I’ve occasionally wondered if the sex offender registry might lead to some sort of flocking behavior where those on the registry tend to gather in particular locations.  I’ve even looked for, but not found the heat map showing where they flock too.  Yeah Google, I thought you were all seeing?

Similarly I’ve wondered if we will seem other scarlet letter offender registries?

So it is with much delight that I learn that Utah is close to creating a registry for white collar criminals.  Apparently Utah has a lot of affinity fraud.

Gosh if they set one of these up in New York state I can visualize the what the heat map of Manhattan would look like.

I’m currently enjoying Deborah Tannen’s book on Conversational Style.  Here is her summary of that might be called New Yorker style.  Sometime’s it’s called fast talking,   People unpracticed in this style often find in exausting or obnoxious.   She calls it “HIgh-Involvement Style.”

1. Topic

• (a) prefer personal topics,
• (b) shift topics abruptly,
• (c) introduce topics without hesitance,
• (d) persistence (if a new topic is not picked up by others, reintroduce it. Data show persistence up to a maximum of seven tries).

2. Genre

• (a) tell more stories,
• (b) tell stories in rounds, in which (i) internal evaluation (Labov, 1972) is preferred over external (i.e., demonstrate the point of the story rather than lexicaling it), (ii) omit abstract (Labov, 1972) (i.e. plunge right in without introduction; cohesion is established by juxtaposition and theme);
• (c) preferred point of a story is the emotional experience of the teller.

3. Pace

• (a) faster rate of speech
• (b) pauses avoided (silence has a negative value; it is taken as evidence of lack of rapport-Tannen, 1984);
• (c) faster rate of turn taking,
• (d) cooperative overlap (the notion of back-channel responses [Duncan 1974] is extended to include lengthy questions and echoes, resulting from a process of participatory listenership).

4. Expressive paralinguistics

• (a) expressive phonology,
• (b) pitch and amplitude shifts,
• (c) marked voice quality,
• (d) strategic pauses

I’m a bit of crank about the right answer to the question: “What has improved the quality of life the most for humans?”  Since pretty clearly the answer is Public Health.

Here’s a nice example of one of the many stories of that kind:  A Striking Change in Lightning Deaths.

I wonder if there is an estimate of how many lives the slogan: “”when thunder roars, go indoors” saved?

Ha!  I have here a service X that is listens for it’s clients on private port N.  It failed to start because another activity Z was using N.  Looking at the state of things it’s clear that Z got N randomly assigned when it established a connection to a service on another machine.

This is the kind of bug you discover only if you get a short debug loop around what is typically a rare activity – rebooting the server in this case.  Gosh the chances of this happening are small.

I have been parking my private listeners in the private port range (49152 to 65535) for almost 40 years.  Maybe, I need to stop doing that.  Or at least assure that all listeners get started before any other activities start using the net – yeah right.

But now I’m confused.  I see that there is a concept of “ephemeral ports,” but the Wikipedia article leaves one with the impression that in practice you don’t know what range they are being drawn from.

So now I’m a bit confused what best practice might be.  Advocates of resource discovery score a few more points?

A few misc. items…

Happiness & Economics … What a wonderfully weird chart this is.  It’s weird in two ways.  First off what the heck is going on in the US?  Secondly this is basically the inverse of the chart of happiness v.s. income.

Programming languages – There is a very nice dialect of Lisp build on top of the Python ecology.   Sort of analogous to the way clozure is built on top of the Java ecology.  It’s called hy. Very smooth interoperability with Python, across many Python implementations.  For example you can casually load libraries written in hy into python code and visa versa.  Macros, backquote, real lambdas, everything is value returning, etc.  Surprisingly it even works pretty well with the Python debugger, such as it is.

Pricing games – As an collector of amusing pricing games this article that attempts to puzzle out the details of MTA ticket pricing is fun.

Programming – I wish I could find a standard tool that would let me make a compressed archive and then insert a descriptive header of unpredictable size at the front of it.  Something suitable for when you are building an archive by streaming and after the fact you want to prepend the cataloging metadata.  I guess I’m just a bit surprised that this use case isn’t so common that we don’t have a widely used tool that supports it.

Current events – NYPD?  What a bunch of babies!

Tourist Info:  The Brooklyn Art Museum is amazing.

Pypdfocr is very nice.   The input is a PDF file, for example the output of scanner.  The output is another PDF, which looks like the original but now has the words recognized in it.  That lets you can search it, and if you index all your documents then that’s very useful.  Spotlight on my Mac sees into these.

You can extract the raw text using pdftotxt, which is nice for reading on the train.

I was delighted the it understands columns pretty well.  It is not so good at paragraph breaks though.

I gather that a some of people use this to scan all the paper, receipts, et. al. that comes into their home.  It has some clever switches to help with that usecase.

It is a bit of a pain to install, lots of homebrew packages and pip packages are required; and then – at least in my case – it works but it complains that I didn’t get it right.  There are pages that talk about these things; but I’m happy enough now.

Recently I’ve added Ponzi Tracker to my RSS reader and it’s fun in that way that we all enjoy things that feed our confirmation bias.  And who doesn’t love a story about a criminal.  Today’s post included this bit:

“… the court-appointed Receiver, Kenneth D. Bell, begins his quest to recover “false profits” from thousands of victims that were fortunate enough to profit from their investment.  The receiver’s efforts to recover these “false profits” will become markedly easier in the event that Burks pleads guilty to the fraud, since the guilty plea or conviction of a Ponzi schemer allow the use of the “Ponzi presumption” that significantly simplifies the burden of proof required in the so-called “clawback” actions.”

I didn’t know that.  It seems like a big gaping hole in the investor protections that encourage corporate risk taking.  The reason we have limits on investor liability is that it lets the investors delegate risk taking to the corporation while avoiding the worst case scenarios that they will be held responsible for the evil that firm does.  Their risk is limited to the amount of their investment.  Back in the day only the king had the power to get away with murder, but then it devolved to his friends.

So I’d love to know why Ponzi schemes are unique in this regard.  And I’d love to know that if we convicted a few large financial firms of just the right crimes we could then claw back the money from the “lucky” ones who cashed out early.

Any amateur social scientist knows the next question: What about incentives?  If you threaten investor class it creates an incentive.  Presumably the kings friends let this loophole appear because the victims of Ponzi schemes are somehow unique when compare to the other victims of corporate malfeasance.  Maybe it’s about affinity.  Which is ironic, as affinity is a common feature of Ponzi schemes, but in this case I think it might be that the Ponzi victims are called “investors.”

If only the victims of the mortgage crisis had called themselves investors.  If only we could learn use that phrase “false profits” more.

Another example of a device for helping with your self control, in this case a sock you can lock your cell phone in.

Click bait:

• Awesome story of the evil light bulb industry cartel
• The Triffin Dilemma – a long geeky economics essay
• DIY interior storm windows.

For years I’ve been frustrated by my inablity to puzzle out how to write this in bash:

H=$(dirname $0)

so it’s safe if $0 has spaces in it.

Clearly

H="$(dirname $0)"

is better, but still the $0 isn’t usefully quoted.

I finally complained to the shellcheck author that this should be in the FAQ, though there isn’t a FAQ. And he assured me if you do it right it isn’t a problem.  He also happened to mention the answer:

H="$(dirname "$0")"

I complained that just because it wasn’t a question if you’d ask if you knew the answer didn’t mean that it wasn’t a commonly asked question.  So he added (or updated) a wiki page to say that the $(…) creates a new “context”.

So there you go.