Alexis C. Madrigal

His legacy, however, is unclear.

It's different on the way out.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu is, as expected, stepping down from the top post at the Department of Energy. He'll stick around until a successor is chosen and then, I assume, head back out here to the Bay Area and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Politico broke the news, getting a hold of (or being sent?) the memo Chu emailed to his staff.

After some tough years under the Bush administration, Chu's selection buoyed hopes among scientists that the Obama administration was serious about funding good science to deal with climate change, an infrastructure built on cheap oil, and the relatively slow pace of energy technology improvement over the past few decades.

He leaves having presided over a huge but temporary boost in energy science fundingt, a boom in natural gas production, the BP oil spill, the creation of ARPA-E for high-risk research, and the overblown bust of a few companies like Solyndra. Republicans blocked efforts to pass climate legislation, but that can't really be counted against Chu. 

Though the stories tended to be short of specifics, the narrative in Washington became that Chu was a political naif, even though he was a brilliant guy and competent administrator. I wondered if he could ever have been painted otherwise, given his background and the state of play in energy politics. Despite Chu's support for nuclear and solar energy, in Congress, supporting solar is for Democrats and nuclear is for Republicans. Coal state representatives support the coal agenda and the same goes for wind. One guy, no matter how smart, isn't going to change these structural divisions. At the very least you can say he survived Washington longer than any previous Department of Energy head, which is something.

One sign of what the Obama administration thinks about Chu's tenure will come when his successor is selected. Darius Dixon gave this short-list of candidates for his replacement:

Obama has not yet announced a successor, but speculation in Washington has focused on a short list that includes former North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Other people who have gotten recent buzz include Ernest Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served as DOE undersecretary in the Clinton administration.

I can't evaluate how accurate this list is. National Journal's Coral Davenport had a similar, but slightly different list: Dorgan, Ritter, Gregoire, and then ex-Googler Dan Reicher and the Center for American Progress' John Podesta.

Let's say both lists encompass what the administration is thinking. We've got two natural-gas state politicians, two other northern-state politicians, a Google policy wonk, a Washington think tanker, and a single academic. And Moniz, for his part, has been a part of public life for a long time. None of these folks has a Chu-like profile.

Nonetheless, I'm not sure we know yet what Steven Chu's legacy will be. Or to rephrase: I certainly don't. He was given a monumental task of distributing $35 billion dollars to energy projects through the stimulus package, and though the disbursements weren't perfect, they seemed, to an outsider, to be the mix of "shovel-ready" (remember that term?) projects and longer-horizon research that you'd expect. Who knows what fruits the seeds planted during his tenure will bear?

In which a new technology trial is proposed: The Shotwell's Test.

This is how regular patrons act at Shotwell's (flickr/melinnis).

Two people wearing Google Glasses walk into a bar.

...

Nope, that's the whole joke.

Don't get me wrong: I'm as excited about Glasses as the next nerd, but I'm not so sure the rest of the world is going to love their arrival.

Case-in-point: yesterday, I saw that Tom Madonna the co-owner of my favorite bar, Shotwell's, had posted this to Facebook:

Last night around 9:45 two people walked into the bar. Looked me square in the eye, and acting as if everything was normal they ordered beers.. Oh did I mention they were wearing Google Glasses! In public! In A BAR!

For all its ubiquity and $1.59 billion in revenue, the company's net income was $64 million in its last quarter.

Add it all up and the company made just $64 million on revenue of $1.59 billion. That means the company is generating about half a buck a month of revenue per user, and just $0.02 a month in income. Facebook says that a run-up in R&D hurt their profitability for the quarter. 

Nonetheless, compared with the other tech giants (save Amazon, which has its own profitability problems), Facebook is not much of a money machine. It isn't even within an order of magnitude of old-school companies like Microsoft or Oracle, let alone Apple.

But hey, it's young. And detailed data on all of our lives has got to be worth something, right? Right? And the good news is that for the full year 2012, Facebook generated $13.58 in revenue per user in its most developed markets, the US and Canada. That's up more than $2 over 2011 and $4 over 2010.

Update: Facebook would also probably like me to note that if you don't follow the GAAP method and use Facebook's own accounting, they made $426 million for the quarter, which is considerably more money than $64 million. Then again, there's a reason they're called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. 

