#newtwitterhq

The New Twitter HQ has been in the news recently, and we'll be moving in soon.

I've been lucky enough to get a few sneak peeks in the last few months. Thanks to the supportive facilities, executive and comms teams I've been able to visit regularly and share pictures of the build-out from January, February, March and May. Somehow it didn't quite happen in April.

My most recent visit had a new aspect, though: I was able to take some shots of the exterior from the roof of a nearby tower. From thirty floors up, I took this

and this

and this

I snapped a few more from the top of that tower, though, and those—as well as an update on the Neighborhoods App, are to come.

San Francisco Neighborhoods

You guys, I can't tell you how exhausting San Francisco is. The weather is fantastic, the people are interesting, it's just so *tiring*.

— Dana Contreras (@DanaDanger) April 29, 2012

I've lived in this city for nine seven years now. It's the best place I've ever lived. About the same population as Frankfurt, same land area as Cambridge, pretty much as sunny as Denver, similar cultural diversity to that of London, and by now it feels more like home than my original hometown Sheffield.

I find the neighborhoods endlessly fascinating, too. The neat-o posters:

the microclimates and sub-microclimates, now with an associated iPhone app:

The app provides a detailed listing of the temperature, cloud cover, wind speed and chance of precipitation for 17 different San Francisco microclimates. Developer Michelle Sintov came up with the idea during her daily bike commute from the Richmond to SoMa. "I'd hit Divisadero Street and suddenly see the sun," she told [us] with a laugh.

- New iPhone App Shows Weather Forecasts For Every Neighborhood In San Francisco, Huffington Post

the passionate upstart neighborhood-wannabes and the enormous diversity of opinions on what the neighborhoods are, from the sublime to the unreadable.

The boundaries between neighborhoods are interesting in particular. Where exactly does 18th Street, going East to West, transition from Dogpatch to Potrero to Mission to Mission Dolores to Castro to Upper Market? What precise shapes to these perfectly tessellating areas take?

Obviously the notion of neighborhood borders as zero-width lines is a fiction. Nonetheless it's a fiction with significant appeal to someone with a mathematical background and an Aspergic heritage. I've often found myself somewhere familiar in San Francisco, thinking "is this technically Mission or Noe or Castro?" — or somewhere completely unfamiliar, thinking "I wonder what neighborhood this is".

So I made this thing. It's an iPhone app which tells you where in San Francisco you are. This is me, at home:

It doesn't show you a map, or tell you the history of the neighborhood, or link to Wikipedia, or give you vital stats like population or elevation or weather. It just tells you what neighborhood you're currently in—and how far you are from the closest adjacent neighborhood. That's it. ^†

Next time: how it works and how I made it. And if, in the meantime, you live in San Francisco and you're interested in trying it out for me, let me know.

^† the best idea I had to reject from an early tester was listing imports and exports of the neighborhood, eg. "Mission District. Imports: cheap beer; Exports: hipsters"

Multiple Chromes

Same disclaimer as last time: I worked at Google for years. I left voluntarily, and still consider myself extremely fortunate to have worked there. I'm very lucky to count many current Googlers amongst my friends, etc etc.

Update (March 20th): some are saying that the latest Chrome includes a working multi-account feature. In actual fact, as far as I can tell, this bug with 2-factor has never been addressed. Still, some claim to have this working.

A little while ago I ranted about trying to use multiple Google accounts with Google services in a single Google browser. Google claims that this stuff is supported but it's plainly not. The fact that they make this lie is probably the second most frustrating thing about the whole situation; the most frustrating thing being that it doesn't work in the first place.

With a calm reasonableness which was itself infuriating, Matt suggested just using two browsers (Chrome and Safari, Chrome and Rockmelt, Safari and Firefox, whatever). Obviously this is crazy, but wait:

Before you dismiss the 2 browser approach out-of-hand, consider its merits:

1. Clear, consistent behavior - check
2. Open a new tab, navigate to your fave Google application, be automagically signed in using the account you expect - check
3. Spatial organization of work and play - a Good Thing

I'm not sure the behavior you expect from 'proper' multi sign-in to be, but I don't think you could expect number 2 to be supported. Drawback is, you might need to copy the odd YouTube URL from your work email to your personal Space.

Once I'd overcome what Matt called my "righteous indignation" I decided to give it a go. Rather than actually different browsers, though, I figured I'd use side-by-side "work" and "personal" Chrome instances—using different profiles.

