Regruntled

Regruntled makeover

2008-01-01T10:06:00.001-10:00

Regruntled is now at Regruntled.com.

I'm switching from Blogger to WordPress, for a number of reasons. WordPress will let me create pages that are outside the linear, chronological blog sequence, sort a cross between a blog and a wiki. In fact, there is a WordPress plugin that will let me use a markup language similar to MediaWiki's.

When I've run into Blogger's limitations, I've gone around them by putting code on other servers. This works, but is not ideal. I'm moving everything to one server at DreamHost, which gives me much more control. I have my own copy of the source code for WordPress, which means that I can customize it.

Finally, I'm redoing the visual layout of the blog. I'm going to a more monochrome theme, which is a bit stark, but won't clash with any pictures I use in the posts. The new layout also uses the screen real estate better. With two sidebars and a horizontal menu bar, I can declutter the page and improve the navigation.

I will attempt to switch the FeedBlitz subscriptions over to the new address. If that doesn't work, or if you subscribe using a different service, you may need to resubscribe with the new address.

Again, I have no real complaints with Blogger. It's a decent platform to learn on, and most people won't need anything else. I just think I've outgrown it, and it's time to move on.

Art on drugs

2007-12-31T08:47:00.001-10:00

Here is a report on an experiment by the US government in the fifties. An artist produced a series of 9 drawings during the course of an LSD trip. The picture to the right is number 6, presumably when his brain chemistry was the most scrambled. Picture number 1 was a rather conventional portrait.

I wonder what would happen with an abstract artist, who starts out drawing stuff like this. Would drugs make him draw realistic landscapes?

Hamster sudoku

2007-12-30T09:43:00.001-10:00

I thought doing sudoku in color was weird, but this web site has sudoku with pictures of hamsters. I suppose it could be worse. The hamsters could be animated.

Tiger Dreams

2007-12-29T08:29:00.001-10:00

Here we have a fractal flame color-shifting a photo of a cat. There is an old saying:

To a three-year-old with a hammer, everything looks like it could use a bit of pounding.

To which I add:

To a computer nerd with a fractal flame generator and a color-shifting program, every digital photo looks like it needs some animation.

Alien glyphs

2007-12-28T07:43:00.001-10:00

Is this an alien alphabet, and is there a secret decoder ring for it? Maybe it's a syllabary, like Katakana. Maybe it's a series of ideograms, like Chinese characters. How could we tell which? Or, just possibly, it's something so alien that we don't even have a category for it.

We are literate, so we are predisposed to believe that anything with this combination of regularity and disorder has to mean something. My fingers want to type "symbol", but to call something a symbol is to assume that it has a particular kind of meaning. Maybe the glyphs are asemic writing, decorative but meaningless. How could we tell?

The glyphs were inspired by my non-periodic graph paper. I was designing a favicon, and with the limitation of 16 by 16 pixels, I wasn't able to express the idea of a sudoku, so I went with Plan B.

I realized that my favicon was one of a number of variations. Well, of course, let's generate them all and see what they look like. Let's put them next to each other in different combinations and see what happens.

Who is the artist?

2007-12-27T07:47:00.001-10:00

Is Thomas Jourdan the artist? He wrote Kandid, the open-source genetic art program that I used to generate this image. He's never even seen the image. On the other hand, many people have contributed to the math behind fractals, genetic algorithms and evolutionary art. Do they deserve some credit?

Is Kandid, the program, the artist? Or is a program just a tool, much like Leonardo's paintbrush was a tool?

Am I, the user, the artist? All I did was click a few buttons and see what happened.

Am I, the editor, the artist? I generated a few dozen images and picked out the one I liked best. That act of selection seems something like art, the same way I take a hundred pictures with my digital camera and delete 99 of them. However, if we call that art, we have to call what art critics do art as well.

Math as art

2007-12-26T09:15:00.001-10:00

Here is a math video so good that it's fun to watch even if you aren't interested in the math.

In art, there is the problem of perspective, the realistic representation of three-dimensional objects in two dimensions. In Medieval art, the Bayeaux Tapestry for example, objects are flat and depth is indicated by overlapping. During the Renaissance, artists worked out the rules of perspective by trial and error. In the seventeenth century, the mathematicians formalized the process, beat it to death, and called it projective geometry. And now we have come full circle: a video illustrating one of the basic principles of projective geometry, a video that is itself a work of art.

Non-periodic graph paper

2007-12-25T08:45:00.001-10:00

This is a variation of my non-periodic plaids. Maybe more practical, maybe not. You can download a 10-page pdf and print out as much as you want. Every page is different. Of course.

Download non-periodic graph paper

You may be asking, "what is non-periodic graph paper good for?" Good question! I just program this stuff, I don't explain it. I program it because I can, not because I have a use in mind.

However: you can draw boxes for flow charts or organization charts and the boxes will line up horizontally and vertically. They won't be the same size, but they'll line up.

You can use the grid to draw large rectangles and subdivide them. Then you can paint them in primary colors. Very Piet Mondrian. The randomness of the grid will keep the composition from looking too regular.

Every snowflake is different. Why not graph paper?

Sudoku pizza

2007-12-24T08:05:00.001-10:00

The internet is such a wonderful thing! No matter how obsessed I think I am, with a little googling I can find someone else who already been there and done that.

Here is the sudoku pizza, with nine toppings arranged in a sudoku pattern. The picture above is the stage of construction which most clearly shows the sudoku pattern. The skewers are then removed, the pizza is topped with grated cheese, and is baked to a golden brown.

Random art generator

2007-12-23T08:34:00.001-10:00

Andrej Bauer at the University of Ljubljana has a random art generator. You can type in a name and his computer will scramble the name into a computer program, which then generates the art. The process is random in the sense that you, the user, have no idea how the name you type affects the picture. All you can do is try different names and see what happens.

