Ten Reasons Why

Yesterday, I departed my parent’s house at 3pm to drive back to my home in Capitol Hill in the District. Six and a half hours later I arrived there. That might not have been phenomenal if my parent’s lived in Wilmington, NC, or Providence, RI. But my parents still live in the same house I grew up in on the southside of Richmond, VA, a scant 114 miles, door-to-door, from my current abode. At almost exactly 6.5 hours that gives me an average speed of about 17.5 miles an hour through the eastern seaboard parking lot formerly known as Interstate 95 North.
In all likelihood, it could have been much worse than that. I took almost two hours and fifteen minutes to get from Richmond to Doswell, VA, barely 30 miles. At that point, I got off of I-95 and hopped on US Route 1 North which moved at a pretty normal pace until Fredericksburg, where Route 1 North turned into a parking lot as well. After it took me more than an hour to get about eight miles through Fredericksburg, I turned back south (the southbound lanes being virtually traffic free) and caught Route 3 east to 301 North, crossed the Potomac on 301 (the only bridge across the Potomac east of DC) and came into DC through southern Maryland.
The detour tacked an extra 40-45 miles onto the trip and may not have saved me any time in the long run (Fredricksburg to DC via 3 and 301 is just under 90 miles . . . and it still took two and a half hours, thanks to having to merge to single lane for the bridge and passing through the shopping center hell of Waldorf, MD). However, it did at least allow me to actually drive at over 20 MPH for a good portion of that leg, which did wonders for my sanity.
The emergent properties of traffic are kind of interesting: small perturbations at one point (merging, single accidents, even rubbernecking) can result in jams at that or even other areas on the road.
On the other hand, when you’ve been stop-start inching along the interstate for four hours, never getting above 15 miles an hour for more than 30 yards, it’s really very uninteresting.

Culture

Ray Kurzweil, a well-known inventor, has received a patent (NY Times, free registration required) for software that creates poetry by reading poems, learning the style of the poet, and imitating it.
It’s probably a bit more complex than that, and the results are likely underwhelming as poetry (the example in the article certainly is), but what I’m more interested in the potential impact of providing a software patent (which are dodgy patents anyway) on the computerization of common artistic practices.
Can the patent holders litigate against human students of poetics for patent infringement if those students create poems by reading and imitating the style of existing poets?!? Think of the repercussions on graduate creative writing programs!

Books, Writing & Literature, Intellectual Property

A good introduction to the FCC’s broadcast flag ruling on Slate:

Broadcast-flag technology works like this: Digital TV signals that are broadcast over the air, rather than transmitted via cable or satellite, will include an invisible data tag — the broadcast flag — along with the picture and sound. By FCC fiat, any digital TV tuner built after July 1, 2005, must refuse to allow broadcast-flagged programs to be recorded in such a way that they can be redistributed in their high-definition format. You’ll be able to record Letterman tonight and watch him tomorrow but you won’t be able to e-mail a copy to your friends.

Link via Scripting News.

Intellectual Property

Fun: One word. So little time.

Books, Writing & Literature

Two recent articles raising red flags about a rosy RSS future:

• Plugging the RSS Usability Hole [Link via Lockergnome's RSS Resource] re-affirms the lunacy of the little orange XML box as the primary interface to content syndication feeds. I wrote about this extensively back in the summer [chronologically: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Kudos to the author, David Shea of Mezzoblue, who actually does something to solve the problem: a true human-readable RSS feed. Yes, it looks like a regular web page; that’s the point. View the source, though, and you’ll see it’s just the RSS 1.0 XML file rendered via XSL and CSS.
• The End of RSS [Link via Stephen Downes' Online Learning Daily] talks about the irony of RSS success: ” Herein the black hole of RSS: If your feed works, if you are successful in attracting subscriptions on a global scale, if you do it right, you are doomed.” The problem isn’t RSS itself, but rather that much of the RSS aggregator software doesn’t properly follow protocols, downloading the feed even if it hasn’t changed, thus consuming unnecessary bandwidth. Is it any surprise that Radio Userland appears to be one of the most eggregious abusers of the protocol? Doubly ironic, since Dave Winer lodged complaints about the bandwidth burden of his feed being accessed too frequently.

