Babak's Journal

A struggle to think about ideas

2011-04-01T00:15:00.000-07:00

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

Lately, I don't follow up much on ideas; instead I read the news about people with great ideas. I don't care much for such vicarious pleasures, but that is what's mostly on offer for a lazy reader such as myself.

~
Kicking yourself in the butt now and again is not a bad thing.

Toronymous

2010-09-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

[A short story in progess..]

The twenty teens were destructive. Constructive, really, as the saying goes, but that only came behind its ruinous wake. For just as the web's ecological structure, it's business model, as they liked to say in the day, was beginning to solidify, just when it seemed the Wild West had finally been tamed, just when click-through rates were hailed the most accurate barometer of economic activity, the rug was about to be pulled from underneath.

The dark web, as it was later called (and then forgotten), like the web before it, developed mostly in the shadows, and by the time the captains of the new [old] order could see it coming, it was already too late. It represented not just new technology but also a movement. It was embodied in a word, an electronic device, really: the Toronymous.

In 2014, the small Taiwanese router manufacturer NextHop first introduced the device. Technically, it was hardly groundbreaking: a mashup of off-the-shelf hardware, and open source software that many a hobbyist could build themself, now packaged in a smooth, reassuring, charcoal black encasing bearing an orange lizard logo--available at Walmart.

To be sure, there would have been many other similar devices on the store shelf at this time. Bundling home and business routers with extra smarts and storage capacity was already a booming growth category. These new smart routers (recall, the vernacular "smart" connoting snooty comes a few years later), not only serviced their owners inside the network, but also served users outside the network (the public): the router, in other words, was also one or more websites. They were touted to do many things: a thermostat manufacturer, for example, provided a simple plugin that allowed the temperature be set remotely.

But more significantly, following a number of high profile divorce suits in which Facebook data were subpoenaed, people had begun to see a need to take physical possession of their digital contributions to the web. These routers now allowed their owners to host their own blogs, blurbs, and albums on a device they physically owned and could always unplug.

A number of geeky developments had set the stage. From small beginnings, W3C work on a secure, web-based, push/pull information exchange protocol had yielded a set of basic building blocks--collectively called DOSN (pronounced "Dawson")--for constructing (among other things) distributed, implementation-agonsitc, social networks. This simple, Spartan "standard" had attracted a good deal of mindshare in the community: developing DOSN-based, social networky apps was considered sexy. What was cool about doing apps this way was that different implementations now had a way to talk to one another. And these applications had now found a new home in those shiny routers sitting on the store shelf.

The movement had caught on. A dark web had emerged. From the inside, it looked very much like the ordinary web outside. Only, who could see what was now determined by you and your friends, not some central clearing house. In the dark web, you would trust certain people with certain information. To be sure, your friends could leak the information you shared with them--but that is how it had always been and would be. Now, however, using steganographic tools, it was usually possible to determine who had leaked the information by examining the version of the leaked artifact.

Facebook page views, meanwhile, for the first time in the company's history, started trending lower, and the company's stock price sank following two consecutive quarters of declining growth. The market had been caught off guard, and there were now no shortage of pundits predicting the next business model headed to the dust bin.

The growth of the ad-free, dark web, however, had thus far not come at Google's expense. Indeed, the benevolent giant was making forays into the smart router market with its own Linux-based Droid Route (DR) operating system. Google had seen no decline in overall traffic as the dark web had emerged. To the surprise of many, it turned out a great many darkies, as they liked to call themselves, were not so private after all. They still shared a great deal of information about themselves publicly--which the search engines were only too happy to index.

Google's advertising model had evolved. Broadly, its ad placements were determined from two inputs: the content the user was viewing, and "anonymized" information about that user. The content side of this equation was safe. The Personally Unidentifiable Identity (PUI, pronounced "pew-ee") end of the business, however, was increasingly under attack. Privacy groups had long bemoaned the lack of oversight in this burgeoning industry, and time and again, security experts had demonstrated how to de-anonymize supposedly anonymized information. Google, it was said, knew more about you than any other government or commercial entity on the planet. This concentration of informational power worried many, and some were even considering legislative measures and remedies that defined what, how and when personal information could be harvested.

But the browser makers had already begun chipping away at the ability of PUI outfits to harvest personal information about users. Better cookie / persona management, HTTP request header sanitization (e.g. user-agent, and referrer), ad-block mode, and a slew of other out-of-the-box improvements had made life for the PUIs more difficult. A cat and mouse game had begun--with the cat casting an ever wider net, as the mouse got better at evading it.

Still, the PUIs' ace in the hole was the user's IP address. At the end of the day, whether dynamically or statically assigned, a user's IP address was an anchor from which much information could be gleaned, cross-correlated against databases of user browsing habits, pieced and assimilated into existing "anonymized" user dossiers maintained by the PUI.

Others however saw a giant industry standing on its last leg. Take away the IP address, and they got nothing, they argued. Already a growing number hobbyists and technically savvy users were modding their smart routers to do this by installing Tor/Privoxy gateways.

What distinguished NextHop from its peers however was that it was the first to introduce this mod out-of-the-box. Toronymous was a fantastic, if short-lived, marketing success. And the story of how Mr. Lang managed to engineer on-demand manufacturing capacity, of course, is still a subject of study for students of business. For example, instead of scaling manufacturing capacity by making more of an existing model, he would craft a new model suited to the manufacturing location at hand. (And so it was that NextHop next introduced the Toronymous X series, and as if the pun needed explaining, this branding pattern was followed by Toronymous Rex, and then simply the Toronymous Rx series.)

Mr. Lang was right to milk this brand as fast as he could, for he never even owned it. Tor, the open source project responsible for a key software component used in the device, had sent the company a cease-and-disist over their use of Toronymous . NextHop at first rebuffed the claim, but when Lang learned his trademark applications at the Patent and Trademark Office were going nowhere, he approached the group hoping to license the mark. It was not to be, but Lang somehow managed to keep the license negotiations going, all the while Toronymous sales continued. A Chinese manufacturer, meanwhile, having caught on to NextHop's branding game, introduced the T-Rex. More copycats followed with other variations on the name.

