Vroo Speak

Turning off AI in Google search

2024-11-07T15:24:00.010-08:00

If you don't like how much slower Google search is with AI results, find them useless most of the time, and want to limit the climate damage potential of AI, here’s how to use Google as your primary search engine in Chrome with AI turned off:

Click this link chrome://settings/searchEngines to go the search engine settings page.
Click the Add button.
Enter these values:

Google (no AI)
withoutai
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-art1f1c141

Click Save.
Find your new no AI search engine in the list and click the ⋮ icon and choose Make default.

So what's this actually doing? The -art1f1c141 tells Google to not include search results that include that (non) word and this has the side effect of suppressing AI results and also certain other instant results. I've chosen an arbitrary string that (as of the time I wrote this) does not appear in any Google or Bing search results. So excluding that string won't affect the search.

Searching for "time in Antarctica" would normally show the time directly, but with the negative clause it won't. To get that result, just remove the -art1f1c141 in the query. To make that a bit easier, edit the Google search engine and change the shortcut to just g. Then to search google without disabling AI just type g and a space.

These same instructions work in Edge except start at edge://settings/searchEngines in step 1.

Settle it on the field

2014-12-07T16:08:00.001-08:00

To everyone that thought expanding the college football playoffs to four teams would end the debate about which team got left out: I told you so. Of course this just moves the debate down to fifth place instead of third place. There are 68 teams in March Madness and people still argue about the teams that get left out. Some people are saying we should stop complaining because we asked for it. Well, I didn't.

The truth is that there's a standard way of selecting a champion from a large set of teams where it's not feasible for every team to play every other team.

Divide the teams into pools. (Done: these are called conferences.)
Select a winner from each pool. (Done, except for the Big 12's co-champion problem.)
Rank the teams and select wildcards to fill out the bracket. (Done: the playoff committee already ranks the top 25 teams; see below for selecting wildcards.)

Yes, this can be done without adding any games. Here's how it would work. You can read my original 2009 proposal for more discussion.

Eight Team Bracket:

The five conference champions* from the Power 5** conferences.
The top-ranked Group of Five** team (mid-major conferences), provided it is ranked in the top twelve or above at least one Power 5 champion.
Additional top-ranked teams as wild cards to make a total of eight teams, except including no more than one wild card team from a single conference.
Teams seeded in order of ranking with the order of the bottom four teams adjusted as necessary to avoid any team playing a rematch in the quarterfinals.

Matchup Week:

The regular season is reduced by one game and a new Matchup Week is added after the conference championship games.
The quarterfinals are played during Matchup Week.
The rest of the teams play a comparably ranked team from another conference, paired on a rotating basis. For example, teams in the SEC East might play teams from the ACC Atlantic one year, and teams from the Big 12 South another year. This provides an exciting way to compare the quality of teams between conferences head to head.

Bowl Games:

The four teams that win in the playoffs, advance to the four team bracket.
The remaining bowl games are scheduled as they are now, including the four teams that lost in the quarterfinals.

Championship Game:

A Plus-One game, as now.

As with the NCAA basketball tournament, this provides a clear path for teams to win the national championship. And it indubitably makes wins on the field more important than votes in a poll.

UPDATE: Yes, the conference championships are effectively the first round of the playoffs. So this is really a 12 team bracket. (And it will be 13 teams if the Big 12 adds a championship game again as they are considering.) However, teams that lose in the first round still get a chance to make the quarterfinals as a wild card.

* Yes, there is the unlikely possibility that a team with a losing record (and therefore not bowl-eligible) will win a conference. The conference loses its automatic bid in that circumstance but is still eligible for a wild card team.

** The set of power conferences (currently, Power 5) and mid-major conferences (currently, Group of Five) would be subject to periodic adjustment just as they are currently.

Alice in Puzzlehunt

2013-01-21T22:30:00.001-08:00

Note: The puzzle is sized for 11×17 but is solvable if printed on 8-1/2×11.
This puzzle is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND-US.

I'm one of those people who like to find puzzles in everything. I'm always looking for hidden puzzles, like anagramming names I encounter or reading text backwards.

Which brings me to one of my favorite puzzles, shown on the right. Click here or on the image to download a PDF.

