Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

Mom and Dad just came for a visit to see the new baby. Mom was just telling me about this phenomenon: for a healthy percentage, someone will come to your house and clean out your attic for you, sell what they can, and then give you a check. No muss, no fuss, and if you were never going to get around to it anyway, it’s hard to argue too much about the margin. Here’s the article in the NY Times: No Time for EBay? Here Come the Agents.

I don’t have many antiques, but I’ve got tons of books, some of which I’d be happy to pass back into the book ecosystem for little or no money. After all, it’s a sin to throw a book away, and not many places are interested in taking books off your hands. I’ve thought about listing all the books I’m done with on Half.com (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of eBay), but it’s way too much trouble. This smells like an opportunity for an enterprising teenager, if not an outright entrepreneur. For instance, because of some business strategy seminar I went to at work, I’ve got a copy of Competing for the Future by Hamel and Prahalad. Sell that sucker on Half.com and you can clear as much as $0.75. After paying eBay its share, you’d have a good fraction of a subsidized hot school lunch.

Apparently eBay has been so successful generating more business for itself that prices are coming down as attics and basements all over the world are being flushed into the daylight. There are now liquid markets and stable prices for more weird crap than ever before in the history of mankind. At this very instant, I have my pick of 45 different Hemingray #42 glass insulators (I’m partial to the blue green Hemingray #42). Better sell all your weird crap before I sell mine and drive the prices down even further.

In the New York Times magazine there’s an article about how you can become a temporary autistic savant by zapping your brain with electromagnetic pulses. It’s an interesting topic, and my son is autistic, so I mailed it to my wife. Then I noticed, below the “E-Mail This Article” icon, there was a “Most E-Mailed Articles” icon. It leads to the
Top 25 Most E-Mailed Articles From the New York Times page. And whaddya know, the piece I picked was today’s most emailed article. I felt strangely validated.

I’ve become a big fan of these lists. I used to eschew them as pointless popularity contests, representing something faddish and frothy, but not worth tapping into. But I’ve come to believe they save me a lot of time. The key thing here is that they are based on what people do rather than what they say they do. It’s entertaining to look at the top list of emailed items and say not only “hey, this is interesting” but also “I wonder why this topic is so popular?” I’m sure the editors and reporters feel the same way. Wouldn’t you be the proud young Jason Blair to realize your article was the most emailed piece that week?

We do the same thing with our MATLAB Central web site: we list the most popular files on the assumption it is a useful guideline for future visitors to see where past visitors went. Yahoo has a Most Emailed Photos list which is almost always either sexy, gory, or bizarro in some way. They have an Editor’s Pick list too, full of well-chosen well-taken photos, but who wants to see that? Show me what the people want to see! That’s the enduring appeal of pop culture: if the thing in question it isn’t interesting in itself, then it’s interesting to consider why it’s interesting to so many other people. Somebody must be reading all those Louis L’Amour books.

By the way, I was going to say that what I really wanted was an RSS feed for the NY Times most-emailed list. But once the thought occurred to me, it didn’t take me 15 seconds to find out it already existed: http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/57/5057.xml

If all goes well (and that’s a big “if” considering our Martian track record) there will be six active missions on and around Mars next year. A pair of identical Mars rovers, significantly bigger than the Sojourner rover from several years ago, will land on the planet. One of these just recently took off, and the other will take off soon. Wish them luck…

NASA is obviously a good place to go when you want to learn about space missions, but I have been very impressed with SPACE.com. These guys launched their site in the middle of the dot-com frenzy, and I remember thinking at the time that it was an unlikely way to make money. Happily, though, they’re still in business, and they have some really good material. For instance, you can visit their Mars rover page or check out the nifty 3-D pictures of the surface of the sun. I particularly enjoyed a philosophical discussion about how colors are applied to Hubble Space Telescope pictures: Coloring the Universe: Why Reality is a Gray Area in Astronomy. What would Mars look like if you were really there? It’s a fair question. Maybe you will go there someday. But what would the Eagle Nebula look like if you were there? It’s a much trickier question to answer. For starters, what does it mean to be “there” when there is the Eagle Nebula? From the article:

The quintessential Hubble photograph is a 1995 image of the popular Eagle Nebula, also known as M16 or the Pillars of Creation. The soaring structures had one of their red emissions converted to green — by the astronomers who took the picture — in order to highlight scientific detail. In “reality,” no green was detected coming from the Pillars. Interestingly, all Hubble images are created with black-and-white cameras. Ones and zeros are sent to Earth. Color is dropped in later with the popular Photoshop program.

