Gulfstream

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/25/224415/367 Spam detection with gzip. (Tech-ish.) Note gzip has 32k buffer—see comments. 18:54

http://saltyt.antville.org/stories/267751/ Sophie Dahl before and after shots. 18:40

http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?030120ta_talk_wilkinson “No one is saying that the hiring of Chef Bobo by the Calhoun School, on the Upper West Side, was an intentionally provocative gesture, but clearly it puts the onus on Manhattan’s other private schools to respond…” 17:37

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/iraq_debate/ How should we use our power? Iraq and the war on terror. Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, this Tuesday. 17:32

http://slate.msn.com/id/2077346/ A history of conscription in the USA: until WWII, individual rights trumped the responsibility to serve your country. 17:32

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ideology.html Ideology and Sustainability: “For many, prophesying doom if we don’t change our ways, is a signal of virtue.” Part of a set of pages on progress and sustainability. (The author is, on this issue, pleased to be an “extreme optimist,” which is “a person who believes his country will probably survive even if it doesn’t take his advice.”) 20:31

http://www.angelfire.com/tx2/vogelein/ A fine, fine, use of the internet: man records 4,788 dreams had since 1972, types out most of them. They’re cross-referenced: Iran, Bonnie, Danny DeVito, mirrors… 19:25

http://www.geourl.org/near/?p=http://beebo.org/ I’m in San Francisco now and guess what, they have Starbucks here too. Got here on Sunday afternoon and ran to the supermarket first thing to see if they still had egg nog. (It’s Christmas-only.) Nope. Today I trailed my parents to the City Lights bookstore, Ghirardelli Square (has great architecture/design bookstore) and bits of downtown. Rode the cutest little tram! They have trams, buses, trolley buses, cable cars and two varieties of train here. 20:37

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/technology/circuits/16inst.html Glenn Reynolds profile. 11:31

http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1522706 A decidedly Orwellian turn: the Economist reacts to the DCSD’s poorly written anti-Lomborg judgement (see bottom).

(Lomborg has taught me not that environmentalists can be ignored (they can’t) but that environmental problems represent just some of the problems the world faces, and in deciding where to allocate resources, these concerns must be set against each other. What is the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol? What are the benefits—and are they guaranteed? Does it make more sense to immunise children against disease, eradicate malaria, provide fresh drinking water to those without it, save the whales? I think it fair to ask these sorts of questions of those soliciting donations: if you’re from, say, Save the Children, why does your charity deserve my money over AI, the Royal Children’s Hospital, Greenpeace, the local school?) 17:25

http://www.theonion.com/onion3901/one_look_at_my_music.html One Look At My Music Collection Will Show You How Much I Respect Women 17:08

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14923 Medical products and drugs are generally built for white people. (For example, the colour of the (original) Band-Aid is the colour of white people.) I’m somewhat sympathetic to both sides here. (Although I don’t think it’s reasonable to regard peachy-beige contraceptive patches as an affront to your race. Surely it’s more an irritation or annoyance?) Companies can’t produce a different version of their product for every possible group. Sometimes it’s possible to cater to only one: park benches and stairways, for example, are designed (and can only be designed) for people of normal height. 16:54

http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/000811.html Paying for Moveable Type: “… I feel that $65 is insignificant compared to the value I’ve received over the last nine months.”

I find it quite fascinating that people are very much willing to pay for MT, but not for any of the software that MT depends on. To run, MT needs Perl and lots of Perl libraries. It may also need MySQL, and it probably uses Linux or FreeBSD. Each of these pieces of software is the product of several orders of magnitude more work than that which went into MT. (Even the Perl libraries that come with MT are bigger than the whole of MT: the MT “with libraries” distribution is 3.8Mb, of which 1.8Mb is in the extlib directory (non-MT code); 0.7Mb is in the lib directory (MT code); templates and other bits and pieces make up the remainder.) What’s more, these programs (but not MT itself) are Open Source.

So why do people pay for MT, but not for the other bits of software responsible for getting their writing out onto the web? Is it because MT is the visible front-end to all the bits, whilst the back-end stuff is not? Do the people behind MT seem to deserve it more, or need it more? (It is their full-time job.) Is it because MT is written by two identifiable people, rather than hundreds? Is it simply because they directly ask for money? It’s a mystery to me, but the answer is surely worth knowing for all sorts of reasons. (For example, if it turns out that people are willing to pay money for good front-ends, it might be possible to do something about free software usability (more).) 17:27

http://slate.msn.com/id/2076587/ On Arianna Huffington’s really silly terrorist-linked campaign against SUVs: “The Detroit Project anti-SUV ads let all other drivers off the hook. Is somebody who uses an SUV to cart their family around town really that much worse than a joy rider in a sports car? Is there some minimum miles-per-gallon threshold we can cross and be absolved from all complicity in global terror?” 11:21

http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/03q1/mwsf/mwsf-1.html A cynical Mac lover reports from MacWorld SF. (I’m a little late posting this I suppose.) “Because the Mac Culture is dynamic and constantly changing, except for CPU speeds…” 12:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/12BROO.html The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest: “People vote their aspirations … none of us is really poor; we’re just pre-rich.” 09:32

