My plan will be unchanged, it seems. I’m not sure what will come of the merger, but at the moment I’m just waiting for my contract to run out so I can get an iPhone. The Helio Ocean is not quite what it’s cracked up to be. Press release after the jump.

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Wordle is a Java Applet for creating word clouds, such as the tag cloud here on mindtangle.net. However, the words can be set to orient themselves every which way, nest, etc. I’ve seen this on a couple blogs, so I decided to make my own. Here’s my delicious word cloud, artfully arranged:

AB noticed that on the Chinese version of Google Finance, red and green have reversed meanings: red for good and green for bad:

I’ve exaggerated the red because it was hard for my color-differently-abled eyes to see.

Red is certainly a lucky color in China, traditionally. I wonder if green has any cultural meanings. AB did note (helpfully) that “in China, ‘green hat’ often refers to a man whose wife is cheating on him. In the unlikely event of you wanting to give your Chinese friend a hat, steer clear of green.”

From the S.F. Biker Bulletin:

[W]e’re pleased that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is exploring possible “Stop and Roll” legislation for California, modeled after an Idaho law that allows bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs. The Idaho stop sign law has been in place since 1982 and the stop light law since 2005. These changes, coupled with motorist, pedestrian, and bicyclist education, could smooth traffic flow for all road users. As gas prices rise and more people switch to sustainable modes of transportation, our government agencies need to reconsider how our traffic laws are structured and update them to support and encourage sustainable transportation, walking, biking, and transit. A thorough analysis on the feasibility and impact of these laws is needed, and we’ll keep you posted as the MTC’s research moves forward towards possible state legislation. For more background, read this SF Bay Guardian story “The Bike Issue: Don’t stop“.

A fake media history from the future: http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

It runs about five minutes. The invented histories and news presentation technologies in the 2008-2014 time span are interesting and plausible.

Just sent this to the geeks list:

Note: FF3 is at RC3, now, and I’ve had almost no crashing issues since RC2. The autocompletion continues to get more useful as I think of new ways to use it. For example:

• Typing in the numerical address of any place I’ve visited in Google maps (e.g. “555″) brings up the map for that location.
• Typing a search term that I’ve used before brings up a list of all Google queries that I’ve made containing that search term.
• Typing words in subject lines of Gmail messages I’ve viewed also brings those up.

~e

P.S. I’m seriously concerned at this point that if I lost access to Google, I’d end up blind, deaf, and dumb, mumbling in some alleyway God-knows-where.

I love how Robb generalizes phenomena, creating useful frameworks that find application in many disparate domains (e.g. economics, politics, warfare, sociology, etc.) His latest is the concept of a “dissipative system,” a system that draws energy from its surroundings to resist entropic forces:

This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (obsessing a bit, perhaps) about how complexity emerges in various forms (at different physical scales, on different substrates), and how our own individual experiences of consciousness fit into those ideas. Robb’s “dissipative structures” is a useful tool for generalizing the underlying constraint that shapes selection functions for natural selection at every level.

For example, in a later post, Robb begins re-framing economic and conventional warfare in terms of dissipative systems in conflict:

NOTES: Isolate your opponent from the external environment to prevent energy acquisition and trap entropy (force them towards thermodynamic equilibrium and “heat death”). Increase your own connectivity to acquire energy and expel entropy faster (movement farther away from thermodynamic equilibrium and greater structural complexity).

I had this to add, in a comment on that post:

The function that translates energy into complexity is far from constant. It is highly dependent on technology, for example (compare joules required to power the Pony Express vs. fiber optic communcation, per byte.) You might call this “efficiency,” but my suspicion is that the translation function is much more complicated than that.

In any case, struggling over energy sources is necessary tactic for dissipative system, but a system may prevail with lower energy sources if its energy-to-complexity function outperforms.

I’m finally beginning to grok Git.

Spring Training is a fun, free outdoor party we throw every year to get ready for a summer full of good weather. This is one of our favorites because it’s super low-hassle. We show up with djs and sound equipment, play, and then leave. This was the third annual iteration:

(Thanks, Ben, for making the video)

HASA (Harvard Alumni for Social Action) was started by a bunch of ‘81 alums to advocate the use of the university’s enormous endowment (estimated to go from $35 to $100 billion in the next ten years) for social good. From the site:

Harvard Alumni for Social Action (HASA) is an independent organization open to all Harvard alumni who seek to encourage the University to use donations for social good. HASA members believe that Harvard’s prominence and wealth make it uniquely able to support educational and research institutions in developing countries. HASA therefore works to fund scholarships for African graduate students at Harvard and also to fund infrastructure improvements at needy African universities.

At the moment, the mission sounds like it’s limited to educational grants. I hope they think bigger as more people take interest in the idea and join the org (I just did.) Harvard is a university which presumably has a huge number of innovative ideas around development. Example: the Kennedy School alone probably has half a dozen graduate students thinking about how unhealthy political structures cause the “resource curse” in developing countries (see this TED talk for an interesting discussion on that topic.) Now, imagine if there were huge grants for those graduate students to do research abroad. “Business plan” competitions for social ventures. New departments, even.

I hope HASA expands into a general-use fund directed globally at fixing the social problems that current markets can’t fix on their own. If such things already exist at Harvard and at other schools, I hope HASA finds ways to support them. This is a topic of such enormous interest (academically, politically, and meathook-future realistically.) If they aim higher, perhaps they can draw many orders of magnitude of funding more than they’re currently raising.