Month: October 2008

Ad Pollution

In these bad economic times, it might be heresy to attack marketing, but advertising is starting to crush my innate cheery disposition.  The web is being choked with ads, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio so low that many sites and searches are worthless.  Google, the darling of weberati, whose motto is “don’t be evil,” has become corrupted by advertising revenue.  Slashdot.org should stop making Borg allusions about Microsoft, and start making them about Google.  Too often a search on Google leads to page after page of links to sites wanting to sell me something directly, or links that take me to honey-pot pages, with tiny bits of info nestled in large screen acreage of ads.  For the most part, I’ve replaced the World Wide Web with Wikipedia when I’m searching for knowledge.

I stopped listening to the radio decades ago because of advertising and annoying disc jockeys.  I can only watch TV because of PBS, HBO and DVRs.  I know people who have stopped watching television altogether because of the advertisements.  I’m quickly approaching the decision to stop going to movies because of advertisements.  The only place I don’t mind advertising is the Sunday newspaper, but I feel guilty about all that wasted paper.  Shouldn’t there be a better way?

There are sites on the web that will reward or pay you for looking at ads.  What we need are systems to bring ads to us when we need and want them.  There are times when I’m shopping that I would be open to sales pitches, and I wouldn’t even mind an AI shopping companion.  Marketing really should be on the basis of don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Are ads really effective?  Sure, sometimes.  Those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” TV mini-dramas from Apple are effective at making me hate them for selling misinformation and promoting style. I’ve never bought a Mac.  Microsoft is miserable at creating ads, and I always buy their products?  Neither decision has anything to do with advertising.  When I want to buy something, I research it, and then look for the most convenient place to shop with the lowest prices.  And how often do you see ads on TV selling on the basis of price?  I suppose if Apple ran ads that said, “Buy the latest Mac Book with the hi-tech aluminum cases for $899,” I might rush out and buy one.  Instead they sell comedy on TV, without mentioning the details of their products, or the price of the one I want.  Me to Apple, if you want “me” to be a Mac, then sell that $1299 Mac Book for $899, and I’ll come visit your store.

My point is I’ll buy something I’ve studied if the price is right.  The rest of the time I’m just avoiding ads like I avoid mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, germs and viruses.  Of course, the real test of reality is whether or not the various forms of mass communication could exist without advertising.

If there were no advertising, how many television channels would we have?  How many TV shows would exist?  How many college sports programs would exist?  How many professional sports teams would exist?  Can you imagine racing cars without their advertising paint jobs?  HBO and PBS exist without advertising and have outstanding programs.

I’m not alone in my aversion to advertising.  It’s obvious some big economic bubbles have burst this year, and I’m wondering if the advertising bubble will not burst soon too?  As we move into a world-wide recession we’re going to see a lot of companies cut their advertising budgets.  Unless there is real proof that ads bring in dollars, companies will start seeing how naked their marketing programs really are, and close them down.  Recession has a way of cutting out the fat, and mean vicious recessions, like I’m guessing we’re moving into, trims away every gram of grease.

I would like to see more marketing along the HBO model.  I’d rather pay $5 or $10 a month per channel for a handful of quality channels, and abandon all the rest.  I’d rather pay a subscription fee to an online digital magazine if they could provide me the content without the advertising.  Theater owners and movie distributors need to cut the ads before people give up on going to the movies.  And that’s for three reasons.  One I hate seeing the ads.  Two I hate people trying to find seats at the last moment trying to avoid the ads.  And three, I hate that they waste my Saturday afternoon time.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  There are occasions when I want ads.  I’ve been meaning to buy some new shirts, and have wished I could get some stylish ones that fit better.  My wife complains about the constant boring shirts I wear now.  I wouldn’t mind going to a web site and telling it I’m in the mood to buy shirts and then see some healthy competition to market me new styles, especially if I had more choice in sizing and material.

