Interface

When you have a couple of minutes, click on the squares.

http://mandaflewaway.tumblr.com/post/2057242738

Do you see what I see?

Since I just posted several photos that have intense colors, this seems like a good time to mention that your web browser might be able to display colors in photos better than it currently does. For a good show-and-tell, see http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/29/633/. The summary is that if you’re using Firefox 3, you can download a Color Management plug-in that will tell Firefox to stop muting the colors in photos.

Links for home and away

Want someone to design and build a mini-golf course for you? Try Harris Miniature Golf Courses.

Prefer traveling? Lots of ideas at I Will Teach You To Be Rich, including many that may give you a new perspective on reasons to travel.

We’ll be up in Maine quite a lot this summer, starting in less than three weeks. Even in the areas that we know well, there are new places to explore like the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

This post is derived entirely from natural ingredients

FoodEssentials.com is a good start towards making it easier to shop when you have food allergies or food restrictions. SelectWisely.com makes laminated cards listing food allergies in multiple languages that you can take with you when you’re traveling. And Wikipedia still wins for clearest and most comprehensive explanations of ingredients like guar gum (which is kitniyot, in case you’re wondering).

In loving memory of my first crosscut shredder

Since doing my taxes requires going through all the loose papers in the house first, my first spring cleaning task involves sorting everything not yet filed away in my home office. That always makes me more receptive to articles about organizing, and the best personal account that I’ve read in a long while is by Sara Rimer in The New York Times. The reader comments are great as well—full of suggestions, alternative viewpoints, and a sense of collaboration.

Ontogeny capitulates again

Paul Spinrad, writing on Boing Boing:

When my friend John started going to the Bronx High School of Science, he was surprised to find that it contained the same cliques that his former, neighborhood school had had—the jocks, the geeks, etc. He figured that because the student body consisted of all the geeks taken from other schools, he would only find geeks there. But no—and when he got to know the school’s Chess Team, the geeks among geeks, he saw that they paralleled the same divisions.

Humans and human groupings always seem to break down into the same archetypes, and this also seems to happen at all levels of granularity, from national character to impulses within an individual.

From id, ego, superego to legislative, executive, judicial, we categorize what we see into our mental models. Never doubt that a single explanatory model can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Forget about it

If you could take a pill that would permanently reduce the emotional impact of a stressful memory without losing the factual recall, would you want to?

Beta blockers may let you do that: take a pill, deliberately recall the stressful memory, and let the brain rewire the memory a bit to permanently reduce the emotional impact. Repeat as needed, or at least that’s the theory. Researchers are currently testing it with PTSD patients and touting it in the news.

We have natural healing processes that can, when they are working well, help us gradually cope with traumatic experiences. PTSD is typically defined as a set of symptoms that are interfering with a patient’s life more than a year after the initial trauma. Does that mean we should accept being put in a state of fear and anger when recalling a traumatic event for anything up to a year, just because that’s been considered a normal response? Would you rather suppress the fear and anger after a month? After a week? After a couple of hours?

If this became a common treatment, I’m sure people would have widely variable threshholds for treatment just like we do with many other problems, and it seems unlikely to create an affectless society. But before seeking treatment myself, I’d be really concerned what other emotional impacts this might suppress aside from fear and anger. Sit here, take this pill, and for the next several hours try not to think about any of your joyful or spiritually meaningful memories whose emotional impact you don’t want to lose.

For a deeper look, I strongly recommend reading “Better” Memories? The Promise and Perils of Pharmacological Interventions, a 2003 staff working paper from the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Glass houses and Chinese walls

Kathleen Richards has written a long behind-the-scenes look for East Bay Express at the apparent manipulation of Yelp reviews by Yelp’s advertising sales department. Suppose you’re running a restaurant with a mix of mostly positive reviews on Yelp. Then a couple of negative reviews (sometimes written by Yelp) appear at the top, and Yelp promptly calls you to tell you that for $300/month, they can move the negative reviews lower or even make them disappear. You refuse, and positive reviews start disappearing. It’s hard to imagine a business not giving in.

Becoming the dominant destination for user reviews is a huge advantage: it’s the reason I shop on Amazon and look for hotels on TripAdvisor. But there are plenty of reasons not to trust those reviews even if the site is not manipulating the reviews themselves. Businesses write positive reviews for themselves and negative reviews for their competitors. People can boost their favorite business or tear down a business they’re unhappy with, and they can do so more effectively with exaggerations or outright lies. And it’s hard to know what approach a site takes with its reviews: Costco removes most negative product reviews while Amazon leaves up reviews that are demonstrably self-promoting, but how is the casual consumer supposed to figure that out?

The approach that Yelp takes is very familiar from my experience trying to get computer products reviewed 15 years ago in computer magazines. Want the editorial side to briefly announce your product? Buy an ad. Want a positive review? Buy more ads. The ad department at one prominent computer magazine called me up to let me know that the editorial side was going to run a long and very positive review next month, and did I want to buy some ad space in the issue? When I hesitated, they said they might not be able to find the space to run the review either. The outward claim was that there was a Chinese wall between editorial and advertising, but anyone marketing computer products quickly found out otherwise.

The difference on the web is that review sites are equally reviewable. Check out Amazon on Yelp Boston, and you’ll read that “a lot of reviews are bullshit.” Useful (5). Ironic (6).

