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.

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.

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

Apple has decided to force my favorite local Apple vendor out of business. On May 15th Apple opened a new store in Boston’s posh shopping district. On the 16th they told Tom, who’s store is Mission Hill, that he’s out.

My bud, Tom Roberts has run this funky little shop,  Organize-it Software, in on a side street on the border between the poor part of town and the medical district for decades. Over the years he has complained that Apple has slowly but surely pushing all the stores like his out of business. More recently he’s mentioned that each time a new Apple store opens they toss a few more little stores off the bus.

No doubt that’s good for the brand. This is really lousy for my loyalty to Apple.

The little guy just doesn’t have much recourse in these situations.

In marginally related news, for those interested, Google still has me marked with the evil bit – so I’m not in their index. Their automated response says I can expect some resolution in a few weeks. Two highly competent people have told me they never managed to get the evil bit removed from their sites; oh dear.

I’ve almost entirely disappeared from Google. Boy is that bad; since I’m looking for a job. Did somebody take offense at how I did this gig for them?

Nope, my blog got hacked and spammers infected the footer of my active wordpress template, ouch.

This is very good news for the other Ben Hydes, who have had to suffer from my early mover advantage.

For example! Here’s Ben Hyde’s campaign video. He’s running for high school president, and he’s got my support. Particularly since he understands the dangers of increasing polarization in the modern political discourse.

I enjoyed and recommend David Sims’ paper “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations” (abstract). Sims is a B-school type, an organizational theorist. The question at hand is what’s up when we loose our patience with those around us. As this unfolds we give license to our indignation. We relax our efforts to construct a positive model of the other guy. We demonize him. In short: we declare him to be a bastard.

My wife brought my attention to this paper by way of one of Ms. Manners’s columns titled “Best. Paper. Ever.” Now that’s high praise from a great height!

In this paper I got to learn a new word: ’emplot’ or the short form of narrative emplotment‘. The idea here is to repurpose the tools of story telling or theater to talk about how we make sense of the world. We make sense of the world by mapping its raw bits into plot lines. The paper is a very preliminary run at the scenario where we map somebody in our organization into the role of the evil bastard.

The nice thing about taking this path, i.e. thru storytelling, sensemaking, and narrative, is how it serves up different perspectives on the problem about what is worked thru in as the demonization unfolds. I.e. the story has to work for all parties; the demonizer, audience, colleagues, etc. This approach lets us dig into the functional benefits that might arise for each of these. For example we get this delightful sentence: “St George needs his dragon as a matter of narrative necessity (Pratchett 1992).” The paper is most interested in the functional benefits for the demonizer and I find that refreshing.

Three species of bastards are mentioned, but to be clear these are not presented as either exhaustive or even the most common types. We get to imagine the joys of having an avuncular leader who seems incapable of using his power when we need him. We follow the very clever consultant only to discover he’s led us right down the drain. And we observer the middle manager who it becomes apparent is unwinding a devious and vicious plot. These aren’t uplifting stories; at the end somebody is irredeemably lost; evil even. They are a kind of tragedy; or if they were a musical they would be the end of the second act.

These are not uncommon stories. The entertainment industry tends to mislead us abut how common happy endings are. But it is amazing how rarely they are told and analyzed in the B-school literature. Since many b-school candidates are victims of these emplotments you would think it would attract more analysis (though there is a little).

This paper suggests that organizational actors are generally reluctant to cast their peers into the role of bastard that hasn’t been my experience. Many are reluctant, but most are aware that it’s a common move in the game; and some are very quick to play the move. Some play it quite effectively. And the move is not without it’s benefits, benefits beyond the ones he outlines in the paper. Just to mention one: it can be difficult to act and be reasonable at the same time. Some folks just skip the bother.

This paper is a start, but there is a lot more to be done. Maybe Sims will become “The Bastard Guy.” Maybe that’s why the literature on the bastard question is so thin. Who’d want that title?

To be clear I think we should treat petroleum consumption as a sin and tax it accordingly. Because it’s: a) murdering the planet, b) it’s a principle contributor to the war, c) it’s running out and we need to accelerate the switching to alternatives, and d) the cost comes out of producer pockets, and e) it’s funding people who in many cases are coming to despise us.  I think lowering the tax is extremely bogus idea and a horrific diversion from other topics.

