Even I Can Understand This...

If you know me, then you know that I am not at all interested in sports.  Any sport.  I know so little about sports that I can't even identify most sports when I see them being played.

But I understand this:


On rare occasions these days, I feel some hope for the survival of the human species.  Watching this brought that hope back, at least for a few minutes until I watched a video of Obama declaring that he wasn't a dictator.  I should make a page with a bunch of these on it, to help me regain my spirits on such occasions...

Map of National (and Some States/Provinces) Wealth...

Wealth of a country (or other geopolitical entity) is a notoriously slippery datum to measure.  It isn't enough to convert per capita income to a common currency and compare them, because the cost of living varies tremendously from place to place.  Furthermore, in some political systems (I'm looking at you, Mother Russia, Mexico, China, Nigeria, India, et al), pervasive corruption means that significant fractions of their economies are underground and therefore not even in the official per capita income data.  What's a poor statistician to do?

One possibility is to find a proxy for that which you're trying to measure.  Ideally the proxy would be perfectly proportional to the value you actually want to measure, and could be measured without perturbing the value you're trying to measure.  In the case of the wealth of countries, some scientists have proposed the prevalence of outdoor artificial lighting at night as a proxy.  Their thinking is that the wealthier any country is, the more outdoor artificial lighting they'll use.  And very conveniently, outdoor lighting levels can be easily measured by existing satellites, hundreds of which image the surface of the earth every day.

The map below is the result of an attempt to make exactly this measurement.  As I cast my eye over the map, relatively few of the results look unexpected to me.  For instance, I wouldn't have guessed Greenland was so prosperous, nor Paraguay so poor.

Visualization: Migration Between Countries...

Peoplemovin is a well-done interactive visualization that lets you see migration to or from any given country.  For instance, in the clip below I've clicked on the Phillipines on the right, to see where people migrate to the Philippines from. 

There were lots of surprises for me as I browsed around this visualization.  In the example case, I never would have guessed that the top three sources for immigrants to the Philippines were the U.S., China, and the U.K.  I spent about nine months (in several stretches) in the Philippines when I was in the U.S. Navy, way back in the '70s, and I did run into quite a few U.S. military retirees.  I wonder if that's where most of these immigrants come from?

Publicly-Avaliable Data Sources...

A nice, partially organized collection of free datasets, publicly available on the Internet (either via download or API).  The sources include private companies, educational organizations, non-governmental organizations, and governments.  There's a lot of interesting stuff in here on a wide variety of subjects...

Zopfli Compression...

A new open source, Apache licensed general purpose Deflate-compatible compression algorithm.  This one consumes more CPU time to get a little better compression; it's aimed mostly at web sites delivering a large amount of static content.

Sinkhole Swallows a Man in His Bed...

This is a frightening scenario that actually happened last night.  You're asleep in bed, and all of a sudden an enormous sinkhole opens up underneath your bedroom.  Your entire bedroom – including you! – is swallowed up.  You scream for help, and it arrives – but they can find no sign that you ever existed. 

Definitely the stuff of nightmares...

Science Fiction Becoming Reality...

Direct connections between brains and computers are getting ever closer...

Court of Public Opinion...

I recently blogged about the spat between Elon Musk (of Tesla Motors) and the New York Times.  Musk was convinced that the Times was lying about the results of a test drive they made in a Tesla car, smearing the company's good name and reputation in the process.  Instead of suing the Times through our court system, Musk appealed to the “court of public opinion” by publishing an open letter to the public.  His letter was publicized by hundreds of news sites, newspapers, and blogs.  In the resulting kerfuffle, the New York Times reconsidered its stance and reversed its previous support for their reporter, withdrawing the story.  Elon Musk won that “case” in a manner far more convincing to the public than anything I can imagine emerging from a case pursued in the traditional courts.

I thought that case was interesting, which is why I blogged about it.  Security expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier saw it as one example of a pattern of behaviors enabled by the Internet.  It's part of the rise of an alternative system of jurisprudence.  An excerpt from his recent article on Wired:

The court of public opinion is an alternative system of justice. It’s very different from the traditional court system: This court is based on reputation, revenge, public shaming, and the whims of the crowd. Having a good story is more important than having the law on your side. Being a sympathetic underdog is more important than being fair. Facts matter, but there are no standards of accuracy. The speed of the internet exacerbates this; a good story spreads faster than a bunch of facts.

...

The court of public opinion has significant limitations. It works better for revenge and justice than for dispute resolution. It can punish a company for unfairly firing one of its employees or lying in an automobile test drive, but it’s less effective at unraveling a complicated patent litigation or navigating a bankruptcy proceeding.

Mr. Schneier is onto something here.  I found myself thinking along these lines recently, as I'm currently in a dispute with a large environmentalist organization.  Seeking justice in a court of law is an intimidating, expensive, and very uncertain proposition.  Seeking justice in the court of public opinion just might be a better alternative – though not one that occurred to me immediately.  Apparently I'm more of a hidebound traditionalist than I thought I was :)

Cat Troubles...in the 1400s...

