Lunch over IP

Word clouds

It's a different way of looking at text: Wordle, a new (and addictive) Web-based tool, turns any text into a word cloud (via TEDblog). Here is the Wordle version of my recent Wall Street Journal article about the Solar Impulse project:

Put in a list of tags (in this case, my del.icio.us tags) and here is the result:

And the lyrics of John Lennon's "Imagine" produce this:

Fiction: The Google Apocalypse

I've written a short fiction, situated in 2013, speculating about what would happen if everything that Google knows, and could conceivably know, about the users of its services became public. It's in German, it's inspired by a past blog post, and it is published in the newest issue of NZZ Folio, the very sharp magazine of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung -- full summary here, the issue is devoted to the Internet. The editors titled the story -- illustrated by the drawing at right by Anna-Lina Balke -- "The Google Apocalypse".

Average webpage size tripled in five years

Interesting data about the "size" of the average webpage, from WebsiteOptimization: the size (total of all the elements in a page) has more than tripled since 2003, growing from 93.7Kb to over 312Kb (plus 233%).

During the same five-year period, the number of objects in the average web page (texts, images, ads, audio, video, applets, etc) nearly doubled from 25.7 to 49.9 objects per page on average, with top sites including generally more objects. As broadband becomes more widespread, web designers have created more elaborate designs, and web2.0 technologies such as Ajax certainly contribute to the increase in the number of objects per page. Longer term statistics show that since 1995 the size of the average web page has increased by 22 times, and the number of objects per page has grown by 21.7 times.

Other data:

• The average download time of a chosen set of pages has decreased from 2.8 to 2.33 seconds from Feb. 2006 to Feb. 2008: in other words,  the increase in the average speed of broadband has more than kept pace with the increase in the size and complexity of the average web page.
• A 2006 survey of over 21,500 non-framed web pages found that the average web page contained 474 words, 281 HTML tags, and 41 links, 10 of which pointed outside the domain.
• The use of streaming media on the Web has increased by more than 100% each year. From 2000 to 2005 the total volume of streaming media files stored on the Web grew by more than 600%. More than 87% of all streaming media is abandoned by users in the first 10 seconds, however.
• About 10% of the most popular videos on YouTube account for nearly 80% of the views.

Contemporary priorities

At Geneva airport they just restructured one of the restaurants. This is the sign above the main door, spelling out clear present-day priorities:

Earth-rise and Earth-set

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) has released some extraordinary video footage taken by the the onboard high-definition camera of their spacecraft Kaguya, showing amazing images of the Moon's surface and the Earth "rising" and "setting" beyond the Moon's horizon. (Clicking on the link on their page opens up a second window: let the whole video download -- it takes a while -- before watching it).

Earth-rise:

Earth-set:

(If you want more of the kind, watch or download the great speech that NASA's Carolyn Porco gave at TED07 last March, showing images of Saturn and its moons.)

Which law applies on the International Space Station?

Excerpts from an article in the European Science Foundation website on the limits of space law:

What happens if astronauts from different countries get into a fight on the International Space Station? ... Space law is based on the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 ... It has been ratified by 98 states. Following the tradition of maritime law, the treaty recognises that states have legal jurisdiction within spacecraft registered to them. ... The space station posed new legal problems as it is being assembled from modules supplied by the United States, Russia and Japan as well as the European Space Agency. The partners rejected an initial proposal that US law should prevail throughout the space station. “It was agreed that each state registers its own separate elements, which means that you now have a piece of the US annexed to a piece of Europe annexed to a piece of Japan in outer space, legally speaking.” ... What if one astronaut gets into a fight with another? “They decided that if somebody performs an activity which may be considered criminal, it is in the first instance his own country which is able to exercise jurisdiction." ...  Another solution was found for patent law. An invention created on the ISS will be patented in the country which has jurisdiction over the module in which the work was done. ... The parties also agreed a new approach to civil liability. What happens if a US astronaut damages equipment in the European part of the space station? “The basic idea is that we all accept our own risks.” ...

Further ahead, whose law will apply if bases are established on the Moon and even on Mars? The Outer Space Treaty says that no nation can lay claim to the Moon. ... Jurisdiction on the Moon is not covered by existing treaties ... “Jurisdiction is not possible on a territorial basis. A base on the Moon can never qualify as the territory of any country in the world, so you have to find other means.” It is also not clear what legal nationality a child born on the Moon would have.

The perfect airport

This just landed in my in-box from a frequently frequently frequently flying American friend (frequent travelers will know why I'm -- with a smile -- blogging this):

It’s 6:15 am and I’m sitting in a comfy rocking chair, watching the sun rise in what might be the perfect airport (Charlotte, NC). I’ve never been here before, but my first impression is that it's lovely; a strange adjective for an airport perhaps, but fitting. The main hall has calm, muted lighting; street signs that point to the way to the concourses; and rows of white rocking chairs – **with electrical plugs next to each one!**. With the whiff of Cinnabon from across the room, the whole place has a decidedly small-town main-street feel to it. And to top it all off, I just discovered it has FREE wi-fi. I may never leave.

How many ways can you spell V1@gra?

What's most remarkable about the question posed in my title is that I probably don't need to explain it. If you have checked your e-mail anytime in the past few years, you know all about "V.i.a.g.r.a" and "V!A6RA" and "\/lagra".

That's the beginning of a very serious and at the same time amusing article by Brian Hayes in American Scientist Online about spam e-mail, and particularly about its mutations in order to evade the filters that both users and Internet operators have put in place. Spam "is shaped in many ways by our own combat it", he writes. He goes through some maths before concluding that "it seems safe to say there are at least a million ways to spell Viagra" (there are various possible substitutions for each of the five letters V, I, A,G and R; for example, any the 12 characters I, i, 1, l, |, ï, ì, :, Ì, Î, Í or Ï might serve for an I. More: the spelling can also be altered by inserting extraneous characters into the word, such as dashes and asterisks; or some letters could be doubled, as in "Viaggra"; etc)

(Of course, the same logic applies to "C1aL|$" and "Rrol,x Rep,ica" and "pen1s en1argement" and many other such key spam words).

Which spelling ends up in your inbox however doesn't appear to be completely random (although random-spelling generators certainly exist in the spam world). Hayes has mapped the different spellings of "Viagra" in some 10'000 messages he received over time, and the result can be seen by clicking on the image at left (a separate window will pop-up). "The spelling variations might be likened to the spectrum of genetic mutations in a population of bacteria", Hayes writes. "The Viagra variants offer some tentative hints about the working habits of spammers. Often, once a spelling has been incorporated into a message, it is mailed out repeatedly over a period of a few months, then given a rest. The conspicuous vertical correlations within the diagram suggest that mailings with the various spellings are not independent. A plausible inference is that most of the pill-pushing spam comes from a few individuals.

A sexy modem and other advertising pearls

The editors of Computerworld have gone back to look at 40 years of print issues. They were looking for important stories and people to prepare a special anniversary issue, but they ended up considering the ads -- and, they say, spending a whole news meeting laughing while they were flipping through the pages.

They picked 10. And, indeed, with hindsight they grant some laughter. "80 Mbytes of storage for less than $12,000!" (1977); "What the heck is electronic mail? Simply put, it means high-speed information transportation" (1981); "With WordStar, you have a true screen image of what your printout will look like before you print it!" (1981); and more, including -- image -- a modem that's "maybe even sexy" (1971).

Surreal warning

From my last trip to California, this piece of surreal art (I don't see how else it could be defined) hanging on the wall of a hotel corridor in Palo Alto: