On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.

Frozen Grand Central at Improv Everywhere

Findory was a personalized news site. The site launched in January 2004 and shut down November 2007.

A reader first coming to Findory would see a normal front page of news, the popular and important news stories of the day. When someone read articles on the site, Findory learned what stories interested that reader and changed the news that was featured to match that reader's interests. In this way, Findory built each reader a personalized front page of news.

Below is a screenshot of an example personalized Findory home page. Articles marked with a sunburst icon are personalized, picked specifically for this reader based on this person's reading history.

Hey this sounds like a niche market...

Geeking with Greg

Googlers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have an article, "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters", in the January 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM.

It is a great introduction to MapReduce, but what I found most interesting was the numbers they cite on usage of MapReduce at Google.

Jeff and Sanjay report that, on average, 100k MapReduce jobs are executed every day, processing more than 20 petabytes of data per day.

More than 10k distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented. In the month of September 2007, 11,081 machine years of computation were used for 2.2M MapReduce jobs. On average, these jobs used 400 machines and completed their tasks in 395 seconds.

What is so remarkable about this is how casual it makes large scale data processing. Anyone at Google can write a MapReduce program that uses hundreds or thousands of machines from their cluster. Anyone at Google can process terabytes of data. And they can get their results back in about 10 minutes, so they can iterate on it and try something else if they didn't get what they wanted the first time.

It is an amazing tool for Google. Google's massive cluster and the tools built on top of it rightly have been called a "competitive advantage", the "secret source of Google's power", and a "major force multiplier".

By the way, there is another little tidbit in the paper about Google's machine configuration that might be of interest. They describe the machines as dual processor boxes with gigabit ethernet and 4-8G of memory. The question of how much memory Google has per box in its cluster has come up a few times, including in my previous posts, "Four petabytes in memory?" and "Power, performance, and Google".

Update: Others now have picked up on this paper and commented on it, including Niall Kennedy, Kevin Burton, Paul Kedrosky, Todd Huff, Ionut Alex Chitu, and Erick Schonfeld.

Update: Let me also point out Professor David Patterson's comments on MapReduce in the preceding article in the Jan 2008 issue of CACM. David said, "The beauty of MapReduce is that any programmer can understand it, and its power comes from being able to harness thousands of computers behind that simple interface. When paired with the distributed Google File System to deliver data, programmers can write simple functions that do amazing things."

MapReducing 20 petabytes per day/ Google's guts!

For all intents and purposes, Bill and Hillary Clinton should be my candidates. On the political spectrum I consider myself center-left, and the Clintons have been center-left politicians since, well, they became politicians. You can call it centrist, or “Blue Dog,” or what have you, but they are political dealmakers in a system designed for compromise. However, the system seems to work well when those who are forced to compromise also have a set of core values that are different from the opposition. The whole notion of compromise might be a foreign thought to our ears after enduring the reign of W. and his contingent of “no compromise” congressmen and women; however, during Bill Clinton’s tenure as President, he frustrated the hell out of many Democrats by making whatever deal he could to insure that he would survive politically — even if that meant walking and talking like a Republican.

During his presidency, it seemed whenever Clinton decided to undertake a policy initiative designed to help middle-to-lower-middle class folks who elected him, he wound up doing more harm than good. From health care, to gays in the military, to reforming the social welfare system, to the Telecommunications Act, to the Defense of Marriage Act, it all seemed so antithetical to what Democrats supposedly stood for. Sure, he said he was trying to chart a “third way” in politics that would transcend the ideological clashes between New Deal Democrats and Reagan Republicans, but it seemed the only politically viable “third way” out of this clash was for him to support the party of Bill Clinton. Since Clinton is more like a “Rockefeller Republican” than a political leftie, it was easier for him to make deals with the current crop of Republicans (who became a majority in 1994) than it was with Democrats. The result of his impressive political acumen and tepid political ideology was a presidency that, at bottom, stood for one thing: political survival.

