Fnord.

So it’s been a few months since I started experimenting with Twitter and Asaph (microblog), and the results are kind of interesting. Similarly to how architecture affects our behaviour, the designs of these two have changed how I blog here at Fnord. To wit:

Twitter is, of course, all about short posts, 140 characters or less. It’s ideal for impressions, brief wit and small updates. Combined with a URL shortener like tr.im, you can sort of microblog on it, but that doesn’t work as well. As others have noted, Twitter really excels at keeping up with your friends and family, hearing the little trivia and minutia that keep us connected. 

Asaph similarly allows posting a paragraph or so of text, or a scaled image. No space for wit, but excellent for a fast way to share interesting links/sites. 

The software affects the usage, too. On the desktop, I use MoodBlast, which is hotkeyed, so you can Twitter in 15 seconds or less; quite handy. There are also several good iPhone clients, I use Twitteriffic and like it. Very convenient.

Asaph is accessed via a bookmarklet, so I only use it from the desktop.

I’ve got accounts on others services (Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn, not sure what all else) but for me Twitter and Asaph work best.

In a way, this post is an explanation of why I’ve posted less (short stuff goes elsewhere now), a review of the services, and a long-winded way of saying ‘keep an eye on my Twitter page and microblog if you want another way to keep in touch.’ 

Another reason that I thought to write this is a surprisingly good piece on NYT Magazine about Twitter – highly recommended.

I’ve been an RSS fan for years now, and with the advent of the iPhone/Google Reader combo I read even more. I used to use NetNewsWire, but by using Google Reader I’m always in sync on mobile and desktop. Their iPhone interface is really good, even on EDGE data rates.

Yesterday, I checked out Google Reader Trends, and found the following:

Umm, that’s a lot, right?

Kinda interesting. What I’m finding is that the iPhone allows me to do short newsfrouping sessions when I have a few spare minutes, so I end up reading more than I did before. I also really like that the load of loading feeds and pages is moved to Google, resulting in less laptop/PDA CPU usage and faster overall performance. It is, in a word, magnificent.

Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iTouch, Google Reader is still most excellent. If you do, fire up Safari and start keeping up with more of the world than previously possible!

Highly recommended.

P.S. I have several hundred feeds, with an unusual organization that I plan to post later. I’m also happy to share the list with you in OPML format if you want to jump-start your Reader setup.

Update: Here’s reading by time of day and day of week. Lots of late-night!

I was listening to Elbow this morning while working on a report, and was struck by this lyric fragment:

Words to make me stay

You said “Leave me and the plants die.”

It really struck me as a compressed vignette, a moment where two people are struggling to make a relationship work and one of them tries a bit of humor to lighten the mood. Elbow is good that way, succinct and intelligent lyrics everywhere.

(The song is Not a Job, from Cast of Thousands. Listen to it here on last.fm)

The next thought that I had was a bit random – while everyone likes to think that they have a sense of humor, those that have defective ones are the same people who are angered when you try to introduce humor into stressful situations. “This is no time for jokes!” and similar responses. On the contrary, stress is exactly the time for humor.

Of course, to make this all quite humorous, I just got an email of familial bad news. So now I have to try and apply the medicine I’ve just prescribed. Ahh, life, never dull.

Yesterday, amid much hullabaloo and inflated expectation, Apple introduced the second generation iPhone or ‘iPhone 3G.’ Announced yesterday, it’ll be available July 11th. There’s a bunch of incremental improvements (Battery life, faster wireless, GPS, nicer shape, metal buttons) and some extraordinarily clever RF engineering (ten wireless bands on just 2 antennas – brilliant!), but the basic unit doesn’t change much. Much to my surprise, the software (iPhone 2.0) will also be free for generation-1 units such as mine. Previously, in iPods, new features were never released for older hardware, so this is a delightful change.

Nevertheless, as it stands now I won’t be getting one. And it’s a toddle that a lot of other geeks won’t be, either. Here’s why: The first-gen iPhones introduced the idea of ‘activation at home.’ Instead of sitting at a desk with some clerk, forking over credit card, SSN and driver’s license, you simply bought the iPhone and walked away. Once at home, you plug the phone into your computer, on your own time, and ran the streamlined activation via iTunes. As a way to reduce consumer frustration and humiliation, it was brilliant, and had the side benefit of helping stores too – you didn’t need activation staff, counter space, etc, and you could sell more phones in less time. Huzzahs all around.