And, cutting to the chase, I confess that it's indeed a solution effective enough that the problem is no longer near the top of my list of computing annoyances. That's a score, I guess, and here's how I did it.

First of all I found DeWitt's "Chrome Profiles on OS X" guide (the core idea), and ark's "Multiple Google Chrome Profiles on OS X" (a different approach). I took a look at both and eventually ended up with this script:

I made this into an executable on my path called make-a-chrome. You can use it like this:

Look at that! Two independent Google Chrome apps in ~/Applications.

The icons are just the default "no icon" icon but you can fix that by assigning whatever icons you like. More annoying than that is the fact that both have the same icon in the Application Switcher:

and the best I've got on that front is that hey, you get used to it. Send fixes if you know of them.

But hey, you've got two side-by-side independent Chrome instances. Each has its own history, bookmarks, cache, cookies, tabs, autofills, saved passwords, themes, extensions… it works great. One pro tip I can offer is to install different themes for each instance so you can tell them apart at a glance. I used some kind of brushed metal thing for work:

and a pencil drawing thing for personal:

The only other thing to realize is that the first-launched instance grabs the OS-level http(s):// protocol handler. For what it's worth, I launch my personal instance first so that clicks from Twitter.app (my main source of clicks into Chrome) launch a new tab in Chrome (personal)

I know, I know. Google should just fix this issue—or at the very least confess to it. The default situation is infuriating indeed. And while my indignation remains, my daily browser pain has pretty much disappeared. In practice the above solves the problem pretty well. Best of all, it's highly predictable. That alone is worth a lot.

Thanks Matt.

Twitter Hacks

My new business cards arrived the other day:

It reminded me to share some interesting bits and bobs related to work. The below isn't my full-time job by any means, but it's fun that I have on the way.

The hobby project I invested most time on in the last year was the Twitter mention constellations. I learned a huge amount on the way; I realized how much goes into taking a hack which works on one's own machine to one which works for others; and I'm excited that a 4-foot-square mounted version of my work is on the wall at Twitter HQ.

More recently this was one of mine:

Sad times, no doubt, but it's nonetheless fascinating to see the data behind such phenomena. I was very impressed by SocialFlow's detailed work on the topic too.

More whimsically, I also shared this one recently

in case you were wondering how long you should make your tweets for maximum engagement.

I also did

which (see detail on Flickr) shows the spread on Twitter of an on-air hashtag versus news of a seismic event.

One of my favorites is still this:

for which the context can be found on YouTube.

January 2012 in England

We'd not been to the UK since November 2010 when Lux was just 3½ months old. That trip was pretty straightforward kid-wise: she slept for most of the flight over, and was sketchy enough sleep wise that timezones were somewhat academic.

This time things were different. At 18 months, as you might expect, Lux significantly more fidgety and needy in transit—and the jet lag thing was just crazy. Every day we were there, Lux was wide awake from 1am to 6am; Wendy, me and a grandparent would take shifts staying awake with her. Everyone in the house was pretty much just grazing on sleep for a week.

Fantastic time, though.

Great to see my dad again after the longest I've ever gone without seeing him:

and in turn the longest he's been without hanging out with his granddaughter:

A chance to reunite with my sister's fantastic kids: #1

and #2

and of course my sister and brother-in-law themselves:

I saw my brother Jak (a bit):

Lux got to know her cousins a little:

and I strolled around the English countryside with my mom and Wendy and Lux:

All in all, a wonderful time with my very favorite people.

New Year Link Clearance

I had occasion on my flight to Austin today to partially catch up on my Instapaper queue. Here are a few of the pieces I read and liked:

• My Guantánamo Nightmare. Eye-opening.
• Wikipedia's article on the nonpartisan blanket primary. A bit of backlog reading from my electoral reform series.
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets. I didn't expect to learn anything. I was wrong: the bit about Internet Explorer surprised me.
• The Complete Guide to Twitter's Epic 2011. The Next Web gushes about my employer. A feel-good piece.
• Two Diamonds Linked by Strange Quantum Entanglement. First time quantum entanglement has been demonstrated at a macro scale at room temperature under fairly normal conditions.
• Lessons From the Failure of Flash: Greed Kills. Michael Mace is a smart guy. I enjoy his writing. Lessons herein for any technology strategist.
• Pandora’s digital box: In the multiplex. Interesting piece about the motivations, implications and economics of the transition to digital projection in movie theaters.
• Mathematicians Solve Minimum Sudoku Problem. I also read the original paper behind this article. Definitely some ingenious thinking, but I find computational brute force proofs pretty unsatisfying.

