June 30, 2005
Practical and Important Things Class
It would be nice to have a class at some point during grade school where they teach everyone the important things that everyone is supposed to just pick up somewhere or learn from their parents. Parents often teach these things to their kids, but clearly not always, since you often run into people who don't know them. Maybe they can get rid of teaching cursive (does anyone actually use cursive?), and use the time that would be freed up.
Some examples:
1. Which direction do you turn a light bulb, knob, or screw? (righty tighty, lefty loosey)
2. How do you tie a tie?
3. What is the right way to shave? This is a bit controversial, most places on the web (e.g. here, here, and here) discourage men from shaving against the grain. However that advice doesn't really work without instruction.
4. How do you know if a taxicab in your city is available or taken?
etc. . .
Posted by Lonne at 08:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Congress to allow tax free bonds to finance "private roads"
I was describing my wireless idea to a buddy last night at a party. I told him wireless was like public roads and he started kidding around that I had become socialist. Today he sent me this:
Looking for ways to finance highway projects without hitting the public trough, the U.S. Congress appears set to pass a proposal to encourage private ownership of new toll roads.The provision, part of the highway spending bill now being hammered out by a Senate and House conference committee, would allow private companies to raise up to $15 billion for highway projects with bonds that are exempt from federal income taxes.
The point here is that the government can't afford to pay directly for infrastructure and perhaps that private toll roads are not a monopoly business. My point was that in cities toll roads don't make sense. As for how to fund the wireless plan, how about a surcharge on existing wireless and wired data services :-).
Posted by Alex at 02:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
My goodness! Everyone listen to NPR right now!! "Morgan" is on the radio!
Update: OK that was cool. NPR just did a long segment about one of "Morgan"'s web sites, Overheard In New York. After the interview they took calls from people with cute stories. Cool.
Posted by Dan at 11:50 AM | TrackBack (0)
Tighter! Brighter!
The nicest thing about digital stuff is that previously scarce resources become endless. Like digital bubble wrap. Or digital lite brite.
Posted by Dan at 09:31 AM | TrackBack (0)
The Vulgar and the Common
I may start another blog to post interesting etymologies I find, a descendant of my former RT newsletter (a note to my fellow Spareinkers: maybe we should create categories on the blog & then I can just have a category for these here?). Funny, as a side comment, how creating a traditional web page (such as my etymology page) just doesn't cut it anymore for me: no one will know if/when I update it and if I do put the updates on the top, then it's really a blog. Until I create another blog for this, if I do, I will post them here:
The English "vulgar" comes from the Latin "vulgus," meaning "common" -- the common descending into the vulgar is a great example of the pattern that words degrade over time.
Now, thinking more politically, I will add that this descent is also a linguistic recognition of Aristotle's political point that, that which is cared for by all (that which is common) is indeed cared for by none (it devolves into the vulgar).
Tonight I was looking for other contemporary English words that come from the same root, vulgus. The most interesting one I found is divulge. Here's what dictionary.com has to say on it:
[Middle English divulgen, from Old French divulguer, from Latin divulgare, to publish : di-, dis-, among; see dis- + vulgare, to spread among the multitude (from vulgus, common people).]
Next time you divulge something (that is: publish something), remember that it's the commoners that you're telling it to!
Posted by Morgan at 12:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 29, 2005
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
I think it would probably be fairly interesting to induce closed timelike curves, violating causality.
But I don't think it is true that "if you run a movie of a baseball game in reverse people will laugh."
Posted by Lonne at 08:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Googlewhacks
Any websites that list specific Googlewhacks of course cause the Googlewhacks they list to no longer be Googlewhacks. The original Googlewhacks experience a sort of a Schrodinger's Cat situation. As soon as you list a Googlewhack on the web, it ceases to be a Googlewhack.
One way to hedge against this is to list a Googlewhack and a similar pair of qualifying words that result in exactly 0 hits. For example, at the time of this writing, "parapraxis skullduggery" is a Googlewhack. As soon as this page is indexed by Google, however, it will cease to be a Googlewhack and "transliterating parapraxis," which currently results in 0 hits, will become one.
