Recommendation: Polymeme

The last few links come courtesy of Polymeme, which I highly recommend. It's not a replacement for reading individual blogs or for sites like Digg and Reddit, but it's an excellent supplement-- the content is different than the more socialy-driven sites, and of course if you're really interested in a particular blog, you should continue to subscribe to it directly.

Polymeme excells at filtering through "expert" blogs and pulling out the content that a more general audience is likely to want to see. In fact, I may remove a few feeds from my reader since Polymeme seems to be linking to the articles I would've read. And of the content it's shown me which I wouldn't've seen otherwise, I was interested in over half, a good deal more than almost any other feed on my list. It's at the very least worth a try. You'll be hooked.

NEWSFLASH: AMERICANS LIKE OUTER SPACE!

McCain and Obama offer their statements about their plans for the space program. (Notice the similarities.)

I've always felt that NASA was one of the less necessary of the governments' expenditures, especially given it's huge cost. It seems like it's primarily a leftover from a Cold War-era effort to "establish the U.S. dominance in science and technology" (from McCain's statement), a good example of government playing the government game rather than doing it's job.

I'd like to see a candidate who promised to cut government spending on things like the space program in order to finance things like fighting poverty, drug research, and fixing the economy.

Brains Are Not Books

Collaboration on exams via technology? How could they allow such a thing?!

Really, though, I've always wondered if it actually hurts to allow it. It would need to be regulated in order to avoid simple copying, but to me it just makes sense to allow communication during tests, or at least access to reference materials. Most people who don't already know the material will probably fail anyways. It just takes too long to look up all the answers, and an exam really shouldn't ask questions you can look up the answers to anyways.

Fat != Dying

Hopefully you already knew this. I figured it out once I realized how my ribs were positioned; I'm not saying that I couldn't lose a few pounds (I definitely could), but if I lost too many without gaining some serious muscle, my torso would look rather bucktoothed.

If Teachers Payed for Textbooks

People are using technology— open textbooks, wikis, and (illegal) ebook torrents— in an effort to save money on textbooks. While they are ridiculously overpriced, books are relatively cheap in comparison to the rest of the expenses of college. I wonder what would happen to prices if textbooks were built in to tuition?

A New Kind of Addiction

Pharmaceutical companies have apparently been running "seeding" trials, distributing (potentially dangerous) medication to doctors with the purpose of getting the doctors used to prescribing it and patients used to taking it. Not really surprising, but pretty lame nonetheless.

Public Healthcare for America?

Obama supports state-run healthcare, though not right away for America. I'm still not sure what the best route to go on this is; while I think that everyone should have access to health care, I do believe in the power of competition. Also, the libertarian in me doesn't want anyone to have to pay for others' well-being. More on this soon.

I'm Twenty-Three in Cell Years

Researches have found a way to determine a person's "biological age" based on the ability of their cells to regenerate. Seems like it could have a lot of uses, especially since this means that we are learning more about how aging actually happens (which hopefully means we'll be able to stop it, or at least slow it way down).

Gay Gene Passed On By Females?

This theory on (male) homosexuality makes a lot of sense to me; unfortunately, it doesn't account for females. Basically, it explains how a homosexuality gene could propogate through it's effect on females (the males' mothers and sisters), where it leads them to have more children than average. I remember some studies a while back which claimed that women were much less fixed in sexual preference than men, which when coupled with this theory may form a comprehensive explanation.

The Environmental Facts Label

Japan is launching a campaign asking companies to issue their products with a standard government label with details about the products' carbon footprint. Unfortunately, the labels are entirely voluntary- while they will get a large amount of participation from companies wanting to show off their eco-friendliness, those producing goods which strongly impact the environment will obviously avoid the label.

Visibility is an effective way to get people to think about the impact they are making, and I applaud Japan for taking this first step. It's not a new idea- preexisting examples include Nutritional Facts labels and glowing power meters- but it's one that seems, to me, hugely underutilized. I know that the nutritional labels on foods influence what I buy, even if not all the time. (Think how McDonald's sales would change if they were required to put nutritional facts on their menu.)

A big concern I have for the labeling scheme is how they will represent what are "good" and "bad" levels of environmental impact. It can't be purely numerical; I doubt that many people will know what those numbers actually mean. The Nutritional Facts label uses the "2000 Calorie Diet" as a comparison (thought that obviously is just an average); would different products' carbon footprint have to be printed in comparison to the average for that type of product? If that's even feasible, it could actually hurt the cause for which the labels exist. Most products have similar production processes, meaning that the "average" will be near the existing levels for all products. It'll help against companies which are being blatantly irresponsible and thus falling well away from the mean, but it won't do any good once an equilibrium is reached.

