Thank you, New York City

fresh off the bus

It was 11:15AM in the pink D corral of the fifth wave, and surrounding me were runners of all shapes and sizes, from around the world, all of us waiting for our race to start in 15 minutes. We had waited through the morning (five hours for me) as our faster friends drifted away excitedly and cannons sounded the starts of earlier waves. There was a determined silence as each of us thought ahead to our 2024 New York City Marathon.

A few meters to my right I saw a woman wearing a large pink button proclaiming her status as a "Birthday Girl". Her shirt had the name "HEATHER" across the front. I shouted "HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEATHER!", and she turned to look at me, a bit startled. I walked over and we chatted a bit. She was from the UK, and was running New York to celebrate turning 50. I told her she was going to have fun, and that the crowd would be calling to her the whole way. "Really?" she said. "Hey, this is New York", I reassured her. "You don't have to know someone 10 years before you can talk to them on a first name basis!"

Then, over to the side of the corral, I saw another woman, wearing a BIRTHDAY GIRL shirt. "Heather, you must go over and wish her happy birthday!" Heather hesitated, but I said "Aw come on!" and led her through the crowd to the other birthday girl. The two marathon twins hugged, and everything felt right with the world. I looked around and the crowd seemed a bit anxious waiting. I shouted "Hey everyone! We have two birthday girls running with us! Let's sing Happy Birthday!"

And so I led a happy chorus of more than a thousand runners in a joyful rendition of "Happy Birthday". Miraculous. My whole day was like that. From start to end, the crowd was shouting my name. They got riled up when I acknowledged them, sometimes chanting "ERIC, ERIC, ERIC" as I gave them high fives. 

I had decided to run the 2024 New York City Marathon about ten months earlier. A friend heard me talk about running and suggested that I get a fundraising entry through the charity he was involved with. At that point I had just run my 11th Half Marathon but never a marathon. A marathon seemed an unnecessary stretch for me and my creaky legs. But I decided in an instant. Two days later I told a running friend, Janell, and a few others about my decision. I knew I couldn't back out after that.

still looking good at mile 9

The first 10 miles of the race flew by as I ran at a pace that was faster than I expected (I was doing a 3:1 run:walk). Axel and Karen were there rooting for me at mile 9 with my Fleet Feet friends and then again around mile 12. The crowd on 1st Avenue at mile 16 made me forget that I had never raced that far.  More running friends were waiting at mile 18 where it really helped. At mile 21 my 3:1 cycle became 2:1, and at mile 23 it was 1:1. On Fifth Avenue it seemed like everyone I knew was there cheering me on. The bearded prophet with "The End is Near" on a sign could have been a hallucination. Coming out of the Bronx I had switched to my running playlist, and in the Park I started "singing" the lyrics out loud: "It's the End of the World and We Know It!". I wasn't feeling that fine and I switched to 100% brisk walk.

Re-entering the park for the last half mile, I was determined to finish it running. BIG MISTAKE! I cramped up immediately and could barely stagger on. But after a few minutes, my legs consented to a sloooow walk and finally relented on a brisk finish. Then a second miracle occurred. I knew I had friends who were volunteering at the finish line, but to see and hug them all was a blessing I had not expected. And to get the medal from my friend Janell! 

Back of the medal with braille text "TCS New York City Marathon"

Thank you to everyone who donated to my fundraiser for Amref Health Africa. Thank you to Karen and Axel for getting me home with my cramping legs. Thank you to the coaches, runners and PTs who helped my get through the training. Thank you to all the spectators and to the volunteers who got me from the start to the finish, and thank you to the zombies that trudged with me for the long long long walk out of the park. 

Strava: All my friends are in New York

This series of posts:

• We'll run till we drop
• Running song of the day 
• All the Streets in Montclair
• Running away from home
• Thank You, New York City

I Fondled Salvador Dalí's Earrings

 Content Warning: AI

My Uncle Henry was a Professor of Chemistry at NYU. He lived, for the most part, in his sister-in-law Barbara's 7-story townhouse on East 67th street in Manhattan. He acted as the caretaker of this mansion when Barbara went off living her socialite life in Paris or wherever. My family would stay in the townhouse whenever we came to New York to visit my favorite uncle.

