Simon Stevin's Problem

Flemish mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin (1548-1620) studied the principles of mechanisms and machines. He had seen many perpetual machine proposals. One particularly interested him: a chain looped over a pair of asymmetric ramps. Some made the claim that it should move of its own accord because there were more balls, and therefore a greater weight on one side of the apparatus. They were sure it would move if only you could get rid of that pesky friction.

Stevin analyzed this and showed that the chain would not move, for in fact the system is in static equilibrium. In doing this he invented an important principle for the analysis of machines: the Principle of Virtual Work that may be found in engineering mechanics books even today. So important was this principle, that this picture of the ball-chain appears on the title page of Stevin's book on mechanics, and on his gravestone.

Stevin's achievement was an early example of how one can carefully analyze a mechanical system to determine whether (and how) it works. Stevin accomplished this long before the force analysis was understood, and before formulation of the laws of thermodynamics. Stevin also adopted the useful tactic of analyzing mechanisms in the "ideal" case where friction is assumed absent.

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

What happened to digg?

original here

Yesterday, I wrote:

I'd like to say I'm sorry that I disrupted eleven seconds of everyone's collective day over there with my error, but I'm so fed up with the constant bitching and complaining at every fucking thing I do that gets Dugg, (not to mention the insults I have to constantly endure from the average 15 year-old Digger) I'd rather direct those children to that brick wall over there, where they can bitch and complain as long as it takes to justify their self-righteous existence . . . At this point in time, I've just about had enough of Digg, so it makes no enormous difference to me either way.

This morning, I was looking through my friends' submissions at Netscape, and saw this story about Digg users going on a rampage and hijacking Yahoo's message boards, and this observation that Digg users have the maturity of middle schoolers.

Before I go add any additional comments, I'd just like to make something clear: Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson are my friends. I like them very much, and together they've helped build an incredible feat of technological brilliance that's affected every tube on the internet (for better and for worse.) I've been a Digger for a long time, and always felt like I could rely on Digg's homepage to reliably and consistently direct me to interesting and useful content, accompanied by insightful, funny, and interesting commentary.

My, how things have changed in just a few months. The links (that make it past the bury brigade) are still pretty good, but for whatever reason, the maturity and behavior of the average Digger has evolved into, well, something resembling a middle school lunch room. While Digg has always been a great way to share your creation with a large audience on the Internet, the associated grief that frequently comes with being exposed to Digg's userbase has lead to several sites blocking Digg, shutting off comments because of abusive Diggers, and using complicated .htaccess rewrites to send Digg's traffic away. What's Digg doing about this? Does Digg even care? If I were one of the public faces of Digg, I'd be pretty horrified that this sort of behavior was associated with me and my work, but as I wrote at Netscape today:

I've had to complain to abuse@digg twice. The first time, it took five hours to get a reply. The second reply never even came.

At the moment, Digg is unleashing a mob of unaccountable and out-of-control vandals on the Internet. I'm left to believe that Digg's owners are entirely happy to accept Digg's users acting like this, and don't especially care what reputation Digg has, because they have the numbers to effectively do whatever they want.

I've always thought that Netscape, Digg, and all the other social sites can co-exist; clearly the tribal nature of the average 13 year-old [Yeah, I wrote 15 yesterday and 13 today; having raised two kids who have passed both of those ages, there's not a significant maturity difference, despite what the average teen will tell you] Digger doesn't allow for that. They have the maturity of middle schoolers because they *are* middle schoolers.

I'm not going to predict the downfall of Digg, because Digg will always be a fantastic source of links and a great starting point for driving your truck down the internets. But the "social" aspect of Digg's "social news" is rapidly deteriorating into the sort of childish idiocy lampooned in xkcd's You Tube comic, taking John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory to its extreme (and seemingly inevitable) conclusion. Kevin is a great guy, and I'm sure he doesn't approve of or encourage this sort of crap, but he's also the public face of Digg. I'd really like to see him take a public stand and speak out against this childish, disruptive and destructive behavior. Even more, I'd like to believe that if he did it would make a difference, but at the moment, I'm not especially encouraged.

Update: If you care at all about this subject (whether you agree or disagree with my assessment) you will most likely find the comments on this post worth reading. I think there's an important and worthwhile discussion to be had about this whole thing: as people who frequently interact online, what can we do to prevent this Lord of the Flies world from taking over? I have no idea what the answer is, but I bet we can come up with some interesting discussion about it.

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