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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: October 2009 (page 3 of 4)

Against SEO

Derek Powazek on search engine optimization:

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

Concussions and football

One of the oddest things I’m thankful for in life was that I didn’t love football enough to be really good at it. I played football in junior high and high school, but I never really loved it. To be more specific, I love the game of football, but I was never able to turn off the part of my brain that constantly does cost/benefit analysis. I have known for a long time that the more years you spend on the football field, the more you have to deal with joint pain and stiffness later in life, but it’s only been recently that people have started talking about the huge concussion problem that afflicts former football players.

I remember first hearing about the long term effects of multiple concussions when former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster died in 2002. It was also discussed when Merell Hoge was found wandering around his neighborhood, suffering from memory loss. HBO Real Sports has done a number of pieces on concussions, forcing the NFL to address the issue. And then this week, 60 Minutes ran a piece on concussions, and Malcolm Gladwell writes in the New Yorker on the similarities between football and dog fighting.

Every football fan should think about the moral implications of taking enjoyment in watching a spectacle that is literally killing the competitors. I love football, but I wonder if I should support it, given the injuries inflicted on the players.

I also wonder why we never hear about what is to me the real root of the problem — hard plastic helmets and face masks. Players make helmet to helmet contact because the shell and padding give the feeling of impunity.

Back in the good old days, players wore leather helmets like the one pictured here. I can guarantee you that these guys didn’t smash into each other face first or have hard helmet to helmet contact on every play. Players would hate it if the protective equipment were scaled down in football, because it would take a lot of the speed and recklessness out of the game, but it would increase the safety in a big way.

Revolutionary War steganography

Letters of Note has a really cool example of steganography in practice — a letter from a British revolutionary war general that includes a secret message readable by placing a mask over the letter. The mask and letter were sent to the recipient via different routes.

Why credit scores irritate me

Felix Salmon lays out one of the reasons I really hate credit scores.

It’s a great time to be a news junkie

Matthew Yglesias has a very smart post on the news business that really captures the problem for people in the news business. Mainly, that the Web and Google are bad for the news business, but not really bad for people following the news. I honestly don’t know how good the national news coverage is in my local paper, much less the international news, but I really don’t care. The local paper does a good job on local issues, and for national and international news, I have the New York Times, the BBC, and whatever washes up on Google News. If I want to know what’s going on in Israel, I read papers from Israel. The structure of the news business that’s going away made sense when you had to go to the library to read national papers, but in this day and age, I can read anybody’s local paper. I’m with Yglesias, now is the best time ever to be a news junkie.

The finances of writing computer books

If you’ve ever been curious about what kind of money you can make writing computer books, check out Peter Cooper’s post What I’ve Earned (and Learned. Having written a number of books myself, I find his article matches up pretty well with my experience.

Unicorn in the wild

GitHub explains their new architecture, having replace Mongrel with Unicorn (the hot new Ruby Web server all the kids are talking about). Even if you’re not deploying Rails applications, it’s interesting to read about how Unicorn’s process-based architecture beats Mongrel’s thread-based approach.

Sergey Brin on Google Books

Google founder Sergey Brin takes to the pages of the New York Times today to explain the value of Google Books:

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

As an author, I’m completely supportive of Google Books, and I agree with Brin in that I wish there were many such services. Recently an out of print, foreign album I had been searching for in any format for years became available via Amazon MP3. In one day, this band’s music went from being completely inaccessible to being available to essentially everyone with an Internet connection. Google Books’ arrangement is slightly different, but the concept is the same. Most people create things in order to reach an audience, and Google Books gives authors of out of print works an opportunity that simply does not currently exist. It’s unlikely that a better opportunity is worth holding out for.

Ryan Tomayko on Unicorn

Everybody’s linking to Ryan Tomayko’s post, I like Unicorn because it’s Unix, but I’m not going to let it keep me from linking to it as well. It’s a paean to the Unix design philosophy, and really illustrates how few applications these days are built on that philosophy. Go read it. It’s good.

Airline customers hate baggage fees

Turns out that not only do airline customers hate baggage fees, but they seem to be avoiding airlines that charge them.

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