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

Many believe that zebra stripes aid the reader by guiding the eye along the row. However, despite being in use in both paper and electronic mediums for almost half a century, there is practically no evidence that it actually assists users in this way.

A List Apart: Articles: Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?

A programmer is walking along a beach and finds a lamp. He rubs the lamp, and a genie appears. "I am the most powerful genie in the world. I can grant you any wish, but only one wish."

The programmer pulls out a map, points to it and says, "I'd want peace in the Middle East."

The genie responds, "Gee, I don't know. Those people have been fighting for millenia. I can do just about anything, but this is likely beyond my limits."

The programmer then says, "Well, I am a programmer, and my programs have lots of users. Please make all my users satisfied with my software and let them ask for sensible changes."

At which point the genie responds, "Um, let me see that map again."

Best Programming Jokes

I've ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element.

John Resig - Processing.js

The cool thing about eBay's support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn't a Nigerian scammer. Timothy has discovered the awful truth behind today's eBay—something many readers here already know—which is that it's become virtually impossible to sell any sort of medium-to-high end electronics there anymore.

Nigerian Scammers: It's Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay

I'm reading a business plan that I received. 10 honking megabytes of brainwaves put to paper. 115 carefully crafted pages which gets me deep, really deep, into the mind of the entrepreneur. You are thinking to yourself, self, how could a simple business plan allow the VC to learn tons about me and my people.

Simple.

Make tons of changes to your document, pass it to your 'advisors' for advising, get back their edits, make more changes, save and send the document to me without accepting all changes and stripping out all the notes and comments.

The Post Money Value: The Coolest Business Plan Ever

In an effort to return to my roots, I spent the majority of the day compiling what I believe to be the mother of all technical SEO cheat sheets. The recommended viewing format of this cheat sheet is as a PDF rather than the traditional blog post (I found the blog posts inconvenient to print)

SEOmoz | The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet