Category: Uncategorized

So DARPA had to trash their innovative terrorism markets program because Congress got their collective panties in a proverbial twist. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if just the opposite is true. When congressmen all start thumping on the national bible, it’s time to buy whatever they hate. At any rate, the predictive power of markets is well-established, and if you’re clever you can spin that into gold by mitigating risk in the venture of your choice.

Here’s a good NY Times article about innovative futures markets: Predict the Future of Technology and Win a Plasma TV. Give away a few baubles and trinkets, and you can get your hands on priceless information. What’s the Next Big Thing in the tech toy market? How’s that can’t-miss film with Ben Affleck and What’s-Her-Name going to do at the box office? There are lots of funky futures markets out there. Yale Econ professor Robert Shilller’s New Financial Order website has a good list. Here is an amusing quote from from the site:

Tradesports.com is an Irish firm that allows betting on world events, such as election or ouster of world leaders. Even after the DARPA terrorism futures scandal, Tradesports continued to trade terrorism events like the U. S. terrorism alert levels and the capture of Saddam Hussein. When the terrorism futures scandal broke in the U. S., Tradesports created a contract on the ouster of John Poindexter as head of DARPA.

Is anything sacred? Well, what’s it worth to ya?

This is a damn good article by Clay Shirky about why micropayment systems don’t work and won’t work: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content. The gist of it is that, while the monetary cost of acquiring content can get vanishingly small, the mental cost does not. There is a significant mental expense even to think about whether you want to buy content. Sifting through thousands of ten-cent online offerings trying to find a good read is headache-inducing at best. Since there’s a lot of really good free content out there, the obvious conclusion is that even a small cost will cause people to substitute the free stuff.

I remember having long email discussions about this with my Star Chamber co-authors back years ago, but I lacked the wit to say it as forcefully as Shirky puts it here. My argument was that we are all, all of us who create original content, going to have to get used to giving away big chunks of what we make, if we want to be successful. Here’s a good quote from Shirky about the paradoxical effect of the Internet:

People want to believe in things like micropayments because without a magic bullet to believe in, they would be left with the uncomfortable conclusion that what seems to be happening — free content is growing in both amount and quality — is what’s actually happening.

Free, good, and plenty of it… how do all these virtues come to coincide? As Shirky observes, when you give cheap publishing tools to a writer, you don’t get a publisher who writes, you get a writer who publishes. Publishers must have money, but a writer may happily substitute fame. Creators hunger to see their ideas in motion. This all raises the next question: where does the money come from? Surely writers must eat, or at least drink expensive coffee. My answer is that none of this means paid writing jobs are going away. I am not any less inclined to buy magazines and books now than I was before the Net came along. But my selections, my expectations, and my general information-space standard of living have all improved vastly. Micropayments can slip beneath the waves and no one ever need shed a tear.

Amazon has been doing this search-the-entire-book search for a few weeks now. Here is what the New York Times has to say about it: In Amazon’s Text-Search, a Field Day for Book Browsers

It sounded cool, so I tried it and discovered it really was cool. Here’s my example: for a long time I was trying to remember a quote by Stanislaw Ulam about nuclear physics and the bomb. The quote, paraphrased, was something like, “It’s amazing how a few scribbles on a blackboard can change history.” I had read it in a great big very good book called “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes, but I don’t own the book, and I couldn’t find it on the web, so I had to make a special trip to the bookstore to find and write down that quote. So for my Amazon test, I typed

“stan ulam scribbles”

and in a few seconds I had my answer.

It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles ona blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.

Read what Jon Udell has to say about Amazon’s new service. He points out one of the big advantages of the feature: getting more value out of your own library. Just as I used Napster to grab music that I owned but was too lazy to walk downstairs for, this search tool is a great way to pick information out of books on your bookshelf.

Via BoingBoing I found this groovy faux 3-D site. It’s a brilliant fusion of the old “winky” lenticular concept with digital cameras and the web: Burning Man Opera Ark of the Nereids. I didn’t find a “how we did this” page, but it looks like you just need to mount two digital cameras next to each other and snap them at the same time. Low tech + high tech = average height tech. Very nice. Some of the pictures are more compelling than others. I particularly liked the one near the bottom of the bell car. You really get the sense of bouncing along in a vehicle next them. The difference between this and a single still picture is dramatic. The general weirdness of the photographic subject matter adds to the otherworldliness of the pictures. I want to go to Burning Man.

Blogger Jeff Hall of Finkenwalde recently linked to my Red Sox essay and sent me a nice email. I went to take a peek at his writing and discovered that he’s in the army and was recently stationed in Central Asia. Uzbekistan, to be precise. Uzbekistan is an interesting place, not only because it’s in the middle of Stan-land (it borders Thisstan, Thatstan, and Theotherstan) but because it straddles the great Silk Road and contains one of the most exotic places in the world: Samarkand. Never having been there, I can’t vouch for what it’s “really like.” But the history of the Silk Road is fascinating, and the names can’t be beat for raw sex appeal: Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the Rome of the East, is located in the valley of the Zarafshan; it is the city of Tamerlane the Great, and home to Ulugbek’s peerless observatory.

