Boobs for Bourbon Street!

/ Media Technology

One of the folks helping to raise money for the Katrina relief effort is the site Boobs 4 Bourbon Street (it’s been slashdotted and is down right now, but check back later). People are donating pictures of their bare breasts (with the website shown in the photo itself, to insure they were taken with full knowledge and consent of how they’d be used), and anyone who donates $5 or more to one of the main relief charities gets an account and password to view them.

From the site:

Click on any of the charities in the right-hand column, go to their donation page, and make an online donation for $5 or more. (Please note: Habitat For Humanity’s minimum online donation amount is $10. If you try to make a smaller donation in their form, you’ll get a fairly nondescript error message.) Then, once they send you a confirmation email, forward it to us, at verify@boobs4bourbonst.com. At this point, one of our volunteers will see your email, then create an account with which you can access the gallery, and email you with your login information. The username will be the email address that you emailed us from. The password will be randomly-generated. Write it down or print it out or save the email.

To quote my friend Adam, this has got to be the least efficient way to use the Internet to get pictures of boobs since Archie, but hey — it’s for charity, and when I checked a couple days ago they’d already raised $3000.

I also note (so you won’t think this post is entirely about boobs) that they’ve got an interesting trade economy going here, where they’re providing a service (in this case light-porn) not for cash but for proof that cash was paid to someone else. It’d be great to build up the infrastructure to make this kind of thing easier, much as Software Ransom sites have done for pooling commissions for software (are you listening, PayPal?).

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Beyond Satire

/ Culture

I’ve just come across a new blog called Beyond Satire (beyondsatire.us):

For years, we’ve been observing that truth has moved beyond satire. We created this site to highlight news that would be unbelievable as satire but is nevertheless true. Please help us by submitting comments and stories.

I can tell from the first dozen or so posts that this is going on my short list. (It reminds me of the “No Comment” feature that Ms. Magazine runs — things that are so over the top they supply their own punchline.)

As a side note, it took me two-thirds of the way through reading it till I realized the author is Ellen Spertus, a CS professor in San Francisco that I know from back when she was at the MIT AI Lab. Small world syndrome strikes again…

(Thanks to Andrea for the link!)

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TiddlyWiki

/ Media Technology

OK, this makes my head hurt. TiddlyWiki is a self-contained, client-side Wiki written entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Unlike most wikis, there’s no server for a TiddlyWiki — when you download a page you have your own local copy of the entire wiki, and any changes you make affect only that local copy. It’s not a collaborative authoring space, at least not in the traditional sense, but it’s useful for taking notes or maintaining a set of HTML pages that you later want to upload to a server. I’m impressed by the numbers of features and slickness of the interface given that it’s “just” JavaScript (note to self: JavaScript is now a real language). It also has an interesting navigation that’s something of a cross between a wiki and a blog, where clicking on a link inserts the relevant post into the main page you’re reading. It reminds me of Radio Userland‘s Live Outline Tool, though unfortunately that includes the fact that I find it easy to get lost in both.

The full implications of this kind of client-side Wiki didn’t really hit me until I briefly wondered where I could download a copy, only to realize I already had just by visiting the site. As their instructions point out, just do “Save Webpage As…” (either of their main page or of a blank version) and you’ve got your own copy, ready to edit.

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iPod Nano

/ Media Technology

ipod-nano.jpg

Apple announced their new iPod Nano yesterday — 2 or 4 GB (around 500 or 1000 songs, or around 25,000 photos), with 14 hours battery life, color display and a click-wheel, all squeezed into a 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inch package. That’s about 20% of the footprint and only 75% of the thickness of a single standard CD jewelcase! Nicely done.

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Ambidextrous

/ Uncategorized

The new Stanford Institute of Design (aka the d.school) has just started a quarterly design journal called Ambidextrous. From their webpage:

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Ambidextrous Magazine is the design journal of the nascent Stanford d.school. It is a magazine for the wider design community, which includes engineers and ethnographers, psychologists and philosophers. Rather than focusing on promoting product, Ambidextrous exposes the people and processes involved in design.

Ambidextrous is a forum for the cross-disciplinary, cross-market community of people with an academic, professional and personal interest in design. The magazine is geared toward high subscriber participation and interaction. It is expressly designed to be informal, irreverent, and fun to read.

I’m still reading through the first issue, but it looks like it’ll be both a good place to find new insights and be a nice way to build community between the d.school and other like-minded designers.

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Science is hard, let’s go shopping!

/ Science

There’s a debate going on over at The Edge about the role of common sense in science, especially physics and cognitive science. John Horgan is the science journalist who started the debate with a NYT op-ed:

[String theory and the idea of parallel universes] are preposterous, but that’s not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends.

Common sense — and a little historical perspective — makes me equally skeptical of grand unified theories of the human mind. After a half-century of observing myself and my fellow humans — not to mention watching lots of TV and movies — I’ve concluded that as individuals we’re pretty complex, variable, unpredictable creatures, whose personalities can be affected by a vast range of factors. I’m thus leery of hypotheses that trace some important aspect of our behavior to a single cause.

He later responds to comments with:

The question that I raised — and that all these respondents have studiously avoided — is what we should do when presented with theories such as psychoanalysis or string theory, which are not only counterintuitive but also lacking in evidence. Common sense tells me that in these cases common sense can come in handy.

As I see it, Horgan is mistaking lack of differentiation for lack of evidence. Unlike the so-called theory of Intelligent Design, String Theory and the Parallel Universes interpretation of quantum physics have a great deal of predictive power and evidence behind them. The problem is that (currently) this is the exact same set of evidence that supports quantum theory in general, so there’s no way to say that one interpretation is better than the other. However, if we found evidence that our understanding of quantum theory was fundamentally wrong, the other two theories would also be out the window.

Horgan is also wrong about why these theories are so non-sensical. The reason is not, as he implies, that scientists mistake preposterousness for profundity, nor is it that they just like making fun of English majors like himself. As Stanford professor Susskind points out in the debate, the reason these theories violate our common sense is that the world violates our common sense as soon as we look outside of our comfort zone. No theory that fits the experimental evidence will satisfy our common-sense understanding because the evidence itself fails to do so.

(Props to Mind Hacks for the link.)

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More on the Placebo Effect

/ Mind and Brain

Rawhide commented on my previous post that he was surprised there was much doubt about the placebo effect’s existence. It turns out there’ve been some serious questions raised about whether the placebo effect is actually just a myth after a 2001 New England Journal of Medicine article that analyzed 114 placebo-using medical studies and found that, on the average, the placebo effect was minimal if it exists at all.

Dylan Evans (a frequent contributor to the MindHacks blog) has a 2003 book called Placebo: The Belief Effect that argues that the placebo effect only helps with some kinds of conditions — namely pain, swelling, stomach ulcers, depression, and anxiety — and that by lumping everything into one average the meta-study washes out the few places where placebos actually work. He also suggests that placebos probably work by triggering the release of endorphins, which affect the same kinds of symptoms. Given the recent study it looks like he hit the nail on the head on that one.

You can find a nice summary of his idea in this short paper, which also includes a nice history of the discovery and our understanding of the placebo effect.

Update 8/30/05: typo fix

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