Nat Friedman

Pictures of ordinary street life from long ago are fascinating. Look at this picture. It’s New York in the 1880s. Everyone is wearing hats. It probably smells god-awful. And part of you wants to enter that picture and walk the streets for a few hours. Not long enough to contract typhoid, but just for a little while, to see how people walk and talk and what they wear. Right?

This is the same impulse that creates period films and practices creative anachronism. I loved the Sherlock Holmes stories and read all 4 novels and 56 short stories. Same thing.

So sometimes when I’m walking down the street in 2010, I like to remember that I’m walking through a future past. My great grandson (not yet born) would love to switch places with me for a few hours and see what life was like back in 2010.

His interest is attenuated by the huge number of archived youtube videos from this period, but today’s video capture technology will look pathetic compared to what they’re recording in 100 years, and certainly won’t compare to being there. He’ll feel like he’s missing the full picture.

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in the future, so it’s nice to remember that we’re also walking through the past.

The idea is a weekly webcomic that explains some element of a bill that’s currently passing through congress.

Comics are a low-friction way to learn about stuff with which you are totally unfamiliar. A one-page weekly webcomic that teaches you something and is funny is the kind of thing I would subscribe to.

It could be done in the style of  The Cartoon Guide to Statistics and similar books. And it would cover current events in a way that also teaches you about a general principle. For example, you could explain a rifle-shot provision in one particular bill, and readers would learn what rifle-shot provisions are in general.

(Rifle-shot provisions are clauses designed to apply to a single individual/organization without naming names. So they say, for example, this law applies to all hospitals incorporated on February 3rd, 1983.)

Any interested cartoonists want to open a kickstarter project?

It’s always nice when you find some valuable database is available online via an API.

An API means you don’t have to write grubby code to screen-scrape their web site, and you can get all the data you need.

For example, recently I was messing around with book information and found that the New York Times has a best sellers API you can use to access their bestseller lists going back several years. Cool, right?

Of course like many online APIs they rate-limit you to 5,000 queries per day. So if you want, say, all the bestseller data from the last ten years, you’d need about two days to grab all of that (assuming there are ~4 updates to the list per month, and you want to grab all 15 of their bestseller lists).

So here’s my proposal. Instead of making us run slow crawlers on your APIs to access historical data, just provide a sqlite database we can download.  It’s easier for everyone.

The API is still useful, of course, for up-to-the-moment data.

Now, commercial websites like the New York Times might want to use the inconvenience of an online API as a way to limit access to their data or to enforce some terms and conditions. But I think in practice it just means that people have to run their crawlers a little longer. And maybe they implemented an API because they thought it’s what people wanted.

In the case of government APIs, this is especially important. All government “open data” web sites should be providing downloadable data sets. If they’re too big, chunk them.

So, keep calling for online APIs. But ask for downloadable datasets too.

Alex and I just released the fourth episode of Hacker Medley, called Humans Only.

It’s about CAPTCHA and it’s our first try at integrating interviews into the podcast. It’s also our first long podcast – weighing in at a hefty 50 minutes of documentary-style goodness.

Our format is inspired most heavily by shows like Planet Money and This American Life. From Planet Money we took the style of weaving the interview clips into the narrative, and opening the show with a clip. From This American Life we took the musical transitions that break up the show into little set-pieces.

Let us know what you think!

We just got back to San Francisco. We rented an apartment for a month, and I’m stealing wireless from a neighbor. And I just ordered Mexican food.

On the flight here I watched The Cove. This is a really well-made documentary about a town in Japan called Taiji where local fishermen secretly slaughter tens of thousands of dolphins every year.

The filmmakers smuggled in hidden cameras and hydrophones and managed to capture the killings on camera, despite being dogged by the local police.

Last summer when Stephanie and I were scuba diving in Rangiroa, a pod of wild dolphins swam into our group. They hung out with us for a couple of minutes, swimming around and under and above us in tight, playful loops. It was obvious they wanted to hang out and they came back several times during the dive. I could hear their clicking noises and knew they were imaging me with their sonar.

We saw a lot of life under the sea but when a wild dolphin swims up to you, you get this instant sense that you’re looking at something person-like. It’s like the feeling when someone smart and charismatic walks in the room. It’s nothing like looking at a fish.

So The Cove moved me. Check it out.

There are a few new mobile apps that scan the barcodes on food products and automatically tally calories and nutrients and make pretty little graphs.

Which sounds amazing and convenient and health-conscious, until you realize that for this to be useful, you have to eat food with barcodes.

If what you’re eating has a barcode, it’s not food. It’s a food product.

So, yes, you registered for a website and installed an app on your iPhone, but you’re still eating processed crap. The only difference is, now you think it’s ok. Now you think you’ve finally started to get that whole nutrition thing under control.

Jamie Oliver gave a talk at TED that’s been going around recently. He showed a clip from his TV show when he brought various vegetables around an elementary school classroom, and the little kids couldn’t recognize tomatoes, potatoes, beets, etc.

Humans have cultivated food and changed food for thousands of years. And that’s ok. But we have to distinguish between the good food inventions and the bad ones. They’re not all good.

Domesticated corn: good.

South Beach Living Chocolate Meal Replacement Bars: not so much.

You know what’s a nutritious way to satisfy hunger? Food!

As a little reminder, here is what food looks like:

And for the meat eaters (not me but I don’t hold it against you):