eparker

Sprint's Palm Pre plan is $384/year cheaper than AT&T's iPhone plan

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:16:00 +0000

The Palm Pre is better than the iPhone in many ways: it has a real keyboard, the OS supports multitasking beautifully, and it is significantly cheaper. Yes, with a contract the 8GB iPhone 3G is now only $99 compared to $199 for the Palm Pre, but the contract is where all the hidden costs are. Sprint's Palm Pre plan is $384/year cheaper than AT&T's iPhone plan with the same features. Here's the math:

Sprint Palm Pre base plan: $70/month. Features included:

450 anytime minutes
unlimited data
unlimited nights & weekend minutes starting at 7pm
unlimited text
voice guided GPS navigation by Telenav

(Source)

AT&T iPhone base plan: $70/month. Features included:

450 anytime minutes
unlimited data
5000 nights & weekend minutes starting at 9pm
...and that's all. Pretty bare bones, but may be enough for some people.

Extra features you may want:

$9 for Early Nights and Weekends (starting at 7pm)
$5 for iPhone Text Messaging 200
$20 for iPhone Text Messaging Unlimited

(Source)

An AT&T iPhone plan with almost all the features of the Sprint Palm Pre plan would therefore be $70 base + $9 early N&W + $20 unlimited sms = $99/month. That's $384/year more expensive than the Sprint Palm Pre plan. Note I said "almost": there is currently no iPhone app with voice guided GPS directions, and while tomtom did just announce an iPhone app that does exactly this, I suspect tomtom will use the new in-app iPhone payments system to charge a monthly fee to users of this app, so the price difference for true feature parity could be even higher.

For unlimited everything plans ("Simply Everything" is what Sprint calls it) the savings with Sprint become more pronounced: $100/month on Sprint vs. $150/month on AT&T, making the iPhone $600/year more expensive than the Pre.

Bottom line is that the Palm Pre is better than the iPhone and cheaper as well. The only problem is that it's sold out everywhere, so good luck finding one :)

Full disclosure: I've been a loyal Palm Treo user for 5 years, I have a friend that works at Palm, and I spent significant effort to get a Palm Pre the day it came out. The Palm Pre is better than the iPhone, and its story needs to be told.

Update: Appmodo has a very thorough comparison of the iPhone 3.0, the Palm Pre, the Android G2, and the Blackberry Storm. It's a lot of information, but it might help you decide which one you want if you're looking to get a new smartphone.

IE8 Image Size Bug Breaks Google Maps, Even in EmulateIE7 Mode

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:56:00 +0000

Google Maps currently does not work on IE8 Beta 1. Even in the "EmulateIE7" mode of IE8 it does not work completely: most of the UI works OK, but the pan/zoom controls and markers don't show up on the map. It appears this is because of a bug in IE8 (in both IE8 mode and EmulateIE7 mode) where the size of Image objects is multiplied by 100:

I hope this gets fixed in IE8 Beta 2 (due out in less than 2 weeks).

Running Man on Street View

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:22:00 +0000

Me, running furiously to keep up with the Street View van as it drove by Google:

Creepy scam site using my name and picture!

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:57:00 +0000

Ok, so they changed one letter in my name, but that just makes it even more creepy. http://www.maxern.us/ is the creepy scam site and on http://www.maxern.us/maxern-work.php there are a bunch of bogus testimonals about how MAXERN will help you make money, one of which is by "Eman Parker" of "Menlo Park, CA" who evidently looks exactly like me:

"I dont know much about website development but i wanted to make my website.maxern not only made website for me but also helped me in earning. Its really helpful."

I recognize the identities of a bunch of other people giving testimonies on that page. All have their name slightly mispelled. Looks like the pictures and names come from Orkut. Maybe it's time to delete my Orkut account.

Possible identity fraud thanks to Helio

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:58:00 +0000

I just got this letter in the mail from Helio:

We are writing to you because of a recent compromise in security. Helio has discovered that restricted data containing certain personal information was accessed through illegal means.

We regret to inform you that your name is among those that may have been compromised. While we are uncertain whether your personal information was actually obtained, we know that the individual(s) responsible sought and retrieved some personal information, including customer names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers (last four digits).

Helio has taken steps to secure this data by limiting access to this information, resetting passwords and implementing new procedures to protect this information. In addition, Helio has notified the appropriate law enforcement agencies and an investigation is being conducted.

