Vacuum

All Hands Active, downtown Ann Arbor hacker space

All Hands Active is a downtown Ann Arbor hacker space.

The think ahead buffer

How far in the future do you need to be thinking to make sense of the world?

I can imagine some calendar-centered routine that starts with "I'll need that for tomorrow" and works its way out slowly through time into a year from now.  To the extent that you can do something now in advance of needing to do something in the future (distinct from planning to do something in the future) that seems reasonable.

How much think-ahead time is helpful?

It's almost certainly worth 15 minutes to plan 24 hours ahead of time, and almost certain worth 60 minutes to plan 7 days ahead.  I can make a good argument for spending 1 day to look ahead 90 days.

Think ahead or do ahead?

Contrast:

Hey, I should send postcards this vacation.

Here's a list of people to send postcards to.

Here's a deck of postcards, already stamped and addressed, waiting for the opportunity to write a note.

Urban chickens in Grand Rapids, MI

The Michigan Radio account details the opposition:

But not everyone agrees. A representative of large scale chicken farms has warned the city of the risk of disease. And the Kent County Health Department also opposes backyard chickens.

The Editorial from the Grand Rapids Press is careful not to take a side on the question.

Grand Rapids is considering joining the trend. The city’s proposal will be up for a public hearing July 13. Before allowing backyard poultry, however, commissioners should be convinced that keeping chickens in the city won’t create a nuisance or a health hazard.

Black Bean Tortilla Casserole Recipe

This is the easiest possible black bean tortilla casserole that I could come up with. It is suitable for preparing ahead of time and putting in the oven with a timer. Adjust seasonings to taste.

via www.grouprecipes.com

I signed up for GroupRecipes a million years ago, in Internet time; it's still around. The tag line is "recipe discovery" and it has some really interesting ways of assembling a set of recipes that might be what you want to make so that you can go off on your own to make your own.

In a casserole pan, put a layer of corn tortillas on the bottom. Drain and rinse a can of black beans. Pour the black beans over the tortillas. Pour canned diced tomatoes over the beans. Cover with a layer of shredded mozzarella cheese. Mix the beans, tomatoes, and cheese in the pan. Cover with another layer of corn tortillas and top with salsa. Bake, uncovered, until done, about 30 to 45 minutes.

 

Bloom filter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bloom filter, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970,^[1] is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positives are possible, but false negatives are not. Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with a counting filter). The more elements that are added to the set, the larger the probability of false positives.

via en.wikipedia.org

I've never understood how this works, only that it exists. I've also never understood how you might construct something that behaves this way that isn't built with a computer.

Note: broken links fixed Oct 5 2010

Logarithmic calendar design

Imagine a calendar as a slide rule, and you pretty much have the basic design right there.  If you're too young to know what a slide rule is, you're missing something, buddy.

"Objects in calendar are closer than they appear"

Domesticated Crickets and the Cone Macro Flash Concentrator | The Backyard Arthropod Project

The basic idea of a non-imaging light concentrator is that if you just want bright light in a particular spot and don’t care about making the light form an optical image, you can just generally reflect random light into the desired place. The concentrated light then illuminates any subject in that spot from all sides, making a very bright yet diffuse light. This idea has already been used for concentrating sunlight for solar power applications, but as far as I can see nobody has applied it to photography. So, how about if I design one that will catch most of the light from my on-camera flash, and direct the bulk of it into the relatively small volume that I actually want to illuminate?

via somethingscrawlinginmyhair.com

Innovations in lighting for macro photography, driven by the need to do well-lit photos of bugs. From the Backyard Arthropod, "A Field Guide to the North Side of Old Mill Hill, Atlantic Mine, MI".

from prices to prizes: competitions « orgtheory.net

Rankings, an ordinal list, can result from tests or from contests. Start with contests, and take first the forms in which competitors play against each other. The score in such a contest indicates which player (team) performed better (earned more runs or goals, ran faster, jumped higher) against another or others on a given day. The score of a soccer match is the result of a direct, head to head competition.  And the aggregation of these scores (in, for example, win-loss records) results in rankings – whether it be a soccer league or of all the professional tennis players or of all the Grand Master chess players in the world.  Note that in such contests there are referees and timekeepers but not judges. Technology contests (e.g., solving the problem of determining latitude on the open sea, building the fastest computer, the lightest airplane, robotic cars on ever-more challenging terrain) operate according to similar principles.

via orgtheory.wordpress.com

I have to read this inside the context of annual city ratings and rankings; your favorite home town is nth on some magazine's list of the top 100 cities in the world, and this is a cause for rejoicing.

