Expensive != Quality.

I learned this recently. Price is a signal of how much one party values something. Spending money can be a signal of how committed someone is, a way of showing that he knows he'll make the money back. Or it could be that the cost he's paying right now is peanuts to him. A high cost doesn't automatically mean you're getting what you pay for.

Free personality tests are more reliable and efficient than the paid variety

A “Chef” Fools Diners Into Preferring Inferior Food

DIY at an AWS presentation

Last Saturday I attended an event for Amazon Web Services. It was really informative and interesting, but the one that left a lasting impression was the DIY seismograph one of the presenters debuted. It was a dinky little thing, an accelerometer connected to a toothpick needle and handwritten dial. The whole thing relied on an Arduino to send data into AWS, and can send push notifications to a cellphone or turn on an alarm over the Internet.

The kit for portable seismographs will cost into the thousands of dollars. The DIY device showcased at that talk will cost much less, and can be tuned for different functions and greater/lesser sensitivity. It can be distributed to different areas, and AWS provides the analytics tools. The push notification capability alone exponentially increases the speed of info dissemination. 

This device is revolutionary because it transfers potential into the hands of the regular people. It has the ability to outperform bloated institutions that are more concerned with perpetuating themselves than actually performing the purpose they were created for. Where I am for example the weather services are a joke. But what if instead of a motion sensor we attach to the Arduino thermometers and hygrometers and anemometers and rain gauges and tide gauges? What if we didn't have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to wait for advisories, and we could depend instead on a message on our phones?

IoT is here, and it is amazing.

Dom Giuca: Thief vs. AAA Gaming

There's a lot of keen insights here, some that mirror my own views and also a lot that escaped me the first time I played the old Thief games.

 

Actor-observer bias in the wild

Overheard how one bro lost respect for his brother because the latter pronounced sauce as sows (as in, He sows corn in his field everyday.). This same bro later characterizes someone as "matured," and another as a "dooshbug."

Need to remember this.

Was This Louisiana Cop Accused of Being in the KKK Actually Fired for Objecting to Police Corruption?

It's a pretty cut-and-dried story. Except it turns out the bigot detective was actually an informant for the FBI.

We all lose battles. It's fine if he loses this one - he's already done more than anyone in his lifetime. People are going to live more peaceful lives in Louisiana because of what he did.

Biology

Exciting stuff like this sometimes makes me regret not working harder for my Biology degree.

Humble Plants that Hide Surprising Secrets
How Quantum Biology Might Explain Life's Biggest Questions

A friendly reminder

This made me remember that for all the integrity media trumpets it has, the bottom line is they get paid to have people tune in. Their incentives are not my incentives.

.NET Excel File Download

This was a cool trick I learned from a co-worker, which he in turn found from StackOverflow. I'm putting it here as a reference, because it's so simple and useful. So, let's say you want to have the browser download an Excel file instantly without using plugins or Interop. You put the following lines in your controller method:

Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + [filename]);
Response.ContentType = "application/ms-excel";

Then you have the method return a PartialView. The PartialView will have an IEnumerable of your view model:

@model IEnumerable<[view_model_here]>

Then you can just add the markup and styling for the data. When you run the application and use the controller method, it will cause a download attachment to occur.

Like I said, cool.

How to Age Well

Huh.

Puppies and Complexity Theory

X is for Xing Tian

Interesting bestiary by Nathan Anderson. I'm partial to Xing Tian, myself.

The Secret to Being a Pretender

Remember The Pretender? I really loved that show. In hindsight I think it was the freedom Jarod had to be anything that caught my fascination. And now I've finally hit upon a procedure to learn quickly.

Here are my references:

Scientists have found a new trick for completing your goals

Finding what to learn next

Learning how to learn

12 Prescriptions for creating a brain-healthy life

The habits of highly boring people, by Chris Sauve

Looking into the brain: when the map isn't the territory

Mind Expansion, Right Here

What Changed You as a Person Forever?

Excel Subreddit

What is the Most Expensive Life Lesson You've Ever Learned?

The Illusion of Transparency

The Secret Kings and Queens of the World

Compulsion

Sandorkraut and the Economics of Fermentation

I found out about him since the channel I linked to in my previous post had another video about him. I found his blog in short order - color me impressed. I know what book and DVD I will be buying next...

The microbiome inside our bodies has never been properly understood; recent findings have clearly proven there are surprising connections between the state of your gut's microorganisms and brain development, gut health, anxiety, and even mental health.

The very activity of creating fermented foodstuffs actually has interesting economic consequences. I would recommend reading this blog post in the Wild Fermentation site to learn more.

Kimchi Emergency

Korea’s kimchi in danger of disappearing due to heavy competition from China

I love kimchi.

I love the smell - it makes my mouth water. I love the deeply rich medley of flavors. It's good for you too.

Even if there were nothing else Korea achieved in its long history, I would still say God bless them for bringing kimchi into the world. It is a fond dream of mine to one day travel to the country and spend my time sampling authentic Korean cuisine - including their best kimchi.

Now, it seems like that dream is in danger. I understand the economics - the mere presence of a cheaper alternative in the market drives prices down, regardless of its quality. I get that China is more effective in terms of producing the stuff. There is, and let me emphasize this, nothing wrong or illegal at all about what's happening right now.

But while we're talking economics, let's talk about unintended consequences. The recipes for kimchi from Korea have a unique history. Some may have been passed from parent to child; others may have been refined over decades to appeal to the most people. Korea's population ate their mother's kimchi as the country went through both terrible and great upheavals. Kimchi is part of Korea's culture, but the Koreans grew into their culture because of such daily things like kimchi. To have this diversity and heritage just up and lost without much of a fight to generic product... sort of hits me hard.

