More ESRI and Twitter

A while ago I posted about a map from esri.com that incorporated social media such as Twitter with more traditional sources of fire information.  My conclusion was that the social data was not that helpful.

ESRI has just put out another set of maps, this time on acceptance same-sex marriage.  The first map uses a proprietary demographic model to try to rate how likely a given county is to favor same-sex marriage.  As far as I can tell, this model isn't particularly based on, say, polling data or election results from ballot measures, but more on factors like how urban or rural the county is, how many people have gone to college and so forth.

The second map shows state laws.  It corresponds roughly with the first map.  With the interesting exception of Iowa, the first map shows significant support where same-sex marriage is legal, as one would expect.

The third map is based on Twitter data.  It says there is strong support for same-sex marriage across the country, opposition in five states (including Minnesota, despite significant support in the populous Twin Cities), and very strong opposition in exactly one state: North Carolina.  Idaho, Wyoming and Vermont had insufficient data.

The support map shows North Carolina as fairly similar to neighboring Virginia, which the Twitter data shows as strongly supportive, and as more supportive than neighboring South Carolina and Tennessee. The Twitter data show both of those states as moderately supportive.

Clearly something is out of line here.  Two possible explanations:

• Concerning the overall map, the Twitterverse is not a representative sample.  Overall, Twitter traffic is much more supportive of same-sex marriage than the country as a whole.  This probably shouldn't come as a surprise.
• Concerning North Carolina, the Twitter data covers May 9 through June 30, 2012.  As the map explanation notes, North Carolina had voted on May 8 against a proposition supporting same-sex marriage, by a roughly 60-40 margin after a very intense campaign.  It would be interesting to know what portion of the Twitter traffic surveyed is from the immediate aftermath of that election.  My guess would be a large portion.

Along with the fire map I mentioned above and a study on Twitter rumors after the London riots, which was presented in the Guardian as confirming the notion that Twitter is a good, self-correcting source of information but in fact shows anything but, this is the third piece of evidence I've run across suggesting that you should treat any inferences drawn from Twitter traffic with a grain of salt.

Twitter may well be a great way to find out what people, at least those with Twitter accounts, are paying attention to at the moment, but it's risky, to say the least, to draw conclusions about objective facts from that.

Building a better password

I've recently complained about the irritating nature of the password strength checkers that have been popping up everywhere, so I feel obliged at least to try to analyze the problem and offer solutions.  This is leaving aside the question of whether password authentication is a useful approach at all.

Fundamentally the real measure of password strength is how many passwords you'd expect to have to guess in order to get the right one.  A more formal version of this is the notion of bits of entropy.  If you had a list of all possible passwords in your scheme, I could identify any particular one so long as I could get answers to a series of yes/no questions, for example:  "Is it in the first half of the list or the last?",   "Is it in the first half of that half or the last?" and so forth.  The number of such questions I need is the number of bits of entropy.  Twenty questions means twenty bits, etc..

If I know that your password is either "0" or "1", you have exactly one bit of entropy.  If I know it's an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, digit, "$" or "%", there are 64 possibilities, so you have 6 bits of entropy.  If I know it's two such characters, you have 12 bits, and if it's eight such characters you have 48 bits, which is not too bad.  Someone trying to guess your password would have to guess about 140 trillion passwords, on average, before stumbling on yours.

[Don't assume that guessing a password requires typing it in to the same text box you have to use.  If someone steals the right data from your service provider, they can throw as much computing power as they've got at guessing the passwords.  Quite possibly they'll be happy enough just to try a few thousand weak passwords for each account, since that will crack depressingly many, but attacks like running through the OED with simple substitutions of letters for numbers are absolutely feasible as well.  Here's an article from 2012 about hardware that can guess 350 billion Windows passwords per second.  48 bits suddenly doesn't seem like so much.]

This is assuming that you picked eight characters at random.  If I knew instead that your password was either "F1%ldN0t3$" or "sasssafras" (maybe I'd watched you read your password off a piece of paper with only those two words on it but couldn't quite see which you were typing), then you have only a single bit of entropy, even though both passwords are not just eight but ten characters long and one has plenty of non-letters.

More realistically, if I knew you'd picked an uncommon English word and maybe changed some of the letters to numbers, you'd have somewhere around two dozen bits of entropy.  That's not trivial, but keeping in mind that each added bit doubles the number of passwords a cracker has to try, it's tens of millions of times weaker than the 48-bit scheme above.

The fundamental flaw of password strength checkers is that they can only look at the password you gave them.  They have no idea what other possible passwords you might have chosen.  The assumption is that if you're forced to jump through enough hoops you'll be forced to expand your parameters, but in fact it's possible to generate passwords in a secure manner using only letters, and or to generate them insecurely to satisfy any strength checker out there.  Which is why I half-grimace, half-laugh when I see the "password strength indicator" jump from "poor" to "great" as soon as I type a number.

Now, it's perfectly possible to generate completely random 8-character passwords.  The problem is that something like "qcrQf1x2" or "u%js%hPQ" is a pain to try to memorize, so most people will fall back to picking a "hard" word and maybe altering it a bit.  However, as xkcd points out, it's possible to do a lot better by using random short words.

For example, here's a kind of clunky way of producing a random, memorable password:

BIG HONKING DISCLAIMER: This is just for demo purposes.  The second site I mention uses http, not https, so in theory anyone could be looking in on your session.  Even with https, the sites might be logging all your traffic.  I personally seriously doubt they would, and it's hard to imagine they would be able to connect the dots and figure out what you were using the generated password for, but if you really want to be on solid ground, get the source, look it over, run it locally and use something like /dev/urandom or D&D dice to generate the random input (15d10 will give you close to 50 bits ... not that I would have any idea at all what "15d10" means).  There are also smartphone apps that do more or less the same thing, I believe.

[I last checked that this recipe worked on 19 March 2013]

With that out of the way:

• Go to this site and copy the random string you see there (e.g., A6727933B0169E89).  To get more randomness, just reload the page.
• Go to this site.
• Type some short number and a space into the Challenge box and paste the random string from the first step in after it (e.g. 123 A6727933B0169E89)
• Type anything at all into the Secret box (e.g., "secret").  This doesn't have to be hard to guess.  The real entropy is coming from the random string.
• Press the Compute with SHA-1 button.  Again, the cryptographic details of how strong SHA-1 is don't matter here.  You're just converting a random number to short words.  A simple table lookup would do just as well.

