the tweney review

Some librarian got her knickers in a twist about the word “scrotum” appearing in the latest Newbery award-winning children’s novel:

“The Higher Power of Lucky” is the story of a 10-year-old girl in rural California and her quest for “Higher Power.” The opening chapter includes a passage about a man “who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ‘62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.”

Librarians have been debating whether “scrotum” was an appropriate word for young readers, especially from a book with the Newbery seal.

Librarians Debate Award-Winning Novel

What’s funny is that people were not shocked by the appearance, in a children’s book, of a passage about a man drinking half a gallon of rum while listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his Cadillac. Instead, they are shocked by the very last word.

So I propose a challenge. Try writing a really shocking sentence that could appear in a children’s book, and cap it off with an ordinary English word, but do it in such a way that ignorant people will get outraged about the final word and completely ignore the sentence preceding it.

Some examples to get you started:

“My kid sister Veronica used to hang out by the train tracks, letting the hoboes feel her up in exchange for swigs of whiskey from their canteens, but stopped after one of them died of angina.”

“I spent the morning of my junior high school graduation binging on Ho-Hos and puking them back up by sticking my finger down my throat and tickling my uvula.”

“My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Festerhazen, was a drunk, couldn’t spell, taught Creationism in class, and when it came to giving out grades, he was really niggardly.”

I’m sure you can do better. In fact, let’s make this a contest. Post your examples in the comments here. I’ll give a copy of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator — a rollicking, entertaining, flawed, and quite politically incorrect sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — to the best entry posted here before midnight on February 28, 2007. As a bonus: If you are a writer and get a similarly offensive sentence into a published children’s book, send me a copy and I’ll buy you a half gallon of fine rum plus a Johnny Cash CD.

Richard Branson has set up a $25 million prize for the first person who can come up with a workable way of removing a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.

It’s a clever idea, offering a big prize as an incentive to spur innovative research. Big purses like this (or the X-Prize, which offered $10 million for the first private suborbital space flight) attract a much wider range of innovators than most R&D projects do, for the simple fact that the barrier to entry is lower. To get a $500K DARPA research grant requires serious credentials and a solid academic or industrial R&D track record. But if you’ve got a great idea for how to build a new kind of rocket, the only barriers are your own abilities and resources.

What’s more, it probably costs Branson far less than $25 million to set up this prize. He’ll probably have put up a nominal amount, with the balance to be covered by an insurance policy from an underwriter who is betting that no one will be able to solve the challenge by the deadline. So there’s another incentive for the winner: You’ll be taking money from a rich bastard and an insurance company that bet against humanity’s ability to solve global warming.

Branson’s prize will probably attract all kinds of wild-eyed inventors and innovators, some of whom may actually have interesting ideas. And it will undoubtedly also draw heavyweight competitors who might even spend more than they’re likely to make from the prize, just for the prestige of having won it — and because an innovation like that could be very, very valuable economically. If you’ve got a system for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, you could make far more than Branson’s $25M by selling it to governments or to companies that want to (or need to, depending on government regulations) reduce their carbon emissions.

Incidentally, my personal favorite solution to global warming — nuclear winter — is not going to qualify, because although it would offset the warming, it doesn’t do anything about CO2. Alas. Neither would the proposal to put up giant orbiting space mirrors in order to block out some of the sun’s light. To win Branson’s prize, you actually have to remove some of the CO2 that his jets belch into the air.

The deadline for entries is 2010, although it could be extended to 2012 if no one comes up with a solution by then. So put on your thinking caps, people!

Doing some research into the global PC industry, I discovered that 82.6% of notebooks are made by Taiwanese companies. By 2010, it will be 92.5%, according to a mid-2006 press release from iSuppli. These Taiwanese companies, known as original design manufacturers, don’t just build notebooks–they design them. In fact, about 85% of the ODMs have outsourced the actual manufacturing to China.

So that American notebook you’ve been using? It was almost certainly designed in Taiwan and built in China. With tech support in India, of course. The only thing left for the Americans to do is choose the color of the case (Apple=white, IBM=black), advertise the product, and bill the customers.

I’m happy to see that the Communications Workers of America (that’s a trade union, for all of you Silicon Valley readers who have never heard of such a thing) is launching a campaign to push for faster broadband for all US citizens. It’s a union issue because it means more jobs pulling cables and fiber. But it’s also a competitiveness issue because, frankly, US broadband speeds suck.

Driving the point home, the CWA’s Speed Matters website has a bandwidth speed calculator. I checked it from work, and was feeling pretty smug about the way Ziff Davis’ pipes had the speed meter pegged at 10Mbps+. But then I took a look at how it compares to international speeds. If we were in Japan, my office’s paltry 20Mbps would be terrible. And the 3Mbps I get at home: Only slightly better than dialup, really. We can, and should, be doing better.

Firefox 2.0, which I finally upgraded to this week, offers two standout advantages relative to 1.5.

