Blue sudoku tiles

CET suggested the palette for this pattern, based on my rainbow sudoku. The problem is that it is hard to find nine shades of blue that are easy to tell apart.

I think this pattern would be good on the bottom of a swimming pool. It could be manufactured as a puzzle, where the 20 or so clue tiles are glued to a mesh, and the other tiles are loose. The tile layer would have to solve the sudoku as he laid the tile.

I'll do the same for anyone who sends me the hex values for nine colors. See colr.org for some tools.

Deceptive censorship

Trend or coincidence? Recently I've come across two examples of deceptive censorship in computer forums. If the San Francisco Chronicle deletes your comment, the comment is invisible to other readers, but it remains visible to YOU, presumably so you don't realize you've been censored and start complaining. (Thanks to TTB for the link.)

Prosper, the online lending platform, censors their forum. The lender community responded by setting up an alternate, uncensored forum at Prospers.org. (If you're thinking about lending at Prosper, you REALLY need to read what the other lenders are saying in the uncensored forum.)

Well, OK, but how do people at Prosper.com find out about Prospers.org? It used to be possible to post at Prosper.com and mention Prospers.org. Now Prosper's forum software automatically changes "prospers.org" to "prosper.com". If you mention the competition, it's turned into a mention of Prosper.

Both the Chronicle and Prosper are private businesses, and I really don't have a problem with a bit of censorship to remove spam and maintain a civil atmosphere. However, I think they ought to be honest about their policies. Post the rules and provide a referee to enforce the rules, but don't have secret rules that you enforce when no one is looking.

Random text fragments

Here's another experiment, for no particular reason.  The box below displays random paragraphs from Secret Ballet:

You can reload the page to get a new fragment.  I seem to be pushing the limits of Blogger.  When I do something like this, some things will work, and some things won't.  I can publish this post, but I can't edit it on Blogger, I have to delete it, edit it on my computer, and repost it.

For some reason I find Secret Ballet fascinating.  I keep wanting to read just a little bit more, even though I know the book was assembled from sample sentences in  a dictionary.  There's nothing really there.

Is television news any different?  News is a business.  The stories are composed, packaged, teased and delivered by professional news readers.  There is a pretense of substance, the idea that something important actually happened, but on a slow news day, the news business fills the same amount of air time with no substance at all.

Maybe the fascination is that Secret Ballet doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is.

Experimental video

This is a proof-of-concept project that combines still frames into a video. I took a digital photo and modified it programmatically to make 3,888 different frames. I ran the frames through Windows Media Encoder to make a video and edited the video with Windows Movie Maker.

Computer colors are combinations of red, green and blue. A photographic color negative inverts all three colors at the same time. However, if you're messing with the bits and bytes, it's just as easy to invert one color at a time. First I inverted red, then green, then blue, then red again, green again and blue again. At the end, all three colors have been inverted twice. Everything cancels out, and we have the original image again.

Rainbow Sudoku

I took a solved sudoku, replaced the numbers with colors, and generated this image. I added a black background to separate the colors and make it easier to see the 3-by-3 blocks.

Sudokus are tileable. If you take the three blocks from the left of a sudoku and move them around to the right, you still have a sudoku. Similarly, you can move blocks from the top to the bottom. Consequently, if you repeat the pattern, you can pick out any 3-by-3 block and the 8 surrounding blocks, and you have a sudoku.

Unlike the plaids, this pattern is not weavable from horizontal and vertical threads. However, it could be made from little ceramic tiles (and black grout).

Cat v. bird, verdict at 11

A feral cat stalks a bird. Either the cat is fast enough to catch the bird, or the bird is fast enough to get away from the cat. Very simple. Evolution in action.

Or is it? The bird is an endangered species, and an ornithologist with a gun has the cat in his sights. He fires. One less feral cat in the world. Very simple.

Or is it? Depends on what 'feral" means. This is a true story, and the cat lived under a toll bridge near Galveston, Texas. Ornithologist and birder Jim Stevenson shot the cat as it was stalking endangered birds. Under Texas law, it is illegal to kill a cat belonging to another person, and the maximum penalty is two years in prison. Tollbooth employee John Newland placed food under the bridge for feral cats, including the one killed by Stevenson. Does accepting food qualify as "belonging to"?

Believe it or not, this case went to trial, and the jury deliberated for two days before becoming deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial, and the prosecution dropped the case.

(Thanks to Mr. Bill for the story.)

Crawling background

Here is one of those "I wonder if I can do it" projects. I'm reading about background images and I see that the position can be adjusted pixel by pixel. If I can do that, I can make the image move. Already, I'm so focused on the technical details that I'm not even considering whether this is a good idea or not.