At right is a 15th century manuscript with unmistakeable feline paw prints on it, in ink.  The cat must have walked over the page while the ink was still wet, no doubt frustrating the heck out of the scribe.

Below is another example of cats messing with scribe's heads – and this one decided to curse the cat in writing (translated from the original Latin):

Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.

All cat lovers will instantly identify with these :)  Owning cats most definitely has its rewards, but not all is purring and affection...

Death to the Patent Trolls?

The advent of “patent troll” companies has seriously perverted the already-perverted world of intellectual property law.  These companies acquire portfolios of patents (or the rights to those patents) with the intent to prosecute companies alleged to be infringing them.  The key word there is “alleged”.  Patent trolls are frequently accused (almost certainly accurately) of bringing actions that they are sure to lose – because they know that the accused companies will often (most of the time, in fact) pay a settlement just to make the lawsuit go away.

Many have noted that the patent trolls are enabled by a feature of American law: that the winner of a lawsuit like this still pays their own legal expenses.  Under English law, the loser pays for both sides legal expenses.  This “loser pays” system greatly discourages frivolous lawsuits, as the side with a good defense is willing to pay for that defense, knowing that if they win the other side is going to pay the entire expense.

Now that same “loser pays” system is being proposed for the U.S. – but only for suits brought by patent trolls.  Defining a patent troll is trickier than it might appear.  Here's an article about the proposed bill, and here's the EFF's statement of support for it...

Visualizing Formerly Invisible Motion (and More)...

Through a technique dubbed “Eulerian magnification”, computer scientists are getting better at producing stunning, informative visualizations.  The video tells the story, and there are more details in the accompanying story.  This search will show you many more videos produced via Eulerian magnification.  What an awesome new tool!

World's Nerdiest Marriage Proposal?

I was skeptical until I read it.  This is one physicist's written marriage proposal to another physicist.  Partial clip below; click on the link to read the whole thing.  Awesome!

Changes...

For nearly 20 years now, “Siggy” (more formally, “Eight Sigmas”) has been a big part of our life.  We purchased this stock '96 Toyota LandCruiser in 1995 using some of the money we made from our stock options after Stac's IPO.  We had to order it (and wait several months to get it!) because we wanted the four-wheeling features that were then available (most especially the differential locks) from Toyota. 

Siggy was our ride on many adventures throughout the Western U.S.  It took us in safety and comfort on freeways and on extremely rugged back-country roads.  Perhaps the most challenging thing we ever did with Siggy was a wonderful vacation in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado (where we're going again this summer).  With Debbie, my dad, and two dogs (Mo'i and Lea) we roamed all over those mountains – never meeting a trail we couldn't take, and never feeling the least at risk.

But poor Siggy is now too old and decrepit to safely take us into the back-country any more.  With nearly 300,000 miles on it (with never a major repair!), the engine is now on its last legs.  Replacing the engine would be quite expensive, and the rest of the vehicle is worn as well.  Really the entire drive train should be replaced, and that just didn't seem practical.  So last week we researched all our options and chose a new ride: a 2013 Toyota FJ Cruiser, bright orange and white.  This time we're not going to keep it a stock vehicle – we bought a very basic model (just the off-roading package) and we're going to add aftermarket gear to make it a really capable and safe off-road vehicle.

I drove Siggy to the dealer (in El Cajon) to meet its fate as a trade-in.  It was a sad drive; Siggy is just chock full of wonderful memories for us.  I shed a few tears, and at one point almost turned around to take it back home.  But what would we do with an old, beat-up LandCruiser?  In the end, I decided I'd hope that somebody on a tight budget would buy Siggy and fix it all up in a labor of love.  I hope that's what happens, anyway...

Asperatus Clouds...

...over New Zealand.  Via APOD, of course.

Economics 101, with Humor...

A good primer on the absurdities of the sequestration hysteria:

Challenging Authorities...

Very interesting montage of individual Americans challenging checkpoint authorities...

Coronal Rain on the Sun...

The Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the photos used to make this movie last summer.  When you play the video below, you're seeing things about 360 times faster than they actually occurred – ten hours of actual events seen in about four minutes.  Via APOD, of course...

Do-It-Yourself Weapons of the Syrian Rebels...

This web site has a lot of photos like the one at right, showing the surprisingly sophisticated improvised weapons being put together by the Syrian rebels.  Armored vehicles, artillery shells, rockets, remote-controlled machine guns, “technicals”, and more – somehow not what came to mind when I saw the title.  I'll have to revise my preconceived notions of the capabilities of your average Syrian young man...

Cool Stop-Motion Short Film...

Very cool little film.  Watching this reminded me of the old Nick Park flicks (esp. Wallace and Grommit).  On this one, I wonder how they managed to keep all those positions so accurately...

Hmmm... Looks Like We're Not Running Out of Oil...

Every year a new round of hydrocarbon doomsayers predicts the imminent exhaustion of the planet's supply of crude oil – and the U.S. supply even earlier.  Every year reality proves them wrong.  Someday, of course, the doomsayers will be right – but it looks like someday is a good many years away...