The idea behind this puzzle was to create a page that looked just like the puzzle placemats that restaurants use but was really much more. I wanted it to be completely solvable and enjoyable by kids. But beyond that, I wanted something there for the people like me that look for puzzles everywhere. I added another layer with a metapuzzle pulling all six puzzles together for a final answer. It was a bit complicated to make all the pieces fit together so I was fortunate to have help from two friends. I don't want to spoil anything, but there's one part of the puzzle that I hope you'll be amazed that it was possible to do.

The puzzle was originally used in a puzzlehunt called "Alice in Puzzlehunt", inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll. We had a mad tea party that was a puzzle, a croquet game that was a puzzle, and a lot more. In addition, this puzzle was used as the "hidden puzzle" at one of the National Puzzlers' League annual conventions. The placemats were placed on the tables at lunch and it wasn't long before people were busy solving it instead of eating lunch. I thought people might be fooled and think it was put down by hotel staff, unaware of how juvenile the puzzles were. No such luck!

I'm writing about this now because this puzzle was recently featured in the video puzzle in Puzzazz's Kickstarter campaign for a Year of Puzzles and that inspired me to post it here. I hope you enjoy it and I encourage you to check out the campaign. UPDATE: The Kickstarter campaign was a success! The Year of Puzzles is in progress and you can download the first puzzle for free at http://www.puzzazz.com/yearofpuzzles.

To avoid spoiling this puzzle for others, please do not put the answer or any spoilers in the comments. The final answer is definitive -- you'll be sure you have it correct when you have it. If you have a question that isn't suitable for the comments, you can send me mail with questions at 'vroo' at this domain.

Your social security number is a very poor password

2011-05-17T22:08:00.000-07:00

I've written before about why using social security numbers as an identifier is a bad idea. But why learn from other's mistakes, when you can learn from your own?

First Tech Federal Credit Union is the product of the merger of First Technology Credit Union and Addison Avenue Credit Union and they're finally integrating their banking systems. As always, there are a few hiccups in the process. For example, some members are getting new account numbers since there are conflicting account numbers between the two.

There's a bigger problem with the phone banking system. As part of the transition, they need to reset the PINs of all members of the old First Tech (Addison Avenue members are not affected). I'm guessing this is because they're moving the First Tech members over to the old Addison Avenue system. According to the First Tech integration guide (page 11), they're making two changes during the transition at the end of May:

you will be able to "use any of your account numbers to login"
"we'll reset your Phone Banking PIN to the last four digits of your social security number"

When you write a check, many businesses ask for the last four digits of your SSN for identification or verification purposes. So anyone with a copy of that check now has access to exactly what they need to access your account by phone.

How sure are you that your account is safe? I'm not – which is why I asked First Tech to disable phone banking on my account.

I love First Tech and have been a member for a long time. Before posting this, I contacted First Tech to notify them of the problem. Their response:

We could not issue new PINs to members because they would have to be issued after our system conversion, which would leave members without access to Phone Banking for at least several days. Setting the PINs to the last 4 digits of the Social Security Number allows members to continue to access Phone Banking during this system conversion. At this point we are moving forward with the plan as stated in the integration guide.

I hope that First Tech will change this decision, but in the meantime, I know that many members will not be aware that their accounts are at risk. Unfortunately, I can't be as sure that hackers aren't targeting First Tech customers. In fact, First Tech is aware of this possibility and specifically advises people to watch out for "phishing" attacks during the transition.

Therefore, I've decided to write this blog post to publicize the problem. I recommend that you disable phone banking for your account before May 26th. To do this, call 1-800-637-0852 option 2 or sign into online banking and send First Tech a message asking them to disable phone banking.

Ironically, a glaring Google grammatical error

2011-04-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

Google unveiled a new trivia question a day site to encourage people to learn better searching techniques.

Note this part:

"... signed me ... my importance ... I have ... What is it?"

Why doesn't it end with "What am I?" Apparently, whoever wrote this isn't aware of how to properly use the first person convention in riddles. It just sounds awkward and ungrammatical and likely to confuse solvers.

Personally, I would have used the word "readers" instead of "viewers" but that's a more minor quibble.