Update 2: The chart I originally posted had an egregious error. I used Apple's year income number, not its quarterly one. The trend remained the same but the number was obviously grossly inflated. My apologies, and I'll update the chart as soon as I can.

Celestial movement at human speed.

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Daniel Defoe's novel about London's 1665 plague can help us understand new media. No, really.

The plague was abroad.

Londoners knew not where it had come from, only that it was upon Holland. "It was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus," Daniel Defoe wrote in the opening of his historical novel, A Journal of the Plague Year.

The book, which many read as something like non-fiction, bore the webby subtitle, being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665, and bore stamps of authenticity -- it was "Written by a citizen who remained all the while in London" -- and intrigue, having "Never [been] made public before."

Which, as a journalist of the web era, made me think: that Defoe knew how to gin up some pageviews! And in fact, Defoe did. (If you can't see the translation to the headline argot du jour, allow me: 73 Amazing and Horrible Things That Happened During the Plague, From Someone Who Saw Them With His Own Two Eyes. And no, I didn't count. But the point is: no one's counting.)

That is to say, Defoe would have been a mean blogger. He rose to national prominence as a journalist in the burgeoning print media scene of early 18th-century England. In part, he was so successful because he could crank out the copy. A biographer, Penn's John Richetti, called him a "veritable writing machine," and went on to say, "for sheer fluency and day-to-day pertinence and insight, there is nothing else in English political writing then or since quite like this extended and unflagging performance." He had his own publication, the Review, which he wrote and published three times a week for nine years straight! It is so like a blog that a Defoe scholar actually recreated it as a reverse-chronological Wordpress site: defoereview.org. 

And then, after publishing Robinson Crusoe in 1719, he produced the Journal in 1722, a strange little book based on nearly a decade's worth of collecting facts, accounts, stories, and anecdotes about the plague that hit London when Defoe (then still-named Daniel Foe) was a child. As documented by Katherine Ellison, a literary scholar at llinois State University and editor of Digital Defoe, the Journal is obsessed with how information, not just the plague, spreads. It's fascinated by where authority comes from and how people make sense of news, and whether the message is the medium (not really, for the record). The Journal forms a pillar of Ellison's book, Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature.

On the very first page of his book, Defoe signals that information ecology will be a key subtext (emphasis added). 

We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.

There was something so contemporary about this observation, delivered through his narrator H.F. The arch language, the irony. The impossibility of narrowly distinguishing whether the author was for or against these newspapers. He was a creator of (the new) print journalism, and yet he does not know what to say about its impact on his world. I mean, who has not felt deep ambivalence about digital media while clicking away on Facebook or Twitter or Google News or TheAtlantic.com? 

It could have stopped there. In fact, that was my plan for this post. Making fun of Vine, Ms. Vine User? Meet your ancestor, Daniel Defoe, patron saint of those who equivocate over their vocation. 

But, this one phrase stuck in my head: "to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men." It is brilliant. Positive words (improve, invention) end up attached to "rumours and reports," and become deeply ambivalent. Improved rumors, invented reports, invented rumors, improved reports. (At least one of these things is not so bad.) The newspapers, then, pervert ... not the simple facts, but "rumours and reports of things," the stuff brought by merchants and letter-receivers, printed by pamphleteers, dreamed up in coffeeshops, posted in Bills of Mortality, given as decree by governments, divined in comet-visitations, or seen with one's own eyes. The newspapers, it would appear, perverted the melange that was late 17th-century news before the proliferation and formalization of newspapers. (A mix reflected in his Defoe's own publication, according to Defoe scholar Christopher Flynn.)

I had to know more about Defoe. I called up Katherine Ellison to ask her about Defoe and her book on information overload. Reading her criticism and talking with her on the phone, I found a wonderful and nuanced account of a media system in a state of change with Defoe acting as both mover and shaken. He was not alone. Her book situates him among several other literary authors -- John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift -- who dealt with the rise of a new kind of information age while they were writing. Ellison shows how they demonstrated strategies for dealing with this "information overload," a state that existed despite the word's slow entrance into broader usage. As new media flourished, perhaps too vibrantly, these writers found ways to navigate the new arrangements. She writes:

What a close analysis of representative works by each author reveals... is an awareness that goes much beyond acceptance or resistance. Each work traces types of adaptation that readers can adopt to deal with the perceived proliferation of texts. Each demonstrates its own process of technological problem solving.

