles driving the roads everywhere on behalf of Google Maps. They have funny masts sticking out of them, with all sorts of electronics on the boom - GPS receivers, probably WAAS receivers, and digital cameras pointed in all directions. Recently, this lead to the introduction of Google Streets View.

In fact, here in Pittsburgh, somebody who knew when the Google car was coming staged a some performance art for the Google car to encounter, digitize and document. The Street View of Sampsonia Way is online here.

Street View is very popular. There's a limitation; Google was only documenting what could be seen on public roadways; there was no documentation of footpaths, jogging paths, walkways, or bike trails. Enter: the Google Trike. A perfect next job for me could be pedaling the Google Trike.

The Google Trike is a bicycle that travels where the Google cars can't go. Here's a picture (via BikePittsburgh, thanks!) of the Google Trike on a Pittsburgh trail - the Southside Trail, if I've got that right, looking across the river at downtown.

Here's a picture of a Google Trike mapping a narrow alley in Rome:

Interview with Google Trike ~~Operator~~ Pilot

Google Trike at Stonehenge:

Also, I expect they'll make a contribution to the effective organization of the bicycle dashboard, which cries out for advancement:

The use of a tricycle is inspired. Imagine if we'd had that insight forty years ago, maybe this would've looked different:

This could be my perfect next job. Although, I would suggest, the Google Trike could use fenders, and a bell. And an orange triangle. This is just way cooler than riding a Good Humor tricycle.

Elegent Code And Implementation: The Baby Rocker

2009-10-11T12:35:00.006-04:00

Linux Baby Rocker

There's elegant code, and there's elegant implementation, and sometimes you get to see them together in the same project.

Here's a bit of elegant code, just 5 lines if you remove the explanatory comments:

while [1 = 1]
   do
        #eject cdrom
        eject

        #pull cdrom tray back in
        eject -t
   done

Here's an abundantly elegant implementation:

Pittsburgh, the Copenhagen of Appalachia

2009-10-10T13:53:00.014-04:00

Excellent article in USAToday proclaiming the Great Allegheny Passage as a Recession-Proof Getaway, complete with "life-affirming views amid forgiving terrain".

There's a great video of Cumberland trail activist Larry Brock describing the trail and its economic impact. The work is still in progress, but the trail is already bringing positive economic benefits to the towns while presenting low obligations for maintenance and marketing. Seems pretty green/sustainable.

Maybe next summer, maybe 2011, the trail will be complete from McKeesport to Point State Park. Then we'll see more cyclists coming into Pittsburgh with loaded bags looking for lodging, carbs, and beer.

Current status is there's a trail in McKeesport that leads over the Riverton Bridge and then stops at the trainyards. In 2010, the trail, the gas company, and the railroads will complete the trail up to the Waterfront. The Holy Grail is the hope that there'll be an accomodation negotiated with Sandcastle by 2011.

I know great bicycle advocates in Pittsburgh who believe that their efforts are best spent on projects within the city proper- sharrows (that is, share-arrows) and bike lanes, signage, etc - and while those are very important, IMO the completion of the trail between Duquesne and the Hot Metal Bridge is going to be the event that moves downtown bicycling past the tipping point.

Completion of the trail will move out-of-town cyclists into the Duquesne-Southside-Station Square- Jail Trail - Downtown corridor. That will present a volume and a presence beyond that which local cyclists generate. It'll be a force-multiplier.

People will be coming into Pittsburgh to ride to DC, people will be coming from DC along the trail. Their economic impact will include bike accomodations, bike lockers, bicycle friendly hotels and restaurants, etc.

To a lesser extent, you'll see people flying into Pittsburgh with their bikes in bike-boxes and trying to ride out of the airport to a hotel near the trail complex - and then we'll see momentum for the Montour Trail's Enlow Road Connector.

I'm thinking our next sobriquet might be "Pittsburgh, the Copenhagen of Appalachia".

PG Plus: Standoff, Casino, Governor

2009-10-09T00:03:00.002-04:00

Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission has announced that bloggers must disclose their paid relationships with companies or products they blog about, even if the payment is only a free sample.

Let me be clear: I have received no payment, consideration, or so much as a free copy of the Sunday Post Gazette in exchange for my campaign to support the introduction of Post Gazette Plus.

I did think that a better title would have been "Post Gazette 2.0", or "post-Post-Gazette" (seems somebody already had pPG.com), but whatever - I'm here to support the hometown Black and Gold. But I'm not getting anything out of it, not even a complimentary pass to see what's actually in "PG+".

And that's the PG+ marketing plan, because you can't see what you're buying until after you've paid for it. I think that's asking too much - Salon gives you a two-day pass. The NY Times Select would give you a free look. All the street dealers know, if you want somebody build a habit, give them the first taste for free. Even McDonalds gives away their cold coffee.

As it is, I'm just sitting on the outside looking at those teaser headlines, hoping that maybe Santa Claus will bring me a PG+ subscription. I'd like to be able to entertain my Black-and-Gold peeps with some subscription-only, value-added scoop n'at.

Here's some enticing Thursday teasers:

Role Reversal: Gamblers Turn Casino into ATM

2009-10-08T12:22:00.021-04:00

The Post-Gazette (standard edition, PG-Zero) brings us the news of three adventurers who are accused of turning a casino machine into an Automated Teller Machine, having withdrawn $430,000 in a series of $2500 transactions.

The accusation is that the trio persuaded a casino employee to activate a "double-up" mode on the machine, which left it vulnerable to hacking. A series of specific keystrokes and the machine would generate a significant payout to the operator, and that payout would not be reported on daily summaries.

This unauthorized role reversal - with the "gambler" using the machine to take money out of the casino - is abhorrent to all who understand the nature of casino gambling, which can be summed up in a three-word rubric ("the house wins") and a two-word unspoken corollary ("suckers lose").

A casino is a facility for fleecing ~~gamblers~~ suckers by arbitraging the probablity of victory against the payoff rate. It's a lot like the old-school numbers bookie: the odds of winning are 1 in 1000, the payoff is 500 to 1, so the house keeps 50% of the volume.

The reason we have casinos, the reason We The People license casinos, and the reason the state protects the casinos is that they offer state budgets a piece of the action.

So this unsavory trio is alleged to have gone into a place that runs a fixed game, a crooked house, and they reverse the game and cheat the cheaters. So what?

What's intriguing to me is that the state is now the enforcer for the casino. No more no-neck leg-breakers needed. Somehow, we've put the Washington County District Attorney into the business of tending to the casino. And when I say "the state is now the enforcer", that really means that We The People are the enforcers.

What is our public interest in protecting a rigged game, or in protecting those who run a rigged casino?

People who go into these casinos aren't gamblers, because they're not playing in a game of straight percentages - they're suckers. These three accused men, however unsavory, might be the true gamblers - they played the casino at the casino's own game, and gambled that they wouldn't get caught.

Near as I can tell, their mistake (if guilty) was gambling on a retail scale, while the House and the State are working the wholesale game.

Let's apply Kant's Categorical Imperative - would it be OK if everybody did it? Would it be all right if a lot of people swindled one-armed bandits? I believe it would be all right. (edit)

What is the state's interest in defending a swindling machine that exists to take money out of the population?

Friday Post Gazette Plus

2009-10-03T00:06:00.000-04:00

The Post-Jobs New Normal

2009-10-02T13:45:00.001-04:00

Robert Reich is an economist. To say that Robert Reich is an economist is to say that Lance Armstrong is a bicyclist.

I disagree with him on political matters, but I always listen closely to him on economic issues, because he's brilliant, generally right, capable of explaining technical nuance in layman's terms, and he's willing to state contrarian views.

Although physically diminutive, his stature is such that in 1992 the Democratic wisdom on economic policy was "to get somebody in the Oval Office who will put Robert Reich in the basement".

In his blog on Thursday, Reich talks about The Truth About Jobs that No One Wants To Tell You.

America is productive and making money. Let me rephrase that.
Americans are productive and Corporations are making money.
They're making money (i.e. they're taking wealth) out of the population.
The workforce is suffering while the corporations are thriving.

The "new normal" is that the formerly-middle-class will not have high-paying jobs, benefits, unions, security, retirement, or certainty. We're entering a "post-jobs" economy, call it the Wal-Mart economy, and Reich points out that the corporate strategy is unsustainable.

Reich calls for a new Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the ongoing jobs program he recommends would dwarf the recent bailout and stimulus programs.

There's a lot of examples of Works Progress Administration projects around Pittsburgh. My favorite is the terminal building at the Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin.

We have an industrial policy which suggests that car companies are too big to fail. We have a financial policy which suggests that investors must be protected from market forces and responsibility.

We need to have a jobs policy that develops the middle class ~~so that they can continue to bail out those corporations that the government deems worthy of our treasure~~.

China has a jobs policy. A major reason China is growing is they've adopted a policy of putting people to work. I'm no fan of Beijing, but they certainly have established and pursued employment as a priority, and right now they're doing better at it than we are.

I encourage you to read Reich.
(via Get The Flick.)

