Yesterday’s Thoughts

As someone who has definitely expended too much of my life on the watching of Gilligan’s Island, this is heartening news. Shirky argues that there has been a cognitive surplus in the developed world and for the past 50 years we have been soaking up that surplus with situation comedies and that now we are ready to divert that surplus to something, anything that is participatory.

Sample fact: The time American’s spend watching television commercials every weekend is approximately equal to the entire time spent in creating Wikipedia to date.

Rule of thumb: “Doing anything is better than doing nothing.” “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

Via Jason Sutter who lives in New Zealand but shows up in my feed of blogs local to my zip code.

Update - 28 April 2008 Here (via Gruber) is a link to the text of the talk. Also, the quoted rule of thumb is corrected.

A personal story in the Times talks about the impact of having a severely sick or injured child on parents. There isn’t any data, only personal stories, but startled me into recognition of my own condition. I still sit upright in bed in the middle of the night recalling the five seconds when I turned away from the wee one and she wandered into traffic. That nothing terrible happened in those five seconds has been the difference between a life that would have been very difficult to endure and a more or less constant source of joy in my life.

The days of waiting and worrying about the older girl as she lay ill in intensive care, twice, are also permanently engraved on my memory and stored in my body. I find and feel that concern every time that I get to see her and admire the young woman before me. That it all turned out well in the end was fortunately, but I still feel the toll.

How do you solve a problem?

I had two different concrete experiences of problem solving in the past couple of days. I think these examples are interesting because they are so contained, not because they are hard problems. They illustrate how I tackle a problem and provide some generalizable strategies for problem solving. I’ll cover the other problem in a future post and try to extract the strategies.

This post is about the little man’s homework this week. He’s still struggling with this:

Shelley wanted to buy some clothes that were on sale.

Blouses	Pants	Socks	Shoes
$10	$10	$5	$20
$15	$20	$10	$30
$25	$35	$15	$40

Her mother said she could spend $85. List all the different ways that Shelley can buy 1 blouse, 1 pair of pants, 1 pair of socks, and 1 pair of shoes that total exactly $85. One way has been done for you.

Blouses	Pants	Socks	Shoes
$10	$20	$15	$40
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___

So how do you solve this? Read the rest of this entry »

Wow! Prince’s solo in this performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is awesome.

Thanks Rodgers.

I rolled a stop sign last month and I received a well deserved ticket.

When it came time to pay the ticket, I elected to pay an additional $32 to the City and County of San Francisco and $20 to online provider of traffic school in this jurisdiction. This allows take a course and a test. Once I pass the test, I can have the infraction removed from my driving record, protecting my insurance rates, and presumably rendering me a better, safer driver.

I went through the course materials and took the chapter tests. The content was reasonably well presented, although the web site was annoyingly slow and there were a number of infelicitous UI decisions (arrows that seemed to imply links, but didn’t, no url or other identifying information in the e-mail that they sent me to confirm my registration, etc.)

Some of the material that was presented in the course and the chapter quizzes didn’t seem like it was particularly important to the goal of improving my driving skills and making me a safer, more responsible driver. Material on what constituted valid forms of identification at the DMV is useful, but it isn’t going to keep me from pulling out into traffic when I don’t have the right of way.

Little did I know. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my re-evaluation of my toolkit, I’ve started using MarsEdit.

For those who don’t know, MarsEdit is a Macintosh program to write blog posts.

There are a couple of small features in the way the Mars Edit works that could have been deal breakers for me, so I was going back to the MarsEdit forums to figure out if there were a work around for them. I couldn’t remember the url of the site, so I Google MarsEdit.

The problem is the results. The first result returned by Google is to a page on the Ranchero Software site mentioning that Ranchero Software sold MarsEdit to Red Sweater Software more than 7 months ago. The second Google result points to the Red Sweater Software page that describes MarsEdit.

Curiously, the PageRank for the Red Sweater page is 7 while the Ranchero page PageRank is 0, and the PageRank for the Ranchero Software home page is 7, while the Red Sweater home page is 6.

What this means is that there are so many more links out there on the web that point to MarsEdit at the Ranchero site than at the Red Sweater site, and the rating of those sites is so much higher, that a deficiency in page rank of 0 to 7 is overcome.

Even more confusingly, the absolute number of links isn’t that different. As of this moment 282 links point to the Red Sweater page and only about 592 links point to the Ranchero Software site.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible. This is a PageRank result that really confounds all my expectations.

Is it any wonder communication fails?

Her version of the story:

R: I thought of something else you should get at the store.

L: Ok.

R. Hum.

L: I’m getting a pad.

L: What was it?

R: What was it?

L: What was what?

L: What you wanted to me to get?

R: I thought you wrote it down?

L: Wrote what down?

R: Gum

My side:

R: I thought of something else you should get at the store.

L: Ok.

R: Gum.

L: I’m writing it down.

L: What was it?

R: What was what?

L: What you wanted to me to get?

R: I thought you wrote it down?

L: Wrote what down?

R: Gum

A few weeks ago, I had a bad experience using search at an e-commerce site. It cost me a little money and it cost the merchant a little good will. It was neither enough money nor enough good will to be serious, but that was just luck. If this had happened with a higher cost purchase the costs could have easily been higher. Since that time I have had several different similar experiences, so I thought I’d write about it to save you some cost or good will.

