tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-291462162024-03-07T10:25:17.427-08:00How to Spy on Ryan.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-77809607653009372652012-03-18T19:38:00.000-07:002012-03-19T00:38:35.375-07:00The Tragedy of Bits<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">The content/hardware markets are a crazy inversion. Hardware has marginal costs; bits don't. Yet hardware is now being subsidized by the high "margins" on selling bits. The price you pay to flip bits in your device pays for the cost of the device itself. T</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">here's a war raging for who gets to be the one with the 30% cut of every bit sold. It's being fought with device subsidies and a combination of habits, defaults, and lock-in. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Amazon doesn't pretend to accommodate competing bit sellers on their devices. Apple is happy to let them </span><a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/02/15Apple-Launches-Subscriptions-on-the-App-Store.html" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">sharecrop</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> for the same 30% cut. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Console gaming is becoming the model for everything, exploiting the inability of humans to sum small numbers over a long period of time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The best allocation of resources would be for every one of us to consume as many bits as we want on a small number of devices; That's what our economy can produce. Instead the incentives are for us to consume a small number of bits on a large number of resource-intensive devices. The bit-sellers are hoping that they can commoditize the bit-makers by abstracting them away behind the veneer of their device and payment system, like we'll forget that beef comes from cows and not the grocery. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">All this for the minimal service of flipping some bits and processing a credit card. The net effect of this will be less content produced (with lower budgets,) less content consumed (at higher cost) and an endless stream of slightly shinier devices that contribute more in social status and momentary dopamine than actual marginal improvement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Absent from all of this is any sort of coherent strategy on the part of the bit-makers. Their only apparent objective is to keep customers from getting used to buying <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/03/08/148246580/justice-department-warns-apple-about-e-book-pricing">cheap bits</a>, oblivious to the fact that they are no longer even the ones selling the bits. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The makers haven't yet realized that they have the power.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Imagine if the bit makers sold the bits themselves, or offered them DRM free through multiple sellers. The sellers would have to compete on convenience and price out of their diminishing margins. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The maker would have a direct relationship with the customer, and might even end up with a respectable brand.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> With a diversity of sources, s</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">ingle-seller devices would become obviously broken by design and fail in the market. Bit-sellers would be revealed as nearly redundant, with makers at the center of the transaction. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Instead they seem intent on squeezing blood from the stone of their existing customer relationships while letting their biggest threats move into comfortable positions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The net effect for me is that buying media is uncomfortable. Even when it works, I feel like I'm participating in someone's machiavellian scheme. Amazon, I love your devices, but they don't read any of the bits I'm willing to buy. Please BBC, I would love to pay you for Planet Earth, but I have no intention of buying a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD">bunch</a> of <a href="http://us.blu-raydisc.com/hardware.html">redundant bit readers</a> to do so. Useless hardware offends my aesthetics more than owning your bits can compensate for, and I'm not paying money for hardware that is <a href="http://www.defectivebydesign.org/">defective by design</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The goal of copyright is to get people to pay for bits, and to pay people for making those bits. Its approach is to shoehorn it into the rest of the economy with a series of bizarre compromises that try to make bits become less bit-like. The associated notions of information "owning" are a tool, not an end. As bits have regained their natural state over the last few decades, we've done a horrible job of fulfilling the original goal. Most of the remaining money spent on bits is not getting spent on making those bits. Instead we're trying to come up with a new set of packages in which to put them, and all the strategy revolves around those packages instead of the bits themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Meanwhile, we now have the technology and infrastructure to give all bits to all people. It's a tragedy that we don't.</span></div>
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-80788918015433039922011-12-31T21:52:00.000-08:002012-01-01T15:43:51.793-08:00Fiction is now either Science Fiction or Historical Fiction. The present doesn't last long enough.I just finished reading "The Wind up Bird Chronicle," and the plot of it requires that the main character be unreachable by phone when he is outside of his house. How different a world that was, where going out into the world to meet other people actually isolated you in some ways. This dated the novel entirely. It became a novel about sometime last century instead of just a novel.<br />
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Consider writing a story about someone who gets lost on a road trip or a walk. This is an archetypical setup, but how difficult it would be to do that today, to set that up in a way that rules out all the obvious ways of getting directions in an entirely uninteresting way from our smart phones? I can imagine it now: "My battery was too low to get signal, and between my two companions, one doesn't have a nationwide data plan, and the other is with a second tier carrier with poor 3g coverage, so miraculously, we have to talk to another person, and thus move the plot forward in an interesting way." Even after all those awkward contortions, that setup probably has a half-life of 5 years.<br />
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All of us spend a lot of our lives on our computers, but what we do on them can't be written about in a way that is both poetic and accurate. We just don't have enough words for it. Every humble tool in a leatherworker's arsenal has its own name (the awl for instance.) These things have been around for long enough for that to happen, and to gain the gravity that makes them candidates for metaphor. The pen is still mightier than the sword, even though we no longer use either. The keyboard may be mightier than the cruise missile, but I can't imagine saying that with any dramatic weight.<br />
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The basic ways we do common things are not only different, but changing from year to year. Henceforth a novel will have to choose a time period in which to take place, and choosing "now" will make it historical fiction by the time it is published.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-64100255112999845672011-03-08T20:47:00.000-08:002011-03-08T20:55:54.765-08:00Why big organizations don’t take risks proportionate to their size (a theoretical argument)TLDR version: People optimize E(Log(x)). Big organizations should optimize E(Log(Σ x)), but because they are composed of many people, they optimize ΣE(log(x)).