In the Response box you will see six short words followed by some hexadecimal gibberish (in this case, LANE RICH ACE HIS TWIN BLUE (AA59 E401 0D7F 1CB3)).  Each of those words represents 11 bits of entropy (technically, slightly less, since we only started with 64 random bits, but who's counting?).  Take at least four, preferably five or all six.  If you don't like those words, just try again with fresh random bits.

Then add a random punctuation character or whatever makes your site's password strength checker happy.  Voila!  Your password is now richtwinacelane5 or whatever.

If your site's password checker imposes an 8-character limit (and, incredibly enough, some do), cry.

Curiosity online

The Curiosity rover, formally the Mars Science Laboratory, landed on Mars late on August 5th (or early on the 6th, depending on your time zone).

This was a major accomplishment.  Mars has a habit of eating space probes.  The majority have failed, sometimes quietly and sometimes spectacularly, at least once due to the kind of basic coding error that would send a regular geek cursing back to the keyboard.  Except when it comes to interplanetary travel there's generally no "next release".

The Curiosity landing was more complex than any Mars landing before it, and parts of it had never been realistically tested, much less the overall sequence.  This was not out of negligence or cut corners but a simple necessity.  Mars's atmosphere is much, much thinner than Earth's.  At its thickest it's equivalent to Earth's atmosphere at about 35 kilometers (about 20 miles, or about four times as high as the summit of Mount Everest).  Mars's gravity is about 40% of Earth's.  There's simply no practical way to re-create those conditions at the necessary scale anywhere near Earth.

This thin atmosphere is a real problem.  There's just enough of it you can't ignore it, but not enough for a parachute to take the lander all the way to the surface safely.  To land Curiosity, which is considerably larger and more massive than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers before it, NASA put together a landing sequence that Rube Goldberg might have appreciated:

• The probe slams into the atmosphere, protected by a heat shield and pulling upwards of 10g of deceleration, possibly as high as 15g (This is from NASA's press kit from before the landing.  I don't know what the actual numbers were, but clearly it's not going to work with humans aboard.)
• Once the the probe has slowed enough not to need the heat shield, the heat shield is jettisoned.
• The probe then deploys a parachute, which slows it to about 300 km/h (about 180 mph).
• The parachute is then jettisoned and a rocket-powered descent stage takes over, carefully avoiding the parachute and the back shell it's attached to.  If the rockets don't work, the probe will hit the surface, hard, in about 20 more seconds.
• The descent stage lowers the rover on nylon cords while it slowly descends, since landing completely under rocket power risks kicking up enough dust to damage the rover.
• While the descent stage is doing this, the rover gets its landing gear into place.
• When the rover is safely on the ground, the cords are cut loose, using explosives, and the descent stage flies off to crash land some distance away.

What could possibly go wrong?  Mind, this is a simplified description (and any inaccuracies are mine).  The full details include several more maneuvers, through six different configurations in all, with 76 pyrotechnic devices, ballast jettisoned at various points and dozens of people sweating bullets in the control room and elsewhere.

"Seven minutes of terror", they called it.  Damn impressive engineering, I call it.

OK, so now that we've paused to admire NASA/JPL's chops, what does this have to do with the web? 

I'm old enough to sorta kinda remember Apollo and grainy black-and-white TV coverage.  And Tang.  Cool, and, it must be said, more culturally significant than today's missions, but technically not even close to what we have today.  This is true not only of the vehicle itself, but of the communications technology.  In the 70s we had grainy black-and-white video.  For better imagery you had to wait for the astronauts to bring back the film.

Now, using essentially the same technology as a cell phone camera, NASA is able to capture digital images and put them up on its web site for the world to see immediately (as many have pointed out, much more quickly than NBC saw fit to broadcast Olympic events).  The web gallery includes not only the pretty press-release pictures but also the raw frames they were made from, including pictures of Curiosity staring at its feet and other such that didn't make the cut.  There are plenty of other goodies as well.  I particularly like the "white-balanced" images, which have been post-processed to show what the same terrain would look like under sunlight on Earth.

And there are, of course, a Twitter hashtag (#MSL) and (obligatory plug) updates on NASA's Google Plus page.

As inspiring as it may have been to watch thrilling news coverage with Walter Cronkite narrating, there's something much more intimate about being able to visit a web site from time to time and watch the story unfold directly from the source.

Two more comments on wild and wooly markets

1. Intrade and Bitcoin are two entirely different markets, with little in common beyond operating on the web and more or less separately from the more conventional financial markets.  I don't mean to imply anything more than that by mentioning them in the same post.
2. Much of the recent excitement about Bitcoin has been due to its value increasing sharply lately.  Its value, that is, in dollars.  Just sayin'.

What's twice as big as the internet?

(Yikes ... I went 0 for March!)

I've mentioned before that telescopes can generate a lot of data.  IBM seems inclined to drive the point home by collaborating with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) to put together "exascale" computing horsepower behind the world's largest radio telescope.

The telescope is actually (or rather, will be) an array of millions of antennas spread out over a square kilometer, from which the name SKA, for Square Kilometer Array.  This array is expected to produce on the order of an exabyte of data per day.  This is an absolutely ridiculous amount of data by today's standards.  Think one million terabyte disk drives, or twenty million feature film's worth of Blu-ray, or ... according to IBM, twice the daily volume currently carried on the internet.

I'm a little skeptical as to exactly how one measures that, but hey, you've got to trust a press release, right?


So where do you put an exabyte a day worth of data?  Well, you don't.  You're certainly not going to upload it to the web.  Particle physicists are faced with the same problem of having to figure out what portion of a huge data set to keep for later analysis, and a large part of running an experiment is setting up the "trigger" criteria by which the software collecting the data will decide what to keep and what to throw.  IBM and ASTRON's system will be dealing with the same problem, but on an even larger scale.

Or I suppose you could sign up two million people and somehow stream an equal share of the data to each at Blu-ray resolution all day every day, but somehow I doubt that kind of crowdsourcing will help much.

Dear Reader,

When I was in school (a while ago, admittedly), we learned how to write a letter:

Dear So and So, 

Blah, blah, blah ... 

Sincerely,
David Hull

(or, with a close friend or family member, "Love, David" or "Yours, David", or such)

In email these days, if there's any salutation or closing at all, it's something like:

Hi So and So, 

Blah, blah, blah ... 