Waiting to inhale

I’ve been paying more attention to air quality over the past week, since listening to a commuter rail abutter describe the health problems she attributes to 10 years of exposure to diesel particulates. Here’s a bit of good news: the right mix of plants (and enough of them) can make our indoor air much healthier.

Solar, wind, and fire

An article by Chris Goodall in The Guardian about current environmental issues has brightened my Sunday morning, so I pass the link along to you.

I attended a focus group recently about energy efficiency, and it was clear that most people are concerned about the environment and are willing to take productive steps to reduce their energy usage. Utilities, too, would be happy to continue the trade of helping us reduce usage in exchange for higher rates. And with a potential massive public works program to improve energy efficiency in public buildings, our federal government could finally get on board the solar train to Cleanville. That prospect makes me really happy. And researchers say that means you’ll now be happier too. Smile, and the world is up to 34% more likely to smile with you. Catchy, ain’t it?

How do you feel?

After making a couple of dozen “I [Heart] whatever” bumper stickers (actually, literally using whatever might be funny), it’s time to play around with replacing the heart. The classic Rorschach ink blot seems like a natural choice: the shape is right, a deep red filter in Photoshop makes the color right, and there’s the additional layer of your feelings towards Rorschach being open to interpretation.

Actual bumper stickers now available at http://www.cafepress.com/redrorschach.

Games back in the day

BibliOdyssey has posted a lovely collection of game boards from the past 500 years. I’m particularly taken with this round board of music notation:

Interfaces

The iPhone, Microsoft Surface, and the Wii Remote are offering radical new options in how we interact with our electronics. But for the humble keyboard and mouse/trackball/trackpad, Google and Apple have had all the cool interfaces. Google Maps and Google Earth. CoverFlow and Spaces. Now Amazon has WindowShop, which could seriously improve the online shopping experience by creating an easy browsing experience. When WindowShop is merged with the power of database queries, sort filters, and personalized recommendations, I’m not sure I’ll miss the mall.

Ticket Me Elmo

German speed cameras have been repeatedly catching an Audi’s passenger, but not the driver, because the Audi is British and has the driver and passenger positions reversed. And the passenger is a Muppet, who cannot be ticketed.

The photo that the German police have released is from 11:11 on 08/08/08. Surely the driver deserves an award for timing.

National values

In American Scientist, Roald Hoffmann conveys excitement about theoretical chemistry. There’s still work to be done, molecules to dream up, puzzles and problems to solve. These sorts of intellectual pursuits for the sake of knowledge and for the sake of progress are the real America to me. I grew up hanging around a national lab, where scientists from all over the world saw that America valued science. Crystallography moms and math dads passing on the value of teaching, the value of learning, the value of research and collaboration. That’s the American idea, or at least a working hypothesis.

Choose your vendors well

Robert Reich writes about our general preference for ignoring the moral implications of our spending decisions:

[A]s moral beings we want to think of ourselves as stewards of the environment, intent on protecting future generations. But as consumers, we often disregard this moral aspiration. Many of us continue to buy cars that spew carbon into the air, and some of us spend lots of time flying from one location to another in jet airplanes that have an even greater carbon footprint. And we often buy low-priced items from poor nations in which environmental standards are lax and factories spill toxic chemicals into water supplies or pollutants into the air. How do we square our moral stand on the environment with our purchasing habits? Beyond buying the occasional "eco-friendly" product, we typically don't even try.

Many of our choices as consumers are not simple A/B choices, of course, and there’s a complex web of linked effects further up the supply chain that we typically can’t even determine. But I know I feel better when I can support local producers, local farms, and small businesses.

I can has royaltiez?

Oxford University Press has published a new book by David Crystal on the language of text messaging, cleverly titled Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. The executive summary: Chill, white-haired dudes! Language isn’t being weirded too much.

Curves in architecture

What would you do with 50 kilometers of white polypropylene string?



Closer to home, John Kostick created the ultimate pergola.



Our house is mostly straight lines. But perhaps in the back yard we could someday afford a non-rectilinear shed, also built by John Kostick:

Remaining silent

I was raised to believe that the police were friendly, and I’ve known genuinely decent and friendly cops. I’ve chatted with plenty of cops on street corners, asked them for directions, reported crimes, and offered witness statements. I never used to worry about talking to the police, because I never had anything to hide.

I still have nothing to hide, but I’ve learned that it is perilous to talk to a law enforcement officer of any variety. That still distresses me, because our society is very poorly served by a system where honest and law-abiding citizens face serious risks from talking to the police. But there are in fact numerous reasons that every defense attorney will tell you to never talk to the police, even if you have done nothing wrong and even if you want to tell the police the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Some of those reasons are laid out clearly, if quickly, by law professor James Duane in a 27-minute lecture. You may follow his reasoning and still disagree with his conclusions, as do many of the commenters on that page, simply because his conclusions are distressing. I’ll just point out that Duane goes out of his way to assume an ideal world in which the police officer you talk to is completely honest and well-intentioned, and his conclusions hold even in such a world.

As time goes by

A dear friend of mine has written a thoughtful reflection about the costs of keeping and severing our ties to friends from days gone by. It is not easy to maintain friendships with those who do not live near us, or even with all those who do. I certainly claim no answers, but I do know that the questions are worth reflection.