Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Any amateur economist knows that if two goods can substitute for each other they will, overtime, adjust their prices to about the same level.  So obviously the choice between oil or gas for heating your home shouldn’t be a matter of price.  So, being a gadfly, I found myself taking the contrarian point of view in an argument last fall.  At the time it was much cheaper to heat your house with gas, and it has only gotten worse.  This is, of course, bizarre.  But as this chart shows it’s been true for years and years.

Those are US Department of Energy forecast numbers.  They are published annually, for example here are the recently released 2008 numbers.  That link is a good place to get a sense of what the numbers mean.  I drew the numbers for the other years from this page.  Even amateur economists are right some of the time.  I can’t believe that’s stable.  Maybe I should be trying to lock in my natural gas fuel price for next winter.

Ben Adida brings our attention to this cool, but evil, hack for seeing into your visitor’s minds!

Aza Raskin’s hack is a bit of java script that lets you adjust the web page based on the user’s browsing history, say to show the bookmarking links that this user actually uses.  I was quite amused at Aza’s use of the term village bicycle to describe a page that links indiscriminately to dozens of 3rd party sites; it reminded me of the term link slut.  This technique works because you can put a few dozen links on your web page and then using java script the page can glean out which ones the visitor has previously visited; using that data the javascript can then customize the page.

But now I’m fascinated by the idea that you could build pages using this technique that glean estimates of various attributes about the visitor.  For example say you put a few dozen each of left wing and right wing political sites and then compute a score for where on the political spectrum the visitor is.  It would be fun to make a bunch of examples.  Age, sex, politics, income, etc.  Each one of these could be distilled down to a single Javascript widget, it might display a badge.  An exercise for and upon the reader.

This is a perfect example of the kind of thing which Caja[1,2,3] is meant to fix.  We should all send positive thoughts in that projects direction at regular intervals.

The World Wide Web Consortium’s offices are in the world’s most marvelously silly building the cartoon like Stata Center. Among these boffins are a few working to bring the Semantic Web to life.  Around them experts labors away on the more esoteric arts of computer science reside; robotics, origami, cryptography, even user interface!  Surrounding the Stata Center are larger less fanciful buildings full of wetter bio-scientists, brain sciences, genetics, and such.  More of the bland masive buildings are going up all the time.

The Brian Sciences center looms outside the windows of many of the folks working on the Semantic Web.  Over the last few years I’ve often wondered if that was a little joke on somebodies part, the Gods possibly, or maybe the facilities manager.  That kind of thinking afflicts my brain; put two random things in and I start finding their associations amusing.  It is often a kind of a buzzword bingo in here.

So I was delighted to encounter this article in Ars Technica, which garners a very high scoring round at buzz word bingo. “The Semantic Web gets a boost from functional MRIs.”   The author must have been giggling!  I think his headline writer let him down, I like my headline better.

Paul Graham writes about ambition and cities.  Paul seems quite concerned about ambition, status, but yet I really like this essay.  It’s a nice variant on the well studied theme of specialization in cities.  Regions specialize, for example Hartford in insurance and guns, and so it’s natural that each region’s alpha-males would be drawn into that specialization.   Those who particularly aspire to ladder climbing will then strive that way.

The other thing I like about Paul’s essay is how, no doubt, natives of each venue he passes over will be offended.  He is, of course, making quick cartoon versions of each town and cartoons always offend somebody.

The New York City he describes is not the NYC of my youth.  More than anything else the NYC of my youth was about diversity.  So many many things packed together into one space.  It was, it seemed to me then, impossible to climb to the top of that pile.  There were so many distinct piles, all running off in different directions.  I can certainly feel that same way about NYC these days, but yet his caricature of NYC as a place where the ambition is all about wealth rings true, about Manhattan.  So much of Manhattan seems more like a odd walled community of the rich built out remnants of the more authentic city that was there before.

He allows that Silicon Valley is about power.  Sure that’s true, but it would not be at the top of my list.  At the top is a pervasive engagement with building things.  Usually via entrepreneurial activity.  While I have hung out in lots of places where people talk about it, the Valley is the only place were it was in the water.  And there it was a form of play; like football or dancing.  People who love to do create firms that do something new everywhere you turn.  If that’s your kind of fun then that’s the place to live, just as if you love playing in a good intellectual thicket living in Cambridge you will find it easy to find other playmates.  What he says about power, it’s true.  It’s something that the guys that came and had a lot of fun building things come to learn, but they all seem sad about.

He seems to be describing smaller cities, like the one Hammett sited Red Harvest in, where the whole place’s workings could be revealed by throwing one or two well aimed spanners into the works.  Cities over a certain scale ought to be able to be about many things, not one, and so they shouldn’t by default drag all their strivers into a single pattern.  I don’t know, maybe globalization has made that something of a nostalgic fantasy.

Here are random icons generated from the entries on my PGP/GPG keyring; i.e. I grep’d out the fingerprints, jumbled them a bit for privacy, and then gin’d up identicons and wavitars for them.

Meanwhile, here’s another scheme to gin up images from random numbers; in this case the numbers are slightly less than random, e.g. barcodes. Barcode Plantage. It would be fun to have one that was based on a tangle of string, or a knot. This fun hack wordle could be repurposed for this as well.