Thanks!

Some of this, I'm sure, is because times change.  The canonical letter of my youth is miles and miles less formal than one from, say, the 1700s.  Nonetheless, I think the switch from snail mail to email has had an influence.

For one thing, it feels a little funny to add a salutation and closing at all, when the email header includes the names of the sender and recipient.  On the other hand, it can feel a little funny not to have at least something.  So, I think, we tend to revert to what we'd say in a conversation, with both participants standing right there and knowing who the other is.

Beyond the switch to a new medium giving an opportunity for new forms, the medium itself influences the forms.  This has been true with letters as well.  Formal letters with half a page of salutations and closings make more sense when hand-writing and sending a letter is difficult and therefore reserved for occasions like petitioning the kings court, where you are quite possibly addressing an official you only know by name and trying to establish your reputation by means of any titles you may have.

Y'r Humble & Ob'd't S'v't
Etc., etc.

Xanadu vs. the web: Part III - Xanadu the business model

Any publishing scheme has to solve two basic problems: How do you get the content out to people -- or perhaps more importantly, how do you get people to the content -- and how does everyone, particularly the creators of the content, get paid.  Granted, there are any number of reasons people will create content for free (as with most blogs, for example, this one very much included), but to get anything going on a serious scale there will have to be money involved at various points.

Technology has steadily made it easier to disseminate content, to the point where any random blogger now has a potential readership in the hundreds of millions, but it hasn't made it any easier to find readers.  Most blogs have a readership considerably below a hundred million.  Finding readers requires editing, to choose what to publish and make sure it is of good quality, and marketing to make people aware of what you're publishing and try to get them to read it.  Publishing is a different thing entirely from printing.  Publishers, in this broader sense, have to exist in any viable system, whether the web or something Xanadu-like.

To my knowledge there are two main ways of getting people paid: Advertising, and direct payment, whether one-time or subscription.  Xanadu proposes to provide direct payment by means of transcopyright and micropayment.  Micropayment is already in use in various forms, so let's assume it can be extended to the level that Xanadu requires.  The more interesting concept here is transcopyright.

Transcopyright is a license agreement, meant to be enforceable under existing laws, that allows use of content so long as the content is not actually copied, but instead presented as a link back to the original context.  So far, this seems much like what we have on the web, except we usually just make a link and don't actually quote the text.  But Xanadu posits that you pay for paid content when you chase the link (more accurately, the first time you chase the link).

To this end, the (draft) transcopyright license stipulates that the content must be held on the author's servers.  To work on today's web, the exact wording would have to be adjusted to be more cloud-friendly, but that doesn't seem insurmountable, nor does it seem inconsistent with the overall picture.  Storing redundant copies in places other than the place of origin is explicitly part of the Xanadu model.

Nonetheless, I can think of two reasons why this may not work.  The first is the pay-for-access model in general.  There are any number of highly motivated major players -- record labels and movie studios come to mind -- who have been trying very hard to control access to content.  I've written at length on why this is fundamentally a losing battle (see the DRM tag in general, or this attempt at a pithy summary).

In practice, access can only really be controlled under special circumstances, for example in the case of cable pay-per-view where the cable company owns the box, and even then the control doesn't mean much.  If people want to pirate, they can and will.

On the other hand, it's clear that people will pay for content even if they could get it for free.  My guess is that it's some combination of people by and large not wanting to break the law and people understanding that if no one's getting paid, no one will, say, make blockbuster movies.  This is actually good news for the Xanadu scenario.  Most likely, in such a scheme, if it existed at all, people would be willing to pay, even if they could pirate -- and of course they could.  But that leads me to my second point.

People don't mind paying for content, but they do mind hassle and uncertainty in payment.  For example, many people hate hate hate having to watch their cell phone usage to make sure they didn't wander through a roaming area or go over their minutes and will pay a premium in order just to know what the bill will be every month.  They'll actually pay more for a less transparent pricing system.

Paying per access can be fine in some cases.  I'm fine with going through a little payment ritual for an on-demand movie because 1) I know up front what I'm paying for and how much it will be, and 2) It doesn't interrupt my viewing of the film.  I may be missing something in the Xanadu scenario, but as far as I can tell the pay-per-first-retrieval model means either an obtrusive taxicab-style meter showing how much you're spending as you browse, or the uncertainty of finding out later how much you've paid (or being interrupted by a "please deposit another $X" message at random intervals).

Instead, what we have outside limited contexts such as on-demand video, mp3 audio and smartphone apps, is advertising.  You can think of advertising as a sort of indirect micropayment system.  When you view content with ads in it, you "pay" by having to watch the ad and potentially being influenced to buy something.  However, the actual exchange of money is between the advertiser and the creator (and various intermediaries).  The advertiser gets paid back, assuming the ad campaign worked, when you decide to buy something, which you will do with high enough probability to justify the expense.  Advertising revenue correlates with volume of access.  The more people access your content, the more traffic the ads get and the more money the creator gets.

It seems worth noting here that the advertising model has little if anything to do with quotation and copyright.  I don't have to enter into a licensing agreement with you for you to be able to read this blog or for me to be able to (hypothetically) run ads on it.  Copyright matters mainly in preventing someone from, say, mirroring a popular blog and running their own ads on it.

In short, we don't need a new concept of copyright to make online content widely available and make sure creators can get paid.  We just need to put up with ads [of course I would say that, considering my employer, wouldn't I?].

So ... what version are we on?

Trying to do a bit of tidying up, I tagged a previously-untagged recent post "Web 2.0".  I did this because the post was a followup to an older post that was specifically about Web 2.0, but it felt funny.  Web 2.0 is starting to sound like "Information Superhighway" and "Cyberspace".  A quick check of the Google search timeline for the term suggests that usage peaked around 2007 and has been declining steadily since.  Always on the cutting edge, Field Notes uses the tag most heavily in 2008.

Google's timeline isn't foolproof.  Anything before the late 90s is probably an article that mentioned the date (and Web 2.0) with no stronger indication of when the page is from.  On the other hand, the more recent portion is probably more representative, since there's more metadata around these days.  Also, the numbers are larger, which is often good for washing out errors.

But anyway, are we still in Web 2.0?  Are we up to 3.0?  Does it really matter (spoiler: probably not)?

