The hard lesson of Google Reader

Google Reader logo

By Aaron Sherman

Google is learning some new lessons of late. Specifically, that the user base of a product doesn't map 1:1 to the impact that removing that product will have. In the case of Google Reader, the company's recent announcement that they'll be discontinuing the service in July first met with the usual round of "noooo! I use that!" from what few users the service still had after it was gutted to remove its social features and replace them with Google+.

That was probably no more or less than Google expected. But since then, there have been some interesting secondary effects:

• "Reader" has been one of the top-trending topics on Google+ since the announcement.
• New product announcements from Google are now being met with suspicion.
• Digg, a social news site, has announced that they'll build their own replacement.
• An existing competing service, Feedly, has seen over 500,000 new users in two days.

On Consciousness and Creation

James Hopwood Jeans
from Wikimedia Commons

By Aaron Sherman

Tonight I was browsing Google Plus and came across a post by Kevin Clift of a lecture by Richard Feynman as a video clip. The lecture itself is well worth watching. However, at about 7 minutes, 30 seconds he says, "I would use the words of Jeans ... 'The Great Architect seems to be a mathematician.'" That phrase struck me as kind of interesting, but I didn't recognize the name, so I googled for Jeans... not terribly useful. Then I googled that phrase, which lead me to the specific Jeans: James Hopwood Jeans.

Among the many fascinating things that this man said and did, I found this quote:

"I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe... In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind."

Why aren't Republicans mad as hell?

There's much to love hating about the Democratic party in the U.S., and usually I'd say just about as much to hate about the Republican party (I'm not talking about Republicans and Democrats, but the actual party bureaucracies .. if you have trouble with the idea that those are separate things, then you might want to stop reading, now). However, in recent years, the Republican party has really made a case for their entire voting base just walking away from them in disgust. No, I'm not talking about the usual complaints of the left. There's a comfortable dance that the two parties do, slinging mud at each other while maneuvering toward a known conclusion. It's not the best way to run a country, but it's what we had for many decades.

New York's man-made climate

Hurricane Sandy, 2012

credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

By Aaron Sherman

Nothing like it had been seen in a very long time. The hurricane ripped through the eastern seaboard and washed away entire communities in New York and surrounding states. The financial mess that the nation had been through wasn't yet over and the blow came hard in the communities that it hit. It was brutal. It was 1788.

Nothing like it had been seen in a very long time. The hurricane ripped through the eastern seaboard and washed away entire communities in New York and surrounding states. The financial mess that the nation had been through wasn't yet over and the blow came hard in the communities that it hit. It was brutal. It was 1821.

Nothing like it had been seen in a very long time. The hurricane ripped through the eastern seaboard and washed away entire communities in New York and surrounding states. The financial mess that the nation had been through wasn't yet over and the blow came hard in the communities that it hit. It was brutal. It was 1938.

There are two things we know about New York weather:

1. About once a century, a really nasty hurricane will hit.
2. It's clearly precipitated by a financial crisis...

Music on Amazon

Amazon now has a kind of cool feature where you can turn your purchasing history into a sharable bookshelf. The above collection is a random selection from the music that I've purchased over the years. Pretty slick, really.

Stocks don't get "punished" for missing estimates

You see it all the time, "so and so got punished for missing estimates." It's especially common in the press relating to a specific market segment, but isn't strictly a finance publication. The other day I saw this in numerous articles about Google. Here's what one Android Web site had to say:

Stocks -- or, more accurately, investors -- always react to quarterly results. Analysts keep detailed models of their expectations, and the average of these models is known as the “consensus estimate.”  If you miss consensus, as Google did, you get punished.

This is exactly wrong. There's no punishing going on.

Digging into politics: the political spectrum

One (U.S.) view of the political spectrum.

Politics is complicated, I'll grant, but the rampant misunderstanding of what the political spectrum actually looks like is often frustrating to me. First off, unlike the visual spectrum, it's not a line of various shades of color stretching from conservative to liberal, as many Americans seem to think. Instead, it's actually an incredibly complicated star with dozens of end-points. In this essay, I'm just going to touch on one aspect of it: how people view the function of government.

Imagine that you asked thousands of people to complete the sentence, "the government should exist to provide..." Like the old game show, we can imagine taking the top four answers to this question and laying them out in a grid. The most common  answers would probably be variations on, "benefit to society," "corporate liberty," "benefit to the individual," and "individual liberty." At their heart these describe who you think government should provide benefits to and who you think government should protect the rights of. As it turns out, while Democrats and Republicans would like to paint each other as enemies of individual liberty, both parties favor a balance between corporate and individual liberties. On the other hand, the traditional liberal position slides further out toward individual liberty.