I’d like a little gadget that I can carry in my pocket, or perhaps strapped to my belt. Every N minutes (where I can set the value of N) it will record my GPS coordinates (position, altitude, and velocity) to sufficiently high precision that plotting the coordinates on a map makes sense. After a long time, perhaps as much as a month, I can connect the thing to a Macintosh via FireWire or USB or wireless, and the file of samples it has accumulated will be saved in csv or some other useful format to a file on my hard disk. Oh, and I want it to cost $200 or less.

Where can I get that? My LG vx4400 cell phone has a GPS chip in it, and is able to tell the cell network where I am when I make a 911 call. Why can’t I know?

There are such things in the world, oft observed and remarked upon, which regardless of their popular acknowledgment still may offer no little pleasure to the inquisitive seeker:

• Plush microbes (via ThinkGeek)
• An intriguing online clock (via Ron Jeffries)
• Rubber duckie memory device (via Ron Jeffries)
• The Apple PowerPod (an April Fool’s gag, via Gizmodo)
• HubZilla FireWire hub in the shape of a giant monster (via… well, somewhere a long time ago)
• Anything from Despair, Inc. (since I’ve been sitting in a lot of offices that have the standard crap on the walls, lately)

Do not, if you are presented with a noisome stain which offends your eye in the bottom corner of the shower stall of the house you are trying to sell, and which therefore you desire to remove before the morning brings strangers to muck about in your closets and hmmph and tsk at your habits, attempt to do so with a combination of Super Strong Mildew Fresh With Stain-removing Chlorine Bleach, and subsequently (due mainly to impatience) Softscrub with Clorox and Some Weird Squirty Smelly Stuff in a Bottle Which Seems To Be Dutch Cleaner, Which You Brought Back From The Netherlands When You Moved in And Started Husbandry On That Particular Mildew Strain Seven Years Ago, and which Might Be Window or Perhaps Oven Cleaner, But Dammit You Have Packed Or Perhaps Sold the Dutch-English Dictionary.

Perhaps the last one is the key element to avoid. Well, actually, no… the key element to avoid is chlorine gas.

W. A. Blaze writes in his excellent recent poser on landmarks and implication

…anyone who turns at a Starbucks is going nowhere but in circles… Drive around any populated space, USA and you navigate not by landmark but by pattern. Radio Shack doesn’t define the location, but a Radio Shack, Baja Fresh, Noah’s Bagels sequence just might.

I’d like to stroll a while from there, along such paths that may appear as we go….

I visited Las Vegas a few years back for the first time, when a large technical conference was held at the Riviera, on the Strip. The Las Vegas Strip, for those who have never experienced it first-hand, is an honestly amazing place, particularly in late July or August. To stand in the desert sun, in 106°F aridity, staring down the street past an Eiffel Tower towards a Brooklyn Bridge, shining black pyramid and ultimately to the glowing golden monolith of Mandalay Bay in the distance sets you down very firmly in a specific place in the world. Many of my colleagues somehow failed to appreciate it—to their loss, I’m afraid. The hubris and operation of the whole is breathtaking, a rare vision of an ephemeral moment in human history. I mean, the monorails, and the huge fountains that spray thousands of gallons of water into the air most of which evaporates before it has a chance to land, and all that toilet paper and shrimp cocktail. Perhaps my colleagues would be more impressed if they paid attention to the toilet paper. Before I left town, I had booked a return flight for my wife and me as soon as possible, and the first day we simply sat in our tower room in Mandalay Bay and looked down at the fascinating ebb and flow of trucks and employees in the back lot, towards the desert…. One is blessed if a partner sees wonder in the world’s same facets.

At any rate, before all this sense-of-wonder stuff set in, just when I arrived at the conference, I found that I had forgotten to pack the charger for my cell phone. I asked the concierge (yes, they have one, even at the icky Riviera) where I could go, and after he consulted with the staff a bit he pulled out a map. As he highlighted the path I was to drive, he made a little apologetic face — I understood that I was to venture out into Las Vegas proper, the native city, the town. A Radio Shack.

It was, as anybody familiar with Las Vegas will confirm, a very odd feeling. The towering gaudy structures fall away surprisingly quickly and indeed can barely be seen from even a short distance to the west, and almost instantly one enters a broad continuum of Southwest Grid. That is: a great deal of adobe/cinder block walls, periodically placed corner shopping centers featuring a grocery (usually blue signage), dry goods, drug store (sometimes combined with the grocery), and a few shoe/hair places (red signage), a restaurant (usually green/white signage), and one or two specialty shops (small signs). Southwest Grid seems to be a terrain differentiated by paint colors (light, often white), coverage (80% or more ground paved) and tree plantings (almost always palms, with occasional eucalyptus where appropriate). In my limited experience, this pattern applies equally well to Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

In our cultural region, for example in the sprawl around Detroit, we have the same fundamental pattern, but the primary building coloration is brick-and-copper, the terrain coverage much lower (unless you count lawn as paving, which I am tempted to do), there are fountains in the drainage catchment basins adjoining the better parking lots, and the trees are pines and flowering fruit rather than palms.

Back in Las Vegas, I got my phone charger. The afternoon’s sessions were a bust, so I explored for a while. It was a fascinating drive. Some questions arose, which Mr. Blaze’s post call forth:

What is the natural spatial scale of the lives individual inhabitants of a city? In other words, if we drew a little x-y plot of the geographical coordinates of each person every ten minutes over the course of a month or two, how big would the cloud of dots be for an average person?

How correlated would the dot-patterns of different people be? I imagine that there is much diversity in the world — but many of the things I imagine are false. What differentiating structure and pattern is there in the way people use their cities? How might we divide them up into territories? How do those territories differ (and correlate with, and overlap between) class, race, voting preference, &c;?

How is it that so many cities — especially in the Southwest — have a core “Old Town” region set aside for tourists and impractical unique matters, surrounded by the more familiar Grid? Anecdotally, it seems as if residents of cities do not visit Old Towns any more frequently than tourists. Clearly there is a historic reason, since Old Towns are for the most part old (the Strip is not actually Old Las Vegas — Downtown is — but honestly I would class the two together). But has anybody ever tried to create an Old Town? What has come of it?

This last reminds me of The French Market, in the northern reaches of Columbus Ohio. When my wife and I were first dating, this New Urbanist extravaganza was thriving — boutique shops and destination restaurants and elegant condominium living all bound up in a little decorative mound of brick and exposed timbers. Twenty years ago, it was a fun place to go, and doubtless a lively place to live.

It’s dead, of course. I suspect that one does not need to have a balloon shop, flavored popcorn shop, or Thai carryout downstairs under one’s luxury apartment. On average, I suspect one would rather enjoy a Radio Shack, Starbucks, Krogers or a McDonald’s instead. Something potentially useful. Because otherwise, it’s a long way to drive to get to the grocery store anyway. And of course you would have to drive, since in Columbus taking the bus is an ill-posed question about safety and class. And of course there are no trains.

These aspects of life don’t seem to be limited to big cities and New Urbanist enclaves. Here in Ann Arbor, I find myself falling into the same patterns I used to make fun of when the “old townies” would meet me for lunch: I go downtown less often; I visit the Mall rarely, and then only peripherally; I think of restaurants in terms of what they used to be (as in, you know, “that place that used to be Sweet Lorraine’s”). Indeed, as we prepare to move to the country an inconvenient distance away, the trips downtown will probably practically disappear, the Mall will be supplanted completely, and the less-frequent visits will lead to more “used-to-be” locations.

About a year ago, our earnest Ann Arbor city planners inaugurated a new purple Link Bus system. The fares are ridiculously cheap, and the route is an expansive twisted loop that takes in all the important parts of the shopping district downtown and the central and business campuses. It seems very useful. Yet nobody rides it. Whenever I (drive) downtown, I see the vivid buses, passing their lettered stops every eight minutes, emptily looping eternally. My wife and I rode it once, just to see the loop, and we were the only folks on the entire ride; and then another time in a cold rainstorm with some friends late at night.

It will be shut down in a few weeks. It goes everywhere anybody might want to go. But it goes everywhere else, too.

In most of the US, Old Towns are the only place people walk or take the special-purpose tourist transport. Perhaps it is because in Old Towns the streets are close and twisted, built for another purpose in another day. Anywhere there is a grid of broad streets, the grid of local scale and Radio Shack/Starbucks/McDonalds imposes itself.

We must want it. In most of the country, nobody lives in Old Towns — perhaps a few shopkeepers and eccentrics, surely. Visitors, tourists, innocents abroad are the only ones wooed by the unique attractions and quaint narrow streets. The rest of us, when forced to do so by intense need, dash in and out as quickly as possible and afterwards wipe our brows and complain about the traffic, the parking, the jumble.

Perhaps I’d like things to be different. I recall living in the small Dutch village of Vianen, and walking a few minutes to a perfectly fine grocery and bakery every couple of days, and hopping on the bus to go to Nieuwegein or Utrecht for important stuff, and occasionally riding the train up to Amsterdam or Haarlem or Leiden for excursions. The sense of scale was pleasant.

And here? What would we do here if we undertook a broad New Urbanist renovation? What shops would we place downstairs beneath the apartments and condominiums? What restaurants would be situated in the neighborhoods, among the greige 2500-square-foot starter homes on 0.16-acre lots? What would people want near their houses? Which types of store would succeed, and which would fail?

My looping stroll seems to close ironically in on itself. In the old days, when Old Towns were being built, the natural scale came from foot and horse-drawn traffic, and things were close by. They weren’t zoned, and for the most part they weren’t planned. We like the look and feel of them. Nowadays, in cities and suburbs built according to a ritualized and pervasive city planning regime, we seem to have lost control of what goes where, and a periodic state arises that we find ugly and unappealing and oppressive.

Which is more natural? Which do we want? Are they alternatives, really?

To those dealing with the steady onslaught of Intelligent Design finaglers, Anti-globalization zealots, and Back-to-basics Neo-luddite sentiments wherever they may be found, I recommend you pick up a copy of Samuel C. Florman’s The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. Written in 1976, near the beginning of what I read as our ongoing period of anti-technological anti-intellectual anti-scientific finger-pointing, Florman is a well-spoken and insightful defender of the human side of engineering — the innateness and propriety and neutrality of technology. Alas, Florman’s defense is still as important for the scientist or engineer today as it was twenty-five years ago, for one can still today hear many of the arguments he deflated taken as Received Wisdom by the press, government spokesmen, and anti-technological intelligentsia.

Some days, we don’t seem to have made any headway at all. Endless circles. “…doomed to repeat it…” &c; &c;

For example, consider this, part of a moving response to the accusations that “technology” is a demonic entity separate from human nature itself, responsible for our troubles:

Further, if we are considering the source of a man’s discontent, let us remember that it is art, philosophy and religion that have made promises that cannot be kept. Technology’s promises can be fulfilled. Visions of beauty, truth, and eternal bliss can only be mirages. Therefore, added to our real problems are the frustrations that must follow when we recognize that our dreams of Paradise can never be realized.

Go get a copy and read it.

Negotiation has always been a great deal of fun for me. When I was a pre-failed dotcom founder, I remember that while there was a real serious side involved in planning and arguing over Very Large Sums of Money, there was also an atmosphere of gentle play in the air — a gleam in all parties’ eyes. And you got to eat out at nice restaurants a lot.

In contrast to that heady deal-making and elevator-speaking, the “seven-figure days” of the pre-bubble world, this little piddling real estate deal between us and the stunningly intransigent House Builders seriously cuts my take-home enjoyment. Now it begins to sink in how cunningly crafted the whole New Construction Infrastructure is to favor the Builder: they built the house, and they can charge whatever the hell they want to. Piss them off, or just look at ‘em funny, and they will (a) walk away, or (b) charge you more for the privilege. Both, if they can. All well within their rights, too. Wry conversations with our agents confirm this fact of life, and the ten-minute phone conversation I had with one of them nailed the case.

Unlike the situation we had prepped ourselves for over months — in which some family somewhere must sell their pride and joy, and are willing to parley on price and perks just so they can move on to their New Life somewhere else — we were at sea for a while. Ickily at sea. Nothing can really be done in the form of direct force or leverage.

“Ahh,” says the long-dormant entrepreneurial bit of my brain that years ago made me stride around like a self-important asshole in a very expensive suit, “did I just hear you say ‘direct’? Very interesting limiting word. What does that make you think of?”

Hmmm… Umm, maybe mail? You know, like “direct mail?”

“No, moron. Sheesh. Come over here and let me whisper it in your ear.” [whispers]

Ow! You hit me!… ohhhh…hmmm…

“Exactly.”

Today I may just be able to find a little block of time to see how one submits a freelance newspaper article. Or magazine article to the regional rags. Who knows — maybe I’m writing a book on the experience of finding and buying a house.

“How do you spell your last name again, Jim?”

… … …

Naaah. Enough of this. Back to work. Science, engineering, and philosophy from here on out, folks. That guy doesn’t like his ear being bit. We’re back on track.

Oh, and Ann Arbor forteana, too….

Well, yesterday I spoke with one of the builders of the house we’re negotiating for. Amazing how quickly our carefully-crafted hypotheses about the world and interpersonal dynamics can be shattered and remade.

With regards to the Buyers’ Agents and Sellers’ Agent, the Sellers and even us, I suspect now I that I have misjudged many aspects of the situation. None of the facts of the matter have changed, of course — simply how we interpret them in light of new information.

This is what they call cognitive dissonance. How disconcerting it can be.

Subtle but rather leading comments by the Buyers’ Agents to the effect that, “You know, dealing with a builder is very different from dealing with an individual owner-seller,” just slipped right through our filters. Unlike a normal seller, they’re not moving off to a new job and a brighter future; they can wait to sell it to anybody they want. Thus, they start from a strong position in the negotiations, or at least they always assume and act as if they do.

I begin to think we should have listened to the Buyers’ Agents.

No surprise that they respond to somebody trying to negotiate terms with impatience and disdain.

Subtle but rather leading hints that the people crafting the increasingly confrontational addenda to the contract were the Builders (and not the Sellers’ Agent) just slipped right through our filters. The Sellers’ Agent, I am told, has been the one who has been smoothing over the ruffled feathers of the Sellers.

I begin to think we should have listened to the Sellers’ Agent.

Our folks (the Buyers’ Agents) have to deal with intransigence and inexperience. Their folks (the Sellers’ Agent) have to deal with intransigence and ruthless business sense. Consider, for example, this fragment of a telephone conversation:

Bill: Well, Jim, we had a chance to go out there with Glenn Miller. Nice man.

Jim: I think I had a chance to work with him on a project years ago.

Bill: Well, we had a look at the things that were bothering us, and for the most part he said there really wasn’t much to worry about.

Jim: That’s what we’ve been saying all along. All you need to do is look into our reputation.

Bill: Yes, it’s a great reputation. The only thing that seems to be a major issue is the water bubbling up around the well. Glenn—

Jim: Yeah, the Health Department have already been out to see it, and we’re going to put a drainage tile around it to drain the excess water off into a ditch. That’ll clear it up fine. But there’s never been any problems with that well. I remember when we were working on the site, we had a pipe sticking up from it, and I’d go over to it to have a drink. Pleased as punch to hit a flowing well like that.

Bill: Yes, well… [Glenn Miller, when first informed that the well was a flowing well, was heard to sonorously utter “Hoe-lee shit,” and upon seeing the well itself he shook his head woefully. To avoid serious health risks, the well will have to be re-grouted. That will cost $2k or so, because it’s a flowing well — in this case that seems to mean that if you stuck a pipe into the top of the well and let it fill with water, the static head would be 4 feet high above the ground. Imagine trying to pour concrete in a fountain. Tricky. But Bill hadn’t read the official report at the point the conversation took place, so…] I’m not sure that Glenn’s report will recommend that, so I’d like to ask that you hold off on the drainage tile thing. We’re not professional well people, so I just want to make sure it gets done right.

Jim: Look, there’s never been a thing wrong with that well. The people who dug it are some of the best.

Bill: Yes, I’m sure they are. We’ll have Glenn’s report on Monday and have a look at what it says, OK?

Jim: Hey, by the way, have you got your house listed for sale, yet?

There was a good deal more. What we’re dealing with, here, is exactly what the Buyers’ Agents and Sellers’ Agent have been trying to protect us from all along: An unswerving force (the Toziers) meeting an immovable object (the Sellers).

I wonder how long they will be able to stave off the crash?

As I might have mentioned before, we don’t post a PayPal link to help offset the hosting charges and maintenance of Notional Slurry, but rather an eBay link to our current auctions and eBay store items. On offer this week are a number of vintage and antique nature and technology books — last chance before we pack it all up in preparation to moving!

View my eBay auctions here…

Never having met a geologist who was not a professor is not the only reason I want to meet Mr. Miller. When we chatted a while back about having him come over to the new not-quite-our-house to look at the spring(s), I asked him a bit about himself. One of the first jet pilots. Trained pilots for the Korean war. Played the trombone. Owned a well and drilling company until the 1960s, when the margins disappeared. Since then he’s been helping sand and gravel companies avoid stupid mistakes, remediate those that arise, and also helping residential home-builders like us ruin the serenity of the lakeshores and wetlands of our fine state by building on difficult damp spots — just the sort of thing we need on the case.

I like him already.

[Update: Also among Mr. Miller’s anecdotes heard while we were driving out to the house together, he was the first to note bacterial metabolism of hydrocarbon pollutants in groundwater in a Cape Canaveral consulting project many years back, and also the first use of LANDSAT foliage spectra to predict the soil characteristics (for obtaining construction sand for Interstate 10 between Houston and New Orleans, where useful sand was considered scant). Truly an interesting fellow.]

[not substantially changed from reality]

The Players:

• The Toziers, Bill and Barbara, who are seeking to purchase a particular house in the country, and who have a minor concern regarding some water they have found in the back yard
• The Sellers, Jack and Jim, who have built said house in the country, on spec, and whose reputation is extremely good, and who to all appearances seem fair businessmen
• The Supervisor, Joe, Jim’s brother and the man who knows everything that actually is going on at the site
• The Buyers’ Agents, who are a team of several different people who collectively represent the interests of the Toziers during negotiation of the contract by which the house in the country may be bought
• The Sellers’ Agent, an individual representing the interests of the Sellers during negotiation of the contract by which the house in the country may be sold

Toziers: Could we have somebody please look at these two big puddles in the back yard, right next to the well and the sill drain outlet? We just want to know if they’re ground water or springs or what. Not a big worry, but we really just want to know about it because we’re utterly ignorant about whether they represent an issue with the house.

The Buyers’ Agents: Sellers’ Agent, the Toziers want to know what you’re going to do about the water problems.

The Sellers’ Agent: Buyers’ Agents, there are no water problems! It is a wet year! No need to bother the Sellers with such trivia. I will therefore cross off this item from your list for our mutual convenience.

The Buyers’ Agents: Toziers, the Sellers’ Agents say, “What water?”

Toziers: Ummm.. the water, which is welling up from the ground. Around the well head and the sill drain. You really can’t miss it. We all actually stepped in it when we were there at the site last time. Maybe what we should do is include a contingency with our offer stating that we want a detailed site plan that shows the location of the house on the property, so we can show that to an engineer or something. Just a plan.

The Buyers’ Agents: Sellers’ Agent, the Toziers will be pleased to buy the house, given that they would like to walk with the builders in person and point out a punchlist of minor items needing to be repaired, and given a site plan.

The Sellers’ Agent: OK. They say fine.

The Buyers’ Agents: Toziers, they said fine! Congratulations. Start selling your house now!

Toziers Great. Now, let’s deal with that water thing. Can we have the site plan now?

The Buyers’ Agents: Yes, here, the Sellers’ Agent faxed us this one-page sketch that shows a blob where a house with a different floorplan was proposed to be sited some years ago, and approximate boundaries of the property. Will that do?

Toziers: Well… no. And we’re not actually sure why you would think that it could. We specifically stated to you folks that we were requesting a site plan showing enough detail, including the house’s siting and the topography around the house, that we could show the plan to an expert and have them sign off on the water. The point of the site plan was that we wouldn’t have to mention the flowing groundwater as an explicit contingency, according to your advice. Hang on… when you said “site plan” in the offer, did you make it very clear that what we needed would have a specified level of detail? Oh, dear… you didn’t, did you? [they sigh] OK. Tell them that this is unsatisfactory and that we need a plan in sufficient detail to settle our water concerns, or if not that we need to do something else about it. The water is probably nothing, but we are ignorant and therefore want somebody to sign off on it for us.

The Buyers’ Agents: Sellers’ Agent, the Toziers are concerned about the water around the well head. Is there a problem with the well?

The Sellers’ Agent: The well passed inspection months ago. We have the document here, and if we get past these ridiculous trivialities, we will provide a copy for you. Why are you pestering us? When will you be buying the house?

The Buyers’ Agents: Toziers, the Sellers’ Agent says that there is no water around the well. But we were there with you last time, and we saw it too. What an obstructionist the Sellers’ Agent is, eh? But, that said, is it that important?

Toziers: Look, can we just get together with them all and go there and see it? All we want to do is have somebody—an engineer or a geologist or somebody—look at it and tell us whether the water flowing up around the well head and the sill drain are a problem. It’s not complicated, is it? Water, problem, quick yes or no, and we’re done. What do The Sellers say about it?

The Buyers’ Agents: We don’t think the Sellers have heard about it, yet.

Toziers: OK, I guess we’ll just have to bring it up when we meet them face to face at the house to create the punch list of items to be repaired.

some days later, at the house…

Toziers: Hello, Jack and Jim. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

[The Toziers are unaware that “Jim” is in fact Joe. This is not made clear by any of the Sellers’ party.]

The Sellers: And a pleasure to meet you, Toziers. Why have we all been summoned here?

Toziers [seeing blank look on the face of The Sellers and The Sellers’ Agent] Well, there are some minor things we wanted to clear up — cracks in the grout and minor settling stuff that is to be expected over the first few months of a house’s life — and we thought it would be expeditious to talk directly. Here are a few minor concerns, mostly just cosmetic items.

The Sellers: Well, while recalcitrant to do anything that requires serious effort, we will be happy to polish and finish everything on your list. We would have to do that anyway, if the deal were to fall through and we were to list the house for sale again. Is there something else?

Toziers: Well, the site plan. Have you perhaps brought it along? This little squiggle isn’t sufficient, of course, because as we communicated in detail to our Buyers’ Agents and thereby to your Sellers’ Agent, we would need sufficient topographic detail and the house’s footprint and elevations so that we could show the plan to an engineer or other person skilled enough to sign off on the water flowing in the back yard.

The Sellers’ Agent: Well, frankly there is no such thing in the world. Such a plan would include an unreasonable degree of detail, and would surely be very costly — what we have provided in our fax is the site plan. Therefore, having acceded to the stated wording of the contingency while disregarding all that extraneous and non-binding verbal explanation of social context, we will not be providing any other plans. Was there anything else?

Toziers: Well, yes, the water itself, then.

The Sellers: Water? What water?

later, in the back yard by the well head

Bill: See, Jim, this puddle here? Is that something we need to worry about?

“Jim” [actually Joe]: Well, what happened is this: When we drilled the well there were no problems. Several months passed, and then of a sudden this water started to appear around the well head. I think it is a spring or other layer of groundwater, which was struck when the well was dug during the dry years we have recently experienced.

Bill: I see the wisdom in your hypothesis, and find it persuasive. Do you think there might be a problem?

“Jim” [actually Joe]: I doubt it very much, but of course if there is we will be happy to fix it. But the well has passed inspection, and you will note that we are standing some distance below the elevation of the house’s foundation. Surely we did not strike the same water flow when we dug the house.

Bill: I am relieved. It is a pleasure to speak with you directly on the matter.

“Jim” [actually Joe]: Was there something else?

Bill: Walk with me to the sill drain. Do you see the water welling up around it, much as it was over there on the other side of the house?

“Jim” [actually Joe]: Yes, this drainage tile was placed to bring water away from the foundation of the house, which is a standard prophylactic measure with all of our fine houses to avoid unforeseen future problems. We noted no water in the sill drain trenches when we built them, nor did any water flow here until recently. Like as not we struck the same layer of groundwater as we did at the well head when we dug this trench. But surely there is no problem, since we are many paces from the house.

Bill: Yes, I see this, but we seem to be standing, this time, higher than the elevation of the floor of the house, and the puddle surrounding the drain pipe covers the mouth. I hesitate to guess whether the layer of groundwater we see here is flowing out from the sill drain, or we have another spring here. If a spring, I am concerned that you might have struck the same layer when digging the basement, but did so during the dry years we have recently experienced. Also, you might note that while the well head is on the right side of the house, this drain is on the left side of the house, implying to my untrained mind that they may represent a larger body of water pressing against the house itself, which lies in the middle. I am sure this would be practically unthinkable, but as an ignorant city slicker, I would just like to discuss it long enough to argue the possibility away. Insofar as it is now a wet year, might we have somebody skilled in such matters look at this?

“Jim” [actually Joe]: I’m not sure who one would have look at it.

Bill: I would think perhaps a civil engineer or geologist would be appropriate. We will be happy to arrange to get them here, at our expense, simply to tell us not to worry. We like this place a great deal, and also you and Jack, whose reputation is excellent and who seem to be very high-quality builders, and friendly fellows as well. We would very much like to live here.

“Jim” [actually Joe]: [nods]

after another week…

The Toziers: Buyers’ Agents, we have added text to the contract to the effect that we will have a professional look at the water coming up from the ground in the back yard of the house. because of our relative ignorance of such things, our purchase of the house is contingent upon this being cleared up and explained by somebody who understands ground water and drainage and such. Is that clear?

