This post by Zack Exley articulates exactly what is wrong with the overuse of the "we're in a war" excuse constantly used by the Bush administration. Al Qaeda can't hurt us in any meaningful way. They are not the USSR. They are not Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan. They're not even Canada. And yet, we have allowed our government to do things we never allowed during World War II and the Cold War. There's something very wrong with that, and I'm glad to see someone with at least a little influence saying the right things.
What the credit card companies need to sell is a device that informs you in real time of an attempt to charge to your card. You then have some amount of time to approve the transaction. If you do not approve the transaction in time, or explicitly reject it, the payment is declined. You should also be able to whitelist some merchant so that their transactions are automatically approved. The query should happen as close to instantaneously as possible, so that you can use it to authorize transactions at any ordinary retail establishment. Alternatively, instead of a standalone device, it could be integrated with a phone, perhaps as just a text message exchange. I know Paypal is working on something like that, but Paypal is not supported nearly as much as credit cards, especially not in the physical world. Of course, as someone who as to work with credit cards, processors, and the bizarre mainframes that drive it all, I know it wouldn't be easy. But it's definitely an idea whose time has come.
Alastair Reynolds has written another fine work of hard science fiction set in the Revelation Space universe. The narrator travels from one star system to another, chasing a man responsible for the death of his employer and his employer's wife. Upon his arrival, however, he slowly discovers that not everything is as it seems. The world he expected to find has been vastly altered by a mysterious plague, while his target eludes him, and he finds himself the target of more than one hunter. It's a complicated mystery set in an imaginatively bleak setting. It's a smaller story in scale than Revelation Space, with only hints at the epic scale covered in the latter work. Reynolds seems more suited to working on a grander scale, so Chasm City is slightly weaker than the other book, but is nonetheless a fine effort.
I think the furor over Mel Gibson's drunken, anti-Semitic tirade brings up a host of interesting questions. How much do the beliefs of musicians, actors, etc. matter when it comes to consuming their product? I have no doubt that some of my favorites believe stupid and/or offensive things. They might not say them publicly, but isn't the problem the belief itself? After all, that's part of why people have jumped all over Gibson. They feel like they have been deceived for years and it took alcohol and an arrest to reveal what he really thought. Where does freedom enter into the equation? It may be reprehensible, but we should be careful not to create an environment hostile to free speech.
Then there's the question of punishment and rehabilitation. Rob Schneider has declared a Gibson boycott, that he would never work with Gibson no matter what
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. On the one hand, it's understandable that he wouldn't want to associate with someone who believes such things. On the other hand, if most of Hollywood behaved the same way and marginalized him, Gibson would see no point in attempting to change his ways. I don't care about Mel Gibson or about this relatively minor incident that has become national news, but it does provoke some interesting questions.
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Which I'm sure has destroyed what would have inevitably been a wonderful partnership, since they have so much in common.
Austin just got a car share service. Basically, a car share is a membership-based organization that allows its members to rent cars at a low rate, in addition to a monthly fee. The idea is not much different from a rental car on the surface, but it allows a considerably different mode of use, as rental car companies charge by the day and cater to out-of-town visitors and people with their primary vehicle in the shop. The idea behind a car share is to make it possible for some people to not have a primary vehicle at all.
We own two cars, which are idle on average for about at least 22 hours per day. That seems like a waste of our money, even with the inexpensive cars we have. Compare the cost of a car with the value you get out of it, and it's pretty expensive
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. This isn't for everyone right now, but it's for some people, and it can drive change (haha). Consider someone who lives in a downtown area, with their job and grocery shopping in walking distance. Consider someone who has a motorcycle or scooter as their primary transportation, but still owns a car or truck for backup. Maybe you're a student who runs errands on the weekends, but stays on campus the rest of the time. Then there's the couple with a single car that occasionally needs a backup. Or, with a slightly different system, maybe you drive a tiny Toyota Yaris but occasionally need a truck.
