Moving files while they're being downloaded

When I'm downloading a file in Windows, it won't let me move the file or rename it. Sometimes I want to be able to move it, for exactly the same reasons I want to move ordinary files. In this case, I realised there was a better place to put it.

Ideally, it would let me move the file, and it'd be smart enough to update the file contents there. I'm not saying it would be a click of the fingers to implement, but it's certainly technically possible to implement an OS that works like this.

When you think about it, this limitation is simply an inconsistency (of the sort that might confuse people who aren't computer literate) arising from a technical detail, and I think these are the sorts of things we should be trying to eliminate.

---

A similar thing goes for files that are open in editors. In this case, you might want the OS to notify you that it is currently open, and confirm that you want to go ahead with the operation. The editor would be notified of the change, and adjust things accordingly.

Reader's Digest: 23 ways to avoid catching a cold or the flu

The seems to be a lot colds going around lately -- I've got one now. Reader's Digest has an interesting list of things you can do to prevent catching a cold or the flu.

Here are some of the interesting ones I hadn't heard of. Some might sound strange, but they make sense after you read the explanation for them.

• Wash your hands twice every time you wash them.
  
• Run your toothbrush through the microwave on high for 10 seconds to kill germs that can cause colds and other illnesses.
  
• Leave the windows in your house open a crack in winter.
  
• Speaking of which, buy a hygrometer.
  
• Sit in a sauna once a week.
  
• Inhale air from your blow-dryer.
  
• Wipe your nose -- don't blow.

Here's another bit from it

3. Use this hand-drying strategy in public restrooms. Studies find a shockingly large percentage of people fail to wash their hands after using a public restroom. And every single one of them touches the door handle on the way out. So after washing your hands, use a paper towel to turn off the faucet. Use another paper towel to dry your hands, then open the door with that paper towel as a barrier between you and the handle. It sounds nuts, but it's an actual recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control to protect you from infectious diseases like cold and flu.

I've always found it strange how many people don't wash their hands... I wonder why exactly?

Amazing landscape scenes made from food (pics)

Some people have far too much time on their hands.

---

Similar: What chefs do when they're bored (pics)

Bruce Schneier on the different mindset security professionals need to have

Bruce Schneier on the different mindset security professionals need to have. It involves “thinking about how things can be made to fail. It involves thinking like an attacker, an adversary or a criminal. “ The person with this mind set “can't walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can't use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can't vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice.”

Funny comic "I met a butterfly the other day."

Funny: I met a butterfly the other day. Sounds a bit twee, but it isn't.

Greek Bean Stew with Feta

Nice greek-style stew. Tomatoes and dill make a great flavour combination, and provide the central focus of the flavours here. (Unfortunately, I can't recall the name of the cookbook I got this from).

• onion, 1
  
• olive oil, 2 tbsp
  
• garlic cloves, 2, crushed
  
• canned chopped tomatoes, 400g
  
• tomato paste, 1 tbsp
  
• bay leaves, 2
  
• parsley, finely chopped, 2 tbsp
  
• dill, finely chopped, 2 tbsp
  
• salt, 1 tsp
  
• pepper, 1/2 tsp
  
• paprika, 1/2 tsp
  
• sugar, 1 tbsp
  
• canned beans, 3 x 400g cans (cannellini, butter or kidney)
  
• feta cheese, 100g
  
• Potential accompaniments: flat bread and a greek salad.
  

• Halve and finely slice the onion
  
• Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan and fry the onion until soft but not browned.
  
• Add the
  
  • garlic
    
  • tomatoes
    
  • tomato paste
    
  • and 500ml water
• followed by the
  • bay leaves
    
  • parsely
    
  • half the dill
    
  • salt
    
  • pepper
    
  • paprika
    
  • sugar

• Bring to a simmer.
  
• Simmer, partly covered, for 20 to 30 minutes until nice and thick.
  
• Drain and rinse the beans, add to the stew, and simmer gently for another 10 minutes.

• Rinse the feta cheese, pat dry and cut into smallish cubes
  (perhaps 1cm to a side - so you don't end up biting into huge peices that'd overwhelm the other flavours).
  
• Add to the pan and simmer for another 5 minutes until the cheese is soft.

• Serve in small bowls, drizzled with a little extra olive oil and scattered with the remaining dill.
  
• Serve hot or at room temprature (it's actually quite good when cool), with some warm flat bread and perhaps a Greek salad.

Impressive shadow puppet routine on Letterman

Pretty amazing performance by Raymond Crowe, who happens to be from Adelaide in Australia.

Recipe: Tuna and Boccincini Pizza

Tuna and Boccincini Pizza

Bit different to the usual pizza, but quite nice. Here's the source for this recipe.

• Pizza base, 1
  
• Fennel bulb, 1, finely sliced
  
• Bocconcini or fresh mozzarella, 75g, sliced
  
• Tuna in oil, 185g can, well drained.
  
• Fennel fronds, 1 tbsp, finely chopped
  
• Parsley, finely chopped, 1/8 cup
  
• Basil, finely chopped, 1 tbsp
  
• Olive oil, 1 1/2 tbsp
  
• Grated lemon rind, from 1/2 lemon

• Preheat oven to 220 degrees.
  
• Brush each pizza base with a little olive oil.
  
• Sprinkle the fennel evenly over each pizza base and top with the sliced cheese.
  
• Bake in oven for 12-15 minutes.
  
• Gently toss together the flaked tuna, herbs, olive oil and lemon rind and season with salt and freshly ground pepper.
  
• Scatter over the hot pizza and serve.

Kevin Kelly: When copies are free, you have to sell what can't be copied

More and more things are becoming digitised, and thus easily copied. The Internet is a big machine for grinding out free copies. And when copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. So argues Kevin Kelly, in his post Better Than Free.

So what can't be copied? He lists eight things, which he gives plenty of examples of:

• Immediacy
  
• Personalization
  
• Embodiment (which is really a subtype of personalization)
  
• Interpretation
  
• Authenticity
  
• Accessibility
  
• Patronage
  
• Findability

Basically, making money from these means making money from capturing attention, which is a different kettle of fish from what we're used to.

I reckon his post presents some pretty deep insights into future technological development.

Here's a few other details about it.

He criticises the notion that advertising is essentially the only means to make money from free copies.

He also generalises his argument from digital copies to "any kind of copy where the marginal cost of that copy approaches zero", going on to say

Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don't want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill.

---

Additional Notes

Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is relevant to these issues, according to one of the post comments: it is "arguably one of the cornerstones of an understanding of multiple media in modern life, and it describes convulsive, revolutionary changes to media distribution really elegantly".

The same comment also recommends Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things for more on the value of "findability".


In relation to technological development as the removal of constraints

I think what Kelly writes fits in nicely with the notion of technological development as the removal of constraints, which I talked about in a 2006 post Scientific and Technological Development = Removal of Constraints.

Briefly, my argument was along these lines:

• Our capabilities are obviously limited, to differing degrees and in various ways
  
• Technologies lessen these limitations (or constraints).
  • It can be two-steps forwards, one step back, but I think there is an overal trend in this direction
• You can think about where technological development may go by thinking about the ways our capabilities are constrained, and the ways these constraints can be lessened.
  • You don't have to do this just to speculate, but to try and figure out how to improve on current technologies.

I think Kelly's post fits in nicely with this. Copying used to be heavily constrained. It took a fair bit of time and effort to make copies of things. But now, technology has removed a lot of these constraints.

The copying constraints enabled you, as the producer of some content (e.g. a song), to charge people for copies. But since that constraint is drastically lessened you have to find other things to sell that people can't copy - things where our ability to copy them is heavily constrained.

But even these other constraints may be lessened by further technological development. For example, it will become easier to personalise content, through higher-level ways to configure things, and through more intelligent software that knows your preferences better and can do a reasonable job of ensuring they're met.


Dimensions upon which to imagine ideals

This bit is sketching...

