I wanted to post a little synthetic idea connecting something I observed watching Wanted this weekend with Tai Chi boxing and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

Since Jenni’s copy of Blink is in Baltimore, I figured I’d just go on Fictionwise and buy a copy so I could just cut and paste from the ebook. They’ve got it, but I can’t read it though. The DRM they use to keep people from sharing it isn’t supported on my Ubuntu desktop.

I probably wouldn’t buy the DRMed version anyway. So long as someone else controls my ability to control access to my media, I risk ending up like folks who bought from MSN Music. Once the service went belly-up they turned off the computers allowing people to access their music. Not a problem unless you do something crazy like get a new computer.

After I gave up on Fictionwise, I thought perhaps Amazon might be able to help me out, but you can only buy Kindle books if you have purchased a Kindle from Amazon.

I eventually got tired of screwing around with it, looked at a page on Amazon’s preview, entered a sufficiently long sentence to be unique into Google, and just pirated the book. I really did try to buy the book but, ironically, they were so busy trying to keep me from stealing it that they wouldn’t take my money. (I guess I could go ahead and pay for it now, but I really don’t want to give the businesses the impression that what they’re doing satisfies me as a customer.)

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Item to item similarity is a method popularized by Amazon for computing the similarity of items in its catalog. The reasoning is that item similarities are more static than user similarities and so in situations where finding the similarity requires extensive computation they have an advantage in robustness to infrequent updates.

You know that you might be having trouble with the impulse to eat when you start eying your bottle of tuberculosis drugs and wondering what happens if you eat more than one in a day. After all, they’re not pepto or Gatorade.