<h4><strong>Logarithmic Utility Curves</strong></h4>
Suppose someone offers you a 50% chance of a $1M prize, or a 10% chance of a $10M prize. Most people who don’t already have a lot of money would take the first, more certain option, even though the expected value of the second is double that of the first. ($0.5M vs $1M). $1M would improve my life a lot. $10M would also improve my life a lot, but not so much more than $1M that I’m willing to risk getting nothing. Economists call this “risk aversion.” and model it using a “utility curve.” Though quite abstract, it corresponds pretty well to intuition. The idea is that $10M isn’t “worth” 10x as much to me as $1M, so I have to account for that before I take the expected value. The most common utility curve used in simple models is logarithmic, both because it’s mathematically simple, and close enough to reality for most purposes. Intuitively, no matter how much money I make, I’m willing to put in a linear amount of additional effort in order to raise my income level by 10%, so you end up with logarithmic utility.
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To compare these two offers, before we take the expected value, we’ll take the log of the outcomes.<br>
log(1M) ~ 6,<br>
log(10M) ~ 7,<br>
0.5 * 6 > 0.1 * 7, so we take the first offer as observed.
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Rather than optimizing E(x), we optimize E(log(x)) and get behavior somewhat like what a real person would do.
<h4>Organizations</h4>
It makes sense that an organization should have a utility curve looking like a log. Going out of business (log 0) is -infinity as observed, and companies care about percentage improvements rather than absolute improvements just like individuals do. I apologize for not having better arguments that this is the way organizations should behave. This is a blog post, not a research paper. :)<br><br>
This means that if the output of each employee is x, the outcome for the company as a whole is Σ x, and the company should be optimizing E(log(Σ x)).<br><br>
How do they actually behave? The company will behave in the way that the aggregate of its individuals behave. If individuals are rewarded in proportion to their personal outcomes rather than the company’s outcomes, they’ll behave by optimizing their personal utility function. As a result, the company as a whole will optimize Σ E(log(x)). <br><br>
<strong>Big organizations apply the risk-aversion of an individual to losses that are teeny relative to the size of the organization, because people care more about their individual risk than the risk to the company.</strong> Ideally, a company should have many people working on huge improvements with a small probability of success. In reality, it's almost impossible to structure incentives so that doing things with a small chance of success is a good personal strategy. It’s hard to reward competence and not outcomes. If you reward outcomes, the company will be risk averse. Having a few engineers work for years on something that doesn’t finally work is a teeny risk to the company, but potentially a huge risk to the careers of those engineers.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-9014816042032618362010-12-16T23:29:00.000-08:002010-12-19T16:20:57.965-08:00History through Google Books NgramsEach of these graphs plots over time the fraction that one word constitutes of all words in books <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/find-out-whats-in-word-or-five-with.html">mined from the Google Books project</a>.
<h4>Westward expansion of the U.S.</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Ohio+River,Mississippi+River,Colorado+River&year_start=1830&year_end=1940&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Ohio%20River,Mississippi%20River,Colorado%20River&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1830&year_end=1940"></a>
<h4>One invested in railroads, the other, canals.</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Cincinnati,Chicago&year_start=1800&year_end=1920&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Cincinnati,Chicago&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1800&year_end=1920"></a>
<h4>New religions of the last 200 years.</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Scientology,Wicca,Mormonism,Seventh+Day+Adventists,Jehovah's+Witnesses,Rastafarian,Krishna+Consciousness,Bahai&year_start=1820&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Scientology,Wicca,Mormonism,Seventh%20Day%20Adventists,Jehovah's%20Witnesses,Rastafarian,Krishna%20Consciousness,Bahai&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1820&year_end=2008"></a>
<h4>Race.</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=colored+woman,black+woman,Black+woman,Negro+woman,Negress,negress,African+American+woman&year_start=1860&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=5"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=colored+woman,black+woman,Black+woman,Negro+woman,Negress,negress,African+American+woman&year_start=1860&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=5"></a><br/>
Note how people didn't start capitalizing "black" until the mid '60s, even though it had been used as a descriptor as often as "colored" for a long time. Note the different curves for "negress" and "Negress." Capital "Negress" rose in usage alongside "Negro woman" and was nearly as common in the '40s, but half as common in the '70s. Lowercase "negress" was mostly replaced by capitalized versions, which were then replaced as well.
<h4>Industrialization of food.</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=pawpaw,huckleberry,blueberry,blackberry,raspberry,gooseberry&year_start=1830&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=pawpaw,huckleberry,blueberry,blackberry,raspberry,gooseberry&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1830&year_end=2008"></a><br/>
Pawpaws were more popular than blueberries, and gooseberries were more popular than raspberries!
<h4>Communism</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Socialism,Communism,USSR,PRC&year_start=1830&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Socialism,Communism,USSR,PRC&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1830&year_end=2008"></a>
<h4>Presidents</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=President+Bush,President+Clinton,President+Reagan,President+Carter,President+Ford,President+Nixon,President+Johnson,President+Kennedy,President+Eisenhower&year_start=1945&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=President%20Bush,President%20Clinton,President%20Reagan,President%20Carter,President%20Ford,President%20Nixon,President%20Johnson,President%20Kennedy,President%20Eisenhower&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1945&year_end=2008"></a>
<h4>Marijuana</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=marijuana,marihuana,hemp,cannabis,hashish&year_start=1820&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=marijuana,marihuana,hemp,cannabis,hashish&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1820&year_end=2008"></a>
<h4>Industry</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=rubber,steel,steam,coal,machine,gasoline,factory&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=rubber,steel,steam,coal,machine,gasoline,factory&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1800&year_end=2008"></a>
<h4>Music</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=jazz+music,rap+music,rock+music,pop+music,blues+music,soul+music,rhythm+and+blues,rock+and+roll,electronica,classical+music&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=jazz%20music,rap%20music,rock%20music,pop%20music,blues%20music,soul%20music,rhythm%20and%20blues,rock%20and%20roll,electronica,classical%20music&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1900&year_end=2008"></a>
<h4>AIDS</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=AIDS,condom,HIV&year_start=1970&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=AIDS,condom,HIV&year_start=1970&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"></a>
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Notice how HIV lags AIDS, and condom is correlated more with HIV than with AIDS.
