Alien Intelligence (James Martin) & Structured Blogs

In my more pessimistic moods, I imagine that I post about "Law of Demeter" and fifty Google programmers scratch their heads and ask each other, "What's a da-meter, Billy Bob?". (After all, it's a fundamental concept of Google's business.)

In my more optimistic moods, I imagine that Google has outsourced all their programming to China, and the programmers know all about Demeter, but can't read my post because I didn't internationalize the blog.

I have the same conflicted thoughts about mentioning a book written by James Martin. Everybody in IT should know who he is, but in America today we focus on gaming The Rules, not on producing fundamental values. So I'm betting on my pessimistic thoughts today -

Alien Intelligence by James Martin

Published in 2000, the peak of the bubble.
Read the synopsis.

Ebay requires an explicit decision to buy or sell a product.
This requires thought and effort.
It also entails risk that time and effort will not be rewarded with a profitable transaction.

Imagine that I'm posting to a structured blog.
I post about my old car.
Later, I post about a new automobile purchase.
Imagine that Mary Contrary in Smallville, Kansas posts about receiving her driver's license and her new part-time job.

So far, no explicit transaction has taken place, but an intelligent system with historical information might deduce that a potential buy/sale transaction exists. An intelligent agent surfing millions of blogs might deduce and exploit transactions before they proceed to a user-participation system like Ebay.

Imagine an invisible, generic agent capturing buy/sell transactions before buyers and sellers finish that explicit decision to list or research products. Do you even need advertising?

And now, in the hysterically deadpan words of Spikyme...

I'm going to go drink now, too.

SOA & J2EE Transaction Models

note to self: The Vogue has a good alcohol:price ratio
note to others: Apparently Norway lacks a sardonic sense of humor

Last night wasn't a total loss (the Vogue was an okay place), and I worked out two simple models for SOA and J2EE systems. I used a standard MVC pattern for J2EE and assumed a heterogenous network for SOA (to require transformation transactions).

A diagram of transaction count spanning network organization -

A visual diagram is always good. In SOA, the ESB (bus) manages all control and some routing; in the MVC, the controller manages all routing, control and creation (remember our pattern model). So centralized traffic is high in MVC.

The assumption of heterogenous network is valid for large networks & companies, but you might argue that J2EE matches SOA across homogenous networks. But even then, the transaction count for the controller rises faster than for the ESB. SOA is more scalable because it pushes transactions to the periphery of the network (into the services) and puts less incremental traffic on the bus.

I see now that the issue with SOA is network latency, which might be why the phrase "coarse-grained services" shows up so often now in the design literature.

PF Chang Fortune Cookie

My christmas meal at PF Chang's ended with a fortune cookie prediction....

Your dearest wish will come true".

I chuckled when I first read it.

After awhile, I realized that I no longer have any idea of what my "dearest wish" would be. My scamming, sack-of-shit Mormon fuck-o "friends" at Boise State University wiped out my last chance at a real career or retirement. I spent several years trying to rebuild the results of their provincial, cover-my-Church-buddy's-ass mentality, but in 2004 I finally gave up and just torched it all.

Now I have a laptop, a sleeping bag and some clothes and I go from contract job to contract job. I don't think I'll bother to rebuild anything permanent again. It cost too much effort and heartbreak and I'd rather travel around now.

I don't think I care that much anymore (you can never be sure of your own motives), but I wish I could get my wife re-married off to somebody stable and mainstream. She didn't deserve the last eight years.

So what is my dearest wish?

I sat at the Vogue tonight, drinking and wondering....

Okay, I admit I'd probably smile if a meteor hit Boise or Salt Lake City, but I can't honestly say it's my dearest wish. For awhile, I wanted an architect job title, but right now I'm as close as I can come without becoming a glad-handing, backstabbing, politizing, sack-of-shit game player like I've worked with on and off over the past five years.

I don't need more money, especially now.

Okay, it would be nice if I could find some kinky, younger chick that matched my proclivities, but.... you know it would just get fucked up somehow anyway, and I kind of doubt that it's my "dearest wish". It sounds like too much work and responsibility.

A warmer sleeping bag might be nice.

Wait, no...

A new laptop would be better.

A new job at Google, maybe? Naw, not really. Those guys are okay, I suppose, but for some reason, Google just don't spark my interest. Sorry, Bruno, but it just sounds boring to me.

