Social Networking Meme

Facebook's rate of growth is unsustainable and will top out around Summer, 2008. I think Facebook's traffic growth may be an illusion. I know that a great deal of my own traffic is web crawlers indexing my site and anticipation of Facebook's growth may be attracting robotic indexing through its API, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy but not one which has the value of human eyeballs. However, there may be quite a bit of marketing & advertising info which can be sliced and diced out of it.

As I predicted in April, 2006, MySpace.com has peaked out in Alexa traffic and Google inquiries. LiveJournal, a forerunner of MySpace, shows a net decrease in market share but has managed to retain a core of users. I believe that MySpace will repeat that pattern. Assuming that MySpace's peak represents maximum possible users and that MySpace will retain a core of users, you can make a rough determination of Facebook's peak.

My prediction - Facebook's Alexa traffic will hit an inflection point in the next 3-4 months and Google inquiries will peak sometime in Summer, 2008, effectively setting the upper boundary of Facebook's market.

TOGAF Meme

To observe a trend, you must first know about it. And that act of knowing makes the observer part of the meme. TOGAF is an acronym for "The Open Group Architectural Framework" and I ran these graphs because I am part of its meme. I always am, of course, but this meme is a little different in that I can identify exactly when I came upon it. And when I came upon it again as indicated in the next graph.

It's in a solid uptrend, a good possibility that it's a worthwhile investment of time and money.

Scale & Chaos

Symmetry in small things, chaos in larger. Do the organs of the human body conform to this concept? Heart, liver, stomach, tongue, nose, intestines, pancreas, yes. Other organs are symmetrical yet mirror-imaged. But individual cells are identical so perhaps "symmetry" isn't the right condition.

Uniformity in small things, chaos in larger?
Close but not quite.
What does the opposite condition yield?

Chaos in small things, uniformity in larger. Free markets. Mosaics. Jigsaw puzzles. Rube Goldberg machines. Governments.

Why would you choose one pattern over another? Scalability? They seem so similiar but there is a difference, almost the differnce of top-down versus bottom-up design.

If the top level is simple, the bottom can be complex.
If the top is complex, the bottom should be simple.

I used to think that car engines were too complex, too many movng parts, I couldn't understand why so many were necessary. What drives the necessity of a part? Imagine a mosaic. The simplicity of individual pieces means that they are largely interchangeable. They serve no purpose in and of themselves, their value is from the community of their peers. They are disposable.

In the human body, most organs are mission-critical, ergo they are bound to a narrower, more rigid job description. The more important, the more structured, the more predictable.

Mosiac chips have freedom because they are unimportant.

Recession Meme Revisited

Original Recession Meme.
Methodology

I've made a couple of bad predictions in the past year. My prediction that MySpace.com growth rate had peaked was right and "social networking" probably did enter its inflection point in 2006 but the curve is less definitive now. I made an off-the-cuff prediction that headcount at Defcon 15 would be lower than Defcon 14 and it appears that I was wrong. However, my recession prediction is showing signs of life.

In August, 2006, I showed that keyword count WAS a leading indicator as it preceded the 2001 recession by six months. I also showed that Google Trends (a comparable tool) wasn't displaying the same pattern... yet -

Those graphs are fourteen months old.


What does Google say now? -

The double-top pattern shows up in the 2001 graph, and now in the 2007 graph.
The duration between the double-tops is 18 months in 2001 and 7 months in 2007.
The first top in 2001 preceded recession by 6 months.
The current 2007 top occurred 8 months ago.

Based on the banking situation, dollar situation, general economic news, debt loads and this keyword graph... we're toast in 2008, baby. My track record for technical predictions is fairly good. My prediction - Bernanke will cut rates again in a futile effort to revive the housing market and the dollar will drop accordingly. I believe that Jimmy Rodgers' recent comments about the dollar are driven by a similiar insight into changes which are reflected in public conversation (i.e. keyword counts).

Defcon 15 Video Online

My presentation for Defcon 15 is online now.

My speaking skills are better than Defcon 13 or 14 presentations with less repetition and overuse of keywords, better voice inflection and projection. But I didn't rehearse much so it's a little disjointed and runs too short on time.

Blame

Over the past ten years, I've gotten quite a bit of blame for the mistakes and malicious nature of others. I thought the 1997 incident at Boise State University was a fluke, but I've seen, especially these past few years, an increasing hidden hostility in the workplace. Perhaps I am lucky, I've rarely suffered from envy.

I wonder why I became a mirror into others. Maybe everyone is, to some degree. Perhaps they don't notice. I don't engage in that sort of rumor-mongering manipulation of co-workers but I have an acquaintance who takes pride in his "special ability". Of course, my acquaintance doesn't understand why we've remained "friends" for years. He believes that he successfully deflected responsibility for his own malice onto me. And for the great majority of participants, he did. He believes that I don't know that he was the source of malicious rumors about me.