The alternative to an average (assuming you want to have some kind of comparison on the label) is an outlier or an ideal. Using an ideal is risky; you have to have somebody calculating that, and there will be pressure on them from the various industries to keep that ideal nice and close to current values. Additionally, an ideal could easily be too ideal, hurting industry by making products looking bad due to an unachievable goal. An outlier is a safer bet, but there are still problems with that; some categories won't have outliers, some will have special outliers which are technically in the same category (think: a high end car, hand-built but in the $100,000 range versus a mass-produced compact car, a useless comparison since the people going for the compact aren't going to be able to afford the other and so will ignore the carbon rating), and some categories may not have but one or two products.

The other major problem I see with requiring products to wear these labels is that some companies simply won't be able to afford it, or won't have access to all the data. Joe Carpenter doesn't always know where his wood came from, and probably doesn't know how to calculate the emissions from his various equipment. This is a solvable problem, but it requires a significant information infrastructure to be built.

Overall, I think the idea is a good one. If it's executed properly, it could go a long ways towards helping reduce emissions, both through consumer choices and corporate pressure. Here's hoping that Japan does it right, and that other countries will follow suit.

Missing Minutes

Women spend 3276 hours getting ready: While I never really put much store in this kind of study, I do find them interesting. I'd like to see an extensive survey of people from various demographics in which their entire daily life is tracked. It'd be a difficult (and probably expensive) thing to pull off, but I think it'd be worth it. You could probably convince people to do it as a kind of money-saving/optimization thing, like where companies bring in people to watch employees and tighten things up. You could even make it a reality TV show similar to TLC's Clean Sweep or What Not to Wear. If people saw where all their time was going, what would they do?

Scott Adams' "Barge World"

I love to think about different ways people could live in the future that are radically different from how things are now. Scott suggests a "barge world", in which a large portion of the population lives on barges (flat-bottomed boats, usually used for transporting goods, which can be connected together somewhat like a train to expand). People can float on their own or connect together to form temporary or permanent cities, taking advantage of the additional 70% of the Earth's surface which is currently uninhabited. There are a couple of disadvantages to this, of course; for instance, if a substantial portion of the ocean surface was covered with barges, it would block light for the ocean life underneath. But it is an interesting concept, and probably plausible with proper engineering and foresight.

Link

On the Offensive Against Spam

Sorry for the another spam-related post, but I had another thought which didn't seem related enough to merit an edit. Boing Boing's coverage of Scamorama, Eve Edelson's book on "scam baiting", made me wonder: why don't we take a similar approach with spam in general?

One simple idea would be to give the spammers what they want. Imagine this scenario: a spammer sends out a million emails, expecting a click-through rate of 0.1%, or a thousand visitors. Any old server should be able to handle this load with relative ease, assuming the visits are spread out a little. But it takes a decent server to handle a million visits-- not the kind of server a spammer is running (hopefully). If email clients, rather than simply discarding spam emails, automatically opened every link in those emails, it would create a server load on spammers proportional to the amount they sent.

This does make it simpler to execute denial-of-service attacks in which servers are intentionally overloaded with requests in order to deny service to it's legitimate users. One workaround for this is a whitelist/report system, where an email won't auto-open links to legitimate websites and where people can report email attacks of this kind to put the linked site on a whitelist. Another solution would be to have a waiting period during which linked site administrators should be contacted, but that also has the downside of being annoying, as well as requiring some way for webmasters to provide contact information.

Another solution is similar to that described in this post at philosecurity: use social engineering to take down spammers directly. While taking down spammers who comply with the law (CAN-SPAM and similar) may put you in a questionable legal situation, taking out illegally operating ones, especially those who rely on botnets, is likely to be overlooked. The government (or Google, or Microsoft, or whoever) could pay professional hackers to work on seeking out and destroying these botnets, as well as hiring investigators to find and prosecute spammers. Sure, there are things which are higher-priority, but it seems like it would probably be financially feasible for someone, especially considering the increased network activity and processing power required by spam filters.