Another way to look at Kelly's list of eight items, is as a list of eight dimensions along which we can remove constraints, to look at where technological development may head. To think, for example, of ways for making content more immediate, or more authentic.

What I think is actually the most useful thing to do is have a clear idea of what the ideal would be for each of those constraints. For example, the ideal in terms of Findability might be for you to simply want to desire something, and with the most minimal amount of effort be able to get it. Or even better, for technology to be able to (reliably) predict that you'll want something and deliver it to you before you even have to realise you want it.

Removing all the constraints associated with interpretation would mean there is an automatic provision of interpretation -- of what the content means, what you can do about it, how to use it, etc -- suited to you. The ultimate step would be not to have to provide you with this information, but for it to be automatically applied for you.

But so what, right? What's the use if you're just imagining some fantasy ideal, and not thinking about something more realistic, or about how to improve the technology? The answer to this is that we need to think beyond means that directly lead to the improvements. What imagining these ideals can do is help give you higher-standards. And high-standards are crucial for any creative work. Steve Jobs has very high standards. So does Ricky Gervais. So it seems with most people who make good stuff.

You've got a benchmark that keeps you from simply being satisfied with an incremental improvement. You're taking a broader, more fundamental viewpoint. This might lead you to redesign things from the ground up, or at least not simply see an incremental improvement as "good" and stop there, but be thinking about there being more that is possible.

Apple is an example of a company that pushes things more than just 'one step further'.

Article: innovation is the result of hard-work, not flashes of brilliance

Janet Rae-Dupree, in the New York Times:

As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us.

Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

"The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems," explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, "The Myths of Innovation." "Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation."

---

That's a common theme in innovation, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the Claremont Graduate University in California. "Cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume that some kind of information processing keeps going on even when we are not aware of it, even while we are asleep," he writes in "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention."

Though that's hardly surprising once you're aware that most of cognition is unconscious, and that conscious thought is like the tip of the
iceberg.

Tiredness is not literally a lack of energy

One of the malaises of our modern world is that we get fat. We eat
too much sweet and fatty foods. Why? Because in ancestoral
conditions, food was a scarce resource and sweet and fatty foodstuffs
were potent energy sources. We've evolved to seek them out. In
developed countries, food is no longer a scarce resource, and this
instinctive craving makes us fat.

Tiredness is another modern malaise. Many of us just don't have much
energy. No doubt overwork, hectic lifestyle and inadequate sleep are
major contributors. And lethargy could be due to mental exhaustion,
though here I'm talking about lack of physical energy.

It is interesting to note that this tiredness must be an intentional
part of the design of our bodies, to make us get some rest, like the
way we need sleep. It is not actually a lack of energy. We have more
energy than ever. Energy is, quite literally, what those fat bellies
we're carrying around are.

Fishmongers at Byron Bay

If you go to Byron Bay, you must try the fish and chips at Fishmongers! It's in a laneway that doesn't get much foot traffic, so you could easily miss it. And that'd be a shame, the food is fantastic. And it's cheaper than most higher-end places in the area -- basic fish and chips are only $10. You'll find the place in the laneway behind the beach hotel.

Clay Shirky on the use of evidence in society (his response to the 2007 Edge question)

Clay Shirky's response to last year's Edge question "What are you optimistic about?". Very good I think.

Evidence. 

As schoolchildren, we learn that different weights fall at the same speed. This simple and readily tested observation, first published by Galileo, refuted Aristotle, who claimed that heavy things fall faster. As Galileo put it in Two New Sciences "I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true..." We are left to wonder how people could have believed what they were told, and for two millennia at that, without ever checking? Surely the power of evidence over authority is obvious. 

Except it isn't. Even today, evidence has barely begun to upend authority; the world is still more in thrall to Aristotle than Galileo. As a simple example, the time-honored advice for those suffering from bad backs has been bed rest. Only recently, though, have we discovered bed rest isn't the best treatment, and isn't even particularly good compared to moderate activity. How did this discovery come about? A researcher in the field of Evidence-based Medicine surveyed multiple databases of trials and results for patients with back pain. (It tells us something about medicine's current form that we even need a term like Evidence-based Medicine.) And why did it take so long to look at the evidence? Same reason it took so long to question Aristotle: some doctor in the distant past reasoned that bed rest would be a good idea, and it became the authoritative and little-questioned view. 

In school, the embrace of evidence is often taught as if it were a one-time revolution that has now been internalized by society. It hasn't. The idea of evidence is consistently radical: Take nothing on faith. No authority is infallible. If you figure out a good way to test something, you can contradict hallowed figures with impunity. 

Evidence will continue to improve society, but slowly — this is long-view optimism. The use of evidence dragged the curious mind from the confusion of alchemy into the precision of chemistry in the historical blink of an eye, but its progress past the hard sciences has been considerably slower. Even accepting that evidence should shape our views is inconsistent with much human behavior. Everything from the belief in supernatural beings to deference to elders pushes against the idea that a single person, if he or she comes to understand the evidence, should be allowed to upend a millennium of cherished human belief. 

It is only in the last hundred years that evidence has even begun spreading from the hard sciences into other parts of human life. Previous platitudes about the unpredictability or universal plasticity of human behavior are giving way to areas of inquiry with names like Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Economics. (That we need a label like Behavioral Economics says as much about economics as Evidence-based Medicine does about medicine.) As reliance on evidence spreads, it takes with it an understanding of how it works. Apologists for religion often bolster their claims by noting that it is impossible to disprove the existence of supernatural beings. This argument assumes that their listeners don't understand how evidence works — it makes sense to believe in things for which there is evidence, and no sense to believe in things for which there is none. As evidence moves out of the lab and into everywhere else, rhetorical tricks like that are going to be progressively less effective. There will still be fundamentalists, of course — probably more of them, as improved evidence requires a heightened ability to shield the mind — but the oxymoronic middle ground of 'religious but reasonable' will become progressively harder to occupy. 

This isn't just about religion, though. Most of the really important parts of our lives ·who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence. We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question. 

Social science is expanding because we are better about gathering data and about understanding it. We have gone from a drought to a flood of data about personal and social behavior in the last generation. We will learn more about the human condition in the next two decades years than we did in the last two millennia, and we will then begin to apply what we learn, everywhere. Evidence-based treaties. Evidence-based teaching. Evidence-based industrial design. Evidence-based parenting. 

There will always be some questions we can't answer, but they will be closer in spirit to "Who put the bomp in the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp?" than to "Why do fools fall in love?" There is an astonishing amount of work going on on that latter question right now, and there's a reasonable chance we'll have a really good answer, to it and to thousands of other questions once thought to be beyond study or explanation, in the coming years.

Spectacular looking construction - pics of big research facilities

A refreshing bit of unfamiliarity: some pictures of the spectacular-looking construction in some big research facilities (along with short descriptions of the facilities).

Recipe: Tuna, Capsicum and Zuchinni Cannelloni

From the San Remo website.

Tastes great!

• Instant Cannelloni Tubes, about a dozen.
  
• Filling
  • Tuna in Brine, 425g can
    
  • Capsicums, 2 medium, finely diced
    
  • Zucchini, 1 small, finely diced
    
  • Plain flour, 2 tbsp
    
  • Butter, 2 tbsp
• Sauce
  • Tomato puree, 425g can
    
  • Ground basil leaves, 1 tsp
    
  • Olive oil, 2 tbsp
    
  • Salt, 1 tsp
    
  • Ground black pepper, pinch
    
  • Cream, ½ cup (optional)
• Topping
  • Chopped parsley, 2 tbsp
    
  • Grated mozzarella cheese, 3/4 cup

• Preheat oven to 200ºC
  
• Make Filling
  • In a large frying pan heat butter, add capsicums and zucchini and cook at a moderate heat.
    
  • When the vegetables are cooked, add plain flour and cook well (until golden brown) stirring constantly.
    
