Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I have sighted a new urban myth: Electric heating is cheaper than oil heat! Here in Boston people heat with both gas and oil, and the cost per unit of heat between the two has diverged rapidly over the last few years. Those who heat with oil are looking for ways out of their plight. Apparently the rumor making the rounds that it is cheaper to use electric. That’s not true.

In related news Martin brings my attention to a company EnerNoc that sells negative energy, i.e. load shedding, to the utilities. They use telecom and widgets to shift power consumption from high demand time periods into low demand time periods. Martian’s example is the fridge. You chill when power is plentiful and let it coast when others are paying higher prices.

I assume that EnerNoc’s role in all this is to aggregate small power users into a large enough pool to be worthy of selling to the utilities. It’s a interesting example of a coordination problem. There are of course other ways to approach the problem; ones that are less dependent on a thicket of contracts and ongoing coordination signals controlled by a middleman and enabled, as Martian, points out by the telecom infrastructure.

The obvious alternative is to just broadcast signal; and let the demand side react to the signal by selling some simple technology that responds to the signal in reasonably simple ways. That alone would enable substantial contributions from the demand side. But you can improve the incentive structure either thru regulation or by using statistical sampling to tell which customers have gotten with program; and then reduce their tariffs.

The amount of signal that needs to flow from the grid operators to the consumers is small, in the sense that you can broadcast it. A signal only needs to flow back the other way sufficient to assure that the incentives play out right. It is stupid to presume that the only incentives that are available are monetary or that they need to be executed with fastidious accounting. Most social systems have very fuzzy accounting and they work just fine, thank you!

The puzzle to be solved here is how to draw more of the peripheral demand into a load balancing system. Reading about EnerNoc’s approach isn’t the first time I’ve seen discussion of this. For example Bruce Schneier mentioned a regulatory attempt at something similar. I liked that one a lot, it provided a way to signal household thermostats. He was concerned that the resulting system would attract hackers. I presume he’d be just as sanguine about the security of the EnerNoc system; probably more so since it’s a closed system.

Such concerns are appropriate, but for heaven sakes I wish smart people like Bruce would stop pretending that these cases are somehow unique. It is the very rare large scale system that doesn’t have vunerable choke points. Hubs who’s failure can bring the entire system to it’s knees. Telling designers not to build large systems because of those risks is lame. Helping them know how to build them so they are safe and robust is hard, yes. But these systems get built because they generate mind boggling amounts of value. So it’s better to do the hard job and forgo the short term pleasure of a bit of hysteria.

Speaking of load shedding: turning your car’s engine off when you stop is more efficient than you thought.

Icons have a long history running thru hobo marks, trademarks, and of course the icons seen in Xerox, Lisa, and Mac software.  The image at right is from a beautiful collection of icons drawn by Gerd Arntz, though he adopted the term isotypes (International System of Typographic Picture Education) for his.  There is an venerable collection of tiny icons, picons, at the university of Indiana which were collected from contributions and, I assume, the x-face mime headers in usenet postings.  For example here is the one I used for years.  That collection is interesting since it includes icons for objects other than people, including websites.  Favicons might have leveraged picons.  But Microsoft, what can you do?

There are some fun hacks to generate arbitrary icons for a object; these mostly work by computing some value based on the object’s description (a hash say) and then using the digits you get to guide the generation of a drawing.   For example this number a81e249865bc3d694fd0ab99e6e69f453213967e denotes a body of code stored in a repository.  We can map that into assorted icons as so:

Those examples are a wavatar, an identicon, a monsterid, a barcode, and a qr-code respectively, and if you poke around it’s not hard to find code and webservices that will generate these for you.

You can use these to put eye candy all over you user interface.  You could give every blog posting a icon, every blog, every user, every paragraph…  For example, it would be nice if the git browsers showed one of these along with the harder to recognize hash codes.  Obviously there is lots of fun to be had inventing additional icon generators.  For example it would be cool to have one that uses one of those plant growing algorithms; that could then be used to create a series of icons effected by the deltas done to document or source code repository.  You could pluck your object icons from a large collection of icons.  There are quite a few large public collections out there.  You could also pluck random bits out of larger photos or illustrations.

Icons are just another kind of metadata and there are some fun things that could be done, say with distributed hash tables, to create global repositories for iconic representations for URI.  Managing the rights to set these would be entertaining.

My fresh Wordpress upgrade now infected my blog with 3rd party content; how offensive.

One of the ‘features’ in Wordpress now that folks who read my blog and leave comments get avatars.  Well the would, except I turned it off.  These avatars are injected into the page from a gravatars.com.   Gravatars is a divisiton of Automattic, i.e. the Wordpress company.

These avatars have assorted problems.  First off they let Automattic track my users.  Argh.  Secondly the design for gravatars makes only a slight effort to maintain the privacy of the users.  The avatars are indexed by taking the user’s email address and jumbling it.  So ihavean@email.com becomes 3b3be63a4c2a439b013787725dfce802.   That’s bad.   It’s not particularly secure; with a good dictionary of email addresses you can recover the user’s email address.

That’s also a globally unique identifier for the user; enabling anybody with access to a good web crawl to find other places the same user has left comments.  Bleck.

The privacy policy at gravatars.com is joke.  Note how it doesn’t say anything about reselling the tracking information they are collecting to third parties.  Wordpress hasn’t exactly been well behaved in the past.

via Tim Oren:

Now there’s an investing theory. Let’s have all the annoying companies buy each other.Comcast acquires Plaxo.

Acquisitions are easier if the two firms are entangled in similar ways; similar software platforms, similar open source licensing practices, similar unions, similar distribution channels, similar management fad.  No doubt, two firms with similar annoying privacy policies are a natural fit.

Happy Day! Google in their beneficence has removed the evil bit from my account. I’m back in the index. I exist.