Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  Right next door to Harare Magistrates Court there's a major building development. Interpol is establishing its subregional headquarters in Harare. I'm outraged by lots of things in Zimbabwe, but this particular issue takes the (wedding) cake. Interpol's hierarchy has feted the commissioner of police, Augustine Chihuri, for many years. Zimbabwe is a country wracked by violence, a compromised judiciary, and the disintegration of the rule of law. Meanwhile, Interpol decides to build its headquarters next to the building into which activists limp, having been beaten to within an inch of their lives.

  On the way home, we drive past the University of Zimbabwe, where students frequently protest the poor conditions on campus. Apparently there are only 15 computers in the computer lab for 12,000 students. Just outside the entrance there's a sign saying that fishing worms are on sale. I tell my passenger that it's rumored that worm-sellers double as mbjange (marijuana) dealers.

  I make sure to fit my run in at lunchtime. Running keeps me sane and balanced (although Brenda might not agree with this). Frank and I were puffing our way up a quiet road when I noticed two smartly dressed people pushing their car. They'd run out of petrol. So, I offered to give them a hand to the next intersection. My mother always said that I had thighs that could kick-start a jumbo jet, so I figured pushing a Mazda 323 would be easy.

  In the afternoon, I had a coffee with Brian, a co-activist from as far back as 1990. We met in the well-known Meikles Hotel, which is where all the journalists and media people hole up whenever anything's going down in Harare. As I skipped up the steps, I noticed a Mugabe portrait in the foyer. I've long wanted to start an organization called PAPP—People Against Presidential Portraits. There's no law that requires people to put them up, but many of our citizens believe that if they comply, they'll get a degree of protection. So, the dictator responsible for the collapse of our once vibrant tourism sector gazes benignly on as a few tourists trickle in and out of the hotel. In the lounge, where Z$4000 cream teas are served, an old guy plays sentimental songs on a piano.

  When I get back to my office, I'm told by Leah, who organizes my press advertisements, that the state-controlled press in Harare, Bulawayo, and Mutare have rejected my latest round of advertisements. I recently came across a beautiful poem by Seamus Heaney, about justice and freedom, so I put together an inspirational advertisement that carried his words:

  So hope for a great sea change

  On the far side of revenge.

  Believe that a farther shore

  Is reachable from here.

  This isn't the first time that my material has been rejected. And it won't be the last. But I'm going to keep on trying.

  Why You Can't Keep Up

  23,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information were created last year.

  By Timothy Noah

  Posted Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2003, at 4:50 PM PT

  The publication of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, has sent Chatterbox into a quantifying frenzy. According to Murray, there have been 14 cognitive breakthroughs since 800 B.C. Murray calls them "meta-inventions," but a simpler term for them would be "Great Ideas." They are:

  Artistic realism; Linear perspective; Artistic abstraction; Polyphony; Drama; the Novel; Meditation; Logic; Ethics; Arabic numerals; the Mathematical proof; the Calibration of uncertainty; the Secular observation of nature; and the Scientific method.

  Mortimer Adler, who half a century ago oversaw Encyclopedia Britannica's publication of the "Great Books," added a supplement, titled the Syntopicon ("collection of topics"), that listed civilization's Great Ideas. Adler's hit parade had 89 more Great Ideas than Murray's:

  Angel; Animal; Aristocracy; Art; Astronomy; Beauty; Being; Cause; Chance; Change; Citizen; Constitution; Courage; Custom and Convention; Definition; Democracy; Desire; Dialectic; Duty; Education; Element; Emotion; Eternity; Evolution; Experience; Family; Fate; Form; God; Good and Evil; Government; Habit; Happiness; History; Honor; Hypothesis; Idea; Immortality; Induction; Infinity; Judgment; Justice; Knowledge; Labor; Language; Law; Liberty; Life and Death; Logic; Love; Man; Mathematics; Matter; Mechanics; Medicine; Memory and Imagination; Metaphysics; Mind; Monarchy; Nature; Necessity and Contingency; Oligarchy; One and Many; Opinion; Opposition; Philosophy; Physics; Pleasure and Pain; Poetry; Principle; Progress; Prophecy; Prudence; Punishment; Quality; Quantity; Reasoning; Relation; Religion; Revolution; Rhetoric; Same and Other; Science; Sense; Sign and Symbol; Sin; Slavery; Soul; Space; State; Temperance; Theology; Time; Truth; Tyranny; Universal and Particular; Virtue and Vice; War and Peace; Wealth; Will; Wisdom; World.