  • Add tuna and brine, stir in with vegetables until the mixture is thick.
    
  • Set aside to cool.
• Fill Cannelloni tubes with mixture (a teaspoon can be used).
  
• Make sauce.
  • Heat oil in a frying pan, add tomato puree, basil, salt and pepper and bring to boil.
    
  • Remove from heat.
• Put it together
  • In a greased baking dish cover bottom with sauce.
    
  • Place filled Cannelloni side by side in dish.
    
  • Cover with remaining sauce, and if desired thick cream
    
  • Top with parsley and then mozzarella cheese.
• Bake in oven at 200ºC for 25-35 minutes (test by pricking with skewer).
  

'Pizdaus, The Pics We Like'

Pizdaus, The Pics We Like.

A bit like reddit but for photos: people upload and rate them. Some pretty spectacular photos there.

Abstinence-only gun control (comic)

Funny comic - abstinence-only gun control.

Using the internet as a broker between data processing projects and volunteer resources

Consider this situation. An institution has some worthwhile project they want to undertake, but it has huge data-processing requirements, and they just don't have the resources to fulfill them. Maybe they'd like to simulate protein folding, for medical research.

In an increasing number of cases like this, the internet is being used as a broker to enable such projects, by providing a pool of volunteer resources, either of people's computers or their own time to perform manual data-processing. There's huge pools of resources out there - a whole world of computers in homes and potential volunteers.

So far, this strategy has been quite successful, as reported in this article in the Economist.

Here's a summary of the details

Automated data-processing

Using the spare processing cycles on people’s home computers (and other devices, like Playstation 3’s).

Folding@home - simulating protein folding and mis-folding -- a cause of diseases such as Alzheimer's.
In September, had combined computing capacity one petaflop--a quadrillion mathematical operations per second--something supercomputer designers have dreamed of for several years.

SETI@home - analysing data for signs of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilisations

The BOINC platform has been developed to support such processing.

Manual data-processing ("distributed thinking")

Galaxy Zoo - volunteers help astronomers to classify the shapes of galaxies from powerful telescope images. "Thanks to the exquisite pattern-recognition capabilities of the human brain, amateurs with just a little training can distinguish between different types of galaxy far more efficiently than computers can."
Had more than 100,000 volunteers classify over 1 million galaxies in a few months.

Stardust@home - volunteers spot the tell-tale tracks left by microscopic interstellar dust grains in tiles of porous aerogel from a probe sent into space.
Enlisted some 24,000 volunteers, who in less than a year performed more than 40 million searches (about 1500 searches / person).

Herbaria@home - volunteers document plant specimens from images drawn from the dusty 19th-century archives of British collections. Already, some 12 000 specimens have been documented.

Africa@home - volunteers extract useful cartographic information -- the positions of roads, villages, fields and so on -- from satellite images of regions in Africa where maps either do not exist or are hopelessly out of date. This will help regional planning authorities, aid workers and scientists
documenting the effects of climate change.

Distributed Proofreaders - volunteers help to proofread OCR'd scans of pages from old books (not metioned in the Economist article, but in a referring slashdot article).

The BOSSA platorm (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation) has been developed to support such processing.

What if the non-expert volunteers do a poor job at the dataprocessing? This isn't actually a problem, as redundancy is used to ensure quality. For example, a particular image used by Galaxy Zoo is classified by thirty different people, and it turns out that this is enough to get a highly accurate answer.

Some thoughts

Some ideas not touched on in the Economist article.

Will there always be a need for such volunteer resources? Or might Moores Law make computing power so cheap and abundant that even the most processing hungry project easily satisfy its own needs?

Second, I wonder if there might be a time in the future when the idea of such projects is well known in the public mind, and where people would think of them like they would think now of volunteering for a community group or giving money to a charity?

Lastly, the manual data processing projects might be a good way for school children, or members of the general public, to gain a gentle introduction to the world of science, and learn a bit more about how science is done and how the scientific community works? I'm not saying that volunteering on such projects is an education in these things, but it might still provide a little bit of a feel and familiarity.

Dharmesh Shah: Why Some Software Is Not Simpler, Just Suckier

Last year, Dharmesh Shah wrote some posts on the topic of simplicity in software, trying to distinguish between good and bad types of simplicity (as I mentioned here).

The other day, he wrote a pretty good followup. It's main point is that

The goal for software developers should not be to make things simpler just by reducing features. The goal of software should be to make it simpler for the user to do what they are trying to do.

and the post elaborates on what this means in practice.

A climate-change leadership opportunity

 

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States.

That sort of leadership might be what the world needs for tackling climate change.

The leadership to do what needs to be done, and not make excuses. To set the sort of example that'd make the rest of the world follow.

It'd need a brave leader, but they'd be also taking the opportunity for them and their country to be heroes in the eyes of the world.

The more that the rest of the world drags its feet, and the bleaker the future comes to look, the greater the rewards for taking such leadership will become.
 

---

BTW, the text of JFK's speech can be found here.

TextMate text editor, and a screencasting idea

The TextMate text editor looks quite good. I haven't used it -- my laptop runs Windows, and it's only on Mac -- but going by these screencasts, it's got some nifty features and overall seems quite impressive. Looks like it might provide a nice way to edit structured data like XML, while still retaining the free-form feel of a text editor -- see this screencast.

If you watch that screencast, you'll notice that it's often difficult to tell exactly what the person is doing to perform the operations they show, because they're using some sort of keystroke combination to invoke the operations. That made me think that software for recording screencasts could have a feature to add a 'virtual keyboard display' to the video, showing a little display of a keyboard in the video, showing which keys are being pressed as things happen.

That is, user can record their screen cast as per usual, and while they are doing so, the recording software keeps track of what keys they pressed and when. Then, it adds a little animated keyboard picture somewhere in the screencast recording, that shows when different keys were pressed.

How I’d like my mobile to work – sending an SMS

If I want to send an SMS to confirm a lunch appointment, I'd like to be able to do the following. Pick up my phone, unlock it, and say to it: “SMS Joe Blogs, Lunch at 1pm at the usual place, question mark”.

To which it would display the text “Lunch at 1pm at the usual place?” on the screen and present me with the prompt “Send this SMS to Joe Blogs? Yes/No”.

That’d be a much more direct way of doing things.

This seems technically feasable, so I’m wondering if any phones can do this?

Non-screw-top caps on premium beers seem nothing more than pretentiousness

As far as I can tell, the non-screw-top caps on premium beers are simply pretentiousness.

Screw top caps don't make much change to the bottle's look (cap on or off), and don't -- as far as I know -- have any impact on the beer's quality. They can't be more expensive for companies to use, either, as you find them on all the cheaper beers.

Non-screw-top caps seem to be there to convey an air of class. There's nothing wrong with that goal, per se. But I think it's a shallow attempt at class, to forego an alternative with real benefits just to use an older-style of cap mechanism with no real distinguishing features aside from its inconvenience.

---

Related to this, in Mind the Gap, Paul Graham writes:

[...]

Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person.

Cars are a good example of why. It's possible to buy expensive, handmade cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there is not much point. Companies make more money by building a large number of ordinary cars than a small number of expensive ones. So a company making a mass-produced car can afford to spend a lot more on its design. If you buy a custom-made car, something will always be breaking. The only point of buying one now is to advertise that you can.

Or consider watches. Fifty years ago, by spending a lot of money on a watch you could get better performance. When watches had mechanical movements, expensive watches kept better time. Not any more. Since the invention of the quartz movement, an ordinary Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. [13] Indeed, as with expensive cars, if you're determined to spend a lot of money on a watch, you have to put up with some inconvenience to do it: as well as keeping worse time, mechanical watches have to be wound.

[...]

The same pattern has played out in industry after industry. If there is enough demand for something, technology will make it cheap enough to sell in large volumes, and the mass-produced versions will be, if not better, at least more convenient.

