Plurp: A Weblog

2000.10.15 : 2000.10.21

Saturday, October 21, 2000
Blab. My Biggest Fan writes:
Dear Dr. Plurp, I am getting tired of being called "a reader" when you refer to my notes. Call me what I truely am,
Your Biggest Fan
Just for the record, I do not wish to precipitate a Stephen King incident here, in case anyone happens to be reading this in their more lucid moments.

Blab. A reader claiming to be Martha writes:
We want those yellow squares back! We want to play with the yellow squares! No squares, no read. We want the yellow squares back! Why is it, when something works and is a good thing, the creator burns out on it, or eliminates it and tries to come up with something better? Yellow squares were a good Plurp thing!
Signed, Martha
Yes, well. Those of you addicted to the insidious Yellow Squares should click here. Or here.
Meanwhile, your Loyal Plurpitrator is deeply enmeshed in coming up with a new, improved Yellow Squares game. Pity me. I have nothing to go on in the way of JavaScript except that one (really awful!) example from the original author of the program I used for Yellow Squares.
Fear not! This Ph.D. in physics shall not go to waste! Gravitation cursor! Electrostatic forces! Chaos! Coming soon(ish) to a Plurp site near you!

Blab. An especially talented reader writes:
I can sing the ABC's backwards. If you are interested, I can make a little mp3 of myself singing it. (I have the equipment to do this, though it might take me a bit of time to figure out how to actually do it). I learned how to sing the "ZYX's" as I call them, when I was a child and would spend several hours a day (it seemed) swinging on the swings at the playground with my friends. One day we decided to try to sing the alphabet backwards. So, bit by bit, we slowly reconstructed the alphabet song, starting from the end of the alphabet and experimenting with the best way to match the letters to the melody of the song. It actually comes across pretty well, I think. But it certainly was not all-in-one-go or anything like that. So... let me know if you'd like to hear it.
How could we resist such a seductive offer? On behalf of the vast readership of Plurp, we accept! Do send us an MP3 of your dulcet but inverted tones. We will post your childhood accomplishment here for archival reference.

Blab. Finally, a sonically gifted reader writes:
ding ding ding ding ding!
We interpret this as high praise from a semantic minimalist.

Yo. The kind folks who host www.stevewhite.org tell us that these were the top three searches on our site in the past week.

sophia

alien

booga booga hey baby

Anyone having a theory for numbers 1 or 3 is invited to send it to us in the Blab box in the left margin.

Plurp. eBay has been "cleaning up" sexually-related auctions recently. God forbid there be an efficient market in anything having to do with sex. Or fun. Or enjoyment.
eBay has to make tough calls regarding what's just "risque" and acceptable for minors and what's truly pornographic and appropriate for adults.
-- eBay announcement

Nazi memorabilia is OK, though, as are torture, astonishingly racist things and Klan stuff. Just no sex. Got it?

Yo. Speaking of roadside attractions, does anyone remember the Doggone Doggie Diner? Used to be that the California landscape was dotted with this kind of architectural atrocity.
There were hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs, donut shops shaped like giant donuts, and a restaurant called The Brown Derby. Kinda like shop and guild signs in Medieval European villages, representing visually the good available therein for the illiterate population, but writ large. Real large.
For all I know, the Doggone Doggie Diner really did serve dog meat.
But no, it wasn't blue.

Plurp.
In a previous
life the
blue dog was
a roadside
attraction.

Friday, October 20, 2000
Yak. Offered without context, for the moment.
I can't spend the entire f***ing week figuring out how to support my halo.

Plurp.
Upon closer
examination the blue dog turned
out to be made
entirely of hand
painted mustard
seeds.

Thursday, October 19, 2000
Blab. There was a small flurry of responses to yesterday's introduction of the Blab box (the one there on the left - try it!), suggesting that Plurp has at least one reader who is not me. Amazing.
In the very first of these, a reader writes:
Dear Dr. Plurp, Everymorning I wake up especially early so that I can get my computer and crawl back into bed with you. Are you there?
Your biggest fan
Gracious! Who knew that bloggers had groupies? Interestingly, the Blab box gives no indication of the identity of any particular author. Life is so full of mystery!