Rather than a categorical pro- or anti-printing technology stance, these writers figured out ways to work with the new things the technology allowed and society attempted. They gave literate citizens different reading, organizational, and genre strategies. 

"People didn't respond solely enthusiastically about the technology. They did not respond only with unbridled enthusiasm or only with horror, saying, 'We're going too fast, we're going too fast,' Ellison told me. "What you see the literary authors doing is already grappling with the consequences and strategies for coping with this perception of being overwhelmed."

(I would say that the archness we see in the Journal's take on newspapers is one of those strategies itself. Two aphorisms come to mind: 1) Don't get high on your own supply and 2) Don't believe your own press.)

But he goes further. H.F., Defoe's narrator, models how to interpret the information that the government puts out regarding the state of the plague. His book is filled with notices of the dead in the city, the Bills of Mortality, which serve to chart the rise of the disease outbreak. But he takes this quantification and inflects it with the reality of the human production of statistics.

The next bill was from the 23rd of May to the 30th, when the number of the plague was seventeen. But the burials in St Giles's were fifty-three-- a frightful number!-- of whom they set down but nine of the plague; but on an examination more strictly by the justices of peace, and at the Lord Mayor's request, it was found there were twenty more who were really dead of the plague in that parish, but had been set down of the spotted-fever or other distempers, besides others concealed.

Many times throughout the book, Defoe's narrator watches a crowd try to make sense of something, say the appearance of a comet, or an apparition, and he keeps a critical distance, you might say. Maybe even a journalistic distance:

And no wonder, if they who were poring continually at the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations and appearances, which had nothing in them but air, and vapour. Here they told us they saw a flaming sword held in a hand coming out of a cloud, with a point hanging directly over the city; there they saw hearses and coffins in the air carrying to be buried; and there again, heaps of dead bodies lying unburied, and the like, just as the imagination of the poor terrified people furnished them with matter to work upon. 

So hypochondriac fancies represent
Ships, armies, battles in the firmament;
Till steady eyes the exhalations solve,
And all to its first matter, cloud, resolve.

In another instance, the narrator watches a person tell a crowd about an angel with a flaming sword that she sees in another cloud. The people begin to join in on her hallucination. "I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much willingness to be imposed upon," he writes, "and I said, indeed, that I could see nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the sun upon the other part."

Defoe shows how not to be "imposed upon" by the information that exists all around him in the city of London. That information emanates from many sources: the texts released by governments, the rumors of the people, or the possible signs in the environment itself. Defoe's narrator reads all these kinds of information in the same way, with healthy skepticism, and an unwillingness to be like the crowd, "terrified by the force of their own imagination." Indeed, Ellison notes that other Defoe scholars had shown "that oral messages, printed texts, and manuscripts cannot be thought of simply as separate media." These communications were promiscuous and tended to cross boundaries (then as now, e.g. "OH:").

The one thing about Defoe's approach to information that will probably strike more secular, modern ears as strange is his commitment to seeing the signs of God's will in the information around him. As the narrator wavers between leaving London like all the rich people or staying like the servants and some businesspeople, he keeps seeing signs that God wants him to stay, even if his brother wants him to leave. In a Puritan context, Ellison said that this type of question, of decrypting the world, occupied Defoe. "For him it's a very spiritual question," she told me. "What is God trying to tell me?" 

There's been a considerable amount of scholarship into the idea that technology is the religion of our times. Say, David Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, or more subtly, David Nye's American Technological Sublime. Take the conceit (skeptically, of course) that technology could be the new religion. 

Now, we watch what happens to our relationships, how we use our smartphones, the emergence of emoji, the phenomena of online dating, the mechanics of digital journalism, and just about anything else that could take a prefix like cyber, digital, smart, or online -- and we look for signs about what technology wants. Looking at Twitter or Facebook, or how well certain BuzzFeed posts do, or Politico's reporting model, or drone warfare, we ask, "What is technology trying to tell me?" 

The messiness of the world out in all its everyday augmented reality becomes a complex cipher for what the Internet or technology might mean or "how they're changing the world." (Is technology separating darkness from light? Or is technology resting? Perhaps letting the land produce vegetation?) In the divination process, we lose the actual texture that makes life interesting. So, when Timothy Egan writes against "the Internet" in the New York Times, he makes tech a powerful force, omnipotent and omnipresent: 

The Internet is the cause of much of today's commitment-free, surface-only living; it's also the explanation for why someone could tumble head-over-heels for a pixelated cipher.