I suppose he doesn't understand that his guilt drives our relationship. Perhaps he doesn't realize that his guilt becomes his anger, he projects his anger on me, and yet he still engages in the same sort of malicious manipulation that brought us together in the first place. And me, lacking "tact", have never breathed a word of any of this, a hidden secret between us, and perhaps even a secret from his conscious mind.

Gig Ranking

I've worked in fifteen different companies in the past sixteen years. Some were good, some were bad so I ranked them using the "poker hand" technique. I shuffled them at random, drew a hand and as I selected a new card, discarded the worst one until I arrived at this order -

1 Federal Highway (Aspen)
2 Saleslogix
3 Unigard Insurance
4 Standard Insurance (Meridian)
5 Cingular
6 Sunhill (startup)
7 JP Morgan (Prolifics)
8 Verizon (Prolifics)
9 Sheridan
10 Wells Fargo
11 Transcore
12 Avnet
13 Nike (Meridian)
14 Perficient
15 Third Wave

The ranking represents how willing I am to repeat that experience, significant accomplishments, income and the general environment. You'll notice not particularly correlated to technology, management structure, size or type of industry. My best experience was essentially startup work under Federal Govt' auspices, my second best was a small startup company that failed. Third Wave was a fraud, written up in the Las Vegas Review Journal as a participant in defrauding the City of Las Vegas.

Crash Continues

As noted at Calculated Risk, the ABX index fell another 25% this week, which rougly translates into "subprime meltdown is now worse than anyone, even the perma-pessimists, believed possible", which was a minimum of 2 million foreclosures and a one trillion dollar government bailout. So, what? Four million foreclosures now, do you think?

"Dishonest money breeds dishonest people."

Here's an idea of where we are in the housing crash cycle... a minimum of two years and perhaps four or five years until bottom, and once real estate hits bottom, it won't pop and rebound like it did in the mid-nineties, the demographics don't support it.

The Desert Of The Real

Downtown Seattle after a dinner date. Many people in dark clothes, averted eyes, Asian women, an obscure Frank Sinatra song playing in Starbucks and my state of almost hyper-realism watching the expressions of passing faces. I never realized that so many want so desperately to not think. To not know. There is a duplicitious diversion and I wonder where the real artists live. Isn't the purpose of art to provoke thought & controversy? That's the mission statement of art but perhaps its real purpose is to assist an indulgence of ego. Self-indulgence of sensation at the expense of perception. I wonder why I happened onto this path when so many others seek it.

Was it Dominique?
Perhap it was always buried in me, an inevitable outcome.

Now I live in the Desert of the Real.

Amidst the busy-ness of the Conscripted. The Deliberate Unknowing. The Living Dead? I wonder where the real people are. Are there so few? Busy, busy, busy. Everyone is busy, busy buying, busy talking, busy avoiding unpleasant thoughts, worries, consequences. I could be one of them without knowing it. But I doubt it because... I'm not busy. I'm not distracted by other thoughts, I see detais, grimace, the tightness of a forced smile, the twitch of an eyebrow as eyes dart away in conditioned social response, long-worn lines of smiles or frowns, the set of their walk, stiffness of their arms, the tilt of a head and hair.

Asymmetry of Information is my latest jag. ADSL, "Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line", describes asymmetry of information flow over a phone line. Most bandwidth is download, little is upload. It implies a passive state of subscription and consumption. I've wondered lately about the asymmetry of human I/O. Because it is asymmetrical. Input? The five senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and sound while output is.. talking and movement. The asymmetry is quantifiable but like ADSL, it implies a consumer mentality, a state of high input, low output. If systems tend towards impedance matching (to maximize efficiency), then the asymmetry of human nature defines the boundaries of team sizes, communications, and by extension, societal structures like corporations, government and The Arts.

Very few people can think critically.
I understand that now and perhaps it is a byproduct of asymmetry.

Most people cannot think, but they can react.

Government spans a continuum with libertarianism at one end and socialism at another. Yet neither extreme is mapped well to human nature, which is why most modern governments are a poorly-integrated composite of both. This is why they eventually fail. And this is why they succeed for periods of time.

Perception Of Reality

Is that you, Oyadancer?
What on earth prompted a visit?
Fear? Perhaps the article on paranoia in Britain?
Well, rest assured that the article applies equally to the U.S.