About 1.5 years ago I bought a Helio phone to try out the built in GPS, but returned it within a month because it was nowhere near able to replace my Treo. I was a bit peeved at Helio because the sales guy ensured me that I could get all my money back if I returned it within a month, but in the end I still had to pay for 1 month of service. Now, thanks to this "compromise in security", I need to deal with the hassle of potential identity fraud - contacting credit bureaus, placing a fraud alert with them, being on alert myself for the next year, etc. Ugh. I hate Helio.

Vitamin D "substantially reduces all-cancer risk" - by 60%!

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 03:32:00 +0000

I've blogged before about the health importance of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, and new evidence keeps coming out. In June of this year the results of a great vitamin D study were published that concluded that "Improving calcium and vitamin D nutritional statussubstantially reduces all-cancer risk in postmenopausal women.^"The study is very high quality because it was a "4-y, population-based, double-blind, randomizedplacebo-controlled trial" with 1179 post menopausal women. The first key point is that the subjects that took vitamin D plus calcium had 60% less cancer (compared to those that took the placebo) over all 4 years (with a P value of 0.01, meaning the probability that this result was due to chance alone is 1%), and 80% less cancer "when the analysis was confined to cancers diagnosed after the first12 mo" (with a P value of less than 0.005 indicating even higher confidence). The second key point is that because the trial was an intervention trial (double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled) it shows that vitamin D (possibly plus calcium) was actually the cause of this reduction in cancer (as opposed to just being correlated with it, as most previous studies have shown). And by the way, a third group that was given just calcium did have reduced cancer rates too but the reduction in cancer was not as significant and the results were not as conclusive (due to a higher P value). I wish the study had had a fourth group that took just vitamin D - I bet this would have shown that vitamin D alone prevents cancer significantly.

If you want to read something less technical than the actual study then I recommend an article at theglobeandmail.com that describes the study like this: "A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error." It's also got a bunch of great background on vitamin D and the increasing awareness of it in the medical industry as something of a wonder drug that prevents diseases of all kinds.

Another recent study suggests that vitamin D is likely safe up to at least 40,000 IU per day, and remember that it is extremely cheap (~$10 for a years supply), so take more vitamin D! I've been taking over 4000 IU per day for at least 6 months, and my dad is up to 7500 IU per day now :)

Facebook poll: What mapping site do you use?

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 06:56:00 +0000

I just ran a poll on facebook to see which mapping site people use. Mostly I was curious about facebook polls, but the market research is also useful to me as I work on google maps. I was impressed by how fast the responses came in (182 in ~20 minutes), and it was fun to watch them in real time, though at $0.25 per response it cost a pretty penny. Maybe I can expense it :) The results were a bit surprising to me, but maybe not given the demographic (facebook users on facebook at midnight). Anyways, click through to see the detailed results with breakdowns by age, gender etc.

Rants:

Why is blogger's image upload so slow tonight and why does the image come out grainy even when I select large size?
I wish the preview button on blogger's compose page showed me what the post will look like on my blog's frontpage (currently the preview doesn't look at all like it does once I post it because the width is different).
Facebook should make it easier for me to share my polls with my friends.
I wish facebook polls showed me a geographic breakdown of the users that responded.
I would also like to be able to control the time range over which the poll will be shown so I don't just get facebook users at midnight.
Make the polls app easier to find on facebook. I want to be able to search for it! Currently the only way to get to it is through a little link at the bottom of the page.
I wish facebook allowed poll results to be viewed without logging in.
Why does it take so long for facebook to import this post as a note? I'm tempted to just write the note in facebook instead of on blogger so it will be distributed faster on facebook, but then the note would only be accessible to facebook users. I wish facebook was more open in cases like this. Photos can be viewed without logging in (if the user who uploaded an album sends you the right link), why not notes?
Why did gmail mark this post as spam?!?! I have a google groups email list I set up to distribute my blog posts to people (like my parents) that prefer to read them via email than via a blog reader or the web. I myself am also subscribed to this list but the message it sent to me was marked as spam :( C'mon, I'm using Google's Blogger to send a message through Google Groups to my Google Mail account, and it gets marked as spam. Sigh.

Update:

Another rant: Turns out that facebook doesn't allow users to see polls that others have created :( Isn't the whole point of facebook to make it easy to share things like this?!? Anways, I've taken a screenshot of the poll page and changed the links above to point to that screenshot instead of facebook so others can see it.

