Archive for 2004
July 19, 2004 at 7:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
[based on the version of 18 July 2004 from the old blog site]
An idea came to me some days back. For the most part, it was inspired by my deep and carefully-considered abhorrence of eBay’s recent “marketing moves”, but it’s also (I think) a neat new idea.
I want to share it. I’ve seriously considered patenting it. Instead, I’m just going to throw it out there into the realm of public discourse — and prior art. If you think it’s a good idea, please do take a minute to read the Creative Commons license wording down there in the bottom right of the page — it’s important.
Background
It’s difficult even in the best circumstances for collectibles and one-of-a-kind items to sell at a fair price. I’m talking about things that aren’t commodities. Things for which there is little or no competition. To summarize a whole lot of advanced marketing research and complicated economics in one partial sentence: the problem lies in the sparsity of potential customers, the diversity of reasons they might want the thing, and the difficulty of letting the right people know it’s for sale. And some other places, too.
In real-life markets, whether they’re Yankee auctions or double auctions (stock) or fixed-price storefronts, non-commodity items are (I’ll declare without scholarly justification) a typically underpriced. Read about the Revenue Equivalence Theorem if you want to understand it the way classical economics approaches this, but realize that this important result depends upon assumptions like multiple people interested in each item are present at the sale and every potential bidder is there for the full duration of the sale. Go buy and sell things like roadmaps and estate jewelry and antique horseshoes — or just attend two real-life estate auctions — if you want to really understand how the “crowd” affects the sale price of items.
Here’s the kicker: Online, it can be worse.
All that hype they (we) were tossing around during the dotcom revolution was simultaneously true and false. There are more people using the Internet to look at auction sales than there are attending any one seller’s physical shopfront or real-world auction: the extra people are out there. So based on that alone, the odds seem to be higher that somebody who’s interested in your exact item might find it. But in the same period, it has become so incredibly easy to create an online sale that there are more things for sale, making it far, far harder for these more numerous customers to find your particular stuff. Tragedy, meet Commons. Commons, Tragedy.
If there aren’t enough people seeing the offering, then there surely is less chance of an up-bid in an auction format sale. Keep in mind that both auction and fixed-price sales typically need to be seen by multiple interested parties before the price approaches a fair value: Auction pricing depends on up-bids to discover prices, and sellers using fixed price sales need to be able to adjust prices upwards between sales to discover fair price. In either case, the time-scale needed to wait until they happen by with their money in their hot little hands is longer than the time the price might normally change.
In brief: unfindable offerings command decreased prices.
It’s interesting to consider that eBay’s and Yahoo’s Yankee-style auctions typically last for seven to ten days. Originally, when these venues were new and there were far fewer items on offer than there are today, that was enough time for multiple interested bidders to see the sale and decide whether to bid or not. Now that there is an overwhelming assortment of offerings, and findability is gone, the 7-day auction is arguably no better than a 1-day auction, and just a cash cow for eBay (who charge by the listing).
Browsing eBay categories in which there are a mix of commodities and collectibles, such as Books, you’ll see a strange dichotomy: There are hundreds of copies of a commodity bestseller like Cold Mountain on offer, and insofar as there are sufficient buyers to generate demand, the market is liquid and fair pricing is active — you can see multiple bids on many of the books, and the final prices are very similar for similar quality.
But look at the antiquarian books, the “collectible” books, each much scarcer than a commodity book. Even though the collectibles dominate eBay’s listings in aggregate, you will see that very few sell, and those that do typically sell with one bid.
There’s no up-bidding for collectibles, even though online sales are supposedly made for these items. I can think of at least two ways to interpret this. One is that the seller has set the starting bid too high for the market to support — but the $3.99 I pay on eBay these days for a truly rare old book doesn’t strike me as overpriced, even if it’s in rough condition. The other, more reasonable interpretation is that there are too many sales competing for the limited attention of the bidders. They simply don’t encounter the sales in which they would be interested.
Illiquidity.
And as eBay and the other major consolidated venues continue to dominate, I can’t see how the situation can improve for sellers, and as a consequence for the centralized venues. Commodities will sell at fair prices with multiple bidders, simply because even the most inexpert customer can’t swing a cat without hitting one. Search works. But the specialized items like antiques and collectibles are lost against the background of the commodities, and lost among one another.
People don’t have time to find things.
What is a Ratchet Auction?
Some days ago I wrote about Dutch (descending) auctions, and proposed the notion of the Drunkard’s Auction, in which the price makes a random walk up or down each tick, where the earliest, highest offer matching the current price is the closing price.
I like the Drunkard’s Auction format because unlike the more common Yankee (increasing) auction or even the traditional Dutch auction, it never ends until somebody makes an offer. If nobody has come along, it may wander on in its random walk, visiting all possible prices eventually. Even when somebody makes an offer at a fixed price, it may still take some time before the walk matches that price. That’s a good thing, I’ll argue, when you’re offering an item a shallow market like collectibles.
That said, it has some flaws. It’s random. If you sample the price at random, it tends to sit in the middle of the specified range.
In response, I’ve concocted this:
Suppose the seller has an item they want to offer in an online sale, but because it is unusual (an antique or collectible) they have (a) a poor idea of a fair fixed price that will not tie it up in their inventory, and (b) no expectation that sufficient audience will be present during the course of a limited-time increasing auction to drive the price up to a fair one.
The seller initially sets several parameters defining the sale’s price dynamics:
- The maximum price is the starting price at which the lot will be offered.
- The minimum price is the lowest price the seller is willing to accept for the lot.
- The discount increment is the amount the price will typically drop between two steps of the sale.
- The price persistence is the length of time a price is in effect before it changes again automatically.
- The ratchet probability is the chance that the price will jump up rather than dropping down by the discount increment
- The residual discount determines the amount of discount remaining when the price ratchets up.
(Does this sound like a lot to juggle? As it turns out, I suspect that many may be set to default values, leaving only the maximum price, minimum price and price persistence as things that might be set by the less controlling seller.)
The lot is offered for sale at the maximum price initially. Periodically thereafter, at fixed times determined by the price persistence, there is a random change in the price. For a ratchet probability p, there is a probability (1-p) that the discount will increase (that is, the price will decrease) by the fixed amount of the discount increment, and a probability p that all but the residual discount will disappear.
Finally, if the price is so low that the next discount would drop it below the minimum price, then it will instead revert to the maximum price (wrap around).
Potential customers have two options: They may buy the item at the current asked price. Or they can make an offer, a public promise to buy the item when the price crosses a specified price level.
Let’s play with an example. Suppose the maximum price is $100, the minimum price is $10, the discount increment is $1, the price persistence is 1 hour, the ratchet probability is 3% and the residual discount is 1/6. The online sale starts at a price of $100, and every hour thereafter there’s a 97% chance that it will drop by another dollar and a 3% chance that it will jump back up 5/6 of the way to $100. Say at one point it’s at $64: at the end of the hour, it will either drop to $63 or jump up to $94. If somebody comes along and buys the item outright before the end of the hour, they pay $64; if they make an offer at $63 or $63.99, then they have a 97% chance of winning (assuming there are no other offers that precede theirs, or are for higher bids). If the price should happen to ratchet up, then their offer to buy at that price stands until they change or cancel it. And if nobody comes along, and the price drops to say $10.12, then the next time the price changes it will either jump all the way back to $100 (97% chance) or it will ratchet back up to somewhere less than that (3% chance).
Now, I’ll just state without detailed supporting argument that a successful web-based sale using a Ratchet Auction will depend not merely on the traditional information supplied by auction sites — pictures, description, condition, current price and the like — but also will require that the exact probabilities of prices in the near future, and bidder interest in the item are disclosed.
So let’s imagine that for each auction item there is a little time-series graph showing the price over the recent past. This graph is annotated very clearly to indicate the exact time that the price will next change, and what the values will be. It is annotated to show the web page views for the auction as little tick-marks along the time axis. It is also annotated with a horizontal line showing every open offer, starting at the time it was logged, and at the price offered. Like this:
A graph rather like this one is shown to anybody viewing the sale web page. It shows the price, the page views, and the offers. It shows the community’s interest in the item, and the timing and prices of the offers are signals to the seller about the general market for the offering.
The price time-series is that little stair-stepping line, which steps down (likely) or ratchets back up (rarely) every tick of the clock — forever, if nobody ever buys the damned thing. Every time anybody views the page, an indicator is added to the graph (those rather inadequate little blue ticks along the bottom of the graph are supposed to represent that). So people know how many others are watching. If anybody wants to buy the item at the current price, they can — in our example, nobody has done so. Instead, a number of people have made offers, indicated by those broad horizontal lines. As soon as any user enters an offer, everybody gets to see it. Whenever any offer is crossed by the price, that person wins (the green offer line is the winner, in this case).
I’ve tried to indicate a little of what I think might happen in this cartoon: First, that offers can be canceled or changed by the bidders. Second, that lowball offers (like that long line low on the left) will take forever to close. Third, that bidding wars and up-bidding can occur here just as in a Yankee auction (witness the little ladder of offers in the middle). Fourth, that the past doesn’t matter — an offer that is expired or changed is no longer binding, as is the case with the person who made an offer of about $65 between steps 50-80; even though the price subsequently drops below that offer, it’s been canceled or moved, and so they don’t win.
That’s it. The sale will continue adjusting the price with no intervention from the seller. Some small amount of web-based infrastructure would be needed to update the graphs and keep track of and report the offers. At some point — whenever prospective customers happen to come by — they will buy the item outright or make an offer. As noted above, lowball bids will take a long time for the price to reach that level, and there’s a significant risk that some more reasonable person will come along and buy the item at a higher price.
There’s a lot of tuning that one can do, too. You might imagine, given the numbers I’ve used here ($100 max, $10 min, $1 increment, 1/6 residual, 3% ratchet probability) that the price will spend a long time way down low. Nope:
This is a histogram of prices seen in 10000 steps of the same time-series used in the previous figure. The red line indicates the mean price over time — somewhere up around $72. Counterintuitive, after looking at the prices in the first figure? Here’s a hypothesis for some nice empirical economist to test in the future: I think that these simple-seeming downward trends overwhelmingly trigger our instincts about momentum, tricking us into thinking the price is headed for $0 every time it continues on down for a while.
Here are a few more steps (500) — trace along and make a prediction, based on this sample, of the average price. I betcha you’re waaaaayyyy underestimating it. I know I do. If you were presented with this graph, and you actually wanted to bid on the item, what would you bid? How rational are you feelin’, punk?