If elected, Hillary may be a different kind of President than Bill, but currently he’s dominating her campaign by doing what Bill Clinton does best: making it all about Bill. Sure, he artfully weaves Hillary’s name into his speeches, but if Hillary becomes president, I think the ’90s redux of Clintonism is bound to flounder due to the following realities:

1. We’re mired in an expensive war with no exit strategy.
2. We’re headed for (or already in) an economic recession.
3. A large majority of the Democratic base wants universal health care.
4. And if you read Dw. Dunphy’s excellent piece, Americans and the government need to get out from under the piles of debt we’ve accumulated. For the working stiff that means better paying jobs. For the government, it means stop decreasing taxes while going on a deficit spending spree. And for American businesses, it means stop boosting your profits on the backs of slave labor overseas.

If we’ve learned anything from Clintonism, or Third Way politics, it’s that it seems to do well in times of peace, ideological insouciance, and when members of your political party are not particularly united around a set of core issues. Just surveying the political attitudes of Democrats today will make it clear that having the Party of Bill back in office is the wrong way to go.

Amen...

Why Bill Clinton Is a Douchebag

Glen Schulze, a noted expert witness in Aviation Accident Tape Analysis, has completed an extensive analysis of the limited data released by the NTSB on the Flight Data Recorder (FDR), its numerous revisions by the NTSB and a recently obtained segment of the analog tape waveform at the end of the tape.

In this detailed analysis he proves beyond any doubt that the NTSB is withholding data from the end of the FDR tape. The analysis shows that the printed data released by the NTSB, which was revised several times, does not match the analog tape segment waveform received under
the Freedom of Information Act. Glen's analysis shows that there could be up to 4 seconds missing from the end of the tape, or in the alternative, the end of the tape was edited to remove some data, causing the difference between the printed data and the waveform data.

Although this is very technical reading, it is worth a look. He supports his analysis with numerous exhibits from the NTSB docket public record. The final graphic shows a transient spike, which is
consistent with electronic editing.

This new information is troubling and demands and explanation from the NTSB. Perhaps we will finally get one with the new Administration.

The Flight 800 Investigation

Where does he find the time? Apparently, in between shooting his much-lauded video blog experiment and being a celebrated Internet guru, Ze Frank also dated Chelsea Peretti.

Not very good... but ...

Ex #6 – Ze Frank

View Larger Map

So I have been getting hit from a telephone # that says, "US Dept State"...

Hmm very odd... So with a little digging around... I found out that the calls are from "1025 N IRVING ST ARLINGTON, VA 22296." And is the CO that "could" be for Clinton's VA office at "4420 Fairfax Dr, Arlington, VA 22203." Will someone tell that woman to fix the dam predictive dialer that keeps calling and hanging up...

It's odd is says, "US Dept State"... "Miss" leading? Yep!

Sheesh...

That is all...

Mrs. Clinton quit calling me! Will the real "US Dept State" please shut up!

Electric car pioneer ZAP says that owners of its ZAP Xebra electric city car commuting into London can save so much on parking, charging and tolls that it could help pay for the car within a year.

London is expanding the number of charging stations, according to recent news reports. The London Evening Standard said that Westminster council is putting in 10 roadside posts following a trial of two in Covent Garden. About 50 more will be installed in 13 of its car parks. Funded by Transport for London, the Energy Savings Trust and EDF Energy, users have to register with the council and pay a one-off fee to cover administration costs after which charging is free. Colliers International estimates parking in London to cost US$55 per day. With free parking, charging and no congestion tolls, the incentives start adding up.

"If you do some quick math on the incentives for electric cars, the numbers are staggering," said ZAP CEO Steve Schneider. "Assuming there are no parking, charging or congestion toll charges for your electric car, the car will be saving an estimated $50-80 per day and could pay for itself within one year."

ZAP Electric Car Gets a Free Ride in London...

FUD: /fuhd/, n.

Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.” The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.

FUD

FUD: /fuhd/, n.

Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.” The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.

[In 2003, SCO sued IBM in an action which, among other things, alleged SCO's proprietary control of Linux. The SCO suit rapidly became infamous for the number and magnitude of falsehoods alleged in SCO's filings. In October 2003, SCO's lawyers filed a memorandum in which they actually had the temerity to link to the web version of this entry in furtherance of their claims. Whilst we appreciate the compliment of being treated as an authority, we can return it only by observing that SCO has become a nest of liars and thieves compared to which IBM at its historic worst looked positively angelic. Any judge or law clerk reading this should surf through to my collected resources on this topic for the appalling details.—ESR]

FUD