-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-
``.~. r-. (O) -=~ .___ __. , ___ _ __
' ' / \ // `| R \\ / \\ /: ^ / / '. \\ \/ ====|
- | | ! || < :|. _ //.| 0 | /|: |*| | | A | || ||:
= \*/ + || / | =|\ |. 0 |. \ | : | | a || | V | >===
-= v \ || \==- | ^ |. \\ // \\/ \v/ \_ --, \'/ :
~-= |`. `" ~ `~ u ' V |__| V .====|
"It's all magic."
2008.02.17 - In-ears #
Prepar' for the most comprehensive review of in-ear monitors in
the world!
Audio sources:
* Apple iPod nano 2G
* Apple iPhone
* Edirol UA-1000 audio interface (headphone out)
Jays q-JAYS
the good
- Great form factor
- L/R well marked
the bad
- None of my audio sources seemed to drive them
properly
- Way too much treble, way too little bass
Shure SE530
the good
- Amazing response and clarity
- Selection of ear sleeves allows a proper fit
- iPod seems to drive them as well as the Edirol
the bad
- Harsh treble; a general problem of canalphones,
but more pronounced here
- Less bass than I hoped for with triple
armatures
- Awkward/ugly cabling
Ultimate Ears super.fi 5 pro
the good
- Lots of bass (though not with much definition)
- Fantastic sound for $190 (via HeadRoom)
the bad
- Lacking treble
- L/R poorly marked
- They protrude pretty far out of the ears,
making me nervous about what could happen if they
get bumped
Etymotic Research ER-4
the good
- Incredible definition without brittle treble
the bad
- Not producing much below 100 Hz
- Seemed to want to be inserted farther into my
ear than anything has a right to go
- Hard to drive with an iPod, but OK with the
Edirol
Sleek Audio SA6 (with neutral treble filter and bass port)
the good
- Most balanced sound so far; good bass, good
definition, no treble harshness
- Fantastic cabling
- Sounds great on the iPod and iPhone
- Included storage case based on Sony's excellent
Fontopia winding cases (since the early '90s)
the bad
- L/R poorly marked
- Storage case fails to be good in any of the
ways the Fontopia cases are
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2008.02.02.1 - Patent reform #
In 2004.04.10 I suggest that patent filing fees be proportional
to the number of patents filed per assignee per year. Here's
another patent reform idea:
Associate with every patent a public-domain buyout value. After
a patent is granted, any party may send money to the patent
office toward this buyout, and the office holds the money in a
fund. When the value is met, the patent is placed in the public
domain and the fund is disbursed to the patent's assignee(s).
One drawback of this proposal is that it must parry two seemingly
opposing factors -- it must discourage inventors from pricing the
buyout value arbitrarily high, and it must protect great ideas
which are had by little companies with rich competition.
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2008.02.02.1 - Scientific consensus #
I'm so sick of religious fundamentalists who deny Newton's laws
of gravitation. The scientific consensus on these laws is so
overwhelming, they're basically not even up for debate. It isn't
as if the laws first appeared in the '80s or something. They're
over 300 -- with a capital "H" -- years old. If the scientific
consensus hasn't changed in that time it never will.
I mean, haven't they heard of the U.N. report on classical
mechanics? Yeah, it was authored by an international panel of
over 2,000 scientists. And let's not even mention how many
people agree we've successfully sent spacecraft around the solar
system using the laws.
It's like these people missed the enlightenment or something.
From 1686 through at least 1910, the physics literature is filled
with discussions of the consensus being built around Newton's
laws. You can read it for yourself.
'nuff said.
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2008.01.18 - Googleideas #
* Package tracking API for Checkout
As a card-carrying PayPal hater, I use Checkout every chance I
get. This feature would provide an API through which couriers
like UPS and FedEx could provide tracking information. So you
get your package tracking right on your Checkout receipt.
* Maps, maps, maps
1. There are too many different views in Maps. Just take me
right to "View larger map". WTF.
2. I defy you to discover the difference between "Search the map"
and "Find Businesses".
3. The map should always show n results (with slider), regardless
of its scale. You'd think you could manually re-"Search the map"
after zooming to get a fixed number of results on it (as above),
but what you get instead is really weird behavior.