85.211.19.207 - - [17/Oct/2007:18:04:02 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6775 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&hs=SZb&q=Broward+Horne&btnG=Search" "Opera/9.10 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)"

My geography teacher in high school was Pete Colias. He was short, tanned, from Greek heritage and also a tennis coach whose most memorable advice was "play percentage". Play the percentage shots, play the long odds. Avoid dramatic shots and keep your ego out of the game. Many years later I read similar advice in _The Great Reckoning_ by James Davidson, that the best investor is an emotionally objective investor. These concepts were a natural fit to my childhood upbringing and probably led to my fairly unique viewpoint on society.

I played pool tonight. Perhaps the "adrenaline high" of sports is closely aligned to perception of reality. If I could fully grasp reality for a few minutes, I'd choose the rights shots in the right order, stroke the cue exactly right, compensating for imperfections in balls, table, lighting and cue. I'd run the table in seven consecutive shots. In one sense, the pursuit of excellence is the pursuit of an objective sense of reality. Our perception of reality is never reality, but we can work to narrow the delta between the two.

Current American culture seems bent on the opposite, though; bent on the pursuit of denial. Paranoia is one avenue of denial. And I reluctantly admit that cynicism is as well. Fear. Why the fear, Oya? Why do you have so much fear, so much anger? These manifestations of denial are handles for manipulation, haven't you realized that yet? And yet, the culture is mired in parochial myopia.

95% of the population has no idea of what's happening in our financial system. Money either has value. Or it does not. There's a reason that gold & oil rose 10% in the thirty days.

I do believe that Lisa was flirting with me tonight, in her own fast-talking, stilted way. She projects attitude and vulnerability and that combination appeals to me. Her face and smile were positively radiant at times.

Mental Inertia, II

In the mid-90s, The X-Files was the rage, a budding fascination with conspiracies and secrecy. But that was the love affair with paranoia and now we're well into deadly drudgery of "the marriage". I originally applied networking & electronics concepts to the Ideosphere and discovered that memes do have measurable latency and amplitude. I combined them together as a measure of mental impedance.

"Impedance" was a nice confirmation of "memetic evolution", the darwinian theory that the strongest, most relevant memes displace weaker memes and create mental "stickiness", a general aversion to new ideas. But lately I think there's more to this "mental inertia" than simple "quality of service". Often the denial is too fierce, objection too strenuous. And the pattern of dispersion is too odd. There are small cults completely devoted to irrational memes (Anarcho-capitalists) but conversely, the pattern of denial is broad-based across the whole population in small, inconsequential memes.

Ego is bound to meme. It has to be, I can't see another reason for the strength and length of denial. Perhaps, empirically, many memes can produce positive re-inforcement by pure chance, whether they're truly effective or not. I could probably add another property to the impedance theory, something analogous to the electron shell of the periodic chart, that certain materials (like Teflon) possess fanatical inter-atomic bonding while others are weak.

The mental bonding of "real estate investment" to behavior is still exceptionally strong but irrational. When house prices rise 100%, cash becomes available to buy goods. But what new goods were created when a house sits quietly on a street? None. Ultimately, house prices are a tax on the rising productivity of future generations. If those generations don't exist or that productivity never materializes, is the house worth more? Go to Pittsburgh, PA for an answer.

Diversity is a two-edged sword. When its marginal cost higher than marginal gain, diversity is a profit center. But once its cost exceeds benefit, it becomes a target of resentment. I can't prove it but I suspect that the diversity cycle and credit cycle have a fairly high correlation. U.S. history shows a strong implied relationship. Periods of rapid change and increased productivity are followed by slow growth periods of consolidation and conformity. During consolidation phases societies are pressed for resources, and they weed out the marginal players... perhaps that's the future of IT.

I just realized that I've never had a waiter rob me.
They could, you know. They could claim that you didn't pay that $40, that it was $20, or $10.

It's never happened to me, though.

Orwell

I never realized, until a few years ago, how petty and hostile my fellow citizens can be. We're all petty at some point, but it seems more prevalent today. The Paranoid project their paranoia onto others because they believe that everyone is like themselves. That's one of my problems. I project myself onto others and I don't expect to be deceived or tricked or cheated.

Lately I think that George Orwell was right in his "1984" portrayal of the average citizen. Many people seem bright, they speak well, they know many things but still, there's myopia in their actions and schemes.

Positive thoughts today? Well, my resume filter of the past six months is working better. About 80% of the interviews aren't insulting. Does *anyone* (besides the 30-year-old paranoid supergeniuses) really believe that I lasted 17 years without writing a SQL query or creating a java class?

Think about it.
Think about the paranoia in that.

What I've accomplished wasn't by being a supergenius, it was mostly persistence, constant effort, tireless repetition and refinement.