(One of the main reasons this worked was the revenue model – the phone were expensive (started at $600) and AT&T had a monthly kickback to Apple based on subscriber revenue.)

The downside of this became evident later, as literally thousands of geeks bent their efforts to unlocking the iPhone for use on other networks, or simply to write and run their own programs. Since you didn’t have to activate in-store, or make any sort of promise, it was much easier to do and many (yours truly included) did just that. 

Now, however, they’ve changed the revenue model to copy other cell phones: The phones are subsidized down to $200/$300, with AT&T footing part of the bill. The elephant in the room is that you now have to activate before you leave the store. Think long lines, annoying idiot salespeople, and a required new 2 year contract with a minimum monthly cost of $70/month. (Your bill will be higher, due to taxes and such.)

Because of this, you can’t order one online any more, and anyone wanting to hack their phone faces the breach of contract fee from AT&T, which is probably at least $200. This is really going to put the hurt on iPhone hacking, which they probably accepted as an ancillary cost to reducing the numbers of unlocked iPhones in the wild. I wonder how they accounted for the customer backlash of in-store activation?

Tech companies such as Apple regularly ignore propellerheads such as myself for the very $imple rea$on of money: Though vocal, we’re just not that large of a market, and stuff that makes us happy doesn’t necessarily translate to mass sales. Therefore, those of us who wanted to upgrade and use it on, say, T-Mobile, are acceptable collateral damage. I do suspect that they’ve underestimated how peevish people are going to be at the bad old activation hassle, though. Fingers crossed for the resumption of sanity, because there’s one thing that I’m completely certain of: The iPhone 3G will get hacked anyway. People like this will make it happen, so why play King Canute?

(In the meantime, I’ll probably buy a 16G gen-one unit and give/sell my 8G to a relative that wants one.)

This is really a post about two things, so bear with me. Cast your mind back a few years to Bush’s heyday and Medicare Part D, the infamous drug benefit. Due to pharma handouts and dishonest accounting now coming to light, they couldn’t afford real coverage and came up with the infamous ‘doughnut’ gap in coverage. From Wikipedia:

The plan requires Medicare beneficiaries whose total drug costs reach $2400 to pay 100% of prescription costs until $3850 is spent out of pocket. (The actual threshold amounts will change year-to-year and plan-by-plan.) 

I have to assume that the soulless bastards who came up with this consciously refused to consider the human stories of suffering and tragedy it would inevitably cause. I consider this a prime example of ‘getting captured by a large system and the rationalizations that ensue.’

Stories like… but I’m getting ahead of myself. The other thing this post is about is ‘Weblogs that I enjoy’. Allow me to introduce you to the self-proclaimed ‘Drugmonkey‘, an anonymous, foul-mouthed, cynical, liberal pill peddler at some large pharmacy chain. He has most excellent stories and I highly recommend him. As with some of my favorite blogs, he gives you a glimpse into another world. The title of his blog is ‘Your Pharmacist May Hate You’, which gives you some idea of the content…

Today, I was clicked through to his site and reading some old stories when I found this one. He used to call himself ‘drugnazi’, and it explains why he changed. Go read it; it’ll simultaneously move you to tears and also to find the asshats of Part D for a serious beatdown.

‘Compassionate conservatism,’ my ass.

Every now and then I run across someone declaiming how Mozart is the best composer ever, blah blah blah. I was thinking unrelated thoughts the other day, and I had a mini-revelation:

Mozart and light-roast coffee have the same weakness: A total lack of intensity.

Consider: With notable exceptions like the Requiem, most of Mozart is background (chamber) music. It’s light, cheerful, complex, cerebral and lacking in dynamic range. As devoid of emotion as possible, since chamber music is supposed to provide the audio backdrop for upper-class socialization. It doesn’t engage, it doesn’t compel.