No, wait — it gets better with more transparency. The auction listing should not only fully disclose the historical prices, the page views, and the timing and prices of offers, but should also explicitly state the probabilities and the possible prices in the next tick. As in “there is a 3% chance the price will be $50, and a 97% chance that it will be 22.” And also explicitly list every person who has made an offer, what its price level is, and and how different offers are in effect. What we want, honestly, is to pressure the visitor into buying now or making a higher offer than anybody else’s. And transparency is the key to that.
Unlike a Yankee (eBay-style) auction sale, lowball offers are postponed, not immediate. In a ratchet auction, it seems that the incentive to bid is spread out more evenly in time, whereas a Yankee auction increases pressure to bid towards the scheduled endpoint. By spreading out the pressure to bid, I’ll argue that a ratchet auction caters to asynchronous visits by potential customers, could as a result lead to improved sales prices in situations where you do not have the full and synchronized attention of the marketplace.
Like an online site, say.
Ron Jeffries notes that what I’ve described now could be managed by hand by a seller, if the period was sufficiently long. You could, I suppose, just change the prices in your storefront and update the accompanying graphs, and accept offers via email. There is a small matter of getting the customers to trust that you’re not ratcheting the price up in response to their offers — but you know, there always is, isn’t there? And there’s still a problem in getting people to see your offerings in the first place.
Sounds like there are some things left unresolved. I have some ideas, but I’m tired. I’ll get to them in a bit.
In the meantime, consider how it is you came across this little entry of mine. There are so many other things for you to read. How is it that you’re here, now?
June 26, 2004 at 5:19 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
If a book should become infested with mildews and stench, the acolyte must venture forth to procure a casket, one not over-large but also never used, with a tight and sturdy lid. Before leaving the department of Rubbermaid, circle the aisle thrice widdershins and say unto the Second Clerk when it is met: I adjure you, Abonometh, Azripan, Abonometh, Second Clerk — where is the cat litter? If the Second Clerk doth obfuscate, produce the Stave and make the Sign of Defenestration, and speak: Greebo! Greebo! Greebo! I am not dissuaded! Arm & Hammer Brand will be fine! Is it in the Groceries section? and then the clerk will direct you thence. Many fall or falter upon the long path from Storage Solutions to Groceries, for tempting delicacies may be offered unto the unwary; falter not, but rather fast, and partake of neither sausage nor crabcake nor coffee. If challenged, make the Sign of Defenestration twice and turn aside, always along the heartline; the path may waver, but goal should never change. The acolyte must depart with the casket of rubber with a tight lid, and the cat litter; on occasion, silica gel may also be obtained. Thence depart this place with all haste.
Prepare a Short Rack of Metal or Wood, such as would fit inside the casket and be about the height of a finger from the bottom. Consult the Moon as required. A cookie sheet will do in a pinch.
Place the casket of plastic in the ritual circle, for it should not be disturbed overmuch by children or household familiars. Cleanse the book which doth stink carefully with Swiffers and dry paper towels, using always the utmost care and patience, while chanting quietly: Stink away. Stink away. Fly stinky away. Abronalith. Stink away. Spread the cat litter as deep as two knucklebones in the bottom of the casket, pouring in a single motion, saying: Lord Zygax, protect this book from the stench, Oh Lord I hope this works. Avaunt!
Avoid breathing the dust.
Place the Short Rack of Metal or Wood upon the cat litter. Do not allow the Short Rack of Metal or Wood to be covered entirely. Next place upon the Short Rack of Metal or Wood the books which stink, saying, UVAVU. ERANU If the casket and books and the Short Rack of Metal or Wood should allow, fan the pages of the books so that they are open to the still air within the casket; this will draw out the waters of evil. Next seal the casket. Tie above it a frog dipped in honey. When ants and flies have cleaned the bones of the frog entirely, the books shall be relieved of its stink, and may be used with pleasure.
Lacking a frog, check in about a week.
This process may be amended to prevent the dropsy, in the normal manner.
June 24, 2004 at 6:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We’ve just returned from an expedition of about 1500 miles, with about 1500 books.
When I said I’d go get them, I knew very little about them. When I saw them, I was embarrassed and sad. Now that I’ve handled each and every one of them… well, I’m happier than a clam. And clams, I am told, are quite happy indeed.
A few weeks ago, in my normal daily eBay shopping I happened across some very interesting antiquarian books on eBay. These were not just “vintage” or “nice old” books, but real and valuable antiquarian treasures. When I checked the seller’s other auctions, I saw a lot many of those were just as interesting. I placed a few bids.
I won them.
For a few dollars or even cents each.
She kept listing new stuff.
Somewhere in one of our correspondences regarding payment and shipping I nonchalantly asked — because my wife Barbara has been enjoying participating in Project Gutenberg so much, and because the few dozen books I had received were in worn but still fascinating (and still very, very valuable) shape — whether the seller had any more like that. Who knows: maybe some that were more beat up than she was willing to get rid of cheap, or maybe some that were missing covers but complete (for Project Gutenberg)?
Or maybe — just in case, you know — more nice old unusual stuff like I had already bought from her?
Her answer was very close to, “Sure! How many you want? I bought a barn-full, and I want to get rid of them all real quick!”
Now it should be obvious to anybody who knows me — whether just from reading here, or from reputation, but surely anybody who has visited our house — that I am a bull when it comes to rare books, and that a statement like this is a big flapping red flag. Here I sat, reading that email, and my head turned up and I squinted calculatingly across the room at the stack of rarities she had sent me already, and I closely examined her other eBay auctions… you could hear little machine noises and churning and lightbulbs flashing and popping, and all sorts of metaphoric scheming noises (let alone the literal gurgling) emanating from me.
Barn. Full. Books.
I mean, what else could I do? “How many is a ‘barn-full’?” I replied, with forced nonchalance. Her answer was rather ambiguous but encouraging. A lot. More than a thousand.
Lots of old books.
For the next few days, the passer-by might hear sounds of carefully-timed revelation, pleading, cajoling, and the like coming from our household. Detailed maps of Virginia and West Virginia were bought. Cars were rented. Plans were made and changed and calendars pushed out and….
Well, we’re back. The books we have brought home are lovely, exceeding both my initial expectations, and definitely beating the first impression they gave. Some, yes, some are now gone on to better lives as nascent soil… but many survived, or have been resurrected, and so will grace bookshelves here and elsewhere as their authors intended.
This is the story of a road trip. We went uninformed and on a lark. We arrived at our destination with trepidation, after adventures involving the Civil War, mummies and thousands of daylilies. What we found seemed disappointing on the face of it. But by the time the dust had settled, and we saw what we had in our hands, the delight came back. With interest.
8:48am 20 June 2004 [odometer reads 33 miles] Barbara and I set out in a rented Dodge minivan from her parents’ house in Plain City, Ohio. It is a minivan, and not our own pickup truck, and the seats of the minivan have been left at the rental place for more room because the seller (call her JH) said, “Oh, yeah, they should all fit in a pickup truck. We brought them home that way from the sale where we bought them.” But at the same time, she tells me there are about 1700 books.
Now because we’re moving, Barbara and I have been packing books for months now — ours, my Mom’s, my Mom’s friends’ — and I can tell you than our truck holds exactly 14 book boxes under the tonneau cover, and also that each box holds no more than about 40 books, unless they’re dinky little paperbacks. Something doesn’t gibe in the “one truck-full” and “1700 of them” numbers. There’s a clear volume/density incongruity happening.
Well, sure, we could leave the tonneau cover off, and stack them up like the Beverly Hillbillies. But, but… if it should rain in the 500 miles we need to drive them back, they’ll get wet! Wet! (Ironically, on this first morning, in my ignorance of the events to follow, I still believed that a little water would ruin the nice pristine old books we were going to rescue. Heh. In hindsight, it would have improved some.) At all costs one must protect the books, old books in particular.
Erring on the side of the “1700” and not the “one truck-load”, we are driving a seatless rented minivan, with 33 miles on its odometer.
9:40am 20 June 2004 [69 miles] We’ve cleared Columbus, and it’s a beautiful crystalline high-pressure Midwestern summer day. Spirits run high. The land is lush and green, and the hints of the Appalachians are starting to show.
Well, not entirely lush and green: what exactly is wrong with the locust trees near the Ohio River? They’re plentiful, and seem to have some new growth, but on every one the older leaves seem sere and brown. Do cicadas do something to them? Is there some new bug we need to worry about? I really need to know, since we’re considering planting one in the front yard to replace the frickin’ pin oak that’s dying of some other unpronounceable fungal infection.
11:29am 20 June 2004 [179 miles] West Virginia. State lines are an arbitrary and purely social construct but nonetheless a worthy milestone. We’ve crossed the Ohio river, and are one step closer to our goal.
Along the way, we have been discussing plans of attack. We have this day of beautiful sunshine, and the next day of potential clouds and rain. Barbara suggests that we take the slower, more touristy route to Staunton, VA by way of US 50 and US 250, via Parkersburg and Phillippi, WV and Monterey, VA. I recall a note I saw on the Road Geeks website asking for pictures of the old signage at the original end of US 250 in Grafton, just along the route Barbara has mentioned, so we head off for Grafton as a stopping-off point.
11:43am 20 June 2004 [190 miles] Lunch at the Parkersburg, WV McDonalds. Why is it, Barbara will ask some hours later, that the builders of West Virginia’s roads cannot manage to place food and services any closer than 3 or 4 miles away from the main road? Is it to maintain a semblance of unspoiled country life?
1:35pm 20 June 2004 [279 miles] Grafton, WV. An interesting little town, filled with lovely brick and gothic stone architecture, all in relative disrepair. Their post office is impressive, set alongside the railroad and towering several stories into the air. Their banks and courthouse and other buildings and ruined mansions are also impressive, flattered by the brilliant sunlight. Many pictures are taken (from the car, to save time). The Baltimore & Ohio railroad terminal is especially nice.
Wish we had more time to visit this area. It seems quiet and nice. But we can’t find any noteworthy signage to photograph. I’d feel better about submitting arbitrary snapshots if we could determine the actual historical end of the road.
1:50pm 20 June 2004 [284 miles] Webster, WV — “Home of Mother’s Day” Charming little mountain town.