Draggable Driving Directions!

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:58:00 +0000

We just launched this really cool new feature on Google Maps: draggable driving directions! I didn't help develop this feature, but I did get to act in a video promoting this feature:

Google Maps: Draggable Driving Directions

The video was a lot of fun to make, though personally I think we should have made it much cheesier :) Also, I smile way too much in the video, probably because I'm used plastering a big smile on my face when doing a dance performance.

Anyways, this is one of the coolest features we've ever launched on Google Maps - I think we're the first mapping site to support this feature - and it's also quite useful. So check it out!

Google Maps Street View!

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:45:00 +0000

We (the Google Maps team, of which I am a member) just launched Street View! This new feature allows you to see various cities as they would look from the ground, all from within Google Maps. Basically we drove a car around the streets of various cities in the US, taking pictures with a panoramic camera, and now we display them for our users on Google Maps. In my opinion, this is insanely cool :)

I am particularly proud of this new feature since I was part of the mini engineering team (within the larger Google Maps team) that helped launch it. As an easter egg, we had taking panorama-picture-taking-car take a picture of everyone involved in the Street View feature so we could show it on Google Maps:

Google Maps Street View team picture

I'm the guy in the center back of the above picture.

Anyways, try it out and let me know what you think!

Vitamin D: The Sunshine Vitamin

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:25:00 +0000

Sunlight is bad for you, right? Wrong! Sunlight can actually be very good for your health, and the darker your skin the more of it you need.

What makes sunlight good for your health is Vitamin D. When your skin is exposed to the UV light found in sunlight it produces Vitamin D, and there is mounting evidence that Vitamin D helps prevent many health problems, including various forms of cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, and even common colds. Too much UV light can also increase the risk of skin cancer, which is why sunlight gets such a bad rap. So if you do decide to get more sun to get more Vitamin D, don't overdo it and burn yourself. For light skinned people, 20 minutes a day in the sun is more than enough to get all the Vitamin D you need. One major caveat is that sunlight only causes your skin to produce Vitamin D when the sun is above a certain angle, so during winter months the sun may never get high enough to cause your skin to produce Vitamin D at all if you live in say the United States or Europe.

For people like me that work in an office and sit in front of a computer all day, getting enough sun can be difficult. Another great way to get Vitamin D is by taking pills. Below is my dad's recommendation for Vitamin D pills - these are the ones that he and I take.

Here is the least expensive Vitamin D3 supplement I have yet seen. A year's supply for $11.25! One capsule per day (2400 IU), with food, should be about the right dose for most people. Those who have not been taking Vitamin D3 could take two capsules per day for a couple of weeks, then cut back to one capsule per day long term. Ideally, take an extra capsule once or twice per week to bring average intake to 3000 IU per day. This should achieve and maintain optimal Vitamin D blood levels for most people.

Healthy Origins, Vitamin D3, 2,400 IU, 360 Softgels
SRP: $24.99
Our Price: $11.25
http://www.iherb.com/store/ProductDetails.aspx?c=Herbs&pid=HOG-15308

Vitamin D is also added to various foods like milk and cereal, but usually not in high enough quantities to be of much use. For example, 1 glass of milk typically has about 100 IU of Vitamin D in it, so you would have to drink 30 glasses of milk to get the amount my dad recommends above!

I recently blogged about how resveratrol can help extend life span, but in terms of overall health I would say that Vitamin D is more important.

If you need any more convincing, watch this video of a presentation by Dr. Reinhold Vieth, a lead Vitamin D researcher. It is an hour long, but, to quote my dad, "Its the most complete coverage of Vitamin D I have yet seen, though recorded in 2005. Well worth watching! Send this to all your friends!" Hence this blog post :)

Update: A couple people have told me they are already taking the RDI ("recommended daily intake") of Vitamin D, or 400 IU per day. This is actually not enough: the 400 IU standard is way outdated, and as my dad noted above you probably need more like 3000+ IU per day. Watch the video for a thorough explanation of this.

Search. Send. Drive.