More interesting than its etymology, however, is the movement Toronymous later came to represent. The big, established home/business router manufacturers were the last to embrace the game changing trend towards anonymous browsing. Much of the establishment in America thought anonymous browsing should be illegal, anyway. The public, however, demanded anonymous browsing, and so great was the flood of email citizens sent their representatives that a grand coalition of liberals and conservatives of many stripes in Congress aligned against any legislative measure that would make Toronymous-like devices illegal. That left the fate of Toronymous in the safe hands of the glacial court system.

Toronymity was making the transition from grassroots to mainstream. Or rather, it was the other way around. The early devices had a button which when pressed, glowed an orange icon depicting three overlapping stick figures representing "community mode". In this mode, the device was also a Tor relay. Users were advised to run their devices with the icon glowing. The basis of anonymity, the online help page explained, was safety in numbers and running the router this way helped increase both the online privacy of the owner and the community at large. For some, running in community mode was a way to thumb your nose at power; for others it felt more like pledging money to public television--sharing communal burdens, only now a lot more cheaply. Either way, pressing that button had a feel-good effect for most anyone who had bought the device. It turned consumers into activists.

The world was changing. The router was getting fatter by the day, and more and more storage and computing power was drifting to the edges, to the end user. As Facebook had demonstrated before, people spent increasingly more time on social networks than the web at large. This dark web had emerged as a tier-accessed, individuated, grassroots social network. It lacked an all-seeing eye. In fact, no one could see but a small part of it.

Now, to be sure, the web itself was not going dark. Far from it. The public web was still growing as if there had never been a dark web. But the dark web was expanding even faster, filled with photos, videos of family and friends, and other information shared discriminately across smaller circles. And as it grew, some private information, whether by intention or accident, whether leaked or released, would make the transition to the public realm. By the time the dark web was an order of magnitude larger than the public web, this constant unidirectional leakage had caused the growth rate of the two webs to converge to a same number. The dark web, in other words, was where the vast majority of web content originated.

Business wasn't quite sure what to make of this new medium: not even the porn industry had come up with a scalable business exploit for it. There were two seemingly insurmountable problems, from a business perspective, with this dark web. One, it was one-to-one: it was relationship-based, and relationships take much too long to develop. Two, it required an authentic human voice, which in turn made working these dark networks labor-intensive.

Meanwhile, a precipitous drop in the Nasdaq PUI Index signaled the coming collapse of a once legitimate industry based on trading, packaging, and selling dossiers of clandestinely gathered personal information. A commentator on a popular financial network lamented, "I don't imagine people quite realize how much this toronymity is costing them. The slide in the PUI [index] alone marks a half-trillion dollar of wealth destroyed."

Maybe. But in a sense that informational wealth had been returned back to its rightful owners. A new world order was in the making. Or rather an old world was in the remaking. For the dark web heralded the return of the individual, the guild, and the community at the expense of that historically younger institution, the corporation.

Avatar: what to make of 3D projection?

2010-01-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

My son and I went to see Avatar on the big screen. In 3D. I don't usually go to the theater (I'm rather attached to the "rewind" button on my remote), but this was an experience we couldn't replicate at home. I was very impressed with how far the technology had come along. Now, looking back, I'm wondering how soon this technology will make it into every living room. Not very soon, I'd venture.

Update 1/11/10: Perhaps I was obtuse when I wrote this. I never considered how this technology could be used in gaming and VR programs in which the scene responds to user input. That could turn out to be very interesting, indeed. But regarding its use in more passive applications like movies and static video, I still think this new medium has little to offer.

The main obstacle to fast adoption is that you need special glasses to view such a display device; conversely, without the glasses, the viewing is horrible. That's one downside of this stereoscopic 3D display technology. So what's on the upside? What's the great value-add that would make putting up with the glasses worthwhile?

Immersion. The 3D experience feels more real than the 2D one. It takes the viewer a half-step further into the screen. A step closer into a virtual reality, a simulacrum. But is it [closer]?

While watching Avatar, I was surprised at how often I would mentally step back (unconsciously) from the screen and watch the walls of the theater instead. It was as if my mind preferred to frame the experience inside the cinema, instead of inside the movie itself. What was going on? I later mused.

In order to experience the 3D immersion, you need to surrender your eyes to the movie. Surrender, in the sense that once you have mentally stepped into the screen, your eyes must follow the action on the screen; they cannot wander about in the simulacrum. You must place yourself and your eyes at the mercy of the camera. It is as if the camera were one of those birds in Avatar you're riding, with your head and eyes fixed in a brace: you only have a narrow field of view ahead. (And unlike the characters in the movie, you cannot control the bird.) You must resist the expectation of freedom the mind is so accustomed to in a 3 dimensional world; for as soon as you try to exercise that freedom you are awakened from the illusion, and you perhaps find your eyes wandering off on the walls of the movie house.

Not only must you not forget to keep your eyes on the screen once immersed a half-step into it, you must also try to keep your eyes from trying to focus on projected objects that are meant to be out-of-focus. For example, a petal descending inches before the "camera lens" may have been intentionally left out-of-focus so that it obstructs less of the background. But if curiosity begets you and you try to focus on the petal, I speculate one of two things might happen: (a) your failure to focus breaks the illusion, the suspension of disbelief that maintains the psychological immersion, or (b) you maintain the immersion but blame your tired eyes for not being able to focus.

So it would appear current 3D projection technology requires of the viewer some of the same mental rigor that is necessary to ride a bird in Pandora.

And glasses, aside, do we give up anything when we switch to this 3D medium? I wonder. Quite a lot, I imagine. For the traditional motion picture is less of a technology than it is of a language, an art form, cultivated over generations. Much of that language is a play on the medium's limitations. The composition of the picture, think of golden ratios, for example, is only realized against the bounds defined by the edges of the screen. Moreover, as our minds have become more introspective, more self-reflective, we have developed a more self-aware narrative, the camera behind the camera, the eye that sees the eye that's seeing. A meta language that describes itself and sees its reflection. A way of thought that cherishes its ability to step back and see itself--in a sense, an ability to step out of an immersing experience, the opposite of immersion. (It's this cultivated mental ability that makes the sports bar possible.) This new 3D medium, on the other hand, is like a mirror that breaks when it sees itself in it.

In summary I'm not particularly fond of the 3D technology on offer for two reasons. One, there is little extra information that can be gleaned from it that was not already present in its 2D version (I doubt there is any detail that would have been lost on a viewer watching the flat version of Avatar). And if it is not about the information delivered, then it must be about how it's delivered. Which leads us to Two, the experience itself: impressive as it is, it adds little value once its novelty has worn off. That's because we already know how to immerse ourselves in so many mediums: the novel, the play, the radio, not to mention the 2D motion picture. The technology offers little that viewer's mind cannot already synthesize from its "flatter" 2D version.