Mental Inertia

There is a "mental inertia" that I didn't notice or understand before. In a sense, it's a contextual layer of society, a global binding of unspoken, unexamined and unnoticed assumptions. I can catch glimpses of it out of the corner of my eye, if I blank out my mind and switch mental gears quickly enough.

Delving into the Ideosphere laid a theoretical foundation for me, and my recent triggering of defensive & denial patterns in other people aroused my curiosity and suspicions. My theorizing.

I can see it now.
I can see, if I try, occasional edges of its vague outline.

There is a mental inertia. It's quantifiable. One dimension of "mental inertia" originally showed up on my radar as "ideosphere impedance". I see other parts now. It has protrusions and symptoms into the observed world. Dishonesty breeds guilty, guilty fosters fear, fear evolves into paranoia. The great majority of my workplace troublemakers had paranoia. Thinking back, I see that behavior breeds paranoia, not vice versa.

This is "mental inertia", a subtle mental context which is dense and unreactive, its impedance is quite high. I can almost... see it. It is the hidden challenge to salesmen and politicians. It waxes and wanes, sometimes strong here or weak there. Why? It manifests in different forms, it's very difficult to see but equally hard to circumvent. I caught glimpses of this week as it passed by, I heard it shift gears.

It is malleable.
It is reactive, ergo it can be manipulated.
It's an essential difference between western and eastern culture.
Western culture ignores it, eastern accomodates it without thought.
Is it the mental equivalent of an immune system, do you think?
Parts of it, at least.
Can it be defined as different "organs" or functions?

I am the true artist here.
I must be.
It makes no sense to me, though.
I didn't choose it.

These things follow me around. Her irrational reaction to a simple news article. His projection of paranoia onto me. The mass denial of the housing crash.

Is it new behavior?
Did they change?
Or did I become more aware?

I've changed, that's true. I'm no longer dependent on my expectations of the future, no longer beholden to "The Now", I have almost no expenses so I'm not driven by money like I was but I am more driven by ego and boredom. And my time horizon is different. I was surprised when a university secretary branded me as "a seeker of truth" but later it seemed accurate. So I've come full circle? This all seems so arbitrary yet unavoidable.

I thought I wanted the job on Tuesday but it didn't want me. It seemed right but somehow it was wrong. And wrong in a violently reactive way, like I've never seen before. The events were wrong but the outcome must be right.

I reached out to touch the inertia and it shrieked in fear.

I might have forced a different outcome but as in karate and lethal force, if you resort to force then you've already lost.

Speed II

Official production test result for yesterday's PL/SQL changes -

Report Run

10/9/2007 14 mins
10/10/2007 6 secs

Yeah.
That's a 99+% reduction.
Awesome.
I actually accomplished something worthwhile.

A Deliberate Strategy

Yes, of course it's a deliberate strategy.

What did you think? That it was accidental? If you read me, then you know my modus operandi by now. N believes that he and I are equals but my adult life experience is double and I know more. Think about it... if you wanted to avoid environments populated with envious, deceitful backstabbers, environments which reward lies and punish performance, how would you do it?

You could research and make educated guesses.

Or you could do it the easy way.

Lay out rat poison and let those environments auto-weed themselves out of your life. That's what I do with women. And that's what I've done with companies for the past three years, after I first realized that the No Treason gang was purposely slandering me. I injected memes into the Ideosphere, radioactive isotopes to illuminate the cultural arteries of paranoia, envy, deceit. Heck, that's why I put up my website in summer, 2004.

" The most interesting part of any system is its information filtering and control mechanism" - I try to maintain a coarse filter by measuring results. I make guesses of the depth and breadth of my memes but there are always surprises such as the AOL videos. Detail is blurred but I have a good idea of the when and why of things. My ex-wife said I was an artist and I see it in myself now. My very first Internet meme was in 1991 when I posted as "MC ESDI" to test Hewlett Packard's response. It was a purposeful strategy with predictable results and to this day, none of them know that it was a deliberate test of their integrity.

In this current test, I didn't anticipate the prevalence of sickness in American culture, with so much hidden envy and spite. The younger people are the least ethical but the entire culture is infected with back-channel rumor-mongering and slandering for political and personal purposes. It's a cancer throughout our society.

And I pondered on that for some time. Then I realized. Americans don't produce goods so they don't value people who produce. Americans value people who lie. They value people who validate lies to produce feel-good results. Television, politicians, evangelists, realtors, salesmen.

I accomplished what I set out to. My current environment isn't particularly challenging, no career path but... at least I'm not being stabbed in the back. And I can write this up for posterity because it's nestled down inside hundreds of other entries. Very few people have any idea of what I'm doing and I like the irony of "hide in plain sight".

I do.
I like the irony of it.