Special Interest Group on CRAP

Unfortunately this has a ring of truth to it. It’s hard for some people to imagine, but there really are reasons to say no to some friendships.

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Sadly, today is the 30th birthday of spam. I seem to remember that you should never trust anyone over 30. Email providers are largely distinguished today by their ability to accurately filter out spam. There is a huge of amount of absolute crap that is sent, but most of this is easy to handle. The [...]

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There is a crying need for a button on most consumer electronics these days. I call it the “FUCK YOU” button. I’ll offer a few examples: You put a DVD into your DVD player, but none of the buttons on the remote will function until you finish watching the promotions, the FBI copyright warning, and [...]

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I’ve written in the past about the interpretation of the PageRank probability distribution as an economic utility function. Recall that one interpretation is PageRank(url) = probability that a random surfer arrives at the url. This can be used to estimating monetary value for advertising on the page, because it is correlated to the number of [...]

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For some reason today I was wondering what the oldest email address is at this point. All addresses in RFC 821 are from the now-defunct .ARPA domain, but presumably the postmaster user at the oldest domain is a reasonable contender. root@localhost is another popular one, but the real question is – what is the oldest [...]

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You may have noticed that there are essentially no comments allowed on this blog. The reason is simple – the vast majority of comments that are generated for blogs are pure spam, and I don’t want to deal with it. There are also a huge number of sites who copy my content and then link [...]

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I recently submitted a paper with the title “income Inequality in the Attention Economy’. This is my first paper in welfare economics, and the results in the paper came as a surprise to me. Among other things it shows that an increasing amount of attention is concentrated on a tiny number of websites. Among over [...]

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Over the years we’ve all seen technological trends come and go (I’m old so I’ve seen more come and go than some others). I regard Facebook as one of these fads that will fade quickly. As a mathematician I have been interested in the study of random graphs that arise from social phenomena. Examples include [...]

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Much has been written about the PageRank algorithm that can be used to calculate a static ranking on world wide web pages. The principle that makes it useful is that when someone links to a document on the web, they are implicitly conveying a positive impression of the page. I’ve come to the conclusion that [...]

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