Here’s a satirical site by Parsons MFA student Dan Provost, a faux listing of Facebook’s upcoming privaliciously-helpful features. For example:

Facebook Image Scan

Facebook Image Scan uses a sophisticated computer algorithm to filter through every image in the user’s Photo Album, identifying brand markings and products and tagging them with links back to your homepage.

The awesome thing about this is that I wouldn’t put it past Facebook to consider such a feature, were the technology feasible. Rather, I should say that I don’t put it past Facebook to consider such a feature when the technology becomes feasible. Maybe sites like FBS will help inoculate us against business practices that insinuate themselves this far into our lives, by highlighting their absurdity before-the-fact. Talk to me again in five years.

To round out the awesome creepiness of the site, you can actually log in from this page. I inspected the source, and the login goes to Facebook (at least as of this morning.) But it could easily phish for your username and password, too.

Nice work, Dan. This is a killer media hack.

via The Art of the Prank

Here’s another batch of notes on three TED Talks (you can see all of them here). The Pinker one is particularly interesting, to me; I’m going to solicit comments from an email list I’m on.

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

Pinker lays out a story of humanity that I believe to be true, but has been challenged repeatedly by those I’m close to: A long history of dramatically-declining violence and a commensurate increase in our empathy towards the other. He describes this history at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and individual years, calling it a “fractal” decline. He also draws from thinkers over the last hundred years to lay out four explanations for why this decline has occurred:

1. Thomas Hobbes: Life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The Hobbesian solution to this problem was the “leviathan state,” a central authority with a monopoly on violent power. The Machiavellian explanation here would give some credit to the rise of central governments for the
2. Life is Cheap: When suffering and early death are commonplace, the consequences of violence seem less dramatic to us. As wealth and quality of life increase, so does our value of that life, even if it is of the Other.
3. Robert Wright: Nonzero-sum games can often result in parties benefitting when they trade or cooperate rather than enter into violent conflict. Over time, the greater ability of parties to communicate has allowed more and more people to discover these nonzero-sum dynamics in more and more situations.
4. Peter Singer: The “expanding circle” of empathy. This, too, has been borne along by increasing wealth, access to communication technologies, and education.

There are holes that one can poke in this description of our history. Pinker’s narrative is very Euro-centric (what happened in China during these centuries? Africa?) It also completely ignores the incidence of sexual violence towards women; It’s hard to say if that how much that has declined over the ages, if it has.

Overall, though, I think Pinker is right. I’d be interested to see any data that contradicts the trend line that he can draw from hunter gatherer times to our own.

Bill Clinton: TED Prize wish: Let’s build and health care system in Rwanda

Clinton discusses the work of his foundation, and how it fits into the larger picture of social inequalities and development work. He stresses the importance of focusing on systems rather than taking on problems piecemeal. The Clinton foundation cut out middlemen in Haiti, cutting per-annum costs of anti-retrovirals from $3500 to $500, and then reduced it further to $190 by helping the pharmaceutical companies change their business models (from “jewelry store” to “grocery market.”) Mentions Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health; they are working with PIH to reproduce that system in Rwanda. In time, they want to develop a health administration system that can be adapted for any number of other countries. An interesting thought on “fund leakage”: On corruption in developing nations, Clinton mentions that he believes that lost opportunities due to health problems are a much greater problem, and they in fact feed corruption.

Juan Enriquez: Why can’t we grow new energy?

Playing on words, Enriquez extends the definition of “bioenergy” to include coal and oil, which of course were originally plant and animal matter, eons ago. He describes the possibility of using biological processes to convert underground oil and coal into gas, thus allowing us to extract the energy content without mining, and thus greatly increasing the reserves we have access too (3x, possibly.) He likens the possible growth of such an industry to the “green revolution” that allowed the productivity of agriculture to boom in the 20th century: think in terms of biology, not chemistry, in order to scale massively.

Of course, this is not a carbon-reduction technique (in fact, it sounds like a perilous way to keep dirty energy costs very low.) Enriquez proposes it only a “bridge” to new tech.

Another, separate idea: stabilizing oil prices by taxing to set a floor on oil prices, giving alternative fuels a floor to work with (and thus be able to invest against.)

As usual, you can see all of the TED talk notes, here.

