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December 31, 2005

links for 2005-12-31

Posted by 12:21 AM

The Genealogy of Math

I've never seen The Mathematics Genealogy Project until just now. It's pretty incredible, covering the professional history of almost 100,000 mathematicians. I did some searches on the math PhDs I know and they were all there. The math greats are there and they even offer posters of anyone's entire genealogy.

I love magnificent obsessions like this one -- that someone went to the trouble to create it and that they keep it up to date (one math geek I know just finished summer 2005 and he was there), eventually creating this IMDB.com of math.

Posted by 12:12 AM

December 30, 2005

Advice

As I've gotten older, I've noticed that I'm increasingly coming back around to old cliches and sayings -- stuff grandparents and parents and parents of friends' would tell me back when I was 15 and I never believed a word of it. Some of it is profound, life-changing stuff that I ignored all those years ago.

Then it dawned on me: maybe I've already gotten all the great advice I would ever need in a lifetime.

People from all walks of life and every age have at one time or another given me their life lessons that gave them some understanding of how the universe works. It's likely how one generation passes knowledge onto the next generation. The problem is I wasn't mature enough or smart enough at the time to recognize it or understand it. I'm hearing myself say things my grandfater would say, and it gives me pause. It's not the standard worry that I'm turning into my parents, but more a worry that I've let all of life's truths slip through my hands when I was younger and I'm just now starting to catch them and pass them on. I hope my hunch is correct -- maybe life isn't a journey to uncover new truths in far off places, but instead to simply gain enough to experience to understand what is all around you, all the time.

Of course, I've got to remind myself of this when I start handing out sage advice to toddlers. They'll be ignoring me until well after 2035.

Posted by 12:48 AM

December 29, 2005

Pave the Planet

I'm impressed with Google Earth. I hadn't totally got what was cool about it until I built my first Google Earth app earlier today. The documentation is pretty slight (it'd be nice if they simply broke down which elements are required and which ones are optional) but they have a good demo file you can simply copy.

After about an hour of hacking and I had a nice kml file with nearly 4200 points on it, direct from the MetaFilter user database. It's great that Google Earth launched the client with this robust API already in place.

The results are pretty cool. I've only offered lat/long values for a week or two, and already there are loads of people in far off places showing up. It's a good feeling to give the old globe a spin and see points all around, and to hear stories of people getting to know each other offline as a result.

Posted by 12:49 AM

December 27, 2005

Ten Years

In spring of 1995, while using a borrowed computer (I didn't own one myself) in the undergraduate lab, I noticed a new icon in the main window. It was a blue globe with a snake-like S shape around it. It was labeled Mosaic. It was an early version and you couldn't type addresses in the URL field, so I took to just navigating from the start page, which was some generic NCSA welcome page. It was difficult to get very far, but eventually I found all sorts of things that interested me.

In Fall of 1995, I had a BS degree under my belt but felt I needed to know more, so I started work on a Masters. My parents bought me the first computer I'd had in many years, and with a Netcom dialup at home, I began to explore. Soon after, I felt I could do more than simply read stuff online -- I wanted to create stuff as well.

About a week before christmas, I searched for HTML books and ended up buying Creating Your Own Netscape Web Pages for myself. On a lonely Christmas night, I cracked open the book at 11pm and began to read it while seated at my desk, in front of my computer. It was the only computer book I ever read every single page of, from start to finish, in a single sitting. It taught me HTML, the basics of FTP, Paint Shop Pro, and the Hot Dog Pro text editor.

There's this moment somewhere around 3am on December 26, 1995 that I can recall vividly. I've only had a handful of moments like this in my entire life. I'm sitting there writing code for a couple hours. A bunch of special words bounded by greater than and less than symbols -- stuff that seems meaningless. I press save, open a web browser, and suddenly it's a rich and colorful page with all sorts of stuff on it. My first web page wasn't a simple Hello World -- I had graphics, backgrounds, colors, and loads of links. It took a few tries to get just right, but when it was complete, I was transformed.

I recall a similar moment the first time I used two-point perspective in a 9th grade art class. You follow some rules and go through some motions that feel mechanical and suddenly you end up with art.

By 6am that morning, I was exhausted and went to sleep. Soon after that night I remember telling a friend that I wasn't sure I should be in grad school -- that maybe this new web thing was taking off and I could somehow make a living building websites. I finished grad school, but soon after I got to quit my first job and do just that. Follow my dream building websites.

It's now been ten years since that day and thanks to a mixture of luck, patience, and perseverance I'm in a wonderful place. I'm happy, content, and fulfilled. My personal and professional life are better than they've ever been.

And I'm still spending much of my day, every day, building web pages.

