Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

Corban and a handful of his men arrange to speak with the commander of the enemy forces. Corban is astonished when he sees Tark swagger in at the head of a group of enemy generals and guards. Tark smiles, "I have several surprises for you, Corban."

Tark draws his sword -- everyone knowing that he dare not attack Corban -- and suddenly plunges it into the side of one of his own guards!

"Don't ever send a spy among my forces again. I lived among you for seventeen years. I know your ways."

Corban watches as his friend slumps to the ground. Then he turns to Tark and begins negotiations.

(Why does this somehow feel more like Moroni and Amalickiah?)

Why do we fear great things?

We do not fear failure. We fear foolishness. We fear above all that, like Don Quixote, we will be found tilting at windmills. That our friends will see our efforts and know that we spent our strength in vain. That our friends will laugh at us.

When we can try and fail in solitude, we have little enough hesitation. We risk little, and generally we achieve little. The truly great requires us to risk the laughter of our friends. The truly great requires us to reach, to risk falling. It requires us to strive for something that may not even exist.

But we fail to see that any expense of effort redounds to our benefit. All work makes us grow. If the end for which we strive is not attained, yet we become one who has done the work. If the end for which we strive is found to be a windmill only, yet we have gained the experience, strengthened the muscles, and trained the spirit.

And if the ends of today are windmills, and our friends and foes deride, yet there remains tomorrow.

And tomorrow, they might be giants.

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(And yes, this did really all start by wondering why the music group selected its name.)

Everyone remembers the day the cloudmaker fell. Some say he looked like one of us. Others recall his powers and strange speech. Still others insist he was nothing but a wanderer from another tribe. Everyone remembers the day the cloudmaker fell.

But I alone remember the day he left.

A group of tribes living in the cratered remains of a world -- trapped and isolated from the modern world still growing around them, just outside the craters.

Maybe too like my Firefly Stars, but maybe not. Miyazake can tell the same story twice, and Stephen Douglas. Why not me?

The sound of the cloudmakers was a call to the fields. We wanted them to see us working hard, so they would bless us with the falling waters.

"Are you a God-fearing man?" the priest thundered.

"No, I wouldn't say I fear God," the young man answered.

"Heathen!"

"Not at all. I know God, and I love him."

"Do not speak to me of love!" The priest trembled with righteous passion. "You are a being incapable of any real emotion -- a vessel only of wrath and darkness."

"Oh! Well, I had no idea. I'll try to keep my wrath and darkness to myself."

"Oh, no you'll not! You'll not keep it at all! I command you in the name of the Almighty -- be free! Be cleaned of the terrible evil that even now racks your soul!" The priest concluded his tempest with a vigorous shake of staff.

An awkward quiet settled in the clearing. "...Did it work?" the young man asked.

"You tell me. Are you a God-fearing man?"

"Well, is God like you?"

"I try," the priest preened, "to model my life after His divine pattern."

"Then, yes."

Authority is essentially the promise of power. In the absence of power, authority is meaningless.

Currency is essentially the promise of money. How's that for an interesting analogy?

Here are some ideas for thesis projects I'd like to do:

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1. Search Engine Relevance
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What are the clickthrough rates for different ranks on the various search engines? They each surely know their own rates, but they have no real incentive to share those numbers, so we'll never see a good comparison. Unless someone like me partners with Omniture and does this study, see, to compare companies' rankings with their traffic from search engines, and the Overture search volume, to determine it.

For example:

Company A, Google [cliff diving], ranked number 4.
Overture [cliff diving], queries 3600.
Page ranked at 4, clicks from Google 36.
Google's number 4 spot CTR is 1%.

Do that enough times, and you might come up with some interesting data.

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2. Linking Security Tech to the Internet
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I'd love to study the companies whose 'web-enabled' security cameras have turned out to be a major mistake when Google indexed them all.

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3. Brand Monitoring - Corporate Intelligence
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How about developing a tool to track and monitor brand popularity online? Some company called TNS Media tracks ad spending and stuff, and as I was reading about them, I thought it would be cool to put together a tracking system for the Internet. I could enter a list of brands, and then watch their rankings and frequency over time. That data could be overlaid with product lifecycle data, ad spending information, or PR things that are happening, to see what sort of aggregate effect it is having online.

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4. Content Analysis of Internet Advertising
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Is the stuff being sold online different from that being pitched on TV? Clearly, SPAM tips things that way. What about the products featured on major websites? Which industries have embraced the Internet, and in which is there still a potential first-mover advantage to be exploited? Have any tested the waters and fully turned away?

