tedesson

I've got 8 google wave invites to give away. If you'd like one, just leave
a comment, and we can figure out how to make it so.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1897093,00.html

Gallery of photographs by blind photographers.
Wonderful pieces.

The coffee shop music is Johnny Cash covering the Theme Song from
Bonanza. My Dad always got excited when he told the story of the time
the actor who played Hoss came to town to go duck hunting.

David Foster Wallace was awake and is now dead.

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

This week we took both Steve and Minkey to the vet for their annual checkup
and vaccine boosters.

Steve was getting his rabies and distemper shots, and I noticed the Vet
tech assistant was tapping his nose, right around the time of the
injection. Steve didn't notice the shots, just the bop-bop-bop on the nose. I
thought it was such a cool trick.

So, the next day, when I took Minkey in to the same office, I
bop-bop-bop-ed him on the nose when he was getting his temperature
taken. He hates that part, and always cries. This time, it was like
nothing happened.

So, when you know it's going to be bad, tapping the nose helps. I suspect
this works with other things, just a little hypnotic distraction.

http://www.re-nest.com/re-nest/insects-pests/fruit-fly-death-trap-055578

Put a paper cone in a glass with a bit of cider vinegar, or a piece of
fruit in the bottom (banana works well). Instant, effective flycatcher.

The article includes a link to a pdf which has a little fly tombstone,
entirely optional, but cute.

http://www.girleffect.org/

What if development focused on the needs of girls?

Last night, as is our favorite thing to do on the 4th, we went over to a
friends house for a barbeque, then walked over to the city park to watch the
fireworks.

I love the whole thing around the 4th. The always good weather, the hanging
out with people, the patriotic themed foods, like Flag cake and red beans
and rice salad. I especially love going to the park and watching the
fireworks with a significant fraction of the total population of the town
where we live.

This year, the fireworks were very good. But, a difference I noticed from
the last several years, is that the security was much more relaxed. The
last few years, but not this year, the city police had been out in full
force, checking bags and containers, and in general doing serious
enforcement. But this year, with as many, or more, citizens in attendance,
I saw only one police officer, who was standing at the entrance to the
park, where the buses dropped people off, but which was otherwise closed to
traffic. No police wandering the crowd making their presence known.

Last night, a crowd of hundreds of people, all together in the city they
live in and love, watched a spectacle celebrating this place. And they did
it with more freedom than they have in years past, and it was all the
sweeter for that.

( Salman Rushdie on universal humanist truths )

http://beatonna.livejournal.com/18665.html

If you don't know who Agnes Macphail was, here's a good bio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Macphail

Stranger than Fiction is wonderful!

http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/2007/10/13/the-cookie-story-told-in-pictures/

A story about cookies.

From: Overcoming Bias and Eliezer Yudkowsky:

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
-- Eugene Gendlin

The blog Overcoming Bias is about teaching us to think more clearly, more truthfully.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17tier.html

A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization By JOHN TIERNEY Published: July 17, 2007

"In 1993, J. Richard Gott III computed with scientific certainty that humanity would survive at least 5,100 more years. At the time, I took that as reason to relax, but Dr. Gott has now convinced me I was wrong. He has issued a wake-up call: To ensure our long-term survival, we need to get a colony up and running on Mars within 46 years."

Gott's scientific certainty is based on the assumption, the Copernican assumption, that unless we have a good reason to believe otherwise, what we observe now is nothing special. The example he gives is if we were to encouter two geysers on an alien planet, and we had evidence that one started erupting a million years ago, and the other one started erupting 10 seconds ago, that we could confidently predict that the one that had been erupting for 10 seconds would likely stop erupting before the other one, based only on the fact of the duration so far of the eruption.

He's been successful at predicting lots of sorts of things, from the duration of political terms, to streaks in poker, to 95% certainty.

"Dr. Gott’s Copernican Formula assumes that whatever you’re observing is unlikely to still be in the first one-fortieth of its lifespan, so if it’s already been around for x amount of time, it’s unlikely to last an additional 39x amount of time. Conversely, it’s probably not very close to its demise — – it’s probably still in the first 39/40 of its total lifespan, not in the final 1/40 — so you can predict that its remaining life is likely to be at least 1/39th of x."

I noticed a couple of problems with this right away. A prediction to 95% certainty isn't what we would consider useful in everyday life. Say I was using this Formula to determine how long a software development project was going to take.

