Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Concept for improving email: StampMail.com

Often, email feels like an impossible torrent of mostly-unwanted information.

For a while, I have felt like one way to improve it would be to require refundable stamps for messages. In order to send you an email, a person might pay $0.50 or $1.00 for a virtual ‘stamp’. When you receive the message, you get to choose whether to refund the sender (perhaps minus a set fee for the email provider), or keep the value of the stamp yourself (again, minus a $0.05 or $0.10 cut).

If emails cost $1 each to send, there would be a lot fewer trivial ones. I doubt many people would totally replace their normal email with StampMail, but a lot might set up a parallel account for higher-priority messages.

Some spam will be profitable enough to make sending emails with stamps worthwhile. There are two responses to this. First, StampMail could be a lot more aggressive than existing email providers about banning accounts that are sending spam. Second, any spam you receive is more tolerable when it comes with a $0.90 to $0.95 payment.

Fry on language

The brilliant Stephen Fry on the balance between rule-following and tiresome pedantry in language use:

I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.

The latest nuclear fusion enthusiasm

I have written about nuclear fusion as an energy source before:

Periodically, however, there are news stories about supposed breakthroughs in fusion technology with the potential to be rapidly and affordably deployed, potentially curbing climate change.

I have seen enough of these stories in my life to be pretty skeptical, but this can be a thread for keeping track of and discussing them.

Here’s the latest: Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project

What if?

My copy of Randall Monroe’s What if? book arrived from Amazon today, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Upper Library going through it. Right from the disclaimer it is quite entertaining:

The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

Toronto friends are welcome to borrow the book and learn about bullet-sized pieces of material with neutron star density; the effects of draining Earth’s oceans; the plausibility of eradicating the common cold through global quarantine; and similarly practical matters.

Tour of Ottawa sights

My Saturday in Ottawa involved a rather comprehensive trek.

Beginning at the home of my friends Andrea and Mehrzad, I walked up Booth Street – past the first apartment I rented in town and the War Museum – and across the Chaudiere Bridge to the Terrasses de la Chaudière complex which includes Environment Canada headquarters.

On the Quebec side, I then walked to the Museum of Civilization, which has been rebranded by the Harper government as the Canadian Museum of History. I then crossed the Alexandra bridge back into Ontario, putting me near the National Gallery. I walked through Major’s Hill Park and crossed the Rideau Canal near the Chateau Laurier. I then entered Parliament Hill, walking the scenic northern edge, looking out over all the major government buildings of the National Capital Region.

I carried on west, walking around the Supreme Court, before heading east again to buy a ticket for the guided tour of Centre Block. While near Parliament Hill, I had a peek at the building where I used to work for the Privy Council Office, along with the Blackburn Building (home of the PCO library) and the Langevin Block (home of the Prime Minister’s Office).

I then walked through the downtown core, mostly along Bank Street, getting a peek at the new Venus Envy location before diverting west down Somerset. I also had a quick peek at the headquarters of the Department of Finance and Treasury Board Secretariat. I also talked to some not-especially-interested salespeople at Henry’s cameras about the relative merits of the 6D and 5D Mk III.

All through the walk, I was struck by how small a place Ottawa is. Having spent five years working there, every neighbourhood is peppered with memories and (at least on a pleasant summer’s day) they can all be walked to quite easily.

I walked down Somerset all the way back to the Booth neighbourhood and said hello to Andrea’s hilarious dogs before following the river back to Parliament Hill for my tour. The guided tour included the elegant corridors and atriums of Centre Block, committee rooms, the senate, and the extremely beautiful Library of Parliament.

After the tour, I walked up Elgin Street, passing the pub where I used to do trivia on a team of tax economists on Tuesday nights. I headed south to the Museum of Nature before having a look at the much-developed Beaver Barracks complex where I used to live. I then walked back to Bank Street and south through The Glebe to the redeveloped Landsdowne Park.

From there, I visited the Bank Street canal bridge and wandered along the canal and through neighbourhoods as far as Dow’s Lake, before making my way back to Andrea’s via the Natural Resources Canada complex on Booth Street.

Peter John sums up

“A synthetic approach implies there are multiple causes of policy change and variation. Accounts that rely on one process to explain why decision making takes a particular course are too narrow and relegate other factors to some dominant principle. The common view of contemporary social scientists is that there is no one general principle governing social and political life. Instead, social scientists need to make sense of the complexity, variation, and changeability of the empirical world, which is constituted by conflicting ideas. As such, theories of policy variation and change must incorporate and account for continuous change and adoption. It is not possible to say that only institutions count, or that social and political phenomena can be reduced to economic drivers. Policy outputs and outcomes are the result of a confluence of the five processes [institutions, groups, exogenous factors, rational actors, and ideas] that the book outlines in chapters 3 to 7.

There are three sets of authors who try to synthesize these factors. They are Sabatier (policy advocacy coalition theory), Kingdon (the policy streams approach), and Baumgartner and Jones (the punctuated equilibrium model). The first seeks to combine ideas and networks in public policy, where policy subsystems are driven and sometimes fractured by large socioeconomic or external events. The second is based on the continual interplay of problems, solutions, and policies in the garbage can model of policy choice. The third is a model of agenda setting, seeking to describe how agendas and policies move fro periods of high stability to times of rapid change and fluidity. All three models are contemporary because they place ideas at the center of their analysis. The time when writers believed that only interests drive public policy is now over. Conceptions, discourse, beliefs, and norms define the process of policy making. Yet unlike some of the ideational theories described in chapter 7, Sabatier, Kingdon, and Baumgartner and Jones seek to place ideas with the complex interplay of individual choice, networks, institutions, and socioeconomic changes. Thus each framework has all these elements.

In keeping with the critical approach of this book, none of these authors quite succeeds in creating a theory of public policy. For all the role of knowledge and advocacy in Sabatier’s approach, the policy advocacy coalition framework is too static, as it is driven by outside events. Kingdon’s approach is highly attractive, but it relies too much on change and fluidity. Baumgartner and Jones neatly contrast stability and instability in the account of policy making over time, but in the end it is not entirely clear that they explain the transition between stability and change and back again.”

John, Peter. Analyzing Public Policy: Second Edition. 2012. p. 176 (hardcover)