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5. Integration of Offline and Online Campaigns
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Which companies are successfully integrating real-world marketing with the Internet? Which are doing it inadvertently? (That kind of gets back to the brand monitoring idea.)

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6. Educational Gaming
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What do we know about using games to teach? People remember 9/10ths of what they DO, right? What if we can get them to do it in a game?

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*** 7. Search Engine Personalization ***
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An update to the 1994 study would probably be the easiest thing to do. And it would be fascinating! So much has changed since then. Their study saw only periphery -- personalization of the interface, and accessories, with no meaningful effect on the results themselves. Today, powerful intra-search personalization is available. What is the real state of personal search?

Psst... Wanna' buy a digital camera, cheap? Yeah, the new Canon Rebel XT. Eight megapixels, SLR, fully featured... A great piece of hardware. Going for eight, nine hundred bucks at Amazon? A thousand or more at big-box retailers?

I got here for just $449. Too much? You're breaking my arm! Okay, $399. That's as low as I can go!

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Google Adwords:
Digital Rebel XT New $449
www.InfinitiPhoto.com/Canon_RebelXT Canon Digital Rebel XT w/18-55 $549

Canon Digital Rebel XT
www.superhotdeal.com Canon Digital Rebel XT Bargain! Starting from $0.99.

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Amazon Reseller Marketplace:
entirelypets.com Canon Digital Rebel XT (Silver) New $540
Feedback Rating: 85 (97% positive)

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All fake. And that's just a tiny sample. There are dozens, if not hundreds of sites on the Internet making totally fraudulent claims to sell products at hundreds of dollars below the retail price -- often below the minimum wholesale price to the retailers!

I made two purchases through Amazon's marketplace, to see what would happen, and of course Amazon caught and cancelled both of them. (They don't want to have to pay me back the $600 when it all falls through!) These vendors sell tons of low-cost items to build up a positive reputation, then burn it with a few high-cost, high profit margin sales.

The websites don't even need to go to that effort -- a few hundred bucks to get a "credible" website, and per-click fees for Google ads.

I'd like to investigate this from any of several perspectives:

1. Con men -- how do they manipulate credibility to get our money?
2. What can organizations do to detect patterns of fraud? (How could Amazon keep its marketplace clean?)
3. What can individuals do to stay safe?

It's a fascinating subject.

(Read more for a list of websites that look fraudulent to me:)

Provo city has championed the installation of a city-wide fiber-optic network for Internet, TV, telephone, and whatever other services they can think to run over it. The system is almost completely deployed and early projections seem to show the city failing to meet revenue projections. But there is a lot of positive 'buzz' about the project on the Internet, across the country, as people would like to see similar projects attempted in their cities.

I'd like to study the Internet PR effect this venture has had on Provo. For typical, business-related searches, for instance, does Provo come up more often because of iProvo and the related publicity? Are more new businesses coming to Provo? What about home-buyers? Anyone possibly swayed by positive or negative coverage of the project?

I know I'm excited to have broadband! But I'm in the second to last zone receiving the system. Boo.

What other benefits might Provo be receiving as an early entrant into the civic-broadband space? How is the Internet responding to Provo's efforts to become an ISP? (Yeah, I know they're not *technically* an ISP...)

Sirens screamed as the thief ran heedless through the grid of lasers she plainly saw through her active goggles. Gravitometers measured the displacement as she hefted the diamond from its protective seat and four cameras fed video of her stuffing the diamond into her small backpack. Guards burst into the room and pointed their rifles at the huddled woman and her prize.

“Do you believe in magic?” she asked the men.

Without hesitation, the guards opened fire. Four cameras recorded the bullets tracing perfect ballistic paths through the air as the gravitometer noted the sudden disappearance of seventy two kilograms of mass.

Forty seven miles away, the woman laughed as she started her Toyota and headed off toward the border.

It was time for the Watering. Her leaves stretched forward, her bulb poised to capture every precious drop. Deep below the earth, her drying roots nearly quivered in anticipation of the gift. She had nutrients ready to transport and she could feel the cells in her stem preparing to receive. It was time for the Watering, and the vital renewal it brought.

But the plant didn’t know that the Waterer was on vacation.

