Photo by nickhall

While reading an article on The Thirteen Tipping Points of global warming for my environmental studies class, I took notice of one hypothetical solution to make people more active in combating global warming: A public lottery.

The article starts by informing readers that democratic, cooperative species tend to survive through the millennium. This is contrary to some economic theory which suggests that humans will only ever act in their own self-interest.

It also cites a game theory experiment in which greater success is obtained by the group as a whole when all participants can see how much each player is contributing to the communal “pot”:

A recent study hints at the evolution of altruism. A team of Swiss and American mathematicians and population biologists ran a variant of game theory known as a public goods game, in which players contribute money to a common pot that an experimenter doubles, divides evenly, and returns to the players. In ordinary play, if all players contribute all their money, everyone wins big. If one player cheats, everyone wins small. If an altruist and a cheater go head-to-head, the cheater wins consistently. This paradox is known as the Tragedy of the Commons.

But in the new computer variant, population dynamics were introduced into the game. Players were divided into small groups that played among themselves. Each player eventually “reproduced” in proportion to the payoff received from play—thereby passing her cooperator or cheater strategy to her offspring. Mutations and dispersions were introduced, creating a shifting population of individuals divided into groups of changing sizes and allegiances.

After 100,000 generations, the results were surprising. Rather than succumbing to the cheaters, the
cooperators overwhelmed them.

Drawing on this evidence, the article presents an intriguing possible solution that would encourage humans to be more active in preventing further global warming:

How might we get these messages across? Imagine a lottery funding advertising about he fiery monster, the Lilliputian arrows, the neighborhood dangers. Ideally these advertisements would be big and splashy and persistent enough to awaken us from our slumber in the televised lagoon.

Instead of a ticket, we’d buy a web listing displaying our commitment to the battle as well as our marksmanship rating: a number reflecting how much money we’d donated, the efficiency of our car, home, appliances. The highest-rated players would earn high-visibility web pages. Low-rated players could improve their ratings by following a list of lifestyle amendments. The higher our rating, the greater our chances in the lottery. Every week someone would win.

Would we play?

An interesting scenario to say the last. It has some obvious holes, but might have the potential to create real change if somehow implemented on a large scale.

Watch the Corporation

I just finished watching a documentary called The Corporation, an intriguing look at the modern day exploits of global corporations. I wanted to quickly mention a couple points that I found particularly interesting:

• For all legal purposes, corporations are considered a person
• Being a person, corporations are allowed to give campaign constitutions because it is free speech
• Before 1987, the patent office clearly stated that it was not legal to patent any living thing. After a misguided supreme court ruling stating that a bacteria looked more like a chemical than a bug, a corporation was allowed to copyright that bacteria. The ruling now states that you can patent any living thing in the world except a full birth human being.

The end of the documentary gives a list of things we can do to remedy the issues that are posed by modern corporations:

• End corporate personhood
• Put people before profit
• Build economic democracy
• Use full-cost accounting

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Photo by Mrs Magic

Everyday in my office building there are cookies on a table on the second floor. No one can be sure where these cookies come from, but people are constantly partaking of them. They are rather unique cookies, if I do say so: a single bite has the potential to change your taste buds forever.

Some people only enjoy the taste and texture of the cookies and haven’t taken the time to consider anything about what cookies are composed of or how they were baked. To these people, a snickerdoodle is nothing more than a tasty treat. I mean, they do taste fantastic after all! What more could there be than what meets the eye?!

A smaller subset of the population might be considered cookie connoisseurs. To them, a snickerdoodle is an item worthy of much respect and examination. They are always striving to know more about the baking process and the true composition of a cookie. For them, each bite must be savored and reflected upon.

My friends and I like to eat cookies with one another and discuss them. Sometimes the discussion is about how the cookies were baked, other times we talk about to make other people’s experience a more enjoyable one. These conversations always results in a better eating experience for all involved. Each bite shared makes the next bite better.