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:58:00 +0000

The Google Maps Send to Car feature just launched! It actually came online around 10am Tuesday morning PST, along with the BMW Assist page describing the feature. BMW then held a big press event at the International Motor Show in Geneva on Wednesday where they promoted this feature along with the launch of the new BMW 1 Series. On top of all this, BMW created this very polished video of the ideal German man using Send to Car on his way to a date with the ideal German woman:

Google Maps - Send to BMW

Given how slow moving car companies traditionally are, this feature is very cool. I am quite impressed with BMW. And to Google: keep the cool features coming!

Condoms in Iran, Gapminder

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:33:00 +0000

Iran produces a lot of condoms. Surprising? I thought so. When Iran built the only government supported condom factory in the middle east, Iran's birthrate plumeted.

If you want fast access to more fun world health statistics like this then follow these instructions:

1. Subscribe to the Gapminder Google Coop module.
2. Search Google for things like iran fertility, rwanda, brazil population, lebanon economy, china, etc.
3. Click the Gapminder result with the green background.

Enjoy :)

Blogging About Click Fraud

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:18:00 +0000

Matt Cutts wrote a great post about Click Fraud today in response to another great post about Click Fraud by Shuman Ghosemajumder yesterday. Matt Cutts works for Google and has been an informally blogging for Google for years on the topic of web search. Recently Shuman (also of Google) has started doing the same, but on the topic of click fraud.

This blend of personal and corporate blogging is emerging as a really powerful form of communication. I think what Matt and Shuman are doing is great, and I encourage them to keep it up!

Imagine a World

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:56:00 +0000

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
- Sam Harris, author (1967- )

A friend of mine, Andre, just shared this quote with me. I like it.

Need a ride to the airport?

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:20:00 +0000

Use PlanetTran! Or you could ask me :) But honestly, PlanetTran is probably a better choice.

PlanetTran is a taxi/limo service that drives Toyota Prii (that's the plural of Prius) to save you money and help the environment. Basically, PlanetTran's advantage over regular taxis is that it saves a ton on gas because the Prius is so much more efficient than standard taxis, and so it can charge you less and provide better service.

I discovered PlanetTran a couple years ago when I was traveling to Boston a lot, and I used it to get rides to and from the airport every time I flew there. The prices are the same or better than regular taxi services, the service was better (more like a limo service than a regular taxi!), and the drivers are usually cool to talk to because they are into saving the environment. They also use a bunch of cool tech to improve the experience: the car usually has a gps nav system so the driver doesn't have to memorize the road system, you can make reservations online (or by calling), they keep your credit card on file so you don't have to worry about cash, and they just announced that they have in car wifi!

I met the founder, Seth Riney, a couple times when he ended up as my driver (this was a couple years ago when the company was still really small and had only a couple cars...I don't know if he still drives these days). I got him to tell me a bit about how he founded the company and the business plan behind it. One thing that impressed me was that he said that the main hurdle in starting the company was all the bureaucratic hoops he had to jump through to start a new taxi company. Another thing I remember is that he had worked out this cool mathematical model of flights arriving to and from airports and he had based the business around this model in a way that cut costs even more. Here is a video of an interview of Seth that Clean Air - Cool Planet put together:

Interview of Seth Riney about PlanetTran

What prompted me to write this post today is that PlanetTran just announced that they have entered the bay area market. This is very exciting for me, because now we (myself and all you readers here in the bay area) can use PlanetTran whenever we go to and from the airport. Here's the email announcement I got:

Dear PlanetTraveler,
We are now serving the greater San Francisco Bay Area! We will begin transfers between points in the Bay Area and SFO, SJC, and OAK airports Monday morning Jan. 22, 2007. Pricing information is available on our homepage at http://www.planettran.com. Reservations can be made, as usual, at http://reservations.planettran.com.
Additionally, we would like to invite you to connect your wireless device to our in-vehicle Wifi access point next time you are traveling. Your device should be able to find 'PlanetTran-XX", the SSID of the access point in the vehicle. In addition to the internet access for passengers and drivers, the vehicles now report their position to a central server. Applications being developed by PlanetTran Labs are already making our service the most efficient and reliable in greater Boston, and the same will be true in San Francisco!
As always, we welcome feedback regarding service issues of all kinds. To that end, we have provided a Feedback link from your Reservations Control Panel. Feel free to offer suggestions, ideas, constructive criticism, compliments and support as you feel necessary!
Lastly, we plan to work w/ other organizations with similar sustainable vision in this New Year, and would like to communicate these relationships, along with news and accolades about PlanetTran, to you. However, we realize your privacy is important, so we are developing a separate list for items not directly related to our service. Please use the link below to opt-in to our News and Offers mailing list.
Stay tuned for additional service updates in 2007, as we have big plans for expansion to other markets this year.