Bill scrambled to catch the radio but his reflexes had never been as quick as his tongue. The box hit the ground and bounced as the case cracked open and bits of electronics spewed out across the room.

“Cheap, foreign manufacturers!” muttered the tiny fairy, as it flew out of the mess. “Buy a better brand next time, human.” She picked up her violin, guitar, piano, and other instruments and flew away.

There's not much else to say about that.

Religion and the development and institutionalization of war are two topics that come to mind, relative to that assertion.

Just beacuse something can't be proven doesn't mean it's not true. Also, ust because something can't be measured doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Just because a project can't be quantified, we can't put an exact dollar figure and timeline to it -- that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

Just because someone can't be "managed" doesn't mean he's not worth employing? Yeah.

Sometimes risks succeed. And if you stick only with the totally safe, you will succeed only to the level that everyone else does. (And even then, you may fail regularly -- because the "totally safe" isn't, and everyone else is dumb.)

Well, there. I found some more to say about it.

My strength is to lift the burden of others,
My health to help the sick,
My mind to solve the problems of all,
My soul to serve my God.

- Book of the Inalen
Chapter Four, Verses 5-8

Two small, stupid points that won't mean much to anyone but me: (and this is, after all, my blog)

1. Rajah -- the rise of India and a social move towards Hinduism; "truth is rarely reached by consensus"

2. The feeling of power that comes from matching an old, poorly publicised vulnerability with an unpatched system

I think that'll do. Thanks!

Googling myself again, new results today. Saw this entry on Wikipedia:

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Tom Dalton was a lineman for an electric company until he was shocked and killed by 10,000 D.C. volts of electricity. He was brought back to life by a coworker, who used 10,000 A.C. volts. Tom Dalton became Magno. He was powered by the very electricity that saved his life, and he used it to fight crime with his magnetic and electrical abilities. He sometimes ran out of power and had to recharge himself by touching exposed wires. He was featured in Smash Comics #13-21.
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That's the secret right there, see. Reverse a killing by DC, with AC. It's so simple!

But you didn't think of it, did you? And that's why I'm a superhero and you're not.

It could seem like fun. An easy way to gain acceptance to a group that may not be terribly appealing, but may actually be to the right person. It may seem like a quick way to escape from problems -- but I wonder if that's ever actually the reason somebody starts. That seems more like something that would come after your body is conditioned a little bit and knows what will happen. I don't know why people start. I bet mostly they just start young, when dumb things happen for no good reason.

And I don't know if it inevitably destroys. I'm no expert, and all I really know is what they taught me in D.A.R.E. And I know that it does at least occasionally, and I believe that it does eventually, far more often than not.

We call it "doing drugs." That's a broad name for a problem with many faces. Does the domestic prescription drug abuser need different treatment than the sometimes-burglar who shoots up on a street corner? Should policy and practice differ for those cases?

The sponsor of this post, Stone Hawk, runs a drug treatment program that boasts a 75% recovery rate. It's awesome that they can help so many people, but scary that even if addicts pay the program costs, relocate to Michigan, and live in a dedicated drug rehabilitation community for an extended period of time, 25% will still relapse.

I was lucky -- blessed with a family and community around me that made it easy for me to never touch drugs or alcohol. I hope I never allow myself to think badly of people who were not so fortunate.

I hope they can find help.

'Smack' by Melvin Burgess. That's one of just a few books I've read about drugs that really conveyed a sense of the despair and human reasoning behind drugs. It's not light reading, and it's offensive, but it's like having a conversation with an addict who spits on you.

That's probably a good analogy, actually. I appreciated the experience, but I don't suppose most of my friends/family/associates would. So don't go read it.

Sheesh. And I'm getting all weirded-out just sitting here thinking about it again. What a terrible scourge drugs are to society.

Partly because I frequent BoingBoing, and partly because I heart Disneyland anyway, I've run across and read a few stories set in the magic kingdom recently. I've never played Kingdom Hearts, but I'm in love with the theme songs to that game (in which Disney characters join forces with Final Fantasy characters to save the universe).

So it shouldn't surprise me that last night I had an idea for a story of my own, to be set in Disneyland: just a decade after the neutron carpet bombing of America. Or maybe to be cruel, Japan again. By China? That would transport the story to Tokyo Disneyland. Where people still love Mickey Mouse without a trace of irony.

What would the park be like after ten years of no maintenance? If kids could string some power to it, what would they make of the place? What would they think of the world outside, if that were all they knew?

Just an idea.