The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Avery:

Getting back to the Doctorow story, I'm not sure his idea of a future economy is that far off base.

So Monday to Friday I am an analytical biochemist for Big Pharma Inc. Lately we (and when I say we I mean my corporate overlords) have been eyeing nimble little biotech startups and asking "How can we achieve the same kinds of things in our R&D area that they are?" They've made some changes in how we do things at the strategic level. It an amazing exercise in cargo cult reasoning since, at the same time, the systems that we operate under (IT environment, safety and security policies, purchasing, getting samples, etc.) have exploded into a bouquet of pointless bureaucracy.

On weekends I'm trying to rehab an old arts and crafts house that has taken some hits in the past 90 years. Right now I'm making doors and I'm doing it right – split and wedged through tenons, the whole nine yards. Looking at the prices in the adds in "This Old House" and other magazines of its ilk, it's struck me that I could probably do better for myself quitting my job and going into what seems like a pretty laid back level of production of wooden doors and windows.

To me, Doctorow’s story is this observation with a jet engine strapped to it. Large structures, be they physical, financial or social, are not nimble no matter how much time and money they spend lashing bamboo together in the image of nimbleness. At the same time there is growing portion of the population out there that’s getting disenchanted with newer shinier mass produced crap and is starting to look either to the craftsmanship of the past, or a new kind of future craftsmanship that’s typified by Make magazine and the RepRap project.

I don’t think people will someday point to this story and gasp at Doctorow’s uncanny prediction of the future any more than they will Dovetail in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, but they’re both onto something.

Xopher@30

Do you really know people who bought into the food pyramid? As far as I know, if I had a dollar for everyone I know who eats the recomended ammount of fruits and vegetables I could MAYBE pay for the lipid and protein rich meal that I'm likely to call lunch today.

Eric K@31

Sugar metabolism is well enough understood that if you pick a carbon you can pretty much determine every place it might end up.

What gets messy is individual physiological response, but that's another animal.

So we have this weasely business type who wants protection money from is suppliers and employs sock puppets in an internet debate. Rather than read what he has to say, I'm pretty much going to spend my day pretending to be an actor trying to come up for motivations for peering inside his mind.

Now after Adam Smith's invisible hand gets through spanking him, I know what my motivation is going to be. Good old-fashioned schadenfreude.

Emily H @ #10

Your experience mirrors my own. Broken metacarpal, right hand, extra knuckle and everything. Never a twinge! Not when I half-heartedly tried to put it back into place myself. Not after a trained professional drilled holes in it an laced it back together with a piece of wire.

I always expected incredible pain with a broken bone. The most painful parts of the experience were having the stitches removed and getting the "pimp my skeleton" bills.

Here's geek cake (with instructions) that is not for the squeamish! But with Halloween just around the corner....

Also, shouldn't there be some kind of duration or percentage attached to that imitation of a jerk thing? I mean if normally happy friendly commenter takes a moment to get into the character of a troll to make some sort of point about trolls, it's not like he's become a troll. Now, if he starts moving his furniture in there....

Kathryn Cramer @ #83
I don't know about that. A huge percentage of my personal contacts know me by my SCA name. And I naturally tend to use some fragment of it when I need a nick name for a some web activity or another and don't feel like sticking my own oft mispronounced (read: rendered unrecognizable) name in there. And somewhere in there my boss took to addressing me as Lord Avery.

All it would take is for me to do is take one or more of my little making stuff in the basement hobbies commercial and I'd pretty much be where Leva describes herself.

But a legal name change? That'd be too geeky.

I'm just going to stand by my comment on Metafilter a month or so ago:

Imagine the Objectivist version of Burning Man. 30-odd thousand Randroids - people for whom capital goods are fetish items - all out in the desert at once. How many do you think would know the difference between an AC and a DC motor? On what day do you think they'd resort to cannibalism?

You know, if this were a jigsaw puzzle I'd be looking on the floor for the piece shaped like voyeuristic kite ariel photography right about now.

I vote for on purpose, with intent.

It's not like the dog owners had myostatin knock-out dogs grown in a tank somewhere. The dogs just happended and they said, "OMG! WTF?" so the dogs aren't guinea pigs in either sense.

And a little closer to home....

I almost find myself wondering if the whole thing isn't some bizarre art/sociology project. I'd be less likely to believe it if the original plagiarism story was in "The Provo Sentinel" rather than a student paper, but since it wasn't.... If that's the case maybe the artist digitally known as Mark Mitchell IS plagiarizing his name.

Or maybe he's just some guy with the same name who is more clueless than I can comprehend.

On a related note - here's a hypothetical question for you all. You are contacted by someone who is doing their thesis on plagiarism detection and wants to put up a small sample of your work (like a blog post) under a ficticious name somewhere to see how long it is before a reader catches on. The one request is that if you are contacted they would like you to act like you are unaware of the "plagiarist" and report it to them. Would you agree? Why or why not?

I keep gazing longingly at K'zoo and comming up with other things that need doing.

For those that have been, I see lots of literary, religious and sociological topics. I don't see a lot of this kind of thing. How much material culture stuff goes on up there?