Also, I didn't make it all the way through this one but I gave it a shot: Joint Calls from The Central Committee and the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea on the centenary of the birth of President Kim Il Sung. Another eye-opener.

Electoral reform, compendium

I had some time off work over the New Year, and wrote a few things:

• Electoral reform, in which I present a system just as fair as today's, but with more individual empowerment;
• Electoral reform, redux, in which I examine a little of the math and philosophy behind the new proposal; and
• Electoral reform, epilog, with interesting academic prior art.

Electoral reform, epilogue

After my last post people kept sending in more things, and I keep discovering more from following the leads they give me. The topic also has a deep academic history, which I should have guessed. I thought I'd wrap up here with a quick summary before moving on.

A friend Matt pointed me at a 2005 New York Times article entitled "Why Vote?". It's fascinating and worth a read, but the bit about "your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar" is demonstrably false, as shown in the last post: fact is that you're trillions upon trillions of times more likely to win the lottery than to affect an election.

As mentioned (and misattributed) in the article, Anthony Downs, the pre-eminent economist and political scientist, in his 1957 work "An Economic Theory of Democracy", concluded that "a rational individual should abstain from voting". This, "Downs's Paradox" can be stated as

In voting, compute the benefits (B) of having one's candidate win and weight them by the infinitesimal probability (P) that one's vote will be decisive. Then, since voting is costly (takes time, mainly), calculate the overall reward (R), proportional to the probability of actually turning out, as R = P×B - C. Because P is so small, this will be negative for almost any positive C. Thus, no rational individual should vote.

And yet supposedly rational people do in fact vote—hence the paradox.

Some attempts to resolve this issue have introduced a new term, D, to the equation, representing the reward one gets from expressing oneself, participating generally in the democratic process, or fulfilling an endogenous sense of civic duty. Then the reward and probability of turning out becomes R = P×B - C + D which may be positive even for minuscule P, explaining the empirically observed turnout.

This leads us to the research on the Swiss system which is referenced by the Times article. In that paper Patricia Funk postulates another factor contributing to the term D: that of exogenous social pressure to vote. From the paper,

The key innovation of this paper is to use a natural experiment, which allows me to shed light on this particular motivator to vote: the introduction of optional mail voting in Switzerland.

The intuition behind this experiment lies in the opposite effects, postal voting (or other modern voting tools such as internet voting) have on economic and social incentives to vote. Concerning the first, the obvious effect is a reduction in voting costs, with a positive effect on turnout. Secondly, mail-in or internet voting renders the voting act unobservable. If social pressure matters for voting decisions, the presence of mail-in ballots provides an opportunity to escape. Therefore, the more social concerns matter for voting decisions, the more distinctive the mail ballot system’s trade-off between cost reduction and a reduction in social incentives.

While previous voting models cannot easily account for a negative turnout effect of mail-in or internet voting alternatives, a positive turnout effect is consistent with both traditional voting models and with those that include a concern for social motives. The sharpest test for social pressure arises from looking at the effect of postal voting in different-sized communities. A large number of anthropological studies have documented that social control is particularly strong in small and close-knit communities. People know each other and gossip about who does their civic duty and who does not. Therefore, the relief from social pressure is supposedly the highest in small communities and ceteris paribus, also this negative "social effect" on turnout.

What the study found was that the reduction in voting cost afforded by the opportunity to vote by post didn't result in any statistically significant increase in turnout. In fact,

Turnout declined up to 7 percentage points in the [administrative division] with the highest share (i.e. 36%) of citizens living in small communities. A replication of the same procedure with community-level data confirms that the turnout decrease was particularly a “small-community”-phenomenon.

That is to say, once the Swiss were no longer obligated by the social pressure in close-knit communities to show their faces at the polling places, they didn't.

Smart.

One final note from my friend Andrew, who pointed me at the Asimov short story "Franchise" in which

the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.

I couldn't find an ebook so I ordered the paperback. Sounds like a good read.

Update 9.37pm December 30th: I couldn't leave it alone. Two final points, and then changing topic:

1. Read Hannah's comment on the original post. It brings in Toqueville, about whom I now feel I should be more educated and you might too.
2. I also wanted to add a super thought experiment which Robin threw in: what if government representatives themselves were simply chosen at random from the electorate? "It's super-duper jury service. Which, as an analogy, I realize, does not exactly fill a person with optimism," he writes but of course you've got to think past the implementation difficulties. Personally I'm pretty sure it'd be utter chaos in the short term but in the long term I figure the infrastructure surrounding these hapless "politicians" would adapt to the new regime. Probably they'd make it like the last.

