I love patent drawings…

It is a warm humid day here in Boston, early summer rather than spring.  Nature is bursting out all over and the authorities have told close to a million people (Watertown, Newton, Waltham, Belmont,Cambridge and Alston Brighton) to shelter in their homes so they can look for a young man who, which his older brother, is suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon on Monday.

My town is not on the list, but just the same everybody is indoors.  It’s been incredibly quiet here.  No traffic on the main streets, no pedestrians on the sidewalks.  The occasional dog walker.  It’s quieter than when we have a major snow storm and the air is full of sound deadening snow flakes and the authorities have begged the populous to stay off the roads.  It’s weird.

At this point they have caught the 2nd guy, the 19 year old.  Late in the day I went to Trader Joe’s. Things were quiet on the way over, but it was crowed.  People seems sort of giddy, glad to be out of the house.  It was kind of sweet, for some reason.

I don’t have any complaints.  I feel the authorities did what they needed to do, and for logical good reasons.  I’m happy they got the 2nd kid alive; i hope he survives.  It’s been a tough ride for people in the media, they just can’t quite get that really they shouldn’t speculate.  And gosh, they ought to to keep their hands off the emotional levers.

Let’s hope, it’s over.

Andrew Gelman reminds us of an an amusing thought.  Which I will paraphrase… Social Scientist explain surprising behavior in two ways.

1. Yes, that is surprising, but here let me explain why that happens.
2. Yes, that is surprising, but here let me explain how to tinker things so that doesn’t happen.

In Gelman’s version is a more focused.  The social science in question is economics.  For economists surprising is called “irrational” and is largely synonymous with costly, inefficient, etc; i.e.  it has monetary metrics.  He quotes Steve Levitt: “… economists … by training … (don’t) think.. about whether something is right or wrong, they think about it in terms of whether it’s efficient…”

What’s delightful about this dialectic is how these two are identical except for the underlying agenda of the social scientist.  In the first he’s adopted the role of naturalist observer and in the second he’s tapping into his inner entrepreneur.  While it is pretty trivial to switch back and forth; the trick is to be sure you do that efficiently and rationally.

In the end this is the dialectic between understanding and effecting.

A nice posting where in the author takes issue with that thought stopping phrase: everything should be “run like a business.”

An auction house near Boston is selling a huge collection of Scientific instruments later this month. The exhibit starts on the Saturday April 20th and the auction then runs for four long days Thrusday thru Sunday. Looks like fun!

I think the blog is back now. Six months ago it got hacked, in a very minor way; but I was very busy at the time. When my repair attempts stumbled it went onto the back burner. Something weird about mysql character set encodings, or word press evolution’s in that area. In short when I exported the database and then initialized a new one with the exported data things got wonky. Most noticably sequences between sentences, but other things as well.

One way to address the very busy problem is to lose your job (yes I’ve checked under the bed – thank God it’s not there!).

So lots of chores are getting my attention.

Of course I had to waste a few days trying to puzzle out what actually happen. That devolved into archeology. This blog is more than a decade old. It had a lot of curious character set anomalies, not just the recent damage. Some of which, at least, appears to be the result of copy paste from other blogs.

I wrote some code to visit all the text in the database and heuristically repair the character encodings. FYI clsql and asdf don’t play together very well. I didn’t really want to learn about how many different kinds of quotation marks there are, or that occasionally people use the double-prime character (U+2033) as a quotation mark; etc. etc. And did you know there is both a character for degree (U+00B0), as in temperature, and one for marking a numeral as a Feminine_Ordinal_Indicator (U+00AA). Ah, diversity!

The blog’s still not quite right. There are some broken links, some missing images, and I’m not happy with the color scheme or the layout yet, etc. etc. But yeah; it’s somewhat presentable.

What a lovely scatter plot…

A big thick thesaurus used to be one of my most beloved  possessions.  I kept one on my desk at work and a 2nd copy near my chair at home.  I used it daily; not as a writing aid but as means to expand my thinking on a topic.  So clearly I’m the perfect audience member of this lovely talk about mapping the content of a thesaurus over time.

That shows four snapshots over time of the English language.  The older rectangles are smaller – so old to new is blue, red, green, and the most modern is yellow.  Individual words are points in the rectangles.  The rectangles are treemaps  based on the outline of the  thesaurus.  In the yellow/modern rectangle sharp boundaries appear in the coloration between branches in that outline.  Notice how homogenous language used to be.  I think that reveals when the categories were designed; you see something similar with the dewey decimal system.

The shading denotes how old words are; the black bits are old words.  The lighter bits show were the language has expanded, the fabric has stretched.

At the end of the talk he tosses out provocative hints of other things you could do with the data.  Thomas Jefferson hung out on this landscape talking about football.    Metaphors cut highways across this  territory.  Moral courage is on the decline.

The author is  Mark Alexander and his tumbler account has more pretty pictures and charts.  I’ve often wished that libraries had a tree map of  their  collection near the front door.

I’m amused that the organizers of the Maker Faire in NYC have discovered that they need to replicate on a local level the function of the Federal Communications Commission on the national level: “Due to the nature of the event, we need to know if you plan to use radio frequencies and if so, what frequency and/or frequencies and the amount of power you are using so we can coordinate placement and usage. There was a detailed list of potential radio frequency issues requested on the maker entry form.”