Update: Yes, I know that "it" is the intended answer, but the question should have been written so that it was less confusing. A better way to write it would have been "Most modern readers think there's a glaring spelling error in a famous US historical document. Two future presidents signed it and two didn't because they were abroad. What is the error?"

March gets more madness next year

2011-04-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt that the selection of teams for this year's NCAA Men's D1 basketball tournament was a complete debacle, with both the tournament selection committee and ESPN commentators proving that they have no special (or normal) ability to decide which teams belong in the tournament.

Today, the NCAA announced a series of changes designed to improve the tournament. First, the tournament will roll back to 64 teams next year. This will avoid the possibility of a team like VCU, which really doesn't belong in the tournament, embarrassing the committee so spectacularly.

Second, the NCAA will no longer use a committee to select the teams or seeding to match up teams. Instead, teams will be selected by the well-respected BCS selection algorithm and randomly dropped into the bracket. This should result in more interesting and competitive games as well as increased revenue for Las Vegas sports books.

Third, the tournament will have eight regionals instead of four with each regional having eight teams. The geographic region names have been a challenge, with the majority of teams seeded outside their region. To avoid that problem, the NCAA announced that the new regions will not be geographically based and instead we will have:

Dogs – canines such as Huskies, Huskies, Bulldogs, and Bulldogs
Cats – felines such as Wildcats and Bobcats, as well as Lions and Tigers
Bugs – insects and orther arthropods, such as Spiders and Hornets
Reptiles – including both Alligators and Crocodiles
Birds – both fictional, like Jayhawks, and real, like Cardinals and Geoducks
Primates – including Gorillas and Pirates and everything in between
Fish – including Dolphins, Penguins and Banana Slugs
Legends – recognizes the conferences that can't think of good names and includes all the inanimate or otherwise perplexing mascots, including Zips?, Heat!? and Orange!??

The regions will be matched up differently each year on a rotating basis. So one year, the Dogs will fight the Cats for a Final Four berth while the next year, the Dogs might face the Birds. Teams that don't fit into any of the above categories will be arbitrarily and capriciously assigned to one using the same process that the selection committee has been using for seeding up until now.

UPDATE: After posting this I learned that the Miami Heat is, in fact, an NBA not an NCAA team. My bad.

UPDATE 2: Sorry, this is all made up. Except the part about the Big Ten (sic) having a Legends division.

Fix the filibuster

2010-12-31T08:41:00.000-08:00

If there's a debate in the Senate and there's nobody talking, is there any noise? The US Senate has a long tradition of allowing unlimited debate but over time this tradition has been perverted: in today's Senate, Senators can filibuster without ever debating. And it's being increasingly abused: there have been more filibusters in the last 4 years than between 1920 and 1980.

The worst abuse of the filibuster is the "secret hold" where one Senator can secretly block the Senate from doing its business. This has been used to block legislation as well as presidential nominations from being considered. It has no place in a democratic society: if a Senator objects to a bill or a nomination but wants to remain anonymous, tough. They were elected to represent the people of their state and the people have a right to know what they're doing.

Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) is on the right track. The Senate should adopt rules that preserve the right of Senators to debate legislation and curb the abuse with two simple steps:

Ban secret holds.
Require actual debate.

Of course the details here matter, because if anyone is good at finding and exploiting loopholes, it's politicians. So I hope the Senate keeps it simple. Honest, constructive debate — yes; obstructionism — no.

Enduring Joe Barton

2010-11-29T22:38:00.000-08:00

Texas Rep. Joe Barton (@RepJoeBarton) would like to be chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee. To promote himself, he prepared a presentation to the Republican leadership highlighting his credentials, including:

"Led Republican resistance to ObamaCare in Committee."
"Forced markup in Committee to take more than 17 days to complete."
"Forced the Democrats to endure a 4-day markup, with 300 prepared amendments and 47 offered amendments."

In other words, he stood in the way of healthcare reform, period. He didn't work to make it better. He didn't work to find middle ground. He didn't work to help Americans. And he's proud of it.

Rachel Maddow (@Maddow) and the Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) have more to say on Joe Barton and George Patton.

Don't ask, don't kill

2010-11-21T16:35:00.000-08:00

The United Nations currently specifically condemns "extrajudicial" executions due to sexual orientation. Now, a UN committee has replaced the words “any discriminatory reason, including sexual orientation” with the words “discriminatory reasons on any basis” and it looks likely that this will be approved by the UN General Assembly.