And then we read that perhaps there were culturally specific reasons rooted in Samoan culture (perhaps!) that could partially explain Te'o's behavior. Technology may have opened the door through (newfangled) telephone networks and texts, but very specific circumstances of a young person's life allowed him to walk through it. Of course, Te'o and Egan are not really the point. These apparitions occur every five minutes, approximately, and there is always someone to vigorously point out Technology's role -- good or bad -- in any situation. 

Perhaps we can take some direction from Defoe, from his irony and from his skepticism about reading too much into the world. Sometimes a cloud is just a cloud. Sometimes the cloud is just the cloud. There does not have to be a teleology. No one has a good track record predicting the path or impacts of technological change. Yet many people have very specific, concrete reasons for promoting certain futures as inevitable. 

And this medium we're all co-creating to "spread rumours and reports of things," this grab-bag of tools we call the Internet? Let us not forget the double meaning Defoe gives to the words "improve" and "invention." These are not simple things. They have costs, which are different, but not categorically distinct from, the solutions that came before them. As we endeavor to build something new and better, I recommend the dose of humility for our times that Ellison delivers as the first line of her book, "Every age has been an information age."

A photographer's marketing trick, a legend's self-importance, and a funny pair of glasses.

Photographer Tom Zimberoff's original contact sheet from his Jobs photoshoot (Tom Zimberoff).

Zimberoff immediately took the Rosetta Stone replica off the wall and moved it to the front lobby, which he converted into a make-shift studio by lining the ceiling to floor in black drapery.

Several hours later, Steve himself walked in, in hellfire mode.

"I'd been working in the lobby to turn it into makeshift studio for hours when Steve walked in with his entourage," Zimberoff recalled. "Jobs didn't even acknowledge me, but just walked in and asked the room, 'Whose stupid f***ing idea is this?' So I told him it was my stupid f***ing idea, and if he didn't like it, he could go screw."

But the best observation in the Cult of Mac piece relates to another photograph, the famous one of Steve Jobs' sitting in his house on the floor. The image conveys asceticism, dedication, a sense that Jobs needed nothing but his mind and his bicycle for the mind, the computer. 

The famous photo of Jobs by Diana Walker.

A cloud of chemicals. One researcher detects a smell. The other does not. What happens next? Science.

A food laboratory from 1935, though sadly not the one in the story (flickr/University of Washington).

Like I always say, there are two kinds of people in this world: normal tasters and supertasters. But no really, there really are two distinct populations within humanity, when it comes to taste-sensitivity.

Supertasters, taste scientists have shown, possess certain gene variants. Supertasters have more of those bumps on their tongues, which are technically called fungiform papillae and contain the taste buds. Not only can supertasters taste some bitter substances that normal (or non-taster, as per the scientific literature) people can't, but many tastes are more intense for them.

This week, Andrew Han took up the question of how scientists discovered this subgroup of superhumans cleverly disguised as people just like the rest of us.

Turns out, it all began with an accident at a DuPont chemical lab: A cloud of chemicals goes up. One scientist detects a smell. The other does not.

Alas, the scene did not portend the beginning of a new comic book series, but it did lead to a paper that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the paper, the scientists themselves describe the episode:

Some time ago the author had occasion to prepare a quantity of phenyl thio carbamide, and while placing it in a bottle the dust flew around in the air. Another occupant of the laboratory, Dr. C. R. Noller, complained of the bitter taste of the dust, but the author, who was much closer, observed no taste and so stated. He even tasted some of the crystals and assured Dr. Noller they were tasteless but Dr. Noller was equally certain it was the dust he tasted. He tried some of the crystals and found them extremely bitter. With these two diverse observations as a starting point, a large number of people were investigated and it was established that this peculiarity was not connected with age, race or sex. Men, women, elderly persons, children, negroes, Chinese, Germans and Italians were all shown to have in their ranks both tasters and non-tasters.

As Han notes, the last couple decades have seen tons of work on supertasters as new genetic tools have begun to unlock the mechanics of their blessing/curse. There's even a plausible evolutionary narrative for why such a trait might have developed and propagated. " Chemicals like PROP [or phenyl thio carbamide] can cause thyroid problems and toxic alkaloids found in poisonous plants often taste bitter," Han writes, "so the sense to avoid ingesting plants that produce these toxins might confer an evolutionary advantage."

