Privacy for the cows

MADISON, Wis. — In case you were wondering, people who visit the Dairy Cattle Instruction and Research Center to watch the cows being milked on football Saturdays are subject to a fine. The cows like their privacy during football games, if you don't mind.

Palm trees in center field are encouraged but not required

SARASOTA, Fla. — Okay, so I've only been to one spring training baseball game in my entire life and am hardly an expert. But I wish the regular season was more like the game I attended.

For one thing, the full Major League Baseball season should be played in rinky-dink ballparks like Ed Smith Stadium, capacity 7,500.¹ It was jam-packed, which made for a fun atmosphere. Plus, it means most everyone has a good seat. My new criteria for good seats is having dirt get in your eyes when they rake the infield between innings.

I also came away impressed with the stadium staff. At every turn, ushers were thanking me for coming and asking if they'd see me at the next game. Do they do that at regular season games? (If so, not the games I've attended.)
¹There are a handful of teams that regularly sell out their giant stadiums — I suppose they're exempted.

The solid truth

Back in my day, textbooks said "No one knows why the dinosaurs died off." It was a mystery. Maybe it was massive volcanic eruptions at the Deccan Traps in India. Or a rash of disease. Or a solar event that covered earth in complete darkness.

Now we know for sure. "It's official," writes Thomas H. Maugh II of the Los Angeles Times.

Children today learn that a collision of rocks in the asteroids belt caused an asteroid called Baptistina to slam into our planet and create the 110-mile-wide Chicxulub Crater, triggering earthquakes larger than 11 on the Richter Scale, giant tsunamis, global wildfires and dust storms. These events killed half the species on earth, including the dinosaurs.

A few years ago, Marnie & I spent a couple days in Mérida, the capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán and the approximate epicenter of the Chicxulub Crater. Would I have done anything differently on the trip if I had known for certain that we were standing at ground zero of dinosaur extinction?

Meh, probably not.

Friends I like

As everyone on Facebook knows, the site doesn't allow for different gradations of connections. Either a guy is your "friend" or he isn't.

Does this mean that people growing up in the Facebook age will perceive the word “friend” differently? Nick Bilton of the New York Times raised this question, wondering if young people consider a friend to mean anyone they've met even just once.

Bilton raises another question about the word "like." When a friend posts compelling content to Facebook, users click "like" to indicate an interest. This means we clicking "like" on well-written stories and photos about the developments in Haiti, even though we aren't fond of widespread devastation.

Taco Bell Express

HANOVER, Md. — Is the experience at Taco Bell really so slow and complicated that we need a Taco Bell Express?

Square one on Foursquare

A location-based social media service called Foursquare has won media acclaim as the "Twitter of 2010," by which people presumably mean a mobile channel that breaks into the mainstream.¹

Anyone with a Blackberry, Android or iPhone can join for free, and Foursquare has been the subject of glowing features on CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Last week, Foursquare was even featured in a TV ad for the cable network Bravo.

Despite the attention, Foursquare is nowhere near the mainstream yet and relies thus far on its early-adopter membership.²

Many people aren't warm to the idea of giving their personal location information to a social media application. However, that data is already being recorded whether they know it or not. A cell phone knows exactly where it is, either by GPS or by triangulating based on the nearby mobile towers. Even your desktop computer knows its location within about 20 feet just by scanning nearby WiFi networks.

If people are hesitant to join Foursquare because of concern over location privacy, they should share the same concerns about Twitter, which already has added geolocation to its API, allowing each individual tweet to be pinpointed on a map. And buried in this Washington Post story is the news that Facebook is looking to add location information to its status updates.

Having said all that, there are a couple key steps to improve privacy:

1. Keep your Foursquare community to a close-knit set of friends. Don't open it up to the lower standards for "friendship" you likely have for Facebook and Twitter.
2. Don't link your private Foursquare account with your public Twitter account. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake and the subject of PleaseRobMe.com and a funny YouTube video pointing out that it's a security hazard to broadcast your whereabouts.³

This is an important stretch for Foursquare and location services, and my hope is that it avoids the long-term stigma of the ignorant stereotype promoted by PleaseRobMe. After all, Twitter is still living down the lasting stereotypes that it is nothing but people posting what they ate for lunch, and bloggers still are forced to prove they are not unemployed losers typing in the basement in their underwear.

¹Following in the path of Twitter means that it's only a matter of time before 90 percent of CNN's airtime is taken up by reading user-generated content from Foursquare. Sigh.

²I became a user a few minutes before meeting founder Dennis Crowley and a few seconds before spelling his name wrong. Ooops.

³Funny but wildly misleading. The argument that someone who knows you’re at Target or at the movies can rush to your house to rob you misses the point. There are many ways they can know you’re at Target or the movies, including spotting you there and phoning ahead to the robber. Do you wear a mask and hide from public view at all times?