The pretext for this change is that "there was no justification to highlight" sexual orientation (Benin) and selectivity accommodating "certain interests over others had to be avoided by the international community" (Morocco).

Perhaps there are sincere beliefs that there's no need to specifically highlight sexual orientation. For example, it is a reasonable argument that having a list of specific discrimination has "the danger of leaving some groups out" (St. Lucia). But the fact is that homosexuality is illegal in more than 70 countries including St. Lucia and Morocco, which is more than the 68 countries that have signed the UN declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity. So the sincerity of those arguments is dubious. And gays will remain the targets of violence around the world.

Which brings us to the the US "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Last June, President Obama extended federal benefits to same-sex partners, which he was able to do because he didn't need Congress to go along. And Congress has balked and stalled at taking action on don't ask, don't tell, despite many of our representatives having promised to do so.

But ... if you read the actual law, you'll see that we don't need Congress to go along to end don't ask, don't tell. They've already given the administration that authority:

"Nothing ... shall be construed to require that a member of the armed forces be processed for separation from the armed forces when a determination is made in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense that ... separation of the member would not be in the best interest of the armed forces." 10 USC 654(e)

Given the ongoing combat operations that the US armed forces are involved in, all we need is a simple declaration by the Secretary of Defense that in times of war it is not in the best interest of the armed forces to discharge service members that want to serve, regardless of their sexual orientation.

And given the direction the United Nations is heading, a strong statement from this administration supporting gay rights would be welcome.

Just Vote No

2010-10-27T22:23:00.000-07:00

(Updated with election results.)

I'm voting no on most initiatives this year. I've decided that the burden of proof is on the side of the initiative proponents and if they don't convince me, I'm voting no. The really sad thing about many of these initiatives is the large amount of money being spent on both sides misleading voters.

Here's the lineup in Washington:

NO on I-1098. I think income taxes are more progressive than sales taxes. I'd enthusastically vote for an initiative that abolished the sales tax and business and occupancy tax and replaced both with personal and corporate income taxes based on the federal income tax with very limited differences. But I-1098 makes our tax system more complicated not better. (Result: Failed)

NO on I-1100 and I-1105. Both of these initiatives privatize liquor sales in Washington. But they do this at an annual cost of $100 million. I'd support a revenue-neutral conversion to private liquor sales, not a giveaway to business. When a government uses eminent domain to take private property, it has to pay fair market value. Conversely, when government transfers property to private use, it should receive fair market value. You only need to look at the amount of money contributed by the proponents of these two initiatives to realize that they expect to make a lot of money from the private liquor business. (Result: Both failed)

NO on I-1082. The current workers compensation insurance system isn't broken and this initiative would transfer it to private business at a cost of $50 million per year. As with the privatizing the liquor business, we shouldn't be spending taxpayer money to enrich private insurance companies. And privatization needs guarantees that ensure that every worker and every business will be insured. (Result: Failed)

NO on I-1053. This requires that "legislative actions raising taxes must be approved by two-thirds legislative majorities or receive voter approval." We've seen the gridlock in the other Washington caused by a 60% supermajority on everything in the Senate. We don't need that here. (Result: Passed)

NO on I-1107. I support the sales tax exemption on food because it reduces the regressive nature of the tax as everyone needs to buy food. But restaurant food is not exempt and eliminating the exemption for candy and bottled water is reasonably along the same lines. Of course, if we replaced the sales tax with an income tax, this would be moot. The proponents of this have spent a lot of money misleading people about the law. They imply that the sales tax on candy also applies to granola and chili which is just not true. The truth is that this law closes a loophole that allows granola and chili manufacturers to claim the tax exemption that were intended for fruit and vegetable processors and meat packers. They also say the legislature picked a crazy definition of what's a candy bar, although that definition is from the Multistate Tax Compact. (Result: Passed)

I am voting yes on one:

YES on Resolution 4220. I realize this is a knee-jerk reaction to a particular tragic case, but this is a rare case of getting the referendum right. This allows the courts to deny bail to dangerous individuals, subject to limits determined by the legislature. Hard to believe a referendum/initiative that gives power to the courts and the legislature rather than taking them away. (Result: Not surprisingly, passed overwhelmingly)

The results match my position with the exception of the anti-tax initiatives.