Alan Kay's definition of 'technology', and taking things for granted

The article on the Kindle e-book reader I recently referred to starts like this

"Technology," computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "is anything that was invented after you were born."

I like that, it’s nicely put. We are keenly aware of that which is different to the usual stuff we take for granted. We take older technologies for granted, so new technologies seem quite different.

But this is really just an artifact of the way we see the world – of our personal perspective. Objectively, the old and new are both just as much technologies, and a sharp distinction between them is a false one.

If we don't realise that, we end up with an overly narrow concept of ‘technology’ that tends to only include the newer technologies.

The article uses that quote to make a point about not taking books for granted as an example of a technology (and a very successful one at that):

So it's not surprising, when making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, that we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book.

Given their point about not taking things for granted, what they say next is very ironic

It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.)

No instruction manual needed. Unlike computers, or cars (people need to get instruction to learn how to drive) or other modern technology. Except that's a kinda silly statement to make, that takes our reading skills for granted.

They may be able to pick up a book now and read it straight away, but then, I can just load up a computer program and use it, or start a car and drive it. I once had to learn how to use them, but then again, I -- and they -- once had to learn to read too. No one just naturally learns to read. It's an artificial skill, and one that takes a lot of time and effort to learn. It's just that, in developed countries, everyone has learnt it at a young age, so long ago, that it's easy for us to take for granted.

e-books might finally be here - the Amazon.com Kindle reader

Another bit of The Future may be about to click into place. E-books have been talked about for a long time, and we may finally have a viable alternative to printed books: the Kindle e-book reader, about to be released by Amazon.com.

NewsWeek has a – rather wordy – article on it. (The second half of the article goes into how pervasive ebooks might change things. e.g. people might use advertising in books, and books could be updated w/ errata).

Amazon has got the major publishers on board, and 88,000 titles will be on sale at the Kindle store on launch.

The reader’s specs are:

- has the dimensions of a paperback
- weighs 290g (10.3 ounces)
- sharp screen
- as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours
- doesn’t run hot or make intrusive beeps
- can hold about 200 books onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon.

Kindle has wireless connectivity for downloading books, and

you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process. And once you buy, the Kindle does its neatest trick: it downloads the book and installs it in your library, ready to be devoured. "The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos.

You can also
- access newspapers and use it as a web-browser
- search within books
- make make annotations and copy text from books (though it’s not clear exactly how this works).

It’s US $399 (remember that the iPod was quite expensive when it first came out).

A nice information-graphics example – baseball pitches

[Update: the page can now be found here]

Here’s a nice example of information graphics done well.


So you know there's many different types of baseball pitches, but can't tell your cutter from your slider or changeup? Well help is at hand in this visual catalogue, showing each type in a simple graphic that intuitively captures it essential character.

On Schneier's notion of CYA Security

Here's a rather rambling bit of sketching out some thoughts:

Bruce Schneier says:

Since 9/11, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves from terrorist attacks. Stories about the ineffectiveness of many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions of why they are so ineffective.

His explanation, in short:

much of our country's counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from criticism when another attack occurs.

which he refers to CYA (cover your ass) security.

He gives numerous examples of this. Basically, it's safer for agencies to overreact to things that are out of the ordinary, because if something happens, they can appear to be trying. Or to focus disproportionately on threats in the public consciousness (like what terrorists have tried in the past). Even if these measures are ineffective. And they ignore threat possibilities that don't make the news as much, such as against chemical plants. Or doing focusing on overly specific threats, and not focusing on longer-term investment - e.g. more training in arabic language skills.

There's two comments I want to make on his article.

First, this is another example of systems that have kinds of goals or purposes, where there are various constraints/inefficiencies that impede the system's ability to meet those goals/purposes, as I spoke about recently. In fact, in that post I gave an example of CYA-like force at work in the purchasing of enterprise software.

In this case, that the system is held accountable by government/media/public who aren't necessarily that good at evaluating how well they've done their job, which sets up ineffective incentives/disincentives. Have to remember that in these agencies when they are considering measure to take, they are making a cost/benefit analysis.

Moving onto the second reason.

Despite calling it Cover Your Ass security, he ends up giving the following explanation of the cause of it:

It happens not because the authorities involved -- the Boston police, the TSA, and so on -- are not competent, or not doing their job. It happens because there isn't sufficient national oversight, planning, and coordination.

People and organizations respond to incentives. We can't expect the Boston police, the TSA, the guy who runs security for the Oscars, or local public officials to balance their own security needs against the security of the nation. They're all going to respond to the particular incentives imposed from above. What we need is a coherent antiterrorism policy at the national level: one based on real threat assessments, instead of fear-mongering, re-election strategies, or pork-barrel politics.

Sadly, though, there might not be a solution. All the money is in fear-mongering, re-election strategies, and pork-barrel politics. And, like so many things, security follows the money.

That is, he ends up putting it down to insufficient national oversight, planning, and coordination.

I'm not sure I agree. I think he's closer to the mark with his Cover Your Ass moniker. That is, that the problem is of people needing to cover their asses rather than an issue of coordination.

Except I don't like the term "Cover Your Ass" so much because it makes it sound like the problem is with the agencies. I don't think they really have a choice. Edward deBono coined the term 'ludency' to refer to situations where you're basically forced to play by the rules of the game, and even if you drop out, someone else will come into take your place. So all you can really do is try and find some way of changing the rules.

I think the real culprit here is the way "the general population" attributes responsibility. Typically they want to find a single person to assign the responsibility. If something good happened, that person gets all the praise; if something bad happened, they get all the blame. Even if this is utterly unrepresentative of what actually went on.

There's various reasons why they do this... lack of information about the actual situation... but also it just seems like we're wired to do this. ... a quirk of our psychology.

Here's two of his examples that illustrate this:

CYA also explains the TSA's inability to take anyone off the no-fly list, no matter how innocent. No one is willing to risk his career on removing someone from the no-fly list who might -- no matter how remote the possibility -- turn out to be the next terrorist mastermind.

Another form of CYA security is the overly specific countermeasures we see during big events like the Olympics and the Oscars, or in protecting small towns. In all those cases, those in charge of the specific security don't dare return the money with a message "use this for more effective general countermeasures." If they were wrong and something happened, they'd lose their jobs.

Am I just saying this to assign my own blame to "the general population" for having this attitude? No. I think that to address this problem, we need to create greater awareness of the attitude. It seems so common for people to attribute responsibility poorly like this, and no one seem to blink an eye, so we need some consciousness-raising about it.

Some surprises from speed-dating based study of male/female partner preferences

Using speed dating as an experiment, some economists and psychologists examined what males and females look for in a partner (as reported in this relatively brief Slate article). Mostly, it confirmed what they had expected, though there were some surprises.

'Personas' provide requirements that are too vague (comment on a 37signals post)

The 37signals guys say they don't design software to meet the needs of 'Personas' representing 'typical users', they design it for actual people -- themselves, mostly. Read the post for their justification.

If you've now read it, I just want to note that I think it's an example of how central high standards are to ‘creative’ tasks. The problem with the ‘personas’ is they’re too vague, and thus don’t provide stringent enough critiera or standards for judging what you've done and what you should do.

I think success in creative tasks is primarily a matter of having high-standards or strong evaluation criteria (though my point here is mainly just to make a 'mental note' about this example rather than to try and properly justify that larger point).

Distance-based face-perception illusion (pic)

[Update: a copy of the illusion can be found here, from this page containing many examples of optical illusions.  Some details of how the illusion works can be found here]

Have a look at this very cool visual illusion. On the left is the face of an angry man, on the right is the face of a calm woman. But get up, and walk three or four meters from your screen and look at it again -- the image is exactly the same but the faces have swapped positions. Walk back towards the screen and see them magically switch again.

What chefs do when they're bored (pics)

More cool vegetable arrangements like this:

History is all that's happened

sketching...