I don’t know what to do about the web.  I can’t believe that all those web pages with Google ads really make enough money to pay their bills.  I was just researching on optical astronomical interferometers and I couldn’t believe the “Ads by Google” signs I was seeing on pages with links to scientific papers.  The reality is we have too many web sites trying to direct us to too few places with real content by paying for their useless help with web ads.  Go away.  Please, turn of your servers, and go away.  If you try to make money on the web by solely linking to other sites, you are worthless.  Google and other top level search engines can do all that work.

Comment to Microsoft, if you want to beat Google, offer a search engine that is based on subscription income and only provides links to 100% content.  I can’t guarantee it will work, but if you offered such a service for $19.95 a year, and you filtered out all commercial web pages, you might have an alternative to Google.  If I’m sick enough of Google’s commercial results and willing to pay, there might be others like me.

This recession is going to shake up how we earn money and how we spend money.  Inflationary bubbles will be bursting everywhere.  I think the advertising world will be one big bubble that’s going to pop big time.  In all the various mass market venues, we’re going to see disappearing players, fewer networks on TV, fewer magazines and newspapers, and fewer web sites.  I’m an ordinary guy, so if I’m reaching the tipping point of running away from advertising, I imagine there are lots of other ordinary folk feeling the same way.

JWH – 10-25-08

Free Stuff Table

At work, years ago we set up a “Free Stuff” table, up on the third floor near the student copier.  I work at a university, in the College of Education.  The free stuff table started with old text books, from a school book repository.  We had a library of K-12 schoolbooks, and when new editions came out, we’d put the old ones on the free stuff table.  After that, when a professor would move their office, or leave the college, they’d dump academic books and journals on the free table they didn’t want to take with them.  Eventually, faculty and staff, began bringing books, magazines, music CDs and LPs, software, VHS tapes, DVDS from home and drop their stuff off on the table.

Sometimes the donations were good stuff, and the table would clear in less than an hour, sometimes even within minutes.  Other times, the table would fill with boring stuff, 20 year old educational journals that would lay there for weeks, but would eventually thin out and disappear.  I used to take old books to the library, but bringing them to work is much easier.

Because of its location, the table needs to stay neat, so mostly people leave small stuff.  Sometimes we’ll see a DVD drive for a computer, or little radio, or various office supply gadgets, but for the most part the giveaways have been books and magazines.  We have a couple hundred faculty and staff, and a few thousand students, and the table is by the computer labs, so it sees a lot of traffic.  The free stuff table has become a form of recycling.

I’m also fascinated by what kinds of books show up there.  Lots of fiction, lots of educational books, but also religious books, statistics, psychology, sociology, kids books, cook books, etc.  After my mom died, I took a bunch of her old books up there, various bibles, religious books, and Edna Ferber novels.  They went quickly.  The other day my wife set out a box of Christmas ornaments to give to Goodwill.  I took them and put them on the free stuff table and they were gone within 5 minutes.  What’s worthless to one person is valuable to another.

I’m writing about this free stuff table as a way to recommend the idea to others.  It could be a common concept at most offices, but I don’t know.  All we did was tape down a sign on a 30″x42″ table that said, “Free Stuff.”  After that, the table took a life of its own.

JWH 10-21-08

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is an old fashion novel of super-science that won the Hugo award in 2006.  It reminds me of War of the Worlds, but not because the stories are alike, but because of their sense of wonder impact.  I really do not want to say anything about what happens in the story, hoping you’ll just try it sight unseen.  I’d even advice you not to read the blurbs on the book.  If you want the story spoiled, follow the title link to Wikipedia, it explains everything.  I’ve read two other books by Wilson, Memory Wire, and Darwinia, and enjoyed them both.

Of course, this puts me in a quandary, because how do I recommend a novel without giving some juicy tidbits to get you hooked?  If you can imagine how readers in 1898 felt after reading War of the Worlds, then think about what an alien invasion of 2005 would be like, except that it’s a totally new take on alien invasions, and with luck you might feel awe like H.G.’s readers at the end of the 19th century.  The scope of Spin also reminds me of the epoch spanning ideas of Olaf Stapledon.  If you’ve happen to have read Greg Egan’s Quarantine, you might think that Spin is less original, but I found it unique enough to admire it’s vast gee-whiz sense of wondrousness.  However, these two novels do need a name for their new sub-genre of alien invasion types.