Today, we are all Chileans

2010-10-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

Another little math problem: thirty-three miners trapped in a mine in Chile. Thirty-three men are ferried to the surface through a specially built rescue capsule. How many men remain in the mine? (Answer)

Some people view the rescue as a miracle. To me, the miracle is the human kind and the kind that can restore our faith in humanity. After 9/11, the French newspaper Le Monde famously wrote "Nous sommes tous Américains" ("We are all Americans"). In that same spirit, today people are writing "We are all Chileans."

Here's part of the human miracle: the rescue started with a rescuer, Manuel González, going down into the mine. All the miners have been rescued, but González and five other rescuers, Roberto Ríos, Patricio Robledo, Jorge Bustamante, Patricio Sepúlveda and Pedro Martinez, also went down into the mine and, as I write this, are waiting their turn to come back out. Scientists say that altruism is in our genes, but still it's amazing and reassuring to see it.

Security update for Bing toolbar?

2010-10-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

Windows Update is offering an important "Update for Microsoft Silverlight (KB2416427)" and says it "improves security, reliability, accessibility support, startup performance, etc." There's a helpful link to find out more information which takes you to the cited KB2416427 article.

But the article merely says "This update fixes an incompatibility issue between Microsoft Silverlight 4 GDR 1 (4.0.50826.0) and earlier versions of the Bing Toolbar." I didn't even know there was a Bing Toolbar.

But, really, don't the people at Microsoft talk to each other? Is the KB article just woefully inadequate or is Windows Update lying? Either alternative still undermines confidence in Microsoft security updates.

The way of testing

2010-07-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

Even if you're not a software developer, you know what a software bug is. If you've ever wondered why those bugs made it into the finished product, here's a blog post that can tell you how they could have avoided them. And if you are a software developer, then here's some good advice.

Testivus, Testability and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Somewhat ironically, the blog post was originally published with the title Dr. Jekill and Mr. Hide, which proves that editing of blog posts is as important as testing of code.

While overall, I think this has some good advice, I strongly disagree with one part: The maxim "Think of the code and test as one" is a path to disaster. This leads to people doing things like sharing code between production code and test code and writing the same bugs into the tests that the production code has. Yes, tests themselves can have bugs.

Here's some advice that I think is better:

Think of code and test as two sides of a coin

You can't have a coin with just one side.
When writing the code, think of the test.
When writing the test, think of the code.

A coin with two heads is designed to cheat.
Don't copy from the code to the test.
Don't copy from the test to the code.

New controls in Google Talk

2010-03-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

Check out the Google "Talkabout" blog for info about the new controls in Google Talk!

Bowl Playoff Championship Series

2010-01-07T00:46:00.000-08:00

Apropos of today's BCS "championship" game, check out my guest post on PlayoffPac.com (UPDATE: PlayoffPac is now offline and I've reproduced the original post below the break):

Imagine that you were given the task of designing a tournament for more than 100 teams. The tournament should provide each team with a dozen or more competitive games and ultimately produce a champion by pitting the best two teams against each other. The obvious choice is a pool-play tournament followed by a championship bracket. If only we could do this for college football.

The full proposal is at http://playoffs.vroospeak.com.

Guest Blog: The Bowl Playoff Championship Series Proposal
Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Bruce Leban (Guest Author)

This post is part of an ongoing series that allows guest writers to highlight their playoff proposals. This post was written for PlayoffPAC.com by Bruce Leban, creator of the Bowl Playoff Championship Series proposal.

Imagine that you were given the task of designing a tournament for more than 100 teams. The tournament should provide each team with a dozen or more competitive games and ultimately produce a champion by pitting the best two teams against each other. The obvious choice is a pool-play tournament followed by a championship bracket. If only we could do this for college football.

In fact, we've already got most of this. Each league or division works exactly like a pool. And at the end of each season, we have some championship and bowl games. What's missing is the connection between the two. Instead, the current system asks judges and computer programs to pick two teams to play each other for the championship, even though the system is very likely to produce multiple legitimate contenders.