Regards,
PlanetTran Management

So next time you need a ride to or from the airport, check these guys out. I highly recommend them!

Update (2007-01-28): I should check my facts better before blogging. A number of people have informed me that PlanetTran is very expensive compared to regular taxi services in the bay area. For example, the PlanetTran quote I get from SFO airport to Menlo Park, CA is $95. Chris, a friend of mine, says he can get a Town & Country towncar (a limo service I think) for $60 for the same trip:

dude.. planetTran is cool
but 94 to sjc and 99 to sfo
is super expensive
I can get you a town and country towncar one way for 60 bucks

Another friend of mine, Amit, says he can get a regular taxi for the same trip for $35 with a coupon. So PlanetTran is clearly not a cheap taxi service here in the bay area.

When I last used PlanetTran in Boston in April 2006, going from Logan airport to Mather House (a Harvard dorm), PlanetTran charged me $33, as you can see in this email reciept:

This message is to confirm that a transaction has been successfully processed by Planet Tran, LLC.

Please do not reply to this message. This is simply a courtesy confirmation for your records and security.

Order information is as follows:

Amount: $33.00

Description: 4/30/06, Mather House to logan

For Logan to Harvard, $33 is as good or better than the regular taxi fare. However, it appears that PlanetTran has raised their fares since then (quote obtained from planettran.com):

Estimated One-Way Fares between BOS and 10 Cowperthwaite St., Cambridge, MA 02138: $56

Or maybe I was getting some sort of discount and just wasn't aware of it.

In any case, PlanetTran is still a cool company, but not one I can recommend to my friends right now given how expensive their current fares are. Public transportation or mooching off friends still seem like the best alternatives.

Me, My Dad, and Resveratrol

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:03:00 +0000

What if you could take a single pill, once a day, that would let you live longer and healthier? Resveratrol may be this pill.

My dad is one of the leading experts on health and longevity in the world. I'm serious. He's not your standard scientist, but he has been experimenting with the health of his own body ever since he was in college in the 60s. For example, in college he was really tall and really skinny: 6'2" and 130lbs! Wanting to gain some weight, he decided to eat a pound of butter a day (that's two whole sticks of butter a day!). He knew that you had to eat a lot of calories to gain weight, he'd read that fat had twice as many calories per gram as carbs or protein, and he knew butter had a lot of fat in it, so he though why not? Well, surprisingly, he didn't gain any weight, but he got really sick and lethargic. Lesson learned! He's been experimenting like this since his twenties and as a result has learned a hell of a lot about his body.

He is constantly reading about the latest breakthroughs in health and longevity, and on a daily basis he tracks things like his weight, the amount of sleep he gets, the number of calories he eats, what foods he eats in what quantities, the amount of exercise he does, his blood sugar level (he pricks his finger 5-10 times per day to take his blood sugar!) all in an excel spreadsheet, and he's got data going back at least 10 years. He takes something like 100 pills a day, mostly minerals, vitamins, and other dietary supplements, and he exercises so much that he is in better shape than I am.

My dad's habits have worn off on me to some extent - I take about 10 pills a day and try to exercise regularly and eat healthily - but I don't go to the extreme he does. I just try to pick out the best of his habits and apply them in my own life. I also enjoy telling my friends about the really important and less well known things my dad discovers. In this post I'd like to highlight his most recent and promising discovery: Resveratrol.

Resveratrol is a substance found in red wine, and there is mounting evidence that it extends life span significantly (e.g. ~30%) in organisms from yeast all the way up through mice, and very likely even humans. This is a true breakthrough, because until resveratrol was discovered the only thing known to extend life span similarly in all organisms was calorie restriction, which is impractical and really hard to practice for us humans (we love eating too much :). And resveratrol doesn't just help you live longer, it improves your health while you live. Who doesn't want to be healthier and live longer? As my dad puts it, this substance could be the "magic pill", the proverbial "fountain of youth", that people have been searching for since the dawn of humanity. My dad has been taking it in various forms for many years, and I've been taking increasing doses of it over the past couple years.