It's not a good idea, no matter what the Feuer Buech says.

Illustration, cat and bird with rocket packs (University of Pennsylvania).

This fleeting life spent in sickness and worry --

The pure vision passes before my eyes just for a moment. 

When cocks crow and bells sound, flocks of birds scatter --

Soon the drum beats at the prow and people call to one another.

As you might expect, there are times when reading someone else's journal entries is disquieting and revealing. I discovered aspects of my brother's relationship with our father that I hadn't appreciated. One of his entries said: "Asked about my accident (first time)." This was more than a year after my brother had been hit by a car and badly hurt. My heart cracked: I had not realized how inattentive my father had been.

Going back through the calendar now, more than 18 months after my father died, the entries chart a relentless physical decline -- profound fatigue, sore hips and knees, aching wrists, swollen legs, inflamed teeth, increasing forgetfulness, the savage indignities of old age. One day, he took a bath but couldn't get out of the tub. Luckily, the housekeeper arrived; she couldn't get him out either, so she recruited the postman to help. My father thought this was hilarious: I admired his ability to laugh.

For through it all, there's such courage. Yes, he's just had a pacemaker installed and he's feeling rotten, but he's making strawberry jam. One day, "He sounded very low -- lonely, old, and scared." But another, he's reading a history of some sinister French aristocrats and planning to install a wood stove in the fireplace. A beloved friend is coming to stay. He's just learned a new poem.

"In my opinion, they did a good job with this. Some may agree, some may disagree."

Here's the plot for this video: a kid in a suit eats a Domino's pan pizza and reviews it in tremendous detail. Then he eats the breadsticks. The end.

But proving that execution is more important than concept, this is one of the most adorable and hilarious videos you'll see in 2013, in my opinion (which is his catchphrase). Just watch it for at least two minutes. 

Via Dylan Lathrop.

No, really, this garment might fool the infrared cameras mounted on drones.

"Try finding Harper's Magazine when you Google 'magazines that publish essays' or 'magazines that publish short stories' -- it isn't easy." No, Rick, no it's not.

I don't want to delve too deeply into John "Rick" MacArthur's latest Internet troll, in which he rails against being indexed by search engines. Ain't no troll like a Rick MacArthur troll, non? 

But I do want to point out how he thinks people might find things on the so-called Internet.

Google's bias for search results that list its own products above those of its competitors is now well-known, but equally damaging, and less remarked, is the bias that elevates websites with free content over ones that ask readers to pay at least something for the difficult labor of writing, editing, photographing, drawing, and painting and thinking coherently. Try finding Harper's Magazine when you Google "magazines that publish essays" or "magazines that publish short stories" -- it isn't easy.

Emphasis added.

Well, I thought I'd try out that search strategy for some other common things John MacArthur, or someone with his same sensibility, might go looking for things.

• Places that sell food, especially truffles
• Cameras that use the wet collodion process
• The other John MacArthur
• Evelyn Waugh
• Cats that have bushy tails and make cute faces
• Stores that sell shirts
• Companies that buy quarter-page print advertising
• Good help
• Restaurants that make pizza with pepperoni and sausage

I've heard and read a lot about driverless cars. I've read New Aesthetic essays and listened to Google engineers. I've pondered whether they'll be a net environmental disaster or quite the opposite.

But I'd never had one driving towards me in a parking lot and looked into the driver's seat and seen ... Nothing. I had a very tiny moment of panic that I quickly squelched, gripping my DSLR a little tighter. It was a profoundly weird feeling that I want to share with you. One day (soon?) you'll almost undoubtedly be faced with an invisible robot intelligence maneuvering a vehicle. May this video, which I shot at the Volkswagen Group's Electronics Research Laboratory, help you prepare.

Change takes a long time. Pittsburgh, for its part, did not enact smoke controls until more than a century after travelers described it as hell with the lid off.

NASA

The photographs and measurements coming out of Beijing these days are horrifying. You can see the brown clouds from space, and Chinese media has even been talking up the problem.

I've heard from some Americans saying, "Why don't they do something about this? How can they live like this?" Etcetera. To an early 21st century American, particularly one living in northern California or a relatively pollution-free Washington, DC, it seems crazy to live with such bad air.

But it was not always so.

