Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I’ve been reading The Old Drum.com for a while now. Recently it’s mostly been about the consequences for the hurricanes on the US oil, gasoline, and natural gas supplies. More generally it’s about the hypothesis that the planet’s oil supplies are on the verge of switching from more available every year to less available every year. This will happen. When it happens the current economic system is going to have to change faster than it’s probably able to. Something to throw on the pile of things to worry about along with global warming, bird flu, the US deficit, terrorism, etc. etc.

Today it was pointed out that the site, which is vibrant little community of smart people, is entirely invisible via Google. I’ve never seen that before. It really is invisible. Weird.

In the world of big-things-to-worry-about conspiracy theories are very popular. The Oil Drum used to be at blogspot, maybe Google’s carrying a grudge?

Between buyers and sellers there is always an information gap. The buyer can not know all that the seller knows about the good he is buying. For example when you buy a car you can’t know if that car was used to transport drugs and is now covered in a light dust of narcotics. The seller can never know how much value you might extract from the goods after you purchase them. This information gap makes price setting difficult and risky. If you highly value the thing your buying the seller would raise the price. If you new more about the history of the good you might be less willing to pay. The larger the information any the less likely any deal can be struck.

Standards are often used to help reduce the information gap. In some cases standards are set that force one or the other side to reveal information. Cars, for example, have a record kept of significant accidents and buyers can query that data to reduce their uncertainty. Certification and government regulation are two other examples. The public health inspector’s job is to reduce the information gap for restaurants; he does what the dinner would rather not have to. In many of these cases both sides of the transaction would prefer to have the regulation, certification, etc. The rules make transactions flow where they might not have otherwise. Sometimes middlemen play role. Restaurant reviewers are an example of that; assuming they aren’t sock puppets.

Models like this one explain why a car looses so much value the moment it leaves the lot of the new car dealer. At that moment the buyer is forced to assume the worst about the car. This is compounded by the suspicion that private sellers only dispose of cars for negative reasons.

Firms often attempt to create certifications, standards, regulations in the hope reducing the information gap, increasing the number of transactions, and raising prices. A good example of that is the way that all the new car companies have a “certified used car” program of some kind. The idea being that this certification reduces the buyer’s uncertainty about the car and allows the dealer to sell the car for more.

Jay Levitt bought a certified Audi recently. Turns out, to hear him tell it, that Audi’s Certification program is a joke. Maybe they are using one of these online make your own certificate sites.

Since I’m a data addict I have various alerts shot straight to my phone by tireless perl scripts in my basement. This morning as I drove downtown one of these informed me of high wind warnings in the area.

Like FEMA receiving a report of a Hurricane headed for the homeland I carefully filed this away and did nothing. I forgot that it was recycling day.

Later upon returning home I turned up my street to find it strewn with hundreds of pieces of paper. Each recycling container along the street was methodically pealing one sheet after another off the top and donating it to the party.

So I parked the care and began to pick up. It was like flying monkeys had attacked my neighbors identities. Credit card offers, bank statements, gas bills, magazines, catalogs. Mother nature the identity thief.

The curse of being a data addict is that random bits of knowledge bubble up and clutter your head so you can’t stay focused on task. So as I picked up all my neighbor’s bits I found my self stuck on the last bit of the last verse.

Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Leo Simons seems to be having exactly the experiance that pushed me out of Ada and into Lisp 22 years ago.

Java in many ways is kind-of a joke (yes yes its great for some stuff). On the surface its this really type-safe, compiled, predictable language everyone is using for everything. When you dig a little deeper and look at what actually is going on in “real life”, you’ll see that there’s usually some hack to get rid of all that type safety and predictability. For example, you generate source code based on XML, or you generate object code based on XML. And of course we don’t stop there. Since its kind-of hard to sensibly specify chunks of code that are bigger than a “class” (hint: other languages have things like “modules”), we use some huge application library, which we of course configure using more XML. Nevermind that we need to load 500 megs of jars into memory to make all that happen.

Programming languages ought to allow the designer to craft his notations, type models, and execution models so they fit the problem. Not demand that the problem be force fed into the mold handed down by somebody who hadn’t a clue what your problem requires.

Problem is that if you decide to make a switch your forced to write off a vast sunk cost, a network of relationships and a fluent skill set. At the same time your stuck deciding where to jump; and you can not know the color of the grass until your living right on top of it.

My wife noted that one thing we can be confident will come out of the tragedy in New Orleans is PHD thesis. We have enjoyed enumerating all the different departments (math, engineering, sociology, ecology, history, music, etc. etc.) that will be granting these.

One that I look forward to reading is the book or doctoral thesis on the dynamics of the rumors spreading. The stories about violence in the shelters in New Orleans have turned out thankfully much overblown.

Apparently people are actually quite constructive in these situations, but have a tendency to assume the worst about the behavior of ‘those other people.”

I gather that the textbook pattern for a rumor runs along these lines:

• An exceptional event occurs outside the usual frameworks; so it’s hard to assimilate
• Details that don’t fit the available framework are discarded or minimized.
• Details that fit the available framework are highlighted, or invited.
• The story, now reduced to rumor, can be assimilated.

But these scenarios don’t seem to fit that model. These seem more like given extreme anxiety a demand emerges for some idea of exactly how bad things are going to get. Rumors evolve to fill that demand; and apparently those that increase the anxiety thrive. But maybe not. Every narrative I read about Katrina includes lots of rumors. Many of these rumors, maybe even the majority, are positive - though false. E.g.: the bus is coming today, or supplies are available over at the school.