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2008.01.02 - The Edge Annual Question 2008 #
I've read all of this year's responses so you don't have to.
Here are the ones worth reading:
Freeman Dyson Japan's decision to surrender
Stewart Brand Good old stuff sucks
Robert Sapolsky The adult brain does not make new neurons
Joseph LeDoux Memories are 'stored' in the brain
Stanislas Dehaene The brain's Schrodinger equation
Lera Boroditsky Do languages shape perception?
Tor Norretranders Permanent Reincarnation
Gregory Benford Evolving the laws of physics
Daniel Kahneman The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill
Alan Kruege I used to think labor markets were very competitive
Diane Halpern From a simple truth to "It all depends"
Helena Cronin More dumbbells but more Nobels
Mark Pagel We differ more than we thought
Nicholas Christakis Culture can change our genes
Linda Gottfredson The calculus of small but consistent effects
Gerd Gigerenzer The advent of health literacy
Beatrice Golomb Reasoning from evidence: A call for education
Bart Kosko The sample mean
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2007.12.11 - Roundup #
This talk is one of the best treatments of the subject of gender
I've seen.
I highly recommend this Freeman Dyson essay on climate change.
An insightful post on woonerven.
The age of the oldest known animal was determined by killing it.
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2007.12.08 - Labor markets #
A recent report claims the U.S. produces more qualified science
and engineering graduates than we can employ. Yet corporations
claim their technical positions are impossible to fill with
domestic talent, and are even quite hard to fill from the global
labor market. Are they just making a play for more visas and
lower labor prices?
Not just, I'd say. There's something more serious at work: gross
inefficiencies in the way skilled labor is bought and sold. Just
a couple posssible reasons why:
* Interview customs haven't changed much in 50 years, though the
average term of employment and buying power of salaries have, by
an order of magnitude in that time.
* Skill and job fit are quantified in useless or even counter-
productive ways (see Malcolm Gladwell's Blink for some evidence
of this). The specialization of recruiting (read: HR) moves
hiring decisions away from people who know the work.
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2007.12.06 - Climate change #
That something is wrong with the weather is not new. That it is
our fault is also not new.
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2007.09.06 - George Washington's Money #
Just how wealthy was our first President? These two sources...
http://www.raken.com/American_Wealth/
http://www.scottwinslow.com/2002/wealthy.asp
...give his net worth (at the time of his death in 1799) as
$890,000 and $530,000, respectively. OK, Winslow doesn't say
he's measuring in 1799, but whatever.
In order to give context to these numbers, let's get some
historical population and GDP data...
year GDP ($B) Pop. (T) GDP/Cap. ($)
1799 0.44 5,141 86
2006 13,194.70 299,398 44,071
These yield... Raken Winslow
% of GDP 0.20% 0.12%
...in today's $ $27B $16B
years per cap income 10,400 6,200
...in today's $ $460M $275M
< Excel version >
These results match up with the "(relative share of) GDP" and
"GDP Per Capita" indicators at...
http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
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2007.08.04 - Big company #
Over four years ago I did a list of big corporations and their
market caps. Here's what it looks like today:
Exxon Mobil....462B
GE.............390B
Microsoft......272B
Shell..........239B
Walmart........187B
Chevron........174B
Google.........157B
IBM............152B
Altria.........140B
Intel..........139B
Coca-Cola......123B
Apple..........115B
PepsiCo........107B
Time Warner.....70B
Disney..........66B
News Corp.......65B
There are some new players here, but just following the members
of the original list, we find the combined value of this
'Microwave index' has gone from 1.6T to 2T; an increase of 28%,
or about 6% per year. The only loser on the list is Walmart.
The big winners were Altria and Exxon, doubling in value.
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2007.07.31 - Digital camera buying guide Mk.3 #
cost | thick | raw | sensor | zoom wide
Leica M8........4800 n/a Y 27x18mm @ 10.3mp n/a
Canon 5D........2570 n/a Y 36x24mm @ 12.7mp n/a
Sigma SD14......1200 n/a Y 21x14mm @ 4.6mp n/a
Sigma DP1........TBA 2" Y 21x14mm @ 4.6mp 28mm
Fuji F50fd.......TBA 0.9" N 1/1.6" @ 12.0mp 35mm
Panasonic FX100..400 1" N 1/1.72" @ 12.0mp 28mm
Panasonic FX33...TBA 0.9" N 1/2.5" @ 8.1mp 28mm
Sigma cameras use Foveon sensors. Prices via B&H, rounded to the
nearest $10.