Science fiction has a reputation for poor characterization, and science fiction writers are often accused by literary types of producing pawns for their plots, and that’s essentially what Wilson has done here, but I have to give him great credit because Tyler Dupree, the first person narrator, is very engaging, even though he is still a plot pawn.  The trouble is science fiction writers think up ideas first, and then figure out what characters would best show off the ideas dramatically.  It’s probably very difficult to create characters in a SF story that don’t feel like straight men setting up gags for the science fictional funny man.  [That would make a great blog entry – a discussion of SF characters that stand on their own.]

In Spin, Wilson has created a story around three children and then follows their very long lives.  Jason and Diane Lawton are twins, but identical they are not.  Jason represents science and Diane religion, while Tyler plays the reporter of their stories, even though he eventually becomes a doctor.  Jason and Diane are rich, and Tyler is poor, and like the plot of Brideshead Revisited, Tyler loves their big house, admires Jason and falls in love with Diane.   If you subtracted the science fiction, you’d have mediocre love story that would make an entertaining potboiler, but since we’re reading a fantastic tale that John W. Campbell would have loved, that doesn’t matter too much, because when it comes down to it, it’s the super science that dazzles.  The characterization is far better than most pulp fiction, and Wilson does a pretty good job developing the family dynamics of the three children and their three parents.

What Robert Charles Wilson has done is imagine science fiction on a big scale, an evolutionary scale of astronomical time, and then invented a gimmick to make it all work in the short life-time of his very human characters.  That’s one pretty fancy writing trick.  Spin is a very satisfying modern SF novel, that well deserves it’s Hugo award.  I recommend it to all science fiction fans.

JWH 10-20-08

Hubble Telescope at 10x or 100x or 1000x

The other night I caught a new documentary, “Hubble’s Amazing Universe” on the National Geographic Channel that in high definition wonder showed how the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy since 1993.  Sadly, I can’t find a link to an online version.  I hope they repeat this HD documentary often because seeing the spectacular Hubble images on a 52″ inch screen was beyond beautiful.  Using technology that I can’t name, they made the images look three dimensional, and the stories that went with them explained why Hubble was well worth it’s price tag of billions.

Now, I’ve got to wonder, what will a telescope that is 10 times more powerful than the Hubble will see and discover?  What about one 100 times more powerful, or even a 1,000 times more powerful?  We really won’t know what such futuristic telescopes will discover, because like the Hubble’s discoveries, they will be unexpected.  In my mind, the most exciting thing these future space telescopes could discover are Earth-like planets orbiting around nearby stars that show indications of life or technology.

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Pillars of Creation

Ever since our cave dwelling days, humans have been asking how we got here in this unbelievable reality.  Well, the Hubble telescope has shown us how big here really is, both in dimension and composition.  Hubble has revealed stellar nurseries and black hole graves.  It has helped scientists make discoveries about dark matter and energy, and revealed the largest structures in the universe discovered to date.

Most people never ponder the size of reality.  They never grasp that we live in space-time.  Hell, few people even look at up at the lights in the sky at night.  If Genesis had to encompass the scope of Hubble’s vision, imagine how different God and the Bible would have been.  Is there any analogy that I can give that can convey the scope of how far Hubble can see?  If you were the smallest sub-atomic particle in an carbon atom that’s part of a molecule in a one cell of your heart, would any scientific instrument you build show you how big your body would be?  Imagine being one grain of sand and trying to count all the others on a beach?  In the photo above, our solar system is so small it wouldn’t be seen in those dust pillars that are light years high.  But look at the picture below.  The above scene is smaller than you in relation to the solar system compared to the objects in the photo below.

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This is the famous Hubble ultra deep field photo, where scientists tried to photograph an empty patch of sky.  Each speck of light is a galaxy containing billions of stars.  Now imagine a more powerful space telescope picking a black patch in this photo and zooming in on it.  What would it see?