  Even though Adler's list is much longer than Murray's, Adler managed to miss most of Murray's topics. For example, Adler didn't bother to separate "Arabic numerals" from "the Mathematical proof." To Adler, they were both just "Mathematics." Adler also skipped "Drama" and "the Novel," presumably because he thought they fell under "Poetry" or "Memory and Imagination." (Having just edited the Great Books, you'd think Adler would have remembered to create a Great Idea category called "Literature.") The arbitrary nature of this selection process drove Adler's most withering critic, Dwight Macdonald, absolutely batty, so you can just imagine what he would have said about Murray's much shorter list. Indeed, the further you allow yourself to be drawn into any exercise of this type, the more inadequate any given list of Great Ideas seems. Eventually, the quest for completeness descends into madness. Where's Contraception? Where's Revolving Credit? Where's Valet Parking?

  In the interest of preserving his sanity—Murray would no doubt call it cowardice—Chatterbox resolved to forego all standards. Forget Great Ideas. Forget Ideas, period. How much information is out there?

  Quantifying all the information ever created is probably an impossible task, but Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems have thoughtfully compiled estimates of the amount of information stored on paper, on film, and on magnetic and optical media for the past three years. To this, they've added estimates of the amount of information that's flowed through electronic channels—telephone, radio, television, and the Internet—during the same period. In essence, they have calculated the amount of information communicated every possible way except orally, from one person to one or many other people, without the aid of technology (except, perhaps, a megaphone or amplifier).

  For simplicity's sake, let's focus on 2002, the most recent year for which Lyman and Varian have data. (Before doing so, full disclosure: Lyman and Varian's work was partially funded by Microsoft, which has an obvious commercial interest in quantifying information, particularly the kind stored on computers. Microsoft is Slate's corporate parent. Chatterbox was entirely unaware of the Microsoft link until he was well into researching this column, which grew out of an e-mail discussion Chatterbox had with a reader who has no ties to Microsoft.)

  Lyman and Varian measured information in bytes, i.e., the amount of space the information would take up on a computer. A single typewritten page would take up 2 kilobytes (i.e., 2,000 bytes). A novella would take up 1 megabyte (i.e., 1 million bytes). The collected works of William Shakespeare would take up 5 megabytes. All the Chatterbox columns posted on Slate in 2002 occupy 9.9 megabytes. (As you can see, quantity isn't everything.) All the editorial copy posted on Slate in 2002 occupies 328 megabytes. The number of books needed to fill a pickup truck would occupy one gigabyte (i.e., 1 billion bytes). The number of books in the Library of Congress' print collections would occupy 10 terabytes (i.e., 10 trillion bytes).

  OK, ready? The total volume of information saved in 2002—most of it on hard disks—is 5 exabytes (i.e., 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). Per capita, that's 800 megabytes saved—imagine a stack of books 30 feet high—for every person in the world.

  But that's peanuts compared to the 18 exabytes of information communicated electronically—most of it by telephone—during the same period. All told, then, we can account for at least 23 exabytes of information c
ommunicated one way or another in 2003.

  Of course, nearly all of it was worthless. But it's comforting to imagine that somewhere in those 23 exabytes lies a Great Idea.

  [Clarification, Nov. 6: Many readers have written in to say that it just isn't possible that Chatterbox produced more copy in 2002 than William Shakespeare produced in his entire lifetime. It turns out they're right. Chatterbox's 9.9 megabytes include html and xml coding, which, Chatterbox has learned, eat up around three-quarters of the total. If you just count text, Chatterbox's megabyte count is probably somewhere between 2 and 3 megabytes as compared to Shakespeare's 5. Chatterbox's 9.9 megabytes do not include whatever advertising accompanies the columns.]

  Digging for Googleholes

  Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.

  By Steven Johnson

  Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 8:39 AM PT

  The arrival of Google five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious PageRank system would find what you were looking for—and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google's top 10 results.

  But the oracle—recently described as "a little bit like God" in the New York Times—is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole.

  Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.

  The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you'll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn't appear in an online catalog.

  I suspect this emphasis is due to the convention of linking to an online store when mentioning a product, whether it's a book, CD, or outdoor grill. In addition, a number of sites—such as DealTime—track the latest prices and availability of thousands of items at online stores, which creates even more product links in Google's database. Because PageRank assumes that pages that attract a lot of links are more relevant than pages without links, these most-linked-to product pages bubble up to the top.

  Google is replicating one of the problems experienced by some of the big portals—sites like Lycos and Infoseek—during the boom years. They sold so much real estate on their pages to online stores and other advertisers that their results became less reliable, which gave Google its opening in the first place. Now the same thing is happening again, only it's happening organically, without Google manipulating the integrity of its search engine.

  Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer—and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page. You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the Washington State Apple Growers Association. To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?

  At this stage in the Web's development, people who create a lot of links—most notably the blogging community—tend to be more technologically inclined than the general population, and thus more likely to link to Apple Computer than something like the Washington State Apple Growers Association. (This process is sometimes known as "googlewashing," where one group of prolific linkers can alter the online associations with a given word or phrase.) But there's another factor here, which is that categories that don't have central, well-known sites devoted to them will fare poorly when they share a keyword with other categories. Maybe there are thousands of pages that deal with apples, but only one Apple Computer or Fiona Apple home page. People interested in growing or eating apples will distribute those links more widely across those thousands of pages, while Mac or Fiona fans will consolidate around fewer pages, driving them higher in Google's rankings.

  Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.

  There's a parallel development in Google's treatment of Web sites that restrict access to their archives. The New York Times may be an authority in the world of opinion, but its closed archives mean that its articles rarely rank highly in Google results, if they appear at all. Search for "Augusta National," Howell Raines' pet obsession from this year, and not a single page from the Times site appears in the top 50 results. Uber-blogger Dave Winer bet the CEO of the New York Times Digital last year that in 2007 bloggers will rank higher than the Times in Google searches. As Winer now puts it: "If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web."

  You can't really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the "group mind," but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn't speak for everybody.

  We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page—filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion—than an encyclopedia. It's still the connected world's most dazzling place to visit, a perfect condensation of the Web's wider anarchy. Just don't call it an oracle.

  Have You Flown a Ford Lately?

  Flying cars already exist. So why can't you drive one?

  By Brendan I. Koerner

  Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 9:39 PM PT

  Admit it: You're a tad disappointed that, three years into the 21st century, our automobiles are still earthbound. Flying cars always seemed like sci-fi's most attainable vision, much more so than lunar colonies or robotic paramours. Living in the exurbs wouldn't be such a hassle if an airborne, 150-mph commute were possible.

  But mass-market air cars are far less feasible than The Jetsons and Blade Runner made them seem. Engineering hurdles aren't what's keeping commuters out of the skies. Flying cars are already here: Way back in the 1940s, a man named Robert Fulton (often said to be a distant relative of that Robert Fulton, though the claim has never been verified) produced the Airphibian, the first "roadable aircraft" to earn federal certification for highway and aerial use. The current Great Flying Hope is the Skycar, which
Canadian-born Paul Moller has been developing for more than 40 years. Those who enjoy a brisk breeze as they commute may prefer Trek Aerospace's SoloTrek, which resembles a latter-day jet pack cross-pollinated with a Harrier jet.

  So, what's keeping your car tethered to the two-dimensional confines of streets and highways? True believers argue that these designs have yet to flourish due to overregulation, poor timing, and automaker myopia. They like to share how, in the early 1970s, a young Ford executive named Lee Iacocca took a keen interest in something called the Aerocar, until the oil crisis and the proliferation of Toyotas diverted his attention. That's about as close as the nascent roadable aircraft industry has ever gotten to mass production. The news of late has been somber, as SoloTrek recently "cut all payroll costs"—that is, fired everyone—and a Skycar prototype failed to sell in a February eBay auction. (Moller has somehow coaxed more than 100 people to pre-order Skycars—as well as plunk down $5,000 deposits per nonexistent vehicle.)

  What the flying-car faithful tend to ignore are the concept's mundane flaws. Start with what may sound like a minor concern—noise. Until some yet-to-be-born genius figures out how to harness the power of superconductors, flying-car designers are stuck with VTOL (vertical takeoff/landing) technology, which relies on whirring rotors. As anyone who has stood near a helicopter knows, this isn't exactly the quietest approach to locomotion. It seems unlikely that suburban America, where the background noise rarely rises above 70 decibels, would put up with the rush-hour roar as commuters rev their engines.