A departure from my usual topics, in remembrance of my college math classes (and with a nod to Mozilla folks working on related areas like automated testing and software verification): Via Eric Drexler via Emergent Chaos comes this interesting review paper on formal proofs in mathematics and software to verify them. As a dual math/physics major I was well acquainted with jokes about the lack of mathematical rigor on the part of physicists, who often engaged in rather slapdash simplifications in their drive to get formulas they could use to explain experimental data and make further predictions. However physicists who cut corners are ultimately saved by the fact that nature will check their work and let them know if they’ve made bonehead mistakes. ...

On the eMusic message boards I just saw a post from rednano74 about Amazon offering “50 albums for $5”. Silly me, I thought this meant for $5 I could buy 50 albums, or $0.10 an album. This of course was just a fever dream; Amazon is simply continuing its standard practice of discounting selected MP3 albums from $9.99 to $5 or less. It’s interesting though: I looked through these 50 albums and didn’t see anything that was attractive to me at a $5 price point. This seems to be my general experience with Amazon’s discounted albums. (I subscribe to the @AmazonMP3 Twitter feed, so I see pretty much everything that appears.) When offered an essentially random collection of discounted albums, a $5, $3, or even $2 price is typically not sufficient to motivate me to purchase something I’m not already seeking out; only at the $0.99 per album level do I tend to make an impulse purchase from Amazon. ...

(In the spirit of Twitter, I’ll keep this post brief.) eMusic folks are now twittering as @17dots (but folks, register @emusic too before it’s taken) @17dots following more (94) than follow it (61), should promote on the message boards Suggest @17dots do 1-3 posts per day, highlight new arrivals, always include links @17dots “competition”: @amazonmp3 daily deals, 6,849 followers (OK but drop in bucket, Twitter over-hyped?)

(This is part 2 of a two-part post; for background on the Gini coefficient see part 1.) I previously discussed use of the Gini coefficient as a way to measure income inequality (or equality, as the case may be), and promised to discuss why Howard County is noteworthy in this regard. In brief, Howard County is one of only seven counties in the US (out of 800 counties and other geographic areas) that rank in the top 5% (positions 1-40) for both median household income and income equality (as measured by the Gini coefficient): ...

(This is part 1 of a two-part post; for the conclusion see part 2.) In a previous post I discussed the concept of median income and how it avoids certain distortions inherent in mean (average) income. However median income by itself is not adequate to characterize the economic status of households in Howard County (or anywhere else for that matter). In particular, the median income just provides the “midpoint” for income, i.e., the income value for which 50% of the households make more and 50% make less; it does not address the question of how income is actually distributed among the various households. ...

This doesn’t sound good: While researching a Howard County-related blog post today I happened to follow a Google search to www.columbia-md.com (a domain controlled by General Growth Partners), and got the following message: “This Account Is No Longer Active.” I guess when your stock’s in the toilet and you’re flirting with bankruptcy you’ve got more pressing things to worry about than keeping your web sites up.

I happened to get an eMusic email a few days ago (announcing new releases in the alternative/punk category) and noticed a link to a “special offer for AT&T Mobile subscribers,” with the promise that “You could win 6 months of free AT&T mobile service.” I recently became an AT&T subscriber (when I bought an iPhone), so this sounded intriguing and I clicked on the link. It turned out to be a sweepstakes tied to a trial offer for eMusic Mobile, and isn’t even applicable to me because eMusic Mobile doesn’t work with iPhones. ...

In a previous post I investigated the question of whether those in Howard County with annual incomes of $120,000 or more truly constituted the “wealthy few” or not. (The answer: No.) Key to that investigation was the idea of median household income, as reported by the US Census Bureau in its annual Amercian Community Survey. It turns out that the ACS data provide some interesting insights into what makes Howard County special, and can help explain the nature of the conflicts that have raged over the future of Howard County in general and Columbia in particular. ...

Today I got interrupted from my Swindleeeee!!!!! blogging slumber by the news that David Pakman is leaving eMusic. I have been critical of Pakman one or two times (most notably for not getting into “social software” earlier), and I have no idea how Pakman was perceived inside eMusic by its employees. However there’s no question that Pakman was a strong and consistent voice for moving the music industry past the DRM debacle, and that he had a clear (and I think mostly correct) vision of eMusic’s target market and how best to serve it; I suspect that without him eMusic would either have failed entirely or would have been acquired and then ruined by some clueless major corporation. ...

Last night a post by local blogger Wordbones caught my eye. Based on a story in the Baltimore Sun, it discussed proposed plans for affordable housing in Columbia Town Center, housing that would be reserved for those with income of less than $80,000 (10% of total units) or those with income between $80,000 and $120,000 (another 10% of total units). Wordbones particularly noted a quote in the article from Alan Klein of the Coalition for Columbia’s Downtown: ...