I gather that economists believe[1,2,3] that gas prices are largely unaffected by the gas tax. (That tax pays for highway maintainance, so it’s more like a user fee than a tax.) In fact I’ve heard it argued that if we raise the gasoline tax the effect will be to reduce the incomes of oil producers. I accept this logic, but I’ve had trouble seeing how to explain it in simple terms.

So rather than try to find a way to explain it i made this picture instead. This shows one dot for each state (except Hawaii and Alaska) plus the District of Columbia. The horizontal axis the the amount of gas tax [see] each state charges. The vertical axis is the price of gas in each state [see].

Oh dear.  This doesn’t seem to be supporting the conventional wisdom.  In fact it seems to say that a gas tax has a disproportionate effect on the retail price.  Every 10 cent increase in the tax is corrolated with a 12 cent rise in the price the consumer pays.  Huh?

My insta-theory for the amplified effect is that the tax rates are higher in states where the cost of doing business is generally higher. For example they have more services, health insurance, employee rights, education, regulation, etc. etc.  As an aside I think it’s interesting that I view a high cost of doing business as a signal that a venue is highly attractive to business; while rhetorically it is often treated as a signal of a bad place to do business.
I must say that I don’t quite see how this chart supports the conventional opinion of the economists.

So, recalling that I think this that lowering the gas tax a very bad idea, my only reason for posting this is to dig into the evidence for the conventional wisdom.  I love the idea that a high tax on petroleum products would largely come out of the producer’s pockets. If that’s true and you can convince a lot of people it should be a easy move toward a better outcome.

This is a product endorsement. I wanted to go down to NYC from Boston for a few days, quite spontaneously. So I grabbed a hotel room via priceline at 2:30 in the afternoon; and then I had to find a way to get to down there.

For the past few years there has been an bloom of extremely cheap bus rides to NYC; these run from chinatown to chinatown. The press reports are totally wild-west. Fires, sleeping drivers, gun battles between competitors! But yeah, it’s cheap!

Recently the more established bus companies have decided they need to compete and two new lines have entered the competition. Boltbus and Megabus they both sell a few tickets for a few bucks, i.e. as a teaser rate; but their full fares are cheap too.

So I went downtown and into the bus station and found BoltBus guy sitting in his bus, they leave every hour on the hour. He took my $20 and I climbed in. It would have cheaper if I’d bought the ticket online but it wasn’t clear which one I was going to catch.
Very nice bus, nice drivers, very comfortable smooth fast ride. The trip back was even smoother, taking a little under 4 hours. For both trips the bus was about 30% or less full; so plenty of room to stretch out.

But most importantly free WIFI and a plug! On the trip down a guy behind me drew a crowd as they all watched the Celtics live in the basketball playoffs; via the WIFI.

One of the many things I learned reading the literature on standards is how they tend to set floors on behaviors. I was reminded of that from this posting from Kevin Drum

I want to highlight a single passage from the Roger Lowenstein article that I blogged about below. It’s about how investment bankers create complex financial instruments that receive high ratings:

Credit markets are not continuous; a bond that qualifies, though only by a hair, as investment grade is worth a lot more than one that just fails….The challenge to investment banks is to design securities that just meet the rating agencies’ tests….”Every agency has a model available to bankers that allows them to run the numbers until they get something they like and send it in for a rating,” a former Moody’s expert in securitization says.

Go ahead and call me a rube, but is this for real?
This is a bit like being surprised that the lunch on your airplane flight bears no resemblance to what would pass muster as lunch at mom’s house. In fact I love that the airline industry at one point had to convene their industrial standards body only to set a standard for what counted as a sandwich; since some carriers handing out “sandwichs” while others were actually providing a sandwich. Of course once you set the standard everybody in the industry pretty quickly starts handing out the minimum meal that meets the standard.

This kind of gaming of standards is well standard. One way to temper the effect is to keep the rules fuzzy. It is oddly perverse that if you give the regulators wide latitude in their enforcement you can undermine this gaming; since the regulated players will then have to strive to overshoot the standard sufficiently to avoid the risk of failing to meet it. The players will then complain that the rules aren’t clear and that the regulators are capricious. Another trick is to make the standard a bit competitive so only top N% get the rating. The judging will give an element of fuzziness, and it also creates striving for improvement. But then tends to create demands for the judging to be more transparent – a proxy for the return of the bright line – in the name of fairness.