Pass this link around, digg it, share it, let’s get the word out there to Google that this is something we want…and we just might get it.

Google, Inc. knows more about me than I do. Even the people I am closest to in my life don’t know as much as Google does. I use Google Search, Google Adsense, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, YouTube and occasionally Google Notebook and Google Bookmarks. Google knows where I live, where I am most of the time (calendar), my SIN card number, my banking information, my real name, my friends, my interests, my hobbies, and my love of lavish dwarf entertainment. All in all, Google knows a terrifying amount and I’m wary of any organization knowing that much about me. In dystopian science fiction, the government is often portrayed as a Big Brother knowing every private detail about their citizens and we usually shudder in fear, but I’ve given all this information up to an entity who’s sole purpose is to make money and has made some vague claim to not being evil. I want to discuss three possible products that we might see coming up: Google OmniAds, Google BlackMail, and Google PreCrime.

Google OmniAds

Google doesn’t have to try hard to find out what sort of products or services I’m interested in based on what I search for, what ads I click on, what I write about on my blog, what I write emails about, etc. It could also quickly generate a profile of what my “hot buttons” are (loss of control or hair, for example) and create ads that are 95% effective. Instead of having ads based on the context of the page, have ads based on the psychographic buying profile of the person doing the web surfing. Enter Google OmniAds. Google knows everything about me and will have 95% influence on my buying decisions with ads like, “Losing your hair? Try lavish dwarf entertainment!”. The scary thing is, I might actually like that.

Google BlackMail

There’s a lot of “sensitive” emails I’ve stored in my GMail inbox, as well as “sensitive” google searches. My searches for ninja-pirate lovin’ videos, for example. Any number of those emails–if they got out–could seriously hurt my reputation as a fine upstanding gentleman among my nearest and dearest as well as potential employers. So, what’s a giant corporation geared towards profit to do? Start blackmailing people with their knowledge of your affairs, or that person you killed and just how much you liked Barbie’s Unicorn Adventure. Google would do it classy, too. No clandestine letters cut out from newspapers and magazines. You’d get your own BlackMail representative who will work with you to work out a good amount of money in exchange for keeping their mouth shut. Letting out information of your distinctly unmasculine love for hair braiding may cost as little as $100 to bury forever, but that time you searched drunkenly for Ukranian mail-order brides despite being married may cost as much as $100,000. It would be egalitarian, of course, and you would pay as much as you could afford. This would quickly become the most lucrative division of Google, Inc.

Google PreCrime

Google exclusively hires very, very smart people. All it needs to do is throw in a few good psychologists, write some programs that comb their data for specific personality markers as well as any emails saying, “tomorrow we bomb the white house” and you’ve got yourself the ability to predict crime. It doesn’t have to be big-time crime, either; theft of stationary from offices causes more than ten billion dollars of losses a year, and I’m sure someone out there is bragging about stealing that stapler before they got fired. I wonder how long it’ll be before the government orders Google to start running these search patterns on their data and identifying potential threats. Oh wait…

Also, I accidently stole a book on Friday as I was buying another one. Oddest thing is that I can’t remember putting it in my bag at all. Ironically, I stole a book that would strongly advocate not stealing: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina. Steve has a past that included being addicted to stealing, so perhaps even more ironic. Obviously, I will be returning it. I may even buy it because this is a book I’ve been wanting to read and doesn’t appear to be in the library system at all. It is also reasonably priced because it is a paperback.

From the side:

Cause it reminds me of the Batman: The Animated Series car:

Not only is the SLR an absolutely gorgeous car, its super fast, too. So, who’s with me? Next Batmobile?

I’ve actually gone back to watch a lot of these old-school shows and I’ve noticed two things. The first is that the shows are a lot crappier than I remembered and the second is that they’re all hippie show!

Captain Planet, also about saving the world but that was ok mostly. Biker Mice from Mars, though, is a pretty obvious attack on technological growth, greed and money. Shows like this might help explain my weird relationship with those pieces of paper and digital bits called money.

Oh, and Street Sharks! DOUBLE DRAGON!

It may be useless, but it is gorgeous.

Some interesting tidbits:

Jumbo, probably the most famous elephant that most people know of, is actually how the word “jumbo” entered our lexicon, it originally meant either “hello” or “chief”. He was supposed to be 13 feet tall when he died. That is huge. Do you know how he died? He was crushed by a locomotive. Many metallic objects were found in the elephant’s stomach, including pennies, nickels, dimes, keys, and rivets.

“Jumbo’s skeleton was donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, New York, USA. The elephant’s heart was sold to Cornell University. Jumbo’s hide was stuffed by William J. Critchley and Carl Akeley, both of Ward’s Natural Science, and the mounted specimen traveled with Barnum’s circus for a number of years. In 1889, Barnum donated the stuffed Jumbo to Tufts University, where it was displayed until destroyed by a fire in 1975, coincidentally a fate that befell many of Barnum’s exhibits during his own lifetime. The great elephant’s ashes are kept in a 14-ounce Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar in the office of the Tufts athletic director.”

