The Deliverator...
does not drive a hummer. Domino's is apparently unaware of this; I was rather disturbed earlier this week to find myself biking behind what I assumed was a pizza delivery H2. Since then I have seen two other H2's painted with advertising, one for Verizon; the last company I failed to note. I suppose it's a reasonable place to advertise; the fuel economy (frivolity?) might even be cheap by the standards of advertising.
My boss asked me yesterday if there is some particular project that I want to work on, of those that need to be done in the near future. This is rather nice, and implies that I get to decide between working on the hard (not quite weak-AI, but probably NP-complete) parsing problem, or on something else. The last word at work today was that he wants to farm that parser out to the (real) programer who built our Zope database interface, and in the interim, wants to have someone write bunches of regexen to extract partial information from each of the bios that we mirror. I've been telling him for weeks that this is the wrong way to do things, and not a good use of my time, and it sounds as though I win the latter, even if I lose the former---I've apparently gone from being a data entry monkey, through writing code (which I enjoy), all the way to drawing block diagrams with which to explain to someone else what APIs they need to follow. When I said that I wanted to go into architecture, this is not what I meant. I hear that Google is solving this parsing problem; I'll bet they can do it right.
The Economist has an insert on oil this week. I did not really expect them to get into climate change, but the fact that they talked about peak oil without actually countering any of the arguments was a bit disturbing. As usual, I don't trust any of my news sources, but this seems like an easier problem than getting accurate political reporting. I just want useful predictions of the future; that's not too much to ask. Either capacity is increasing, or it is not. Demand elasticity should have some knowable value. (Actually, I liked the one sidebar devoted to demand elasticity. But its conclusion was that demand has not dropped, and no one knows if elasticity is that low, or just very non-linear.) I think I would be happier if I did not find economics relevant to my life---I don't actually want to dedicate time to studying it, but I seem to want information that is only available in its domain.
My boss asked me yesterday if there is some particular project that I want to work on, of those that need to be done in the near future. This is rather nice, and implies that I get to decide between working on the hard (not quite weak-AI, but probably NP-complete) parsing problem, or on something else. The last word at work today was that he wants to farm that parser out to the (real) programer who built our Zope database interface, and in the interim, wants to have someone write bunches of regexen to extract partial information from each of the bios that we mirror. I've been telling him for weeks that this is the wrong way to do things, and not a good use of my time, and it sounds as though I win the latter, even if I lose the former---I've apparently gone from being a data entry monkey, through writing code (which I enjoy), all the way to drawing block diagrams with which to explain to someone else what APIs they need to follow. When I said that I wanted to go into architecture, this is not what I meant. I hear that Google is solving this parsing problem; I'll bet they can do it right.
The Economist has an insert on oil this week. I did not really expect them to get into climate change, but the fact that they talked about peak oil without actually countering any of the arguments was a bit disturbing. As usual, I don't trust any of my news sources, but this seems like an easier problem than getting accurate political reporting. I just want useful predictions of the future; that's not too much to ask. Either capacity is increasing, or it is not. Demand elasticity should have some knowable value. (Actually, I liked the one sidebar devoted to demand elasticity. But its conclusion was that demand has not dropped, and no one knows if elasticity is that low, or just very non-linear.) I think I would be happier if I did not find economics relevant to my life---I don't actually want to dedicate time to studying it, but I seem to want information that is only available in its domain.