The Bowl Playoff Championship Series—a system that I’ve proposed—would choose the national champion using head-to-head play among the best teams in a four-round bracket, without using polls or computer rankings. The season would be the same length as it is now and all teams that play bowl games now would still play in those bowl games. Here's a synopsis:

The regular season would function as the pool-play round, with the winners of league championship games automatically advancing to the quarterfinals.
Since not all leagues have championship games, the remaining quarterfinal teams would be selected based on win-loss record and tie-breakers.
Quarterfinal games would be played before the bowl games.
Two bowl games host the semifinals.

The national championship game would be played after all the other bowl games.

How is it possible that we can add playoffs without making the season longer? The secret is making the season shorter instead. For conferences with a championship game, each team would schedule one less game than it does now. That would enable scheduling the league championship games one week earlier, and the schedule would work out with the championship game played at the same time it is now.

But if teams failed to make the championship game, they wouldn't get cheated out of a game. Instead, we would get something better. We would match up conferences and each team would play a correspondingly ranked team from another conference. Take the Big 12 North as an example. The champion, of course, would play the Big 12 South champion, with the winner of that game advancing to the quarterfinals. The remaining Big 12 North teams would play some other conference, for example, the ACC Atlantic, with #2 vs. #2, #3 vs. #3, etc. Ever wondered whether the Big 12 or the ACC is a stronger conference? Now you can find out!

Under the Bowl Playoff Championship Series, bowl games would be played after the inter-conference games and the quarterfinals. Teams that lose in the quarterfinals would go on to play a bowl game. And after all the bowl games, the winners of the semifinal bowls would play each other for the national championship.

The Bowl Playoff Championship Series would add a dramatic finish to the college football season. For more details, read the full proposal at http://playoffs.vroospeak.com.

Sarah Palin vs. Newsweek vs. the flag

2009-11-26T19:51:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin denounced this Newsweek cover as "out-of-context" and "sexist." Out of context because the photo was originally taken for Runner's World and sexist because Newsweek wouldn't have used a photo of Obama like that on its cover (maybe not, but the Washingtonian would).

Newsweek defended itself saying they chose "the most interesting image." I think it was no coincidence that they chose a photo of Palin in a "running suit" given the speculation of whether or not she will run in 2012.

But what really strikes me about the photo is Palin disrespecting the US flag. I guess she's glad that there are no penalties for violating the US Flag Code. Darn that activist Supreme Court putting the First Amendment above the flag.

Meep that frindle!

2009-11-13T23:53:00.000-08:00

The principal of Danvers (Massachusetts) High School has a discipline problem. According to the Salem News, the principal responded by banning the students from using the word "meep."

Meep? Yes, meep.

Clearly something's wrong when students use of a nonsense word can be seen as so disruptive that the word has to be banned. It reminds me of the book Frindle by Andrew Clements. The back cover of the book asks "Is Nick Allen a troublemaker?" because he decides that pens should be called "frindles."

I won't spoil the story, but I think it would be a good idea if everyone at Danvers High read the book.

I note that this news report came on the same day as Sesame Street's 40th anniversary? Just a coincidence? I think not.

Unlinked links

2009-11-06T21:51:00.001-08:00

A little while ago, I wrote about web sites that have missing links and how that's breaking the web. There's another problem that might be even worse, nofollow links, exemplified by Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is without a doubt a cultural phenomenon. I frequently link to it in my blog posts. I suppose I could link to Encarta but in case you hadn't noticed, it's gone :-(. I haven't been linking to Encyclopædia Britannica because I just provide the links for background material not because you need to go read an encyclopedia to follow along, and most people don't have a Brittanica subscription. (However, I've just learned that you don't need a subscription to read linked articles, so I might be linking more to Britannica in the future.)

Anyway, since many people link to Wikipedia for the same reason I do, it's not surprising that Wikipedia pages often show up at the top of search results. That's just the way the web works.

Except when it doesn't. Wikipedia marks every link with a "nofollow" attribute instructing search engines that they should not follow the links. That's telling the search engines: "please notice who links to us but please ignore who we link to." When I link to Wikipedia, their ranking on the web goes up as they get some of my link juice. When they link to me with a nofollow attribute, they don't share the juice. This is a classic case of applying a big hammer to a small problem and breaking other things in the process.