Electoral reform, redux

I had a great set of responses to my recent post about electoral reform. I got emails, Tweets, blog comments, and comments on Google+. Many interesting thoughts and articles, which I thought I'd respond to in this follow-up.

Some folks argued with the decision not to vote. How could that be a good idea? What if everybody did that? This one's easy. Firstly, that'd be great. Secondly, it's irrelevant. Consider: I might do my bit about overpopulation by deciding not to have kids. Sure, if everybody did that then the consequences would be catastrophic but that doesn't disqualify it from being a rational individual choice. Indeed, many people do make that choice with net positive effect.

Nick provided an interesting post on the "fallacy of the deciding vote". It's a well reasoned piece, but premise (2) renders it inapplicable: the argument at hand isn't whether my individual vote unilaterally decides the result (which obviously it doesn't, as the article points out, in all but the most degenerate cases). It's about the probability that adding or subtracting my individual vote has an effect on the outcome. I don't need my vote to be the single deciding vote by any means.

So that we're clear, before we move on let's call a given individual voter democratically impotent in an election if the election has an identical outcome with or without their vote. Conversely the voter is democratically potent if removing their vote changes the outcome.

Dominic commented on the post presenting a syllogism:

Premise: Your vote is the same as everyone else's
Premise: Your vote literally counts for nothing
Conclusion: Everybody's vote counts for nothing

...and yet, we have a result. I suggest that premise 2 is faulty

and he's right. My hyperbolic "I literally count for nothing" should really have been "in the span of my lifetime, with overwhelming probability, I'm democratically impotent in every election in which I'm eligible to vote". There's a mathematical distinction but barely a practical one.

Interestingly, as you remove more and more voters from the electorate the chances of a voter which remains being democratically potent increase significantly. Thomas Pogge, Yale's Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, showed in a post last year that in a small population of 63 voters, with each voter choosing independently and with equal probability between two electoral candidates, a given voter has a full 10% chance of casting a deciding vote.

I like those odds, but in large populations things look much bleaker.

In the simple equiprobabilistic model which Pogge presents, in an electorate of 100,001 people the probability of a given voter casting a deciding vote is about 1 in 400. Not bad at all! Assume instead, though, a slight general preference in the populace for one candidate over the other, let's say 49% to 51%, and suddenly your 1 in 400 chance of affecting the outcome in Pogge's model sinks to 1 in 193 billion.

Scale up from there to a population of just a million, and you as an individual voter are democratically impotent with a novemvigintillion to 1 probability¹. If you voted in an election of this kind every second for as long as you lived (or even, hey, every nanosecond for the entire lifetime of the universe), chances are—by an inconceivable margin—that you'd not affect the outcome of even a single one.

Little wonder, then, that cynicism about democracy comes so easy. Richard passed along a link to a passionate soi-disant rant including:

I am being sadly sincere when I describe [democracy] as a system which is much better at giving the feeling of participation than actual participation. To me, this is one of the terrible things about democracy (and part of why it is so successful) - because voting lets people feel like they can influence things. Even if they don't vote, they feel like they could have voted.

But any one vote never matters...

…as indeed is demonstrated above.

So we come back to that idea again of selecting the election winner by picking a single ballot at random and going with that. Now one's chances of democratic potency in an electorate of a million people voting between two candidates with a 49%/51% baseline preference is simply a million to one. Still sounds like long odds but it's a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times better than before. In this system people are thus vastly more individually empowered, the tyranny of the majority is ameliorated, and the end result remains proportionally representative, albeit with added statistical noise. It's a win-win-win!

At the end of the day, though, as James noted, whoever wins an election it's always a politician. A solution to that problem is left as an exercise for the reader.

¹ a novemvigintillion is a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion; about ten billion times the number of atoms in the universe.

Christmas 2011

A brief interlude to isaach.com regular programming: I thought I'd blog a few pictures from a Christmas Day in San Francisco. I already put a bunch from earlier in the season on Flickr, as well as a set from Christmas Eve, but here are some from December 25 itself.