For a good demonstration of this, look at this image of the Hourglass Nebula and tell me the Photoshop expert who got their hands on it wasn’t trying to make it look like a giant eyeball. It’s a beautiful and compelling image, but how much of it is marketing?

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, but soon they’ll know exactly where your doghouse is. Despite the mysterious whereless possibilities of cyberspace, it turns out that not only do websites want to know where you are, you want to tell other people where you are too. This New York Times article on Online Locator Software talks about how commercial content providers want to know your surfing address for the same reason TV broadcasters do: markets behave geographically. That’s not so surprising, but wouldn’t you expect people to want to hide behind the location-free anonymity of the web? Not so. The GeoURL server allows websites to attach themselves to physical locations on the globe, and it’s quite popular. Only today, fifty people added themselves to the list, and there are more than 12,000 sites catalogued so far. Cyberspace permits rootlessness, but the humans that inhabit cyberspace crave roots. When I look at the logs for my site, I want to know the same thing: where are you? Australia? Germany? Canada? Next door? Does it matter? Yes it does. I have spent a long time, for example, reading through kuro5hin’s Roll Call posting. kuro5hin is a popular site, and the roll call post just asks people to say who they are. The results are fascinating.

So who are you? And where are you? For the record, this blog comes to you from Watertown, Massachusetts, USA, just outside of Boston. Anyway, remember, you leave a lot more footprints than you think wherever you go, and they all lead straight back to your door. Hope that’s okay with you, $BLOG_VISITOR_NAME.

Here’s another nifty ambient data display, though not commercial yet. Take an illustration, say a calming tropical beach scene, and then tie elements of the picture to incoming data streams. As we read on the Technology Research News website:

The dedicated information screen in Stasko’s office displays a beach theme. A sailboat moves from left to right between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. to keep time. The type of clouds in the sky reflect the weather in Pennsylvania where his parents live. A large seagull shows the Dow Jones performance: minus 200 points is the left edge of the screen and plus 200 is the right. Mousing over elements in the image makes small text balloons pop up to display, for instance, “42 degrees.” When Stasko gets email from his wife, a towel appears on the beach chair.

It may sound a little silly now, but I’m certain there will be lots of this kind of thing in the near future. Then again, just imagine how puzzled your co-workers would be if you jumped up and yelled “Oh my God! Look where that sea gull is!” and ran out of the office.

This new baby gig is making it hard to stay up late and blog, but I finally got around to trying out some RSS syndication software, and I can now safely say that I get it. I knew it was useful… it made sense, but I hadn’t really experienced how valuable it was until I tried it myself.

If you’ve never heard of RSS before, it’s really simple. I mean, it’s REALLY really simple, because RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication. That is, it’s a way for a site, any site, to provide a freeze-dried condensed version of what’s happened recently. I have one here at http://www.starchamber.com/index.rdf. Take a look at it to see what it looks like. It’s just an abbreviated XML version of my latest posts. But if you subscribe to the RSS feeds for a lot of interesting sites, it changes how you look at the web.

A few eons ago, during the Great Dot-Com Era, there were a number of companies trying to create “MyPage” personal newspaper sites (octopus.com is the only I can recall right now). They all failed. But the idea wasn’t fundamentally flawed. Something was off about the timing and the approach. RSS might change that. I use an RSS aggregator called Aggie (there are lots of others; see the bottom of this page). It works very well, and it lets me scan in one document the (new) daily content from a number of blogs, newspapers, and magazine sites. It’s a faster way to sift through lots of information, and it finally starts to deliver on the promise of the personalized newspaper.

Moore’s Law has exerted a strange pull on the modern psyche for the past dozen years or so. What was once simply a statistical prediction has become a mythological imperative with the apparent force of physical law. For years it was an exciting harbinger of progress, but recently it has taken on a darker tone, as all gods eventually do. Exuberance has become fretfulness: we must keep up with it (it is a law, after all) and yet how, and to what end? It becomes a burden… what must we sacrifice to appease this pitiless law? And if we fail, how will we be punished?

