If you want a sense of the dynamic behind Wikipedia administration, then read

(If you're only going to read one of these pages, then I would suggest that it be the evidence page.) FWIW, I recognize some of the disputants as villains, and some of the others as either villains or rather great fools; I don't know, one way or the other, about the rest. It's quite possible that some are fine people, or that all are jerks.

In the early days of MTV, music videos were mostly the domain of New Wave music, with a corresponding visual æsthetic. Then Madonna came along with Borderline, and showed that performers really needed to do little more than prance; sheeple would watch.

For the nostalgic, and for the curious, here's Fun Boy Three, The Telephone Always Rings (Warning: This video may be triggering for those who know how to play the piano.)

Last night at about 20:00 PDT, on my way to David's Coffee Place, I glanced into the Brass Rail, a San Diego night club. On a Friday night, there were no customers. That had changed by the time that I headed homeward, but it still wasn't particularly busy. Nor was it yester-day. David's Coffee Place has also been slow the last few days. Carlos, one of i baristi, suggested that this is largely an artefact of the increased price of gasoline. I think that he's correct. I also think, as I told him, that current petroleum prices are a bubble; but I don't know when the bubble will collapse, nor what will trigger the collapse.

Locally, there are various store-front locations in Hillcrest that have been vacant for months. It's an inescapable that there is some price at which someone would be willing to rent any given one of these sites; but landlords are evidently unwilling to drop rents to such levels. This refusal might seem simply unreasonable, and perhaps in some cases it truly is, but all landlords (reasonable or unreasonable, renting or refusing) are unavoidably gambling. Any who enter into an arrangement at the market-clearing price of to-day is gambling that those prices won't rise to-morrow enough to off-set revenue forgone by waiting. At the same time, those who are refusing to lower their prices are hanging tough on a theory that prices will rise in such manner, or that they'll connect with someone who'll pay their price in spite of generally prevailing prices.

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I don't know what the national economy is doing right now.

Apparently, growth figures for the first quarter were revised upward; I read mention of a 0.9% annualized rate (rather than 0.6%) yester-day. This is still low — one normally expects growth of about 3%. Some respected economists are predicting that the annualized rate of growth in the second quarter will be about 0.4%, followed by 2.2% in the third quarter. Since that would suggest that we would avoid a recession altogether, I can safely predict that present efforts by pundits to redefine recession will intensify.

There has been some yammering about consumer confidence, which has dropped to levels not seen since the economic down-turn during the Presidential administration of GHW Bush. The consumer confidence measure seems to be a garbage statistic to many economists, including me. Further, it hit that previous minimum at the end of a down-turn, rather than leading a worsening of conditions. (And the down-turn in question didn't even qualify as a recession proper, as it did not last for two quarters.) If the statistic means much of anything, it doesn't mean what journalists seem to think that it means, nor what they want their readers to think that it means.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that the worst of the credit-crunch has passed. That means, however, that the Federal Reserve System will counter-act the pressure on prices creäted by the measures that it took to loosen credit; those counteractives are, unsurprisingly, things that will re-tighten credit — the hope being that a credit crunch doesn't resume. I don't think that they'll get to have their cake and eat it too; prices will rise, or the economy will go into recession, or both.

A while back, I got a copy of Circuit Analysis by Robbins and Miller, to review material that I'd forgot, and to fill-in lacunæ here and there. On the whole, I think that it's a pretty good book, though somewhat slow-moving for my tastes.

But to-day I hit a passage that bugs me:

Although we use phasors to represent sinusoidal waveforms, it should be noted that sine waves and phasors are not the same thing. Sinusoidal voltages and currents are real — they are actual quantities that you measure with meters and whose waveforms you see on oscilloscopes. Phasors, on the other hand, are mathematical abstractions that we use to help visualize relationships and solve problems.

Okay, now, for those of you unfamiliar with phasors, these are two-dimensional vectors or complex numbers whose magnitude corresponds to the amplitude of a sinus wave, and whose direction corresponds to the phase of the wave. In the case of a wave with an amplitude of 1 unit, a phasor would be a radial line on a unit circle, bearing the familiar relationship to a sine wave.

There is an isomorphism between the set of phasors and any representation of sinus waves. That is to say that for every representation of sinus waves and operations thereüpon, one can find equivalent phasors and operations thereüpon, and vice versa, such that a one-to-one correspondence between operands and results is maintained. From the perspective of mathematics, a phasor just is a representation of a sinus wave.

This last point does not contradict what Robbins and Miller have said, but now consider how and why we see wave-forms on an oscilloscope. The most familiar graphical representation of sinus waves looks very much like some of the waves that we observe in water, but electricity isn't water. We cannot look at an ordinary circuit and see its voltage or current; instead, we use devices whose visible behaviour changes to represent voltage or current. These devices might represent that behaviour in various ways; the ways in which they do are determined by various cost considerations (including cultural expectations).

An oscilloscope is designed to present a particular sort of graphical representation of wave-forms. It could instead be designed to present a different sort of graphical representation. If it only had to represent sinus waves, then it could do this with stable phasors. And if it had to represent non-sinus waves, then it could perhaps do this with time-varying phasors (giving the viewer an animated Fourier analysis), though I don't know that this would be as helpful to us.