See also.
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2007.07.30 - Like a baby #
Adric is especially cute when he's sleeping. Then it hit me: how
often do you get the chance to watch someone sleep? Humans are
so cool. This sort of voyeurism has to be one of the major perks
of parenthood.
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2007.07.29.2 - Sugar #
Common compound sugars:
lactose = 1 glucose + 1 galactose
maltose = 2 glucose
sucrose = 1 glucose + 1 fructose
High-sugar foods suitable for use as sweeteners:
agave syrup: mostly fructose, some glucose
brown rice syrup: mostly maltose
corn syrup: nearly 100% glucose
high-fructose corn syrup: 50-90% fructose, rest glucose
honey: 40% fructose, 30% glucose, various other
maple syrup: mostly sucrose
sugarcane juice: mostly sucrose
Compound sugars get broken down into simple sugars in the body.
So if you want to avoid fructose, your only options are brown
rice syrup and regular corn syrup. Neither are very palatable,
but at least brown rice syrup has _some_ flavor. It looks like
maltose is broken down to glucose in the small intestine by
maltase. This is probably slower than the sucrose breakdown,
which happens in the stomach by acid.
Honey deserves honorable mention because it has the highest
nutritional value of any of these. And I think it's one of the
best tasting sweeteners, along with maple syrup.
The thing about fructose is that it's terribly sweet. It's the
sweetest sugar, and sucrose second. Glucose isn't all that
sweet, and it's very thick, which makes it hard to work with.
Note that fructose itself has a low glycemic index, so looking
for low glycemic index isn't going to help you avoid it.
Incidentally, glycemic load is a better indicator of overall food
quality than glycemic index.
The principle carbohydrate of raw agave nectar is supposed to be
inulin, which is apparently good for you. But it's hydrolyzed
either by heating or with an enzyme to turn it into the syrup.
It's not clear how sweet the raw nectar is... probably not very.
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2007.07.29.1 - Checkers is solved #
Checkers is solved, but poker is not.
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2007.07.19.2 - Boss dollars #
I'm of the belief that traditional management hierarchy is an
inappropriate and money-losing practice in the information
economy. It may have made sense when workers weren't doing
anything that required brains, but now that they are, they ought
to be allowed to use them. Why should I be anyone's slave? The
business ought to be a marketplace of ideas.
Not all jobs are one-man jobs, however, and that shouldn't count
against them. So here's a way to help lubricate everything using
the power of capitalism!
First, fire all middle management, sales, marketing, and PR
personnel, and generally anyone with an MBA. Come on, you've
been wanting to do this anyway.
Next, give all employees a standard monthly allotment of 'boss
dollars'. Be creative with names here, like "Altria Fiats",
"Netflix Scrip", "AMD Specie", "Lucent Lucre"... ok, I'll stop.
The currency should be units of time, good to buy anyone's help
for that long. They must put up an equal sum to refuse, in which
case both sums are destroyed. To hold a meeting, you must buy
the invitees' time (at a 25% discount for the first 4 people, a
50% discount for the next 4, and full price thereafter). Anyone
who doesn't show has to pay the caller of the meeting for their
time at the full rate.
All transactions are logged against a project -- buyer and seller
agree on a project name for each transaction. Employees review
projects at regular all-hands meetings. With some restrictions
they may individually fund projects; e.g. per project per review
meeting, they can give one hour of Cisco Dough or do nothing.
Project income is proportionally disbursed to the project's
spenders up to their break-even point, and equally to all project
transactors thereafter.
In an ideal corporate culture (how Google was legend to be in its
early days), such a scheme would probably just be unnecessary
complication. In many companies I think it could work miracles.
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2007.07.19.1 - Excluded middle #
I think this fallacy does more harm in science than any other.
Let's have a look:
Noncoding DNA isn't functional
Was there ever a reason to believe this? I first heard about
"junk DNA" in 9th or 10th grade, and I didn't believe it then.