• It’s faster. Pages load noticeably quicker — in some cases, as little as 50% of the time they took under 1.5, judging by the performance I’ve seen on Bloglines, Gmail, and an assortment of websites.
• Links that ordinarily pop up in a new window get sent to a new tab instead. This is surprisingly useful. One of the most annoying things a web designer can do is add “target = _blank” tags to every link on their site, so that the simple act of clicking on a few links turns your desktop into a cluttered mess. I’d gotten in the habit of right-clicking and choosing “open link in a new tab” but this new feature saves me having to do that. It’s useful enough that I’ve even switched Google’s default behavior to “open links in a new window” — which, in Firefox 2.0, opens them in a new tab.

It’s also got a spiffier, more Aero-like set of buttons (or more OS X-like, if you prefer) and fixes some security problems with earlier releases. And it’s a painless, easy upgrade. Do it.

To the comment spammers hitting my haiku site: There is something buggy with one of your scripts. I keep getting these comments that contain nothing but a bogus email address and a single word:

Array

Now, come on. You call this comment spam? Not even a link to a phentermine or Cialis site? No keywords touting hotels in Brussels or Miami? The only excuse I can think of for such a weak-ass attempt at comment spam is that one of your scripts is broken. Instead of inserting values selected from an array of potential spam comments and links, your script is just outputting the word “Array.” Most likely your script is missing a quotation mark, or maybe a semicolon somewhere. Maybe you forgot to put in a dollar sign before the name of a variable. Or perhaps you forgot to load the array with data from your paying customers. Whatever. It’s embarrassing to watch, really. You can do better than that.

Generally, Apple does software reasonably well. The company understands that the user experience doesn’t end with the plastic and the circuits, but also encompasses the on-screen interface, the dialog boxes, and even the fonts used in its applications.

So what happened to iTunes? Version 7 is, frankly, one of the slowest, most annoyingly designed applications I’ve used in years. It takes more than a minute to launch (previous versions were relatively snappy). When I drag a tune to my Shuffle (or delete a song from it), it takes iTunes a minute or two to do the update, and often this locks up the interface so I can’t do anything else. The library has been subdivided into five categories and I can’t get a total view of all of them — a problem, since some of my podcasts are in the “podcast” category while others, perplexingly, are filed under “music.” The video playback is bizarre and counterintuitive. And the bottom section of the screen is filled with a bright blue ad for the MiniStore. I don’t want the MiniStore! I want it to go away! I just want to listen to my music, and get some podcasts onto my Shuffle, and not have iTunes taking over my computer, churning the hard drive while I’m trying to work on something.

Bottom line: iTunes 7 is a terrible mishmash of poor design decisions and poorly-implemented software architecture. Whoever was in charge of this revision to iTunes desperately needs to be reassigned. And in the meantime, I need to find a lightweight alternative.

My friend You Mon Tsang is finally taking the covers off of Boxxet, his third startup since I first met him a decade ago. It looks very promising. Boxxet takes aim at one of the problems I targeted in the livable web manifesto: that the World Wide Web as viewed through Google is just too big, too filled with spam and garbage, and too hard for most people to manage.

Or, as You Mon puts it, the web is filled with “rants layered on opinions layered on analysis layered on rumors.” There’s a ton of good information out there, but how do you find the good stuff? One way is by creating sites that collect only high-quality information on narrow topics.

Boxxet uses a “bionic” combination of human intelligence and computer-based textual analysis to create focused fan sites, or “boxxets.” (”Box sets” — get it? Domain names must have been hard to come up with.) Each boxxet contains lots of useful, prefiltered information on a specific topic. For instance, the boxxet for Madonna has news about her ridiculous African adoption, pictures of Madonna, and Madonna forums. There’s a list of the top blogs and top bookmarks about the star. Naturally there’s a tab to buy Madonna-related merchandise.

Similar collections exist for big-league sports teams, TV shows, Disneyland, and even some technology topics like Web 2.0. The textual analysis isn’t perfect, but it’s surprisingly good, and if you’re a fan of one of the topics covered by Boxxet, this could be a very easy way to stay in the loop.

Of course each Boxxet has its own RSS feed, so you can drop it right into your favorite newsreader.

Boxxet’s biggest shortcoming right now is the limited number of topics it covers. You Mon tells me they’re deliberately limiting the topics because of the large amount of processing power it takes to create and maintain a boxxet. But over time, the site will need to expand its topic coverage massively in order to succeed.

I’d also like to see more opportunities for individual tuning of Boxxets, so I could create variants on my favorite topics or even combine boxxets (San Francisco Giants AND Oakland A’s, Johnny Depp OR Keanu Reeves).

Boxxet is superficially similar to About.com or Squidoo, in that it collects a bunch of micro-sites that guide you through the thickets of the web in a (relatively) trustworthy way. But About and Squidoo are highly dependent on the quality of their individual editors, however, and a bad or lazy editor can make a topic useless — with no opportunity for any recourse or second opinions.