And now even Moore’s Meta-Law is in danger of becoming obsolete. Moore’s Law, as you cannot fail to know, says that the computing power of a single chip will double every 18 months. Moore’s Meta-Law states that usage of the phrase “Moore’s Law” in the world press will double every 12 months. After years of solid predictability, there now appear to be both long term and short term limitations to Moore’s Meta-Law. A Google search this evening reveals a surprisingly feeble 143,000 documents that refer to the fabled law.

In the immediate future, we can expect to see continuing heavy impact from events in the Middle East as they drain the available reservoir of journalistic ink: more politics means less Moore. Is this the future you deserve? Don’t you deserve Moore? Working on exactly this principle, several House Democrats eager to revitalize the tech sector have proposed a “More Moore’s Law Law” that would legally coerce journalists to include more mentions of Moore’s Law in their articles in order to bring us in line with the prescribed trend, perhaps thereby vaulting the economy out of recession.

In the long run though, even if we pull out of the current downturn, we can expect to hit the true physical limitations of Moore’s Meta-Law before the close of this decade. According to some projections, by late 2008, every word appearing in print will be “Moore”, “Law”, or words that sound like them. Beyond this horizon predictions are sketchy, but we should remember that in the past researchers have always managed to overcome obstacles that seemed all but insurmountable. Dr. Leonard Chen of Lucent’s Bell Labs observes that “we may yet work out a satisfactory semaphore system, not unlike Morse Code, in which the dashes and dots are replaced by the words Moore and Law.” Armed with this “Moore’s Code” we could, in theory, stay on track for another three years or so merely by increasing the total output of published matter in the world’s press. Beyond this it’s anybody’s guess. But ingenuity has always kept us on track in the past, and if sacrificing meaningful communication is the cost of progress, then Moore’s Law Law Moore’s Law Moore’s Moore’s Law!

As part of my cleanup work over the weekend, I was trying to untangle some Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) problems I was having with my blog. The problem goes like this: any element on your page, like a block of text, can inherit a property, like its color or its font size, from any of several style definitions that surround it. For simple style sheets, this is straightforward. But as the style sheets you use (particularly those you didn’t write) get more complicated it can be hard to deduce why the page doesn’t look right. Was the problem due to the <p> paragraph style or the <div> style or the <span> style or what? I figured there must be some diagnostic tools out there, and with the aid of Google I quickly found just the thing: bookmarklets.

Bookmarklets use CSS and JavaScript magic to instantly change your web page in useful ways. Jesse Ruderman’s amazing ancestor bookmarklet does exactly what I was looking for. Hovering over any element on your page will reveal the inheritance structure. For instance, the text below has the

HTML > BODY > DIV#content > DIV.blog > DIV.blogbody > BLOCKQUOTE

Try it! Click on this link, and then hover over this page somewhere. Believe me, this is marvelous information. Now go back to Jesse’s Bookmarklet page and check out some of the other cool loot, like the one that zaps cheap effects on cheesy web pages. There’s a lot of good stuff here.

Happy Memorial Day!

I’ve spent a some time in the last few days remembering and cleaning up a lot of old stuff around the site. Now all the styles should be pointing at the same style sheet for a least a modicum of consistency. Also, I have dusted off the page where I list all the writing I did before (and some after) I started the blog: Paracelsus Writes.

I started the Star Chamber website with three other guys in April of 1996, and between the four of us, we had something new up on the site once every week, more or less. This was, of course, before blogs were invented, so we were kind of making it up as we went. We wrote longer pieces and we posted them less often than your typical blog. If we were starting the same thing today, it would probably be a group blog. But hey! We kept it up for four years before we lost steam as a group. Now I’m the last one standing on the site, and it has largely been co-opted by my blog. But all the old files are still there. If you want to know more about the other members of the Star Chamber and what they wrote, look at the About the Star Chamber page. And if you’re really interested in getting a taste of the old site, a collection of Star Chamber writing is available via Peanut Press for convenient reading on your PDA or handheld computer. Check it out:
The Star Chamber: Writings from the Web