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Chuggnutt!

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  • Big Bangs… and Bangs… and Bangs…

    There’s an interesting article in the February issue of Discover Magazine on the Big Bang theory—or rather, an alternative to the Big Bang theory. (No good link to the article itself, sorry; Discover only allows registered Discover subscribers to read the full article online.)

    The gist of the alternative theory is that rather than having space and time starting at zero with the Big Bang, there is instead an eternal cycle of universal creation as our three-dimensional universe is actually part of a much larger reality (having up to 10 dimensions). Every so often (“so often” being a trillion years or more), our universe collides with another universe in this multi-dimensional reality and the resulting explosive reaction is essentially a Big Bang that expands, cools, condenses into matter and stars and galaxies, and eventually expands into near emptiness… only to start over again.

    I like it as a theory, largely because it provides a simpler and more elegant explanation for the origin of the universe than the Big Bang theory has lately been providing. (Caveat: I’m not nearly as fluent in my physics and cosmology as I probably should be to discuss this.) I mean, dark energy—what is that? It’s like some kind of ugly, complicated kludge shoehorned into current thinking because no one understands why the universe’s expansion appears to be accelerating. From the article:

    Theorists invoked another unknown energy field, called dark energy, to account for that cosmic acceleration. “This wasn’t really predicted at all,” says Steinhardt. “We can fit it into the model, but we don’t know what this so-called dark energy is. The standard model is definitely becoming more encumbered with time. It may still be valid, but the fact that we have to keep adding things is a bad sign.”

    This alternate theory actually accounts for this expansion force as a by-product, without having to invoke dark energy. Elegance.

    Interestingly, I see this analogous to programming. Ever tackled a programming problem with a solution that seemed to start out simple, maybe even obvious? Then, as certain situations come up, you start applying fixes, conditions, adding complexity until basically the “solution” to the problem has become a kludge. (Or maybe you started out with a kludge. Either way.) Then, one day you have a moment of clarity—either you stepped back from the problem for a bit, or maybe a coworker suggested something way too obvious, and then Bang!—you suddenly have a simple, elegant solution that solves the problem entirely.

    Yeah. It’s kind of like that.

  • Bend Gridlock

    Bend made the national headlines last week (CNN: Rush minute becomes rush hour) because it’s the largest city in the west without a public transit system. And we’re not going to get one anytime soon, unfortunately. From the CNN article:

    Public transportation advocates in the city are up against a steadfast car culture reinforced by the influx of Californians, plus a wealthy population that probably wouldn’t ride the bus even if one existed.

    “If they are getting around town in their Lexus, they are not too concerned about the next bus stop,” said Brian Shetterly, the town’s chief planner.

    All too true. Bend’s traffic is one of the big drawbacks to living here; I’ve watched it steadily get worse over the last decade, as more people have moved into the area but the infrastructure hasn’t scaled accordingly. I sometimes think Bend is a city with a small town mentality: people don’t want to accept that they are living in a city and therefore can’t or won’t deal with the issues that growth inevitably brings—like gridlock. Classic denial: “Hey, we live in a small town, we can’t possibly have traffic problems that need fixing.”

    I’d love it if Bend got a mass transit system, I’ve thought we’ve needed one for years. I’d ride a bus, if one was available, and I think a lot of other people would, too, despite the picture the article paints. Here’s a hint: Not everyone who lives here is wealthy and tools around in a Lexus.

    They wouldn’t need to start big, at first: maybe two or three routes in Bend, covering downtown, west up to the college, north to the malls and back down east along 27th and Knott Road, swinging south and back up Country Club maybe. Then a route to Redmond, maybe Sisters, and one to Sunriver/Lapine, but those extended routes could come later.

    Oh, well. It’s nice to dream.

  • Overused Phrases on Blogs

    Gah. I almost wrote a blog post at the end of the year ranting about the most overused phrases showing up in the blogsphere. (“Blogosphere” itself is definitely an overused word, but I can’t help it. It’s succint.) The phrase at the top of my list for 2003 was “drinking the kool aid.” The new overused phrase for 2004? Rising sharply over the last week, and will continue gaining momentum: “echo chamber.”

  • Amazon Reviews

    One of the big online stories over the past couple of days is Amazon.com‘s weeklong glitch that “suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews” (New York Times article here). Turns out a lot of what was revealed was that authors were anonymously writing glowing reviews of their own books, and getting family and friends to do so too—and conversely, anonymously panning rivals’ books. This “glitch” exposed a bigger issue:

    …many people say Amazon’s pages have turned into what one writer called “a rhetorical war,” where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

    Amazon called this “an unfortunate error.” Yeah, right.