It takes a few minutes to generate the art, which gives you time to browser the gallery of pictures that other people created. You can vote the pictures up or down, and the most popular pictures eventually make it to a "best of" gallery.

I picked the picture above from the visitors' gallery. Someone generated it from "doodoo galore". I generated the picture to the left from "Regruntled blogspot". Go figure.

How to carve a cat

2007-12-22T08:37:00.001-10:00

Seam carving is a new technique for content-aware resizing of images. The idea is to squeeze the images without reducing them. An audio analogy would be speeding up a recording without changing the pitch.

The alternatives to seam carving are cropping and shrinking. Cropping loses information at the edges. Shrinking loses detail everywhere. Seam carving analyses the picture and deletes "unimportant" information.

Of course, I can't just read about something like this, I have to download some software and try it for myself. Here is a feral cat, 400 pixels wide:

Now we progressively carve the picture.

Now the picture is half size. Ouch! The head and tail are about the same size as in the original, and it looks like the algorithm decided that dark shadows, blurry green leaves and white fur were "unimportant" information. The cat's adorable face is preserved. Which makes a certain amount of sense. To me. Maybe not to the cat.

Solstice Wishes

2007-12-21T06:49:00.001-10:00

Please accept with no obligation, implicit or explicit, my best wishes
for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress,
non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice, or spring solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . . and a financially successful,
personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated experience during the generally accepted calendar year 2008, or, if that is not your calendar of choice, the approximate period from the current solstice until the following winter solstice, or spring solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability,
religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual orientation
of the wishee.
No elves were exploited, and no animals were harmed, during the wishing of this wish.

By accepting this wish, you agree to these terms:

This wish is subject to clarification, revocation or withdrawal at the sole discretion of the wisher.
This wish may not be transferred without the written consent of the wisher.
This wish implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wished-for conditions on behalf of the wishee.
This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent solstice greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.
This wish is void in the State of Nebraska and wherever prohibited by law.

Enjoy!

Spidermobile

2007-12-20T07:57:00.001-10:00

Maybe THIS is the future of urban transportation.

Fractal Flame 1

2007-12-19T08:00:00.001-10:00

I played around with fractals way back when, but the state of the art has advanced quite a bit since then. Apophysis 2.0 is software that will generate "fractal flames", something like fractals but way cooler. Flam3 is software that will render the individual frames of an animated fractal flame.

At 30 frames per second, and 5 seconds to render a frame, rendering takes 150 times real-time. A four-minute animation takes about ten hours to render. Then there is the time to generate the video from the stills, mix in the music and titles, and upload the thing to YouTube.

All of this doable. The computer does most of the work, while I do something else, like sleep or eat. Unfortunately, I can't do my usual strategy of "let's make a dozen of these and see which one we like best". Someone needs a faster computer.

Color sudoku

2007-12-18T08:08:00.001-10:00

Here is an online sudoku with colors instead of numbers. I have a couple of problems doing these, due to the lack of a natural order. First, I can't say to myself, "I've done the ones and twos, time to check the threes." Second, I can't count off a row or column to find the missing numbers.

I also notice that my internal dialog is more difficult. The words for one through nine are all one syllable, except for seven. Dark green, light green, orange, yellow... colors take more syllables. Or maybe, being a computer nerd, words, numbers and mouse clicks are all left-brain for me, while colors are right-brain. Whatever the reason, I have trouble working these.

Non-periodic plaids

2007-12-17T08:25:00.001-10:00

Here's the latest silliness from the Regruntled Computer Works: non-periodic plaids. These are constructed like normal plaids, except that the thread counts are randomized.

I rather like the patterns. I'd like to have a dress shirt made. And I'd like to watch the seamstress try to match the pattern for the pocket! OK, that's just cruel. No pockets.

Humans tend to see patterns that aren't there. Conversely, if they try to randomize something, they make it "too random". I'm guilty, too. I generated lots of these plaids, and discarded the ones that didn't "look right".

I suspect that's part of the reason I find the sudoku patterns so interesting. The rules of the pattern create something with the colors all mixed up. It's not random at all, in fact it's highly structured, but to the eye it looks random without being too random.

Sudoku cat

2007-12-16T08:17:00.001-10:00

Here is Zack the cat, colored in a sudoku pattern. Well, not colored exactly, but color-shifted. You can still see the texture of the fur within the blocks. A sudoku needs nine numbers or colors or patterns. Doing nothing is one, I had two more from Color Shift, and three more from Horse of a Different Color. That makes six. Here I've added three more transformations to my palette, namely canceling the red, canceling the green and canceling the blue. That makes 9 transformations, numbered 1 through 9 and applied in a pattern based on a solved sudoku.

Here is the original picture, shamelessly ripped off from TTB at Blogospherical Ruminations:

Treadmill bike

2007-12-15T08:51:00.001-10:00

Bicycle Forest says:

"The treadmill bike is the future of urban transportation!"

The purest of metals

2007-12-14T07:52:00.001-10:00

In a Ben Bridge commercial, I heard a reference to platinum, "the purest of metals". This is complete nonsense, since purity is not an attribute of chemical elements. It makes sense to say that a particular piece of metal is more or less pure platinum, but it does not make sense to say that platinum itself is pure. Nor is purity a particularly desirable attribute! We make alloys for all sorts of good reasons.

I did some googling, and found that "the purest of metals" is a common marketing phrase in the jewelry business. Most platinum jewelry is either 90% pure (10% iridium) or 95% pure (5% ruthenium). In comparison, sterling silver is 92.5% pure, and 22K gold is 91.7% pure.

However, the aluminum foil in your kitchen is 98.5% pure! So, this holiday season, if you care enough to give your loved ones "the purest of metals", forget platinum. It's not that pure. Instead, give them lovingly wadded lumps of 98.5% pure aluminum.