It's a lot like how there was a wealth of gong fu in China before the Communists; if the latter had their way all these arts would have been replaced by wushu - which is really an amazing thing, let me tell you. But wushu is not gong fu.

Online Shaming - Kafka at its Finest

The thing is, shaming is a mechanism to enforce societal rules. It serves to help solidify the lines between who is in the group and who is out, between who has a high social standing and who doesn't. Because if you weren't higher than the other person in status, you wouldn't be able to freely punish them, would you? 

And so punishing someone for a transgression, even if it weren't strictly criminal, confers status on the one doing the punishing - they are gatekeepers of what is "right," they have a role in the group, and they are willing to enforce the duty that comes with their role. For the good of the group. Not the welfare of the members, just the good of some abstract concept of "the group."

Shaming shares similarities with physical assault - in both cases perpetrators target the victim who won't track them down and butcher their families in retaliation. Both are done for gain - whether it's to fit in more or gain status or, as in the case of companies who got involved in the circus that was described in the talk above, get money. But most importantly, shaming is done by people who can't do anything else - the elites don't bother to get into these petty squabbles. In fact, doing so is all downside for them. Criminals don't have any other avenue to get their fix or get to tomorrow; in this then we see that shaming is a tool of the mediocre.

Here's another article about online shaming. Sadly, all that vitriol won't bring Cecil back. Nor does it stop the continued poaching of these endangered animals.

On the Internet of Things and Talking Light Bulbs

I had the opportunity to hear Dr. John R. Williams give a talk titled, "Talking to Light Bulbs-- How the Internet of Things is transforming everything." This was a particular treat, listening to the man at the bleeding edge of innovation in my field give context and perspective to the IoT movement revolutionizing modern life. This is my attempt at setting down the points that resonated during that speech.

Right now, the best taxi service in the world doesn't own cars; the best retail service in the world doesn't have a physical location. And the best hotel service, doesn't own a single hotel. Data is being generated at an exponential pace, and analyzing this data is enabling the above to happen - it's even helping teach farmers how to be better at their job, beyond their own personal experience.

The beginnings for this were set up with the founding of the World Wide Web. Originally just to be used by the United States military to keep track of their stuff, the purpose soon expanded. Another milestone was in the development of HTTP - according to Dr. Williams at the time because HTTP was text-based it could get past firewalls since text was deemed safe; this made HTTP more useful than binary protocols.

The Internet was intended to support documents only. The coming about of Javascript birthed the creature known as a web application, which soon supplanted that original vision; it enabled developers to build programs on browser engines, which meant that these web applications can run on whatever device can run a browser. Now web applications are ubiquitous - practically all web pages aren't static documents, but rather are code that aggregate information from a multitude of sources. The code also has a second ability - it can track the user, and send out this information.

The revolution has only been helped by the open-source movement and the practice of releasing API's; developers can mash up different technologies and come up with novel applications. One example of this that Dr. Williams showcased was an app created by his students - the app leveraged the Meetup API to provide real-time information about meetings, filtered to those meetings comprising more than fifty people. The point of the app was to provide taxis with information on where to go for possible fares.

The coolest thing though that was demoed during the talk were the talking light bulbs. This was connected lighting - light bulbs able to change hue to create an atmosphere, able to turn itself on to wake you up, able to be toggled into security mode from your phone. Lights that can turn themselves off and on again to notify you of an emergency or a phone call. Light bulbs that turn on as you approach your house. 

The Internet of Things isn't all upside. It has proved to be a very disruptive force - many old businesses do not exist now because they have been made obsolete. Some companies have found success by embracing these changes and adapting to the changing times. The problem is that companies grow so successful they think they are too big to fail - it takes a special effort to always be on the lookout for the next sea change. Companies need to always be observing and orienting, and they need to decide and act quickly. In software development, this methodology is embodied in Agile programming - which in turn owes a lot to John Boyd and his OODA loop.

But IoT isn't just dangerous for companies that don't adapt; in many ways it's dangerous for its proponents as well. With increased connectivity and generated data and the current trend toward analytics, many people fall into the trap of thinking that the sky's the limit, that they can predict anything, and that the more information they put in the more in control they are.

This is understandable because for the longest time the prevailing mindset was that we can create mental models of phenomena to understand them. As more information comes up that shows minor problems with our mental models, we can make changes accordingly.

But what if a single infinitesimal change resulted in behavior completely different from that predicted by the model? The discovery of chaos and the butterfly effect mean that very small initial differences can result in huge perturbations. Dr. Williams illustrated this with the three-body problem - while it may be easy to predict the movement of a body hanging off another like a pendulum, adding a third body to the pendulum bob just makes predicting movement a hopeless endeavor.

Dr. Williams also related an anecdote about his colleague who was trying to predict the weather. During his calculations, the colleague made a mistake on the digit at the fifth decimal place; the result was that all his model's predictions were wrong. The colleague concluded it was impossible to predict the weather, because our measuring tools will never be accurate enough. And that's without taking into account the tools changing what they're observing as the measurements are being done.

Even in analyzing data one doesn't make use of all of the data; Dr. Williams mentioned that in order to make predictions often they just look at a fraction of the data - because data is almost always dirty, and making the algorithm fit the data too closely makes it too sensitive to these minute changes we've been discussing that result in wildly off predictions.

So there have to be boundaries. Within those boundaries, we have to allow for patterns to emerge on their own, perhaps introduce new strange attractors or dampen non-helpful ones. Of particular help would be the Cynefin framework developed by Dave Snowden.

Overall, it was a great talk. The above video was also used by Dr. Williams, but I couldn't find the other material I remember he used. I find some similarity with N. Taleb's ideas; lots of stuff to ponder.