Trip to the Morton Arboretum

Jessica and I recently went to the Morton Arboretum. I took the occasion to try out some stereoscopic images. A nifty technique to show them is to alternate between the two images quickly. Below are some of the images I took:(WARNING may make you dizzy)

Web Page Rage

So I updated my website to be more "advanced". It now shows my twitter status under my name. I created a php script that would get the status from twitter. However this proved to slow down my website by a lot because twitter is slow, retarded monkey slow. So I created a perl script that saves my status to a file and my page reads that file. I created a cron job to run that script once in a while. So for those who need to want to know my twitter status with little fuss you can get it at http://mempko.dyndns.org/twitstatus

You know, you can make a programmable clock that speaks my status and stuff. But I doubt you want to be woken up to the sound of my ramblings.

The Trap

I watched a wonderful documentary by Adam Curtis called The Trap which describes the distinction between positive and negative freedoms and how fighting for negative freedoms has put our society into a trap. Discover what that trap exactly is and how negative freedoms lead to a moral dead end.

Free Market and Snow Plows

Its snowing here in Chicago. I was driving the other day and saw a snow plow driving on the street with it's plow up. It drove for a while like that on the slippery snowy street until it pulled into a strip mall parking lot.

"That's incredibly annoying", I thought.

The businesses payed private plowing companies to plow their parking lots while the city clearly pays plowing companies to plow the streets. So you end up with snow plows that are supposed to plow a parking lot not plow the streets when they go to their destinations.

This may be efficient in terms of speed. Businesses get their lots plowed fast. Often faster than the city can plow the roads. Which is funny because people can't get to those nice clean parking lots.

However this setup is not efficient in terms of resources. In reality the total cost for an area is larger for the community as a whole. The city I live in already employs bus drivers. How hard it be to equip some city trucks with plows. I am sure the bus drivers would love to get some more hours of work in.

I see the snow plows as an example in the inherent inefficiency in the free market. The free market does not consider externalities (Is that a word?). Two parties interacting don't think about the third. Stores don't consider the idea that they might be putting more plows on the road than necessary. To the point of perversion where nobody can get to their clean parking lots.