As for Avatar, itself, aye.. the story line itself presents an artful play on the stereoscopic medium's own limitations. How fitting that the viewer is made to identify with a paraplegic protagonist! And even more fitting that the plot itself involves the very concept of immersion: the medium's inability to visually frame itself is compensated by the eye-behind-the-eye theme in the narrative. A beautiful production. But to draw a line from here to the everyday use of this new medium, I think, is overreaching. It'll be more like a difficult brush few can master how and when to use.

Decentralizing social media over HTTP and HTTPS

2009-09-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

From a recent email I sent a friend:

I've been thinking about Facebook recently: their misuse of personal data, specifically. FB is a pretty fun site. And, for me, at least, it has been very useful. Too bad you end up locked-in to a specific vendor like FB. Not only do you have to trust them, you also have no way of porting your personal data to a site like ning.

A better scheme, I imagine, would involve making social media [personal] data, and indeed its whole ecosystem, more decentralized--more like the rest of the web.

I've been thinking about the requirements for a decentralized, standards driven, web-based social media ecosystem. At the very least, I imagine you need an easy-to-configure access control mechanism that lets you choose which friends can read what. The picture I have in mind is a file specification (maybe a zip file with a standard directory structure) that completely describes the state of a user account, and a (HTTP) container specification for loading and implementing the "intent" of the file specification as well as a network protocol (over HTTP) that implements cross-container messaging for user accounts. The spec would not concern itself with the presentation layer.

Do you know of some such project already underway? (My searches came up naught.) And is this interesting, silly, or old?

Update [15 May 2010]: There is now: Diaspora. I'm trying to find out how I can contribute time instead of money to the cause.

Update [1 Nov. 2009]: My friend sent me this link to a recent paper entitled Privacy, Cost, and Availability Tradeoffs in Decentralized OSNs. Here's an abstract:

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become enormously popular. However, two aspects of many current OSNs have important implications with regards to privacy: their centralized nature and their acquisition of rights to users’ data. Recent work has proposed decentralized OSNs as more privacy-preserving alternatives to the prevailing OSN model. We present three schemes for decentralized OSNs. In all three, each user stores his own personal data in his own machine, which we term a Virtual Individual Server (VIS). VISs self-organize into peer-to-peer overlay networks, one overlay per social group with which the VIS owner wishes to share information. The schemes differ in where VISs and data reside: (a) on a virtualized utility computing infrastructure in the cloud, (b) on desktop machines augmented with socially-informed data replication, and (c) on desktop machines during normal operation, with failover to a standby virtual machine in the cloud when the primary VIS becomes unavailable. We focus on tradeoffs between these schemes in the areas of privacy, cost, and availability.

I've done a bit more reading and thinking since. First, I think it's a good idea. Second, it's not a particularly clever idea. We already have decentralized login (think OpenID): controlling access to personal data is a no-brainer. A lot of people have been thinking about this problem and have proposed various implementations--see Henry Story's RDF presentation, for example). So this is old, but as Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, perhaps it's an idea whose time has come.

Why then aren't people already developing such a thing? I would venture that it's because

there is little profit motive in such an undertaking, or
the community that could pull this off is all wrapped up in that proprietary, gated, winner-takes-all battle which Facebook dominates, or
the W3C crowd, the folks you'd expect to be most involved in such a project, are too busy shoe-horning RDF to real world problems. Or,
it's just a bad idea.

So what is it? Here's a sketch of what I'm imagining. (A sketch is all I have right now..)

Each individual controls a mini website, which we'll call an indisite. This indisite serves its authenticated owner (logged in, say over an OpenID protcol) a customized view into their social universe. That view (over HTTPS) is something like what you see at Facebook or some other social media site.

Beside providing this individuated presentation layer for its owner, an indisite also serves other [usually] authenticated users (friends of the owner) raw data (without presentation markup) and files. Some files and data may be public (for discovery purposes, for example), in which case, no authentication is required. For example, an indisite's default page might be the owner's profile page.

A key feature of an indisite is that it allows its owner to control access to their data and files. For example, as a user, I might not want to share a particular family album with all my friends. An indisite would allow me an easy, convenient way to assign access rights to only those friends I want to share the pictures with.

Indisites are designed to work with friend indisites (sites operated by the owner's friends). Privileged information is shared across sites over HTTPS. A user adds information to their network by publishing new information to their indisite. Their indisite in turn routes notification to friend indisites (again, over RESTful HTTPS calls). How and when this routing is done requires much thought. Also, there obviously needs to be a way for an indisite to poll friend sites.

Those considerations aside, the information exchange is XML-based. A "wall" posting notification (or meta description) may look something like..
<wall xmlns=.. > <posting id="https://friend2.host/wall/posting/549"> <type> .. </type> <date> .. </date> </posting> </wall>Other types of information may involve rule-based authentication schemes--for establishing a friend-of-a-friend relationship, for example.

An individual's indisite, then, is both an aggregator and publisher of user information. Information is exchanged and used based on an honorary protocol. It's honorary because friendships themselves are honorary.

Implementation route

I'm thinking an indisite could be packaged as a .war file to be run in a servlet container. But in order to use it, you'd need a trustworthy service provider who'd let you drop in the .war file as well as provide storage space for the data that will be published, aggregated, or cached. The web application also allows the owner to download the entire state of the application as a single compressed file. This feature allows application portability across service providers.

At first glance, it's hard to see how anyone could make a business out of this (becoming a service provider) without charging users. There are few opportunities to sell advertising under such a scheme since a lot of privileged information is encrypted. (And so it should be!) But users (indisite operators) may opt to make a lot of information public (for example, if the scheme implements, or is bundled with blogging) and rent advertising space. So perhaps there is a business angle to providing such services for free.

This would have to be a community-driven project. Some ideas take a very basic reference implementation to take off. I can't see how this is one of those, but I'm hopeful that I'm wrong. I think I'll share and give it a try..