I've argued before that while Web 1.0 was a game-changing event, Web 2.0 is more a collection of incremental improvements.  Enough incremental improvements can produce significant changes as well, but not in such a way as you can draw a clear bright line between "then" and "now".  The Linux kernel famously spent about 15 years on version 2.x, only just recently moving up to 3.0, and Linus says very clearly that 3.0 essentially just another release with a shiny new number.  From a technical standpoint I'd say we've been on Web 2.x for a while and will continue to be for a while, unless we decide to start calling it 3.x instead.

Because, of course, "Web 2.0" is not a technical term.  Never mind who uses it to what ends in what context.  The ".0" gives the game away to begin with.  A real version 2.0, if it ever exists, is very soon supplanted by 2.0.1, or 2.1, or 2.0b or whatever as the inevitable patches get pushed out, which is why I was careful to say "2.x" above.  "2.0" as popularly used doesn't designate a particular version.  It's supposed to indicate a dramatic change from crufty old 1.0 (or 1.x if you prefer).  In the real world of incremental changes, that trope will only get you so far.

Hmm ... in real life versioning usually goes more like

• 0.1, 0.2 ... 0.13 ... 0.42 ... 0.613 as we sneak in "just one more" minor tweak before officially turning the thing loose
• 1.0 First official release.  Everyone collapses in a heap.  The bug reports start coming in
• 1.1 Yeah, that oughta fix it.
• 1.1.1, 1.1.2 ... 1.1.73 ... the third number emphasizing these are just "small patches" to our mostly-perfect product -- bug fixes, cosmetic changes, behind-the-scenes total rewrites, major new features important customers were demanding, that sort of thing.
• 2.0.1 OK, now we've got some snazzy new stuff.  Anything coming up for a while is just going to be a "minor update".  Everyone collapses in a heap.  Bug reports keep coming in.
• 2.0.2, 2.0.3 ... yeah, we've seen this movie before
• 5.0, because our latest version is so much better than anything you've ever seen, including our own previous versions (Actually, version 3.x ended in tears, 5.x is largely a rewrite by a different team and no one knows what happened to 4.x  -- maybe that's why one of the co-founders was sleeping under his desk and living on pizza for a couple of months?).
• 5.0.1, 5.0.2 ... you know the drill
• Artichoke.  Yep.  Artichoke.  Version numbers are so two-thousand-and-late.  We're going with vegetables now.  Already having long meetings on whether it's Brussels Sprout or Broccoli next.
• Artichoke 1.1, Artichoke 1.2 ...

Answering my random question

I recently asked whether there were more than a Britannica worth of Britannica-quality articles in Wikipedia.  Looking into it a bit, I'd have to generally agree with Earl that no, there aren't.

Britannica has about half a million articles (according to Wikipedia's page on Britannica).  English Wikipedia has about four million.  I would not say that one in eight Wikipedia articles is up to Britannica standards.

Granted, the famous Nature study of 2005 found that Wikipedia science articles are nearly as accurate as Britannica articles -- and that Britannica is far from flawless.  One can dispute the methodology and conclusions of that study, and Britannica did, but the overall conclusion seems at least plausible.

However, apart from science articles only being part of the picture, the writing in Wikipedia is uneven and full of Wikipedia tics.  Britannica, with full-time writers and editors, ought to be a bit better.  I tend to think this is where Wikipedia generally falls short. Factually, the two are comparable.  In style and organization, not so much.

Taking content and writing together, there are probably relatively few Britannica-quality articles in Wikipedia, but there are more than enough that are close enough.

JW Pet Company Ball Medium Still alive

JW Pet Company Tic Tac Ball 5 Dog Toy, Medium Read more...

Super stretchy ball can be stuffed with treats or other toys

This size is perfect for small to medium breeds

Comes in assorted colors

This ball is a wonderful training aid and virtually indestructible

Malleable natural rubber ball

Fantastic catch and chew toy! We have had a blast with this ball. Our Bichon can sling it chew it play soccer with it and catch it. It is light in weight but keeps it sphere shape regardless of the impact. We have used it for months and there are no signs of wear or teeth marks. It does not harm anything because it is soft and you can get it to bounce at all sorts of angles and english due to the grip possibilities.
So far so good I bought this for my Min Pin mix puppy who's about 7 months and 15 pounds now.I really appreciate the design of this toy the Tic Tac pattern makes it a great puzzle ball. I stick the stray bits of rawhide chews that can't be swallowed of course into the ball then Rafa has to roll the ball crush the ball carry it around shake it etc in order to extract them. This has resulted in some chewing of the rubber but we're 5 days in and it's not showing chew marks at all. I'll update my review if this changes as I've done with my other dog toy reviews but so far I'm very satisfied.
Virtually Indestructable! I purchased this ball for a friend's 85 pound Boxer dog. The dog had pretty much destroyed every other toy that my friend had bought for him. I have two Boxer dogs and two of these balls. My dogs play tug and pull on them constantly and both balls still look like new so I thought this ball would be good for her Boxer too.
Glad to find it again! Both of our Corgi mixes love this ball. We purchased a a couple from Target a few years ago and they stopped carrying them. We put dog bones in them and they have fun working to get them out. We have to watch them with it because they will chew threw the rubber given the chance both POWER chewers destroy nylabone durables in no time. Also DO NOT leave these in the sun because it causes the rubber to breakdown.
Happy Dog. Another great JW toy. My Boston Terrier loves this. She loves balls and I bought this one because its larger and she can still pick it up.
My Dogs Love this Ball I had purchased this same kind of ball about 6 months ago from a local discount store. My dogs absolutly love it. Ever since I have been keeping my eyes open for a second one to keep in our upstairs bonus room so they have one in each area that we play in. I happened to come across it at Amazon and was glad that I did. I take a smaller softer squeeky toy and insert it into the ball.
Sturdy toy for medium size dog I ordered 2 of these balls for my small dog.
Not so durable I ordered this in the hopes to replace a toy my dog loved that after a year had finally had enough. This ball looked almost identical to it and said in the description virtually indestructible. I now know this not to be true. In under an hour while playing with my dog he had virtually destroyed the toy. Please see images of the blue ball above. I was throwing it and letting him wrestle with it then throwing it again. Within 5 minutes he had already pulled one piece out because I had turned my back. Please keep in mind I was not completely attentive while he was playing with it but he was not left alone with it for more than 5 minutes at a time and he managed to tear it into pieces.
Still alive My dog loves this! She has destroyed almost all of her toys except this one and the kong products! I would definitely recomend this one to someone who has a dog that likes to destroy toys.
dog loves this Because this is rubber and flexible my dog has a blast with this. She's about 50 lbs and it's a good size for her. Even smaller dogs can carry it around because of the flexibility. I've had this toy for about 2 years and it has help up wonderfully.
Read more...





