I'm Flattr'ed!

Support my writing via Flattr, a new social micropayment system

I conducted an experiment back when I wrote my HP N36L review: I added affiliate links to both Amazon and Newegg, hopefully to get some revenue—without adding advertisements.

It was successful; I earned enough to pay for a few cups of espresso, at least.

Many authors have PayPal-powered "tip jars" or links to their Amazon wishlist. I've now setup the same, but it's unrealistic to expect visitors to spend the requisite time or money to use them.

Enter Flattr, a new "social micropayments" platform, a tip jar evolved to work on Web scale. Flattr is a quick and easy way to give back to content creators—including myself. Rather than trying to explain it, watch Flattr's introductory video. I love the cake analogy.

If you want to get an item from my Amazon wish list, please do! But why would I, you, or anyone else want to use Flattr over PayPal?

Well, one, it's simpler. Users only need click a single button (the widget) to Flattr me. Also, users don't need to worry about figuring out how much to give me—they just decide how much they want to be giving each month to content creators (not unlike payroll deduction for supporting your local NPR station) they wish to support, and Flattr figures out the "cake cutting". Nothing stops you from donating more to me, of course.

Second, Flattr's rates are better. Say you've decided to add $10/month to your Flattr account, and you've Flattr'ed 10 people, including me. Each of those people will be entitled to $1. With Flattr's 10% commission, I'd get 90¢; with PayPal's default fee schedule, I'd get 67.1¢ ($1-($1×2.9%+$0.30)). Big difference.

Flattr works well when you're dealing with small amounts (called micropayments), exactly the niche market they're trying to fill.

Imagine you're walking down the street and hear a great musician, to whom you'd like to donate some small change. It's easy to do in the real world. With conventional payment systems oriented around transactions, this model doesn't translate. With Flattr, however, the model does—it brings a donation system and ethic present within the real world onto the Web.

PayPal has its own little-known micropayments platform with a better fee schedule, but it requires the receiver to go through a manual approval process to receive a special account. A "beta" product, it's also available in only a few countries. Lastly, PayPal, making money on high-value transactions, has little incentive to develop micropayments—not until there's marketshare and mindshare to steal, something Flattr is building.

Third, with free culture luminaries like Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay fame behind it, Flattr seems less likely to "censor" recipients, holding funds hostage and even confiscating them, something for which PayPal is notorious. While I'm not worried about anyone censoring my overly-politically correct blog, should I be OK with organizations unfairly censoring others? *cough* WikiLeaks *cough*

So, there we go. If you like my blog, please flattr it!

An aside: you're not going to see widgets on any my sites. That includes Facebook Like buttons or share buttons for Twitter and Google Buzz/Plus/their latest failure. It's amazing these corporations have convinced webmasters into adding things that both slow the performance of their websites and compromise visitors' privacy, for little/no tangible benefit the webmasters themselves—you'll not see any of that here.

However, in a minor bout of hypocrisy, I have added Flattr widgets. They use performance-oriented, "progressively enchanced" HTML and Javascript, so their widget doesn't slow sites down. Also, since they're not a "free" social or advertising network, I don't believe them to have any motive in tracking visitors across the Web.

Michael Madsen's Into Eternity

With Chernobyl's 25th anniversary a few weeks past (ignored, for the most part, by Western media), and the Fukushima nuclear disaster fresh in everyone's minds, now is as good a time as any think about nuclear energy's role in our civilization. Into Eternity, a Finnish documentary released in 2010, takes a very unique look at the nuclear power industry, one not typically thought about. Rather than nuclear proliferation or the plants themselves, it focuses on the geologic storage of spent nuclear fuel (aka SNF), in particular, Finland's Onkalo repository.

Spent nuclear fuel

Low-level nuclear wastes include things such as clothing, plant construction materials (e.g. concrete) and machinery

At the moment, the US does not have a storage plan for spent nuclear fuel. There is one geologic storage site, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico, but the site is relatively small and destined for storing the generation I nuclear wastes of America's nuclear weapons programs, not that of commercial reactors. A larger site, Yucca Mountain, well isolated in the Nevada Test Range (where nuclear weapons were tested for decades, and much contamination remains), was shelved in 2010 by the Obama administration, leaving America's nuclear energy industry without secure storage for its spent nuclear fuel.

Much of the topics Into Eternity touches, such as communicating the dangers of nuclear wastes stored at sites via markers and monuments, has similarly been discussed for the US' Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Drupal 7 upgrade post-mortem

This weekend, I upgraded Samat Says (this blog, in case you missed the memo) to Drupal 7.

For my Drupal 4.6/4.7-based site, I had created my own theme, Sands. Lack of time prevented me from porting Sands to Drupal 5 or 6, and it's unlikely it will be ported forward. I'm probably going to recreate it with one Drupal 7's many starter themes, however.

Patient care in the ICU in terms of vectors and topological spaces

Biomedical Informatics, Medicine

A few weeks ago, Timothy G. Buchman gave a talk at the Columbia DBMI weekly research seminar. During the QA session, someone asked why patients in intensive care units (ICUs) were given such “extreme” treatments, often causing them to develop new health problems and complications, keeping them in the hospital. He replied with this wonderful mathematical metaphor about patient care.

You are a point in an n-dimensional space. Each dimension is some vital sign or homeostatic attribute, e.g. blood pressure, blood glucose, temperature, etc. Homeostasis is defined a polytope in that space. As you do the various things of life, your point moves within the space defined by that polytope. For example, when you eat, your blood sugar goes up, and the point moves along in the blood sugar dimension; when you take a cold shower, your body temperature is reduced, and you move along in that dimension. Young people have a large space inside their homeostatic polytope

When you leave this homeostatic polytope, you're considered “sick.” If you travel to far from it, you die.

People who enter the ICU have points that are moving away from their homeostatic polytope. Their movement away can be represented as a vector, representing how quickly their condition is deteriorating.

Treatments in the ICU represent vectors that try to point you back towards your homeostatic polytope.