History includes everything that has happened. But that's not the way we tend to conceive of it. In practice, we tend to see it as something much narrower.

There are three ways we tend to narrow it: by focusing on signficant events in 'grand narratives', which happened sufficiently long ago, and focusing on the facts associated with those events.

We tend to just see it as the events in the grand narrative of nations -- wars, successions, the discoveries of new lands, etc. Or in the narratives describing the development of science, tehnology, religion, ecnomics, etc.

We tend to only include sufficiently distant events. Recent events don't seem sufficiently 'historical'.

And we tend to focus on history as a sequence of events -- "one damn thing after another" as Henry Ford is quoted as saying.

Here are some possible reasons for this narrow view: this is the picture of history that tends to get taught in schools, and those are the features that tend to most strongly differentiate history from other fields, and are thus the ones that stick in our minds.

I think this narrow view of history gives a distorted sense of the value of knowing about history. Seeing it this way, we might wonder what is the value in knowing facts like who-did-what-when.

I think the real value in history is lies in drawing out patterns and higher-level conclusions from all of the things we know have happened. This is not just a matter of facts about significant events, and can also include details from the very recent past.

Patterns in economic and technological development, for example. Or general conclusions you can draw about the psychology and behavior of people and groups of people like societies - conclusions that are relevant to today's world.

Many people seem unaware that many questions can be answered by looking at history. As a contrary example, Paul Graham uses many historical points of justification in his essays.

---

Version history

• 14/04/06, 00:18 - original
  
• 08/11/07, 13:10 major revision. changed expression, and added: people excluding recent events; conceptsCategoriesAndDefinitions tag

Talisman-based superstitions in gamers

In one experiment, B.F. Skinner fed pigeons pellets every 15 seconds no matter what they did. "After several days each pigeon had developed its own independent superstition about what produced this manna from heaven. One thought circling clockwise was necessary, another that it had to attack a spot on the cage to get the pellets".

Gamblers are known to do a similar thing. If they get a win, they associate it with some property about the situation, and think that repeating it will help bring on future wins.

In all these cases, pigeons/people form beliefs that certain things are talismans (these things don't have to be objects, they can be actions).

Here's a post reporting on talisman-based superstitions in players of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. That post is in turn commenting on this work.

Phil Greenspun's suggestions for philianthropy

If you've got a bit of money and want to put some of it to good use, Philip Greenspun has some suggestions. He explains the benefit each suggestion could bring, how it could be done, and it's approximate cost.

• Donate money to Wikipedia
  
• Internet Content Prizes - for content such as novels, poems, plays, non-fiction books, textbooks that is published on-line. At present, serious awards for such content is -- by and large -- only when they're published on traditional media.
  
• Internet Classical Music Free Library
  
• English-language School in Peru's Urubamba Valley
  
• Computer Science University in Africa
  

Richard Brunstrom on drug policy:

As the Belfast Telegraph reports

"If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral, to be replaced with an evidence-based unified system (specifically including tobacco and alcohol) aimed at minimisation of harms to society"

Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales

Bruce Schneier: humans not evolved for IT security (short news piece)

itnews.com.au reports

Human beings aren't evolved for security in the modern world, and particularly the IT security world, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.

Olle Lundberg’s wood-cabin escape (pics)

Pictures of Olle Lundberg’s wood-cabin escape. “woody, simple, airy and largely reused environment he's created for relaxing when not working”. (normally, he lives in a ferry boat in San Francisco harbor).

Richard Hamming's advice on doing research - "You and Your Research"

In "You and Your Research", Richard Hamming gives his advice on -- not surprisingly -- doing research. For some reason most research advice seems to be pretty elementary with what they say being fairly obvious, but his advice is actually quite good.

If you're wondering who Richard Hamming is, he worked on the Manhattan project, was a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery, and was a recipient of the Turing Award (which is like the Nobel prize for computing).

Incorporating inefficiencies/constraints into your conceptualisation of systems

Companies and governments are examples of systems that have kinds of goals or purposes. I think that when we try thinking about such systems, we find it very difficult to factor in the real-world inefficiencies/constraints that apply to/within them.

We tend to conceptualise and reason about those systems as if the agents within them had full/perfect information and had a clear path to work towards those "goals". (I don't think most of us realise we do this, though we can learn to realise that we do it).

But there are all sorts of constraints there - people have limited information, and not all of the information that would enable them to carry out their job properly, and not everyone has incentives that are aligned with the system's overall "goals".

Let's consider an example. If you didn't know better, you might think that, of all software, enterprise software would be the best. Unlike music playing programs or computer games, this is serious business, and companies are paying lots of money for them. And these are companies in highly-competitive environments, and since the software is crucial to their operations, they'd need it to be good.

But enterprise software is -- I'm told -- generally not that good.

In an idealised system, the software would be designed to meet the user's needs. But there are several practicalities in the actual systems that cause inefficiencies, skewing the system away from the idealisation.

Signals vs. Noise say that enterprise software sucks because it's not really designed for the end-users, but to meet the buying critiera of the software purchasers within large companies, who are not themselves end-users of the software.

The buyers don't have as keen a sense of what the software is required to do, and how well it does it, so their evaluation of the software is skewed towards "the feature list, future promises, and buzz words".

Paul Graham mentions another evaluation criteria used by software buyers: making a choice that appears "safe" or prudent:

There used to be a saying in the corporate world: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." You no longer hear this about IBM specifically, but the idea is very much alive; there is a whole category of "enterprise" software companies that exist to take advantage of it. People buying technology for large organizations don't care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. It's not their money. They just want to buy from a supplier who seems safe—a company with an established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, and software that conforms to all the current fashions. Not necessarily a company that will deliver so much as one that, if they do let you down, will still seem to have been a prudent choice. So companies have evolved to fill that niche.

Leaving this example now, I think one of the reasons it's important to understand topics like economics or evolutionary biology (and probably the law -- especially its hisorical development) it to gain a better appreciation for, and awareness of, the effect of constraints upon systems.

Lone houses in stunning landscapes (pics)

Photos of lone houses in stunning landscapes.

Missing the thickets for the forest

Focus too much on the trees and you can miss the forest. But focus too much on the forest and you can miss the thickets.

If the trees are individual parts or details and the forest is the whole, then thickets are intermediate structures. They are patterns or structures within the whole.

Entities such as car engines, ant hills, brains, languages, ecosystems and economies can not be understood simply by understanding each of their parts in stand-alone terms.

There is a natural tendancy to think that if an entity isn't X, then it must be the opposite of X. If the entities aren't the parts, they must be the wholes. We can end up seeing them as unalloyed, indivisible wholes. Some people practically relish their 'essential wholeness'.

But I think this goes too far. All of those entities have substructures and patterns within the whole, and we understand how they work and their nature by understanding these substructures and patterns, or thickets.

Visual input control

Webcams are more ubiquitous these days. Many newer laptops have integrated webcams in the top of their screens. You could employ all those webcams not just for taking pictures or video-based chatting, but also as another input device for controlling the computer.

The user could provide visual gestures. E.g. they could point at a window to switch to it.

Such visual input might be best combined with voice control. E.g. pointing to a window and saying ‘close it’.

You could analyse the video input in more sophisticated ways. For example, to determine where on the screen the user was looking. So instead of pointing at a window and asying “close it”. The user could just look at it and say “close it” (or something like that). Or they could look at a place in a document and say “move cursor there”.

(I have no idea whether it’s feasable to accurately determine where the user is looking. It mightn’t be possible. For instance, there’s a lot of processing that constructs what you see from what your eyes receive, and the specific thing you're fixating on may not be exactly in line with where your eyes are pointed towards).

Here are a few things in this vein:


EyeTwig 'headmouse' "when you move your head left and right, up and down, the Windows cursor, typically controlled by your mouse, moves about the screen".

Camera Mouse "track head or other body movements and to convert those movements into cursor movements on a computer screen."