Evolution is far from perfect, but where else in nature do you
see such waste? In 2004, I noticed even the lyricist of the
reggae band Midnight had figured it out. Recently, I supposed
the whole thing must have been an invention of the press. But
apparently scientists were actually saying it.
No extraterrestrial life in our solar system
I first heard this one on a film loop in 1st grade. The
reason given was the "extreme" conditions on other planets. I
called B.S. immediately. Why such a narrow definition of life?
That film loop was probably made in the early '60s, but I still
read this kind of stuff from time to time.
When I was in 6th grade, I saw an episode of Star Trek TNG
where scientists intent on terraforming this desert planet hide
evidence of silicon-based life there (which would be destroyed in
the process), until Picard steps in. At the end, the red-handed
scientists say they didn't believe it was life at first because
it wasn't carbon-based, but gee, they shouldn't have been so
egocentric. I got pretty hyped.
The next year, while vacationing in North Carolina, I saw a
documentary -- I think it was Cosmos by Carl Sagan -- that showed
what Jovian life might be like. Pretty hyped again, until I
found out the documentary had been around since I was a baby.
See also.
It seems scientific consensus could itself stand greater use of
the scientific method. Rather than defaulting to, 'If it isn't
explained by the current consensus, it doesn't exist.' Lack of
evidence for something isn't evidence against it.
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2007.07.16.2 - Tabsinterface #
Firefox 2, like many tabbed browsers, adds new tabs to the end of
a list. The active tab is denoted by a visible close button (or
coloring difference). These two innocent-sounding features make
for some interface... unpleasantness.
To fix it, spawn new tabs to the right of the last tab spawned
from that source tab, or immediately to the right of the source
if there are no previous children. And, keep the active tab
centered above the browser window. On tab close, move the tab
list a click right (left neighbor of closed tab becomes active).
Result: users never have to search for the active tab, and the
tab list becomes a (hierarchical) timeline with the past to the
left and future to the right. I can't be bothered to mock this
up, but it's provably better than anything on the market today.
This is just another example of the common HCI faux pas of making
making users hunt through lists.
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2007.07.16.1 - iPhone #
* The display and touch interface work as advertised, which is
saying a lot. No buttons makes the phone easy to slide in and
out of pocket, and for an effective 'hold' function. The real
glass surface is a joy to touch. However, it's hard to use with
one hand / without looking, and thus, hard to use in the car.
* No storage class (disk mode) functionality. There's a damning
sort of irony in carrying 8GB of flash everywhere you go and not
being able to use it without installing iTunes. Even with
iTunes, I can't get PDFs on the phone and point Safari at them,
to read while I'm waiting in line and such (and thus probably out
of WiFi range).
* We need at least a three-position ringer switch: no ringer,
vibrate, and audio ringer. Two positions aren't enough.
* We were promised better voice quality. We didn't get it.
* Visual voicemail is the killer feature for me (I'd gladly pay
another $600 just to never again have to dial into a voice menu
to get my messages), but the quality of the recorded messages is
even lower than a 2-way cell call. AT&T must be downsampling
them like the bastards they are.
* The battery is fantastic.
* Only Safari and the photo viewer rotate. Why not everything?
And, the accelerometer misses a fair number of rotations. And on
those that do register, there's just a bit too much lag before
the screen does its thing.
* A little too much animation in the UI. Especially the camera
'shutter', which is confusingly used to indicate both that a
photo has been taken AND that the camera app has started or quit.
I could do without the 'flocking' home-screen icons as well.
* There isn't a generic beep-like ringtone. We really want a
synthesized ringer here, people. Recorded ringtones are laame.
You just can't get the dynamics out of the speaker/amp.
* Audio jack should be on the bottom, like the nano. Yes I know
this is a hotly debated issue.
* The Apple bluetooth earpiece is really nice, except its
antenna is criminally weak. I get nasty dropouts with the phone
in the front pocket on my jeans, and I'm not the only one to
notice this.
* I'm not using the iPhone for e-mail. Why? Because if I'm
going to have X hours per day to do e-mail, I can handle a lot
more messages behind a real keyboard.