Rather than go on any more about this myself, I'll just quote my dad from an email he just sent me:

Here is the best article on Sinclair's blockbuster study using resveratrol:

http://web.med.harvard.edu/sites/RELEASES/html/11_1Sinclair.html

Here is the most potent, least expensive supplement: 37.5 mg resveratrol per capsule

Nature's Way, Resveratrol Synergistic Formula, 60 Vcaps
Our Price: $10.00
http://www.iherb.com/store/ProductDetails.aspx?c=Herbs&pid=NWY-15611

No one knows the ideal dose for humans, but resveratrol has been studied for safety and is extremely safe. The studies with mice that produce such dramatic results use high doses. I am experimenting with higher doses, currently taking 6 to 8 capsules per day, 2 capsules with each of my 3 or 4 meals. Even the suggested use of the above product, 4 capsules per day, should produce good results. I was taking only 90 mg/day until a few days ago, using two other brands, and the effect on my glucose readings after meals was simple [sic] amazing.

Here is a recent video from the Dow Jones Online discussing the same research as the article my dad links to above:

Resveratrol Heightens Endurance In Mice, Study Shows

And here is a video of Charlie Rose interviewing David Sinclair, the leading researcher studying resveratrol:

Charlie Rose - Red Wine & Mice

Finally, here is a recent post to the "MoreLife" yahoo group that my dad just forwarded on to me with lots of discussion by experienced members of the group. It contains lots of interesting tidbits about how resveratrol may improve memory, enhance muscle building, and a discussion of why, if it is possible to extend life significantly, it has not been selected for through evolution.

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/morelife/message/1387

Live long and live well, and you may just live long enough to live forever :)

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:49:00 +0000

I just finished reading "Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book is hilarious, passionate, and absurd. Very similar in style to his more famous book, "100 Years of Solitude", which I started a couple months ago but never quite finished. This one is quite short - only about 110 pages - and is the story of a 90 year old man discovering love for the first time, the object of his love being a 14 year old girl. As I said, absurd. I quite enjoyed it.

The book was recommended and lent to me by my new cube mate, Sean Askay, and I in turn recommend it to you :)

Trust and Terrorism

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 08:56:00 +0000

I'm currently reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. It's about how the opening of traditionally closed societies (Eastern Europe, India, China), the internet, and various other forces have "flattened" the world by empowering individuals and making it possible for these individuals and companies of individuals to compete and collaborate with each other on a global scale. The result is amazing economic development, especially in formerly closed societies like India and China, which has raised the standard of living of billions of people around the world. You would probably agree with Friedman and I that this a good thing: as a reader of this blog, you are a part of this flat world and probably well aware of the benefits it provides you. We want this flattening to continue, and we want everybody to be a part of it.

There is a chapter near the end called "The Unflat World" in which he talks about a number of ways in which the flattening of the world and all the great economic development that comes with it could be reversed. I found his discussion of one of these ways particularly interesting. It's about the importance of trust in keeping "societies open, innovating, and flattening", and how terrorism attacks trust precisely in order to destroy this openness. The passage focuses on terrorism by Muslim extremists but could apply to terrorists of any ideology. One reason the passage interests me is my recent realization as to the importance of trust. Another is that I've developed a number of connections to the Middle East over the past couple years: my cousin Paige Austin who has become a reporter in Lebanon, a recent friend of mine Wael Salloum who is from Lebanon and has been teaching me about the history and culture of the Middle East, a coworker of mine Mohammed Elfeky from Egypt, and various other friends who are currently traveling in or are from the Middle East. Finally, I can see the way 9/11 has caused America to become a bit less trustful and open in things like travel becoming more difficult because of airport security measures and people hesitating a bit to speak up against our government for fear of being labeled a terrorist, and I worry that this will slow down America's ability embrace the flattening of the world.

Anyways, I've copied the beginning of the passage below. I didn't hand type the passage - thanks to Google I found a pdf of the book online :) If you actually want to read the whole book though, either buy the book or borrow it from someone (me for example), because it is a very long and you don't want to read it all on a computer screen or print out all 400 pages of it.

Too Frustrated

One of the unintended consequences of the flat world is that it puts different societies and cultures in much greater direct contact with one another. It connects people to people much faster than people and cultures can often prepare themselves. Some cultures thrive on the sudden opportunities for collaboration that this global intimacy makes possible. Others are threatened, frustrated, and even humiliated by this close contact, which, among other things, makes it very easy for people to see where they stand in the world vis-a-vis everyone else. All of this helps to explain the emergence of one of the most dangerous unflattening forces today-the suicide bombers of al-Qaeda and the other Islamist terror organizations, who are coming out of the Muslim world and Muslim communities in Europe.