Aw, hell yeah:

Part of a series of whimsical posters by Packard Jennings Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert, all depicting architect’s ideas of what public transit could look like without economic, political, or physical constraints.

David Foster Wallace’s entry into the Atlantic Monthly’s series of writers’ thoughts on the “American Idea”:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

I, for one, am willing to sacrifice my personal safety to protect the ideals that seem so elusive to us. I’ve expressed this thought to several people, over the years, and the response has often been vehemently negative. The problem, I think, was the technocratic manner in which I presented the thought. I’d describe ongoing terrorist attacks as the “operating cost” of an open society or a “tax” that we pay for being a global market player. “You’re trivializing the deaths of thousands,” they’d say.

I think DFW puts it better. His full piece (only a few paragraphs more) is after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I remember being so excited when I first found out about Wikipedia by the idea that I could add all of my copious bits of knowledge to it, making it better. That feeling lasted for about an hour, before I realized that there really wasn’t much that I knew that the lazyweb didn’t already know, usually with much more depth that I did.

Today, though I was able to add a little bit of my brain to the mix. I was looking at this guy’s weird contraption for tracing out parabolic volumes (for large solar cookers), but I had a little trouble figuring out why it worked.

Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on parabolas was no help. Once I figured it out, though, I was able to make a minor adjustment to one of the diagrams there and add it. A good feeling ensued.

Details: The Instructable works on a weird mechanical contraption that relies on the principle illustrated in the diagram that I added:

“Parabolic curve showing arbitrary line (L), focus (F), and vertex (V). L is an arbitrary line perpendicular to the axis of symmetry and opposite the focus of the parabola from the vertex (i.e. farther from V than from F.) The length of any line F – Pn – Qn is the same. This is similar to saying that a parabola is an ellipse, but with one focal point at infinity.”

The wording is a little unwieldy; feel free to tighten it up!

Coworker, English muffin in hand: I love how the butter gets in all the nooks and crannies.
Coworker, passing by: That’s what she said.

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.

I almost forgot about this, which is strange because I wrote it all the way back in August, 2007 and use it on a daily basis. JSLoad is a clever bit of plumbing that powers all of the user interface over at Instructables. We’ve released it under an open-souce license (LGPL.) A lot of non-coder friends read my blog, so the coolness of it may not be apparent. Suffice it to say that I’m proud of it, despite its rough edges. I’m also hoping that it will be useful to others.

For the geeks, JSLoad is a script loader and dependency manager:

The real usefulness of JSLoad comes with its ability to group dependencies using tags. Tags are arbitrary labels that you can apply to (i.e. make dependent on) any group of files or other tags. Tags can be applied to single files or multiple files. Multiple tags can be applied to a single file. You can even think of your tags as depending upon a portion of a file (say, class within a file containing several classes.)

As a result, you can mimic most other dependency structures: Chains, trees, or more complicated graphs. You can tag things that often appear together, that share a certain aspect; whatever your usage calls for. At Instructables, for example, we generally have a base set of widgets and features whose dependencies are primarily tree-like. Those little bits are then collected into larger groupings like “editable” or “commentable”; abstract labels that approximate the kinds of interfaces that are common on our site.

Tags are also very useful while refactoring code. Often, because of the flexibility of Javascript, you won’t be sure of the best way to split your code across files. Which portions will be used together most often, and should thus be grouped together to reduce HTTP requests? With JSLoad, you can tag the variant groupings, then organize your code as you wish. Your web pages will just call JSLoad the tags as they need them. Over time, you may find that one tag is used much more often than the others. Using JSLoad, you can refactor your code into a more efficient file structure, without changing any of the script calls in the pages that use the code.

Click through to the official page to read more or to download the code for yourself. You can also preview it on the test page to see it in action.

I’ve been receiving a number of security alerts from Goma, since many expect the government to move against various rebel groups (mostly FDLR) in the next few days. I’ve received standard warnings, before, but this batch were distinct in that they included specific expected troop movements and a map of Goma indicating evacuation points:

Fortunately, there are places to regroup both near Maji Matu Livu (the house where I stayed) and near the hospital. Sadly, I know that evacuation plans like these are mostly for non-Congolese. I hope everyone I know stays safe, and that contingency plans like these aren’t needed.