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2007.07.12.2 - Language bandwidth #
hardwriting
About 30 WPM. [Wikipedia]
SMS, 9-key
Claims for 58 and 44 seconds exist for the following
phrase (the latter claim works out to about 35 WPM):
"The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and
Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the
world. In reality they seldom attack a human." [various]
telegraph, straight-key (Morse code)
The fastest speed ever sent by a straight key was
achieved in 1942 by Harry Turner W9YZE (d. 1992), who
reached 35 WPM in a demonstration at a U.S. Army base.
[Wikipedia]
smartphone (QWERTY with predictive text)
In the Dom Perignon III PDA speed-entry contest by
Fitaly, a thumb touchtypist achieved 84 WPM on a
monochrome Treo.
[http://www.fitaly.com/domperignon/domperignon3.htm]
telegraph, "bug" (Morse code)
In his online book on high-speed sending, William
Pierpont N0HFF notes thaty some operators may have passed
100 WPM. [Wikipedia]
full keyboard (Dvorak layout)
As of 2005, Barbara Blackburn is the fastest typist in
the world, according to The Guinness Book of World
Records. Using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, she has
sustained 150 WPM for 50 minutes, 170 WPM for shorter
periods of time, and has been clocked at a peak speed of
212 WPM. Blackburn failed her typing class in high
school, first encountered the Dvorak keyboard in 1938,
quickly learned to achieve very high speeds, and
occasionally toured giving speed-typing demonstrations
during her secretarial career. [Wikipedia]
speech
200-300 WPM. [Wikipedia]
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2007.07.12.1 - Open letter to Steve Jobs #
When I'm leaving a voice message on someone else's phone from my
iPhone, one thing that's annoying is having to touch to expose
the "old fashioned" keypad, and then touch again to send the
# or * that will skip their outgoing message.
What's even more annoying is, with any phone, you have to know
whether it's # or *. Get it wrong, and you get prompted for the
person's password; you'll have to call them back to leave your
message. Unfortunately, there's no industry standard here -- it
varies by carrier.
But if there were a way for the iPhone to learn the carrier on
the other end, it could present an intelligent "skip outgoing
message" button that always worked.
Just a thought,
-Carl
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2007.05.22 - Human population becomes more urban than rural #
http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/2007/may/104.html
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2007.03.31.3 - Rest of World enters Microwave #
Ether is a work-for-hire portal I think I'll check out tomorrow.
Not quite what I describe in 2004.10.06, but hopefully one better
than the likes of Google or Yahoo! Answers.
--> Update: 1-800-GOOG-411 launches.
Confirmation of my assertion in Free as in Microsoft.
Brace for the coming shingles epidemic. Or lots of shots.
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2007.03.31.2 - MLP v.3 #
Newsworthy in Q1 07...
http://www.mapsofwar.com
http://www.mapofhappiness.com
Two interesting maps sites.
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/
Denali got me the kit for Christmas. I'm making a note to send
in my sample next weekend.
http://www.solixbiofuels.com
Michael Pollan argues convincingly (in my opinion) that corn and
soy are not good fuel sources. But this looks like a win.
http://www.scholarpedia.org
Good idea. I see Marcus Hutter is the editor of the Algorithmic
Information Theory article.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070124115529.htm
A genuine milestone in medicine.
http://www.rosettacode.org
A wiki for algorithms in different languages.
--> Update: Also en.literateprograms.org
http://www.freymartin.de/en/projects/jitwatch/
Finally, a gadget that could really improve my quality of life!
Actually, to hell with the watch; just bulid this functionality
into my phone.
--> Update: Dash takes a step in this direction.
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/03/72846
First national vote-by-internet elections called a success. And
in the country of my fathers, no less (or was that Finland?)...
http://www.numenta.com
Jeff Hawkins' company has finally released some software. It
seems to work pretty well.
http://news.ufl.edu/2007/03/07/net-neutrality/
Game theory supports net neutrality. And this story even manages
to explain it in a way that makes sense.
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2007.03.31.1 - Adric's first words #
There's nothing more thrilling than hanging out with my son. His
first lexicon is primarily made of: "this?", "da-du", and
"ut-oh". "This?" when he wants something, "da-du" when you give
it to him, and "ut-oh" when he drops it. It's the best bit this
side of the Mississippi.