Probably for the last Christmas in a while, we got up late in the morning: Lux slept an incredible 15 hours and didn't wake up until 10.30am. By that time I'd already had a lie-in and a good chat with my mom at home in the UK—both generous presents themselves, and altogether a lovely start to the day. When Lux did wake we had a family breakfast

and opened some presents.

It was a beautiful day, clear and bright and dry, so we headed up Bernal Hill for a walk. I feel very lucky to live in this climate, on this hill, in this place

with my favorite people

and

Seriously. The most precious companions (and one more family member on the way) as well as this view ten minutes' walk from your house on Christmas Day?

Truly I'm blessed.

Electoral reform

I don't vote. I've never voted. It's a long story.

If, though, at the end of my life you count the number of elections in which I was eligible to vote, whose ultimate outcome was decided by a single vote, and therefore could have been affected by mine, I bet you count zero. Add my vote, take my vote, no change in the result in any election. I literally count for nothing.

My vote would count for more in the following system I first saw described nearly ten years ago:

Instead of counting the ballot papers, and declaring the winner to be whoever got most votes, the ballot papers would be put into a tombola, thoroughly mixed and one ballot paper taken out. The winner would be whoever was voted for on that ballot paper.

To encourage a high turnout, only the winning candidate would retain his deposit. The remaining deposits would be given, as a prize, to whomever cast the vote which was taken out of the tombola.

In this arrangement I'm actually more likely as an individual to have my own vote affect the outcome than in the current system. It doesn't seem any less democratic: as the original post says it's just a statistically noisy form of proportional representation.

I note the following advantages over the "first past the post" system:

• sidesteps the tyranny of the majority;
• offers a chance to break out of the vicious cycle which leads to a two-party system;
• gives me, an individual voter, a non-zero chance of my vote affecting the final outcome;
• offers positive incentives for turnout; and
• has an exciting entertainment aspect.

The future of politics is right here! What's not to love?

Lasting value

As I said, my dad's a teacher. And a few days ago @pichipsandgravy tweeted at me.

@isaach sorry to bother u Isaac, by chance was your farther a teacher called dave had a yellow 2cv car?

— Pie chips and gravey (@pichipsandgravy) December 14, 2011

Now it turns out that yes, when I was growing up my dad taught kids in elementary and middle schools in the north of England. And to my utter shame at the time the family car was indeed a yellow Citroën 2CV.¹

So I wrote

@pichipsandgravy yes! that was a while ago, mind. do you know him?

— Isaac Hepworth (@isaach) December 14, 2011

and then over the course of a few more Tweets (from me in San Francisco to @pichipsandgravy on an oil rig in the North Sea) established that yes, my dad was his teacher at school about 30 years ago. He'd learned guitar from my dad, and still plays. He remembered my father being a particularly special teacher; was hoping to get back in touch to say thanks.

My wife Wendy is a teacher too, and (on a smaller timescale) gets the same thing: kids of classes past making touching personal gestures of appreciation; being a part of the neighborhood's social history; local families recognizing her on the street and excited to see her.

It makes you think! I wrote my dad "I can guarantee you that nobody's going to be writing to me in 30 years being appreciative of my work and how it's affected their life!" and I believe it.

¹ which was desperately uncool until the same color and model featured in the Bond film For Your Eyes Only in 1981.

On conformity

My dad's a teacher. In his study when I was growing up he had a poem on a sheet of paper. I've always loved it.

He always wanted to explain things
But no-one cared
So he drew
Sometimes he would draw and it wasn't anything
He wanted to carve it in stone
Or write it in the sky
He would lie out on the grass
And look up at the sky
And it would be only the sky and him that needed saying
And it was after that
He drew the picture
It was a beautiful picture
He kept it under his pillow
And would let no one see it
And he would look at it every night
And think about it
And when it was dark
And his eyes were closed
He could still see it
And it was all of him
And he loved it
When he started school he brought it with him
Not to show anyone but just to have it with him
Like a friend
It was funny about school
He sat in a square brown desk
Like all the other square brown desks
And he thought it should be red
And his room was a square brown room
Like all the other rooms
And it was tight and close
And stiff
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk
With his arms stiff and his feet flat on the floor
Stiff
With the teacher watching
And watching
The teacher came and smiled at him
She told him to wear a tie
Like all the other boys
He said he didn't like them
And she said it didn't matter
After that they drew
And he drew all yellow
And it was the way he felt about morning
And it was beautiful
The teacher came and smiled at him
"What's this?" she said
"Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing?"
"Isn't that beautiful?"
After that his mother bought him a tie
And he always drew airplanes and rocket ships
Like everyone else
And he threw the old picture away
And when he lay out alone and looked out at the sky
It was big and blue and all of everything
But he wasn't anymore
He was square inside and brown
And his hands were stiff
And he was like everyone else
And the things inside him that needed saying
Didn't need it anymore
It had stopped pushing
It was crushed
Stiff
Like everything else.

