The first unfinished movie footage from the Golden Compass has been posted. I teared up a little bit with excitement. The scene of Iorek running without his armor looked really good.

The narration in the clip is a mess. It describes the story in only the blandest terms. Chris Weitz's mention of freewill is the only clue into the big journey the story takes. I wonder if they're still not sure how to pitch the story to American audiences.

Sometimes it seems like we're quick to forget the great engineers and scientists who make our world possible. More people know who Anna Nicole Smith is than say Jon Postel. I've been really pleased to see all ink spilled on the passing of John Backus. While I knew about Fortran and BNF I didn't realize how bright and forward thinking the guy behind them was.

Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak...

[via Scott Rosenberg]

That is from the opening of an ACM paper he wrote advocating for functional programming instead of conventional procedural programming. Functional programming took a back seat to Object Oriented programming, but in recent years it has seen a resurgence. I imagine part of this is because we've also seen a sort of return to the mainframe/dumb terminal model of computing with web servers/browsers. Of course it doesn't hurt to have Google championing functional programming with their map/reduce algorithms.

It's great to see someone willing to look beyond their own innovations (Fortran isn't functional) to find a better way. I hope I can see my own flaws as clearly.

I'm surprised I haven't seen more about OpenCongress in the sites I read. It is one of the better Congressional resource sites I've seen. I can't wait for the next release which will include the ability to tag bills, and follow the Congressional calendar.

It nicely bridges the gap between official government items (votes, bills, hearings) and public discourse about those items. Most sites like this play one side or the other.

They've got a Trac site for developers. Unsurprisingly it's written in Ruby on Rails.

What if we used a different currency for commodity items like toilet paper or Coke. So instead of paying $1 for a Coke you'd pay say 500 credits. Or think of it as 50 yen for a Coke.

Price is a crucial piece of information for the consumer. Commodity pricing in America loses detail because our currency doesn't work well for discriminating products at the low end. But if you could price two items as 2000 credits and 1800 credits, instead of each being $2, you're adding more detail back into the price. That detail just can't be reflected with our coarsely grained US currency.

I think what happens is that commodity prices have to be inflated because US currency can't go smaller. I think we could drive prices down if we had a new kind of currency to handle commodity pricing. Maybe this is one reason why prices go down when you buy in bulk? You're getting closer to a true price of an individual item because our currency is equipped to handle those kinds of prices.

Recently I've been fascinated by microcredit, and currency exchange. In the quest for more knowledge I was talking to someone who actually has a masters in finance. I threw out the analogy that banking is to microfinance as Newtonian physics is to Quantum physics. The idea being that the laws of finance change when the dollar amounts get small.

He wasn't fully sold on it because fundamentally risk modeling is the same for big and large. But he threw out the idea that Newtonian physics might be used to describe finances of $1m and up, whereas microcredit finance would be more like an electron cloud with probability describing the electron's movement.

I like that. The analogy also works if you think about how big an impact a $50 loan can have in a microfinance situation, whereas in traditional banking it's a nuisance.

I've been researching the PATRIOT Act which naturally leads me back through US history and similar cycles of radicalism. While pausing on the 1920 Wall Street Bombing and the later Palmer raids I came across this excellent quote. Then US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had his eye on the Democratic presidential nomination and tried to fire up support for him with this gem:

Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order … eating its way into the homes of the American workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.

From 9/16: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street

Attorney General Gonzalez doesn't seem to have the same fire in his belly.