How to power a frisbee

2009-07-31T22:11:00.000-07:00

I was wondering the other day how a free standing object like a frisbee, or a rotating space station, can be made to spin (where it counts) at variable rates in an efficient manner. By "variable rates", I mean that the thing can be made to spin fast, then slow, and then fast again, for example. By "an efficient manner", I mean a mechanism that doesn't cause significant mass loss and which therefore conserves the angular momentum of the whole system.

So the idea here is that if there is one component of the thing that's spinning in one direction (the outer hull of the frisbee) then there must be another component spinning in the opposite direction (e.g. an internal flywheel). If you use only one internal flywheel, then the only way to slow the rate the spinning is to slow the internal flywheel's spinning by braking against the outer hull that is spinning in the opposite direction. A better solution (no doubt already discovered by some gyro tinkerer from the 18th century) is to use 2 flywheels: instead of having to change the magnitude of the spinning, you change the orientation of the flywheels. Here's how it works.

The schematic is a side view of the contraption. At the center of the device we have an "engine" from which 3 arms extend. One arm is fixed to the engine and represents the thing that is to be spun (labeled "power train"): the engine will spin along with the thing it's spinning. The other 2 are affixed with identical flywheels at the ends and spin along the axes of their respective arms.

The engine controls the rate of rotation of the "power train" by two means: one, by controlling the rate at which the 2 flywheels spin, and two, by changing the angle between the arms of the flywheels. (The 3 arms always lie in a same plane relative to each other in, as we shall see, the rotating reference frame of the engine).

Using those 2 levers of control, we may employ a variety of strategies to make the "power train" spin. For example, starting at rest (top figure in drawing), we can arrange the arms of the flywheels (initially not spinning) along a straight line perpendicular to the power train (shown horizontally in the figure). The engine could then expend energy to make the two flywheels spin in opposite directions in such a way their net angular momenta cancel each other. So in this configuration as the engine stores rotational energy in the flywheels, the engine and its attached "drive train" remain at rest.

After the flywheels each have absorbed a sufficient amount of kinetic energy, their angular momenta can be transfered to the power train by drawing the arms attached to the flywheels inwards--towards the engine and therefore the axis of the power train arm. The two arms of the flywheels, each subtended at an equal angle from the horizontal, induce a rotation on the engine and the drive shaft (power train) it is affixed to such that angular momentum of the whole system is conserved (see lower figure in drawing). (Given the initial conditions of our example, the angular momentum of the whole system adds up to zero.)

For a frisbee, of course, some of the angular momentum would be dissipated into the environment (the surrounding air) in order to create lift. So in a real application, the angular momentum of the whole system is not conserved. Nevertheless, the same principles can be applied. To get a better appreciation of the dynamics of the system, it would be instructive to look at the system's Lagrangian--which doesn't seem too complicated. That's a task left to the reader or a later article.

So why do I think this is interesting? Mostly because it avoids using gears and such for directing rotational motion: instead, it uses inertial forces. Compared to the teeth of a gear, for example, inertial forces can be more evenly distributed over a larger volume of material. This suggests we could achieve greater acceleration (or deceleration) for spinning the outer of hull of our hypothetical frisbee: the achievable angular acceleration is more likely bounded by the structural limits of the whole system, than by the limits of some small component of it (e.g. a tooth in a gear).

On health care reform

2009-07-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

Over decades health care costs have been rising at unsustainable rates. While the need for change is intuitively obvious, the actual remedies are not. Lacking a proper, more or less unified conceptual foundation upon which to articulate their arguments, the proponents of reform seem to be outsmarted, outmaneuvered by the defenders of the status quo.

The status quo has an economic theory and model to draw on--or defend, as Stephen Colbert once critiqued proposals to better regulate the financial industry: "After all, I have an economic theory to defend." The proponents of change, I believe, lack the language and conceptual tools to counter much of this laissez-faire bunk. Meanwhile, some on the right even argue that there really isn't any problem, that rising health care spending is a natural consequence of greater prosperity.

Take Andrew Briggs of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, who drives the point by comparing health care spending for people vs. pets over the last two decades. He observes the two categories of costs have been growing at roughly the same rate, and that pet health care expenditures are more discretionary than expenditures on humans because a) we value our own lives more than those of our pets, and b) pet care costs are out-of-pocket expenses (little to no insurance for pets). Using this relative priority scale in consumer decision making (should I spend the money on myself, or my pet), Briggs makes an implicit logical leap to conclude that pet health care spending is indeed discretionary, and if consumers are spending ever increasing amounts on their pets, then the onus must be on the consumer to spend less, not on the [pet care] industry to provide more affordable health care. And the reader is left to conclude that indeed the same relationship between the consumer and the general health care industry must also hold.

Such laissez-faire arguments ignore the reality that health care spending is generally non-discretionary. Health checkups, for example, are a necessity, not a choice. In fact, using a similar (fallacious) argument, one could argue that a responsible parent's health care spending on themselves is more discretionary than their health care spendings on their children; so what? that doesn't make the parent's health care spending discretionary. Using the same data Briggs uses, one can plausibly infer the opposite conclusion: neither of the health spending categories (pets or humans) is discretionary.

At any rate, health care costs cannot continue to eat into an ever increasing slice of the GDP pie. The situation is clearly untenable. At some point, the health care slice of the GDP will become so large that our other industries will become globally uncompetitive. At that point (if we haven't already crossed it), we will either be net exporters of health care (hard to imagine), or we will be facing some sort of economic malaise.

From an economic theory perspective, the laissez-faire-do-nothing camp of the health care debate is armed with a well-articulated, widely understood, and widely applicable, market driven economic model. The proponents of health industry reform, by contrast, seem to lack a solid, articulated economic theory or model to base their reforms on. I wonder whether the difficulty in articulating the message for reform stems from a lack of public understanding about how certain industries do not fall neatly into the unregulated, market driven model (e.g. law enforcement, public utilities, roads).

The proponents of change need studies to buttress their arguments, but tellingly, there's a paucity of such research. Simple facts, like the inflation rate for the cost of stitches for ordinary cuts requiring emergency room visits, or the inflation rate for the cost of casting a broken arm, are hard to come by. Concentrating on the cost structure of clear, "simple," everyday services that have remained largely functionally unchanged over the decades might crystallize the message for needed reform. In any event, the message for change is muddled: it is intuitively obvious that we need it, but we lack the popular concepts to express and defend that need.

