Published Monday - Friday about 8 AM Central Time Except Holidays....many major typos are fixed by 8:30 dailyTuesday July 7, 2009 07:55 AM CDT
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World NOT Ending Today
A surprising number of people sent me emails over the past week telling me things like "Did you know that the latest crop circle is forecasting a major solar flare to damage earth on July 7th?"
Well, not to throw too much cold water on the idea, but the little bit of sunspot activity which was reported was only capable of causing B and C class solar flares. From a practical standpoint, the amount of energy from such flares is miniscule and the impact of these on earthy are about negligible. Now, you get to talking M class and X class flares, you begin to get my attention.
But, the sites which have been nattering about crop circles forecast big doings today, are at least in my estimate, not being realistic. If we get a flare that wipes out the national (or even a local) power grid, I will be willing to eat my words, but for now, get out from under the bed and get to work.
If you want to worry about something which will end life on earth, worry about the long-term increase in seismic activity or the coming second round of the derivatives meltdown. Worry about the release tomorrow of Consumer Debt numbers. But B &C class flares? Pah-leeze. Energy levels of x times 10-6 watts per square meter from a B flare means you'd need hundreds of miles of wire to light a cheap 3-watt LED. If you're holding a 500-mile hunk of #22 wire...maybe you could like a small LED, but I'd have to do the calcs.
Fact is the HVAC distribution system gets switching spikes on it that dwarf that kinda power level. Your surge suppresser is going to get more workout from a lightning storm 5-10-miles off than this B & C class stuff. Out from under the bed....really. Buy a bonehead physics refresher.
Is the word "gullible' In the dictionary?
With Friends Like This
"Obama: US, Russia not destined to be adversaries." He's right. More like clones so far, just based on the spending, central government power grabbing, and money printing.
Climate Justice
Reuters has a new report out that says, among other things, that "world's richest emit about half the earth's carbon." So, how many po folks does that corporate jet equal?
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Not that it matters after the lobbyists start throwing their weight and money around, mind you. Nice thought, though. File with Easter Bunny.
Summer of Hell
Our riot du jour "Swine flue worries spark Cambridge Jail Riot."
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Curfew in effect in China where 140 died in rioting this weekend. These are the worst in 40-years.
Are things calmed down? Nope.
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Riot squads at the ready at Staples Center in downtown LA for the Jacko memorial.
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But here's the kind of linguistic fill I've been waiting for - terms like 'digging trenches, building barricades" as rioting continues outside of Athens Greece. This is the kind of spark-meme that could light up more of Europe...at least seems to be that in the model outputs I've read.
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And we're seeing reference to uses of riot police as headlines have been coming in this week about how "Migrants are going to Britain, come hell or high water."
A little popcorn while we watch the news slick spread out from these kinds of beginnings.
A Claire Wolfe piece "11 Ways to prepare for Civil Unrest" over at LewRockwell.com is worth reading, although I think we've covered much of it over the past 6-months.
See? Sick
150 down with norovirus on a Germany-based cruise ship in Scotland.
Meantime, Back in the Cookie Jar
Washington Post publisher Katherine Weymouth is reportedly launching an internal review of the planned invite at $25-grand a pop to have lobbyists come to her place and have off-the-record dinner/ access to WaPo editors and even some Obama administration officials.
Since it's the WaPo general counsel that's doing the investigating, what do you suppose they will find, hmmmm? I'm ready to be NOT surprised.
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Coping: SEO and Digital Time Sinks
A friend (and one-time client) sent me a nice note the other day and advised me that the latest 'hot thing' in SEO (search engine optimization) was effective use of Twitter in order to boost web traffic.
I didn't point out to him, but I will to you, that the 'latest' and 'greatest' in SEO is always being rediscovered. SEO is something of a high art (a black art, if you're not in the white hat SEO camp), but SEO started off innocent enough when the web was young (once upon a time) and people who had web sites were jockeying for position. That's because on the web, the higher your search engine ranking, the more traffic (readers) your site will have, and therefore if it's a business site, the more money you will make.
So SEO started off innocently enough.
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It started with use of 'meta tags' - the keywords and such used by search engines to know where to list your site. In the early going, people would list huge shovels full of 'keywords' and hope that would lead to a high listing.
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The Search Engines (like Google, et al) caught on, however, and started to give preference to sites that weren't keyword loading. So a new rule emerged that each page on a site should only have 10-12 keywords, but that page names and content should be heavily focused on that keyword.
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All of which was fine, until 'doorway' pages came along - pages that beat keyword use to death..
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This was followed - after a period of abuse - by Google et al figuring out that what was going on was 'spamdexing' - and they wrote code to sniff out that kind of abuse.
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Along about in here, 'articles' came into vogue. The SEO folks discovered that the more 'news releases' they could crank out, the higher their search engine rankings would get. This led to a generation of 'article submission software,' which you can still find today.
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The Goog's et al wrote code around this.
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Then we went through a phase of syndication - where people who had the RSS and ATOM feeds were getting highest ranks.
