July 2009 Archives

Please compare and contrast these two articles which appeared today in the Chicago Tribune:

Group Says Hot Dogs Should Carry A Warning Label

Lettuce Recalled Due To Salmonella

As a footnote, I would like to mention that many vegetables, such as celery, spinach, and kale, contain a significant amount of nitrates, which is converted by bacteria in our mouths to nitrites. This is why many organic hot dogs contain celery juice extract and bacterial cultures to convert the nitrate in the celery juice to nitrite. This allows them to be packaged "nitrite free" despite the fact that they do contain nitrite, just not as an explicit additive. Yes, this annoys me to no end.

In many urban areas, there unfortunately exist entire neighborhoods without any access to fresh produce. These areas are usually only served by fast food establishments and convenience stores. Citing this inequity, WalMart has decided to hold a "farmers" market in Chicago's Chatham neighborhood -- which just happens to be the exact site of where they would like to put their second store in Chicago. According to the article, WalMart will "feature" the produce vendors they use for their stores. I know that even Sysco has started using local vendors as an option for their customers, but I somewhat doubt we will see Nichols Farm rolling into Chatham for this. More likely than not, it will look more like the stacks and stacks of random flats one can see at the Maxwell Street Market on Sundays. I think that may be stretching the definition of "farmers market" a bit far.

While I do support access to fresh produce and think providing that access would be good, would WalMart moving into the neighborhood improve the neighborhood overall? Would it displace local businesses and jobs, whatever they may be, as the men from Bentonville have a tendency to do? I can't really say. I've never been to Chatham, nor will I probably ever be. All I know is it feels weird when Wal-Mart tries to portray themselves as the good guy.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball points out that his website is not free. It is free to read the website, but he charges advertisers and sponsors to be associated with the site. So the question is not whether to charge, but who.

This is something the traditional news media has had a hard time figuring out. Traditionally, the newspapers would charge both the advertiser and the reader -- although there are also a number of newspapers which are free to the reader and completely supported by the advertisers, such as the Chicago Reader. Many traditional publications have struggled to make their online presence profitable and some are probably getting further from the black. Case in point, Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, predicts "that 'almost all' new organizations will be charging for online content within a year." Again, Gruber has an interesting exposition concerning this pricing model of publishing online. It is like this guy does this for a living. Oh wait...

In any event, it will take time to persuade users to pay for something as massless as news online. At least with a physical newspaper the user feels they receive something of inherent worth -- it has a physical presence, a physical weight. Online news just does not have the gravity, in many ways.

Or how Google can offer so many products for "free".

There has been much published about Google in the recent weeks, particularly concerning its supposed "death blow" to Microsoft with their press release (actually a blog post, because this is Google after all) stating they are developing an operating system for netbooks which may be released as soon as the second half of 2010. I'll probably expound upon why I don't think this is a real game changer in a later post (preview: come on, it is just linux with a browser running on a small, underpowered notebook), but the announcement did make me think more about how Google funds all of these seemingly free projects.

Google states that 97% of their revenue in 2008 was generated from selling advertising. On the surface, this is where the dollars are coming in to keep the lights on, keep the servers running, and fund all of the new research. These ads appear on screen in many Google products and on many other websites which subscribe to Google's ad network. Now, do not get me wrong, I am not saying these ads are a bad thing. With the exception of The Deck ad network, Google's ads are probably the most innocuous ads on the web, usually just encompassing a list of text ads on the side of the screen. These tiny ads support many online services by generating money for the site whenever someone clicks on them, but there is also a reason they are so effective.

Google is able to target what ads are being displayed on a page by the content of the page. For instance, if I search for "how to make my lawn green", I'll probably get a an ad for a lawn care company. Or I may get an ad for environmentally friendly fertilizer. Now here is where it gets interesting, not only is Google looking at what I am searching, but they can also draw a profile on me from searches I have previously done or sites I have visited to better target the ads. I may get different ads if I had previously searched for "green projects" versus if I had searched for "home services". Now, let's add on top of this data that Google also has at its disposal from my gmail account, calendar, and RSS feeds. We voluntarily give Google (virtual) mountains of data in exchange for free services.

This isn't a new concept and isn't entirely the domain of Google. Facebook and MySpace also exchange services for personal data and trends. Your local grocery chain probably has a loyalty program -- that little swipe card -- that allows them to track what you buy in exchange for some discounted items. In and of themselves, these are not necessarily bad things (assuming these companies keep this data securely and confidentially). I am not trying to be a privacy nut here, but I think people should be aware of what they are giving up in exchange for these "free" services. You may not be paying out of your wallet for these services, but you are paying with your personal information and attention to some advertising.

The Atlantic's usually exemplary Food Channel posted today an entry concerning the humane treatment of crustaceans. While I am a supporter of the humane treatment (and slaughter) of livestock, this article seems a bit past the line for me.

First, the author is extrapolating from the fact that a hermit crab can sense an electrical field in a shell to a lobster suffering from being cooked in a boiling pot of water, despite the fact noted in an article he links to that the sensors in the lobster shut down at 25°C (or slightly above room temperature). The linked article also questions if crustaceans have the mental capacity to perceive pain, having six orders of magnitude less neurons in their brains than mammals. As Sheriff Truman said, "Where there's no sense, there's no feeling."

Second, while the author does describe a practical method for dispatching a lobster in your home kitchen, his other solutions to this inhumanity to crustaceans are the industrial crushing of the lobsters and packaging of the meat or to give your lobster their own electric chair, neither of which are proven to be any better for the crustacean if they were able to perceive pain. The author also alludes to an issue which is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, that the American carnivore tries to remove the fact from their mind that meat comes from animals (but I should dedicate that to a future essay here). In any case, while I have been known to brain a lobster before dumping it into a pot of boiling water this method would be utterly impractical for a crawfish boil.

Lastly, when issues like this come up and someone proposes the government get involved, I can't help but think we have bigger issues we need to tackle first. The economy has gone to shit, many people don't have access to basic medical care, some people that don't agree with us are trying to make nuclear weapons, we're in two wars, but let's deal with the possible crustacean torture first. While we're at it, let's look at banning foie gras again too.

Today is a unique day in the American calendar. Well, I guess you could make an argument that every day is unique, but this day has a certain characteristic which makes it notable. Today is the only day of the year without a major - professional or college - sporting event.

Please do correct me if I am wrong, but I can think of no other day than today - the day after the MLB All-Star Game - that traditionally has no major sporting event in the United States. You could argue that the day before the All-Star Game also does not have a proper game since the only sporting event is traditionally the Home Run Derby, but that still gives SportsCenter something to highlight. And every other sports league has another sport or two running consecutively, but baseball is the only game in town after the NBA Finals/Stanley Cup until the Hall of Fame Game in Canton, OH.

Yes, I am not counting the WNBA or MLS. If you are about to make an argument that they should count, please stop, even you know you are wasting our time.

I was waiting for something like this to come up with the unlocked/jailbroken iPhones. I remember reading an article a year or two ago about hacking Time Machine to do network backups before it was allowed, and the author basically saying "here is the theory behind what you have to do, so if you know what you are doing, go right ahead and proceed with caution." Basically saying, I've given you enough rope, it is up to you to hang yourself. In a follow up, he said he was inundated with requests for a step-by-step description of the hack, but as he stated in the original article and reiterated then, he wasn't going to do it because he did not want to be responsible for broken backups, which would happen frequently if there was a network hiccup during backup. Instead, he had published information which would allow someone to replicate his hack if they knew a little bit about how the system works, hoping that if they knew how the system works, they would also know why modifying the system would be a bad idea and what the consequences may be -- in this case, broken backups.

So let's go back to the "hacktivated" iPhones. Step-by-step descriptions of modifying your iPhone exist on the web and are relatively easy to find. What is not necessary to follow these instructions are an intimate knowledge of how the hack works and what it might be affecting. The story linked above illustrates that hacking your phone may have consequences beyond being able to run unauthorized programs or use it on a non-sanctioned network, it may break core functionality of the phone. If you hack your phone, please be responsible enough to own up to it and not blame someone else for breaking your phone. You broke your own phone when you hacked it.

Update: So the plot thickens. Now users who hacked their iPhones are getting each other's push notifications.

I've gone and back and forth on the usefulness of comments on a site. While some will tell you they increase the sense of community for the readers and foster lively debates, they must not have read the comments on 98% of the sites I personally frequent. There are some sites which do have rich communities of commenters which add depth and personal experience to the articles, but there are many, many more which end up being a sea of "first posts" and "fanboi" accusations.

By not enabling comments on this site, I am not trying to stifle responses to my missives, but encouraging them to be contained in other forums. Write your own blog pointing out my numerous factual errors and slippery slopes. Email me your spelling corrections and mischaracterizations of numbers. Twitter me your numerous death threats until admit the tacit usefulness of online office suites. Learn semaphore to signal me when I can't see the forest for the trees. However you want to relay the information to me, I welcome it. I will not, however, police a comment section, filtering out spam for online medications and great deals from deposed Nigerian leaders.

Of course, with no one reading this blog, there is also no one to comment on it.

I've gone back and forth about starting a blog. What audience am I writing for? Do I really expect anyone to read this? Do I care? Well, I guess I care enough to write this and don't care if anyone actually finds it. So I think I will make an effort to start a blog and update it semi-regularly (weekly/biweekly?), and this time I mean it.

The number of non-news stories in the past couple weeks have made me rethink starting a blog. I had started a blog for a previous project and enjoyed thinking about subjects to write about and drafting posts. As the project began to sputter on its own, posts stayed in draft form and failed to be posted. At the time, I had set up an alternate blog for subjects that I wanted to write about, but thought may be best left unassociated with the new business. Well, I guess the alternate blog will now be the one and only blog.

I expect the overall theme of the blog to be varied and scattershot, much like my own thoughts, but heavily skewed towards technology and food, much like my own thoughts. Sometimes, instead of knowing where you are going to end up, you just have to go. I'm not sure where this is going to take us, but I hope it is interesting along the way.