Hang on — what’s this? We find a place to do a U-turn (not a simple matter on a West Virginia country road), and head back a half-mile to see Hays’ Daylily Farm. Hemerocallis is a favorite around our household, and after all this is our vacationish day, and after all we’re here and we’ve never seen a daylily farm, so… Down a long and winding single-lane gravel road, up a rolling hillside, and thence to a lovely broad expanse of sunlit beds. Thousands of blooming (early early, this time of year) daylilies. Are they open? There’s no “Open” sign? Me, I fret about these things, don’t want to bother folks on Sunday. Is it a house? A business? Are they open? Are we being rude?
One shouldn’t worry about these things too much, I realize in hindsight. The Hays family are home, and it is their home, and they’re great folks and own and sell some amazingly pretty flowers. As is often the case with hobby-related businesses, they originally started selling their lilies so they could make more room for the new ones, and now they have a catalog of several hundreds. Lise and her son were out working on the labeling, and we chat for some time (here they are with Barbara) about the various merits and dangers of waterproof markers, metal tags, plastic ties, and sun-bleaching.
The ironic juxtaposition of daylilies and books should be pointed out, as it was that afternoon. Hobbies gone wild. Here we all are, surrounded by the extras of our hobbies gone wild. Though their hobby brings them in contact with wondrous, appealing stuff like frogs and decorated dragonflies; mine with icky silverfish and mildew.
Not only are there daylilies that the Hayses have collected for themselves through the years, but special Hays-bred Hemerocallis, and Asian lilies in respectably vivid hues, and also Japanese irises. Beautiful plants I’ve never had an eye for, but here presenting an strikingly robust yet frilly habit. Another thing to accumulate, someday.
After the books.
But the daylilies. I try to situate myself to take an overall picture of their beds, but there are a dozen beds at least, all containing several hundred plants. Not a chance — the horizon is too close to get them all. Instead, we chat, run around oohing and admiring, noting that there was no rust apparent, and listening to what I can only assume was a mockingbird loudly impersonating in turns a bluejay, a cardinal, the distinctive and well-known “screeeeeee” of the red-tailed hawk, and a crow. (Unless that was a really crowded oak tree.)
We promise to return. And we will. My Mom will want to see them. I want to see them. If you live in a place where it can be arranged, you really ought to go see a thousand or so different daylily hybrids, all in bloom at once. Try July in Michigan, and earlier farther south in the US.
And if you’re in the area, try the Hays’ Daylily Farm, in about two weeks.
4:00pm 20 June 2004 [300 miles] All the way to Philippi, I have a loose memory rattling around in my skull. What is it about Philippi? We have no guidebooks since we didn’t expect to be here at all, so it can’t be something I read recently… ahh, well, we’ll just have to look —
What’s this. A covered bridge? An interesting bridge. An old bridge, clearly. Ohh, blast, now this is really starting to feel familiar from something I’ve seen, yet I’ve never been here… what is it about Philippi?!
Aha! From the gas station across the bridge, looking back towards the northern part of town, an image of the old train depot sparks the memory! From a TV show watched late at night, Discovery or National Geographic or Fox…. Mummies! The Philippi Mummies! I nab Barbara as she comes out of the gas station, and we drive back into the little depot museum. Surely, they will know something about the mummies!
Unanticipated forteana: always a plus.
When we walk into the museum, we meet Olivia Sue Lambert, the volunteer curator. First thing she does is tell us the historical museum is free of charge, and we should enjoy our visit. Second thing she does is look me in the eye, then looks us up and down, then says with a grin, “And if you’d like to see the mummies, there’s a dollar-a-person charge.”
Hurrah! She not only knows about the mummies, she has them readily at hand.
Ms. Lambert is a lovely lady, full of humor and anecdote and a delighted enthusiasm regarding the things and stuff that have been entrusted and accumulated here in the Barbour County Historical Museum. Not least the militaria (we hear about the Philippi Races, the first land battle of the Civil War, and how it came to be called by that unusual name), the bridge (we learn how its inventor won the contract for building it by standing on his scale model, embarrassing the other competitors who could not; we learn how it was the site of the battle; we learn how not long ago it blew up and burned, yet was simply scraped clean and set back in place), the category 1 hurricane of 1985 that submerged the town and the building (and the memorabilia and the mummies) for several days, the odds and ends that folks find in the dirt and their attics and bring in ‘acause they’re old, which are then identified in many cases by the visitors). And she shows us a miraculous lawnmower. I suppose said lawnmower might be considered the least of the marvels by those enamored of battles and famous names and the like, but I assure you it was a fascinating thing I can’t begin to describe here, for it functions in a manner utterly unlike any extant lawnmower one may see today.
I am embarrassed to say, however, that all during this extravaganza I tend to check my watch. In hindsight I wish I hadn’t rushed things — I wish we’d just given up the day at this point and settled there in Philippi for the night and spent another hour or two in the museum and the local environs. But alas I ask, if politely and in a roundabout way, about the mysterious closed door for which we had paid our two greenbacks.
And so we get to see the mummies. We learn a great deal about them. They are the bodies of the insane. The means of their nigh-miraculous preservation is not only known, it’s patented. No mercury or arsenic was used in their preservation, but rather a safe, cheap and in fact potable embalming mixture was used to preserve them — and do please recall that they were under water for four days straight when Hurricane Juan hit. These sad mad dead folk are really and truly preserved.
Much more information passes amongst us (in both directions, since of course we add our own observations and insights to the mix), but I fear I do not have the time to spell it all out here. We discuss the wonders of Civil War period Howitzer shells, and partial weapons lost by famous and sometimes foolish generals, the letters of semi-famous people, the pleasures of well-preserved furniture, the odd rocks that are brought to the museum by kids and turn out to be of great interest, and drums that were at the battle of Appomatox.
I heartily recommend the Barbour County Historical Museum as a destination — along with the Hays’s place — and frankly pine for a day or two to spend the area. We missed the renovated mansion, the historic downtown area of Philippi, and numerous other sights of interest in the surrounding area. And everybody should have a chance to chat with Olivia Sue Lambert. Really.
But, but, but. Practicality intrudes in our vacationlet. What with the daylilies and museum, we note that the sun is lowering. Ms. Lambert asks us where we’re heading, and when she hears it’s Staunton she makes a worried sound and a frowny face and advises us that the mountain switchbacks can be tricky at this time of the day. Sound advice from a local (always take it, except when it comes to the best ice cream in town), so we ask after an alternative route. Since this is the vacationish day anyway, we head down towards Lewisburg, WV instead of Staunton on her advice. Much easier and more straightforward, we are told, and we all three wave goodbye and part for now.
approx 8:00pm 20 June 2004 [429 miles] In hindsight, I can’t imagine what US 250 between Phillippi and Staunton must be like. It must be very, very bad. Like mountain roads in disputed areas of Kashmir, perhaps, full of washed-out gravel ledges over mile-deep gorges, and bomb craters. Because the alternative “straightforward” route suggested by Olivia Sue is an exhausting rollercoaster of high-speed two-lane bends, flashing sunlight and shadows, and crazy mountain drivers. Puking, and avoiding it, is a frequent subject of conversation as my motion-sick wife and I find places to pull over and take a breather.
Three hours later, we arrive.
Aggh. Must. Sleep. Hampton Inn, Lewisburg, WV. Aggh. Nice. Ow. Shoneys. Fine. Eat there.
Ahh, the blessed oblivion experienced by the diligent vacationer. Nothing like it.
9:00am 21 June 2004 [429 miles] I am awakened this morning by a vivid dream featuring interior designers of the California mode, all short frosted hair and muscle shirts on the buff tan men, and low-slung tight black jeans and long straight hair on the busty women. For some reason we are having our house (well, not our house now, but our dream house of course) redecorated, and are taking bids, and so these people who are unquestionably from some television show or other are one of the bidders on the job. But for some reason they assume they already have the job, even though they are competing against reasonable normal folks who are not going to glue grass on the walls. I recall a mounting sense of frustration and failure to communicate — they are clearly confused by the fact that I don’t want to be on television, and couldn’t care less what people think. And then some one of them hands me a schedule. It covers four days, and labels the wee hours of the day with things like “living room shots” and “interview with decorator” and “owners painting”. My outrage at their presumption mounts, and peaks (in a way that wakes me up) when I see the name of the decorator who is going to be in charge of our house: Oval von Oval.
Remember that name. It will be important later. Not in this narrative, of course — I mean it’s just a cool name and should become important. Go ahead, use it. Make it so.
Anyway, today the vacation is over. The day of work begins, and the sky begins to cloud up. Piling omen upon omen, the Student Osteopathic Medical Association has left a plastic discount card under our windshield wiper sometime during the night.
9:11am 21 June 2004 [443 miles] The Virginia border. The mountains are beautiful, even from the freeway — perhaps moreso because one is less prone to puking on the gentler curves. But the gray sky looms low.
10:51am 21 June 2004 [532 miles] We pull into the parking lot of the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton to call JH and tell her we’re almost there. Mapquest gives us wrong street names (as usual), but we follow the spirit of the instructions rather than the letter, and all seems well.
What, though, is the abandoned antebellum building that sits at the entrance to the Museum parking lot. A lost orphanage, with its windows shot out? A hospital for veterans of the Civil War? The set for a Southern gothic ghost story?
We leave it for another time. A different investigation. If you want to see it, just get off I-83 at the Staunton exit and turn west — you can’t miss it.
approx 11am 21 June 2004 [540 miles] We have arrived. JH and her husband meet us, and we all seem enthused about the process — they’re happy to see the books go and the money come in (though I note she’s now a PowerSeller on the basis of these books), and we’re getting Lots. Of. Old. Books.
JH leads us into their little house, and asks if we’re ready. Barbara and I laugh and smile and think (with a slight sense of foreboding) about how it is that we need to be “ready.” Is JH simply responding to our excitement? Or is there something we haven’t planned for involved here, like a fraying rope bridge across a fiery chasm? I say something like, “Sure! Let’s get started, shall we?”
Then JH opens the door to the room she’s been using to store the books.
This is the pig in the poke. You have to admit, it has that look, at least at first — a good deal of pig, and not a little poke, too.
Well, well, JH did tell me that there were enough to fill a twin bedframe about five feet high. There’s the bedframe to prove it. And, yes, I now can hear her insistence that they’d go into a pickup truck — which is feasible, if they’re stacked five feet high. Like the Beverly Hillbillies.
So erring on the side of caution seems to have been a good idea, at this moment.
But there are many mixed feelings. Books, yes. Most of 2000, I think.