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Also in here, we had a period where how your site used 'tags' was considered; such that if your keywords and your embedded tags (like the
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headline strength tags along with the bold and italic tags & , has a high level of congruence with keywords, content, and title, then you'd get a high page rank.
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So SEO guru's got web teams busy on that which led to the indexing services tuning to eliminate abuse as best they could.
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This is not to overlook the importance of inbound page links, which also plays in all this. It was assumed that if a site had relatively few outbound links and more inbound links that it was a 'source' as opposed to a leaching operation, and would therefore be ranked higher.
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But even that has changed. New blogging software (which I don't use) has much of the SEO work done and included in the code. But at some point, I have to wonder if super-optimized blogging won't be penalized a stroke, or two, for not being as 'original'? I don't know, but I expect to find out over time.
All this gets me to the note from my friend advising me that I ought to consider using Twitter as part of my SEO strategy for UrbanSurvival, IndependenceJournal, and Peoplenomics.
I likely won't.
I've run into a personal 'wall' - if I can call it that - when it comes to SEO. A lot of the SEO guidelines make sense. Should there, after all, be a high level of correspondence between what a site writes about, how it's titled, what its keywords and other meta data is, and the embedded tags? You'd think so.
And sure, there's an RSS (real simple syndication) feed for UrbanSurvival that goes out to Feedburner and from there, who knows? But that's a matter of good customer service.
When I went over to the Twitter site, I discovered that it all seems to be based on the notion that everyone wants to know what everyone else is "doing right now."
Me? I don't care what you're doing right now. Nor, do I expect that you much care about what I'm doing right now, beyond the obvious: I'm not spellchecking or proofreading this page deeply enough.
But seriously there's a whole genre of software out there which seems to have little purpose other than to defuse the Will of the People - it's the modern high tech version of bread and circuses. And it's called what?
Social Networking.
To be sure, I have a LinkedIn account - but I don't make a big deal about it, because most of the people I 'accept' links to/from are people who I either know & like, or they are experts in their fields. Not being a snob, but I look at LinkedIn as a kind of toolbox where if I come up with a real 'stumper' there may be someone I know and maybe haven't kept in touch with closely, but who I hold in high regard.
For example, if I need some advice about a patent, I might have a colleague who owns a law firm which does patent law and who teaches patent/patent theory at a university. See how that makes sense? C-level types and experts.
On the other hand, with the except of only a couple of people, my FaceBook account has gone pretty much untouched. True, there is a group of East Texas folks - which is interesting, because the population out here in the outback is fairly sparse. And there are some friends from my young (under 40) who I'd like to keep in touch with a bit closer. But hundreds of people wandering by to scribble some on 'my wall'? Sorry...life's much too busy for that. Reading 'scribbles' is down there with watching mislabeled 'reality TV'.
My operating theory here (and I can be dead wrong and a nutjob) holds a couple of notions at its core:
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General 'social networking' is an emotional waste of time that could be used to do something productive in life. Like garden, do carpentry (see next section) and spend in the hammock reading a good book.
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"Specific' social networking where it has some more tightly defined purpose or possible use does make sense.
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I wonder whether people would be more actively engaged with their government if we weren't all jabbering on cell phones (while driving) and tweeting our lives away?
That said, if you're confined to bed and can only manage a few words at a time while you wait for the Grim Reaper, maybe short message systems (SMS) make sense. Wikipedia has a great selection of them here.
Long term? I figure the number of 'social networking' sites that go belly up or just close because there are people like me who are social Luddites will increase. In fact, Wikipedia already offers a "List of defunct social networking websites."
"Ah! George, didn't you notice that there are far more active social networks than there are defunct ones?" you're thinking to yourself.
Well, duh, of course I got that. But it will all, over time, head for the scrap heap where all those BBS's went in the late 1990's.
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Humans have a compulsion to communicate and in some of the literature it's linked to obsessive-compulsive disorders.
To support this observation, simple goog "communication obsession disorder" and you'll come up with papers (from the government www.pubmed.gov site) with titles like "Social and communication difficulties and obsessive-compulsive disorder." by Cullen B, Samuels J, Grados M, Landa R, Bienvenu OJ, Liang KY, Riddle M, Hoehn-Saric R, Nestadt G.
"The relationship between pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has not been extensively studied despite having some phenomenological features in common. Abnormal social and communication behaviors (pragmatic behaviors) are key components of PDD and are also part of the broader autism phenotype (BAP). In this study we sought to establish if there is any association between the presence of abnormal pragmatic behaviors and OCD and whether this association delineates a familial subtype of OCD. "
There you have it! The link between OCD and communications fadistry whether it's excessive CB radio use, hours and hours on long distance, compulsive BBS/fora postings, or more recently tweets, chirps, and all the rest of social networking.
George the Luddite figures if your energy is being trained and drained by tweets, you'll make fine fodder for manipulation as tweeters in Iran were orchestrated recently. Which gets me around to my tentative conclusion: Social networking is social engineering. I prefer independence and mobbing doesn't sit well with me. Reminds me too much of a stampede and we all know how those end.
