Behold the mighty dinosaur,
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his power and strength
But for his intellectual length.
You will observe by his remains
The creature had two sets of brains –
One in his head (the usual place),
The other at his spinal base.
Thus he could reason A priori
As well as A posteriori.
No problem bothered him a bit
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise was he, so wise and solemn,
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong
It passed a few ideas along.
If something slipped his forward mind
‘Twas rescued by the one behind.
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving afterthought.
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgment to revoke.
Thus he could think without congestion
Upon both sides of every question.
Oh, gaze upon this model beast,
Defunct ten million years at least.

– Bert Leston Taylor (1866 – 1921)

What if we could have been double-butt sacrocoocygeal-brained?  How would that have changed us?

chemistry lab assistant, mathematics tutor,
electronics store salesperson, bank teller, lawnmower,
geology lab assistant, babysitter, inorganic chemistry tutor, computer lab assistant,
geology research assistant, geologist intern, geology teaching assistant,
geological engineering / virtual reality research assistant,
virtual reality center coordinator, web designer, Indian languages advisor,
geologist, geophysicist, krewe accountant,
geospatial & engineering services technologist, tech blogger

What jobs (and other unpaid responsibilities) have you had?

* If you don’t get the title reference, you Must Watch This (and, no, it’s not that stupid South Park “Jarbs” episode).

1) A list of Google’s or Ask’s search terms shows many internet users cannot pose a question to save their lives. Use these 20 Tips For More Effective Google Searches to avoid being overwhelmed by search results.  Become one with Boolean.

2) There are many free science search tools out there.  Here is a review of the prominent ones.  Search early, search often.

3) Ask a librarian.  There exist these humans, many Library & Information Science graduates and other smart people, who work at libraries who can help you hone your search skills as well as find answers to your questions.  They also do funny dances with library carts, I hear, which is always worth the time spent at your local library.  Jokes aside, considering the number of people who don’t possess home computers and computer & online literacy, well-funded libraries and intelligent, helpful librarians are crucial to the future of information facilitation.  Also consider publishing your search results and analyses as a blog post to help others who may have the same question.

4) For humanity’s sake, lower the noise or help verify data.

Blair pointed me to The Economist’s The Data Deluge which simultaneously celebrates and bemoans the exponential increase in data, be it photographic, tabular, scientific or vital-statistical in nature, and how corporations are only beginning to find value in separating the wheat from the chaff.  Violation of privacy aside, the greatest threat to signal quality is data hoarding (especially by individuals, taxpayer-funded organizations and publishing houses) and a large amount of noise in the system.  Those who do put information out there don’t (want to) curate it, which includes ensuring accuracy and constant updates.  In a comment on the aforementioned Economist article, a D. Sherman says it best:

… the vast majority of of “noise” in databases is simply bad data, duly entered and propagated … We put a great deal of effort into collecting more and more data, but comparatively little into weeding out bad data. This implies that the sign[al]-to-noise ratio is only going to deteriorate. Part of the reason for that is that the incentives all favor collecting more data, but do not adequately penalize bad data.

… Members of the database resistance movement who are willing to risk more radical means of spoofing more important databases can readily imagine even more creative (though less legal) methods. When RFID tags and image-recognition tracking of people and vehicles becomes more common, the opportunities and means for injecting noise into the system will multiply exponentially.

The solution is a selective and sophisticated willingness to part with data depending on what the data involves.  Not divulging personal information and data hoarding are two different things.  While I value my personal privacy and often purposefully give wrong phone numbers and zip codes to websites and salespeople, I will readily part with any scientific, technological or social information that is not classified explicitly as proprietary.  Google and Bing are not entitled to my street address but they are to my paper on transtensional folding because Americans paid for it and not Elsevier or Springer.

