More on peer to peer. Recall that what’s cool about peer to peer is that it allows a publisher to reach a bizillion consumers while only expending a few units of bandwidth. He shifts the distribution costs onto the consumers. It makes for a wonderful example of the classic standards problem – “If everybody would just…”

One aspect of this that I’ve been playing with is how the publisher might frame the game to encourage the swarm to collaborate. The BitTorrent technique of this kind is to fragement the content and scatter it into the swarm.

At that point the publisher sits back and says “Oh boys, you sort it out.” It’s a variant of 52 card pickup. Coordinating the resulting card game is the trick. In BitTorrent an entity known as the tracker helps along that coordination. There is a lot of design space to search around how to orchestrate the coordination.

At the same time it’s a special class of market making and clearing house design. Part of the cost born by the consumers is the cost of keeping the market liquid. For example can you design the system so it welcomes and forgives poorly behaving swarm members while at the sametime holding onto the generous ones?

New England used to ship ice all over the world. To store the product they build palaces in India. To assure that they got nice clear ice each fall they would dump poison into the lakes. In the winter they would cut blocks of ice and store them in huge buildings insulated with sawdust. Sometime after the industry collapsed these building burned in spectacular fires.

It’s hot and muggy here. I got to thinking about using ice for air conditioning. Apparently you need a big 25 foot cube of ice. The phase transition, liquid to solid, stores most of the calories. I gather that block has about 130 million BTU of cooling stored in it.

Converting that into the emerging standard unit of energy; 1 barrel of oil (5.8 million BTU each) that’s 22.5 barrels of oil. At 50$ each that’s $1,120 worth of energy. How big is a barrel of oil?

I wonder how hard it would be to convert my garage into an ice house? Can you be an eccentric if you don’t have a grand scheme involving ice. Maybe the Tammany Ice Trust will rise from the grave.

In a posting over at Gobal Guerrillas there appears this phrase “plausible premise”, like so: “Remember, al Qaeda (and to a lesser extent the US) set this new organizational structure in motion by providing a plausible premise for the war.”

My first thought was that’s a nice way to describe what your doing in a start up. Such enterprises are held together by a plausable premise in spite of unlimited uncertainty and risk. For many years people’s reaction to open source was that they found the entire premise implausible.

This seems like a phrase that would be fun to add to my toolkit. But you can get in trouble adopting a phrase casually. For example while I love the phrase “bias for action” I was discomforted to discover it’s roots. So, I poked around in various venues (google, google print, Amazon Amazon’s SIPS).

Apparently it lacks a strong bloodline. Sometimes it’s used in describe the premise in the plot of a bit fiction: “It’s an all too plausible premise of what would happen if Earth was visited by a superior, technologically, alien race.” It’s used in philosphy to get a premise introduced early and casually. It is very occationally used to describe a marketing process – “the email must create plausible premise that persuades the recipient to divulge personal information”. There is something called plausible reasoning, an alternative to deductive reasoning. But, I don’t see any use of this term plausable premise in that vicinity.

Some enterprising airplane book author should domesticate it and breed up a purebred. Meanwhile, you find the wierdest phrases at Amazon: existential foothold.