technology

→ April 10, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/10/21.

The Inside Game is now out in paperback! Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available, and you can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock as of Wednesday. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic, a draft notebook with some notes on the top of the draft, and a look at prospects from my top 100 who are currently on MLB rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest review for Paste covers the pickup-and-delivery train game Maglev Metro, from the designer of Suburbia and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I have some quibbles with the art choices but the underlying game is pretty great.

On this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show, I spoke to White Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito about his transformation as a pitcher, from reworking his delivery to developing one of the game’s best changeups. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about my second book, The Inside Game, in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association. For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last two weeks was Prof. Simukai Chigudu’s essay on growing up in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, the repressive, murderous, racist colonizer for whom Chigudu’s native Zimbabwe was once named, and who is still honored with a statue at Oxford.
Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic about Alex Berenson, the “pandemic’s wrongest man,” who wrote a very wrong book about cannabis and has now spent the last year being wrong about COVID-19 and, more recently, the vaccines against it. Berenson also bullies and harasses people on Twitter, name-searching himself and encouraging his followers to pile on.
“VC Lives Matter?” That quote from a venture capitalist trying to oust San Francisco’s reformer District Attorney is the most tone-deaf thing I’ve heard in some time. The story is really about a moneyed few trying to buy the government they want – the United States in miniature.
I’m not a huge fan of Brandi Carlile’s music, but this New York Times profile of her and partial review of her new memoir Broken Horses is excellent.
Delaware’s Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) features prominently in this article on how websites use deceptive techniques called “dark patterns” to fool users, as she has introduced legislation to crack down on the practice.
The Journal of the American Medical Association is embroiled in a scandal of its own making, as one of their podcast hosts dismissed the possibility that there might be racist doctors or racism within medicine, and they responded poorly to the backlash, too.
There’s a genocide going on in northern Ethiopia, led by the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed.
The NYPD has a “goon squad” manual that explains how police officers can violate citizens’ rights to freedom of assembly, according to an investigative report from the Intercept.
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced a new finding around the wobbliness of muons that appeared to be the death knell of the Standard Model – but another new paper might explain it within the Standard Model. Physics is fun!
The Anti-Defamation League has called for Fox to fire Tucker Carlson after he espoused the white supremacist dogma called the Great Replacement during his show on Thursday.
Dr. Peter Hotez writes that the anti-science movement is going global and thousands of people will die needlessly as a result.
And, shocker, white evangelical Americans are saying they won’t get vaccinated.
A gun in the house increases that someone living there will commit suicide – like 11-year-old Tyler Paxton did with his dad’s gun.
The economic impact of sporting events, like the MLB All-Star Game, is usually wildly overstated.
Prof. John Ioannidis had a significant, positive impact on the world of science in 2005 when he argued that most published research was wrong, as researchers only had to find statistical significance to be published, resulting in many false positives and conclusions that couldn’t be replicated. He has since become a COVID-19 denialist, and wrote an unhinged personal attack against two experts who dared question him, publishing it in the journal of which he was previously the editor in chief.
A bunch of right-wing grifters and pundits were tweeting at length about a Pakistani Muslim immigrant killed in a robbery by two Black teenagers, but Wajahat Ali explains why this was all done in bad faith.
A new neurological disease that resembles Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome (the prion disease that you could get from eating beef from ‘mad’ cows) has emerged in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, killing 6 and sickening up to 38 others.
A longtime bartender at St. Elmo’s Steakhouse in Indianapolis died of COVID-19 after an outbreak at the restaurant. St. Elmo’s has been an annual stop for me during Gen Con, and I know it’s a favorite of many during the NFL combine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, coronavirus, guns, longreads, religion, stick to baseball, technology

→ February 22, 2019
→ By keith

Innovation and Its Enemies.

The late Calestous Juma died shortly after the publication of his last book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, which may be why the book is still so little-known despite its obvious relevance to our fast-changing, tech-driven economy. Juma was a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School with a longtime focus on international development, especially the application of new technology to developing countries and to boosting sustainable development. While the prose is a bit on the academic side, Juma uses very well-known technologies and even other inventions that you might not think of as ‘technologies’ but that still drove massive cultural and economic changes that led to substantial societal, religious, or political opposition.

