Cox Crow

In “Lost in Translation: IA Challenges in Distributing Digital Audio,” Boxes and Arrows (June 15, 2005), Dan Brown writes

On the other hand, a virtual environment enables behaviors unimaginable in the physical world. Wouldn’t it be great if I could play tracks … [t]hat my kids did NOT mark as a favorite.

One of the considerations with the location of a house is which school district it is in. In some states, determining the school district is easy: it’s coterminous with the political unit, such as the city or county. In New York, it’s not so simple. However the question is rather important, as which school district your property is in can have a significant impact not just on your child’s education, but on the value of the property and your tax burden.

A development down Tarrytown way was built right on the edge of the Pocantico Hills and Tarrytowns districts. The families who bought homes in this development have sued to send their children to the Pocantico Hills school. It looks like they won’t be, as you can see in either the Journal-News article below, or in the appellate division’s verbose opinion.

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National Geographic has an excellent documentary based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel now playing on PBS. I suggest telling the TiVo to catch it for you.

I spent the majority of today installing an enterprise-class document management system’s client. Now, I get a request to file my request for x electronically.

This is just too funny. To understand, you need to know that the request form is a Word document, and that the previous procedure required us to fill out the form in Word, print the form, sign it, fax the form to the recipient, snail-mail the form to the recipient, and e-mail the unsigned form to the recipient and to our supervisor.

Good thing I still have the original.

Can you imagine a world where the supply does not respond to the demand? I can. It’s called in-house software.

John Lienhard, in his essay Fusang, talks about the Chinese discovery of the Americas.

The Chinese were very isolationist, 1500 years ago. China thought the outside world was benighted and uninteresting — to be avoided and sealed off, not sought out. But a newer breed of Chinese Buddhists had a different view. Their business was to go out and convert all lands to Buddhism.

In AD 499, a Buddhist missionary, Hoei-Shin, came back from a long voyage and told of a strange people in a strange land — 20,000 Chinese miles to the east. That would’ve put him right on the west coast of Mexico.

That reminded me Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculation, in The Years of Rice and Salt, about the Yongli emperor’s treasure fleet’s being blown across the Pacific to find Mexico, and about a similarly speculative book, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which I had put on my wishlist. I think I’d like to read a less speculative history, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433, but, for this week, the National Geographic will have to do.

Is procrastination a learned behavior, or genetic?

I have to wonder in what world industry analysts live. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article on broadband prices’ dropping to dial-up levels discusses the End of Internet Access as We Know It:

“At some point, we may see dialup disappear - in three to five years,” said Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research who specializes in the U.S. telecommunications industry.

Um, availability, anyone?

In the general case, it would seem that Ms. Pierce could be right. The cost of broadband Internet access is dropping. This will impact the number of customers who are using dial access, as the two services substitute for each other. However, she neglects the availability of various forms of Internet access, and the effect of sparse access on prices, which causes her prediction to fail in the specific case.

For example, Alice has broadband access available, but only over CATV. Because there is no DSL or fiber service to her address, and because satellite Internet access is even more expensive, there is no pressure for her local cable franchisee to reduce their price for Internet access. This may keep her on dial until the franchisee feels the competitive pain. Similiarly, her brother Bob and her other brother Bob, live in Middle-of-Nowhere and an Outer Borough, respectively, and so no broadband option will be available until the rural telephone cooperative on the one hand, and the municipal power company on the other, find the funds to provide access.

Meanwhile, the plain old telephone system is everywhere.

We should have such children!

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. [emphasis mine]

That’s Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University [via Ernie].

Rick Ochoa pointed out Planarity, a simple game by John Tantalo at Case-Western Reserve University. All you have to do is align the vertices so that no edges overlap.

Good luck!

Via Ernie the Attorney we find that the Congresscritters have the mistaken impression that they are there to do something. In the instant case, it’s H. R. 3073, a bill to rid Congress of that pesky Supreme Court, in which the House proposes that,

The Congress may, if two thirds of each House agree, reverse a judgment of the United States Supreme Court

IANAL, but it seems to me that this bill is on its face unconstitutional. The Constitution established the Supreme Court, and bounded its jurisdiction. If anything other than a blatant disregard for precedent gives Congress the power to reverse the Court, it is a tortured reading of Article 3, Section 2, Clause 2, and whether the Court would have original or appellate jurisdiction.

Ernie thinks this bill has no chance of passing, but I marvel at the arrogance of those who would propose it.

It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.

Joe Gregorio’s post, A World Made of (Well-Designed) Cities, points to two interesting pieces: Tim O’Reilly’s reprint of a Stewart Brand lecture on urbanization, and a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy presentation, Visualizing Density (which he found by way of WorldChanging). The latter in particular is welcome. We can talk or write about the built environment all we want, but words can only give you an cerebral impression of a place. In order to understand the more visceral effects of the environment, photographs or visiting the site are necessary. Since we can’t all travel as widely as we would like, the photographs will have to do.

“Visualizing Density” begins with this introduction.

But, as anyone who has tried to build compact development recently will tell you, if there’s one thing Americans hate more than sprawl, it’s density. This is evident in the public planning process as regulations are written and projects are reviewed. Across the country, efforts to increase density have met with stiff resistance. One reason people reject density is that they don’t know much about it—what it looks like, how to build it, or whether it’s something they can call home.

That’s because density, qua density, is not a viable goal. Density may be a necessary condition for something else desired, such as walkable neighborhoods, but by itself is meaningless. When a planner speaks of density, we, the public, hear only that there will be too many others too close to us. Those values, “too many” and “too close,” vary from person to person. For some, too close is sharing an apartment; for others, it is having neighbors closer than the next ridge: Ma and Pa Ingalls left the Big Woods because it was getting too crowded.

Population density is relevant only in context. Consider the tiger or Wal-Mart in its environment. Each depends on a sufficient population within a given area to survive, but the area ranges in size.

I’ve come up with what I hope is a practical application of podcasting: love notes.

Secretly download the new version of iTunes and subscribe to the love notes feed. Synchronize with the Significant Other’s iPod. Wait for her astonished call when your voice whispers gently in her ears.

Via Eric Hancock, I learn that Apple appears to be caching podcasts. This is a damn fine idea.

Eric wonders, It should be relatively easy for Apple to allow publishers to opt out of Apple caching. Well, yes, by golly, it should be! It’s called the Cache-Control header.