Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

“I’m not asking anybody to panic,” said Gov. Mike Easley. “If I find out we need to panic, I’ll come back and tell you tomorrow.” (here)

For Blogday. I enjoy the blogs of people who practice a craft and write about it; for example Spirits Dancing is the blog of an artist in Australia. “My husband’s grandfather had a wide notion of what might be fixed with paint, and it got more extensive as he got older, until he was happily fixing stains in upholstery and carpets with dabs of paint.”

Two blogs that skim off the cream from the long tail. Global Voices out of harvard is providing a slight glimpse of what the real world is like; it tends to be a bit more political than I’d like “In Bangladesh, Futurebanglanetwork is cynical about the World Bank’s motivations when it comes to lobbying against a SIM card tax.” For something completely different Xupacabras is almost entirely arty photographs of nude women and certainly not safe for work; it provides an excellent portal for finding the sites of amazing photographers.

The author of Open Brackets is a translator who grew up Canada and lives in france. I particularly love how many times she will revise any given posting. “Although most of us would probably like to think that grand philosophical leitmotifs thread their way through our lives (ethical dilemmas and a steady but glorious plod to some form of wisdom), an obscenely large portion of solitary meditation is in fact taken up by the pettiest of thoughts ”

And finally pubsub. Pubsub isn’t a blog, it’s kind of search engine You give it a query and it gives you back a rss feed. I love to make queries of combinations of words and see what comes out. For example I got the posting from the “real yellow pages” suggesting that it’s very important to keep your phone book close at hand when preparing for a hurricane. Or the posting that there is a ranking for colleges based on reports of how healthy their squirrel population is. I love the sendipity of these feeds. I tend to have a 20 at any given time, churning all the time. Pick an unusual word, for example right now I’m watching “unwatering” or a pattern of words (for example: (”duck boat” OR “duckboat” OR “cruise ship”) AND katrina) and see what happens.

More fun at: Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Del.icio.us

A GARLAND OF PRECEPTS
by Phyllis McGinley

Though a seeker since my birth,
Here is all I’ve learned on earth,
This is the gist of what I know:
Give advice and buy a foe.
Random truths are all I find
Stuck like burs about my mind.
Salve a blister. Burn a letter.
Do not wash a cashmere sweater.
Tell a tale but seldom twice.
Give a stone before advice.

Pressed for rules and verities,
All I recollect are these:
Feed a cold to starve a fever.
Argue with no true believer.
Think-too-long is never-act.
Scratch a myth to find a fact.
Stich in time saves twenty stitches.
Give the rich, to please them, riches.
Give to love your hearth and hall.
But do not give advice at all.

Here’s a contest. Name the actions the administration could take which serve their agenda but have little if any relevance to actual problems that need to be addressed. For example I just listened on the radio and the administration is relaxing environmental protections (you know so we can increase the fuel supply) and suspending labor work rules (you know so we can respond more vigorously).

Or maybe FEMA could direct donations to Pat Robertson’s (you know the guy the close personal friend of Charles Taylor who likes to suggest taking out foreign leaders and supreme court justices) operation blessing. Here just for example are at least 30 legitimate places to to donate.

Or yeah, it’s five days after it the national hurricane center forecast this catastrophe, time to get back to work on repealing the estate tax. If only we could find a rich corpse!

But wait, how about we eliminate the minimum wage.

In the southwestern united states they warn you about flash floods in the canyons. Storms dump a few inches of water at someplace upstream and this water is then aggregated into a giant pulse of water that sweeps down thru the canyon your standing in, killing you. The sky is clear and there is very little warning, maybe just a slight increase in the flow before the flood passes thru.

I’ve always been a fan of this realtime stream flow data network the government runs. It allows them to make accurate forecasts for the downstream flooding. The black dots on this chart show the gages pinned to their maxiumum. A number of gages aren’t reporting.

The tree like networks that draw the water out of river basins and down to the sea are made up of billions of links. Each segement of the stream another link. These networks are powerlaw distributed, the mighty rivers at their roots the hubs of thier distribution systems.

On Monday morning I filled the cars with gas, topping them up to capture the last of the gas at last weeks prices. I was actually surprised that none of the gas stations had raised their prices. Gas on the wholesale market in New York was already up and I assumed that station owners would reprice that huge expensive asset each morning. One guy I asked said “Later, we do it around midday.” Another guy said “The boss hasn’t come in yet.”

This morning we were awoken by a sound you don’t hear in the summer. The oil truck was delivering oil across the street. A few minutes ago another oil truck filled the tank of another neighbor. I don’t know if that my neighbor’s topping up, or if it’s their oil guys pushing oil out to their customers so they can, in turn, top up their tanks.

This is an interesting example of the long tail at work. The moment that supply shifts from abundant and dependable to scarce and volitile everybody along the entire distribution system changes their behavior. They address the volitility risk by adding reserves to their storage capacity, but they also shift capital into oil and gas because of the perception that their price will be higher in the future. I.e. it’s a good investment to top up my car’s gas tank or for my neighbors and their oil guy to top up their storage tanks.

This is a facinating example of the long tail at work. If the entire periphery of the distribution system tops up it’s as if the river basin suddenly starts running up hill. The calculations about risk and future values changes for each and every link in the entire distribution chain.