Ok! Did Arron Swartz really say in his talk about Open Library what David Weinberger reports:

The first thing librarian argued about when they saw OL was what subject classification system to use. “We don’t have to choose on the Internet. We can store all the category systems and let people choose which ones they want.” Likewise with all the different identifiers, e.b., ISBN, OCLC numbers, OL identifiers. (“We have to make our own identifier system because we’re going to have more books.”)

Ferberization means connecting physical books to all the different abstractions, e.g., print runs, editions, translations, etc. The library world has focused primarily on the physical books on the shelves. “We’re going to have to come up with new ways of expressing the relationships,” including allowing people to create new relationships, e.g., this book is based on that one, this book refutes that one, this one replaces that one.

This is just outrageously funny! It’s perfect! I’m gobbsmacked. Oh, I hope that’s what he said!

For those who don’t know, Ferberization is a process for teaching a baby the skill of putting it’s self to sleep.

Don’t you just hate the way those damn books wake up at all hours demanding to be settled down again into their snug little categories?

… now lets you embed fragments of your documents into your web pages.

That chart is x = 1..100 v.s. y = 1/(1+x). I don’t see how to tell it to make the axis log rather than linear though.

That is done with an image; but ou can also grab chunks of a spreadsheet and show them in an iframe:

Two nice visualization examples.

Daniel J Bernstien has a posted an extended abstract (pdf) showing some nice visualizations of assorted crypto algorithms (via Bruce Schneier). The three thumbnails below are a preview.

Fun. See also.

Secondly I liked this visualization of before and after pairwise correlations over time.

I don’t think I’d previously see this visualization technique. The lines denote the degree that the nodes behave similarly. This is from a paper that attempts to puzzle out what happened in the financial markets in August 2007. One hypothesis, illustrated by that chart, is that the diverse world of fund strategies ain’t so diverse after all.  The industry’s strategies have been collapsing into a single uber-strategy.  They checked to see how correlated the returns were between pairs.  Emerging Market funds used to be only lightly correlated with Risk Arbitrage (see EM v.s. RA in the chart).  Now they are highly correlated.

This is a technique that could be run on lots of time series; for example any of the many indexes available for metropolitan areas. It could also be enhanced with color and more sophisticated graph layout techniques.

Who needs it? Northwest passage open.

The canal intermediating between two oceans is the perfect example of a monopoly exchange hub. Routing around it will have tremendous disruptive effects. Immediately this changes the pricing situation. The Panamanians collect 600 Million a year in revenue on tolls, a price that is presumably set in “consultation” of the US government. I have no idea what we spend a year on “their” “security” and we have, of course, invested a bit in that area over the years. Adding Canada to the pricing discussion will be complex, but probably not intractably so. The Panamanians are currently engaged in a 5 Billion dollar canal upgrade. Canada faces some significant startup costs to govern their alternate route. The world hasn’t ever managed to eliminate piracy in the south china seas.

Governments aren’t the only players.  The shipping business has a dominate player, it’s Walmart/Microsoft/Saudi-Aramco/what-have-out, i.e. Maerk Line. They are currently building a set of 10+ container ships able to hold 14 thousand standard shipping containers (TEU). When those go by on the superhighway one guy is driving the truck. These ships have a crew of 13. These are the largest cargo ships in the world, but yet they conform to the standard dimensions required by the canal. Maerk has 1.7 Million TEU of shipping capacity.

I bet some people are rerunning the numbers on a lot of projects: that one, the canal upgrade, the cost of regulating a new route.

Nations whose funding runs through a single bottleneck have a tough time dealing with disruptions to that bottleneck. Which is why one worries about Mexico’s stability as their oil run out. I guess we can add Panama to that list.

When disrupting an existing exchange hub it’s de rigor to leverage each way your alternative is maximally different from the competitor. I wonder what can be made of the near term seasonality of this new route. I bet we will see a lot of PR about how environmentally beneficial the reduced energy usage of this new route is. Should be quite interesting for ship design, since presumably you don’t have to fit through the canal anymore.

Two words you do not want to see together: Surprise Hurricane.

“A surprise Hurricane Humberto ripped into Texas near the Louisiana border this morning, bringing winds of 85 mph and torrential rains to the coast. Humberto didn’t even exist yesterday morning, and grew from a tropical depression at 11am EDT to a hurricane just 14 hours later.” — Jeff Masters

“With many frameworks and languages, I get the feeling that I’m dealing with a metal cabinet covered by layers of marine paint; one where scratches tend to reveal sharp edges.  With Erlang, I get the feeling of a Victorian mahogany armoire; one where scratches in the wood simply reveal more rich wood.” — Sam

Protection rackets seem easy to run on the internet.  While that example is pretty large scale; there are plenty of smaller opportunities for this kind of criminal activity.  Another long tail.  This morning this got caught in the blog’s spam filter:

hello , my name is Richard and I know  you get a lot of spammy comments ,  I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50%

He goes on to provide an IM contact and suggests the payment would be, only, some link juice.

I haven’t really a clue what wibble actually means, but it certainly looks like a fine neologism who’s support I encourage. Meanwhile I’m quite pleased to see that fat-tail distributions are now recognized as so common that we can ridicule those who pretend not to know that. That certainly wasn’t the case even a few years ago.

The W3 and IETF should, and I believe this is one of the rare cases where they would agree, that wibble should be the official pronunciation for WWW. It’s apparent association with states of emotional insanity and high-minded blovating seem like a perfect fit for what most sites serve up from that those names.

In other news related to improving our language tools I’m sure I’ll need the phrase used in this headline: ‘… Outage Blamed on a “Deficiency in An Algorithm”‘.