I like Gmail, and I use it as a personal account for this blog and other purposes. One of the things I like best about Gmail is the one-click ease of reporting spam and having it vanish from my inbox, with the sense of accomplishment that due to my small contribution, the Google anti-spam terrier is getting sharper teeth and a nastier disposition.
Except the terrier seems to be sleeping. Unless I am blind to some subtle i18n character set issues, it should be really, really easy for the Bayesian filtering algorithms over at Google spam central to figure out that hey, *every single* Arabic email that estock has received, he's classified as spam! And look, *every single* cyrillic and Mandarin character set email he's received, he's classified as spam as well! Hmmm. What could we do with this information? I think that just possibly, entropy could be reduced a little by incorporating it.
Ten or so of these a day, every day, get old. No, I do not want to hire any stock brokers from Dubai, even when they write to me in English -- and especially when they write in Arabic. Really. Hey, spam terrier -- bite 'em!
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Lunch 2.0 at Zvents -- Wednesday, May 31st noon
Come join us for BBQ in the back yard of Zvents / NetService Ventures -- part of the Lunch 2.0 series started by Mark Jen and the guys at Plaxo. Read about the whole Lunch 2.0 series here.
RSVP by commenting on the Lunch 2.0 web site, or by adding a comment to the zLunch event page:
Parking will be tight, so please carpool, or park at the Sharon Heights Safeway, which is about a 5 minute walk west on Sand Hill Road (turn at the light at Sharon Park Dr.)
We'll provide all the food and drink, you provider the conversation!
RSVP by commenting on the Lunch 2.0 web site, or by adding a comment to the zLunch event page:
Parking will be tight, so please carpool, or park at the Sharon Heights Safeway, which is about a 5 minute walk west on Sand Hill Road (turn at the light at Sharon Park Dr.)
We'll provide all the food and drink, you provider the conversation!
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" - History of Oil
I was chatting with one of my self-identified libertarian friends tonight (he started out the conversation with "were you referring to me in that last blog post?") and I ended the evening by recommending Daniel Yergin's fabulous book The Prize to him. It's a history of oil from its discovery in 1850 through to the first Gulf War in 1990, and it won a well-deserved Pulitzer. It's a huge tome (800 pages, I think) but an outstanding history of the single most important factor in world history during the past century and a half. If you read it, you'll be amazed how the thread of oil runs through the waning days of imperialism, both World Wars, and the Cold War... it really has been the fulcrum of power in modern times. Highly, highly recommended.
Airlines vs. Fuel Costs = Dirigibles?
I just read a fascinating article in the New York Times about Boeing, Airbus, and the future of commercial aviation. Boeing, as airplane geeks will know, has bet heavily on the 787 'Dreamliner', a highly fuel-efficient midsize plane designed to serve point-to-point international routes -- San Francisco to Shanghai, Athens to Boston. Airbus, on the other hand, is building the massive A380, a plane designed to carry 500+ passengers on core 'hub and spoke' routes such as New York to Tokyo, with smaller planes serving as 'feeders' to these routes.
This multi-billion-dollar faceoff between two different philosophies and infrastructures is reminiscent of so many other distributed-vs.-centralized battles. FedEx created a business by going with centralized hubs. "Mesh" networking is supposed to be more efficient and resilient by getting rid of hubs. However, it's clear in this case that one simple calculus will decide the fate of Boeing vs. Airbus:
Fuel cost vs. customer happiness.
As recently as 12 months ago, I would argue with friends about 'peak oil' and what an economy looks like as it slides down the back side of a bell curve of production; and I would get signficant pushback that we were anywhere close to such a circumstance. The more libertarian-minded were fond of citing the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet on commodities as a supporting point.
And here we are. Massively rising demand for oil from China and India; potential disruption of significant sources of production ranging from Venezuela and Bolivia, Nigeria and Sudan, Iraq and Iran, to the Khazak basin in the former Soviet Union. No massive new sources of oil discovered, and few likely to come on line soon. And wild cards such as the Canadian tar sands are predicated on... high oil prices to make them relatively cost-efficient to produce.
Which got me to thinking: If the tradeoff for airlines is fuel efficiency vs. customer satisfaction, why not dirigibles or blimps? Right now it takes about 10 hours to fly the 6000 miles from SF to London, at about 600 miles per hour. An appropriately designed dirigible could do it in 24 hours at 250 miles per hour, at a vastly (90%?) reduced fuel cost -- since a dirigible would benefit both from the cubic reduction in power-required vs. speed flown, and the absence of the need to expend power to keep the aircraft up in the air, which accounts for a large percentage of airplane fuel cost. Imagine that, instead of spending 10 hours on a cramped, noisy, EXPENSIVE airplane, you spent a full day and a full night on a quiet, spacious, dirigible? Broadband internet access would be essential -- not only could you make crystal-clear phone calls, but you could transfer any volume of data. You'd get nice meals from a large kitchen. You could walk around and exercise. You could sleep in a real bed. And in a world of $70 - $140 a barrel oil costs, all of this might be CHEAPER to provide than a miserable 10-hour flight.
The key, of course, is making the experience as business-like for business travelers, and as vacation-like for vacation travelers, as possible. Without doing some considerable aeronautical math, I can't estimate at what fuel price point dirigibles would start to make sene. But it's certainly fascinating to consider.
This multi-billion-dollar faceoff between two different philosophies and infrastructures is reminiscent of so many other distributed-vs.-centralized battles. FedEx created a business by going with centralized hubs. "Mesh" networking is supposed to be more efficient and resilient by getting rid of hubs. However, it's clear in this case that one simple calculus will decide the fate of Boeing vs. Airbus:
Fuel cost vs. customer happiness.
As recently as 12 months ago, I would argue with friends about 'peak oil' and what an economy looks like as it slides down the back side of a bell curve of production; and I would get signficant pushback that we were anywhere close to such a circumstance. The more libertarian-minded were fond of citing the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet on commodities as a supporting point.
And here we are. Massively rising demand for oil from China and India; potential disruption of significant sources of production ranging from Venezuela and Bolivia, Nigeria and Sudan, Iraq and Iran, to the Khazak basin in the former Soviet Union. No massive new sources of oil discovered, and few likely to come on line soon. And wild cards such as the Canadian tar sands are predicated on... high oil prices to make them relatively cost-efficient to produce.
Which got me to thinking: If the tradeoff for airlines is fuel efficiency vs. customer satisfaction, why not dirigibles or blimps? Right now it takes about 10 hours to fly the 6000 miles from SF to London, at about 600 miles per hour. An appropriately designed dirigible could do it in 24 hours at 250 miles per hour, at a vastly (90%?) reduced fuel cost -- since a dirigible would benefit both from the cubic reduction in power-required vs. speed flown, and the absence of the need to expend power to keep the aircraft up in the air, which accounts for a large percentage of airplane fuel cost. Imagine that, instead of spending 10 hours on a cramped, noisy, EXPENSIVE airplane, you spent a full day and a full night on a quiet, spacious, dirigible? Broadband internet access would be essential -- not only could you make crystal-clear phone calls, but you could transfer any volume of data. You'd get nice meals from a large kitchen. You could walk around and exercise. You could sleep in a real bed. And in a world of $70 - $140 a barrel oil costs, all of this might be CHEAPER to provide than a miserable 10-hour flight.
The key, of course, is making the experience as business-like for business travelers, and as vacation-like for vacation travelers, as possible. Without doing some considerable aeronautical math, I can't estimate at what fuel price point dirigibles would start to make sene. But it's certainly fascinating to consider.
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