Ben Franklin, if his schedule is to be believed, got up every day at 5 in the morning to do his ablutions, “address powerful goodness”, and “take the resolution of the day”. The whole schedule is rather charming, including, for example, a good four hours for supper, music, and “putting things in their places”.

I recently felt the need for more order in my life, and figured I could do worse than adapt someone else’s schedule. Unfortunately, unlike Ben Franklin, I am not in the mood to take the resolution of the day until about 10, and am not generally in the mood to address powerful goodness at all. So, as a first cut, I offset Mr. Franklin’s schedule by 5 hours. Here’s what that looks like:

10, 11, 12, 1: Washing, breakfast, powerful goodness, etc.
2, 3, 4, 5: Work.
6, 7: Lunch.
8, 9, 10, 11: Work.
12, 1, 2, 3: Put things in their places, supper, etc.

As intellectually interesting as lunch at 6pm is, this is now a rather anti-social schedule. I did a little more fiddling, and came up with this version:

10: Rise, wash.
11, 12: Work.
1: Lunch.
2, 3, 4, 5: Work
6, 7, 8, 9: Put things in their places, socialise.
10, 11: Work.
12, 1: Relax.
2: Sleep.

This version contains the same number of work hours as Franklin’s, but that number actually seems a little low. I’ll have to experiment.

I just saw this in the Evening Standard:

App for sounds of the streets

A musical tour of the capital revealing the London links to songs by the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and Chuck Berry has been created as a new phone app. Museum of London curators have collected musical facts about more than 200 locations and 160 artists for the app, Soundtrack to London, which is available for Nokia phones.

Here’s my idea for an app called “Music Tourist”, which I had 6 months ago but never did anything about: Music Tourist is a location-aware music exploration app that makes use of people’s existing music library. It’s designed to be used on an iPhone or similar when the user is walking around a new location – i.e., being a tourist. When the person walks near a location that is associated with a particular piece of music in their existing music library, that music starts playing.

To take a cheesy example, the user could walk down Abbey Road in London, and Come Together would start playing, if they have any Beatles; Let There Be More Light might come on if they have Pink Floyd instead. As they walk past The Hope And Anchor in the Islinton, they might hear Tits by The Stranglers. And so on.

There are lots of good things about this sort of app: firstly, there would be no licensing fees because it would use people’s own music. There would be good advertising opportunity, if I could bear it. And it wouldn’t run on horrible Nokia phones.

We bought a vegetarian haggis the other day. Did you know you could get vegetarian haggis? Vegetarian haggis! It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Its skin is plastic and its interior is oats, vegetables, and spices.

Anyway the haggis purchase, it turns out, was perfectly timed for a Burns supper. We drank Scotch and listened to readings of Address tae the haggis whilst we partook of it.

Haggis, even vegetarian haggis, is very rich!

Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!

There was a recent discussion on Hacker News on renting vs buying in the USA, inspired by Trulia’s Rent vs. Buy index for 2011.

The model they use is pretty simple: for each city, they calculate index = (average house price) / (cost of rent for one year). For example, a city with houses costing a median of $140,201.37 and where rent is $1,871.65 a month would have an index of (140,201.37 / (1,871.65 * 12)) = 6. This gives a rough indication of break-even point: in this case 6 years of rent at an average place would have bought it. It ignores other costs of ownership, such as mortgage interest and taxes; and of course it has no chance of representing benefits such as being granted the ability to, say, rip out and replace the kitchen.

According to the site, and I’m not sure how they came up with this, an index <= 15 means that owning is more cost effective; 15 < index <= 20 means that renting is probably more cost effective; and 20 < index means renting is certainly more cost effective. I have no idea why 15-year mortgages are cost-effective while 20-year mortgages are not, but these numbers at least give a basis to work with.

So how do things change when you do the same thing in London?

Here are UK house prices by post code. The most obvious thing here is that it would be misleading to talk about an “average-priced house in London”: there is an order of magnitude differences in prices depending on where you go. So let’s talk about an average house in Islington. This covers a couple of postcodes. It’s pleasant, central, and correspondingly expensive.

House prices vary by type, so let’s talk about semidetached places. Here is more information on Islington specifically. It’s probably not surprising to see that the average and median prices are very different, with the median being rather lower. Annoyingly you can either choose to view by property type, or by number of bedrooms, but not both. Stick with the semidetached idea, the median price turns out to be £672,475.

That completes the “buy” part of Trulia’s calculation. What about the “rent” part?