How do you measure success? Assessing 5 years of a2b3 lunch

That's a question I often pose at the beginning of projects, and one that I struggle with often when there is no simple answer.  Some reflection has me thinking it might be too simple a question to pose when goals are complex and long term and emergent.

I'll illustrate with a project that by some multiple measures has been successful so far, my weekly lunch meeting called a2b3.  Every week we gather for lunch, people eat, they talk, they leave.  At various times I've tried to determine what to tally up to see if I'm doing the right thing, and no number that I make visible ever holds up to repeated fixation. 

How do you measure success of a weekly meeting?  There's one simple measure of attendance, though we have filled the restaurant and don't plan to move so there's no real way to grow beyond the 20 to 30 or so that are normally there.  When on the odd week that there's a low turnout of 15 the lunch is so different and enjoyable that that feels like success too. 

I find myself counting the number of people who are long time regulars, and also counting the number of people who are new.  Both seem like good people to have.  It can take a while to meet someone new until there's some other good connection, so my ability to add people to my world seems fixed - if the whole group was either people I already knew or people I didn't know that would be a challenge.

I also count the message traffic on the mailing list.  Email lists have some amount of channel capacity, so you want to have the list be busy enough to occupy the channel but not so busy that they cause people to turn it off or so idle that people forget it's there.

There is a degree of diversity to the group that surprises me, and what's more it surprises me that I don't need to do deliberate recruiting of anyone in order to get the occasional undergraduate or high school student or person from out of town or other demographic outlier to arrive.  It's perhaps because I don't keep track that makes it possible to be pleasantly surprised by how it feels like a broad cross-section of a corner of town.

One easy measure of success is how well the group self-organizes when I'm not there. Some part of years of what might retrospectively be considered thoughtful planning is some zen quality of not needing to plan very much at all.  When I'm not there, something still happens.

Traditional "economic development" organizations crow about their ability to attract or retain jobs, the number of events they organize, the value of square inches of favorable newsprint copy in ad-equivalent dollars, or the square feet of real estate they helped cause to be occupied. Those are all useful measurements when you're spending tax dollars, so that people doing accounting can have something to count.  But if all you are spending is lunch money, you better have a way to count on goodwill building up over time - credit toward some future, rather than a precise reckoning of the present.

The lost chicken hatcheries of Iowa City, IA

Copied in its entirety from the Iowa, City IA city government web page in their "Public Art" section.

King-Littrell-Palmer Chicken Hatchery

Irving King, head of the University of Iowa Department of Literature, had an unusual sideline for an English professor: raising chickens. In 1918, King started a hatchery as a hobby on the south side of Jackson Avenue. Eventually, the hatchery occupied several wood structures from Sheridan Avenue to Ralston Creek between the alley and Rundell Street. Fittingly, King's protégé in the poultry business was a poet: Ralph Littrell, who had a bachelor's degree from Iowa State University. By 1940, Littrell was the hatchery's owner and operator. At about the same time, a local builder named Lloyd Palmer bought the King home at 903 Dearborn Street from King's widow. Palmer, another hobbyist, ran a hatchery in the brick building west of the house until 1946.

Local residents bought dressed chickens and eggs here or from one of the many small neighborhood groceries that this hatchery supplied. Farmers came to buy live chickens. Chickens were sent by overnight train to Denver, and biweekly trucks would carry eggs to Chicago. Schoolteachers brought their classes to see the chicks, and the office was a popular place for neighbors to gather for conversation.

At one time, Iowa City had several hatcheries. Littrell's hatchery was the last one in town when it closed in 1986.

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Iowa City is in the middle of an urban chicken imbroglio; here's a 2009 story about chickens running loose in the streets. An online organizing group IC Friends of Urban Chickens aims to "put the Iowa back in Iowa City." In March, local police confiscated chickens during a traffic stop because state laws require permits to transport animals across borders. (There were also squirrels in the car.)

USA Today points to the Iowa City mayor, Regenia Bailey as the source for anti-backyard poultry sentiment; this is apparently a reaction to the risk that domestic fowl present to state agribusiness.

"We have a lot of small farmers around here making chickens and eggs available for sale," Bailey says. "My fundamental question is: Why aren't we supporting the regional economy?"

My Iowa connection is through my great grandfather, George F. Kay, who was the Iowa State Geologist; here's a review of "The Pleisoticene Geology of Iowa" published in 1945.