Of course, the Blogger platform doesn't co-operate. But I'm also reading about inline frames, which is a way to display a piece of one web page on another. So I put the crawling image on another server, and display it in an inline frame in this post. Maybe I can use the same techniques for something useful.

Slide show widget

Here is a widget from Slide.com. You can upload a bunch of photos and they will make a slide show for you and give you the code to drop into your blog. There are other ways to make slide shows, but this was relatively painless.

The luxury of choice

In a comment to my post on Payday Loans, CET eloquently argues that "it is more expensive to be poor". This got me to thinking, because one of the premises of Voluntary Simplicity is that it is LESS expensive to live simply.

The difference between Voluntary Simplicity and Involuntary Simplicity (otherwise known as poverty) is that the Voluntary Simpleton can make choices. He can make choices because he has accumulated capital. He can buy a six-month supply of spaghetti sauce when it is on sale, because he has the money to take advantage of the sale. Not only does he have the capital, he has the values that led him to accumulate the capital.

Voluntary Simplicity, while rejecting consumerism, is still very much a middle-class, Protestant-ethic way of looking at things. Sometimes this is very explicit, as when the authors of Your Money or Your Life urge their readers to save money, buy Treasury bonds and live off the interest. In other cases it is implicit, as when Thoreau, a Harvard graduate whose family owned a pencil factory, decided to camp out on land owned by his friend Emerson.

As I have argued elsewhere, the essence of Voluntary Simplicity is not simplicity, but deliberateness, and deliberateness is the antithesis of the consumerist, immediate-gratification mindset that puts people into situations where a payday loan is even a plausible solution. In a Voluntarily Simple world, the payday loan shops would all go out of business.

Random thoughts on randomness

There are 138,510 versions of this page. The background is randomized, as is the image to the right. Although Blogger, the platform, hosts zillions of people spewing mindless drivel, randomizing the images was surprisingly hard to do. I had to put the randomness on a different server and link to it.

Can I randomize the text of a blog post? Again, this is easy enough on another server, but not so easy on Blogger. But maybe there is a way.

In the literary world, the cut-up technique can be traced back to the Surrealists, but is mostly associated with Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in the 50s. The name comes from cutting up newspapers with razor blades and physically juxtaposing pieces of paper.

The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart, is a novel about randomness. The protagonist makes life decisions by rolling dice. On the other hand, Secret Ballet, by Detlev Fischer, is a randomized novel. It is composed of example sentences from a dictionary, arranged with some assistance from the author. The resulting text is quite readable, and the effect is more aimlessness than randomness.

Gratuitous drama

On a TV show, the police bring someone down to the station for questioning. They sit in the usual little room with the usual table and the usual stark lighting. What happens next?

• The subject co-operates immediately.
• The subject refuses to talk, period.
• The subject initially refuses to talk, the police argue with him, and finally he reluctantly decides to talk.

Of course, it's almost always the third option. No-argue-yes is more dramatic than either Yes or No, and TV is in the drama business.

We know that advertising on TV affects behavior in the real world. We strongly suspect that violence, hyper-sexuality and boorishness on TV affect behavior in the real world. Does gratuitous drama affect behavior? Does TV make us more indecisive? Does TV turn us into drama queens?

Payday loans

The Predatory Lending Association is a spoof web site (or IS it?). Their motto is: "Helping payday lenders extract maximum profit from the working poor".

And extract they do! Advance America offers loans with APRs as high as 495 percent. My experience as a lender on Prosper, and as an owner of junk bonds, gives me a certain amount of sympathy towards lenders. 495 percent sounds pretty good. Can I get some of that action? As a lender, not as a borrower.

Here is a quick comparison between a payday lender and a regular bank:

Company	Advance America	Bank of America
Ticker	AEA	BAC
Dividend yield	5.68%	5.77%
Price/earnings	11.30	10.20
Price/cash flow	9.40	9.90

I'd have to say that payday lending, from an investor's point of view, is comparable to banking. The outrageous fees are offset by lower volume, higher expenses, and higher default rates. Of these two, I'd rather own some BAC because I figure AEA has more regulatory risk.

Ambient Findability

Who can resist a book with such a title? And with a lemur on the cover? Not I.

Searching is an ancient problem, going back to our hunting and gathering days. This book turns the problem inside out and examines it from the point of view of the objects being searched for.

How do we organize things so we can find them? I've written a lot of database retrieval systems, and the process is fairly simple. The customer says "we need to search by name or account number". The account number is simple, the name is more complicated due to inconsistent spelling, but the solutions are well known.