<h4>Feminism</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=feminism,rape,IUD,the+pill,sexual+harassment,motherhood,domestic+violence,civil+rights&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=feminism,rape,IUD,the+pill,sexual+harassment,motherhood,domestic+violence,civil+rights&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"></a>
<h4>Scurvy</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=vitamin+C,ascorbic+acid,scurvy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=vitamin+C,ascorbic+acid,scurvy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3"></a>
<h4>Ideology</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=communist,socialist,anarchist,capitalist,terrorist&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=communist,socialist,anarchist,capitalist,terrorist&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"></a>
<h4>Israel and Palestine as a people and as a place</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Israeli,Palestinian,Israel,Palestine,Israelites&year_start=1860&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Israeli,Palestinian,Israel,Palestine,Israelites&year_start=1860&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3"></a>
<h4>The names of Muslims</h4>
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Muslim,Moslem,Mohammedan,Mussulman,Mahometan&year_start=1750&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=5"><img class="whitepadding" src="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Muslim,Moslem,Mohammedan,Mussulman,Mahometan&year_start=1750&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=5"></a>
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It's 2:00 AM, and there's still worlds to explore just off the top of my head. This is a treasure trove. Google Books Team, this is an amazing accomplishment.
I used to envision that this is how history would be done in 50 years when the digital age has ensured that anything that someone cares enough about to transfer is preserved. Now we're getting to do that sort of history, today.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-76247884572920595112010-07-19T13:50:00.000-07:002010-07-19T14:28:33.086-07:00InceptionThe movie is great. Go see it. What I'm about to write will be entirely spoiler free.
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<span style="font-style:italic;">Inception</span> will leave you distrusting your own perceptions in the manner of Descartes's Demon, more so than <span style="font-style:italic;">The Matrix</span> ever did. It does this I think because the experience of the characters in the movie entering and leaving dreams is so similar to our experience entering and leaving the movie. "Waking up" from a good movie is a very similar feeling to waking up from a dream.
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When we talk about "suspending disbelief," it isn't supposed to be something you <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span>, but rather something that happens automatically if the movie succeeds in drawing you in. When dreaming, we tolerate wild violations of physics and causality without it ever decreasing our emotional involvement. The objective of a good movie is to tap into that level of credulity, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone discovered that the same pathways in our brains are involved.
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When Christopher Nolan was writing the dialogue about how addictive it is to be an architect of dreams, he must have been really talking about is how addictive it is to be an architect of shared dreams: movies.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-53954341889089837292010-06-24T11:47:00.000-07:002010-06-24T12:41:17.742-07:00Men's Wearhouse is missing a major business opportunity.Every male in the U.S. who goes to a prom or is someone's groomsman has likely been fitted for a tuxedo at the Men's Wearhouse. Theoretically, the Men's Wearhouse should have the most comprehensive database of men's sizing information of any company. There have been a lot of weddings among my close friends this year, and I assumed that after the first fitting I'd be able to rent subsequent tuxes without going to the store in person. Amazingly, according to one of the attendants, they throw away all information about the customer after 6 months.
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This loss goes beyond convenient tuxedo rentals. With this much information about me, they could be delivering clothes custom-tailored overseas to my doorstep at a price no other company could match. That much opportunity is certainly worth the cost of a few dozen more machines. Ancillary data produced by your business can become more valuable than the profits from the business itself. Don't throw anything away.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-25453627872963482592010-05-23T22:22:00.000-07:002010-05-24T12:59:20.228-07:00Janelle Monáe (Wow)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDQS0cjLKoSyEO-Jhxvs5vfbn13dXsmWm9WN_hLfFf2bSpVT7HHqck2RN6oOIzRdefnTFnOA0A_Fnf5pvs6jPLLB2aBpCvE0Bkwr0vBs1nz5cJAEvRF1GuQGnjPNmmF_GpL0yoWA/s1600/ARCHANDROID_COVER.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDQS0cjLKoSyEO-Jhxvs5vfbn13dXsmWm9WN_hLfFf2bSpVT7HHqck2RN6oOIzRdefnTFnOA0A_Fnf5pvs6jPLLB2aBpCvE0Bkwr0vBs1nz5cJAEvRF1GuQGnjPNmmF_GpL0yoWA/s320/ARCHANDROID_COVER.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5474719239416463874" /></a>
Imagine if Lauryn Hill became a geek, teamed up with Outkast, and wrote two concept albums about an android uprising in the futuristic city of Metropolis. The result would sound something like Janelle Monae's inaugural two albums, <a href="http://www.jmonae.com/album/metropolis-the-chase-suite/">Metropolis</a>, and <a href="http://www.jmonae.com/album/the-archandroid-1/">The ArchAndroid</a>, the first three acts of a six act story. The songs flow seamlessly (literally) from one to the next, usually jumping genres in the process. She can wail, she can scat, she can croon, she can rap, she can dance (oh she can dance), and she can sound like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgP4kT5-9Cc">GLaDOS</a> when necessary. Orchestral interludes bookend the chapters; In one, she puts words to a snippet of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvUepMa31o">Claire De Lune</a>.
