Think of this every time you search

Many people often have wondered how much money does it cost to google every time we perform a search. The Search that google will get everything perfect to respond instantly to produce 100 results, to search multiple times while you write the search etc etc... Even though we understand that the resources involved have to be significant we also understand that the cost of a web page request - even at an expensive site - it is small enough that you would need to batch a 1000 requests to really talk about meaningful numbers.

Starting from that point I asked my self the question
 - How much money does google earn every time I search.
   My first instinctive answer would have been :
       Nothing really - given that I never really click on ads ... but if you have millions searching... that quicky adds up

Which is completely wrong:
Google really charges per impression - not per clicks : given that the clickthoughrate of the ads are carefully regulated - and advertisers are penalized if the CTR is below 0.5-1%... we can make the approximation that average impression nets to Google about 1% of the average click.
What is the avg CPC?  I would definitely put it at $1  for US geos... which means that Google makes about 1cent per ad impression

Quick reality check
 - googling average ctr on google => 3%

 - googling average cpc on google => $0.35

ie cpc was 1/3rd of what I thought but ctr is 3x of what I thought - their multiple is exactly what I thought (smiling)

.

Ok So google makes 1cent per search of mine? No. Google makes 1cent for each ad that is impressed on my search results. How many ads are there on my results?3 at the top - 7-8 on the side and recently there are more in the bottom. Plus I will get more ads displayed as I am writing my query - and the page reflects results+ads on demand... So lots of ads.

If the avg # of ads is 10... then google makes 10cents every time I do a search - no matter whether I click or not!!!!

Unreal!

Cool node projects

Three related interesting projects - they open the potential for crowd-expanded education…in the form of multiple people adding problems/exercises that others can do/verify/learn
  1. https://github.com/maxogden/art-of-node
  2. https://github.com/rvagg/learnyounode
  3. https://github.com/rvagg/workshopper

They also make use of some new widgets I have not seen

Talking about widgets I also liked the license widget seen by substack at stream-handbook

My first HN post - Sunday Assembly

I did it rather impulsively - no preparation. It has  been falling like a rock since I posted it :-(

I really liked the idea of the "Sunday Assembly" when I heard about it on NPR on the way home yesterday. I liked their moto too "You can talk about Good without talking about God"
They seem to be running a crowdfunding campaign - which was not very successful 33K british pounds instead of 500K  (ends tomorrow..)
My hope was that a bit of HN publicity can go long ways in helping them get some funding...

Alter egos

I was supposed to be doing actual work... instead I went into HN... so there I am after a while daydreaming (since I don't have anyone to talk my ideas with (I am talking about you gl)).
So the post that piqued my interest was the post about working from a cruise-ship http://tynan.com/cruisework .

Now. 

The idea of having some way to have all your life-logistics handled efficiently by the "system" so as you don't have to worry about them... is well discussed in prior chats.

The idea of internet isolation (in the form of actual wifi isolation) maybe useful interesting to some - but for me its not ideal... nodejs like programming is relying too much on continuously browsing working on top the work of others etc.

The idea of communication isolation is obvious. However getting on a cruise ship to achieve this seems a rather inefficient way to achieve this.

So here is an alternative way:

I always felt that it is worthwhile thing to maintain an alter ego. One or more identities that are completely disconnected from your normal identity - (pushing this to the limit is also providing you with means of defending enemy of state situations). What is though interesting is to think of one of these identity as your vacation identity. Imagine that you go to your email, skype etc and you change status signatures, vacation messages... that you are on vacation and that any emails/pings will not be responded to for a while.

And then , you close your chrome that is associated with your normal identity (if you are like me you have already a chrome profile for the "employer" with all the employer related logins , google apps etc and a different one for your personal gmail etc.. So what I am suggesting is that you have a third one. Your vacation self.

So you close the chrome profiles - and you don't open them for a weekend, or a week. You do the same with your skype, your phone etc. You open your vacation profile switch there all your devices and browsers etc. 

You are switching to a new connected self who has no ties with your normal self. Even your good friends don't know about it - you have probably diff followers contacts if at all .. .vacationing gypsies rarely have long term connections.. As soon as you brought all this up there is significant friction (given that your android chrome supports only one profile...) to go back to your normal self for quick peak. You can still do it ... but it inconvenient  (Note that your vacationing self ... has a diff google voice mail.. .and if you are like me your android nexus phone now gets associated with another phone number... )

So that is it. If you feel like going on a vacation, switch to your alter ego and your digital world around you changes. You are someone else, with diff playlists, diff Stack overflow profile, following different blogs and news... If you want the "watching through the glass" feeling of visiting another country - without really visiting it (thats my view of cruise ship tourism) ... hmmm thats a diff post... I need to be going.

Airbnb and regulatory environment

Just read this article at HN http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-airbnb/ 

I've had the discussion about this "business model" (with similar ideas for finding high demand / low supply areas) with at least 3 separate set of friends - debating the profitability/scalability of the model.

