DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Wired’s Googlemania is a collection of 10 stories about Google. It offers short takes on several interesting facets of the Google story, like Google vs. Microsoft, 3rd-party Google API apps, PageRank-killing comment spam.

The opening piece, “Surviving IPO Fever,” contains a list of IPO cautionary tales: sudden wealth going wrong, culled from longtime members of the Silicon Valley community:

• The mousy guy in accounting who dumps his mousy wife and runs off to Mexico with the admin.
• The lonely programmer who goes off to a men’s club to celebrate his new wealth and marries a stripper he meets there.
• The sober family man who, upon discovering that he’s half-Native American, renounces his US citizenship and moves to an Indian reservation so he won’t have to pay taxes.
• The programmer who quits, buys the sports car of his dreams, crashes, loses everything in the resulting personal-injury lawsuit, and ends up broke, back in his old job.
• The senior executive who takes his new wealth up into Los Altos Hills and spends the next decade putting the money up his nose one gram at a time.

Another great story of the darker side of IPOs comes from Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first employee:

“Before [eBay] went public, I used to send out a company-wide joke each day, just as a way of loosening things up,” says Skoll. “The day after the IPO, I sat down at my computer to write that day’s joke and in walked the general counsel. He says to me, ‘You know that joke of the day thing? I think it’s very funny.’ Gosh, thank you, I replied. ‘Well, stop it,’ he said. ‘We are a public company now, and we don’t want to offend anyone. If you want to keep sending out jokes, they can only be about lawyers.’ So I tried sending out lawyer jokes for two weeks - and then I gave up.”

In 2000, a band called Transatlantic released an album featuring (among many other moments of musical transcendence) an extended piano solo, performed by Neal Morse.

The band was channeling the Allman Brothers, specifically Chuck Leavell’s extended piano solo on the song Jessica, from the 1973 release Brothers and Sisters. The Allman Brothers was not a progressive rock band, but the members had this in common with the guys in Transatlantic: they could play.

I hear stylistic similarities when I compare the two solos. Listen to this figure, used by Leavell, and then by Morse. Now listen to the way the drummer and pianist play off one another, first in Jessica and then All of the Above. There’s an organic energy to these solos that appeals to me — an energy that says, “this might be magical, or it might get taped over in 60 seconds.” They were right the first time.

Here are the solos in their entirety:

• Jessica, The Allman Brothers Band, Brothers and Sisters
• All of the Above, Transatlantic, SMTP:e

I’d like to write that the piano solo in Jessica is one of the finest musical passages released in 1973, but that was too good a year — Camel released their eponymous debut then, and Genesis released perhaps the most wondrous progressive rock album of all time, Selling England by the Pound. And the ink was still drying on Jethro Tull’s 1972 release, Thick As A Brick, also the most wondrous progressive rock album of all time.

As far as Transatlantic goes, I have to say that the entire discography kicks a whole lot of ass. Buy them all, like right now.

Last week I wrote about re-using plastic bottles to reduce landfill waste. My friend Bruce pointed out the controversy about safety issues: some people claim PET plastic was not designed to withstand repeated use, and begins to break down, releasing toxins.

Clearly that’s a bad thing. I don’t need toxins in my water; I get enough of them in my salad.

A moment’s research located the controversy. But as I dug deeper, I found solid conclusions, backed up by independent lab analysis.

The mutant-baby predictions started with a research paper by a U. of Idaho student on the subject of contamination caused by PET plastic bottles. It claimed, “Four compounds, 1,4-benzenedicarboxaldehyde, benzoic acid butyl ester, 4-ethoxy-benzoic acid ethyl ester, di(2-ethylhexyl) adipate (DEHA), were found to migrate from PET bottles exposed to conditions of reuse.”

News of this paper circulated widely, fueled by “sky is falling” emails, like the one about buying a drink for a pretty girl and then waking up the next morning in a tub of ice with a note reading “call 911; we’ve just taken both your kidneys” tacked to the wall. And I think the PET/DEHA chain email held about as much truth.

The American Plastics Council published a refutation of the U. of Idaho paper, noting conclusively that “DEHA is not inherent in PET as a raw material, byproduct or decomposition product.”

But if DEHA isn’t used in making PET plastic, how did the U. of Idaho student’s analysis find traces of it in the water? According to a hoax-busting page put up by the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Quality and Treatment in Australia, “the concentrations of plasticisers detected in test bottles in [a] Swiss study were the same as those in blank water samples which had not been in contact with PET.” In other words, the U. of Idaho student hadn’t found contamination; he’d found statistical noise.