Light roasted coffees are the same way. You’ll see descriptions like ‘floral’, ‘hints of X and Y,’ ’subtle notes of Z’ and so on. Blah blah blah. Real coffee looks like this:

That’s a sublime French roast from Norm Whiting. (More on him in a bit.) It’s complex, intense, multi-layered and very tasty. Unlike a lot of places, Norm has an excellent mix of first-rate beans in his roast; many roasters just take cheap beans and cook ‘em dark. Beware such crap!

Unless we’ve already met, you have likely never heard of Whiting Coffee. They don’t advertise, don’t have a website, and do post-paid mail order! (You pay after you get the coffee — unheard of, eh?)

The other amazing thing about Norm is the value compared to other roasters. If I go elsewhere, I usually have to pay about $30/lb to match or exceed his roast. Shipped to my door, his is $8.

Yep, $8. So any excuses about cost are gone. Call the man at (505) 344-9144, tell him I sent you if you like. And for the love of god buy beans and grind them yourself!

Getting back to musical comparisons, I’ll cut this short due to Anna bedtime – if complexity is why you like Mozart, try any or all of the following by my man JSB:

1. The Brandenburg Concertos
2. Art of Fugue
3. Musical Offering
4. The works for organ, especially canons and fugues. (The F minor fugue is a revelation – the Bowyer performance is quite good.)
5. Goldberg variations . I like the Feltsman performance of these.
6. And, of course, the coffee cantata.

Ol’ JSB did it all. Best enjoyed with a cuppa from Norm.

I was in San Francisco for AGU 2007, and walked by a Tourneau store on Market every day:

In the window, they had a Glashutte Original Sport Evolution Panorama Date:

Here’s a PR shot:

It’s quite nice, German made with in-house movement, gold rotor, lots of hand finishing, all the details of a luxury watch. List price is about $8800, typically discounted to 6500 or so, available used on TZ for around 4500.

I was curious to see what that much cash would get in a sport watch, and GO is widely admired for its main line of dress watches, so mid-week I venture in and ask to see it. I’m dressed reasonably well, in a pressed dress shirt, slacks and dressy boots, wearing my Marinemaster on its bracelet. Since the Marinemaster is a rare watch in the US, I didn’t expect the droid to recognize it and he surely didn’t. I’ve read of store clerks who did admire a Marinemaster, but the 20-something I got certainly didn’t.

So, he tells me that “I can’t possibly compare Japanese engineering to German” and generally treats me rather shabbily. The engineering comment is absurd on its face, and was compounded by the irony of him being of obvious Asian descent.

My thought/question is this: Was this just a rude clerk, or is it a viable sales strategy to put customers on the defensive? Perhaps “If we insult what they’re wearing, they’ll a) see us as experts and b) spend more to buy a watch we ‘respect’?”

(I was disappointed in the watch, GO doesn’t do sport very well. Nicely made, but 60-click bezel and uncoated sapphire crystal. If you have the dosh for this sort of toy, you shouldn’t have to accept that sort of thing.)

I’ve read of Saville Row tailors who do similar things, as in telling the customer “I think we can do better than that” with a sniff. I’ve loaned out my copy of Cialdini’s “Persuasion” but I seem to recall it discussed this. As with cars, I hope that its an artifact of asymmetric information to be vanquished by the Internet. It sucks to be treated shabbily, especially as an enthusiast.

Update 12/28/07: I hear from a comment and an email that this seems to be the MO for Tourneau and similar stores. Exceedingly weak if true. Consider Higuchi or KSeiya for Japanese, TimeZone for used, anything but this. It’s your money, and we all deserve better.

Via this Salon article, news of paper on PLoS by Lisa Gross with the imposing title of “The Toxic Origins of Disease.”

(Sidebar:

What if scientific and medical literature were considered a public resource, available to use any way you chose at no cost; all you would have to do is give credit to the author and source as described in the Creative Commons Attribution License?

That’s from this page, which phrases it better than I can. PLoS, the Public Library of Science, solves many of the super-expensive-journal problems I had in school and the ability to google-read-cite is magnificent. I’m a big fan.)

Anyway. The paper hypothesizes that Bisphenol A, a very common polymer used to make polycarbonates and epoxy resins, causes obesity. There’s a lot of it around, and it is known to act like an estrogen receptor agonist. That’s bad:

Recent studies have confirmed that bisphenol A exposure during development has carcinogenic effects and produce precursors of breast cancer.[6] Bisphenol A has been shown to have developmental toxicity, carcinogenic effects, and possible neurotoxicity.

