Alston Grove

What is it about humans that makes us exaggerate and overcompensate? If I apply force to something and it doesn’t budge, I will next apply too much force and bust the thing to smithereens. I did that with a bag of chips once. As I grow older and wiser, I learn to make smaller movements, but many people don’t learn or they forget to apply that philosphy in new contexts.

I am tired of listening about gas prices on the news and people complaining about it. They drive around in their $50K SUVs, pick up $4 lattes at Starbucks, and complain that gasoline costs $2/gallon. Puhleez!

Let me explain it this way: If you adjust for inflation, gas prices are at a historic low. Believe it. In 2004, gas was about $1.88 per gallon, and in 1980 it was $2.87 after adjusting for inflation. After the low in 2004, the price per barrel rose from $20 to about $50, and people freaked out. If we had spread out the increase over 25 years, nobody would have noticed. But the market overcompensated, and so has our perception of what happened.

Besides the recent jump in price, another reason people think gas is expensive is because other things cost about the same now. This article has a chart of prices after inflation that shows how things like bannanas and eggs are cheaper in price while the price of other things rose faster than inflation.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain that people are complaining, because some good has come from it. The hybrid gas-electric vehicles are having some success. Especially, Toyota’s Prius. While Honda’s Insight is technically superior in gas mileage, it went too far with redesign. Prius is practical and cool, and it significantly outsold Insight. Small movements.

So while gas prices aren’t really as high as we think, let’s continue overcompensating by buying more fuel-efficient vehicles that will lead to alternate fuels. We’ll be better off for overreacting. Now, I wonder if I can convince my boss to overcompensate on my salary. Hm…

My buzzword sensor has found enough occurrences of people using the term “tagging” to investigate further. Tagging is just classifying things, but in the way that most people see the world instead of how scientific taxonomies distinguish it. When you get a highly collaborative, self-organizing community like the Web to start tagging, then you have something interesting called a folksonomy. And it’s the latest rage for social network websites.

For example, del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager where you store and categorize your collection of links. Because links are tagged, you can find links that other people tagged with categories that interest you. Of course, bloggers have been using tags all along, tagging their posts, photos, and links automatically, because most blog software uses RSS/Atom. To manually tag things like links, people are using a new attribute of rel=”tag”.

The current fad is to measure the use of tags and display a weighted list, also called a tag cloud. It’s a list of popular tags, with the most popular tags receiving a larger font size and weight. Some examples of tag clouds are at Technorati, Flickr, Craigslist, and 43 Things. Perhaps we have gotten a small step closer to the semantic web.

LOAD “*”,8,1
SEARCHING for *
LOADING

If you just enjoyed a blast from the past, then have I got a new old toy for you. A joystick loaded with 30 Commodore 64 games, ranging from Impossible Mission to Summer Games, that can be played on your TV. A hot seller on QVC, it was designed by Jeri Ellsworth, a high school dropout and self-taught chip designer. She created the device for Mammoth Toys from her Yamhill, Oregon home. There’s an interesting writeup about her in a local paper.

Tom’s hardware did a review of the C-64 DTV that goes even further to detail some fun easter eggs. The article calls it an emulator, which is how most of the all-in-one device are done, but some web writeups claim Jeri’s device is running the software natively. People have figured out how to add a keyboard and 1541 disk drive to the joystick.