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<a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14271-the-archandroid/">Pitchfork</a> loves her too. Historically, the intersection of the albums I like and the albums they bother to review has been approximately 0, so these two recommendations are about as independent as they come. Go have a listen! Every track can be heard for free at the links above.<br><br>
My favorites so far: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1J1RFKHCx0">Sincerely, Jane</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc">Tightrope</a>, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azd3xD_1h-c">Oh, Maker</a>.<br>
<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EZyyORSHbaE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EZyyORSHbaE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-69121565016377100312010-03-07T17:40:00.000-08:002010-03-07T17:52:38.629-08:00Tax-time gripes<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">California Use-Tax</span><div>It's really not reasonable for me to try to add up all the money I've spent online (but only on items used in California, not those purchased as gifts to someone out of state.) This is the largest expenditure for me outside of rent and travel, and I don't remember everything I've bought and from where. Mint.com and searching for "receipt" in gmail helps, but it's really a lost cause. I do my best, but it seems most people I talk to don't bother, despite it being the law. This is by far the most time-consuming part of filing my return, and only hurts me to do so.
</div><div>A few things confuse me about it.</div><div><ol><li>Is shipping and handling included in the taxable portion? It's not "used" in California.</li><li>Do online retailers have enough information themselves that they could provide some sort of automated assistance in tallying these?</li><li>Have the courts decided whether use-taxes are constitutional despite being a tax on inter-state trade?</li><li>Am I a chump for bothering?</li></ol><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Passwords</span></div><div>Filing my taxes inevitably involves getting data from financial institutions that I haven't had any interaction with all year, and thus, remembering my various passwords. If you are designing a password system, please don't place restrictions on the content of the password. It's your responsibility as an administrator to keep your users' passwords from being brute-forced. Do not offload this responsibility to them.</div><div>
Arbitrary restrictions I've seen today alone while trying to get forms from various financial agencies:
<ul><li>Must have at least 1 number.</li><li>Must have at least 2 numbers.</li><li>Must have at least one capital letter and 1 number.</li><li>Cannot have special characters.</li><li>Must be greater than 6 characters, but no more than 15.</li><li>Must be greater than 6 characters but no more than 8.</li></ul>If I can't have a small secure set of passwords to use everywhere that I can reasonably remember, I'm just going to email them to myself, thus defeating every high-minded security best practice you are trying to implement.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-38965332811705807232009-11-08T13:59:00.001-08:002009-11-10T15:58:04.767-08:00Google can render your equations for you!In my last post I mentioned that Knol and Google Docs now have <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/back-to-school-with-google-docs.html">equation editing</a>. What I didn't mention is that this is an undocumented feature of the public <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/chart/">Google Chart api</a>, and it's easy to use. For instance, if I wanted to include the Schrödinger equation on this blog. I would construct an url like this:
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<a href="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00&chco=AACCFF&chl=i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial%20t}%20\Psi(\mathbf{r},\,t)%20=%20\hat%20H%20\Psi(\mathbf{r},t)"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00&chco=AACCFF&chl=i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi(\mathbf{r},\,t) = \hat H \Psi(\mathbf{r},t)</span></a>
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Put your <img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00&chco=FFFFFF&chl=\LaTeX" /> code in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">chl</span> parameter. The <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">chf</span> parameter lets you specify a background color in RGBA, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">chco</span> lets you set the foreground color in RGB. When you drop it in inside of an image tag you get this:
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<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00&chco=AACCFF&chl=i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial%20t}%20\Psi(\mathbf{r},\,t)%20=%20\hat%20H%20\Psi(\mathbf{r},t)" />
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If you anticipate making 250,000 calls to the chart server a day, contact Google first at <a href="mailto:chart-api-notifications@google.com">chart-api-notifications@google.com</a>. There's no limit to how much you can use it, but they reserve the right to turn you off.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-4096458617107566832009-10-01T21:02:00.000-07:002012-10-10T21:40:32.905-07:00Simple Simhashing, My favorite trick.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Knol got <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/back-to-school-with-google-docs.html">equation editing</a> a few days ago, and to celebrate I've written up a knol on one of my favorite CS tricks, <a href="http://moultano.wordpress.com/article/simple-simhashing-3kbzhsxyg4467-6/">simhashing using sets</a>. It's a technique I picked up at Google, and it's extremely useful for grouping together similar things in a large dataset.
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<blockquote>
Suppose you have a huge number of items that you would like to group together by a fuzzy notion of similarity. Suppose the only tool available to you is a key-value store. Suppose you only have the resources to consider each object once. Never fear, <a href="http://knol.google.com/k/ryan-moulton/simple-simhashing/3kbzhsxyg4467/6#">simhashing</a> is here!</blockquote>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-53315706582360583112009-05-30T20:15:00.000-07:002009-05-31T02:09:37.430-07:00Keep Your State Parks OpenGovernor Schwarzenegger has proposed <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12481195?source=most_viewed">closing 80% of California state parks</a>, including most of those in the Bay Area. This is estimated to save $143 million out of a $24 billion deficit, or half a percent. This strikes me as a very poor decision given the miniscule effect it would have on California's finances, and the large effect it would have on California's quality of life. Furthermore, it may end up costing the state more than it saves if it decreases tax revenues from tourism. Admittedly it's a tough decision to spend $143 million on parks rather than on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31calif.html?_r=1&em">health insurance for poor children</a>, but ultimately $143 million is a drop in the bucket for the latter. To put this in perspective, $143 million is <a href="http://www34.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=143+million+/+(0.9+*+population+of+california)">$4.35 per capita</a> after removing the unemployed. I'd much prefer higher entry fees or taxes to outright closures, or he could parole <a href="http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060830072230AAokWcK">~3000 non-violent drug offenders</a> instead.
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This site makes it easy to <a href="http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html">contact your state representatives</a>.
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Closing these state parks means that gates would be padlocked, and parking and restrooms won't be available, though it will likely still be physically possible to enter. You can find a list of <a href="http://www.marinij.com/ci_12473263">all 220 here</a>. Here are a few of my photographs from the parks they are intending on closing.
