Science continues to do it’s best to explain lifes mysteries. Today we learn that beautiful women make men stupid. Which seems a nice complement to earlier reports regarding how smart flies don’t thrive.
Exuberance is beauty. – Blake
Beauty, like ice, our footing does betray; Who can tread sure on the smooth, slippery way: Pleased with the surface, we glide swiftly on, And see the dangers that we cannot shun. – Dryden
Super Volcano – Not to worry thought, we know the right solution: tax cuts for upper income brackets and the distruction of the welfare state.
Update: Never mind.
I have an affection for natural disasters. They tend to bring out the best in people. They expose the power-law nature of natural systems and in doing so remind people that their models based on more regular distributions are wrong. They make people more careful and they reenforce the value of community, goverment, and the social network. They don’t fit into the media’s prefered pattern of finding somebody to blame and so the media then shifts into it’s more health alternate pattern of telling stories about how people help each other.
Of course it’s a strange affection since they are, well, a disaster. I suspect there is some wonderful german word for this affection of mine, probably a shelf of books in the library about it.
I think about this each fall during huricane season. It may well be that my affection really arises from the excitement of the huricanes that rolled thru New England in the 1950s when I was very very young. Those were very exciting memories; and the black and white photos of the period are extremely facinating and nostolgic.
The shoreline of eastern Rhode Island was, before the hurricane of ’38 hurricanes a line of vast beautiful victorian castles. As the storm approached that swept those beaches clean the rich loaded up their cars and drove away. The servants stood on the porchs and waved good by. In Watch Hill the only survivors of one long stretch of beach that was along with it’s houses swept away retreated progressively up into the attic of the house. The roof and attic where then torn from the building and like a raft the they were driven inland, 10 miles up the river and into the tidal mashes.
The last catagory 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin was in 1998. Isabel, now category 5, has winds gusts 190 miles an hour at her core. I find that impossible to imagine. The wave heights are only 20 feet at this point which is much less than the last hurricane Fabian had.
At this point it’s too early to tell what may become of Isabel. Let’s hope it turns north soon and dissapates in the North Atlantic rather than someplace on the East Coast. picture, more pictures.
I don’t know how many times I’ve watched somebody put up a slide showing how the distribution of posts in a mailing list, or commits to source code, or what ever are power-law distributed. So it’s nice to see somebody trying to drag some other statistics out of the posting data.
Who’s a regular? Who’s a flamer? Who’s an information provider?
A person with a high posts/thread ratio would seem to be a conversationalist. A person that tends to respond, but rarely post would seem to be a reactor – maybe even a flamer. A person who starts threads but rarely responds in threads would might well be a spammer.
You can read more in this news article about Marc Smith, Sociologist at Microsoft which appears to be connected to the PR around the release of NetScan .
Netscan’s pretty neat too. It shows that alt.sci.sociology‘s near neighbors include alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.high-heels and alt.comedy.standup. Who knew?
There is a maple tree in my backyard. Each year it drops a carpet of winged seeds on the ground. Tens of thousands of seeds, every year, for 30 to 60 years. One, just one, of those seeds needs to take for this tree to fulfill it’s Darwinian mandate and create the next generation. One survives out of million? The ecologists call this a r-Selected strategy.
I, on the other hand, have only a few children, and unlike the maple tree I am expending vast resources on each one of them. The ecologists call this a K-Selected strategy.
Species with an r-Selected architecture (weeds, annuals, insect pests,bacteria) tend to be opportunistic. They spread fast. The “r” stands for resources. If storm clears a section of forest the nearby maple is ready to seed that clearing. These species quickly cover new territory and quickly compose the dead. They tend to fluctuate quickly with the weather.
Species with K-Selected strategy (coconuts, apples, birds, most mammals) expend more on each offspring. Their populations tend to be more constant and self regulating
I assume that some business models are more r-Selected, with others are more K-Selected. If the weather is good and new markets are emerging fast then one should invest in the r-Selected businesses. For the last hundred years technology has created new markets in quantity – a good time for r-Selected businesses. Ones where it’s best to encourage a large population of lightly funded experiments. Now if you think that’s easy I’d recommend a careful dissection of a maple seed. Conversely I’d assume that if your operating in a very mature market with volatile weather then larger enterprises more careful planning and husbanding of your resources if a better tactic.