The Buyers’ Agents: Yes. I just got off the phone with the Sellers’ Agent, who made it clear that the well has passed inspection, and therefore she can’t understand why you’re being such nitpicking fools about it.

The Toziers: Look, when Bill talked with Jim, it all seemed straightforward. All we need to do is have somebody like the Sanitarian or a geologist go out there and look at it and tell us it’s all right.

The Buyers’ Agents: Sellers’ Agent, the Toziers are still worried about the water. It’s no big deal, but they want to be certain it’s not a problem.

The Sellers’ Agent: Sorry? What water problem? Look, we already said we would re-do the grade in the yards.

The Buyers’ Agents: Sellers’ Agent, they mean the water around the well.

The Sellers’ Agent: The well has passed inspection, months ago. We have the documents here, and if we can just get past this ridiculous sticking point we will provide them happily. When will they be buying the house??

The Buyers’ Agents: Toziers, they still don’t think there’s a problem.

Toziers: But we stood there and talked with Jim about it.

The Buyers’ Agents: Well, Jim isn’t hearing in this conversation, is he. You talk to us, and we talk to The Sellers’ Agent, and typically we work it out for you. On your behalf. Tell us again what this water problem is? What was that about the sill drain you were saying? Is the basement wet?

Toziers: No, here, let me draw you a picture. [draws picture] See? There is water near the well and the sill drain. Jim said they might have struck a spring when they dug them. We just want to know what that means to the house in the long term.

The Buyers’ Agents: Oooh! I see. OK — Sellers’ Agent, the Toziers are asking again about the water near the well, and the sill drain too.

The Sellers’ Agent: The Sellers are addressing the water around the well. What the hell is this about the sill drain?! Haven’t you told your Buyers that they’re not allowed to add new contingencies to the list this late in the game? Nobody ever said anything to me about the sill drain. This is ridiculous and unreasonable. I am going to cross this whole thing off the page, and at this rate I will advise my clients to kill the deal because your Buyers are being so unreasonable. When are they going to buy the house???

The Buyers’ Agents: Toziers, it doesn’t look good. The Sellers’ Agent made it sound like she was about to cancel the whole thing over this. We don’t know what to tell you to do… but is this really that important?

Toziers: It didn’t start off that way, no.

To be continued…

Back in January I wrote about an unusual news story, and opined that it might take off, or might not — and wondered why. I come across it again tonight, via a story in the Guardian, and frankly it’s almost as if nothing has happened in the intervening months, and I am reading the original January story again word-for-word.

You might find it interesting. I do. But in the context of the original essay, I also find it interesting that the Google news search I set up still only has thirteen hits as of this writing; a search of Google News for William Krar comes up with seven.

Intriguingly, in light of my little essay, is the opening of the first Google News hit that does come up for Krar:

WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) — Since his appointment as attorney general, John Ashcroft’s Washington office has issued 2,295 news releases. Not one of them has mentioned the name William Joseph Krar.

[Among other things, I am reminded that I need to put a lot of good citations in that original essay. The eminent and very important Dan Sperber, for example. Coming soon!]

Just noted, though almost certainly it’s already made the rounds: Light-transmitting concrete

Makes me want to build something very interesting. It should be pointed out that nothing requires that the fibers are aligned and pass straight through the structure. For example, one can easily imagine a method of arranging curved fibers into a structural wall that would render it, in effect, a “horizontal skylight”.

[via Fortean Times]

Update: My wife, always more pragmatic than I am, points out an unforeseen issue with bidirectionally semi-transparent walls: night. At best, your house would glow eerily from the lamps inside; at worst, you’d project potentially embarrassing shadow-puppet shows to the neighbors.

Just reading a noteworthy essay by Jerry M. Landay at MediaTransparency. You may want to have a look as well.

Attention Conservation Notice: B. Mark Smith’s The Equity Culture: The Story of the Global Stock Market is interesting and worthwhile, but like many single-volume histories of many-threaded multi-tiered social phenomena, rather scattershot and abbreviated. It’s a good introduction to a system that would be better described by a dozen thicker volumes—in other words, a great way to get you thinking about it.

[and the rest of the review will arrive as soon as I can find my copy in the shambles our house has become…]

…when he said I didn’t want to hear it.

It doesn’t seem to be a good sign, after paying somebody 50% more than they originally estimated it would cost to fix your house up, that it looks worse as a result.

Well, perhaps not “worse” as such. How about unfinished in a different way?

We bought a “fixer-upper” several years ago when we moved into this house. Now we’re selling it, and our open-ended schedule of fixing it up is coming to an abrupt close — the sort involving a bunch of nice guys pounding on it with hammers, and prodding it where it looks squishy, and shaking their heads and generally making it nicer than it has been the whole time we’ve lived here.

But I’m resigned to that. It’s the way these things go. It’s the extras I’m unhappy with right this sec.

The fellow up over my head at the moment can be heard to mutter (roughly) “Good Lord, what did these idiots do?” This is not in reference to us, rather but the people we bought from. Or maybe the people before them. Something about soffits and siding and conventional nails. It doesn’t look good.

See, all of the previous owners of this house were apparently “handy”, not in the sense of people who watch a lot of HGTV and therefore have some idea of how stuff is supposed to go and when to call a professional, but more along the lines of some guys with a hammer and some old wood layin’ around and way too much spare time on their hands.

One of the previous inhabitants of the house was a 16-year-old who with his brother framed and “finished ” (to use the term loosely) our guest room. It’s his handiwork that fellow with the hammer up over my head is swearing about. He came by a few months back with his kids, a balding man about ten years older than me, armed with a smile and fond remembrance of his childhood home. Today I am reminded that while we were chatting he asked, “Hey, did anybody ever refinish that old addition we put up over the garage? You know, me and my brother built that whole thing. Heh, we didn’t know what we were doing. I can’t even believe it passed inspection. It’s been re-done, right?”

Today it has, yes. Much to my surprise.

Ron is often pining for fancy high-end hand-crafted motor vehicles. These here are not something I’ve seen before.

[via b3ta]

Just a brief reminder that the site is supported not by straight PayPal donations (though you’re always welcome to do so as you see fit) but rather eBay auction sales.

If you have the time and inclination, please hop over there and see what’s on offer.

We’re moving soon, so the listing count will be dropping precipitously over the coming weeks.

Amy Greenwood recounts an infuriating lecture by Leon Kass of the President’s Council for Bioethics on the “dehumanizing danger” of modern biomedical technology. Her summary includes:

In short, Kass’ position is that some of the controversial biomedical advances being developed today will degrade our humanity and trivialize our lives. Even if we approach them with the best intentions, we will be less human if we embrace them.

In particular, he made examples of stem cell biology, therapeutic cloning, genetic enhancement, psychotropic drugs, steroids, and longevity research. For each technology he mentioned a few of the possible real dangers, and then claimed that worse than these, we would lose most by the fact that our thinking about our lives and identities would change.

I recommend her essay. It’s good.

Meanwhile, the recent events in Madrid, the ridiculous and embarrassing shit that’s happening in my home state of Ohio (can you renounce a home state?), and in general the foolishness that surrounds us and pervades our lives and causes us to attack one another in body or mind, because of beliefs….

I’d drop everything right now if somebody came along with a convincing new method to teach people, engineer society, mass-brainwash people, or otherwise dehumanize them away from their intense faith and the accompanying conviction that they must interfere with others’ lives to pass it on. Some days I think a little dehumanization, correctly applied, would do us all some good. Because it seems some mornings that what sets us apart from the rest of the animals on the planet is the ability to be dangerously stupid.

We need a credulity vaccine.

Michael Berubé’s recent post on meta-conferences is making the rounds, with a spirited (and weird) comment-level discussion going on at Electrolite. Insofar as the discussion was derailed by some sort of social troll thingie I can’t gist very well, I thought it the better part of valor to post my anecdote here.

I’m a sort of biologist, among other things, and this talk of the humorous ubiquitous types of seminar audience members has reminded me of a story that was going around where I used to work. Was it at CWRU or Miami University, U Penn or somewhere else? Was it an old emeritus or my advisor telling the story? I can’t recall. You may treat it as semi-apocryphal, in that the person who told me witnessed it first-hand. FOAF.

So, anyway, there was a famous elderly emeritus faculty member at Institution X. He had been there in the research domain of physiology in the earliest days of its existence, and still many decades later he attended every departmental seminar and job talk, and some occasional faculty lectures in classes. In every case he would come in early, sit near the back, and immediately fall noisily asleep, sometimes before the beginning of the talk. Snores and all.

But, after admittedly missing the entirety of the biology / biochemistry / pathology / neurology / physiology / botany talk, he would always rouse himself a bit in the Q&A; session and ask—every time—”What is the role of calcium in this phenomenon?”

And, as anybody who knows any biology will acknowledge with a wry smile, it is always a very good question to ask.

I earnestly hope that, with experience, I might develop my own version of this for use in the type of talks I attend. Eventually, my mere presence in the audience might be enough to push the speaker to touch on my “two small questions” during the course of her lecture. Such a helpful pedagog, me.

And I could take more naps that way. Naps being my goal in life.

Shalizi has thrown the big knife switch that transmogrified his (almost) ten years’ worth of notebooks into a real-live bloggish thing with an rss feed and everything.

Anybody who’s anybody should go and rummage. And subscribe to the feed.

We’re not even moving yet. We’re just packing up some of the books in the house—just books—and putting them for a few weeks into a storage bin so that it doesn’t look like a little warren of pathways between the stacks quite so much while the real estate agents do their stuff and try to explain the crappy mess we’ve made of our home improvement projects.

We are using only the best: lovely, clean, standard-size 1.5 cubic foot boxes, made for books, from Uline. I enthusiastically recommend Uline for everything shipping- and boxing-related. They rock.

Anyway, we bought 75. That would be, what? a mere 112 or so cubic feet. Sounds small. Yeah. Think of it in terms of refrigerators-full, and perhaps that will help. Anyway, these we have now will fill up tonight, and that’s almost enough to take what we’re calling the “extra” books and pack them up. You know, the science, business, sociology, kooks, crackpots, science fiction paperbacks, cartoons… just a few. Fiction, art, and some of business are still around, as are the Victorian ones in the barristers and the inventory stuff for sale on eBay. We’ll move that all later.

Amazing what you find when you’re randomly jamming all your books into boxes. Stuff we’ve bought at estate auctions, I barely had a chance to browse. Lovely stuff. I’ll take pictures when they’re being unpacked. It will be interesting.

Anyway, the latest estimate based on our current shelf-per-box packing rate is: 110-120 boxes of books, overall, when we’re done.

Just books, no shelves.

We may consider cutting the collection’s size, someday.

I’ve been meaning to start this category for a while; organizational silos in academia and research funding are one of the things I specifically count as a dangerous stupidity of the culture. Something I read this morning leads me to start a new list and tally them up as I encounter them….

A recent post at mamamusings voices frustration at silos and dismissive pigeonholing in science research funding on personal medical devices. It should be stressed that government agencies are the sole effective source of funding for early-stage academic biomedical research.

How often, I wonder, do they turn down grant applications because the review panel discounts the research proposal because it is not of a form traditionally funded?

How often is there no clear-cut place to apply for funding?

How often does a grant-writer need to downplay the interdisciplinary aspects of their project in order to avoid summary dismissal or under-funding?

Mixed but informative signals arose last night at dinner among Mark and Cosma and Julie and Barbara and myself.

I need advice.

Cosma is putting his boggling notebooks into a Blosxom system so that they have an rss feed and such. I asked him if he was planning on adding a Creative Commons license. He blanched and balked. (There was a second there when he looked a bit like Bilbo that one time in Rivendell, you know, when he asks Frodo to see the ring?) No, seriously, do you know how much work he’s put into those things?

Mark also admitted as the main reason he doesn’t have a blog is that he… well, the main reason is he has no time. But the second reason he doesn’t is that he would inevitably blog about the stuff he’s most excited about, and doing that would give away the game and allow other up-and-coming scientists do the research before he got around to it. This is a valid concern, alas.

It’s going around. I see it today over at Many2Many, as well.

Me, I’m gearing up to give a whole bunch of research-grade implication-laden scientific riffing away, for free, open-source (kindof)… but I want to make sure it can’t be patented by anybody. Maybe it’s that I’m a few years older than they are, and thus I have a sense of mid-life panic. Maybe that it’s all stuff I did a long time ago, and as I’ve magpied along through life I have never had a chance to get back to it, so I’m sad to see it languish. Maybe it’s that I have four freakin’ feet of notebooks full of projects I can never do. Maybe I’m a cunning self-serving opportunist who’d like to sucker a bunch of amateurs into doing my work for me — I confess I miss hanging around with eager, energetic graduate students to whom I can drop well-crafted and leading hints.

This obsessive protectiveness of the intellectual family jewels is an interesting cultural trait. “Net culture” (including even some of the startup dot.gone companies like ours) tends to be liberal about intellectual property to the point of disregarding its value, instead treating it as something to be traded immediately for social capital. That attitude has rarely percolated over into the Real World or the Ivory Tower. In the Real World, Lessig and his ilk are making me think this comes down to inertia.

In the Ivory Tower culture, perhaps it’s because social capital is artificially depreciated. In the University, nobody is supposed to care who you know, only what you’ve done. Which is arguably a stupid thing to assume in any culture (because who you know is invariably a big part of what culture is), but we can suspend judgment somewhat today since this one small stupidity is set against such a vibrant and teeming diversity of other stupid cultural norms and assumptions that it blends right in and is thus barely questioned. And stupid or not, it’s what most professors and students of my experience believe in their hearts: only intellectual property (papers and research) have value in the Tower, and indeed the use of social capital taints the research process. No cheating. No collaboration. Keep your cards close to your chest, beat the other guys to the punch, or else you’ll be forever the middle author or not get grants or tenure or nuthin’. Maybe you’ll be an adjunct.

Tangent? Well, no. I love to collaborate with people, chat and riff and opine and brainstorm. But through the years I’ve found to my dismay that I’m playing a different set of rules, and on a half-dozen occasions have found my riffs incorporated into other folks’ company patents. At first I thought it was just a couple of people with “poor personal boundaries” when it came to technical papers and conversations, but now I see it’s an unavoidable urge promoted by the stupid cultural norm I mentioned above.

Thus I need to believe I’ve drawn a line in the sand.

So, anyway, the question. Unlike Cosma and Mark, I’d like to publish exercises and thoughts and research proposals on the Web and convert them immediately into social capital. I want other people to have them, run with them, change the world or get their Ph.D.s or whatever with them — but I don’t want it to get sucked into a black patent hole. It’s my stuff, and I’m foolishly giving it away and not letting anybody else hide it. What do you call that, when it’s science¹?

The normal CC license has an “attribution” clause, which would be fine if I were Cory Doctorow or somebody publishing my work of art. But this is science, and many of the things I’m gonna drop here on the stoop could be patented in a flash. Trust me — you should have seen the gleam in their eyes, back when I was an entrepreneur geek.

As should be clear, somebody else patenting this stuff would cut me out of the social capital I want. Unless I treat these Web publications as preemptive prior art, and can thus threaten to undermine obstructive patents and stuff.

So what can I do? Anybody reading this have any links or advice on preemptive prior art? Do I even need to worry?

end

¹besides “seriously weird”?

Today I’ve been playing with the idea of cultural dynamics as an extension of evolutionary dynamics. [And also packing the several goddamned tons of books we own.]

Forget memes. I don’t want to talk about memes. Really. Don’t get me started on memes.

Instead, I’m carrying forward my earlier musing on the “complexity leaps” we see in long-term evolutionary history. As I recall from my brief and passing experience with the subject¹, it’s pretty well accepted in the literature that things like photosynthesis and heterotrophy and multicellularity and so forth—and culture—lead to big noteworthy bursts in species diversity because they expand the modes of interaction between organisms. That is, they create new niches, and the burst is organisms finding and exploiting and co-evolving into those niches.

Grit your teeth and lose your cultural biases and put humans back into the ecology for a while. From an evolutionary perspective, the invention of culture some 50,000 years back led to a whole new mode of ecological interaction among organisms. We’re really just at the dawn of this new era. No matter that I disagree with the Singularitists’ take on the matter, I agree that lots of weird shit is gonna come down. As it were.

For example, play the analogy game a minute. Right now at the moment of the evolutionary transition (geologically speaking) the cultural landscape is very level. We talk to each other, and produce some cultural stuff that other folks consume and integrate and rework into their own stuff. Something like a few very similar types of bacteria interacting with one another to establish communities and pass chemicals back and forth.

What will it be like when we start to speciate on cultural lines? I mean literally, of course: remember I’m talking about the Big Picture of language and culture and society as a new channel of ecological interaction. It’s an interesting exercise, which helps explore what we mean by these vague notions like “culture”.

Like: What might a “cultural predator” be? A predator is a predator; it would be something that ate you. But over the long-term, what might the ability to “interact culturally” with its prey mean to a separate species of carnivorous animals?

I don’t think it’s valid to consider this as a question about Sunnydale High School and vampires. By the time cultural predators arise, humanity may well have given way to something else. What?

end

¹This modest meaning: I packed my hundred-or-so books on the subject already and can’t be bothered to do much Googling right now.

Some time back I was engaged in a rather wide-ranging discussion/argument on Transhumanism and the Singularity (“rapture for nerds”). One of the tropes through which we danced was the idea that big changes in life—societal and biological—are somehow synchronized. Somewhere along the way I used the phrase “the ragged edge of the future,” and it stuck with me.

I’m thinking about it, still. Or rather percolating on it.

Six unrelated faces of this high-dimensional thought-doodad seem to be:

• Who says the future happens to everybody? Oddly enough — and contrary to many folks’ understanding of biological evolution — the origins of new species are not generally accompanied by the replacement of ancestors. Yet the analogy often drawn between large-scale evolutionary dynamics and social dynamics often seems to depend on this assumption of “succession”, of replacement of inferiors by superiors. Note, though, that there are still bacteria, amoebae, and other “primitive” organisms that supposedly are “inferior” to “higher” ones. The fact that they’re still here, chugging along, and outnumber “higher” organisms by many orders of magnitude should be kept in mind. Does your typical Extropian futurist understand that there might still be peasants and mill-workers, farmers and politicians, doctors and rocket scientists still, even after their fuzzy never-ending “singularity”? I dunno.
• Sloppy punctuation: oft-misunderstood facts about punctuated equilibrium, revolutions and the like. Generally, I’m thinking here about how the lay understanding of Gould and Eldredge’s notion of punctuated equlibria seems to be misshapen by some assumptions that aren’t in the original framing. Folks—especially those who invoke it as a metaphor for social transformation and other sorts of general large-scale transformations—seem to think the Burgess Shale was a kindof flash-illuminated snapshot, happening instantaneously and universally. That is, that all of a sudden everything changed overnight, everywhere. It’s often dangerous when a strict scientific notion with a specific meaning is used as a loose metaphor, as with the foolish equation of “punctuated equilibrium” with “revolution”, and sad and stupid when it’s done wrong. A list of some of the frequent errors and misunderstandings regarding PE are available at talk.origins.

• The irreversible “arrow of complexity” There is apparently a trend in increasing complexity in biological evolutionary history. This is another metaphor oft bandied about regarding the coming time of extraordinary change: we’re about to leap to a new level of complex social life, it’s said, caused by all this new technology we have. My hesitation about this optimistic take on life is, frankly, the overwhelmingly intense flavor of hubris it carries.

  First, the inherence of the “arrow” of complexity should be treated with some caution and skepticism. Try a little thought experiment: Colonize Mars, taking humans and any ten other species you like. If they remain completely isolated from Earth, what do you think will happen to the “complexity” of the colonists’ post-human descendants over the next few million years? You think the inherent drive towards greater complexity will lead these humans to evolve into some post-human godlike intelligence? I suspect rather that they and their ten other companion species will diversify to compete for the ecological niches available, which is to say, most of them. So if I were you, I’d worry about counting on any kind of “complexity momentum” in near-future social evolution.

  Might it be, rather, that what drives increasing complexity is that ecological niches at “lower” levels are filled up and locked tight by the extraordinary success of the organisms that inhabit them, and that a sudden increase in organismal complexity is some sort of last-ditch effort to re-write the playing field? Note again that less-complex species seem to be perfectly fit, in that they hang around, seemingly forever. (Dan McShea’s done some work on this, which I hope to revisit; I’ve lost track of it since when we were both at SFI together.)

  Second, you should be skeptical about the benefits of what is perceived as increased complexity. What exactly is inherently better about being a sociable, Internet-using human being than, say a bristlecone pine? I dunno. What’s inherently better about being an modern American, Internet-using guy than, say a Trobriand Islander in the 1400s? Here it seems clearer: dentistry and cars and grocery stores, and a lack of most epidemics, stone-axe wielding enemies, and so forth. Well… and yet: on the atomic war, hectic teaching schedules, bankruptcy, and ubiquitous-estrogen-mimicking-hormones-messing-up-your-body fronts? I dunno.

  To me, this is just a Great Chain of Being argument—the same sort of religious or pseudoreligious discrimination that sets humanity apart from the rest of the world as a special creation of some sort, and sets “modern Western civ” apart from everybody else. Do we sit atop the heap? Are you sure? I dunno.

  I’m not a PoMo relativist, mind you. That would be silly. But somebody has to ask: Does it matter to your model of the world if you integrate yourself into it, instead of standing apart?

• What do you call it when there’s always a revolution? This is more an abstract question, really. Suppose there are big changes that revolutionize life. Social or biological — you pick. Take it as a given. But also suppose that there are many small changes for each bigger one, and that they’re all going concurrently, all the time. How many really small ‘revolutions” does it take to equal the extent of a big one? How many does it take to counteract or mask the effects of the big one? I dunno.
• How efficient we are at information processing? Much is made of the fact that there’s “too much information these days”. Too much for what? First, economies work on the basis of boundedly-rational agents, not the rational all-knowing spirits invoked by traditional economists. Second, people use simple heuristics to manage their daily lives and make decisions, not rational contemplation of all the facts. Third, most people don’t ever even read most news, email, watch most television, or any of the other media stuff we’re “inundated” with — nor need they to make their way in life. We’re awash in information all the time these days, but we don’t pay any more attention than we used to. So what’s the problem? I dunno.

  That said, I’m still wondering what makes people believe that humans process more information than an equivalent pile of any other organism. Aside from stating “that’s not what we mean when we say ‘information’”, nobody’s explained the assumption. I dunno.

• …like the back of your hand? Do we know more than people did long ago? I don’t think so, somehow. What does seem to be different—and interesting—is that people in my great-grandfather’s generation would have known far more about their local geographical region and things done by people closely related to them than I do, whereas I know a lot more about things done far away by people unlike me. Why is this interesting? Does it show a noteworthy trend in cultural history? I dunno.

I’d like to tie these together; they’re definitely related and interconnected. But I’m mulling and acquiring, still. Thus, I would welcome pointers to scholarly work on these subjects.

Upcoming.org is a surprisingly useful collaborative/social scheduling system. Suddenly in the last day or so, integrated support for Apple’s iCal system software has appeared. Users of MacOS X should be pleased and intrigued by this. Among other possibilities, this means that upcoming.org is now a new channel for automatically updating shared iCal calendars.

Those who are encumbered with other operating systems should also go have a good look at Upcoming.org’s usefulness. It’s a good example of free, non-intrusive functional social software.

A highly amusing ad campaign for pot noodle/ramen/instant soup. Why it is so very amusing will be obvious only to those who recognize the allusions; the others may just find it rather gaudy and odd. I could explain the joke, but don’t feel it’s necessary at the moment.

But be sure to visit the links for those who find such food-libertinage disgusting: the No To Noodle Society for those who wish to take a more aggressive approach to noodle depravity, or Eldoon Hall for those who have already succumbed and wish to seek restorative treatment….

I do, however, think a similar approach might be used to spice up the goings-on over at xxx.lanl.gov. Don’t you?

[via futurismic]

In addition to the other items shamelessly advertised for sale earlier today, I’m still sitting on (and would be happy to pass along):

• A 1994 issue of the small-press zine Aberrations, a rather sexy splatterpunk fiction ‘zine from the 1980s. Includes a first printing of an early Jeffrey Ford story [not The Physiognomy — that’s just to remind the reader who Ford is].
• A 1995 issue of the small-press ‘zine Ecco, featuring esoteric articles and interviews in the sub-sub-sub-genre of trashy European horror and exploitation cinema
• A very nice issue of the great ‘zine Your Flesh, the punk culch rag of choice, with a neat Frank Miller cover.

[somewhat revised 12 Mar 2004]

I was a tad disingenuous in an earlier post: in the back of my mind, I have always been planning something specific to do with the reverted wilderness acreage we’re buying in the country.

Victorian amateur scientists have always fascinated me. I imagine fondly that someday in the next few months you will find me ensconced at a portable table out in “the back”, wearing my sun hat and glasses, with my WANned iBook and cheap USB microscope, live-blogging pictures of my very own algae, rotifers, seed capsules and suchlike. Better by far, in my technophilic opinion, than a mouldering leather-bound personal journal filed with watercolors of toadstools and calligraphic noodling.