Taxing tall people

2007-12-13T07:29:00.001-10:00

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw and graduate student Matthew Weinzierl have proposed taxing tall people at a higher rate than short people. Their argument is twofold. First, height correlates with income, so tall people have more money, which means that a tall tax will bring in more revenue. Second, people can't change their height, so taxing tall people doesn't create economic distortions, as opposed to taxing the industrious, which discourages them from working so hard.

Do Mankiw and Weinzierl actually endorse such a system? Far from it. Rather, they argue, the proposed tax clarifies our thinking about taxation in general. They say that height is a “justly acquired endowment”: it is not unfairly wrested from anyone else, so the state has no right to seize its fruits. By the same logic, they imply (though they do not state outright) that the government has no right to force someone with the “justly acquired endowment” of entrepreneurial genius to pay a higher tax rate.

I think Mankiw and Weinzierl are missing the best argument for the tall tax, namely "What about the CHILDREN?" Children are short! Especially young children. The tall tax is good for children, and good for America. All we need is a Presidential candidate to champion the tall tax. Are you listening, Dennis Kucinich?

How to pose like this

2007-12-12T07:34:00.001-10:00

Magical thinking

2007-12-11T07:28:00.001-10:00

Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Consequently, we use magical thinking to deal with advanced technology.

This is very evident to me when I watch other people use computers, which I understand better than they do. Sometimes I catch myself doing the same thing, for example when I have to do something with Vista and Microsoft has changed the terminology or behavior to make it more confusing (to me).

As technology advances, any one person will understand less and less of it. We will have to use more magical thinking, not less.

Or maybe there is a synthesis, a scientifically informed magical thinking. With branded chemicals, such as Benadryl, I understand that diphenhydramine hydrochloride has a predictable effect on my body. I believe that I am capable of understanding the chemical reactions involved if I put in some effort, although I do not presently understand them.

There is also a false magical thinking, as when people pay as much extra for the Benadryl brand as they did for the diphenhydramine hydrochloride. The false magical thinking is encouraged by the advertisers, who aren't thinking magically at all.

Oprabamarama

2007-12-10T06:23:00.001-10:00

Oprah is touring with Obama. This is really quite unprecedented. Oprah is a LOT more successful than Obama, she's more famous, and she has more money. Being Obama's warmup act is a step down for her. She's slumming in the sordid world of politics.

Meanwhile, Obama has two things going for him. He's a great speaker, and he's not Hillary. Really, what is Obama famous for, except for a few great speeches?

Obama has always been the candidate with the most style and the least substance. Oprah is the Queen of Daytime Television. By definition, her audience doesn't have anything productive to do during business hours. Is this a natural alliance, or what?

With Oprah to draw a crowd, Obama can reach more people with the audacity of hope, whatever than means. Of course, I like to quantify things. I note that Obama has gone from a 10% chance to a 30% chance for the nomination at Intrade, and that the polls have him leading in Iowa. Intrade has Hillary at 60%. Not that I would take either side of the Obama trade... anything could happen. It's a great story!

Branded chemicals

2007-12-09T03:34:00.001-10:00

I had a runny nose, so I went to the drugstore for some antihistamine. Generic store-brand diphenhydramine hydrochloride, 25 mg caps, three dollars a box. It was right next to the Benadryl, same chemical, same number of 25 mg caps, six dollars a box. The only difference is the brand.

What I find amazing about this is that the brand is worth as much as the chemical. I can only conclude that there are two kinds of customers. Some customers, like me, took chemistry in high school, and understand that chemicals have predictable effects on the human body. Why pay twice as much for the same chemical?

Other customers use magical thinking, and think the BRAND, not the chemical, is what stops their nose from running. What's the point of saving a few dollars if you don't get the magical brand?

Diphenhydramine hydrochloride also makes me drowsy, and every once in a while I will take it to help me sleep. Guess what? Nytol, a branded sleep aid, is diphenhydramine hydrochloride in 25 mg caps. Same chemical, about the same price as Benadryl, different purpose, different brand, different magic. I suppose there are people who have a box of Nytol as well as a box of Benadryl in their medicine cabinets. If they take a maximum dose of Nytol on top of a maximum dose of Benadryl...

Steampunk laptop

2007-12-08T07:28:00.001-10:00

This is a modern HP laptop, taken apart and re-assembled with lots of wood, leather and brass to give it a Victorian look. No price is given, but ForbesLife mentioned $1500 for just a keyboard.

The technology part of this thing will be obsolete in three years. How will it fare as art? Consider a Compaq "portable", circa 1983. 28 pounds, shoulder strap, 9-inch green screen, 4.77 Mhz processor, 128KB Memory, 2 5-1/2-inch floppies, no hard drive. No doubt someone could have replaced all the plastic with leather and wood and made it look like a piece of Victorian luggage. Perhaps someone did. So here we are, 25 years later, and it's a ridiculously obsolete piece of technology dressed up as something a hundred years more obsolete. So what? That's what the steampunk laptop is going to look like 25 years from now.

(Steampunk, by analogy with cyberpunk, is a type of science fiction set in the Victorian era, the age of steam engines. The term has spilled over from literature to art.)

Faith of the Founders

2007-12-07T03:54:00.001-10:00

Mitt Romney, in his much-anticipated speech on religion, invoked the memory of the Founders. As a rhetorical gimmick, this is a slam dunk. In EVERY country, EVERY politician invokes the memory of the leaders of the last successful revolution. It's practically a pre-requisite for public life. Let's take a look at what the Founders really believed.