This is how my parents ended up being at a fancy party attended by Salvador Dalí. It seems that Barbara had commissioned a portrait of herself, and the occasion of the party was the painting's unveiling. I was there too; I was a few months old. The great painter was amused to see a baby at this party and the baby was extremely amused at this strange looking adult. More accurately, I was captivated by his shiny earrings and reached out to play with them as though they were a mobile hanging in my crib. Or so I have been told. So many times.

Dalí and Eric as hallucinated by DALL-E

My dad was presented to Dalí as a brilliant young engineer, which he was. Dad was born in Gary, Indiana, but moved to Sweden with his family when he was 7 years old. (That's a whole 'nother story!) After graduation from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, he decided to take a job with Goodyear Aerospace in Akron, Ohio, because that way he didn't have to serve in the Swedish Army and give up his American citizenship. He worked on semiconductor devices before anyone had ever heard of semiconductors.

Maybe brilliant engineers were exotic creatures in that fancy New York City party circuit, because Salvador Dalí buttonholed my dad. He wanted my dad to invent something for him. The conversation went something like this (imagine me sitting in Dalí's lap, not paying attention to the conversation at all):

Dalí: "Tell me, young man, do you invent things?"

Dad: "As a matter of fact, I'm working on what they call a buffered amp..."

Dalí: "Never mind that, I have an idea I want you to work on..."

Dad: "Yes?"

Dalí: "I want you to invent a paint gun..."

Dad: "That doesn't sound too hard..."

Dalí: "... that will paint what I see in my mind."

Dad: "??"

Dalí: "I paint, but the paintings are never what I want."

Dad: "That's not how..."

Dalí: "I want to press a button and have the paint go in the right place."

Dad: "Well maybe someday..."

Dalí: "You start working on it, let me know how it goes"

Eric: "Waaaaaaaaa!"

Apparently, the paint gun was a bit of an obsession with Dalí. He created a technique called "bulletism" that involved using an antique gun (an "arquebus") to shoot vials of paint at a canvas. A couple of months after the fancy party, he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show firing a paint gun at a canvas! 

Sixty-four years later, we sort of know how to build Dalí's mind reading paint-gun. We have technologies that let us see the brain think (functional brain imaging combined with deep learning), and technologies that can make pictures from human thoughts (when expressed as LLM prompts). It's now easy to imagine a device that uses your brain to control an AI image generator (see the image above!). Such a device could take advantage of the brain's plasticity to give Dalís of the future the power to make images from activity that exists only in their brains.

People are arguing about whether AI can make art. There's even a copyright case in which the US copyright office is saying, effectively, that you can't copyright what you tell an AI to create.

It seems clear to me, at least, that AI, wielded as a tool, can make art, in the same way that a Stradivarius, wielded by a musician, can make art, or that a camera, wielded by a photographer, can make art, or that computer program, wielded by a poet, can make art. 

Salvador Dalí was just ahead of his time. 

Notes:

1. While OpenAI's "DALL-E" is supposed to be a combination of "Dalí" And "WALL-E", I've not been able to find any mention of Dalí's interest in brain-computer interfaces!
2. I couldn't find an image of the painting "Portrait of Bobo Rockefeller" on the web; a study for the painting is in the Dalí Museun in Spain. Dalí had a policy of not allowing his subjects to see their portrait before is was unveiled, and my understanding is that Barbara was never really fond of the painting. It had an prominent place in her living room though.
3. Researchers have studied the use of brain-scanning techniques to develop brain-computer interfaces for uses such as the development of speech prostheses that convert brain activity into intelligible speech. 
4. Openwater is combining infrared and acoustic imaging to see brain activity for neurological diagnosis. But they can see the potential for mind reading using the help of deep learning pattern recognition. Founder May Lou Jepsen says “I think the mind-reading scenarios are farther out, but the reason I'm talking about them early is because they do have profound ethical and legal implications.” 