We know the universe is big.  Back to that analogy of being a sub-atomic particle in your heart, now imagine trying to figure out that you are part of a body of organs, each with its purpose, could you ever imagine what the brain does from just looking at its parts from your tiny vantage point?  It’s no wonder that so many want to embrace the Biblical view of creation, because the scientific view is too much work to grasp by us little fellas.  Individually we are tiny, but scientists stand on each other’s shoulders to get the bigger view.  Now imagine future space telescopes spying on nearby stellar systems and seeing other Earth-like worlds, worlds where we analyze the chemicals in their atmospheres.  What if we discovered what we call man-made chemicals?

Now imagine, if we could get our giant artificial brains to communicate with the distant giant AIs of their world.  How far can two species see standing on each other’s shoulders?

Think of it another way.  If we consider every human as a cell in the body of a single being called humanity, a space telescope could be its eyes, and all our computers and knowledge, its brain.  The mirror lens of the Hubble telescope was slightly wider than a very tall man.  Now imagine building a pair of eyes in space where the pupils were the size of a football stadium?  How far could our new body see?  Then hook them up to immense armies of computers and swarms of natural philosophers and you might begin to imagine what I’m asking.  And, I’m only wondering, “what might we see?”  We won’t know until we build these new eyes.

The primary question we’ve always asked is, “Where do we come from?”  The next important question is, “Are we alone?”  We hoped that SETI would answer that question, but it might be astronomy and space telescopes that will actually answer it.  The manned Apollo missions to the Moon answered a lot of scientific questions, but the Hubble Space Telescope has answered an immense amount more in comparison.  Some people are now asking, what if we went back to the Moon and built truly giant telescopes on its far side, how far could we see?

The James Webb Space Telescope is schedule to fly to L2 orbit in several years, and it’s eye is 6.5 meters in diameter, compared to Hubble’s 2.4.  The JWST is designed to see in the infrared, and not the visible spectrum like Hubble, but then the visible spectrum is such a tiny fragment of the total spectrum to be explored.

What if Congress had said no to the financial bailout, and given the $700 billion to astronomers, how much more would we have gotten for our money?  Just try and speculate what life on Earth would be like if we found out we weren’t alone in the Universe, and had nearby neighbors.  The Hubble Space Telescope gave us a quantum leap in knowledge about the universe, so think about a Hubble telescope at 10x, or 100x or 1000x.

JWH 11-18-08

Science As Fantastic As Science Fiction

Science fiction magazine editors often complain they don’t get enough science fiction stories submitted to them.  What they need to do is convince the popular science writers showcased in the latest edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 to also write fictionalized versions of their latest essays.  Or maybe, all those would-be science fiction writers stuffing their slush piles should study this volume, integrate the ideas into their work, and then they’d impress those editors.  I kid you not, there are some far-out, fantastic, sense-of-wonder concepts in these essays.  Just do a bit of sampling here, and you’ll see what I mean.

Start with the Freeman Dyson prediction about green technology.  He’s not talking about windmill generators, but plants with silicon leaves, engineering biology and taking over the role of evolution to remake the Earth.  If you want to know about alien minds, trying reading the essays by Colapinto and Cook.  They don’t look to the stars and little green men who think different, but to South America.  Then Jon Mooallem looks at the history of people seeking anti-gravity and gravity radio.  Each essay, no matter how down to earth, could be used to inspire SF stories.

Here’s the table of contents with links to the articles on the web:

Just the fact that I can link to full-text versions of all but three of these articles on the web is science fictional.  It represents a major paradigm shift in copyright, economics and the dissemination of knowledge.  And I’m not linking to these articles to give you free reads, you should buy the volume and study it.  I’m linking to web pages as a way to review this book, because just sampling these links will give you a taste of what I’m talking about far better than I could with descriptive words.  Most people do not like to read off computer screens, but having these essays online is an excellent way to recommend them to your friends.

This collection is a snapshot of our times but far different from what you see on the news at night.  These articles are overwhelmingly about the future, either predicting fantastic new developments, or warning us of dire happenings if things continue as they are now.  All the concepts that science fiction writers use to write visionary science fiction.  I’ve been getting this volume each year for awhile now, but I’ve yet to meet anyone else that recommends it.  That’s a real shame.  Science was never so accessible, so why isn’t it more popular?