Nowadays our information is on the web, and most of it is found by search engine, not by going to the home page and looking in the table of contents. A lot of information is found serendipitously while looking for something else. How do we organize for findability when we don't know who the searchers are, or what they're looking for, and someone else wrote the search engine?

The book has more questions than answers. In fact, the author begins by asking the reader how he found the book. I was looking for something else. I looked up something in the card catalog at the library, and didn't find it, but I browsed the shelves above and below the shelf that didn't have what I was looking for. The title, with its juxtaposition of two unusual words, jumped out at me.

The Plaidolyzer

I put the computer to work generating web pages with plaid backgrounds. It looks like you can modify the plaids interactively, but this is an illusion. You are actually navigating through plaids that have been generated ahead of time. Try it and see:

Click here for the Plaidolyzer

I decided to do some variations on the rainbow plaid theme. I shuffled the colors a bit. It turns out that the colors don't look right if they're out of order. For example, if yellow is between orange and green, it looks yellow. If yellow is next to white, it looks white. This puts some constraints on the shuffling.

Next, I tried different backgrounds from white to gray to black. Non-white backgrounds bring out the yellow.

Rainbow brain

Remember the "this is your brain on drugs" ads? Well, this is a genetically modified mouse brain, sliced and lit up under a microscope with fluorescent light.

Borrowing genes from bacteria, coral and jellyfish, Harvard scientists have set mice brains aglow in a bold panoply of colors, revealing the intricate highways and byways of neuronal connections... (more).

Nice colors! I don't know about the science, but it sure works as art. Thanks to TTB for the link.

Time displacement

No, not time travel or time shifting, but time displacement:

Some of the pixels are delayed, and the higher up in the picture they are, the longer they are delayed.

I see that Adobe Creative Studio has this feature. Very interesting. Some of the transitions (the dissolves and fades) in Windows Movie Maker could be considered forms of time displacement, but Adobe CS apparently gives you greater control.

Rainbow Plaid, the video

This is my demo of the following tools:

• Image generation via C# Express
• MIDI editing with Anvil Studio
• Integration with Windows Movie Maker
• Delivery via YouTube

"I've learned something today." -- Kyle Broflovsky

Rainbow Plaid

I like plaids and stripes because the patterns are based on the same technology that is used to make the fabric, namely weaving. Just set up your loom with colored yarn in the right sequence, and you get a pattern. Printed patterns, on the other hand, require an unholy marriage of printing technology with weaving technology. It's just not right.

Computer screens, with their rectangular grids of pixels, are well-suited for simulated weaving. It may be hard to see, but this plaid is constructed as if horizontal and vertical threads, each thread a single color, are woven in an over-and-under pattern, with each pixel taking the color of the thread that is on top at that point.

Traditional plaids tend to be drab because the traditions where formed before the invention of synthetic dyes (mauveine in 1856). The patterns are simple because only simple patterns were possible before the Jacquard loom in 1801. The Jacquard loom was the first programmable machine and a precursor of the computer.

So here I am using computers inspired by looms to generate a traditional woven pattern! I can use any colors I want, and I can generate hundreds of variations before choosing one I like. The only thing missing is physical cloth.

Sound-biting

In the last Democratic debate, I learned that Hillary is neither for nor against issuing drivers' licenses to illegal aliens. Or is she both for AND against it? It's hard to tell.

Yesterday I watched Obama on Meet the Press and he is no less a weasel than Hillary. The problem is that anything a candidate says can be taken out of context, turned into a sound bite, and played over and over again. Think Howard Dean and his yell, or Dubya and "Mission Accomplished". The only way to avoid being bitten is not to say anything biteworthy.

And so we have this strange sport of debates and interview shows where the reporters try to get their sound bites, and the candidates try to run out the clock without answering the questions. Watching a debate is like going to a car race and hoping for a crash.

The only candidates who can say anything interesting are the ones without a chance, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul. Being sound-bitten would be a step up for them. (One of the reasons that I'm confident that I can sell Ron Paul short is that if Paul gets anywhere near being a serious contender, the other candidates will sound-bite him back into obscurity.)

Life in Space

Fooling around at the International Space Station.

Selling Ron Paul short 2

Finally! After three and a half weeks, my account at Intrade is funded, and I can place an order to sell Ron Paul short.

This has been quite an adventure. My credit card company refused to process a charge from an offshore gambling operation. I could have sent a bank wire, but the transaction costs were prohibitive. I had to airmail a $250 check to Dublin, where Intrade presumably put a hold on it until it cleared. (Intrade could have handled this better. An email when they processed the check and started the hold would have been nice. I had pretty much given up on the whole thing.)