Do I have any serious enemies that I'd wish harm on? Let me think..... no, not really, I don't think. I don't even care about the Mormons anymore; they're fucked up and I avoid them in job searches, but I don't care that much now, except after I've been drinking and pondering a weird-ass fortune cookie that made no sense to me.

Gad. I can't believe I got a free fortune cookie wish and I can't think of anything to wish for.

Wikipedia Semantic Analysis

Who can resist a little funning at Google's expense, hey?

This link was sent to me by a long-time acquaintance.

It's a high-brow analysis of the dynamic semantics of Wikipedia, leading back to power laws.

I have little doubt that it shows that Wikipedia is expressed and categorized to minimize total transaction costs, that it functions internally like the Internet functions and I strongly suspect that Usenet (using Dejanews as a proxy) works the same, too, so it may be a reflection of the human mind works.

I suppose I should do an entry comparing and contrasting Mediator pattern and Power law distribution as
complimentary reducers of transaction costs and my theory about why......

But instead, I'm off to Howl At The Moon,
the employee rendition of "Time Warp" alone is almost worth the price of admission!

Google Bait #351

Q: What's the biggest difference between Google and Microsoft?!

A: 860 miles!

OUCH!
That one's gotta hurt!

If you want to escape this living hell,
cast off your chains and be free,
If you don't believe you owe it to yourself,
you can owe it to ME!

Mono Project Meme

11-Jan-2006: Updated graph using keyword search of "Mono Linux" instead of "Mono Software" and a longer time period so you can clearly see the inflection point and downward slope.

--------------------

The Mono Project looks dead to me.

Their blog tends to re-inforce my opinion,
but I did learn a lot about Iraq and Evil George Bush.

A healthy, growing meme should look like this -

Google Baiting

Q: What's more fun than pulling Google's chain?!

A: Pulling my own chain!

(But if I do that, I'd be arrested for child abuse, so Google it is!)

Ho!

Q: What's better than seeing 30 Google IP addresses in one day?!

A: Seeing 100 Microsoft addresses on the same day!

Ho HO!

Ebay Bandwidth

We know that the Ideosphere has finite bandwidth.
That is, the sum of our collective brain power has finite storage and I/O capacity.

In 1995, Ebay was barely a ripple on the Internet, consuming no bandwidth or resources.
But today, Ebay consumes mental bandwidth.

Many sellers need to know that Ebay exists, what it does, how effective it is, how to use it.
Many buyers need to know about Ebay.
The Fedex delivery guy needs to know a little about Ebay.
So does the UPS delivery guy.

Ebay aborbs a measurable amount of society's thought process and memory storage.

If the "attention crisis" is real, if our finite collective bandwidth is under increasing competition for its consumption, then Ebay's slice of that bandwidth has an increasing marginal cost over time. In other words, there is an increasing potential profit for somebody, somewhere, if they can eliminate Ebay from our thoughts and memories, but retain the economic function of Ebay.

Imitation : The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

Why, thank you, Google Guys!
(wink wink)

Google Zeitgeist Graphs

Altruistic Networks

So I'm sitting in Hampton, Virginia at a new club, "Saddle Ridge".
And the club has almost 1000 tipsy customers.

And 100 of them are line-dancing.
And they're doing a credible job, given the number of empty beer bottles.

And I wonder, "Gosh, how strange, how do they stay so coordinated?"
Is it the country music?
Is it the off-duty Navy guys?
Is it my vision blurring?

And suddenly I realize that I'm watching a human altruistic network.....

How do birds fly in formation?

They are an altruistic network.
They share a common set of hard-coded rules, a common context of behavior.
Transaction costs for altruistic networks are low because they're mostly signals of co-ordination,
not of decision-making or context decoding and synchronization.

Look closely at the structured blog model again....

Can you see the similarity to the altruistic network?

So by implication, structured blogs might reduce total transaction costs in some manner?

Marginal Cost Of Ideosphere Bandwidth

Assume an idealized function, call it the "Cost Of Information" (COI). It represents the sum of all costs required to produce a unit of information divided by the total of all information produced.

It is a measurement of the inputs required to produce a "unit" of information.

The COI has been a major economic driver of the past few decades because of steadily decreasing costs. As the COI falls, unfeasible projects become profitable and drive economic growth. The growth of the computer industry and the Internet are inversely related to the COI.

