Friday, November 15, 2002

Several people have written suggesting that yesterday's link to Markoff's piece on Poindexter may have been motivated. Specifically the work is research with the focus on finding suspicous patterns without revealing personal identity. There are many "ifs" here. Encouraging good non-trivial research is usually a good thing - at the very least it can be argued that knowledge will eventually be discovered. The implementation of the research can be a different matter and, in cases like this at the implementation level, public discourse is very important. If the project is to be large, having Poindexter's name associted with it is probably wrong at several levels. His motives are suspect from past actions and give ammunition to a few groups. 6:45:24 AM     Of all of the clocks I've seen, this is one of the more annoying. Of course one could improve on it ... perhaps a squeaky chalk clock... 5:39:06 AM     Steve points out an interesting set of worldometers. It is a nice idea - some of the sources don't appear to be very accurate and uncertainties aren't quoted - but it is still cool. 5:31:55 AM     Scientific American has a nice piece on Gamma Ray Bursters. 5:31:23 AM     Very little has been written on the economics of spam. It is astonishing that some people can break even with a 0.001% response rate. 5:30:45 AM

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