Odd thought of the day: maybe software is just like Macaroni and Cheese. It was developed (allegeldy by Thomas Jefferson, no less) and released to the public. Countless people have tinkered with the ingredients. Likewise for the basic recipie. Numerous variants have appeared.
But at the end of the day, corporations have declared intellectual property over relatively unappetising varieties (the mysterious orange powder one mixes with milk and butter) or the velveeta one squirts from a tube into oddly altered pasta shaped like SpongeBob SquarePants.
The community source for Mac & Cheese can use more nutritious pasta, fresh cheeses, and many other versions, depending on one's personal tastes. Like cut hotdogs if you live in Upstate NY, or breadcrumbs. Or stewed tomatoes. You have to understand cooking a little more, but you're free to customize as you see fit.
(Note: it's just a white sauce with cheese in it. You have to just understand the whole point of heating milk in a pan.)
Which resolves both the issue of the nature of Open Source software, and what's for lunch.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
Bag the whole argument
Not sure why, but the whole plastic bag debate in the still bothers me. Despite retracing the arithmetic in the Christian Science Monitor article and extending it to its conclusion, the basic issue of banning plastic bags still bothers me. The material that makes up a plastic bag is minimal compared to the material making up the goods it contains, and yet nobody is calling for bans on other retail packaging, or even improved recycling, with the same fervor as the bags.
Cited in the article: bags choked drains in Bangladesh, causing massive flooding and deaths. Sea life mistake floating plastic bags for squid, eat them, and die. They cause litter. It takes a lot of petroleum byproducts and energy to produce them.
You know, this reminds me of the arguments against the 6-pack plastic rings, which used to allegedly strangle seagulls and other marine life. Everybody started cutting up the rings after use. Cans stopped being sold by the 6-pack so much, and are instead sold in cardboard boxes by the 12-, 24-, or 36-pack. Not a direct causality, but I wonder: is the impact reduced by encasing a whole dozen or three in cardboard less than just holding a few cans together with less than an ounce of plastic?
Even worse, by packaging foods and drinks in larger quantities, aren't we really just encouraging overconsumption? A 24-oz bag of chips seems to use less material for packaging than 2 12-ox bags. Unless you consider one bag to be a serving, regardless of size, which is a little too common. Drinking half a six-pack isn't as bad all around as splitting a case with someone.
Human behavior is the entire problem here. Banning plastic bags isn't going to save the Earth. We're just going to screw up somewhere else. But one thought hit me: if you just pull the bag straight and tie it into a knot, it won't float. It won't clog drains as easily. Sea creatures are less likely to see a plastic knot in the ocean and try to dine on some calamari.
The point of this isn't to start a public service announcement to tell people to tie their shopping bags into a knot when they're done with them. Rather, just think about what you use and what you throw away. Stop giving dirty looks to people who bring their own bags to the supermarket. Try to refuse a shopping bag when you're just buying one thing.
It's trivial. It's meaningless. One less bag out of a half trillion used per year won't make a damn bit of difference. But that's not even remotely the point here. The point I'm trying to make is to think about reducing our impact on the environment, even if it means making your paper fit on 10 pages instead of 11, turning off lights when not needed, turning your air conditioning or heating down a degree or two, or even using your MP3 player instead of your stereo sometimes (without damaging your hearing of course).
Or even better, hop on the bus once in a while, if you have a trip that's suitable.
Cited in the article: bags choked drains in Bangladesh, causing massive flooding and deaths. Sea life mistake floating plastic bags for squid, eat them, and die. They cause litter. It takes a lot of petroleum byproducts and energy to produce them.
You know, this reminds me of the arguments against the 6-pack plastic rings, which used to allegedly strangle seagulls and other marine life. Everybody started cutting up the rings after use. Cans stopped being sold by the 6-pack so much, and are instead sold in cardboard boxes by the 12-, 24-, or 36-pack. Not a direct causality, but I wonder: is the impact reduced by encasing a whole dozen or three in cardboard less than just holding a few cans together with less than an ounce of plastic?