Juma’s main thesis is that there will always be forces that oppose any new technology or invention that offers the potential for change, and he tries to categorize the reasons for and the types of opposition that any innovation might face. Some of the case studies he covers are ones you’d expect, like the printing press, refrigeration, and genetically modified crops, but he also covers less-expected ones like margarine and coffee. Margarine was invented in the mid-1800s and faced a torrent of opposition from dairy farmers, leading to the development of dairy associations that lobbied Congress and state legislatures for absurd laws that restrained or prohibited trade in butter alternatives, from requiring labeling designed to scare consumers to requiring the stuff to be dyed pink to make it less appetizing. To this day there are still regulations that overtly favor dairy butter that date from decades ago, although the discovery that the trans fats in traditional margarine are deleterious to heart health has made such laws anachronisms.

Coffee might be the most fascinating story in the book because it appeared and spread like a new technology, even though we don’t think of it as one. Coffee originated in east Africa, notably Ethiopia, and spread across the Red Sea to Yemen, from which it began to permeate Arab societies and faced its first wave of opposition from Muslim authorities who feared its stimulant effects (with some imams ruling it haram) and from secular authorities who feared the culture of coffeehouse would give rise to organized political groups. The same two forces applied when the drink spread to Europe, where it also faced a new group campaigning against its spread: producers of beer and wine, who feared the drink would replace theirs – in part because all three were safer than drinking well water at the time – and employed every trick they could find, including getting “doctors” (such as there were in the pre-science era) to claim that coffee was harmful to one’s health. While there are still some religious proscriptions on coffee, the drink’s spread was eventually helped by its own popularity and by the split among many authorities on its beneficence and value, with monarchs and even the Pope coming out in favor of the drink.

The two chapters that look at the ongoing controversy, most or all of it fabricated, over transgenic crops is probably the most directly relevant to our current political discourse, as genetically modified organisms are probably required if we’re going to feed the planet. Juma shows how GMOs suffered because regulatory authorities were consistently behind the technology and had to react to changes after they happened, and then often did so without sufficient guidance from technology experts. No example is more appalling than that of a genetically modified salmon called the AquAdvantage salmon that grows to maturity in about half the time required for wild salmon, and that thus has the potential to reduce overfishing while providing a reliable protein source that also has less impact on the environment than protein from mammals or poultry. The U.S. government was totally unprepared for the arrival of a genetically modified animal designed for human consumption, which also gave opponents, from Alaskan legislators (including Don Young, who openly promised to kill the company behind AquAdvantage) to fearmongering anti-GM advocates (look at the “Concerns” section on the Wikipedia entry for the fish), time to maneuver around it, blocking it through legislation and excessive regulatory obstacles.

Where Innovation and Its Enemies could have used more help was in how Juma organizes his conclusions. There are common themes across all of his examples, from the natural human fear (especially those of adults over age 30) of change to concerns over job loss to questions about environmental impact, but the choice to organize the book’s narrative around specific case studies means that the conclusions are dispersed throughout the book, and he doesn’t write enough to bring them together. A book like this one could be extremely valuable for policymakers looking to create an environment that encourages innovation and facilitates adoption of new technologies while providing sufficient regulatory structure to protect the public interest and foster trust. It has all of the information such a reader would need, but it’s scattered enough that a stronger concluding chapter would have gone a long way.

Next up: Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business, Economics, highly recommended, non-fiction, Nonfiction, technology

→ May 21, 2018
→ By keith

Thank You for Being Late.

Thomas Friedman’s Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations is a solid book about the fast-moving present and immediate future written by a man whose prose is firmly, almost embarrassingly stuck in the past. Friedman has obviously thought deeply about the topics in this collection of connected essays, and talked to many experts, and there are many insights here that would be useful to almost anyone in or soon to enter the American workforce, as well as to the people who are attempting to manage and regulate this fast-moving economy. It was just hard to get through the clunky writing and jokes that don’t even rise to dad level.