Well! While I'm composing this post, I get an email from Intrade confirming that I've sold 25 Ron Paul short at 7.7. So now they're responsive?

The contract expires on August 31, 2008. If Ron Paul IS NOT the nominee, I make $19.25, which, over 10 months, is about 9% annualized. If Ron Paul IS the nominee, I lose $230.75, which is horrible.

Real Clear Politics, one the few sources where I can find a poll that lists Paul separately, shows him at 3.3%. Keep in mind that someone with 3.3% of the votes gets 0% of the nomination.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul has been very successful at raising money. I watched the last Republican debate, and Paul was the only candidate that was booed by the Republican audience. At the end of the show, he won the instant text messaging poll. I can only conclude that Paul's people spammed the text message number to create the illusion of support. The idea must be that if they can convince enough people that Paul IS popular, then Paul will BE popular. Sort of a high-tech, magical thinking, bandwagon strategy. Very Boomerish.

I suspect that something similar is going on at Intrade. Here is an article showing Ron Paul's Intrade chart and arguing that Intrade is a better predictor of the nomination than the polls. Nonsense. If Intrade is being manipulated, and the polls are not, then the polls are better predictors.

Mapping the Rainbow

In Physics 101, we learn that color is one-dimensional . A color can be described by just one number, the frequency of the light. When light passes through a prism, or a raindrop, the angle of refraction depends on the frequency, which gives us the rainbow.

In Programming 101, we learn that color is three-dimensional. A color requires three numbers for its description, a red value, a green value and a blue value. You can think of colors as being graphed with x, y and z co-ordinates. LCD screens, web pages and digital cameras are all based on this three-dimensional model.

Alternatively, in Biology 101, we learn that the human eye has three kinds of color receptors, corresponding more or less to red, green and blue. We can see that the computer model is based on the biological model, not the physical model.

So how do we map a one-dimensional spectrum to a three-dimensional grid? The picture above is my first attempt. Not very rainbowish, is it? (I'm trying to find a mathematical formula that I can program to generate a rainbow graphic.)

The mismatch between models leads to some weird anomalies. For example, there really is such a thing as yellow light, but the yellow on your computer screen is a mixture of red and green. Your computer screen doesn't have any yellow in it.

On the other hand, there is no such thing as purple light. We think of purple as being half way between red and blue, but red and blue are at opposite ends of the spectrum, so there is no half way between. There really is a violet, on the far side of blue, but violet is not the same as purple. In physics, that is. In computers, both purple and violet are made by mixing red and blue.

It's an interesting mess. I'm trying to see it as more of an opportunity than a problem. I'll go with the three-dimensional model, because that's what my computer tools use. If I can't generate realistic rainbows, I'll generate alien rainbows, with the colors in the wrong order.

Mr. Picasso Head

Here is yet another bit of interactive silliness. Mr. Picasso Head lets you move eyes and noses around on a canvas and put together a portrait. It's the same idea as the South Park character generator, only more pretentious.

The basic strategy is "try a bunch of things and see which one you like best." The problem is that the "try a bunch of things" part is very time-consuming, while the "see which one you like best" is very easy.

To take this strategy to the next level, you need a metric. A metric is a measurement, a number, something that can be calculated by the computer. For example if you have a million pictures, your metric could be the number of different colors.

Once you have a metric, you have the computer generate a bazillion different things, calculate the metric, and use the metric to generate a top 10 list. Now the human comes in and looks over the top 10 list and picks the one he likes best. The computer does what it is good at, the human does what he is good at.

Evolution works something like this. The organisms generate a bunch of different things by shuffling their genes, and nature applies the metric of survival.

Regruntled is something like this, too. I'm putting a bunch of stuff in the blog, and my metric is the comments and visitor count. The volume is still low enough that I can read every comment, but I have a computer count the visitors.

Oh my God, I killed Kenny!

This is what I would look like on South Park. I found a South Park character generator that let me pick out a hairstyle and some clothes and accessorize them with a chainsaw and some blood spatters.

In the early seasons of South Park, Kenny McCormick got killed in every episode. In the next episode, Kenny would be there again, and no one would have remembered that he had been killed. Then he would die again. Kenny's other characteristic was that he was unintelligible because his parka muffled his speech. But the other characters understood him, and after a while I thought I did too.

Boomhauer in King of the Hill has a similar gimmick. Who came first, Boomhauer or Kenny? Both series debuted in 1997, but King of the Hill was first.

Mike Judge has stated that the inspiration for Boomhauer’s voice came from a message left on his answering machine by an irate viewer of Beavis & Butt-Head.

Does anyone remember a character from black-and-white movies who spoke gibberish?