See, I often pine for the days when not just landed gentry but regular folks had microscopes and telescopes and fossil-collecting handbooks and terraria and bred doves and lilies and otherwise learned something first-hand about the real world in their own gardens and town auditoria. The social norm of public scientific inquiry faded long ago, of course, but now I practically despair over it. For example, home-schooling parents are probably the biggest purchasers of microscopes and science training stuff for their kids, but the demographics (and general anti-intellectualism) of the majority of home-school parents don’t encourage me that biological learning is being thoroughly elucidated in these efforts. Most “nature stuff” people do these days pays attention only to the sort of big dramatic cheetah-kills-antelope stuff they’re exposed to on TV: whale-watching, hiking, hunting, birding and the like. They tramp miles through equally interesting but ignored life to go and see the animals, and then tramp back home and sit back down in front of the TV, their boots covered in fascinating stuff on the mat by the door.

Some small part of the reason people don’t “do science” is the cost of equipment and supplies. Yes, a nice gas chromatograph is still rather pricey, and a useful telescope will set you back a few grand. But I spent $30 on my 200x plastic USB microscope (it’s a discontinued toy), and I have this computer just sortof sitting around warming my lap up all the time anyway. So I’m not entirely certain that it’s reason enough ever. Except maybe nuclear physics, and maybe radio astronomy.

Some other part of the reason is supposed to be the difficulty of getting your head around today’s super-specialized scientific knowledge. People (kids) are not trained in science, therefore not qualified to do it. They need somebody to train them in the methods, and show them what they’re supposed to be looking for, and what it means in context. This indicates to many people that science teachers are required, and parents therefore off the hook. But take it from me: I taught botany to wannabe science teachers for three years; you would be frightened or very very sad if you really understood how bad they were at thinking or understanding, let alone teaching about science.

But I think the biggest reason hobbyists don’t do science is that they just don’t know they can. All you really need to do is think and understand the process to be qualified to do it.

By what will be seen to be a very direct path, buying muck and dreaming of sitting in the shade with a microscope and putting it all right here on the Web has reminded me of one of the other projects I’m gearing up for.

A huge and very important chunk of complex systems research consists, in a reduced sense, of thinking about how systems are put together of agents following simple rules. Writing little stories, in other words: “What would happen if people in a market simply traded according to random rules?” and “What would happen if proteins were composed of two types of subunit (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) on a chain constrained to a planar lattice, and you let them wiggle around and ‘fold’? What would you see if you did that? Does it suffice to explain some of what really happens in protein folding?” Of course, before they’re published these what-if questions are prettied up and presented as if the researcher knew all along that they were doing a rational experiment, but because you’re a diligent and faithful reader to have worked your way along this far already, I’m letting you know the Big Secret of Professional Science: we really mostly just try stuff and see what happens.

The science part of complex systems happens in at least three stages. Two of these are: (1) analysis and reframing of stuff that really exists in terms that let you talk about it reasonably using concepts that easily become simple models, and (3) in interpreting the computer simulations you build according to those models to see what they tell you about the real world. The bit in the middle, the (2) that differentiates a lot of complex systems research, is what I refer to as building analogous systems — artificial worlds in which your model of the real world is literally true. So for example, the previous notion about “people in a market trading using random strategies” is in a sense a prospective model of real-world market traders using bounded rationality other weird non-rational stuff we see all the time. The analogous system you can build is the actual running computer program in which little agents representing people trade some tokens representing real market goods and currency according to rules you code as “random” according to your interpretation of the term. The resulting program is not the model: your model is your analysis of the real world, summarized as “perhaps it’s like this” (or hidden in “what if it were like this?”)

The third part, mainly observational but informed by your original modeling effort, basically lies in collecting data in the analogous world and seeing how that may explain or apply to the real one. For example, in collecting a million different protein-folding results in a simulation based on your two-component model of proteins, and then seeing how the statistical distribution of the results might match that seen in nature.

I’m wordy because I’m excited and writing-to-think. All I’m trying to say is this, really: Much of complex systems research is just:

1. Look at what’s around you and frame a model that summarizes what you think you see
2. Write and run a little computer program (an “analogous system”) in which the model is literally true
3. See if the behavior of the analogous system gibes with what you observe.

That’s it.

Point: Complex systems research is easy.

See, the interesting thing about complex systems research—simultaneously the thing that makes the systems interesting, and the field—is that even the analogous systems we build are capable of unexpected and often nigh inexplicable emergent behavior. That’s the point: the model is not tractable by traditional math approaches, so for example a traditional economist would simplify away the stuff that’s emergent because the equations are too hard to solve. But you — you cunning complexologist you — build a simulation based on the model and work around the hard math bit. Yes, maybe even the computer implementation is wild and does weird stuff, but it’s much faster than the real world and so you try it 100,000 times and see what happens.

I harbor secret desires. Many of those I will choose not reveal here, but among the others are: I would like people who are not credentialed union card-holding ivory tower scientists to be able to undertake scientific exploration and investigation personally, collect and manage the observations that will arise, and publish the results in valid peer-reviewed scientific journals (that they can afford).

I think something like the Open Source approach to software development would work, and for exactly the same reasons. I will write about that here in a bit.

In the meantime: almost anybody who knows what it is (and can write code) has written a Game of Life program. Almost everybody who knows what it is (and can write code) has written a Mandelbrot set generator program. The same goes for genetic algorithms, Markov text generators, and innumerable other canonical “chaos and complexity” simulations and algorithms which have been popularized through the years. Yet, recreational or not, these simple programs are exactly the sort of thing that makes complex systems research go.

I’ll bet that at least a dozen of the thousands of people who wrote their own Game of Life (at least those who played with the parameters) encountered phenomena that would have warranted publication in a peer-reviewed journal. And at the same time, I bet that most of the thousands of other people (if only they had been exposed to the work in the context of a community of like-minded collaborators and background information) might have moved on beyond screen-saver diddling and addressed real and serious unanswered scientific questions.

But as amateurs, these folks worked alone and were thus hemmed in by a limited social capital and intellectual context. Their results are forever relegated to recreational status in the “umbra” of science, never published and thus doomed to oblivion. No matter how many interesting “what would happen if…?” and “what does it mean that…?” questions they asked, the answers were for the most part unattainable or unshared.

That’s sad. It’s just as if they lived in the country, went out occasionally and poked around a bit, caught a few butterflies nobody had ever seen before, and not knowing what they had let them go, got bored, and went back in to watch TV.

Working alone, these folks (which I would number in the thousands) remain hobbyists re-creating simple toys. Working together, I think they might become a potent distributed scientific workforce, as powerful and effective as more traditional labs and warranted scientists.

By my argument, you need three tools to do valid complex systems work yourself: One is what you are sitting in front of right now. Another is the mess of meat perched up there at the top of your neck. And the third? Access to other people working on the same thing.

And that’s one thing you can do with muck and the Web that you can’t do with just muck: begin to disintermediate—or enhance and expand—the traditional scientific establishment.

As I mentioned previously, instead of a PayPal slot we use an eBay slot: now and then I’ll post a brief and hopefully enticing description of what’s on offer over at the Corners Bumped storefront, and that will (a) help me clear my house so I have less to move, while (b) funding the blog to some extent.

Let’s try a new format, inspired by many actual auctioneers’ announcement flyers:

photo: unusual androgynous Iowa lady; antique photo: looks like a mean little girl; 1984 PHOTO TECHNIQUE INTERNATIONAL nudes, still life &c;; antique photo: Ann Arbor, Michigan dandy in his finery; antique photo: honest boy from Strawberry Point, Iowa; photo: Hudson, Michigan boy IDENTIFIED: NYE; Civil War era man in unusual cravat; photo: amazing curly-headed boy in costume; 1983 AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER: nudes, fine art,advertising; 1936 PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE charming drawings of children; 1970 NASA report SP-230 Ecological Surveys From Space; 1962 NASA Mercury mission: M. Scott Carpenter AURORA 7; book: 1941 SAFETY IN FLIGHT aircraft & flying; 1940 PENCIL DRAWING signed by author RINES; 1895 LANDS OF (Sir Walter) SCOTT European travel guide!; 1910 HOW TO STUDY BIRDS photos birdwatching; 1902 BOTANY TEXT beautiful illustrations; 1913 SOCIAL LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME & THE AGE OF CHIVALRY; MATCHED PAIR antique photographs from Paw Paw Michigan; BOY IN A DRESS identified antique photo WM M. BRUNER; 1983 UNO WILD TILES game complete in box!; vintage GUESS AGAIN ELECTRIC GAME Milton Bradley WORKS; IMPERIAL HERALD L5R Legend of the Five Rings; 1917 LEATHER BOUND National Geographic color!; 1942 FLOW OF FLUIDS IN VALVES, FITTINGS & PIPES Crane; 1981 Prince Charles & Lady Diana scandal book; 1912 STORY OF ANIMAL LIFE zoology text illustrated; TYPE RECIPES Designing with Type typography; 1969 NASA LEWIS RESEARCH Tech Report Writing; 1952 NACA (NASA) TECHNICAL NOTE #2843 report; 1953 NACA (NASA) TECHNICAL NOTE #3042 report; 1952 NACA (NASA) TECHNICAL NOTE #2656 report; 1973 ROCKET/RAMJET Astronautics & Aeronautics; 3x 1950s-60s AUDEL GUIDES for Electrician, Electrical Wiring, Fireman 7 Engineer Training; 1973 NASA TECHNOLOGY IN THE SERVICE OF MAN; 29 SIMPLE STAINED GLASS LAMPSHADE PATTERNS

We’ve gone and done it now.

Our latest offer for a house on three acres just north of Chelsea Michigan is likely to be accepted. It’s a nice house, big enough for the family (including my Mom, who’s moving in with us) and some of our stuff. The three acres include the bog-standard development grade-and-grass crap on the front third, but overlooks a hundred acres or so of beautiful low, flat wetland meadow to the south in back.

Of which we are buying two acres.

Barbara has brought her ferociously thorough research attention to bear on this project, and thus we not only have the sale prices of all the other houses in the development, the names and occupations of at least half of the owners, detailed aerial photographs from four sources covering the last five years showing the transformation of the land from working farm into exurban development, a number of government and nonprofit groups’ opinions of the degree of protection and development the place can take, notes on utility coverage, advice from the County on “how to live in the country”, line-of-sight bearings to the wireless internet provider in the area (I did that), and cost-benefit analyses of the various unfinished bits (driveway, decking, water softener), and what the farmer grew on the various bits we’re buying (potatoes and corn). And how much the developer paid for the land and is charging for the construction on it.

We also have a soil map.

See, the lay of the land is what makes it so beautiful and hard to describe, and also a big factor in our decision to pay what is frankly a scary amount for the place. The prospect to the south is (in winter) something like being perched on the shores of a large, dry lake. Of plants. The flats stretch off to the horizon, and the opposite “shore” is occupied only by one timber-framed and distant house. In between, the many maps show some drainage ditches (one of which we’re buying in toto, apparently), and a sinuous line of telephone poles (which oddly also remind me of past visits to waterside towns like Port Clinton or Tampa).

But, as should be obvious from my elision, that’s not water there. As the soil map makes clear, that’s Houghton muck down there in the flat picturesque bits.

Of course, we will like all our neighbors preserve and enhance the natural beauty yadda yadda &c; &c.; It’s to look at, not do something with; I know that. It’s not like I’m allowed to, say, build a little hobbit house in the back out of strawbale and cob as a studio/office/eccentricity — neither by the deed restrictions nor my wife. But you know, now and then the earnest and diligent exurb conservationist will want to knock down the taller weedier stuff with a riding mower.

And not sink.

Or put a couple of subtle but useful benches out there, whence one can watch the red-tailed hawks and sandhill cranes and white-tailed deer and bluebirds and such doing their thing.

Without sinking.

So now I find I must learn about muck. This, I confess, is not what I expected.

I am reviewing manuscripts. Because I am a kind person, I am reviewing something like three dozen of them this Spring for the Summer conference season. I may be reviewing yours. Or, because I hope to remain a kind person, and odds therefore favor me reviewing even more papers in future years, I may in future review one of your manuscripts.

I want to give you a bit of advice. Two bits, in fact: no, and no.

Oh, what the heck, here’s what they mean in context:

1. If you believe that your special super-duper method or algorithm is better than anybody else’s specifically because you thought it up yourself, and one night you coded it up yourself and ran a few runs and therefore are submitting an eight-page manuscript to an international conference to the effect that “Linear Agent-based Representation with Pseudomunging Outperforms Really Old-fashioned Simple 1960s Representations From My First-year Textbook, Well At Least for Descartes’ Snooker Problem with Boolean Boundary Conditions (Most of the Time)”, I will roll the manuscript up and hit you on the nose with it. And I will say, “No!” in a stern voice.

In public, at the meeting, if need be. Don’t you make me come over there and hit you on the nose during your 20-minute Powerpoint presentation!

If you do not understand why this is so, perhaps you should ask me — or your local librarian — whether any other papers like yours have been published in the last 30 years before submitting such a manuscript. And then ask yourself, in deep meditative mode, whether more than two or three of them should have been published. And when you understand the answer, and see that hundreds of these papers are accepted for publication for some inexplicable reason by seemingly decent and thoughtful reviewers, you will take it upon yourself to hit them on the nose with your accepted manuscript.

Here’s the secret reason: We all know all we need to about Descartes’ Snooker Problem. Nobody has even considered (let alone used) the Really Old-fashioned Method for thirty years at least — for god’s sake, it was proposed as a thought experiment in theoretical biology and computer science, which you would know if you’d ever read much about it. No, instead it’s clear you came across a rough hand-waving summary of the ROM in a Scientific American “Computer Recreations” column in the 1980s, and read about Snooker Networks in a brain teasers book once, so you think nobody has ever come anywhere near solving the Descartes Snooker Problem except by the Really Old-fashioned Method. You imagine hundreds of highly-paid operations researchers sitting around in conferences, scratching their chins and covering chalkboards with indecipherable gibberish and banging their shoes on the podium arguing over Why have we made no progress on the Snooker Problem? Modern Commerce is doomed unless we find a way! and then you come along, thirty years later, out of the blue, with your Incrementally Improved Ad Hoc Method, and they will kowtow before you and declare your MS (surely) Best Graduate Paper By A Poor Writer!

Just wear a big bouncy protective clown nose just in case I come along. Or actually solve the Snooker Problem, which is a real problem, and forget the obsolete methodologies pissing contest.

2. If you have run some simulations and/or stochastic something-or-others, and decide to report how much better your algorithm/method/simulation/brain is than others’ like this:

	Old Stupid Way	My First Approach	My Advisor’s Approach	My Earth-shattering Approach
test score (average of 50 runs of 10 cross-replicated training runs each)	40.291	49.112	48.91	50.102

…and then state in the Discussion section that “Clearly My Earth-shattering Approach is better,” then I will take your manuscript, crumple it into a little ball, douse it in a nice habanero chili sauce I have here, and … well, let’s say feed it to you or something. Note that this procedure does not preclude (1) above. And of course for pedagogic value I will still be saying “No!” in a stern voice &c; &c; as before.

If you do not understand why this is the correct and proper response, then I will also include free of charge an elementary statistics text (also in habanero sauce, similarly applied).

If you are a graduate student, post-doc or associate faculty, this should suffice. However, if you are tenured faculty I will also be obliged to ridicule you in public and by name if (in defiance of all my earnest efforts on your behalf) your manuscript somehow manages to pass peer review.

A long-standing IEEE, ACM or INFORMS membership is little excuse, if any.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list by any means. More handy and helpful pointers for the young engineer and scientist are forthcoming daily.

An idol. Therefore worth paying attention to.

[via boingboing.net]

[update] A serious question has arisen: Is this a link to the sayings of Gene Wolfe, or some other Wolf? The “Wolfe”s seem to prevail, with boingboing, Making Light, and the original link all spelling it as expected. A typo on the original page? An interesting case of Chinese whispers.

Collect a half-dozen or so statements that begin with or are otherwise determined by the word “We” that are uttered by a single political or business leader, futurist or historian, activist, teacher or club president. These statements will for example take the form,

• …we will/will not/cannot…
• …we believe…
• …we intend…
• …we feel that…
• …we understand…
• …in the future, we…

(and so forth)

It may be helpful to examine a large national newspaper, television news outlet, or book of futurism, history, political commentary, or religious outreach. If you cannot find enough from one person, try to collect them from people who are demographically similar to one another—for example, only white male Pentecostal preachers or female European farmers.

In any event, try to collect a list of these utterances, and at the same time build a clear notion of who the speaker/writer is.

Now, construct a list of as many of the various groups and classes to which the speaker/writer belongs. Do not be too artificial; try to limit your list only to those groups to which the speaker would affirm membership if asked — imagine asking them directly, “Are you a [member of this group]?” Even so limited, this includes the group implied by the original utterances, but also many overlapping classes and groups, determined by sex, race, age, class, employment, detailed beliefs and values, addictions, reputation, publications, and membership in other organizations. These alternative groups may include people who have never met the speaker, and may be broad (such as “children of immigrants”, or “Latin-speakers”) or narrow (“people who reside on Main Street in Anytown, Ontario”) as you like. Regardless of your feelings, it should not include groups or classes that you do not think the speaker would agree to, such as “fools”, “bigots”, “conspirators” and the like.

You should have at least a dozen such groups. It is easy to create many hundreds, if you’re thoughtful about it.

Now, revisit the original list of quoted utterances. Pick a random utterance by the speaker and a random group from your lists. Force yourself to read the speech as if the speaker were speaking on behalf of the new group. Imagine the situation which would lead to this statement. Consider the consequences if a spokesperson for that group were to say that thing. Repeat for as many new combinations as possible.

Consider the number of people who fall into each of the other classes to which you have assigned the speaker. Consider how often a mismatched utterance/group pair may be feasible (or might actually have been said at some point).

Think specifically about whether the mismatched speech might be taken seriously by one member of the new group, as opposed to being a broadly-held consensus among them all.

Bonus exercise: Choose one of your initial list of utterances, and determine who you believe the speaker thought or implied he was referring to by “we”. For example, in the case of futurists, this may be “humanity”; in the case of a religious leader, this may be every member of the religious denomination; in the case of a business leader, this may be every employee.

Find a member of the group to which the statement does not apply. For example, consider the futurist’s statement about the coming importance of VOIP as it applies to a Slovak peasant farmer (a member of humanity).

Very generally, determine the proportion of the implied collective for whom the statement is literally true.

Years ago, before they “upgraded” so they could keep the same boring movies longer at the Michigan Theater, they used to run dozens of different very small independent and old and foreign films each year. One of our favorites was always the Year’s Best Commercials From Around the World reel (actual title TBD).

Turnpike Films makes amusing commercials. I like them. They remind me of my loss.

This one is terrifying and brilliant. It makes me want to give the product to people I know, just to see what happens.

This one is a physiological challenge. Watch it without yawning. I dare you.

This one is just good.

[via RoboRanch]

Spend two minutes examining the products in your pantry or grocery store that include corn (maize) products, including corn syrup. Spend another few minutes examining industrial uses (cornstarch packing material, coatings of pharmaceuticals, and so forth). Consider the number of acres of farmland corn planted in the United States; the proportion of hectares of agricultural land worldwide planted with maize; the proportion of biomass consumed by all heterotrophic animals worldwide that is maize. Compare these numbers to the same values a decade and a century ago.

Force yourself to seriously take the stance: The species Zea mays has developed a strategy for dominating and out-performing its natural competitors by directly modifying the behavior of Homo sapiens. Take into account the psychological effects of corn syrup, foods deep-fried in corn oil, and the species’ recent diversification into industrial ethanol production. Take into account the industrial, transportation, social, and medical infrastructure of human society that is devoted to or depends upon Zea mays. Consider what would happen to a 50-acre cornfield if abandoned suddenly, and compare the evolutionary fitness of the plants in the field while being tended vs. the state of abandonment. Consider the reported flavor benefits and health dangers of corn-fed vs. grass-fed beef. Think of farmland as having been scraped clean of many tens of thousands of established organisms per square meter, and re-scraped periodically, so that corn seed and only corn seed may flourish.

It may be useful to read a bit about the coevolutionary dynamics of orchids and insects, and examine the structural engineering involved in the hooked surfaces of burdock and nettle seed cases.

As quickly as possible, change your perspective to the more traditional one: That thousands of years ago, primitive human neo-agronomists discovered the wild grass teosinte and began co-opting it for their settlements. Over several hundred generations of directed breeding, the genetic makeup of the wild plant was twisted into a food crop. Since it was on hand and increasingly standardized by human manipulation, maize plant material came (through a process of technological exaptation) to be used in many diverse applications. Modern genetic agronomy, including transgenic manipulation and other intricate manipulations of the species, has led to the transformation of the original wild plant into a literal tool of Homo sapiens.

Now switch back. Repeat until the notion of “advantage” and “usefulness” begin to be undermined.

Bonus exercises: Undertake the analogous exercise with: tropical houseplants, bamboo, dogs/wolves, the chili pepper. Can the same effect be brought about for books? Light bulbs? Computers?

Computer viruses?

Doubtless others have pointed this out before, but… Why is it that library vigilantes¹ never insist that a warning note should be prepended to the Bible? Something along the lines of

There remain too many questions with this book to consider it as fact. The ideas presented in The Bible should therefore be considered a matter of opinion. The book is thought by many scholars to be a work of folklore, written from the perspective of a local tribe of isolated people several thousand years ago. There are many other accounts of the world that offer very different views. The reader is encouraged to consider these alternatives and come to their own decisions about what is true or proper. Critical thinking is an important part of every education, and it is not the State’s right to stress any one view over any other.

¹In case the linked article (from the Feb 29 2004 Helena Montana Independent Record moves or proves otherwise unreadable: Roxanne Cleasby of Helena Montana, in the spirit of many thousands of parents before her, attempted to have Horse banned from the libraries because it states that horses evolved over 55 million years, and does not give equal time to a creationist account.

It’s been some time since we listed anything for sale on eBay. Nonetheless, friends and family (and friends of the family) who know we’re consignment dealers with an unusually reasonable fee structure still keep giving us stuff to sell.

Inasmuch as we’re looking seriously at moving to a new house, have many thousand individual books, antique photographs, antiques proper and collectibles to sell for folks or else have to move by brute force halfway across the county… let’s avoid injuring anybody’s sensibilities and simply say there’s a “bee in my bonnet” about eBay.

Time to start the ball rolling again.

Besides. It’s Spring. Bluebirds flit among the branches (well, strictly speaking out at the possibly-new place; here we have to rely on the old starlings and crows), the sap is running, and those folks in the world destined to play the role of customer are coming out of their post-holiday hibernation period.

At the moment, while we rearrange inventory and perk up the marketing materials, a number of previously listed books, antique photographs and suchlike are on offer as auction items through our eBay Store.

Even those who merely visit the site for pleasure and scientific inspiration are encouraged to take a break from the intellectually strenuous effort of deciphering my meanderings and shop a while. It’s the exact equivalent of me passing the PayPal hat, after all.

Alas for Terms of Art.

A recent and increasingly argumentative discussion with Stephen Gordon seems to revolve around misunderstanding each other’s terminology: Like many laymen, he sees “information processing” as some sort of intrinsically advanced and human thing involving computers, telephones, and philosophical dialog. I see it as moving bits around, an act in theory done by bacteria at least as well as by humans. I understand the phrase to mean something very specific and well-defined in the scientific research literature, and he is using it in the normal lackadaisical folksy manner to refer to what it “commonly” means. I doubt we will ever get past that, since when I say things I tend to be careful about what I specifically mean.

Yes, the word “information” has a long and varied philosophical history. That means that it has had a long enough stint that it now means many different things to different people. In my humble opinion, it’s a symptom of a deeper problem if you don’t even bother to check whether your conversation partner knows what it is you think you’re talking about. Especially if you’re trying to make a technical point.

Precise words may be used to make points. Imprecise words tend to make dabs and splotches.

I am reminded of equally frustrating “discussions” with Intelligent Design advocates (in some cases, those supposedly trained in biochemistry) in which they see evolutionary algorithms for search and optimization as equivalent to biological evolutionary dynamics, and therefore misunderstand that the No Free Lunch Theorem applies to real-life evolution. Much as I know the difference between a sweater-as-clothing and a person who is perspiring, I actually know the difference and act accordingly, but the appearance of the word “evolution” in two very different settings somehow frightens and confuses them. I understand it to mean two different and well-defined things in the scientific and engineering literatures, but they see one word and conflate them. I doubt we will ever get past that, since when I say things I tend to be careful about what I specifically mean.

I am reminded of equally frustrating “discussions” with Complexity In Management “gurus” (in some cases, those supposedly trained in mathematics and physics), who have latched onto the phrase “edge of chaos” and believe that they know what the hell they’re talking about. I understand the word “chaos” to be salient only to describe very specific traits of the Lyapunov exponents of a dynamical system, or an analogous measurement of a discrete dynamical system, but they continue to use it in its folk definition to mean “out of control” or “unpredictable” (a costly and dangerous mistake, since they then move from that shifty ground to giving prescriptive advice). I doubt we will ever get past that, since when I say things I tend to be careful about what I specifically mean.

Sad thing is, I worked with the people who coined the phrase “edge of chaos.” I think I kindof know what it originally meant. Because of linguistic slippage of “chaos” towards a folk definition, your management guru is 99/100 times wayyy off base.

I am reminded of equally frustrating “discussions” with those skeptical of Extreme Programming’s usefulness and practicality (in some cases, those who are supposedly professional software engineers), who have latched one or more of the names or phrases used to describe its core practices (especially “Do the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work”) and never get past the words. I understand that these phrases and names describe very specific and rigorous practices, and that XP is perhaps the most formal and strict method of developing code around—but they hear the words and believe they advocate slapdash rule-free risky behavior among developers. I doubt we will ever get past that, since when I say things I tend to be careful about what I specifically mean.