Even worse, by packaging foods and drinks in larger quantities, aren't we really just encouraging overconsumption? A 24-oz bag of chips seems to use less material for packaging than 2 12-ox bags. Unless you consider one bag to be a serving, regardless of size, which is a little too common. Drinking half a six-pack isn't as bad all around as splitting a case with someone.
Human behavior is the entire problem here. Banning plastic bags isn't going to save the Earth. We're just going to screw up somewhere else. But one thought hit me: if you just pull the bag straight and tie it into a knot, it won't float. It won't clog drains as easily. Sea creatures are less likely to see a plastic knot in the ocean and try to dine on some calamari.
The point of this isn't to start a public service announcement to tell people to tie their shopping bags into a knot when they're done with them. Rather, just think about what you use and what you throw away. Stop giving dirty looks to people who bring their own bags to the supermarket. Try to refuse a shopping bag when you're just buying one thing.
It's trivial. It's meaningless. One less bag out of a half trillion used per year won't make a damn bit of difference. But that's not even remotely the point here. The point I'm trying to make is to think about reducing our impact on the environment, even if it means making your paper fit on 10 pages instead of 11, turning off lights when not needed, turning your air conditioning or heating down a degree or two, or even using your MP3 player instead of your stereo sometimes (without damaging your hearing of course).
Or even better, hop on the bus once in a while, if you have a trip that's suitable.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
paper or plastic...
In a bit from the Christian Science Monitor, the issue of disposable plastic bags has come up again. We use half a trillion bags a year worldwide, or about 200/person/year. Each bag takes 500 years to break down. Assuming we're avid plastic bag consumers for 40 years, that makes each person's impact on the environment about 200*500*40, or 4,000,000 person-bag-years. For 2.5 billion bag users (.5 trillion/200), that brings it out to 10,000,000,000,000,000 person-bag-years of impact for everyone alive today, assuming the bag-using population remains stable. (I think the bags degrade in parallel rather than sequentially.) The real math is harder than I care to think about right now.
The damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't world is well familiar in public policy circles. Unfortunately, the general public is not terribly comfortable thinking in terms of consequence. Can we just ban plastic bags? How about plastic wraps? Where do we get the materials for the more fragile paper bags? Cloth bags? What are their environmental impacts, and how many plastic bags do they replace?
Great, just bring cloth bags or other reusable containers. The ones you wash with somewhat scarce drinking water and detergent that's toxic to the environment. Our current water supply system provides the same quality drinking water for drinking, bathing, washing, and flushing the toilet. (I suppose that's why some of us demand plastic bottled water shipped from France and Italy.)
Then there's the other question: even if you don't use plastic shopping bags, you're still buying disposable containers made out of heavier plastic containers, metal, and paper. Sure, recycle plastic bags or get a reusable cloth bag, or pack your sandwich in the bread bag like I do once a week. We're still throwing away lots of other metals and plastics-- that hasn't changed at all, and nobody's complaining about what happens to a soup can in the landfill--yet.
The damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't world is well familiar in public policy circles. Unfortunately, the general public is not terribly comfortable thinking in terms of consequence. Can we just ban plastic bags? How about plastic wraps? Where do we get the materials for the more fragile paper bags? Cloth bags? What are their environmental impacts, and how many plastic bags do they replace?
Great, just bring cloth bags or other reusable containers. The ones you wash with somewhat scarce drinking water and detergent that's toxic to the environment. Our current water supply system provides the same quality drinking water for drinking, bathing, washing, and flushing the toilet. (I suppose that's why some of us demand plastic bottled water shipped from France and Italy.)
Then there's the other question: even if you don't use plastic shopping bags, you're still buying disposable containers made out of heavier plastic containers, metal, and paper. Sure, recycle plastic bags or get a reusable cloth bag, or pack your sandwich in the bread bag like I do once a week. We're still throwing away lots of other metals and plastics-- that hasn't changed at all, and nobody's complaining about what happens to a soup can in the landfill--yet.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
In case the whole Information Science thing doesn't work out...
