Useful Things I Learned This Weekend

1. World of Goo is a very cool game.

2. An hour playing with World of Goo will give you a better intuitive feel for stress analysis and the effects of resonance in a structure than ten hours reading a textbook will.

3. The ramshackle buildings you wind up with in World of Goo remind me of a lot of some source code I've seen.

4. The Wii Internet Channel's a pretty good browser (being Opera and all), but it doesn't have the horsepower to play an NPR podcast.

5. An electric crock pot turned on "high" can crack a Corian countertop.

6. You can make an effective trivet using a 12" piece of ceramic tile and five of those sticky-back felt tabs you put on chair legs. You really only need four tabs, at the corners, but the fifth in the middle is belt-and-suspenders.

7. If important work e-mail's going to arrive, the most likely time is right after you've mixed the catalyst with the self-etching primer and started spraying.

8. Just a hunch, but I'm guessing the "answer e-mail while wearing latex gloves half covered with catalyzed primer" scenario didn't figure prominently in Blackberry usability testing.

more on inverting the pattern

I've been thinking a bit more about inverting the pattern, moving from a blog-like pattern of lots of talking and not much listening to something with more listening and less talk, or at least more meaningful listening.

Broadcast media is not the answer. A radio or TV station is basically the same thing as a blog, still a monologue where the speaker is hoping listeners will tune in. There might be more listening, but only because there are fewer speakers.

If you look at the pattern of a typical conversation, it's a group of people with only one person talking at a time. It happens that way because if two people try to talk at once, they interfere with each other. And it's usually considered bad form for one person to monopolize the conversation. With blogs, though, there's really no limit to the number of people who can talk at once, so there's a lot more talking. But with all the talk, who has time to listen and evaluate?

So what would it mean to bring a conversation-like pattern into the Internet? One example might be Internet Relay Chat: when one person types, everyone on the channel sees it. Another example, which I like even better because it moves a little more slowly, allowing the opportunity for greater depth, is a computer bulletin board. The modern version would be a web forum. Unlike blogs, where the blog's author holds most of the conversational power, the participants in bulletin board systems or forums [1] all have roughly equal power, so there's more room for the give-and-take that makes for conversation.

[1] Apologies to the classics purists, but I just can't bring myself to write "fora".

inverting the pattern

Blogs are all about talking, but they're rarely about conversing. They're more like monologues within earshot of one-another, and sometimes another person will tune in and change their own monologue in response. Twitter's basically the same thing, which isn't too surprising since it's really a form of blogging.

I wonder, though, if there's a way to invert the pattern. Instead of everyone talking and hoping someone listens, is there a way you could reverse it so there's much more listening going on than talking? What would such a thing look like? And would people use it?

The Park and Supergenius Criminal Masterminds

So I've started reading The Park, about a trailer park full of people with superpowers. The idea's got a ton of potential, maybe even for some social commentary. And it looks like the villain just showed up.

Which has got me thinking: why is it that so many supergenius criminal masterminds want to rule the world? "What are we going to do tonight, Brain?" "The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to take over the world." I mean, say you do take over the world. What do you get? The massive headache of running the whole friggin' world, that's what. And guess who everyone's going to blame the next time there's a war, or a recession, or some government agency muffs disaster relief?

So I'm thinking the really clever supergenius criminal masterminds--you know, the ones a cut above the Wile E. Coyotes of the world--they're not in it for the money or the girls or the private 747 with the jacuzzi tub and reporters and NORAD interface, 'cause there are a lot easier ways to get those things. And they're probably not in it for the recognition, either. Let's face it: a good PR firm will take you a lot further for your dollar than world domination will.

So what is it? Resume padding? The sheer challenge of the thing? The belief that they can run things better than anyone else?

Hmmm. Considering how well things sometimes run, maybe there's something to that last possibility.

where did the time go?

Coppertop claims her old watch is dying: it's running slow, losing time.

I know better.

In the far future, people will have wildly advanced technology. But time, as they say, will still be money. People will be willing to pay quite a bit for a well-placed extra few minutes here, or an hour there. But time, like the other spacial dimensions, can neither be created nor destroyed. So where do you get it?

Easy. Mine it. From the past. From around the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when people are so distracted by all the social changes that they'll barely notice it. They'll just chalk it up to being busy. Take just a few milliseconds out of every second, or even a good chunk of each second during peak demand periods. Squeeze it there in the past, stretch it out here in the future, and sell it at premium prices.

When you look up at the clock and wonder where your day went, well, now you know. Some future person with cash to burn is enjoying an extra few minutes lingering over drinks, or some desperate student who hasn't been born yet just scored another hour to cram (or fritter away trying to cram) before a final that hasn't yet been planned for a subject that doesn't yet exist.