Where are the studies showing the in inelasticity of demand in the face of rising health care prices? Where are the studies showing the breakdown of the health care market's pricing mechanism? (I imagine this would involve an analysis of how powerless health insurance companies are in controlling costs, except for the cruel and crude ax of denying coverage.) And who would fund such research?

I am a bit befuddled by the health industry's adolescent-like stance in the debate. Surely the big players must realize it is in their long term interest to be proactively involved in shaping policy and reform. Surely they understand that postponing reform will only make future reforms even costlier, that the longer they wait while the national health care crisis simmers, the more onerous will be the regulatory attempts to fix the system. Instead we have a political class beholden to a health care industry that is largely happy with the status quo--a status quo which, under the laws of gravity, cannot stand.

Here's how I'd try to frame the reformist platform.

1. Fund studies into the breakdown of the market mechanism in the health care industry and establish a language and popular nomenclature for this breakdown. Taking exception to pure, free market thought is no small undertaking and requires a solid, yet easy-to-communicate conceptual framework for why the status quo needs fixing. (Take our anti-trust laws as an example.)

2. Establish the idea of a "right" to basic health care, and delineate the boundaries where this "basic health care" ends.

3. Propose offering "basic" health care insurance from the government. (Usage of the expensive GE Omnigotron machine that'll keep you alive for another 2 weeks is not covered.)

4. Phrase the concept of a government run insurance plan as a mutual insurance scheme, where the interests of shareholders and policyholders are aligned. (There's a lot of meat in considering and contrasting the business models of public and mutual insurance companies , I think.)

But the first step on the way to change has to be winning over thinking minds. And hence the need for a new language to crystallize the dialog.

The Little Depression

2008-11-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

If we do get an economic depression, and there are signs aplenty that we will, it will be short lived.

That's my crazy investment thesis. When I search my feelings, I cannot see how a protracted depression is in the cards. (Yes, that's how I imagine I decide things: the mind leads the gut, but it is the gut that ultimately [thinks it] "knows".) So what after-the-fact arguments do I have to support this view?

The Velocity of History

The obvious is easy to overlook. History unfolds, unwinds, at an ever faster pace. The dynamism of the world is incomparably greater today that it was some seventy years ago. The rise and fall of actors on the world stage has been both amplified and shortened. The rise of new corporate titans such as Google, and Microsoft before it, is historically breathtaking. And so is the fall of the once mighty.

So if things get bad quickly, then likely they wont stay bad for as long as they did last time.

The Information Currency

Imagine we're in a depression. I wont bother describing how horrible things have become (no job, no credit, foreclosures and soup kitchens). Still, does the internet still work? Do cell phones still work? Do airplanes still fly?

Of course everything will still work. We wont somehow fall into the dark ages--at least not from an economic calamity. No, the better question is "Will these things still be plentiful?" If the cell phone owning homeless of today are any guide, then the basic communication tools will remain around even in the hardest of times.

Now imagine how trade could possibly come to a standstill. Retailers have gone bust, distributional channels are somehow broken, and producers have no efficient means to meet consumers and sell their goods, so prices plummet driving even more folks out of business.

I submit that was the real cause of the Great Depression: a breakdown in distribution channels. That the failure of distribution channels was caused by financial mismanagement is a side issue. The point is "If we can somehow avoid a systemic failure in the distribution of goods and services even in a crippled financial regime, then the economic rebound will lead the financial rebound; not lag it."

Todays communication tools (most notably the internet) make it easy for producers to meet consumers. The new distribution channels (think eBay) are efficient, many, and resilient. It is hard to imagine how these can disappear. Ultimately, that back door through which consumers and producers can meet will alway be open.

If capital is not just a store of wealth, but also a "signal" that allocates resources to a purpose, then information too, when it reaches a certain "critical mass", acts as an agent that repurposes and reallocates resources. The big difference between now and seventy years ago is that we can find each other.

Positive Black Swans

And lest we forget how improbable predictions generally are, let us enumerate a number of technological game changers that might lift human economic activity. Odds are there will be a game changer; moreover, it'll likely not be any mentioned here.

Clean, cheap energy
Quantum computing
Mind/machine interface
Stem cell and tissue regeneration
Cognitive enhancers (drugs)

On Black Swans, Greenspan, Markets and Leaders

2008-10-24T23:26:00.000-07:00

I read Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan some time ago. It is a wonderful, clear-eyed view of the world as you have not seen it. It is mostly about debunking what we think we see. If you haven't read it, have an analytical bent and enjoy ruminating over financial/economic theory, then this book may be for you. If I had to sum up the book in a nutshell, the basic message would be that most everything you hear from the so-called experts in the field of finance and economics is based on flimsy science, and the pseudo logic of mathematical models that are removed from reality. No wonder, then, that Taleb's ideas are in vogue these days.

Which brings us to Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress, yesterday. Here we had the former high priest of economics (some would have him a demi-god), the father returning from retirement, the leader in whose wisdom we trusted (e.g. I don't know what he's talking about, but he does speak with authority and exudes confidence in his understanding of the wheels of finance and economics), the one whose steady hand had guided us through many a crisis before, this guy.. here we had this guy say that the current credit crisis had rocked (or in his own words, "shocked") some fundamental precepts of his world view, that he could not have seen the problem coming given that world view, and admit that he no longer thinks he understands how the world works.

On first hearing that admission on video, I let out a silence gasp. Moments later, I became aware that I had gasped. I wondered what had startled me about his testimony, but as I searched my feelings I could not come up with a why? Mr. Greenspan hadn't said anything I hadn't already known: I have never believed anybody knows how things in spheres of human affairs, such as in finance and economics, really work. But as the committee members proceeded to attack the fallen angel, the reason behind my instinctive recoil became evident.

The average committee member is not a financial genius: often, that is abundantly clear from the tenor and incoherence of their questions. Rather, they rely on the very same actors they are supposed to oversee for constructing an oversimplified, conceptual view of world finance they can understand. The believers (the ones who favored the facility of belief over the rigor of reason) were feeling betrayed by the priest who had lost faith. They were now rudder-less. They were mad to find out the priesthood had disbanded, and they lashed out at the poor 82 year old governer.

And it was not just the committee. The stock market too seemed not to like hearing Greenspan admit he couldn't understand how things had come to this. Yes, the market, with all its sophisticated actors, it too needs a high priest, something, someone to have faith in.

The old order is clearly gone. Ironically, the new order that will replace it will be founded on faith, too.

