Regruntled.com

On a TV show, the police bring someone down to the station for questioning. They sit in the usual little room with the usual table and the usual stark lighting. What happens next?

• The subject co-operates immediately.
• The subject refuses to talk, period.
• The subject initially refuses to talk, the police argue with him, and finally he reluctantly decides to talk.

Of course, it’s almost always the third option. No-argue-yes is more dramatic than either Yes or No, and TV is in the drama business.

We know that advertising on TV affects behavior in the real world. We strongly suspect that violence, hyper-sexuality and boorishness on TV affect behavior in the real world. Does gratuitous drama affect behavior? Does TV make us more indecisive? Does TV turn us into drama queens?

The Predatory Lending Association is a spoof web site (or IS it?). Their motto is: “Helping payday lenders extract maximum profit from the working poor”.

And extract they do! Advance America offers loans with APRs as high as 495 percent. My experience as a lender on Prosper, and as an owner of junk bonds, gives me a certain amount of sympathy towards lenders. 495 percent sounds pretty good. Can I get some of that action? As a lender, not as a borrower.

Here is a quick comparison between a payday lender and a regular bank:

I’d have to say that payday lending, from an investor’s point of view, is comparable to banking. The outrageous fees are offset by lower volume, higher expenses, and higher default rates. Of these two, I’d rather own some BAC because I figure AEA has more regulatory risk.

Who can resist a book with such a title? And with a lemur on the cover? Not I.

Searching is an ancient problem, going back to our hunting and gathering days. This book turns the problem inside out and examines it from the point of view of the objects being searched for.

How do we organize things so we can find them? I’ve written a lot of database retrieval systems, and the process is fairly simple. The customer says “we need to search by name or account number”. The account number is simple, the name is more complicated due to inconsistent spelling, but the solutions are well known.

Nowadays our information is on the web, and most of it is found by search engine, not by going to the home page and looking in the table of contents. A lot of information is found serendipitously while looking for something else. How do we organize for findability when we don’t know who the searchers are, or what they’re looking for, and someone else wrote the search engine?

The book has more questions than answers. In fact, the author begins by asking the reader how he found the book. I was looking for something else. I looked up something in the card catalog at the library, and didn’t find it, but I browsed the shelves above and below the shelf that didn’t have what I was looking for. The title, with its juxtaposition of two unusual words, jumped out at me.

I put the computer to work generating web pages with plaid backgrounds. It looks like you can modify the plaids interactively, but this is an illusion. You are actually navigating through plaids that have been generated ahead of time. Try it and see:

Click here for the Plaidolyzer

I decided to do some variations on the rainbow plaid theme. I shuffled the colors a bit. It turns out that the colors don’t look right if they’re out of order. For example, if yellow is between orange and green, it looks yellow. If yellow is next to white, it looks white. This puts some constraints on the shuffling.

Next, I tried different backgrounds from white to gray to black. Non-white backgrounds bring out the yellow.

Remember the “this is your brain on drugs” ads? Well, this is a genetically modified mouse brain, sliced and lit up under a microscope with fluorescent light.

Borrowing genes from bacteria, coral and jellyfish, Harvard scientists have set mice brains aglow in a bold panoply of colors, revealing the intricate highways and byways of neuronal connections… (more).

Nice colors! I don’t know about the science, but it sure works as art. Thanks to TTB for the link.

No, not time travel or time shifting, but time displacement:

Some of the pixels are delayed, and the higher up in the picture they are, the longer they are delayed.

I see that Adobe Creative Studio has this feature. Very interesting. Some of the transitions (the dissolves and fades) in Windows Movie Maker could be considered forms of time displacement, but Adobe CS apparently gives you greater control.

This is my demo of the following tools:

• Image generation via C# Express
• MIDI editing with Anvil Studio
• Integration with Windows Movie Maker
• Delivery via YouTube

“I’ve learned something today.” — Kyle Broflovsky

I like plaids and stripes because the patterns are based on the same technology that is used to make the fabric, namely weaving. Just set up your loom with colored yarn in the right sequence, and you get a pattern. Printed patterns, on the other hand, require an unholy marriage of printing technology with weaving technology. It’s just not right.

Computer screens, with their rectangular grids of pixels, are well-suited for simulated weaving. It may be hard to see, but this plaid is constructed as if horizontal and vertical threads, each thread a single color, are woven in an over-and-under pattern, with each pixel taking the color of the thread that is on top at that point.

Traditional plaids tend to be drab because the traditions where formed before the invention of synthetic dyes (mauveine in 1856). The patterns are simple because only simple patterns were possible before the Jacquard loom in 1801. The Jacquard loom was the first programmable machine and a precursor of the computer.

So here I am using computers inspired by looms to generate a traditional woven pattern! I can use any colors I want, and I can generate hundreds of variations before choosing one I like. The only thing missing is physical cloth.

In the last Democratic debate, I learned that Hillary is neither for nor against issuing drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens. Or is she both for AND against it? It’s hard to tell.

Yesterday I watched Obama on Meet the Press and he is no less a weasel than Hillary. The problem is that anything a candidate says can be taken out of context, turned into a sound bite, and played over and over again. Think Howard Dean and his yell, or Dubya and “Mission Accomplished”. The only way to avoid being bitten is not to say anything biteworthy.

And so we have this strange sport of debates and interview shows where the reporters try to get their sound bites, and the candidates try to run out the clock without answering the questions. Watching a debate is like going to a car race and hoping for a crash.

The only candidates who can say anything interesting are the ones without a chance, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul. Being sound-bitten would be a step up for them. (One of the reasons that I’m confident that I can sell Ron Paul short is that if Paul gets anywhere near being a serious contender, the other candidates will sound-bite him back into obscurity.)

Fooling around at the International Space Station.