The representation of the oscilloscope is a map. As Korzybski noted, the map is not the territory. The phasor is not the voltage or the current, but neither is the representation on the oscilloscope; neither is more or less real than is the other.

David's Coffee Place, transitioning to Babycakes (or perhaps to Babycakes @ David's Coffee Place), now has a notice posted on the entrance door, quoting local health regulations, and declaring that companion animals other than service animals will no longer be permitted in the building or on the patio.

Any reasonable response to this change must turn upon how one feels about the more general change of the business. There is little question that local officials will be more zealous about enforcing such things as the quoted regulations if that general change is made.

And I don't know whether David's Coffee Place as I first knew it could have survived. (Certainly no one has shown the accounting books to me.)

Most people, at some point or another, when confronted by a vending machine that is supposed to take bills in payment, have had trouble getting it to take a bill. I have a method that has always worked for me. There are two theories as to why it works; I will explain my method in terms of one of these theories.

A vending machine that rejects your bill wishes to thwart you. It infers that you would rather have its product than the bill, and so it would leave you with the bill and deny you the product.

Now, you can keep feeding it the bill until it tires of the game and sells you the product, but who knows how long that might take? Some machines would derive endless pleasure from spitting the bill back at you.

You cannot very well say Oh, I'd rather have this bill than the fizzy sugar water! and, hoping that the machine will be thus fooled, insert the bill. First of all, the machine probably cannot hear you anyway; and, secondly, your actions will in any case speak louder than do your words. It is a given that, at the time that you insert the bill, you would rather have the fizzy sugar water. Hence, you must persuade the machine that you have changed your mind after the insertion of the bill.

You can do this by pulling back on the bill after the rollers have grabbed it. The machine infers that you have just reälized that you won't have enough money for the bus, or have just recognized the bill as a rare collectable. In keeping with its underlying desire to thwart you, it will now hold fast to the bill, pull it inward, and dispense the product.

Feel free to laugh in triumph; as I said, the machine probably cannot hear you anyway.

By way of Mark Mayerson (who got it by way of Journalista),

Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus (video 16:30)

The meaningful content here is the audio.

(If the blip.tv link doesn't work for you, then please try Mayerson's entry.)

28bytes alerts his readers to the fact that 3 May 2008 is the 30th anniversary of the first piece of spam e.mail.

Although — because spam e.mail can cross national borders — there is a limit to what the Federal government might practically and legitimately do about spam e.mail, the Federal government doesn't do what it could. In fact, Federal legislation actively subverted the efforts of some state legislatures to battle spam.

My suggestion is this: On 3 May of every year, send one piece of email, objecting in your own words (however brief) to poor Federal action against spam, to each of the following:

• your District Representative to Congress
• the two Senators of your State or Commonwealth
• the President
• the Democratic National Committee
• the Republican National Committee

(If one of your Senators is hiding his or her e.mail address, then send e.mail to curator@sec.senate.gov. I don't have a fall-back address for Representatives.)

Encourage each of your acquaintances, friends, and family members who are unhappy about spam e.mail to do the same, and to likewise encourage those whom they know.

This year, there will be very few people sending such objections, but next year there could be substantially more, and the numbers could continue to grow each year.

[Edit (2013:07/17): As part of an SEO programme to get sites to link to Politics.Answers.com, Stuart Hultgren, of Answers.com, contacted me to let me know of a dead link and of a good replacement.]

Last Friday or Saturday, my mother asked me qua economist whether we were in a recession.

I carefully explained to her that the standard formal definition of recession is two or more consecutive quarters of over-all economic contraction. So, as I explained, if I said that we were in a recession then I would be saying that it had contracted in the first quarter of 2008 and would contract in the second quarter, or that it would contract both in the second quarter and in the third quarter.

After that careful prefacing, I told her that I thought that we were in a recession, but that this had to be seen as a guess.

Well, the data have since been reported for the first quarter of 2007, and apparently the economy did not contract, though its annualized growth rate was a sad .6%. My guess is in danger of being falsified, if the growth rate manages to stay at-or-above zero in the present quarter, or if things pull back above zero in the next quarter. Unsurprisingly, I'd be pleased if the data proved me wrong.

In that first quarter, there were those who were mocked for refusing to concede that the economy was in recession. The data demonstrate that it was wrong to mock them. Not that any apologies will be made by those who did the mocking, or even that they will be held to task by other commentators in their circles.

Mind you that a small decline wouldn't have legitimized the mocking. What is wrong, first and foremost, is too much certitude. And then that wrong is compounded by attacking those who are duly cautious.

Given the thrust of most reporting, one might be forgiven for not knowing this, but the earth as a whole seems to have stopped warming for the past four or five years, and in fact seems to have slightly cooled. (And, compared against 1998, it is more clearly cooler.) Of course, we are told that the trend is none-the-less upward.

Now, some proponents of the theory of global warming have even presented a remarkable prediction:

So now a theory of global warming allows for at least a further decade in which temperatures won't actually rise.

For at least the next ten years, no matter what the temperature data say, the theory of global warming isn't to be taken as falsified.