Another sure-fire way to lower noise is to cut back on content replication.  A mature search engine will a) enforce canonical URLs and b) take a scythe to unabashed content scrapers who enjoy high search engine rankings.  I’ve lost track of the number of MY blog posts that show up on others’ sites as higher-ranked search hits.  (Just because my content is published under a CC-BY-NC-SA license does not mean you are entitled to pilfer it and ignore the non-commercial and share-alike components of the license.)  Also, take-down notices only work if you can find a responsive human on the other end to respond, and who has time for that?  There has to be an easier way to punish websites and aggregators for outright plagiarism and internet abuse.

Speaking of content replication, here’s an interesting “what-if” article on information copying and machine sentience.  I guess there is one benefit to a low signal-to-noise ratio in the network: really dumb Artificial Intelligence, should it emerge.

The following map shows all 963 earthquakes between January 1st, 2010 and today.

In two months, a tiny fraction of a percentage of a blink of the geological eye, there were almost a thousand recorded movements of the lithosphere.  They nicely outline Earth’s plates and some intra-plate activity: Oceans subducting under continents, the mid-Atlantic rift quietly creating new crust, the furious Pacific Ring of Fire, the East African Rift, India ramming away at Asia and America unraveling at the Basin and Range.  The Earth is alive and doing its thing.  Earthquakes aren’t oddities, they are the natural norm.  Never forget that.

Next up are all earthquakes above Magnitude 5.0 for the same time frame.  These make up a third of all earthquakes in the last two months.

The IRIS Earthquake Browser uses the Google base map and interface, so you can zoom in on particular earthquake-hit regions and look at satellite imagery & terrain data along with regular map view.

I urge everyone to donate as much as they can to the victims of the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and also ask you to take an objective stance towards why natural disasters happen.  As I explained to my physician brother who was concerned about the frequency and severity of recent earthquakes and attendant natural disasters, think of the earth as the human body, i.e. it’s all inter-connected and there is a perfectly plausible reason for all “ailments,” even ones we don’t yet fully understand.

Let’s use Haiti and Chile themselves as examples.  Haiti is an impoverished and deforested former French island colony sitting on the steep, clayey soil over an active strike-slip fault which just moved in a catastrophic manner in the lead-up to the rainy and hurricane seasons.  I hope to still be alive when the nation is rebuilt and recovers from its ongoing and upcoming physical, emotional and social trauma.  The geographic shape of Chile could not have been fashioned more disastrously by God himself.  The nation parallels an active subduction zone to the west and a highly-explosive mountain range to the east.  When were this earthquake and associated tsunami NOT going to happen?  (As it happened half a century before.  And how long until the Andes let one loose?)  Thankfully, Chilean buildings are more sturdy in build and the earthquake occurred offshore and not directly underfoot as in the case of Haiti.  This also highlights the difference between the magnitude and intensity of an earthquake and why a 7.0 in Haiti wreaked more havoc than an 8.8 in Chile.  Again, this time around, the generated tsunami did not take as many lives as in 2004.

Each new natural and unnatural disaster definitely weakens our collective will, but it’s not an excuse for brain rot.  This is why I’m glad to be alive in the internet age.  We use this interconnectedness to give and get help, hope and knowledge.  Vive Haiti. Vive Chile.

From NCOTB, where commenters think they can make a better one. Can you?

IP ALLIANCE TO OPEN SOURCE: YOU’RE PYRATES. ME: YARRRR! Like anti-healthcare legislators who take money from insurance companies, the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance and its friends in congress should not have any say in determining the future of copyright and intellectual property, and how other countries set their own IP laws. Instead, the IP Alliance wants the United States to consider a Pirate or Enemy Of The State any nation that uses and encourages free/open-source software. Indonesia is the latest nation on the Alliance’s 301 watchlist for having the audacity to give “preference to free/open-source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government.”