Friedman’s main thesis here is that the world is accelerating, and many people – I think his main audience is Americans, although it’s not limited to them – are unprepared for it. Technology has substantially increased the pace of change since the Industrial Revolution, and 100-plus years of accelerations now has the developed world changing at a rate that leads us to a point where it doesn’t even take a full generation of people to churn through more than one generation of tech. These technologies also collapse borders, threaten sovereignty of states, and increase economic inequality. Everyone reading this likely knows about the debate over automation and machine learning (please, stop calling it AI, they are not the same thing), but Friedman is arguing that we need policy makers at all levels to accept it as given and respond to it with policies that produce a populace better equipped to cope with it – and that people themselves accept that continuous learning is likely to be a part of their entire working lives.

Friedman refers to the cloud – a term I’m not 100% sure he even understands — as “the supernova,” a pointless and confusing substitution of a fabricated term for a more commonly accepted one, and then refers back to it frequently throughout the book as the source of much of this technological change. He’s certainly correct that the power of distributed computing has allowed us to solve more problems than we were ever able to solve previously, no matter how many chips you were able to cram into one box; he also gives the sense that he thinks P = NP, that this accelerating rate of growth in computing firepower will eventually be able to solve problems that, in nonmathematical terms, probably can’t be solved in a reasonable time frame. And Moore’s law, which he cites often, has changed in the last few years, as the growth in the number of transistors Intel et al can put on a chip has slowed from 18-24 months to more like 30, and with Intel projecting to hit the 10 nm transistor width this year, we’re probably butting up against the limits of particle physics.

The strongest aspects of Thank You For Being Late are Friedman’s exhortations to readers to accept that the old idea of learning one job and then doing it for 40 years is probably dead. Most jobs, even those we might once have spoken of dismissively as blue-collar or low-skilled, now require a greater knowledge of and comfort with technology. (There’s an effective CG commercial out now for University of Phoenix, where we see a mom working in a factory where all of the workers are slowly replaced by machines until one day the supervisor comes for her. She eventually pursues some sort of IT degree through the for-profit school, and the commercial ends with her walking through stacks of servers.) He lauds companies like AT&T that have already set up programs for employees to take new courses and then make it easier for those employees to identify new jobs within the company for which they qualify – or could try to qualify with further learning. He also discusses municipal and NGO efforts to build job sites that help connect people with skills with learning opportunities and employment opportunities.

There is, however, a bit of a Pollyanna vibe about Friedman, who refers to himself repeatedly as an optimist, and seems to think that more people in the American working class have the time to be able to take classes after hours – or that they have sufficient background to go get, say, a certificate in data science. I looked up some of the programs he mentions in the book; the one related to data science expected students to come in with significant knowlege of programming or scripting languages. He supports government efforts to support lifelong learning and to improve diversity in the workplace and in our communities, but doesn’t even acknowledge the potential government role in ensuring equal access to health care (essential to a functioning economy) or the mere idea of universal basic income, even if to just explain why he thinks it wouldn’t work.

And then there’s Friedman’s overuse of hackneyed quips that felt dated twenty years ago. “Attention K-Mart shoppers!” didn’t resonate with me in the 1980s, since there wasn’t a K-Mart anywhere near where I grew up; the chain has since been obliterated by competition from Wal-Mart and Target, and K-Mart operates 75% fewer stores today than it did at its peak, fewer than 500 nationwide. “This isn’t your grandpa’s X” is just lazy writing at this point; besides, if my daughter read that, she’d likely point out that her grandpa is a retired electrical engineer with two master’s degrees who already did a lot of the lifelong learning that Friedman describes.

Friedman’s writing is also dense, which I find surprising given his background as a newspaper columnist; perhaps he feels like he’s finally set free to prattle on as long as he wants, without anyone to stop him. There’s a level of detail in some parts of the story, such as his overlong descriptions of the halcyon days of the Minnesota town where he grew up, which I’m sure was very nice but probably not quite the Mayberry he describes.

There’s value in here, certainly, but I found it a grind to get through. This could have easily been a series of a dozen or so columns in the New York Times — that they wouldn’t run today because they’re too busy running columns denying climate change or explaining how so-called ‘incels’ need sex robots — rather than a 500-page book. He’s right about his core premise, though: Expect to learn throughout your working life and to see your job, whatever it is, change regularly over the course of your career.

