Spelling does count. If the sender, subject line, or your message is misspelled, I’m far more likely to think that it’s spam and bin it. I’m fine with the false positives which may make it into the bit bucket if you didn’t take the time to figure out how to spell what you wanted to tell me. *cough*joe*cough*
And I’m not buying from you if your math is horrible and it makes a difference to what I’m buying. A dimwitted marketer put this on thestreet.com below an article I was reading.
Hmm… while it’s true that if I’d bought and sold at the prices indicated, $18.37 and $37.82 respectively, I would indeed have made over 50% on the investment, as you advertised. But if you’re advertising what a financial genius you are, shouldn’t you be noting that buying something for $18.37 and selling it for $37.82 brings you a return of over 100%? I think on math alone, I’m far better with my bad guess strategies than with this genius guiding me.
December 15th, 2008
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This has been a year of considerable introspection. I’ve been on a journey of learning, renewed by the availability of wonderful content online which I could carry with me. I haven’t read many books, but I’ve listened to a lot of them on my iPod or iPhone. I’ve listened to and watched podcasts. I’ve listened to lectures, to books about religion, philosophy, science, mathematics, politics, and biographical histories.
I’ve had a cherished few conversations which have opened my eyes quite a bit. I’ve been inspired. I’ve cried tears of hope and been overcome by generosity. I’ve been selfish and selfless, gotten my priorities and my budget screwed up, corrected for a while, and let them get back out of hand. But I haven’t stopped learning.
I’m going to dig up some of the names of books and authors and urls.
Last year I saw An Inconvenient Truth, and came to my own conclusion. A conclusion that I needed to look harder both in the mirror and into enough of the science for me to know that there’s an impact of our fossil-fuel burning behavior. And I think that the solutions need to be scalable beyond what people without a purpose can accomplish. This isn’t about the incandescent bulbs I still have in my bathrooms because we like the light better. I’m not exempt from responsibility by any means. But my purpose can’t be limited to my home. My home, in the whole scheme of things, even if it were an adobe hut with no electricity or combustion going on in it wouldn’t change the world.
It may have been the beginning of a search for purpose, something to become comfortable with a sense of purpose independent of a simple regression to nature, with enough political sophistication to consider the absolutes of my ideology negotiable if it’s for the common good. Ah, but there’s the rub… what’s the common good? Who’s defining it? What has his day been like? Can there be a worldwide common good?
We have to consider what we call rights… and reconsider which may be privileges. And make sure we don’t call the privileges rights. If government is going to play a guardian role, and its citizens have rights, then the government will eventually end up providing for those rights because it is cruel not to ensure every man his rights. If they are privileges, then even if the government does pilot a program which subsidizes that privilege because it may be a social experiment, then they can be withdrawn when the test is over. Taking away rights should be hard to do. Let’s take the time to reconsider what our personal goals are, and see if they can be separated from what we want for rights. They can still be goals.
Early in the year, I listened to the Richard Dawkins book The Ancestor’s Tale
, which got me thinking about purpose. What’s lurking back in our evolutionary past which can tell me about society’s role which appears to be counter to the “natural way of things”.
Knowing that Dawkins was famously atheist, I then listened to The God Delusion, which I’d been refraining from because I didn’t want to look to be a militant atheist. Or did I? The fact that I could consider the evolutionary process that life has taken, and how I was deriving some sense of the world — and that sense was subject to revision with new evidence, but that new evidence will always be threatening to organized religion, I found my comfortable place.
A desire to seek alternate views from what could be considered similar brought me to the Christopher Hitchens book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I chatted a bit with a friend who’d read both authors and found Hitchens tolerable, but Dawkins too in-your-face. My personal interpretation is that Hitchens looks down his nose at the religious, and thinks them ninnies, but Dawkins seems to want to change them.
And then I saw this TED Talk by Dr. Ramachandran which contained a section on his research into relieving phantom limb pain. Understanding my perception of the role the mind plays in pain in a limb that is no longer there — hint: it’s not the nerve damage — it made me understand that what really matters to people most is what impact it has on his mind. Just like the rational explanation that the limb isn’t there not making the phantom pain any less real, it’s not that trivial to convince a religious person that her deity isn’t real.