What about the other toxins identified in the original thesis? Although not addressed specifically by any of the official-sounding refutations online, they’re covered in a document from the Plastics Council entitled, The Safety of Polyethylene Terephthalate [PDF]. This paper presents a readable 2-page summary of the issue, and quotes a study by the International Life Sciences Institute that concludes,

“PET itself is biologically inert if ingested, is dermally safe during handling and is not a hazard if inhaled. No evidence of toxicity has been detected in feeding studies using animals.”

The only risk of PET bottle reuse that any of these websites admit to is bacterial infection due to poor hygiene. In other words, if you don’t wash your plastic beverage bottles, they’ll become host to potentially dangerous populations of bacteria.

The Plastics Council PDF on PET safety distinguishes PET beverage bottles from microwavable food trays — as the latter are intended for one-time use only, and are labelled as such. The implication is that reuse of beverage bottles is perfectly safe. The Plastics Council stops short of approving such reuse, but remember that they have a financial interest in the issue. The PDF quotes a second study from ILSI on the topic of “Refillable Plastic Packaging,” which states,

“… the levels of migrants potentially present in beverages packaged in PET bottles are below applicable international extraction limits that are based on safety considerations and orders of magnitude lower than levels causing adverse effects in toxicity studies. The use by consumers of PET polymer in food packaging, therefore, is demonstrated and considered safe.”

I don’t know what reuse conditions the ILSI tested, but it’s evident there is no immediate risk to reusing PET beverage bottles. Replacing bottles monthly seems like a sane compromise.

And, after that, the bottles need to be recycled. But you knew that part already.

Update 2007-02-25: Much has been written elsewhere about the scourge of plastic water bottles — e.g. water being shipped 5000 miles from Fiji (!) to California despite the presence of excellent water at the nearest tap — but rather than regurgitate that I’ll just say I bought a couple Klean Kanteens (stainless-steel water bottles) to remove myself from the plastic-bottle industry altogether.

On February 12, the Washington Post published a graph of George W. Bush’s approval ratings, superimposed with the three defining moments of Bush’s presidency: the terrorist attacks of September 11, the invasion of Iraq, and the capture of Hussein.

Sound familiar? It should. I published the same graph ten days prior.

Of course the Post’s version is much prettier than mine. They have a paid staff of illustrators. I have a paid staff of… none. No, wait — I once made $1.50 in commissions from Amazon.

In related news, some folks on a political discussion board had a debate about my graph. One poster in particular seemed to think I’d faked it — a curious response, given that the data is publicly available.

The battery in my motorcycle died again. I was downtown, in a place where every hill in sight goes up. If you’ve ever been stranded, you know what it feels like — but add to that the helmet and heavy jacket and boots and really heavy motorcycle and you’ll realize the depths of my despair. I was at the bottom of more than one sort of decline. Not only could I not get home, I’d have to carry all my gear, and deal with the dead vehicle too.

We don’t have taxis here, by the way.

After some moments of looking around dumbly, hoping for salvation to appear, I realized with a start that salvation had done just that: my bike had died one block from the garage where we have our car serviced.

Our mechanic is a great guy, always ready to help in a pinch. And I was pinched.

He was elbow-deep in a brake rebuild when I approached, yet he stopped immediately to help me jump-start the bike. He set out his portable jump-start rig (cables with attached battery). He was reaching for tools as I jogged back outside to retrieve the bike.

A half-block from the garage entrance, the street dips slightly. I hadn’t thought this would give me enough momentum to bump-start the bike, but as I rolled toward it I realized this was my last chance to drive home without getting messy. So I dug in. I pushed with everything I had. Bones bent under the strain. My boots sprouted talons. The top layer of enamel on my molars spontaneously ground to dust.

I think I achieved a whopping 10 mph. I dumped the clutch like a bucket of old paint. And with a feeble cough, the engine turned over, sputtered, and caught. Freedom!

With a wave to the mechanic, who was shaking his head in mirth at my slow-motion Flintstones sprint down the street, I sped home to arrange a maintenance visit to the Kawasaki dealership.

The bike was due for a major service: tune-up, valve adjustment, new battery, and an institutional-sized serving of TLC. Also I asked the dealership to wash the motorcycle, for it was filthy with grime and brake dust and chain wax overspray and cobwebs. Years out of maintenance, dead, and dirty, it was Frankenbike.

When I returned to the dealership, the guys in the garage were standing around, smiling at my approach. “What’s up?” I asked. “Your bike looks good,” came the reply. They were laughing because I’d dropped off a nasty, ugly thing, a real crime against motorcycling. (Even off-road bikers wash their bikes every weekend.) To their surprise, it cleaned up really nicely; under all the dirt and grime was a near-pristine motorcycle.

The service manager wouldn’t let me leave until he’d personally blown off the tiny bit of dust that had settled since the wash. Service with a smile! I shook everybody’s hands, grinning like an idiot.

I took pictures as soon as I got home. The bike may never be this clean again.