Syndication & Aggregation

After some analysis of California supermarket strikes and a not-too-far-off-topic (but-still-kinda-self-indulgent) digression into Where I Shop And Why, Evan finally drifts into my favorite topic of the week and makes a few excellent points:

Wal-Mart is simply on the leading edge of a very large price signal, and the ultimate end of this process isn’t Wal-Mart’s current $9 per hour with no benefits, but zero dollars per hour: ten years from now, no matter where you shop or whether the management is good or evil or indifferent, there will be no such thing as a human bagger or checkout clerk in any discount store….one trivial application of universal radio-frequency tags in products will be taking a cartful of goods and rolling it through a radio scanner with a credit-card slot on the side. Human baggers are going to vanish much faster than human telephone operators did.

and

[T]he very notion of a “supermarket” rests on the destruction of a long list of what once were lifelong professions: all those small bakeries now replaced by machine-made loaves of bread trucked out from a central factory in the dead of night; all those butcher shops, delis, pasta-makers, crafters of sauces and pickles, photo-development booths, and all the other specialties now rolled into one building with fewer people in it. I’m guessing that each job of “supermarket bagger” is built on the grave of a dozen or more former jobs.

I can’t help but think that this is a great premise for a very wonky horror movie. The Wal-mart is built on the economic graveyard of long-dead professions . . . that now rise from the dead as zombie butchers, zombie bakers, and zombie checkout clerks with a taste for brains!!

Culture

Okay, is it just me waking up to the phenomena, or is Wal-mart getting a lot of fairly negative press from multiple directions all of a sudden.?
The Los Angeles Times started a three-part series on Wal-Mart today: An Empire Built on Bargains Remakes the Working World (no-cost registration required).
What was the tipping point that triggered all this examination of Wal-mart’s impact?
Can it be that big honkin’ warehouse-size stores full of gallon jars of pickles and cheap jeans aren’t as sexy as operating system monopolies?

Culture

…but affirmation is good.
174.

Technology & Internet

Wal-mart is apparently planning to launch its own line of Wal-Mart notebook computers. The article from CNet says:

The retail giant plans to begin offering notebooks under its own brand name during the first quarter of 2004, according to industry sources quoted in a report the Taiwan Economic News published this week. . . . If Wal-Mart, which sells PCs from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and eMachines, moves into the notebook market successfully, it could send ripples across the PC industry. The retailer’s typically aggressive pricing could compel manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Toshiba to reduce their notebook prices in response, analysts said.

Thinking about this in the light of the recent Fast Company article on Wal-Mart, this could feasibly be a move that significantly affects notebook pricing, particularly for manufacturers that sell via retail stores (e.g. Hewlett-Packard).
It would also be interesting to see if if Wal-mart would forsake Windows and sell Wal-mart-branded laptops with Lindows or Lycoris (two consumer-oriented desktop versions of a Linux OS) installed. They already sell Lindows workstations from Microtel. Given that the Linux-based Microtel desktops haven’t exactly revolutionized the OS industry, I doubt that a Linux-based Wal-mart notebook would.
But it would be fun to see Wal-mart and Microsoft get into competition. :)

Technology & Internet

Kudos to Clay Shirky for Otlet: Some ideas die because they are wrong.

[Yahoo] was, in other words, “an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers.” And it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn�t even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.

I won’t dive into the Otlet debate 1, 2 (not that it’s that heated).
However, as someone who in the past longed for a way to heirarchically categorize all of my information, I have gradually moved away from that mode of thinking toward the value of search.
In fact, my current strategy for personal knowledge management, both at home and work, revolves around recording the non-heirarchical flow of ideas into a wiki. My wiki-of-choice is the Python-based MoinMoin, because it’s quick to set up, easy to customize, and has good management tools. While I maintain some notion of heirachy when recording ideas into my personal wiki, I find that the best way to access them is through the search.
The problem with ontologies or taxonomies is that they are damn hard for the average person to build and maintain effectively, especially if you want it to be used by someone else, and even more so when it has to interface or mesh with other taxonomies created by other people. Which is why I think Dave Winer’s attempt at organizing weblog entries by heirarchical categories, and the eventual goal of meshing multiple people’s category directories together, pales in comparison to the usefulness of a tool like searching a Wiki or searching a weblog for your own information or searching Google or Feedster for multiple information sources.

Technology & Internet