We’ve all had the experience of buying something like a new car – a make and model you weren’t particularly familiar with prior to the purchase – then driving around town and seeing that make and model every where you look. You may not be aware that there’s a process running in your brain searching for those cars, but you’re sure aware of the results.

Recently I’ve been noticing quite frequently that two seemingly unrelated things in my life are somehow connected. They share a thread even though I came to them independently. It happened so many times I started keeping a list. They are minor, and it’s not the specific examples I find interesting – it’s the frequency.

Dec 11 – While playing Skyrim I was listening to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Shortly after a discussion in Foundation about transmutation my character in Skyrim found the Transmute spell. Do you know how often transmutation comes up in my life? Probably about as often as it does in yours.

Dec 12 – I listened to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, then the No Agenda Show. During an Adam Curry rant about human rights (already getting weird) he mentioned something that brought the “basic english” version of Wikipedia to my attention.  Basic English seems an awful lot like Newspeak.

At this point I decided this was happening all too often, and I should start keeping a list. I made a note about transmutation and Newspeak incidents. Minutes later, after moving on to other things, a blog entry I wrote here on September 16, 2010 called Information Out of Reach came up in a google search.

That takes us to today. I’m reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series and listening to Scott Sigler’s The Crypt. Both feature convicts being tricked into boarding space-going vessels.

I think there’s a glitch in the matrix.

All credit to Wikipedia for the descriptions.

• Moore’s law - An empirical observation stating that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 24 months. Outlined in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel.
• Godwin’s law - An adage in Internet culture that states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Coined by Mike Godwin in 1990.
• Dunbar’s number – A theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150. First proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
• Clarke’s three laws – Formulated by Arthur C. Clarke. Several corollaries to these laws have also been proposed.
  • First law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  • Second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  • Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
• Occam’s razor – States that explanations should never multiply causes without necessity. (“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”) When two explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable. Named after William of Ockham (ca.1285–1349).
  
• Hanlon’s razor – A corollary of Finagle’s law, and a play on Occam’s razor, normally taking the form, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” As with Finagle, possibly not strictly eponymous. Alternatively, “Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence.”
• Benford’s Law –  In lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 about 30% of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than 5% of the time.
• Hawthorne effect – A form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied. Named after Hawthorne Works.
• Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle – States that one cannot measure values (with arbitrary precision) of certain conjugate quantities, which are pairs of observables of a single elementary particle. The most familiar of these pairs is position and momentum.
• Bradford’s law – a pattern described by Samuel C. Bradford in 1934 that estimates the exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search.
• Bremermann’s limit – Named after Hans-Joachim Bremermann, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.
• Brooks’ law – “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Named after Fred Brooks, author of the well known book on project management The Mythical Man-Month.
• Dilbert principle – Coined by Scott Adams as a variation of the Peter Principle of employee advancement. Named after Adams’ Dilbert comic strip, it proposes that “the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.”
• Niven’s laws: “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.”
• The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Three Laws) are a set of rules devised by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov and later added to. The rules are introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround“, although they were foreshadowed in a few earlier stories. The Three Laws are:
  • First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
• Schneier’s law – “Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.”

The first draft of this post had about twice as many laws but I pared it down a little. This is a good starting point. Other than Heisenberg I left most of the physics out. My intention here was to focus on computer sciences, math, and science fiction.

Extra Credit: Newton’s laws of motion, Archimedes’ principle, Avogadro’s law, Bernoulli’s principle (which I also mention in my post “Questions, Not Answers Or The Physics of Flight“), Coulomb’s law, Einstein’s General and Special theories of relativity, Maxwell’s Equations (good luck), Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and the Laws of Thermodynamics.

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To me it’s all about access. I don’t need to own media any more. In fact, I don’t want it. I don’t buy movies any more, I watch them on Netflix. And I downgraded to the streaming only plan ($7.99) so I don’t even watch DVDs or Blu-Ray any more. While the Netflix streaming collection is nowhere near complete, it’s constantly growing and it already has 10s of thousands of hours of video I’ll never get to. There are probably 200 movies and TV shows just in my instant queue, and I long ago stopped adding to it.