My pirate name is:
Iron Sam Flint
A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!
Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network
Monday, June 18, 2007
Remembering the milk...
It turned out to be not uncommon to have milk delivered at home in Albany, even in 2007. Which means that I have one less thing to remember every week.That had been a vague childhood memory, the arrival of the milkman, soon to be replaced by the Milk 6-Pack from Stewart's. (I'm not sure what killed off milk deliveries, but I suspected it had something to do with the 1970's gas shortage.) I'm the youngest of seven kids-- we bought half-gallons of milk by the six-pack. Not that it was that far to the nearest Stewart's shop, nor did we each drink a gallon of milk at a sitting, but three gallons of milk should've been enough until the next time my father remembered to get milk on the way home from work. If that were only the case.
In today's feverish obsession with Getting Things Done, we have Remember The Milk. It's your personal to-do list, though hosted through a browser, on a web server in San Francisco. At first glance, I had written the whole thing off as part of the new wave of disaggregated AJAX-powered, Bubble 2.0 hype.
Meanwhile, back on my Tech wish list, I was hoping for a some kind of catch-all program for making my own life easier. A to-do list that actually posted deadlines on a calendar would be a good start, much as my Palm PDA used to do when it felt like it. And something that had an awareness of location. And something that actually talked to my PDA-- though it doesn't quite support what I have now without some serious hacking.
With summer comes even greater activity around the house as we try to juggle our respective schedules-- the mix of kids activites and kid day camps, work, and those darned incompletes I have to finish if I plan to become a Candidate this Fall. Is Remembering The Milk a timesaver, or another Web 2.0 time-suck?
Friday, June 15, 2007
iGoogle
iGoogle has new themes: I've been using the "Tea House" theme for a couple of weeks. It's cool. It changes every few hours.
I don't have an IS theme for today. It's sunny out. Enjoy!
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Another summer, another paper, another block
I have to write three more papers before the end of the summer, and I'm just plain stuck.
Now that summer's kicked in, I'm back to my full-time summer job, which means expending whatever intellectual and emotional energy I have for the day shortly before 1 pm, after which I usually put in another 3-4 hours.
On one hand, I'm looking forward to not waking up at 6 am to get my daughter ready for school.
On the other hand, the thought of another summer with the kids home all day seems daunting, even with the prospects of summer camp for part of it. The thought of hearing, "I'm bored. What are we going to do today?" about 10 times a day (starting within 30 seconds after finishing some activity) is hardly helping matters.
I'm in dire need of a vacation.
I think Job #1 will be making a weekly schedule of general activities, and a list of choices for activities. Maybe even hour-by-hour, just like school. Reading hour, activities hour, lunchtime, chores, naptime, snacktime, then cleanup and go home.
Then after, I'll make a schedule for the kids.
Now that summer's kicked in, I'm back to my full-time summer job, which means expending whatever intellectual and emotional energy I have for the day shortly before 1 pm, after which I usually put in another 3-4 hours.
On one hand, I'm looking forward to not waking up at 6 am to get my daughter ready for school.
On the other hand, the thought of another summer with the kids home all day seems daunting, even with the prospects of summer camp for part of it. The thought of hearing, "I'm bored. What are we going to do today?" about 10 times a day (starting within 30 seconds after finishing some activity) is hardly helping matters.
I'm in dire need of a vacation.
I think Job #1 will be making a weekly schedule of general activities, and a list of choices for activities. Maybe even hour-by-hour, just like school. Reading hour, activities hour, lunchtime, chores, naptime, snacktime, then cleanup and go home.
Then after, I'll make a schedule for the kids.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Tag: You're It
I've realized that my del.icio.us account just might be yet another manifestation of pack-ratting. At the moment, I have 1100+ articles tagged, though a lot of these came from the other 33 mostly anonymous strangers in my network.