Blab. Another reader comments:
With regard to the second-story walkways in Minneapolis... Toronto is justifiably famous for a nice underground walkway system that connects tube stations with the basements of large buildings, shopping centres, and the like. They're very handy (last time I visited Toronto was one January... and it was not only very cold, but also very windy). Web pages mentioning these are commonplace -- [this] is a nice article mentioning them. This type-in box is really _very_ small.
Two things are worth emphasizing here. (1) Lazy bloggers get their interesting content from their kind and knowledgeable readers, so please do Blab at us. (2) That type-in box really is very small but a larger one is like Fermat's proof of his Last Theorem, which this margin is too small to contain.

Blab. On that great scam from yesterday, a pensive reader claims:
I vaguely recall a Dragnet episode in which the Good Guys track down and arrest a Bad Guy running exactly this scam (on horse races). A websearch for Dragnet would be easy; one for exactly this episode (if there ever was such an episode!) might be Too Hard...
That could be but, after an exhaustive examination of old Dragnet plots on the Web, I must admit I doubt it.
This does, however, suggest a much more difficult form of our standard Web Search game: Find an authoritative source that disproves some claim. Ooh. That's hard!

Blab. A helpful Canadian reader says:
You can't say just "href="#20001018"" in your daily links! You have to give the permanent archive URL, eh?
This points out that I have become sloppy in my dottage (yes, pun intended), not properly updating the Permanent Links to which you are taken by clicking on the lovely mustard-yellow boxes that start each day's Plurp entry. (Those of you whose eyes are glazing over at this mildly technical point can stand in the back and discuss driveway sealing for a moment.)
Yes, the current ones have all been fixed now. (The already-archived ones don't quite have this particular problem.) Thanks! I'll try to be more careful in the future.

Plurp. Apropos of my earlier rant about violence in professional sports, a reader notes an AOL article which proclaims Zednik Suspended for Check. Turns out he's a hockey player and not, as I initially assumed, a chess player. Curiously, no such article seems to exist on the Web. Did AOL get it wrong, or is everyone else asleep at the keyboard?

Plurp. These days, my only source of aerobic exercise is hyperventilation.

Plop. Xerox is rumored to be considering selling their famous Palo Alto Research Center to stave off bankruptcy for their failing printer / copier business. PARC was, of course, where almost all of the early ideas for PCs originated: a computer devoted to each person, all-points-addressible displays, the windowing user interface, mice, point-and-click interactions, ethernet, and on and on.
The folks at Xerox were, however, dumber than stumps, and never really managed to profit from this brilliant work. Instead, Steven Jobs stole a lot of it for the Apple Lisa and then the Macintosh, Bill Gates made a low-fidelity version of the Macintosh and called it Windows, and all of the PARC hardware and networking innovations simply became ubiquitous.
Selling PARC seems much like selling your brain to fill your stomach, but perhaps Xerox has demonstrated such confusion about what to do with a brain that it doesn't really matter.
Pity, though.

Plurp. I'm making a game at the conference of trying not to go outside at all, using the enclosed Skyways instead to get around. It's surrealistic, as if the outdoors were a tableau meant to be admired from various viewpoints, rather than an environment in which to live.
The surrealism was heightened this morning as I walked down a long, sunny and otherwise empty corridor between two hotels. At first in the distance, and for nearly a minute, a man in a sports jacket walked silently towards me. As he passed he said, quite distinctly, It's a complete waste of time.
He was speaking into a head-mounted cell phone.
I think.

Rant. At the conference, there was a presentation about collaborative shopping online. The argument goes something like this. In the real world, people like to shop with other people. Online shopping is currently a solitary experience. Therefore, we should build multi-person shopping into the Web shopping experience.
Folks who give such presentations then go on to talk about the collaborative shopping prototype they've built. The architecture is done so. Messages are passed thusly. Browser extensions go here.
These folks strike me like a bridge-builder who builds bridges in his backyard because (a) it's handy and (b) they're easy to admire there.
No one seems to ask the obvious question: What kind of social interactions do people want when shopping online? Do they want a chat window to type to other people in the same shop? Do they want to wander from site to site with some set of other people? How many? And how do they identify them? Is a keyboard-and-Web-page interface all wrong to begin with, and do people want voice interaction and to be able to see each other?
Heck, maybe what they like about shopping with each other is being able to eat pizza together, which is going to be tough to do in a collaborative shopping application.
A modest suggestion to bridge builders: First wonder where people want a bridge.

Yo. Our Midwest correspondent identifies the physicist song from the other day as Einstein the Genius by Cranberry Lake (Jug Band). Shockingly, even with this fabulous clue, I still can't find the words or the song itself on the Web. This is getting to be a serious blow to my already-fragile ego!