You may have similar experiences. I would like to hear about them. More importantly, I would welcome a productive rhetorical approach to avoiding them.

[read more about Open Questions]

Stephen Gordon’s ongoing chat is engaging my attention.

He has made a claim that I’ve come across many times in many forms, but have never been able to block cogently (lacking the technical prowess). Aha, but I now know there are particular people reading this (ahem) who are smarter than I am, and specifically know about information and stuff like that there. So I ask:

Which processes more information (in bits): A human being, or an equal mass of diverse bacterial community? Assume that each is carrying on life in its normal environment, and a detailed time-series of the molecular state of both is recorded over a period… oh, say a full day.

Stephen is certain that people process more information, inasmuch as we are the culmination of a great chain of evolutionary progress. I suspect that we do about the same, and probably worse—dynamic community formation and fierce competition for resources and evolutionary variation and exotic metabolic chemistry are all things that our cells can afford to be ignorant about. That said, bacteria don’t do much typing, or yelling, or faith-based outreach.

But my intuition is, while Stephen believes that stuff is much more important and information-rich, I think in terms of real actual info-theory bits it doesn’t even compare to the info-processing we’ve given up to be able to think and talk. In other words, I’m betting that thinking and talking and being human is terribly inefficient.

Bits being bits, I’m not sure how to quantify the processing of information to even begin to answer the question formally. I think I know what Stephen means by “information processing”, and I hope he understands what I mean. I will take suggestions with pleasure.

Dan McShea, who I briefly shared an office with, has written extensively on the subject. But I’m not sure Dan was thinking of raw numbers, but rather an organizational/structural complexity measure. Perhaps we should start from there?

Stephen Gordon [sorry for the earlier mistake] over at the Speculist has pointed out to me that I am missing the obvious and ominous disappearance of humanity’s ability to predict the future. I would like to expand a bit on a comment I posted there. What follows is an edited version of that comment.

I think Stephen may be misunderstanding, or perhaps failing to discern, something I’m trying to stress. This has happened often, and I suspect it is because I am not nearly good enough at speaking clearly. I must apologize. I use too many words.

Here: Indeed, we do live in a fog of bounded rationality and sorely limited predictive ability—as individuals, and also as institutions, cultures and polities. But unlike the transhumanists, I do not believe that its scope or scale has changed for a very long time. Ever, in fact.

I see no trend, though I think you want to.

Another trend that is often perceived—but which is no less a myth—is that of evolutionary progress. This expectation of an imminent Singularity implies that we’re heading/plummeting/rocketing/evolving/emerging towards somewhere in particular (and better). I think we’re just moving about as we always have—somewhere like where we were recently, and less like where we were a long time ago. Let’s agree to call it “the future” instead of something special.

The evolutionary past is a contingent story of ramification and pruning of the tree of descent. I see history as wandering around in just the same way.

Perhaps I can better explain my Singular Concern based on another of Stephen’s statements:

“In the past it was possible for a well-educated and informed individual to keep track of a larger percentage of contemporary scientific work than it is today (even with the advent of the Internet). Today too much work is being performed in parallel for any one person to keep up with it all.”

I am not sure I see that the quantity of material known by a well-educated and informed individual in 1504, 1804 or today has changed. In 1504, that material would concern matters more geographically and culturally isolated than that of the others; an educated person of Mogul India would know or care very little for contemporary Vatican pronouncements or the course of sociopolitical events in Australia, for example. A well-educated person of 1804 would have a better first-hand knowledge of innumerable vital aspects of daily life than I have, among them the dangers of smallpox, why I might want a spring in my yard, and how to milk a cow.

This particular educated person of the 21st century knows a great deal more than either of those others about complex systems, global sociopolitical dynamics, emergent phenomena, evolutionary design, molecular engineering, the fossil fauna of the shallow Ordovician seas, the best kind of petite syrah to go with rogan josh, how to install and maintain MacOS X, and lots of other neat and arguably cool stuff. But not a clue when it comes to Borneo, breeding chickens, fixing cars, or spelunking. But I don’t need to know about that stuff, any more than my analogs in 1504 or 1804 needed to know how to build a Kauffman Nk model of epigenetic interactions, or how many sunspots are currently showing on the face of the Sun.

It’s really a very minor thing that bothers me: That Singularity nonsense. I agree with almost every one of the observations of technological change made by transhumanists (especially since I have been personally involved in a number of those developments, not least molecular engineering, emergent design and complex systems research). I am also just as enthusiastic about the social consequences of all that neat new stuff. It will, indeed, change the world.

What I disagree with are the illusions that (a) now is significantly and qualitatively different from any other time in history, or that (b) it is important to know the consequences of “developments” (scientific or otherwise) before you undertake them.

In (a) I suppose it might appear that I am a blind gradualist where a transhumanist is a prophetic catastrophist. Not exactly. It’s more accurate to say that where the transhumanist worldview is focused on one Big Event coming sometime soon, I see a continuum of equally important events ranging down to the smallest scale. There are so many of the smallest-scale “singularities” that they outnumber the big ones astronomically. (Bet it’s a power-law, or at least that somebody tells me it is.)

I think it’s a built-in shortcoming of human nature. Our attention tends to be drawn towards big, noisy things, and ignores ubiquitous little things. As a result, we believe the rare big ones are more important than the common little ones. Suspiciously enough, this is exactly analogous to my recent rant on the bias in biology towards big, noisy multicellular stuff, at the expense of the vast majority of life on earth.

In that context, I don’t even think it’s a very deep insight to say that the amount of stuff a human pays attention to has been more-or-less constant throughout history. Do you really think your great-great-grandparents knew less than you do? They just sat there staring dumbly off into space, those unenlightened barbarians. Nope. You know a little bit about many things that are far away, but they knew a lot more about a few things close to them. Bet you money they add up exactly the same. I’ll even go farther and bet you both would have the same amount of tacit knowledge, first-hand knowledge, and domain knowledge.

This is true among complex systems models of biology, as well: Do you honestly think a billion bacteria are less “complex” (whatever that means; it seems to be used to mean “important”) than a billion human cells?

Betcha ten bucks.

As for (b), which I addressed at length a couple of days back: those who would argue that we are rapidly approaching a sea-change in the way we live because we are inundated with too much information to predict the future must first show me a time when predicting the future has made one lick of difference to the way people lived.

I’ll say it again: People, whether individuals or institutions, do not rely for success upon predictions of the consequences of their actions. They often don’t even know they’ve taken action until they compose an explanatory narrative on the basis of hindsight.

It might be that Isaac Asimov was just making stuff up when he proposed the eminent field of psychohistory. That he didn’t actually believe what he proposed in Foundation?

That evil misleading bastard. Never trust anybody with biochemist’s training, I say. They’re always making dangerous over-generalizations.

I think there are some amazing things to be seen in this excellent movie about the Messiah. I earnestly believe that the filmmakers have presented an important new view of some dangerous heretical assumptions that have made through the years, and is without question very emotionally affecting. Indeed, there were times when I was watching this movie that I could barely catch my breath from its impact.

I suspect that my friends, who were similarly affected when they saw it, are thinking of memorizing all the lines in the film!

Other people whose blogs I read frequently are also writing similar testimonials.

The Passion of The Christ. Trailers. Good Website. Protesting Gibson’s Passion Lacks Moral Legitimacy.

(via Pharyngula)

The amazingly dense… umm, “accumulation” is a good word… has been compiled by John Smart at SingularityWatch, and is worth reading in detail. It includes, among other things, this very useful sentence:

Don’t worry if much of this is still unclear to you.

Alas, it is. Oddly enough, this is in spite of the fact that I know what all the boldfaced words actually signify (as terms of art, but not as used on this page), and have worked with a number of the boldfaced people (as actual scientists, but not as Singularity Researchers and they are described on this page).

That said, I seem to agree with some of Mr. Smart’s points. A distinct difference, though, is that to him they represent something wonderful, while to me they represent something surprisingly mundane. Transhumanism as he presents it seems to be a rather credulous take on a manifest destiny for spacemen.

It is a common malady to perceive that one lives in a time of great change. I suppose the glass-half-empty version is the myth of the lost Golden Age, and the glass-half-full version is the expectant belief in something wonderful just around the corner: the immanentization of the eschaton, Jeezy-bit’s return, and so forth.

Like, for example, that quaint affectation of the upper-class technophilic maunderer, the Singularity. A recent post over at The Speculist sums up the whole rambling notion handily with this:

The singularity is that point in the future at which our ability to forecast today fails us completely. This will not be a sudden failure, but an increasing failure as we approach the singularity. We are already in the fog.

One has to grin. One is, indeed, grinning.

One reason to grin is that this idea of forecasting today is just such a sweetly wonderful concoction.

A second reason to grin is that if you find yourself in a wine bar with Cosma, and in trying to explain what the Singularity is purported to be to Mark you lean over and snap your fingers forgetfully at Cosma and ask him, “Hang on — when do they think the Singularity is supposed to happen?” he will snap “Never!” before the question is out of your mouth.

A third reason to grin is that Stephen Gordon’s summary is so helpful. Because of this, I get it. I see a number of problems all explained at once, and (suspiciously) the resulting core answer is a drum I have been beating for many years (including my own professional futurist writing¹).

I am such a grinning enthusiast right now. This is cool.

Oh, you expect to hear what this amusing and pleasing insight is? I can’t just sit here beaming like an idiot? Right. Here:

What makes you think you need to understand how things work? Even things you create? Even if the Extropians are right and there’s a Singularity, what their worldview fails to grasp that you don’t have to have detailed predictive models of the world to live successfully in it. You don’t need to understand the physics of granular materials to build bridges out of sand and water (concrete) that last 2000 years. You don’t have to examine every possible outcome and contingency that might affect the performance of an artifact you’ve designed, especially if it’s inherently adaptive or just really really strong—that’s a fluke of our current legal morass, not a necessity of design.

Things do not stop working when you don’t understand them. Neither physical artifacts, nor social constructs, nor any other aspects of the natural world. (Italics mine)

Stephen’s summary was the golden spike that linked a number of troubling observations I’ve developed about the technophilic deme, and for this I’m very grateful. It’s not just Extropians, but many other progress-bound glass-half-full folks that suffer from these tricksy assumptions. They inform almost all of our culture, frankly, from liberal to conservative to libertarian to populist.

For example, somehow the last 300 years’ improvement in the ability to predict the weather (and the economy, and disease outbreaks, and so forth) is taken to imply that it’s (a) asymptotically approaching perfect accuracy, and (b) something we have come to depend upon. The last hundred years’ liability lawsuits in the US (and to some extent elsewhere) is taken to imply that future engineering projects (including the design of social and institutional systems) will require 100% forecasting for safety and robustness—even though functionality and safety are orthogonal goals of design. The last 50 years’ tremendous growth in discrete deterministic computing platforms (like this one I’m typing on) and excruciatingly detailed top-down system design (like Microsoft Office) is taken to imply that in the future we will need more people modeling everything in UML and filling rooms with detailed three-ring binders of specifications, just to keep up!

In all cases, the requirement for detailed quantitative predictive models is understood as a necessary bottleneck. Who but a fool would build something that they didn’t really understand? Who would use it and trust that it worked? Who would ensure safety of the users? Who would be liable if it failed?

This is exactly the fallacy of Intelligent Designers: the assumption that without detailed conscious planning and (as a software engineer might use the term) “architecture”, nothing useful can be done — or, that anything that is done is doomed to fail because it’s stupid and ignorant and inherently dangerous. They assume you need to know what you’re doing.

Bah. Nobody knows what they’re doing until after they’ve done it, and even then they will be wrong.

Just like Intelligent Design’s critiques of biological explanations of biological explanations, I don’t think these folks have ever actually paid attention to how it’s done. The have read a lot, and they are not ignorant, but they think that the explanatory story (say, the “manual” or the “research report”) you produce after you have created an artifact is something you must have before you did the work. You were “rational” in the process of engineering or science, in other words.

Anybody who’s done it for real should know better.

Please, if there is to be a Singularity, please please please let it be that that part of civilization collapses. Let the pervasive cultural assumption of the all-seeing eye of scientific declarative prediction die, toppled in the square like a 30-foot dictator’s statue. Like many people in a totalitarian regime, I can’t rightly say as how I ever voted it into power. It just sort of snuck into place over the years, taking over more responsibility, and now in these dark times its power is bolstered by legions of legal and media lackeys.

We do not need to know how things work. They work by themselves. Utility is not the same as understanding.

Look, for example, at the favored toy of Extropian futurism. Nanotechnology is here. We have a bunch already, and it’s becoming increasingly clear what it will be like when it has matured. Is it, I am forced to ask in my sternest pedagogic tone, the precise detailed atomic-scale machine-tooled gears and nano-aircraft of K. Eric Drexler? God no — the realnanotech revolution is shooting exuberantly up from the thick humus of messy, mutated, emergent life. Stuff that’s been around for billions of years. Smart people are building really cool stuff out of proteins, viruses, bacteria, DNA.

Just to be perfectly clear, speaking as a real-life biologist: These are all aspects of the world we can’t even lie and say we understand. We have the gist of protein folding (almost), but basically all this real-ife bio-nanotech stuff is best imagined as a big mysterious humming writhing black box of alien bugs. One can ask the box via directed evolution to solve one’s problems — but the oracular box is typically an impenetrable and ruthlessly misdirecting adversary when it comes to explaining how it has solved your problem.

And yet it works.

So Stephen has reminded me of two things that will collaborate to found the future: The realization (his “fog”) that we should not necessarily waste our time thinking too hard. And the reminder that a tool is where you find it: some of our companions on this rock have been “developing” “tools” to “solve problems” for at least three billion years. I bet they don’t worry to much.

That said, I suppose I may be coming down with a little enthusiastic fever of my own. But heck, they’re contagious.

 end 

¹Alas, the people who paid me to write stuff forbade me to publish it. So I’m not as well known as many other Singularity Aware Futurists. Actually, I suppose I am an SAF, in the same sense that I am a CAB (Creationism Aware Biologist).

John Scalzi has posted an amazingly simple analysis of what makes Mr. Bush’s latest comments on gay marriage so appalling:

…our president backs an amendment to our constitution which would, if passed, be the first time our government has specifically encoded into our constitution the denial of a right to a specific class of people….

You might want to point this little fact out any politicians (professional or wannabes) who begin to pontificate on the subject. Collect their responses. I’ll post them here, if any roll in.

Be sure to catch Scalzi’s excellent blog in general, as well, especially his preceding post on the prevalence of Levitican pseudo-Christians in this country.

Jim Lileks Institute of Official Cheer has received/will be receiving a new addition: Stagworld (still just a preview, alas). Be sure to browse the other earlier exhibits at the Institute, including the memorable and ground-breaking Gallery of Regrettable Food.

…perhaps it’s time to consider staff and upgrades.

[via comments seen on Adam Felber’s blog Fanatical Apathy]

Well, we’re close to thinking about committing soon to making a preliminary contingent offer on a new house. Which is pretty serious, for us.

Some worries arose concerning the property in question when we read the line in the ad where the listing agent wrote “overlooks a lovely wetland”. While I honestly love and desire a natural setting, my birdwatching level has not yet reached the point where I will deign to pay $50k/acre for swampland, and the whole mosquito thing has been on our minds since the crows started plummeting out of the skies a couple years back….

So, informed by a rare spirit of empirical inquiry, our buyers’ agent and I just visited again — we walked through the house, and then put on big boots and walked the perimeter of the lot.

It’s a hard plot to describe flatteringly enough, frankly. Even on a sullen snowy day like today, it’s nice. Three acres, about 230ft wide x 600 ft deep. The front third sits up high, next to the street (Yes, it’s in a development on what was an old farm; I’m sorry for personally ruining the rural charm of the county. Go pass another law if it bothers you.), but the yard drops off and the back two acres is meadow sitting on the edge a broad flat scruffy brown plain, which is probably a half-mile wide and a couple of miles across. With the southern exposure, this is an honest-to-goodness vista, and there is but one house out there in the distance (across the plain).

That big flat place is a shoo-in for bog, to be frank. Sure enough, when you look at the all-powerful County Drain Commissioner’s maps, those back two acres—and the remaining lovely plain—are clearly labeled with a brown splotch of “wetland”. Since I would at least like to be able to walk on land I own, this was a concern, so after oohing and aahing over the neat household wiring panel, we booted up and went for a crunch in the snow.

It’s OK. Yes, there was a place where we fell in—our mistake. There’s a little ditch, maybe six feet wide, that was put there when it was a potato field, and we got a little close and got our feet a tad wet. But we were able to walk the whole thing without sinking into mire.

No spectral warriors of ancient days cast their pallid gazes up upon us with dangerous envy. Which is a plus, when you’re buying land. I can imagine the places where the park benches could be set, and see a little curving network of paths. Nothing intrusive, but rather a subtle and enhancing landscape architecture. It started nice, and could be easily made nicer. I’m kindof psyched.

Walking back up towards the house, we trudged along the other 600-foot lot line towards the rise. All of a sudden we were surrounded. Standing on an isolated peninsula, which was weird. Running water — which is weirder, this time of year when we’re well below freezing—and not just melting snow runoff, but running water. More interestingly to the ex-biologist, pretty happy green algae in there.

Hunh. That’s weird, think I, redundantly.

And then I put my foot in it. Literally. It’s down at the lower right corner f the “front” yard, before you get to the flat 2 acres, and I blundered right into it: a stack of rocks about four feet square, covered all over in lovely fluoresecent green algae, with clear water burbling up out over it. Probably a gallon or two a second.

What exactly am I supposed to do with a spring? I’d happily take suggestions. My initial confused reaction is something like I had been informed that there was a family of fairies living under a rock in the yard: A good deal of initial city-slicker awe at the unceasing surprises to be found in the world, quickly followed by a sense of ignorant hesitation about the implications: Are these mean fairies? Will we have to worry about them getting in the house or souring the milk, or can we maybe ask them to help out? What exactly are these fairies there for? Are they gonna mess up the foundation?

“Cheese Computers On Track to Overtake Humans in 2004”

The logo (top left of each page) is set in the interesting Engrossing font from Fontcraft’s Scriptorium type foundry, created by the prolific David Nalle. If you like it, or are interested in quaint and interesting type with character, please go to them and look through their 450 or so fonts.

If you are using a modern Macintosh, the rest of the blog should be set in Hoefler Text, the Apple foundry’s OpenType interpretation of the beautiful classic book font family with pretty little oldstyle numerals.

All the rest of you are probably seeing this in Palatino. Ah, well. You will have to imagine how much better it looks to those of us among the Select.

As should have been obvious from my previously expressed pleasure with the eWashtenaw HistWeb, I get a lot out of a nice map. Whee. I love my wife because she found these two links and told me about them, and moreso because she is sitting over there staring intently at her iBook screen whispering, “Fascinating….”

Michigan Geographic Data Library.

Washtenaw county USGS topographical maps.

While I was working at the Santa Fe Institute one Spring, I undertook a minor distraction: building an averaged portrait of every person in the building on the day.

I ensconced myself on the sofa by the front door and buttonholed everybody who walked by. White-painted adobe is a great backdrop, as it turns out. (Note to self: build new Michigan house from adobe…)

But as is often the case, the notion was much simpler before the intricacies of execution entered into the picture. As it were. In this case, I wholeheartedly blame the morphing software. If you morph enough people together with that software, you inevitably end up with a Symbolist portrait of… well, a brownish and rather pleased-looking fuzzy person. A portrait done by some unholy hybrid of Franz von Stuck and Chuck Close.

But rather than throw the whole aborted directory of pieces away, I’ve decided in a fit of pity to expose a partial result here. This is an amalgam of some famous (and/or visiting) complex systems researchers, as well as the post-docs and students and the vital and under-appreciated staff who support us academics as we argue our way about the halls scribbling on the windows. I’m pretty sure (notes were taken and lost in the intervening years) that this is:

Ken Arrow, Ginger Richardson, Simon Fraser, Tylis Chang, Melanie Mitchell, Tim Keitt, Mark Newman and Andi Sutherland

Some years ago I purchased a number of glass negatives at an estate auction north of Toledo. When I had them printed in contact sheets by a local processing house, I found that they are apparently the second quality efforts of an amateur photographer, a chubby and pleasant-looking fellow who looks rather mayoral in his one self-portrait. I say “second quality” because—aside from this group portrait of his family—they’re a fuzzy and jiggly lot of people. I’m assuming that somewhere else, perhaps in the family albums where they belong, the better shots reside.

Except for this one. I like this one.

I have no idea who the folks are, nor where they lived (except that northwestern Ohio seems likely), nor where White Cottage is.

And not even a hint of what’s in the bottle….

As I mentioned previously in a blog entry that I now cannot find (!?), we met a fascinating lady a few months back at the county records office. In addition to sitting with us for an hour or more and paging through 19th century plat books to find our current house, she mentioned that she was responsible for the eWashtenaw historical archive website.

We’re looking for a place in the country, and while the buyer’s agent we’re working with is very nice and knows the roads, there’s nothing quite like looking at the land. With this tool, I can zoom in, and pan and scan the entire county with a wonky but ultimately effective interface. It’s based on an amazing archive of annotated high-resolution aerial photographs.

With it, I browse the house we own now (see me, waving up at you?), and all of a sudden the superimposed watercourses explain the stand of trees down at the end of the cul-de-sac and the weird way the development’s roads curve. It all makes a subtle kind of sense, from 1000 feet in the air. This is what augmented reality is all about: seeing and understanding the real world supplemented with what it implies and entails. Hear that, developers, investors, cyberpunks, and futurists?

You can keep y0ur weird-ass surreal useless avatar junk, your swirling cyberspatial 3-d rendering, your real-time social network visualizations and all the silly psychedelic anime decor. Give me the actual world with labels stuck all over stuff.

I browse the stunningly weird rental property we once drove Cosma & Kris to, hidden on a dirt track just off a main county thoroughfare, secreted away in an unreachable peninsula surrounded on all sides by undeveloped parkland, and there in the photograph I see the clear remnants of Harry Bennett’s lion cages (Yes, the man had pet lions. A lot of other stuff, too.), and Bill Ford’s new place next door.

I browse the place ten acres of vacant land we like down towards Saline, but which is way too expensive. I see the house of the neighbor downhill, who was out in front with his wife, gardening, the last afternoon we scoped the place out. We chatted with them, and he told us how he reckoned the whole thing was a scam and a farce, since the land didn’t perk and the sewage from any house built up there on the hill would drain right down into his pond, where his grandkids swim. Yup, there’s their lovely driveway, and there’s the pond in the backyard, and damned if I don’t see a little blue line of a creek draining right down into it from the spot Barbara and I were imagining the house. He’s got a point, damn him. And he said the shifty owner had trucked tons of gravel in to fake the soil, and… there’s the tracks of many heavy loads criss-crossing the meadow, clear as day.

And I browse the house we’re looking at today, and thinking seriously about, and there implied in the lay of the land and the terrain I can clearly see the southern exposure, the way the streams and ponds in the area drain away and safe, the (lack of) possible locations of future unsightly development by neighbors, the minimal chance that we might get cable some day, the closeness to Chelsea but isolation in a snowstorm… all there. No house, since the photo predates it, but I see the drive and what was there before.

All this, and yet I have not scratched the surface of this tool: A click, and every historical structure in the county is highlighted and annotated (well, I don’t much care for the moment, but good to know). Another click, and all the floodplains are highlighted (Ditto — new house is on a rise.). And the watercourses (more interesting).

I must write and thank the lady for spending my taxes this way. This is just one little project. One county in our state. Imagine the possibilities if it spreads. This is better than topo maps, and that’s saying a lot. The sense of illuminating exploration is exhilarating. I’m wowed. I want more.

What about other parts of the country? What if I scan just past the edges of our county?

Nothing. Blank gray nothing.

There abide monsters, I suppose.

Today’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday interview with Betsey Dexter Dyer reminded me: Read her book. Now. It’s really, really good.

Seriously. Read it. Buy it. Leave it around the house, and loan it to the neighbors’ kids. It’s the most important science book for laymen that I’ve seen in years.

See, Dr. Dyer echoes and reinforces a problem that frustrated me to no end during the years I was a biologist: willful eukaryocentrism is just as stupid as any other prejudice.

Sure, like any academic I can understand and forgive a layman who is simply ignorant or sheltered, and believes as a result that bacteria are “just germs”. That can be remedied with education and exposure. I tried to help as much as I could, back when I was teaching.

It’s the majority of biologists and their steadfast blindness that pisses me off. I think it’s a vicious cultural circle: All the money for grants is in medicine and vertebrates, so professorial hires and student educations are biased towards people and diseases and mammals and maybe some pretty birds and stuff. A few grad students—probably more likely socked away in some small rural college—may be exposed briefly to a plant or fungus in a required botany class. But by the time they’re tenured, their little specialist minds are closed to the fact that this is a bacterial planet. All that big stuff, the stuff they mainly teach you, about mammals and medicine and suchlike? That represents a vanishingly small fraction of life. Bacteria cover Earth, miles into the air and miles deep into the rock. They cover us. Every surface of every thing. Inside most things. Everywhere. They outnumber us by trillions-to-one, and for all we know they out-mass us by nearly as much.