You might wonder how this could happen on Wikipedia, which is all about sharing information and consensus, etc. etc. If you read the policy article, you'll see that the change was instituted unilaterally at the request of Jimbo Wales, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, despite consensus from Wikipedians that this was not the right solution. In case you have doubts, Wikipedia is not a democracy. But I digress.

In order to understand what the right solution is, first we have to understand the problem. The problem is spam links, links added to Wikipedia (and other sites) in order to push the spammers' pages up in search engine rankings. A proper solution would make that infeasible. So all that's necessary is to apply the nofollow attribute for some length of time after the link is added. This gives time for the link to be removed by Wikipedia editors or for the spammer's website to be shut down, rendering the link moot. Obviously, there can be refinement to this idea, but the general concept is sound.

So, c'mon Wikipedia (that is, Jimbo), it's time to start following along with the rest of the web.

A non-partison election fable

2009-11-01T00:18:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Washington State had a blanket primary where voters could vote for anyone they wanted to in any party and the candidates receiving the most votes in each major party advanced to the general election.

The major parties challenged the system because they didn't want non-members choosing their candidates for them. Apparently, they were under some delusion that no logical person could ever honestly support a Republican for one office and a Democrat for another office.

The result: after lots of legal wrangling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court not once but twice, the parties won and lost. They succeeded in eliminating the blanket primary and voters replaced it with a "top two" primary, where the two candidates receiving the most votes advance to the general election. Of course, the two big parties are still upset about this because there's no guarantee that a candidate from each party will advance. Parties can, of course, be involved in recruiting candidates and endorsing and supporting them but not choosing who gets on the ballot.

Now here's where it gets silly: in retaliation for the parties still fighting the top two primary, voters in King County went one step further, making all elections "non-partisan." The truth is that elections are inherently political, and pretending that political parties are irrelevant is a sham. It's unreasonable to think that all candidates fit neatly into one of two boxes and all this does is keep the voters in the dark. In fact, the Seattle Times reports that in next week's race for King County Executive, the campaign contributions between the two candidates are divided overwhelmingly on party lines.

While writing this post, I stumbled across More Party Animals, "a lighthearted kick-start toward change in this country," founded by two guys who think we should have more diversity in our political spectrum. See the illustration above. Of course, in King County, the animals would all need disguises so no one would be able to identify them on the ballot.

UPDATE: Read Joni Balter's post-election column on partisanship in the King County Executive race.

Backup your life

2009-10-15T00:27:00.000-07:00

The recent news about Sidekick users losing all of their data serves as a sharp reminder of the value of backups. Lots of people are wondering whose fault it was, T-Mobile or Microsoft, sabotage or cloud computing in general. And there are now indications, that T-Mobile and Microsoft may be able to recover some of the data after all. I hope playing the blame game doesn't make people ignore the reminder.

It could be worse: In China, after the loss of a personal file (Dang'an), and the records of achievements it includes, it's as if those accomplishments never happened. Imagine losing not just the phone numbers of all your college friends, but your college degree and your high school diploma too.

So, now that you're paying attention, some advice you've probably heard before:

For data on your PC, back it up offsite, either using an online backup service or by burning CDs or DVDs and storing them somewhere else.
For data in the cloud, back it up on your PC or burn CDs or DVDs. Some companies, like Google, make it easy to get your data out. If the service you use doesn't make it easy, then let them know how important it is.

Eat your own dogfood

2009-10-09T23:17:00.000-07:00

In the tech industry, when we say people eat their own dog food, it means they use their own products. It's funny that we have a special name for it because it seems pretty obvious: software developers should use their own software, cooks should eat the food they make, and auto companies should drive their own cars. It just makes sense.

I recently rented a Chevy Malibu, and discovered it has a stunningly bad design flaw. Take a look at the picture here and see if you can spot it.

The armrests for the front seats are split in two pieces: one part on the door and one part on the B-pillar (the post behind the front doors). The part on the B-pillar has a corner that jabbed me every time I got into the car.

The interesting thing about this photo from the Chevrolet web site is that the flaw is plainly visible. My guess is that the photographer pushed the seat all the way back to make the car look as roomy as possible. And apparently none of Chevy's test drivers did that. Or if they did, they didn't mind getting jabbed. And that's too bad, because other than this fundamental flaw, the Malibu seemed like a nice car.

