Category: Ideas

“It’s hard to kill a city,” West began, “but easy to kill a company.” The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And “cities are the crucible of civilization.” They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. “Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities.”

That’s from the intro to Geoffrey West’s Long Now seminar “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster”.

Kevin Kelly summarized it in this way:

All organisms (and companies) have share many universal laws of growth. Creatures age in the same way, whether they are small animals, large mammals, starfish, bacteria, and even cells. They share similar metabolic rates. Similar distributions. All ecosystems (and cities) also share universal laws. They evolve and scale in a similar fashion among themselves — whether they are forests, meadows, coral reefs, or grasslands, or villages.

Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute has piles of data to prove these universal and predictive laws of life. For instance, organisms scale in a 3/4 law. For every doubling in size, they increase in other factors by less than one, or .75. The bigger the organism, the slower it goes. Both elephants and mice have the same number of heartbeats per lifespan, but he elephant beats slower.

Ecosystems and cities, on the other hand, scale by greater than one, or 1.15. Every year cities increase in wealth, crime, traffic, patents, pollution, disease, infrastructure, and per capita by 15%. The bigger the city, the faster it goes.

Geoff’s talk is worth a listen, especially as you consider how companies grow and evolve over timespans measured in decades, not years or rounds of funding.

Your body has about ten times the number of microbial cells as it does human cells. Collectively this bacteria weighs about three pounds, about the same as your brain. The evolution of our understanding of these bacteria has been evolving rapidly over the past twenty years, and I expect its findings to be the most impactful on our health and wellness in the coming decades.

The New Yorker has a fantastic article by Michael Specter that starts and ends with our changing perception of heliobacter pylori, linked to gastritis and peptic ulcers, but whose absence in children (it used to be universal, now fewer than 5% of children in the US carry it in their guts) is linked to asthma. It also has consequences for weight:

There is equally convincing evidence that destroying H. pylori could alter metabolism in ways that increase the risk of obesity. Several research groups, including Blaser’s, have found a strong relationship in humans between the bacterium and two stomach hormones, ghrelin and leptin, both of which play central roles in regulating our appetites […] The more ghrelin you have in your bloodstream, the more likely you are to overeat. Leptin functions in the opposite way, suppressing appetite and increasing energy levels. For people whose stomachs are infected by H. pylori, ghrelin became far less detectable after a meal. For the others, levels of the hormone remained high, and the effects are evident. […]

That finding was not a complete surprise. Roughly three-quarters of the antibiotics consumed in the United States are fed to poultry, cows, and pigs, not to treat illness but as dietary supplements to promote faster growth. […] Until recently, the biochemical reasons for that weight gain, and its unsettling implications or humans, were murky. […] “A lot of things are happening at once,” he said. “The rise in obesity, celiac disease, asthma, allergy syndromes, and Type 1 diabetes. Bad eating habits are not sufficient to explain the world-wide explosion in obesity.

The environment inside our body is as complex and varied as the one outside our body and responds just as unpredictably to wholesale changes to its ecosystem. I’d recommend reading the entire article, unfortunately it’s not available in its entirety on the New Yorker’s site, however here’s a PDF of the entire thing.

Users use the same passwords for multiple services. It’s a fact of life, it’s just so easy to that most people end up having 2-3 passwords they use everywhere, including one “hard” one for financial sites, etc. The downside is your password is only strong as the weakest link of where you’ve used it — when something like the Gawker hack happens there is a huge wave of compromised accounts that follow.

You can ask users not to use the same password, you can even encourage things like 1password (too expensive for many people I recommend it to), but what if there was a way to enforce that people registering for your site hadn’t used the same password elsewhere?

It actually wouldn’t be too hard, if you’re registering with 123@gmail.com and the password “abc” when you register and the site hasn’t encrypted and stored the password yet it could try to log into your Gmail account with those details, and if it works force you to choose a different password. There’s no reason this has to be limited to email logins, you could put it against the APIs of WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, any number of other services that expose simple authentication APIs and see where it works. Any successful logins, tell the user they need to pick something else.

Of course all that work and they’ll probably just put a 1 at the end of it.

As many people have heard now, blogs that were previously hosted at weblogs.com are now needing to find new homes. Dave is going to be sending people their backup files but it looks like a lot of links may be broken, and some people proposed keeping a list of the old and new URIs.

Why not go one step better? I apologize if this is not technically feasible for whatever reason, but here’s my idea. DNS is very flexible, Dave can have specific A records for subdomains of sites that are going to stay under weblogs.com, and then set up a wildcard * A record to point to a different IP. This IP could be anyone running a service that would allow people to redirect their old domains to their new ones. Technically this would be pretty simple, no more than a few hours of hacking. The machine serving the redirects could have a wildcard virtualhost entry in Apache and a simple PHP script (or Python script, or RewriteMap) to serve 301 Moved Permanently headers depending on the hostname.

It could redirect to whatever the site owner wanted. The hosting overhead would be minimal. I’m willing to personally commit to writing the code and hosting it for at least 2 years.

It’s always sad to see a good project go a direction that you’re not going to follow it in. Case in point: Power Phlogger. It’s a neat stats application that I was always partial to because it gave information like user resolution and color depth that you don’t usually get from stats programs. It is called through javascript or a backup “image” so you only get “people” in your stats, not bots. It makes it easy to view your stats in terms of actual people visiting your site, what pages they went to, how long they spent on each, information that I find a lot more useful than “X number of people came to your site in May, here are the browsers they used.” Most web logs (not weblogs) have a lot of redundant information that can be easily abstracted in a relational database. (Okay, weblogs too.)

However it’s been half a year since the application has been updated, and much longer since there have been any significant upgrades. They basically stopped working on it to focus on PowerPhlogger3, which is going to be built from an entirely new codebase. That should have been my first warning. Part of the reason WordPress has been so successful when other PHP blogging applications that started about the same time haven’t is that it built on the b2 codebase rather than rewriting everything from scratch. The old code had a lot of problems, but it’s something we’re improving incrementally with each version. (The old code also did a lot of things right.) What if the Firefox developers had decided they needed an entirely new rendering engine and we had to wait 3-4 years for the first release of Firefox? The release date for PPhlogger has fallen back again and again, and no code is currently available to the public. It went from requiring PHP 4.2 to not working on anything but PHP 5, which hasn’t even been released yet and is a long way from being available on most hosts. Along the way they created yet another PHP5 framework. Whenever version 3 comes out it will run on a dozen different databases (11 more than I need). Everything is object-oriented now.

I’m sure all of this is very exciting from some sort of computer science standpoint of code purity, but on the other end there is an impatient user. The situation is made worse by the fact that, as I have found on wordpress.org, PPhlogger 2 does not scale well, to the point of slowing down everything else on the server. I ended up just removing it. I’m going to have to turn it off on this site soon. To some extent logs become useless when your traffic grows; you just can’t watch stats like you used to. That’s why services like Technorati are popular amoung high-traffic bloggers—they extracts meaningful data (who’s linking to me?) out of the noise of web stats. I’m looking for another program that will do this.

PowerPhlogger’s first release candidate will come out “no earlier than July 2004,” a date that has been moved several times. I hope I am wrong in thinking the project has jumped the over-architected shark and they release an amazing product that is fast, useful, and stable.