One of the key question that arises - is the long term regulatory environment - the whole hotel and entertainment industry pays a great deal of use taxes - allows for strict regulation  - compared to an apartment rent this way. The odds are that the hotel industry will focus first on homes/apartments whose exclusive purpose is the daily rent (as opposed to a resident that occasionally rents their place when they are away...). This long term outlook is relevant when you are looking into 4yr plan - (more than that if you are to take into account the cost of capital/interest rate, taxes etc.). 

... doing a bit more research: Las Vegas city tax on hotel rooms is 12%...

I am curious how much is the regulatory overhead : making sure that your processes pass regular health inspections, that the people you employ are working legally, pay taxes etc.

Quite probably it may add up to another 10% - which still doesn't kill the model.

However, if I were in the hotel business I would probably push primarily for enforcement of certain rules that would make it impossible to allow the retrofiting of a typical residence into a "hotel", these are typically the regulations around fire and emergency rules (e.g. fire doors across the building, alternative exits, exit lights throughout the building that work when electricity is out, building plans and exit maps throughout the building so as the un-experienced resident can find their way out etc etc...

I wonder when this will happen. Either when the first bad airbnb accident happens or when the hotel industry reads the HN post :-)  (I am sure that the post will produce more copy-cats)

I bought an apartment to rent out on airbnb | Need/Want

Inbreeding and evolution

Following a thread with my kids about the fragility of the human body
- I was telling them "imagine having a pet so fragile, that as it walks, it may slip, fall, break its head and die. Thats how humans are. Walking accidents, top heavy, too much guts and brains, too little muscle mass and bone mass to keep things together. Imagine a dipod, like a chicken falling as it walks and injuring itself.
To accentate the difference I pointed out to felines like chetah that while running at 70mph lounge to their prey, bringing it down to the ground - something equivalent of jumping off a car at highway speeds - and doing that multiple times daily.

My smart-alecky kids, instead of being impressed from my points they jumped to tell me I am wrong and that cheetahs are not that fast (todays kids have grown with animal planet and know pretty well the largest, fastest,deadliest,smartest of any sort of thing) . Defending my speed claims I arrived at the cheetah wikipedia page (I was off by a bit, cheetah go up to 100-110km per hr, and they are an extreme case) where I was attracted to the following comment (and abandoned the not as satisfying discussion with my kids):
The cheetah has unusually low genetic variability. This is accompanied by a very low sperm count, motility, and deformed flagella.
That seemed interesting. Reading further the article went on to explain that this was caused due to a recent genetic bottleneck.
It is thought that the species went through a prolonged period of inbreeding following a genetic bottleneck during the last ice age.
What changed my view from interest to annoyance was that comment though:
It has been suggested that the low genetic diversity of cheetahs is a cause of poor sperm, birth defects, cramped teeth, curled tails, and bent limbs. Some biologists even believe that they are too inbred to flourish as a species.^[45] Note, however, that they lost most of their genetic diversity thousands of years ago (see the beginning of this article), and yet seem to have only been in decline in the last century or so, suggesting factors other than genetics are mainly responsible.
See, my simple way to explain most of evolution effects to my kids, why I have black eyes, why my hair is thick and black why skin is this or that why swedish people are blond but Eskimos are dark haired, why our nose is less pointy than the chimps and the chimps nose is less pointy than other animals etc etc... all that includes a continuing combination of using
 - fatal disadvantages
 - strong advantages
to explain how a some particular member (or group) of a species was able to reach a certain level of environmental dominance/monopoply which often implies that this member will become a new Abraam patriarch/matriarch and explode its genetic tree - with most of the descendants carry the unique genetic characterists of nose, hair etc.

Its a relatively simplistic way to explain things - given the more incremental nature of genetic change ... still I think this model of explaining evolution is a very good one:
Where evolution happens the fastest when a relatively small sample of a species find itself owning a slice of the environment/geography , either due
 - they were able to move to a new place due to their small incremental advantage
 - they were they only ones to survive to the new place due to their incremental advantage
 (new place - may be the old place + some new environmental change (draught, flood, new disease, newfound prey, newfound enemies, newfound resources))
and then genetically explodes to fill the "new place" until it reaches some sort of equilibrium.
The smaller the group that survives, the biggest is the genetic bottlneck(and following inbreeding) and then the big is the change that happens as a result.

Of course human morals are seeing inbreeding as synonymous to incest and thus wrong/bad.
Somehow that same morality made it all the way to scientific analysis  and became a meaningful explanation -
 - this species is too much inbred thats why it wont survive
 - those species parents doesn't love/care for their offsprings that why it doesn't as well
 - that species is cannibalistic, it kills and eats its own ..... why should we even put it in the endangered list if it does that to its own.

I get annoyed just writing it.

Maps and visualizations

I found this at HN a couple weeks ago

http://twistedsifter.com/2013/08/maps-that-will-help-you-make-sense-of-the-world/

Apparently most of these come from a reddit  http://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/ . Some of the maps can be good topics for dinner discussions.. its a definitely intriguing list.

On the visualization topic, I really want to find a reason to play with D3.js ....