Some variations on the theme of getting a camera to pick up on a laser pointer shone on the wall, in order to control things like your music player: here and
here

Video of using headtracking for some control in a FPS game.

One a day

You know that card game called Freecell that comes with Windows? I play that a hell of a lot while I'm doing PhD writing (though I can't now that my new computer doesn't have it. Probably a good thing).

Whenever you win a game, it displays an image of the King from the deck of cards. I though it’d be a nice little touch if, instead just having that one ‘winning image’, it has a different one for each day of the year. So there’s a specific image for 19 October, and you only get to see it if you win on that day. That might add a little extra incentive to play it.

You could apply the same idea to pretty much any webpage or program where people are likely to read/use it over and over. For example: the user brings up the form, and on it they see a nice photo for this day. Clearly, nothing earth shattering, but might be nice little touch.

Funny Wondermark comic on lack of perspective

Funny Wondermark comic on lack of perspective – “Everyone who’s smarter than me is a nerd! Everyone dumber’n me is an idiot...”.

Favourite Recipes: Grilled Chicken Tacos Alambres

Grilled Chicken Tacos Alambres

(updated 16/10/07: fixed a few typos, and now you can mouse-over ingredients in the cooking instructions to see the quantities, which is useful if you're reading the recipe off the screen while you're cooking.)

Yields 12 to 16 tacos; serves four to six.

This recipe is from an edition of Fine Cooking magazine (I'm not sure whether you can get Fine Cooking at the newsagents here -- I don't recall seeing it -- but you can get them, as I did, from the Brisbane City Council libraries). Tastes really good.

Note that this is for the small, about 12 cm diameter, soft tortillas. Not the big ones, or the hard taco shells.

I haven't been able to find poblano chillis here, but the jalapeno / capsicum substitute works well, and you can get jalapenos at some supermarkets.

• For the marinated chicken
  • lime juice, ½ cup (from about 2 limes)
    
  • ancho chilli powder, 1 tbsp (it'll still be fine with other sorts of chilli powder)
    
  • garlic, 2 cloves (about 2 tsp) minced
    
  • salt, 1 ½ tsp
    
  • dried oregano, 1 tsp
    
  • black pepper, 1 tsp
    
  • veg oil, 1 cup
    
  • boneless, skinless chicken breasts, about 600g (1 1/4 pounds)
• For rest of the filling
  • veg oil, 1 tsp; more if sauteing the chicken
    
  • bacon, 3 slices, finely chopped
    
  • fresh poblano chiles, 1 cup, cored, seeded, and finely chopped (about 2 poblanos)
    OR
    jalapenos, 2 fresh, and green capsicum, ½, cored, seeded, and finely chopped
    
  • yellow or white onion, finely chopped, 1 cup
    
  • fresh corriander, chopped, 1/4 cup
    
  • juice of 1 lime
    
  • salt
    
  • oaxaca cheese OR freshly grated mozzarella, ½ cup (optional)
• For serving
  • Corn tortillas (5 to 6 inches wide), 12 to 16, warmed
    
  • Guacamole
    
  • Pico de Gallo
    
  • Tomatillo Salsa

Note that none of these last three items -- guacamole, pico de gallo, tomatillo salsa -- are essential. And if you can't get tomatillos (so far, I haven't found anywhere that sells them), you could just use a tomato salsa)

• Marinate the chicken
  • In a medium bowl, mix the lime juice, chilli powder, garlic, salt, oregano, and pepper; whisk in the oil.
    
  • Add the chicken, cover and, and marinate in the fridge for 1 hr but no longer than 1 ½ hrs.
• Make the fillings
  
  • Prepare a medium-hot fire on a gas or charcoal grill or set a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat for 1 ½ minutes.
    
  • Remove the chicken from the marinade, shaking off any excess.
    
  • Grill the chicken (or sear it in the skillet with 1 tbsp oil), flipping after 4 mins, until it’s just firm to the touch and cooked through, about 9 mins.
    
  • Let the chicken cool and then chop it into very small pieces.
    
  • Heat a skillet over medium heat, add 1 tbsp oil and the bacon, and cook, stirring frequently, until the bacon just begins to brown, about 6 mins.
    
  • Turn the heat to medium high, add the chillis and onion, and cook, stirring frequently, until they begin to soften, about 4 mins.
    
  • Add the chopped chicken, corriander, and lime juice and stir constantly until the chicken is hot.
    
  • Season with salt to taste.
    
  • Sprinkle the cheese (if using) over the top, take the pan off the heat, and let the cheese melt.
• To serve
  • Set the skillet with the filling on a trivet on the table next to the hot tortillas, guacamole, pico de gallo, and tomatillo salsa so each person can assemble his or her own tacos.

Worlds largest swimming pool (1 km long)

A swimming pool (includes pics), 1km long, eight hectares in size and transparent to a depth of 35 metres, in the South American resort of San Alfonso del Mar in Chile.

Saveless mode

When I'm using a text editor or word processor, I don't want to have to think about saving the document. I want to be able to expect that if I've typed something, it's safe and I can't lose it.

I'm not saying that programs should completely forgo an explicit save feature. I'd just like it if, in addition to the way they are now, they'd also had a 'saveless' mode of running where it automatically and behind the scenes saved everything you typed as you typed.

At present, everytime I've write a little bit -- like a sentence, or a sentence clause -- I save the document. I find it simpler to constantly and habitually save, rather than having to remember to periodically (like once a minute) save.

I don't want that distraction of remembering to save. And I don't want the interruption of saving. Interrupting my typing and my thought processes, however minor that interruption may be.

Autosave features might sound like a solution, but I don't like them. If you have it save every minute or so, you still have the consciousness that changes between those saves aren't safe. And even if you have it save very frequently, like once a second, it's not ideal. Usually, there's some graphical indication that it's saving, and that's a distraction. And that's still not enough to guarantee that you won't lose things occuring between saves. Like if you've pasted in a large amount of text.

What you really need is something that is designed specifically for saving absolutely everything you type, as you type it. And to do so in the background, without the user being aware of it happening.

An explicit save feature adds to a program's concept count. Something that people have to initially learn. Pads of paper don't have a 'save' button. Without an explicit save feature, programs would be simpler.

Jimi, meet Kurt and Fatboy Slim

Random thought. Imagine going back in time to the sixties, and showing musicians like Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles styles of music that didn't exist then, like hip-hop, grunge (yeah, people don't like that term, but I can't think of a better one for what I want to refer to), heavy metal, and various forms of electronic music... Would it blow them away? Would some of them find some of the styles unpalatable? Would it send their music making down a different path? It'd be awesome if you could actually do it and see.

Measures of the world

What are the different ways we can measure the size of the world?

There's the earth's diameter. Another measure is its surface area. That might be more meaningful to us, since our lives are played out on its surface. You could even just measure the amount of land, ignoring the water. Or limit the measurement to the amount of habitated or habitable land (according to some reasonable definitions of habitated and habitable).

Another thing we could ask is: how big is the world each of us has seen? How large an area have you actually seen with your own eyes, during your lifetime? For most of us, it's only a small fragment.

Though we may have only seen a fragment of it, our conception of the the world is much broader, because it also takes in details that we know secondhand, through conversations, books, television, etc.

This conception is subjective, and infused with personal and social details. The place I went to school. The path I take to get to the train station. Where my best friend lives. Those streets in the city where it doesn't feel safe to walk alone at night.

In my conception of the world, the unit where I live is sketched out in detail. But to the person down the road who only knows it from walking past it from time to time, it's little more than a facade made up of what's visble from the road.

Because of these personal and subjective details, this mental conception of the world, though only dealing with small portions of the world in detail, is -- in this sense -- richer than the physical world.

There's another kind of measure of the size of the world. Though the physical world is large and these mental worlds small, there is only one physical world, and billions of mental ones. And the total area and details covered by that billion-piece mozaic is large indeed.

