Since you’re a band member in our hypothetical mega-band, what this means to you in practical terms is that bloggers cannot put your videos in their blogs, among other things. Naturally, the music label wants to disable sharing, because they want fans to be dependent on the label to get band updates. In Internet terms, this is a de facto walled garden of content, which in the music labels’ ideal world would be something completely separate from the Internet.

Ideally, as a band member, you’ll get a cut of everything the Label sells, so there’s a lot to say for the walled garden concept. The big problem is this: by definition, sharing is disabled between the Internet and the walled garden. For as long as the Label was the best way to promote your music, there has never been any benefit to sharing content. Ever since broadcast radio music was used to promote albums, and even through the whole music video era, sharing has never played into the promotion scheme.

Maybe sharing should be a part of music promotion.

I’m not talking about ripping whole albums or bittorrent filesharing, per se, although there are some people would riff on this. They might go so far as to argue that if you give an artist some money as a result of downloading an entire album worth of mp3s, then that artist got some free promotion via filesharing. It’s happened before.

But I’m not even going to touch that. The situation I am talking about is when a music label on youtube clicks that one checkbox to “disable embedding.” In the picture below, these are some of the options youtube gives you.

It’s worth considering why someone would ever decide to disable sharing, but the inescapable observation is that many music labels have made this choice. A practical consequence is that they are missing out on potentially free promotion through the Internet. More on this point later.

After some analysis, I decided it had to go, even though it was totally harmless. I was going to chase it into my specialty spider-catcher, consisting of a bowl and an old piece of cardstock.

They never see it coming.

First, the bowl comes descending from out of the sky and encloses the target bug. Usually, the bug stays where it is on the wall, but sometimes it runs madly into the bowl itself, which makes the next step even easier. The cardstock slides between the bowl and the wall, and it’s done. The bug is totally enclosed, and I can just bring it outside.

The key feature is that I don’t kill the bug in the process, which has a number of practical consequences. First, there’s no carcass and guts splattered all over the place, which is always an unpleasant thing to clean up. Next, my capturing method has a nearly 100% success rate, whereas it’s sometimes really hard to squash a bug because they happen to be really good at avoiding being squashed. This means it’s way less frustrating to simply catch the bug, and it’s less work in the long run too.

The spider was near the ceiling, so I used a broom-type thing to chase it towards the wall where I could reach it. …but once the spider was near the door, I thought: I can just send it out the door and skip the catcher. Then, the spider got onto my broom-thing, and I thought: I can just walk outside with the spider clinging to the broom, and then shake it off.

Here’s where it went all wrong: I think the spider went into the broom-thing, and I can’t really tell one way or the other. It’s some wacky proprietary cleaning device with non-standard, non-maintainable parts. I think the spider lives inside the device now, and I’m not sure what the next step is.

The concept was this: I’d disassemble the table, move it to the side of a major Toronto street, and angle the table towards oncoming traffic. The price would start at $40, and every 5 minutes, I would lower the price by $5. Now, this type of auction works best with a captive audience, and ideally the person who wins the action will think like this: I must buy the item at this price, because if I wait too long and the price is lowered, then my competitor might be willing to purchase it at the lower price. In the end, a reverse auction has the same consequence as a forward auction: you find the single individual who is willing to pay the most.

I wanted to use a reverse auction because I assumed it would guarantee that we would eventually find a price point that someone would buy at, and I could establish a schedule that would rapidly get us to the right price. In other words, it was a time issue; I felt it wasn’t worth my time to ask top dollar for the table, so I’d make price vary by time and accept the tradeoff.

I think a fair price for the table was around $30, so I started it at $40. I printed some price tags on letter-sized paper, using a 400pt font size to make the numbers legible from the street. Armed only with these price sheets and some tape, we set a timer and waited for someone to snap.

My wife was quite the salesperson, and effectively maintained a constant stream of sales points about the table. First, 5 minutes passed and the lowered price still didn’t make anyone budge. Another 5 minutes, and we lowered it to $30. I caved to pressure and waited 10 minutes before lowering the price to $25, and another 5 minutes later we moved it to $20. This started to get a reaction from people; bikers were commenting, people walking on the sidewalk discussing quietly among themselves…

And finally, someone bought it, in large part due to my wife’s sales pitch. I think they saw that we were lowering the price pretty rapidly, and realized that eventually it would be so cheap that someone else was definitely going to buy it. Here’s the insight, then: the reverse auction worked even without the captive audience, but the price-lowering mechanism is most effective if someone actually witnesses the changing price. They need to see the price drop in order to consider that someone else might compete with them at the lowered price point.

Instead of leaving the table for garbage collectors, earning $0 in the process and adhering to an arbitrary schedule, we sold a $30 table for $20, and we did it in less than half an hour. It was a lot of fun, and it was even educational. I think we ended up executing something related to the Reverse Auction, but which was different enough that it behaved unexpectedly. Nevertheless, it worked, and we bought delicious curry and pad thai with our spoils.

I have a problem with the way “we” write dates, but in particular, I have a problem with the totally inconsistent way people are writing dates in Canada.

Date templates

The US has about the dumbest system imaginable. The template goes “Month / Day / Year” as in “1/20/2009″ is “January 20, 2009.” Nevertheless, it’s a template that basically everyone follows. I don’t know who made up the template or why, but the number form appears to map directly onto the written form.