Missing links

2009-10-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed a new trend for some web sites: missing links. Here's an example from the article ‘Real Buzz’ welcomes Buzz Lightyear back as posted on MSNBC.

Seriously, though, Fincke said, Buzz Lightyear's flight represented an important education tool. On Friday, NASA launched a contest for children to design a mission patch for Buzz Lightyear; the winner will get a Kennedy Space Center tour and a trip to — where else? — Walt Disney World.

Did you notice the prominent link to the Kennedy Space Center tour? Gotcha. That's an ad. One of those annoying ads that pops up a floating window when you move the mouse over it and is hard to dismiss. What about the link you were looking for, to the NASA page on the contest? You won't find that here.

This breaks the web in two ways. The first is that if ads are disguised as links, then people will start avoiding the links. Tricking people into seeing your ads might also make people avoid your web site.

The second problem is that the web works because of links. Search engines use the link structure to "crawl" the web and find pages. Without links, the web is a bunch of disconnected dead ends. No links = no structure. No structure = no search. No search = no web

I should point out that you shouldn't blame Marcia Dunn, the author of the article or the Associated Press. The link you're looking for <http://www.nasa.gov/buzzoniss> was in the original article. MSNBC just chose to leave it out. And while this example is picking on MSNBC, the truth is that lots of other sites are breaking the web too.

P.S. Can't wait to see what kids come up with for Buzz Lightyear's mission patch.

Death by fire

2009-09-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

David Grann's article "Trial by Fire" in The New Yorker bears the subtitle "Did Texas execute an innocent man?" It's a chilling story. After you read it, consider these numbers:

1,173 = people executed in the United States since 1976.
439 = people executed in Texas since 1976.
242 = people freed from death row after being exonerated by DNA evidence proving they were wrongly convicted.
3,297 = people currently on death row.

In other words, in the United States:

five people executed = one person exonerated.
five people executed = two people executed in Texas.

Given that, the odds that Texas hasn't executed an innocent person seem pretty low.

Even all of that aside, if you're a get-tough, don't-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way, fiscal conservative there's one statistic in Grann's article that should turn you against the death penalty: it costs as much to execute someone as to keep them in prison for 120 years.**

Want to learn more? Check out the Innocence Project and the Death Penalty Information Center.

** UPDATE: Most of the increased cost is legal and trial costs. Check out this article on costs of the death penalty from the Death Penalty Information Center.

And one damning statistic from that article: defendants in federal capital cases with less than $320,000 in terms of representation costs had more than double the chance of receiving a death sentence at trial compared to those whose representation costs were higher than $320,000.

Try, try again

2009-07-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

I hate software that's tries to pull one over on me. Microsoft Update (aka Windows Update) just did that to me. I prefer to choose which updates get installed because I don't like having to restart my computer when I don't want to.

Microsoft thinks that installing Internet Explorer 8 is "important." I don't think it is. I usually use Chrome or . When I do have to use IE, I'd rather use the version I'm more familiar with. And I'd rather wait until it's clearly better and more stable than IE7.

So today I selected the updates I wanted and unchecked IE8 again. The updates failed because my network connection flaked out. I fixed that and clicked the convenient "Try Again" button. Hmm. Why is there one more update being downloaded? Answer: because Microsoft decided to throw IE8 back into the set of updates to install.

Thanks, but no thanks. While some would see this as a deliberate attempt to trick me into installing IE8, I know that one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

In other words, Microsoft, try again.

P.S. While I wrote this I was surprised to discover that http://www.microsoftupdate.com linked to http://www.bing.com/search?q=microsoft%20update&form=MSSRPD. Guess that's one way to pump up the stats. But wouldn't it have been better to link to the right place: http://update.microsoft.com/?

Getting down to Earth

2009-07-20T00:05:00.000-07:00

On the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, there's something humbling about the big news from space being the malfunctioning toilet.

When I think of space, there's one specific image that comes to mind. I used to have this picture on the wall of my windowless office so I could see the outside world. I always found that looking at that picture put whatever small problems I might have had in perspective.

I hope that the astronauts on the space station struggling with the plumbing are enjoying the view outside their window.