The Longest Now

From Zapiro‘s genius sketchbook.

Some things are too good to mako up: The prison-blogging project La Voz Del Mako, “un espacio libre para los reclusos” at Centro Penitenciario de Albolote in Spain, apparently began life as a newspaper of the same name a dozen years ago. The current director of the prison said, in setting up the blog, “I wanted to open more than prison.” It’s not quite Between the Bars, but it looks like an interesting cloistered-community-wide effort.

Hooke liked to note discoveries he had made before he had found time to exlpain and prove his discoveries.  He used the simple mechanich of anagramming an entire phrase:

The true Mathematical and Mechanichal form of all manner of ARches for Building, with the true butment necessary to each of them. A Problem which no Architectonick Writer hath ever yet attempted, much less performed. abcccddeeeeefggiiiiiiiillmmmmnnnnnooprrsssttttttuuuuuuuux

This code, not decrypted during Hooke’s life, was revealed on his death to anagram to: Ut pendet continuum flexile, sic stabit contiguum rigidum inversum — “As hangs a flexible cable, so inverted, stand the touching pieces of an arch”.  The modest original context follows; (more…)

I’m almost back from 2010… here one more from the road, to make you smile or win your fellow linguist’s ♥!. Lyrics and fabulous youtube recording (what, no video?) are (c) Christine Collins:

let me have your heart and i will give you love
the denotation of my soul is the above
if there’s anything i lack, it’s you
as my double brackets, you make me mean things
i can’t say enough
(more…)

NMAtv gives the secret DailyShow cabal a saucy McRibbing. (Hat tip to the show for calling it out.)

My dear cousin Simon (of Lynch / Eisinger / Design) is an inventive architect and the inspiration for some of my own passion for design work.  His firm put together a showroom for Herman Miller recently, and over the summer it won two serious awards — the highest architecture award in New York State, and California’s state award for Adaptive Reuse.  It’s nice to see this work recognized! See below for some view of it.

Herman Miller building interior

Front view of the building

Joseph Reagle is a Wikipedian and a researcher of social collaboration.  He was an early fellow at the Berkman Center before I got involved there, worked on some interesting W3C projects, and joined NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication where he studied collaboration and Wikipedia.  He turned some of his PhD work into a book on Wikipedia culture, which was just published this month.

“Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia” is an excellent read, suited for both my mother and for the armchair sociology buff.  Having seen some of the detailed research that went into it, I was pleased to find it organizes that into clear narrative facets, each illuminating part of the whole, without creating artificial story arcs.

The book is careful with its use of language and terminology, self-conscious of when it is sharing a widely understood phrase and when it is creating one that it needs for clarity.  It includes a comprehensive look at Wikipedian writings and coming-of-age debates during the heady period from 2004 to 2006, when much of the texture of current community structures was being formed.  The writing is poetic at times, and I particularly appreciate its comparisons to similar projects across two millennia (we have indeed been collating and collaborating for a long time)

This is also the first extended research into Wikipedian culture to strike what I feel is a carefully-sourced (60 pages of endnotes!) and neutral perspective, giving it a certain… idempotence.  In the tradition of early philosophical wikis, Wikipedia has long hosted a great deal of its own commentary on and analysis of itself and its community, and these existing analyses are given apprporiate historical prominence.  Good Faith Collaboration builds on these on-wiki conversations to offer a balanced look at decision-making within the community, describing the varied and sometimes conflicting views held by groups within the community.

Kudos to Joseph for this work, which I suspect will become a launching point for future community analyses.

There is much more that could be accomplished with the open ten-year history of Wikipedia across its many languages, subprojects, and variants!   One natural expansion (both for Wikipedia and for other long-lived transparent communities) would be to repeat a certain community analysis at regular intervals along a timeline.  We can observe and classify cultural change with a precision and a visualization of propagating memes that would be impossible in more opaque communities (dominated by invisible communication).  This was more true a few years ago than it is today — in the past year many significant documents or ideas were drafted in private, and perhaps not versioned at all, and many conversations left unarchived.  If we are to continue to make this sort of learning and analysis available for future generations, we may need to refocus our energies on public and transparent communication channels.

1) 23andMe has Genetic kits for genealogy and health analysis. I’m told they are like the OLPC version of genetic kits — green, cheerful, roughly lunchbox sized…

2) My mother made a lot of calls from her cell phone to my brother in Chile in the aftermath of its recent geologic activity. This week she received a letter from AT&T in the mail letting her know that all calls to Chile during that week were being refunded. Three cheers for transcontinental neighborliness!

3) Birthday Milongas and Holy Lolas.

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid, they say — commonly remembered as a reference to the final drinks of most victims of the Jonestown massacre. At the time the phrase was coined,Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was also popular, and in the context of  60s hippie culture, “drinking the kool-aid” could also mean taking LSD.

Early reports about the compound referred to “cool aid(sic) packets”.  Since then, Kraft Foods and others have maintained that it was an urban legend that they all drank Kool-Aid, and that it was Flavor Aid instead – a misunderstanding thanks to the genericization of “cool aid” as a term.