It's beautiful, tragic and moving, but what really takes your breath away is the coda: the author, a high school senior, committed suicide two weeks after submitting it as an English assignment.

Sadly, the actual story behind the work is unclear and likely lost to history. Still, it gives you pause.

The Littlest Twitter Term Counter

A basic need of many folks I work with is to count hashtags or terms on Twitter in real time.

The below isn't a complete solution by any means but it does the job in the simplest sunny-day case. If you, or your technical team, are looking for the most basic starting point then this is it:

curl -d 'track=TERM' -uUSERNAME:PASSWORD -s -o - \
https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json \
| perl -e '$|++; while (<>) {m/\{/ and $i++ and print qq{\r$i}}'

Fill in the values in CAPS (use your Twitter credentials) and you're all set.

Google Multiple Accounts

Right on the heels of the sublime, here's the ridiculous: Google's support for multiple accounts.

First of all, though, don't get me wrong; I worked at Google for years. I left voluntarily, and still consider myself extremely fortunate to have worked there. I'm very lucky to count many current Googlers amongst my friends, and by no means am I irrationally antagonistic towards Google.

This multiple login madness has driven me over the edge, though. It's been on Quora; on Twitter, on Buzz (I lost the link, but the thread included Jeff Huber) and on Google+. Amongst people with whom I work it's inciting fury and despair in equal measure.

Here's a simple reproducible example: let's start off with a fresh new Chrome Incognito Window:

and let's sign in to my work account. Here's my work email.

I'm going to use this "multiple accounts" feature to sign in with my personal account too. First

and then

and, username and password later, boom:

You see those two tabs there? Two perfectly coexisting Gmail tabs. One for work Gmail; one for personal Gmail; they both work. This, ladies and gents, is Google Multiple Accounts.

Thing is, though, I'm about to click a YouTube link in my work Gmail:

which works well enough and opens the YouTube "watch page". Great video! I want to share it…

…but I have to log in…

and BOOM the trapdoor opens and you're in login hell.

First you get this:

and of course you click the only link which is going to take you forward. Or so you think. In fact that link takes you to this:

and I mean DIRECTLY, no login form in sight.

Again, meaning to make forward progress you click "Sign in":

and you're greeted by a welcoming login form:

at which you log in, only to be returned directly to this:

But wait, look above. See the "hepwori" at the top right? I did actually sign in successfully, but got this error page nonetheless.

Already I see the Google guys rolling their eyes and sighing about the YouTube guys. But wait, there's more.

First of all, falling through this trapdoor has caused not just one, but both of my email tabs to log themselves out. Here's the work tab:

And personal:

So OK, perhaps this is still YouTube's fault? Let me ask you this. At this point let's say I open a new tab with ⌘T. In the Chrome address bar I type "foo" and do a Google search. Which account, if any, has this search added to its Web History?

Of course you've no idea. Nobody does. It's all random. Sign into two Google accounts at the same time and you're opening yourself up to the undefined, and good luck with that. Steer clear in particular of Blogger, YouTube, AdWords and Analytics… but basically your best bet is not expecting any of this stuff to work at all.

Google Apps customers are afflicted daily, and it's maddening. Google's silence on it is a particular shame, and—with due respect to many of my Googler friends with this suggestion—multiple browser instances or profiles aren't the answer. Either support multi-account sign-in in a single browser, or don't.

Update: a commenteron Google+ writes:

Sometimes [tabs with multiple logins] all work (ie co-exist) and then, for no reason i can fathom, i get logged out and i spend two days signing in to various accounts to try get back to where i was (ie, multiple accounts happily co-existing)

and yes, this is another part of the problem: the sheer fickleness of the system. On my home laptop and work laptop I have the same set of tabs open and yet the behavior is different when logging into additional services.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: grr!

Hepworths++

I took some photos of the West-Coast Hepworths today.

Wendy:

Lux:

Chaucer:

And Wendy took a photo of me:

This one, though, is from the hospital this last week. We're going to meet the subject in June 2012 and until then it's called Ce Ce. We're excited.