Spammers are more like mafiosos than street robbers. Thieves are usually unpredictable; you have some people who steal frequently, but most do it occasionally or even only once. The main lines of defense against thieves are locks, lights, and 911, because you can't really do much to predict them. But with organized crime, the opposite is the case; you bring it down by investigating it, recording it, and finally taking it out with a bang. You hunt the mafia.

Why don't we hunt spammers?

Spambox

What if the major free email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) set up special mailboxes designated spam-only in an effort to improve their spam filtering? Set up a few accounts, put some links on the web, sign up for a few free services, and wait for the spam to come rolling in. Mail that makes it to the inbox obviously got past the spam filter; simply auto-mark it as spam to account for it according to the already-in-place mechanics.

This may already exist, of course, and Google's spam filtering at least is quite good, but it would be a simple way to get a possibly big improvement. (Unfortunately, spammers could use this same technique to figure out what gets through in an attempt to find holes in anti-spam technology.)

Undergeneralizations

Mathematicians, programmers, and designers are lazy.


Duh.

Steve Jobs and the New World Order

I just re-watched "Tomorrow Never Dies", and is it just me, or does Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) bear an uncanny resemblance (and not just physically) to Steve Jobs? He's even got the black shirt thing going, though it's not a turtleneck.

He could totally do it, you know.

Stomp-n-Swirl

Why don't we flush with our feet?

Pedal-operated toilets exist, and they don't seem terribly complicated (after all, we already have foot-operated trash cans), but according to this Slate article, "high installation costs" have prevented their widespread adoption. Besides being more convenient than the laser-powered auto-flushing toilets that the story rants about, surely these are cheaper as well?

P.S.: I sincerely hope that no one has ever attempted to brand that product "The Pedopotty".

Jurassic Park? Naw, I'm Old School.

Today's xkcd is so subtle, you may have to read it more than once.

The Most Common Words

Try this quiz. Your goal is to guess the 100 most common English words in 5 minutes. I got 62 right, but there were a lot of words there that I didn't expect, as well as a lot of words that weren't there that I would've expected. For instance, up and down were both there, but left and right (which both have multiple common meanings) were not.

An Interesting Twist

365tomorrows.com offers a new short story (as in, usually less than a page's worth) every day, usually set in the future and usually with an interesting twist. They vary a lot, including vivid fantasy worlds, incredibly beautiful melancholy, and occasionally little chuckle pieces.

There have been a few of them that have run chills up my spine, and though today's is in an entirely different class from those, it's probably one of my favorites.

Background Music Interface

Background music usually annoys me. I feel like this is a common thing. Multiple instances of background music playing simultaneously are especially annoying.

I wish that operating systems dedicated a special sound channel specifically to background music. This channel should have a special volume control and should only be accessible by one application at a time. If a game or something wants to play background music, but you've already got Pandora on, then there should be a little popup which requests permission to give the background music channel to the new application. If you say no, you continue listening to what you had before (perhaps with sound effects from the new application, which should also be controllable.) This would have the added effect of discouraging people from using background music where it's unnecessary, because it would annoy users to have to give it permission.


It's important to have some options avaliable (figure out what people want to set the defaults):

• remember old choices (have a checkbox labeled with text like "Always let Pandora play background music")
• for power users, have a priority list set up
  
• have three modes: automatically give new applications permission, with an option to switch it back; always request permission to switch; and always play both (normal mode)

It's these kinds of tweaks that make interfaces nice (or not). Flashy may sell, but these kinds of things are what make people really love your program.

Jott and Insomnia

Jott is a free service which lets you take down notes via the phone. You sign up for an account, register your number, and then you can call a toll-free number to leave a 30-second message which Jott transcribes for you. You can access these messages through Jott's interface, through the email which Jott sends you automatically, or through other web services (scheduling, blogging, and other apps) which you can link to your account. You can also send messages out to other people through contacts which you associate with your account. Jott does a pretty good job transcribing my voice- getting about 95% right- but your mileage may vary. Overall, it's a great service, though I can think of some simple improvements.



For one, I'd like to be able to record messages via the web browser. Just a simple button which allows you to record via your computer's microphone would be nice, and seems simple to implement. (Flash has this capability.) Alternatively, some sort of Skype integration would be cool, especially since Skype's founder is invested in the speech-to-text service. It'd be really cool if the system they use for transcribing speech was avaliable to the general public, as there aren't many good speech-to-text tools out there, though obviously they may want to keep their tech to themselves.

Also, Jott requires you to log in via your phone number. This seems strange to me, especially since you can change your number and link multiple numbers to one account. Why not go with the norm and offer usernames?

