Deep-Thoughts

Yay for old friends, economics, and technology! All at once! kc wrote a blog posting with her humble ideas on how to use IP address space tax. Wait… there’s a tax on address space? Yes, because it has become a scare quantity, because people are too lazy to move to IPv6, IPv4 address space is running out. The best of all bad ideas about what to do about this is to make an open market for address space, as though network addresses were some kind of useful piece of property with any kind of useful value. (BTW: When the present econolypse is over, and the next bubble starts, it will be an IPv4 address space bubble. Mark my words…) Address space is bits. We can make more bits… Look! I just made some! But because the value of a network exists in everyone who is using it, not just your implementation of the network, you can’t just add bits in your IP stack and get any benefit. So, while bits are free, and address space could conceiveably be free, because we have a network with limited space, we have a scarce asset. And, of course, what do humans do with scarce assets? We make bubbles! Yay for bubbles! ...

In 15 years, the Global Warming hysteria is going to be one of those embarassing episodes in history. Several sociology and history of science PhDs will write their theses on “how they blew it on climate change”. The latest person to risk his reputation by coming out and speaking truthiness to the enviro-powers is Freeman Dyson. As I am not 80 years old, and I have to live with my reputation for a while longer, let me make my position clear again: ...

More discussion about marks on hard things. I suppose I should really get around to figuring out the physics of my modest proposal. The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project does something clever, which is to start their disk with big text that swirls into microscopic text. The idea is to tempt the reader to want to keep going, and help him figure out that the next step to read the next scale of text is to go grind himself a lens. ...

By way of procrastinating doing my French homework, I found myself on a webpage which has the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in more languages than you knew existed (including, to absolve some of my guilt, French). That’s a little bit of hope right there. That’s a message in a bottle that says, “we might not get it right all the time, but this is what we as humans stand for, and you are allowed to hear it in the language that your elders speak when they teach you about the old ways”. ...

I became aware of Iceland’s bankruptcy through a curious route. A local geek mailing list had a posting from a friend of one of the guys on the list. She was Icelandic, and she was really in distress – able to understand how serious the situation was, unable to understand it at the same time, scared for the future, and reaching out to a friend. It was really touching. I replied to the guy that it was a shame I couldn’t access any of the Icelandic news as an English speaker, and that perhaps his friend would like to start a blog translating it, so that I could understand her country’s situation better. I offered to donate some money for the service. ...

I saw this quote in an article on E-Ink: If you ever want to make a billion of anything cheaply, you print it. What an interesting observation! With such interesting far reaching consequences: Nano Solar is on the right track, crystaline solar is not. Diamond Age-style nano-assembly is not quite a sure bet, and mass-customization by table-top fabs will clearly never be able to compete on price with items that are printed. Though another way of looking at nano-assembly is to recognize that nature manufactures far more, far cheaper, than all the printing presses in the world… Things that are flat, flexible, and where the complexity is expressed in 2D will always be cheaper than their competitors which violate one of those constraints of printing presses. It also further informs my day dreaming about clay tablets: a system for preserving data needs to be flat, flexible, and 2D. My “dots on ceramic” design might still be able to fit the bill, but the kind of uber-cheap ceramic I was thinking of (i.e. the same stuff in the 20 cent porcelin plates at Ikea) won’t be the material, something else will be. But what? What can go roll-to-roll in a printing press environment, but has the chemical stability of ceramics? I’m feeling like I really wish there was a layman’s introduction to ceramics on my reading list right now. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? ...

One of the risks of being a person who is constantly processing information, forming opinions, and trying to predict the future is that when you get it right-ish, you tend to say, “I told you so”. Or if you are polite, you just think, “I told you so”. I’m not so polite so I blog it instead. Right this moment, the top two stories on Slashdot make me say I told you so. I don’t have the time to dig into them right now, but the headlines lead me to believe my gut instinct has been on the right track for a while: ...

Here’s a quote that turns everything you think you know on it’s head: When the debt is big enough, it’s the debtor who has the power, not the creditor. That’s Niall Ferguson talking in Vanity Fair. It’s for stuff like that I read Vanity Fair. Well, the photos don’t hurt either…

Here’s someone else who has taken control of his life and chosen exactly what he’s doing and why. That’s part of why I work for MSF. It occurred to me about the time Silicon Valley was getting ready for another lap (which came to be called Web 2.0) that I didn’t want to make the lap with them. And that if I was going to do something, that it should matter. ...

There is a really excellent article on aid work in The New Yorker. Though this is pretty much a write-only blog at this point, and I don’t really know if anyone cares, here are my reactions to the article: It is remarkably candid, but… it is too hopeless… because it focuses too much on the UN and not enough on independent actors. Of course, any reader of mine know my biases: I am a cynical humanist capitalist from Silicon Valley (engaged to be married to a practical humanist socialist from Switzerland), who chose to work with MSF due to it’s independence. Because this article speaks to the core of my identity, of course my biases are going to be the key to my understanding of it. ...