Renting is harder. Specifically, it’s difficult to find rental statistics broken down by house type. So I did my own survey, using 3-bedroom properties currently available to rent on Rightmove.

At the time I did the survey, there were 65 properties, for an average annual rent of £46,368.00, and a median annual rent of £39,187.00.

Putting those numbers into Trulia’s equation, we get 627,475 / 39,187 = 16. This nudges semidetached places in Islington just into the “renting is probably more cost-effective” category. I suspect the purchase price of semis with 3 bedrooms specifically is slightly higher than the number I used, which would make the index even higher.

What I found interesting about the whole process was how easy it was to get completely different answers. For example, it seems that smaller places, such as 1- and 2-bedroom flats, are cheaper to buy.

What I also found interesting is that after doing all this work for semis in Islington I ended up getting the answer “maybe”.

When the robot uprising occurs, they’re gonna kill the programmers first.

One thing you really need in London is lip balm. Unfortunately there are a huge range of lip balms out there, and it’s not at all obvious which one you should choose. Here I have reviewed five. Each gets an overall score as well as ratings in terms of pungence and longevity.

Natural Beeswax Lip Balm

Enriched with Vitamin E & Peppermint
OraLabs, Inc.
Bought at: UNSW chemist

Review: You are making honey on toast, but you can’t seem to focus properly. You push the knife hard into the jar. When you pull it out again, it is covered in a thick brown smear. You attack the toast, but something is wrong: you can’t tell where the knife ends and your hand begins. You push your arm vaguely over the toast and watch the tendons in your hand contort and stretch. In a sudden panic, you drop the knife. The toast is covered, dripping with golden honey. There is too much honey, you realise, but you can’t pick up the knife. Rivulets of thick honey drip from the toast and form a pool on the floor. Your fingers are sticky. ⁸⁄₁₀.

Pungence: 2 Longevity: 8

Sanctuary Balm

St. Augustine’s Abbey, Ramsgate
Bought at: online store

Review: This brings to mind musty attics in wooden houses, the smell of age. Pull the lip balm out of your pocket and smear it liberally over your lips. You are going out for the evening, but your date has not arrived. Check your watch nervously. Invent excuses. Smear the lip balm over your lips. Sit, taught-muscled, next to the phone. Smear the lip balm on your lips. Adjust your hair nervously. Your face feels hot and greasy. ⁸⁄₁₀.

Pungence: 5 Longevity: 7

Filberts West Country Lip Balm

Filberts Bees, Dorchester, Dorset
Bought at: online store

Review: Strong and assertive. Recalls memories of primary schools. Strict teachers and just punishment. You have been bad, but we will make sure you are never naughty again. Dominates the upper lip and vanishes, leaving only a lingering aroma of hospital disinfectant. ⁶⁄₁₀.

Pungence: 5 Longevity: 3

Burt’s Bees

Rejuvenating Lip Balm with Açaí Berry
Burt’s Bees (UK) Ltd.
Bought at: Boots, Golders Green, London

Review: You are walking with your lover through a sun-drenched meadow. The sun is low in the sky and the air is warm. You play at chase; laughing, you stumble and collapse on a bed of soft heather. You gaze at the sky through drowsy lids. You let the warmth caress you. A shaft of sunlight pierces the heather, and you feel yourself growing down, down into the earth. Your body dissolves into a million pieces of life-giving energy. You are the meadow. ⁷⁄₁₀.

Pungence: 8 Longevity: 5

Rose & Co. Sweet Vanilla Salve with Beeswax & Honey

Bought at: Boots, Piccadilly Circus, London

Review: Light and guileless. Airy floral notes. Strong aftertaste of bilge. ⁴⁄₁₀

Pungence: 4 Longevity: 6

Before I talk about the nipple incident I need to discuss the way I walk. I walk very quickly, with long, even strides. I tend to look at the people I’m passing. Sometimes I stare at them in a very disconcerting way. If I’m not looking at people’s faces I look straight ahead.

When I am on a collision course with somebody, I change direction. I telegraph the direction change from a long way off by reorienting my entire body, rather than just my feet. After making eye contact with people, I look towards the ground, so as not to be misconstrued as aggressive. The whole eye contact and reorientation thing gets stressful, because I never end up walking in a straight line, but is on the whole rather pleasant, because this is typically how other people behave.

Well, geeks beware, because apparently this kind of footpath politeness marks you as someone of low social status. I was reading one of those horrible pop-evo-psych blogs on the nature of social status. I’d like to summarise the argument of the blog post so you don’t have to read it, but it was quite scattergun and not very coherent, so I am having trouble. On the other hand, the post is quite scattergun and not very coherent, so I don’t recommend you read it.