Batyr was a talking elephant. Not much more can be said about the subject except that it’s astonishing, read up.

Tusko, a common name, refers to two famous elephant. The first was touted to be the Meanest Elephant, weight a ton more than Jumbo (though a bit shorter) and had tusks that were 7 feet long. Holy crap.

Another Tusko was given a crapload of LSD. He collapsed within 5 minutes and died within another hour forty.

An elephant could probably win a fight with a rhino. However, elephants generally haven’t done that well against organized modern humans.

The final two famous elephants suffered a worse fate: execution. Topsy was electrocuted after she killed three people in three years (although there may have been abuse involved and elephants can be vindictive). Thomas Edison used AC current to both discredit rival Tesla and to electrocute the animal which 1,500 people witnessed. Edison even captured the event on film and released it under the name of Electrocuting an Elephant (youtube). You can see the elephant being brought in and bound to chains. 6,600 volts and a few seconds later, it collapses.

Mary was a similar case and her story is perhaps best told by Wiki itself:

Mary was a five ton Asian elephant who performed in the Sparks World Famous Shows circus.

On September 11, 1916 a hotel worker named Red Eldridge was hired as an assistant elephant trainer by the circus. On the evening of September 12 he was killed by Mary in Kingsport, Tennessee while taking her to a nearby pond to splash and drink. There are several accounts of his death but the most widely accepted version is that he prodded her behind the ear with a hook after she reached down to nibble on a watermelon rind. She went into a rage, snatched Eldridge with her trunk, threw him against a drink stand and deliberately stepped on his head, crushing it.

The details of the aftermath are confused in a maze of sensationalist newspaper stories and folklore. Most accounts indicate that she calmed down afterward and didn’t charge the onlookers, who began chanting, “Kill the elephant!” Apparently within minutes, a local blacksmith tried to kill Mary, firing more than two dozen rounds with little effect. Newspapers published claims that Murderous Mary had killed several workers in the past and noted that she was larger than the world famous Jumbo the elephant. Meanwhile, the leaders of several nearby towns threatened not to allow the circus to visit if Mary was included. The circus owner, Charlie Sparks, reluctantly decided that the only way to quickly resolve the potentially ruinous situation was to kill the elephant in public. On the following day, a foggy and rainy September 13, 1916, she was transported by rail to Erwin, Tennessee where a crowd of over 2,500 people (including most of the town’s children) assembled in the Clinchfield railroad yard.

The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane. The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks.

Sad indeed.

I should write for Damn Interesting.

John Hetherington was an English haberdasher who supposedly modified the riding hat of the day into a Top Hat, widening the brim and lengthening it. In 1797, he caused a riot in the streets of London. People are said to have run in terror, dogs barking, women fainting. The crowd broke the arm of an errand boy as they ran past. Hetherington was charged in court with wearing “a tall structure having a shining luster calculated to frighten timid people”, and was fined £50.

Source.

An amusing article about funny laws in the UK.

Another amusing article cataloguing amusing history.

Google’s also been giving me dating advice. Google doesn’t think I have a chance with real women, so it keeps recommending I date cougars. Lately, its been suggesting I just buy a woman off the net, like with this ad:

Sweet Moscow Lady – www.Anastasia-International.com – Your Beautiful Moscow Lady to Love Marriage minded. Family Oriented

I know for a fact that the above site is not actually Russians, they’re Ukranians passing themselves off as Russians. I mean, really, Google doesn’t think I can handle a real Russian woman?

I dunno, I just get the feeling that Google thinks I have problems. I mean, I try to fix them, but it just hurts, you know? When you love something that much and then it just turns around and tells you to get your moobs looked at.

It just hurts.

There are also a number of subjects I’m interested in knowing but the actual process of learning them seems tedious to me. Certain maths, statistics and probabilities fall in this category. I like to know them, but not to actually have to learn them. Books are useless to me here because I have yet to find a book that explains these subjects in a very entertaining or interesting way (perhaps through the use of stories), but audio programs or video programs are great because all I have to do is pay attention and that’s great for this sort of thing.

Another thing I like to do is have some idea of the course material for the courses I’m taking. I find it really cuts down the amount of time I need to study and improves my grade. Watching a ten hour series of lectures may reduce my studying/homework by five times that over the duration of a course, and I’ll get better grades because I have first brush familiarity with the ideas.

That’s how we learn, see, complex ideas are learned best by being introduced to them in passes. The first pass, you get a shallow understanding of the key terms. The next pass is a little deeper and you start to get an understanding of the parts. And so on. I like to reserve some time to step back and make sure all the big parts link together. Its easy to simply think of each class or chapter as a discrete unit when you’re studying in a course, but everything is actually connected together and its important to understand this connection.

That all brings me to The Teaching Company. They seek out nationally-recognized professors (and I can tell you, its really worth it. The difference in learning and enjoyment from a good prof versus a great prof is very noticeable) and have them teach courses and record them on video and audio. They cover a very wide range of topics and have been in operation for many years. Here’s a list of the courses they offer. Truly an excellent business.