You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

* Bulleted list

How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

To make a long story short, this morning, Rand got in touch with Google and was advised that changing the URL so it doesn't end in ".0" would be a wise decision. Google would prefer not to make an official or public comment, but they did give us permission to share this tidbit. Naturally, we investigated deeper, and found that it's not just inadvisable, but literally impossible to get a URL indexed in Google's engine if it ends with a .0

SEOmoz | Unwritten Google Webmaster Guideline: Don't End URLs in .0

There's a ongoing SMS / email fraud underway.

Clever. Evil, but clever.

419 SMS scams - F-Secure Weblog : News from the Lab

The State of Real Estate, by Jonathan R. Surridge, May 25th 2008

Great presentation on the housing bubble and the disaster we remain in.

JSurridge.pdf (application/pdf Object)

This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.

Freeman Dyson writes a book review.

The Question of Global Warming - The New York Review of Books

New imaging research shows that brain activity differs in sleep-deprived and well-rested people. The study, in the May 21 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, shows that individuals who are sleep-deprived experience periods of near-normal brain function, but these periods are interspersed with severe drops in attention and visual processing.

This seems a more plausible explanation than the typical "reduced cognitive ability" statement applied. I had sleep apnea for several years, undiagnosed, and did reasonably impressive cognitive things at the time. I guess I also had distraction or ambition trouble. Hyperconcentration, and then not so much. After treatment (CPAP, then surgery), cognitive function did not improve (not anywhere like my physical energy level did).

Sleep-deprived brains alternate between normal activity and ‘power failure’ | Think Gene

ERROL MORRIS: One other question occurred to me. Take these two smiles, the “say cheese” smile and the smile of genuine pleasure. Wouldn’t natural selection have built into our perceptual apparatus the ability to quickly discriminate between the two?

PAUL EKMAN: Well, it apparently hasn’t. One has to try reasoning backwards, “There must not have been any advantage to being able to tell the difference between the two.” The most important thing in terms of adaptation is for you to know that the other person is either actually or simulating enjoyment. And that was more important than whether they really were enjoying themselves. The fossil record doesn’t tell us much about social life. All one can do is to say there is no really good facial signal that evolved. Now when people laugh in a phony way, that’s a little easier to pick up. But even then, most of us want to hear good news. We don’t want to hear bad news. So we’re tuned to it. We’re very attracted to smiles. They’re very salient. But telling the feigned from the genuine, we’re not good at that for any emotion, for anger, fear. It takes quite a lot to train a professional, a National Security or law enforcement professional (we do quite a bit of that) to be able to distinguish between the two. There are no clear-cut obvious signs. So what must have been important was to know what a person was intending, not what they were feeling.

This is a pretty comprehensive essay about revisiting one of the more important photographs from Abu Ghraib. There is an impressive back story, and a lot of research here. "Standard Operating Procedure" looks to be intense, if this is the kind of work Morris is doing. Which is typical of Errol Morris, but still.

Long essay but worth it.

The Most Curious Thing - Errol Morris - Zoom - New York Times Blog

The interactions among the myriad participants in a tax system are as impossible to unravel as are those of the molecules in a gas, and the effects of tax policies are speculative and highly contentious. Will increasing tax rates on the rich increase revenues, as Barack Obama hopes, or hold back the economy, as John McCain fears? Or both?

Mr. Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. On this page in 1993, he stated that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.nullnullnullnullnullnull

You Can't Soak the Rich - WSJ.com

The great chicken or the egg dilemma. IPv6 has had operating system and router support for years. But, content providers don't want to deploy it because there aren't enough potential viewers to make it worth the effort. There are concerns about compatibility and breaking IPv4 accessibility just by turning IPv6 on. ISPs don't want to provide IPv6 to end users until there is a killer app on IPv6 that will create demand for end users to actually want IPv6. There hasn't been any reason for end users to want IPv6 - nobody's dumb enough to put desirable content on IPv6 that isn't accessible on IPv4. Until now.

We're taking over 100 gigabytes of the most popular "adult entertainment" videos from one of the largest subscription websites on the internet, and giving away access to anyone who can connect to it via IPv6. No advertising, no subscriptions, no registration. If you access the site via IPv4, you get a primer on IPv6, instructions on how to set up IPv6 through your ISP, a list of ISPs that support IPv6 natively, and a discussion forum to share tips and troubleshooting. If you access the site via IPv6 you get instant access to "the goods".

The Great IPv6 Experiment

By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five.

Fun history essay about Richard Feynman's computer science contributions and involvement with the origin of Thinking Machines.

Long Now: Views: Essays