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<h4>Point Lobos</h4>
<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/yyn0FPBA-dZeSZyGdNxyAQ?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSBfNA4VDqmwUnuHwcEdJSE_I9xMqx1VqGsdB2yo4fn6zaPOYgUH0Fh5Fekvj_fzJEkN4qWCIaSyUWr_w4gtjc-tvmzs5jc5QHmdiq99uXxElQadWVJpbPiTEhELty1qdMBw5mxw/s400/cove2.jpg" /></a>
<h4>Big Basin</h4>
<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/dFgeoblWTcmKPK8ksaPTqQ?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi50SXhRDvbwgLou5nk_JOgymKfZwvY64X80-E_VUKE8RP6vhF9AmVOAFe-Ert9S9PLW8e03K3zkOiDpN3nfTDJxFLTI9AL4qMFf_i9LP2FpmSbEhyKX12dyn8NBLdLaHhUaH1JzA/s400/redwoods_and_creek.jpg" /></a>
<h4>Prairie Creek Redwoods</h4>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVs_eRwN-V5mMPFuOGltls8H4DaxT9AvP2mwuc6AmFBEzdSDp3lD3uroo0uW8CSng3dApzysE7Y9McaQfZttdGSY5eeYCjIOEl0VvD6U4etm3gi7T7hFAE_VGKh-W_ujnY72z9dQ/s400/fern-canyon.jpg" />
<h4>Henry W. Coe</h4>
<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Vet0Lbj2HLconIoXBKYcVw?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwThO6wXUTZJgJdJkJENb_48H30PyAeboBF4OXW2uayNN3Ly4xUBQTXZb_5NtnbCvvoYIUB3eaPFevsbqv9JqkU_3x432Rj2WuQS5SfiRXLf15EAJkKADokWr6yrIVJ9YLlnlncw/s400/IMG_0744.JPG" /></a>
<h4>Sugarloaf Ridge</h4>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisDoGF2uLqBJN734uij3797pkE4Li7tnG8Y_KZN6TFfwBIIvbQthDwLJ2afAOQ8ySw4EEKc2I9_t5merSX66M6mcZHq8ALVxSesP9lDkDwiO4LNir6xj2t5raLtGpSw7Uk_qMzuw/s400/IMG_1701.JPG" />
<h4>Pfeiffer Big Sur</h4>
<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/K25QZOel6Py5_OjoRwfLLA?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWd2VRJ3SFkECouOSWluiIY11_McnkcjuMOdpH2RrMyTVeODyjz4CKbCf0f7uA9fihW8ld0nf06ySEw8oi2WcvtrADvbb-R5vyWaByOiZeZH4ornUPvxc18atj9AaxlM6gGjv_ZQ/s400/IMG_2330.JPG" /></a>
<h4>Castle Rock</h4>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFQZTBychHakluI9w8vjuDaZhxXyjxXYH4Ysblcdl8G5M9QPm7oEAkRyQ5xITgPFysQ9sj1i8FHCn3670OUnXoM8IFvRMAxx-Lrk-qL0irYlwyYm3JWiNNTo_66mnpDsH4iSz-RQ/s400/IMG_1562.JPG" />
<h4>Moss Beach</h4>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIm8_oSXWmHTYI-9H5dGHk5GdL0OSndd9gVkt93NRGm4fhB09vW7pkEJ3Tp-tlbICL6QdC4x_Dt4zl48VlPJlVC1mLeC7IaQN_TK-USGllQ9BmuLqlV71YrTjIgbDAHmFQS6ZRTQ/s400/IMG_1047.JPG" />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-91456528993802468252009-04-12T22:08:00.000-07:002009-04-12T23:00:31.550-07:00To those for whom I recommend games . . .You have to try <a href="http://braid-game.com/">Braid</a>.
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It looks like Super Mario Brothers redone as a shimmering, moving, impressionist painting. It plays a little like <a href="http://orange.half-life2.com/portal.html">Portal</a>, but really unlike anything you've played before. The game explores the concept of time, how we perceive it, how it effects us. In each world, time operates in a different way, and there are maddening ingenious puzzles built out of the implications. Each puzzle teaches you something new about the logic internal to the world, and will make you think in a way you've never thought before. Once you've figured out a puzzle it doesn't require much more physical dexterity to complete than getting through the first few levels of Mario, but some puzzles may take hours of thought before you stumble upon the solution. As penny-arcade described it, epiphany is the central game mechanic.
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<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmSdF8pYE8PFSm95kEwjz9zdP0_yvH_C8_BNlESh-DjoQYNQONZIETUG0NJT7fZnODLq3JYsahe_elbgwZI9waB4whahPIZgTvZx5ItfQ4vOysSkkICkcFEMKI7L10wYpxwb-Sdg/s1600-h/braid-screenshot.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmSdF8pYE8PFSm95kEwjz9zdP0_yvH_C8_BNlESh-DjoQYNQONZIETUG0NJT7fZnODLq3JYsahe_elbgwZI9waB4whahPIZgTvZx5ItfQ4vOysSkkICkcFEMKI7L10wYpxwb-Sdg/s320/braid-screenshot.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324041742451502594" /></a>The story is as impressionistic as the artwork, mostly told in snippets of text that accompany the entrance to each world. They relate the mechanics of time in that world to the ways in which we experience events in our lives. One section describes how returning to a place laden with memories can cause us to feel as if we are travelling in time, and not just space. In that world, time moves forward as you move to the right and backwards as you move to the left. The story and the art both get darker and more mysterious as the game progresses, with a baffling ending that will leave you reevaluating everything you've seen up til that point, probably for days afterwards.
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If there was any debate that games are an art form as expressive as any other, Braid has settled it.
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You can get the PC version from <a href="http://braid-game.com/news/?p=556">several sites</a>, including <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/">Steam</a>, or the Xbox version from Xbox Live Arcade. All are $15, and a free demo is available.
