Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/business/law-school-economics-job-market-weakens-tuition-rises.html?pagewanted=all

Burningman still seems to be a rather unique beast, and I’m happy that it’s there. I am also happy to see what I feel are the influences it has had on the goings on in the “Default World.” Thanks for encouraging us all to bring more of these influences into our daily lives.

‘Welcome Home’ is a greeting meant to invoke a sense of belonging both to the first timer as well as the seasoned veteran. It’s an invitation to participate, to freely express oneself and to embrace the community though your willingness to pitch in, volunteer, and in all other ways treat Black Rock City as you would your own home.

It’s a greeting my friends use both at BRC as well as at other gatherings throughout the year.

I believe that the origin of the greeting is the ‘Rainbow Festival’- an annual festival of ‘Hippies’ and other similarly transient-by-choice people. Within that community the greeting is given both at the annual Rainbow Festival as well as as any gathering of ‘Travellers’ throughout the year.

I’ve heard a legend that the greeting dates back to Europe and the Gypsies and Traveller cultures whereby the culture (the people) are the home, not the location- thus home is wherever there is a gathering of one’s own people.

But I’ll assume now that few of the people reading (including our host) live in the same place we grew up in, and have pursued other activities outside of our original home despite all of the challenges which have come about from abandoning the village (which can be significant–especially once the kids get added in, huh?). So despite all of the Grandma’s thinking we’re crazy for leaving town, we do it anyway, and society benefits for a set of other reasons, because the circumstances change, because there are other (new) components in the value creation network, and because technology (among other factors–like different social compacts) can disrupt the old equations and sources of value and friction.

Back to the matter at hand, Facebook may indeed enjoy a “natural” monopoly for the moment, which certainly does it make it difficult for Google to enter the marketplace. It must be important, though, because this is essentially Google’s fourth attempt (don’t forget Orkut). What I suspect Google really wants to do is blow apart what gives Facebook it’s (current) monopolistic power: the proprietary social graph. If Google can reduce the value of Facebook’s particular social graph to zero (by building one which is more open and making it portable) than they seriously undercut Facebook, at least as a monopoly. And in the end I think that’s a good thing, because while there is huge value building upon the social graph (as you point out), that value is more stable, not to mention flexible and secure, when built on something not owned by a particular company, or at least owned in a more open way (and don’t argue that Facebook’s graph is open: if it was, you could use your Facebook graph within G+).

So while all of the people who see Facebook as the secure place and thinks us techy people are crazy to wander off into the new G+ cities, and even if G+ isn’t the eventual settling place for us wanderers (though it does seem to have better momentum and compelling use than prior attempts), the period of Facebook as a natural monopoly will come to an end at some point, when the current social benefits wear thin. And given the pace of technology, I suspect that point is far closer on the horizon than most would of us would even suspect.

Apologies if I stole your next piece…I’m very focused on avoiding some of the very tedious work associated with moving (away from my current village).

Anyway, I think people are somewhat missing the point in painting G+ as just a direct competitor in the social networking space to Facebook. It’s no accident that G+ is integrated into every part of the Google ecosystem and they’re clearly leveraging that integration effectively. The integration and their promotion of Circles as first level objects has already lifted them past dead on arrival given that they’re at 10 million+ users in the first few weeks. Whether or not they’ll cross the chasm and pick up the Grandmas is still in question, but we’re not gonna see G+ go the way of Wave or Buzz.

reading the report of the kernel crash, it shows:
Kernel Extensions in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.filesystems.ntfs(3.4)@0xffffff7f81236000->0xffffff7f8128dfff

and i really was plugging an external hd formatted for pc (ntfs) in my mac…

thanks a lot for the nice text and awesome explanation.

jessica, from brazil

DEFINITELY nice to see exactly how kernel panics work, too.

Not saying that helps in your case, but I thought it relevant.

Thank you though, for the brief Kernel Panics 101. Every “Genius” at the Apple Stores should definitely know how to read them.

I would just like to correct you on the current death toll of the Chernobyl disaster being in the “thousands”. As of 2006 the World Health Organisation stated:

“A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.”

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html

By my reckoning, we would have to see at least 70 cancer related deaths per year caused by Chernobyl radiation to reach the figure of 4000 deaths before the affected population dies of old age (it’s the most closely medically studied population in history, so this should be easy to measure). At this rate, we could not talk about “thousands” of deaths until at least 2030. Right now in 2011, it’s not even in the hundreds.

On the other hand fast cooling, or tranfer of heat, is not so spontaneous. Conversion of heat energy, kinetic energy, or even chemical energy in to electric energy is not spontaneous either. Pumping of water is not spontaneous. All these would require some intervention mechanism. Just like external sources of power could fail, these intervention mechanisms could fail too.

Fundamentally this risk is going to be there. It is there even in producing energy on dams, because a powerful earthquake can damage a dam’s wall and then water will spontaneously want to fall and flood towns and cities around it.

So the practical things to balance out is the level of risk. On an average 1 accident in 10-15 years is not an acceptable statistics. The statistics must be reduced and the amount of human loss per accident must be reduced too. These statistics can be reduced but in the end it comes down to dollars and cents (or yens and yuans), i.e., the price of energy goes up. For an example one could make systems that it is spontaneous for coolent to reach there in case of failure (gravity is spontaneous), but in case of false alarms, it would mean damaging some part of the reactors, and hence increasing cost of energy produced by it.