Enter YouTube, Wikipedia, and the open web.  After decades of casual debate, we can now resolve half of the mystery: they certainly had both powdered drinks at Jonestown, and we have a handy link to the 9 seconds of a newsreel that shows it first-hand.  Whether the final drink was from one set of packets or the other, this handily settles the question of whether they had Kool Aid on site.  It’s the first time I’ve seen a few seconds of video effectively used as a moving-image citation!  Note to Readers: you can also embed YouTube videos and tell them where to start playback.

Hat-tip to brassratgirl for helping me towards enlightenment on the issue.

This new reality show from Malaysia looks amazing. I would go out of my way to watch this sort of show for any religion whatever. (The Frum and the Restless didn’t do it for me. But if you have another amazing reality show that captures real life, let me know.) The winner of the show is sponsored to take the Hajj, and has a chance to lead services for a famous congregation in Kuala Lumpur.

UPDATE: Here’s a YouTube video trailer of the show.

OK, it was in Queens.  And it was a young schizophrenic bull, not an old one with degenerative troubles.  But you can’t make this stuff up.

Our interconnected global economy is built on the illusion of trust.  Gautama himself would be impressed by how far we have advanced the texture of societal illusion.  While there are certainly many non-illusory sources of trust, the trust most modern men have in our financial instruments and currencies is based on a blind association of “interest rates”, “inflation”, “market valuation” and similar concepts with a hazy set of economic laws, as though they were fundamental laws in the sense that one discoveres Mathematical or Physical Laws.   Not social norms that could change on short notice; not starting rules of nomic games of risk and manipulation; not Massively Multilayered Online Resource-Permuting Guidelines, hundreds of indirections removed from the original social norm of personal credit and unenforcable on any large scale.  They are perceived instead as Laws, discoverable and immutable.  Not quite.

For better or worse, we live in fascinating times.  Thanks to this motif of fright, many once-in-a-lifetime financial decisions are being made every day.  A few recent moves by the US Federal Reserve Bank, striving to maintain order:

• Sunday: an unprecedented 4-hour Sunday afternoon org-to-org trading session, part of “last-ditch efforts to prevent toxic assets from ailing Lehman Brothers spilling into global markets and rupturing investor faith in the international financial system”.   The result: only $1B in trades, slightly less panic the following day, and a loosening of the shared global trust in unwavering financial regulation.
• Sunday night?: Banks are told they may use deposits to fund their investment bank subsidiaries, flaunting Federal Reserve Act Section 23A. potentially stabilizing failing banks at the cost of risk to individual investors.
• Monday: a ‘dramatic loosening’ of the standard for federal loans to banks, potentially stabilizing them at the cost of dramatically increased risk of government losses.  Meanwhile, the US Treasury’s S&P AAA rating is vulnerable. Shared global trust in regulation dips.
• Tuesday: The Fed lends $85B to AIG, after refusing them $20B over the weekend.  True, AIG isn’t a bank, but see FRA Section 13(3).  AIG uses ‘all of its assets’ as collateral, giving the Fed an 80% stake.
• Tuesday: the FDIC feels the crunch, says it’s ok for a while, but makes a medium-term request for a $500B line of credit.  Why?  Well, while there are over $6,000B in bank deposits in the US, more than half of them FDIC insured, banks report less than $300B cash on hand. And the FDIC reserve is down to $45B, only enough to cover ~15% of the difference in case of a widespread bank run.
• Wednesday: Banks may count goodwill as capital when meeting regulatory requirements for capital onhand.  This allows a deepening of the leveraging of assets of troubled banks, which only caused trouble during the S&L crisis; what’s different now?
• Thursday: After three Reserve Fund money market accounts drop below $1 a share, Putnam‘s Prime Money Market Fund shuts down to avoid losses.  It’s been a while.
• Friday: The Treasury pulls out a few more stops and assigns the $50B in the Exchange Stabilization Fund to current money market funds.

Updates as the week progresses.  The large market swings are reminiscent of the month before Black Monday… so stay tuned, relax, stick to insured banks, and (remind your loved ones to) stay out of the stock market.

Liquidity pyramid diagrams, fractional reserves, and other comments below the fold. (more…)

Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :

• a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates

• scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time.  A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections.  The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…

Inspired by this spoof of Mankiw and the droll wit of my future Aikido opponent, I am tempted to publish a blog tackling each failed field in turn.  Oh, and there are so many…

Chinese philosophers debated for centuries whether one discovers the nature of the universe by investigating oneself or by investigating the outer world. I don’t have a dog in that fight (I might say both grant equal power of discovery when approached properly), but I do like poring through random selections to get a feel for an expansive whole (yes, I want a Special:Random for the universe).

Sometimes I do that reflexively while thinking, practiving a little Langerfulness. So it was that I found myself tonight seven pages into the discussion threads for the YouTube video “Why Chuck [Norris] endorsed Mike [Huckabee] – Episode One [of Five]“, where I ran across the following exchange between BuckDresser and jtm04d; those of you who know my favorite tests of familiarity with good scientific method may appreciate it… (more…)

Quanta plans widescale rollout of cheap computers; the cheapest with small screens and no hard drive.  No word on whether they care about power and life…

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