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2007.01.22 - Apple + Fingerworks #
Looks like the iPhone's multitouch technology was acquired from
Fingerworks, along with that company's founders. And the
original Fingerworks keyboard is selling for ~ $1500 on ebay!
Should have kept mine instead of returning it for the $250 minus
shipping. :(
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2007.01.18 - Eminem #
I've been listening almost exclusively to Eminem for the last two
months. He's still the best-selling recording artist this
decade, with over 70M records sold since the year 2000, and sales
well split over his four main albums. He's won nine Grammy
awards and one Academy Award (for a song from the 8 Mile
soundtrack). Former professor of poetry at Oxford and Nobel
laureate Seamus Heaney has spoken highly of him. . .
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2007.01.17 - Band names #
Antikythera Mechanism
Balsam Specific
Congreve's Inflammable Powder
Perigean Tide
Stuffed Animal Repair
Oobleck
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2007.01.16 - Mac OS X #
The good:
. Unix
. Columns view (Finder)
. Application bundles
. Global dictionary lookup / spell check
. Input language selection can apply to entire environment
. Finder lists can be copied as text
The bad:
. Slow as molasses
. Shared menu bar makes users switch focus to access features
. Associations by file instance instead of file type
. Window size controls limited, may be off-screen
. Dock only shows minimized windows
. Dock holds too many different kinds of things
How to improve* columns view:
. Always show three columns, current folder always center
. Automatic column widths (e.g. show longest name shorter than
twice the mean length)
. Entire leftward hierarchy always available
. << < > arrows above center column
. Spotlight in upper right, searches recursively to the right
. Desktop and home buttons in upper left
. Two sort modes...
1. alpha: folders and files sorted separately
2. date: folders and files sorted together
* Some of these are addressed by hiding the 'brushed metal' skin.
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2007.01.03 - A useful view #
Most browsers have a 'turn off images' mode -- or you can use
Lynx -- but do any have a 'turn off everything but images' mode?
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2007.01.02 - No secret sources #
There's a romantic theme of secret or lost knowledge... a lost
Sumerian tablet with a technique to cure old age, a grand unified
theory of physics stuck in some monk's palimpsest... but it isn't
realistic. Human knowledge is built through aggregation. People
with useful knowledge are inevitably rewarded to share it. The
best sources of information are the ones everybody knows about,
because they've probably contributed. It's why the best source
of information on the planet is Wikipedia. There's never a need
to read the 841st Google result -- in fact, this is the last
result of the 13M for "codex" that Google will even return.
A related and interesting observation is that our knowledge of
Rome surpasses that of the Elizabethans, despite that we're
removed from her an additional 500 years. This occurred to me
while reading notes on Shakespeare's Caesar. More generally,
history is better today than it ever has been (it's even good
enough that we know this).
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2006.12.15 - MD clinical practice #
One of the most encouraging trends in medicine is the so-called
"evidence-based" approach. Makes you wonder what they were using
before...
In fact, despite the white coats, most outpatient procedures have
no basis in science. The "evidence" that promises to change this
is usually meta-analysis of published studies. However, the
selection of available studies isn't terribly good. Why not use
clinical data? Because it doesn't exist. Doctors' offices are
the black holes of medicine.
Even within a clinic, the scientific method should be used. The
best MDs do some of this by intuition, but most seem to merely be
going through the paces. And aside from going to conferences
or publishing a paper (which few doctors have time to do), there
is no standard interface for sharing anything they've discovered.
Part of the problem may be that in the current clinical market,
patients are like raw materials, with little control over their
own records, with little ability to shop for the best care, and
compelled to buy insurance that further restricts their choice.
Doctors are the consumers, with advertisements as their primary
source of information.
In hospital care the situation is somewhat different. Surgery
will not tolerate those marking time until retirement. Surgeons
are well-paid and subject to competitive peer review. Patients
can choose a surgeon. Despite the more acute nature of the
illnesses and the increasing conglomeration of local hospitals,
patients seem to have more choice in this market than they do in
routine care! And the result is a rate of innovation that makes
clinics look like leech ponds. My mom is getting an artificial
hip this year -- her second in three years. Same surgeon, same
hospital, totally new procedure that cuts recovery time in half.
