JasonMorrison.net

UC Davis physics student Austin Sendek has proposed that the prefix “hella-” be used as a standard prefix for 10^27th power. If that sentence doesn’t make much sense to you, you’re in luck – there’s an explanation in Part 1 below. If you could parse the sentence but think it’s a rather lame joke, don’t make up your mind quite yet – I’ll lay out the surprising history of some units that might make you reconsider in Part 2.

Part 1: Giga-what, giga-who?

Most of the time you and I can get by with some pretty small numbers. I might buy a 5-pound bag of flour or ask you to lend me 20 dollars, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you work in science, engineering, economics, or other similar fields you inevitably need to count or measure things that are really, really big, and you don’t want your readers to spend all their time counting digits rather than appreciating your brilliant prose.

This is why we have the International System of Units (SI) and its prefixes. When Doc Brown is pouring pilfered plutonium into a DeLorean to send it to the future, rather than wrapping Marty’s head around 1,210,000,000 watts he can simply exclaim, “1.21 gigawatts!” When Commander Data is downloading MP3s, he can say he’s got 100 petabytes to fill, rather than boring Geordi with 100,000,000,000,000,000.

But what happens when you get past peta- (10^15), exa- (10^18), zetta- (10^21) and yotta (10^24)? Right now you’re stuck. At this point we’re in the range of some ridiculously big numbers, but the universe is ridiculously big. The mass of the Earth is about 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams, or 5,980 yottagrams – but who’s got time for thousands of yottagrams?

(more…)

Salon had an interesting post about some trouble Nestle ran into on their Facebook fan page. You can read more there, but here’s the gist: environmental groups are accusing Nestle of driving rainforest destruction through their purchase of palm oil. They buy palm oil from Indonesia, where enough forest is being cleared to threaten orangutans with extinction. Nestle has a fan page on Facebook, and orangutan lovers started posting complaints on it.

Shortly thereafter, the moderator posted:

To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic — they will be deleted.

If you know anything about the internet, then you know that this message was the worst possible thing Nestle could have posted. It’s the Streisand Effect – if you try to hide something on the internet, it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting, and you only draw more attention to it. This is so basic to the sociology of the web that if I were hiring someone to do social media work or PR, that would be the first question in the interview.

The Salon article catalogues some interesting exchanges between the Nestle admin and Facebook users, culminating in this announcement:

Nestle: This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise. And for being rude. We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude.

A trip to the fan page now shows nothing but altered logos and calls for boycott. The Salon piece concludes that the real shame of this whole exchange is that the admin acted like a human being, actually talked to people, and is probably in big trouble for it – and if not, Nestle will be less likely to do anything like this in the future, retreating to boring press releases and spokespeople.

I think the real lesson to be learned here is that when you show up to a conversation, you actually need to have something to say.

Nestle is trying to take advantage of the fact that there’s a lot of people out there who really like their milk chocolate, or really enjoy KitKat bars. They’re using social networking sites to encourage people to talk about chocolate and KitKat bars, remember how much they like them, and hopefully buy more. This all makes sense and is a lot more engaging and cost effective than TV ads and the like. But once you start people talking, you cannot control what they are going to say. That’s not how conversations work, even conversations attenuated into new formats like Facebook wall posts.

So no people are accusing you of hating cute orangutans, what do you do? You need to be able to say something:

• We didn’t know, this is what we’re doing to fix this.
• This isn’t true, here’s why.
• There’s no other suppliers, but here’s what we’re working on to substitute or work around the problem.

Hell, if you think you can get away with it without losing more customers, even saying “Who cares about monkeys, we gots to have our delicious sugary snacks!” is better than saying nothing or trying to edit the conversation in progress. Having some kind of ethics really matters here.

But if you can’t say any of these things… well, just shut everything down. Stop trying to build equity in your brand and concentrate on making the cheapest candy because your company obviously doesn’t understand the point of building a brand or cultivating passionate customers.

