It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important! Or that they’re already doing it. It’s kind of like breathing—we’re not usually that aware of it. It’s much easier to recognize more “outbound” activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important—it’s really where everything begins. There’s a funny Zen saying about that: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

Ever Notice?

How artists are mining data sets to make you see the unseen.

Infoviz art

Stewart Brand and Mayor Gavin Newsom talk about mass urbanization, the effects on the environment, and nuclear power.

Gavin Newsom interviews Stewart Brand

Bruce Schneier:

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person's name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

The TSA's useless photo ID rules

Atlanta: not so hosed, after all? Or only just not yet?

Below we highlight the percentage difference between current median home prices and the max median home prices seen in each of the twenty cities that S&P/Case-Shiller tracks. As shown, there is quite a big difference between the worst areas and the ones that have held up the best. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami and San Diego have all seen a median home price decline of more than 30% from their peaks. Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco and Tampa are in the second tier of declines between -25% and -30%.

On the flip side, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Portland, Seattle and Atlanta are all down less than 10% from their peaks, while New York, Chicago and Boston are just over -10%. While the composite indices are down about 20%, there is a pretty big discrepancy in price declines depending on what area of the country you look at.

Declines From Peaks in Housing Show Big Disparity

Shouts & Murmurs:

Staring blankly at the seat back in front of you for the entire flight is no longer permitted on my airline. If you have brought nothing to read, a book will be provided for your use, at a charge of fifty dollars.

Laughing out loud at anything in any movie, whether it is playing on the cabin system or on your own DVD player, is fifty dollars per incident. Asking me to turn off my reading light so that you can see the screen better: also fifty dollars.

I realize that you have a choice of airlines, and I encourage you to exercise it.

My Airline

Andrew Odlyzko:

Service providers argue that if net neutrality is not enforced, they will have sufficient incentives to build special high-quality channels that will take the Internet to the next level of its evolution. But what if they do get their wish, net neutrality is consigned to the dustbin, and they do build their new services, but nobody uses them? If the networks that are built are the ones that are publicly discussed, that is a likely prospect.

What service providers publicly promise to do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to offer all that much revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary.

If service providers are to derive significant revenues and profits by exploiting freedom from net neutrality limitations, they will need to engage in much more intrusive control of traffic than just provision of special channels for streaming movies.

From 1849:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches ... What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

And more recently:

Noooooo problem ... don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... that's what you want ... that's what you NEED ... Buy my shit! Buy it -- give me money! Don't worry about the consequences ... there's no consequences. If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

The delusions of net neutrality

Papers from a workshop:

A Modified Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm For Collaborative Filtering

Putting the collaborator back into collaborative filtering

From hits to niches? or how popular artists can bias music recommendation and discovery

Investigation of Various Matrix Factorization Methods for Large Recommender Systems

Improved Neighborhood-Based Algorithms for Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Large-Scale Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize Competition

As of this blog posting, exactly 900 days remain until the end of the Internet, or at least the exhaustion of IPv4 registry allocations. And you don’t have to take my word for it, even the normally staid London Times and Fox News proclaimed, “Internet meltdown ... The world is heading for a digital doomsday”.

Heady stuff.

Of course, IPv6 (or the new IPv4) was supposed to take care of all of this — billions of billions of new IP addresses, hardened security built in from the start, and an elegant new architecture to replace all of IPv4’s hacks.

So what happened to IPv6?

The End is Near, but is IPv6?

Downhill skating is like surfing; carving back and forth on long downhills. Note: you guys who skated as kids and have quit. The technology is way advanced these days. Decks, trucks, wheels, designs. It's a different skating world. If you've ever skated, you've got the motor skills (due to "muscle memory"), and you'll be surprised at how much fun you can have skating downhill with today's boards. Here are three unique skateboards meant for downhill, as opposed to acrobatic street and ramp skating.

Downhill Skateboarding