    Consider: these “anonymous” reviewers are not anonymous at all, Amazon clearly tracks who they really are and can, at any given time, follow exactly who is saying what about any book. Confronted with the questionable antics of these reviewers and the growing “rhetorical war,” I know what I would do to try to put a stop to it. (Here’s a hint: it’s basically the same thing that happened to Amazon.)

  • Happy Valentine’s Day

    It’s a little late in the evening, I know, but better late than never, I figure:

    Happy Valentine’s Day!

  • Comment Spam

    Last night I got my first bonafide blog comment spam! Two comments showed up four minutes apart on an older post (the post titled, “Not Your Father’s Sesame Street“) that have nothing to do with that post—in fact, it’s kind of disturbing that they would show up on that particular one, since it’s about kids’ television. I haven’t yet decided what to do with the comments, whether to delete them, or let them stand for posterity but kill the links, or what. At any rate, I was looking into where they came from today, and thought I’d post the details here. Kind of a Transparent Society type of thing to do.

    Both comments originated from the same IP address: 24.195.207.220. Checking the Apache server logs, I found that they got to my site (directly to that post, in fact) from a Google search for “adult weblog”, offset 370 (meaning that they had paged through at least 370 results—37-ish pages—before finding the link to me). Other than that, though, there’s not much to report. I just thought it was noteworthy (to me, at least) that I managed to garner some comment spam.

  • Writing every day

    Since the beginning of the year, I set a personal goal for myself to write and publish something on my weblog here at least once a day, and I’ve actually stuck to it. (Yeah, there’s some gaps on the calendar there, but if you look closely, it’s because the post didn’t get done until something like 12:07 a.m.—so while I didn’t technically get it in on the calendar day, I still count it because it was still part of the day I had, before going to bed.) The trick, of course, is coming up with something to write everyday—or rather, as I’ve been finding, something to write that I have time to do.

    (This is the point where other writers, upon hearing my complaint about not having the time to write, scoff and insist that if I truly was a writer, I would make the time. I know. Fair enough.)

    I’ve got several ideas for longer articles that I want to (eventually) write and post, but by the time I’m at the point in my evening where I can sit down to write, it’s late and I don’t really want to stay up much past midnight most of the time, so what I’m stuck with is trying to come up with shorter items to blog about. And see, that’s actually harder for me sometimes than in coming up with longer items to write about. What I could do is start longer articles in draft mode and work on them as time permits, and post them when ready—and I do, sometimes—but that doesn’t really mesh with my goal of blogging something everyday.

    Anyway, I’m rambling a bit, but it felt like something to get off my chest. I actually spent a good part of my time this evening working on a long article that I’ll publish here soon, but since that’s not ready for prime time I wanted to get this out of my system, too.

    Any other bloggers out there with similar thoughts?

  • PHP XML Benchmark

    Interesting PHP benchmark of parsing XML showed up on PHP Everywhere. In High Speed XML Parsing is Not Intuitive, John Lim tested five methods of extracting the title element from an XML RSS feed. Surprising results; the regular expression match was by far the fastest, and I would have thought the SAX parsing (based on libxpat, I believe) would have scored significantly faster than the DOM or XPath parsing—but it came in last.

    Of course, the regular expression matching in this case was a bit simplistic—typically if you’re going to parse XML files, you’re looking for more than one element. But it’s a good technique to keep in mind.

  • Upside down calculator spelling

    Here’s how it works (in case you didn’t know). Find a calculator—a single line LCD display one, not a fancy thousand-button monster or the Windows calculator (!). Turn the calculator upside down. When you punch in the numbers, they will look like crappy LCD versions of letters. The challenge is to spell words using those letters; 3045, for example, will read “ShOE” when it’s upside down.

    Yeah, it’s lame, and yeah, it’s old school. But back in the days before the Internet, we’d amuse ourselves by typing in such choice numbers as 7734 or 5318008 and snickering over the results.

    Ah, good times.

    And just for fun, here’s some links related to calculator spelling:

  • Oregon SWAP

    From UtterlyBoring I picked up this link to Oregon SWAP, which looks like an interesting experiment.

    SWAP is designed to promote reuse of materials in Central Oregon. It is a free and convenient way for individuals and businesses to exchange reusable or surplus products and prevent them from ending up in the dump.

    Looks interesting, although the small Comic Sans font is making my eyes bleed. I also notice they seem to be running PHP for their database search. Booyah!