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Hartz Clean Large Bacon Flavor Beware!

Hartz Chew 'n Clean Large Bone, Bacon Flavor Read more...

Veterinarian-approved

Cleans teeth and gums

Long-lasting

Promotes strong jaws, clean teeth, and general oral health.

Bacon flavor

My dogs LOVE these! I have 2 small dogs who love to chew. One dog is 7 lbs and the other is 20 lbs but they are both intense chewers. They both get hours of enjoyment out of these bones and they last a very long time. I purposely get this size so that they last a while I'm talking months. I highly recommend them for dogs who are serious chewers and for pet parents who don't want to buy new chew bones every couple of days.
best chew bone Both my dogslab and Cavalier choose this bone over all others. They love the nubs on the center. These bones last months and I have strong chewers. Great product.
wrong item my bulldog loves the product except its the wrong one..
Good bone for large dogs I have bought a lot of these over the years and I've never had a dog that didn't like them. Mine go through phases where they want them and then will neglect them for a while. Somehow when one dog gets into chewing them the others take them back up. You do need to watch the bone as eventually it will get nibbled away to the point that a dog could swallow too large a piece and either choke or have an obstruction but this is the case with all chew toys. They aren't cheap but they last longer than softer things and don't make a mess. I keep several lying around the house at all times.
Dogs Love It And EAT It My dogs haven't been big on chewing things that aren't edible. It's actually tough to find stuff they want to chew on and they LOVE these bones. But when they get down to the nub of this THEY EAT IT. EASILY. Debating whether or not I should buy again since inevitably they eat whatever they're chewing on.
Dogs will eat I have 2 9 month old chocolate labs and they both love to chew and eat this thing. I would watch your dogs with this chew toy as I bought one of the large ones and it is half gone and going into the garbage. My dogs haven't gotten sick but probably shouldn't be eating this either.
chew bone My dogs love this item they never get tired of chewing and this keeps them busy for days. I would recommend this if you have aggressive chewers.
Great for chewers But only have had rat terriers that would chew them These are great for dogs that like to chew. I have had two rat terriers that really love them. Both of them have always had sparkling white teeth due to these plus not eating table food. I now have a 11 year old Jack Russell that has been used to rawhide and his teeth are yellow and have some plaque. I have worked with him trying to get him to Us the Chew N Clean but he is stubborn and set in his ways!My suggestion is only start your puppies off with these.
Beware! Beware of these bones any of the sizes. My brother's dog boxer/pit bull mix ended up needing surgery today to remove a piece of one of these bones that got lodged in his stomach. Dogs can and will eat these without you even noticing. I have one for my dog mini dachshund/cocker spaniel that will be going in the garbage. It is not worth my dog's life to have them eating something that can be so harmful to them.
Great Toy Dog loves it. Its pretty hard so it will last him a long time. He was goin threw nylabones in a day and that gets expensive. Its been a week and still in good shape.
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Random question

Are there now more than a Britannica worth of Britannica-quality articles on Wikipedia?

There's an app for that web site

(To whoever posted the last three comments -- not that there's even the slimmest chance you'll read this -- no, I do not want to buy French sunglasses from you.  Quel dommage.)

Ah, the late 90s.  We knew everything.  We knew that phones, TVs and PCs were going to "converge" until there was no real difference between them.  We knew that the web was exploding and was going to keep exploding.  "Broadband", that is, speeds faster than 56kb, was going to be everywhere.  We knew that mobile computing was going to be big and that the web would necessarily look different on a phone as opposed to a big monitor with a keyboard and mouse.

Honest.  I remember people talking about all this in the hallways and in the restaurants that always seemed to have at least two VCs interfacing animatedly in the booth behind you, before I left the Valley.

And we were right.  Unfortunately, we were wrong about a few of things as well, like whether this was all going to happen "right now, at internet speed" or over the course of decades.  And whether a company had to actually show a profit to be worth a gazillion bucks.  And this idea that in order to have half a chance in this blindingly fast new world, you had to become the "first mover" no matter the cost.  And buildings like this.  I mean, who would want to work there?


Now that web-and-video-enabled phones with decent bandwidth are commonplace, what does the web look like on them?  Well, if you actually try to use your phone's browser, it looks pretty unimpressive.  Pages come up in tiny print.  If you try to zoom in so you can actually read them, they may or may not reformat so as not to spill over the edge of the screen.  Selecting links or navigating to the right text box can be pot luck.  In all, pretty dismal.

Not that there haven't been efforts to make web pages look and feel differently if the browser is running on a phone.  There certainly have been, and again, I recall some of those efforts from back in the day.  But that's often not what happens.  What happens instead, often, is an app.

I can read this blog on a phone browser, if I want to, and it looks OK, because Blogger has machinery in place to present it in "feed" form, without all the formatting of the full web version.  This is exactly in line with the "one web site for all browsers" model, but it takes considerable extra effort.  If I go to a random web site, including major ones, I may or may not arrive at something useful.  At the end of the day, phones are just too different from the big-screen/mouse/keyboard setup.

To deal with the small screen, limited keyboard facilities and other peculiarities, phones have to do things significantly differently:

• Much less text fits on the screen and typing is often cumbersome, so graphics play a larger visual role.
• The layout changes, often radically.  Elements appear and disappear depending on where attention is focused.  Buttons are more common than links.  Input elements like buttons and text boxes tend to have reserved chunks of real estate, as opposed to being part of a big page that scrolls.
• A touch screen favors gestures like swiping, pinch/spread for zooming out or in, long press instead of some altered flavor of click (right-click, shift-click, control-alt-meta-cokebottle-click ...), and so forth.
• Autocomplete is even more important.
• A phone is more apt to lose and regain connectivity, so it often makes sense to cache results deliberately, as opposed to counting on some generic caching layer to hold on to whatever happens to be around at the moment.
• Phones are mobile, so physical location can play a much bigger role.  Not a lot of turn-by-turn GPS web pages out there.
• Phones are phones.  You might switch from listening to a song to taking a call at any moment.  To some extent different apps on the phone have to cooperate to make this happen smoothly.