The Founders, for the most part, were not Christians at all, they were Deists. (Deism is out of style these days, but a reasonable modern equivalent would be Unitarian Universalism.) The US did not have a Christian president until 1829, when Andrew Jackson took office, half a century after Independence.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote the Jefferson Bible, which praises Jesus as a moral teacher, but never mentions the miracles or the Resurrection. For a Christian, the Resurrection is not exactly a minor detail.

Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, one of the most anti-religious books of all time. The backlash against this book has been cited as one of the causes of the Second Great Awakening, the religious revival that led, among other things, to Mormonism!

For a Mormon politician to invoke the memory of the Founders in a speech on religion is just a little bit hilarious. Good politics, bad history.

Selling Ron Paul short 3

2007-12-06T07:27:00.001-10:00

Ron Paul is down to 4.7 at Intrade (I shorted at 7.7). I didn't expect this to happen until late January. OK, so I was wrong, but at least I'm wrong in a good way. My bet is paying off faster than expected. What happened?

Mike Huckabee happened. The only plausible scenario for a Paul nomination is a surge in the polls followed by wins in the early primaries. The come-from-behind, underdog story is there alright, but it features Mike Huckabee, not Ron Paul.

Paul's supporters are already urging him to forget about the Republican nomination and run as an independent (Intrade gives the odds at 25%). His campaign has raised a lot of money, and money has its own momentum. An independent campaign would push the day of reckoning from January to November, allowing the true believers to remain delusional for a few more months.

Intrade also has a contract for Ron Paul winning the general election. I didn't short that one because it was priced lower, presumably because of the possibility that Ron Paul would win the Republican nomination only to lose to Dennis Kucinich in November. If he switches to an independent campaign, I may be able short Ron Paul all over again with the other contract.

Speaking of delusional:

Sound-biting and back-spinning

2007-12-05T07:32:00.001-10:00

The recent revelation in the National Intelligence Estimate that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has had some interesting effects. The obvious conclusion is that our information was wrong, so we need to stop the saber-rattling and re-evaluate our policy. Duhhh. But Dubya says "... the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion ..."

I listened to the Democratic debate on NPR. The candidates took turns sound-biting each other. "You said this, you said that." A logical response would be "I said that based on the information I had at the time, and the information was wrong". But no, everyone says "what you think I said is not what I actually meant. In spite of having bad information, I've been right about Iran all along." I'm paraphrasing, but I am not making this up.

I'm coining a new word: "back-spinning", spinning a new interpretation of an earlier statement in the light of new information.

I'll give another example of back-spinning: Day-Age Creationism. This is less topical, so maybe we can be more objective about it. Genesis is full of phrases like "and the evening and the morning were the first day". For three thousand years, Biblical scholars thought "day" meant "24 hours". It was not until AFTER science established that the earth was more than 6,000 years old that creationists advanced the theory that "day" really meant "age", an indefinite time period. How convenient. In other words, when Moses wrote "day", he really meant "age". In spite of not having the slightest clue about astronomy or geology, Moses was right all along!

A horse of a different color

2007-12-04T07:38:00.001-10:00

In my Color Shift experiment, I rotated all three colors: red to blue, green to red, blue to green. It is also possible to hold one color constant while switching the other two. There are two ways to shuffle three colors, and three ways to shuffle two colors, for five ways in all. Alternatively, there are six permutations of three objects; the five just described plus the original colors equal six.

With computers, when I come to a fork in the road like this, my inclination is to try all possibilities and see what happens. It doesn't take much more programming, and CPU time is free.

The picture above is the most interesting of the five. I explain this by noting that the background (grass, shrubs) is mostly green, and the foreground (horse) is mostly red, so holding the green constant and switching the red and blue results in a blue horse on a normal-looking background. The dissonance between the foreground and the background is what makes the picture interesting.

This is all very glib, but of course the computer doesn't know which is the foreground and which is the background. There are plenty of optical illusions to show that this is not always so easy for humans to figure out either. I tried averaging all the pixels and found that the picture as a whole is slightly more red than green. Holding red constant and switching green and blue results in a normal-looking horse against a bluish background... which is not interesting. The other three transformations change both the foreground and the background, which is even less interesting.

Of course, what I am looking for is some kind of metric that will tell me which of the five color transformations will likely result in interesting pictures.

Speed bump

2007-12-03T06:57:00.001-10:00

German engineering, applied to the lowly speed bump. If the player doesn't work in your browser, here is a link.

Zopa

2007-12-02T06:22:00.001-10:00

Zopa is a new social lending site. Zopa UK has been around for a while, and Zopa US is about to launch. (I'm on their email list, and got to do a bit of beta testing.)

I'm a lender at Prosper, which is working out OK so far, but I don't have much faith in management. At Prosper, the problem for lenders is estimating the likelihood of default, so the emphasis is on diversifying, choosing borrowers wisely, and getting compensated adequately for risk.

At Zopa, the lender buys a CD, insured by the NCUA. Zopa then lends the money out to borrowers. Zopa handles the diversification, and (with its credit union partners) assumes the risk.

Zopa requires that borrowers have a FICO score of at least 640, which drops out the bottom 25% of the population. The current CD rate is 5.10% for 1 year, which is not bad. I have a CD at GMAC Bank, which is currently offering 4.50% for 1 year.

Zopa borrowers can post their sob stories, and Zopa lenders can "help" them by diverting part of their interest to the borrowers' payments. This is the social part of social lending. For example, a lender with a $1000 5.10% CD could reduce his interest to 4.10% and allocate the extra $10 per year to help specific borrowers. It is possible that a borrower with a good story could get a free loan.

It's nice to see some competition for Prosper. Zopa has a completely different business model, and will attract different borrowers and lenders. There's no reason they can't coexist. Personally, I can't get too excited about Zopa, but the next time I'm in the market for a CD, I'll consider them.

