Back in college one of my schemes for impressing the women was to make popovers and more recently I have received (indirectly) a request for instructions. So.

My mother made this recipe for Yorkshire pudding; and in that variation you eat them with roast beef covered in gravy.

They are mind boggling simple. In a hot oven, 400F degrees say (convection is good too), you heat the muffin tin.

For six you mix: 1 cup milk, 1 cup flour, and 2 eggs. So, of course for 12 you double that; or you can also make 12 smaller ones.

Once the oven and tin comes to tempurature you cut table spoons of butter into quarters and place one bit into each tin to melt. Then pour in the thin batter and cook for 30 minutes.

Some recommendations that I follow but don’t actually put much faith in. When they come out, poke a hole  in the top of each one with a knife so they can crisp up a bit. Have all the ingredients warm before you start, i put the cold eggs into a bowl of warm water and microwave the milk a bit. Don’t obsess about how well mixed the batter is. Let the batter sit for a bit before you use it, but not more than an hour.

Tim Oren sees a “studio model” emerging for Facebook Applications.  Interesting thought.

Waiting the other day my thoughts turned again to coordination problems, since I was thinking about how the store needed one of those take a number, now serving schemes.  I don’t think I’ve seen a scheme like that in a software system, wonder why?  Wouldn’t be too hard, in the abstract, to add one to HTTP.  It would be a slight variation on the temporary redirect.  The server’s redirect would include the number, along with a time to delay before the retry.

Today I was tinkering with a Freebsd installation.  It includes a tool that fetches system updates.  The instructions advise me to invoke that tool in a mode that forces it to do a random delay before it actually fires off.  This is to avoid having the entire installed base of systems hit their upgrade server at the top of the hour.  It’s brittle since it depends on the users to use the right mode.  A scheme like the one above would avoid that risk, and it would could be used to help the server tune the load so it can run flat out when the bursts of users show up.

It is almost possible to do this without changing the existing HTTP spec.  For example you set up a Rube Goldberg device with three servers.  One to hand out numbers, one to queue up users, and finally one that actually provides service.  Say you want to sell concert tickets on a first come first serve basis.  As buyers arrive at your server you redirect them, providing a number, to a second server.  This server has only one purpose in live and that’s to make them wait.  A HTTP server configured to do that for a huge number of users is a bit odd to set up but it’s not particularly difficult.  This waiting server finally redirects them to the actual selling server at the appropriate time.  The nice thing about this approach is that it removes the incentive for buyers to attempt to poll as fast as possible.
Curious, I’ve mentioned take a number systems before (includes more amusing picture).

The first sentence reads:

It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, …

This is bull.  Speaking as a practicing dyslexic it should say that dyslexics are driven into running their own business.  The rising idiocy which is the meritocracy movement drives out of the main stream talent with any learning disability that runs counter to their fetish for testing.

That’s my opinion.  I have experience; and I have considered numerous hypothesis over the decades.  Many of which I’ve discarded and some I still nurture.  I certainly don’t have data from well run experiments.  This article, in the New York Times, pretends it’s reporting a legitimate conclusion.  But yeah, the  article stands upon the result of one question in one survey of small business owners.  Here’s that result:

35 percent – identified themselves as dyslexic

And it’s off to the races … the author, and possibly the researchers doing the survey, decided to adopt the Pangloss position.  Sweet of them.  They then called around and collected quotes from various successful dyslexics.  Who, understandably, got with the program.  It is certainly in our best interest to pump up the impression that we bring some secret talent to the party, and no doubt we do.  But, it ain’t got nothing to do with some magnetic attraction to running a business.

I did take some delight in reading between the lines.  The various “dyslexics speak” pull quotes are a study in one of the talents dyslexics have; that most anything they say has layers of hidden meanings.  I enjoyed the subtle undercurrent of bemusement at the invitation to play into this farce.  The best is this quote the article ends with; I’m quoting this a bit out of context but this is from the last quote in the article:

Actually, it’s baloney. But that’s what our marketing people came up with.

Exactly.

The virtual antique typewriter museum is a delight.  This example was built at the very end of the 19th century.

Notice that it has cylindrical type ball.    This same vendor also made an electric version.  That one had a lock.  I wonder what the salesman would say about that lock and key; kind of bad actor, waste, or impulse that lock and key where intended to address.
The teletypes like those I used when interacting with a timesharing system back in the 1960s has a cylindrical type head.  They could also read and write a punch tape.  You’d use that to prepare data before making your phone call.  I used to carry a carefully folded punch tape in my wallet to initialized my sessions.