It may be that Greenspan's successor Bernanke has largely made the right decisions in this crisis. However, big crises summon leadership. The human collective is at its most irrational at such times. The voice of reason is inaudible; the voice of faith and hope is--the voice of a prophet. Mr. Bernanke's temperament is ill-suited to the task right now. But he might as well try. Perhaps he should make an about face, abandon the new openness that has diminished the Fed's mystique, adopt the old terse language of the priesthood that can be endlessly reinterpreted, and shepherd a new faith and thereby reestablish trust.

On the Markets, US Dollar, and Inflation

2008-09-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

I hadn't planned on prognosticating on the financial markets here, in my journal. These are unusual times, however, and I have been entertaining unusual thoughts lately. But first a little about where I'm coming from..

Background: Trading Activity

I play mostly individual stocks, and luckily (for me, that is) I have been on the right side of the recent market action. I've been in the market for over 20 years now. I first started as a broker on wall street where I became good at selling mortgage backed instruments (CMOs) and such derivatives as "residuals". Actually, no. I wasn't good at selling them; I was good at explaining how the pricing model was supposed to work. I made okay money, but a year or so after the crash of '87 (my best trading day ever), my interest wandered back to painting and I left the business shortly thereafter. I was young, and had yet to try many other things. Through it all, though, I've always had skin in the market.

Over time, I have developed some trading/investing habits. I summarize them below.

Whatever the overall strategy, it has to be simple to execute. This means, for instance, that I wont consider a trading strategy that involves anything more than a few trades a day.
I generally prefer to be market neutral: that is, I like to hedge my long positions with short positions in other stocks.
I like to maintain anywhere from 6 to 9 positions at any one given point in time. This policy does a few things for me. One, it helps me focus on what I believe are the best opportunities by narrowing down on a few. Two, it makes following the news that I have exposure to easier. Three, it makes trading the positions easier. (Trading 20 different stocks is considerably more challenging than trading 3.)
I prefer to speculate on medium term trends: 6 months to 2 years out. I will not enter a position for which I have no medium term prognosis.
I trade around core positions. I do this in an attempt to increase profits while minimizing my average downside exposure over time.
I accept that to win you must also prepare to lose.
The only number on the screen that matters is the one on the corner: your account's value.
I begin everyday with one mantra: "I don't know anything; I'm just a speculator in search of an edge."

Inflation or Deflation?

What's the nasty end game? That's what everyone is quietly wondering.

Will the dollar plummet, as in the unraveling of an elaborate confidence scheme to which foreign traders of goods and capital are just waking up to? Or will the dollar plummet as the treasury prints more money to stave off a financial crisis which itself was a product of another credit bubble? Or does the master plan (the one nobody knows about but which is written in stone) involve cheating our creditors by wiping off the real value of all this toxic debt with an inexorably steady dose of inflation?

Or is deflation in the cards? The US government does not print money; it doesn't have to. The world's creditors run to the protection of the one "true" thing they still believe in, the US dollar. Economic activity contracts in the developing world and takes the emerging economies down with it. Unemployment rises, interest rates fall, and the treasury finds yet more willing foreign buyers for Treasury debt. And the currency confidence scheme of international trade and national current account deficits continues.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..

-W.B. Yeats

The future, it seems, can have both outcomes in the cards. For now, while fear is in charge and world markets price in economic contraction, deflation is the theme of the day. As a horrible as it might get, we will eventually meet our demons, and fear will first be replaced with ambivalence, before greed's comeuppance. Somewhere along that path, I expect inflation to rear its nasty head. I hope it doesn't, but a dollar is an IOU, and that's what happens to IOUs issued by borrowers who can't balance their books.

A more efficient shorting tactic?

2008-07-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

The recent SEC curbs on shorting a select list of financial stocks got me thinking about ways to avoid these silly procedural rules. I was short some of these financials, and in deciding whether or not to cover, I had to also consider the fact that I would likely be unable to short the stock again.

I called my broker, and they confirmed my suspicion: there was no stock available for shorting--for the time being. I asked whether it was likely that my short position might get called away--that is, that I might be forced to cover: highly unlikely, was the answer. I described my predicament (a juxtaposition of fear against greed), that I wanted to cover (fear), and still keep the borrowed shares around for shorting later (greed), and they said there would be no guarantee that there'd be any more shares to short after I had covered. How about if I bought the stock in my long account, didn't touch my short account, and later sold the shares in the long side of my account? I suggested. Can't do that either, they said. Once I bought the shares on the long side, they would be in a boxed position, and I would not be able to sell any more shares. I thanked the broker and hung up.

The solution to my problem had already presented itself in that last question. All I had to do was to go long the shares in another account I own at another broker: the combined account positions could exactly offset each other, and I would be able to later return to a net short position simply by selling the shares in the long account at the other broker.

I doubt the procedure described here is illegal, [ Ignorantia juris non excusat warning and other usual IANAL, IANAIA disclaimers go here], and if it is, I certainly couldn't find anything about it on the web. (Truth be told, I didn't ask either of my brokers: I had heard enough stupid "No"s for one day.)

My solution to this short term problem, created by a seemingly capricious regulator, led me to consider its more general application. For the regulator, by making shorting difficult, has created artificial scarcity. A short position, then, by virtue of its scarcity, must have more value than its nominal value. How much more?

Let's call this double account tactic, where your long shares in one account are exactly offset by your short shares in another account, an open boxed position. I suggest the scarcity value of a short position might somehow be connected to the cost of money (e.g. as employed in the Black-Scholes model) required to maintain an open boxed position in the same number of shares. I say "somehow", because while I can easily quantify how much it's currently costing me to maintain my open box, there is no general way to determine what it might cost another person (the cost of borrowing shares varies from broker to broker).

To put it another way, I suggest an open boxed position is a store of all the regulatory overhead associated with shorting. A speculator wishing to short hard-to-borrow shares, must consider both price movement and the availability of shares to short in the timing of their trade. It is a well known fact that open interest tends to increase at price peaks, making shorting at the best price a double challenge. This puts the short trader at a tactical disadvantage to the long trader. In order to mitigate that disadvantage, a speculator who plans to short shares at, for example, some future higher price might build a (net neutral) open boxed position, to be unboxed (net short) at a future time when the price or trend is right. In building the open box position, you are satisfying all the regulatory overhead of shorting ahead of time (whether that overhead is the requirement that your short never be naked, the now defunct up-tick rule, or some other silly red tape impeding your ability to short at the precise time of your choosing). Alternatively, as described at the beginning of this post, a short position can evolve into an open boxed position.