Jeff Hall has been there, and you can read about what he had to say about it on the July 17th, 18th, and 19th posts to his blog. As a result of these posts, I’m putting Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game on my reading list so I can learn a little more about Central Asian history. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be useful information. Any Rambles readers out there ever been to Kazakhstan?

I just learned from the latest issue of Parabola magazine (Chaos and Order, Fall 2003) that the word for monster has the same root as admonish, taking its meaning from the Latin monere, to warn. Monsters, like the dragons that inhabit the vague and unpeopled borders of old maps, do not exist for the purpose of rending and terrifying. They are there to warn us about the unnameable corrosive chaos just over the horizon; their purpose is to turn us back. Monsters are the last conceivable form before the unknowable black froth beyond. They are thrown up from the darkness of our minds and projected onto the fringes of the void. They stand on the lip of the tiny cup that contains us and everything we know. More explicitly: if you are afraid of the dark, what are you afraid of? Not monsters. Monsters are your friends, projections and personifications of who you are and what you know. But just beyond them is the thing worth fearing. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. You’ll find out one day.

Many years ago I had the good fortune to travel in Japan with my friend Mike. He took us north to Nikko, where the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate is buried in a vast temple complex. We snuck onto the temple grounds one night after a late dinner, and this is what happened: Filling the Void. Happy Halloween!

When I was in junior high, I saw a documentary about plants that utterly amazed me. The show was an episode of Nova on PBS called The Green Machine, and it used a lot of time-lapse photography to illustrate how “alive” plants are. They move like animals do, only much more slowly. They can coordinate their motion with nearby plants, and they are constantly nodding and dancing in response to environmental cues. If you could only look at them with your slow eyes, alfalfa sprouts would give you the major creeps. My interest in botany stayed with me through high school, and when I was in biology senior year, I did research at a local university on thigmomorphogenesis, or how plants respond to touch (people always challenge me whenever I play that word in Scrabble, and boy are they sorry). I was even a co-author on a paper on the topic… Computer-Assisted Image Analysis of Plant Growth, Thigmomorphogenesis and Gravitropism. Plant Physiology 77(3): 722-730. No kidding! Rush down to your local botanical lending library and check it out.

So I was very excited to see the new site called Plants In Motion out of Indiana University. It does justice to the wild sentient gyrations of our green friends. Make sure you look at the movies for morning glories twining, and corn seedling phototropism. Next time you stroll through a garden, keep in mind that those plants are watching you too.

SIGNALS Magazine is a good biotech trade “online magazine,” although it publishes new content relatively infrequently. But what do you expect for that paltry online revenue model? The articles I have worked through have been interesting (I particularly enjoyed the systems biology piece), but more than that, I was impressed with a little Flash application they did call “Power Brokers.” With it, you can see how insanely incestuous the biotech world is by looking at who is serving on which board. It’s a nice little data visualization app even without the interesting data. I don’t know how up-to-date their database is, but try this. Start with Paradigm Genetics. They’ve got heavy-hitter Leroy Hood on their board, but also the well-connected Terrance McGuire who sits on nine boards. If you open up two of these, deCODE Genetics and Inspire Pharmaceuticals, you’ll see that Andre Lamotte is common to both of those.

There’s even a nifty tool in this power viz app that lets you test out the six-degrees-of-separation concept. Choose two companies and see what the shortest path is to join them up by board members. It’s a small world, and some of these power brokers are very well-connected. For instance, if you’re raising money for a biotech venture, consider talking to Jean Deleage. He sits on what must be a record of 18 different boards.

I should have seen this coming: comment spam. A bot posts a meaningless comment to your blog and leaves behind a link that points to their porn or e-business site. I got hit by it a few times, though at least (so far) the comments themselves have been dumb but innocuous. In a larger sense, it’s interesting to watch the blog community immune system kick in. The reaction has been vigorous, ranging from informed discussions about various corrective actions to outing the alleged perpetrator (see the continuation here). All the discussion, and the speed with which it matures, makes me confident that we’ll have some good solutions in short order.

I’m always a little concerned about violent reactions because once you’ve made it clear you have a knee-jerk response to something, someone will come along and hack your reflex to bring about their own desires. For instance: people really hate spammers, so all I have to do is convince the world you’re an unrepentent repeat-offending mass spammer and other people will take you down for me. Or as they said during the French Revolution, j’accuse!

(Thanks, Snowboard Girl, for getting me started with a good link on this)

Last week there was a piece of glass in my foot. It hurt. I could actually see it sticking out of the arch of my left foot an eighth of an inch or so. In fact, it had been lodged in my foot for almost thirty years and only in the last month or so had it finally worked its way back up to the surface. It was a weird sight, because the sharp end was poking out, so that you could have cut yourself by rubbing too closely against the arch of my foot.

I can’t remember exactly when it joined me, but I was something like ten or eleven years old. The weather was warm. I was standing barefoot in a creek late in the afternoon, when I saw my dad walking across the park. I made a happy noise, ran for him, and then WHAMMO! The glass shard went into my foot and decided to unpack its bags and stay for a while. Only just this week did it manage to work up high enough for me to start poking at it with tweezers and needles, and a few days later it emerged, a little slippery, but none the worse for the wear. I felt like breaking out the photo albums to show it all the interesting places we had gone together. I’m relieved my foot is finally glass-free, but I still can’t quite bring myself to just throw the little guy in the trash.