I think this could combine well with a resurgence of rail travel. Energy costs are enormous for airlines, which trickle down to us. Then there are the delays, security issues, airline peanuts, cramped spaces, no-fly lists, as well as airports often being located well outside the city proper. Trains, on the other hand, are marvelously efficient, low-key, and far more spacious and comfortable. For medium length travel, say, the 200 miles from Austin to Dallas, the times required for driving, flying, and riding a train don't differ much. On a train, I can read, play a video game, or take a nap. Given the choice between riding for 4 hours of useful time
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, or driving for 3 hours staring at asphalt, I'd definitely call the former a more valuable use of time.
I can do this now, but I have to deal with the hassle of a car when I get to Dallas. If the car share programs in those two cities are affiliated and near the train station, I get the advantage of inexpensive, environmentally-friendlier inter-city travel combined with the convenience of a car for local driving, without having the overhead of actually owning a vehicle. The cities of Texas may be less ideal for this sort of model, but I can imagine it being very useful in the urban Northeast, and its success there trickling back to us.
Of course, the real revolution will come when the cars can drive themselves, but that's a topic for later.
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And that's with a slow train; imagine a medium fast train at 120 mph.
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Take a $20,000 car that gets 25 mpg that I keep for 5 years before selling it for $8,000. I pay $1600 in sales tax and $500 destination charge. I drive 10,000 miles per year, using 400 gallons of gas at $2.75/gallon. My insurance costs me $200 every 6 months. That's $21,800 net over the 5 years and 50,000 miles, which is $0.43/mile.
I have decided that I will enthusiastically watch the Women's World Cup next year. I have a daughter now, and I don't want her to think that women's sports are worth less than the men's. Besides, this way I can see a US soccer team that doesn't suck.
Effendi is the sequel to Pashazade, continuing the story of "ZeeZee" in an Alexandria of the future of an alternate past. Some of the mystery that brought our fearless hero to Alexandria. This time, though, the stakes have grown higher. Instead of figuring out his own situation, Zee Zee discovers he has the weight of an unexpected friend and Alexandria itself on him.
Effendi carries over many of the virtues of Pashazade. It has the same distinct mood and atmosphere. It's a lesser book, though, partly because it doesn't quite cross the gap in shifting its subject from ZeeZee to Alexandria. The structure is a little annoying, with flashbacks and flashforwards coming with great frequency. Grimwood also leaves a little too unsaid. I might have read the book too fast, or maybe I'm dense, but I felt that the plot could have used a little more exposition to clue me in to what the heck was going on. I had it mostly figured it out by the end, but it would have been nice to feel less clueless in the middle of it. Still, it's a decent sequel, and I look forward to getting my grubby paws on Felaheen, the final book in the trilogy.
Charles Stross dips his toe into fantasy with The Family Trade. It's not very fantastic, in either sense of the word. Imagine that there is a parallel world to ours, with the same geography, but a very different history. Now imagine that some people can will themselves between worlds. Got it? That's the premise. Kind of interesting, but Stross will have to make it up on plot and character development. Uh oh. Ok, so Stross can do plot, but character development? Kind of a weakness. So we have this cardboard heroine thrown into a completely bizarre and foreign situation with a Mafia-like family, who finds her footing and forges ahead with aplomb, encountering other cardboard characters along the way. And it's kind of boring. Not so boring that I won't finish the series, but still... It's limp. Weak. Uninspired. Stross can do better. He has. Singularity Sky, or some of his short stories, for example. This thing? Blah. Skip it.
There was a guy driving like a jerk this morning. I got the sense that maybe, just maybe, there was a legitimate reason for it, but I was still convinced he was just a jerk. That got me thinking... how do you know when someone's legitimately in a major hurry, like with a woman in labor in the back seat, or 2 miles from home at World Cup kickoff time? The only way we civilians have to signal our urgency is by honking horns, flashing lights, and driving aggressively, all things that an aggro psycho does. Then I realized it didn't matter. In neither case do I want to be in the way. I don't care about your reasons, just go past me so I don't die.