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<object width="600" height="345"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4083982&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1"><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4083982&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="600" height="345"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-3710025920510302632009-03-16T22:45:00.000-07:002009-03-16T23:57:55.420-07:00How to convince yourself to get rid of stuff (especially if you live in CA)I helped some friends move into their new home over the weekend, and as always, moving became an opportunity to decide whether certain things were really worth moving. The broken grill that just needs an afternoon's woodworking to fix, the rusted recumbent bike bought with good intentions, the box full of leis and decorative sticks left over from a theme party, all become a little less benign when you have to load them into a truck and then figure out where they "go" in a new home. Some popular metrics for throwing it out: if you haven't used it in the last year, if you haven't used it since your last move, if you forgot you owned it. I hereby propose another metric particularly suited for those living in California: what it would cost you to get that space back by enlarging your dwelling.
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First, figure out approximately what it would cost in dollars per square foot to increase your living space. From browsing Craig's List postings of comparable apartments, my current 400 square foot apartment could be upgraded at a rate of about $1.5 per square foot per month. Now compute the floorspace that the item consumes, multiply, and you have an approximation of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost">opportunity cost</a> of that item in dollars per month. Translate this to years for added impact. To keep my new conga drums at 27" × 14" I'm giving up <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US301&q=27+in+*+14+in++*+1.5+dollars+/+(1+foot+*+1+foot)++/+1+month+in+dollars+per+year&btnG=Search">about $50</a> worth of floor space per year, which is a rate I'm comfortable with.
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To compute this metric for stackable items such as books, divide this number by how deep the items are currently stacked in the way you are storing them, so as your bookshelf gets taller the storage of each book gets cheaper. It's cheating to compare it against the height of your ceiling directly. Add in the extra space wasted in storage. On my 3 layer bookshelf, the average 6" × 1" paperback stored vertically with 5" of wasted space in front of it is costing me <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US301&q=(1+in+*+6+in+%2B+1+in+*+5+in)+*+1.5+dollars+/+(1+foot+*+1+foot)++/+1+month+in+dollars+per+year&btnG=Search">$1.35 per year</a>. That's more than I paid initially for some of these used paperbacks that I still haven't read after a few years of lugging them around. Out they go.
If you are living with someone and they want you to throw something out, experiment with paying rent to them on it at the rate you get from this calculation.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-83242656992373295832009-02-06T22:24:00.000-08:002009-02-06T23:11:39.828-08:00Texture TargetingI made it to the <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/postmortem">San Francisco Postmortem</a>, a get-together for bay area game developers, for the first time last Tuesday. I finally got to meet the creators of <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/">Natural Selection</a> as well as reconnect with some friends from college, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/blinktwice4y">Sam Hart</a> and <a href="http://www.interactionartist.com/">Chris DeLeon</a>. The guys at Unknown Worlds are busy working on a sequel to Natural Selection on a shoestring budget with minimal staff, and they are doing an amazing job of doing things <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2009/02/unknown_worlds_videocast_8_tools">as efficiently as possible</a>. The biggest bottleneck though for a modern game is the incredible quantity of art assets required to achieve the graphical standards gamers expect. I've been interested in texture synthesis since I took a graphics class in college, and decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with it in the hopes that it could speed up creation of texture sets. I've started a <a href="http://code.google.com/p/texture-targeter/wiki/Instructions">texture synthesis project</a> on Google Code, and there are <a href="http://code.google.com/p/texture-targeter/downloads/list">two bare-bones utilities</a> there that are ready to start playing with. The code is all based on techniques from <a href="http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/people/efros/research/EfrosLeung.html">Efros and Leung</a> with a variety of experimental modifications of my own. The ultimate aim of this is to produce something akin to an "automated super clone tool" such that an artist can make a few textures for a theme in exacting detail, and then synthesize the rest from sketches using this software.<br><br>
So far I haven't been able to get satisfying results for any non-stochastic textures, but that's my aim. With this technique there seems to be a dramatic trade-off between giving the artist any control at all over the resulting texture, and the amount of detail present in that texture. If anyone has an interesting results or ideas in that regard, drop me a line.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-61284508966229483002009-01-12T19:33:00.000-08:002009-01-12T19:43:49.832-08:00My first painting since Kindergarten!<table style="width:auto; float:left; margin-right:10px"><tr><td><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/4fpFN7YsiorwZbWja1EDGQ?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ7kNoi4CUrOPad47AiqvVSx1YJhiEO8-f1nIwz9LmXrLKHNmqwPmqW59AlmGVmNT0ACv3zmfqyGiyL4I976htoGFK1Sh1r82llIrBD6h5CoBPSbtfcFhzEgdAKNVGMOnrx1AFfQ/s800/IMG_1539.JPG" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right">From <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanmoulton/Portfolio?feat=embedwebsite">Portfolio</a></td></tr></table>
Mike Rotondo held an art party last Friday night, and I took the opportunity to learn to paint! I mysteriously remembered a lot of techniques either from watching my mom paint, the tips she's given me, or my art-history class in highschool. It's 16"×20", acrylic on canvas paper.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-82126355441263444402008-12-23T13:42:00.000-08:002008-12-23T13:45:38.696-08:00Stuck on what to get someone for Christmas? Try a Kiva.org gift certificate!Usually charity gifts aren't really satisfying. Giving in someone's name doesn't give them much enjoyment, or even much of a warm fuzzy feeling. They aren't personally doing the giving even if it's in their name.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=gift&action=giftPromotion">Kiva.org gift certificates</a> are different! The person gets to go online and pick and entrepreneur in the developing world to help fund. It's interactive so it's fun, and the person gets the warm fuzzy feeling of charity at your expense instead of theirs.
