The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Some amazing pictures from one of my new favorite blogs, The Deputy Dog.

Corn-based ethanol is just dumb for many reasons, but an important and undercited reason is that it drives up the price of corn. Similarly, biofuel demand in Germany has driven up the price of glucose by 30%, which will intern drive up the price of a huge variety of snacks, including gummy bears. “Der Spiegel warns that if crops continue to be more lucrative as biofuels than foodstuffs, then gummy bears could soon become a candy only the rich can afford.”

I’m not a big shopper, but one thing that has struck me as almost universally true is that the clearance rack in a clothing store is filled almost exclusively with the extreme sizes–your XLs, XXLs, and even the occasional XS. Given that I wear a medium, this means that I very rarely can purchase anything for myself on the cheap.

All that changed today when Michelle and I were shopping at REI for a birthday present for her mother. She visited us in Boston last year and left her windbreaker in my car, and for many silly and largely inexcusable reasons, it took us months to get the POS jacket (honestly, it was a crappy, crappy thing the color of sand) into a package heading for Texas. So we figured that a good gift might be a really nice jacket.

I started modeling the jackets so that Michelle could see how they would look on a human, and I discovered that I can comfortably wear XL women’s outerwear! This is awesome, since many jackets, vests, and other outerwear in both the women’s and men’s sections in REI (and other stores) are pretty much unisex. Outerwear, such as windbreakers, fleeces, and rain jackets, are not generally cut specifically for a woman’s or a man’s form, so as long as I can find a color and style that’s unisex as well, the clearance rack is all mine! Similarly, Michelle can easily fit into a man’s XS!

It turns out that this trick isn’t particularly unique; my wife, on occasion, has purchased unisex clothing such as sports gear from the boy’s section of department stores, since children’s clothing is almost universally cheaper than adult clothing.

TheScientist has an article that discusses a disease called “Greening” that has already decimated the orange populations of China and Thailand, and has started killing those in Brazil and the United States (the global #1 and #2 orange producers, respectively). Could we be at the beginning of an orange-free future?

Bizaar. Thanks for the link, Nova.

In a facinating interview about “building sound,” I found this incredible quote:

Knowing about how things work only increases our feelings of wonder and awe about them, just as keeping things mysterious only causes us to argue and opinionate.

An cool video tracking obesity and social networks over time. Surprise surprise, there is a tendency for obese people to be linked socially to obese people, and for non-obese people to be linked socially to non-obese people. The study takes place over a 30 year people.

Thanks to David Weinberger for bringing it to the blogosphere (and thus my feed aggregator…which, now that I mention it, I really don’t like that much: can anyone recommend one for Windows that doesn’t suck? I used to use and love akregator on Linux…).

Introducing Blackle! It’s Google, but with a black background instead of a white one. The idea is that producing the color white on a computer screen uses more power than producing black (the lack of color). On the main search page there is a “Watt hours saved” counter that, at the time of writing, reads: “116,944.374 Watt hours saved”. I applaud this type of creative, saved-pennies-add-up approach to environmentalism (plus I had a good laugh that someone thought to do this), and encourage readers to check out Blackle’s About Page. I’ve added it to Opera’s search bar and will take it for a spin over the next couple weeks.

There is a great article in the New York Times about eco-consumerism; the idea that you can buy your way into environmental conservatism through everyday purchases such as a hybrid car, hemp blanket, bamboo flooring, CFL light bulbs, etc. What I really liked about the article is how it highlighted, with specific examples, how well-meaning consumers, buying “green,” are really not as green as they think. For example:

The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.

Or:

Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

The takeaway from the article is not, however, that these purchases are all silly and that no one should make them; it’s actually that people are beginning to care on a wide enough front to make the purchases at all. Homes everywhere are shifting to CFL bulbs, which, en masse, does have a significant impact on energy usage. Now that the common man has been motivated to try to do something about it, environmental groups have a greater chance than ever of having an appreciable impact.

Towards the end of the article, the following quote appears:

A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.

If the people are interested enough in environmentalism to vote with their dollars, perhaps they’ll start voting with their votes as well.

In one of the best posts on search I’ve read in a long time, Dave Kellogg observes “Why guess when you can know?”. That is, a great deal of innovative energy in the search industry in general is going into improving keyword search (using semantic knowledge, statistical analysis, etc.) or into natural language search (e.g. Ask.com, some BI tools). He follows the post with another post that summarizes his main point:

Here’s a quick follow-up to the last post, which got long and perhaps failed to net-out the point as clearly as it might have. Here’s the point:

• Search engines seem to assume that the question is improving relevancy based on a few keyword grunts.
• They use various degrees of magic to try and improve relevancy: dynamic clustering, taxonomy, recent query history, social tagging/editing, entity extraction, PageRank, SemanticRank, SomethingRank, etc.
• The point of all this magic is to guess exactly what you want.

Here’s the question: why guess when you can know? When you send a SQL query to a Oracle, it’s not guessing what you want (e.g., show me average sales by product line for 2Q). It knows what you want and there is a single correct answer to your question.

Yes! That’s exactly it! Take advantage of the structure to build applications that allow naive users to unknowingly ask complex questions/queries. A user shouldn’t have to know SQL (or XQuery, or SPARQL, or whatever) to ask the questions. And, more importantly, the IT departments shouldn’t have to know beforehand what questions the users will ask. Let the users form the questions to ask the system as they need to. As I see it, that’s one of the issues with traditional BI; it requires people to maintain the types of reports that are generated.