Ben’s posthaven

1. Diamonds are not actually that rare, except that most diamond production is owned by a single cartel (De Beers) which constrains the output to prop up prices and create the appearance of scarcity:

   Natural diamonds aren't particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity because everyone thinks it's a precious commodity, the geological equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary.

   Credit for the modern cult of the diamond goes primarily to South Africa-based De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer. Before the 1940s, diamond rings were rarely given as engagement gifts. But De Beers' marketing campaigns established the idea that the gems are the supreme token of love and affection. Their "A Diamond Is Forever" slogan, first deployed in 1948, is considered one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time. Through a near total control of supply, De Beers held almost complete power over the diamond market for decades, carefully hoarding the gemstones to keep prices—”and profits—”high. While the company has lost some of its power to competitors in Canada and Australia over the past few years, it still controls almost two-thirds of the world's rough diamonds.

2. Diamonds will soon be easily producible in a lab, which will be excellent for industry

   With a cheap, ready supply of diamonds, engineers hope to make everything from higher-powered lasers to more durable power grids. They foresee razor-thin computers, wristwatch-size cellphones and digital recording devices that would let you hold thousands of movies in the palm of your hand. "People associate the word diamond with something singular, a stone or a gem," says Jim Davidson, an electrical engineering professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. "But the real utility is going to be the fact that you can deposit diamond as a layer, making possible mass production and having implications for every technology in electronics.

3. Unlike diamonds that come from the dirt, man-made diamonds aren't socially nor environmentally destructive

   Like most open-pit mines, diamond mines cause erosion, water pollution and habitat loss for wildlife. Even more troubling, African warlords have used diamond caches to buy arms and fund rebel movements, as dramatized in the 2006 movie Blood Diamond. Actor Terrence Howard wears a diamond lapel pin with Apollo stones. He told reporters, "Nobody was harmed in the process of making it."

As always, I've been working on a random side-project, and lately, I've been learning to appreciate Unicode. Specifically, the rude awakening of having to deal with various character encodings rather than plain ASCII text. Of course, now I can say something silly like Oh '0x92', this must be good ol' 1252. But having to carry this sort of arbitrary knowledge around is a bit silly now, and will be all the more silly as people interact more across languages and cultures.

For now, it's a fact of life, and I know we can all learn to deal with it. But I'll be working toward the day when, we'[ll] take Unicode for granted and cheerfully accept things like perl variables called $¶, the URI http://alþing.is/þjóð/, and people named Zoë.

Until then, you can wear shirts like this one. Now, I'd like to point out here that the so-called Mac version is more correct. The diamond with inset question mark is actually a unicode character for "replacement character" (U+FFFD). Both Windows and (Gnome) Linux get this wrong (for now).

One night in Cali, Stephanie and I were out to see a show, when we noticed something strange. I won't go into details but we saw something that didn't seem right, and my first instinct was to call the non-emergency police services number. It took a lot of trying, but I pretty quickly got on the phone with a dispatcher and rattled off the details of what we'd seen. While I was still on the line, still answering questions about specifics, two cop cars zipped around the corner, speeding off in the direction we'd just come from. In a matter of minutes I got a call back from the dispatcher thanking us for calling it in. I'm guessing there was in fact a crime in progress, and thanks to the accessible communication afforded by cell phones, we were able to get the word to the right people in a very short time. It's my hope that we saved someone from frustration and violation felt by someone who suffers a crime without finding the perpetrator.

On an even more serious note, It's this kind of thing which encourages me not to worry about the prospect of governmental missuse of technology. As lines of communication are shortened, the people's power to associate, work together and aggregate information increases at a level comparable to the convenience afforded the government, perhaps in some cases more so, as the people are not so easily tied down by governmental bureacracy. This convenience helps keep the balance of power somewhat level, and guards against minor tyrannies.