The worst of Wikipedia

Wikipedia administrators delete over 1000 articles daily. An all-time best-of-the-worst list is here: Deleted_articles_with_freaky_titles

Invisble iPod

I'm a fairly late adopter when it comes to technology (note the start date of this blog). Many years after people started talking about the design of the iPod, I now jump in:

I got an iPod Nano a couple of months ago. I love the thing for the usual reasons: the aesthetics of the hardware, the way it feels in the hand, the integration with the music store, and the information density on the small screen, to name a few.

But since all that is old news, I'd like to mention a couple of nice features/design decisions which happen to be invisible. Invisible features rarely get enough credit.

The first is one I noticed just the other day: when you pull out the headphone jack, it pauses playing automatically. Perhaps Apple hasn't gotten it quite right yet, but the general idea is a good one. I think of all the scrambling I've done to press Pause in the inanely frequent event of a music player being accidentally separated from its headphones. Who needs that stress?

The second cool thing, something I am grateful for on a daily basis, is a few differences in how the iPod treats songs and podcasts. When you play a song, it always starts from the beginning. When you play a podcast, the podcast always resumes from where you last paused it, even if you've listened to a bunch of other stuff after you paused the podcast. Also, when you use the "Shuffle Songs" feature, podcasts don't get into the shuffle list.

On paper, these facts might seem like minor details. On paper, it's also easy to come up with reasons to think they're actually terrible ideas: "The behaviour of podcasts and songs is inconsistent!" OK then, these are good examples of how consistency isn't always important (or, put in different terms, the most important kind of consistency is consistency with the user's expectations). In practice, the simple truth is that I would be quickly annoyed if songs always started from where I last left them, especially given my habit of hearing the first few notes of something and skipping to the next song. As for podcasts, my expectations are indeed different: I'd be even more annoyed if I had to fast-forward through anything I'd heard before as I make my way through the latest interview on Quirks and Quarks.

Like the pause-when-headphones-drop-out feature, the songs/podcasts separation is also imperfectly implemented. For example, if you download a podcast from somewhere other than iTunes, it's difficult to get the iPod to treat it as a podcast. But for trying and getting it mostly right: Thank you, Apple.

Lantern Ride June 3

One of my favorite Bike Month events is the Evening Lantern Ride, which this year is on Saturday, June 3. We meet at David Lam Park in Yaletown at 7:30 for bike-decoration, and ride through the West End, Coal Harbour, and Stanley Park with lanterns. The park is magical at night, and this is one of the rare chances when anyone can feel safe while enjoying it.

We stop to sing songs a few times along the way. I'll be helping with the music this year, and if the weather is good might be playing fiddle.

The actual ride starts at 9:00 and goes for a couple of hours. Lee, the main organizer, acknowledges that the timing is not very kid-friendly. "The sun doesn't go down until that time. Sorry, God makes it that way."

Liking Bill Gates

Q: "What does it say to you that of the 4 million babies who die within their first month, 98 percent are from poor countries? What do those statistics tell you about the world?"

A: "It really is a failure of capitalism. You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down."

Surely this exchange must come from a group of fiscally inept, bleeding-heart leftist, dreadlocked East Vancouverites. Or perhaps earnest 19 year-old Geography majors. But in this case, the person speaking about the failure of capitalism is the richest man in the world, discussing his foundation's efforts to improve world health in a startling 2003 interview with Bill Moyers. By the way, I'm a bleeding-heart centre-leftist from East Vancouver myself. I'm also using Firefox on a Mac right now. I wasn't expecting to ever be moved by Bill Gates.

Bill Gates having more money than he knows what to do with is not news. However, Bill Gates putting serious time and attention – certainly limited resources to him as they are for the rest of us – into these causes is something that defies cynicism. What makes the interview interesting is how he's giving, and why.

Stark realization number one is that although Gates has stepped out of the corporate ring for this role, he is clearly not on a holiday from thinking like a smart businessperson. He talks about how to allocate financial resources, about how to motivate people to change their behaviour, about understanding the math and science of world health, and about getting comfortable with risk. There are risks of project failure, he explains, that politicians cannot accept but philanthropists can.

Another thing that makes this worth reading is Gates's discussion of what he sees as the right and wrong reasons to care. I won't summarize these, except to say that perhaps the next generation will remember Gates as above all a profoundly decent person.

Other quotes:

"And maybe the most interesting thing I learned is... as you improve health in a society, population growth goes down."

"There was about six months where I was carrying around about 10 issues of The Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report. And people would see that on my desk at work and what the heck? You're reading The Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report."

"I actually get angry when people try and justify these health things in economic terms. You know like you'll read a paper that says, you know, "If malaria was cured, the GNP of this country would be 30 percent higher." That gets it so backwards... Statistically it's true and I suppose there're some audiences that you've got to use that argument. But the whole wealth is a tool to measure human welfare. It's just a tool that we created to help us sort of incentivize people and help get things done."

"And those, you know, those arguments, if they get more money for world health, then fine. I won't object. But they're wrong. The right argument is, you know, this mother's child is sick."

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_gates.html

Psychology podcasts

I've been listening to the lectures of "Introductory Psychology," by Jim Hamilton of the University of Alabama. Got them from iTunes Canada. The podcasts are good so far, more satisfying than radio show segments and I have to say better than the average course I took in university. Listening to someone having real interactions with his class hundreds of miles away is much more exciting than watching a lecture with 799 fellow students.

No 8:30 a.m. class times, no grades, no deadlines, and tuition is free. I wouldn't want to do most courses this way, but it's sweet when it does work.