Comments. I encourage comment on the Fediverse or on Bluesky. I've turned off commenting here.

Reminder: I'm earning my way into the NYC Marathon by raising money for Amref Health Africa. 

Running away from home

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon.)

For a long time, it's been a goal of mine to live and work someplace where the language is something other than English. I've studied French in school and I've studied a bit of Mandarin and Japanese. And Swedish. But I'd never had the opportunity to live in another language, to get comfortable enough to have casual conversations and say the things I want to say.

Two years ago (2022) my Aunt Siv planned an 80th birthday celebration for herself, inviting the whole family to join her for a party in Lappland (northern Sweden). Coming out of two long pandemic years, we were eager to go and travel. There was still a lot of uncertainty about Covid, and with the invasion of Ukraine adding to the feeling that the trip might or might not happen, we booked refundable tickets for a vacation in Sweden. 

Swedish was my first language! My parents both grew up in Sweden, but met and married in Ohio. My mom's teenaged sister Siv came over to help my mom with the baby (me) so there was a lot of Swedish in the house. When I started going to nursery school I quickly learned English, and began refusing to speak Swedish. By the time I got to kindergarten, I had completely forgotten all of my Swedish language. But traces remained. After college I decided I should learn Swedish and I took a class in Stockholm. Learning Swedish was completely different from learning French in school, because I could hear in my head if it was right. After one day of class, I could speak 2 sentences of perfect Swedish. I confidently went into a shop, used my 2 perfect sentences, and got into deep trouble because I had no clue what the answers meant. I had a good accent without much trying. This has been very helpful, because when swedes hear a foreigner try to speak Swedish, they immediately switch to English, making it rather difficult for the foreigner to learn. Not me. Swedish people are amazed that I seem to be able to speak good Swedish.

I wanted to improve my Swedish, so I wanted a little longer in Sweden than the rest of the family, and our planning took its final shape when my wife said "Eric, you should just stay! For years you been saying you want to live somewhere in another language, and now the internet lets you work from where ever you want!" So all of a sudden I was going to spend four weeks in Stockholm on my own without much of a plan. I was scared. How would I meet people? Sure, I could sit in my AirBnB and work as a digital nomad, but what would be the point?

Running was one of the answers. There was a half-marathon to run, RUNmaröloppet,  that would take me out to an island in Stockholm's archipelago. I had identified a running club, Mikkeller Running Club Stockholm,   that seemed sociable, as they meet at a bar on Tuesdays and have beers afterward. Both of these turned out to be awesome. And so I started running away from home. 

Running with a group is universal and local at the same time. No matter where you run you can have the same conversations with whoever's running next to you. "Are you training for a race?" "My legs are so stiff." "I'm recovering from an IT-band strain." "My name is Eric, have we run together before?" But every route you run is different in its own beautiful way, and the group helps  newcomers (and often the regulars!) to avoid getting lost. By the end of the run, the group has shared an indelible experience and there aren't strangers anymore.

RUNmaröloppet was a blast. You have to take a boat to the island. The course is quite technical in places and is also the most beautiful race I've ever run. I did it again this year, and finished 5th in my age group, despite a lingering knee injury that force me to use walk-run again. Full disclosure: I also finished DFL (Dead F-in Last) out of 282 runners, and was never so happy with a finish.

Mikkeller Running Club Stockholm meets every Tuesday on the lively urban island of Södermalm. Good people, good beer, 5K, 7K and longer routes. The 5K is at a "cozy" pace and welcomes runners of all paces. (Linguistic note: back home we call it "sexy" pace. Maybe this has deep sociological meaning. Or maybe it's the conversion from km to mi.) 