They don’t give a good first impression. Stacked higgledy-piggledy in old, damp boxes. Dusty musty books in dank damp boxes. We learn from JH that she bought them at an estate auction. The deceased had bought them when a local women’s college (Fairfax Hall) closed some years back, and he had stored them for a few more years in a number of barns. She bought one barn-full a few months back, and has been selling some of the choicer morsels since then. But she has no idea what’s in the pile, really, since she sortof started up near the top when they were brought into the room, after clearing out the worst rat-nibbled and bird-shat ones.
So we get what we get. Some of the good stuff is gone — but not all. Catch-as-catch-can.
Only fair! Just what I signed up for, I suppose. I sit down at her computer and pay her via PayPal. Then we all gird our loins and stand around staring at the stack with our arms akimbo, and do all the other things people tend to do when surveying a mess of hard work on a hot day, and eventually set to hauling. I recall scratching my chin a few times, for instance. (It’s a guy thing.)
Time passes. We sweat. I rearrange the car. I stuff. I purge. I unpack and repack. I shake my head a lot. Barbara and JH and her husband box and haul and stack stuff and carry it outside into the driveway. Finally, we reach a state of ultimate compression — no more books will go into the car. Some few boxes are left behind, containing children’s books and bestsellers, thank goodness. Or I’d’ve had to strap them on the roof with Grannie.
Actually, it’s lucky we didn’t bring any Grannies. Or the dog. Or thick clothes. This is what the car looks like, just before I slam the tailgate. It is stacked within a foot of the interior roof from the rear door to the back of the front pair of seats. It is sagging, since this many books weigh about a ton I’d guess.
It is also dusty and dirty and stinks of birdshit and mildew and mice, frankly.
In all, it’s a wonderful, terrifying prospect. It implies horrors and delights; tragic loss and great profit; intellectual amazement and vast seas of disappointing trash.
After all, it’s lots of old books. Books are not merely the objects they are, but also the things they describe.
You have to expect a world-full of such stuff to weigh a lot. And possess a bit of stink. Contained multitudes, for example, are well-known stinkers….
1:16pm 21 June 2004 [543 miles] As we wave at JH and her husband and son and cats, who are great people and friendly as all get-out, and to whom I hope only the best befalls, the Bad First Impression starts to kick in. There is a bit of smell. There is a deal of dust. Nobody has looked through these boxes for years, in some cases, and at least a few of them were exposed to animals and filth.
What have we got? Is there anything in there worth saving?
Doubts are dangerous things. I mourn quietly to myself at the thought that we may have driven twelve hours through the mountains to buy a ton of silverfish and birdshit, just to haul it back through the same mountains to throw it in the dump.
2:25pm 21 June 2004 [580 miles] We pull into a Dairy Queen in Lexington, WV to wash up (again, having washed up back at JH’s house), and have a snack, and ponder what we’ve got ourselves into.
There’s dirt, and there’s dirt. Soil is a good dirt, earthy and ripe with possibility. Dust like that we’re covered with, though, well that’s allergic dirt, ripe only with the possibility of sneezing and headaches and itching eyes.
Nothing like waiting until you have a closed minivan full of ferocious allergens to make you appreciate the simple elegance of the pickup truck. Would you rather have the windows closed and the air conditioning simply concentrating the bad smells and floating dust, or have the windows open and allow eddies and vortexes to swirl it straight into your eyes and mouth?
A word of warning to sensitive bibliomaniacs: Buy loads of old books from dry locales. New Mexico, or people with radiant heat and not forced-air.
But we don’t really know it’s all crap, neither literally nor figuratively. Books, covers, and judging: you know what to do with those three things.
Our moderately gray mood is livened by a tasty Dairy Queen chokkit milkshake, and also the sight of a couple of middle-aged folks wearing the most stereotypical Greebrier Golf Resort togs one can imagine. White shirts with logos. Khaki shorts. Sunglasses on black cords. An SUV with a vanity license. Lord, they have to be doctors.
Unless, of course, they’re dentists.
3:23pm 21 June 2004 [648 miles] Back where we started in the morning. Only later.
9:03pm 21 June 2004 [997 miles] We arrive back in Plain City. Darkness has fallen. Nonstop driving since lunch. Aggh. Must. Sleep. Ow. &c &c
8:10am 22 June 2004 [997 miles] You realize, of course, that we cannot simply take these books home with us. They have to be gotten out of the boxes, cleaned, dried, sorted, disinfected or washed as appropriate, and trashed if need be. So today and tomorrow shall be known evermore as the Days of the Great Sorting.
And they are two days of revelation and discovery. [If you’re tired of reading, you lazy bum, here: we do find treasure. Lots of it.]
So we set up shop in the garage — mainly by just offloading the boxes into a single layer on the floor and the ground when the floor is full. Jake, our Boston Terrier, finds them fascinating.
His opinion should convey a lot to the astute reader: Jake is a dog who revels in stinks and stenches, who rolls enthusiastically in shits of all kinds, who enjoys a good bug-chase at least as much as any of us. He’s captivated by these new objects, investigating them for most of an hour with lots of deep snorking infusions of eau de stinky book, like some sort of canine connoisseur. Bostons have short noses, and need to take deep draughts of air to get much out of them, so he runs his head all over the piles like a wine aficionado snorting glasses of wine at a tasting.
An aficionado who sneezes a lot.
Barbara and I just take drugs. Antihistamines. Decongestants. And wash a lot. Paper towels are everywhere. As we handle the worst books, there is I confess some “eeew”-ing.
In the sunlight this morning, it appears that we have some boxes that look very promising, filled with clean, dry old valuable books. And we also have some boxes that look and feel depressingly like mulch. Used mulch. We see leather-bound spines, but also modern Books of the Month from library sales. We see sets and partial sets and pieces of other sets. We pick at the edges and see some very odd and exciting things. There are many small pieces, a jumble. A number of small 12mo and 16mo black books, cloth-bound, on rag paper — which is good.
And also many very nasty things. All mixed up together — which is bad.
We need to take every goddamn one of them out of the boxes, look at them all, clean them all, and cull the sick and wounded. We enter triage mode.
When you’re doing book triage, each experience is different. Unique simple rules must be developed to handle the problems of every different stack of old books, but there are standards rules of thumb: First, any damp book gets trashed immediately. Any book with birdshit on the pages, trashed immediately (the covers can be cleaned, sometimes). Also: books with live silverfish and firebrats; books with no binding or covers; books missing big chunks; books with white mildew thriving on them; books that have been wet and dried into materials resembling engineered wood products more suitable for building (or perhaps sculptures). And books that smell of cat pee.
First box I open contains a good omen: The Repairing of Books.
Unfortunately, the good omen takes some time to kick in. Around lunchtime on Day One of the Great Sorting, I come across this lesson in terror. Many of my readers are, I know, book people. “Bookworms,” yes? Some are perhaps flattered, like smart people who like to be thought of as “eggheads.”
Don’t be hasty. Have you ever seen what a bookworm does? As a human bookworm, you should be terrified of the real thing, and offended by the moniker. Here are the front cover, a middle page, and the back cover of a book devoured by bookworms. See this, ye bibliophiles, and experience true terror. Note that the final image’s “blotty shape” is actually a void about forty pages deep, and that the little holes my fingers are near in the second image pass through the entire book from front to back:
But these few items are nothing in the scope of the whole pile. Barbara and I spend much of both days crouched on folding chairs in her parents’ driveway, moving piles around, checking to see whether each volume passes muster and is more or less uninhabited. Anything that is particularly rare or valuable wins tacit points, even if it harbors a thriving crop of mold or city of bugs, and is set in the noonday sun to cook and dry.
After a few hours, it starts to dawn on me: It’s not that bad, after all. The number of dead books is running at around 1/3, and of the remaining 2/3 there are some unique and clean and lovely treasures. We take all care to keep them well away from the critters, and wipe and de-smell them as much as possible.
You know, with a dab here and there, some sun, and maybe a little make-up, they’ll clean up real purty.
By the end of the first day we have made our way once through the whole intimidating stack.
If you’d asked me back at Dairy Queen I’d’ve said we would have to just haul them all straight to the dump. Now I know: We are not doomed! Even though our muscles ache and our minds are worn down with the incessant litany of, “Oh, look at this! A German book on the works of Plato!” “Oh, look at this, a bound volume of 1870s sheet music, infested with silverfish! Aggh!” “Oh, wow, check out these Arts and Crafts gardening books!” “Damn damn damn damn, there are 45 of 46 volumes of this Waverley set!” &c &c And, of course, “Eeew. Ugh. Ick. Whew.”
Now then, a didactic word in your ear, gentle reader: Let us all pause a few moments to mourn the passing of the greats shown in this picture, some of which were in fact unique author-signed volumes, and partial sets of early 19th-Century works, and illustrated with cunning wood engravings or chromolithographs, or were even Book of the Month Club Special Selections or 1960s high-school English textbooks…. But we cannot save everybody. All must, in their own time, die.
So at day’s end, exhausted, sore, and sunburned (silverfish are not the only ones injured by ultraviolet and dryness), we gave it all up and sat surrounded by a pile of trash, and a pile of “keepers”.
I feel like a general after a very bad turn on the battlefield: Thankfully, the majority are still here with us today.
9:12am 21 June 2004 [add 144 more miles to account for the trip to the landfill]
Authors: reflect with care. Conceit and vanity may lead you to imagine the final resting place of your work as a well-dusted University library shelf, or a remainder stack, or even (at worst) in a decorative stack in a furniture store. Nope. For these few hundreds, as with untold millions more, the final resting place is a combination of (a) the guts of some bugs, and (b) the Buckeye Waste SVC tip just north of Bellefontaine, OH.
Day two of the Great Sorting will involve cleaning as many as possible of the healthy and wounded (as opposed to the dead, now buried). Meticulously, each damp or buggy book must be sun-dried; each bird-limed cover carefully chipped and wiped with a damp cloth (then dried); every filthily dusty cover and edge (six, recall) of every dusty tome wiped with a Swiffer and a paper towel; each interior page that has birdseed or mouse droppings fluffed and puffed and fluttered until it’s clean; each bookworm-eaten volume examined to see if the damage might be innocuous or severe. Triage, in other words, must go on.