By the way, ZOPA is an acronym for "zone of possible agreement". If a borrower is willing to pay as much as 10%, and a lender is willing to accept as little as 9%, then the range from 9% to 10% is the zone of possible agreement. If there's no ZOPA, there's no deal.

Color Shift

2007-12-01T07:31:00.001-10:00

Yet another experimental video. Here the colors are shifted instead of inverted. Inversions change red to an absence of red and vice versa, like a photographic negative. Here I am shifting the red to blue, the green to red, and the blue to green. In the computer, colors are just numbers, and I can do whatever I want with them, including shifting them around.

What I like about this effect is that blacks, grays and whites are unaffected. They contain equal amounts of red, green and blue, so shifting the colors around doesn't change anything. An inversion, on the other hand, will change black into white and white into black.

Watch the horse. The horse has black pupils and white patches that remain constant as the horse changes from brown to purple to green. The fence post stays gray.

Blue sudoku tiles

2007-11-30T08:42:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-29T07:55:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-28T07:38:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-27T07:26:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-26T07:14:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-25T08:09:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-24T08:02:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-23T08:33:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-22T07:54:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-21T08:07:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-20T08:28:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-19T07:29:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-18T06:54:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-17T07:45:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-16T07:38:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-15T06:58:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-14T07:37:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-13T07:59:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-12T07:45:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-11T08:15:00.001-10:00

Fooling around at the International Space Station.

Selling Ron Paul short 2

2007-11-10T08:00:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-09T08:20:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-08T07:55:00.001-10:00

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!

2007-11-07T07:43:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-06T07:48:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-05T07:54:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-03T18:23:00.000-10:00

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

2007-11-03T08:20:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-02T07:54:00.001-10:00

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

2007-11-01T07:40:00.001-10:00

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.

Virtual Timber 2: the Pinchot Plan

2007-10-31T08:02:00.001-10:00

I got spammed with a solicitation for True Wealth, one of the top five financial newsletters in the world. Yeah, right. The email touts the "Pinchot Plan",

"...an unusual investment most Americans have never heard of... which was made possible by a former U.S. Presidential Advisor and Governor of Pennsylvania.
This investment is safer and more profitable than stocks, bonds, real estate, mutual funds, gold... and just about every other asset on the planet."

Gifford Pinchot was the first Chief of the US Forest Service, and advocated scientific forest management. Very Progressive, very Teddy Roosevelt. He has a National Forest named after him. The "Pinchot Plan" is investing in publicly traded timber companies. Minus the huge steaming pile of marketing, that's all it is. No need to subscribe to the newsletter. Anyone can do this on his own.

I mentioned Plum Creek Timber (PCL) in an earlier post, but here are a couple of other possibilities: Rayonier (RYN) owns 2.5 million acres and has a 4.27% dividend. Potlatch (PCH) owns 1.5 million acres and has a 4.25% dividend. All three companies are REITs. I own some PCL right now, but both RYN and PCH are plausible alternatives.

Virtual timber is a decent investment. Buy it when it's on sale. Better than stocks? Better than gold? Well, no, not better, just different. It's a good diversifier.

Spamming God

2007-10-30T07:21:00.001-10:00

I found something new, at least new to me: the prayer blog. There seem to be a number of these, and of two varieties. Some are places where people post their prayers, which raises some interesting theological questions.

Does posting to a prayer blog count as prayer? Does God have an internet connection? Does infinite bandwidth go along with omnipotence and omniscience? Is Heaven behind a firewall? Does God have a PC or a Mac? Does God use commercial software without paying for it?

Other prayer blogs are solicitations for others to pray for a particular purpose, like healing a child with a medical problem. The parents have presumably already tried prayer, to no avail, and now want some help spamming God with prayers.

Does God like being spammed? In other words, do a million similar prayers have more effect than one prayer? Does God have a spam filter? Is that why so many prayers go unanswered? Does spam piss Him off? I assume that dietary restrictions aren't a factor here, since spam is only metaphorically a pork product. However, the God of the Old Testament was a wee bit touchy about a lot of things, and getting spammed just might qualify as smiteworthy.

Guest rant: Eye Candy

2007-10-29T07:39:00.001-10:00

I keep hearing and seeing a term that for some reason irritates me: "eye candy." This term is often used to describe the visually appealing aspects of new computer operating systems like Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard. The term gives me the creeps, because it makes me feel like I have some sticky gooey (not GUI, forgive the pun) substance in my eye. The use of "candy" in this way probably comes from the seventies term for cocaine, "nose candy." The meaning is slightly different, however. With "eye candy" the meaning is one of something aesthetically appealing to the eye, whereas "nose candy" was not aesthetically appealing to the nose, which it often did damage to, but made the user feel good. The metaphor here does make more sense because the cocaine was physically ingested by the nose just as candy by the mouth, although the nose didn't necessarily enjoy the experience. However, it might suffer damage as the mouth does from candy in the form of tooth decay. "Eye candy" is not physically ingested by the eye, and won't damage it.

Taking these two terms together, one might arrive at the following meaning for the new additive element, "candy": some aspect of a thing or process that contributes an enjoyable or aesthetic feature appreciated by one of the senses.

Now imagine the horrific results if this usage spreads. If cocaine is "nose candy", then marijuana can be called "lung candy", and heroin, "vein candy." Music will have to be referred to as "ear candy" and art in general is an other example of "eye candy." Would Preparation H be "butt candy"? Perhaps the users of this product might disagree, because the term "candy" implies that the thing, substance, whatever, is not essential to the "operating system."

Finally, if the term really gains wide acceptance, then we will have to call real candy (like chocolate) "mouth candy," which of course could refer to cake, ice cream, and all forms of desert. I suppose alcohol would be included.

So please, stop the spread of "candy," and instead of "eye candy" substitute "aesthetically appealing features." Not as catchy, but it won't give your eye that sticky gooey sensation.

