A truly great man. The world is poorer (in every sense) with his passing. Russ Roberts was fortunate enough to interview him only a few months ago - his brilliance shone through even at the age of 94. From another interview in 2004:

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.

Update: The New York Times has a detailed story and biography.

'What's sex?' - Betty

Pleasantville is a favourite film of mine. Powerful on many levels, it manages to captivate the attention as well as entertain and give pause for thought.

The premise is simple; David (Tobey Maguire) is given a remote control that allows him to enter the TV set and the programme of Pleasantville with his sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon). This mysterious start to the film is a well-trod one (Gremlins and Back to the Future being well-known previous examples), but it works without too much tedium. The world of Pleasantville that they enter is a black and white sitcom set in the 50s with bland, inoffensive content. David loves this programme, but, egged on by his sister’s behaviour in having sex with one of the town’s other teenagers (in a place where holding hands is risqué), he soon begins to encourage the townspeople to rebel and investigate their adventurous side. Apparently too much sex means poor quality basketball the next morning, but as each townsperson’s innocence is challenged, the town begins to turn from black and white to colour, piece by piece, in a most beautiful manner, as they realise their greater potential.

When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time tinkering with digital sound: mostly MOD files, on the venerable FastTracker. The highlight was remixing a track by Jim Young - I’ve unfortunately lost my version, but here’s the original (any competent media player, such as XMMS or Winamp, should still be able to play MOD files with the right plugin). I used the sound of my CD drive opening as an ‘instrument’ (slowed down many times), and felt very silly when I came to listen it to some years later. Only later did I realise that the professionals do exactly the same thing; Gary Rydstrom, one of Hollywood’s leading sound designers, describes how he used exactly the same kind of found art - bottles, floors, etc. - to design sounds for Monsters Inc. on the DVD extras for same. Nevertheless, my efforts were still pushing unlistenable.

Firstly we learn that owning knives in Hampshire is wrong. Or maybe it isn’t; but the police only seem interested in gathering them anyway. Then we discover that the police are targeting signs that others find offensive. I’m not convinced this is a good use of my tax money.

But accordingly, I would like to politely request that Hampshire Police remove the following signs across the county, which I find offensive:

• ‘Please wash before exiting rest room’ (the facilities in my office)

  More ...

As I’ve mentioned before, I regularly listen to the Econtalk series of podcasts; along with TEDTalks, they are one of the highlights of my [vod,pod]cast week.

An Econtalk podcast on the subject of religion a few weeks ago was the first I haven’t fully enjoyed. Larry Iannacone, the guest that week, outlined a theory he has spent many years developing: the amount of religious participation in a market (e.g. a country) is correlated with the amount of religious freedom permitted. He alleged that the USA was a good example - somewhere that had constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom, and subsequently widespread religious belief. This argument has intuitive power (when people are more free to do stuff their own way, they are more likely to take part in it), and seems empirically justified too (I didn’t spend long on the ARDA website he linked to, which contains more statistics on this than one can shake a stick at).

Second Life is an idea I want to like. It’s not a game, and it’s not just for playing around either (despite the slightly frivolous avatars and other trivialities imported from actual games). Some of my colleagues from IBM in various R&D; labs around the world - such as the Emerging Technologies Lab here in Hursley - have been doing an admirable job of promoting Second Life as a genuine business tool (articles on Slashdot, the BBC), and I think it’s great that IBM is looking at using something so bright and fresh.

A recent BBC In Business episode discussed the recent innovations in the on-demand air-taxi market. One of the startups hoping to make a name for themselves in this market are DayJet, who are in the process of launching a service which allows for buying seats on charter aircraft from and to airports you nominate. The logistics are solved in real-time by an automated system, and the wider the time window you allow for your journey (which permits drop off/pick-up of other passengers), the cheaper the ticket. DayJet are hoping to offer prices not far off the cost of a standard economy/coach ticket on scheduled flights. They are also planning to use extremely cheap (only $1.5 million) jet aircraft produced by Eclipse. I think all of this combines to produce what seems to be a pretty novel service, although to be fair they aren’t the only ones exploring this market.

It’s strange how the same techniques can be used to attack both sides of a problem. For some time now, some of the more sophisticated web spammers have been using OCR techniques to circumvent CAPTCHAs on websites in order to hijack free email accounts, submit comment spam on blogs, and similar forms of mischievousness.

As the more capable e-mail spammers seem to be figuring out that anti-spam technologies are getting pretty good at filtering out the crap they send, normally using rule-based detection, Bayesian learning, or a combination of the two, a lot of spam now being sent out is image-based - and anti-spammers are now using OCR to fight back against this new tide.

A quick Google search for “common myths about” turns up ~315,000 hits. Apparently, there are a lot of myths about:

• Sex

• Atheists

• Copyright

• Science

• Gifted Students

• The Apple Mac

• Web Design

• Earthquakes

• West Nile Virus

The last one is the most surprising. I’m not even sure what the West Nile Virus is. Perhaps that’s why there are myths about it. But at least as regards the other subjects, it seems to be a slight cheat, and writing cliché, to ‘correct’ a set of myths without demonstrating that they exist. For example, here are some alleged myths concerning the subjects above:

Ladies and Gentlemen, you may turn off your brains now.

How to develop the plot of a brainless Hollywood action flick, in 11 easy steps:

1. Demonstrate SWAT’s awesome prowess but arrogant fallibility with an opening scene that introduces handsome lead Colin Farrell.

2. Develop some guilt and other emotion to be easily overcome later in the film, via a few heart-to-heart chats between colleagues. Demote Farrell for his cockiness in the first scene, but consign his colleague to the police bin of history.

   More ...