I like the whole social bokmarking aspect of del.icio.us and similar sites. It's nothing that could not have been done 10 years ago-- but the web was still brochureware back then, and the concept of social computing hadn't really taken hold yet. My favorite part: the network, where you can see who else links to the same things you do, and even subscribe to their links within your "network". This in turn becomes a feed of the latest things the people in your network have linked to. It's the laziest form of websurfing, and yet how I do it the most.
Being a total geek, I dumped my tag list into Excel, to discover that I have 405 tags whose frequencies don't quite match the usual power law for word counts, though tags behave differently, probably due to some bundling effect. My top 10 tags:
The top tags have more potential for overlaps: software, opensource, and development probably occur together pretty often. My guess is that a more accurate bundle of these terms would better follow the power law: there are a finite number of things one cares enough about to bookmark. (Tags should be extended into "concepts" more generally, which is probably the point of the "bundled tags" option.)
There's an Information Science idea lurking in here somewhere. Maybe after I knock out another paper this weekend I'll try to think about it.
I like the whole social bokmarking aspect of del.icio.us and similar sites. It's nothing that could not have been done 10 years ago-- but the web was still brochureware back then, and the concept of social computing hadn't really taken hold yet. My favorite part: the network, where you can see who else links to the same things you do, and even subscribe to their links within your "network". This in turn becomes a feed of the latest things the people in your network have linked to. It's the laziest form of websurfing, and yet how I do it the most.
Being a total geek, I dumped my tag list into Excel, to discover that I have 405 tags whose frequencies don't quite match the usual power law for word counts, though tags behave differently, probably due to some bundling effect. My top 10 tags:
- 178 research
- 135 opensource
- 117 development
- 103 software
- 96 wiki
- 95 web2.0
- 94 programming
- 92 blog
- 91 transit
- 89 academic
The top tags have more potential for overlaps: software, opensource, and development probably occur together pretty often. My guess is that a more accurate bundle of these terms would better follow the power law: there are a finite number of things one cares enough about to bookmark. (Tags should be extended into "concepts" more generally, which is probably the point of the "bundled tags" option.)
There's an Information Science idea lurking in here somewhere. Maybe after I knock out another paper this weekend I'll try to think about it.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Tokyo Pig
Yesterday's excursion to the Berkshire Museum's "Ninja" exhibit turned out to be slightly disappointing. It turned out to be just a demo from the local Karate club, and the only tie-in was a post-session of making Ninja Stars from Origami paper. (My wife made a big ninja star from a newspaper to show the kids, since that's a lot easier for origami than the little stiff sheets of colored paper used for origami proper.) They're also used for non-ninja-themed decoration, since they're usually made from a couple of colors and spin in a cool way when hung by a thread through the middle...
I decided to finally let the kids watch the Japanese Anime Tokyo Pig this morning, which is just as mindless as the image (right) might suggest. Except, for the first 5 minutes, it's actually kind of funny compared to its American peers. And, there are lots of Japanese cultural references-- farily obvious as well as fairly subtle. (The mythical Japanese father figure who ranges from fun to scary, funny to sarcastic, who occasionally gives a stern look "that could peel paint from the wall" when the kids misbehave. To date, I have yet to duplicate that look.)
But after a couple episodes, the kids are getting bored, and my daughter wants to kick me off the computer and go to Barbie.com.
I decided to finally let the kids watch the Japanese Anime Tokyo Pig this morning, which is just as mindless as the image (right) might suggest. Except, for the first 5 minutes, it's actually kind of funny compared to its American peers. And, there are lots of Japanese cultural references-- farily obvious as well as fairly subtle. (The mythical Japanese father figure who ranges from fun to scary, funny to sarcastic, who occasionally gives a stern look "that could peel paint from the wall" when the kids misbehave. To date, I have yet to duplicate that look.)
But after a couple episodes, the kids are getting bored, and my daughter wants to kick me off the computer and go to Barbie.com.
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