That’s Apache, Blender, GNU packages, Linux packages, Perl, Python, Ruby, Thunderbird and WordPress, for starters. While I fully agree with Cory Doctorow that “this is like crack dealers campaigning against having a laugh with friends because happiness reduces the need for intoxicants,” what angers me about it is the sheer hypocrisy of the IP Alliance and the businesses it represents. Any technologist or R&D person will tell you that an astonishing number of these same companies use free/open-source software to maximize their technology budgets, innovate using these free tools and then slap patents and all kinds of proprietary-IP stickers on their final products. You think I’m kidding? The Recording Industry Association of America website runs on Apache and PHP. *facepalm*

No, kids, Walt Disney did not invent Cinderella and Snow White. Just like Disney built its fortune by copyrighting works in the public domain, the IP Alliance fosters this unethical business model: Build on or monetize free or cheap ideas and technologies that have come before, and then shut off these alternatives by buying yourself several congresspeople. (And people wonder why the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision was so dastardly and wrong.) When the technology world clamors for automation, standardization and interoperability, i.e. different systems of different capabilities playing together more efficiently, is not the time to make useless noise against open standards and technologies. During a recession when innovation is key, charging $1000/lb for a sack of shit top dollar for clunky, mediocre products and enforcing these as preferred solutions with political bribery, in lieu of free, shared and open source technologies, is stupid and tantamount to the communism Real Americans so fervently dread.

SPYCAMGATE Schools spy on kids through webcams. This shocker made it into the mainstream news, so I’m sure all of you know about the class action lawsuit filed against Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District and associated offenders by now. What you probably don’t know is that this is not an isolated incident. In the PBS Frontline Digital Nation documentary, which aired earlier this month, a Bronx school administrator boasts that he regularly monitors students remotely through their school-issued laptops. Parents: This is an egregious violation of privacy, especially using property purchased with your taxes. Take this opportunity to check your kids’ equipment, know your rights and read Cory Doctorow’s Creative-Commons-published Little Brother before he is thrown in the brig with the Indonesians.

PLEASE ROB ME & SCRUB MY KITCHEN FLOOR WHILE YOU’RE AT IT Despite being an IT professional or perhaps exactly because of it, my husband has no social media accounts. He can be contacted solely via email, phone or the occasional private IM. D’s rationale is that there is enough information about him out there, should someone choose to search hard enough or pay enough, that he doesn’t need to feed the beast. Conversely, Twitter Queen (someone at work actually called me this today) here is still not afraid that someone is going to rob my house when I’m gone and tweet from the road because they have to a) know where I live and b) say hello to aforementioned big, burly husband if he happens to be home. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You’ll just have to find out. Big, burly Neighbors 1 and 2 and crazy hunter dude with shotgun may be around, too, so take your chances.

Patrix comes closest to pointing this out, but if you are smart about what social media outlets you pick, employ the highest privacy settings and don’t declare your street address or UTM coordinates, you can tell the whole world you’re leaving your jewelry and electronics on the back porch and are going away for a month and folks will not be able to use social media to locate your home. Unless they bribe your crappy friends, in which case you’re screwed anyway and it’s not Twitter’s or FourSquare’s fault.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR GOOGLE Google’s Top Executives Defied Italy’s Privacy Laws Except this time, I’m on Google’s side. They did not act quickly enough to pull down a YouTube video that showed kids bullying an autistic/handicapped boy, which violates Italy’s privacy laws, but this may be the only chance for justice for the assaulted child. Should the kid’s guardians sue, the video may be thrown out as evidence for being fruit of the poisoned tree (assuming Italy does assault lawsuits & has similar legal code). This is a tough one: Do we allow Google to flout international laws in humanitarian ca(u)ses, but complain loudly that we don’t want a large corporation in our business when it comes to our email and Buzz? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

BOOK Tarleton Gillespie, law-technology-media-culture professor and blogger, was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on February 23rd to speak about the politics of online media platforms. I wasn’t able to attend but am waiting on responses from friends who did attend. Gillespie’s book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture nicely sums up the fight for digital culture and the links in this post. From the Wired Shut website:

… the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology …

… this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The [print,] film and music industries are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society.

That’s it for This Week In The Fight For Digital Culture. Keep thinking. Keep fighting.

“You held on to me like I was a crucifix, as we went kneeling through the dark.” Leonard Cohen, you’re the best.