And watch out for "that damn Gaukler kid!" He'll outbid you on all the best bits on E-bay.

sburnap@27

I agree with you on one level, but is it still their pin number if they sell the item to which the pin number is attached?

The game that is being played is that I buy the disk when my ownership of the disk suits them but I meerly buy the rights to use the disk when their continued ownership of the disk suits them. And then there is the EULA where I have to use their approved hardware to watch the disk and not the stuff I already have. Oh, and they can retroactivly revise the EULA.

Imagine if a drug company tried this? "You broke out in hives? Are you aware that breaking out in hives is a violation of our EULA? Page 17, line 21 specifically forbids metabolic reactions involving histamines, gamma globulin and cytokines. I'm afraid this is now a matter for our legal department."

For another pre-modern example of things getting ugly when you couple the low social status thing with a minimal hope of things getting any better, look at the people's crusade. The main differences are that the crusade had a groupthink element (there were 100,000 of them with a charismatic leader) and they didn't have access to weapons that could produce deadly force with a minimum of training and skill.

I don't know from crazed killing sprees, but in the SCA I love fighting people like Derbyshire who think themselves powerful machomancers. You just sorta hang back, block their one at a time over-powered attacks and let them stick their amrs and head into your favorite target zones. I'm guessing a 9mm pistol has a much larger prefered range than a sword and probably takes a proportionally longer time to cross.

A while back I found that my company (or the service they subscribed to) had blocked the wikipedia site in which was explained what acetone peroxide was and what it did. I already knew what acetone peroxide was - that's why I was writing an e-mail telling people not to store peroxide with the strong acids, particularly not in a cheesy plastic tray in the same fume hood as a mess of organic solvents. I was moved to write to our IT people and let them know the horse was out of the barn.

The page is still blocked.

I hope their also blocking web sites that tell you not to leave stuff on the stairs or plug to many extension cords into an outlet - that way the bad people won't know to do these things!

Maybe they're working under the principle, "If you can't beat 'em, join em".

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that my take on viral marketing is different from everyone else’s. In my mind the Sony Brava Superball commercial, OK Go's treadmill video and Halo 2's "I Love Bees" game were viral in nature. They were cool things you wanted to tell your friends about.

The stuff I'm seeing cited here is often dressed up with the term viral by the people selling it but, well, they're selling it. And probably using the phrase "information superhighway" while they do it.

You say Interference Inc. could have stopped the scare earlier, but I wouldn't bet money on it. Several years ago the HAZMAT people were sent out in response to a suspicious white powder on the floor of a locker room. Despite someone telling them it was the residue of their daily application Gold Bond Medicated Foot Powder they insisted on doing whatever it is you do when the jihad decides they hate America and our American showers.

More recently there was the flight that was diverted when someone didn't realize his I-Pod had fallen out of his pocket and into the airplane toilet. He told one of the flight attendants what was going on as soon as he noticed it was missing and realized what must have happened, but that didn't stop a bomb squad from doing their thing to the airplane toilet.

If Interference called the authorities first thing I'm not sure it would have changed a thing. (I'm not sure the authorities would admit it if they did, either.)

136 Paula Liberman Don't put weird devices up on bridges etc. with blinking lights...

It would be different if there where a bomb was disguised as a weird looking device. Using history as a guide, bombers put bombs in normal looking things that don't draw attention. The IRA put them in trash cans. Ted Kazinski put them into normal looking packages. Bombers in Iraq put them in parked cars and piles of rubbish. The Red Army Faction put the bomb that killed Alfred Herrhausen in a bicycle book bag.

By carefully examining weird looking devices all we are doing is making sure that bombers are only putting bombs in their usual locations. It's like having a guy come to your house and make sure cattle aren't nesting in your chimney. You can't argue that it wouldn't be a problem if they were, what with carbon monoxide and all, and yet I doubt you'd pay money for the service.

Also, in this situation they didn't yell fire in a theater. What they did was yell something like, "Hey Mike!" Someone else concluded that the only reason you'd want to get Mike's attention was because you had finished dumping gasoline on the floor and he had the lighter. If your goal is preventing arson there is probably a better way to go about it.

#111:GlendaP Can anyone confirm that? If true, it puts the lack of previous reports in an entirely different perspective.

If the people in charge of thwarting terrorists only notice or react to suspicious devices that have blinking lights that are actively blinking, then yeah, it certainly does change my perspective. It tells me that after being needlessly inconvenienced I am going to be blown up!

Last Halloween I had a big animatronic scarecrow in my front yard. Rather than try to code and debug my microcontroller while it was attached to a nine foot tall scarecrow I put some LEDs on the contacts where the solenoids ultimately would go and wrote my script using them. LED 1 lighting up = lunge forward, etc. I'm just guessing here, but I would think mad bomber types do something similar when debugging their creations. If the LED is on either the detonator has failed or you will shortly be introduced to Mr. Shrapnel.

Comment statistics for Avery on the Making Light blog

Total: 97 comments. View all these comments on a single page.