Put this all together and it's going to be next to impossible to maintain a web site that can automatically look good on all the major browsers and all the major phone platforms.  A better solution is to separate the information in the web site from its presentation and develop the PC/laptop presentation more or less separately from the phone presentation.

That explains why a good portion of apps are essentially web sites redone for the phone.  As long as the separation is done reasonably cleanly, this is the right call.  A weather web site and a weather phone app ideally share the same raw weather information, and probably a fair bit of common elements like icons for "sunny" and "fair to partly cloudy", but the web designer doesn't need to figure out how to recognize and handle a swipe gesture and the phone designer can dispense with a lot of web markup machinery.

It took me a while to pick up on this, not because it's that hard to notice but because I'm a little slow that way.  "Apps", huh?  Sure are a lot of them, and a lot that sound like web sites.  What's the point?  Must be some sort of marketing gimmick.  But of course apps are not a gimmick at all.

Old albums

A few weeks ago the Encyclopædia Britannica finally threw in the towel and, after over 200 years, stopped publishing the lovely multi-volume sets that have graced bookshelves the world over.  Naturally, there has been a run on the last edition (2010).  When I heard the story on the radio today there were supposed to have been no more than 800 copies left.  I'd be surprised if there were any left by now.

Clearly the whole point of this run is to get at the physical volumes.  The contents can be had digitally for much less.  The doorstop edition is valuable for the same reason any artifact is valuable apart from any utility it may have: rarity and emotional significance.

Imagine you are rummaging through an attic trying to decide what to keep and what to throw.  You run across a stash of vinyl LPs of popular hits from the 70s.  Odds are most if not all of the songs can be had digitally with better sound, but that's not the point.  As with the 2010 Britannica it's the physical artifact that matters.  Do you like that vintage artwork on the jacket with the circular imprint of the record worn into it?  Do you enjoy the tactile experience of dropping the needle on the platter, the crackle and pop of surface noise, the ritual of cleaning any wayward lint from the grooves?

Then you run across an album of photos, page after plain page of pictures tucked into little white corner-pockets, colors desaturated, edges curling.  Tucked into an envelope with them are the negatives.  Scan them and you probably have images of reasonable quality that you can attach to an email, share on your favorite social site and archive durably.  The physical artifact is less important here.  It's the actual images that matter, images you can't get anywhere else.  With the bits, you could create another album as good as the original one.

That's the common question that determines what's really of interest: what can't you get anywhere else?  It's not a matter of songs versus pictures or LPs versus photos.  If the vinyl in the Greatest Hits album is warped and cracked and the album art is nothing special, you may as well just buy the tunes online.  If the photo album is something your great Aunt put together, with cutouts and notes and decorations, you probably want the physical album as much as the images.

If the content is important, then you'll want to get it into the cloud, or at least into bits on some local disk.  If the artifact is important, then the web will play less of a role.

The infinite scrollbar

It's somewhat annoying when sites decide to show, say, the first 20 items of a list on a web page and to get more you have to find the "next" button.  It's nicer to bring up a list you can scroll through.  As you scroll, the size and location of the scroll bar will tell you how much you've got left.

Except when it won't.  Some sites -- particularly social sites, it seems -- will give you a scrolling list, but when you get near the bottom, they hit the server and bring in more items.  Suddenly your scroll bar gets smaller and the space below it grows.  After a while you realize that no matter how much farther you scroll, there will still be some left.  But by then you're hooked.  Just one more page ...

Technically, it's not a bad call.  Browsers can handle pretty big scrolling lists these days, but they probably wouldn't deal well with the full list of, say, hundreds of thousands or millions.  Bringing items in on demand is a nice compromise.  Chances are the human doing the scrolling will grow bored long before the browser's memory limits are seriously tested, and if not it can always throw out items from the top that are now well out of sight.  Score one for AJAX.

Psychologically it's pretty clever, too.  The nice large scrollbar at the beginning says "Come on in!  Just a little bit to look at here.  Won't take too long."  As noted, by the time you see what's really going on, you're drawn in.

Overall, I'm not sure I have a strong feeling about this style of widget.  I guess the convenience outweighs the subtle feeling I've been played.  But not by a lot.

A note on Bitcoin foreign exchange

Bitcoin has been extremely volatile of late.  That doesn't speak for its potential as a currency, though the  Economist's Free Exchange blogger makes a good point:  Volatility is only a problem to the extent you have to exchange with other currencies.  If the virtual nation of Bitcoinia can transact its business in pure Bitcoin, then it matters much less how many dollars people think a Bitcoin is worth.  Even so, the examples of volatility cited in that article, as much as 20% in a matter of weeks, are far, far below what Bitcoin has experienced over the past month or so.

In any case, we're far from such a point.  There don't seem to be a lot of places where goods or services are priced purely in Bitcoin.  Rather, the real price is in some reserve currency and the Bitcoin price is based on the going rate.  For at least some period of time, transacting in Bitcoin will generally involve converting to and from reserve currencies.  Bitcoin foreign exchange, if you will.

That's a bit of a problem.  To use one of the several existing Bitcoin exchanges, you have to provide an account in conventional currency, subject to conventional banking regulations and so forth, which is pretty much the opposite of what Bitcoin is supposed to accomplish.  Besides that, having a single point of failure that can bog down or fall over at any point (and is more likely to just when the need for it is most urgent), seems silly.  Finally, I've seen complaints that exchanges can tend to charge fairly heavy transaction or withdrawal fees, which Bitcoin is supposed to eliminate.  Can we do better?

It shouldn't be a problem to track bids, offers and trades in a distributed manner.  Bitcoin already does much the same with its blockchain, and there are various flavors of distributed hash table running around.  I'm sure someone could come up with something.

The bigger problem, I think, is escrow, since this is all supposed to be pseudonymous.  Suppose I call myself Mr. Blue and I own a Bitcoin wallet.  Ms. Green is willing to give me $X for one of my Bitcoins.  We can both make sure the world knows this without going through a central exchange.

But how do we actually settle the trade?  I need to give Ms. Green one Bitcoin.  Bitcoin makes that easy.  I initiate a transfer and few minutes to an hour later the Bitcoin world agrees that that Bitcoin is hers (or, more precisely, is now in the wallet whose identity she gave).  Ms. Green then disappears and I'm one Bitcoin poorer.