… You see, the very definition of terrorism has changed, right beneath our feet. A man with strong ideological beliefs against the government of the United States tries (and succeeds) to kill himself and take as many civilians (federal workers) as he can with him. But they don’t call it terrorism. That sacrosanct term is now reserved only for non-white people with funny sounding names. Preferably Muslim.

Swear by a copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang?  Threaten to ram whaling ships?  You’re an “eco-terrorist.”  Pre-meditate and carry out the murder of a physician who conducts abortions and swear to take more such lives, all while possessing a solid anti-government track record?  You’re an “abortion foe.”

Shoot up people while screaming Allah in Fort Hood?  You’re a terrorist.  No, wait, you’re an “Islamo-kazi.”  Fly into America with a bomb strapped to your nads, which, thank the Gods, did not go off?  Damn straight, you’re a terrorist.

Long-windedly admit to illegal activity and a long-term hatred of American government and “taxation without representation” in your suicide manifesto, and then fly an airplane into a government building with intent to kill?  You’re a “crash pilot” at best, “cowardly criminal” at worst.

Shame on CNN to Fox News and Obama’s White House to Scott Brown for not referring to this dastardly act as terrorism.  And shame, shame, shame on everyone out there who screams for investigations and the heads of selfish, agenda-based murderers only and repeatedly when it is politically expedient.

There are the dead in the Austin IRS building, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the airplanes, the Oklahoma City federal building and cowardly, unnecessary acts of violence all over the world.  Whether their killers are termed “terrorists” or not does not make a damned bit of difference to them.  Nor will it bring them back and make their families whole ever again. There are the living, however, who have to go on with the fallout.  The rest of us die inside slowly every single day that blame and justice are assigned improperly.

(Update: But hark! Stack’s manifesto has been calculated as 76% left-wing.  Don’t all trip over yourselves calling him a “terrorist” now.)

Suggested Reading:
Patrix | What Does It Take To Be Called A Terrorist?
Big Man | Oh, Hell Naw

Here we are, in our full costumed regalia. D wanted to walk in comfort and warmth while ripping on the NFL and I was going for a Saint / winged-football-goddess sort of look.  Not many notice that the mask represents a football field with yard lines.  Yes, I am a dork.

It doesn’t look too shabby in the picture above, but I wasn’t pleased with the quality of my costume this year for a number of reasons:

a) Notice severe lack of headdress.  Thanks to bad weather all across America over the weekend and the classic incompetence of Delta Airlines gate agents, I didn’t reach New Orleans halfway into Sunday.  Therefore and alas, between abuse taken during repeated trips to the airport and the fact that the sealant fumes still coming off it would have rendered our entire airplane unconscious, my headdress had to be left behind.  An almost-seizure-inducing hour on the phone yesterday with Delta corporate customer service got me a $100 voucher good towards the purchase of a future flight.  Woo to the hoo.

b) Too tired on Tuesday morning to do anything more glam with hair. Boo!

c) The wings didn’t make it past the car.  Yes, I forgot to put them on once we reached our destination, leaving me prey to an endless string of tourists asking, “What are you supposed to be?  An Indian?”  D and I wanted to say, “Yeah, Mardi Gras Indian!”  But, we didn’t think they would understand.

d) Costume 2010 would have been decidedly more spectacular had I not been forced to wear a whole sweatsuit under it.  Damned cold.  Actually, damned fluctuating temperatures, which made poor Loki so ill he had to go to the doctor on Mardi Gras Day instead of leading the annual Krewe of Chartreuse walk.  Ick.

We caught some of the Zulu parade, walked into the Quarter, ate chili cheese tots at the Three Legged Dog and ended up at home away from home, i.e. Fahy’s.  As usual, our evening ended early.  To quote Editor B: “Mardi Gras is primarily an early morning holiday, at least to me. It’s kind of like Christmas in that way. This is contrary to the image many casual tourists might have in mind, due to the common association linking revelry with late nights. But I rarely stay out late on Mardi Gras, and for me the best part of the day is generally before noon.”

The rest of the pictures are in the Mardi Gras 2010 photo gallery.  Happy Lent!