I like to call my cell phone pda “my box of daemons”.  Maybe I should call my laptop “my secretary”.  While neither have a lock and key; they have lots of passwords instead.

Good map showing where the world’s oil is. Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

It is worthwhile to compare that to this cartogram showing the crude oil exporters.

As if he were reminding himself of a fish that got away the speaker spread his hands wide apart to suggest how much discovery remained before it would be practical.  He held them closer for a second technology.  Turning them from the horizontal to the vertical he spoke of the engineering work.  He was answering question about what was needed before commercialization, spanning a big imaginary box of risk.

He was wrapping up his talk.  I had come to hear the next talk about deep water windmills for electric power generation.  The day’s topic was energy, the track was renewable energy, and the talk about windmills at sea was pure engineering.  Hardly a wiff of discovery is required.  I got the impression the only hard part might, and even this wasn’t clear, making the turbines robust over a 20 year life span when they must stand one or two hurricanes each year.  The speaker appeared convinced that he can deploy these for a cost commenserate with current natural gas fired electric power plants.  That’s delightful news.

I like that one would measure the amount of discovery v.s. the amount of engineering in a scheme.  Wet fish and hand spans seem like a good framework.

This article that Brad DeLong posted to his delicious bookmarks is perfectly aligned with my interests. First off it has a wonderful new metaphor for a two sided network effect:

Think of it as an hourglass on its side, says Brian Cook, a research consultant who studies food issues for Toronto Public Health. “You’ve got thousands of farmers on one side, and consumers on the other. In the middle, there’s a bottleneck.”

That’s nice because fleshes out the usual idea of the two sided network as having a bottle neck and emphasizes the grains, the flow, the rate; i.e. the timing. The article is about strawberries; the grains of sand are not single strawberries but truck loads of them. To get the sand to flow smoothly you need to standardize; as the standards become more exacting the growers who fail to fit the standards are displaced from the system.

… McCarthy, sold to a developer last year after an especially gruesome season. Two weeks before the strawberries on his patch were due to glow red, the nearby chain he counted on to accept hundreds of quarts daily canceled. It no longer accepted back-door deliveries. …

Or this example which is about details, timing, capital equipment, etc.

into the lot behind Food Basics in Georgetown. Already in the lot are two 18-wheel tractor-trailers, one finishing a delivery while the other waits its turn.

They are refrigerated, …

“Oh Jesus, oh my God – we’ve got to wait,” he says, gripping the wheel tightly. “We’ve got perishable stuff here. If it’s left in the vehicle in the sun, it’s going to be roasted.”

That example is the counter point to the pattern I usual talk; i.e. routing around the a monopoly bottleneck. In this case as the standardized distribution hub condenses out it displaces the long tail strawberry producers who lack refrigerated trucks or who production doesn’t fit in the required unit size, e.g. an 18-wheeler.

I wrote sometime ago about how the modern strawberry has evolved. Where it once fit the mouth of the sparrow it now fits into the mouth of the buyer. To survive as a modern producer you have to fit the mouth and the throat of your adjacent hour glass bottlenecks.

It is rare to read a well crafted article about displacement. Most such articles fail to grasp nub of what is causing it. Often the tend in these articles is to over identify with the victims of the displacement. Though there is an another kind of article that waxes heroic narratives about the entrepeur creating the hub of the wonders of the market. Between these two over emotional journalistic approaches it is very hard to think clearly about all the externalities involved in the process.

The granularity of agriculture is right up there with Moore’s law one of the forces reshaping the world economy. And it’s been doing it for much longer (see Diamond’s the Worse Mistake, pdf). Drop into any point in history and you’ll find stories of farmers being displaced by technology. For example writing about the rise of urbanism in the late 19th century as triggered by railroads Douglas Rae quotes an expert suggesting that Connecticut farmers are going to need to diversify.

“… his farm decreasing in value, his capital shrinking, his crops no longer paying fairly because of Western Competition, … expert … suggesting “raising … squabs, trout, carp, honey, mushrooms … “

That’s 1890, but it sounds remarkable like Michael Dukakis suggesting that Iowa farmers raise endive. The tragedy here is that the advice is basically bogus. If the distribution channel is changing in ways that dry up opportunities in the long tail then your an idiot if you try to survive by diversifying. The answer is not to become less standard, more eccentric. Rather you needs to be on find a way to evolve; to fit through the throat of the new hour glass. Or maybe you can route around; find somebody willing to open their backdoor.