And, by the way: they were here first. Billions of years before single-celled eukaryotes arose (from them). And they never left. They can do amazing—practically magical—things with chemistry. And they can do amazing genetic experiments in uncanny ways we cannot fathom. What, after all, are we but some weird unholy amalgam of bacterial genes, combined and intermingled in a molecular embrace that spawned all this macroscopic mess we comprise? The harsh emptiness of the endless void, the deadly glare of atomic radiation, boiling temperatures and freezing desolate wastes are their favored homes — they love it. They eat it up. They eat rocks, sunlight, sulfur, hydrogen… just about anything. Us. And yet they are not inimical, not our enemies. They don’t even know we exist.

And in those rare times when things get too hard, they just go dormant and wait a few centuries or millennia until things change. “That is not dead which can eternal lie…” indeed.

Bacteria are the Great Old Ones. And who told you they were sleeping? Why, that Lovecraft guy. Know why he was wrong? Prejudice, pure and simple. He was multicellular. There you go.

So, yeah, maybe he had the “we are merest insignificant specks” thing right. It was just the typical human blindness that fooled him into looking up instead of down.

We’re starting to clean up the house in preparation to selling it, and under a pile of Victorian magazines I came across this old soapbox. (Or: My post yesterday on the ridiculous lack of explicit acceptance criteria for academic research projects reminded me of a couple of other things I am compelled to rant about.)

I’ve been touting diligent agile software development to all my friends in the academic world ever since I first started learning about Extreme Programming. The main point—the most important point—is the way it reduces risk in software development projects. And my fillip: especially in today’s simulation-based science.

My thinking goes this way: Most of my colleagues in complex systems research base the credibility of their entire careers on software they write or have written — simulations, numerical calculations, demonstrative models, and so forth. It is vital that their simulations and other home-cooked software does what is expected (because that is after all exactly what they write about in their papers), and also whether their results can be replicated (because the program will be rewritten from scratch based on their published specifications if the validity of their results is to be assessed).

And yet all this depends (in most cases) on the work of amateurs and dilettantes.

See more ...

A few months ago I had the pleasure to attend the 2003 U-M/SFI conference, which is nominally an annual get-together between complex systems researchers from the University of Michigan and the Santa Fe Institute, but in this case it was people from U-M’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and elsewhere (perhaps because the folks from SFI are moving on as time goes by).

Something came up today that reminded me of an important thing that happened at the conference.

The theme this year was “Emergence and Engineering in Complex Systems”, and as a result we heard from a number of engineering speakers, many of whom were faculty at U-M. One in particular (John Laird) mentioned about 10% in jest that he was the token representative of “real” engineering, since his talk was about his rather famous and arguably successful software project which aims to simulate human behavior using a number of hand-crafted and carefully designed classical AI approaches (as opposed to emergent complex systems and black-box machine learning techniques).

I admit that I thought that it was a grand thing to have a real engineer on hand to interrogate — I’ve been pushing for a stronger engineering sensibility in complex systems research for many years.

In addition, as a practicing (though not real, as will become apparent) engineer who’s spent a lot of time in the last few years watching the Extreme Programming movement in software development unfold, I’m a big fan of explicit acceptance tests for engineering projects. Far from just being a way to prove your customer is satisfied, I’ve come to see acceptance tests as a tool for researchers to know when a project is done and successful.

So it was a leading question I asked after Laird’s talk: If you’re designing a simulated human behavior module, how do you know when you’re done? I was really hoping to hear something about how they had a battery of automated and hand-run tests on hand, and that when the AI passed these with a certain grade they would be done. They’d have answered one question, provoked a number of others, and in the spirit of agile engineering they could move on to a new incremental project to answer those new questions. If they were really savvy software engineers, these tests would be automated, and unanimous set of little green lights on the screen would indicate that the champaign should be broken open and the press releases drafted.

What was the answer from the token engineer on the panel? When the grant money runs out.

Which, alas, does not satisfy my acceptance test for “real engineer”.

Perhaps John misspoke. He might have meant to say he was the token top-down designer.

I can see how they might be confused, in certain instances. I hope to help end that confusion, in time.

I am expecting to return to my derailed academic career next Fall after a decade away. Since I’m changing fields dramatically (or so it may seem to a layman, though there will be not one whit of change in the core of my research agenda. Come to think of it, the fact that I was doing really neat operations research and machine learning stuff back in the day may have a lot to do with why I didn’t get a biology Ph.D. after seven years’ work, but rather a muttered statement more along the lines of, “We don’t really get whatever this weird-ass shit is you’ve been talking about….”), this entails grad school. Again.

The irony of advising my niece yesterday on how to choose a school and a degree program at the same time I’m doing it myself doesn’t escape me. Maybe that’s a benefit of age—you learn to see irony in all these new places. And if you’re very, very smart and lucky, you will even come to see it in yourself.

For example, a recent well-written post by Amanda Butler over at Crescat Sententia reminds me that I am chooosing a field that depends upon a great deal of mathematical rigor and innovation. Yet for twenty years my friends and colleagues have pointed out that no mathematician ever does anything useful and interesting after age 35 or so (or words to that effect).

I’m not too worried, for some reason. One has learned, with diligence, to apply ironical interpretations on so many concepts. Say, for example, “mathematician”, “ever”, “useful”, “interesting”.

Especially “interesting.”

I see a brief note may be in order to discuss the apparent hiatus I’ve been taking. This February has not been a good thing. Father-in-law is quite ill and needing care; a favored niece has just heard three of her next-door neighbor/friends shot in the street outside her family’s home, two of whom are now dead; a good friend underwent unexpected surgery due to a misdiagnosed and serious problem; my own debilitating “cold” took most of a month to dissipate.

Let’s be careful out there, people. From here on, I’m considering skipping over February, and I advise you do the same.

I often tell stories for a living. Nothing provides more pedagogic value when you’re being paid an arm and a leg for expertise in engineering emergent and adaptive systems than a nice illustrative anecdote, and I’ve accumulated a pleasant and amusing assortment through the years.

Emergent phenomena lead by definition to unexpected consequences, so for maximal storytelling bang-per-buck these anecdotes tend to have the feel of a good joke: A not-too-outrageous lead-in situation (“…innocent engineers want to solve problem X by using advanced technique Y…”), hints of foreshadowing enhanced by glimpses of narrative omniscience (“…Of course they did the obvious thing, that any smart person [include audience ironically] knows is the right thing to do, which is Z. Oh, those smart gals/guys…”), followed by an illuminating punchline (e.g., “…but they had in fact evolved a superstitious stock portfolio manager that always sold off any holding that included the letter ‘A’ in its ticker symbol ticker whenever it made more than $100k a month!”) And a moral, of course, which is what consultants are paid for. (“Which goes to show, machine learning algorthms are very good at doing what you tell them to do.”)

One of the more recently acquired anecdotes came up in “something I read” (meaning “some blog somewhere”) concerning the massively multi-agent simulations used in the battle scenes of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I had heard that the CGI engineers used these awesome little swarming agents for the orc and human combatants. In essence these were nominally self-aware autonomous agents that watched their local environments, paid attention to their own health and local allies and enemies, and really fought like realistic soldiers.

Except (went the story) they displayed so much emergent intelligence that they actually ran away all the time. So they had to be dumbed down or shoved around by brute force to actually go fight the enemies.

Well, today we have news that the story I thought was apocryphal isn’t. Better yet, truth is way better than I could possibly have imagined. On today’s Screen Savers show on TechTV, we are told in an interview

TechTV: There was a story, and it seems to me it can’t be true, that these guys were actually running away, that they were actually scared. They weren’t behaving like you’d hoped.

Rygiel: Right. When I first got there, they showed me this tape, this rustic form with guys fighting. And in the background were these guys in the distance running away. And I said, “Those are the smart ones. They’re running away.”

They’re not actually running away. They’re running around the world to get around to the other side. They’re programmed to attack. They’re just looking the wrong way.

Let it now enter the official canon.

[via a rollicking guffaw from the other room where Barbara was watching TV]

[For reasons that will become apparent, some bibliographic refs remain to be set in place here]

A little short bit about boundaries, agent-based models, and the illusion of individuality tonight, brought to mind by a insomnia-causing itch.

A little red bumpy patch on my back leads me to believe that my old friend varicella zoster is making himself known once more. For those that may not know him by name, he’s the virus that causes chicken pox. And shingles. See, once you’ve had chicken pox and gotten better, the virus particles don’t leave. Oh, no. That’s an illusion of purity you won’t hear gainsaid by modern medicine.

No, VZV moves in for good, becoming a permanent latent resident inside various ganglia, especially the dorsal root ganglia that transmit sensory information from your skin to your brain. Then when a serious cold comes along, maybe coupled with a big overdue project, out they pop. “Hi there! Remember us?”

Notice how I’m talking about it? This itching little bastard of a virus?

He’s not me. Is he?

Way back when I was teaching biology labs, I used to give a little quiz on the first day. One of the questions I always asked was, “When was the last time you were in physical contact with bacteria?” Typically the kids would mostly say, “Ewww, gross. What, when I had a cold?”

This is of course one of those trick questions uppity TAs always like to throw in (supposedly for pedagogic value, but basically just to show off)—you’re always in physical contact with bacteria. If you aren’t, you’re about to be extraordinarily ill; the many billions of bacteria that comprise your gut flora are all that stand between you and a world of hurt. Indeed, we host a thriving and diverse ecosystem of not just bacteria but protoctists and multicellular organisms—a veritable jungle that has never been exhaustively described.

But those bacteria—they’re not me. Are they?

Where are my boundaries? Where can I draw the crisp line that separates me from other stuff? Disregarding the bacteria, which I suppose might be argued to have a potential for individual free existence (though that’s really doubtful), what about the viruses? What about the viruses who have completely destroyed their envelopes and simply integrated their bare genomes into mine, and therefore cannot live an independent existence ever again? What about the viruses that integrated into my grandparents’ genomes, and whose progeny I now carry? What about my hair (which seems increasingly to be declaring its independence)?

Not to get too personal, but when officially did the ring you left in the bathtub last time stop being you?

This isn’t a trivial and esoteric philosophical question, as it turns out. It’s come up in four separate conversations I’ve had over the last month, on subjects ranging from agent-based modeling to economics to autoimmune disease to organizational learning.

As scientists and philosophers and mathematicians we seem to like drawing lines. When we’re sketching a model out graphically, whether it’s on a beer mat or a big wall-sized UML diagram or a picture of a mathematical function or defining a variable in a program, we want to know what things are, and set them cleanly apart.

Maybe it’s because we use pens and pencils. I don’t know. If god wanted us to handle fuzzy concepts, he would have given us… what? Crayons? Watercolors?

No, something else.

Nonetheless, speaking as one of the most ruthless and incisive aficionados of the Venn diagram and the discrete directed graph… you have to wonder: why is most of the interesting stuff in the world so hard to discuss that way?

Orkut was discussed at length during this last week on a number of blogs I read, not because it’s cooler than anything else, but rather because several authors [to be cited here eventually] point out that it demands way too much discrete descriptive precision to be useful. But what is a network if the edges are not discrete binary relations?

In the four minutes I had a chance to talk with my buddy Scott this week, he was chatting about a favorite riff of his: It matters where you “draw the lines” in models of economic systems. That is, whether agents themselves have behaviors, beliefs, aspirations and the like, or whether these are left to emerge from their interactions. What is a market if it does not include the minds of the people modeling each other? What is a plan, if it’s separated from the mind that frames it and the context of the assumptions that informed it?

Even the notion of fuzzy mathematics, which arguably was formulated to deal with this sort of gray area, is framed in relation to notions of discrete membership. Sure, they describe qualities—they’re qualitative. But for a normal fuzzy value, there always has to be some case which is 100% that quality. There has to be some particular temperature which is 100% “hot”. You’re fuzzifying the crisp values, doing some manipulations in the world of fuzzy sets, and then typically in most applications you defuzzify your numbers to get crisp numbers back again.

Because, even given the supposed power of fuzzy math, we like crisp. And probability theory is of course the same crisp animal in a different formal attire: maybe there’s uncertainty about some event, and we can represent its potential as a cloud of probability density, but in the end in the real world specific discrete stuff happens.

So I’m not convinced that fuzzy mathematics does a good job in describing aggregates like biological and social systems. A favorite example from the days when I was back at the SFI was: What are the boundaries of IBM? Are contractors part of IBM? Is somebody who’s out on maternity leave for three months? Somebody laid off? How about a vital contractor? A corporate officer in a coma? The janitorial staff? The computers? The piece of paper in Delaware (or whatever state is appropriate) that communicates and symbolizes IBM’s incorporated identity?

Crisp doesn’t hack it.

The formalism that seems necessary—as the itching intensifies—should be capable of talking about hierarchical aggregates (molecules, metabolisms, meat, men, and markets). These are exchanging components at multiple levels. We may at any given moment be concerned with one or another of these organizational levels, but (here’s the kicker) should not have to ignore the others.

Men buy meat at markets and metabolize it, incorporating the molecules into themselves. One wants to be able to draw that, or equivalently write it as an equation. It was one sentence. It shouldn’t be this hard.

As things stand today, it seems that I need either a magic multiscale pencil that can write microscopic stuff about molecules at the same time it writes stuff about markets, or an awful lot of different colored crayons and a really big freaking piece of paper. I’m not satisfied with those solutions.

And tonight, neither is my friend VZV.

From The Ann Arbor Register. April 18, 1895. Page 3, Column 3.

Bloomers at the U. of M.

The question of bloomers has assumed a new form at the Michigan University at Ann Arbor. Miss Edna Day, a pretty junior literary student, appreciates their superiority over skirts and wore them until her landlady told her she would have to don her skirts while in the house. Miss Day has complied. When outside the jurisdiction of the boarding house keeper, however, Miss Day will appear as of yore. She is an enthusiastic bicycle rider, and thinks that such a dress is much more sensible and comfortable to wear on rainy days an during sloppy weather than muddy skirts. The wives of several professors also favor them and her instructors have commended her upon the stand she has taken.

From The Ann Arbor Register. April 18, 1895. Page 9, Column 2.

Mental Travelers.

They Manage to See Much of the World Without Leaving Home.

Pittsburg Dispatch [sic]: “You would be surprised at the number of mental travelers that are in a community,” said a railroad man yesterday. “I mean people who travel only in their minds; who, to indulge this mania, make a collection of railroad literature, such as is issued in time-tables, excursion books, pamphlets, etc. You have often heard people talk knowingly of a place which you have best evidence that hey have never visited. They can discourse fluently upon the hotels and principal sights of the city, even tell you of the trains and the connections they make, or describe the small stations through which they pass going there. If you have ever known a man or woman like this, then you have met a mental traveler. He might also be dubbed a railroad literature fiend, as this it the title by which he is known among the employes of a railroad office, who look no further into the motives of men than the surface. We have hundreds of such men and women who come tot he office after every piece of literature the railroad prints, from the local time-tables to the book descriptive of a southern or western jaunt. Their thirst for this kind of literature can never be satiated; it seems to have the same influence as alcoholic stimulants—the more they get the more they want. We have men who are employed in leading positions in banks and business houses who come to us daily with the question, ‘Anything new out?’ When the people live in the city they usually call upon us daily, but when they reside in the country their visits are at longer intervals. We have one old man who comes from Westmoreland county who never fails to appear upon the same date of each month. He seems to revel in going through the large batch of time-tables and books that have accumulated since his last visit. He never varies in his mode of procedure. After supplying himself with a sample of each one he comes over to the window, and, with his face wreathed in smiles, in the intoxication of his delight, he says, ‘How’re you, anyhow?’ After being assured that our health still permitted us to continue at our business, he always asks, “Well, kin you tell me how much’s the fare to Boston?’ When this information is given he invariably remarks, ‘Well, that’s gol darn cheap, that is.’ Then he lapses into a thoughtful mood, from which he breaks by making the assertion, ‘Confound me, I’ll go down there next year.’ Then picking up his grip, he starts off and we do not see him again for a month. He has been going to Boston ‘next year’ to my own knowledge for six years. These mental travelers get more satisfaction out of their dreamy wanderings than the usual tourist of the day who travels not to learn, but to kill time. One man told me that he had never been to Washington in his life, yet was as familiar with the getting there and the city itself as if he had lived there his lifetime. He can talk about the streets and numbers, and can direct people from one place to another with more accuracy that the average Pittsburg policeman can give you information about his town, and gets it all from railroad literature. You watch the time-table racks of a railroad station and notice what a high class of people these mental travelers are.”

This little mapping thing is making the rounds of the blogosphere. Having a quick look at the URL the site uses to generate the map I note that it includes a neat little feature vector:

visited=”AKAZARCACOCTDCDEFLGAHI
IDILINIAKSKYMDMAMIMNMOMTNENVNJ
NMNYNCNDOHOKORPARITNTX
UTVTVAWAWVWIWY”

This could as easily be rendered as a 50-element list of binary bits.

I see that many maps on many blogs have green Alabamas and Mississippis. Maine also seems to be bypassed a lot. What structure might one expect over the complete set of these vectors, sampled over the bloggers now using it? Or a larger question: what correlations might there be in terms of demographic variables (politics, class, sex, &c;) and the vector of states?

Perhaps there ought to be a place to compile these. I’ll volunteer to do so (anonymously): If you send me your state vector, I’ll parse and compile them, one per email address, and report the results here:

Total respondents: 1

[later: You know, why the heck didn’t they just set up a vector of fifty bits? Their cgi script to render the map must be using regular expressions to extract the two-letter abbreviations, this way. Sheesh.]

An excellent post by Bill Poser over at Languagelog rips a new one for the author of [thanks to Cosma for the gentle correction] 1421: The Year China Discovered America.

If you’re planning a defense against ridiculously bad science in any setting, you may want to pay some attention to his engaging style….

Handy mapping site, which colors states you’ve visited red. Ah, I miss those old driving vacations.

create your own visited states map

or write about it on the open travel guide

Well, it seems the thing to do on a Saturday night, doesn’t it?

You are 62% geek

You are a geek. Good for you! Considering the endless complexity of the universe, as well as whatever discipline you happen to be most interested in, you’ll never be bored as long as you have a good book store, a net connection, and thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment. Assuming you’re a technical geek, you’ll be able to afford it, too. If you’re not a technical geek, you’re geek enough to mate with a technical geek and thereby get the needed dough. Dating tip: Don’t date a geek of the same persuasion as you. You’ll constantly try to out-geek the other.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Cosma Shalizi has recently pointed out some recent research results from the Bergstroms on the exorbitant costs of technical journal subscriptions. The other component of publishers’ gouging tactics, and one for which undergraduates’ parents are provided a line item in college bills, is textbooks.

While I’ve never been a fan of public interest reports that include reviewers quotes inside the front cover, if I grit my teeth I find much of interest in the recent CALPIRG report on the subject.

Now there’s a certain amount of “publishers should be made to” and “shouldn’t be allowed to” and such other admonishing stuff implied by this (with which I agree). But seriously—even if you’re an arch-publishing-conservative from an old Dutch family, and have to rework the wording to something more like, “Publishers’ amazing profit margins are seriously threatened by rising outrage among their customers, and increasing talk of cheap (or free) open source alternatives,” you have to admit something’s gotta give.

Somebody or other (remind me, do) mention the PennyLender project today in their blog as “an idea whose time has come.”

Sounds like a great way to start PhDMeatMarket.com, as well.

[read about Open Questions]

Suppose I pick up a handful of soil from my garden (or anywhere). Say a cubic decimeter, which is about the size of your heart. In it will be innumerable organisms, lots of minerals, lots of diverse stuff.

Let’s define a “molecular species” in the context of this thought experiment as a particular arrangement of covalently-bonded atoms (I’m ignoring hydrogen bonds, ionic associations and other supramolecular complexes for the sake of sanity). But just to make things challenging, say we count ionization states and radicals as different molecular species, too.

So, you have a little pile of dirt? Great. Stop time. I want to look at it instantaneously.

Make a list of all the molecular species in that sample. Count how many individual examples there are of each molecule.

Got that? Good. Now make a little histogram of the molecular species, sorted in order of decreasing occurrence. So the common stuff like atmospheric gases and common mineral stuff will be over at the left, and weird, rare gunk like bug metabolites and DNA will be over at the right end. Draw it. Show me.

Hell, show the world. As long as you can justify your answer, you’re done. You may now herald the dawn of a new era in separation chemistry, complex chemical reaction networks, and cheminformatics. Even if you just guessed well.

But while you have that dataset or valid model, here are the real open questions, with annotations:

• How many molecular species do you have? Note that things like atmospheric gases are not particularly diverse, but that biological molecules like DNA will probably all count as unique, since they differ in ionization state and DNA sequence. I don’t care whether you give a well-reasoned theoretical argument or an empirical count. Either way: you’re a chemistry god.
• What’s the frequency histogram look like? Is it a power-law? My intuition tells me it will be. But power law distributions are terribly hackneyed these days, and besides my intuition lacks a stringent mathematical motivation. So…? Help me out here.
• Would either the count or histogram be qualitatively different for the same volume of seawater? Lava? Air from inside a cumulonimbus cloud? Your body? Mars rock?
• What would change if I had allowed hydrogen bonding and ionic association? In other words, what if we counted different sizes of water clathrate lattices as different molecular species, or counted ionic crystals as different depending on their size, and allowed that gases bound in enzyme binding sites are different from free gases? (Recall that we’re talking about an instantaneous snapshot here)
• Ignoring composition, what does the size distribution look like?

Through the years, a number of open questions have arisen. I’ve jotted them down. Time to share.

They share a few simple characteristics. I’m unable to answer them through half-hearted research. If you can answer one by reference, full points and my mistake. But I suspect it will take a bit of work to really address any of them, simple-sounding as they may be.

Why bother? Because they’re all leading questions. Unless the solutions are old news, you should get a Ph.D. or two for getting one nailed down.

[about local Forteana]

From The Ann Arbor Democrat. February 27, 1879. Page 3, Column 2-3.

Davis and the Devils.

Strange Phenomena at the New Court House Witnessed by Jeff. Davis

Spooks, hobgoblins, ghosts, devils or what?

Is the Building Haunted?—”Jeff” Will Tell the Supervisors a Strange Story.

For several days four or five persons in this city (among the number a Democrat reporter) have known of certain occurrences that have taken place at the new court house, and which Mr. McPherson and the contractors are trying to keep quiet and hush up, at least until the building shall be accepted by the county. But the Full facts cannot much longer be kept from the public, and The Democrat, as a newspaper, owes it to the people of the county, if not to science, to publish the facts, so far as they can be gathered from interested parties, who are reluctant to have the matter get out.

Since the completion of the steam-heating apparatus in the new court house, a fire has been kept up night and day to dry out the walls and make the building ready for occupancy as soon as possible. Jeff. Davis, well known to nearly every body in the county as the faithful janitor for many years of the old county buildings, has taken charge of the fire during the night, and has been the sole occupant of the building from 9 p. m., every day, until late the following morning. He has a lounge in the boiler room in the southwest corner of the basement, and occasionally takes a nap when not firing up or pumping water into the boiler, which he has to do several times during the night. One night last week Jeff was

startled while pumping

By hearing the clock, which is fastened to a brick pier in the room, commence striking at half-past one. The striking continued, slowly but regularly, Jeff thinks, for at least ten minutes, at the conclusion of which a strange, unearthly sound like the last gasping groan of a dying man seemed to issue from under the lounge in the corner of the room. Nothing further occurred that night. But the next night, at precisely half-past one o’clock, the clock began striking again, striking 59 times, but no sound was heard from the sofa. The next night, which made the third night this phenomenon had occurred, the clock struck again 59 times, commencing at precisely half-past one, and at the end of the striking

the sofa moved from the corner

Of the room to the brick pier under the clock, Jeff being several feet away.

It seems that the negroes of Kentucky, among whom Jeff. was born and raised, have a singular superstition that a sudden death, which is about to take place in the family, will be announced by the clock, at or about midnight, striking a number of times corresponding to the years of age at which the doomed person will die, and as Jeff. is about 58 years and 6 months old, this striking of the clock had anything but a musical or amusing sound to him.

Nearly every night since he has occupied the building peculiar noises have been heard. Sometimes like the sound made when the earth is thrown upon a coffin, sometimes like the gutteral [sic] gurgle heard in the throat of a man who is hung, and sometimes it has seemed as if a score of ladies were drawing their heavy silk trails over the marble floors in the halls above. But

last Saturday night

Occurred a scene, compared with which the performances at the haunted house at Dixboro, which many old citizens of the county will remember, sing into insignificance—a scene which Jeff. will remember to his dying day. At precisely half-past one o’clock on awakening from a short nap, Jeff. saw, through the opening in the floor over the boiler, a pale, bluish and flickering light. The light seemed to come and go as if it were thrown from a lantern in the hands of someone moving about the hall upstairs. The fire had got low, the gas flickered lazily in its single burner as if about to go out, and the building was wrapt [sic] in a silence that was almost painful, when all at once, the door leading from the boiler room into the hall way, opened with a terrific slam.