Posted by Lonne at 06:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Did you know?
I've spent a lot of time recently arguing the merits of the standard English system of measurement over the metric system. One of the many things we are all taught growing up is that the metric system is simply better than the older system and the only reason we Americans haven't gone along with the rest of the world and adopted the metric system is that we're too lazy or stupid or stubborn. This is simply false. We use the old system for a very good reason, and that is because for the most part, it's more convenient (and because we were never conquered by the French armies and forced to change our ways). While nobody disputes the obvious utility of the metric system for scientific applications, few proponents of the metric system have really considered how, for example, a system in which temperatures in most of the populated earth range from -17 to 38 degrees is really any better the identical system scaled up to range from 0 to 100. True, it's hard to convert feet into miles, but when you're using feet, to measure, say, the size of a room, you don't need to convert them into miles. Feet are useful because they have the right amount of granularity to measure things like room sizes. Meters are clumsy for that kind of human-scale measurement. Acres are useful because they have the right amount of granularity to measure things like house plots. Of course, anything you can do with imperial units you can do with metric units, but for the most part, it's just less convenient, less human scale. At some point the metric people tried to divide the day into 20 hours of 100 minutes. It failed, because hours of 60 minutes are more convenient. You can divide them into 4 sections of 15 minutes, 3 sections of 20 minutes, 6 sections of 10 minutes, and so forth. And to a human, an hour is a very convenient period of time, more so than a longer, less divisible hour would have been.
This post isn't about that though. It's just to share something I didn't know until yesterday but found interesting. Sailors and pilots use the measurement of Nautical Miles for the same reason that we use Statute Miles: because it's simply more convenient. A nautical mile is about 1.2 Statute miles, but it also means something: it is 1 minute (1/60th of a degree) along a longitudinal section (or latitude, more or less, along the equator).
So let's say you wanted to calculate how far New York (lat about 40'30") is from the equator along the earth's surface. Well that would be 40 * 60 + 30 = 2430 nautical miles. If you wanted to figure out about how far New York was from, say, Madrid (same latitude), well, you'd just figure out how many degrees to go (-74 to -3 = 71), multiply by 60, adjust for the latitude (1-sin(40.5 in radians)), and you get 2766 nautical miles. That would be wrong because you'd never actually go straight across a latitude line.. but you get the point. Nautical miles make this stuff easy to calculate.
A knot, then, is one nautical mile per hour. Originally speed was measured in boats by dropping a knotted rope down and counting the number of knots that passed in a given amount of time. I don't sail, but I can see how this system of measurement -- latitude, longitude, nautical miles, and knots -- would be incredibly convenient for navigation on earth.
Posted by Dan at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (7)
Did the US/Britain sever Pakistan's Internet connection?
According to CNN, Pakistan's connection to the Internet went down yesterday. Via Powerline, we have this story from the Miror
SAS troops were last night poised to storm into Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden.Special forces have "good intelligence" the al-Qaeda boss or a senior henchman is holed up in a Taliban enclave.
Two squadrons are on stand-by waiting for the go-ahead from reconnaissance troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
Specialist counter-terrorist soldiers in the rapid-deployment group are on high alert at the SAS's Hereford base.
Now, I don't know if OBL will be captured, but if the SAS or US troops are about to do a major sweep of Al Queada, it would be helpful to disrupt their communications to the world for the duration of the sweep.
Note: There was a a lot of consipiracy mongering on slashdot about the US wanting to listen in on the traffic. I think it is more likely to be an active C3I disruption.
Posted by Alex at 04:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
60% of television is cable.
In this post, I talked about the amount NY consumers would be saved byhaving totally free wireless data. Now via Slashdot comes this report that 60% of TVs are Cable TVs. Now although you can't yet watch regular television over the Internet, you can download a lot of shows.
Would New Yorkers still pay for cable if they got sufficiently good content over the Internet? What sort of Internet video services would emerge in this environment. See e.g. this Internet television channel.