To make this work, Ms. Green needs to put $X in a safe place.  At that point, the dollars are no longer hers, but neither are they mine.  When the Bitcoin transfer settles, and only then, I get access to the dollars and transfer them to my account.

What we need, then, is is a way of moving currency from one conventional bank account to another, securely, anonymously and cheaply, without having to trust any particular third party.

I don't know if that's technically feasible or not, but if it is, it's not clear why we would need a virtual currency.

KONG Goodie Bone Dog Large Another winner.

KONG Goodie Bone Dog Toy, Large, Red Read more...

Measures 8-1/2 inches; for dogs 30-65 pounds

Use with your pet's favorite KONG treats; keeps dogs busy and happy while their owner is away

Natural rubber toy that holds treats for your pet

Made in the USA of nontoxic, extremely durable natural rubber

Patented Goodie Grippers

GREAT FOR TOUGH DOGS
Another winner. This is yet another great Kong toy. For his one I break a biscuit in half and stuff it in. After three years there is no wear at all on the two I have.Note I tried the extreme model but the hole is much smaller and it is near impossible to get the treat in without it breaking apart.
Poor Quality Please save your money. This product does not stand up for your dog to chew. My Lab can destroy it in 10 minutes and i consider it unsafe due to the fact its all rubber.
Kong bone toy Kong they make the best toys for dogs that chew alot. My dog always chews on it and it still has so much life to it.
Good toy to a certain point Loved this toy since we can add treats in it. Thought Kong was durable but our 1yr old King Charles spaniel managed to chew and eat the serrated edges of the bone in one hour after receiving the bone. So hard to find toys he can not chew and destroy.
Durable and fun!! Our pup is a chewer and rather than give her endless rawhide chews that last 10 minutes we decided to buy the Goodie Bone to see if we could entertain her for a little longer. The bone itself is large well made and allnatural rubber am I the only one who loves the vanillalike smell?Either way we use this to put treats in the end and it has lasted for a while now and is holding up quite well.
Love It! I have a dog that is about 2 years old. He is small but destroys all the toys. This isn't his favorite toy but he does chew on it. This toy has outlasted any other toy that I have bought him. I love this bone. He hasn't torn it up or ripped off the edges. This toy has lasted the longest.
Durable Good toy for my 3 Italian mastiffs. Keeps them busy. My dogs are hard on toys.
Kong Bone My labradoodle puppy loves this toy quite a bit. The toy smelled a bit out of the package but a quick wash with dish detergent and a brush got rid of that. Seems like it will last quite awhile.
In love My little monster loves this thing. It's one of the few toys she hasn't managed to figure out yet so it's awesome.I don't know how it would do with larger stronger dogs but it's perfect for little ones less than 15 lbs.. I recommend using Blue Buffalo's turkey jerky treatsjust fold an entire treat in half lengthwise the cut it in half to stuff in either side.
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• KONG Extreme Dog Toy, Large, Black For extremely extreme chewers size UP! I got the Extreme Kong black because my rat terrier had already torn apart a Classic Kong red. He goes through plush squeaky toys in no time flat. He has chewed pieces out of one Extreme Kong but not the other two. What have I ...Read the full


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Sometimes they do listen

My correspondent who complained of bank's website putting "Complete Transfer" on a button that did not, in fact, complete the transfer is happy to report that the button now says "Continue Transfer".

Yay!

Wikipedia tics

I'll say it again: Wikipedia is great.  I use it all the time.  It does its job astoundingly well, particularly given that when it was first getting started any sensible person could have told you it couldn't possibly work.  Anyone can edit it?  Anyone can write anything about anything?  And people are going to depend on it for information on a daily basis?  Riiiight.

But it does work, thanks to countless hours of effort from dedicated Wikipedians hammering out workable policies, nurturing the culture behind those polices and putting those policies into practice by editing a stupefying number of articles.   It is this endless stream of repairs and improvements that keeps Wikipedia from devolving into chaos.  It's a wonderful thing, but wonderful is not the same as absolutely perfect (for starters, one is achievable and the other isn't).  Anyone who's read Wikipedia more than casually will inevitably have a few pet peeves.  Here are some of mine (and yes, I do try to fix them when I come across them, time permitting):

• Link drift: Article A includes a link to article B.  Article B gets merged into article C and the link is changed to point to article C -- not the section, but the whole article.
• More link drift: Article A includes a link to article B.  Someone creates an article on a different meaning of B.  The article for B becomes a disambiguation page, and the article on A continues to point to it.
• Digression:  Article A has some connection to topic B, which people Need to Know More About.  Instead of just providing a short summary and linking to the article on B, an enthusiastic editor gives the complete story of B, in nearly but not exactly the same form as in the original article (or, the digressive section moves to its own article, but the section later regrows).
• I'm really into this: An article is stuffed with unsourced Things You Didn't Know about the topic, often to the point of downright creepiness.
• Some say ... yes, but some other people say ... yes, but ... :  People feel strongly about topic A.  Generations of editors qualify each other's statements until the article reads like a pingpong match. Usually an effort is made to collect the clashing statements into one section, but that doesn't always keep them from escaping into the article at large.
• Actually, everybody gets this wrong:  An editor makes a great point of declaring some piece of common knowledge incorrect without bothering to check if this is really the case.
• This is a very important distinction:  Instead of saying something on the order of "not to be confused with [link]" or such, an editor feels that it's worth including a sentence or two on either side of some valid but not earthshaking distinction emphasizing how crucial it is (see previous item if the distinction in question is invalid)
• Take it to the discussion page, please: A discussion that ought to be lightly summarized is hashed out in excruciating detail before our eyes.
• Oh look, I can write a textbook/conference paper, too!:  Editors seem to make a special effort to pepper their writing with the mannerisms of their professors or other authorities.  Math articles seem particularly prone to this ("clearly ... it turns out that ...").
• My home town/band is the awesomest:  Material on a place or group reads like your cousin showing you around on a visit.  I actually don't mind this, so long as it's not too overboard, even though it generally runs somewhat afoul of Wikipedia's notability policy, because how else does one find out about the Anytown Moose-waxing festival or the real meaning of "incandescent oak" in that one song (don't go searching for those -- I made them up).
• This article reads like it was written by dozens of different people over the course of several years:  Well, yeah.  The real magic of Wikipedia is that relatively few articles read like that, particularly if they really have had a chance for dozens of different people to work on them over the course of several years.
• [One other tic occurred to me not long after I hit "Publish": Gratuitous wikification.  To "wikify", in wiki parlance, is to make an ordinary term into a link to the article for that term.  It's one of the things that makes wikis wikis, but sometimes people seem to go randomly overboard, occasionally with fairly odd results.]