I don't watch "The Daily Show" regularly anymore, but I did catch the episode with Aasif Mandvi responding to the "opportunity" in the Middle East right now. Check it out. I'm amazed that he could keep a straight face the whole way through. Watch it all the way through; the September 11th zinger is a killer.
I just found a friend I hadn't seen nor heard from since freshman year in high school by using the Amazon wishlist feature. If you're looking for someone, maybe that'll work for you.
Wikipedia has the standard county-by-county red vs. blue image of the United States shaded by the results of the 2004 presidential election. The difference with this one, besides using purple, is that the counties have been resized according to population. Looks a little more balanced, doesn't it?
Take a look at this trivial web application. It's just sort -fgu -t, -k2. I do something like that manually when I'm transcribing our shopping list, so I don't have to hunt through the list for the next item every 30 seconds. It's just a lot more efficient to go down a list. Even numbering the list is a big improvement.
I take two lessons from this. First of all, I've already had this idea. I've had the idea to make it a web-based application as well. In fact, I've had ideas built on this basic concept that would be enough to keep me working on it for years. I've elaborated the base concept so much as to make the end product fundamentally different. I've also made it big enough that there's no way I'll even start it, because what I'd be able to do in any short amount of time would fall so far short that I'd consider it useless. The above may be a trivial effort, but I have no doubt it will be useful to a number of people. It forms a nucleus for growing something more.
The other lesson is how obvious this idea would be in a slightly different context. Imagine you were programming a robot to do your grocery shopping for you. Any solution that didn't involve the robot fetching items in a similarly sequential order would announce your incompetence as a programmer. It's so obviously the right thing to do that any halfway decent programmer would do it. That to me suggests a business opportunity, or, more precisely, a whole category of them. Computing has lots of useful algorithms for efficiently sorting, searching, collecting, packing, etc. that can apply well to the real world. Most people, however, are not programmers, and even those that are can be distressingly narrow-minded about applying their knowledge to optimize their daily activities.
Now, you could easily say that I'm a software guy and so I see everything as a software problem. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right
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? You would be quite right, but you'd also be missing the point. What matters is that computing concepts can effectively solve problems people have in the real world. There's something special about computing in its broad, nearly universal applicability to just about any problem that can be coherently described. Besides, having a perspective that differs is a benefit rather than a handicap when trying to come up with novel businesses.
There's an example of this that you've probably already heard of: Getting Things Done by David Allen. Now, he's not a computing guy. That's not really relevant. A key part of GTD, as I understand it
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, is keeping track of the status of all of your tasks. Every task is either:
In process right now
Waiting for you to advance it
Waiting for some condition to happen (time, other input, etc.)
Done
Future
Those aren't quite the categories Allen uses, but it's pretty close. Along with this, you need some method for prioritizing what task to work on and how to handle the appearance of a task more important than the one you're currently working on. This sounds a lot like the process model that operating systems use to multi-task. There are a number of programs running at once with a single CPU
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. Only one can be running at any given time. The rest are either waiting for input from the user, or sleeping in the background pending some event, like 3pm or the completion of a download. The solutions are similar because the problems are similar.
There are a million examples that I could come up with
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. The principles are universal. That's obviously not the entire formula, else I'd be typing my letter of resignation instead of a weblog post, but it's certainly a start. What remains to be determined is which real world problems map well to which computing concepts; some of them are obvious, but I'm sure there are many surprising and subtle ones. Furthermore, though an algorithm may map well conceptually to a real world problem, turning that into a useful product or service is hardly obvious. There's a lot to mine there, and I'm certainly going to be keeping these ideas in the back of my mind.
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Or, when all you have is a gun, everyone looks like a criminal, but that's a tangent too far even for me.
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Caveat: I've only read the first couple of chapters. Jessica, who has read more, assures me that it's not all obvious from there (unlike many "life method" books).
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In the general, personal computer case, though this is rapidly becoming obsolete. The general principles are the same, however.
