An excellent paper: ev: Evolution of Biological Information
Read More
Trains Planes and Ruby on Rails – Is speed the most important thing for a successful startup? Twenty years ago, I was reading a Graham Greene novel on a painfully slow train ride in Italy. In the book, he pointed out that your mood as a train traveller was directly proportional to speed. Evan posts today about how the mood a Twitter HQ is directly proportional to the speed of the site. I’ve noticed that many people running startups seem to have moods that are directly proportional to their Alexa rank. I’d argue that fast response time is the unwritten golden rule of successful web apps. A site that is slow is like wading through mud. Before Youtube I could watch video on the web, but before Youtube, my expectation was that it would splutter and stall. I suspect that focusing on speed is much healthier than traffic or, dare…
The Day Web 2.0 Died. Google release a completely obvious but great new product – saveable personal maps. On the same day, Techcrunch review an enterpise mashup service, Rearden Commerce, with $100M of funding. This wouldn’t appear so ironic, (since they currently and sensibly have their feet firmly in the ‘stupid money’ enterprise camp), if it weren’t for the fact that they are announcing a move into the consumer space. Talk about a day to pick for that announcement. To add insult to injury, Rearden have an hilariously meaningless ‘long tail’ graph and are apparently going after the services market: “services are roughly 60% of the worldwide economy.” Oh yeah, are Rearden gonna run the Bosnian police force (like Computer Sciences Corporation) and hook up tourists with Bangkok Ladymen? Going after the ‘services market’ with a mashups startup is like going after the global arms trade market with a paintball…
Someone on CNN called me a ‘Dirty Jew’ Imagine that Iran decided to invade Mexico in the face of near universal international condemnation, because it claimed Mexico had weapons that it turned out it didn’t. And that it then waged war for several years, de-stabilising the American continent and causing Mexicans to stream across the border into America. Imagine that Iran had the audacity to setup a Pensicola prison, actually in America but controlled by Iran. Here they could put people that they captured and not have them subject to the Geneva Convention or domestic law. Then imagine that Iran had its navy patrolling the area and inspecting fishing boats, just off the coast of Texas. Imagine the Americans decided the Iranians were messing too near their border, like with the Russians and Cuba, and captured several Iranian seamen and showed them on TV looking unharmed physically and possibly much…
Its pretty amazing when you come accross something you actually know a little about, how you discover how naive a supposedly slick PR machine is. Today Bush cited ‘Iraq the Model’ as an example of success in Iraq – because there are bloggers you see. Some time ago I added 20 or so Iraqi Bloggers to my RSS reader. About a third of them have since fled the country, a third have disappeared and the remainder are a woeful tale of human misery and sufffering, leaving a sample of 1 – Iraq the Model. In fact Iraq the Model is the potential online equivalent of ‘Mission Accomplished’, something championed too soon that could go the other way. Carl Rove is not so much a genius (an incumbant Republican sock puppet would have won after 911) but a rather out of touch ‘spinster’. Bush Cites Upbeat Bloggers From Baghdad
Which one of these two buildings was built by slaves? The one built 4000 years later. Protester disrupts Westminster Abbey service marking 200 years since slave trade abolished – International Herald Tribune
Apple TV at one tenth of the cost and 90% of the functionality: A long cable.
Adam Curtis’ (The Power of Nightmares) latest documentary is currently being shown in the UK. It traces libertarianism to the Cold War, number theory and the rise of the self. The title refers to a version of the prisoners’ dilemma developed by John Nash who is interviewed in the documentary and was the inpiration behind Ron Howard’s clawing ‘A Beautiful Mind’. Part 1 is below, the remainder of the series hasn’t yet aired. The Trap: What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom? | smashing telly – the best full length free tv programs on the web, updated every day
Tit for Tat is widely acknowledged as being the most successful strategy in game theory, that this is true is important since it directly affects big things – like foreign policy. It seem clear that human beings have a capacity to harbour grudges over generations, and that these grudges tend to stem from retribution being aimed at the wrong person, or an innocent person who is a member of a perceived group through no choice of his or her own. This creates positive feedback, such that any person who has been a victim of mis-applied retribution is likely to feel injustice and seek revenge, which can also be mis-applied ad infinitum. Tit for Tat models that I have seen imply perfect information flow, whereas the real world case of in-group/out-group mentality and grudges could be simply modelled by adding noise to the system. I believe it would be simple to…
Chris Jordan does some fantastic art pieces that represent quantitative information visually. Amount of money spent per hour in Iraq as a giant picture of Benjamin Franklin made out of dollar bills. Number of people admitted to hospital for painkiller abuse as an abstract shape made from the same number of Vicodin pills etc. Thanks Cori. current work
According to a British Coffee Association spokesperson (with a vested interest), its 4.5 cups a day: “a wealth of scientific evidence suggests that moderate coffee consumption of four to five cups per day is perfectly safe for the general population and does have a beneficial effect on alertness and performance even in regular coffee drinkers” BBC NEWS | Health | Coffee ‘no boost in the morning’
Swiss Army Invades Liechtenstein. 170 troops wandered accross the border during night time exercises, by mistake, causing much embarassment. Perhaps the US government will accuse the Swiss of harboring Weapons of Mass Destruction in the form of Swiss Army Knives?