Most frequently when I am searching, if I enter multiple terms I am implicitly requesting results for items that match all of the terms. This is the way that results from Google and Yahoo work. If you search for Repair Manual the results are pages that contain both the term repair and the term manual.¹

I’ve bolded and in the last sentence because that is the operative term. The results returned by Google and Yahoo are the logical conjunction (and) of the separate results for the individual terms. If I search for Repair and Manual, Google helpfully informs me, “The ‘AND’ operator is unnecessary — we include all search terms by default.”

The other commonly encountered method of combining results is disjunction. This search returns all pages that contain either repair or manual. There are obviously many more results in this case. For repair and manual Google returns not quite 2.5 M results, while for repair or manual Google returns more than 40 M results.

The problem that I encountered, was that many web sites silently ignore the de facto standard set by search engines and attempt disjuctive, or, searches. Instead of returning pages that contain repair and manual they return pages that contain repair or manual. I’m not exactly sure why so many e-commerce sites seem to do this, but it may have to do with available tools. I know that disjuctive search is the default for the Apache Lucerne search engine library, although Ferret, the Ruby search engine gem which was inspired by Lucerne, switches the default to conjunctive search.

Can you see where this is going?

I was attempting to repair a dishwasher that had stopped cleaning the dishes on the top rack. Some small piece of plastic - perhaps the inner liner of a yogurt container - had gotten loose in the dishwasher, been sucked into the pump and macerated. Small pieces of plastic had been blown through the entire circulatory system. I had cleaned much of it out, but it still wasn’t working and I wanted a closer look, but I wasn’t sure how to take some parts off without breaking them. All I needed was a Repair Manual for my washer.

A little Googling around led me to an appliance repair site. I located my make and model of dishwasher and searched for repair manual. When there was only one result returned, I wasn’t surprised. I only expected one.

Without any closer examination I added it to my cart along with the other part that I knew I needed.

Unfortunately, when the part arrived, it was accompanied not by a detailed Repair Manual but by the ludicrous User Manual that I already had.

I was a little annoyed with myself for not being more careful and a little annoyed at the merchant for giving me a misleading answer to my question, but the cost was minimal (perhaps I would have been more careful if it had been higher).

As I noted above, this experience has recurred several times since, minus the steps of adding an incorrect item to my shopping cart and buying it. I think merchants are making a mistake in ignoring the search engine standard and courting a possible liability.

Customers are dissatisfied by these unexpected results and if they make a purchase based on them, they are going to want their money back.

1. Both search engines do some other processing, so the returned pages might contain “manuals” instead of “manual” or even “fix-it” instead of “repair.”

I was looking around on the web for some of the works of the Japanese printmaker Hokusai. Here is The Great Wave of Kanagawa, from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. but if you are unfamiliar with his work I urge you to seek out a larger version and study up on the techniques of Japanese woodblock printing to try to comprehend how such detail could be produced. Wikipedia has an article but it is somewhat weak on the details of the technique. Here is a great set of illustrations and commentary on the technique from artist David Bull who is crafting reproductions of Edo and Meiji era prints by recarving and reprinting them.

If you do try to poke around on the Internet looking for prints, you might just come across this reproduction of the Great Wave (local cache). This is a fine lovely print, you can zoom in to see the detail, read a brief description and note the bequest by the Havemeyer family. (Zoom in on Mt. Fuji and the boats to appreciate the phenomenal detail.)

Art lesson over, the thing that jarred me about this web page was clicking on the “Next” button. That goes to this page (cached) containing a pair of Royal Earrings from 1st century Andhra Pradesh, India.

Could anything be more miscellaneous? Different styles, different techniques, different media; two works of art separated by two thousand years and four thousand miles. They have nothing in common beyond being art produced by human beings. To be fair to the Met, I jumped into a spot in their collection stream where it transitioned from Japanese to South-Asian, so I accentuated the effect. It was as if I were present in the gallery and I turned the corner from the East Asian Hall into the South Asian Hall. On the web, I didn’t have any visual clue that I was nearing a transition. The collection streams are organized chronologically by region, further heightening the transition.

Sitting around, waiting for an event to start, two new units of measurement occurred to me.

Name₅₀ - Size of the group required for the given Name to have a 50% chance of being first on an alphabetical listing.

Late₅₀ - Size of the group required for an event having an equal chance of being postponed because of the absence of a single individual.

My name, Baxter, seems to have a surprisingly small Name₅₀ in the typical mostly American circles that I have moved in through my life. Throughout grade school, high school and college, whenever there were more than about 13 or 14 people in the class, I was second alphabetically. The Adamses, Bakers and Ballarons came first.

In the San Francisco white pages my name would appear on page 24 of 456. That means that my name alphabetically proceeds that of 432/456ths or about 95% of the admittedly atypical population of San Francisco.

By calculation, Baxter₅₀ is 1 + ln(0.5) / ln(432/456) or 13.82, a remarkable confirmation of my impressions above so take it with a grain of salt.

Late₅₀ obviously depends on the composition of the group, who it is that is late and what the event is, but it sure does seem like it is often a surprisingly large number. I’ve seen 50 people sitting or standing around waiting for one person who is only peripherally involved in the proceedings. Talk about the difference that one person can make.

I have no idea what either of these metrics could be used for.