Here is a clip, assembled from many episodes, of Kenny dying over and over again.

Sillier than television

Lately I've been embedding specific video clips in the blog, like yesterday's "Sultans of Swing". Today I have a widget that plays multiple clips, doesn't always play the same clips, and chooses its own clips. In other words, "OK, YouTube, surprise me!" Here is a small version:

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

At the bottom of the blog is a large version that let's you pick and choose. (It's too big for this column.) Most of the content is pretty silly, but I'll take silly over David Caruso adjusting his sunglasses. I don't know if you'll see the same choices that I did, but I rather like Cube Girl.

(11/21/2007: I removed the large widget because the content didn't change often enough. YouTube, you had your chance.)

Free music

Anyone can record music off the radio. The radio station pays the royalties, so the music is free to the listeners. If you wanted a free copy of "Sultans of Swing", and if you knew when the local FM station was going to play it, you could record it.

But wait! There are thousands of internet radio stations. Suppose your computer could listen to internet radio stations for you until it heard the music you want?

BroadClip.com will help you do this. You can download a client program for your PC and enter your searches on the web site. BroadClip never touches the actual music, so they are not distributing copyrighted material. Great idea! I'm not sure exactly how they do this, but:

Q. How do you know what music plays where?

A. That's BroadClip's "Secret Sauce". We have built an entirely new search technology that is optimized to search media streams that occur in real time. We have applied for patents on it, and we call it MobSearch.

How well does it work in practice? Good enough for an MP3 player, good enough for my laptop's built-in speakers. It looks like they're going to do video next.

Oh, all right, here's a video of Sultans:

Floating water bridge

It's amazing what you can do with a little deionized water and 15,000 volts of electricity. Nice music, too. Here's the story.

Art Project

Blogging is fun, but enough with the words already. Today I have something more visual. No 200-page instruction manual, just follow the link, click on different things and see what happens.

Click here!

Statistics

• 195 images
• 195 thumbnail images
  
• 35 background textures
• 6825 web pages
• 34125 links
  

Tools

• Backgrounds: Genetica Viewer
• Image resizing: Image Magick
• Logo: Cool Text
• HTML generation: Visual C#

Sustainability 2

I didn't make my point very well about the Vikings in Greenland, so I'd like to try again. Today we define a sustainable process as one that can be continued at a certain level indefinitely. This definition contains a tacit assumption that the future will be more or less like the past, because without that assumption there is no "indefinitely". This assumption is what is wrong with the idea of sustainability.

Turn back the clock to 1200 AD. The Vikings grew hay in the summer, fed it to their animals in the winter, and ate the animals. In the spring they mucked out the stalls and spread the manure on the fields. After a couple hundred years of doing this, they and their grandfathers and their grandfathers' grandfathers had pretty much figured out how much hay they could grow and how many people they could feed without depleting the soil.

By any reasonable definition, they had a sustainable lifestyle. But the tacit assumption was wrong. Their future was not like their past. They could not possibly have anticipated the Little Ice Age. As the climate changed, the growing seasons got shorter and the winters got longer. They produced less hay at precisely the time they needed more hay. Their lifestyle didn't work any more. Instead of adapting and doing what they could plainly see did work, namely igloos and kayaks, they kept feeding hay to cows in barns.

If we see that the tacit assumption is wrong, that the future is not necessarily like the past, then it follows that sustainability is the wrong mindset. We need a Plan B for every contingency we can foresee, and we need the flexibility to improvise when there is no Plan B.

Voluntary Simplexity 2

My first post on this topic received a few comments, so I will elaborate a bit here. We live in a consumer society, where the idea of simplicity is just another commodity that can be used to sell products or ideologies. There is a simplicity industry, for example, that sells books about simplicity. The book business is what it is, and there is more money to be made publishing long complicated books about simplicity, than short simple books.

The idea of simplicity seems to have been co-opted by the Greens. In the second half of The Circle of Simplicity, for example, the author lays out a Green political agenda, complete with meetings to attend and rules for running the meetings. I am not making this up. Wouldn't Voluntary Simplicity be more voluntary, and simpler, without the rules and the ideology? Well, yes, but it wouldn't sell as many books. There's not much of a market for applying the idea of simplicity to simplicity itself.

And so sometimes we see people doing complicated things in the name of simplicity. This is just consumer craziness, a symptom of successful marketing rather than a logical paradox.

Thoreau went to live in the woods because he wanted to live deliberately. Not simply, not sustainably, not self-sufficiently, but deliberately. He does have a lot to say about simplicity, but I see deliberateness as Thoreau's premise, and simplicity as his conclusion. Your mileage may vary.