Caterina.net

I'm finding that The Wisdom of Crowds is upsetting a lot of presuppositions I've long maintained about, well, the stupidity of crowds. For example, a political scientist at the University of Michigan has done some experiment using computer-simulated problem-solving agents that demonstrated that a group that consists of all smart agents does worse than a group that consists of some smart and some not so smart agents.

There was a conversation that a bunch of us were having at the Rapid Prototyping session at Digifoo a couple weeks ago about the benefits of having some less intelligent or less informed people in a group. I think this works because you have to slow down to explain to these people what you are doing and why -- which is never a bad exercise to engage in. As the group becomes better informed over time, it is important to throw in some new, uninformed people into the mix, so you can get a fresh perspective.

Don MacAskill argued that having someone who generally and actively disagrees with what the group is doing is the most beneficial group member of all, since they provide a completely different perspective, insure against groupthink, and also because (this is something I hadn't thought of) the other members of the group anticipate that this devil's advocate will counter them whenever they present an idea, and so will prepare better, question themselves in advance, and make sure they can defend their idea in the next meeting.

Left! Vote left! (from xu)

I'm not sure what to make of this museum -- it seems to be similar to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. There is only one page in English so it is hard to tell.

The past few days I've been mostly feeling glum and panicked about the election of the previously unelected oil spiv. Aside from that, I've been fielding questions about how I immigrated to Canada, where I am a landed immigrant -- holding the equivalent of a green card here. The way I did it was by marrying a Canadian, and the way my particular Canadian ended up being Canadian at all was by having an American father who married a Canadian. So my advice is:

• Start flirting with Vancouverites and Torontonians (or White Horsians!) on Nerve.
• Take the skilled worker test to see if you qualify (with a score above 67).
• Apply now. It will take a long time -- my application took about a year, but I've heard it takes more than two years these days. You will have to get fingerprinted, reviewed by the local police and cleared by the FBI. You will also have to have a medical exam -- with the universal health care system, they want to make sure they don't have an influx of people coming just to get medical services.
• Start saving money. The government wants to know that you can support yourself, so if you are able to show them that you have a schwack of cash -- I'm thinking $50,000 or so -- it will demonstrate you have enough to live on for a year while you get settled and find work. This is an important and overlooked requirement.
• Another avenue is to get a job first, and have the company sponsor you. This is either easier or harder than going about it the other way. Easier because it can be quicker, but harder because you have to have a specific set of job skills that are needed in Canada, because you are dependent on your employer to stay in the country, and the visa is only for a year (though they are renewable).

It helps, of course, if you have family that is already living here that can sponsor you.

When I was moving into my new studio, I unpacked a box that had a bunch of old 70s and 80s era Philip K. Dick books, some of which I hadn't read, and so I picked up A Scanner Darkly, which had the word "masterpiece" all over the cover... masterpiece perhaps, but at the very least, very good. It would, like >Blade Runner and Minority Report probably make a really great movie. It's about a near-future drug culture (1994! it was written in 1977) in which a mysterious, invisible organization enslaves people by addicting them to Substance D.

In the same pile was The Demolition Man, which Asimov calls a science fiction classic, and which I am reading now.

Walking the walk on family values

You can also look at the relationship between IQ and voting for Bush vs. Kerry. My mother, who is a Republican, often rails against those dreadful "Liberal Ivy League Schools" she sent us to, thinking we'd be getting a good education, which instead cultivated a bunch of bleeding heart pinkos. My reply is that, gee, if you take smart people from competitive universities, who then sit down, study the issues, and come out liberal, it makes you think that the more you learn the more likely you are to sway left. And I say the same thing when she goes on about the liberal media. Here are a bunch of intelligent, literate, well read people who have done their homework and concluded Liberal was the way to go? Where's the problem here?

Then we dig ferociously into our mashed potatoes and glare and wonder what happened to the "agree to disagree" covenant of 1994...

I just discovered that I could make folders on Bloglines, and happily started adding a bunch of my blo.gs weblogs -- but much to my chagrin I found that many of my favorites -- I'm thinking Late Night Pool and NQPAOFU, among others -- don't have RSS feeds, and I realize I've been visiting non-RSS blogs less and less frequently, since it is hard to keep visiting sites to see if they've been updated.

This is kind of like what happened with IM. One of the sad things that I noticed after I moved to Canada was that I was in very close touch with people who were on IM, but I "talked" less and less frequently with friends who were IM holdouts. One friend in particular started using IM to keep our friendship alive. I like to think I'm pretty good about staying in touch, but being on IM ensures that my friends and I have the long-distance equivalent of seeing each other at the office, or running into each other at the cafe.

Inexplicably, I'm the only person at Flickr who uses RSS feeds, especially when there are such great feed such as Photos you've commented on -- which enables you to get a summary of comments that came after the comments you made on other people's photos; feeds of chihuahuas, graffiti or San Francisco, you name it.

Through bloglines, I discovered that Beverly had also linked to the Musee Bizarre (see below) and then from Computing for Emergent Architecture blog, which led me to a slew of interesting links from TomC's pedestrians links on delicious, and then to his art links which in turn led me to this wonderful animation of a bunch of stencil drawings of a walking man, sprayed all over the city, photographed and then recompiled into this fantatic animation.