That’s from Wikipedia’s entry on the chemical, which is fairly conservative. OK, so we know its bad news, and maybe you should lose the Nalgene bottle for something in stainless steel. (For their part, Nalgene has their position here.) I don’t think it passed, but California was going to ban B-A from kid’s products. (Update: it died in committee.)

The Gross paper is fascinating. As you’d probably expect, the companies involved have a bit of an agenda:

By the end of 2004, they had identified 115 published studies on low doses of bisphenol A. They also found a troubling trend. Ninety percent of government studies found significant effects of bisphenol A at doses below the EPA’s lowest adverse effect level, but not a single industry study found any effect. Many of the industry studies, they pointed out, either used a rat strain with very low sensitivity to estrogen or misinterpreted failure to find effects with positive controls. Vom Saal and Hughes urged the EPA to conduct a new risk assessment on bisphenol A.

The news gets even worse:

Soto exposed pregnant rodents to “minuscule doses of bisphenol A, the same doses that humans are exposed to, according to the CDC.” In rats, this treatment produced overweight female offspring; in mice, adding the estrogenic chemical produced female offspring that behaved like males. Both rats and mice also had altered ovarian cycles. In a second round of experiments in mice, in utero bisphenol A exposures induced changes in mammary gland development that began in fetal life and persisted.
…
The changes in the breast and genital tract were expected, Soto says, but some of the behavioral effects and obesity came as a complete surprise. “We were looking at an estrogen thinking it was going to affect the reproductive system and mammary gland only, but then these two other things emerged without us ever imagining that.”

Bisphenol A might induce epigenetic changes by altering patterns of DNA methylation, a chemical modification that controls gene expression, or by activating or silencing genes at the moment of exposure during a critical period of development. Soto is pursuing these possibilities. “A single exposure during a point of vulnerability may suffice,” Soto says. “You know the thalidomide story. You can have thalidomide every day of your life and you will be fine. But [take it] at certain times during pregnancy, your child will end up with no arms.”

OK, that last bit is rather alarmist in tone. The link to obesity, however, seems to be more solid:

In the thrifty phenotype hypothesis, undernutrition in the womb programs metabolic systems to expect a postnatal world of undernutrition. From an evolutionary perspective, genes that promote insulin resistance (thereby limiting glucose uptake) and fat storage would prove advantageous in times of famine. But in a world of fast foods, empty calories, and supersized meals, the same genes would promote obesity, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes. Interestingly, a class of drugs used to treat type 2 diabetes (called thiazolidinediones) activates PPAR to reverse insulin resistance in muscle and liver, but in doing so increases fat mass by facilitating triglyceride uptake in adipocytes.

When vom Saal generates growth-restricted mouse pups by exposing mothers to bisphenol A, the babies go through a “ballistic postnatal growth period.” A second group of mice starts out “really heavy” and stays that way. Vom Saal’s two types of obese mice have 430 genes with different activity in their fat cells, exhibit substantial differences in glucose tolerance and leptin levels (leptin regulates appetite and energy expenditure), and lose weight at different rates.

Though understanding the underlying causes of these differences will take “multiple lifetimes of work,” vom Saal says, it’s clear that both animals end up heavy in entirely different ways, with entirely different physiological, fat metabolism, and regulatory systems. “We think that environmental chemicals like bisphenol A are likely to target subpopulations of individuals that are rendered very sensitive to these chemicals by virtue of their genes, genetic background, maternal–fetal interactions . . . and the amount of hormones they’re exposed to.”

I had previously posted about sugar, and it’s probably also true that we have a lot more obese people now that we used to. The idea that, as Leonard put it, “Does plastic make us fat?” was an important question.

One of the Gross papers’ points that struck me was that

What’s more, production of these chemicals closely tracks the rise of obesity.

Along with the explosions in autism and asthma, the sudden change in the morphology of Americans since the 70s demands answers. Why did we start to get fat (and ill) all of a sudden? What changed? The sugar/corn syrup change is probably part of it, but the correlation with bisphenol-A production is also a possibility. Correlation is not causation, of course, but I rather hope that we can overcome the vested interests and figure out what the hell happened. Papers like this are an excellent start.

