Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

As you know, I took photos of the burning man arson and put them up very quickly, so we did not yet know it was arson, or the reason.

Like most people, even before knowing it was arson was shock. Would this cancel the Saturday burn? Even to the jaded, the burn remains the climax of the event. It is the one time the whole city gets together and has a common experience. (This year the Crude Awakenings burn also did that.) My photos last year are Burning Man's only "group portrait" I would expect. It has, however, become very much a spectator rather than participatory event. The days of volunteers helping to raise the man are long gone.

The burn has also become overdone, under the burden of having to be the climax of an already extravagant week. Each year they feel they have to outdo prior years, and that's a slope that can't be maintained. New burners (virgins) would be impressed by any level of burn, I think, so I presume they do it for themselves and a perception of impressing the old-timers. Still, it was disturbing to think the climax of the event would be removed, and good when it was clear the fire was not so bad as to stop a restoration or rebuilding.

But then I was surprised to see how positive the reaction was. Aside from the team that had their work destroyed (and would now have to give up several days of their event to rebuild) I would even judge the overall perception of the arson to be quite positive. Addis claims it was done with care to assure nobody was under the Man. Having had my own art vandalized (not nearly this badly) at Burning Man, I know how deeply that wounds. So I can't approve of how it was done. But there was a large amount of support for what it meant. (Reportedly even from Larry Harvey.) In fact, since I didn't talk to the rebuilding crew, I can't say I met more than a handful of people who expressed any particular disapproval (or even non-approval) of it. And that surprised me, at first.

Burning gasoline is ruining the world. It accounts for 40% of greenhouse emissions, and a large percentage of other nasty emissions including the particulate matter that kills millions each year. Getting it has driven the world to wars. When you burn it, you pollute my air, hurting me, and you owe me something for it, which is a reason that gasoline taxes make sense even in a libertarian context.

I wrote earlier this week about selfish merging and traffic jams and this prompted some to ask if the selfish merge is really selfish. Update: There is more and new thinking in this later post on selfish merge being not so selfish.

Background: Burning Man is an astounding annual gathering in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada where up to 50,000 people create a temporary city for a week, which then vanishes. The city is devoted to art, creativity and radical self-expression. Since 1996, each year has had an "art theme" which provides inspiration for about a third of the art created that year, as well as the central Man.

I have written before about the selfish merge which is a tricky problem to solve. One lane vanishes, and the merge brings everybody to a standstill. Selfish drivers zoom up the vanishing lane to the very end and are let in by other drivers there, causing the backup. The selfish strategy is the fastest way through the blockage, yet causes the blockage.

I've created a new blog category "Burning Man" to track my posts on the event. I was using a simpler tag before.

Today I want to talk about the Burning Man Exodus problem, a problem you might find interesting even if you don't come to Burning Man. This year, even at 8pm Monday there was a long line and a 2 hour wait to get off the playa. Normally by about 5pm there is no wait. With 45,000 or more this year, and I presume at least 15,000 to 20,000 vehicles, and various chokepoints limiting traffic to 450 cars/hour, how do you drain the playa when everybody wants to go Sunday and Monday. (In addition, with so many now leaving Sunday, it makes Monday less interesting driving some who could leave Monday to leave earlier.)

It has now been routine to see waits of 5 hours or more at the peak times. I believe a solution should be possible involving some sort of appointment system, where cars are given a set time to leave, and they leave then. If they want to go at a peak time, instead of waiting 5 hours in line, they spend 5 hours in the city, or doing more cleanup, instead of idling their car in a giant line. Not that the line doesn't become a little bit of a party, but it's still not like being in camp. And for my exodus on Monday night there as the worst dust storm ever for Exodus, you could not see the car in front of you, or the fence beside you.

However, a good system to hand out appointments is hard to design. First of all, we have a mostly volunteer crew, and they don't have much law enforcement power to stop violators or ticket them. (More participation by the police in this, when the city truly needs them, instead of having them be there for pot busts that nobody wants would be a great thing.)

Here are some of the constraints:

Update: I now have a whole Burning Man area on the blog!