Supposing that

Sheriff Case and Billy M’Pherson,

Who are always around especially at that time of the night, were playing a joke upon him, Jeff. went up the step and through the door leading from the boiler room into the hall. He says that he fairly felt the awful silence around him, while in the farther end of the hall, directly under the east entrance of the building, he saw distinctly the dim outlines of a coffin, and lying upon the top of it an outstretched human skeleton. The thin transparent skull seemed to be lit up by an inward light, and while the coffin was motionless the limbs of the skeleton seemed to be trembling and shaking. But it is just possible that this was apparent rather than real, and that it was the limbs of Jeff. himself that were shaking, for by this time he began to feel intensely warm, notwithstanding the fire had gone down, and great drops of sweat stood upon his forehead and his hair, if it had been hair instead of wool, would no doubt have stood on end. Jeff. thinks he stood there fixed and unmovable about an hour and a half, in fact until

the coffin, the skeleton,

and the lights had faded away. He supposed the performance had now ended for the night, but just as he was about to return to the boiler room he saw a tall, thin figure dressed in white, slowly descending the stairs from the main floor above. He was not in a state of mind to examine the figure critically. He only knew that it passed under the arches of the tower and disappeared in the dark room in the northeast corner of the building. No sooner had the phantom disappeared than a gentle, cool breeze seemed to blow through the halls, and he heard the whispered words—but seeming loud enough to be heard through the whole building—”I shall come again!” Upon hearing this announcement Jeff. crept with a heavy heart back to the boiler room, fastened the door, and was glad to escape in the morning without further experiences of a supernatural kind. He immediately communicated the above facts to tow or three persons who advised him to keep quiet and say nothing about the matter until the supervisors meet, next week, when the whole truth will be made known and sustained by affidavit.

The supernatural phenomena coming to the ears of Superintendent McPherson and the court house contractors, they professed to disbelieve the story, and insist that the whole is a rascally joke upon the superstitious janitor. But as they have tried to keep Jeff. quiet until after the building is accepted by the county, it is evident that they regard the matter in a more serious light than a joke. It may result in the building being rejected by the county, for the people may not want to pay $60,000 for a haunted court house.

Transcribed as originally typeset. The 1877 Washtenaw County Courthouse was replaced in 1955.

From The Ann Arbor Democrat. December 19, 1878. Page 1, Column 7.

The Grant Conspiracy.

There are any number of indications that there is on foot a plan to force the nomination of Grant for the next Presidential vacancy. It scarcely needed the confirmatory information in another column from Boston, concerning the proposed series of grand receptions to be given Grant on his return from his Old World vagabondizing. This Boston revelation is simply an incident among many others, all tending in the same direction. It may be, and probably is, true, as stated in this scheme, that New York politicians will furnish the money for these public receptions, and that they expect to secure a return for the money invested. Both are probably true, the latter more especially. It has never been doubted by intelligent men, familiar with Grant’s administration, that he could be used by individuals to further private ends. The number of presents which he received, the vastness of the fortune he accumulated in a few years, and the rascally character of many of his appointments and personal friends, all go to show that Grant did not limit the employment of his powers as President to the Constitutionally and honestly belonging to his office. There was more corruption, malfeasance, rascality, swindling, speculation and deviltry generally under Grant’s Administration than during any other period in our history.

The men who grew wealthy from subsidy-schemes, the whisky rings, fluctuations in gold and Government securities, and in the scores of other dishonest practices connected with Grant’s official career, are the men who wish to see him once more in the White House. They are yearning for the return of the—to them—golden era of rascality, when honesty in office was the exception, and plunder the rule. To this class is added another large one whose members believe that Grant is the only man whom the party can elect. To them party is of more consequence than aught else, and they would welcome the nomination of Grant, were he thrice as culpable as he is, upon the assurance that he is the only man who could be elected. There are still others who, never having believed in Grant’s mercenary character, and his unfitness for office, still remember him as the man who received the sword of Lee, and who are willing as a matter of gratitude to keep him in the Presidential chair for life. All these classes make up a powerful element who may be able to overpower the good sense of others who fully understand this enigmatical humbug, but who are men in whom the sense of party allegiance is stronger than their convictions of right.

The tremendous onslaught which has been made on the South by so many of the party organs, and by certain officials, means the nomination of Grant. It is true that the President in his message only claimed that there had been any interference in the elections in two of the Southern States, and even then, only in certain parts of these. However, facts seem to be of no consequence to the party organs, and therefore they are teeming with denunciations of the entire South. Their purpose is to “fire the Northern heart;” to convey the idea that the entire South is in a state of rebellion, and that the country needs a strong arm to restrain these rebels. In due season Grant will be presented as the strong arm, and his nomination will be urged as that of the only man who can suppress the new rebellion. Stupid, malignant and insensate as are these indiscriminate attacks upon the entire South, they will have weight among that large class which feels much and reasons little, and takes for gospel whatever may be placed before it by its party press.

The proposed receptions have no connection whatever with a desire to do Grant personal honor. They are purely political. They are a part of the mortifying farce which has been in progress in the Old World ever since Grant landed on its shores. There Grant has never received a single personal compliment. Every reception given him, every honor of which he has been the recipient, have been paid to the country, of which, as ex-President, he was to some extent the representative. There is not a single city of any account which he has visited in which, in private, he has failed to be the subject of endless ridicule and caricature. Everywhere his boorish manners, his lack of knowledge of the ordinary forms of polite society, his sullen silence, and his intemperance have made him a more marked character than even his position as an ex-President and and ex-General. The reports about his having been offered the Bulgarian throne are simply silly lies, invented to give him consequence on this side [of] the water, and give him an impetus for the Presidential nomination. King of Bulgaria! Grant could not, to-day, secure the position of Constable on the London police force. He hasn’t the sobriety the patience, the dignity, that are essential to the position.—Chicago Times (Ind.)

Very little comment is called for on this one, frankly. It’s frankly amazing how well it captures the tone of modern political journalism. And this was mid-term!

Keep that in mind when people complain about “the media these days.”

The previous post reminds me of an old and serious problem I have with classical economics. Heck, as far as the texts and references around here can tell me, and my economist friends can explain, it’s a problem with modern economics as well.

Economic explanations assume actors maximize utility. Profit, happiness, satiety, and all those other disparate concerns which help inform decisions are conflated into the miraculous utility function, a nice little scalar-valued jobby that lets the actor compare between alternatives. The magical utility function is “just” a way of establishing an order over all possible choices. What’s so wrong with that, an economist friend asked me once?

Well… lots of things. Leave aside all the deeply wrong-headed (and admittedly esoteric) assumptions about convexity of multiobjective decision spaces, crisp linear weighting functions, and subjective and error-prone estimation of predicted returns. The big one right now is: How stupid is that?

I’m not speaking rhetorically, I mean it as a quantitative question: How wrong can an economic explanation get when you assume agents use this sort of weird and magical scalarization of orthogonal objectives?

Look, to a very close approximation, every real-world decision is multiobjective. Doesn’t matter if you’re an economic agent or an institution or a bug trying to maximize energy and minimize threats or an engineer trying to make a cheap, strong bridge. Search, optimization, choice and design are basically always multiobjective.

Let’s play with game theory. Have a couple of little guys play the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma for a while. But this time, let’s say they’re playing for both money and happiness. In every round, each player choses to Cooperate or Defect, and for each of the four possible outcomes they both get (or lose) some money and some happiness. Now instead of maximizing “points”, there are two different—and possibly incommensurate—goals: maximize money and maximize happiness.

Now, if having more money is correlated with being happier, nothing nasty will happen, will it? What if they’re not correlated, or anti-correlated? “Maximizing both” implies discovering non-dominated solutions (no different from the single-objective case), but now there is no single dominant strategy.

So what happens? What’s the effect on the classic IPD player strategies for various money:happiness ratios in each the four outcomes of the game?

[And if you can’t figure out why money wouldn’t be correlated with happiness, then dammit fill in “risk” and “return”, and try to maximize return while minimizing risk.]

How much different is the result in a multiobjective case from the assumption-laden one where there’s always a scalar utility function?

And an open question, which is not even mature enough to be a leading one: Does it ever make sense to think of evolutionary dynamics in terms of “multiple” fitnesses? Sure, I know reproductive fitness is by definition a scalar value that represents a propensity/likelihood for producing offspring. But you know, the likelihood of producing offspring may depend on how may attempts you make, or how much effort you put into decreasing the risk of those attempts.

Sound like r vs. K selection in reproductive strategies? Good.

Bob Axelrod gave a seminar yesterday on his recent writings on “Risk in Networked Information Systems”. Among the observations he listed (I’ll assume that listing was as far into it as he could get, in the limited hour and a half…) was the observation that antagonists to a networked organization or other networked system will try to target their attacks on the weakest links. I’ve not yet read the paper in full, but I’ll suppose “weakest links” are defined by some conflation of both their inherent susceptibility to attack, and effects of their loss on the overall network.

This implies that attackers with such a strategy need to expend resources in building a model of the structure and dynamics of their target, in order to identify weak links they can subsequently attack. While one (questionable) defense against weak-link attacks is to avoid having them at all, an orthogonal approach seems to be for the defender to have no self-knowledge of its own structure. Since as Bob pointed out, the most insidious threats are often launched or coordinated by insiders, denying even insiders knowledge of the organization’s structure seems a reasonable defense against such attacks.

There’s a well-known example in the cell structure of terrorist organizations—not designed to defend against internal traitors, but rather to resist capture and interrogation. But another example, potentially more benign but also more pervasive, might be the development of obfuscatory red tape and organizational bloat.

See, I’d always thought confusing organizational charts and bureaucracies arose because they’re adaptive at the level of the individual—a symptom of intra-organizational competition. That seems to be the folklore, in the sense many readers will have encountered in something like, “Oh, yeah, X keeps her job by making sure that none of her underlings or superiors actually knows who does what around here.” You know — like Wally.

What if, instead, organizations develop unintelligible structures as a defense against intelligence-gathering by potential antagonists? Not so much a “holographic storage” of interior organizational knowledge and self-knowledge, but rather something more analogous to chaff, armor plating, and blubber….

Actually if you head out towards the extremes (always a useful exercise), a network is 100% resistant to attack if it is only transmitting noise. Sound silly? Well, OK, think of it as a multiobjective problem, in which communication bandwidth and security against attack are both orthogonal objectives: I bet you’ll see a bunch of pareto-optimal solutions for organizations trying to solve both simultaneously that include a bunch of useless crap.

Frankly, I can’t help but think this is old ground, and I write this (as ever) relatively uninformed by scholarship or research on the subject. I’d be happy to hear who’s already touched on it.

In other words:

When you say “model”, make damned sure you don’t mean “simulation”. Make sure other people aren’t confused, too.

All that other stuff—well, I’ll get back to that and clean it up in a bit.

[being re-edited in light of comments]

In his annoyingly unarchived but entertaining PATNEWS mailing list, Gregory Aharonian today frames an intriguing argument for an engineering boycott of government-funded Moon and Mars missions. To whit: It’s all a waste of money and effort unless we can drop the cost of reaching Low Earth Orbit tenfold. We live in a money pit of a gravity well — brute force with old technology has reached its limits, and it still costs about $10k to get a pound of junk (meat or metal) into orbit. Time to be smart about it.

Speaking as a patent lawyer, seeing innovative stuff a the time, he thinks the current costs are silly. Worse—they’re pork. I tend to agree. In his words:

So to me, these new plans to go to the moon or Mars are nothing more than an excuse to give tax dollars to companies that don’t know how to do true innovation. If they did, they wouldn’t need government monies. The plans are boondoggles, and an insult to inventors. Indeed, a breakthrough in achieving low earth orbit will lead to so many secondary inventions as to spur a regrowth in inventing and patenting.

Look if this country has $20 billion to spend on a Mars mission, why not save $19 billion, and have a multi-year, $1 billion prize contest for a breakthrough in achieving low Earth orbit. The current $10,000,000 (or 20) prize offered by the X-Prize Foundation (for the first private rocket that can carry three people to an altiture of 100 kilometers twice within two weeks) is a good start, but why not a bigger prize, or more prizes?

[my annotations]

Aharonian then lists the titles and abstracts of a number of those very patents: 6,669,148; 6,581,881; 6,568,639; 6,565,044; 6,561,461; (and a bunch more)

And while you’re at it, why not write to Aharonian and ask him to get a damned web archive set up!

From The Ann Arbor Democrat. January 16, 1879. Page 2, Column 2.

The Mining Journal says that Indiana resurrectionists pack cadavers in barrels of potatoes, and send to Ann Arbor, where the bodies are taken to the college and the potatoes sold to the grocers. This is true, except the potatoes are shipped to Marquette where they bring high prices, owing to their rich gamey flavor.

The Democrat seems to have been an edgy college town newspaper—I recall a number of amusing filler items like this as I was browsing the microfilm, and a rather rakish tone throughout.

Robert Schneck, over at the forteana Yahoo group, suggests [login] a connection between Carl Fiegenbaum (the supposed Ripper executed at Sing Sing, mentioned earlier in a transcribed article) and the unsolved murder of “Old Shakespeare”.

On the very next day it seems that the New York Times has run an article on the very same thing [login], the day after I posted this.

I have a confession. May as well make it privately, just between you and me.

I love shopping on eBay. It is a great chance to turn a little education into cold hard cash with little effort. Only consulting is more rewarding, in my experience.

One of my favorite bargain hunts is a search that approximately (I wouldn’t want to give it all away and let you compete with me!) reads “Old German Books”. There’s a good deal more to it than that, with lots of flags and boolean stuff going in since eBay allows one to frame rather complex and comprehensive searches. But basically that’s my baby, my cash cow.

OK. My book cow.

See, people—yeah, Americans in particular, but not much more than human beings in general—are ignorant. Most eBay collectibles- and book-sellers as a rule appear to be moreso, but I’ll argue that this is due more to constraints and the economics of time than to wanton obstinacy.

Though I’ve met more than a handful of wantonly obstinate sellers through the years.

It’s a trade-off that’s surprisingly universal, yet infrequently noted: Time is money. But knowledge is money, too. And knowledge—in this case researching the crap you’re trying to sell—takes time. Thus the obvious conflict.

Think about it: You’re driven, most likely by rampant bibliomania, to become a bookseller. You’ve got a living room with boxes full of old crap acquired from family members and estate sales. Lots and lots of books. Trust me: 94% of book people sell them because they realized they were about to die of bookshelf collapse.

I can go take a picture if you want to understand what I mean….

So, assuming by whatever course of dawning horror or threats from your spouse (or Social Services) that you really want to sell some of them off, and maybe earn a decent wage (or at least pay for more better books) while doing so, you have to describe every damned one of them in as much detail as possible. This is not just lots of typing, but finding out what to type.

It’s a quirk of online economics. On eBay, you sell 90% or more to people who discover your item in the results of a keyword search. So you have to include the right keywords in your auction listing to catch that rich suckercustomer looking for your great thingie among the many millions of listings. But you also have to do that for every goddamned one of them. Time being money, you must skimp on research. You cut corners. You haven’t got the time to look everything up. You haven’t got time even to transcribe the tables of contents.

Let alone translating obscure weird-ass furrin gothic German book titles. You know the kind: ornate calligraphic type, densely set, with all sorts of flourishes and weird letterforms most Americans have never seen in their lives. Hell, unless you got a B+ or higher in high school german class, I bet you can’t even transcribe crap like that. Is that an “f ” or an “s”? A “k” or a “t”? All those little dots over the vowels — what’s up with that? And those weird swirly capital letters all look exactly the same! Aaggh! It’s beautiful! It’s gotta be worth $20 at least! No time!

Better still, eBay will charge you for the listing, even if it doesn’t sell.

So, thou ignorant and time-pressed seller, how do you sell these things? Simple: You call it “Old German Book” in the auction title, and in the description field you say something like, “I don’t read German, but this is a lovely book, with lots of neat pictures. The title is something like ‘Dueftsches Libel’¹. It’s really really nice! Buy it! Please, god, get it the hell out of here! Shoot, I gotta run! Be sure to check out my 8-track tape auctions!² I can tell you what their titles are!”

So who sees this auction? Well, sure there are a rare breed of trainspotters and equivalent lost souls who look at every listing in the Antiquarian Books category. Betcha money they’re busy with well-described books where they know what it is you’re talking about. So, back to the keyword searchers, the lion’s share of eBay sales. How many people are going to come across your lovely Old German Book via a search for… “libel”? “lots of neat pictures”? Shyeah, right.

Nope. You know the only people who will ever see your Old German Book auction? Sharks like me.

Oh, such treasures have I found. One “Nice old German(?) boook[sic] Pixs!” was an amazing scientific tract, filled with full-page wood engravings and chromolithographs, with a fold-out cross-section of the earth showing volcanoes and fossils and bound in a stunning hand-tooled Jugenstil binding in five leathers and… and it cost me $9 plus shipping. ABEbooks.com, when it has this volume (mainly listed by German Antiquariats), says its street value is about €280.

Not that I’m selling that sort of thing, mind you. Just upgrading….

So: Time is money, but knowledge is money too. (Time is probably not knowledge, though.)

¹I just saw that. “Dueftches Libel”. It’s a bible, of course. “Deutsches Bibel”

²At which point you have violated eBay’s extremely stringent keyword spamming rules, and this auction, and possibly every other one you have running, will be destroyed mercilessly. Some rules nazi will come along and ask, “Are you selling an 8-track tape in this listing? Does an ‘8-track tape’ have anything to do with Jugendstil antiquarian books? No? Then die!”

[update later that day]: I am looking at the moment at a listing, which misspells three words in the title, with a starting bid of $20. I might go for it. ABEbooks shows a Leipzig Antiquariat selling what seems to be an equivalent copy for €2300.

[about local Forteana]

From the Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant. April 16, 1868. Page 6, Column 1.

An Antediluvian Lunatic.

Dr. Skac of the Morningside Asylum in Edinburgh, says in his annual report that among the patients who died last year was one who had been in the asylum for 29 years, and was a thorough gentleman. He possessed considerable humor, was an excellent player at bowls and billiards and whist. He displayed the most singular delusion of any man he (Dr. Skac) ever met. He asserted that he was upwards of twenty thousand years of age, and described the pre-historic period of the hearth [sic], during which he had witnessed three floods greater than Noah’s. Noah, he knew very well, and described him as a nice lad when he knew him first, but as having latterly fallen into dissipated habits. He has commanded numerous large armies at various periods, and for the last three or four thousand years was Agustus J. Caesar (his usual signature) commander-in-chief of the Roman armies. His anecdotes and imagination were inexhaustible, and a large book might be readily filled with the history he gave of himself and his time during his long, imaginary and eventful life.

Just as it was individuals with specific genetic diseases who helped us determine the cellular workings of metabolism, it is through crackpots that we will finally learn to understand human social psychology….

Over at Johnny Logic, Mr. Taylor has posted an interesting defense of computational philosophy.

As it turns out, I didn’t know one was required—there seems to be a substantial reading list and group of people and professional organizations out there—but his tone implies there is the same sort of fundamental inertia in circles philosophical as I’ve seen in… well, for example, biology. Having hoed that row for a while, I think I might have a few helpful hints to pass along, both to him and also in passing to the folks who want to promote that ill-defined but interesting field popularly called “complexity”.

There are three main points I’d like to make:

1. Define your terms: People on both sides often elide the distinction between a model, a simulation, and an analogy. This begets anguish and strife, the flaring of tempers, and wasted ink.
2. Building “analogous systems”: The point of building instantiations of models, and why “traditional” fields haven’t been doing it for years.
3. Howsabout Alexandrian patterns?: Sometimes what we mean by “model” isn’t really a model at all; the closest word may be “pattern”, after Alexander.

I’ve broken this up into four parts: This intro, and three segments along the lines of that list. The remainder will be forthcoming as it develops.

[about local Forteana]

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant. March 5, 1868. Page 7, Column 1.

Ottawa Lake Mysteriously Disappeared.

A correspondent of a Coldwater paper gives the following particulars concerning the strange disappearance of Ottawa Lake, in Bedford township, Monroe county.

For some days past Ottawa Lake has presented a very exciting scene. The occassion [sic] was this: Those living near the lake observed for some days previous that the ice on the lake was falling. Soon they discovered that the fish were crowding to the holes in the ice where they watered their cattle. They increased in numbers, large and small, the former having their mouths wide open, and so exhausted that the people caught them with their hands.

As many teams daily visited the lake, hauling stones from the shores for building purposes, the news soon spread to a distance all around. The work of quarrying and hauling stones was soon abondoned [sic], and in a short time scores of teams and hundreds of men might be seen on an about the lake. The men with hand-spikes, crow-bars and axes, were busily engaged in cutting and raising huge peices [sic] of ice, and then stooping down and lifting the fish, some of which were dead, some alive, and some frozen fast in the ice, for the water having departed from the lake by some subterranean passage, the vast sheet of ice lay on the bottom.

For three days immense quantities of fish were carried away, principally pickerel and bass, while vast quantities of white fish were left to rot on the ice and in the mud—for mud and ice is all that is left of Ottawa Lake, numerous pieces of ice being left standing on edge, like so many grave stones. The lake, or rather its bed or grave-yard, presents a novel scene. Some say the water will soon return by the same source by which it departed, bringing a fresh supply of fish with it, for Lake Erie is supposed to be its headquarters. It will be well if it does, otherwise sickness may be feared in the burying ground of Ottawa Lake. In the meantime the farmers will greatly feel the loss of the departed waters.

About seven years ago, I am told, this lake departed in the same way, and old men say it departs and returns periodically.

Hard to say, with the ragged pixelated maps at mapquest, whether the lake is still there or not. But it seems (given scant research so far) that the town of Ottawa Lake is there, in Monroe County, Michigan.

[about local Forteana]

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant. April 2, 1868. Page 7, Column 1.

A Texan Lady.

A wild woman has been seen in the woods near Liberty, Texas. A man on horseback got sight of the strange creature, pursued and overtook her; when she halted, found her to be a medium-sized, middle-aged, well-formed woman with long, dark hair, and clear blue eyes. She was in a state of nudity, save a girdle of moss around her loins. Her body and limbs were covered with a coat of hair about four inches in length. She was much frightened, and seemed unable to talk. The “solitary horseman” attempted to drive her towards the settlement, when she became enraged, seized a club, and turned upon him with the fury of a demon, and it was only the speed imparted to his steed by a liberal use of the spurs that he kept out of her way. Other parties had previously reported seeing this home-made gorilla, and an organized effort to capture her is to be made.

The eminent Dr. Shalizi has, out of the blue, proposed a very interesting thing: an actual useful application of “social network theory”. Or, more accurately, a useful tool that may be the first that could transform the explicit, quantifiable social capital of young academics into real cash dollars, fame, high living, an improved standard of living, a decent wage, self-esteem, inter-university organizations… and suchlike pipe-dreams.

No, seriously. As Ellis has pointed out, Friendster and Tribe are burning their own muscles due to their inherent lack of utility. I mean, aside from casual sex (or rough approximations, like “dating” and “matchmaking”), what good are they, really? What actual economic utility is there to Tell All Your Friends to Join You Online? Look, user dude: you don’t get small world network structure at all, do you? If they’re your friends, and you’re joining Friendster, odds are they’ve already joined too. “Hey, let’s all go to the Mall… well, a kindof chatroom, actually, and… umm, chat. Just fill out this cool profile—and tell the truth!”

Ah, but matchmaking between student and academic position. That is a very interesting thing indeed. As Cosma so aptly kvetches, the academic application process is slow, messy, noisy, tiring, expensive and just plain crummy; in general neither the applicant or employer should be counted on to enjoy it or do it right. But though it’s hard as hell, it’s absolutely necessary (well, as long as you don’t want to just end up working in Borders, it is).

Economists think they’ve solved this problem, but have done so with lots of simplifying assumptions and their traditional disregard for real world social dynamics. As a result they’ve developed the utility-maximizing Economics Job Market. Getting all the students in the country to fit in a standardized format and meet at the AEA Meetings sounds like a fine thing if you’re an economist, but… well, it’s just not it is it. Is it less noisy? tiring? competitive? Does it actually succeed in matching candidates to suitable positions (exploitation), while at the same time maintaining a likelihood of novel and interesting random pairings (exploration)?

I’d guess no. But who am I? (A: Not an economist)

Most Ph.D.s (economists included) possess a nice trackable measurable feature that plays well to both academic social norms and mathematical approaches to social networks: published papers with bibliographies. PhDMeatmarket.com is feasible because the network of citations is already out there. And it’s pretty much machine-readable. Schools want good researchers; researchers want a sense of progress and goals. Both could use the sort of rigor that a formal matching process, and automated peer selection, could provide.

The benefits and implications could extend to other settings beyond professor/postdoc hiring, too. Needless to say, it’s not just grad students who publish papers (nor is it merely academics); should the informal publishing network developing on the Web among non-scientists be incorporated? And in certain hiring situations it would be more valuable to identify generalists and those who collaborate frequently, rather than just specialist experts—you could do that.

Note that we’re not talking about just another Monster.com here. This isn’t a fancy online want-ads system—it’s a map of the intellectual community based on its actual artifacts, an active and helpful directory.

Hmmm. And, I suppose, a point system. Just as an author might be tempted to check her Amazon ranking now and then (I know two who watch tickers updated daily), who could resist checking to see their Academic Centrality or Nominal Expertise measures? Oh, but that’s dangerous isn’t it? Heaven forfend that a graduate student should distract themselves by paying attention to their reputation, or hireability, or who might be interested in hiring them when instead they should be focused on… well, doing their work. For their professors. No, that would be a threat to the social norms of indenture and spartan abuse.

Best not go that way, then. The kids might get uppity.

Heck, speaking of kids, push the notion a bit. Take for example grad school admissions, as John Taylor directs. The trick is, there’s no artifact equivalent to publications, is there? To build the crucial social network, we’re back to plain old surveys and self-reporting, aren’t we?

Well, hang on — there is one class of artifact that is more or less universal: grades.What if the proverbial “permanent record” were to be public. But of course, any student will tell you (me included) that some shit-for-brains professor with a chip on his shoulder gave everybody a C in that class. So these Permanent Standard Grades could objectively normalized for the grade-giving behavior of the professors, of course, and would have to take into account student ratings of faculty.