The Arab-Muslim world is a vast, diverse civilization, encompassing over one billion people and stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and from Nigeria all the way to the suburbs of London. It is very dangerous to generalize about such a complex religious community, made up of so many different ethnicities and nationalities. But one need only look at the headlines in any day's newspaper to appreciate that a lot of anger and frustration seems to be bubbling over from the Muslim world in general and from the Arab-Muslim world in particular, where many young people seem to be agitated by a combination of issues. One of the most obvious is the festering Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and East Jerusalem-a grievance which has a powerful emotional hold on the Arab-Muslim imagination and has long soured relations with America and the West.

But this is not the only reason for the brewing anger in these communities. This anger also has to do with the frustration of Arabs and Muslims at having to live, in many, many cases, under authoritarian governments, which not only deprive their people of a voice in their own future, but have deprived tens of millions of young people in particular of opportunities to achieve their full potential through good jobs and modern schools. The fact that the flat world enables people to so easily compare their circumstances with others only sharpens their frustrations.

Some of these Arab-Muslim young men and women have chosen to emigrate in order to find opportunities in the West; others have chosen to suffer in silence at home, hoping for some kind of change. The most powerful journalistic experiences I have had since 9/11 have been my encounters in the Arab world with some of these young people. Because my column with my picture runs in Arabic in the leading pan-Arab newspaper, the London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, and because I often appear on Arab satellite-television news programs, many people in that part of the world know what I look like. I have been amazed by the number of young Arabs and Muslims-men and women-who have come up to me on the streets of Cairo or in the Arabian Gulf since 9/11, and said to me what one young man in Al-Azhar mosque did one Friday, after noon prayer: "You're Friedman, aren't you?"

I nodded yes.

"Keep writing what you're writing," he said. And what he meant was writing about the importance of bringing more freedom of thought, expression, and opportunity to the Arab-Muslim world, so its young people can realize their potential.

Unfortunately, though, these progressive young people are not the ones defining the relationship betweeen the Arab-Muslim community and the world at large today. Increasingly, that relationship is being dominated by, and defined by, religious militants and extremists, who give vent to the frustrations in that part of the world by simply lashing out. The question that I want to explore in this section is: What produced this violent Islamist fringe, and why has it found so much passive support in the Arab-Muslim world today-even though, I am convinced, the vast majority there do not share the violent agenda of these groups or their apocalyptic visions?

The question is relevant to a book about the flat world for a very simple reason: Should there be another attack on the United States of the magnitude of 9/11, or worse, walls would go up everywhere and the flattening of the world would be set back for a long, long time.

That, of course, is precisely what the Islamists want.

When Muslim radicals and fundamentalists look at the West, they see only the openness that makes us, in their eyes, decadent and promiscuous. They see only the openness that has produced Britney Spears and Janet Jackson. They do not see, and do not want to see, the openness- the freedom of thought and inquiry-that has made us powerful, the openness that has produced Bill Gates and Sally Ride. They deliberately define it all as decadence. Because if openness, women's empowerment, and freedom of thought and inquiry are the real sources of the West's economic strength, then the Arab-Muslim world would have to change. And the fundamentalists and extremists do not want to change.

To beat back the threat of openness, the Muslim extremists have, quite deliberately, chosen to attack the very thing that keeps open societies open, innovating, and flattening, and that is trust. When terrorists take instruments from our daily lives-the car, the airplane, the tennis shoe, the cell phone-and turn them into weapons of indiscriminate violence, they reduce trust. We trust when we park our car downtown in the morning that the car next to it is not going to blow up; we trust when we go to Disney World that the man in the Mickey Mouse outfit is not wearing a bomb-laden vest underneath; we trust when we get on the shuttle flight from Boston to New York that the foreign student seated next to us isn't going to blow up his tennis shoes. Without trust, there is no open society, because there are not enough police to patrol every opening in an open society. Without trust, there can also be no flat world, because it is trust that allows us to take down walls, remove barriers, and eliminate friction at borders. Trust is essential for a flat world, where you have supply chains involving ten, a hundred, or a thousand people, most of whom have never met face-to-face. The more open societies are exposed to indiscriminate terrorism, the more trust is removed, and the more open societies will erect walls and dig moats instead.

iPhone, RDF, and iHandcuffs

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 02:30:00 +0000

After watching Steve Job's keynote introducing the iPhone, I really want an iPhone. Why? I'd like to say it's the sleek design of the phone, or the cool features, but in the end it's really just the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. And then there's the the iHandcuffs that Apple's DRM imposes on your music. Ugh. And I really don't like the way Apple treads on other people's trademarks while furiously protecting their own trademarks - it seems so hypocritical.