And if you find this rant to be a frivolous, but enjoyable addition to Regruntled, just consider it "blog candy."

Pascal's Wager 2: the Apocalypse

2007-10-28T07:29:00.001-10:00

In a previous post, I discussed a warm and fuzzy version of Pascal's Wager. Today, something a bit more extreme.

Some Christians believe that the "end times" are coming as soon as 2008. Allowing three and half years for the Great Tribulation, that would put the Second Coming sometime in 2012. Coincidentally (OR IS IT?), December 21, 2012 is the Mother of All Solstices, when the Mayan calendar's odometer rolls over into a new age.

How exactly did the Mayan astronomers and the Biblical prophets synchronize their watches? And why didn't someone tell the Millerites, who abandoned their farms or quit their jobs in anticipation of October 22, 1844?

What would Pascal do? Would he profess belief in the Second Coming while quietly putting away money in his 401K plan? It's a huge waste of money if he gets Raptured. On the other hand, the scoffers who die in the Great Tribulation lose their lives AND their 401Ks. Would Pascal max out his credit cards, figuring that the money lenders will be wiped out along with everyone else?

The Second Coming is the original vaporware. Christians have been expecting Jesus to come back Real Soon Now for 2,000 years, and they've been wrong every single time. By induction, they're almost certainly wrong this time. Even if you believe that the Christians will be right sooner or later, it's almost certain that their timing is wrong now. And that's a purely statistical argument that doesn't even look at the validity of their belief system.

Does sustainability lead to collapse?

2007-10-27T07:04:00.001-10:00

I've been reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". Diamond studies a number of societies from the past for lessons we can use today. He discusses the usual suspects (Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, etc.) within a five-point framework:

Cumulative environmental damage
Gradual climate change
Conflict with neighbors
Support from neighbors
Adaptability

The most interesting story is that of Viking Greenland. The Vikings settled Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period (984 AD) and vanished sometime in the 15th century at the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Climate change is the obvious explanation, with the colder weather reducing crop yields and the increase in sea ice making it more difficult for ships from Iceland to get there.

And yet, the Inuit had the technology to survive in harsher climates than the Vikings' protected fjords. All the Vikings needed to do was copy the Inuit. Here is where the last factor, adaptability or the lack thereof, comes into play. The Vikings thought of themselves as Europeans, and apparently preferred to die as Vikings than live as skraelings.

The modern notion of sustainability seems to be about reaching equilibrium with a more or less constant environment. Equilibrium leads to conservatism which leads to a lack of adaptability. But nature is not constant. Sooner or later, Mother Nature will try to kill us with earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, forest fires, ice storms... even if we get our carbon dioxide under control. When that happens, we need adaptability, not sustainability.

Micro-lending

2007-10-26T07:57:00.001-10:00

MicroPlace, an eBay company, is a new online micro-lending platform. The idea of micro-lending can be traced back to Lysander Spooner, but the most well-known implementation was by Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank (2006 Nobel Peace Prize).

Foreign aid involves transferring relatively large amounts of money from government to government and is subject the usual inefficiency and corruption. Micro-lending places small amounts of money directly into the hands of specific poor entrepreneurs, for example $500 to a woman in Peru who wants to expand her pig farm. (Is a Peruvian pig an Oinca?)

The internet, of course, can help match people who have money with people who need money and there are several models available. Kiva matches lenders directly with the borrowers, but Kiva loans pay no interest. Kiva lenders diversify by spreading their money over several borrowers. MicroPlace matches lenders with organizations in specific countries. The organizatons spread the money out over many borrowers and pay the lender 2 or 3% interest. Is this a better model? Will below-market monetary interest attract more capital than individual stories with human interest?

Are loans better than grants? At Save the Children, one can sponsor a child for $28 a month. On the other hand, at current money-market rates, $28 in foregone interest works out to about $7000 in Kiva loans or $19000 in MicroPlace loans (to an organization that pays 3%).

We can compare micro-lending to peer-to-peer lending platforms like Prosper. At Prosper, the borrowers are not third-world entrepreneurs, but fellow Americans. The interest rates are much higher and the default rates are much higher. It is possible to earn above-market returns at Prosper, but in practice many lenders end up with below-market returns.

I say let many flowers bloom. Some of these models may not work, but there's no reason that several different models can't thrive at the same time.

Boomeritis

2007-10-25T07:53:00.001-10:00

Ken Wilber defines Boomeritis, the characteristic psychological condition of Baby Boomers, as Narcissism plus Relativism.

Using the language of the "story", narcissism is the notion that the story is about oneself, while relativism is the notion that one story is as good as another. Combining these, we get the notion that we can have whatever story we want. This appears in various forms:

I don't feel the need to limit myself to linear logic.

I choose to live life on my own terms and not be guided by charts based on statistics.

I like to consider myself a co-creator with the powers that be in the story of my life.

Like my fellow Boomers, I'm so vain, I think this song is about me. I acknowledge that there is no one right way to be. There are, however, wrong ways to be. The universe sets limits on our stories.

The problem with Boomeritis is that Mother Nature has a story too, and that story is not about us. In Mother Nature's story, our survival is a matter of complete indifference. In Into the Wild, Alex thought he was living an adventure story, but in fact he and the Alaskan wilderness co-created a story in which he starved to death.

Ironic consumerism

2007-10-24T08:29:00.001-10:00

I was browsing at a Ross store the other day. My rule is to browse one day and come back to buy on Geezer Tuesday for the discount. If it's not worth making a second trip, it's not worth buying.

Anyway, Ross often has quality stuff at a discount, but they've also got a lot of godawful garish crap, made in China, and very inexpensive. This got me to thinking. Living in a consumerist society as I do, I have some choices to make. I can play the game and pay up for recognizable brands and try to impress people. I can hunt for bargains at Ross and maybe find a recognizable brand half off. Or I can shop at Wal-Mart and people will instantly recognize me as the type of person who shops at Wal-Mart.