That you can easily skirt the intent, if not the letter, of regulatory restrictions designed to impede shorting is a testament to the fact that shorting is a natural, organic outgrowth of market activity. It is not an activity born of the invention of some new fangled derivatives instrument; rather, people have been shorting stuff for centuries. So I guess it shouldn't surprise us if we later find that the new SEC curbs on shorting only worked temporarily. The market always finds ways to correct artificial scarcity.

Differential equation estimating the distribution of primes

2008-07-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

Addenda
7/21/08 - I have pos[t]ed this as a question to a newsgroup, and have gotten some useful feedback. Dan there points out there that the differential equation I describe below is properly classified as a delay differential equation. Concerning my claim that I had found a unique solution, Dan corrected me on this too. Of course n.d.e.'s generally have many solutions--what was I thinking?
2/20/09 - Following this line of argument, I've found an interesting relationship between that type of, shall we call it, delayed differential operator and the so called Euler product. I'll post about it when I get brave enough..

Let me begin with this disclaimer, first: though mathematically trained (physics background), I am not a mathematician. OK, got that out of the way.

*

I have found a simple way to derive Gauss's estimate of the prime density function using probability heuristics, alone.

Background

Excerpt From MathWorld: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeNumberTheorem.html

..
In 1792, when only 15 years old, Gauss proposed that , the prime density function

(3)

Gauss later refined his estimate to

(4)

where

..

I have not seen a simple derivation for this estimate, and if it exists, I am surprised why it is not more widely used in expositions on the subject of the distribution of primes. What follows is a very short argument based on a probability model. According to this model, we'll find that the distribution of primes is governed by a delay differential equation of the form

Q'(x) = - Q(x) Q( √x ) / x

which has a solution

Q(x) = 1 / 2 ln x

Anyway, to me, what's interesting is how using some specious probability arguments about the distribution primes I was able to set up the equation and try a test function inspired by Gauss's estimate to solve it. This hints at something more meaningful in my Clouseau-esque accident.

The setup

The setup, I have come to find, is similar in spirit to Harald Cramer's probabilistic, heuristic arguments for estimating of the distribution primes (the difference here being that we don't use any other results from number theory). Here it is..

Equ. 1:
The joint probability of a randomly chosen positive number n not
being divisible by two relative primes p and k is (1 - 1/p)(1 - 1/k).

Equ. 2:
Define Q(x) = ∏(1 - 1/p)
taken over all primes p ≤ x.

Equ. 2a:
The joint probability of a randomly chosen positive number n not being divisible by any prime p ≤ x is Q(x).

Using Equ. 2a, vigorous hand waving, and a pinch of salt, we can say

Equ. 3:
The probability that a randomly chosen positive number x is a prime is Q( √x ).

What we're saying here is that for x to be prime, it suffices to show that it is not divisible by any prime less than the square root of x. Equ. 3 says that in the neighborhood of x, the 'average' distance between primes is 1 / Q( √x ).

Now the d.d.e. above comes from trying to approximate Q(x) using this probabilistic model. The idea is to use that approximation in order to estimate a prime counting function:

∫ Q (√x) dx

But we don't have an analytic expression that approximates Q, yet. Instead of setting up an integral equation, we try a differential approach. Consider the change in Q as x passes over 2 very large consecutive primes p₁ < p₂:

ΔQ = -Q(p₁) / p₂ ~ -Q(x) / x
Δx ~ 1 / Q( √x )

Dividing the top equation by the bottom one, you get the d.d.e. I described above.

The solution

I had read somewhere how the 15 year old Gauss had been able to come up with his logarithmic integral for estimating the number of primes less than n. Was his integral inspired by a similar probabilistic argument? Maybe, but googling it, I couldn't find much. So, I plugged in C / ln x and solved for the constant C (=1/2).

Does it mean anything?

I suspect it might, which is why I posted it. I did a bit of cursory reading on the topic, but alas, I'm an amateur. My claim that

Q(x) = ∏( 1 - 1/p) ~ 1 / 2 ln x

does not agree with Mertens' asymptotic formula (1874)

∏( 1 - 1/p) ~ exp(-C) / ln x,

where C is Euler's constant.

Still, there's something here that piques my nose. My result, when plugged into the prime counting integral, agrees exactly with Gauss's estimate:

∫ Q (√x) dx ~ ∫ (1 / ln x) dx

What do you think? Is this interesting, or is this old?

7-09 Addendum: Interestingly, if we adjusted the model so that

Q'(x) = - Q(x) Q( x^1/n ) / x

then Gauss's estimate would still hold for most n.

On the line that divides private from public

2008-06-17T23:40:00.000-07:00

It used to be hard to dig for information--before we had the web, that is. Even if the information you were digging for was public, finding it was often difficult, laborious, or costly. So we didn't mind, for instance, that a copy of the deed to the house was available to anyone who bothered to walk over to the local Recorder's office, look up the lot number, thumb through the books in the stacks, and expend a nickel a page on the Xerox machine. Few citizens actually visited these offices. So you likely didn't know what your neighbor owed on his property (unless it somehow became your business to know); nor did your neighbor likely know what you owed on your property. This information was public, but it was tucked away in a hard to get corner of a government office.

Finding your neighbor's phone number in the phone book, on the other hand, was much easier than finding out how much they owed on their property. (After all, that's what phone books were used for, back then.) So in a very practical sense, your phone number was more public than the publicly recorded lien on your house. While it was understood that there was no legal basis to consider one piece of public information more public than another, it was also understood that some information was harder to find than other information. The harder it was to find the public information, the less it was apparently public.

Contrast the above with the situation today. Finding out how much the neighbor owes on their property is about as many mouse clicks away as is finding their phone number. In a very real sense, both pieces of information (the amount owed, and the phone number) are equally easy to reach.

As more personal information--some of it public--comes online, and as search technologies improve, I predict, you'll soon be able to type a name into a search engine and instantly receive a synopsis of personal information about the individual[s] with links that drill down to their finances (e.g. home purchase/sale price, and amount owed), blog pages and comments, photo albums, listed phone number, date of birth, resume, and so on. Every word ever written, every link ever created, on the public conversation that is the web will take on added significance as it will be attributable to its author.