In Stockholm I discovered this thing called ParkRun.  These people have taken "running away from home" to extremes. ParkRun started somewhere in England and has spread around the world like a pandemic. They have special t-shirts to commemorate milestones such as a runner's 100th ParkRun. I've now run the ParkRun in Stockholm's Haga Park 6 times. It's a timed 5K run. At every run there are people from all over the world - last week I met a couple from Sheffield who had hopped off their cruise ship and took a taxi to the ParkRun so they could add Sweden to their list of ParkRun countries.  Some of them even try to run ParkRun places starting with every letter of the alphabet! I love how crazy runners can be.

My Stockholm 2022 sojourn was topped off by a 10K race around Södermalm called "Midnattsloppet".  Midnattsloppet is sort of a night-time EuroPop Bay-to-Breakers. 22,000 runners in the 10K, another 17K in the 5K. There was a musical act every kilometer to fire up the runners but only two water stations on that pretty warm night. At the top of the first big hill, there was a choir of ~20 blonde women singing “Waterloo” which I thought a poor choice given the pre-ABBA history of Waterloo. The faster waves of runners got “We are the Champions”. At the start, runners were prompted to sing a song which apparently is the anthem of the Hammarby Football Club, written by a guy who must have been the guitarist for a Swedish Spinal Tap. Apparently he caused a scandal by wearing a "69" T-shirt on Swedish television and sadly died at a young age. On Midnattsloppet night you can walk into any bar in Stockholm in a shirt dripping with sweat and the bouncer will say "Good Jobb!". (I verified this.)

I now have a pair of ruby red New Balance 1080 version 12s. (NOT v13!) My running gait is such that there's a flat wear spot where my feet click together. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

This series of posts:

• We'll run till we drop
• Running song of the day 
• All the Streets in Montclair
• Running away from home
• Thank You, New York City

All the streets in Montclair

 (I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. )

At the end of 2020, Strava told me I had run 1362 miles over 12 months.  "I hope I never do that again!" I told a running friend. It seemed appropriate that my very last running song from shuffle was Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom"; founding member Adam Schlesinger had died of Covid. For months of that pandemic year, there wasn't much to do except work on my computer and run. It was boring, but at the same time I loved it. In retrospect,  the parks needn't have closed (or later in the year, required masks while running through). Remember how we veered around other people just enjoying fresh air?  In that year, running was one thing that made sense. But never have I celebrated the new year as joyously I did on the eve of 2021. Vaccines were on the way, the guy who suggested drinking bleach was heading to Florida, and I had a map of Montclair to fill in.

I've called Montclair, the New Jersey town where I live, "a running resort". It has beautiful parks, long, flat tree-lined streets without much traffic, short steep streets for hill work, well maintained tracks, a wonderful running store,  and at least 3 running clubs. During pandemic, everyone seemed to be out running. Even my wife, who for many years would tell me "I don't understand how you can run so much", started running so much. At Christmas our son gave us both  street maps of Montclair to put on the fridge so we could record our running wanderings.

So, come 2021 the three of us said goodbye to the boring routine of running favorite routes. Montclair has 363 streets, and a couple of named alleys so we could have done a street a day for a year if we had wanted to. But it was more fun to construct routes that crossed off several streets ata time. While I was at it, I could make strava art or spell words. Most of my running masterpieces were ex post cursus pareidolia.  Occasionally I spelled out words. Here's "love" (in memory of a running friend's partner). 

Starting on New Year's Day with the Resolution run up "Snake Hill",  I methodically crossed off streets. I passed Yogi Berra's "Fork in the Road"  I finished the complete set of Montclair streets on Jun 13 .

The neighboring town of Glen Ridge came quickly on July 18, as I had done well over half on the way to Montclair streets. Near me, Glen Ridge is only 2 and a half blocks wide! I took a peek at the Frank Lloyd Wright house on a street I'd not been on before! 

With five months left I started on Bloomfield, the next town east. Bloomfield is cut in half by the Garden State Parkway, the source of the "which exit?" joke about New Jersey, and I focused on the half near to me. I got to know Clark's Pond. My streets running helped me set my half marathon PR, in the lovely town of Corning, New York. 