Don't be afraid to express non-unique points of view

Sketching.. I want to be able to express unique points of view on topics. We're all social animals, so there is an element there of wanting to stand out in the crowd. But it's not simply uniqueness for the sake of uniqueness.

Knowledge is like an expanding frontier, building on and growing out of what we already know. Part and parcel of trying to understand things better is trying to develop unique points of view.

But there's a real risk of trying to only say things that are unique. Of thinking that expressing a non-unique points of view is pointless and lame.

Writing (and talking) about things is a way to "gather your thoughts" about them. Writing about well known things helps you think about them. This also applies to things you know well yourself.

And it's through such synthesis and thinking about the topic that helps you construct new points of view.

There's another dimension to this problem. You might see the value in expressing a non-unique point of view, but you might be worried about what others will think of you expressing it. Will they think it's just an expression of my limitations?

I think it's a sad fact that people tend to perceive any behavior as a direct expression of someone's nature. If someone's mucking around, they're childish. So people who don't want to be perceived as childish avoid mucking around.

Even if they're really intelligent, sensitive, mature people, and mucking around is a reflection of just one facet of their personality, which they'd otherwise only express in appropriate situations, and not express in inappropraite ones.

Memorisation supplanting thinking

jotting...

our society seems to be awash in
magazines, books and tv-shows on
how to do things - typically 'lifestyle' topics
like renovating or art-and-craft

that in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing
but it does seem bad that the focus so much on
supposedly-useful 'tips',
which are usually pretty lightweight facts

I think that has a tendency to create
the wrong sort of attitude or approach in the 'learner'
it becomes a game of fact memorising
and then approaching a situation
by trying to recall which facts are appropriate to it

whereas you should really want to have
an /understanding/ of the situation
that is relevant as a starting point
and /think on your feet/ as you are within the situation.

the problem is
fact memorsation supplants thinking

Smoky Shredded Pork Tacos recipe (Tacos de Picadillo Oaxaqueño)

Adapted from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen

A perfect combination of flavours -- including pork, hot, smokey chipotle chillis (smoked, dried jalapeno chillis), sweet raisins and roasted almonds. Like with a curry, the flavours improve after a day or two.

If you're having trouble finding chipotle chillis, look in 'gourmet' delis or you can order them from various online retailers.


Makes enough for 16 to 18 tacos

• boneless pork shoulder, 675g, trimmed of fat and cut into 5cm cubes
• garlic cloves, unpleeled, 5
• white onion, 1 large, diced
• ground cinnamon, ½ tsp, preferably freshly ground Mexican canela
• black pepper, 1/4 tsp
• ground cloves, 1/8 tsp
• raisins, 85g
• slivered almonds, 55g
• for tomato-chipotle sauce (makes 350ml)
  • chipotle chillis, 2 to 3, stemmed (or canned chipotle chilis en adobo)
    OR chilies pasillas oaxaqueños, 1 to 2, stemmed
  • ripe tomatoes, 500g (2 large round, or 7 to 8 plum)
  • olive or vegetable oil, or rich-tasting lard, 2 ½ tbsp
  • salt, about a scant ½ tsp
• corn tortillas, 16 to 18 (plus a few extra, in case some break)
• hot sauce, optional, for serving

Simmer meat

• In a medium-size (2 to 3.5 litre) saucepan, cover meat with heavily salted water.
  Peel and roughly chop 2 cloves of the garlic and add along with half of the onion. 
• Bring to a gentle boil, skim off any greyish foam that rises during the first few minutes.
• Partially cover and simmer over medium-low heat until thoroughly tender, about 1 ½ hrs. 
• If time permits, cool the meat in the broth. (Reserve broth for soup or sauce.)

Shred meat.  Between your fingers or with some forks.

Make tomato-chipotle sauce.

• Prepare chillis
• For canned chillis - remove from their canning sauce.
• For dried chillis
  • toast them on an ungreased griddle or heavy frying pan over medium heat, turning regularly and pressing flat, until very aromatic, about 30 seconds.
  • In a small bowl, cover chillis with hot water and leave to re-hydrate for 30 minutes, stirring to ensure even soaking.
  • Drain and discard the water.
• Roast garlic
  • Roast the remaining 3 cloves of the unpeeled garlic on the griddle or frying pan, turning occasionally, until soft, about 15 minutes.
  • Cool and peel.
• Roast tomatoes
  • Roast the tomatoes on a baking sheet 10cm below a very hot grill until blackened on one side, about 6 minutes; flip and roast the other side.
  • Cool, then peel, collecting all the juices with the tomatoes.
• Blend chillis, garlic and tomatoes -- pulse them in a food processor or blender, to a medium-fine puree.
• Fry puree
• Heat 1 tbsp of the oil or lard in a heavy, medium-size (2 to 3.5 litre) saucepan over medium-high.
• Add the puree and stir for about 5 mins as it fries and thickens.
  
• Taste and season with salt.

Bring the filling together

• Roast almonds
• Turn on the oven to 180ºC.
• Toast the almonds in the oven in a small baking tin until fragrant and lightly browned, 6 to 8 minutes
• Heat oil 1 ½ tbsp of oil or lard, in a large (25 to 30cm) heavy, well-seasoned or nonstick frying pan, over medium-high heat.
• When hot, add the shredded meat and remaining half of the onion.
• Fry, regularly stirring and scraping up browned bits from the bottom, until the whole mixture is crispy and golden, 12 to 14 minutes.
• Sprinkle the cinnamon, pepper, cloves and raisins over the meat, then pour on the tomato-chipotle sauce.
• Reduce the heat to medium and simmer briskly, stirring occasionally, until nearly all the liquid has evaporated, 4 to 5 minutes.
• Add roasted almonds and stir them in.
• Taste and season with a little more salt if necessary.

Heat tortillas

• Set up a steamer (with this many tortillas, you’ll need 2 vegetable steamers set up in saucepans or a big Chinese steamer--either choice with 1cm of water under the steamer basket); heat to a boil.
• Wrap the tortillas in 2 stack in thick tea towels, lay in the steamer(s) and cover tightly.
• Boil 1 minute, turn off the heat and leave to stand without opening the steamer for 15 minutes.

Prepare tacos

• Either prepare the tacos in the kitchen by scooping a couple of heaped tablespoons of filling into each warm tortilla, rolling or folding them and nesting them into a cloth-lined basked
• Or, scoop the filling into a warm bowl and set out with a cloth-lined basket of steaming tortillas for your guests to construct their own tacos.
• Optionally, add a dash of hot sauce onto the filling in the taco.

---

Notes

• Shortcuts: two-thirds of an 800g can of tomatoes can replace the fresh roasted ones; leftover roast pork can replace the boiled pork
• The pork can be simmered several days in advance (refrigerate it in covered container with its broth, then strain and shred before continuing with the dish) or finish the picadillo a day or two ahead, cover it and refrigerate.

Variations

• Try mixing the leftover picadillo with grated chesese, baking it to heat through, then seving it as a communal appeitzer or a light main dish with tortillas--a variation on queso fundido.
• Shredded Pork Enchiladas. Prepare the recipe tripling the sauce; set the extra 2/3 of the sauce aside. Roll the filling in the tortiallas, fit them into a baking dish, pour the reseraved sauce over them and bake at 190ºC to warm through. Sprinkle with queso añejo or Parmesean and chopped coriander; seve immediately.
• Chiles Rellenos for a buffet. Roast and peel six poblanos, make a slit in their sides, remove the seeds, then fill each with about 5 tbsps of the filling (you’ll only need 1/2 the batch) and fit into a decorative backing dish. Slowly cook 2 large sliced onions in a little olive oil until nicely browned, soft and cramelized. Strew over the chillis and bake the whole assembly to heat through. Sprinkle liberally with queso añejo or Parmesan and set out on the buffet.
• Use filling to fill tamales, other chiilis (jaapeños, chiptles, chiles pasillas oaxaqueños), molotoes, qusadillas and so forth.