If people want more safety they should be willing to pay a higher price for energy. As it is proven in the last 15 years, people are willing to pay a higher price for energy and it does not hurt the economy that much either (the price of gasoline at the pump has increased 4 folds and people are paying it). What people are not willing to do is if there is cheap energy available by dirty, unsafer sources then they are not willing to pay a higher price for energy from clean or safer sources. So people jointly should vote to have increased taxes on dirty source of energy (e.g., coal burning) and a tax on unsafer sources. Many reactor will go undergo security checks after this incident. Many would be found in unsatisfactory safety situation. But it will be hard to close them down as people love cheap energy, so most likely no reactor, even unsafer ones, will be closed. It would look wierd, but in that situation, a right thing will be to put a heavy safety tax on those reactors. This will encourage a bit more safety precautions being taken by those who are running these. The society is willing to take only certain amount of safety risk, and so if the risk is more, one should discourage it.

This is a common problem with colo systems where the backup diesels are tested every 3-6 months and they’re fired up for 5 minutes under no load and then ‘passed’ — but when they’re needed in a critical situation for longer than 5 minutes under full load then they fail catastrophically just when they’re needed most. Is there any evidence that this did *not* happen at Fukushima, and that it was solely the tsunami that was responsible for destroying the backup diesels? If there are test results, I would also like to have those vetted by a firm looking for patterns of falsification of records. Given, the lies and spin by TEPCO so far (and given all the lying that I’ve seen by incompetent executives in corporations), i do consider them guilty until proven innocent.

And this is what I want to see reactor designs stand up against — they must pass the incompetent, lying corner-cutting executive threat. It must not be possible for a plant to melt down no matter how badly it is managed. Just like plants need to be designed to stand up to a magnitude 9.0 quake or a 10m tsunami, it needs to withstand a magnitude 9.0 management level clusterfuck.

Instead of finding out whether or not things work by just doing them and only thinking about maybe stopping after they’ve accidentally killed a few million people, you do it backwards, and you don’t do anything that might accidentally kill a few million people until you are absolutely certain that you’ve found ways to ensure that won’t happen.

Having industry-paid experts and politicians funded by industry investors say it won’t happen doesn’t stop it from happening. All that does is smooth the way to do things without the proper precautions, laugh and say, “What me worry?” and then end the press conference abruptly when some soon-to-be-fired reporter asks why you didn’t have KI pills stockpiled.

Nobody has yet imagined the worst case scenario. That would be when a drone in Afghanistan or Pakistan accidentally kills the mother of one of the chief engineers of a nuclear power plant in New York or California. But he wasn’t Muslim, didn’t have an Arabic name, and his mother was only visiting with her garden club to see how the school for girls they’ve been funding there has been coming along. Oh well, accidents happen. You can’t let the possible deaths of a few million people stand in the way of progress. In fact, without killing a few million people here and there, mostly in Africa, to get the uranium for the power plants and the coltan for the electronics to run them, progress wouldn’t even be possible.

Just a few minutes ago I was watching a guy in the US talking about two reactors there built on a fault line and on the ocean. Its quite safe he said, the sea wall is 7 metres high (it looked more like 7 feet to me) and it is built to withstand an earthquake of 7.0. The strongest we expect here is 6.5. Well after what we’ve just seen in Japan I wouldn’t be feeling so comfortable.

There are two further ironies:
1) Fear of unsafe reactors leads to non-development of safer reactors. The Fukushima reactors are old (http://247wallst.com/2011/03/15/fukushima-reactors-same-age-design-as-vermont-yankee-etr-ge/ salient quote “maintaining an existing nuclear plant is far less costly and takes less time to acquire permits than does building a new plant”), and instead of mothballing 40 year old reactors and using the fuel in newer, safer designs, the economical solution is to extend the operation of existing, less safe designs.

2) The continued popular equivalence of Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard/read the two listed side-by-side in the same sentence. The similarity here is that the reactors got hot. The results are orders of magnitude different. Think that the public can’t be lulled into false equivalencies? Think “Saddam Hussein” and “terrorism” and where that’s gotten us.

IMHO the default experience is too barren. Too often useful features are not included or enabled by default with a note in the documentation saying “to accomplish this task, you just need to override/extend this part of the framework.” The thankfully-almost-dead discussion about whether or not auto_now_add should be removed is a clear example of this. One big reason it survived is because it’s legacy, not because it’s consistent with Django’s philosophy. This is wrong. The framework should include more useful shortcuts that make life easier, rather than relying on developers figuring out how to extend the framework. While it maintains some abstract sense of purity, it raises the barrier to building websites, which is a horrible trade-off to make.

Django should look to Rails’ scaffolding for clear lessons about how to make the framework easier to get started with.

IMHO.

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.djangoproject.com,www.rubyonrails.org&sa=N

Since November 2010 Rails is really dipping and if Django continues its trend then 2011 will be the year that Django became bigger than Rails.

One of the most consistent estimators of a residential house’s price is dollars per square foot. That number tends to vary with neighborhood and construction quality. Then it’s a matter of choosing a neighborhood and looking for a place with an architectural layout that you’ll feel comfortable in with other people around. More to say on that later.