jeneralize

In the February 5-11 edition of The Economist, the Economics Focus column discusses a recent paper in the Yale Law Journal by Yochnai Benkler titled “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production” (available in PDF).

The first question, puzzling to practitioners of the dismal science, is why people - specifically open-source programmers - freely give away the products of their effort done outside of their employment hours. Where’s the “Rational Actor”? Where’s “Self-Interest”? Where’s the pay-back?

The “pure economic” theories tend to run along the lines of subtle pay-back: reputation and prestige leading to greater job prospects. The “social economic” theories talk about communities of reciprocity and trust that benefit all members. (The “geek economics” theories say: “What else would I do with my Friday night?” and “Dude, I need to WiFi my toaster.”)

And then there are characteristics of the computing field itself that influence this economic motivation: (more…)

A DocBook Wiki! (That is, a Wiki front-end to a DocBook back-end, not a Wiki about DocBook) love this idea - mostly because this morning in the shower I thought “The World Needs a DocBook Wiki!”, and, lo and behold, the world has one.

Why is this a good idea?

• because wiki content is not portable - the markup is embedded
• because wiki markup only makes sense to the wiki rendering engine
• because it would be easy to map the limited number markup tags used in a wiki to DocBook tags
• because DocBook is a beatiful thing; wiki content stored in DocBook format becomes data

In this article in The Guardian an autistic savant describes the view from inside his own head. (”When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges.”)

Daniel Tammet can speak eight languages (including one he devised himself) and can calculate pi to 22,514 decimal places. And, unusually for a person with autism, he is highly articulate - he can describe the perceptions and processes that occur in his mind.

The Experts are Interested, to say the least. “It’s too early to tell, but we hope it might throw some light on why we don’t all have savant abilities.”

That sentence sends a chill up my spine, because the logical extension is: “By studying Daniel, we might learn how to enable savant abilities in the general population.”

My coworker Andy blogged His Ideal Fight. I think men are at a disadvantage when it comes to fantasy fighting, even if the demographics around slaughter movies and pile-’o-corpses video games suggests otherwise. Women have deeply repressed desires to kick the shit out of someone(s), but they’ve been so effectively de-socialized regarding violence that these desires are left to grumble and stomp around in their alligator brains.

My dream fight, like Andy’s, starts with a real incident: Recently, while walking my dog, I was followed for a couple of blocks (weirdly and scarily deserted in the middle of the day) by a psychotic junkie screaming threats and invective. Most of the Psychotic Junkie’s dialog below is from the real incident, except for his screaming.

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Cue danger-type music (Jaws-ish, but not Jaws)
Camera: pan to show deserted streets, gradually pull in as junkie approaches the soon-to-be victim (me)

Over the soundtrack, we hear a low, ominous growl (Oi the Beagle doesn’t really have a low, ominous growl in her vocal repertoire - she has a kind of chain-saw rrrRRRrrrYIP! sound she saves for the seagulls that land on our skylight - but, hey, it’s my dream.)

Psychotic Junkie: Where ya going, ya ****ing **nt? Why the hurry? (peals of evil Psychotic Junkie laughter)

Jen and Oi walk faster. (This is a theatrical device known as “suspense”.) (more…)