Normally I reserve this space for techie topics, feel free to skip this post if you’re not interested in personal blogging. Or skip to the end for two points about Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Three weeks ago I found out I had a time bomb in my gut. The timer on this metaphorical bomb wasn’t set to an exact hour, and there were no ominous red digits ticking down, but my viscera were rigged on a hair trigger. My gall bladder was filled with stones, and it was just a matter of time before they would be ejected, painfully squeezing down my bile duct. With luck they would jam their way through and into my duodenum, but some could back up into pancreas, causing pancreatitis, or create a blockage and infection, cholangitis.

(more…)

I’m a fan of Twitter – it can be really useful. But status update services and microblogging are relatively young technologies. Twitter is the frontrunner now, but it’s still possible that everything could go south really fast. Here are five people (or more accurately, types of people) who could destroy Twitter and what can be done to stop them.

The list is in no order, except I’ve saved the most dangerous for last.

1. Spammers

Twitter spam is growing, and my guess is it’s a profitable business to be in. Spammers are getting crazy refollow-rates with very little effort put into their fake profiles. Part of this is a technical problem, with Twitter playing catchup to the collective innovative power of the greediest jerks on the internet. The more difficult part is social – users’ trust barriers are too low. Either Twitter finds ways to deal with this, or people will start treating reply tweets, direct messages, and invites the same way they do unsolicited emails now. One of the reasons I stopped logging in to MySpace was a flurry of fake friend requests that followed every session. Twitter runs that risk, in addition to the risk of service degradation.

What can be done? The good news is that no communication medium can be considered successful until someone has tried to send you unsolicited marketing and scams over it. But the Twitter team needs to redouble their efforts and head off potential problems proactively. For example, there are lots and lots of apps built on top of Twitter’s API – and almost all of them ask for your username and password. How long until one of those apps is compromised, or worse scammers make password-phishing apps of their own? Twitter needs to implement strong API keys or something like OpenID.

2. Anyone who uses url shortening services.

It’s hard to fit both a witty observation and a url in 140 characters, especially given url inflation. Bit.ly, Tinyurl, and the like perform the valuable service of giving you more space. They also cloak the destination of almost all the links on Twitter and get everyone used to following links blindly. I’ve already had friends whose accounts were hacked in order to send out a tweet like: “Check out this hilarious video: http://tiny/innocuousgibberish”. The New York Times’ account has been hacked, among others. Twitter can work on improving security and removing spam, but the more everyone uses url shorteners the more we train our friends to click recklessly. I’m as guilty on this one as anyone.

What can be done? People post links to Twitter frequently enough that maybe it should be separate field with it’s own character limit. If that’s too much complication for the brilliantly simple interface, maybe url previews should be enforced. Clients can do this now, but to be safe it should be done by Twitter.

3. Pirates, ninjas, zombies, and mafia thugs

Ah, I remember logging into Facebook the day I got my first “robots vs. hobos vs. Chuck Norris vs. etc.” request. “Ha,” I thought, “that’s a somewhat entertaining way to extend an internet meme into a social networking site.” Little did I know the horror that was about to unfold.

In all seriousness, the “tag, you’re it” games and gratuitous survey apps didn’t ruin Facebook, but they did make everything a bit more tedious. Those apps still fit within the umbrella of social networking – they don’t work at all in Twitter’s use model. When I log in, I want to see, very quickly, what the people I’m interested in are doing or reading. I don’t want to weed through their halves of various games I’m not interested in.

What can be done? This one is up to us – just don’t do it. Twittering with a hashtag for an event, a theme, etc. is fun and useful to others. Sending around vampire bites is not.

4. Chinese government officials

Think periodic fail whale sightings is bad for Twitter’s reliability? China can (and does) just block the whole site, most recently in advance of the Tienanmen Square anniversary. Why does this matter? China is a huge market, and growing. The days where being big in the U.S. meant major marketshare on the whole web are running short. What’s worse countries with theoretically free speech like Australia are following the Chinese model, proposing national internet content control (i.e. censorship).

What can be done? Many American companies just give up. Even Google has had to bend to government pressure. This is not easy to remedy. Perhaps there’s a way to take advantage of the small byte size of tweets, decentralize serving, and wrap access with something like Tor to get it through the Great Firewall. Let’s hope there’s a grad student or genius hacker out there with the right idea and Twitter is smart enough to hire them.

And finally, the absolute worst, most pressing threat the Twitter’s survival is…

(drumroll….)

