Economics should have been more interesting than it was, but it was one of those subjects that the life had been sucked out of.  Except for one rare exception:  in one elective course I came across the concept of “internalising externalities”.  This is basically forcing economic agents (people or companies) to pay for the costs they inflict on others.  Examples were smelters raining down chemicals on vineyards in the Hunter Valley (clear economic cost), or chemicals being dumped into a river and forcing the river to be closed (some costs obvious, some non-obvious and hard to quantify).  When I heard this idea it made instant sense, and seemed a sensible way to solve the whole free-rider problem that plagues our capitalist society.

However I have never heard a mention of it since, it seems to have vanished back into academia (maybe it never escaped) or may even be extinct.  And it was such a neat idea too!

And now here we are talking about the same problem.  But the solution seems to have escaped us.

O’Reilly Radar > Getting the Market to Tell the Truth

This is worth a read.

10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website

Since I was at school I have used paper diaries.  My interest must have been present even then, for I have a collection of diaries in all shapes and sizes marching through my final years of school all the way (almost) up to the present (and that is a looong time).  [As an aside I sometimes look at the gaps and … just … wonder … sad, but true!]  Looking at them now I can still see (and understand) the system I developed just by doing it over and over and over.

For a long time I resisted (and actively disliked) computer calendaring and task management applications.  I thought they were clumsy and crude (and they were in those days), and being a programmer just didn’t seem a good enough reason for me to believe that everything had to be a program.

In the end, though, my circumstances got the better of me.  Working in a startup we all agreed on Lotus Organiser (amongst other things, there was more to the startup than that!).  I kept my paper diaries, but the process had begun.  Resistance was futile.  I was to be assimilated.

Now here I am years later with a well developed system using Outlook and the usual lineup of paper support systems.  I am well trained by David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  I refined my Outlook system using Sally McGhee’s Take Back Your Life. It all seems to work … but I still get the feeling that something is missing.

This rambling began when I was reading some blogs and got pointed in a few interesting directions, and then I came across this … well …  smattering of paper-based systems.  I knew it was stupid, but I couldn’t help myself.  I was hooked. 

So my thoughts are these (sheesh, was all that just an introduction?).  I was wondering, which is better? I came up with these points.

Beauty.  First and foremost is pure elegance and beauty.  Programs can be “beautiful” in many ways, but that is not the beauty I mean.  While a cool user interface impresses, I am not sure it is elegant in the way that a fine journal written by a high quality fountain pen can be.  Even my motley collection of diaries (27 years worth!) looks an order of magnitude more interesting than the 10 centimetre thick double-sided printouts of my Outlook archive that I dump into old-fashioned document boxes every quarter.  Paper wins (and I don’t mean the Outlook archive).

Real-ness.  (I know, I know, it’s not a word).  The beauty of data is that is is malleable, ephemeral and virtual.  The problem with data is that it is malleable, ephemeral and virtual.  A journal with written words is real, it is solid.   For me I don’t take data seriously.  It is too easy.  I don’t need to think about it so I don’t.  When you write something, well you think about what you write … not for a long time .. but for a moment.  You reflect.  Data is scattergun.  Paper wins.

Hiding.  A lot of work goes into user interfaces, with the noble intention of removing clutter.  But I want clutter.  I was thinking about project lists, and my need to write them out on paper.  Currently they are all in Outlook – but they are all hidden inside the text of those little tasks that get collapsed into those endless piles of tasks crowded on top of each other until they scroll off the top and bottom of the screen.  I can’t see anything!  With paper I am in two modes.  Between tasks I have a clean desk.  While working my desk slowly clogs up with paper everywhere; I have notes, lists, diagrams, designs, bugs, ideas and on and on, and I have them everywhere, and I can see them all at once.  I know what is going on.  Paper wins.

The power of writing.  I don’t know why, but there is something powerful about writing something.  Sure people say you recall better if you write it down.  But more than that, I believe that by writing you can tap into strong creative powers that are inaccessible while hitting the backspace key one too many times.  Can you doodle with a keyboard?  Can you diagram?  (To those who say “sure I have program X” please stop reading now).  With a keyboard I spend too much time worrying about the keyboard.  With a pen I am free.  Paper wins.

