White tree in Maine. Taken on a non-skiing ski trip that did feature plenty of apres ski, nonetheless. A few more on the photo blog too, although none of anyone you know...

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

From a friend on LJ, an article from the women's lib days on how structureless groups have their own informal rules and roles: The Tyranny of Structurelessness:

For those groups which cannot find a local project to devote themselves to, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume dislikes for the sake of the larger goals. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person into our image of what they should be.

The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School

Off BB, one of my favorite topics, social networks plus pics: Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School.

Guide to Public Restrooms

Boston Online's Wicked Good Guide to Public Restrooms. Rated by number of toilet paper rolls.

(I had a friend in college whose mother wanted to write a coffee table book about restrooms she'd used; photos of graffiti, nice architecture, odd conversations overheard, etc. I remember it every time I visit one in a restaurant. In bus stations, I'm too busy running to remember it.)

"The Flyer" in St. Croix.

This is a boat with a history...

I thought of it because, well, the weather sucks right now. I took this boat on a trip to the Buck Island reefs off the coast of St. Croix. I was sitting on the deck (there's no room below for anything except our bags and the lifejackets) and some other sarcastic passengers from MA (natch) started asking questions about the construction, which looked a bit homegrown. ("What are we doing, like 2 knots?" And that was with the wind behind us.)

The Flyer been hand-built from a DIY kit by a doctor in France. The mast was in the wrong spot and it had difficulty sailing into the wind. Monsieur Le Medecin Bad Boat Builder got transferred to the Caribbean and didn't want to leave his little project behind, so he convinced 10(!) friends(!) of his to sail(!) it across the Atlantic for him(!), without any motor. We blanched at the idea of storing enough food for 10, let alone where they would all have slept and with sailing into the wind being a distinct possibility as you head west from France. Apparently it was a brutal trip, they ran out of food, and took way longer than expected. I don't know if any of them are still friends, or if anyone got eaten on the trip.

A few years later, he was transferred back to France. He left it behind this time. "La Vache" was probably the French name, although that detail is sadly gone from the story. It really would have made it perfect for me.

The "Medium" Psychic

When I watched ep. 1 of "Medium," I was annoyed by how perfect she was. It would've been fun to have her battle a little more confusion and doubt, like Dead Zone gives us. That's how "real mediums" are supposed to be -- and this article on the real Allison Dubois backs that up, while also talking about the difficulty of testing someone who isn't always 100% right and speaks in generalities about handsome men and black dogs.

Varied readings on Arizona psychic

Dead Microbiologist roll-call

Sarah Weinman posted about this, and it's not a mystery novel. Apparently some folks (Steve Quayle anyway) think that the rate of mortality for microbiologists is a little too high, and it might mean something about future bio warfare.

Steve Quayle's list with pics and method of death: Dead Scientists; and another page of Quayle's with news clippings on the same.

LED floodlights

I'm strangely fascinated by LEDs. Possibly it was the talk at Ubicomp 2003 about how to hack one to detect light as well as emit light. Via MetaEfficient and Treehugger, here's a bunch of LED-powered super-efficient floodlights using LEDs. They even come in colors!

Enlux Lighting.

My cat Salem watched the blizzard this morning in the kitchen window. More cold birds on the photo blog.

Aliens, Global Warming, and Climatologists

It's snowing, and they expect up to a foot or more. So I'm reading about global warming. Here's Realclimate.org's post on Michael Crichton's State of Fear, a scientific rebuttal of bad popular science writing, in their opinion.

The comment thread is, for the most part, intelligent and points to more evidence and counter-evidence. In it, I hit this: Crichton's Caltech Michelin Lecture, aka "Aliens Cause Global Warming." He lambasts scientist for being Bad for making public appearances intended to sway policy-making and mixing specious conclusions in with Things That Can Be Proven and Are Therefore Appropriately Scientific. Yeah, ok, in many respects he's probably right to offer the reminders; but he's a poor social scientist himself to overlook the role of peer networks in doing research (and don't forget even peer review can allow bad results to get published!), the necessity of relying on second hand reports to keep oneself informed, and the lack of time a scientist has to prove everything from first principles for her own satisfaction or otherwise keep mum about it.

20 Questions: "Does it exist in another dimension?"

Hey, this is fun. Play 20 questions with an expert system that learns from the game. From the post-game responses you get (see mine below for "lemon"), I think people might be telling it lies, though. Check it out at 20questions.net.

Uncommon Knowledge about a lemon:

Does it bring joy to people? I say No.

Can it affect you(cause an effect to you)? I say Yes.

Does it have keys? I say Yes.

Is it a part of something larger? I say Probably.

Does it have buttons? I say Probably.

Is it tapered? I say Yes.

Does it have good vision? I say Probably.

Does it spin? I say Yes.

Do people own it as a pet? I say Yes.

Is it lumpy? I say Probably.

Does it have paws? I say Probably.

Is it found in salad bars? I say Yes.

Does it exist in other dimensions? I say Yes.

Stone in Framingham Cemetery.

