On John Kennedy and Throwing Up

When John Kennedy ran for president, he gave a speech about the separation of church and state and about anti-Catholic sentiment. Rick Santorum wants to throw up when he hears it. Why?

Because the first line, first substantive line in the speech says, "I believe in America where the separation of church and state is absolute." I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion. That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square. Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, no, faith is not allowed in the public square.

This is incredibly important, and not because Rick Santorum said it. (I happen to believe that his values are far outside the American mainstream, and I would hate to see him as my president. But that's a post for a different day.) This statement is important because it highlights two very different concepts of what church/state independence should look like. The American legacy on this issue is quite different than that of much of the rest of the world, and it bears some emphasis.

Big Data for Dummies

"Damn, that rock is heavy."

-- Grrrg, son of Booog, discoverer of The Big Data Problem

Big Data is big business, and all the nerds are talking about it. Since many of my readers are not nerds (and I mean that in the nicest way), I'd like to break down what Big Data is, and then I'd like to put it in a historical context that I think has been somewhat neglected.

People and devices are more connected than ever before. Fortunately for you, you represent only one of those people, and you have only a handful of devices and a few friends. All of your data, and all of the relevant data from the people you care about, fits in less than a cubic foot on your desk. If you search for a particular piece of information stored there, your computer can find it in a couple of seconds. Congratulations; you're doing fine: you don't have a Big Data Problem.

Your ISP has tens of thousands of customers just like you. LinkedIn had 100 million members as of a year ago. Facebook has almost 900 million members. And They. Save. Everything. In other words, they have 5-10 orders of magnitude more data than you do. That's far too much to store in one place, and if they searched their data the way you search yours, your one-second search would take them a week. If you typed a query into Google.com and had to wait a week for your search results to come back, you'd be pissed -- like, really pissed.

That, my friends, is a Big Data Problem.

Apple's TV, Again

I wrote last spring about the persistent rumors that Apple is working on a TV set. (Steve J. himself later confirmed that something TV-related is in the works.) Re-reading my piece, I think I got a few things right. For example, Apple will not get into the business of selling giant pieces of phosphor-coated class beyond the traditional computer screens it sells today. But I sold the vision short. I didn't get it. Then today I read this article in The Globe and Mail (via John Gruber).

How could I have been. So. Blind.

It's not about the TV screen. It's about the connections.