It doesn’t seem that there’s a single ingredient that makes for always-relevant material.  Focusing solely on national or global issues certainly puts you in a pretty big pond, but getting too local makes you irrelevant to anyone outside where you live, or worse, anyone who lives differently than you do, even in the same location.  So while I intend to start focusing on local issues more frequently, I’m not planning to give up analysis of larger affairs, particularly because I think there’s a dearth of attention being paid to some of them (climate change comes to mind).

Some upcoming blog-projects: a series on drug policy, maybe a review of the upcoming Northampton Coke plant expansion (“Lane wrote that without a local property tax break, freedom from having to pay for infrastructure upgrades, state tax credits and job training funds, Coke’s investment here was no sure thing.”), and some stuff on the Northwestern DA election and the pros/cons of statutory rape prosecutions.  Also working on a new title for the site (yes, “working on.”  It’s a big decision!)

The project is based off of something I saw demonstrated at by Prof. Allen Downey at Olin College in the fall of 2008 while I was visiting.  Although I didn’t end up applying there, I really liked the presentation he gave, on various computing methods and some of the ways of using computers to produce humanistic output.  Particularly, he demonstrated a program that accepted inputted text, and broke down that text into an associative array with the following properties:

• the array keys were each word in the array (so the text “hello how are you” would generate an array with keys “hello”, “how”, “are”, and “you”)
• the value of each key was a non-associative array consisting of a list of every word that followed the key somewhere in the text (so the text “I saw you and he saw her” would be (in PHP format): array(“I”=>array(“saw”),”saw”=>array(“you”,”her”),”you”=>array(“and”),”and”=>array(“he”),”her”=>array())

This sounds complicated, but bear with me; the next step will make it make more sense.  Once the program has generated this array, it begins to iterate through it in the following manner:

1. it takes key from the array and outputs it
2. it selects a random item from the list of words following that key (the array stored in that key’s associate value) and outputs it
3. then it jumps to the key entry for that word, and moves back to step 2

It repeats this until it encounters a word that has nothing following it (the last word in the source text if it appears nowhere else) or until it’s output a specified amount of words (much more common).  Thus, if you take any two adjacent words in the resulting text (which sounds uncannily similar in tone to the original and sounds like it should make sense, but is complete nonsense), you’ll be able to locate them, still adjacent, in the source text.  It’s legitimately one of the most fascinating and beautiful things I’ve ever seen a computer do.

I came home determined to write a copy, and made a bit of progress.  It lay around for a while, I did some more work on it some point, but I never completed it.  I rediscovered it this evening and just manned up and made it work well enough to be publicly viewable.  When finished, it will accept input in a text field, or will be able to read input from a specified URL.  At the moment, though, it’s just dealing with block of text I hard-coded in (thus it’s not accepting any user input right now), and a word output limit imposed the same way.  Both the source of the text and the length are displayed on the page.

But I know which way the wind is blowing.  If Apple keeps going down the road of intense user control, doesn’t give up the exclusivity contract with AT&T, and continues to break with Google, I’m not going to stick with them.  Google Android, Chrome, and Chrome OS once it exists (not to mention more well-established software like Ubuntu, which I already consider second only OS X), are all completely viable alternatives.  I already have all of my email addresses (including MobileMe, which I get for free as a certified Apple Sales Professional) redirecting to Gmail, and it provides all the services MobileMe does, except for Find My iPhone, and for free.  See my general rule for computing.  It still applies.

So, while I think that Apple is still a generally moral company, one that is providing terrific services to its users, I hope they realize that down the road they are only going to be able to restrict us so far.  Google has done an incredible job of making it really easy to switch to their services, and as we offload more and more of our data storage and processing power to the cloud, that ease of transition and context-switching is a big advantage.  Either it will keep Apple honest, or I’ll switch.  I’m definitely not enough of a fanboy to stick with Apple when there’s a better alternative.  Until that point, I’ll continue to defend them as the best hardware and software provider, but I’m not blind to reality.

Thus, I publicly declare Apple not to be the infallible god that its fanpersons so often claim it is.  And I call on its directors and customers to take it in a direction that continues to provide good products and services, rather than one that treats its customers, as so many other tech companies have, as endlessly ignorant moneybags.  I, for one, will not put up with that.  We’re used to getting good value from Apple, and if we stop getting it, we’ll move on.

This post originally appeared on Jewschool.

I’ve gone through a lot of different phases with this blog.  I began by using it as sort of a journal of my actions and thoughts.  Coupled with the WordPress client for iPhone, I did a fair amount of spontaneous and short blogging, expressing ideas I had, things I saw, and so forth.  As school began, I started becoming more introverted, focusing on the way I felt (usually being under a lot of stress, as it was senior year).  In January, my iPhone was stolen, and I lost the ability to blog at anytime.  I started blogging almost compulsively when I got home every day, almost as a way to let out my feelings.  Because of everything that was going on at school, it felt good to have a place to write about what I thought it all mean.  Sometimes it’s hard to articulate that sort of stuff when you’re still in it.  You need to take a step back.  Blogging has definitely helped me do that, in other areas of my life as well.

When I got a new iPhone in early July, I started using Twitter for uses other than just tracking this blog, and shortly thereafter joined Facebook.  Now I use those as two methods of communication (they’re closely integrated), and have begun to regard this blog as more of a place for contemplative, well though-out concepts or arguments.  A lot of my writing has been inspired by the increasing amount of other blogs I’ve been reading, including Paul Krugman‘s The Conscience of a Liberal, Jewschool, CAP, and Climate Progress, to name a few.  In a lot of cases, doing this writing has helped me solidify my own thoughts on subjects, and opened my mind to new points of view.

In the future, I want to blog more regularly than I have been recently; at least a couple times a week.  Interestingly, it was easier for me to blog regularly during the school year than it has been now.  I’m planning to blog a couple times next week from the NHC Summer Institute about the program and some issues that I will be considering during my time there.  There’s a plan for facilitation of a dialogue about the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (although I don’t really like calling it that), so I’m expecting to get some interesting stuff out of that.

As I begin school, I will almost definitely be undergoing some serious life changes in terms of how I spend my time and what I work on.  I intend to keep this blog an important component of my work and thoughts, and I hope to attract a wider audience as I meet new people and discover new ideas.

It’s been an incredibly rewarding year in many ways.  I look forward to many more.

I’ve made a monumental shift in my desktop computing setup.  For many many years, I have been using Namely as an application launcher.  I’ve tried LaunchBar and Quicksilver, but neither was as fast or responsive as Namely.  I have now, for the first time, found a better application.  Google Quick Search Box for Mac can launch applications with the speed of Namely (which the other two apps couldn’t), and it has more functionality as well (similar to the other apps).  It can search files on the computer, all sorts of application data, the internet (because it’s Google), and my Google account, including Gmail, Docs, Photos, Wikipedia, Google Finance, and more.  It’s incredibly useful.  It also has a somewhat under-documented and, as far as I can tell, under-utilized feature; Twitter updates.  This alone could persuade me to start Twittering, which I’ve been holding off on.  We’ll see.  Either way, QSB (for that is what they are calling it in the inter-tubes) is going to be great.

I suppose this is a rather simple concept, but somehow I’ve never run across it before.  I am PSYCHED!  There is so much I can do with this!  I will probably start implementing it very soon on this site.  I will have to think about cool content to put there to keep people looking.