Personally, I write my dates “Year / Month / Day.” First off, it alphabetizes correctly. 2009/01/01 will be listed before 2009/03/17, for example. While it’s true that the US system also has this property, my system nicely maps onto file/directory hierarchies. A folder called “2009″ has 12 sub-folders called 01, 02, 03, etc. Each sub-folder has a folder for days. If you want to write the path to a specific day (say, the 3rd day of the 4th month of the 2009th year) you write 2009/04/03. You might notice that this is the format used by this very blog, which is because it’s awesome. The date is the filesystem path.

I was delighted to discover that some people in Canada use the same date format that I do, but as time went on, it became clear that this wasn’t a strict rule. To wit, I present two examples, ranging from terrifying to horrifying:

The grocery receipt

First, we have a fine specimen from Metro, which is one of the local supermarket chains. You will notice I have circled two dates in red. Let me be clear about this: these are not separate receipts. They are actually printed on the same, continuous sheet of paper.

Your eyes do not deceive you: they are different date formats. Which is which? I parse the first one as Month / Day / Year, and I parse the second as Year / Month / Day. In other words, the first is like the US system, and the second is like my ideal system, except they opted to not prefix the century (i.e. 2009 instead of 09). Naturally, I have a problem with leaving the century off (since you don’t know if they’re talking about 1909 or 2009) but that’s not the worst problem with the receipt.

The parking pass

In the second example, some enterprising individual completely sidestepped the date format problem, and instead presented us with this gem:

Again, your eyes are giving you correct information. Of course, it’s not clear at all which year it is, which will have profound consequences for that pesky “February 29″ situation.

Converting days into months

Also, it’s just not that simple to convert days into a date. I present the following two solutions:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=217+days+in+months

That’s pretty good, insofar as I can tell that we’re talking about July, but it could be better.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+217+day+of+the+year

Okay – that’s close enough. Assuming it’s not a leap year, this parking pass refers to July 4th. Right? Well, maybe, which brings us to the next problem: the Gregorian Calendar.

The Gregorian Calendar

Do you know what the product of 28 and 13 is? It’s 364, as in it’s just short of the amount of time the Earth takes to go around the sun once. You tack on 1.25 days, and you’re back with the normal year length we all know and love. That’s 13 months, not 12. How did something so elegant get so screwed up?

The first culprit is Pope Gregory XIII, who changed the calendar around because the date of Easter was shifting later and later in the year. You see, Easter is calculated according to an esoteric astral scheme including the sun and the moon (how pagan!) The next culprit is Julius Caesar, who can be blamed for the Julian calendar that so strangely distributed the days among the 12 months. Pope Gregory was simply revising the Julian system.

Back to the parking ticket. Knowing that 217 days is 7 months and 4 days doesn’t actually tell us the date, because it’s not clear how many days are in a month. I got the shivers simply writing that sentence… We can’t say, with any certainty, how many days are in a month; the best we can say is “it depends.” Terrible!

Conclusion

We’re screwed. The calendar is broken, so it’s not much wonder that we can’t write dates. We don’t have a definition of “month” so any attempt to convert days into months is hopeless. We can’t write dates according to any template because … well, I suspect no one gave it much thought.

Without further ado, I present the only date template that is guaranteed to be useful:

YYYYY/MM/DD

This makes “October 17, 2009″ look like this: 02009/10/17. Yes, there’s an extra “0″ in the year, but this is because we don’t want to screw up the year 10,000. I am in the habit of leaving the extra 0 off, but just be aware that it’s good practice. Every day is two digits; if the day is less than 10, you need the leading 0. That means you need to write January 1st as “2009/01/01″. This makes alphabetization work properly. The same goes for months – you need the leading 0.

There’s simply no other way, people!

Don’t worry – I’m with you.  When you’re driving down 401, you can’t help but wonder what the sign is all about.

Well, you’re not alone; I’ve wondered about this sign, too.  It’s not like I’ve been to Hell Holes Nature Trails, but it’s officially on the list, and who could pass up this kind of opportunity?

I particularly like how the couple above are looking at the scary endless pit (i.e. a hell hole) on the right-hand side of the picture.

Apparently we had no problem maintaining 100km/h as we left the Trails in our dust, but after reading a few things about it, I must say that Hell Holes sounds pretty cool.  To wit:

Visit the Devil’s Horsestable Cave. Descend 7.5 metres to the depths of the Hell Hole that widens into a cavern approx. 2.5 X 3.5 metres. (FLASHLIGHT REQUIRED)

Cross a natural stone bridge. Adventure downward below the bridge and notice the atmosphere of a mini-like rain forest. This area is plentiful in small mammals.

Walk through a rugged criss-crossing gorge with over-hanging ledges, grottos, flowerpots, mushroom shaped rocks and sinkholes.

Enjoy a 3.2 km self-guided tour through a unique geological area of Eastern Ontario.

Step back in time to explore the rock formations that were created during the glacial period and see rare plants that have developed over the area. Visit our Log Cabin Snack Bar and Gift Shop.

Picnic area, playground and mini golf are also available. Admission: Adults $6.50, Youths (5-15) $4.50, Children under 5: FREE

Read the rest here.

So we can only dream, right?  Some day, I hope to visit Hell Holes Nature Trails.  Until then, I must drive on by.

The decimal expansion of 1/89 is just the Fibonacci series, added together in an appropriate fashion.

Specifically, think of the Fibonacci series as being a sequence of decimal fractions, arranged so the right most digit of the nth Fibonacci number is in the n+1th decimal place.

via The remarkable number 1/89.