Next up: Roddy Doyle’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Economics, futurism, non-fiction, social criticism, technology

→ May 3, 2015
→ By keith

The Victorian Internet.

I first encountered Tom Standage’s work when a friend gave me Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses, a brief history of a half-dozen fundamental drinks common to most global cuisines. At some point after I wrote about that book, Amazon put Standage’s 1996 book, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph, on sale for the Kindle for just $1.99, so I picked it up because it seemed – as Paddington Brown might say – very good value, and I like to stash a few ebooks on my iPad in case I’m traveling and am caught without a book. Standage’s book was more than worth that price, as it’s a breezy, enlightening book on the invention, rise, and fall of the telegraph, with many parallels to the invention and rise of the modern Internet – although the latter’s fall has yet to come.

Standage covers a lot of ground in a short book, so he’s rarely bogged down in excessive detail; what detail there is he concentrates toward the front of the book as he describes attempts to invent the first telegrpah and then to improve it. The telegraph was preceded by what now seem comically inept attempts to transmit information over long distances using towers that would send signals using light by moving large panels that were visible from the next station. (Such towers live on in the many places around the world named Telegraph Hill.) It took a couple of crackpots who either didn’t know of the difficulties they faced or simply wished them away to come up with the first real devices that transmitted very simple signals over electrical wires – and then the inventors had to convince others that these things would actually work. Telegraphs first caught on thanks to some basic economic needs, not to actual foresight on anyone’s part: Railways and stock traders were among the leading early customers, and the rapid increase in the demand for immediate information via telegraphy led to attempts to increase what we’d now call the bandwidth of telegraph lines. These efforts eventually led to the fortunate accident, also described in Standage’s book, that led to Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson (as all good assistants are named) discovering that they could transmit sounds over electrical wires, leading them to invent the telephone. Thomas Edison also makes a few appearances, as his first paying job was as a telegraph operator, a task at which he was so adept he quickly raised his pay and status and eventually used his work as leverage to fund his first laboratory.

Once that technical material is out of the way, Standage can focus on the social and economic aspects of the telegraph’s invention and rapid spread and adoption. News agencies were also early adopters, leading to the now-ubiquitous organizations Reuters and the Associated Press. Diplomats made heavy use of such cables for several decades, with the telegraph playing significant roles in the Dreyfuss Affair (which led Emile Zola to pen his “J’accuse!” column) and the Zimmermann Telegram fiasco during World War I. But there were also dreamers who thought the telegraph would lead to world peace and skeptics who thought the telegraph a parlor trick or feared its impact, similar to pronouncements on all sides of the earliest days of the World Wide Web (and the Segway, which didn’t work out quite so well). It’s an instructive look at how new technologies can disrupt entire economies, and how people and businesses react to such disruptive technologies in the first place, with massive investments made as if the telegraph was going to last forever, only to have it supplanted by the telephone within a few decades.

Standage wrote his book in 1997, so even in the short period since then we’ve seen substantial upheaval from the explosion of the Internet around the globe and through new access points unthought of when most people got online via a computer and a 28k modem. He adds an afterword, written in 2007, where he correctly foresees the rise of mobile phones as Internet access devices, and even draws a parallel between the economy of characters in text messaging and the various methods of shorthand used to send cheaper telegraphs. The afterword gives The Victorian Internet the finishing bow it needs to tie together its subject with the subtitle, and to allow Standage to emphasize the broader point about the creative destruction wrought by highly disruptive technologies. It’s a quick, educational read that, if it pops up for $2 again, would even make a bear from darkest Peru smile.

Next up: I finished Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena last night and started Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: history of science, non-fiction, technology, world history

→ March 3, 2010
→ By keith

The Droid.

Klawchat Thursday at noon EST.