Wikipedia's strength is in its transparency.  For the most part, you can see every draft of every article if you want to, every mistake, every correction, every paragraph in need of tightening, every statement in need of a reference, every quibble, every pointless edit war -- in short, everything that a normal publication, encyclopedic or otherwise, goes to great lengths to hide.  The downside is that flaws like the ones listed above are also there for all to see.

The upside is that we get Wikipedia.

Multipet Look Whos Talking Cow Finally a good toy for a blind dog!

Multipet Look Who's Talking Cow Dog Toy Read more...

Plush toy for dogs

Real Life Sound

Finally a good toy for a blind dog! Finally found a toy my blind dog can find. The cow we call it moocow moos for several seconds after she activates and throws it making it easy for her to find. It's held up to everyday playing for 3 weeks now without any signs of wear so far so good. I'm back to look at the other critters in this product range. We have a babble ball but it drives me crazy.
Not as good as others I have several of the multipet look who's talking toys was disappointed with this one cow dog toy. Did not seem as though the quality was as good as the others and the sound box was sideways. I got it shifted a bit but it would not stay in place. Arrived quickly.
Another winner! I don't know what it is about the these toys that have the animal soundsbut my little dog just loves them the best. Very durable. Just too funny..
Cow Dog Toy I bought the Multipet Look Who's Talking Doy Toy to replace the one my dog had for a long time over a year. I gave it five stars because of that and that my dog really liked it and would always take it out of his toy box and take his nap with it until one day he got mad over something and chewed it apart. This one I ordered didn't last it was torn up the same day he got it. I was pretty upset because I had paid over $8.00 for it on Amazon. Then saw the same toy on Dog.Com for only $5.99. I buy a lot of dog toys off Amazon and usually they are a very good deal. The problem probably is I have one spoiled dog with three hugh boxes of toys.
So far so good My 8 month old labradoodle can chew through most toys in seconds. He has yet to gnaw this one apart. He runs around the house making it moo. I think the sound occupies him enough that he doesn't destroy it.
Fun dog toy This item appears to be well made especially for the price offered. The item is newly purchased so thelongevity cannot be assessed as yet. It was enjoyed by several small dogs. It would not hold up for medium or larger dogs.
Great doggie toy This toy is my favorite. It's adorable. But what's important is that it's also my dog's favorite. He loves the moooo sound.
No item to review I cannot review this item as the company did not send it. I'm sure it would have been a great product had I received it in the first place. I have sent numerous emails to give the company an opportunity to resolve this. VERY disappointed.
Cow toy
Love it. My greyhound Taz loves this toy fairly indistructable.Please make more I will order another soon.
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• Multipet Look Who's Talking Dog Dog Toy, Colors May Vary Spoiled brat LOVES it! At first glance out of the box I was sorely disappointed about how small this thing was! Seriously about the size of my palm! However this toy seems very well made and what it says my dog loves! It's easy to squeeze ...Read the full


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Hedwig and the Mobile Web

I had no idea of this until I ran across it in a Sporcle quiz:  Actress Hedy Lamarr, best known for her Hollywood roles in the 40s and 50s, and inspiration for Anne Hathaway's interpretation of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, was also co-owner of a patent for "spectrum hopping" technology that eventually came to be used in WiFi, Bluetooth and CDMA.  The actual names on the patent are Hedy Kiesler Markey (Lamarr's legal name at the time) and avant-garde composer George Anthiel, a neighbor of hers who developed a means of controlling multiple player pianos.

This doesn't seem to be the first patent for such technology.  Earlier work by Otto Blackwell et. al. uses essentially the same idea.  Both use multiple frequencies, and both use a shared key to determine how to shift between frequencies.  The main difference appears to be that Blackwell uses telegraph tape as a keying mechanism while Lamarr and Antheil use player piano rolls.  However, there is little doubt that Lamarr's contributions to the invention were real and that the invention is significant.

It's interesting that both patents are presented as secret communication systems, as someone listening on only one frequency would only get part of the message.  However, it doesn't seem like it would take long for an enemy to hit on the idea of listening on more than one frequency and combining the signals.  So maybe I'm missing something.  Today we use spread spectrum technology to increase bandwidth or decrease "power flux density" -- which I assume means about what it says.

It's also worth noting that Lamarr and Antheil didn't benefit significantly from their invention, which was not used in practice until after the patent had expired.  Lamarr did receive stock in a wireless technology company two years before her death, but it's not clear whether that came to anything.  Having made and spent millions over the course of her career, Lamarr spent much of her later years broke, and was twice arrested for shoplifting.

goDog Barnyard Buddies Lamb 24 inch Cuddly doggy toy

goDog Barnyard Buddies Lamb Mama Dog Toy, 24-inch Read more...

Deluxe plush dog toy is double-seamed and extra durable

Barnyard buddies lamb mama dog toy

One in the head and one in each hoof

Machine-washable and features 5 squeakers

Maybe great for the average dog Maybe great for the average dog. I was looking for something tuff. The toy is advertised as extra durable. It took my 2yr. old boxer less than an hour to tear out one of the squeakers in the hoof. I'll keep looking for a tuffer plush toy.
My dog loves this lamb!! My dog just loves this lamb. He is a big lab so we have had to replace it before but I keep buying them because it is unstuffed and very durable. He carries it around and wants it to be with him at all times.
Pleased w/ lamb dog toy. Very pleased with the product and vendor. Toy was in excellent condition and shipped very quickly. Dog loves the toy especially the squeaker in the head. Will purchase from again.
Not for the super chewer I bought this because my 7monthold Rhodesian Ridgeback hadn't torn up her periwinkle dragon made by Go Dog Sherpa same manufacturer. Turns out Lamb Mama doesn't have the same lining as the dragon so puppy tore it apart in a few hours. Fortunately there isn't as much stuffing as other toys so there wasn't as much of a mess.
Cuddly doggy toy Great play toy as well as sleeping blanket. I love that the only stuffing is in the head so there is less destruction.
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