The Amazon cloud service gives you 5 gigs free, and they bump that up to 20 gigs for a year if you buy one album. They just ran a deal yesterday or the day before on the new Lady Gaga album where if you bought it for $.99 that counted as your 1 album and bumped you to 20 gigs.

One thing I find strange about this service is music I bought on amazon before they started the cloud service isn’t in my locker. For example I bought the Stand By Me soundtrack, which I remember loving when I was a kid. Turns out it’s pretty terrible, so I deleted it. Now to get it in my Amazon cloud locker I have to download it again (from Amazon) and upload it back to Amazon. WTF.

Another cool thing about the Amazon service is you can put pretty much whatever you want in it, from what I understand. In addition to storing and streaming your music you can keep docs there.

Also, while you’re right in saying this exact business model hasn’t been tested in court yet a very similar one has, and it didn’t go well. On TWiT Triangulation episode 12 the guest is Michael Robertson, founder of mp3.com. He tells the story of his battle with Universal over my.mp3.com, which was one of (if not the) original music bit lockers. The difference there was you didn’t have to upload your music. You just had to put the CD in your drive and let the software analyze it. Once it figured out what CD you had (based on the unique waveforms, like Gracenote) it unlocked that album in your locker.

Michael Robertson is back at again with www.mp3tunes.com, which is like Google music or the Amazon cloud product, but it’s been around for like 5 years. They also have a product that works along with mp3tunes called dar.fm, which is basically an online DVR for radio. Very cool. mp3tunes.com has caught the attention of at least one label (I think EMI). I think they want mp3tunes, google, amazon, and anyone else running a bit locker to have some special license. They point to things like server de-duping to say that when I upload a track I purchased then stream it back to my PC I’m not really listening to the one I bought anymore. As in, it’s different bits.

And then a correction:

I have to correct something I said yesterday in my comment here. I said in order to get the Stand By My soundtrack (which I bought from Amazon and later deleted) I’d have to download it again then upload it to back to Amazon. But after reading their FAQs I see now that I would have to *buy* it again, download it, then upload it to the cloud service. I assumed once I bought it I’d be able to download it again any time, but that’s not the case.

I guess it makes sense. Note Taker HD pays his bills. His role in personal computing history may be a bit of a sore subject. His genius paved the path to the personal computing revolution (creating dozens and dozens of billionaires) and it kind of left him behind in the same way it left Woz back.

But Bricklin is still a brilliant programmer, and the iPad ecosystem is lucky to have him. I bought Note Taker HD ($4.99) after the interview and I’ve been playing with it ever since. It’s a great note taking app, and easily the most feature-packed I’ve seen. The UI is great. If all you want to do is scribble on the screen it stays out of the way and let’s you go. If you want to incorporate images, graphs, and shapes that’s all there, too. The only additional thing I wish it could do is OCR.

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This Week in Startups: Gavin explains the fundamentals of Bitcoin
This Week in Startups: Who is Satoshi, the mysterious bitcoin founder?
This Week in Startups: The million-dollar bitcoin question: Can the system be hacked?
This Week in Startups: Jason sets his software to generate bitcoins and Gavin explains why that’s a bad idea

Understanding Deflationary spiral

I want to travel to a city (say New York) and I have a small budget (say $1000). But I want to see the ritzy side of NYC.  I tell you where I’m starting, where I’m going, my budget (per person), travel dates, and maybe some interests. Then you plan my trip. It should look something like this:

Flying Southwest Airlines in the luggage compartment with 19 connections – $200
Staying in a motel in New Jersey – $75
Bus, PATH Train, Subway – $25

Now we’re in NYC with $700 left.

Dinner @ Le Bernardin (no drinks) – $150
Ticket to see The Book of Mormon @ the Eugene O’Neill Theatre – $100

Brunch @ The Carlyle – $50
Dinner @ Per Se (no drinks) – $300
Ticket to see The Lion King @ the Minskoff Theatre – $100

We got there on the cheap and blew most of the budget on overpriced food and entertainment. The trick is I want someone else handle the bookings, or at least figure out where I should go and work out the budget.