More expensive than World War II.
Wow.
That really, really puts it in perspective. After adjusting for inflation (which often seems underreported doesn’t it?) the US gov’t has spent more money bailing out financial institutions in the past four months than it spent in four years of fighting World War II!!
More below the fold…
Apparently, the images-with-distorted-text used to prevent automated e-mail signup, are being used to manually digitise sections of text archives which OCR (optical character recognition) technology can’t use.
That’s the premise behind reCaptcha, the follow-on to Captcha (which — being “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computer and Humans Apart” — initials out to Capttttcha).
This is very, very cool — it makes the anti-spam login step bifunctional: in addition to fulfilling the intended purpose, a valuable side benefit is also provided.
Like Skype or file-sharing, it leverages an existing infrastructure. But instead of data transmission infrastructure or computer memory, reCaptcha capitalizes on the “gatekeeping service” crucial to innumerable websites.
Very cool, and worthy of being my first polyfunctionality tag!
iTunes has become colossally successful, having sold 5+ billion songs, according to recent estimates.
Jevon’s paradox says that as a resource gets cheaper, usage increases. I wonder if this is an example of a generalized version of Jevon’s paradox. Namely: (in the absence of discontinuous innovations) as a good or service gets cheaper, usage increases.
This phenomenal success seems likely to be due to a “Jevons paradox”-ification of the cost of music. For people who want to pay for music, that is. __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
Recently I’ve been reading Casino Royale — the first James Bond novel, published way back in 1953.
Imagine my surprise that 007’s literary debut is:
“James Bond suddenly knew he was tired.” (!)
…I’m informed by a source that BC Hydro plans to deploy “smart meters” to its GVRD customers within the next few years. This’ll be great — the smart meters will provide real-time feedback to customers about their power usage, which should motivate people towards more energy-frugal lifestyles.
Now, if we can only keep Hydro public… web resources here and here.
In the next few weeks I plan to transpose periodic e-mail updates to friends, into the blog, of which this is one.
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Updates were sporadic in the past month while I was focussed on my latest writing project, which I’ll discuss further on its publication in January. Take that, forty-three theatres (and counting) who’ve rejected my samurai theatre play! Given the one production, that makes my script-pitching “batting average” about… 0.023.
Sadly, my Shakespearean epic was about as poorly-fit for the modern theatre market, as Big Three automaker SUV’s were for rising gas price environment. And now that the economy is tumbling, it’s even less likely that theatres will lay out the cash for a production with a 19th-century-Russian-novel-esque cast list. Economic turmoil means less discretionary spending, which hits the arts. As they say, “artists always suffer”… which, if Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, blink) is to be believed, might drive them to spend the ~10,000 hours required to master their skill, and gain later success. I’m inferring this from reviews of his new book Outliers, because I haven’t bought it yet. As noted two sentences ago, economic turmoil means less discretionary spending, etc.
The monetary upheaval is having some astounding domino effects. For one, reduced cash flows mean automakers might not have the money to develop more fuel efficient vehicles. Toyota’s even considering delaying the opening a manufacturing plant originally intended to augment Prius production!
Much-revered (and with good reason) Toyota has opened a huge number of factories in the past five or so years, so this’ll be the first time they deal with a slowdown, with a substantial portion of their workforce. Since much of their success derives from a steady stream of incremental improvements from the bottom up, it will be interesting to see if they can preserve that collaborative spirit in their newer factories, where corporate culture hasn’t become ingrained. (Wal-Mart gets a lot less attention for doing essentially the same thing; store managers have typically had a lot of freedom to explore their brainstorms for shaving fractions of pennies off unit costs. It’s tough to build an evil empire on the genius of only one man… )
I was searching for a way to express Alan Greenspan’s fall from grace in the eyes of the commentariat; if you’ll recall, a few short years ago Bob Woodward wrote the hagiography Maestro.
Greenspan is now (correctly) blamed for having blown the financial bubble at the heart of the ongoing credit crisis. Plumbing through the Bhagavad Gita, I think I’ve come up with a suitable analogy. In a few short years, Alan Greenspan has gone from:
“I support the whole universe with a fragment of myself” (10:42)
to:
“I am death, shatterer of worlds.” (11:32) <– Chapter 11, no less!
I was searching for a way to express Alan Greenspan’s fall from grace in the eyes of the commentariat; if you’ll recall, a few short years ago Bob Woodward wrote a hagiography, titled Maestro. He’s now (correctly) blamed for having blown the financial bubble at the heart of the ongoing credit crisis.
Plumbing through the Bhagavad Gita, I think I’ve come up with a suitable analogy. In a few short years, Alan Greenspan has gone from:
“I support the whole universe with a fragment of myself” *
to:
“I am death, shatterer of worlds.” <-- amusingly, this passage is in Chapter 11
* Greenspan was featured on the cover of TIME magazine after the 1998 stock market turbulence as part of “the committee to save the world“