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2006.12.14 - One man's advice on bipolar disorder #
Read ->
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2006.12.12 - Our gift #
For a species so obsessed with its eyes, humans cannot claim as
theirs the most impressive sights of their world. But they can
surely claim as such the sounds.
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2006.12.03 - Renaming files #
A common task: renaming multiple files
Enter key should cycle through files in rename mode
Focus change, rather than Enter, should exit
A common task: change a file's name but not its extension
In Windows XP, we:
Select the file for renaming
Either:
Make a secondary selection for name only
Retype everything, including extension
If we make typo in the extension, we are asked:
Apply the typo?
Throw out our work and start again?
Simple solution:
Extension not selected when entering rename mode
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2006.12.02 - Improvisation Engine #
A feedback loop between a piano and realtime audio transcription
software (or a Disklavier and something like Sibelius). You play
something at the keyboard, and afer n bars its transcription
is displayed on a screen at the music desk, which you then attempt
to read. Transcription/human error will accumulate and result in
novel musical material, as well as a great sightreading exercise.
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2006.11.28 - Spam v. junk #
Spam gets a lot of attention. Far more, it seems, than junk
postal mail. But junk mail is a far worse problem in terms of
resource waste (and to top it off the lions share of it is
apparently made from old-growth swaths of Boreal forest). Why
isn't it reigned in? Why no CAN-JUNK or Do Not Mail list?
Turns out it's because the post office uses bulk mail revenue to
keep first-class postage rates low. Only in America: junk mail
subsidizes the post.
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2006.11.25.2 - Reheating leftovers #
. Iridigm was the subject of one of the first links posted here.
Their MEMS-based display tech looked very promising, but after
four years of silence I assumed it didn't pan out. But they've
been acquired. Suspense regained.
. In the 'obvious but related to 2006.08.23.1' department:
different online social networks draw different age groups.
. Turns out I wasn't watching as many layers of IP infringement
as I thought in 2006.08.23.2, as ILM itself participated in the
Colbert Greenscreen Challenge. But I maintain that infringement
is more tolerated in video than in music.
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2006.11.25.1 - Abstract algebra glossary #
monoid
set closed under an associative binary operator with an identity
element
group
monoid whose elements all have inverses
abelian group
group whose operator is commutative
cyclic group
group which has a generator
ring
set with two binary operators, one satisfying conditions of a
monoid on the set and the other of an abelian group, with the
former distributing over the latter
field
ring whose monoid is an abelian group save that its identity
element has no inverse
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2006.11.24 - Gadgets of 2006! #
For here in the boudoir, the ideologue metamorphosizes into...
the consumerist!
* E-ink arrives via iRex, Sony, and Panasonic.
* The Dell 2407WFP is, cost considered, the best display ever
brought to market.
* Lego finally upgrades Mindstorms, is worth the wait.
* The technology of the 3rd World surpasses that of the 1st in
the motofone.
* A PDA I actually considered buying was brought to us (a year
late, like all Motorola products) by the letter Q.
* But OQO still reigns supreme with the 01+.
* This Christmas, I'm asking for Pleo.
* Segway continues to kick ass, introduces the lithium-ion i2.
* Sony gets at least one thing right: the VPL-VW50 projector.
See also.
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2006.11.16 - "Unsafe is safe" #
It's why Burning Man doesn't have massive casualties. Now, some
European cities are finding that street signs are (surprise!)
unnecessary.
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2006.10.15 - Why We Fight #
This is one of the best political documentaries I've seen. One
quote I will particularly remember:
"The world has changed, and we're not going back to where we
were. I find one of the sillier ideas is the notion -- and you
hear it all the time -- American policy has been hijacked by a
handful of people, and 'as soon as they're out of there, we're
going to go back to the way it was'. They're wrong about that,
because we are not the same people we were before."
-Richard Perle
Another excellent interviewee (who happens to not be a total
dick) was Chalmers Johnson.
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2006.10.12 - Assist Sketch Understanding System #
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZNTgglPbUA
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2006.10.08 - Choose Reality #
Spotted on a guard rail near 280 / Lawrence Expressway:
"Choose Reality
Church of Reality .org"
Yes, it's an official religion according to the IRS.
