toosigma

The mobile phone carriers are some of the worst offenders of monopoly power. Case-in-point is the pricing of the text messaging system. A recent New York Times article explores it in some detail - but I don’t think they go quite far enough. Consider that the average per-message cost (assuming you don’t have a special deal) is $0.20. If you have a special plan (which according to the article run $10-15) you can cut that price to about $0.01 per message. That may sound really cheap - but let’s do a little math:

Text messages are limited to 160 characters. Assuming a standard ASCII encoding, it takes only 1 byte to store each character - so a message is approximately 160 bytes in length. At the prices quoted above:

• $0.20 per message / 160 bytes per message = $0.00125 per byte = $1.28 per kilobyte = $1,310 per megabyte = $1,342,177 per gigabyte
• $0.01 per message / 160 bytes per message = $0.0000625 per byte = $0.06 per kilobyte = $65 per megabyte = $67,109 per gigabyte

Now let’s compare that to another great monopoly offender - Comcast. They recently announced a bandwidth cap of 250 gigabytes on their “unlimited” monthly service, which in my case costs about $50 per month. Doing the math, we get a cost of $0.20 per gigabyte. If Comcast decided to charge the text-messaging bulk rate for their service, it would cost a staggering $16 million per month!!! If Verizon et al. charged the Comcast data rate, then you could send an equally staggering 53.7 million messages for a single penny!!!

The only reason the phone companies manage to get away with this outright robbery is because few people actually take the time to figure out how exorbitant these fees really are.

As an ardent fan of the new 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, I’ve been creating power cards for my players to speed up and simplify play. After discovering the exceptional Magic Set Editor cards created by several designers on the ENWorld forums - I’ve resorted almost entirely to using their designs. In the ongoing and lengthy discussion, several of the designers (and yours truly) have decided to band together and pool our resources to create an even better result.

Currently, there are two proposed projects on the agenda:

• Create a unified standard GAME file - this file contains all the game-relevant information. By creating a unified standard, we should be able to facilitate updating all the various card templates with the latest game information as quickly as possible after release. It will also hopefully minimize duplication of effort, since each designer need only design their templates to match the standard, and won’t have to manually enter all the game information.
• Create a program that can read the D&D Insider Character Builder’s XML output files. That information can then be used to create a customized character sheet based on any of a variety of user-designed PDF templates. The data is also used to create a custom set of printable cards using the Magic Set Editor cards.

To help track the project, I’m creating some pages on the wiki and forum.

Anyone who wants to help contribute - feel free to register or drop me an email.

As a resident of Colorado, I have a lot of research to do regarding the various amendments and referendums that will appear on November’s ballot. I’ve found a couple sites that purport to give a “fair and unbiased” suggestion on how to vote, but I don’t really believe there is such thing as an unbiased perspective.

In discussing a couple of the initiatives at work, my colleagues were somewhat impressed by my knowledge of the various initiatives and when I asked if they would appreciate a more thorough rundown, they all agreed it would be helpful. My basic plan is to post one issue each day, with Pros, Cons, My Bias, and My Verdict sections as best as I can present them. I will do my absolute best to make the Pro and Con sections as free from bias (mine or otherwise) as possible.

My General Biases

• Politically, I’m closest to a libertarian. That makes me socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
  • Fiscal Conservative - The government should be as small as possible to ensure the common good - i.e. low government spending, and as a result, low taxes. I tend to favor a “free market economy” and oppose governmental regulation of business unless it is necessary to correct a market failure or imbalance.
  • Socially Liberal - The government should interfere as little as possible with the private lives of its citizens. So long as something does no direct harm to a citizen, the government has no business sticking their nose in. As such, I’m strongly opposed to most “morality” based legislation which seeks to impose a tyranny of the majority.
• I tend to oppose special interest groups. The benefits allocated to special interests usually result in an increase in taxes and the size of government.
• When in doubt, I prefer the status quo. Unless there is a compelling reason to change the law, I prefer to err on the side of not changing it until such a clear reason becomes available.
• I have no affiliation with any of the groups behind the initiatives.

I’m very interested in hearing any comments anyone might be able to provide - discussion could very well reveal flaws in my logic and might change my opinion.

This post was prompted by this article at Marginal Revolution, which was in turn prompted by a recent court case denying ID “scientific status” and access to science classrooms.

The article presents the hypothetical situation - if you find a watch in the forest, do you assume that it was the product of endless iteration and random chance, or do you assume it was made by a watchmaker? The only time the former is plausible is if you do not allow for the possibility of a watchmaker. Where this argument fails is that it simply presents a hypothesis, which is decidedly not the only step necessary in science.

The Scientific Method presents the following iterative sequence of steps:

1. Use your experience
2. Form a conjecture
3. Deduce a prediction from that conjecture
4. Test - run experiments both to confirm and falsify the conjecture.

If the conjecture is falsified, then you must go back to step #2 and form a new conjecture that takes into account the new information.

Intelligent Design fails as a scientific theory in two very crucial ways:

• Intelligent Design offers no predictive value. Given the theory of Intelligent Design, there is no way to make a logical prediction of how the universe works that is not already in evidence. Any prediction made by a proponent of ID is simply random guesswork.
• Intelligent Design is not falsifiable. There is no way to disprove Intelligent Design. Any evidence that is presented contrary to the theory can be hand-waved away by saying “God made it that way” - the “theory” never adapts to new information, it simply accepts any new information without any need for critical thought.

There’s also the infinite regression problem - Intelligent Design requires the axiom that a Designer exists. Taking the existence of a Designer as a hypothesis, the theory has the same problems as Intelligent Design - it provides no predictive value and is not falsifiable. In the event that unquestionable proof that Designer(s) exist is found, we’re still left with the question of how that Designer came to be, why he chose to design life, and most importantly why he chose to add so much superfluous “junk” DNA and otherwise pointless organs like the human appendix. It’s somewhat ironic that the latter can most easily be explained by assuming that the Designer was intelligent enough to realize that he could create an infinite variety of robust lifeforms using the relatively simple mechanism of genetic drift and natural selection - rather than spending billions of years hand-crafting lifeforms.

After a holiday weekend of excess, I’ve decided that it’s definitely time to get back in shape and lose some weight. Since my last few attempts to gain momentum in weight-loss have failed, I’ve decided to start making my efforts more public and to (hopefully) improve my accountability. The plan is to blog and twitter my progress in various 30-day project goals, starting today.

Currently, I’m hovering right around 240, so I’m looking to drop 40 pounds to a goal weight of 200. This morning, I restarted the Hacker’s Diet - a relatively simplistic diet plan based only on eating less and exercising more. I’m starting at Rung 16 of the Lifetime Ladder with the medium-term goal of reaching Rung 30 by August 1st. This morning’s effort felt pretty good, but I usually find that the first day back on an exercise routine is easier than the next few days. The first 30-day trial is focused on exercise, but I’m also planning to twitter all of my meals, with an eye to reducing my reliance on fast food and pizza. Since trying to change multiple habits simultaneously is more prone to failure, I’m not going to hold myself to a strict diet regimen until the second 30-day trial.

If you’re at all interested, you can follow my progress here and on twitter - and if you see me slipping, please give me as much harassment as you like.