I know of other streets running completists - it seems there's even an app to help you do it. Author Laura Carney wrote about it in her book "My Father's List"  My friend Chris has continued to add towns and cities to his list and has only 9 streets left to finish ALL OF ESSEX COUNTY. Update: He finished! and was written up by nj.com!

To finish the year I spelled out 2021.

2021: 1,268.3 miles, 223 hours 36minutes, 40,653 ft vertical. I ran to 1,700 different songs. Last running song of the year (on shuffle): Joy Division's "No Love Lost":

Wishing that this day won't last

To never see you show your age

To watch until the beauty fades

This series of posts:

• We'll run till we drop
• Running song of the day 
• All the Streets in Montclair
• Running away from home
• Thank You, New York City

The PII Figleaf

The Internet's big lie is "we respect your privacy". Thanks to cookie banners and such things, the Internet tells us this so many times a day that we ignore all the evidence to the contrary. Sure, there are a lot of people who care about our privacy, but they're often letting others violate our privacy without even knowing it. Sometimes this just means that they are trying to be careful with our "PII". And guess what? You know those cookies you're constantly blocking or accepting? Advertisers like Google have mostly stopped using cookies!!!

"PII" is "Personally Identifiable Information" and privacy lawyers seem to be obsessed with it. Lawyers, and the laws they care about, generally equate good PII hygiene with privacy. Good PII hygiene is not at all a bad thing, but it protects privacy the same way that washing your hands protects you from influenza. Websites that claim to protect your privacy are often washing the PII off their hands while at the same time coughing data all over you. They can and do violate your privacy while at the same time meticulously protecting your PII.

Examples of PII include your name, address, social security number, your telephone number and your email address. The IP address that you use can often be traced to you, so it's often treated as PII, but often isn't. The fact that you love paranormal cozy romance novels is not PII, nor is the fact that you voted for Mitt Romney. That you have an 18 year old son and an infant daughter is also not PII. But if you've checked out a paranormal cozy romance from your local library, and then start getting ads all over the internet for paranormal cozy romances set in an alternate reality where Mitt is President and the heroine has an infant and a teenager, you might easily conclude that your public library has sold your checkout list and your identity to an evil advertising company.

That's a good description of a recent situation involving San Francisco Public Library (SFPL). As reported by The Register :

In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library.

Let me be clear. There's no chance that SFPL has sold the check-out list to anybody, much less evil advertisers. However, it DOES appear to be the case that SFPL and their online ebook vendors, Overdrive and Baker and Taylor, could have allowed Google to track Ms. Dudley, perhaps because they didn't fully understand the configuration options in Google Analytics. SFPL offers ebooks and audiobooks from Overdrive, "Kindle Books from Libby by Overdrive",  and ebooks and audiobooks from Baker and Taylor's "Boundless" Platform. There's no leakage of PII or check-out list, but Google is able to collect demographics and interests from the browsing patterns of users with Google accounts.

A few years ago, I wrote an explainer about how to configure Google Analytics to protect user privacy.  That explainer is obsolete, as Google is scrapping the system I explained in favor of a new system, "Google Analytics 4" (GA-4), that works better in the modern, more privacy-conscious browser environment. To their credit, Google has made some of the privacy-preserving settings the default - for example, they will no long store IP addresses. But reading the documentation, you can tell that they're not much interested in Privacy with a capital P as they want to be able to serve relevant (and thus lucrative) ads, even if they're for paranormal cozy romances. And Google REALLY doesn't want any "PII"! PII doesn't much help ad targeting, and there are places that regulate what they can do with PII.

We can start connecting the dots from the audiobook to the ads from the reporting in the Register by understanding a bit about Google Analytics. Google Analytics helps websites measure their usage. When you visit a webpage with Google Analytics, a javascript sends information back to one or more Google trackers about the address of the webpage, your browser environment, and maybe more data that the webpage publisher is interested in. Just about the only cookie being set these days is one that tells the website not to show the cookie banner!

