Month: June 2024

For some reason, the last day of the month always makes me sad.

Oh well, only one more day until we get a whole new month of possibilities!

Suppose I were the government of a very large country on the other side of the world, and I wanted to influence the outcome of the next US presidential election. One particular tactic might be very effective, and as that government I would certainly have the wherewithal to pull it off.

I could simply arrange for someone to slip one of the candidates a mickey just before the debate. The candidate would experience brain fog for the duration of the debate, and then would, seemingly miraculously, go back to being his usual sharp, energetic, perceptive self by the time he gave a speech the next morning.

Remember: Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are aren’t out to get you.

Have you ever been cooking eggs, and one egg somehow manages to roll off the edge of the kitchen counter? At that moment, everything seems to go into slow motion.

You see the egg slip off the edge, and you watch as it seems to descend slowly to the floor. The entire time that it is falling, you observe that the egg is perfectly whole and intact.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you hold out hope that it will stay that way. Perhaps, you tell yourself, it will land on the floor and somehow continue to remain intact, retaining its beautifully perfect and pristine form.

But then, the inevitable happens. The egg breaks, and you are left with a big mess on your floor.

Try to hold in your mind the feeling right after such a moment. That was my exact feeling last night, watching the presidential debate.

When I use Google Docs, I often find myself wondering “What did this line of text say before it was changed?” But there is no easy way to answer that question.

Ideally I would like to point to any given word, phrase, sentence or paragraph, and quickly get a history of just that portion of the text. What was the sequence of changes that produced this particular sentence? When was it last changed? Who changed it?

It would very useful to have a “local change search” feature, which would give me that kind of local history of changes to a document. All the information needed to implement such a thing may very well already be contained in Google Doc’s Version history.

Alas, as an end user, you only have access to Version history for the entire document. There are no tools available to you to forensically examine selected portions of successive versions of that history.

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement local change search. I’m sure a lot of people would find it useful.

Sondheim is to musical theater as Shakespeare is to drama.

In each case, the talent is so singular, that there isn’t even anyone else in their respective fields to make a comparison with.

In each case, if they had never existed, we would never have considered the works of art that they have given us to be possible.

Today I looked at the contents of a backup disk that I hadn’t looked at for years. And it turned out to be a treasure trove.

I found all sorts of software experiments that I had done a long time ago, that I had quite forgotten about. I tried running them, and they still worked!

Now I need to decide whether I want to revisit any of that work, and integrate it into what I am working on now. Or have my interests moved on too much for that to happen?

It’s an odd feeling, as though I am being given an invitation to collaborate. Except in this case, the person inviting me to collaborate is my younger self.

A colleague emailed me today asking whether I could send him a copy of some text he had contributed to a grant proposal that hadn’t gotten funded. It seems that he had been using Outlook to search for it, with no success.

Eventually he emailed me that he’d managed to find it himself, and he added “Outlook needs a much better search function.”

I replied, tongue in cheek, that maybe we can write a grant proposal to improve Outlook‘s search function.

He then suggested that we can just say we are using AI, and we will raise $36M sight unseen.

Sadly, he might very well be right.

Some who wander actually are lost.

Today I looked at a map and saw Ellenville NY. And my immediate thought was “That’s where Donald Hollinger was from!”

So I looked it up on the Web to see who has talked about that. And I found that there are zero searchable references to the fact that Donald Hollinger came from Ellenville NY.

I wonder whether Ellenville is aware that its most illustrious fictional native son is being snubbed by the World Wide Web. Frankly, I wonder whether Ellenville is even still aware of Donald Hollinger.

This episode has made me think. And what I am thinking is that there are probably vast stores of knowledge in our collective human brains that are not found anywhere on the Web.

Maybe that’s good.

Years ago somebody told me about the 1,10,100 rule of innovation. And so far, everything I have seen has confirmed that it is true.

It goes something like this: Let’s say that it takes about 1 unit of effort to create a working demo of your new idea.

If you want to know what it will cost in time and effort to turn that working demo into a beta version of a commercial product, multiply by 10. Now, at that point you don’t have an actual marketable product — you just have a beta version.

However, unlike that first demo, what you have will actually look like a product. In the software world, that means it will have a proper user interface, it will work with various file formats, it will have that all important “undo” function, it will run on all the right hardware platforms, and it will be in the form of an app that can actually be distributed to users, with the proper security protocols built in.

But what if you want to actually make money from your idea? Well then you need to multiply your time and effort by another factor of 10. Because now you will need to have removed all the bugs and put in place a system for periodic updates, you’ll need to do marketing, outreach and accounting, you will need a proper structure to manage and house your staff, a good implementation of data security, and probably some layer of IP protection as well.

Which is one reason that I spend my time doing academic research. My cost multiplier is always 1.