All this give rise to my new cartoon of open source. That those tens of thousands of projects at Source Forge are like maple seeds. That Open Source is a species that has adopted a r-Selected strategy. It assumes that that the problem at hand is not husbanding ideas, but covering the fresh earth of possibilities. That the problem isn’t finding options worth executing upon, but finding which of a ten thousand possible options will actually take root.
Now one thing that’s curious about this is that if you look at large Open Source projects you might not see that. Those projects look more like whales. They tend to have a certain overhead where in their resources more carefully managed so the baby doesn’t die.
Of course all this is in total contrast to closed source projects. Every one of those I’ve worked on has expended tremendous resources attempting to manage scarce resources. Those projects seem much more like K-Selected species, carefully hording their fatty reserves so they can survive the next round of lousy weather that the market or management blows down the hallway.
Finally I think this has something critical to say about what goes on as you move along the power-law curve. That the population that resides on the long tail tends to be more r-Selected (limited by resources and driven by opportunism) while the upper classes that reside in the towering heights tend to be more K-selected (durable in the face of bad weather, fat, enthusiastic about property rights that guard their inheritance.).
Some good news on the SARS front. If I’m reading the chart on Sars Watch correctly we got a day with no new cases!
Now there are lots of reasons to take this news with a grain of salt: the Chinese situation remains extremely unclear, the Canadians are still struggling, lots of people are still infected, there is reason to believe that the seasons may a large part of why numbers have fallen, and then we have occational case of a recovered person having a relapse.
Even so it’s a bit of good news.
Good editorial from the WSJ on how this summer may provide mankind a chance to eradicate SARS, just one chance.
In what I find a deeply disturbing irony the journal has that editorial behind their profit making wall; interesting counter point to China’s problems. I can’t believe anybody is taking the Chinese numbers seriously. The first reports of SARS in China were apparently last fall. It has spread fast in both Hong Kong and Toronto. How can it possibly be credible that it hasn’t spread far and wide in China by now?
Worse of all it appears the damn thing is more fatal than previously thought. One in ten, one in seven? Bleck.
If it’s true, and my presumption about China is correct then there must be areas in China which have already been decimated, how could you possible keep that secret? It doesn’t quite add up.
This story worries me. If the Canadians are having this much trouble keeping the virus in quarantine then it seems vanishingly unlikely that the Chinese have been able to put a lid on it. That implies to me that it will spread sooner or later. Later would be good since that buys time to find a vaccine or treatment, but I have trouble reading that and not concluding that it’s out of the bag in Toronto.
It’s hard to think this thru consequentially. It sure would put a damper on all kinds of activities where people gather: schools, churches, shopping districts, office buildings, public transportation, airplanes, conferences – that in turn would be quite a wet blanket over the entire economy. The thing seems to have a very look course, a 4-6 weeks for those that recover. That’s a lot of people out of the work force. A 3% death rate would be very bleak.
It is amazing though to watch the professional public health people do their job. Over the last few decades the concept of ‘public service’ has come under a lot of negitive PR from the anti-government, anti-regulator, privatizing crowd. Selfish twits.
It’s been far too educational, the last two months. Both my parents died. My father a few weeks ago and my mother last night. A new born child runs a superhighway of connections into your noodle. Death teases them back out again.
When the Challenger exploded I worked for a firm in Cambridge that had written some of the key software. Most of the company was seated in a large atrium watching the television. The launch had been scheduled so school children around the nation could watch. When the shuttle exploded every single person who’d worked on that software could only think: “Am I responsible.”
That was a very delightful place to work. Those were the days when almost nobody studied to become a programmer. Everybody there had come to the trade, called to it from another profession. We tended to hire people who had an interesting background, never because they had a lot of credentials in computer science. We had a rule, no roller skating in the atrium. The building we were in was a lousy old warehouse with a zigzag roof that let in light from large windows. The building had been amusingly remodeled into office space.
That company, and so many others, are now long gone. The people scattered. I was thinking about my responsibility in all that the other day – gazing down from a window in the nursing home on a hill over that zigzag roof. My mother rested her hand on the hot radiator. The air outside was quite cold, it was killing the African violet on the sill.
I see that movable type decided to clear out my blog’s homepage. February has arrived. I guess I should post something.