From the Register:

The subdomain SFPL uses for library member login and ebook checkout, sfpl.bibliocommons.com, has only a single tracker, from Alphabet, that communicates with the domains google-analytics.com and googletagmanager.com.

The page is operated by BiblioCommons, which was acquired in 2020 by Canada-based Constellation Software. BiblioCommon has its own privacy policy that exists in conjunction with the SFPL privacy policy.

In response to questions about ad trackers on its main website, Wong( acknowledged that SFPL does use third-party cookies and provides a popup that allows visitors to opt-out if they prefer.

With regard to Google Analytics, she said that it only helps the library understand broad demographic data, such as the gender and age range of visitors.

"We are also able to understand broad interests of our users, such as movie, travel, sports and fitness based on webpage clicks, but this information is not at all tied to individual users, only as aggregated information," said Wong.

The statement from Jaime Wong, deputy director of communications for the SFPL, is revealing. The Google Analytics tracker only works within a website, and neither SFPL or its vendors are collecting demographic information to share with Google. But Google Analytics has options to turn on the demographic information that libraries think they really need. (Helps to get funding, for example.) It used to be called "Advertising Reporting Features" and "Remarketing" (I called these the "turn off privacy" switches) but now it's called "Google Signals". It works by adding the Google advertising tracker, DoubleClick, alongside the regular Analytics tracker. This allows Google to connect the usage data from a website to its advertising database, the one that stores demographic and interest information. This gives the website owners access to their user demographics, and it gives the Google advertising machine access to the users' web browsing behavior.

I have examined the relevant webpages from SFPL, as well as the customized pages that BiblioCommons, Overdrive, and Baker and Taylor provide for SFPL for trackers. Here's what I found:

• The SFPL website, SFPL.org, has Analytics and  DoubleClick ad trackers enabled.
• The BiblioCommons website, sfpl.bibliocommons.org, has two analytics trackers enabled, but no advertising tracker. Probably one tracker "belongs" to SFPL while the other "belongs" to BiblioCommons.
• The Overdrive website, sfpl.overdrive.com has Analytics and DoubleClick ad trackers enabled.
• The Baker and Taylor website, sfpl.boundless.baker-taylor.com has Analytics and  DoubleClick ad trackers enabled.

So it shouldn't be surprising that Ms. Dudley experienced targeted ads based on the books she was looking at in the San Francisco Public Library website. Libraries and librarians everywhere need to understand that reader privacy is not just about PII, and that the sort of privacy that libraries have a tradition of protecting is very different than the privacy that Google talks about when it says  "Google Analytics 4 was designed to be able to evolve for the future and built with privacy at its core." At the end of this month earlier versions of Google Analytics will stop "processing" data. (I'm betting the trackers will still fire!)

What Google means by that is that in GA-4, trackers continue to work despite browser restrictions on 3rd party cookies, and the tracking process is no longer reliant on data like IP addresses that could be considered PII. To address those troublesome regulators in Europe, they only distribute demographic data and interest profiles for people who've given their permission to Google to do so. Do you really think you haven't somewhere given Google permission to collect your demographic data and interest profiles? You can check here. 

Here's what Google tells Analytics users about the ad trackers:

When you turn on Google signals, Google Analytics will associate the session data it collects from your site and apps with Google's information from accounts of signed-in, consented users. By turning on Google signals, you acknowledge you adhere to the Google Advertising Features Policy, including rules around sensitive categories, have the necessary privacy disclosures and rights from your end users for such association, and that such data may be accessed and deleted by end users via My Activity.

In plain english, that means that if a website owner flips the switch, it's the website's problem if the trackers accidentally capture PII or otherwise violate privacy, because it's responsible for asking for permission. 

Yep. GA-4 is engineered with what I would call "figleaf privacy" at its core. Google doesn't have fig leaves for paranormal cozy romance novels!