Seth's Blog

I use Google Analytics to measure web traffic to my blog, forums, and website. A few months ago a new version was introduced and, as far as I can tell, made the default. The new version is worse than the old version. Every time I use GA, I click on “old version”.

In an excess of confidence, the new version isn’t merely the default, it also has a link called “make this version default”. The old version has no such link. There seems to be no way to make the old version the default. It is a Google version of “this sentence is false.”

More Apparently someone from Google read this or was told about it. The problem has been fixed.

Even More And then someone changed it back — it remains unclear how to make the old version the default.

SOPA is an example of what Thorstein Veblen called “the vested interests” trying to prevent change. In an essay called “The Vested Interests and the Common Man” he pointed out “the existence of powerful vested interests which stand to gain from the persistence of the existing, but outdated system of law and custom.” Jane Jacobs said much the same thing. The most important conflict in any society, she wrote at the end of The Economy of Cities, isn’t between the rich and poor or management and labor; it is between those who benefit from the status quo and those who benefit from change. If those who benefit from the status quo usually win, problems stack up unsolved.

May I interrupt my usual posts to complain about something? Something minor?

It is that iTunes for Windows — from Apple, the maker of what are said to be brilliantly-designed products — is horribly designed. I have two examples.

1. Suppose I want to see what’s in the iTunes Store. I open a new window. I can’t close that window without closing iTunes! And if, after closing the whole program, I open it again, it still gives me the Stores window! Maybe the Stores window went away after a few weeks…I don’t want to even think about it.

2. I pressed the wrong button and started 181 downloads. There is no way to cancel them! If I stop the whole program, they will resume the next time I start it. This is software design from the 1960s.

And this is iTunes version 10.something, not version 0.3.

Andrea Rossi, an Italian inventor, has constructed a version of his E-Cat invention — a new source of energy — that produces 1 gigawatt/hour. A test to verify this claim satisfied an unknown customer, who bought the device. This is easily the most impressive physics/chemistry news of my lifetime. It remains to be determined how long the device can run on a given amount of fuel (supposedly the fuel is cheap), but the evidence that a new source of energy has been found is much better (in my eyes) than anything else I have ever heard. The (previous) evidence for cold fusion, for example, never came anywhere close to this. (More I learned more after writing this and no longer take E-Cat seriously. For details see end of post.) (more…)

Amy Winehouse, my favorite singer, is dead. I’m very sad. She made half my music collection unlistenable because she set such a high standard. I wish you a good journey, Amy.