After the first couple of weeks, on what you think is a small task, you feel like you've accomplished at least half of the work. So, you believe that it's unlikely to be in the first one fortieth of it's lifespan. From that you can say that it's not likely to last an additional 78 weeks. So you predict it's remaining life is likely to be at least another day or roughly 10% of a week. (1/39 * 2 = .102 weeks) So, you can say with 95% certainty that 19 times out of 20 this project is going to finish sometime between tomorrow and 78 weeks from now.

Most people, faced with that sort of prediction would laugh. That's not the sort of prediction that would be useful in doing anything about the project. It's certainly not the sort of forecast a client would accept when they're planning the budget.

The other problem is that Gott is assuming that there aren't strong interdependant relationships between the components making up the event. That is, he's assuming a Gaussian or Normal distribution. For lots of activities, that's a perfectly reasonable assumption, but there are a lot of things in the world where that's not the case.

Back to that software project. You've done 50% of the work in two weeks. You go to your manager and say, I'm pretty confident that the last half of the work is going to take at most another 2 weeks. In a week's time, you go back to your manager and say, "We're on schedule! The project is 80% done with a week to go!" In another week you go to your manager and say "We've run into a bit of difficulty, and are only 90% done. But, the last 10% only took us a week, so I predict that it's going to take us another week to finish. But, Steve's going on vacation next week, so that's going to delay us for a couple of days. So, we'll be done in two weeks, tops."

Anyone who's ever worked on a software project knows the rest of the story. The project will linger at 90% done for somewhere between an additional 6 weeks and 150 weeks or longer.

And that's because when you've got people working on software, you've got lots of interrelated components in the system, any one of which can delay the project, none of which can speed it up to a significant effect. Software project durations don't follow a Gaussian distribution, they follow a Laplacian or Longtail distribution. The time it takes for the last 5% isn't at all similar to the time it took for the first 5%. It's likely to be many many times longer.

Nassim Taleb's latest book _The Black Swan_ is all about this confusion between Gaussian and Longtail probability. He tells a story about a turkey, which wakes up every one of it's 10000 mornings and is happy that the farmer feeds it. On morning 10001, the turkey wakes up, and, being a very smart turkey says "Gott's Formula suggests I've got a 95% chance of between 256 days and 390000 days! Isn't life great!" And the farmer arrives, as it is the week before Thanksgiving, and even though he's got a genius turkey, slaughters it.

The good news is, because people are bad at figuring these sorts of things out, the reward for being right about what kind of distribution it is is pretty large.

PDF instructions on how to build a movable table for growing salad greens in only 3 inches of soil.

Sort of like raised beds, but movable.

I found: Tag Clouds for the Democratic Debate off of Junk Charts, a great data visualization site. Junk Charts takes bad infographics and reworks them into something clearer. One of the techniques he's recommended in the past is tag clounds.

Janet Harris, a researcher at pollster.com, drew up a concordance of each of the words used by each of the candidates during the Democratic debate. A Tag cloud shows words that occur more frequently as larger than words that occur less frequently.

( My comments on each of the candidates cut for spoilers )

And on a semi-related note: Ten steps to close down an open society by Naomi Wolf. If you were starting a dictatorship, what would you do first?

Well, you change the language in specific ways. See The Language of the Third Reich: LTI -- Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook (Continuum Impacts) (Paperback) by Victor Klemperer.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2007/1865021.htm

A radio program of a talk that Leda Cosmides gave at Arizona State University conference on Transhumanism. Wide ranging views of technology, decision theory, transhumanism and psychology.

The premise is, we're the result of an immense number of evolutionary experiments. The transhumanists belive they can come up with better strategies for engineering humans, but without a wide consideration of the consequences of the changes, they're going to chose sub-optimal, or just flat out bad options.

Great stuff.

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?cat=33
Reflecting for a few moments on your values may improve your
performance, particularly in situations where stereotypes suggest you
may not do well.

Date: 2007-02-18 19:53
Subject: Google Maps, Mass Transit and Travel booking

As the person responsible for booking travel for us, I often have to find a
hotel that is close to a mass transit station in a city I'm unfamiliar
with. Up until now, it's been an annoyingly long, interative process of
back and forth between mass transit websites, and hotel booking sites, in
order to figure out what's up. Of course, mass transit websites are often
utter crap as far as telling you what's close to a particular station (if
you can even get a street address for it).

The good news is that google maps now shows transit stations for selected
major cities in the US. I've checked NYC, Washington, San Jose and Boston.
Unfortunately Denver is not covered.

Thank you Google!

Cards featuring portraits of Americans who tell the truth:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.”

Howard Zinn “The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.”

http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/

The accompanying portraits are beautiful.