Despite all this, I'll probably still end up buying an iPhone as soon as it comes out. Sigh.

I like free speed

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:47:00 +0000

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/real-time-quotes-for-free.html

Agency Affirms Human Influence on Climate - New York Times

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 23:42:00 +0000

Agency Affirms Human Influence on Climate - New York Times: "2006 was the warmest year for the 48 contiguous states since regular temperature records began in 1895"

Finally our government admits that humans are causing global warming.

Article: What Jobs told me on the iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:06:00 +0000

What Jobs told me on the iPhone | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology

Published a couple days before the announcement of the iPhone. Great insight into Jobs' personality and Apple history leading up to the iPhone. Written by David Sobotta, formerly the federal sales manager at Apple. His blog is at viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/.

Apple iPhone: Is this thing for real?!?!

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 19:05:00 +0000

The Apple iPhone, announced today at Macworld 2007, is years ahead of it's time. It's everything I ever wanted in a phone! Actually not quite, as it appears to be launching on Cingular first with EDGE , and EDGE just isn't as fast as Sprint and Verizon's EVDO. But it does have built in WiFi, so that might make up for it. And it has Google Maps! But sadly no built in GPS :( OK, so maybe it isn't perfect, but it looks like it will be far better than any other phone currently available. More specs and lots of beautiful pics over at at engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-apple-iphone/

3d Buildings in Google Earth

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:02:00 +0000

Google just released and update to Google Earth that enables a new layer of 3d buildings with textures. "Grey block" 3d buildings have been available in Google Earth for a while, and textured 3d buildings have been available for a couple months but were a pain to find (they required downloading the 3d Warehouse network link and then hunting around for the icons, clicking on the icon, selecting download, then waiting for the download to complete). Finally Google took the "Best of 3d Warehouse" and made it enabled by default in Google Earth. The results are exhilarating! Below is a movie demoing the 3d buildings in Denver, Colorado:

There are buildings in other cities around the world; some cities have more models than others. Denver seems to be the best so far, probably because it is the home of Sketchup, the company Google bought that makes 3d modeling software. Anyone can contribute models - as Google put it, "super models wanted" - so over time the world should get filled in with high quality models. The model of the Google campus in Mountain View, CA is especially high quality - it even includes the solar panels that Google is in the process of installing on the roofs and over the parking lots!

me, you(tube), wii, and treo

noreply@blogger.com (Evan) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:11:00 +0000

I've been watching a lot of online videos recently, and I often want to share videos with my friends. Email is a good way to share videos, and so is blogging, but both of these are impersonal - the best way to share a video with a friend is to watch it with that friend. Sitting in front of a computer with a friend is a great way to do this, but I want to be able to watch online videos with my friends anywhere, anytime...for example, on the tv in my living room or on my cell phone on the go. Well, in the past couple weeks both these things have become possible! Here are my recipes for each:

TV

a tv. duh. cost: $0 assuming you already have one.
a wii. best entertainment system ever. cost: $250, if you can get one.
wifi to connect your wii to the internet. cost: $0 assuming you already have it.
opera browser for wii. cost: $0 - it's free until june.

Total cost: $250.

Here's a youtube video someone made demonstrating this setup:

Tip: watch this video on your wii to really drive home the point.

CELL PHONE

a treo, preferably the 700p for it's high speed data. i've had a treo for 2.5 years and love it. cost: $400 with a 2 year plan from sprint.
a data plan to connect your treo to the internet. you'll want unlimited data (trust me). cost: $15/month with sprint's pcs vision pack.
kinoma 4ex, a kick-ass media player for palm os. cost: $25.

Total cost: $425 up front, $15/month.

Here's a video I made demonstrating this setup:

Like with the wii, you can watch this video on your treo.

Enjoy :)