I've not been blogging of late because I'm at Burning Man, and while normally I don't report breaking news in this blog, we just witnessed a strange event. Through accident or arson, the Man was set alight this evening shortly after totality began in the eclipse of the moon.

Here are three events coming up that I will be involved with.

Burning Man of course starts next weekend and consumes much of my time. While I'm not doing any bold new art project this year, maintaining my 3 main ones is plenty of work, as is the foolishly taken on job of village organizer and power grid coordinator. I must admit I often look back fondly on my first Burning Man, where we just arrived and were effectively spectators. But you only get to do that once.

As I noted earlier, my web site got hacked. As a result, I decided to leave my old hosting company, PowerVPS.com, and find a new host. While another VPS would probably have managed, I know a woman in San Jose who runs a hosting company, simpli.biz, who offered me a good deal on a fast dedicated server. I'll grow into it, and in the meantime you should see much greater performance from my site.

I will make some final commentary on PowerVPS. I left for a variety of reasons, and they were certainly not 100% bad.

It was an interesting experience watching our team argue before the U.S. District Court of Appeals that the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T for helping the NSA spy on conversations without warrants should be dismissed because it impinges on state secrets. While the judges probed both sides, I read some signs from their grilling of the U.S. Government's lawyer that they really have some concern over the important issues. They appear to realize that we can't leave such programs completely without judicial oversight just because an NSA official declares them to be state secrets.

I get forms to fill out and sign in electronic form all the time now. Often they come as PDFs or word documents, every so often by fax, and more and more rarely on paper. My handwriting is terrible and of course I no longer have a working typewriter. But none of the various tools I have seen for the job have had a nice easy workflow.

As workers search for trapped miners in Utah, having drilled a 9" hole down to what is hoped to be their area, they plan to use things like sound and detecting CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere to find the miners.

Twenty years ago Tuesday, I created the newsgroup rec.humor.funny as a moderated place for posting the funniest jokes on the net, as chosen by the editor. In light of that anniversary, I have written up a bit of history of the creation of RHF. From there you can also find links to pieces I wrote earlier about the attempt to ban RHF and how RHF led to my creation of ClariNet.

A few weeks ago, my site got hacked. The attacker inserted an iframe pointing to a malware site into most of my html pages. That of course is bad, but the story doesn't end there. (I should of course have upgraded my OS from the ancient one my hosting company gave years ago, but they don't really support that, and feel an upgrade consists of rebuilding from scratch.)

I'm a big fan of making money by selling services but a disturbing trend is the requirement that customers sign a one or two (or even three) year contract in order to sign up for a service. Such contracts will have a fat termination fee if you want to end the contract early.

A friend asked for advice on selling real estate. I'm no expert, but I thought I would write up some of my thoughts in a blog post for everybody:

At this point it seems only people in San Francisco want to see Barry Bonds break Aaron's all time home-run record of 755. He has 753 right now. In San Francisco, the crowds get on their feet every time he gets on deck, and that was even before he got on the cusp of the record. Outside SF, fans boo him, and it's commonly believed that should he tie or break the record in Los Angeles or many other cities, he will get booed for doing it. In SF there is a willing suspension of disbelief.

Something light hearted. I purchased, some time ago, a small Li-Ion battery for external power for my laptop and other devices. These batteries are great, getting down near $100, weighing very little and, with 110 watt-hours, able to keep a laptop going all day at a conference or over most of a transoceanic flight.

This particular battery, made in China, contains one of the more amusing bad-english warnings on the label, though, particularly item #3.

I'm quite impressed with Google's mobile maps application for smartphones. It works nicely on the iPhone but is great on other phones too.

Among other things, it will display live traffic on your map. And I recently saw, when asking it for directions, that it told me that there would be "7 minutes of traffic delay" along my route. That's great.

Ever since the first science fiction about cyberspace (First seen in Clarke's 1956 "The City and the Stars" and more fully in 1976's "Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin") people have wanted to build online 3-D virtual worlds. Snow Crash gelled it even further for people.