Plurp.
Corn flakes.
Human hair.
A soiled grommet from an engine in Bay Ridge.
Spittle.

Wednesday, October 18, 2000
Yow. An interested reader writes:
How do I send a letter to the editor of your website? Didn't find any fan reply page.
your biggest fan................

And with flattery like that, how could I not introduce (ta da!) Blab, an all-new reply-box-thingie right over there in the left margin. Just type your most effusive flattery into that teeny little box (don't worry, you can type as much as you want), then hit Enter or click on that Send! button. Billions of dollars of Internet Machinery will then deliver your very words to us.
And they might even appear in future Plurp entries. Imagine your delight.
(Thanks infinitely to Dave for letting me steal his Perl script. Thanks to Ian for the redirection example that greatly simplified the Perl script. Thanks to both of them for helping me debug my foolishness, and for putting up with a steady stream of embarrassingly ignorant questions for the last several days. Yay Dave and Ian!)

Yo. I'm at an e-commerce conference in Minneapolis today. Minneapolis gets lots of snow. As a result, the downtown area has an elaborate series of enclosed second-story walkways that weave all of the buildings together. Even if there are ten feet of snow on the ground, you can still shop till you drop.

Sort of like the steam tunnels at MIT, except you don't need to pick the locks to get in.

Yo. You learn the darndest things at conferences. Here's an amazing money-making scheme.

What You See
You get a piece of email from someone you don't know.
Hi. Here's a stock tip for you. In the next week, the stock of Zuzu Industries is going up.
-- Fred
You ignore it, of course. In a week, you get this.
Zuzu Industries stock went up this week. Did you take advantage of my tip? Here's another. Urquhardt Associates stock is going down this week. This would be a good time to short it.
-- Fred
Over the next three weeks, you get similar notes. You check the stocks in retrospect and, by golly, this Fred character is right every time. On the fourth week, you get this note.
I got your name as someone who would be interested in a great new way of making money on the stock market. If you've been following my stock tips, you've noticed that they were all right on. While I can't tell you the details of my prediction methods, I can tell you they are impressive.
I'm not selling anything. But if you try a small investment in Oldsen Oil now, I predict that it go up in the next week. All I ask is that you send me half of your profits when it does. If you do, I will send you more tips, and you may be able to make even more money.
I've been right so far, haven't I?
-- Fred
Curious, you give it a try. Sure enough, Oldsen Oil goes up, you make a bit of money, and dutifully send half of it to your benefactor. He follows through as promised.
You made money on Oldsen Oil. Great! Now it's time to really cash in. Same deal as before. Invest in Knox Asphalt stock, which I predict will go up this week. Invest as much as you can. When you cash in a week from now, all I ask is that you send me half of your profits. Remember - I only make money when you do!
-- Fred
You invest $10k in Knox. You're nervous, of course, but Fred has been right so far, and it sure does look like his success is dependent on yours.
Hurray! Knox goes up, you cash in for a tidy profit, gratefully send half to Fred and congratulate yourself. You never hear from Fred again, but what the heck.

How It Works
This scheme has apparently been used at least since the 1930s, when it was done in the context of predicting horse races. Here's how you do it.

The first email mailing is sent to 512 people. In half of them, the stock is predicted to rise. In the other half, it is predicted to fall.

The second email is sent to 256 people, the half for which the first prediction was correct. Half of these 256 people receive a prediction that the second stock will rise; half that it will fall.

Similarly with the third through fifth notes, reducing the population of people with all-correct predictions to 32. The "hook" note, asking for a small investment, is sent to those 32 people, 16 with predictions for a rise and 16 for a fall.

The final note, asking for a big investment, is sent to whomever responded to the "hook" note by sending half of their small profits. On a good day, that's 16 people. Of these, 8 are encouraged to invest figuring a stock rise, 8 figuring a stock fall.

In the end, this gives you 8 people who have profited from your "predictions". Again, on a good day, all 8 send you half of their profits. You take the money, close your post office box and email account, and disappear.

Of course, you were wrong the vast majority of the time, and most people lost money following your advice. No matter! You got your money and you're gone.
These scams usually involves claims of an infallible prediction scheme - a shady insider, or a scientific breakthrough in prediction. That constitutes mail or wire fraud and is a no-no. If you steer clear of false claims, however, it might be the case that this is perfectly legal. (Though what do I know? I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on the Web.)
Coming soon to an email account near you!