As America became an industrial power during the 19th century, Pittsburgh emerged as the seat of metalworking, iron and then steel. This was a city powered by coal. Soot and smoke covered the city. There was no blue sky. Travelers from around the world visited Pittsburgh to see the wonder of American capitalism. The stories they tell are like -- exactly, like -- the ones you hear today about China. (This is a story that I covered in some detail in my book.)

A wry southerner observed, "If a sheet of white paper lie upon your desk for half an hour you may write on it with your finger's end through the thin stratum of coal dust that has settled upon it during that interval." Another traveler recounted, "Every body who has heard of Pittsburgh knows that it is the city of perpetual smoke, and looks as if it were built above the descent to 'the bottomless pit,'" that is to say, hell. And yet, this dirty power also happened to make a lot of people a lot of money. It was said, "He whose hands are the most sooty handles the most money, and it is reasonable to infer is the richer man."

Everyone knew that the smoke covering their homes and clothes and trees was bad. But it made a certain group of people a lot of money. And so they fought pollution controls.

And those people had friends.

So, while the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (granted, a less august institution back then) declared the health hazards of smoke and wondered aloud whether corporations should be allowed to produce what it called such "evil," a Pittsburgh doctor maintained that soot and smoke "only go throat-deep" and said that fire and smoke "correct atmospheric impurities."

The politics of how this works are pretty simple. The smoke and the soot are something we recognize now as an externality. A cost of doing business that the business doesn't have to pay because they can dump it on society. Chinese citizens and activists and assorted air-breathers will have to get the polluting companies to internalize these costs. The polluting companies don't want to internalize that cost. Here's Chicago's smoke inspector (yes htere was such a title and in this case, he was named F.U. Adams) in 1896 laying out the rhetorical positions of the two camps:

Viewed from the standpoint of the Smoke Inspector, the 1,600,000 people of Chicago are divided into two classes--First, those who create a smoke nuisance; Second, those who are compelled to tolerate a smoke nuisance. One class has radical champions who maintain that smoke is an irrepressible necessity; a concomitant of the commercial and manufacturing supremacy of Chicago; that smoke not only is not unhealthy, but that it is an actual disinfectant, and that the low death rate of the city can be largely attributed to the prevalence of smoke; that the smoke ordinance and its enforcement are aimed at the interests of the Illinois coal operators; that the advocates of smoke abatement are visionary sentimentalists, and in a general way they are emphatically opposed to any agitation on the subject.

The other side has partisans no less radical, and equally emphatic in voicing the story of their wrongs. They declare that the enforcement of the smoke ordinance is a farce; they demand that soft coal be excluded from the city; they insist that its consumption entails an annual damage greater than the difference in cost between soft and hard coal; they declare that the smoke nuisance is a positive menace to the health of citizens, that it has resulted in an alarming increase in throat, lung and eye diseases; they point to ruined carpets, paintings, fabrics, the soot-besmeared facades of buildings and to a smoke-beclouded sky, and demand that the Smoke Inspector do his plain duty under the law.

It is impossible to reconcile the radical partisans of these two classes. It is fortunate that not many of our citizens are so radical on either side of this most important question. There exists a growing contingent, around which is crystallizing a sentiment that it is practical and possible to abate the smoke nuisance without endangering the stupendous interests involved. The most intelligent and active members of this contingent are drawn from the ranks of those formerly largely responsible for the smoke nuisance. They now oppose smoke for the same reason that they once defended it.

They have made the discovery that it is cheaper to abate a smoke nuisance than to maintain one. And by reason of this discovery the smoke nuisance in Chicago will be a relic of the past before the close of the present century.

Ah, you beautiful visionary sentimentalists! My asthma thanks you. But man, F.U. Adams was optimistic. Change takes a long time. Pittsburgh, for its part, did not enact smoke controls until 1946! Yes, 1946! And they didn't really get a handle on the smoke problem until well into the 1950s. That's, oh, 120 years after all those travelers decried the place as hell with the lid off. I mean, this is what Pittsburgh looked like at noon, the lights all on because so little sunlight could penetrate the pollution:

This is what passed for fresh air.

Until finally, one day, after a century of agitation, activists got smoke control measures passed. The sky started to clear.

The fundamental struggle of any kind of pollution control is trying to get the polluters to internalize the costs of their pollution. Because if they don't, the rest of us have to pay more. We -- i.e. all of society -- subsidize their businesses through increased health care costs, declining values of certain kinds of housing, toxic land or water or air. And the only reason they get away with it is that tracing the line of causality back to them -- even when the air looks as disgusting as it does in these photographs -- is just that difficult. They hide their roles in the complexity of the system.