5. Your mom

Despite the allure of turning this into one big “your mom” joke, I am completely serious. What happens when your mom joins Twitter? Do you censor yourself? Take your tweets private? Delete off-color tweets from your recent past?

There’s no right answer. Just about any social software eventually runs into this dilemma where the very different ways you communicate personally, professionally, and publicly collide.

What can be done? Some of the problem might fade as the userbase of sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter ages. But that will take years, so what can Twitter do now? It might help to have better relationship management. You could at least put your friends in one group and family in another. But in general, this strikes me as the toughest problem of them all – I don’t think there are any real solutions for the general possibility of parental embarrassment, or all efforts of every teenager in the world has yet to reveal discover them.

Disagree? Any threats I missed? Please post in the comments below.

I’ve been known to do geeky things.  For one, I’ve been experimenting with putting parts of my life on the web live via Twitter.  For another, I’ve been going to a 30-hour science fiction movie marathon with friends for the past 14 years.

It’s time to merge the two together in a Twitter Experiment this weekend.  Starting on Friday, 7 p.m. EST I’ll be posting updates to Twitter about the movies, ridiculous sci-fi plot devices, funny cracks from the crowd, and the general movie marathon experience.

Now for some questions and answers:

Q:  How can I follow along?

A:  Follow me on Twitter and watch the snippets roll in.  Alternatively, if you’re connected to me on Facebook you can watch my status updates, it’s the same thing.

Q:  I’m going to be there, how can I participate?

Let me know in the comments below, we’ll make it a thing.

EDIT:  Use hashtag #marathon34 in any Tweets.

Q:  Why would anyone have even the slightest interest in this?

A:  The CWRU Science Fiction Marathon is really an excuse for a bunch of sarcastic people to shout insults and rejoinders at a movie screen.  It’s like a huge, live-action, sleep-deprived version of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Q:  No, I mean why would anyone have the slightest interest in you going to a movie marathon?

A:  Point taken, its not like I’m famous or anything (outside of being temporarily internet famous in Australia, of course).  Luckily many of my readers are friends, colleagues, and a bit geeky themselves. If you’re going to get a tiny-text-snippet tour through a science fiction marathon, though, I might as well be your guide – I have a fair knowledge of the genre, I used to be a movie reviewer, and I like to make sarcastic comments.

Q:  How is this possible?

A:  An iPhone, and WiFi or the regular data connection, that’s how.  I might also play around with my G1 phone with Android a bit.  If my connectivity fails for some reason, I reserve the right to basically give up and pretend I never even mentioned it.

–

One other thing I just can’t leave out of this post – when I mentioned this to my coworkers, they poked fun.  My coworkers at Google.  That’s right, I’m officially too geeky for Google.

This past year we moved away from most of my family and added a new leaf to the family tree.  This has inevitably turned my thoughts to family history.  As expected from a guy who let the internet vote for his baby’s name and Twittered the delivery, I’m not going to be happy typing up a plain old document and mailing it out to family members.

I want to start collating a family history and collecting stories, photos, and other artifacts and I want to do it with a web app so that I can share with family spread all around the country.  Though I don’t have time for any hard-core genealogical research right now I’d like to set up a good framework in case anyone else in family catches the bug and finds themselves hunched over microfiche at the local LDS church.

So two of my main concerns are usability and openness.  Openness means having complete access and ownership of the data (so Facebook family tree apps are out) and compatibility with standard genealogical file types.

It would also me nice if it were written in a language I know like PHP, Java, or even Python in case I get the urge to write plugins or change the interface.

I know of two systems that might fit the bill, PhpGedView and GeneoTree, but I’m hoping to get some suggestions and recommendations before I start installing lots of stuff on my web server.  Has anyone done a project along these lines, or played around with this kind of software?

Please leave any input in the comments below.

If you look to your right and down a little ways you’ll see a new widget on my blog – Google Friend Connect. If you’re a friend or regular reader feel free to click on the little “Join this site” button to connect to me.

So far it seems pretty similar to MyBlogLog and other services – if I get some time between baby feedings I’ll try to write up a comparison.  The most glaring advantage for Google Friend Connect is the huge, built-in userbase of GMail users, Picasa users, etc.  You can also sign in with a Yahoo ID or an OpenID, which is very cool.