More to come in another post, soon…
December 11th, 2008
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One of the more difficult truths I’ve come to realize lately is that the type of idealism that I have, which tends toward the libertarian, simply doesn’t scale to the places the human population is going.
As global population increases, and global demand for resources at least keeps pace, we’ll have so many more quarrels about fairness of the distribution of resources. If nothing else, it may be cost that drives everyone into the cities, if energy and water are best provided (and protected from harm) there, if efficiencies of scale can be gained that offset some of the burdens we’re likely to have to bear.
As we get to live closer and closer together, as the far east spawns cities of millions sprinkled along the water’s edge, our lives necessarily intersect more. The guy who holds the doors open on the subway, delaying the train for 30 seconds, delays everyone on that train for 30 seconds — if there are 600 other people on the train, that’s 5 hours of cumulative lost time. And it happens all the time, and it happens everywhere. But it happens a lot less in Wyoming than it does in New York, Toyko, or Shanghai.
I’ve been the offending party, certainly. I’ve been lost like a tourist, or snuck into a closing elevator. But I feel a little guilty about it… and then realizing that as long as I feel guilty about it, I’m better than those who don’t, and get over my guilt. I’m often conscious of my transgressions, sometimes to the extent of anxiety. But I’m surrounded every day by so many people in New York. I see blatantly rude and selfish social behavior. I see blissfully ignorant folk completely unaware of the impact they’re having on the people around them, whether it’s the people who don’t know to get to the side if they’re not sure where to go, or the people who get into screaming matches with the traffic cop who’s telling them not to make a right onto 34th Street. 5 slow-walking people shouldn’t walk all 5 astride, and when they’re doing so and chatting, they have no idea that someone might want to pass…
Yes, I have to smile a concession smile when people ask me why I live in New York if I hate people.
So… back to libertarianism and scalability… I see how little regard people have for each other on a minute-by-minute basis. Carelessness gets magnified. Selfishness has an impact on others. Maliciousness affects anyone and everyone around.
If we look at the Internet as a model for our interconnectedness as people, we see that sometimes the interconnectedness is accomplished better by the upstarts. South Korea has 12.2 million fiber broadband connections. Africa, grossly underserved by fixed-line providers, is expected to have 378 million cell phone subscribers by 2011. We also learn about how the incumbent network providers and the wily Cogent play nasty with each other… will we ever get another permanent member to the UN security council? If we do, isn’t it likely to be the troublemaker upstart who’s seized sufficient power to wrestle themselves in? Cogent’s been playing the Hugo Chavez role, holding resources hostage to try to gain legitimacy as a peer.
I’d include modern cell phones into what I’m calling the Internet even if they don’t have IP connectivity — if there’s MMS and a camera phone, there’s a connection to the global information network which will reproduce news across all media. The flow of information among people has grown dramatically, to the point of overload at times. Millions of tweets and texts have been sent both to organize peaceful political action, as well as spread disinformation or orchestrate violence. We’ve seen security holes in widely distributed software lead to the taking down of websites and even the connectivity of entire countries. We’ve seen countries block content they deem unfit for their nodes, and we’ve seen people overcome those blockades with encryption and various other techniques. Sometimes they do it for good, other times for evil.
You can opt out, refuse to take part in the Internet. But it’s increasingly more difficult to remain unaffected by it. If your power company hasn’t properly secured their systems, or all of the systems upon which they are dependent for proper operation, your electric service may be vulnerable to hackers. What other systems am I referring to? Telecommunications facilities which carry the networks between the interconnected systems required to be able to manage the grid. Environmental control systems at those telecommunications facilities, where forcing systems to overheat, failures can be induced… or the sprinkers could be set off, and the power cut automatically. Once the grid can’t communicate, it’s considerably more vulnerable… and I wouldn’t be surprised if parts would shut themselves down automatically when they lose connectivity to the other nodes.