Assume that everyone you tweet and everyone you like will end up in a Homeland Security 'social mapping'- system such that when push comes to shove, instigators will be easily enough found.
We're seeing that in Iran and despite the stories wondering "Is Twitter the news outlet for the 21st century? I expect the answer will be no. Was CB radio or the BBS forums?
Think you could fit a google of "computer addiction" into your schedule?
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An analogy: Computers are tools - and powerful ones at that because they are 'mind amplifiers." But I've always tried to keep my computer in the same league with my electronics test gear and the table saw out in the show.
If I put a saw blade in my table saw, it usually has something to do with work product that I'm trying to build. A frame for a particular piece of Chinese art or calligraphy in the dining room, or a mounting for an original oil painting win the 'Trader Vic's" room. Tool + time equals measurable output.
Social networking, to put it politely, is like getting the wood and the table saw, and then turning everything you can grab into sawdust, Endlessly amusing and it may even have a purpose if you're planning to take all the sawdust and pulp it down into cellulose and make custom paper out of it. But most people don't think to do that.
Maybe I need another shot of coffee this morning so I can get all atwitter.
Defensive Upgrades
Microsoft has confirmed an attack against XP that hasn't been upgraded to Explorer 8. Teach you to turn off automatic upgrades, huh?
Ready for the Maxa-Tools Upgrade
Still looking like Maxa-Tools (see following section) will be ready for their latest upgrade which will handle not only one-pixel snooping, but also something called 'data spills'.
"I know that a one-pixel tracker" is where a web page points to an off-site 'img_source" tag and snags your IP address," you're thinking, "But, what's a 'data spill' and why is no one but UrbanSurvival and Maxa-Tools talking about it?
Go read here for a short backgrounder. Takes some ingenious code, maybe?
Upgrade free for current license holders of MCM (Maxa Cookie Manager).
Deutsche Snoop
Guess which big German bank spied on one of its own after a reported sales leak back in Q3 '01?
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Compliance departments worry me. Just like police have 'criminalized' us all into 'suspect' status by just pointing a radar gun at us, there are many a good/open/useful story I wish I could tell you about what really goes on down on Wall St., but the compliance departments have people who could rat out the crooks all hamstrung tighter than underwear that's six sizes too small.
No argument about advance non-public disclosure, insider trading and all that, but what about talking about all the crookedness and greed that's already under the bridge? I say compliance should be told to FO once a bit of information is in the public domain. Be nice to get all that 'company review' and only 'official company spokesperson' language out, too. That some compliance departments won't even let people above a certain level (income bracket) post under their own names to financial forums is absurd.
Unless, of course, they're still hiding stuff, right?
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To be sure, there are people who do occasionally stand up for what they think is right in the world of finance, and a story that "Digital Doman to pay $2M in termination suit" is worth reading, although the company seems likely to appeal.
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I mention this because I know people with a whole bunch more tel tell about how the derivatives bubble began to (and seems about to resume) collapse. yet they can't talk to me - or even email me. A small-time financial sheet, I've got no powerful legal department to back up an inquiry and having staff to file FOI requests with the SEC (long missing in action) is only a pipe dream.
Seems like we ought to have something that would be the equivalent of a 'whistleblowers' law in finance. Tell the truth and you're fireproof. Instead, I still hear folks talking about investing 'for the long term'. Where's the drug-testing, not to mention truth in advertising?
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Back in the old days, some PR friends at AT&T told me the best policy they had ever come up with was "When in doubt tell the truth - the whole truth." Invariably, when the fact were on the table, most of what AT&T did made perfect sense from both a business and consumer side. That was before the break-up, of course.
Try selling that 'let everyone talk and tell the truth' to the legal and HR directors in hifi who seem to think that after two serious screwings (the internet crash and housing collapse - maybe rapes is the more accurate term) the public doesn't smell a rat - or whole colony of them - trying to make money at the expense of everyone with an IRA or 401? Gag those who would blog, those would would leak anything but greed-driven dogma. It's really quite sickening.
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Deutsche was looking for a leak - that passes my reasonableness test. But most of high finance hamstrings those of good moral character & high ethical standards with rules that prevent blogging and sending emails to more than one person (like no personal distro lists for dissenting opinion) kind of thing? Well that's obviously (to me at least) NOT in the public interest. And frankly, it pisses me off.
Around the Ranch: Tool Time
A couple of new tools to endorse. Down at Lowes a week, or so, back I picked up a Stanley miter saw bench, so that I could move my saw over to the deck for cutting lumber for the San Francisco room remodel and then the master bath remodel. Only $89 bucks and works great. Well worth it since the chop saw without the stand ate up 12-feet of counter space in the shop previously. has 'wings' long enough for a 2 by 4 by 8-footer.
Another tool I've been using (to cut plasterboard for rerouting some wiring: The Rockwell RK5102K Sonicrafter Deluxe 72-pc Kit
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