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Many people's lives could be improved by getting a small loan, but credit often isn't available to them because it costs as much to administer a small loan as a big one. Kiva.org is part of the growing microfinance movement that aims to fix this by putting up the capital for these small loans so that the receiver gets a much lower interest rate on the loan than they otherwise would. <a href="http://www.kiva.org/about/how">Learn more</a>. Try it out!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-16866190971153141512008-10-25T02:27:00.000-07:002008-10-25T02:32:19.117-07:00That Woman is Terrifying.<a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/sarah_palin_ignorant_and_antis.php">Today, Palin mocked fruit fly research despite it being the basis of much of our modern knowledge of genetics, and responsible for a Nobel Prize.</a> This is more enraging to me than anything else in the broad spectrum of outrages that have come out of the McCain campaign. Basic science research is the most noble thing that humans do, and to denigrate it without so much as a Google search, while still claiming to be qualified to be president . . . I don't have any language strong enough to condemn her without wishing her bodily harm.
It is terrifying to me that given a choice between voting for Bush and voting for Palin, I would vote for Bush.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-30416070408362993592008-10-20T16:55:00.000-07:002008-10-20T17:09:35.723-07:00Decision 2008There are many stark differences in policy and temperament between the major party candidates this election. However, there is one fundamental ideological issue that eclipses all others and has been completely ignored by the mainstream media. When voters enter the booths this November, they will undoubtedly be asking themselves whether they prefer <a href="http://www.osforobama.com/in/">group orgasms through breathing techniques</a>, or <a href="http://www.injesus.com/index.php?module=message&task=view&MID=CB007FA2&GroupID=2A004N9G&label=&paging=all">spiritual warfare to ward off African curses</a>. The choice is yours.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-26036293076909126162008-10-15T10:22:00.000-07:002008-10-15T11:41:53.034-07:00Kahili Ginger!<table style="width: auto; float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/mPSzbT3JJhT7u-wjR_UJPw"><img src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/ryanmoulton/SPYpSnkt_5I/AAAAAAAAQcs/7kS23GsnymE/s400/IMG_1391.JPG" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-align: right;">From <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanmoulton/PlantPortfolio">Plant Portfolio</a></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>The plant that ate my apartment is finally blooming! I bought it as a bulb at the gift shop of the <a href="http://www.htbg.com/">Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden</a> in Hilo two years ago. My <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanmoulton/PlantPortfolio#5257254091464699154">plumeria</a> came from the same store. Below you can see pictures of what it looked like right after it sprouted, (that's a six inch pot!) and what it looks like now. The smell is incredible. I could tell it was blooming just by opening the door of my apartment. The scent spilled out into the porch.</p>
<table style="width: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/vdmRi8wzEEXbvTZCKPpp0g"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/ryanmoulton/SPWC08bvlOI/AAAAAAAAQVw/JvzU9GVKGLI/s288/IMG_2741.JPG" /></a></td><td><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/ad5-FajbS9yLHvoivdihBg"><img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/ryanmoulton/SPWDDEqf-zI/AAAAAAAAQZU/dp5yuhkEdUU/s288/IMG_1390.JPG" /></a></td></tr><tr><td>
</td><td style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-align: right;">From <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanmoulton/PlantPortfolio">Plant Portfolio</a></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p style="clear:left;">Here are a few facts about it:
<ul><li>The plant is named after the feathered standards that were the symbol of a Hawaiian Noble's power.</li><li>When it is sending up a new stalk it grows something close to an inch per day. The roots <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanmoulton/PlantPortfolio#5257251943036051314">completely consume the soil</a>.</li><li>I haven't fertilized it at all, and it's been in a shady south facing window for most of the last two years. I try to saturate the soil with water once per week, but as the pots have gotten bigger that has gotten harder.</li></ul>
</p>
<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/gdxffIbsEVtS6yJJzE0Sag"><img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/ryanmoulton/SPYo7yPjfcI/AAAAAAAAQcg/8z_AxsTZNWU/s800/IMG_1393.JPG" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-30854989883264472702008-09-14T00:51:00.001-07:002008-09-14T03:05:13.741-07:00Next time you are feeling cynical about humanity …<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://ll-295.ea.com/spore/static/image/500/047/295/500047295982_lrg.png"><img style="float:left; cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://ll-295.ea.com/spore/static/image/500/047/295/500047295982_lrg.png" border="0" alt="" /></a>
… inspired by McCain's recent polling numbers perhaps, check out the <a href="http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=view-featured">featured content in the Sporepedia</a>. The amount of creativity is just stunning. Everything in there was created by amateurs in their spare time for fun. In case Wikipedia wasn't proof enough, when you give regular people great tools, they will make amazing stuff just for kicks. Most people have worlds of creativity that isn't used in their jobs, and they just need a convenient outlet to amaze you.<br><br>
More generally, there's huge potential for harnessing our leisure time to produce useful work, and at the moment it's largely untapped. <a href="http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/">Google Image Labeler</a> is a great (though horribly named) pioneer of this. You play a fun game, and in the process you give Google an awesome data set of images labeled with tags. <a href="http://fold.it">Fold.it</a> is another. Playing that game is equivalent to computing the lowest energy state of a protein. If you are good at it, you could cure cancer. The sky is the limit for this sort of stuff though, and the internet is finally giving us the organizational tools to bring it about. Imagine if instead of working out in a gym, people had access to volunteer landscaping groups. You'd get a similar workout, but you'd beautify a landscape in the process instead of just pumping iron and wasting all that energy.<br><br>
Here's a great talk on the subject, <a href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html">Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus</a>. My favorite quote:
<blockquote>
<p>
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
</p><p>
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into … an architecture of participation.</p>
</blockquote>
<embed src="http://blip.tv/play/AbTSFIa8DQ" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320" height="242" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-40909352393430934912008-08-07T01:19:00.001-07:002008-08-07T01:29:18.672-07:00Beyond BlogrollsUsually the links found to the right of a blog are only useful to bored people clicking randomly, or to pass <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank">PageRank</a> (The latter being a model of the former.) As such, I've updated all the banners and links on my sidebar with some information about what they are and why they are there. Some of these deserve much more than a paragraph. Boy Scouts, in particular, deserves essays. For the time being though, this should give you a reason to click on them.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-66469265600982990592008-08-05T22:15:00.001-07:002008-08-07T02:14:12.736-07:00RainbowThe skies are usually boring in California compared to the nightly shows in the midwest, but every so often there's a real treat.
