Check out the image at the bottom of this post. Obama with a halo. Cute.

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: ...

Planet Money is talking about the new Systemic Regulator, and also talking about other theoretical ways of regulating the banks. It occurs to me that one thing that’s missing, and not just a little bit missing, but radically missing, from the current system is negative feedback. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could set things up so that before the next bubble starts, the participants in the market can see that as certain stages of the bubble kick in, as measured by certain predetermined checkpoints, then certain economic brakes will be applied. We’d have to be careful not to take away all the control the Fed has, but perhaps you can invent a new set of levers which fall into this category of automatically triggered negative feedback. ...

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. ...

Here’s a random smattering of links to things that I’ve recently checked out, and that I really like: Children of Men: A well made film about an interesting story in dystopic England (though, to be perfectly honest, it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between that England and the one outside my window). I had the “last generation” story idea last weekend. I sent it to Curtis, and he told me about Children of Men. I made the link go to the Wikipedia page and not the IMDB page, as is customary. The Wikipedia article on the movie is really nice, with great director’s commentary, as well as other goodies. Jungle Disk: Best solution to off-site backups. You pay USD 20 one time for a nice piece of software, and you have perpetual rights to use it on as many computers as you want (Mac, PC, Linux). It helps you put data into your Amazon S3 account. You pay your bills to Amazon. You own your data, Amazon makes sure you don’t lose it (Jungle Disk has published their schema, so even if you decided to throw away their program or they go out of business, your data is still available to you). Key points: Amazon S3 is cheaper than any possible backup medium you could choose in your own house (include amortized hardware costs, energy costs, and the hassle factor – don’t cheat on the hardware, you have to have reliability as high as S3, which means both your hardware cost and your hassle factor will be much higher than you think it is), because you have a direct relationship with Amazon, there’s no markup on storage or bandwidth. The price of your backups can only go down relative to the on-line offsite backup market as a whole. Onlive: Karl, Cary, and Arnold are finally out of stealth mode! Yay! It seems like “Xbox over vnc” to me, but what do I know. I never really mastered minesweeper. Just give me a good book… …like The Shadow of the Wind: A good book. Multiple layers, several stories running at once, from different times, coming at you at once, all set in beautiful and atmospheris Barcelona. Good stuff.

You’re both right. But Dave comes off looking more mature, with more useful things to say. Asa, you made yourself look like a prick, and it’s too bad, since Mozilla seems to be letting you speak for them.

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”. ...

Take a look at this article from Bunnie Hwang, reporting on the copycat industries in China. Bunnie’s nailed it, there is something interesting and important going on. Writing these guys off as copycats is exactly the wrong read on the situation. These guys are going to be a cornerstone of the foundation that science fiction writers are going to launch themselves from in order to help the rest of us understand what things are going to look like in 30 years. ...

A long time ago I thought it would be fun to open two windows and see two things on Google Maps next to each other. That way, I could compare the sizes of them. But getting the scale set the same on both maps was not easy. Wouldn’t it be neat if the scale of the maps was set to the same? I finally got around to implementing this with Google Maps API: ...