Ted Cuzzillo

Metrics your mother warned you about

March 31, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo

I could easily find a parking place in Berkeley on Saturday! What could it mean? On a normal afternoon in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, I usually find just one space open, and often I have to drive around the block once…. Ah, it’s the end of Easter week and a bunch of the university people have gone away. So much for bigger meanings like recession, breaking news on TV or sunspots.

Sometimes such offbeat indicators do mean something. How would we know if the U.S. economy has begun sliding into a severe recession? By a surge in the number of eBay items for sale, according to one article in the March 23 New York Times.… Read the rest “Metrics your mother warned you about”

A proto-dashboard that worked

March 29, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo

Back in 1971 Chile’s newly elected socialists dreamed of what today we’d call a dashboard, and it was to run the country. They actually did build it, and just 15 months after conception it was good enough to thwart a nationwide strike.

Sierra Club’s global cooling

March 27, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo

I listened to the yammering in Sierra Club committee meetings 20 years ago, before I got into technology, and thought that the “real” world knew better.

One little incident convinced me. At one meeting of the group overseeing the Sierra Club’s old ski lodge, Clair Tappaan Lodge, someone wanted to change the name of a room, the Puce Room. A woman who’d just redecorated in there wanted to rename it after the just-passed folk singer Kate Wolf.

I really liked the old name, especially apt for the room’s cold concrete walls and rusty dripping pipes. The committee, though, was about to approve the change.… Read the rest “Sierra Club’s global cooling”