Posted by Alex at 04:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
What Are We Going to Call This Decade?
Every time I hear a suggested answer to this question, all it does is increase my list of things we're not going to be calling it:
1. The Noughties.
2. D1-2K
3. The Oh-Ohs
4. The Two Thousands
5. The Ohs
6. The Turn of the Century/Millennium
7. The Oughts
8. The Naughts
Paul Cox and Elana Centor have some good analysis, but don't come to any convincing conclusions.
When you refer to a time period, it is more important that it be completely obvious what you are talking about than that it be cute or short. No one is going to call it "The Noughties" because other people will not understand. People are more likely to use "The 2000 to 2010 decade" -- even though it is long, it is not confusing. I'm still holding out for an elegant solution, however.
Posted by Lonne at 03:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
The Meaning of 'Spare'
The word 'Spare' in our name has many meanings. Here are a few, according to Answers.com:
1. To refrain from treating harshly; treat mercifully or leniently.
2. To refrain from harming or destroying.
3. To save or relieve from experiencing or doing (something): spared herself the trouble of going.
4. To hold back from; withhold or avoid: spared no expense for the celebration.
5. To use with restraint: Don't spare the mustard.
6. To give or grant out of one's resources; afford: Can you spare ten minutes?
7. To be frugal.
8. To refrain from inflicting harm; be merciful or lenient.
9. Kept in reserve: a spare part; a spare pair of sneakers.
10. Being in excess of what is needed; extra.
11. Free for other use; unoccupied: spare time.
12. Not lavish, abundant, or excessive: a spare diet.
13. Lean and trim.
14. Not profuse or copious.
15. A replacement, especially a tire, reserved for future need.
16. The act of knocking down all ten pins with two successive rolls of a bowling ball and the score so made.
Posted by Lonne at 03:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
China Is Propping up the Renminbi Not the Dollar
Tyler Cowen points to yet another article about whether the Chinese will keep propping up the dollar. Can we get real for a moment? If China made the renminbi freely convertible, the next step would be mad capital glight out of China into US dollars. The reason China exports is because that is the only way the Chinese have to protect their savings. It is simply way too risky to subject your lifesavings to the capriciousness of the Chinese government.
The Chinese aren't proppingup the Dollar. They are propping up the reminbe. Rememberig that fact should add a lot of sanity to many of these discussions.
Posted by Alex at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)
Is Urban Wireless like Urban Roads?
Andrew Rasiej is running for NYC Public Advocate on a campaign to make "WiFi" available to everyone in New York. The actual plan on his website is a terrible plan, but the idea is really interesting.
I'm a pretty hard core free marketer, but there are some coordination problems that are really difficult for the market to solve. Roads are the standard example. You don't want to have to pay a toll every time you turn a corner. You don't want to have to figure out exactly which car licensing entity you have to join to be entitle to drive without stopping and paying a toll. There is an increasing returns to scale problem that leads eventually to a monopoly road licensor. On the buyer side, the consumers then eventually organize into bulk buying cooperatives to negotiate prices on their behalf. Since the buyers at that scale are also voters, effectively roads are government goods.
Urban wireless looks a lot like roads. We want the ability for any device to be able to get on the Internet wirelessly anywhere and anytime. We don't want to have a new registration procedure every time we change position. We don't want to have to program our refrigerator to use a particular wireless service. We don't want to think about which wireless service works in which subways.
Another major commonality is that a really large fraction of the costs are fixed rather than per user. In the case of wireless, the unit costs are primarily marketing and administrative. The price carriers charge has to be higher than the cost of closing a sale with a customer. And this creates an inefficient equilibrium because the higher the price, the more expensive it is to acquire the customer thus a much narrower base of customers/users if the marketing/acquisition costs were lower.
Now, it should be obvious that the benefits of a pervasive and free high speed wireless data network in New York would be HUGE. It would mean a rapid shift away from legacy cellular and cable to IP telephony and IPTV. It would mean that New York becomes a center of gadget innovation . It would also be a massive subsidy to one of New York's top industries, content.
