(no subject)

A parrot grasps the concept of zero. I've seen parrots count and identify colors on PBS before, and I recently heard about the significance of zero on the BBC.

Yet, I'm skeptical of the significance of this finding, as some people have a tendency to employ wishful thinking when it looks like some line of communication may be opened between humans and non-humans. Back when Unscrewed with Martin Sargent was on the air, there was a guy who claimed that his budgie is capable of understanding things like democracy and religion, as evidenced by some low-quality, subtitled video of some incomprehensible babbling. I suspect such a tape was a combination of random word chaining, like MegaHAL, and the interpreter recognizing words that weren't there, as is the case with EVP. Certainly, budgies are social animals, and do communicate, but rarely in English. The budgie guy on Unscrewed did heavily qualify his statements, saying the budgie had to "imprint" on a human to learn our language, and most of his budgies had imprinted on other budgies. So I'm ultimately left wondering whether some of his more grandiose claims would hold up to a well-designed experiment.

I'm impressed by the use of hypertext in this article -- it even links to the sheep story that davetheinverted recently posted about, and one about prairie dogs having a word for humans, which was also fascinating reading. But the one thing I found missing was the null hypothesis, no pun intended. Specifically, if the parrot did not have the concept of zero, how would we have expected it to respond? Or, alternately, what would we have concluded from other possible responses?

Micropayments

No parrots were involved when Scott McCloud wrote about online piracy and micropayments in 2001. And when this article appeared at the top of digg's front page, careful inspection revealed that no parrots had voted it there.

The post was not about piracy, or parrots, but more about micropayments. And I was more interested by Sean Barrett's response, also written in 2001, about the barriers to a micropayment, which he abbreviated as upay (u meaning µ meaning micro). Among his concerns were that getting upay into browsers is hard, and that middlemen could get monopolies.

Now, it's four years later, and we have iTunes. Barrett figured someone would have to write a new browser, and that's what Apple did. It's not a web browser; it's a music browser, optimized to buy songs for 99¢ each with as little effort as possible. The price is more than six times what McCloud initially proposed, but the songs still sell like hotcakes. Millions have downloaded it. Unfortunately, it's also a monopoly in many ways: songs purchased through iTunes can only be played on Apple hardware. Our only consolation is that Napster and Yahoo and Rhapsody exist as competitors.

There's an alternate iTunes client called SharpMusique, formerly known as the scandalous PyMusique. With it, you can buy songs and albums, but without annoying DRM. You can even re-download songs you've purchased.

This illustrates a point that I haven't heard much: at the heart of the iTunes store is not the iTunes application, but a proprietary protocol for exchanging bits for money.

I visited Scott McCloud's site, and found an icon for BitPass. The icon wasn't linked to BitPass, and indeed I ended up just Googling it. It's a middleman, which is inevitable, but the website is a bit sparse on the technical details. I don't know what the user interface is, or how the client-server connection works. The FAQs seem to indicate that it uses JavaScript to do all the client-side work, which I suppose eliminates the need for a new browser as well. That suggests it either uses HTTPS or some proprietary means.

I wonder what would happen if BitPass published their purchasing protocol, and the next version of Firefox's browser supported it natively. And then what if PayPal implemented the same protocol? Then you could pay for your eBay purchases the same way you pay for your webcomics. The business models of BitPass and PayPal are totally different; BitPass is geared to keep per-transaction costs low, while PayPal just takes a cut from each transaction. But, these are minor details, and the protocol would only care about authorizing and verifying the exchange of funds for bits. In eBay's case, the bits would be a receipt. The user experience on the browser might be similar, perhaps a bit more consistent on a per-browser basis. I suspect the real boon would be to content providers, who could support BitPass, PayPal, and direct deposit from Citibank, all with the same code.

I've probably forgotten a lot of details, and some dickhead may already be sitting on a patent for everything I just talked about. But if there's a standard protocol that any customer, escrow service, and vendor can use to talk to each other, then new business models, like micropayments and a music industry without the RIAA, have more opportunities to reach critical mass.

indiantelevision.com

On Google News, I found an article about Roy Disney reconciling with the Disney corporation, so I clicked to read it.

The news article was OK, but what really struck me were the ads all over the place for Pogo, which is apparently a kids' television channel in India partnered with Cartoon Network. On top, there's the Powerpuff Girls, two overly-cheerful-looking adults next to the word "kidology". Scooby Doo rests in the corner of that ad, slightly overlapping the border to the animated ad for MAD, "India's First Music, Art and Dance Show, Made Just For Kids!" A drawing of Dexter jumps out in the lower right corner of the ad.

The best one is the animated inset ad with three captioned collections of characters. The first, "Heroes", consists of two versions of Superman, one live and one animated. The second, "Super Girls", consists of two live actresses, plus Bubbles from Powerpuff Girls, and Didi from Dexter's Lab. The third, "Geniuses", has a big-haired live actor next to Dexter.

I wonder what Indian television is really like. Hey, it turns out the domain name is indiantelevision.com!