But as the Internet has grown, it has steadily absorbed a greater share of human time and effort. If the sum of human time & effort is finite, then the marginal cost of that time & effort will tend to rise as Internet demand rises.

Over time, the marginal cost of human time becomes the predominate cost driver of Internet growth, and the cost of hardware, software and bandwidth become a minority cost.

Essentially, the cost driver of the Internet becomes its ability to push existing human transactions into hardware. Cost decisions become a function of their net effect on Ideospherical bandwidth.

Law Of Demeter

Out of curiosity, I ran a graph for "Law of Demeter". I always get a smile when I think of Malcolm Davis's comment that Meme Miner requires too much work, because it took ten days to write Meme Miner, ten seconds to use it, but it's probably earned me an extra $50K since the DotCom peak.

I get a smile from his other comments, too, but that's for another day.

The Law of Demeter is the stuff of visitor patterns and aspect-oriented programming. The graph shows a steady graph for Demeter during the past three years. Most technology curves aren't that stable, but Demeter isn't a technology, it's an abstract design principle so it's widely applicable to many domains.

Demeter reduces transaction costs within a software system. The adaptive visitor pattern is well-suited to the Law of Demeter; it invokes the proverb that "if the Mountain can not come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the Mountain". For instance, Ebay.com is a centralized system which requires users to login to Ebay. An adaptive visitor would reverse this flow, visiting each prospective buyer and seller, much as a webcrawler visits and logs webpages.

Demeter is a necessary foundation to understand why structured blogs are important.

Structured Blogs - An Ideospherical Perspective

This particular entry is convoluted work in progress, and I'll be re-editing often.
But I'll give the conclusion first, so you'll have some incentive to deal with my kludgy process.

Structured blogs are an important idea, but I'm not sure that even the supporters or detractors understand the real nature of how structured blogs might change Internet structure (and transaction costs). Structured blogs are an implementation of an altruistic network (a cooperative network which reduces overall transaction costs). For the current growth trends to continue, the Internet's slice of the Ideosphere has to remain constant or decline. Structured blogs achieve this by pushing transactions out of the human domain (the Ideosphere) and into the machine domain. There's also some interesting oligopoly-related impacts on current centralized systems, I think. I'll build a more detailed and logical case here over the next week.

Normally, I don't put much stock in memegraphs with low frequency counts (less than 30-40 hits). This graph is marginal, but it fits well as an example of certain long-term concepts. As you can see, it's probably a pre-inflection graph -

Supporting material to build the case -

Law Of Demeter

Altruistic Networks

Marginal Cost of Ideosphere Bandwidth

Saving J2EE, Continued

I wrote Saving J2EE about six months ago. At that time, I omitted a set of strategies in the conclusion, but my first question was "should we even try to save J2EE?"

My answer now is "probably not".

J2EE solves a set of transaction-related problems across large systems. A rehash of J2EE will probably fix many poor implementations (I did my share of those) and extract some value from the remaining marginal set of those transaction issues.

But the more I read on Service Oriented Architecture, the more I think that it solves a different set of transaction issues in large systems, for a net gain of more value. For instance, the top level structure of SOA is a simple pattern -

The Mediator is a basic transaction-cost-cutting pattern. Coupled with adapters, I suspect that total transaction cost for large organizations is very low, almost certainly lower than J2EE's model, because I can't even work out a simple J2EE comparison model without some complex pieces.

A simple mathematical scheme could do a rough transaction count for both models, and compare them against different implementation sizes. I strongly suspect that SOA will be substantially lower across a wide range of larger organization sizes.

I'm about 90% sure that "Saving J2EE" is correct; market demand for J2EE is topping out and it will be measurable in sales terms by the end of 2007.

The Ideosphere Is Bounded

Why do the memegraphs have value?

There's an underlaying assumption in several social sciences (economics being the first to mind) that certain domains are unbounded. For instance, the law of supply and demand is based on the unwritten (and virtually unexplored) idea that the time required to process information and make decisions is.... unbounded.

It is not.

The memegraphs have value because they reflect how we spend our time.

Thought precedes action.
Speech reflects thought.
And we make choices about how our time is spent when we speak or write.

The Ideosphere (or more specifically, the Ideospace) is bounded.
Time constraints force resource decisions.

There appear to be two major forces in place -

The first is the revelation and rendering of the existing Ideosphere into a quantifiable medium, the Internet. The second is the absorption of ideospace bandwidth by the prolific products of the Information Age.