Indeed, this is the day for Barbara’s main focus, the treasure I used to tempt her into the whole irredeemably dirty act: the Project Gutenberg books. There are those books that had to be destroyed. There are those books that should be kept or sold. But there is a sad, ragged crew of books that are “complete”, but undesirable, whether through mildew or missing covers or diverse inhabitants. All yesterday we set these aside, and today Barbara logs into the Gutenberg HQ and checks to see which (if any) are already present in the archive or logged for copyright clearance. A substantial stack pass muster, and so someday soon we’ll rip them up and pass then fast (and fastidiously) as possible through the scanner so that their contents can be saved and passed along to posterity.
At the end of the day, we have all fourteen of the clean boxes (the 12” x 12” x 16” special book boxes from Uline), packed full of miscellaneous mostly-cleaned books that range from “good enough” to “wow”. There are about 100 books in the Gutenberg-worthy category, and we’ll just leave them here in Barbara’s parents’ garage. Another six to ten boxes’ worth of clean and dirty books remain.
About 1000 books, as I judge it. About 5% are scarce and rare and extremely desirable. About 5% are commonplace, but nice enough to sell, for example early 1940s BOMC romances. But the rest, the big bulging middle of the bell curve, we still have to research. Now that we know they’re nice, the remaining work is intellectual. Online. Detailed.
As for the future, well… At least some of that 5% of the neat stuff is mine. We went and got them. We paid for them. We’re fixing them up, as needed. And so we get to keep them. Because they’re cool as shit.
Some of the rest are Barbara’s, often somewhat hurt or infested or infected but still containing all the words and pictures, lost words of lost authors, little-known but well-regarded. So soon she’ll scan and share and post them, as time allows. There are some beauts in this fraction, too. Real treasure — not of the monetary sort, but rather the sort that makes you smile and teaches you about the way the world is. And was. Words learned and foolish, from women and men long dead and wrongly forgotten.
The rest? The rest are yours. Well, somebody else’s. They’ll help pay for the trip itself.
I’ll let you readers know about the auctions as they crop up. After all, you’re such a good reader anyway, having made it this far through a simple travelog, that you deserve a special notice. As we crack open the clean boxes — the disinfected and pest-controlled boxes, mind you! — we’ll let you know what antiquarian treasures appear. They’re there. Because they’re still all in a jumble.
But it’s a clean jumble, now. And one with distilled potential.
So, thank you, JH. Thanks very much. I’m pleased as punch. The pig in the poke turned out to be far better than it could have been. The bad is gone, the best is mine, and the rest is worth the effort.
Consider this the longest positive feedback you — or any other eBay user — has received.
June 18, 2004 at 7:43 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A Dutch flower auction runs (roughly) like this: The price for a lot starts at a high number. At the beginning of the auction, a large clock on the wall begins counting down — quickly — from the high price to lower and lower prices. The first bidder to stop the clock agrees to pay the currently-shown price for the lot.
There are some details I’ve elided, like the fact that there are often multiple items in a lot and thus bids are being made on portions, but let’s ignore that.
I’ve been looking for software to sell things on my websites using this sort of format: I’d start a book, for example, at $50, and then every day the price would decrement by $1. Whoever sent an email, or maybe sent money via PayPal, would get the thing. Simple, efficient, and nice.
So far, I can’t find any. The only stuff I can find is “reverse” auction modules for PHPAuction and the like, which are not the same as Dutch flower-style auctions. And of course eBay has redefined the “Dutch” auction to suit their own metaphor, a very different animal indeed.
Well, anyway, you know me by now. I had to break the assumptions of the elegant, supremely efficient marketplace a Dutch flower-style auction provides. Me, I can’t leave well enough alone.
Thus: the Drunkard’s auction.
- Before the beginning of the sale, the Seller of a Lot specifies a minimum price he is willing to accept for the Lot, a maximum price that seems reasonable, and a starting price.
- The Lot is offered openly on the market at the starting price.
- Periodically, the price of the Lot changes randomly, rising or falling by a fixed (multiplicative) factor, but bounded on the bottom by the minimum price and bounded on the top by the maximum price.
- Buyers may purchase the Lot at any time: first-come, first-served.
Suppose the multiplicative factor is 9%. So if we start a lot at $77 with a floor of $30 and a ceiling of $120, then the asked price in the first period will be $77, in the second period it may be $70.07 or $83.93, in the third period it will be one of {$63.76, $76.38 (twice as often), $91.48}, and so forth.
Not as efficient as the decrementing Dutch flower-style auction, is it? Discuss, if it seems worthy of discussion: strategies for buyer and seller (if any), how it might function in markets such as blogs in which customers are not sitting there anxiously staring at clocks on the wall with their fingers poised over buttons, and whether there might be more reasonable methods of walking (such as additive increments, or weighted probabilities of up- and down-ticks depending on where in the price range the current price sits.
[Frankly, I lied when I said I was just suggesting this to break the assumptions and see what happens — I think this is an improvement over the decremented version exactly because of the asynchronous and low-volume market online sales experience. Plus it would appeal to market timers, who I suspect tend to buy more.)
I’m curious to know whether there are sniping strategies in this or the Dutch flower-style sale, and whether these might be offset by making the length of each period an i.i.d. random variable as well.
It also strikes me as something a cron job and a PayPal storefront might manage to run handily. Off to check that….
June 15, 2004 at 12:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Business Week has run an enthusiastic article touting the coming age of Digital Convergence. In a slashdot comment on the thing, the old “your fridge will know when you need to order milk” trope is trotted out.
That’s a short-sighted idea that I’ve slapped around in public before, but I just realized that it was back before Notional Slurry when I was giving workshops and seminars and tutorials at OOPSLA and ASA/MA and other conferences. So I thought, since I was reminded, I’d pass along what I tell my audiences and customers.
If you don’t know it, the “fridge orders your milk” trope most often crops up in conversations regarding autonomous software agents and agent-based design. The story goes something like, “In the future, every electronic device (a) will be networked, and (b) will be controlled by an autonomous agent-based software system that communicates through the ubiquitous network to other agents. So your agent-based fridge will, for example, read the barcode on the milk when it gets put in, and keep track of when it is about to expire, and will either remind you to buy more or will order it for you.”
Strangely enough, my gripe is not that I don’t believe it. Indeed, I expect it will be literally true in the near future — if only because every short-sighted gurulette has heard it and passed it on to Marketing a dozen times at over the last decade. If you can’t buy a modem equipped or Bluetooth milk-aware fridge from Hammacher-Schlemmer in the next couple of years, I’ll make you eat your hat.
But, if I may say so, it’s the most irredeemably boring vision of the future I’ve heard for several decades. My fridge will order my milk? Thousands of man-hours of research and thought by diligent creative grad students and technicians and a few professors leads to the disintermediation of the fucking shopping list industry? What happens to all the innumerable real advances in multi-agent systems, smart materials, affective computing, and ubiquitous computing? We forget them, like the people in the Star Trek universe all forgot how to use an automatic pilot or a computer targeting system?
You want to know when agent-based design is here? Not when my fridge reads barcodes. No, it goes like this:
My milk will sense it’s not feeling well, and will chat with the fridge and maybe ask it have a look-see with its extra senses and bring its extra smarts to bear, or ask some friends. Together they concoct a plan to remedy the situation. Maybe they do some chemistry. Maybe they develop some antibodies. Maybe they try to talk the bacteria out of their harshness, convert to a nice communal yoghurt and seek a permanent existence as a collective, nurtured and supported by the sheltering fridge. The least they can do is see it off to a noble end, with a little dignity, and make arrangements to take care of its progeny.
Agent-based engineering and design won’t really be here, except as a wannabe immature field or a suite of design patterns, until something like that comes to pass. And if you really attend to how the research is going and how we can make things happen already, this one is just as inevitable as the fridge scenario.
Screw the disintermediation of traditional advertising, the introduction of disruptive technologies to electronics consumers, and the enabling of networked hardware for ubiquitous seamless e-commerce.
No, I’ll be satisfied with nothing less than the disintermediation of design itself, and the empowerment of stuff.
April 10, 2004 at 7:45 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been thinking, this morning. Always a dangerous proposition.
I’d like to revisit discussions of information overload and our cultural responses to it again, but this time in a much more quirky, wandering way.
Which is salient.
Forewarned is forearmed.
My wife and I have been posting articles and essays and some poetry gleaned from the local newspapers and magazines of a century ago, starting… well, starting in 1996, but we’ve recently picked up the pace because of this lovely content management system we now have at our fingertips. It’s a pleasant hobby, though looking at the web server log files, I’m not sure many folks get why.
Having only yesterday heard Barbara muttering “fascinating…” to herself as she re-typeset an old newspaper advertisement for something or other, I’m certain that her pleasure is much as mine — sufficient pleasure, in my case, that I dubbed our little whistling-in-the-dark hobby with the self-important label “nanohistory.”
I think the best way to describe the feeling of delight is: the thrill of discovery in the web of implication.
We don’t hike so much these days (and even when we did it was generally along well-trodden paths frequented by the most mundane of tourists), and we have never camped or spent time in remote parts of the world, so we don’t get to explore wilderness of that kind. Neither do we have much chance to do archaeological work, nor mad science-scale inventing, nor discovering new species in drops of water in our back yards. But we make do.
Instead, this is the trace of one of our recent forays into the nano-scale historical network: When we were living in Hanover, PA, we learned the pleasure of going to estate auctions. One estate auction we particularly enjoyed was that of an English professor at York College. One of the car-load of books we bought there (for $100 or so, total) was Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore, which belonged to his wife (or mother?) Clara Moul. This exotic-sounding and beautifully-bound volume entered our collection, unread, where it sat unremarked for several years. In 1997 or so I came across a number of articles in the microfilms of a local newspaper, all entitled “Lalla Rookh”. Not reading them too closely, I printed them and bagged them with the rest for future transcription. This week, Barbara is transcribing them, and it turns out (as I follow her account) that they are announcements of a Pyrotechnic Extravaganza celebrating the completion of The Detroit Railway —- pyrotechnics having something (perhaps an orientale theme) to do with the best-selling book Lalla Rookh. The Pyrotechnics (provided my a Mr. Pain) were to be held at Boulevard Park in Detroit. Boulevard Park is gone, perhaps replaced or over-paved by Tigers Stadium. Oddly enough, when we were driving (on a lark) to the casino Thursday, we passed a local delivery truck labeled “Pain”, and from the parking structure at the Motor City Casino one has a good view of the devastated ground and lost neighborhoods surrounding Comerica Park, where Tigers Stadium used to sit….