Right now Verizon is offering 3mbps wireless data for $80/month. I don't know their cost structure but I would bet that at scale they could bid to provide all of NYC with EVDO for under $1b/year (4m actual users * $20 actual monthly operating cost * 12 = $960m).
I don't have the numbers handy but I have no doubt that right now New Yorkers are spending substantially more than that on mobile phones, land lines, internet connections, cable television, etc. And this doesn't count the price New Yorkers pay because getting the marginal unit of anyone of these is just too expensive. It also doens't count the value lost because hardware gets bundles with wireless. Just as a data point, basically most of the 917 and 646 area codes are mobile phones. Assume that each area code has 1m users and each of those users pays $40/month for their phone service, we capture $1b of value there alone!
My proposal is that New York city put out an RFP for carriersto supply all New Yorkers with zipless free mobile wireless for 5 years.
I worry that this proposal will be mangled beyond recognition by the political process, but I think if we pay attention we can make something likes this happen!
Posted by Alex at 01:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
New Freedom Tower
Wow. The new Freedom Tower actually looks like a building I'd be proud to have in New York. Who woulda thunk that after all of those ugly designs someone would have come up with something worth building? I love the concept of eight triangular planes connecting two offsetting squares at the top and bottom. Apparently the first 200 feet will be built out of some new transparent concrete material. My prediction is that this one will go up fairly quickly, as there's nothing wrong with it that I can see. Although they might want to think about putting a much cooler spire on top. More renderings here.
Posted by Dan at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Life Tenure
Stuart Taylor makes a very persuasive case that life tenure for judges is an anachronism from the time when people's minds outlasted their bodies.
Posted by Dan at 10:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Synchronization of Periods
I was recently wondering what the evolutionary advantage to the fact that when multiple women live together or spend lots of time together, their periods become synchronized. I e-mailed a mailing list of evolutionary psychology professors, and here are their responses:
Never made any sense to me in that harem set ups are hard to defend when all come into receptivity at the same time but that's assuming that the male hangs around. If male in and out quickly then can impregnate more females at one visit.Otherrwise the reason for most mammals is that it is predator protection with more offspring at once and predator can't eat them all.
~~
I’m also not a professional scientist of any kind…. But I am a woman so that’s an easy question. Everyone gets PMS at the same time and thus they avoid having to put up with PMS in their midst all month long.
~~
I think, as a poet and a woman, "evolutionary advantage" is a competitive phrase that does not really suggest what
the humanities said all along. Synchrony, the music of the spheres, harmony of the universe. The reason it happens
with women's periods is Physics, and has to do with the greater mass and gravitational attraction. Tides work on larger bodies of liquids,
and effectively, tides are what synchronized women's periods are. The fact that any individual woman's monthly cycle imitates (but
without greater mass does not harmonize, synchronize, or connect with) the moon shows that the more connectivity,
the better.I have found lots of these lovely synchronizations: the angle of the earth's axis of rotation is 23 degrees and we have 23 paired chromosomes, 23 bones in our back, and our days are not exactly 24 hours but something over 23 hours. The sun is 23 x 4 million miles
away. All this counting together is pretty, a coincidence, like gongs, like the way male and female voices join in singing, soprano, alto, tenor bass... those musical scales are also connected in various pleasing patterns...~~
This question came up a year ago. Here's a link to the final post in the thread:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/30421
Posted by Morgan at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 28, 2005
The perfect response to Kelo
Developer wants to build a hotel on Justice Souter's home
I've been thinking about clever ways to protest the decision--and I think that they may have taken the cake.
On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter's home.Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.
They have a sense of humor, too:
The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Café" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."
Posted by Morgan at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 26, 2005
SpareInk: Five guys with too much time on their hands
SpareInk is long-overdue blog. Five friends who spend too much time analyzing the problems of the world and not enough time implementing their solutions. This blog is their attempt at a method to continue their conversations for the world to see, so we can all see what happens as a result.
Posted by Morgan at 01:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
