As Slate and Ben Casnocha have illustrated, since Google Suggest uses prefixes (or early sentence fragments) to find suggestions, just exactly what that prefix is matters. If you start a search with “How 2…” as opposed to “How does one…” the suggestions you receive would seem to indicate the level of intelligence of your fellow searchers. “How 2…” as a prefix will yield suggestions such as “grow weed” and “get pregnant,” whereas “How might one…” will yield suggestions such as “protein differ from another” and “account for the rise of Andrew Jackson to victory in 1828.” Not subtle differences at all. Of course, the classic one for me is the “Can I/May I” distinction. I had that one beat into my brains at some point.¹ So let’s see…

Some suggestions for Can I… 1. have your number 2. has cheesburger 3. tap that 4. be pregnant and still have a period

Suggestions for “May I…” 1. be frank 2. have this dance

Not quite as entertaining as others, but then I guess folks aren’t generally asking Google for permission. I find the larger take away to be what an associate of Ben Casnocha said: we don’t lie to Google. The search box is the confessional of the 21st century.

I’d been dreading making this support call. It was one of these things where a company gave me credit card protection for six free months and then they were going to start charging for the service ($1.35 / $100 in credit / month to be exact—exorbitant to say the least!). I didn’t want to make the call to tell them to stop the service because you always encounter like the last bastion of “but wait, but wait, but wait” and you just have to keep repeating yourself: “No. Do not want.” It’s annoying. Anyway, they always ask you for the reason why you don’t want to continue the service and I thought, You know, I’m going to give them a reason that they just can’t be ready for. If you use a reason that they’re ready for, they’ll keep you on the phone that much longer trying to find a deal in their script or database that will keep you around.

“It’s too expensive.”

“But sir, did you know we will never charge you more than bla bla bla…”

I had some actuary tables from a project I worked on a while back and I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and I figured that the probability of me losing my job or getting injured or the probability of my death is currently at about 3.645%[^1] I called and I waited and the operator came on and after the initial exchange the inevitable question occurred “Would you like to tell us why you are canceling the service?”

Yeah, I’ll tell you why.

Read more…

I think this could be compressed into five principles, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb over at Financial Times has presented “Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world.” For those that don’t know, Taleb coined the term black swan event to discuss unpredicted and abnormal events.¹ I couldn’t agree with him more. Making institutions larger simply increases the risk to society at large and increasing the opportunity for black swan event to be catastrophic. And our country has become plagued by behemoths. I mean, why can Aptera build an affordable aerodynamic electric car, while GM, Ford and Chrysler struggle with cars that get 30 miles per gallon? I think the benefits of scale can become outweighed by an inability to innovate and maneuver. As many pundits have been saying, we’ve taken the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism and combined them to create a bizarre corporate welfare state. It could get worse though, is the amazing thing. William Greider argues just that point in a column at the Washington Post. I was disturbed in particular by this paragraph:

“A new regulatory regime that puts the secretive central bank in charge of everything would sanctify the policy of “too big to fail” that Fed officials have long followed but never honestly acknowledged. It would also revive the Wall Street club, albeit smaller than before, with which the Fed has been so cozy. If the largest bank holding companies are given privileged proximity to the source of government protection, then everyone in finance and commerce will want to become a bank holding company, too. We are already seeing this happening as former investment houses like Goldman Sachs and non-bank financial firms decide to join the system. Why not General Electric and Microsoft? Where does this end? What does it mean for smaller enterprises that lack the scale and influence?”

The idea of a corporate state like the kind Greider is driving at is damn frightening. Regulation might bandage the wound today and in the near future, but the real problem is a market structure that persistently creates oligopolies. It stifles innovation and drives prices up. We need corporate reform.

You saw what the world looked like when the inauguration was twittered.  Now the New York Times has a nice twitter visualization of the Super Bowl.  My favorite part is watching the world’s collective consciousness synchronously call out for Springsteen!

Not much more needs to be said than there is this headline from the BBC: “Breast Cancer Gene-free Baby Due.” This is the beginning of the designer baby revolution and a new stage in human evolution. I don’t want to be the kind of writer that proselytizes this as the beginning of the end or something that’s going to get underway tomorrow, but it’s no doubt a callsign. Any ethics debate has already been all but left behind and the girls of San Fernando Valley are only going to get prettier before anyone in Congress decides that they need to have a say in the matter. No, it’s looking more and more like Freeman Dyson’s vision is coming true and that the future of human genetics is open source.