The biggest problem I see with Jott is that it's dependance on caller ID. Caller ID can be spoofed; this seems to me to be an obvious (though, admittedly, benign) security hazard. Caller ID also locks people who block caller ID or who simply don't have it (like Canadians?) out of the service.

It seems to me like a simple PIN system would work well. If you called from a registered phone number, you'd simply type in your PIN to confirm your identity. If you called from an unregistered number, you'd also say or type your username. It wouldn't be much of a blow to the service already offered (typing in a PIN takes only a second, and could even be optional via an account setting) and it would open up the service to people in lots of extra situations. (The only problem remaining here is calling from a phone registered to somebody else. Maybe just a hidden option up front where you could press * or something to call as a different user; because this is kind of a "power user" option, it wouldn't need to add anything extra to the call menu, which I applaud for it's brevity.)

Because I don't get good (read: any) cell service where I live, I can't use this app to it's full potential. I have found one outstanding use for it, though, as an insomnia aid. I find myself unable to sleep many nights because of the ideas running through my head. I have to get up and write down my ideas in order to clear my mind, but this voids whatever progress I had make towards brainwave heaven while milling over my thoughts. Jott offers a brilliant solution in this regards: I can just call and let them take down my thoughts for me. Then, in the morning, I convert these to blog drafts, emails, to-do's, etc. It's kind of funny seeing how, over time, the transcription gets worse and worse as I drift from clear, lucid speech to slow, sleepy mumbles.

Obviously, this particular use isn't suited towards everyone (non-insomniacs, people who share rooms, etc.). I think that many people could use this service, at least to take down those brilliant ideas which are fated to only come when there are no writing utensils handy. But some people will come up with other creative uses for this, which I'd like to see; I love to watch how people use and adapt technology for their own needs in innovative, personal ways.

Minimalism

What a long word!

I Concur, Parker

EVERYONE PLEASE, STOP BUYING SO MUCH WORTHLESS CRAP! Minimalism is a beautiful thing, but even if it's not your style it can't hurt to stop (or at least slow down) on acquiring new things-- it's good for your world, your wellness, and your wallet.

Hopefully, David Malki won't mind me reposting his comic if I link to it as well.

Strangeloveophobia

From Time's Quotes of the Day:

"With this kind of power at their fingertips, we have to make sure that they are not likely to do harm to others or misuse that authority." - Representative ELIJAH CUMMINGS of the House Armed Services Committee, on the need for scientists to be scrutinized for mental-health and behavioral issues before being allowed to work at military labs

I wonder if this is in reference to something in particular, or if Cummings is just afraid of mad scientists. Maybe he's been watching Spider-Man.

Rev-up

I've gone through and deleted/edited all of my old posts. While this is apparently against blogger etiquette (not that I necessarily agree with said etiquette), those posts were too dusty for anyone to notice.

Obviously, I haven't been posting much on this blog lately (in over a year, actually), but I've been meaning to start back. I really enjoy writing and the blogging medium suits me, so I'm going to try to make time and get in the habit of writing every day. Since the new semester begins soon, this may be difficult, but hopefully I'll maintain some desire to do personal writing amidst the onslaught of academic writing for Sophomore Seminar and other Simon's Rock courses.

There's an RSS feed published for the site, so for those inclined towards such things- please subscribe. I'm also going to be attempting to publish notifications and such to the various social networking venues to which I subscribe, so it should be easy to keep whoever updated (and hopefully, keep me going, treadmill-in-the-window style).

I've got a lot on my mind, so expect quite a few pieces coming up soon. (I've got a dozen drafts sitting here which should become full-length pieces in the near future, plus a file full of ideas waiting to be written about, plus my manifesto.) If you're reading this, do me a favor and try to keep me on track. I'm going to be writing whether or not anyone's reading, but obviously a comment here and there (online or in person) would be nice. I'm really excited about getting the ideas floating around in my head out to where other people can read them, rather than just sitting in a scrap file on my computer. So, uh-- thanks for reading!

--Jeb

Dr. Horrible--- brilliant.

Neil Patrick Harris stars as Dr. Horrible in this made-for-the-Internet miniseries documenting the ascent of an aspiring super-villain into the Evil League of Evil. It's forty brilliant minutes of maniacal laughs, teen mid-thirties angst, and bad guy sympathy that you're sure to love.

Watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog