Scott Kirsner has started a new blog, Inovation Economy, as the companion to his new Sunday column in the Boston Globe. I’ve always liked the way Scott intersects business and tech… (Scott has a useful disclosure statement.) [Tags: scott_kirsner business vc boston_globe]

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Now before health care folks stick a needle in you, they say, “You’ll feel a little pinch.” That’s a pretty accurate description, and especially helpful since the action that causes it doesn’t seem to be much like a pinch at all.

But, it wasn’t always a pinch. When I was a kid, they’d say something like, “This may hurt a little,” but they didn’t try to reframe the puncture as a pinch. I wonder how and when this recategorization of sensation occurred… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous needles categorization sensation]

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The Washington Post has posted a provocative animated graphic that shows a social network with the nodes mapped to obesity. The narrated animation shows the clustering of the obese and the non-obese over time.

The animation comes from the New England Journal of Medicine, but the WaPo’s brief explanation of it seems to take a leap. They say it “demonstrates how social networks influence weight gain.” Well, the animation could just as easily be demonstrating that people cluster according to body mass index, but I haven’t read the NEJM article. [Tags: obesity social_networks washington_post nejm]

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I posted at HuffingtonPost about why I think the YouTube debate was a bigger deal than much of the media is claiming.

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Tim Spalding at LibraryThing.com has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere…and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)

At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag ‘em up good. For example, “Freakonomics” has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He’s introduced “tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.

You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don’t have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.

And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I’d want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I’m the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.

LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It’s definitely a site to watch.

[Tags: tags folksonomy librarything tim_spalding everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Our daughter Leah brought back from Prague this very cool, hand-made, three-person chess board.

I haven’t tried playing it because, as a result of an ancestral genetic mutation, I am unable to visualize spatially-arrayed objects even when I am looking at them, much less three moves ahead. But it might be fun for you Normals.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t violate either of these two patents: 1 2. Of course, I also can’t figure out what the hell these patents are describing. [Tags: chess prague games]

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In 2008, Cliff Richard’s first hit, “Move It!,” will come out of copyright because the British government just refused to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 70 years after the artist dies.

Richard’s is up in arms about this. Instead, lets help Cliff Richard celebrate the ultimate success of his work: Fifty years later, it’s touched enough people that it matters that it’s moving into the public domain.

Congratulations, Cliff! You should be very proud that you have the opportunity to see something you made become something all culture now can rely on! [Tags: copyright copyleft cliff_richard ]

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According to New Scientist, Apple’s patented a DRM system that would prevent you from charging your device with anything except a licensed charger. The charger would be locked to your device. Yes, that’d keep a thief from charging your stolen laptop, but it would also keep you from plugging your gasping laptop into a friend’s power supply, and would give Apple yet more control over the aftermarket for its products. Because if there’s one thing users are demanding, it’s that Apple have yet more control over its products. (See Dan Lockton’s post. Thanks to Hanan for the link.) [Tags: drm apple]

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I’ve used each of the Apple machines pretty much when they came out. I’ve owned several, most recently a Powerbook. Yet the Mac has never stuck with me. Now, my black MacBook is bringing me joy. I use my big honking Windows desktop machine only when I have to.

What happened?

I’ve had what I think of as legitimate reasons to find the Mac unpleasant. I don’t think of Apple as a user-friendly company. The Mac’s insistence on sticking with interface idiocies like shipping with a one-button mouse and only allowing drag-sizing from the bottom right-hand corner, strike me as explicable only as arrogance. I prefer Microsoft’s willingness to run Windows on machines manufactured in an open market, although it does result in the chaos of drivers that is the bane of Windows’ existence. The lack of software for the Mac is an issue. And then there are my idiosyncratic reasons for sticking with Windows, including the tons of utilities programs I’ve written for myself and my need to run a version of Powerpoint that has full path animation, which Mac Powerpoint lacks.

Likewise, I’ve been unpersuaded by the Mac’s case against Windows. Windows XP (Microsoft’s failed to give me to a good reason to switch to Vista) is quite robust and stable. Even when a program crashes, it doesn’t pull down the entire operating system. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get viruses. The registry is an overly-complex solution to the complexity of modern software, but it rarely gets in your way, and being able to edit it (after making a back up, of course) actually gives you some additional control over your machine. The problems Mac users rag on Windows users about generally don’t hold against sufficiently sophisticated users. I have become a sufficiently sophisticated at Windows use. I’ve had to.

So, what’s changed my mind?

Some of it has nothing to do with the Mac. In particular, I’m coming off of a Thinkpad X40, an admirably light and small laptop, which has me enjoying the MB’s larger and wider screen. That’s helping a lot.

The open source movement has now created great software in enough categories that I don’t feel like I’m downgrading. Open Office (I’m using the NeoOffice flavor of it, which uses more of the Mac’s UI and skips X11, or at least makes it invisible) now feels as good as Word; the upgrade to the spell checker, for example, has helped. Thunderbird and Firefox work just fine on the MB. The utility programs, like the text editors and FTP programs, are great, and even tend to be prettier than their Windows’ counterparts. So, even though there is far less software available for the Mac, for me there’s enough, and enough is all I need. And, the same is true for the non-open source stuff. The one category that matters to me that the Mac loses at is games. But I still have my honking Windows desktop for that.

The ability to run Windows on the same MB is comforting, especially during the transition. I have a 10gb partition for Windows, leaving about 140gb for Mac. I find I’m only using the Windows partition for working in Powerpoint and for retrieving items I forgot to port over. And, Parallels, which lets you run Windows in a window on your Mac desktop, may not be rock solid, but it is way cool.

I do like knowing Unix is under the hood. It enables a range of tinkering that would require far deeper knowledge in Windows. (Windows API anyone?) Of course, tinkering is how people like me get in trouble.

OS X absolutely handles some core user functions better than Windows does. When I close the lid on my Thinkpad, I can never be entirely sure what state I’m going to find the machine in when I come back. It’s supposed to go into sleep mode, but it on occasion goes into either hibernation or total shutdown. And it takes way too long to come back, no matter what state it’s in. This is one of those things you’d think Microsoft and hardware manufacturers would have figured out by now. On the other hand, I can close my MB and be confident that when I open it, it’s going to blink its eyes once or twice and be fully awake. Likewise, my MB latches on to the strongest, open-est wifi signal without asking me to salute and sign some papers. Also, the Mac seems to be doing a better job of power management, although I’m not competent to judge this. (Hint: Turn on Parallels and watch your power drain, presumably as the Core 2 cpu #2 kicks in.)

Put it all together, and the MacBook feels great. It’s solid, it’s fast, the display is beautiful. Oh, I’ve had program crashes, and there’s UI stuff that seems thick-headed (how about letting me use just one finger to delete forward? Jeez!), but, well, it’s just a computer. And I’m enjoying it more than any computer since my original KayPro II.

Of course, it helped that I got it just before going on a working vacation when I could devote some serious relationship-bonding time with it. Employers ought to grant leaves of absence to users making the switch. The first couple of weeks are such an important bonding time. We ought to respect that. I hear the French give 14 days of paid leave.

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Orcinus on Bill O’Reilly’s latest abrasion of our ability to live together. We desperately need to know when to look at people at their best, and when – the rare occasion – we need to look for their worst.

BTW, when I first saw the bloggage about O’Reilly calling DailyKos a hate site, I thought for some weird reason Tim O’Reilly was doing this. Didn’t seem very likely, to put it mildly. But it does show who is the Top Dog O’Reilly in my little universe. [Tags: bill_oreilly dailykos politics ]

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