The post does, however, link to a completely innocent improvisation blog post on low- and high-social-status walking behaviours. This was interesting because it presented lists of behaviours for actors to convey low and high social status to audiences.

One of the low-status walking behavious is “gets out of the way of other people”. Others include walking jerkily or with unnecessary movements, looking up at people (head tilted forward), slouching, and so on. High-status behaviours include looking down at people (head tilted back), not looking at low-status people at all, and assuming other people will get out of your way.

So tonight while walking home I thought I’d live the high life. Instead of making eye contact with people I stared directly at where I was headed, giving the impression that I knew where people were but that I wasn’t going to waste time looking at them. I didn’t check to see whether people had noticed me. I didn’t smile at all. And as usual I walked quickly, smoothly, and without slouching. Essentially, I acted as if I were more important than everybody around me.

The first thing I noticed was that walking this way was very relaxing, because everybody got the hell out of my way. The second thing I noticed was that walking this way was a little stressful, because every so often I would encounter somebody who had the same idea. This essentially turned a simple thing (walking home) into a ridiculous dominance challenge.

And this is when we get to the nipple encounter, because there was only one person who didn’t move out of my way. This guy was rather muscly, taller than I, and obviously not used to encountering geeks role playing at being street poseurs. We strode confidently toward each other. I figured we were actually going to just bounce off each other, a prospect I wasn’t looking forward to as inertia was clearly on the other gentleman’s side. Fortunately, at the last second, we both did that awkward 45-degree watch-where-you’re-going-you-jerk twist common to street theatre. Unfortunately, we were extremely close to each other at the time, so there was a fair bit of chest-to-chest sliding involved.

And that is how I rubbed nipples with a well-built man halfway along London Bridge. It was easily the most homoerotic thing I have ever done on London Bridge.

Idea: start a gym club for logicians. Call it “The excluded middle”.

I just read a great interview with a moderator of encyclopediadramatica.com. It’s clear that the interviewer was expecting the moderator to be a young stoner with anarchist leanings, but this expectation turned out to be hilariously wrong as the guy is a middle-aged professional and father. Ninemsn applied the standard you’ve-been-a-naughty-boy, what-have-you-to-say-for-yourself line of questioning anyway.

Choice quotes from the article:

Do you think it’s possible for people to go too far with free speech? Is there a line that can be crossed?

Let us talk epistemology for a moment. The minute there is a hidden limit on speech, it is no longer free. Free speech with limits is not free speech under any circumstances. But Matthew 15:11 (what goes into a man’s mouth does not make him “unclean”, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him “unclean”) certainly applies to some users of ED and virtually any other web community in existence.

Later:

Allowing such material to be published doesn’t seem to me like something most Christians would be comfortable with. How do you justify this to yourself?

All the things Christ said and did would make most “Christians” uncomfortable. He called the leaders of a specific ethnic group murderers and liars (John 8:44), demanded hatred (Luke 14:26) and flogged bankers and flipped over their tables. John 8 is an extremely condemning document — at the time it would have been considered worse than anything on ED. Many people were brutally murdered by the Pharisitic establishment over it. The synoptic gospels and the gospel according to John were so revolutionary that no publishing platform would take them.

These days most Christians focus on Paul and completely ignore the life and actions of Christ. If Christ were here again today he’d probably start a website and people would be crying for its censorship.

Interview with ED moderator.

Update: I’m late with this. Here’s the relevant reddit thread which includes a couple of level-headed comments from the interviewer.

When I finish my thesis I’d really like to investigate some nature-of-consciousness type stuff, because the way the brain works is really interesting to me.

Here’s a motivating example from my own brain. I’ve been in serious thesis-write-up mode for quite some time now. Often, I have problems structuring my writing. A good structure can really improve the readability of a piece of writing, so this is a big problem.

I deal with this big problem the way I deal with all big problems, which is, er, to procrastinate. But after procrastinating, I think about all the stuff I want to express, and start writing bits of it down*.

That (i.e. undirected writing) never works, so then I pace around a bit… okay, to get to the point, what actually happens is that after about 7 hours of this, the way to structure the chapter I’m working on just arrives in my head, apparently ex nihilo, and it all makes sense, and that ends up being the structure I use.

It seems like my consciousness isn’t very involved in the creative process at all, but is instead content to just sit back and have fun. Kind of like the tourist sitting in a boat watching Disney’s “It’s a small world after all”, who doesn’t know about – or care about – the phenomenal amount of work that went into building the attraction**. So, to whatever part of my brain is doing the actual work – hi, could you possibly hurry the fuck up? I’m keen to move on.