Could this be why the SF mag editors aren’t seeing that many science fiction stories cross their desks?  Because we now live in a world that seems science fictional compared to what we grew up in just a few decades ago.  I was watching a new cop show called Life on Mars, about a detective thrown into the distant past of 1973, and I was struck by the scene where he’s wishing for a cell phone.  Or another time when he mutters about wanting a computer.  I’d love to time travel back to see The Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, or the Beatles in Germany, but I don’t know if I could live without my sixth sense, the Internet.

The world and election I remember seeing through a 19″ black and white TV in 1960 is so very different from how I see reality in 2008 while watching a 52″ high definition set.  I think we take science for granted now, and back then science was that gee-whiz Mr. Science stuff that nobody paid any attention to other than the proto-geeks.  Many of the science stories in this year’s collection come from The New Yorker, The Atlantic and other mundane periodicals.  Today I can switch on my TV and see an hour documentary on the history of the black hole, and the controversy over the information paradox that Stephen Hawking had proposed that angered scientists for years.  When I was growing up, my choices were Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.

In the early days of three channel television, there wasn’t room for physics and astronomy shows.  Today I can find several science documentaries on every night, and not boring ones like we used to see on 16mm film in science class, but fantastic shows with killer computer graphic clips beautifully illustrating cutting edge science, like string theory and the effects of dark matter of galaxy formation.

Sheila Williams, the editor at Asimov’s SF Magazine, complains she receives too many stories beginning with exploding space ships.  That was a popular way to begin a story back in the 1930s.  Explosions are dramatic and quickly lead to action, but what people want today are new far-out ideas to create sense-of-wonder SF, and evidently too many potential science fiction writers are living on ancient clichés.  They need to be reading the science essays and watching the science documentaries on TV, because the mundane world has passed old science fiction by, leaving it quaint and suitable for nostalgia retrospectives.

The Donlan and Dyson articles inspired me to envision fantastic changes in our everyday landscapes.  Donlan writes about scientists wanting to repopulate the American plains with substitute “megafauna” like that found 13,000 years ago during the Pleistocene overkill, which would make traveling out west like a safari crossing a well populated African wildlife preserve.  Imagine tooling west on Interstate 70 and seeing elephants, tigers, lions, camels dwelling in the high grass beyond the highway fences?  If you add in Dyson’s biological experiments, and think about T. Boone Pickens’ giant windmill farms, our country is going to look very different.  When I was growing up, the future was exciting because of rocket travel.  Traveling to Mars may end up boring compared to just staying home.

I think about the recent hurricanes, Katrina and Ike, and wonder what our coastlines would be like if we could build houses that were indifferent to big waves and wind.  In my neighborhood I’m seeing hawks, raccoons and red foxes set up habitats.  I know there’s a chance that possums, coyotes and armadillos exist unseen.  It wouldn’t take much to let our lawns become urban prairies and adapt our lifestyle to allow for more wildlife, renewable energy, shifting ecologies so where we live would no longer be manicured sameness.

If we listen to Freeman Dyson, we could have all kinds of scientifically created plants and animals joining us, like shrubs that produce electricity.  How do you make such a neighborhood biosphere into a science fiction story?

On the TV at night, the news is all bad, dwelling on lost jobs, crashing stock markets, terrorism, melting glaciers, oil panics that make me worry that the future will be dim and full of drudgery.  Reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008, makes me think the future will be more like living in Oz.  I wonder what the mood of the country would be like if ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs shifted their focus from Wall Street to science laboratories around the world, would we all feel better about the future?

The public fear you see in the news is all about economics, and that’s because economists are uncertain about the future.  Reporters should spend more time interviewing scientists, who are more confident about what’s ahead.  Reading Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman made me feel a whole lot better about the next forty years because he interviewed hundreds of people with solutions, not problems.  The articles in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 aren’t gosh-wow futurism like the 1939 World’s Fair, but working class science, as real and ordinary as cloning and gene splicing.

JWH 10-11-8