Wristwatch of the Future

A bunch of folks from HP Bristol put together a really fun brainstorm design document: The Wristwatch of the Future, a series of concept sketches and descriptions of possible arm-accessories we could build 10 minutes into the future. Some of my favorites: the Webcam wristwatch (so I can see my cats and house from anywhere), the Landmark Reminders wristwatch, based perhaps on David Allen principles that to-do items belong in places as well as lists, and the Mood wristwatch. Imagine how useful it would be if everyone wore a mood indicator: the next meeting wouldn't require advance notice that so-and-so is in a lousy mood so you'd better not pitch that new idea or tug his/her chain today.

Complexity in Design 2005

I saw this once before and thought it interesting, but now that I've read it again (weeks later, after a glass of wine), I find it heart-rending. Here's an entire conference dedicated to both the customers of my company, and the employees at my company, many of whom used to be customers and now have to support other customers in their new role as software engineers: CiD: Complexity in Design 2005. Too bad it's in Glasgow in March (what were they thinking?).

For example, mechanical engineers must develop products that go faster, require less maintenance, use less raw materials than ever before. These demands are compounded by the increasing emphasis on mathematical modelling and simulation rather than destructive testing. Similarly, software engineers are being asked to develop systems that interact with these devices and with human operators. Increasingly the demands of developing safety-critical systems are being exacerbated by the need to produce `band-aid' software that addresses known problems in the underlying mechanical and materials engineering or that addresses underlying human factors problems in the usability of an application.

For instance, re-use simplifies many aspects of complex systems design. These techniques also carry important overheads; it can be hard to ensure that an implementation satisfies the intended requirements within its new context of use. This applies to software engineering just as it does to mechanical engineering. These comments may also, arguably, be applied to the reuse of design processes and teams. Similarly, risk assessment has been used to guide the development of many previous generations of complex systems. However, the increasing integration of large scale application processes and the inter-disciplinary nature of many engineering endeavours makes it hard to sustain this approach from individual component reliability up to the `systems' level.

2 Lists of Books

This has a few that sound worth looking into: Business Week's Pick Of This Year's Crop Of Books. For instance, the provocative title The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations and Emanuel Derman's My Life As a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance.

And then there's the doomed-to-failure-but-always-interesting attempt to list Mathematical Fiction, fiction with mathematical themes. It reminded me of the existence of group theory, and why I don't date a mathematician anymore. (Er, just kidding.)

Both links off Neat New Stuff.

Being French in America: Bridging Oceans of Differences

An American who has spent several years abroad in other countries, I never felt more "American" than I did when I lived in France. I felt it was a culture of polite indirection, circuitous discourse, and ephemeral business values and goals at odds with what I had learned in Silicon Valley. I'll never forget the bid my company lost with Euro Disney, an American company employing international staff. My boss's explanation for why they should have taken our proposal despite our pricetag and my understanding of why they didn't were 180 degrees divergent. A few years later, I'm still trying to understand my 18 months there. (And, it must be said, I feel a bit foreign in the US much of the time, especially around election time.)

Here's a very interesting article by a French consultant who lives in the States and writes about cross-cultural workplace issues. I'm not sure it's capturing exactly what I experienced, in terms of how I understand the cultural differences I saw, but it's valuable for me to see a French experience on the issues. I especially appreciated the section on "Feedback and Self-Esteem." See Life in America: an International Perspective.

Gigapxl again: Balboa Park Reflecting Pool

I am following myself up with a different picture from the previous site: Balboa Park Reflecting Pool, off Gigapxl. This one is interesting because of the people in it. What people, you say? Scroll down to see all the blowups magnifying bits of the scene till you get to the couple sitting on the bench.

Which makes me muse on privacy assumptions again as these cameras get even better -- most of us don't walk around assuming we're being monitored by hi res spy cameras or listening devices (at least those of us who aren't crypto-paranoids), and so we don't worry that the guy 2 miles away with a big camera is about to capture in living, crisp color the fact that we were sitting on a bench with a strange blonde woman who is not our wife, smoking a cigarette after we said we'd quit. Not to mention that we were caught wearing bad Oakley sunglasses and male pedalpushers at the same time.

I'm just pointing it out.

Petroglyphs of Newspaper Rock

I discovered a new obsession this past year: petroglyphs.

This single rock in Utah has enough detail to last me for months, in a very high resolution picture. Look at the 1% zoom and see how crisp it is! From Roy's Blog: Newspaper Rock on Gigapixl Project.

The Eclipse Project

If you're interested in well-thought-out and cool dev platforms with wide open plug-in archictectures, a serious Java development evironment as the first proof-of-concept, a non-superficial attitude towards UI, and open source, check out the slides explaining the philosophy of the Eclipse Project. Also see their Project Page.

Thanks to Erik for being excited at me about it.

Robot Quilts

Off BoingBoing, but nevertheless domestically applicable, it's Robot Quilts! Here, "The Robot Visits the West."

Check out Kathy Weaver - fiber and mixed media artist. She also has some "political" quilts featuring automatic weapons, which I recommend less for household use.