Somehow, in all the mining, they missed Coppertop's watch. It's not losing time; it's keeping it just fine. It's the rest of us that are losing it.

don't write like my brother

The Car Talk guys often sign off with "don't drive like my brother, 'cause if you do, the end of your dipstick might fall off."

I was refilling Snardblott, the Pen of Doom tonight. As I held the adapter and twisted back the plunger to suck up ink, there was a sudden kerplonk, and the entire nib fell off into the (formerly) full bottle of ink. Not just any ink, mind you, but a jar of Noodler's Blue-Black. Which comes in tall, skinny jars. And is almost, but not quite, permanent.

Needless to say, a messy episode ensued. After cleaning up what'd already dribbled, I wound up pouring about half the ink into an empty jar. (Always keep your empty ink jars, 'cause you just never know when you might need one.) Then, after scratching my head for a bit, and wondering why I let the lady at the store talk me into using a non-threaded Waterman adapter when the old, worn-out adapter of the same size had threads on the end, I hit upon the bright idea of using a pair of bamboo chopsticks to fish the nib out of the jar.

Now, I'm pretty decent with a set of chopsticks. Back in college, I used to play the "pass the ice cube" game with the best of them. But I'll tell you, trying to fish a nib set in a round, smooth, cylindrical housing, immersed in inky blackness, through the neck of a tall, skinny jar, is not a challenge I'm eager to tackle again in the near future. I eventually got the sucker out, but not before picking up several blue fingertips for my trouble. And the old trick of washing your hands with shampoo doesn't take this stuff out--as I said, it's nigh permanent.

And to think just a couple days ago I was about to try one of Noodler's bulletproof inks, the ones that are permanent and will stand up to pretty much anything short of dissolving the paper out from under them.

google links and e-mail marketing

I saw this interesting sponsored link come across gmail this evening:

A sponsored link for "e-mail marketing"? I guess it's a good thing there's a "report spam" button, but isn't that kind of like putting the humidifier and the dehumidifier in the same room and letting them fight it out?

finals time again

Finals time again.
Flash cards stay the outdoors' call.
The world in 3x5.

the Alameda-Weekawken burrito tunnel

Absolutely brilliant. Hat-tip to Feld Thoughts.

skateboarding bulldog

This video's been making the rounds. A skateboarding dog! Too cool!

(Yeah, that's about as insightful as it's gonna get right now. I'm just not up to tackling Massachusetts v. EPA till the head and stomach settle down. Lujan and Chevron and statutes, oh my!)

sign in class

"Death penalty presentation. Free food!"

brain's tired

Started the morning trying to cram the law of mergers and acquisitions into my brain. Then it was researching the folks involved in the Disney exec comp stuff: Ovitz, Eisner, Iger. Then ethics rules. Then back to M&A. Then criminal law (which I'm supposed to be helping other folks learn--still figuring out how to do that). Then more Disney deals. Then more M&A (why's the chancellor talking about Unocal in a merger case again?) Then Brin's writing about gun control, Burnham's doing what's next for high tech companies, Schneier's got the attack in Iraq by gunmen in American army uniforms--uniforms as authentication tokens, and Sciam's showing about a zillion science posts. Too many analogies, similes, metaphors. To many verbal and conceptual patterns to sort and match. You can't stop the fire hose, you can only sip and get out of the way.

The brain's like a muscle in many ways. As you use it, it changes. Physically changes. Go blind and a lot of the parts that used to process visual information start to handle other kinds of duties, like maybe auditory functions. Master a musical instrument and the responsible parts of the cortex thicken. Just like your biceps respond to curls, your brain responds to mental curls.

And my brain muscle is pooped.

the more I learn, the less I think I know

"As the circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it." -- Albert Einstein

"Vast is the field of science. The more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know."
-- Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), English novelist

"Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know." -- Socrates (469–399 B.C.), quoted in Plato, Apology, sct. 19

"To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty." -- Lao-Tzu (6th century B.C.), Tao-te-ching, bk. 2, ch. 71, trans. by T.C. Lau (1963).

forty-one

For some strange reason, the number 41 has been popping up frequently. I could understand 42, but 41 is a bit odd.

I almost never watch college football. I made an exception when Rice had their first bowl game in years. They lost to Troy, 41-17 (both prime numbers). I made a second exception for the Ohio State game. Even though they were heavily favored, they lost to the Gators 41-14 (a palindrome). Just now, the price at the grocery store was $41.41.

Hmm. Well, February 10th, a month from today, is the 41st day of the year. I guess we'll see if anything significant happens then.