We’re getting more connected as people just as we are on the Internet. We’re facing resource shortages, including economic growth, while we find new equilibria in this interconnected world. We’re recognizing how interconnected action is required to face some of the problems that we’ve created, and we’re a part of a blame game in the tradeoffs between growth and responsibility for the impact of industry.
As much as I have an inherent appreciation for Locke’s second treatise, I can see how it has problems when population scales and resources become scarce. It would be trivial to say that those who do not work should get nothing, but in this overconnected world we’re a part of whether or not we like it, we know that someone will have to take care of those who refuse to help themselves. They won’t be allowed to die in droves. If that starts to happen, some among them will strike back. And in this interconnected world, just a few motivated individuals can impact even the most “secure” of us.
Pragmatism demands that I try to figure out the extent to which I want to see a safety net defined, be it for money, healthcare, or anything similar… and participate in at least the discussion of that definition. While I don’t think that it’s my responsibility to provide for everyone, if I take the stance that it’s all unacceptable, I’m likely to be bypassed. I think that I’d better be a part of the solution that I can believe in rather than simply have it defined around me.
I’m given hope when Obama talks about encouraging personal responsibility, as much as I’m dismayed when he talks as though people have an inherent right to things. But it’s time to become part of the discussion. I’ll be writing more here shortly to help solidify my thoughts and further discussion.
November 10th, 2008
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Windows protecting me from itself
DEP (Data Execution Prevention) is a technology introduced to prevent the execution of data as code. This prevents a class of exploit where data is loaded into memory, as data, but a program is tricked into running it as instructions. I don’t know whether or not DEP has been enabled since install (I was playing with settings last week), but this is the first time I’ve seen this alert, and I have to wonder if my system has been compromised.
Time to run all sorts of scanners…
I just couldn’t help but to be amused by Windows sacrificing its own face to protect me.
September 17th, 2008
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Russell over at UKD1 did some benchmarking of Amazon’s new Elastic Block Store (I’m not loving the name, but the product certainly does look compelling), using a single device, and various numbers of drives in RAID 0 (striping), RAID 5 (striping with parity), and RAID 10 (striping across mirrors).
His results show a single drive maxing out at just under 65MB/s, RAID 0 hitting the ceiling at 110MB/s, RAID 5 maxxing out about 60MB/s, and RAID 10 “F2″ at under 55MB/s.
He then writes,
EBS. However, I would have expected RAID 10 F2 to have similar performance to RAID 0, rather than the results seen.
First of all, after glancing at this “F2″ variant of RAID 10, I’ve got to say that I haven’t bothered to fully grok it. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that it’s performant. He shows the command-line he used, and it clearly has 3 component volumes in it, and even if I understood how one might use F2, 3 volumes in a RAID 10 seems clearly wrong.
But assuming that the system is intelligent enough to make sense of it…
I also haven’t ever mounted an EBS volume on the EC2 instance I’ve set up.
But one thing is obvious as to why the RAID 10 F2 volume performed poorly… it’s obviously bandwidth constrained, probably by a single gigabit ethernet connection. Software mirroring requires that data is written twice, once to each set of disks. When the disks are on separate controllers, they’re not competing on the same storage bus. Even when they’re on the same controller, but it’s SCSI or FibreChannel or SATA or whatever it may be — the bus has higher throughput than the disks do. You won’t saturate a U320 SCSI bus with a pair of disks, the disks are the bottleneck.
I’m quite impressed by the 110MB/s achieved through striping… now imagine that for every write, you’re clogging the pipe with 2 copies… what would you expect the capacity for each set of data to be? Strangely enough… 55MB/s.
QED
Amazon’s description of EBS refers to it as “highly available, highly reliable volumes”, which I take to mean fault tolerant - I’d assume RAID 1,5,6, or Z (Sun’s ZFS Raid) - which would make the mirroring portion of RAID 10 unnecessary because Amazon’s already taking care of the redundancy, so I don’t see this as a downside.
August 24th, 2008
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