Planet Abell

It’s almost a Zen Koan: How many books does a library make? For Google the answer is: “All of them.” As of last August that particular number was about 129 million, and since then probably tens of thousands have been added to the world’s shelves, even if you exclude Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s A Shore Thing . Some tiny fraction of that immense number is good enough for nearly every library in the world, be it the Library of Congress, the world’s largest, or modest locations which are no less devoted to the preservation and dispensation of the world’s collected knowledge. For Google, though, it’s all or nothing: The Google Books Project — “one company’s audacious attempt to create the largest and most comprehensive library in the history of the world” as wired.com correspondent Ryan Singel put it — began nearly a decade ago. The initiative has seen its up and downs over the years. But it hit a serious roadblock last week when a judge ruled that a difficultly-forg...

I take as a given that it is impossible for sovereign states to be consistent in any meaningful way, and that there are degrees of pretense to projecting consistency. What interests me here is that there isn't any particular US interest in eradicating the world of Gaddafi, and apart from the bluster of attacking his own people bent on attacking him (a peculiarly internal matter, one might even argue) no new one from a month or so ago. So given that world leaders pick and choose their rationales like fruit at a Middle East market, we can only judge (I think) the intent by how far today's rationale is from self-interest. As I see it, Obama's failure here is entirely in the realm of domestic politics, which as these things go is exactly the right place you want to weak when lives are at stake. Which has no bearing on the creation of a new precedent that cannot possibly be consistently adhered to without new conditions to tomorrow's rational for action, or inaction. [Libya ...

Among the harsh criticism heaped on the New York Times for having the audacity to introduce a digital subscription model is that the pricing tiers are confusing, or self-defeating because they leave gaping holes for readers to game the system and thus make anyone who doesn't feel like an idiot. I'm normally sympathetic to this kind of argument. It's why I avoid roll-your-own fixed priced restaurant menus, convinced I will get screwed because I won't be able to reel in the best value from that sea of possibilities. In other words: Complex pricing blocks the road to assessing value. Daring Fireball's always insightful John Gruber puts it this way : One thing many companies — in any industry — can learn from Apple is the importance of simple pricing. If you make it easy for people to understand how much they’re paying, and what they’re paying for, it is more likely that they’ll buy it. Or perhaps this is driven more by the converse: if people are confused...

For all the talk about whether apps could be the salvation for newspapers, one little question has been glossed over: Are apps actually a disservice to readers of what, for lack of a better description, we still call newspapers? The key advantage of the Internet over radio or TV is immediacy. Stories fly straight from pocket-sized devices to a great discussion in the sky with no friction being heard. Short bursts of information — as much or even less data than traders on the exchange floor use to make snap, million-dollar decisions — are what drive the conversation now. Newspapers all have, or could have, vibrant web sites. Web sites are exciting because they are immediate, hamstrung only buy the stupidity of servers, how much traffic they can handle and how fast the Internet is working today. You share a story, and BOOM, there it is: Waiting to be discovered by random travelers, spotlighted by RSS, Tweets, Facebook updates and shared by a geometrical progres...

I missed the first day of IBM Watson's assault on humanity, played out innocently on a game show. But Tuesday's edition of Jeopardy was as demoralizing for my human side as it was exhilarating for the android in me. Part of the fun is what the IBM Language Team came up with to make humans comfortable in Watson's presence. The supercomputer has inflection, and a tone which puts one in the mind of Hal9000 before, well, you know. Watson mixed it up once with a "Let's finish out ..." the category, instead of just naming the category and amount. There was also some frailty on display when Watson gives the same wrong answer as another competitor — I have seen humans do this, so why not a supercomputer? With Watson, though, weakness isn't seen as something with which to commiserate but rather a way to cling to a small hope that we aren't sowing the seeds of our own destruction, as predicted in countless Sci-Fi stories and screenplays. Watching Watson is remar...

The pariah du jour to the United States and the countries who do business with it is one Julian Assange, a soft-spoken Australian whose motives may be obscure but whose life work is pretty clear. The founder of WikiLeaks, Assange is the whistleblower’s whistleblower, enabling the disclosure of anything in digital form — which, in the age of the Internet, is everything. The drama to marginalize/silence/demonize Assange is playing out like a (bad) Hollywood script, but the stakes — to commerce, to free speech, to the freedom of the Internet — are quite real. It’s a good time to take a deep breath. While critics portray Assange as the sort of caricature you’d expect to see as Batman’s arch nemesis he actually hews more to the suave Bond villain ( sex scandal and all ) — an international man of mystery whose calm demeanor is incongruous with a determination to blow things up. Continue Reading...