I could move on from there, of course, but you get the picture. I have not mentioned the side-branches which lead from The Detroit Railway to the Electric Road which used to pass from Ann Arbor to Detroit one block from our house, to the days of ubiquitous trolleys, to the afternoon we visited the local historian and discovered that a block away in another direction is a pair of developments built between 1890 and 1900 (to cash in on the Electric Road as modern developers in Chelsea cash in on the presence of the Interstates?), to the SLUCE Project at the University of Michigan… and onwards. Or the other path that leads in the direction of the Pain family, among whom one would imagine a pyrotechnician worthy of celebrating a railroad’s completion with an ornate oriental flair could be easy to spot.
You will learn nothing of this by Googling. Well, until now, that is.
This is not History, as it is taught at least. Nor is it even microhistory, which is an approach used by professional vetted Historians to seek insights in the historical dynamics of a place or family or village. No, this nanohistory is the meandering flow of ephemeral implication and association that makes up our personal and family histories. Not even the things that one would hear in stories told at family reunions or in interviews for “oral history projects”, but rather the stuff the respondent knows so peripherally that they would have to be reminded of it.
And for the most part it’s gone. The physical remnants exist, but the associations and tacit knowledge and memories that linked them are gone. Metadata. I suppose what I’m talking about is metadata.
The next time somebody hands you a photo album, or makes you sit and watch a slide show (whether it’s on a wall or a monitor, family photographs or a research paper), imagine what a viewer might make of it in a century, when the people are dead, and the people telling you what the pictures represent are dead, and the words refer to things that no longer exist. I sell photographs of people who died before 1880, which were removed from the family albums and were never labeled. Who will ever know the names of the people they portray? We can see the clothing and manner, can guess the town in which they lived (for example if the photographer advertised on the reverse), can opine about the commercialization of photography in the 19th Century, but the links between these particular physical artifacts and the people and their personal cultures are gone forever.
Consider the shadows that might be cast by the forest of family trees, just five or six generations back, on the people you now know. Many of them are your relatives — do you know which? The people exist, but the links between them are very effectively lost.
Find a magazine of the 1940s, open it to the back section with the ads, and think about how many of those items being sold are still feasible components of our material culture, let alone desirable or noteworthy. A garter belt? A magnetic healing bracelet? The Rosicrucians? All the things exist still today, but how they were used and perceived and why they were important has changed utterly.
Is this massive loss of context a bad thing?
No, of course not. It might be said that we learn by forgetting, by filtering, by psychic (and physical) apoptosis. Surely we would be inundated not merely by facts and artifacts if we didn’t lose them outright, but the combinatorial explosion would be terrifying if we also kept a record of what everything meant. Things mean something in the context of a personal and cultural experience, and in relation to other things. Semiotic wiring would be laying around everywhere in tangles; we’d be tripping over it all the time….
But it can be fun. And enlightening.
The written works of Peter Ackroyd (especially in Albion and London: The Biography) and Nicholson Baker come to mind as good examples of the power of this approach. Chares Fort, of course. There are others. Many.
I’m not too sure how many. Let’s think about that a minute.
In context
Here we live, in a world arguably inundated by “too much information”. What is often implied is “too much new to learn”. Yet very few of us attend to the mounting pile of rubbish left behind — to families, neighborhoods, lost cultures and languages, the popular culture of foreign countries in distant times, the history of 19th-century itinerant photographers in Iowa. All that stuff still counts as information, immensely over-weighing the new stuff in the information overload tally.
But nobody complains about that, do they? If they complain about needing to know stuff about the past, it’s inevitably the big stuff — history stuff. Wars and presidents and the Party Line on Progress, and all that. Nothing about Pain the Pyrotechnician, nor memorizing Lalla Rookh, nor reading the Book of the Month Club volumes from 1950, nor identifying people mentioned in passing in old newspaper articles.
Yup, anxiety about information overload seems to be extremely forward-looking. Nobody seems to be anxious about the past.
A word on science and collecting
The deep and warming delight I experience in tracing these miniscule courses of implication is exactly the feeling I get when I’m working (successfully) on scientific research — especially complex systems, probability theory and graph theory, which I specifically love because they can give me this feeling. And when I read a particularly inspiring programming language manual, and see what I can do, where I can go with it. And when I discover a new addition to the few things I actually collect (as opposed to the many items I tend to accumulate). It is not the sense of pleasure when one achieves other goals, at least in my experience. It’s not a sense of domination or power; certainly not one of relief, since implication leads to implication forever. Perhaps it’s the thrill of the explorer, or the theologian, or the earnest science fiction fan — but I wouldn’t know that. Alas, I come to believe it is a personal thing, a you had to be there thing.
That may even be part of the pleasure. Would it be so delightful if I had published a book of detailed history and extraordinary scholarship in an esoteric domain? As one of the few hundred people who personally own that book (and as somebody who broke into a immensely self-satisfied grin when I found it in an estate sale last summer), I am thankful to the author for his troubles… but on reflection I’m not sure I’m that driven. Mysteriously pleased as I am to own it, I wouldn’t write such a thing. What a thankless job that would be.
Hmmm… interesting that I say I’m not “driven”. A word oft used to describe these obsessive encyclopedists (Fort, Baker, Ackroyd again; not necessarily the formal ones like Diderot and the others, who rather than hoarding, threw away), specialists (scientific and historical researchers), mathematicians, and even earnest collectors. What on odd coincidence that must seem to be. Driven by what? What motivates all these weirdos exploring and writing and producing new artifacts about obscure crap that nobody else cares about? And in public, on the Web, too.
Yup, definitely we’re overloaded with information.
Two kinds of people
Are there? Two kinds of people?
Here I’m thinking about people who enjoy traversing the web of implications vs. those who don’t. I think Laura and I and Barbara and Ackroyd and Fort and Shalizi and a number of other folks are in the first group.
Surely the people who complain about information overload are in the second. The people who are bothered when their TV Guide lists a hundred channels, who balk when they see music flowing between makers and customers unencumbered by the physical distribution system, who don’t respond to people who send them emails. The people who feel Intelligent Design will be taught in the schools of the future, who feel pornography could be controlled, who have revived the notion of Manifest Destiny.
After all, if they weren’t in the second group… well, they’d see the implications of the implications, wouldn’t they? They’d get that now we are all swimming in a library, inspired by the people they’d equate with the Lords of Chaos (Borges and Fort and Ackroyd and their ilk), not the Lords of Law (Taylor? Diderot?). They still imagine it’s possible to categorize and formalize human endeavor and knowledge. Perhaps they don’t go the next step and say that they want to control it, but they’re willing to say that it should be the same as it’s always been. Alas, as over-simplifiers who ignore all that messy implication in favor of the Big Simple ones, these are the people least suited to understanding how life and culture have actually been. Ever.
Amusingly enough, what “information overload” has taught me this morning is that the people in the second group — the Ashcrofts and RIAAs and Elseviers, Al Qaeda and the Vatican, many of your schoolteachers and politicians, reactionaries and fundamentalists — are constrained by their own decisions to moving only along the old fixed network of knowledge and belief and law and order. The other folks… well, they’re able to make their own paths through the backwaters of implication. Roundabout.
Something like this little meandering essay has turned out.
The only thing the chaos folk must remember is that they must attend not just to trivia, but to the serious work of the world as well. Implications exist on all scales. Those who focus too much on a few large-scale links lack any sense of the complexity of the real world; those who focus too much on the smallest scales miss trends and cultural shifts and public life, and as a result are more easily divided and controlled by their foes.
Hmmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with politics in this country.
Here’s to Pain.
April 9, 2004 at 7:35 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Over at Apt. 11D, in an April 8 post Laura describes her strategies for coping with information overload, and quotes Paglia and others on “kids these days.” Her inspiration, in turn, comes from an interview with David Shenk, author of Data Smog (visit Amazon via her associate’s link, please). Shenk’s book is just one of the current crop of works in many media regarding Information Overload as a negative thing.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a little skeptical of the “information overload” trope of modern commentary. On a couple of fronts.
First, this sense of inundation seems always to be cast as an intrinsic change in us (whether it’s our individual psyches or the culture or what is unclear). In any case, as a biologist and amateur anthropology geek, I have to doubt (a) that we are witnessing unprecedented large-scale changes now, and in fact that (b) people or cultures can so fundamentally change at all. Note that I’m not saying that change doesn’t happen — just that I don’t think the direction of change is towards more knowledge. I’ll tell you where I think it’s headed in a bit.
I can’t bring myself to believe that our forefathers were stupider or had less capacity, or that they failed to use what capacity they had to know and learn and remember stuff. I suspect my great-grandmother knew a lot more than I do about the people who lived in her neighborhood (a Slovak mountain village or a Welsh mining town, depending on the great-grandmother involved), about the local geography and people and folklore and religion, and so forth. Far more than I know about my neighbors. Heck, after seven years of living here, I just learned the surname of my neighbor across the street for the first time yesterday.
Instead, I know a number of people outside my village and valley, and regularly correspond with folks scattered over five continents. Know a lot more about biology and molecular engineering and Java programming and such, and far less about buggies and milking a cow and which local gentry to watch out for in a dark alley.
I have an odd feeling that the same complaints of “not having enough time or energy to keep up” arose when this whole writing thing began, and when books stopped being chained to shelves in libraries, and when the reading-silently-to-yourself thing became popular, and when newspapers and telephony spread, and so forth. In other words, somebody has felt the right to complain that “there’s too much to know these days” more or less steadily throughout history.
The Paglia paragraph Laura invokes strikes me as very similar (stylistically and in terms of attitude) to a paragraph I read in an essay in the Unpopular Review of 1914 (perhaps Cosma, who now owns the book, can confirm this). Or perhaps it was in an 1896 Harpers or Scribners from the late 19th Century.
It’s so hard to keep track of what they’re writing in the magazines these days. Well, what they were writing back in those days.
My point is: the sense of disruption does not arise from a matter of increasing quantity. While Laura (and I) have chosen for personal reasons of preference not to pay attention to contemporary popular things like American Idol and Foucault (and much of Paglia, in my case), the culture as a whole has also led us to give short shrift to buggies and blacksmiths and how to eke out a living from a kitchen garden patch and midwifery &c &c
The interesting thing, to me, is that the main difference caused by technology — books, magazines and such in addition to blogs and email — is a realignment of geographical and temporal boundaries to personal knowledge. Laura writes that on one day when she did her comprehensive exams, she had her head full of the works of Marx. But he’s a dead fellow, who lived an insurmountable distance away. Later today I will have to put aside my head full of aimless social conjecture and restock with a load of machine learning techniques and the R programming language for statistics. Later on, I’ll probably have to work out how to cook a chunk of pork roast given the sparse selection of stuff in our pantry, and perhaps in the evening will spend a few more pleasant hours listening to Jim Dale reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which will require my mind to focus on what it recalls about the dementors, the implications of Albus Dumbledore’s brother, and that froggy lady (we’re not very far into the book yet, but hearing it read skillfully aloud is the only way to go).