Today, there's still plenty of hard-to-find, public (or practically, public) information. In the future, I predict, information will either be easy or impossible to find. The impossible-to-find, will be private information; the easy-to-find will be everything else. So when a piece of private information leaks, the search engines will be able to quickly assimilate and contextualize the information, and attribute it to a person or group of persons. Search engines will be able to do this, no matter how [apparently] tenuous the link between the information morsel and the person[s] attributed to.

The line dividing private from [practically] public information is becoming razor thin: it is the other edge of the search technology sword. Like time and entropy, information has an arrow along the private/public dimension--from private to public (a piece of public information cannot ever be made private again). This has always been so. Only now, thanks to the web, the rate at which information is becoming public is increasing in leaps and bounds. (And the transition states, as it were, from the private to the public end the information spectrum are becoming fewer and fewer, until there will be but 2: private and public.)

It is easy to imagine a dystopia in which we find ourselves imprisoned in the very public image each of us has projected on the web, where past projections are hard to displace, where labels are hard to peel off, where you must blog in order to protect and enhance your personal brand. But wait a minute! Aren't we there already? And is it so bad?

We're well along the way to such a future, I would say--only, the future needn't be so dystopian. I actually welcome this new landscape, where everyone competes on a more or less equal information footing, where what you know and how you know are more important than your access to information. The problem, I suspect, will be that many will have come to expect their relative anonymity today to continue well into the future. That, I'm afraid, would be unrealistic. I cannot expect this blog post to remain forever unattributable to my real name.

Microsoft and the OLPC deal

2008-05-15T18:23:00.000-07:00

I have been following Microsoft's courting of the OLPC project on Slashdot. Ever since my involvement with the FaunOS project, I've slowly convinced myself that it will be "portables" that pave the way down to ever cheaper, commoditized computing. And Linux has always figured prominently in my speculative conceptions of likely, future computing landscapes. So now what to make of Microsoft selling $3 copies of Windows [on OLPC]?

I believe a simple rule of markets is that once a producer breaks the price of its product in one market, it will eventually have to break prices for the product in other markets as well. (I tried googling for some such succinct rule but, alas, I couldn't come up with the right query terms.) From a long term investor's point of view, this cannot be good news for Microsoft. It is a short term coup for Redmond: having OLPC run on Linux risked cultivating a new cadre of non-Mr. Softies. A $3 copy of Windows thwarts that threat: few children would opt for the Linux version of OLPC--for obvious reasons not worth enumerating. But this sets up a bad precedent. Will Microsoft fight Linux with $3 licenses wherever Linux enjoys a clear cost advantage? My guess is that wherever a user interface is involved, Microsoft will fight to keep market share. Today the battle is staged on what I'll sweeping characterize as ultra-portables, like OLPC and Eee PC. (Okay, maybe it's not a full scale battle, yet, but hear me out..) From Microsoft's perspective, the distinguishing characteristic of the ultra-portables is price: that they are portable is irrelevant. But hardware prices inexorably fall, and we can safely assume to see hardware the size of an ordinary laptop selling at today's Eee PC prices. Cheaper hardware means either a free OS like Linux, or significantly lower Windows licensing costs. This deal is an example of the latter, and is a reminder that Microsoft's fat margin's and pricing power are receding.

Now don't mistake this entry for a Linux fan's attempt at finding a silver lining in a deal that effectively ditches Linux. In fact, I am very worried. Imagine a world in which Microsoft still makes a decent living selling mostly $3 operating systems. Somehow they figured out how the business model could work--e.g. leverage their monopoly position less obviously, or make up the lost margin through greater volume. Whatever. Microsoft could even be a lot smaller company and still control the desktop.

I doubt that is how history will unfold. Linux will win the desktop, but it'll likely be a long and dirty battle in which Microsoft will make a lot of noise while quietly imploding as its pricing power wanes and margins collapse.

Idea: Wave power without moving parts

2008-05-09T01:19:00.000-07:00

When I was an undergraduate in applied physics, I had this idea about using the conductive and dielectric properties of sea water to convert wave motion directly into electricity. I recently googled the topic and came up naught. (May be because it's a bad idea?)

Any way, the idea comes from 2 observations about capacitors.

It takes work to slip out a dielectric slab sandwiched between charged capacitor plates.
It takes work to increase the distance between charged capacitor plates.

Now if we can set up a large scale capacitor with the ground plate placed horizontally underwater, close to sea wave troughs and the "positive" plate well above wave crests, and a suitable timing mechanism to apply and draw voltage to and from the capacitor as the wave enters and leaves the contraption, then some of the wave power can be converted to electricity.

You don't actually need capacitor plates: a mesh of conductive wires should suffice. The power generated by such a contraption is proportional to the area of sea surface covered. But because of its simple design (all the smarts and expensive parts can be centralized), it should scale well.

Numbers? I'll try to add a back-of-envelop calculation, later..

Addendum: 3-20-2010

I'm beginning to think this might not work as decribed. Even if it did, from a practical standpoint, the wires would soon be covered with debris, barnacles or other insulating stuff. A better approach might be to create a giant, barely floating, sealed "waterbed" filled with a suitable dielectric liquid. Two wire meshes spanning the top and bottom walls of the bed from the inside would be used to create the effect of an array of capacitor plates. A component of the [gravity] wave hitting the side of this bed would continue to propagate through this bed, creating a moving bulge through it as it passes. As before, an adaptive control mechanism would time a voltage increase across the cascading, virtual capacitor plates ahead of the approaching bulge and draw power as the wave leaves the region.

Greetings

2008-05-08T23:51:00.000-07:00

Years ago, before marriage and kids, I used to keep journals. I still write, on occasion, for my own pleasure, but in recent years this writing is mostly scattered across email conversations I've had with family and friends. The nice thing about the meat-space journal was that at least it was all accessible in one place (not to mention all the other obvious advantages of a real notebook). The downside of writing in a notebook, well.. is that only you read it.

I don't know if this journal will find an audience. I hope it will, but if it doesn't, the thought that my kids might one day read whatever crap I wrote here is enough to sustain me. That the digital footprint we leave behind in our lives is for posterity, I think, is an under-appreciated facet of online activity.

This will hardly qualify as a blog. Little that I write, I suspect, will be timely. Nor will it likely be focused on any few topics. This is more like an online notebook..