I get really excited when someone wants to talk about The Mystery of The Cookies. Since we eat them all the time, it’s easy to take them for granted, yet I feel we should keep reminding ourselves of their importance. I always find myself wishing that the whole world would see the real complexity of cookies and take some time to examine these delectable delights for themselves. But that will have to remain only a hope for the time being because the majority of people are still too focused on the taste and not the more complex details.

For me, discussing cookies is a means of enlightenment.

Photo by Kazze

Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance.
-William Wirt

Ever since I first ran across this jewel of advice, I have always made an effort to apply it to my life. Whenever my interest in a certain subject flares, I make a point to explore it before my focus has a chance to shift elsewhere.

As of late, my excitement and curiosity have revolved around photography. I bought a Nikon D40 in June and have since only put it to good use on occasion. Since I purchased it, I’ve had a nagging sense that my photos weren’t turning out as interesting or “professional looking” as those taken by my friends who are amateur photographers. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’m not always as creative as I’d like. I also knew the source of my displeasure wasn’t the fact that I have an entry-level Nikon, because I’ve been told time and time again that the camera doesn’t matter.

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Photo by eyeRmonkey

These days, It seems like I meet a new college freshman every couple of weeks. I always wish I could pass along all the lessons I accumulated during my first year of college. And thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, I can! My experiences were at the University of Oregon, but I think they are applicable anywhere. I suspect that some of these lessons need to be experienced first hand to have any effect on you, but I still think they are worth sharing. Here’s my advice (in order of importance):

#1 The first week defines the rest of the year

I feel like this is the most important piece of advice I could offer, but I also know it’s the hardest thing to control. During the first week, be more outgoing that you normally would. Over the first couple days, meet and talk to every person in the dorm for at least a couple minutes. The best way to develop a community is to do everything as a group for the first week.

Let me give you a breakdown of how things went in my dorm for the first week and how I heard things went in every other dorms:

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I’ve been doing a lot of work with complex search queries on Google lately. I have a script that grabs all the URLs returned for a given query. The problem is that although there are hundreds of thousands of results for most queries, Google will give you this notice if you try to get more than the first 1,000 results: “Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query.”

This restriction became a problem for me. After doing some research, I ran across an interesting workaround that allows you to access twice as many results. Simply include and remove a common word in your queries. For example, if you are searching for proxy and want to get 2,000 results, use these two queries:

• proxy +"the"
• proxy -"the"

Now you have 2,000 unique results.

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I have been a nerd my entire life. I started designing websites in grade school and I have only been sucked further and further down the rabbit hole since. I have been part of the online nerdy community for quite a while, but it’s not too often that I get to interact with my geeky brethren in person. This past weekend was my first excursion into that community and I must say that I had a blast.

My boss, Jon Steinhart, has a party at his house every summer and invites all of his friends, coworkers, etc. Little did I know, Jon has built up quite a list of contacts in the tech world in his time.

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Facebook recently released the Facebook Platform which allows developers to write applications and tools that run inside users’ profiles and within Facebook itself. So far, the Platform has been a huge success. Dozens of useful applications are coming out every day and most users are very excited for the extra functionality.

I am in the process of writing an application that brings together Flickr sets and Facebook photo albums. Unfortunately, the current implementation of the Facebook Platform lacks the ability to easily upload photos to a user’s account.

To remedy this situation, Paul Wells and I decided to writing our own addition to the Facebook PHP5 Client Library. Using it is as simple as uploading the file to your server and changing two lines of code in your existing applications. The best part is that our class does not involve code hacks at all. Our classes simply extend the current ones and add the functionality we want. The advantage to this approach is that the code will still work if Facebook updates the API.

To download the code and see an example of it’s use, visit the project page.

I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to install a WordPress blog to my server. I use GoDaddy for hosting. The only problem I encountered during the installation was when I wanted to change my permalink structure.

The problem arose when I switched from “ugly permalinks” (http://example.com/?p=N) to “pretty permalinks” (http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name). I already had a .htaccess file in my root directory, but when switching permalink stuctures, WordPress attempts to write it’s own .htaccess file. Since mine was already in place, it failed and I started getting 404 errors on every pages except the home page.

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