History and personality.  Looking at my old diaries I can see myself sitting down and writing them, because I am looking at the words I wrote, and how I wrote them, and even the little mistakes I made.  You can’t do that with keystrokes.  They aren’t the same.  Even though I use my own system with Outlook, I still use Outlook.  Let’s face it, there are only so many unique things you can do with a program.  The same with the printouts.  They are dull, boring, homogenized and designed.  They are information, but they are meaningless to me.  I cannot imagine I would ever pause as I passed my bookshelves to take out a few pages of my old Outlook printouts from years ago, and fondly remember those days.  Paper wins.

I originally intended this to be a bit more balanced, but I see that lurking inside me is my inner diarist.  Computer programs do have advantages – they can be backed up, shared, processed and analysed.  You can’t do that with paper.  For these sorts of things, the pixels win.

But I see now that this was not really about a careful analysis.  It was about something that I was passionate about, that I lost track of somewhere along the way.

Paper based links:

D*I*Y Planner | Paper, productivity & passion

PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

David Seah: Printable CEO

patrickrhone.com: Org-Fu Überpost – Productivity Whitepaper

The real bonus is that the reviews focus on the quality of the implementation, not just the look and feel.  Quality themes have a longer life and aren’t going to give you that unwelcome surprise somewhere down the track.

WordPress.com Theme Reviews « //engtech

Would you like to display your own icon on the browser address bar when visitors view or bookmark your web page?

Now it’s easy to create icons for your web pages with FavIcon from Pics. Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size/resolution) for the “Source Image” and click “Generate FavIcon.ico“

It’s true.  It works.  And it’s free.  I like …

FavIcon from Pics

It’s a real time research suite tracking RSS, deep web, static web changes and many other sources with multiform alerts, semantic analysis, extensive domain knowledge  …

… and …

… gathers information from 40 million sources of various types … ranked … through a proprietary algorithm … inbound links being just one reputation metric …

Sounds like a research tool par excellence, to be sure.  But it sounds like it could be much more.  Now we have a computer on every desktop, could we now be moving towards having a Google in every computer on every desktop.  Maybe it is just a matter of time before we each have our own customised/trained search engine.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » A look inside the Monitor110 research suite

In this modern age we find ourselves in we have social networking sites to find and interact with other people, blogging as a way of expressing ourselves, and all manner of forums and mailing lists to explore ideas and opinions, even while we move towards an age of seemingly infinite storage. I was wondering what the impact would be if we came to the position that the increase in storage more than absorbed the creative output of the planet, so we never had to remove a thing from the Internet ever again.  Everything that was created would remain there for all time.

What that means is that we have the potential to pull all these sources of information about a person together, and form the mental equivalent of a photograph. That is, a view of who someone is/was in terms of who they interacted with and the content they created on the Internet. Instead of being a photograph, which is a visual representation, I would call this a memegraph, which is a representation of an individual’s thoughts, ideas and personality.  (As an aside, what I really want to call this is a me-me-graph, but I don’t think that is going to take off).

So what would this mean?  That means that in the future I could look up past or present people (such as people in my family tree) and see who they really were. I could aggregate all the things that are being aggregated now into one complex picture.  Even better I could see how things changed over time; because nothing has been deleted I could access a history of that person’s mental landscape.

So I could see how grandpa’s ideas on the stock market crash of 2012 evolved, and when he first predicted it.

Note:  I Googled “memegraph” and unsurprisingly the term has already been used.  But I still think it is an interesting idea …

Unlimited applications.  I would love to use it to create a targetted information widget on my webpage.  Want to know about “topic X”?  Click here.

Very cool.  Very exciting.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Grazr 1.0 blasts off into the future of RSS

The changes go beyond the cosmetic.  I prefer the navigation scheme to the default, and a lot of cruft has been removed.