The good is in the foreground – they have a local program where artists paint the telephone and power utility boxes. It’s really cool, fun to look at and seems to keep them graffiti-free.

In the background, the gasoline prices as of 6/7/07.

Then again, I was walking home from my UCSD shuttle, so it’s not personally a large expense.

The juxtaposition of the two literally stopped me in my tracks to dig for the camera on the way home.

According to the local paper, the runoff from Tijuana is closing beaches again:

The water at Border Field State Park and the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge is off-limits today. Sewage-contaminated runoff from the Tijuana River has been dumping into the ocean there after Monday’s rainfall.

According to the county’s Department of Environmental Health, the river was spitting about 158 gallons of contaminated water per second onto the shoreline. (As of 8:48 a.m.)

The article links to a UCSD web page for plotting the plumes based on surface currents:

A few months ago, the paper also had another similar article. There’s another one somewhere that I can’t find that had a link to this PDF (1.2MB) report on 2005 San Diego beach closures. Inside the report is this picture, which shows a plume from the air:

The report is pretty damning:

Major findings of the San Diego County 2005 Beach Closure & Advisory Report:
Closures due to Sewage Contamination
• Despite a 14% decrease in the number of closure events due to sewage contamination [36 in 2005 from
42 in 2004], the total number of closure Beach Mile Days increased to 263 in 2005 from 225 in 2004. This
represents the third consecutive year of increase and a 183% increase in the total number of closure
Beach Mile Days since 2000. Analysis of closure data since 2000 indicates several trends in beach
closures in San Diego County:
1. Sewage spills to recreational waters that coincide with stormwater runoff following rainfall have
significantly greater closure Beach Mile Days (BMDs) than those issued during dry or less rainy
weather. This is due to the longer duration (often 7 days or more) of these events while awaiting
bacterial levels to drop within state standards to remove signs, and the greater distances posted
because of the extent to which sewage contamination is carried by stormwater flows from lagoon
mouths, rivers, etc. The 2004 and 2005 yearly beach closure reports list the closures issued during
the rainy season of 2004/ 2005, the third heaviest rainfall season since records began in 1850.
2. The biggest contributors to closure BMDs are the closures issued for south county beaches due to
sewage-contaminated runoff from the Tijuana River. These closures are often for several miles of
beach shoreline (compared to several hundred yards for other closures) and can last from a few
days to over two weeks at a time. Closures related to the Tijuana River are also a function of
rainfall frequency and intensity, which cause river flows to enter the U.S. and the Tijuana Estuary.
3. When closure events related to the Tijuana River are excluded, the number of closure events
caused by sewage spills (SSOs) has decreased since 2001. [Down 43% from 39 in 2001 to 22 in
2005].

As with air pollution from China and African dust into the Amazon, or mercury from China in Oregon, it’s increasingly obvious that pollution is everyone’s problem. If we as Americans outsource polluting industries as maquilas, (Wikipedia page) then we can expect the pollution produced to haunt us as well:

“The neural tube defect rate per 10,000 babies in Cameron County, TX was 9.08 in 1997 and 19.94 in 1998. This is almost twice the national average.”
(The NAFTA Index, October 1, 1998)

“The [Texas] Department [of Health] recently declared that, ‘the entire border area remains a high-risk area [for neural tube defects] compared to the rest of the US.’”
(NAFTA at 5, Global Trade Watch)

(Text from this page, which has an enormous amount of information.)

Even the US government agrees.

There are several places to learn more on the web, and I’d encourage you to do so. As far as local pollution, I guess I’ll just watch the beach closures and postpone become a surfer.

I increasingly believe that recent epidemics such as asthma ,autism and perhaps obesity have causal links to the environment we’ve created.

So what do we, as individuals and citizens, do? Vote your conscience, of course, and donate similarly, but clearly more is required. As I’m flu-bound, this all has particular resonance right now, which also accounts for the sub-par writing. And perhaps the lack of a strong ‘go forth and do good’ closing, because I’m depressed and fresh out of ideas.

At least some of the worst Congressional offenders are out of office now, but I have my doubts about their replacements as well.