Plurp. These days, people give conference talks from their laptops. Since their laptops crash all the time, it's good bet that, before they can give their talk, they have to reboot their laptop. That means there's a good chance that the audience will spend quite a bit of time staring at a big screen on which is a big Microsoft logo and large letters that say Microsoft Windows.
Now let's see. If Windows crashes more, then more Microsoft advertising is seen by more people. Hmm ...

Plurp. My friend Benjamin suggests that there is something Karmic about Web-based folks moving into atom-based businesses. Brill's Content, for instance, is clearly destined to be a webzine. In my hotel, however, they provide a (paper! atom-based!) copy of Brill's Content alongside Twin Cities Guest Information. Ick.
Benjamin's theory is that Brill went against his Buddha-nature in his previous Web life (i.e. a few years ago) and has now been reincarnated as a lower (atom-based) life form.
If you meet Brill on the road, kill him!

Plurp. People often say that something complicated or mysterious depends on the phase of the moon. I'm not sure if this was the origin of the term, or merely an exploitation of it, but it's a good story in either case!
[In the early 1960s,] General Electric, Westinghouse, Allis-Chalmers, and I-T-E coordinated a pervasive price conspiracy in selling heavy electrical equipment to the government. A single company would enter a bid lower than all its competitors, all of whom would enter identical bids higher than the lowest. In one instance, seven different companies entered a bid of exactly $198,438.24, and the contract was awarded to the single firm that bid lower. It was a very effective cartel.
These were supposed to be secret bids, and the conspiracy would never have worked if not for the cartel's ingenious enforcement strategy. The firm to enter the lowest bid was determined by the fullness of the moon. This phase of the moon strategy was foolproof for decades, and was only discovered in 1959 by a reporter in Tennessee, who noticed the peculiarity of the identical bids.

Rant. I gotta tell ya. Getting that little Blab box working was hard ! You would think it would be utterly trivial, built into every Web server and every Web page editor from the beginning. Far from it! I had to:

Steal a Perl script from Dave, who already figured out how to do it for his log. Since I didn't really want to learn Perl just for this, I ended up bugging Dave quit a bit to understand the bits I had to fiddle with.

Steal some redirecting code from Ian, since I wanted a nice Thank You page and it was way too painful to encode that directly in the Perl script.

Decide what email id I want to sacrifice to this. Surely not my work id! If I didn't already have another one handy, I would have had to get one.

Get that script up onto my Web hosting service. Luckily, my host actually allows me to do this; many don't.

Go back and figure out why it doesn't work. Turns out it was because the script was written on my PC and the Web server is a Unix system. The PC editor ends lines with <carriage-return> <line-feed>. (These are ancient characters from the age of teletypes, by the way, when ending a line really meant moving the print head back to the beginning of the line and moving the paper up.) The Perl interpreter on the Web server barfs unless lines end simply with <line-feed>, though it gives no indication that this is the problem. So, after you put the script onto the server, you have to run yet another Perl script on the server to get rid of the <carriage-return> characters.

Write the HTML to display a text input box and send its text to the server for munching by the script. Netscape Composer, the HTML editor I'm using (sorry!), is too primitive to do this. You have to go edit the raw HTML, which is fine, but oh come on!

So, to test it, you:

Fiddle with the HTML for the test input box and the Perl script.

Telnet to the server.

Put the script on the server.

Run the Perl filter on the script to get rid of the <carriage-returns>.

chmod 755 to make the script executable.

Try typing stuff into the test input box.

Get mysterious and unhelpful error message.

Repeat until bored.

If putting text onto the Web was this hard, there would only be three weblogs in the world!

Plurp.
The blue dog only
had one
thing to say.

Tuesday, October 17, 2000
Plurp. What is Morning Person Protocol? I am staying at the house of friends who are, I think, all morning people. We're sleeping in tomorrow, she announced last night; we don't have to leave until 7:00. (It took me a while to parse that.)
So I leapt confusedly out of bed at 6:00 only to find the house dark and silent. Not wanting to disturb anyone, I waited in the dark, listening, until I was sure other people were up and about.
Helen is also a morning person, and accommodates my nocturnal habits by some form of quiet activity in the wee hours (like 7:00). So, this is not a situation I encounter often and I want to make sure I don't violate whatever protocol society might have put in place while I was sleeping.
I seem to have been successful, as no one is looking at me aghast so far. Or else they're just being polite.

Yo. Sign on a local church:
Come to church
Resistance is futile
You will be assimilated
We're Lutheran!
I dunno.

