How too much choice is a problem

Too much hardware choice
[Via Marco.org]

From my Verizon iPhone post:

Even the gadget blogs have a hard time feigning enthusiasm for this week’s hot Android phone because they still haven’t taken the shrinkwrap off of last week’s.

Not enough Nick’s response:

Wait, the stream of high-quality, constantly improving hardware with options to fit different desires is a problem for Android?

Yes, it is, for a few major reasons.

Most people don’t read gadget blogs or even know what Android is. They generally hear about individual phones, without distinguishing much based on operating system. (They don’t know what those are, either.)

The highest-profile Android launch that seemed to meaningfully reach the masses was the Motorola Droid, primarily because it was boosted by a massive Verizon television and in-store ad campaign.

But since then, very few non-geeks know about individual Android handsets. They change so frequently, and are so numerous, that there’s never much of an opportunity for a meaningful buzz to generate around any of them. Nobody’s lining up to buy them. CNN’s not covering their launches. Consumer Reports isn’t vigorously testing their antennas. The Daily Show isn’t making jokes about them. So the mass market doesn’t really respond to individual devices. Even if Uncle Joe brings his fancy Android Something to Thanksgiving and your mother is impressed by it and wants to buy one, by the time her contract expires in two months and she goes to the Verizon store, it’s gone.

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When I go into a new restaurant for the first time, I usually see two types of menus. One where there are a choice of 3-5 entrees under a couple headings on two pages or ones where there are pages and pages of items under a multitude of headings. I hate the latter.

Too many choices when all I want is something to eat. And it is likely that only a few of those are really good. Maybe only a few are worthwhile but it is so hard to find them.

But the one with fewer choices makes it much easier to choose.

More possibilities does not make it easier.

OMG. The Mormons want women to vote

Why women shouldn’t be “burdened” with the vote: 1915
[Via Boing Boing]

This 1915 Boston Journal ad warning against the dangers of women’s suffrage lays all manner of dangers at the feet of “burdening” women with the vote, including increased taxes and divorce. It warns that extending the vote to women is a joint plot of the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World, socialists, and Mormons. Good to know that we’ve come so far in our political rhetoric.

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So, women’s suffrage was a socialist plot. And the anarchists and feminists were too. All on the left.

Then the Mormons? They used to be favorite boogeymen for people on the right.

Some things have really changed.

Yes, our kids have rewired brains

Miles O’Brien: Is technology rewiring teens’ brains?
[Via Boing Boing]

My friend Miles O’Brien produced a really cool piece for PBS News Hour about “what could be happening to teenagers’ brains as they develop in a rapid-fire, multitasking world of technology and gadgets.”

You may know the PBS correspondent best from his many years as space and science reporter with CNN—he also slummed it on a few BBTV episodes (1, 2, 3).

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I blame typewriters. Up until the late 1800s, people who wrote used one hand and initiated pathways through one hemisphere. The language skills and muscular movements needed to write only really had to come from one side of our brain.

But, with the introduction of keyboards and touch typing, people wrote and composed using two hands, requiring very precise control and communication between both hemispheres. If the language was not being transmitted to both hemispheres properly, then the correct muscular movements to hit the right keys, with each hand in the right order, could not occur.

It takes a very different type of cognitive effort to compose with a keyboard than with a pen. But, until recently, not everyone had to learn how to use a typewriter keyboard and when they did, they were usually already adults with brains already wired.

My son has never taken typing lessons but has lived with a keyboard his whole life. His ability to type is simply incredible. I watch him compose a Facebook comment and it looks like he is just randomly pounding keys. The coordination between two hands and two hemispheres has to require a very different set of neural connections than living a life with a pen.

His generation’s early introduction to the keyboard, which forces them to have enhanced communication between both hemispheres, may well have caused their brains to be different. We know that if an animal does not get visual stimulation during key parts of its early life, it will be ‘blind’ even though all the right parts are there. The old use it or lose it.

What if we all lost it because we never had the chance to use it but this new generation was able to use parts of their brains during critical times that opened up new pathways for cognition?

Now add in visual cues on top of this dual hemisphere wiring and look out. Now they can make decisions faster but just as accurately than we can. Because they have been raised dealing with games involving probabilities, they are able to understand stochastic events better than older generations.

They also appear to be able to multitask better than the rest of us.

My mother always thought I was some mutant leap forward – yes she read a lot of science fiction when she was younger . I’m beginning to wonder if we are not seeing something here, where new tools are creating a generation that actually thinks differently and perhaps better.

Read this and see real human determination

Sen. Gillibrand, Rep. Wasserman Schultz Describe Giffords Opening Her Eyes

She did more than just open her eyers. She responded to verbal command to touch things. She gave her husband a hug.

To be in the room, with their friend, when that happened. Even the doctors recognized how important having her friends and family were:

And we went out, Dr. Lemole, who is the one that’s been on TV and has been so good about explaining everything, he literally said to us, you know, I’ve discounted — on TV, I’ve discounted emotion being — and friendship and family — really, I’ve sort of discounted that as meaningless out loud. He said, I just witnessed the impact of friendship and what you guys — he said, you did this here today.

Antimatter created on Earth every day

Weather so severe it generates antimatter
[Via Ars Technica]

It turns out thunderstorms pack a much bigger punch than most people think. In the mid-1990s, we found that lightning and the associated electric field above a thunderstorm can be strong enough to produce a gamma ray blast detectable from space. These terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) are believed to occur all over the world at a rate of about 500 per day. Researchers using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have discovered a similar, but previously undetected phenomena: the production of an antimatter beam from the top of these storms.

Fermi is built to observe and measure gamma rays from anywhere in the Universe, but it has also been used to look at terrestrial events as well. Over its first three years, Fermi has identified 130 TGFs. These TGFs have included gamma rays with an energy of 511 keV—the energy signature of an electron-positron annihilation event.

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All these TGFs are postulated to be caused by electron/positron beams by the authors of the paper. Just think that every day regular weather events could be accomplishing things that we have only been able to recreate in the lab within the last 50 years or so.

Electrons getting accelerated to almost light speed. Wow. It is a measure of just how powerful thunderstorms can be. I wonder if there are storms on Saturn or Jupiter that are even more powerful?

Another important symbolic gesture for the State of the Unuin

Instead of sitting on opposite sides of the House chamber, Mark Udall suggests that during the State of the Union speech , Republicans and Democrats sit together, thus demonstrating the collegiality and civility that should be present, even when disagreements exist..

This would be pretty classy and, like reading the Constitution, a reminder of our common interests and goals. Udall states:

On the night of the State of the Union address, we are asking others to join us – House and Senate members from both parties – to cross the aisle and sit together. We hope that as the nation watches, Democrats and Republicans will reflect the interspersed character of America itself. Perhaps by sitting with each other for one night we will begin to rekindle that common spark that brought us here from 50 different states and widely diverging backgrounds to serve the public good.

I hope the political leadership of both parties initiates this as I think it would be very healing.