That sword must cut both ways. Those annoying class reviews, bane of many a tenured hack, become very interesting of a sudden.

Naaah… way too draconian. Much too much like that weird-ass Transparent Society that David Brin thought up.

Nobody would go for such a hare-brained idea. Will they?

Gary Jones has posted an excellent essay on popular misconceptions about Precision Agriculture. While nominally a reaction to an ill-conceived article by Brian DeVore, Gary’s essay is worth reading on its own strengths.

In addition to making a number of informed and thoughtful points, he pushes a number of my personal buttons. To whit:

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to work on a team developing a very advanced machine learning system for farmers applying precision agriculture. I met the farmers themselves, and saw their farms, and talked with them about the technical and management aspects of their farming operations. These may be a slightly biased sample, since they already knew exactly what they needed so they could grow more food, more safely, with less environmental impact: access to data and modeling systems. Maybe there are others who don’t get that.

For example, you need to know about your soil. Pedology is hard. Soil types (of a list of thousands, which are apallingly organized in my opinion) and characteristics (composition, drainage, compaction, slope, &c; &c;) vary on the scale of meters in fields that are hectares in size. Minor variations in soil can have tremendous effects on crop yield (and crop choice), and so farmers really want to know about their soil, and ideally on something like a meter grid.

So which would you prefer:

1. To walk around in your field, squatting occasionally, squinting at the slope and gauging the angle of the sun, and poke and prod your fingers down into the dirt, and taste it occasionally to estimate the surface composition?
2. To pay some middleman to drive a truck out into the field, and take a few dozen core samples a meter deep and a few cm across, haul them back to the lab, from which they eventually return a report that infers and interpolates and estimates the detailed structure of your land?
3. To have a high-resolution satellite snap meter-scale digital images of the field, in three or four spectral bands, and from those images automatically map the soil characteristics, so that the resulting models can be used to maximize yield and minimize environmental impact from fertilizer, tillage and irrigation?

Which do you think DeVore would commend? Which do you think a farmer would prefer? (Note that I have no idea whether DeVore is himself a farmer.)

Notice how the whole “becoming as one with the land” and “sensing the state of the complex ecology through personal experience and intuition” reminds one of the Noble Savage, whose steely and appraising gaze is informed by ancient lore?

I’m reminded of a conversation I overheard between my friends Cosma Shalizi and Erik Schultes, one night in a bar. Erik earnestly and emphatically decried the evils of globalization and the loss of native cultures and societies. In response, Cosma simply described what his ancestors’ lives had been like in Afghanistan. To paraphrase: nasty, brutish, short.

Seems it’s simple to invoke a Lost Golden Age. But why do they always assume the Golden Age was in the past? Sure, it’s a myth of Western Civilization (or perhaps all of them), but… well, it’s not very thoughtful, is it?

I’m Bill Tozier.

Just some guy, no different from anybody else. A dabbler. Unqualified to speak on any subject, like as not.

I can be reached via: email

Well, here are some things that if you asked somebody who knows me they might allow as I know a little bit about, especially because somebody at some point has paid my salary and/or consulting fee to explicitly do or explain at some point: general principles and detailed explanation of complex systems research, astrobiology, molecular biology background training for laboratory technicians, computational models of ecosystem dynamics, discrete models of the origin of life, genetic algorithms for engineering design and operations research applications, neural networks for business decision support, design of novel machine learning and datamining approaches, dynamic models of protein folding, pharmaceutical lead compound discovery using machine learning, extreme programming and related agile software development methodologies, graph and hypergraph theory, graph-rewriting systems, meta-optimization (finding and tuning good search algorithms for particular optimization problems), agent-based system design and analysis, agent-based routing of streaming media on the Internet, evidence marshaling (though we didn’t call it that back in the day) and optimal experimental design, exploratory statistical data analysis, chloroplast molecular genetics, plant developmental biology, plant tissue culture, adaptive predictive decision support models for farmers, automated trading systems and data salience information agents for hedge fund managers, massive real-time datamining applications, consignment sales of antiques and collectibles on eBay, writing corporate futurist reports on the future of manufacturing over the next 20 years, introductory botany, organic chemistry and biochemistry instruction, typographic design, system administration of CP/M networks (though not lately), Forth and Prograph programming, epidemiological statistical modeling, in vivo expression of random-sequence ubiquitin fusion peptide libraries in S. cerevisiae.

There may have been some others I missed, and of course this is just the subset of stuff that people have arguably paid me to do. I have some hobbies, too.

Seen in Greg Aharonian’s excellent PATNEWS mailing list (of which no Web archive exists!? Get with the program, Greg!). Quoted with permission, but annotated and corrected on my own recognizance.

A PATNEWS APOLOGY TO IBM

A couple of years ago I ridiculed IBM for a patent they had acquired, the infamous 6,329,919 patent titled “System and method for providing reservations for restroom use”, which I thought was completely idiotic and pointless. I wish to formally apologize to IBM for using the word “completely”. Apparently I should have used the word “mostly” instead, because in using “completely” I incorrectly assumed (and thus the apology) than no one dumber would come along to make IBM look prophetic. But never say never:

United States Ban Lines for Bathroom on Flights (7 January 2004) SANS PrivacyBits

According to Australia’s Qantas Airways, the U.S. Transport Security Administration is requiring that passengers on flights to the U.S. are not to congregate in groups in any area of the aircraft, especially around the lavatories. Given that the commercial flights from Australia to the U.S. are among the world’s longest flights, Australia’s Transport Minister John Anderson maintains that the ban is “a little bit hard to handle.” [article link]

I can see it know. The Transport Security Administration is going to license IBM’s bathroom reservation patent. Anyone who wants to use the bathroom on an airplane will have to make a reservation using IBM’s technology. The onboard computer taking the reservation will beam each name to a ground-based security computer (to be called the Passenger Incontinence Security System) that will screen each name to see if the airplane passenger will be allowed to complete the processing of drinking one too many Fosters lagers.

So to IBM, I apologize, and hope on my next flight to Australia, they will allow me to use their technology (though as I remember, during a reexam, IBM dedicated this patent to the public, bless their corporate hearts).

[about local Forteana]

From The Ann Arbor Register, April 30, 1896. Page 2, column 4.

WAS THE “RIPPER”

Alleged Whitechapel Fiend Electrocuted.

Carl Zahm, who died in the electric chair at Sing Sing Monday is declared by his lawyer to have been the noted monster.

New York, April 29.—”Jack the Ripper” sat in Sing Sing’s death chair Monday and was killed. His lawyer declared that the man executed was the fiend who set the world horror-stricken with his revel of blood in Whitechapel, and who was put out of existence for the murder of a woman.

This remarkable criminal, who was electrocuted for killing Mrs. Johanna Hoffmann, defied the police of all the continents. He murdered when and where he chose. And now no detective is to reap the glory of bringing the worst assassin of the century to his doom. To a lawyer belongs the credit of revealing the probable identity of the man who, as Carl Fiegenbaum, was executed Monday.

As the murderer’s body was being carried from the death chair to the autopsy-room, William Sanford Lawton, his counsel, who fought for more than a year and a half to save the life of his miserable client, made a statement, declaring his full belief that Fiegenbaum was “Jack the Ripper,” author of many of the Whitechapel murders. And then he told the facts which led to that conclusion. Fiegenbaum, or Zahm, had been all over Europe, and much of this country. He seems on first acquaintance to be simple-mined, almost imbecile, yet the many was crafty beyond measure. He had means of his own, as was probed by a will he made before his death, yet he always professed extreme poverty. Mrs. Hoffmann, who lived in two miserable rooms with her son Michael, was very poor. Fiegenbaum hired one of the rooms for the merest pittance, promising to pay when he had secured work. He lived there for two days.

During the following night Michael Hoffmann awoke to find the boarder in the act of cutting his mother’s throat. Fiegenbaum ran at him, knife in hand, and the boy sprang out on a window ledge. Fiegenbaum stabbed the woman again, jumped from a rear window into an area, threw away the knife, and escaped.

Mr. Lawton’s idea is that he had planned a murder of the “ripper” order, and that the boy’s cries prevented him from carrying out his intentions. The man was caught red-handed that night. He was questioned at length through an interpreter, for he professed entire ignorance of English.

Mr. Lawton frequently conversed with Fiegenbaum in English while the man was confined in the Tombs, but on every occasion when anyone else was present—even today, when he declared his innocence to Warden Sage—he demanded the assistance of an interpreter.

Once in a burst of confidence he told his lawyer that he was a victim of the mania to mutilate women, that it was beyond his control at times, and that it was that which had got him into trouble. He said that in the sight of heaven he was innocent, and added: “God will not let me die.”

The lawyer was greatly impressed by what the man told him. A little later he thought of the Whitechapel crimes and looked up the dates and was talking with him confidentially, he said: “Carl, were you in London from this date to that one,” naming those selected.

“Yes,” the prisoner answered, and relapsed into silence. But as time went on the lawyer, in tracing his movements prior to the crime, discovered that Fiegenbaum had never lived in any house which was not in charge of a woman. Mr. Lawton once put the question of the Whitechapel murders to Fiegenbaum, whose reply was that the Lord was responsible for his acts and that to Him only could he confess.

By his will, which he signed “Figenbaum” [sic] and not “Zahm,” the murderer made Warden Sage his executor, bequeathed $80 to Father Bruder to pay for his burial, and left the rest of his property to his sister, “Magdalene Strohband, widow, in Ganbickelheim, Alzel, Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany.” He directed that a house and lot, which he said he owned in Cincinnati, be sold and the proceeds sent to this sister.

While it seems that a number of contemporary newspaper accounts exist that describe Fiegenbaum’s (variously “Feigenbaum”) lawyer’s account, I’m pretty skeptical of the whole affair since the only online references seem to be derived from a single New York newspaper article.

As ever, please let me know if you have any additional information.

[about local Forteana]

From The Ann Arbor Register, March 12, 1896, page 12, column 3.

He has fits for a living.

Daniel Evans can have them in jail now if he wants to.

Brooklyn detectives say that Daniel Evans, 19 years old, with no home, is the greatest “fit fakir” they have met professionally in the course of a long and varied experience, says the New York Tribune. He has been pretending to “take fits,” they say, with a regularity and perfection that has gained him lots of money from sympathetic persons, but which at least led him to jail, where to-day he languishes under the supervision of a “minion of the law,” who nervously watches Daniel Evans in case he should “take a fit” there.

Evans is the young man who has been visiting hotels and churches, where he had fits and fits and fits. After one fit he would have a collection taken up for his benefit and then he would seek another field and have another fit. He worked this novel scheme in various places in New York city and Brooklyn; in the former city at the Fifth Avenue hotel, in the latter at the St. George hotel and at other places. After each simulated fit Evans would collect money to pay his fare to Fresno, Cal., “where his poor old father lived.” He did this at the St. George a few weeks ago. He went to the Grace Methodist Episcopal church, Seventh avenue and St. John’s place, and had a fit and a collection in the middle of the Sunday evening services.

Last Sunday night he went to the First Reformed church, Seventh avenue and Carroll street, and had a fit there. The Rev. Dr. James M. Farrar, however, thought that Evans was having fits for value received and that his schemes was a fradulent one to gain money and sympathy. So after Evans had called at the “Dutch Arms,” a club connected with the church, Dr. Farrar informed Detectives Reynolds and Weiser, who arrested Evans.

From The Ann Arbor Register, March 19, 1896, page 10, column 4.

Unused Electric Power.

There is considerable waste, as people sometimes find out.

“Did you ever think,” said an observing man lately to a reporter of the New York Tribune, “how much loose electricity there is around? It is brought to my notice especially every time I have occasion to ride in a trolley car on a wet day. I have frequently received a stinging shock by taking hold of the brass rail as I swung myself aboard. My feet are wet, you see, and water is so good a conductor that a ground connection is established with myself as part of the circuit. The sensation is quite enough to be disagreeable, I assure you.

“The metal doorsill, too, is another place where the current leaks out. Since I discovered that by personal experience I have often amused myself by watching the people who enter and leave the car. If they step over the wet threshold well and good, but if their feet touch it they are likely to get some of the superfluous power. Then the expression on their faces is ludicrous. Most of them look completely bewildered, as if they didn’t know what had struck them, and I suppose they don’t know for the instant.

“Those are not the only places where there is free electricity, either. In my own office I can get as severe a shock as I could from a battery. In one of the incandescent light fixtures there is a spot where the current escapes in great force. By touching this place with a key, a knife or any bit of metal and resting my other hand on the iron of the steam radiator near by I can take a shock of such power as to burn my hand and make me drop the experiment in a hurry. The other day half a dozen of us joined hands and formed a line between the two places. The man at one end held a key to the fixture and the fellow at the other end laid his hand on the radiator. You would hardly believe how strong the current was. Our hands seems suddenly gripped together and after we let go our fingers tingled for minutes from the effect.

“I have often thought that a computation of the amount of unused electric force there is around us would be interesting. There must be numbers of other places that I have never noticed where it escapes and I suppose there is no doubt that in the aggregate the power wasted would be sufficient to accomplish a tremendous amount of work.”

The author has struck upon a very useful homework exercise for the science student….

Aficionados of retro imagery and mid-Century advertising art—whether ironic or just earnest—may enjoy EphemeraNow.com. While the site is charming and aesthetically sophisticated, the effort involved seems a tad misplaced to me, if only because we have a house filled with books and ephemera from the 1850s-1950s, and are trying to sell it all off on eBay so we can use our house for sitting and walking and stuff…. [via Mark Newman]

American Victorian Costume in Early Photographs by Priscilla Harris Dalrymple. 128 pp. Dover Publications; ISBN: 0486265331; (May 1991)

Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion 1840-1900 by Joan L. Severa, Nancy Rexford, Claudia Brush Kidwell. 614 pages. Publisher: Kent State Univ. Press. ISBN: 0873385128; (March 1997)

What is one to do when trying to date a Victorian-era family photograph? We sell a lot of them these days on eBay, since we’ve made a habit for many years of buying them up at estate sales. Many times there are few explicit clues that would help identify the people, let alone the date: No names, no cities, no years.

But what about the clothing they were wearing?

Admittedly it’s not the most straightforward process: You do need to have something of an eye for detail. But it’s possible, and fun as well.

Kodak: The lens of Nostalgia (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture) by Nancy Martha West, 242 pp. paperback. May 2000, University Press of Virginia. ISBN: 0813919592

We attend a lot of estate auctions, and as I’ve written elsewhere one of the ways we enjoy them is by thinking of them as museums of other people’s lives—a sort of biographical-sociological slice of lost life. If you’ve ever gone to one, you may have noticed just how many snapshots and albums of family members Americans in general accumulate. Just looking around your own house, think about the number and prevalence of family pictures. It turns out it’s not just you: it’s everybody.

Where did the clichéd Proud Parent Taking the 500th Snapshot of Baby Toddling come from? Where did the Appallingly Thorough Vacation Slide Show for Guests come from? Is this some sort of emergent consequence of deep-seated need for externalizing memory? Some genetically-driven desire to preserve the past forever? Symptoms of pathological nostalgia?

Or is it the outcome of somebody’s marketing plan?

Guess what: Eastman did it. Marketing plan. More or less made all our brains this way all by himself.

This fascinating book—a surprisingly smooth and pleasant read for such an academic volume—traces the advertising campaigns (spanning decades) of the do-it-yourself photography companies: Kodak, Polaroid, and the rest. They touted preserving memories, rampant nostalgia, spontaneous “candid” camera shots (the “Kodak Moment”), independence, travel, and as far as I can tell even the artsy-craftsy aesthetic work of middle-class ladies in museum competitions.

And look what happened….

[UPDATED]

as of 25 January 2004, you’re looking at Blosxom augmented with the following plugins:

• Kozo Avo’s variation on paginate_simple (and indeed the entire iztsu theme)
• Eric Davis’s: headlines
• John Gruber’s: SmartyPants
• Todd Larason’s: categories,seemore
• Stu MacKenzie’s: blox
• Nelson Minar’s: asin, clicktrack
• And also (unattributed while the blosxom site is down): meta, interpolate_conditional, random_text, rss10, antispam, archives, state, storytitle, theme, breadcrumbs, wikieditish, wikiwordish, entries_index, find

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music has been brought to my attention a half-dozen times (not least by futurismic and Bruce Sterling). Forget the music—or rather, enjoy the music, since it’s just fine music—I want to know about how Ishkur embedded the arguably complex classes in such an ingenious space. I mean, there’s a radial time axis, and an implied similarity metric that puts nanogenres that’re more like each other closer together, and separates unrelated ones. And there are the links, which seem to imply literal relationships and crossover, or perhaps just the least-distinguishable classes.

Very cool. Be sure to note the multiple tracks in each pop-up description.

You know, if you were looking for a great machine learning project, doing this automatically would be the cat’s veritable pajamas.

We found this in my father’s office, tucked away in an envelope (runs in the family). I’d imagine it’s from the 1940s or earlier.

It’s the classic Spanish Prisoner Letter. Most folks will simply think of the David Mamet film. But those who follow cons and scams will know it as a whole class of scams—as in, “Oh, that’s just a Spanish Prisoner con. You see them all the time.” Well, I bet you’ve never seen the real thing. A type specimen.

The reader will surely have by now received innumerable copies of the Nigerian 419 email scam, which is its direct descendant.

boingboing mentions Eric Joyner’s online gallery of brilliant and amusingly PoMo paintings of tin-toy robots. Unfortunately, the folks over there seem to have missed the fact that Joyner’s style is that of the classic American illustrators of the Brandywine school, and other magazine illustrators up to the 50s (especially Freas); they call him “impressionistic”. Might as well describe anybody using oils as a “Renaissance” painter, since after all that’s when they invented those oil paints.

Other related imagery from the greats might drive the point home:

• Frank Kelly Freas
• Frank E. Schoonover
• N. C. Wyeth

Numerous sources this weekend (oddly enough including Rush Limbaugh) decry CBS for blocking MoveOn.org’s Bush in 30 Seconds advertisement from the Superbowl broadcast. Suffice to say, the result will probably draw a good deal more attention to MoveOn than even that ad itself would have done.

It will be interesting to watch the Google News zeitgeist on the subject.

[about local Forteana]

From The Ann Arbor Register of 12 March, 1896, page 9, column 2

A Queer Marine Vehicle.

A French genius is credited with the invention of a curious marine conundrum, a four or eight or ten-wheeled cycle, whose wheels are entirely hollow and air-tight and keep the structure above water; these four or ten wheels are located by pairs and between the starboard and the larboard set a horizontal platform is suspended, upon which are built cabins, dining-room, engine room and so forth, intended simply for passengers, there being no hull in which to stow a cargo, while the wheels, instead of sliding across the water and cutting it, as do common craft, roll upon it. The rudder of this new boat is described as consisting of a hollow vertical metallic tube, which dips into the water, and is provided with a lateral slit, through this slit water being forced by an engine at high pressure, and the reaction of this water upon the surrounding medium propelling the craft at the same time that it steers it. The cylinder, which is in the nature of things movable, turns around its axis vertically, by which means the slit may be placed as it should be.

Got a clear mental image? I’m seeing some sort of gigantic farting water-skimmer thingie. You?

[about local Forteana]

From The Ann Arbor Register of 7 May, 1896, page 3, column 4

ST. JOE SUBURB HAS A GHOST.

Residents of the Missouri Town Terrified by a Female Spectre.

St. Joseph, Mo., May 4.—A ghost is haunting Saxton Heights, a suburb of this city, in the form of a woman who flits about under the trees at night and screams until the residents of that vicinity are awakened. The spectre has been seen and heard on several occasions, but nobody has been able to get close enough to it to make an investigation. Last Sunday night 100 people heard the screams of the supposed ghost and many of them arose and dressed. A number of men went into the grove near by, from whence the unearthly screams were coming, and, while they could still hear moaning, as if some one was in mortal agony, they could see nothing. A hunting party will be organized for the purpose of capturing the ghost.

One wonders how (and why) the story reached Ann Arbor. Telegraph, or personal communication, or was it carried by a larger news outlet?

[about local Forteana]

From The Ann Arbor Register of 12 March, 1896, page 5, column 4

There is a man living in the Island District who claims that he saw a spectral form in his bedroom not long ago but it is thought he ate too much plum pudding before going to bed he seems to be all right, no ghost.

Punctuated as found. The location of the “Island District” of Ann Arbor is unclear. Perhaps near Fuller and Maiden Lane?

[about local Forteana]

From The Washtenaw Whig of 10 October, 1849, page 1, column 6

Mental Electricity.

It will be recollected by our readers, that Messrs. I. I. & G. W. Keely¹ gave a number of interesting Lectures, and performed numerous experiments in this Science, a few weeks since in this village. Since then they have been lecturing in several places in this vicinity. The prominent feature in their lectures and [pronounce-?]ments, is the application of this agency to the cure of disease. In this they have been eminently successful, as is testified by numerous affidavits and testimonials of individuals who have been under their treatment. Some of the cures they have effected in Saline, in this county, we published in our paper some weeks since. We have seen the report of their class in Plymouth Wayne Co., also the testimonials of their success, from many who were there, under their treatment, all testifying to the efficacy of Mental Electricity when applied as a remedial agent. In Northville, Wayne Co., they have met with like success, as is testified by many of the first citizens if [sic] the place. Skepticism has fallen prostrate, wherever they have unfurled their banner. May they go on and prosper. Their cause is worthy of their united efforts.

¹Apparently Isaac Iddings Keely and his brother George Washington Keely, of Oxford, Ohio. Not to be confused with famous “zero point energy” mountebank and/or genius John Worrell Keely (though I cannot eliminate the possibility of a familial relationship). Some history of these fellows may be gleaned from a genealogy page from the Butler County, Ohio historical society. I. I. was apparently known as a bricklayer and mesmerist, and his brother a dentist. It’s unclear whether George did dentistry on hypnotized patients; somewhere in the archive I have more articles on their visits, which I’ll try to find.

See also 1849: Keely healing testimonial

The esteemed artists of code at DrunkMenWorkHere.org have undertaken an interesting exercise. Based on a substantial sample of visitor-submitted 3000 URLs which were then converted into image files, they have estimated certain characteristics of an average web page.

It’s gray.

[via Nelson Minar]

[about local Forteana]

From The Washtenaw Whig of 10 October, 1849, page 1, column 6

Mental Electricity.

WASHTENAW COUNTY ss. [?]

Abram Moe of Ann Arbor, in said county, being duly sworn, deposes and says, that my son, seventeen years of age, was attacked with inflammation of the right hip and knee, about the first of April last, with which he suffered very much, particularly at night. His hip was drawn out of its natural position to a considerable extent. His body was drawn very much out of its natural shape. The tendons were very much contracted—his leg crooked—with partial paralysis and cold. He gradually and constantly grew worse up to the first of September.—Previous to this he had been able to work a portion of the time, but the exertion always gave him pain. He was then confined to the house, and part of the time to the bed. Much of the time he suffered most excruciating pain and at all times suffered more or less, sleeping but very little. Medical aid did him no good. I consulted with E. Wells, M. D., one of our most distinguished Alopathic physicians. He gave me but little encouragement, and stated that the disease was very seldom cured—cited me to several persons who had died with the disease, and one only who had recovered. Knowing of several extraordinary cures effected by Mr. Keely to wit [sic]: Mr. A. Munson, Mrs. Hallock and Mr. John Maddigan, and others, I was induced to place my son under his treatment, [sic] I took him to Farmington on last Monday. It was with much difficulty I got him there. He has been magnetically treated to this time, and I am happy to say that he is now nearly, if not entirely well. He states that since the third days [sic] treatment he has been entirely free from pain. He walks erect—his hip has assumed very nearly its natural position—the tendons are relaxed,—walks with rapidity and ease, and I have full confidence that, by a continuance of the treatment, the cure will become perfect, and remain permanent.

ABRAM MOE.

Sworn and subscribed before me, this 2d day of Oct. A. D. 1949. [sic] E. LAWRENCE. Justice of the Peace.

The amount of slapdash typesetting is atypical for contemporary articles.

See also 1849: Keely brothers visit Ann Arbor

[about local Forteana]

From The Peninsular Courier & Visitant of 26 September, 1867, page 4, column 3

THE END OF THE WORLD.—The celebrated Dr. Cummings¹ has several times predicted the end of the world, and fixed the day for the grand finale, but his predictions have always proved false. In spite of him, the world has continued to roll on its accustomed course. The doctor, now, however, is determined to atone for the past, and acknowledges that in his predictions he was mistaken. He says in revising the calculations upon which he based the announcement of the world’s ending in 1867, he discovered that he had overlooked figures which add something like a quintillion of years to the race which this mundane sphere has to run. To see the real day of the end of the world, therefore, we must wait a short time longer.

¹Would this be John Cummings, of the Scottish National Church?

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 7 May, 1868, page 6, column 2

A body which had been preserved seventy-two days by a new process of embalming was dissected recently at Bellevue Hospital, New York. The dissection showed that the new process was decidedly satisfactory, and it may be an era in scientific discovery [sic]. But this was by no means the remarkable feature of the gathering at Bellevue. The corpse to be dissected was that of a woman, and with Doctors Sayre, Purple, Peters and a large number of equally well-known members of the medical profession, were two young female physicians, one of whom was too young to have been long in the profession, or at least in the practice of medicine and surgery. The women were interested spectators of the dissection, and the physicians of the masculine persuasion, the younger of them particularly, who used to jibe and jeer at the very idea of feminine practitioners, acknowledged the equality of these women and their rights to be present at this interesting dissection.

Noteworthy because it was noteworthy.