Plurp. On the radio today, a banjo-pickin' song to warm a physicist's heart, with a chorus that goes:
Albert, dance around
Albert, be profound
And, incredibly, I can't find it on the Web.

Plurp.
The blue dog is not a symbol,
not an icon,
not a morality play.
The blue dog is an oil slick
made of ideas you
already discarded.

Monday, October 16, 2000
Yow. New in our Stuff department: Broken Jokes. These are paradoxical jokes that are funny precisely because they do not have a funny ending. You will either find them utterly hilarious, or you will question my sanity. Or both. A preview:
This guy walks into a bar with a chicken and an alligator.
The guy says to the bartender "I'll have a Scotch and soda." The alligator says "I'll have a Martini."
"That's amazing," says the bartender, "that alligator can talk!"
"Actually," says the guy, "I'm a ventriloquist."

Yow. We added a couple more phone answering messages to our Home Sweet Home section. Enjoy. Beep.

Yak.
Helen (distressed, in a pitched voice): Steve!!
Steve (running, worried): What? What?
Helen: The squares! The little squares are gone!
Steve: What?
Helen: The little yellow squares! I can't get them back!
Steve: Oh. Is that all? Those were last week.
Helen: What do you mean?
Steve: They only show up on last week's Plurp.
Helen: There are going to be a lot of unhappy people out there. You should have warned them. You should have said something.

Yak.
This is your captain speaking. We're currently fifteenth for takeoff, give or take a few - they always slip a few in that weren't in line somehow - so sit back, relax, and we'll be in the air real soon.

Sunday, October 15, 2000
Plop. We received a few flames recently from people who really ought to know better, accusing us of chicanery in the Very First Plurp Vote a couple of weeks ago. You may remember that we asked you to tell us what you thought of Plurp.
We were both surprised and pleased. Hundreds of people responded. (We had no idea that a brand new weblog like Plurp could have so many readers!) What's more, everyone - everyone - who responded rated Plurp as "Fabulous".
We are grateful to you, our loyal readers, and overwhelmed with your enthusiasm. We can only conclude that the few miscreants who leveled these charges are jealous.

Plurp. Are you getting tired of hearing about my childhood? No problem. Skip ahead. I don't mind. Or go here.
When we were visiting Steve & Pat recently, they gave us (well, me actually) beef jerky. They're so wonderful.
I've always loved beef jerky - dried, salted, spiced beef strips. It originated as a preserved meat before there was refrigeration. Cowboys, I think, used to gnaw on jerky on the trail.
From a health point of view, it's probably awful stuff. It's beef, for starters. The package says 97% FAT FREE. Yeah, but it's probably only 3% salt free. And who knows what all those other ingredients are.
No matter. As a teenager, I would go into a local store with fifteen cents in my pocket. They had individual sticks of beef jerky in a big, round glass jar with a loose-fitting lid. They were dark dark brown and knurled, like strips of bark from a walnut tree.
I would buy one stick with my fifteen cents, carrying it home in a small, flat paper bag. Over the subsequent few hours, I would tear off a microscopic piece of jerky, plant it in my mouth and suck it slowly into unrecognizable pulp, then repeat the procedure with another microscopic piece. That single, meager stick lasted a long, long time.
At the time, I imagined heaven as a place where there were rooms built entirely of beef jerky - the walls, the ceilings, the floors, everything. There would be, I imagined, so much beef jerky that you could eat it by the handful, by the armload, with no precious scarcity to inhibit you.
So here I am, an "adult" (though I might dispute that accusation), and I have my wish. I have, in front of me, courtesy of my fine friends, more jerky than I can possibly eat, at least in this one sitting.
Is this heaven? Yeah, maybe it is.

Yo.
FOR FRESHER TASTING JERKY, PLEASE USE WITHIN 7 DAYS OF OPENING.
What could that mean?

Plurp.
In drinking water,
remember its source.
-- Chinese proverb

Yak. We watched the Miss America thingie last night.
It used to be called The Miss America Pageant. They made a Big Deal tonight about how they changed the name to Miss America. They said that, next year, it might be called Miss. I'm hoping that, the following year, it won't have any name at all.
I was distressed by how they All Looked Alike. It was as if all of the various Barbies were competing in a beauty pageant. It's not that they were unattractive. It's just that I kept imagining cutting myself on their sharp, vinyl edges.
Steve: Is there a negligée competition?
Helen: You are so full of crap.
Steve: I am not full of crap. I am full of hope.

Plurp.

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