Oblomovka

2002-11-05»

This story - about a seemingly fake set of scientific papers that managed to get published in reputable scientific journals - just gets more and more weird. Apparently the twins appear quite sincere in their belief that their paper has legitimate merit (rather than just being the Anti-Sokals that I thought they were initially). And they even have bodacious fans!

The sociological milieu of the affair is rich in color and personalities. The Bogdanovs have been described as "charismatic" and and "persuasive." One of the juicier details is that the Bogdanov twins actually have FANS - scores of beautiful, nubile young women - who attend their seminars thereby delighting the other physicists - distracting them from theoretical to applied pysics. The Bogdanovs have political cachet - even the support of the French Minister of education. In addition to this, because of their prominence, the Bogdanov brothers have brought various publishing houses into the fray, making for a general circus-like atmosphere in the normally subdued and monkly Ivory towers of science.

Mind you, the site that's from also talks about a COINTELPRO conspiracy to hold back science. We appear to be entering the really dark, conspiracy-laden corners of sci.physics here. Or at least slightly more French than I'm accustomed to.

Josh's friend Chris got hold of his marketing data under the Data Protection Act. Now he's selling it to the highest bidder on e-bay.

Lloyds TSB: Approximately 500 pages of personal data including an analysis of banking products they believe I might be interested in. Also includes overdraft limit maintenance history (hand written), risk management history data (93 pages) and a full list of letters sent over the previous 5 years (completed by hand). All data and codes come with explanatory notes provided by Lloyds TSB. Original cost £ 10.

Sainsbury's: Dated 12 July 2001, this data is split into five separate reports. Report 1. Operational report (name and address etc.) Report 2. Operational report again, with summarised details and the last 31 transactions on the card. Report 3. Drawn from the main data repository and includes the 'Acorn' standard marketing categorisation. Includes the assumption that we are 'better-off inner-city executives living in a partially gentrified multi-ethnic area'. Report 4. Shows the transactions made using our reward card. Report 5. This is a list of EVERYTHING we bought from Sainsbury's over a 3 year period - where we bought it and how much we paid. This data has been co-produced with my partner whose individual data has been removed.

2002-11-04»

It's the little differences that make a marriage. When I get pestered by someone phoning up all hours of the day, I try to ignore it. When it happens to Quinn, she starts up a blog about it.

Great slashdot comment by Dan "ssh ninja" Kaminsky, matching the decentralised theories of maverick economist David Friedman with the grim realities of how reputation management works. I really enjoy reading Friedman's work, because he seems to be the only laissez-faire economist who truly believes what they all appear to be saying. Friedman genuinely does think the market is the best solution to anything - including legal systems, national defence, and the environment. I don't agree with him, but I think his models give strong clues on how a completely decentralised, emergent infrastructure might work. He's also much more readable than most economists ("The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations." is one of his). If you've read any Ken Macleod, the economy of The Stone Canal is based on Friedman's Machinery of Freedom: the weird bit where you can kill someone legally if you get a witness is lifted from his analysis of the private law world of medieval Iceland.

1988 Economist editorial by Nico Colchester, on the advantages of crunchy over soggy.(From Tomski).

Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became.

Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get. Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim.

2002-11-02»

So back in the new home (which is an older house than the previous home). Still living out of cardboard food and cardboard boxes, and a fantastic backload of mail, and trying to pick up the rubbery tatters of busted deadlines I dived through to go up to Portland.

But I'm getting there with my desktop PC. It's now got a Soundblaster Live!, SCSI card and tape backup, CD-RW, video capture, webcam, and PCMCIA card stuffed into it, and is still coming up for air. Everything's supported under Linux; I haven't had to recompile the kernel once, although some dancing was required for the CD-RW.

And my desktop is looking a lot better. Here's what it looks like now (as opposed to a few days ago). I'm running Gnome 2, which has just turned up in Debian unstable. I just typed:

apt-get install -t unstable gnome

Session management still sucks under X-Windows. That's a bit unfair, as session management doesn't really exist anywhere else. It's the feature that's supposed to let your apps pop up and reinstate themselves in all the right places when you login. In theory, all the windows you see on my desktop should appear without prompting or dragging or clicking or manhandling of any kind. Well, that's the theory. For some reason, Mozilla is one of the few X-Windows apps that pays no attention to session management, which is a pain. X-Chat seems to obey it, but gets very confused as to where it should be. And multi-gnome-terminal - the cool tabbed term you can see in the top left of the desktop plot - just crashes. Yay.

Better news: windows managers are finally getting off the crack pipe in Linux and doing what they're supposed to. Metacity, Havoc's cut-down window-manager for Gnome2, does just what I need: including allowing arbitrary commands to be run from key presses anywhere on the screen. That, and a decent Alt-Tab logic means I'm pretty close to having an almost mouse-free existence.

I'm pretty excited about this. I can now get to almost anywhere I want on the net with just a few keystrokes. I have ALT-G set to go to Google, and I have ALT-ENTER set to go to my bookmarks page. Mozilla's new typeahead feature means I can zoom through my bookmarks by just typing what I think the URL is called. This works fantastically well - I can get to boing boing by just typing ALT-ENTER,b,o,i,ENTER. I can get to Tom Coates' site by just typing ALT-G,Tom Coates,TAB,TAB,ENTER (that's enough to do "I feel lucky" on Tom's name).

It's funny looking at all of this and observing what habits I've picked up from my time with an iBook. I'm not using multiple workspaces on my new desktop, a combination of learning to live without them on the iBook, and suddenly having more screen resolution than I've ever had in my life. And the whole ALT-ENTER thing smacks a great deal of LaunchBar, a great Macintosh intuitive keyboard shortcut utility that really needs to be ported to Linux.

2002-10-29»

Grandfather doing much better. Talking to neurologist tomorrow.

Rejected names for kid: Medusa, Yoko.