*There is a theory that doing a bit of work and then procrastinating for a while is more productive than trying to maintain focus for hours and hours. For obvious reasons, I find this theory to be very seductive.

**The subconscious mind: 289 animatronic dolls singing to a dark tunnel.

A.K.A. I Think All The Product Placement In Lady GaGa’s New Music Video Is An Ironic Joke But Everyone Seems To Be Taking It Seriously

Who wants a Coke?

I like Lady GaGa, but her (not work-safe) video / mini-movie, Telephone, is confusingly full of ads. It features a shot of GaGa’s crotch next to a prominent Virgin Mobile advertisement, and also Diet Coke hair accessories, Wendy’s fast food wrappers, a Polaroid camera, Wonder Bread, and a couple of other products.

Each of these placements get the classic close-up-on-the-product-name that has kind of been a staple of product placement parody since it began. So by now presumably everyone is immune to this sort of stuff and its inclusion in a music video is a satirical take on the whole thing, right? Well, Welt Branding doesn’t seem to think so. Nor does The Guardian, or a host of random bloggers. So I’m confused. Surely people don’t actually take this stuff seriously?

The video is also 95% naked women but I’ll leave that issue for some other blogger.

So what is this, ironic, post-ironic, or post-post-ironic? Thing is, it probably doesn’t matter if it’s ironic or not, since it will work anyway.

Also, what’s with the Swedish lyrics ticker at the end?

Care for a crotchphone?

… or prison dating?

… or some delicious Wonder Bread?

… but I’m at a party. And I’m damn tired of my phone ringing. Sometimes it feels like I live in Central Station. At night…

This is Gordon Guthrie on attracting customers to his start-up:

it’s also like teenage romance, because things seem to go well, we’re getting on, you casually say “would you like to buy the software?” and they sort of coyly go “Ooh! Looks very interesting, but I’ll need to speak to my friends and we’ll see what’s happening,” and then you go home and sit by the phone, and you’re waiting for this: “Please, please, phone up and tell me. Phone up and say you want to buy, you want to buy!”

– Gordon Guthrie on the BBC World Service

Surprisingly lucid description for a software developer, I thought. ;-)

So I went and checked out his site. My first impression is that they really need to do a better job of conveying what the thing does. The front page says “build your own Web apps, without programming”, but that’s way too vague. What kind of Web app can I build? Facebook? It turns out that Hypernumbers is two things: a Web-based spreadsheet, and a way to build a Web-based interface to that spreadsheet. You can produce views which come from data in your spreadsheet, and you can also produce Web pages containing HTML forms which let users modify or add to your spreadsheet.

For example, their sample app is a small Web-based poll which lets you choose a favourite band from a drop-down list, but also lets you select options using radio buttons, or using free-form entry. Submitting the form adds the entries to the spreadsheet. Everything about the Web page and the spreadsheet can be customised (for example, the introductory text on the page is a reference to a cell in the spreadsheet containing text). My only beef with it is a counter they added indicating the number of respondents who have “bad taste in music”: this is simply a count of the number of people who selected “Queen”! A particularly egregious error given one of the other options is Bananarama.

All in all it seems like quite cool tech, but it doesn’t have a real-world use case. Or rather, it has too many: nothing for people to latch on to and say “this is for me!” Also, although the spreadsheet is very nicely done, the demo site is decidedly spartan to the point of looking a little out of date. I realise they want to keep things simple, but some reasonable CSS styling wouldn’t hurt that goal at all.

To be honest, my favourite part of the site is nothing to do with the tech itself: it’s the way it automatically picks a password for you, by combining two words and appending some numbers. It’s more than secure enough (particularly if you do some kind of tarpitting after multiple log-in attempts), but also much easier to remember than the standard 8-random-letters-and-numbers copout. I wish more sites did it!

By the way, if you don’t like targeted advertising, as I don’t, you can visit Google’s ad preferences site and opt out. But it’s probably better to give bogus interests than to opt out, because it reveals less information. For example, I selected things I wasn’t remotely interested in (“Football”, “Nails Screws & Fasteners”, “Payroll Services”). The less attractive “targeted” ads are to me, the better.

(Not opting out means that Google will still build a profile of your interests over time, so you may need to repeat this process. But I don’t think it’s any good at doing that, particularly if you poison the well as above, so I shouldn’t worry.)

Facebook: Facemash “used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person”.

YouTube: the founders of YouTube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site.

(quotes from Wikipedia)