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/texture/pinwheel/ The mathematics behind the tiling pattern used on the exterior walls of Melbourne’s new Federation Square buildings. The pattern is aperiodic (it doesn’t repeat) despite being made from identical triangles. 17:09

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/05QUESTIONS.html Odd little Q&A with Frank Gehry: (1) he didn’t submit a proposal for the Twin Towers site because the sponsoring body was only offering $40,000 per team, and he felt this wasn’t enough; (2) in January 2002 he considered asking Guiliani up to Yale to meet his class, who had been considering how to build an extraordinary public space. 16:44

http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/cst-ftr-ispy26.html Coke is experimenting with a smaller, slimmer, Red Bull-style can. 14:34

http://beebo.org/smackerels/meet-the-cripples.html Recently I’ve been writing some log analysis code to produce detailed page-level statistics, but a side-effect is that it’s now possible to illustrate what I call the “deformed people” effect.

Basically, it so happens that inserting the terms used to find a page into the page itself increases the ranking of that page. Not so unexpected, I suppose, but the size of effect was a little surprising.

The graph below shows hits per week to the “Meet the Cripples” page linked above; the extra hits in recent weeks came via Google:

This page quite suddenly became popular because:

1. until recently the page contained the words deformed and people—though not next to each other.
2. the previous iteration of my statistics software included referrer information on the page itself (mirror).
3. searching for deformed people (used to) suggest this link a few pages into the search results.
4. a persistent few clicked this far into the search results, and then view the “Meet the Cripples” page, which
5. (through the stats software) added the text deformed people to my page.
6. Google, now seeing the phrase deformed people on my page, increased its ranking to #1 (mirror).

So, it seems that it’s possible to boost the rank of some pages (note that no page directly links to “Meet the Cripples,” so the probably more reliable PageRank technology isn’t involved) by tuning the text so that it better matches the sort of things people are looking for. (Which you can easily determine by looking the page’s referrers.) 10:43

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993232 The speed of gravity is experimentally determined to be the same as the speed of light, meaning that “if the Sun suddenly disappeared from the centre of the Solar System, the Earth would remain in orbit for about 8.3 minutes—the time it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Then, suddenly feeling no gravity, Earth would shoot off into space in a straight line.”

Update: Nature has the same story, but told more professionally. (I don’t like New Scientist much.) The second paragraph states that the measurement is only approximate (as opposed to the third-from-last), and it also tells in more detail how the measurement was made. There’s no equivalent of NS’s nice Earth- shooting- into- space visual image though. 14:42

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/opinion/05FRUM.html Analysis of Bush’s Presidency. “George Bush’s party is less economically libertarian than the Republican Party of the 1980’s and 1990’s.” Not a libertarian? That’s because he’s a socialist—at least according to Jane’s, who are taken by his bailout of the airline industry. 00:40

http://www.bartleby.com/61/91/R0199150.html retronyms: once guitar, now acoustic guitar; once watch, now analogue watch; once movie, now silent movie. (Not recognised by OED, M-W.) 15:26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2621581.stm Pepys’s diary, known as a “diary” for almost 200 years, is now being repositioned as a weblog... First webloggers declare newspapers’ days are numbered, now it comes to this? Just leave Anne Frank the fuck alone, okay?

“I couldn’t believe I was alone in thinking this [you weren’t], so I didn’t tell even my closest friends about it.” With friends like those… 22:26

http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=36630 The New Yorker will apparently make money this year (i.e. 2002), for the first time since 1985. Experts in magazine finance are unconvinced.

“The New Yorker under Mr. Remnick remains the magazine world’s rough equivalent of doing the Lord’s work…” So sad to see such a beautiful sentiment lodged in a sentence as screwed as this. (“Working for The New Yorker …”? Or is editing the magazine itself the rough equivalent of the Lord’s work?)

I’m reading the letters of Harold Ross at the moment. They’re fascinating, as are all pieces of writing originally intended for none (like diaries) or one (like letters) that find their way to the general public. Ross was keen on Dorothy Parker: “The verses came and God Bless Me! if I never do anything else I can say I ran a magazine that printed some of your stuff.” (Another reason, I think, was that Parker was the sort of person who needed compliments delivered often, and delivered well.) 11:23