Post Gazette Plus Moves Forward

2009-09-29T21:53:00.004-04:00

Google Love Sept. 2009

2009-09-28T11:20:00.003-04:00

Time for the end-of-quarter Google Love post, hot on the heels of Google's 11th birthday. These are the search terms where recent blog entries get some decent results.

YMMV; Google is on a bunch of different server farms, each running a subtle variety of algorithms, and each updated on different schedules. Google is not monolithic. To say that term 'widget' has a z rating in Google is a statement of probability.

Anarchist Bomber, #1 in google.
ayn rand labor, 1
integrated tour de france, 1
G20 Pittsburgh Police, 1
PATCO NATCA, 1
post gazette plus, 1 (i'm a bit pleased at this)
ravenstahl bunker, 1
Search vs Finding, 1

Ayn Rand's Father, 2
northism, 2
Politicians Play Solitaire, 2
Ayn Rand Labor Unions, 3
women in the tour de france, 4
eliminating airline delays, 5
Dread Lord Zober, 5

Ayn Rand Affair, 7
Ayn Rand and John Galt, 9

G20 Afterglow: Breaching the Event Horizon

2009-09-27T16:45:00.009-04:00

Looking over the city at sunrise Friday, wondering if there'd be columns of rising smoke, and there wasn't: Priceless.

Drove into the city Saturday to attend a BaconPalooza at Shadyside's Harris Grill, with some uncertainty about what we'd find on The Day After. We found Pittsburgh, same as it ever was.

We did learn that it's a tactical error to drive through Bloomfield during their Little Italy days; my GPS wasn't clever enough to avoid that. The streets were crowded with booths and businesses and the Sons of Italy, with nary a black hoody or zip-tie handcuffs in sight.

The BaconPalooza was as advertised; we had shrimp-n-bacon, bacon perogies, bacon wings, bacon sushi, and a few slices of a Bacon Explosion (which was really good). We had bacon cupcakes from CoCo's Cupcake Cafe, also excellent. We did not venture into the chicken-friend bacon.

We met Pittsburgh blogger Mr. BaconPants, who unfortunately does not have his signature trousers for sale yet, but hopes to shortly.

We realized we had a shopping target of opportunity, so we went to the Apple store on Shadyside's main drag to get some replacement ear buds. There was a queue of people standing in the rain to eat at Pamela's. We saw plywood sheets on a few storefronts but there was no other indication that on Wednesday, people weren't certain what Thursday would bring.

In the week prior to the G-20, PghComet cleverly pointed out that anticipating the G-20 was like being at Nags Head and wondering where the hurricane was going to hit.

To me, the G-20 seemed like an event horizon; all planning, concern, etc. went as far as Thursday, and no further. Now we're over the horizon, and there's a day or so of the "sweet spot" familiar to survivors, followed by a too-quick return to the nagging details of life: money, health, politics, war, plumbing, logistics, car pools. Here we go Steelers, here we go...

There were a few blog posts during the G20 and the "sweet spot" that I really liked:

RiffRaffGregg offered a world leader's guide to Pittsburgh.
Eve identified the silver lining: the G20 sharply reduced vehicle traffic and bikes took over. To repeat her question, how can we plan for this more often?
Illyrias compared the G-20 experience with damages caused in Superbowl celebrations.
I enjoyed Infinonymous' wrapup, as well as ALL of his G20 posts, most excellent
2PoliticalJunkies assigns responsibility to Luke in a great column, but I really don't think Luke thought this up - he just handed his city over to the professionals, who applied the Miami model, which is what we just saw- the military application of superior firepower, airpower, information, and control. Sonic weapons, tear gas, n'at. Downtahn shock and awe.

Best G-20 Burgh Photo/shop

Originally seen at ThatsChurch, from Burgher Magnus Patris' blog, we have this:

It's an excellent bit of work. Only Pittsburgh can turn a Greenpeace protest at a world economic conference into the backdrop for a sports discussion.

The G-20 is a lot like Death

2009-09-25T16:47:00.004-04:00

The approach to the G-20 was a lot like Death.

It's unavoidale, it's going to happen, and there's uncertainty — except for those people who are absolutely certain, and even among that population there's conflicting views. They can't all be right. Somebody must have the wrong expectation. It's not personal.

It could be a big bad thing; it might be a pleasant, nice thing. Everybody's got their own theory, ranging from Cassandra to Pangloss. You don't get to see what it's going to be until you put some skin in the game and wait for The Time.

The G-20 has come and gone. Turns out it was not a disaster. It was probably a good thing for the city. An 8 out of 10.

My compliments to the organizers, and to all the people who stayed home.