Read more on the Google Blog.  You can add it to your site as well, it only took a minute or two.

Why add Friend Connect?  It lets you make your homepage a bit more like a social networking site.  Right now its a bit limited, but I think eventually we’ll all be able to own our Facebook-style identities outside of walled gardens like, well, Facebook.

When we were looking for hospitals and doctors offices for little Athena, wifi wasn’t really on the list so much as reputation, compatibility with our insurance, and other concerns.  In retrospect, though, thank goodness Stanford Hospital and Palo Alto Medical Foundation have wifi.

We live more than 2,000 miles from most of our family.  Not all of them could make the flight to California for the birth.  We also have too many friends around the country to possibly make all the phone calls we’d have liked to have made that night.  In addition, we had several thousand people all over the world wondering which name we would pick for our baby.

Because of internet connectivity, I was able to do a fair job of including all of them in the process:

1) With my iPhone, I was able to take and post photos during labor and delivery.  Photos of my mom’s new granddaughter were available for her, on Flickr, within minutes of birth:

I’m not sure I can properly express here how much it meant to her and the rest of our family to be able to see Athena so quickly.

2)  Using the Twitterific App on my iPhone was was able to post updates to Twitter throughout the whole labor.  This is a perfect example of what Twitter is good for.  Liveblogging while my wife endures the pains of childbirth would be ridiculously insensitive, but there were always minutes of downtime here and there to tap out a few words describing what’s going on.

3)  Using the Twitter App for Facebook, my updates showed up on my Facebook status as well.  This was a big help, since so many more friends and family use Facebook than Twitter.

A fourth option, which we didn’t use but might have had the labor been longer, was videoconferencing with Skype.  We’ve been using Skype to keep in touch with family for some time.  It is currently my grandmother’s favorite thing to do.  Since we’ve been back home Athena has become the star of many family video sessions.

One final thing I have to mention is YouTube – we certainly weren’t going to share the gooey miracle of life with the world in streaming video, but my wife followed the videos fo several other women during pregancy up to and including labor.  We don’t know a lot of other couples having kids right now, so that gave Ann a personal connection with their stories and helped her through some of the tougher times during the last 9 months.  She could see that other people were going through the same things she was and that was an important comfort.

The common theme here, which I think goes a long way toward explaining the growth of the internet as a whole, is communication.  Because of almost universal connectivity, we were able to turn a deep personal experience into a social experience as well.

We’re at the hospital, so hopefully I’ll have news soon.  If you weren’t on the email list from the baby name poll, or aren’t already connected to me on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll be posting updates as we get breaks:

http://twitter.com/iamjason

It’s pretty amazing how we’re able to keep in touch with everyone, all over the world.  How did people have babies before the Internet?

I played around a bit with Twitter a year or so ago, but between server hiccups and a lack of things to actually use it for, I didn’t really get into it. Now, though, I am starting to get my Twitter on. So the question is, why use twitter, especially since I gave up on it so easily a year ago?

1. Twitter fills a communication niche, one that we didn’t even know existed five years ago. It really does. There’s a whole spectrum of human communication, which can be organized from timely to timeless, from sparse to dense, from interpersonal to broadcast. Twitter falls into an interesting midpoint in that range, somewhere between instant messaging, leaving a note on the dry-erase board outside your dorm room, and heading down to the local hangout to see who’s around.

2. Twitter is a social app, so it displays classic network effects – the more people you know using it, the more valuable it is for you to use it. Working for Google and living in Silicon Valley I’ve met a lot of people over this past year who are devoted users. Twitter is good for everything from ad-hoc get-togethers to sharing in obsessive election night poll watching.

3. Twitter isn’t just an application, it’s a platform to build applications on top of. So there’s a number of apps which make Twittering more usable and effective.

• The Twitterific iPhone App makes it easy for me to send out updates from my phone. Which I have on me at all times.
• I’m using the Twitter Facebook app to update my status in two systems at the same time, meaning I’m more likely to make use of either.
• Twitturly collects urls that people are talking about in almost real-time, creating a sort of incidental social news site.

Feel free to follow my twitter updates me here. Got any cool Twitter apps not listed above? Let me know in the comments below.