I’ll be on ESPN 1250 in Pittsburgh on Thursday at 11:40 am EST and on KNBR in San Francisco at 12:20 pm PST. Wednesday’s hit on Mike and Mike is now online, although my voice doesn’t sound very clear. And on that note…

—

So my Blackberry Curve stopped making any sounds last week, which meant no ringer on the phone and no alarm on the, uh, alarm, and after a year of getting annoyed with how difficult it was to access the Web even with the superior Opera browser (the Blackberry’s native browser was apparently coded in 1997), I decided to upgrade to a Droid – specifically, the Motorola DROID A855, which is just $50 if you get a new account with Verizon but $529
without the plan. Several of you asked me for thoughts on the phone, so here goes:

* Web browsing rocks. Clear, simple, and compatible with most sites so far. Happiest with this feature by far. In fact, switching applications and moving within applications, all of which is accomplished by tapping or sliding a finger on the screen, is easy and intuitive, and I’ve experienced no lags.

* The screen quality is absurd. This is far, far easier on my eyes than any other phone I’ve seen. Video quality is also very high.

* Pretty good set of productivity apps available. I guess this doesn’t quite compare to the apps available on the iPhone, but given time I think they’ll catch up, and while I’m disappointed that I can’t get Zooloretto on the Droid yet it’s hardly the end of the world.

* Sound quality from the speakers sucks but is better through headphones. It’s still not replacing my iPod, but it’s serviceable.

* Typing sucks. There are three options for typing – a slide-out landscape keyboard, a virtual landscape keyboard, and a virtual portrait keyboard, with the latter two depending on how you’re holding the phone. The virtual portrait keyboard is awful – the key size is appropriate for my three-year-old daughter’s hands. The true keyboard is awkwardly spaced and doesn’t play well with the protective case I bought for the device, which overlaps with the tops of the first row of keys. The virtual landscape keyboard combined with the Droid’s predictive-typing feature works best, but I think I’m only typing at about 75% of the speed I could achieve on the Curve. (I could type on the Curve with my eyes closed, which will never happen with the Droid.) A better mechanical keyboard design would have remedied this.

* I don’t think the call quality on the phone is as clear as it’s been on phones I’ve had before, although I haven’t had trouble completing calls or with calls dropping. I don’t know if the issue on Mike & Mike was my phone, my location, or both.

* The worst feature is the Sync feature, where Google syncs your contacts with … I don’t know, the master server in California where they hold all the data in the world so that they can continue to control our lives through radio waves directed at our cerebral cortices. When it’s syncing, your contacts may become temporarily unavailable, and if the sync fails, you are SOL until it syncs successfully. It’s just a stupid idea – the Contacts should reside on the phone and be accessible at all times.

Despite all those flaws, I do like the phone, since the way I use my phone has changed so much over the last two years. The ability to look things up or stay on top of information has become as important as the ability to communicate outward through the device, but that balance will vary depending on your job and travel schedule.

Also, I’ve found these apps to be useful so far:

* chompSMS. A solid management system for text messages.

* NewsRob. Excellent RSS reader.

* Seesmic. Pretty intuitive Twitter client.

* Google Maps. Impressive. If the voice giving the directions didn’t sound like a computer-generated voice from 1976, it would be a viable replacement for a GPS device.

* RingDroid. I made my own ringtone from Handsome Boy Modeling School’s “Rock and Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This).” Win.

* Pandora. I used this once for an hour and its selections were pretty good despite the fact that I had only uploaded eight songs to my Droid.

* Secrets. Password-protected password storage.

* WaveSecure. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean Google isn’t after me.

I’ve downloaded several others, included MLB At Bat, Astro Player, Shazam, and Urbanspoon, but haven’t used them enough to comment.

—

Unrelated, but if any of you have new suggestions for Phoenix-area eats, I’m all ears. We’re staying in Scottsdale and most of my travels will keep me near the various major league parks, with one brief detour to Tucson.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: mobile phones, technology

→ September 2, 2008
→ By keith

Chrome, chat, radio.

KlawChat returns this week, but on Wednesday at 1 pm EDT. I’ll also be on ESPN 890 in Boston at 5:20 pm on Wednesday.

I just read about Google’s new open-source browser, Chrome. Have any of you tried it yet? I’ve got Firefox pretty well tricked-out the way I like it, and it’s pretty stable aside from a few disagreements with Shockwave, so I’m not sure I’m looking to jump to another browser … but it seems nice and new shiny and all.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: technology