Some time back, I mentioned that I restarted a project that had been dormant for a while. My interest lasted a few weeks before I dropped it again. There were a couple reasons behind it. It was an interesting project, but I just couldn't convince myself that it was useful. I saw too little benefit in sinking my time into a project whose main value would be as a curiosity. The other was that I just didn't want to take the time for this or any other project with such a low chance of amounting to anything. Uma's only going to be young once. I realize I may be closing a door forever (dramatic, I know), but she's worth it.
Bruce Schneier explains how terrorism is succeeding right now because we're panicking. All of the incidents he mentions can only be viewed as horrible failures in our counter-terrorist policies. A key excerpt:
We're all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain.
[snip]
Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.
Some maniac went on a rampage and shot a bunch of people at a school. It's happened before, right? Well, this time it happened at my old elementary school, and the victim was one of my first-grade teachers
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and the mother of a girl a year ahead of me in high school. I don't really remember her or her daughter, but it's still a shock.
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She was actually a second-grade teacher, but I went to the second grade class for math because I was a huge nerd even at age 6.
We managed to get Uma to take her nap away from home today, if only briefly. It was a big step. One mistake we made was that we didn't introduce her to different sleep environments back when she was barely conscious of her environment. Our reasons at the time seemed good: it was hard enough at the time without introducing additional variables. Nevertheless, it made things much more difficult for her to try to get her to adapt once she became aware of and accustomed to her room.
We have a couple of events coming up in the not-too-distant future, and since things have been going so well, we thought we'd ruin it all and try this. She complained for something like 35 minutes before quieting and, presumably, falling asleep. She never got really upset, but she wasn't particularly happy about getting dumped away like that.
When she's unhappy by herself, I always imagine her standing up and staring at the door, focusing on it all her considerable will as though sheer stubbornness could make it open and pull Mommy (or Daddy) through. Obviously, we're never happy when she's unhappy, but it seems like we're more sensitive than nearly all the other parents we know. I don't think that's a bad thing; Uma's a pretty happy kid and very well-behaved, though of course we can't assume that's because of anything we've done
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. I can imagine this sounding rather odd to many other parents, though, and also to many non-parents, that we've been so careful.
Still, it was time to, if not cut, at least loosen the cord a bit more. She's old enough that she can sleep away from home and give us a break. We're hoping to be able to take a week-long vacation next summer, just the two of us. I'm sure she'll be ready by then, but I'm not so sure we'll be able to get to those weddings this fall. Oh well.
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Well, back when Jessica was pregnant, I did read in some parenting magazine at the dentist that pregnant women who regularly ate chocolate had happier children, which advice we followed, so maybe some credit is due.
A Passage to India is considered one of the classic works of literature about India. I say it's overrated. I admit, I found the early 20th century writing style to be a bit tiresome, which is a rather subjective judgment. There was more to my dislike than that. You can tell Forster tried hard not to be the white man looking down, but he could not escape the colonial condescension for "the native." The characters, while not cardboard cutouts, were also not the richly drawn portraits of, say, The Namesake. Without elegant writing, an interesting perspective, and well-written characters, the plot hardly matters. English departments have anointed A Passage to India the canonical novel about India, but there are far better ones out there. I'm sure I can find better studies of British India as well.
I've invested a lot of effort in trying to convince people of one thing or another. I've also spent a lot of time thinking about better ways of doing it. One thing that never occurred to me until reading this interview with Steven Soderbergh is how people actually change their minds. I don't even really know what's been the key factor in changing my own mind. I have theories, but I've never matched them up against reality.
Everybody's changed their mind about something, so you'd think it would be easy. For someone who's spent so much time trying to convince people of various things, that I've never investigated real instances of people changing their minds about something is kind of embarassing. Is it emotional? Logical? Maybe there's a trigger event. I have no idea, and I think I ought to get some idea before trying again.
Maybe that should be one of my conversation-starting questions when I meet new people
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. It sure beats "What do you do?" So what have you changed your mind about lately, and how did that happen?
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Which will happen a lot, with my busy social life.