From The Peninsular Courier & Visitant of 3 October, 1867, page 6, column 4

A HUMAN FROG.

There is a man on exhibition in London who calls himself “Natator,” or the human frog, and who performs feats under water. Mr. F. Buckland has examined him and make [sic] a report thereupon. “Natator” practices in an aquarium, and the following are some of his feats:

He descends and eats, under water, a sponge cake or bun. He opens his mouth to show that he has really swallowed it. It is most difficult to swallow cake under water without also swallowing the water. It requires three years’ practice to do this performance with safety; for if, when under water, he should happen to cough, the water would enter, he would instantly be choked, and a serious accident would ensue.

Ascending to the surface, a soda-water bottle is handed to him; he dives with it to his perch at the bottom, and drinks down the contents, viz.: a half-penny worth of milk; he choses milk because of its color, and in order that the spectators may see that he actually drinks from the bottle; this is a most difficult trick, as it is hard to swallow the milk without the water getting into the mouth.

A lighted pipe is handed to him; he takes a few whiffs above water, and then descends with it. When under water he manages somehow to keep it alight, and he emits bubbles, which, coming to the surface, burst into little puffs of tobacco smoke.—Coming to the surface, he shows that it is still alight.

He is a very young man, twenty years old, five feet seven and a half inches in stature, and nine stone six pounds in weight; he is slightly built but exceedingly well made and muscular. His pulse, on coming out of the water, gave one hundred and forty-eight beats to the minute.

When he first began to practice long stays under water, some four or five years since, he used to suffer from severe headache, but now these have quite disappeared; he never has rheumatism, or other ache or pain in any form, though he goes through his performances at half past ten o’clock every night, and sometimes twice a day. Thew water in his aquarium he generally manages to keep at a temperature of about sixty-two degrees, but the warmer the water is, the longer he can stay in and the easier his performances become. The longest time he has ever remained under water at a stretch has been sixty-nine seconds, and last Saturday week he remained sixty-four. His ordinary tricks require from ten to thirty seconds under water.

From The Peninsular Courier & Visitant of 17 October, 1867, page 8, column 3

An American Spiritualist has applied for a patent for an apparatus for seeing ghosts. The invention consists in the employment of a chamber to which the air is admitted by a stop-cock, and light by a small piece of dark blue glass. The inventor states that the bodies of ghosts are so subtle that ordinary light is not reflected by them, and hence they cannot be perceived without the employment of the means suggested by the inventor.

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 12 September, 1867, page 7, column 2

VERY SINGULAR BUT TRUE.—R. W. Lair, of Spring Grove, informs us that about two weeks ago his wife killed a hen some two years old, which she thought to be very fat, and on cutting it open found common sized teaspoon, that had evidently worked out of the entrails, and was embedded in a kind of bladder near the egg bag. On cutting the bladder open a pint of water came from it. The spoon had been lost some two weeks, and is supposed to have been in the hen that length of time. This seems like an incredible story, but Mr. Lair, his wife, and a number of hands he had working for him testify to its truth. The story of the nails being found in the chicken’s craw is now laid in the shade.— Monmouth (Ill.) Review.

From “Review of New Books” in Graham’s Magazine, Philadelphia, July 1848, Vol 33, Number 1, pg. 60

Wurthering Heights. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo.

This novel is said to be by the author of Jane Eyre¹, and was eagerly caught at by a famished public, on the strength of the report. It afforded, however, but little nutriment, and has universally disappointed expectation. There is an old saying that those who eat toasted cheese at night will dream of Lucifer. The author of Wurthering Heights has evidently eat [sic] toasted cheese. How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors, such as we might suppose a person, inspired by a mixture of brandy and gunpowder, might write for the edification of fifth-rate blackguards. Were Mr. Quilp² alive we should be inclined to believe that the work had been dictated by him to Lawyer Brass, and published by the interesting sister of that legal gentleman.

¹Actually, it was written by Emily Brontë, not Charlotte—but who’s counting?

²From The Old Curiosity Shop

From Graham’s Magazine, Philadelphia, April 1848, Vol 32, Number 4, pg. 203

To The Author of The Raven

A poem by Miss Harriet B. Winslow

Leave us not so dark uncertain! lift again the fallen curtain!
Let us once again the mysteries of that haunted room explore—
Hear once more that friend infernal—that grim visiter nocturnal!
Earnestly we long to learn all that befalls that bird of yore:
    Oh, then, tell us something more!

Doth his shade thy floor still darken? dost thou still, despairing, hearken
To that deep sepulchral utterance like the oracles of yore?
In the same place is he sitting? Does he give no sign of quitting?
Is he conscious or unwitting when he answers “Nevermore?”
    Tell me truly, I implore!

Knows he not the littlenesses of our nature—its distresses?
Knows he never need of slumber, fainting forces to restore?
Stoops he not to eating—drinking? Is he never caught in winking¹
When his demon eyes are sinking deep into thy bosom’s core?
    Tell me this, if nothing more!

Is he, after all, so evil? Is it fair to call him “devil?”
Did he not give friendly answer when thy speech friend’s meaning bore?
When thy sad tones were revealing all the loneness o’er thee stealing,
Did he not, with fellow-feeling, vow to leave thee nevermore?
    Keeps he not that oath he swore?

He, too, may be inly praying—vainly, earnestly essaying
To forget some matchless mate, beloved yet lost for evermore.
He hath donned a suit of mourning, and, all earthly comfort scorning,
Broods alone from night till morning. By thy memories Lenore,
    Oh, renounce him nevermore.

Though he be a sable brother, treat him kindly as another!
Ah, perhaps the world has scorned him for that luckless hue he wore,
No such narrow prejudices can he know whom Love possesses—
Whom one spark of Freedom blesses. Do not spurn him from thy door
    Lest Love enter nevermore!

Not a bird of evil presage, happily he brings some message
From that much-mourned matchless maiden—from that loved and lost Lenore.
In a pilgrim’s garb disguiséd, angels are but seldom prizéd:
Of this fact at length adviséd, were it strange if he forswore
    The false world for evermore?

Oh, thou ill-starred midnight ranger! dark, forlorn, mysterious stranger!
Wildered wanderer from the eternal lightning on Time’s stormy shore!²
Tell us of that world of wonder—of that famed unfading “Yonder!”
Rend—oh rend the veil asunder! Let our doubts and fears be o’er!
    Doth he answer—”Nevermore?”

¹ Anybody else hear Dr. Seuss?

¹Scansion people! Ta tee ta tee ta tee ta tee ta tee ta tee ta tee ta

From The Michigan Argus of Friday 18 March, 1870, page 1, column 8

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From The Michigan Argus of Friday 10 June, 1870, page 4, column 1

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From The Michigan Argus of Friday 15 April, 1870, page 1, column 7

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From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 6 February, 1868, page 3, column 2

The Newark Steam Man

HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN THE STREET.

When a description of Mr. Deddrick’s steam man was published¹, not only the Newarkers, a goodly number of whom, like the Athenians, eighteen centuries ago, “spent their time in nothing but either to tell or to hear some new thing,” all rushed to the shop, where, under the hands of skillful mechanics, he was slowly but surely assuming the “human form divine,” and so thronged the doorway and darkened the windows of the shop that his completion was at one time made doubtful, but scores of gentlemen from other cities ventured into Jersey, and all, men, women and children who could not go wrote, inquiring about this new wonder. An enthusiastic committee of five traveled all the way from Albany, one day last week, to decide a bet that the whole thing was a “newspaper story.” Many of the letters ask for more minute descriptions than have already been published; some contain orders for men; some writers want traveling agencies; some will buy territorial rights to manufacture and sell them, and others wish to hire the man on a speculation. A Chicagoan thinks the most profitable work to which the thing can be put will be farming on Illinois prairies, and proposes that it valk to Chicago on a wager. A Pennsylvanian orders a pair proposing to repopulate his place. Five women write, ordering cast-iron husbands, and one gentleman sends for a wife. As the machine is speechless, the inventor replies to the last that he was doubtful whether a woman could be made a success. Many experiments have been made with the “man” during the past fornight, and, although some accidents, such as are incident to new machines, occurred, he finally works perfect. The old spiral springs have been replaced by stronger ones, so that the steam man is no longer weak in the knees, and upon steam being generated on Thursday, he stumped off like a live Trojan. In the evening he appeared on Broad street, at Crump’s Garden. —New York Tribune

¹I should note that (a) there is no mention as to whether “Mr. Deddrick’s Steam Man” was described in fiction or news accounts, but (b) I’m accumulating a growing body of evidence of the former.

From The Michigan Argus of Friday 22 July, 1870, page 1, column 6

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From The Michigan Argus of Friday 23 September, 1870, page 1, column 6

Never Drink Milk in Your Tea.—It is said that when we pour milk into a cup of tea or coffee the albumen of the milk and the tannin of the tea instantly unite and form leather, or minute flakes of the very same compound which is produced by the texture of tanned hide, and which makes it leather as distinguishable from the original skin. In the course of a year, a tea-drinker of average habits will have imbibed leather enough to make a pair of shoes, if it could be put into the proper shape for the purpose.

From The Michigan Argus of Friday 1 September, 1871, page 1, column 4

A Texan Orang Outang.—Gatesville, Texas, is excited over the appearance of an immense orang outang in its vicinity. The animal is described as being about seven feet high and covered from head to foot with a thick coating of hair. Its eyes shine like fire and it boasts of a double row of murderous looking teeth. When last seen it had in one hand a large crooked stick, and under the other arm a young calf apparently just killed. A hunting party has been organized to capture or kill the monster.

[Amusingly enough, the only current reference I can find to this on the Web is a link to my own transcription from an old website, unattributed!]

From The Michigan Argus of Friday 8 September, 1871, page 2, column 5

A Spiritual Medium Tested.

Louisville, Sept. 5. To-day a test trial was made before a committee of gentlemen of this city between Mrs. Keigwing, a noted spiritualist medium of Jeffersonville, Ind., and Prof. L. Bond and Prof. Van Vleck, who claimed to be able to do, without the aid of spirits, all the mediums could do. After the trial the committee decided that Van Vleck’s exposition was complete, and Mrs. Keigwing had made a total failure, the Professor doing everything she did, and doing it better. The trial excited considerable interest in this city, where there are a number of active spiritualists and the result is a serious disappointment to them, they having placed much confidence in the success of Mrs. Keigwing to the last.

From The Ann Arbor Daily Times of Saturday 14 October, 1905, page 7

Weird Features of Solar Eclipse

Two German scientists who observed the recent solar eclipse from Monte Rosa, in the Pennine Alps, state that at the culminating point of the obscuration the glaciers and snow fields became suffused with a wonderful azure light, while the shadows of the mountains produced most weird effects.

From The Michigan Argus of Friday 7 January, 1870, page 4, column 1

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From The Michigan Argus of Friday 1 December, 1871, page 1, column 7

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From The Michigan Argus of Friday 7 January, 1870, page 1, column 5

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From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 19 September, 1867, page 3, column 2

A FEMALE MYSTERY.— A young lady in New Lisbon, Ohio, assumed the dress of a young man, and in that disguise hired out to Mr. Smith to do farm work. She was quite expert in helping in the house, but was a little awkward in using farm tools, which she explained by saying she had been steward and cook on a boat, and had never worked out of doors. During a severe sickness the disguise was confessed, and the young woman is now an inmate of Mr. Smith’s family, doing housework. She has plenty of money; but it is yet a mystery who she is or where she came from.

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 19 September, 1867, page 8, column 3

WESTON THE PEDESTRIAN.— Edward Payson Weston¹, the pedestrian, who created somewhat of a sensation in 1861 by walking from Boston to Washington against time, averaging fifty-one miles for the ten consecutive days, has been pitted against his old antagonist, to walk from Portland, Me., to Chicago, Ill., a distance of one thousand two hundred miles, in twenty-six walking days, for the sum of ten thousand dollars a side. The articles of agreement provide that Weston is to perform his arduous labor in thirty days, without walking between midnight on Saturday and midnight on Sunday; and is to walk one hundred consecutive miles inside of twenty-four consecutive hours as a part of the feat. The start from Portland will be made between the 1st and 15th of October. On this trip Weston will pass through parts of ten different States, and more than three hundred cities and towns.

¹A number of other pieces on Weston are in the stack waiting to be transcribed; he was apparently quite the celebrity of his day.

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 10 October, 1867, page 5, column 4

A VESSEL SAVED BY THROWING OIL UPON THE SEA.—A correspondent of the London Shipping and Mercantile Gazette says he saw a practical proof of the truth of the old adage that oil would calm the troubled waters. The event occurred on a voyage from St. Johns, N.F., to Bristol, England. The vessel was loaded with oil and blubber, and experiencing severe weather, was disabled and thrown on her beam ends. The sea being very heavy, it was suggested that oil would smooth it, and a hogshead was broached in the hold, and the oil pumped into the ocean with the water made by the vessel leaking. The effect was marvelous. The vessel was drifting to leeward, and to windward the sea appeared as though there was a calm, and spite of the tremendous gale, the sea never broke on board for the eight days the vessel lay to. When the effect was observed, the oil was not spared, and the vessel reached Sicilly¹, though so crippled as not to be worth repairing. If this be true, it must greatly diminish the dangers of whaling, and a few barrels placed on every other sea-going craft might prove the salvation of some in stormy weather.

¹Scilly? Sicily seems particularly unlikely.

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 19 September, 1867, page 6, column 5

A DWARF REVIVALIST.— The South London Press says: “Some months ago we announced that a mite of a Methodist preacher, only one inch taller than Tom Thumb, was causing a great sensation in the country, and that he would soon appear in London. We had a visit from this little man the other day, when he was profuse in his thanks for the notice taken of him, and assured us he was “going about doing good!” He creates, he says, “as much excitement wherever he goes as does Mr. Spurgeon,” and frequently preaches to four thousand persons at a time. He meditates a raid upon the sinners and sham Christians of London, so that the lovers of religious excitement have another treat in store for them. The little preacher is by the name Noble.”

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 18 July, 1867, page 4, column 5

“FISHY.” —A statement is going the rounds of the newspapers to the effect that a lake larger than Lake Superior exists in British America, the knowledge of which has been carefully kept from the world by the Hudson Bay Company. The lake is called Neepignon¹, and abounds with fish, and its shores with game and fur animals. It is said to lie north of Lake Superior.

¹Lake Nipigon?

From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 12 September, 1867, page 4, column 5

ANOTHER NEW PLANET.—Prof. Watson, of the University¹, reports as follows: On Friday night, while observing in the vicinity of the planet Neptune, I discovered still another planet, hitherto unknown, the brilliancy of which is equal to a star of the eleventh magnitude. It is situated in right ascension fourteen degrees and fifteen minutes, and in declination six degrees and ten minutes north.

The New York World says: It is supposed the planet discovered by Prof. Watson on the 25th inst., will be called after him. Watson a name.

¹ James Craig Watson, discoverer of numerous asteroids in this period? Note the dates of appearance of his name on the list of Numbered Minor Planets.

Shopping. Black Friday.

My wife and I visited the oddly desolate Easton Town Center on the day after Thanksgiving. Best not presume I’m making some hackneyed comment on commercialism or crassness by calling it “desolate”, mind you — ETC is actually quite a pleasant little oasis, a miraculously transported Disneyfied vaguely northwestern Europe-tinted Palo Alto shopping district. In what was, when my wife’s father was growing up in a house down the road a piece, not a Town Center but rather a big empty field. To the best of my knowledge, they even made up the name “Easton”.

In other words: there’s a there there, now.

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[Section headers from the high-school history textbook The Record of America by James Truslow Adams & Charles Garrett Vannest, 1935 Scribner]

The Industrial Revolution in the United States

America turns to manufacturing. The factory supplants household manufacturing. The individual workmen cannot compete with the factory. Manufacturing takes people from country to city. Our factory owners begin to employ foreign labor. Industrial Revolution makes possible rapid increase in population. Increase in population calls for an increase in goods. The machine age raises a serious political problem. Fruits of the Industrial Revolution are unevenly distributed. Industrial Revolution makes possible material well-being. The machine age has greatly increased leisure. Many women are now engaged in business. The machine age calls for the spending of much money. The machine age excites the mind in leisure and dulls it in work. Industrial Revolution contributes to our periodic crises.

Heidi, whose name must have been concocted by the same pairwise independent sampling algorithm that named my other recent spam correspondents (Xu MacDougal and Isis Petrovich come to mind) has sent me a new poem, reproduced in its entirety below.

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I’ve long been fascinated with psychoceramics, and the overlap between that world and the world of the fringe believer, devout religious person, devout nationalist… actually, with the nature of pathological belief in general. I’ve been around. I thought I knew ‘em all.

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Brute force is easy.

The state of the art in evolutionary design implies that any day now, a crafty design engineer should be able to ask her computer to do most of the work for her. Sure, there are plenty of bumps and details to work out to make it practical — and a few deep philosophical questions about search algorithms and classes of problem — but as Koza is wont to repeat: human-competitive automated design is already here.

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In bringing material over from the old static website, I came across a review (here soon) of the book that introduced me to the work of artist Lordy Rodriguez. Listen, Lordy — you need a website, all your own.

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I hope someday to see the whole video. The snippets available on the artist’s website are impressive.

I mentioned below the excellent and very catchy Badger Song video, of which b3ta was helpful enough to remind me (thanks ever so much).

Apparently a nascent subculture of Badgerness is spreading. Noted today via dealmac, a mobile badger Lego model. Looks more like it’s about to topple in the video. One imagines there will be updates.

Rael Dornfest’s amazingly simple blosxom blogging system is a [pleasant] dream to work with—at least compared with some of the competition.

Whether explicitly or just as a matter of course, Rael and his colleagues have captured a number of Extreme Programming’s tenets, particularly Small Releases and Simple Design. They’ve produced a single tiny piece of clean and legible code that works, out of the box, simply. And over the last few months, the community of users has produced a slew of plug-ins and add-ons and little incremental frills and whistles that (piece by piece and step by step) can be used like Lego blocks to create a surprisingly powerful and robust content management system.

But only what you want.

Unlike many database-driven CMSes, blosxom simply shows files to visitors to the website. All those frills and whistles merely temper the way they’re shown, how they’re munged, and who can see (and edit) them. In other words, the manager of content can start serving something up almost immediately, and gradually move on to polish and fiddle and finesse as meta-content issues become important. There is no kitchen sink until you want one.

How refreshing.

And this, as it turns out, has been my own personal downfall in setting this site up. I had to fiddle, didn’t I? Just had to cobble together a complicated hand-crafted yellowish layout, and play with typography and web-specific tricks.

Ahhh… but even though I didn’t need to, I could.

[UPDATE] And it was a bad idea, too. Advice to young blosxomers: Don’t make big changes. Small releases!

News items come and go. Some spread across the entire mediasphere, burn themselves into the popular consciousness through constant exposure, and then (hopefully) fade quickly from memory. Others appear on the “back pages” of a few news services, and only months later begin to percolate slowly and battle for a sliver of mediasphere mindshare.

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Ends of years are excellent times to start paying attention to what just happened. Other people, some with decent credentials even, go to the trouble of pointing out the good stuff, and elide a lot of the bad (though this is arguably a root cause of the insidious evil I’ve already pointed out elsewhere in these pages).

For example, b3ta have rounded up the best work of their correspondents in 2003, including a couple I’ve missed.

Bob Dylan’s Space Monkey is a particularly fine effort. One wonders whether the lyrics were ad-libbed, or generated by a cut-ups game.

If you have not seen the Badger Song to its amazing conclusion, you must be sure to wait until the animation is finished for a real treat. You’ll thank me.

Where is it written that reviews of the arts — books, movies, &c; — must always focus on just new junk? I awake from a reverie to find myself standing before an overladen bookshelf in some library, antiquarian bookseller, or even my own collection, wondering how one or another old, old book actually is. And a lot of them are old.

Most books, surprisingly enough, are old.

Yes of course I know there are collections of old reviews (right next to the other old books in the library and antiquarian bookstores), contemporary with the works themselves. But insofar as they told people back then what was good and what was bad, they don’t speak to us, here, now, do they? They don’t say what, in retrospect turned out to be something that ought to be picked up and read — now. “Boy, that was a goodie after all, eh? Pity nobody ever noticed it way back then.” Call it the Wizard of Oz syndrome. The good stuff was wasted on them, back then. Those ignorant savages.

Ah, I hear you starting up a rebuttal that begins, “But of course, good old books are reissued all the time.” I’ll have none of that. If it was so damned good to begin with, then I’d much prefer to read it in the original version. Why fill up more landfills with remaindered obscurities? Tell me what I, now, should read of the medium-print-run novels of 1954. Popularizations of social science from 1939. Political commentary from 1912.

And none of this “canon” bullshit, either. We draw a line in the sand here: books are in the canon because people have said they were in the canon. Nobody says, “Hey, wait a minute folks, we missed this great piece of 19th century science fiction! It rocks! Add it to the canon!” The reason they made the grade in the first place was that somebody reviewed them back then, drew attention to them, made them famous early on. I know there’s good stuff out there that nobody’s ever come across, just because it was missed.

Review me a remainder.

It’s a pervasive sin among the Arts and Letters (and Scientific) communities, really. Just do the numbers. Simple probability theory: there must be plenty of excellent books written each year, and yet (a) very few of them even get reviewed, and (b) the majority of reviews themselves appear in obscure publications.

Thus, what few reviews there are, are (on average) barely able to touch on the total published works.

The only other acknowledgment of this problem I can bring to mind—and frankly the inspiration for the notion—is the wryly weird periodical Fortean Times. The editors publish one or two reviews of classics of forteana in each monthly issue.

But do I ever find a review of great novels of the 1970s in the NYT Book Review? Just one?

So this is my gauntlet: For every four new books you buy and read and review, publish one review of one measly old book. 20% Write me a review of Irving D. Tressler’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Point me in the direction of a nice commentary on the importance of James C. Fernald’s Scientific Side-lights. Hell, tell me what you think, in retrospect, of the 1990 Hugo Award nominees.

Are they useless now? Are they gone?

I think not.

I think we’re just lazy.

…those whose original wording has been forgotten, and minor rewordings of them.

Brockman’s Superfriends has been asked to propound their personal Laws. A number are quite good, as you would expect from smart people who have arguably been selected for being well-spoken.

I’ve spent my half-hour and read a good number of them, and find that some seem on the surface to be trite and self-contained ironies, but upon thorough consideration have deep implications in the context of the author’s work and modern life. Others just start off trite and end there as well.

Another subset are, admittedly, problematical. One such is that of my old thesis advisor, Stu Kauffman. “The biosphere advances, on average, at the maximum rate it can sustain into the adjacent possible.” Some handfuls of us actually know what the adjacent possible is (we who were there as it was invented), and some other non-identical set of us (who have read the book) understand the motivation that drives this incessant intuition… but not many of us, and not much.

My challenge to Stu: Outsource the statement, and move ahead. Pick ten other smart people on that list and get them to say what you mean for you. The effort of communicating this ephemeral but insistent insight to any ten people should finally get it either nailed down, or washed away.

Because the really good stuff — the answers, not just the intriguing questions — can only come later.

(via boingboing.net)

Slate offers up a rather thin but encouraging overview of the amazing tensegrity sculptures of Kenneth Snelson. Be sure to see the last frame of the slideshow, Snelson’s stunning Rainbow Arch.

Some years ago I started browsing the newspaper microfilms at our local library for the newspapers from 1830-1900. Regardless of the fact that Nicholas Baker is right, and they’re mainly illegible and honestly sad replicas of what must have been beautiful tactile newspapers full of character, there’s still a great deal in there that’s interesting.

In particular, I started to collect and stash away a number—a book-full, actually—of oddities and fringe materials, which I’m going to start transcribing and publishing here as time allows.

Do I believe this stuff is true? God, no. Don’t be ridiculous. And neither should you.

As Forteana, though, these articles are quite interesting. They’re anomalies, folklore, crackpot material, jokes… hard to say how best to describe them. Indeed, I think the most interesting thing about them is that they warranted publication in the newspaper of a moderately small college town in the first place. They’re pretty dense in the stacks, too; I’ve accumulated well over a hundred in a mere three hours or so of browsing the microfilm archives at our local library. I’m sure you can find similar items in your own local library (assuming they have copies of the 19th century newspapers there).

A deeper question, of course, is how real these stories are. By “real” I don’t mean whether they’re factual accounts of ghosts and other strange occurrences (I said that; weren’t you paying attention?), but rather whether the stories themselves were really stories. They always seem to be located at the end of a column on the last couple of pages of a daily or weekly paper, and you never know… did this story come in over the wire, or was it merely said to have done so? Was in concocted to fill the column?

It’s an interesting and unanswered question about journalism and entertainment, frankly.

I’d be very happy to hear about similar articles from your own local newspapers. Many public libraries can provide access to either the original newspapers (in which case you’re a very lucky person) or microfilm copies. It’s great fun to look them over and find things. If you send links or content, I’d be happy to include it here!

Snuck into the Macworld SF 2004 announcements from Apple yesterday was the release of the Advanced Computing Group’s xgrid software.

As of this writing, we have five rather nice computers in the house running OS X Jaguar and Panther, and could potentially fire up the old 400 MHz PowerTower Pro and have a sixth. Xgrid, free today, lets us use them as a big-ass cluster computing farm with very little change to anything.

Inasmuch as we’re doing evolutionary computing, all sorts of fancy statistical and machine learning stuff, and science-like stuff all the time around the house… well, ain’t that sweet?

Reports as they become available…