Posted by 11:52 PM

Most Improved, 2005

This is a long time coming, but I've really been enjoying Jalopnik the past few months. When Jalopnik and Autoblog and others like it launched, I was disappointed that these new car blogs were so boring. Cars are one of the most universal of hobbies, and you'd think it's easy to find someone nuts about it that could write. And yet, the first year of car blogs was a blur of warmed over press releases from Detroit and Japan. Yaawwwwwn.

At some point this year, Nick Denton roped in a superfreak car geek that sounds like he wrote for magazines or covered cars for a newspaper or something. His enthusiasm is infectious and his knowledge deep -- he loses me sometimes but for the most part it's still accessible for the average fan of cars. Me, I'm mostly into new car design and custom tuner cars, and the site doesn't disappoint these days. I'd go so far as to say it's the most dramatic turnaround I've seen in a blog, as it went from boring to must-read almost overnight by simply getting a new writer.

Slightly related -- the one thing I thought was annoying about the new author is the fixation on posting a silly car video of the day. They're usually a 30 second shaky short of some mulleted dork (the author calls them "hoons") trying to do a burnout. Sometimes they're funny. More often they're kind of boring. But sometimes they're incredible. I've come around on the "hoon" posts there too.

And while this is the intellectual equivalent of "Man Getting Hit By Football (in the nuts)", Redneck Surfing just might be the greatest hoon video ever uploaded. Watch it about twenty times like I did today to understand what I'm going on about. It's an instant classic.

Posted by 07:36 PM

December 26, 2005

links for 2005-12-26

Posted by 12:18 AM

December 25, 2005

Yule Log

(plucked from the amusing login screen at gmail)

Posted by 07:45 PM

December 24, 2005

links for 2005-12-24

Posted by 12:18 AM

December 23, 2005

You learn something new everyday

Let's say you take a trip out to your mailbox a few hundred yards away, and you know there are big packages in the box, and it's a downpour. So you grab an umbrella (knowing that true Oregonians never use umbrellas, but you make an exception for the sake of dry christmas presents). When you return to your front door with packages in hand, you place the soaking wet umbrella outside the front door to dry.

The next day, when you go out to a restaurant and it's been raining off an on, you take the umbrella, just in case, because you don't want the baby to get soaked while going to and from the car. The umbrella sits by your side for a couple hours while you eat. Then you head home, and on the way into the house, dump all the jackets and scarves and the umbrella on a chair.

Several hours later, around 11pm, you hear a ridiculously loud and strange noise, coming from the chair which is inside the house. The cats are confused. The sound comes and goes for the next ten minutes. It's natural, but also unnatural. It's not pleasant. It's quite loud, this sound coming from a chair in your house.

So here's the lesson: when you bundle your umbrella back up after it's been drying overnight, you might want to open it up and peek in real quick or you just might be carrying around a live tree frog for most of a day.

Posted by 08:12 AM

links for 2005-12-23

Posted by 12:21 AM

December 18, 2005

One freaky year

According to the NYT, Freakonomics was the most blogged-about book of the year, which isn't too surprising considering how much I read about it on pretty much every blog that mentions books. It is impressive that it beat Harry Potter out this year, since everyone I know seemed to mention that book at least once on their blog as well.

I enjoyed Freakonomics in the audio version and then without really thinking about it, I kind of followed some of the advice and points made in the book in my own life.

We sold our first house and bought a new one this year and in the process learned that we really could do without a realtor, just as the authors described. We staged our old house ourselves, and pushed our realtor to get us on the weekly home tour. I took photos for our listing and helped write it, keeping in mind the lessons from the book and removed every empty phrase like "fabulous" and "wonderful" and replaced them with descriptive terms like "open" and "large". We did all of our new home shopping online and by canvassing the city and calling builders with works in progress. We found and bought our new house without any realtors involved at all. It was surprisingly easy -- whenever I was wondering what we were supposed to do at a stage in the financing/offer/escrow process, I could just punch up google and get all the info I needed. Google searches lead me to offer letter templates, legal ramifications for each document we signed, and how to find the best financing. While I like my realtor and consider her a personal friend, if we ever sell our new home, we'll do it ourselves and save a few grand next time around.

The other big takeaway from the book was that life insurance is another industry that only commanded high prices by hiding information. I actually got a great life insurance policy for myself using the site mentioned in the text, accuquote. It was lower than a couple estimates I got from small town agents, since accuquote seems to be a front for a zillion agents that can sell you a policy from any company.

A lot has been written about co-author Steven Levitt asking questions no economist ever has before, but I think his real gift is finding just the right dataset that teases out noise and gets at answers to impossible queries. Someone, somewhere has done a sociological survey of pretty much everything on earth, but few social scientists ever use the data outside those issuing the surveys -- but Levitt seems to somehow find them. I became a huge fan of the book because it rekindled my love of the scientific method and I hope the book inspires a generation of students to take an unconventional look at their area of study, ask impossible questions, then find the right dataset to help answer them.