So, next time you see one of the photos of Beijing's pollution and say, "Geez! The Chinese should do something about this!" Just know that it took American activists over a century to win the precise same battle, and that they're losing a similar one over climate change right this minute.

A visit to YouTube's lab, where they are building the TV of the future

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Google-backed geofenced ads could open up space for whole new types of media as it becomes profitable to do new kinds of local journalism.

Today, Scoutmob, a daily deals site with a focus on the local/artisinal, is rolling out a trial with Google's Field Trip app for Android phones. Field Trip, as we've discussed before, is a foray into pushing you local content and information. Now, with the new deal, the company will get to experiment with pushing ads to your phone. This is a delicate operation, people at Google realize, but they seem determined to figure out how to make it work. What are the rules that they'll have to follow, so that they don't alienate their users?

Over the last year, many people I've talked to about the future of mobile devices told me to expect the phone to evolve into a personal assistant over the next few years. Siri was a down payment on that kind of future, as is Google Now for Android. These companies want to gracefully deliver you information that you want -- like, say, news about traffic when you have an appointment across town -- before you even know you want it. 

But when I try to think through the user-interface implications of such a relationship, I'm struck by how often the phone would have to get my attention without me looking at it. Instead of pulling information from my device, it'll have to push information to me. 

Google's John Hanke described the challenge in a story about Field Trip. "This seamless discovery process, doing things automatically on the phone," Hanke said. "I think it's a whole new frontier in terms of user interface. What's the right model there? How do you talk to your user unprompted?"

Back then, Google's Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android, agreed. "Google Now is probably the first example of a new generation of intelligent software," Barra said. "I think there a lot more products that are similarly intelligent and not as demand-based."

In our interview, he continued, "We've unified all these backends. Things you've done in history, the place where you are, the time of the day, your calendar. And in the future, more things, more signals, the people you're with. Google can now offer you information before you ask for it."

You don't even want to know, they should have explained.

Jeopardy/Alexis C. Madrigal

Humans talk funny. We invent words. We smash words together, tear them apart, abbreviate them one way, then another. Which is great and fun, if you're a human. Not so great if you are a machine or the kind of human who programs machines to understand language.

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And so, when IBM's famous artificial intelligence, Watson, he/she/it of Jeopardy-winning fame, was in development, its head researcher had a great idea. Humans created this repository of slang, The Urban Dictionary. For example, today on the site, we learn that 'healthy gas' is "the gas (fart) produced from a person who has eaten healthy foods like cabbage, beans, broccolli, grains, or other high fiber, high carbohydrate foods." 

Brown realized that this formalization of informal language might be a great way for Watson to understand the way real people communicate. So, he and his team, fed the whole thing into their AI. 

But one problem. Informal language has a tendency to be dirty, nasty language. Its insults and cuss words, new names for gross old things, old names for gross new things, etc. And so, we learn from Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram, they had to delete all that human messiness from Watson's memory. 

Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity -- which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bullshit" in an answer to a researcher's query.

Ultimately, Brown's 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory.

Via Ed Yong

Ok, technically, it's a stitched-together panorama, but just look at it. Click to enlarge it.

Stock up on the Pedialyte and Kleenex, while you still can.

Data by Google, GIFing by Alexis Madrigal.

Look out world, this year's flu season is nasty. 

For the past six flu seasons, Google has predicted the severity of the annual plague based on the increase in flu-related search terms. The company's data matches up really well with the official Centers for Disease Control Statistics. So well that Google is now an official CDC partner; Google's a close-to-real-time warning signal, basically. 

And this year, that's bad news. Because if you look at that dark blue line above, you can see that 2012-2013 eclipses any of the previous six seasons, and it's still very early. Of course, it could be a year the viral hit peaks high but early, a la 2009-2010, or it could have a more traditional curve like 2007-2008. If it's the latter, a lot of people are going to get sick. 

Either way, though, this year is bad. Get your flu shot. Maybe it will help.

Update: why are things so bad this season? Well, we've got three different infections that cause flu-like symptoms right now, the New York Times reports. There are 1) the year's "standard" flu, H3N2, 2) a tough newish stomach bug, and 3) the worst outbreak of pertussis, "whooping cough," in 60 years.