Updated 11 Dec 2017: reformatted recipe and modified some of the wording, to make it easier to read.  Fixed a few typos.

Haunting picture by Bansky

Someone at Channel 10 likes Amon Tobin

Amon Tobin's music isn't very immediate/accessible, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear several of his tracks used during the finale of the Australian version of Big Brother tonight tonight: The Killer's Vanilla and At the End of the Day from his latest album, The Foley Room, and Natureland off Supermodified. They used them as background music in several of the video clips they showed.

Nice line from Scott Adams - "The trick is to..."

A nice line from Scott Adams' blog:

The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.

A missed chance

David Stenhouse looks back on a missed chance:

"When you’ve read as many books as I have, you know instinctively when something is going to be a hit. You mark my words. We won’t hear of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ever again."

Video of impressive statistics visualisation - Hans Rosling using Trandalyzer

If you want to make sense of statistics for people, this is how you do it, as shown in this very interesting and impressive video.

In it, Hans Rosling uses UN statistics to demonstrate that many common beliefs about the modern-day world, such as on the nature of the divide between first and third-world countries, are wrong.

But more than the content (and whether you would agree with it or not), what it's about is how he presents it. The software he uses, Trendalyzer, seems pretty impressive. I don't mean from a technical standpoint -- though no doubt it is -- but from what it is able to do. This is futuristic software, like science-fiction films try to portray.

Graphs are animated to show how the data changes over the years, highlighting the trends. They're morphed to show a different, but related perspective. Details are drilled down into, for example to go from showing data for a particular country to data for its consitutent states. It's all interactive, and it leads to a very impressive flow: one perspective raises certain questions, so he modifies the view to try and get insight into them.

What I think is important about this kind of software is that it allows you to really demonstrate points, directly from the data -- very much showing rather than telling.

Effective analogy for showing what prosopagnosia is like

[Update: the linked page can now be accessed here]

Prosopagnosia is 'face-blindness' - the inability to recognize other humans by their faces. This page is a very effective description of what it's like, written by a sufferer.

They say good writing shows rather than tells, and that's what that pages does, using a very effective analogy -- to show you what it's like to have prosopagnosia.

If individuals were rocks, then it's like having to remember the characteristics of each rock, and try to realise when you come across this rock again, from your memories. The page uses photos of different rocks so you can see for yourself the sorts of difficulties involved.

There's a lot of complications you probably wouldn't think of, which the page demonstrates well. E.g. when someone gets a haircut - as demonstrated by the rock being obscured by a bit of foliage.

RunBot - robot that can walk with a natural, realistic-seeming gait

RunBot is a walking robot with a natural, flexible gait (BBC story; info). It can deal with uneven terrain, and changes changes like uphill or downhill slopes.

I think they've got the right approach. Like with Steve Grand's work, and Jeff Hawkin's HTMs, it uses a hierarchical means of control, where each level has a certain level of autonomy, and there's constant updating of the structures based on the environmental input.

RunBot has been co-operatively developed by european scientists

Some presentation-skills lessons from Job's iPhone talk

[Update: the article can now be found here]

Giving good presentations - five lessons drawn from Steve Job's iPhone presentation. The lessons the article goes into are: Build Tension, Stick to One Theme Per Slide, Add Pizzazz to Your Delivery, Practice, Be Honest and Show Enthusiasm.

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. After a quick look, seems interesting. Maps out the myriads of genres and sub-genres of electronic music, giving a short desc of each -- and the author is not afraid to give their opinion of it -- along with some musical samples of it (usefully giving the artist and track name).

Short Shermer Article on Relativism

Decent, concise piece by Michael Shermer on relativism, and why it's a mistake to think that all false theories are equally false.

[Update: the article is now found here]

.

truth bootstrapped
because everybody knows
that everybody knows it

Police system to accept photographed evidence from cameraphones.

Not a huge deal, but could be helpful:

The LA police department plans to implemenent a system so that when someone gives an over-the-phone account of a crime or accident scene, they can augument that verbal account with photos taken on their camera phone, using the phone's photo sending feature.

Map of US states renamed for countries with similar GDPs

Interesting map. Apparently Australia's GDP is comparable to Ohio's.

[Update: the map can now be found here, or at various other places]

Article: How to explain RSS the Oprah way

Nice example of a non-technical explanation of a somewhat technical subjectmatter: How to explain RSS the Oprah way.

Article: Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor

Turning innovative design towards helping the world's poor -- a New York Times article on an exhibition, currently housed in New York, of designs that strive to do this.

one of the simplest and yet most elegant designs tackles a job that millions of women and girls spend many hours doing each year — fetching water. Balancing heavy jerry cans on the head may lead to elegant posture, but it is backbreaking work and sometimes causes crippling injuries. The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

Article on upcoming malaysian court case

I've got relatives in Malaysia and have been there a couple of times, and from that I knew that Malays are, from birth, automatically considered muslims, and that they aren't allowed to become non-muslims, but I didn't know that they aren't legally allowed to marry non-muslims, as this article on an upcoming court case in Malaysia says:

Ethnic Malays, who make up just over half of Malaysia's 26 million people, are deemed Muslims from birth.

Constitutionally, freedom of religion is guaranteed. But in reality, conversion out of Islam falls within the ambit of sharia or Islamic courts. And sharia law prescribes fines or jail for those who renounce Islam, effectively ruling out the option.

Muslims who leave Islam end up in legal limbo, unable to register their new religious affiliations or legally marry non-Muslims. Many keep quiet about their choice or emigrate.

Lina Joy, now in her early 40s, was born Azlina Jailani and brought up as a Muslim but at the age of 26 decided to become a Christian. [...]

Until the entry [on her identity card] is deleted, she cannot legally marry outside the Muslim faith. The legal wrangling began when she took the department to court over the anomaly.

Woman dies, ignored, in emergency room of US hospital

The LA Times reports (other) on the death of a lady at a public hosptial in the US:

She lay on the linoleum [in the emergengy room of King-Harbor hospital], writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.

Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone's apparent indifference.

Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.

Alerted to the "disturbance" in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez's record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.

Shirky on why a lack of knowledge is useful for entreprenueurs (similar argument to 'knowledge as a creole')

Rough sketching out...

In Knowledge as a Creole, I talked about the largely unconscious process of 'building a worldview' (though i didn't use that terminology in that post). It's a constructive process, that tries to build a reasonably coherent worldview from -- roughly -- the current state of our shared knowledge. We have very limited control over this process, and it is difficult to change our worldview once it is constructed. On the flip side, this process leads to conceptual advances -- advances that were implicit in this shared knowledge.

Clay Shirky has recently written a post The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth [Update: the post can now be accessed here] that makes a similar point, though from a different perspective. Rather than knowledge, he's talking about technological advances (made by entrepreneurs), and he's focuses primarily how already seeing things one way restricts your ability to see advances. Also, rather than just the 'worldview' he's talking about experience in general.

...The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things.

In almost every circumstance, this would be a disadvantage, but not here, and not now. The reason this is so, and the reason smart old people can’t fake their way into this asset, has everything to do with our innate ability to cement past experience into knowledge.

...We are wired to learn from experience. This is, in almost all cases, absolutely the right strategy, because most things in life benefit from mental continuity. Again, today, gravity pulls things downwards. Again, today, my wife will be happier if I put my socks in the hamper than on the floor. And so on.

...In 999,999 cases, learning from experience is a good idea, but what entrepreneurs do is look for the one in a million shot. When the world really has changed overnight, when wild new things are possible if you don’t have any sense of how things used to be, then it is the people who got here five minutes ago who understand that new possibility, and they understand it precisely because, to them, it isn’t new.

---

Note, Acquiring knowledge is acquiring a skill is closely related to the 'Knowledge as a Creole' post.