Another fork in the road led me to the online version of John Frazer's book Evolutionary Architecture, which I'm now downloading in the background. All this wonderfulness compressed into a rare hour when I was feeling well (I have been feeling sick) and now am going back to bed.

Thanks h.

Having a "weak constitution" and a tendency towards sickliness makes me feel Victorian and Alice Jamesy sometimes: I could get a lot of mileage out of a fainting couch, a high-necked black lace dress, and a reticule for covert, Freudian fondling. I have this occasional wish-image of myself as a robust and apple-cheeked mountain climber hurtling up the the Matterhorn, drinking mountain spring water and bivouacking under a million stars, but it is, alas, a total fiction. The good thing about being sick it is I get to eat chocolate pudding, stay in bed (it's raining anyway) and read books about sickly, swooning (or murdered) ladies (Hotel Splendid and Candy Store by Marie Redonnet) and watch movies about sickly, swooning (or murdered) ladies (From the Life of the Marionettes and The Silence by Ingmar Bergman). All four of which were marvellous, creepy and unnerving in the perfect way. Thank you Paul for sending the Bergman, it was the perfect thing.

I decided to create a wrinkle in time, as Paul himself was doing with Alamut before it ceased publication in 2003, and transpose the years (one of the reasons I enjoy the Pepys Diary so much). Reading back to 1998 today, after doing all this filing and tax preparation, I found this:

I've been reading a little bit of Thich Nhat Hanh these days myself.

If you own any DVDs that you no longer want or need, you should consider signing up for Peerflix. It's is a great new service (out of Vancouver!) that I just signed up for a few weeks ago. The way it works is you register the DVDs that you own by entering their UPC codes into the site. Peerflix will send you some envelope mailers. When people to request the DVDs, Peerflix sends you an email with their address. You send it to them, and thereby accrue Peerbux. Likewise, you enter a list of DVDs you're interested in receiving, and they are sent to you by other Peerflix users, and the Peerbux are deducted from your account. The first 10 trades are free, and then 99 cents each thereafter.

Some things they could do to improve the service: mainly, give us more information.

• What are the most requested DVDs? then people could go out, and buy the DVDs they were interested in knowing they could then send them out to other Peerflix users after they were done with it.
• Where are Peerflix users? Since you want to send to people that are in your region (i.e. Canada or another country) this is crucial info.
• Build a community site! Let Peerflix users with the same taste in movies meet one another, and decide who will buy which movie, and then trade them. Peerflix likely believes this would reduce business, but I suspect it would not. The incentive to earn Peerbux is too strong.

So far I've been impressed. Give it a try, and let me know if it works out for you.

After three weeks would go by and three New Yorkers had piled up and I hadn't read any of them, I used to feel guilty, so I stopped subscribing. If there were a way of receiving only every second issue, I would resubscribe. I unsubscribed some time in September, and after a few weeks, Stewart started claiming his life was 10% less good as a result. Not bad, just less good. Not that he has any time to read the New Yorker either. I used to wonder why previously pristine issues were suddenly all puckery and crinkly until I discovered Stewart multitasking by reading the magazine in the shower.

I did something I'd never done last week, which is buy a copy of the New Yorker. It was a so-so issue. But even the so-so issues are so much better than Harper's or The Atlantic, or any other comparable magazine. The New Yorker doesn't bludgeon you with its politics, which is something those two tend to do. And The New Yorker's legendarily high per-word payment schedule (I'm guessing around $2.00/word?) attracts the best writers of the 10 to 20,000-word article form.

The New Yorker makes me feel bad when I subscribe, and when I don't subscribe. Today I got home and there was a Last Chance discount subscription notice in the mail, and I started feeling bad about it again...

• The Gallery of Fluid Mechanics created by Professor M.S. Cramer at Virginia Tech, has a great collection of photographs of air and water and smoke and gases doing beautiful things.
• AOS, an abbreviation newly spotted by Word Spy is quite useful, and stands for "All Options Stink"; a situation in which there is no optimum or ideal course of action.

Sebpaquet posted this score by George Crumb, of The Magic Circle of Infinity. I've got a recording of his diabolical and fantastic Black Angels for Electric String Quartet, which was included on a Contemporary Chamber music CD I bought a while back.

I'm definitely a Long Tail listener in terms of my musical, literary and media tastes, but I really want everyone to try the stuff I enjoy, which is why I keep this blog, I guess.

A note I found that I wrote this summer on my birthday, while having dinner with Paul and N, of interesting videos books, web sites and things that I had to check out, following a conversation about Auge/Machine by Harun Farocki, that I'd seen at Post/CS in Amsterdam (and wrote about as well):

From Language Hat I find a poem by Osip Mandelstam I've never read before. (I've not read much Mandelstam, a mistake, it appears):

This is a really impressive Lord of the Rings board game that Seian made for her brother. She saw a commercial version, but it had the actors faces plastered all over the board, so she made her own. The coins are made out of polymer clay, and the houses and castles are wood, and she's also posted an image explaining what all the properties are.

Home made presents are the best.