<table style="width:auto;"><tr><td><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanmoulton/MountainViewRainbow/photo#5231245127368663746"><img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/ryanmoulton/SJkduh3NYsI/AAAAAAAAM9Y/ZE44wZXLg_I/s800/rainbow1.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right">From <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanmoulton/MountainViewRainbow">Mountain View Rainbow</a></td></tr></table>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-79608091642692969642008-07-23T12:30:00.001-07:002008-07-23T12:35:49.251-07:00Knol has been released and guess who is featured!Look who is on the front page of <a href="http://knol.google.com/">Knol</a>! Some of you are probably aware that I've been working on a <a href="http://knol.google.com/k/ryan-moulton/how-to-backpack/oggVvQ9h/aMOKbQ#">backpacking guide</a> for a while now. I decided when they announced the Knol project internally that it would be a perfect fit, and published it there. Go check it out!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-36271530514207707422008-06-30T01:12:00.000-07:002008-06-30T13:06:19.350-07:00Wall-E is Incredible.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisU1gd2qHWbW5e2CeFluCKEY2Ib47G-q4L9rTlUP_QM-dHfhocJfNg0a9hY-dvo-YdGg_C27EAcV4sEWRKksa90UqYzid3l9KEDZBoK_-d7kct9vobRHqX2fEvG_Vjcj2xC2h2bQ/s1600-h/2750_WALL_E_Preview_Image_1186184869.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisU1gd2qHWbW5e2CeFluCKEY2Ib47G-q4L9rTlUP_QM-dHfhocJfNg0a9hY-dvo-YdGg_C27EAcV4sEWRKksa90UqYzid3l9KEDZBoK_-d7kct9vobRHqX2fEvG_Vjcj2xC2h2bQ/s400/2750_WALL_E_Preview_Image_1186184869.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217768385465554834" /></a>
Just go see it. I don't know how Pixar will be able to top this one. It took my breath away scene after scene. In some moments I started to tear up at the sheer lyrical beauty of it. I kid you not. Just go see it.<br><br>
Edit: Now that a day has passed I'll add my little 2¢ about what makes it so good.<br><br>
I think the most incredible thing about it is how perfectly it nails the tone. It's a post apocalyptic movie in which the earth is uninhabitable and the remaining humans are sluglike consumerist caricatures living out their days in space, but the movie treats the subject with such tenderness that it's never vindictive or off-putting. The humans aren't evil or stupid, they're just innocent, naive. Wall-E is a bit of a packrat, collecting all of the human artifacts that he thinks are neat, and the simple joy he takes in an egg-beater or a rubik's cube softens it perfectly. In spite of the fact that the entire planet is overrun by our junk, a lot of the junk is really cool. It's these touches that make it an honest look at humanity instead of a diatribe.
As good as all this is though, it's really just a backdrop for the love story, which is so innocent and touching that it could carry the movie even if the rest of it was ignorable.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29146216.post-11071885589848146332008-03-18T20:54:00.000-07:002008-03-19T01:28:58.572-07:00Hope for the FutureArthur C. Clarke, author, died today at the age of 90. You may know him as the author behind <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>, the book and famous Stanley Kubrick film. Clarke wrote in an earlier age of Science Fiction. The internet had not yet transformed the world, and cyberpunk was not yet a glimmer in William Gibson's eye. America lived in the shadow of the cold war, and much of the Science Fiction of the time dealt with the possibility of humankind destroying itself.<br><br>
Clarke infused his writing with a limitless view of both human potential and human failings; In his view, humanity is in its infancy, delicate, vulnerable, throwing temper tantrums, but with its best years still ahead of it. In <i>2001</i>, the main character upon his apotheosis literally becomes a child among the stars. In <i>Childhood's End</i> humanity as a whole escapes it's physical bounds in a heartbreaking moment of destruction and transcendence that the title of the book literally describes. Throughout his writing however, the factions of humanity are always a single mistake from destroying each other, and it is often extraterrestrials that distract them enough to survive their own power. Clarke wrote long before Nelson Mandela took his long walk to freedom, and hypothesized in <i>Childhood's End</i> that South Africa wouldn't reach a peaceful settlement until aliens gathered overhead and demanded it by blocking out the sun. Still, in his worlds we always managed to escape our vices to do extraordinary things: building a space elevator, colonizing the solar system, greeting the vast powers of the galaxy with dignity.<br><br>
His books are full of the hope that with the passage of time, the problems that seem so immediate will be immaterial, that the differences between us are surmountable, that we have the ingenuity to escape our lonely planet and join whatever waits beyond. This perhaps the essence of Clarke's future. With that, I present to you the most intelligent and moving speech I've seen delivered by a politician in my lifetime. Had he been able, I think this is the type of progress Arthur C. Clarke would have liked to see.<br><br>
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<br><br>
Clarke delivered a farewell speech on his 90th birthday about his legacy, the incredible distance we've come within his lifetime, and his hope for the future. "I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hope that we have learned something from the most barbaric century in history — the twentieth. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions, and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization." If you'd like to read some of his work, the full text of the "<a href="http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/star_clarke.html">The Star</a>" is available online.<br><br>
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<blockquote>No one dared to disturb him or interrupt his thoughts: and presently he turned his back upon the dwindling Sun.</blockquote> - <span style="font-style:italic;">Childhood's End</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1