That’s a lot of stuff regarding people I never met, written by people I never will meet, in places I will never visit, concerning things — especially in the case of machine learning algorithms and dementors — that I will never actually experience in my physical sensorium. Well, OK, the pork is here, somewhere. But the herbs are from that big company in Baltimore, and the garlic is not garlic I grew myself, and I sure don’t know how to light my stove — it just does it.
All this shuffling around will cause me little or no pain, as it turns out. Indeed, for me it can be a heady experience.
The incorrect thought I’m trying to correct is this: The difficulty and inconvenience and pressure people perceive about “modern life” does not come from increasing demands on their mental capacity. They’re not “getting full.” Their discomfort comes from lack of preparedness.
Think about it. I know generally that I’m headed for a wild ride through the world. I’ve braced myself. While I argue that everybody living in every culture has more or less the same sized stockpile of information in their heads, in my head there is a body of knowledge that acts as a suitable buffer or filter or “padding” to the transitions I make. In the head of, say, my Mom — who was born in the Depression era and enjoys television and reads a book or two a day — there is no infrastructure for coping with “interactive media”, and so interaction with the worlds of modern gaming, email or the Web leaves her feeling stressed.
My Mom’s stress is not from pressure of needing to know more than she can, it’s from acquiring knowledge outside her mental schema. Not “culture” or “future shock” as such, but the subtler relative of that feeling we all experience every day. Laura feels it when she is exposed to American Idol (as do I and Barbara and Cosma and many of my friends and colleagues), but I cope with that stress by hiding the television in a back room, and not having a full cable subscription. My immigrant Slovak grandparents probably felt a good deal of it when they took the long boat ride, but they coped by living in communities of their friends and relatives when they arrived in Cleveland. My fundamentalist relatives probably feel a good deal of it when they hear what happens on Angel, but they cope by going out of their way to avoid such “worldly” things.
But while there are personal and cultural defenses against the discomfort we feel at out-of-schema experiences and knowledge, there are also personal and cultural drives which lead folks to seek out these jarring experiences — things like travel, heresy, amusement parks, libraries, folk art. And some others.
If we feel overwhelmed by all this “new information”, why is it that we keep creating it?
[Updated a couple of cross-links and transferred from archives, 4/22/07]
March 12, 2004 at 8:29 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Some time back I was engaged in a rather wide-ranging discussion/argument on Transhumanism and the Singularity (“rapture for nerds”). One of the tropes through which we danced was the idea that big changes in life—societal and biological—are somehow synchronized. Somewhere along the way I used the phrase “the ragged edge of the future,” and it stuck with me.
I’m thinking about it, still. Or rather percolating on it.
Six unrelated faces of this high-dimensional thought-doodad seem to be:
- Who says the future happens to everybody? Oddly enough — and contrary to many folks’ understanding of biological evolution — the origins of new species are not generally accompanied by the replacement of ancestors. Yet the analogy often drawn between large-scale evolutionary dynamics and social dynamics often seems to depend on this assumption of “succession”, of replacement of inferiors by superiors. Note, though, that there are still bacteria, amoebae, and other “primitive” organisms that supposedly are “inferior” to “higher” ones. The fact that they’re still here, chugging along, and outnumber “higher” organisms by many orders of magnitude should be kept in mind. Does your typical Extropian futurist understand that there might still be peasants and mill-workers, farmers and politicians, doctors and rocket scientists still, even after their fuzzy never-ending “singularity”? I dunno.
- Sloppy punctuation: oft-misunderstood facts about punctuated equilibrium, revolutions and the like. Generally, I’m thinking here about how the lay understanding of Gould and Eldredge’s notion of punctuated equlibria seems to be misshapen by some assumptions that aren’t in the original framing. Folks—especially those who invoke it as a metaphor for social transformation and other sorts of general large-scale transformations—seem to think the Burgess Shale was a kindof flash-illuminated snapshot, happening instantaneously and universally. That is, that all of a sudden everything changed overnight, everywhere. It’s often dangerous when a strict scientific notion with a specific meaning is used as a loose metaphor, as with the foolish equation of “punctuated equilibrium” with “revolution”, and sad and stupid when it’s done wrong. A list of some of the frequent errors and misunderstandings regarding PE are available at talk.origins.
- The irreversible “arrow of complexity” There is apparently a trend in increasing complexity in biological evolutionary history. This is another metaphor oft bandied about regarding the coming time of extraordinary change: we’re about to leap to a new level of complex social life, it’s said, caused by all this new technology we have. My hesitation about this optimistic take on life is, frankly, the overwhelmingly intense flavor of hubris it carries.
First, the inherence of the “arrow” of complexity should be treated with some caution and skepticism. Try a little thought experiment: Colonize Mars, taking humans and any ten other species you like. If they remain completely isolated from Earth, what do you think will happen to the “complexity” of the colonists’ post-human descendants over the next few million years? You think the inherent drive towards greater complexity will lead these humans to evolve into some post-human godlike intelligence? I suspect rather that they and their ten other companion species will diversify to compete for the ecological niches available, which is to say, most of them. So if I were you, I’d worry about counting on any kind of “complexity momentum” in near-future social evolution.
Might it be, rather, that what drives increasing complexity is that ecological niches at “lower” levels are filled up and locked tight by the extraordinary success of the organisms that inhabit them, and that a sudden increase in organismal complexity is some sort of last-ditch effort to re-write the playing field? Note again that less-complex species seem to be perfectly fit, in that they hang around, seemingly forever. (Dan McShea’s done some work on this, which I hope to revisit; I’ve lost track of it since when we were both at SFI together.)
Second, you should be skeptical about the benefits of what is perceived as increased complexity. What exactly is inherently better about being a sociable, Internet-using human being than, say a bristlecone pine? I dunno. What’s inherently better about being an modern American, Internet-using guy than, say a Trobriand Islander in the 1400s? Here it seems clearer: dentistry and cars and grocery stores, and a lack of most epidemics, stone-axe wielding enemies, and so forth. Well… and yet: on the atomic war, hectic teaching schedules, bankruptcy, and ubiquitous-estrogen-mimicking-hormones-messing-up-your-body fronts? I dunno.
To me, this is just a Great Chain of Being argument—the same sort of religious or pseudoreligious discrimination that sets humanity apart from the rest of the world as a special creation of some sort, and sets “modern Western civ” apart from everybody else. Do we sit atop the heap? Are you sure? I dunno.
I’m not a PoMo relativist, mind you. That would be silly. But somebody has to ask: Does it matter to your model of the world if you integrate yourself into it, instead of standing apart?
- What do you call it when there’s always a revolution? This is more an abstract question, really. Suppose there are big changes that revolutionize life. Social or biological — you pick. Take it as a given. But also suppose that there are many small changes for each bigger one, and that they’re all going concurrently, all the time. How many really small ‘revolutions” does it take to equal the extent of a big one? How many does it take to counteract or mask the effects of the big one? I dunno.
- How efficient we are at information processing? Much is made of the fact that there’s “too much information these days”. Too much for what? First, economies work on the basis of boundedly-rational agents, not the rational all-knowing spirits invoked by traditional economists. Second, people use simple heuristics to manage their daily lives and make decisions, not rational contemplation of all the facts. Third, most people don’t ever even read most news, email, watch most television, or any of the other media stuff we’re “inundated” with — nor need they to make their way in life. We’re awash in information all the time these days, but we don’t pay any more attention than we used to. So what’s the problem? I dunno.
That said, I’m still wondering what makes people believe that humans process more information than an equivalent pile of any other organism. Aside from stating “that’s not what we mean when we say ‘information’”, nobody’s explained the assumption. I dunno.
- …like the back of your hand? Do we know more than people did long ago? I don’t think so, somehow. What does seem to be different—and interesting—is that people in my great-grandfather’s generation would have known far more about their local geographical region and things done by people closely related to them than I do, whereas I know a lot more about things done far away by people unlike me. Why is this interesting? Does it show a noteworthy trend in cultural history? I dunno.
I’d like to tie these together; they’re definitely related and interconnected. But I’m mulling and acquiring, still. Thus, I would welcome pointers to scholarly work on these subjects.
[Updated links and retrieved from archives, 4/22/07]
March 10, 2004 at 8:53 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I was a tad disingenuous in an earlier post: in the back of my mind, I have always been planning something specific to do with the reverted wilderness acreage we’re buying in the country.
Victorian amateur scientists have always fascinated me. I imagine fondly that someday in the next few months you will find me ensconced at a portable table out in “the back”, wearing my sun hat and glasses, with my WANned iBook and cheap USB microscope, live-blogging pictures of my very own algae, rotifers, seed capsules and suchlike. Better by far, in my technophilic opinion, than a mouldering leather-bound personal journal filed with watercolors of toadstools and calligraphic noodling.
See, I often pine for the days when not just landed gentry but regular folks had microscopes and telescopes and fossil-collecting handbooks and terraria and bred doves and lilies and otherwise learned something first-hand about the real world in their own gardens and town auditoria. The social norm of public scientific inquiry faded long ago, of course, but now I practically despair over it. For example, home-schooling parents are probably the biggest purchasers of microscopes and science training stuff for their kids, but the demographics (and general anti-intellectualism) of the majority of home-school parents don’t encourage me that biological learning is being thoroughly elucidated in these efforts. Most “nature stuff” people do these days pays attention only to the sort of big dramatic cheetah-kills-antelope stuff they’re exposed to on TV: whale-watching, hiking, hunting, birding and the like. They tramp miles through equally interesting but ignored life to go and see the animals, and then tramp back home and sit back down in front of the TV, their boots covered in fascinating stuff on the mat by the door.
Some small part of the reason people don’t “do science” is the cost of equipment and supplies. Yes, a nice gas chromatograph is still rather pricey, and a useful telescope will set you back a few grand. But I spent $30 on my 200x plastic USB microscope (it’s a discontinued toy), and I have this computer just sortof sitting around warming my lap up all the time anyway. So I’m not entirely certain that it’s reason enough ever. Except maybe nuclear physics, and maybe radio astronomy.