Or... I can buy godawful garish crap at Ross and people will think, "duhhh, I get it! He's being ironic. How clever of him."

One does have to avoid paying up for irony. I saw a bottle labeled "Cheap Red Wine" that was twice as expensive as Inglenook Burgundy, which really is a cheap red wine, only without the irony.

Voluntary Simplexity

2007-10-23T07:32:00.000-10:00

Voluntary Simplicity is a lifestyle choice for those disgruntled by modern life, who want to quit the rat race, get off the treadmill, drop out or walk away. The idea is that by simplifying one's life, by working less and consuming less, one can enjoy life more.

Sometimes I find the complexity of modern life aggravating. For example, I have a digital camera with features I've never used, and a 200-page manual I've never read.

On the other hand, I like to do Sudoku. A Sudoku, with the squares and the numbers and the zillions of possibilities, is a rush of pure complexity. Maybe you have your own favorite obsession, like crosswords or chess or bridge.

If I simplify my life so I can spend more time doing Sudoku, am I practicing Voluntary Simplicity or Voluntary Complexity?

The Voluntary Simpletons see a spectrum from complexity to simplicity and conclude: complexity bad, simplicity good. I think they're looking at the wrong spectrum. The right spectrum is the one from aggravation to satisfaction, from disgruntlement to regruntlement, and the goal is to find a more satisfying mix of simplicity and complexity.

Prosper

2007-10-22T07:55:00.000-10:00

Prosper is a peer-to-peer lending plaform, an eBay of unsecured personal loans. The premise is that banks take in deposits at low interest and lend them out at high interest, so there is an opportunity to disintermediate the banks. The borrower gets a lower rate, the lender gets a higher rate, and Prosper gets a little something in the middle for matching the borrowers and lenders.

I am a lender at Prosper, with $200 of edutainment money. You can see my loan portfolio if you like. It's been a fascinating experience, reading people's sob stories and bidding on the loans. Prosper would make a great hobby, at the $2000 level or so, where you'd have decent diversification and receive enough money in payments to make a new loan every three or four weeks. The hobby would keep your interest and pay for itself besides.

I think there is an agency problem. Prosper offloads all the risk to the lenders, so there is no direct incentive to collect on the loans. On the other hand, Prosper is a start-up with $40 million in venture capital, so there is a strong incentive to scale up as rapidly as possible by whatever means are available. In my judgment, Prosper has to scale up from $90+ million in outstanding loans to about $7 or $8 billion. The US consumer debt market is $2.5 trillion, so it is certainly possible.

The result is that a lot of lenders have been sucked in by the marketing hype and ended up with much lower returns than they expected. There is a large community of lenders, many of them disgruntled, both on and off Prosper, for example at Prospers.org. If you're even thinking about lending on Prosper, read the forums and learn from the mistakes of others.

As for me, I've stopped lending at the edutainment level. It's still early days. Prosper is changing, lender behavior is changing, and there are competitors on the horizon. Someone will get it right, and peer-to-peer lending may become a viable asset class for investors.

However, all the things that make Prosper unattractive for lenders, work to the borrowers' advantage. If you want to borrow money, by all means check out Prosper! Read the forums, and study which stories get funded and which don't. You may be able to borrow on excellent terms at Prosper.

Movie review: Into the Wild

2007-10-21T09:16:00.001-10:00

Great movie! Great scenery, good music. The screenplay is based on a book, which is based on a magazine article, which is based on the true story of a young man who goes off into the Alaskan wilderness and dies there. The story of his death is intercut with his adventures on the way to Alaska. It's a road movie. The ending is tragic, but he meets the obligatory offbeat characters on the way, and we get a glimpse of some unusual locations. Slab City is a real place, and so is Salvation Mountain.

I find it difficult to watch a movie about foolish youthful dreams through risk-averse middle-aged eyes. On the one hand, I see a kindred spirit, a fellow seeker of regruntlement in a way. On the other hand, I see an idiot, who does one stupid thing after another, until he finally does something so stupid that it kills him.

Alex, the young man, burns his remaining cash in the desert, to what, set himself free? Later we see him making fries in a fast-food kitchen. The manager tells him that he will have to start wearing socks, and he walks away. This establishes him as a man of principle. But what exactly is the principle? That he will take a minimum-wage McJob to replace the money that he burned, but he won't wear socks? Wouldn't it have been smarter not to burn the money in the first place? But that would deprive us of two dramatic scenes: the money burning in the desert, and the confrontation over the socks.

I don't know how true to life the movie is. It's not a true story, it's "based on" a true story twice removed. The socks incident and Slab City are not in the magazine article. On the other hand, there are things in the article and book that didn't make it into the movie.

The movie business is about drama, not logic, and sometimes characters have to do stupid things to move the story along. Maybe there's a lesson here. Maybe Alex thought his life was a movie, and his story would be more dramatic if he did some really stupid things.

Guest post: a poem

2007-10-20T08:15:00.001-10:00

A Complaint
You of the brilliance, with a mind full of thought Twisted and tricked and trapped to compliance That all is commerce and happiness is bought Wigged-out and drugged by diagnosis and shame Your transcending thoughts are totally to blame Thoughts that you are both human/humane Expressed with self-doubt when outside the frame

Selling Ron Paul short

2007-10-19T07:23:00.001-10:00

Congressman Ron Paul of Texas is running for the Republican nomination for President. I'd estimate his chances at approximately zero. Intrade gives his chances at 7.5%. Intrade is an online prediction market, the modern equivalent of a bookie. There are people betting for Ron Paul, and people betting against him, and 7.5% is where the market clears. Of course, this is a new millenium and we don't talk about making bets, we talk about buying and selling contracts. It amounts to the same thing.

