Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

I was touring around Wordsworth Books in Cambridge yesterday afternoon when I stumbled across
Linked: The New Science of Networks
by Albert-László Barabási. I don’t know about you, but I keep running across network theory everywhere I look, from biotech applications, to Internet protocols, to six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style pop sociology. Networks are hot. Now is the time to learn about networks. Is this the book to learn from? The reviews on the jacket looked encouraging, but then, they always do.

Then I stumbled across a review of the book at peterme.com. He liked it. I bought the last book he recommended (“Word Freak,” a chronicle of the competitive Scrabble world), it was damn good. So I reckon I’ll get this one too.

A first! A noble, generous, and tasteful reader of the Rambles Weblog sent me a book from my Amazon wish list out of the clear blue sky. Now I can no longer complain that this site has never done anything to pay for itself.

And what was the book that arrived magically at my doorstep? It was R.A.C. Parker’s superb “The Second World War,” an everything-you-need-to-know-about-World-War-II-in-one-compact-paperback book. I recommend it without hesitation, particularly if you can get it for free. Read my (brief) review of the book at the Rambles Bookshop, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Paracelsus Rambles Weblog.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently playing around with the bookshop page. The backbone of it is an XML list that I manage by hand and then convert with an XSL stylesheet to HTML. The process works very well (although XSL is an oddball language to get used to), but I kept thinking there had to be an easier way than tedious data entry to get the author, title, and images all typed in. I figured someone had to have created a web service for this by now. A quick visit to xmethods.org gave me exactly what I was looking for in about three minutes. I don’t know who Cheeso is, but his book search web service did the trick. I wrote a little MATLAB code to format everything and resize the image, and presto, armed with only the ISBN number, I can generate a nicely formatted XML version of all the relevant book information plus a lovely little thumbnail. This is the first time I saw firsthand how valuable web services are going to be.

Here’s an article at Salon talking about the perennial problem of how a common resource, in this case the music downloading network Gnutella, can be ruined by the greedy. Gnutella bandwidth bandits “This incredibly selfish behavior causes a flood of query traffic. Although it maximizes results for the local user, it impacts the network greatly. If every client behaved like Qtrax, Gnutella would surely fall.” I’m sure Atlantic Records would be so sad if Gnutella were to fail because of greedy assholes. A cynic might observe that thieves hate thieves.

I work on a program called MATLAB, and once several years ago on a business trip to Singapore, we stopped at a place called Sim Lim Square, notorious for pirated software and ultra-cheap computers. Sure enough, it was easy to find someone selling the very latest version of MATLAB (and twenty other programs on the same CD) for $5. In the same store, the owner had posted numerous signs bearing the words “SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE TURNED OVER TO THE POLICE.” And who can blame him?

Has anyone ever told you to give them a call at 212-479-7990? That’s the number of the New York Rejection Line, a blow-off service provided free-of-charge to the New York community (or anyone untroubled by the 212 area code). Check out the tag line for RejectionLine.com: “Someone won’t leave you alone?
Give them ‘your’ number: 212-479-7990.” They’ve done a nice job of packaging up several kinds of self-serve rejection. You can preview them online here. As a rejectee you can opt to listen to a therapeutic comfort specialist, a sad poem, or a message that encourages you to cling to unrealistic hope.

I used to use SpyOnIt.com as my favorite notification mechanism. But no more. SpyOnIt looks very ill, ill unto death, sad to say. It was a good service, but then again, I never was clear on where their money came from. Now I’m using NotifyList.com — sign up in the box at the bottom of the left panel if you want to be notified when the Rambles weblog is updated. Of course, I’m not sure how NotifyList makes their money, but why worry? Everything’s going to be fine, right?

The 5K Challenge is back, and the final results have been tallied. The rules specify that you get no more than 5 kilobytes worth of web page to make whatever you want. As they say at the site:

The idea behind the contest is that the rigid constraints of designing for the web are what force us to get truly creative. Between servers and bandwidth, clients and users, HTML and the DOM, browsers and platforms, our conscience and our ego, we’re left in a very small space to find highly optimal solutions. Since the space we have to explore is so small, we have to look harder, get more creative; and that’s what makes it all interesting.

Or, as the poet James Falen has said, “Every task involves constraint; solve the thing without complaint.” Or more succinctly: shut up and dance. One of the highest rated entries is
Wolfenstein 5K, a three-d shooter crammed into 5K. Must be seen to be believed. On the clever concept side of things is the
Scale Model of the Solar System jammed into a long scrolling web page.

This is a good example of something that would not have happened before the web: Steve Silverman is a science teacher who happens to publish a site called Useless Information. I found it because I’m a fan of P.T. Barnum, and Silverman has a nice page about phrases P. T. Barnum was added to the language (it’s an impressive list, including “Siamese Twins”). Poking around the rest of the site, I found an article about Charles Ponzi, who always makes for a good read… do you know what the original Ponzi scheme was? The rest of the Useless site is like this: short punchy pieces about offbeat interesting topics. Silverman got so much good feedback about his web site, he ended up writing a book called Einstein’s Refrigerator.

Salon has a great piece this week about abandoned domain names: I come to bury IAmCarbonatedMilk.com, not to praise it. A site called Deleted Domains will tell you about domain names that are no longer being paid for, and therefore are being returned for public consumption. Go look at the Deleted Domains site… it’s hysterical. As the Salon article points out, registering domain names costs real money, so someone must have thought that these names were going to pay off. Which is sad when you look at some of these names. Some of the names are pure dot-com golden age nonsense: need a bib for your doggie? Log into doggiebibs.com. Others are out of favor: greedclub.com. Others are practical, like the watchful trio diownload.com, downkload.com, and downlioad.com, or the very reasonable faxedmail.com. You owe to yourself to go trawling through the weird stuff that people were willing to pay to own.

Glog ahoy! My friend Nabeel is always telling me about cool software and web sites. So much so that I finally said “You need to get yourself a blog.” Here’s what he said:

“I just don’t think I’m cool enough to have a blog [He’s just being modest. He’s almost certainly cool enough. -Ed.]. In fact, I sort of like living vicariously through others’ blogs. That’ll be the new trend I start. I’ll start a movement where people get mentioned on other people’s blogs, without actually blogging anything themselves.” He calls this vicarious guest blogging activity glogging. That’s the nifty neologism… but what’s the content of Nabeel’s glog?

He was talking to a friend about stay-on tabs for beer and soda cans. One thing led to another and they found a good story (that was heard on NPR during the “Engineering & Life” segment) about the inventor of the stay-on tab. The stay-on tab, so ubiquitous that it is practically invisible (can you picture how it works?), was not a simple thing to design.
This speech at the University of Illinois is a somewhat more detailed version of the same thing. I started poking around the EngineerGuy.com site and found all kinds of cool stuff. Thanks, Nabeel!

Are you smart? Do you work with people who are smarter than you? Malcolm Gladwell has written a fascinating piece for the New Yorker called The Talent Myth in which he discusses the smarty-pants phenomenon and the trouble it has gotten us into. Here is the premise: Enron (and others like it) went down the toilet by hiring smart people and letting them run wild. American hero-worship makes it hard to admit that maybe, just maybe, the system is sometimes smarter than the smartass. You might think that smart people would know when they’re in trouble and then do something smart to get out of trouble. But the problem is this label “smart.” If they admit they got into trouble, they’re not smart anymore, and anything is preferable to being not-smart, including bankrupting your company. I work at a software company where “he’s really smart” is one of the highest compliments you can pay somebody; what Gladwell says fits what I see every day. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, would really hate this article.

Here’s a long quote from Gladwell, discussing a study by a psychologist.

Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. […]
They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. They will not stand up to investors and the public and admit that they were wrong. They’d sooner lie.

Be careful flinging around the word smart. The mantle of smartness is fragile, terrifying, and sometimes paralyzing. It should be reserved for clever people who write weblogs.