Some other part of the reason is supposed to be the difficulty of getting your head around today’s super-specialized scientific knowledge. People (kids) are not trained in science, therefore not qualified to do it. They need somebody to train them in the methods, and show them what they’re supposed to be looking for, and what it means in context. This indicates to many people that science teachers are required, and parents therefore off the hook. But take it from me: I taught botany to wannabe science teachers for three years; you would be frightened or very very sad if you really understood how bad they were at thinking or understanding, let alone teaching about science.
But I think the biggest reason hobbyists don’t do science is that they just don’t know they can. All you really need to do is think and understand the process to be qualified to do it.
By what will be seen to be a very direct path, buying muck and dreaming of sitting in the shade with a microscope and putting it all right here on the Web has reminded me of one of the other projects I’m gearing up for.
A huge and very important chunk of complex systems research consists, in a reduced sense, of thinking about how systems are put together of agents following simple rules. Writing little stories, in other words: “What would happen if people in a market simply traded according to random rules?” and “What would happen if proteins were composed of two types of subunit (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) on a chain constrained to a planar lattice, and you let them wiggle around and ‘fold’? What would you see if you did that? Does it suffice to explain some of what really happens in protein folding?” Of course, before they’re published these what-if questions are prettied up and presented as if the researcher knew all along that they were doing a rational experiment, but because you’re a diligent and faithful reader to have worked your way along this far already, I’m letting you know the Big Secret of Professional Science: we really mostly just try stuff and see what happens.
The science part of complex systems happens in at least three stages. Two of these are: (1) analysis and reframing of stuff that really exists in terms that let you talk about it reasonably using concepts that easily become simple models, and (3) in interpreting the computer simulations you build according to those models to see what they tell you about the real world. The bit in the middle, the (2) that differentiates a lot of complex systems research, is what I refer to as building analogous systems — artificial worlds in which your model of the real world is literally true. So for example, the previous notion about “people in a market trading using random strategies” is in a sense a prospective model of real-world market traders using bounded rationality other weird non-rational stuff we see all the time. The analogous system you can build is the actual running computer program in which little agents representing people trade some tokens representing real market goods and currency according to rules you code as “random” according to your interpretation of the term. The resulting program is not the model: your model is your analysis of the real world, summarized as “perhaps it’s like this” (or hidden in “what if it were like this?”)
The third part, mainly observational but informed by your original modeling effort, basically lies in collecting data in the analogous world and seeing how that may explain or apply to the real one. For example, in collecting a million different protein-folding results in a simulation based on your two-component model of proteins, and then seeing how the statistical distribution of the results might match that seen in nature.
I’m wordy because I’m excited and writing-to-think. All I’m trying to say is this, really: Much of complex systems research is just:
- Look at what’s around you and frame a model that summarizes what you think you see
- Write and run a little computer program (an “analogous system”) in which the model is literally true
- See if the behavior of the analogous system gibes with what you observe.
That’s it.
Point: Complex systems research is easy.
See, the interesting thing about complex systems research—simultaneously the thing that makes the systems interesting, and the field—is that even the analogous systems we build are capable of unexpected and often nigh inexplicable emergent behavior. That’s the point: the model is not tractable by traditional math approaches, so for example a traditional economist would simplify away the stuff that’s emergent because the equations are too hard to solve. But you — you cunning complexologist you — build a simulation based on the model and work around the hard math bit. Yes, maybe even the computer implementation is wild and does weird stuff, but it’s much faster than the real world and so you try it 100,000 times and see what happens.
I harbor secret desires. Many of those I will choose not reveal here, but among the others are: I would like people who are not credentialed union card-holding ivory tower scientists to be able to undertake scientific exploration and investigation personally, collect and manage the observations that will arise, and publish the results in valid peer-reviewed scientific journals (that they can afford).
I think something like the Open Source approach to software development would work, and for exactly the same reasons. I will write about that here in a bit.
In the meantime: almost anybody who knows what it is (and can write code) has written a Game of Life program. Almost everybody who knows what it is (and can write code) has written a Mandelbrot set generator program. The same goes for genetic algorithms, Markov text generators, and innumerable other canonical “chaos and complexity” simulations and algorithms which have been popularized through the years. Yet, recreational or not, these simple programs are exactly the sort of thing that makes complex systems research go.
I’ll bet that at least a dozen of the thousands of people who wrote their own Game of Life (at least those who played with the parameters) encountered phenomena that would have warranted publication in a peer-reviewed journal. And at the same time, I bet that most of the thousands of other people (if only they had been exposed to the work in the context of a community of like-minded collaborators and background information) might have moved on beyond screen-saver diddling and addressed real and serious unanswered scientific questions.
But as amateurs, these folks worked alone and were thus hemmed in by a limited social capital and intellectual context. Their results are forever relegated to recreational status in the “umbra” of science, never published and thus doomed to oblivion. No matter how many interesting “what would happen if…?” and “what does it mean that…?” questions they asked, the answers were for the most part unattainable or unshared.
That’s sad. It’s just as if they lived in the country, went out occasionally and poked around a bit, caught a few butterflies nobody had ever seen before, and not knowing what they had let them go, got bored, and went back in to watch TV.
Working alone, these folks (which I would number in the thousands) remain hobbyists re-creating simple toys. Working together, I think they might become a potent distributed scientific workforce, as powerful and effective as more traditional labs and warranted scientists.
By my argument, you need three tools to do valid complex systems work yourself: One is what you are sitting in front of right now. Another is the mess of meat perched up there at the top of your neck. And the third? Access to other people working on the same thing.
And that’s one thing you can do with muck and the Web that you can’t do with just muck: begin to disintermediate—or enhance and expand—the traditional scientific establishment.
March 10, 2004 at 8:51 am · Filed under Uncategorized
We’ve gone and done it now.
Our latest offer for a house on three acres just north of Chelsea Michigan is likely to be accepted. It’s a nice house, big enough for the family (including my Mom, who’s moving in with us) and some of our stuff. The three acres include the bog-standard development grade-and-grass crap on the front third, but overlooks a hundred acres or so of beautiful low, flat wetland meadow to the south in back.
Of which we are buying two acres.
Barbara has brought her ferociously thorough research attention to bear on this project, and thus we not only have the sale prices of all the other houses in the development, the names and occupations of at least half of the owners, detailed aerial photographs from four sources covering the last five years showing the transformation of the land from working farm into exurban development, a number of government and nonprofit groups’ opinions of the degree of protection and development the place can take, notes on utility coverage, advice from the County on “how to live in the country”, line-of-sight bearings to the wireless internet provider in the area (I did that), and cost-benefit analyses of the various unfinished bits (driveway, decking, water softener), and what the farmer grew on the various bits we’re buying (potatoes and corn). And how much the developer paid for the land and is charging for the construction on it.
We also have a soil map.
See, the lay of the land is what makes it so beautiful and hard to describe, and also a big factor in our decision to pay what is frankly a scary amount for the place. The prospect to the south is (in winter) something like being perched on the shores of a large, dry lake. Of plants. The flats stretch off to the horizon, and the opposite “shore” is occupied only by one timber-framed and distant house. In between, the many maps show some drainage ditches (one of which we’re buying in toto, apparently), and a sinuous line of telephone poles (which oddly also remind me of past visits to waterside towns like Port Clinton or Tampa).
But, as should be obvious from my elision, that’s not water there. As the soil map makes clear, that’s Houghton muck down there in the flat picturesque bits.
Of course, we will like all our neighbors preserve and enhance the natural beauty yadda yadda &c &c. It’s to look at, not do something with; I know that. It’s not like I’m allowed to, say, build a little hobbit house in the back out of strawbale and cob as a studio/office/eccentricity — neither by the deed restrictions nor my wife. But you know, now and then the earnest and diligent exurb conservationist will want to knock down the taller weedier stuff with a riding mower.
And not sink.
Or put a couple of subtle but useful benches out there, whence one can watch the red-tailed hawks and sandhill cranes and white-tailed deer and bluebirds and such doing their thing.
Without sinking.
So now I find I must learn about muck. This, I confess, is not what I expected.
March 3, 2004 at 9:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Spend two minutes examining the products in your pantry or grocery store that include corn (maize) products, including corn syrup. Spend another few minutes examining industrial uses (cornstarch packing material, coatings of pharmaceuticals, and so forth). Consider the number of acres of farmland corn planted in the United States; the proportion of hectares of agricultural land worldwide planted with maize; the proportion of biomass consumed by all heterotrophic animals worldwide that is maize. Compare these numbers to the same values a decade and a century ago.
Force yourself to seriously take the stance: The species Zea mays has developed a strategy for dominating and out-performing its natural competitors by directly modifying the behavior of Homo sapiens. Take into account the psychological effects of corn syrup, foods deep-fried in corn oil, and the species’ recent diversification into industrial ethanol production. Take into account the industrial, transportation, social, and medical infrastructure of human society that is devoted to or depends upon Zea mays. Consider what would happen to a 50-acre cornfield if abandoned suddenly, and compare the evolutionary fitness of the plants in the field while being tended vs. the state of abandonment. Consider the reported flavor benefits and health dangers of corn-fed vs. grass-fed beef. Think of farmland as having been scraped clean of many tens of thousands of established organisms per square meter, and re-scraped periodically, so that corn seed and only corn seed may flourish.
It may be useful to read a bit about the coevolutionary dynamics of orchids and insects, and examine the structural engineering involved in the hooked surfaces of burdock and nettle seed cases.
As quickly as possible, change your perspective to the more traditional one: That thousands of years ago, primitive human neo-agronomists discovered the wild grass teosinte and began co-opting it for their settlements. Over several hundred generations of directed breeding, the genetic makeup of the wild plant was twisted into a food crop. Since it was on hand and increasingly standardized by human manipulation, maize plant material came (through a process of technological exaptation) to be used in many diverse applications. Modern genetic agronomy, including transgenic manipulation and other intricate manipulations of the species, has led to the transformation of the original wild plant into a literal tool of Homo sapiens.
Now switch back. Repeat until the notion of “advantage” and “usefulness” begin to be undermined.
Bonus exercises: Undertake the analogous exercise with: tropical houseplants, bamboo, dogs/wolves, the chili pepper. Can the same effect be brought about for books? Light bulbs? Computers?
Computer viruses?
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