The trade is obvious: sell Ron Paul short at 7.5 and cover at 0. Can it really be this easy? It's a short sale, and Intrade requires a margin that doesn't earn interest. The contract runs through August 31, 2008, after the Republican convention. The trade works out to about 9% annualized. For all intents and purposes, the nomination will be over by the end of January, after Iowa and New Hampshire, so I can probably cover then, if not at zero then close to zero. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 20% annualized return on this bet, I mean investment.

Or I could look at this in a "Wisdom of Crowds" sort of way. The people at Intrade know something that the mainstream political pundits don't, and Ron Paul really does have a snowball's chance in hell of getting the nomination. Nah... I don't think so. Al Gore has a better chance of getting the Republican nomination. I think there are libertarians and conservatives at Intrade who are betting on what they want to happen, not what they would rationally expect to happen. However, there is a lot of enthusiasm on the internet, and you can read "Ron Paul Can Win" for the Paul supporters' case.

Or I could look at this as psycho-financial arbitrage. I like Ron Paul. I'd like to see him get the nomination. I voted for him when he ran for President as a Libertarian in 1988. So I sell him short at Intrade. If I'm right and he doesn't get the nomination, I make some money. If I'm wrong and he does, I have the satisfaction of seeing him run and voting for him in the general election. If I bet, I mean invest, the right amount, on balance I come out ahead either way. Such a deal.

I have $250 of edutainment money on its way to Intrade. If Ron Paul is still at 7.5% when my account is cleared to trade, I will sell him short.

Pascal's Wager

2007-10-18T08:55:00.000-10:00

In a recent episode of House, a man in a hospital bed, in pain and hours from death, wishes he could just get it over with and go to heaven. Dr. House, of course, tells him that there is no heaven. Dr. Wilson says to House, "why did you do that? You don't know for sure that there is no afterlife. What harm does it do for this man to have a few hours of hope?"

Eloquently put. And yet... aren't we all terminally ill, and in pain? Maybe not so much pain, and maybe we have decades left instead of hours, but aren't we in the same existential position? What harm does it do for us to believe in heaven, or in reincarnation, or something else.

I think this is the wrong question. We are constantly bombarded with messages from advertisers, schools, governments and religions that seek to modify our behavior. The messages range from innocuous to misleading to malign. A lack of critical thinking puts a person at such a disadvantage in life.

I say focus on the critical thinking. If critical thinking leads you to warm fuzzy feelings about an afterlife, good for you. I find it does not. I see multiple belief systems that can't all be true at the same time, and a lack of evidence from which to judge which belief system is more likely to be true. Overly analytical perhaps, and not very comforting, but the flip side is that being less deluded than most gives me an advantage in the here and now. Your mileage may vary.

Department of Synchronicity: just before posting, I found yet another modern restatement of Pascal's Wager in an email:

"I would rather live my life as if there is a GOD, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is."

Is there a podiatrist in the house?

I've only been blogging for 4 days, I have maybe half a dozen readers, and one of them really does have Godzilla feet in her closet!

"Actually, I have the Perfect Godzilla's feet in a box in my closet."

OK, I'm convinced. Seeing is believing. St. Anselm's argument is valid.

Consumerism, deconstructed

2007-10-17T09:53:00.000-10:00

A snippet from a recent commercial: a young woman is at the office and her boss asks her, "How can you afford those brands on what I pay you?" The answer being "Burlington Coat Factory".

This is just wrong on so many levels. First, the emphasis is on the brand, not the coat. A brand is totally intangible, a status symbol, a piece of information... as opposed to a coat, which might keep a person warm and dry. It's assumed that the woman, her boss and the viewer all recognize the brands and acknowledge their status.

Second, there's the word "afford"... the brands are not ranked by utility or appearance, but by price. It's assumed that a more expensive brand has more status.

Third, there is a power relationship here, mediated by money. The boss sets the woman's salary, and sets it low enough to keep her in her place. But wait! By being a smart consumer, by "affording" a higher-status brand than the boss thinks she is entitled to, the woman is challenging the hierarchy! Two alpha consumers are battling it out for dominance, and Burlington Coat Factory is on the side of the challenger.

Then there is the assumption that the boss is actually impressed, instead of thinking "Jeez, what an ugly outfit! Where does she shop, Burlington Coat Factory?"

Finally, the commercial assumes that the office is the real world, that the job is real life, that employment is an authentic human relationship, and that impressing the boss is something that a normal person would bother with.

A Voluntary Simpleton would work just long enough to buy a nice warm coat at Wal-Mart, and that would be that.

Clarification: the boss is a woman. The coat picture is from the Burlington Coat Factory web site, not from the ad. If someone can find me a video of the ad itself, I'll link to it.

Virtual timber

2007-10-16T09:37:00.000-10:00

Plum Creek Timber (PCL) owns 8.2 million acres of timber in 18 states. Divide the market cap by the acres and you get about $900 per acre. Cheap land, professionally managed, 4% dividend. Land and timber are hard assets, so they should stay even with inflation, plus GDP growth. You're diversified across 18 states, so there's less risk from natural disasters.

But wait, there's more! If the price of lumber goes down (can you say "real estate bubble"?), management can always just... do nothing. The trees will keep growing, and when the price of lumber goes back up, the trees will be bigger. As opposed to corn, which will rot in the fields if it isn't harvested. The only downside is that there is no specific acreage that you can walk on, no actual trees that you can hug.

All in all, and over the long term, virtual timber should provide a return comparable to that of stocks. PCL, a single company, is riskier than a broad-based index like the S&P 500, but a little bit of PCL should reduce overall portfolio risk.

Disclosure: I do own a few acres of virtual timber.

I'm a Rocka too!

2007-10-15T18:56:00.001-10:00

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