With Boxxet, the topic is not in the hands of a single capricious individual, which should help things: Instead, computer algorithms (continually enhanced by occasional human ratings) do the filtering, which may ensure a more consistent quality for Boxxet’s topics. I hope so.

Check it out: I think Boxxet has a lot of potential to make the web easier to navigate on a topic-by-topic basis. It will be interesting to see how it develops. And in the meantime, there’s a killer collection of Scarlett Johanssen news and photos I have to go check out.

The Web has outgrown the ability of most people to use it effectively. Trying to find useful information via Google requires search savvy that most people don’t have.

Even if you know what you’re looking for, there are problems with spam, advertising, and context (for example, “haiku” gives you results pertaining to poetry, operating system programming, error messages, the encryption system used on DVDs, and knitting).

Personalized home pages like My Yahoo and broad-interest portals like MSN only help so much. The scope of possible interests and the universe of available information are both so vast that it’s extremely difficult to find an intersection between the two that will be relevant to more than a tiny minority of viewers. Thus, the vast number of stories on diets, mortgages, and Britney Spears that these sites’ home pages carry — these are easy base hits: low-brow, pop-culture, mass-media topics. Then there’s the sheer number of links that portals sport. Looking at Yahoo’s home page, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with options.

Even Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us can’t help much — the bigger they get, the more they contribute to the information overload they’re designed to filter.

The fact is, the web as viewed through Google or Yahoo or Digg is just too big, too unfriendly, and too filled with data smog. What most people need is less information, not more.

I’m not proposing that we restrict access to the web through dumbed-down walled gardens, like those that most cell phone providers give to their customers with web-capable phones.

Instead, people need communities of information just like we need communities of people. We need livable webs — information spaces that not only filter data and give us what we’re interested in, but are also small enough and well-designed enough that we are comfortable in them, we can find our way around them, use them, and make connections within them.

In short, these spaces would be livable in the same way that a well-designed house is livable. The Google web is not livable in the same way that the middle of Times Square is not a tenable place to set up camp.

Now, people are already carving out their own livable webs as a matter of survival online. Some ways in which I’ve been creating livable webs are through my own blog, with Bloglines, with My Yahoo, with email lists, and in online groups.

But we can do better. We need:

• prefab, quality-controlled information spaces dedicated to specific interests, like what Boxxet provides, but on a wider range of topics and more customizability
• utopian info-communities like Wikipedia, but with better governance and fact-checking
• contextual search engines like Clusty, but with more fine-grained ability to make our own connections and track new information
• communities of content like MyBlogLog but with more robust collaborative tools

If we can build more livable webs for ourselves — “small webs” instead of the all-encompassing World Wide Web, human-scaled webs instead of the galactic scale Web — we can inhabit these online spaces comfortably, and use them for work and play. They will be jumping-off points for wider research into the unlimited expanses of the big-W Web.

Instead of suffocating data smog, with multiple channels of input (email! RSS feeds! IM! SMS!) we will be able to calmly survey the universe of information that matters to us and of people whom we care about, interacting with them as we want to, and going outside our individual webs when we need more.

What do you think — is this too much to ask? And how can we build such things? Because I am definitely feeling a bit overwhelmed by the size and number of the data channels available to me, and I don’t believe the answer is simply to unplug. I think that better, more livable information architecture is both necessary and possible. Let me know your thoughts.

If you ever have arguments with people of the opposite sex, the following may be the most valuable advice you will receive all year.

In humans, strong emotion starts with physiological changes in your body, not with an awareness of the emotion in your brain. So when somebody pisses you off, your heart rate increases, your adrenaline surges, and your muscles tighten up even before you realize that you’re angry. Or, as William James wrote, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” not the other way around.

According to neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, men and women are about the same in the speed with which their physiology gets engaged in strong emotions. However, in women, the nervous system takes a bit longer to “settle down” and return to normal than it does in men.

What this means is that as an argument winds down, a man will start feeling calmer relatively quickly — while a woman’s body remains in an agitated state even after the apparent resolution of the argument. Because everyone’s brain takes cues from the body, her brain realizes it’s still angry. So it starts casting about for other things to be angry about. Bam: Suddenly the argument flares up again, about a new subject.

Sound familiar? Fortunately, once you know about this, it’s not too hard to figure out how to handle it, whether you’re male or female. If you’re a man arguing with a woman, once the argument seems to be winding up, it’s time to say something funny, switch the subject to a completely different (non-controversial) topic, or do something nice for her. If you’re a woman, you need to remind yourself to go chill out, step into a different room, or do something to calm down before you reignite the argument.

Or, as Sapolsky and his wife do, you can just remind each other, “Honey, don’t forget what the half-life is on the autonomic nervous system!”

All this, and even more fascinating neurobiology, can be found in this highly entertaining episode of WNYC’s Radio Lab: Where Am I? The explanation of emotion and physiology is in the first segment, “Phantom Limbs.” Some of the best science radio ever.