Posted by 08:39 PM

links for 2005-12-18

Posted by 12:18 AM

December 17, 2005

links for 2005-12-17

Posted by 12:17 AM

December 16, 2005

links for 2005-12-16

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 15, 2005

Odd

Five undergraduate programs are being dropped: civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, computer engineering and exercise and sports science.

Tulane University got rid of their Civil Engineering program in the wake of Katrina. Doesn't that seem odd? At the time when New Orleans needs to be rebuilt, the biggest university there dissolves the training for people that build things. I'm sure a lot of graduates helped build and rebuild the levees all these years.

Posted by 10:07 AM

links for 2005-12-15

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 14, 2005

The zeitgeist

12/10/2005 - Saturday Night Live does a joke commercial on the complexity of the Medicare prescription drug plan, and the joke includes a bit about RSS feeds and podcasts.

12/12/2005 - Arrested Development episode has a joke where the twin brother Oscar is told he can't update "but i'm oscar dot com" and he replies with something like "ok, I was thinking of trying a podcast."

It still surprises me when I hear "blog" on TV without a definition attached. "Podcast" being used in jokes on mainstream shows kind of blows my mind.

Posted by 02:46 PM

December 13, 2005

links for 2005-12-13

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 11, 2005

links for 2005-12-11

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 10, 2005

Jingle Bells

1horse.jpg soap.jpg sleigh.jpg

"one horse, soap, and sleigh" is what I thought the lyric was until today.

Posted by 09:44 PM

links for 2005-12-10

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 09, 2005

links for 2005-12-09

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 08, 2005

links for 2005-12-08

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 07, 2005

links for 2005-12-07

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 06, 2005

links for 2005-12-06

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 04, 2005

links for 2005-12-04

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 03, 2005

links for 2005-12-03

Posted by 12:05 AM

December 01, 2005

Subscription vs. piecemeal pricing of music

This week I actually suggested to someone that they avoid an iPod and instead buy something from Creative or iRiver. I know, I was shocked to hear myself say "well if you want unlimited music, no version of an iPod will work with that."

Here's the weird part -- at first I only suggested avoiding the iPod because they wanted to use Rhapsody, but the more I think about it, choosing to go with an unlimited music service seems like a smarter choice. I was glad to see Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED, talk about this last week as well.

For me and my maladjusted alpha geek friends, the idea of nearly unlimited music for the iPod is totally doable in the age of bittorrent, mp3 blogs, mp3 groups on usenet, and iTunes hacks like Ourtunes. We get almost all the music we want for free, and buy a few on the iTunes Music Store (and we go to rock shows and buy shirts and find other ways to repay the band) when we're not spending time ripping our large CD collections to high bitrate mp3 and swapping that with each other.

But for regular people that just use the internet for web information and email, locating tons of free music is a difficult task. When Yahoo or Napster or Rhapsody offers 1+ million songs for ~$10 a month, the iPod and iTunes Music Store starts to look like a ripoff in the long run.

This could be the undoing of Apple's cornering of the mp3 player market -- for a long time people have advocated a compulsory music license, where you pay $50 a year and you get all the music you want for free. The thinking behind it is that $50 x millions of broadband subscribers = more money than the music industry gets in album sales. And that's basically what these unlimited music services offer. Sure, you're merely "leasing" music because when you stop your membership, the music disappears, but all-you-can-download is what napster used to be back in the day, only this time it's crippled with DRM and there's a monthly fee. But it's still all the music you want, all the time, like napster used to be.

It seems like the music labels are always at war with Apple over pricing and I think I can see why. They prefer the subscription model where no one "owns" anything and files only work as long as you pay into it. Apple insists on letting people download copies (crippled with DRM yes, but you still get to keep the files and play them long after you pay for them) but you have to buy them ala carte, which can quickly get expensive for any music fan. And I think I see why the music industry wants to move to a subscription model -- selling albums or song downloads requires constantly coming up with new music to keep sales up. Sales are unpredictable without a constant stream of new stuff to buy, but if you get every listener on a subscription plan, that's money in the bank you can count on every month, regardless of whether or not Sting or Coldplay or 50 Cent ever do another album. Heck, most subscribers would still be paying ten bucks a month to hear old Steve Miller band tracks, as the back catalog would be the main draw in a subscription-based music business instead of the newest stuff.

Maybe I'm finally realizing that if I had to legitimately pay piecemeal for all the mp3s I've ever owned, I'd be spending thousands of dollars a year instead of the couple hundred I spend at the iTMS. Having unlimited downloads of over a million songs starts to sound pretty attractive at only ten bucks a month.

(totally weird sidenote: in my recollection, the big proponents of compulsory music licenses come mostly from the copyfight world but everyone I know from there uses an iPod)

Posted by 08:10 PM | Comments (12)