Another site by the same author has lots of info, including a
discussion of my favorite Festinger and Carlsmith experiment.
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2006.10.04 - How to fix the world #
Make sure education is in the hands of the educated. It's a
formula so deep, it took a billionaire mathematician to
understand it.
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2006.10.02 - Lights out in Reykjavik #
http://simnet.is/andri/
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2006.10.01.3 - Wide aspect #
I'm not aware of any experiments showing improved performance
from widescreen or side-by-side dual displays that control for
total pixels. That is: I think extra pixels are important and
their placement mostly irrelevant. But if you want to pick a
fight, higher is better.
In motion pictures and television, subjects are most often lined
up or moving along the surface of the Earth, so wideness makes
sense. Still photography is usually rectangular ("medium format"
film offers squares), but portraits are taken vertically. Unless
you like paying $2000 for a 15" DVD player, the primary 'subject'
of computing is text. And for text higher is better, because
narrow columns speed reading up (it's why newspapers employ them)
and scrolling slows it down.
When it comes to looking at more than one thing at once, we can
take a cue from a field in which usability testing is a matter of
cash at the end of the day: retail. The maxim is to stripe store
shelves vertically rather than horizontally. This is often
difficult because store shelves are, well, shelves. But any
inventory clerk with a peg wall who's worth his salt will arrange
products column-wise.
Laptops make an additional call for tall displays: one generally
wants keyboards near fingers and displays near eyes, but on a
laptop they're hinged together. So taller displays put pixels
closer to eyes. Though wider displays are less socially
isolating in public, I can't see this justifying Apple's push for
widescreen laptops, or their bizarre insistance on mounting
displays on an L-shaped hinge which brings the screen even lower.
See also.
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2006.10.01.2 - Lightning rod improvement studies #
I love it!
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2006.10.01.1 - Usability testing #
What can users tell you about your software? Can they tell you
how hard it is to learn? Yes. Can they tell you if it's as easy
to learn as possible? Perhaps, with an outrageously-wasteful
Monte Carlo protocol (in science, we exhaust all hope for a model
before resorting to such techniques). Can they tell you what
your software *is*? Surprisingly, requirements are often changed
based on usability testing. Iterate this enough and you end up
with whatever the subjects already know, halting innovation.
A creative act must educate its participants, or it wouldn't be
creative. Can't the participants educate the creator? No, the
creator is also a participant. In fact it is a misnomer to speak
of creative acts. Rather, all truth is the color of discovery.
What if Beethoven had focus-grouped his "Hammerklavier" sonata
before it was finished? He would likely have been deprived of
his discovery along with us. What if Einstein had taken a poll
on his ideas about relativity before he had worked out their
implications? He quite possibly would have been deprived his
discoveries along with us. This seems obvious in the case of
physics, if not music, if not software design.
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2006.09.23 - Kramnik wins! #
The first game of the long-awaited world chess championship title
unification match is a perfect example of what I was expecting:
Topalov refuses a draw, tries too hard to win, blunders, and
loses.
Why is everyone underestimating Kramnik in this event? Topalov's
chess isn't error-free enough to win. Like Kasparov, he's an
aggressive player. And even Kasparov could not beat Kramnik in a
championship match.
Kramnik is one of the best players the game has known. He is
often criticized for making draws, but chess is probably drawn in
theory. If you want a blood bath, play shogi.
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2006.09.22 - A brief history of software #
Microsoft's amazing innovation was that software can be sold.
The open-source community's innovation was that it can be given
away (without being attached to hardware or support contracts).
Google's innovation is that it can be advertiser-supported.
...And Google's way is likely the middle-ground that will win
out. Only trouble is, ads are a degenerate form of human
discourse, even when you are as smart about them as Google.
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2006.09.20.2 - More arrows! #
To start us off, here's a screeshot from Windows Vista (from a
beta back in June, but I don't think things have changed much)...
C'mon guys, this needs more arrows! How many times do I have to
tell you, 14 pointy things in a window just isn't enough!
Next up, the brilliancy prize...
"our usability research told us that most people dislike
horizontal scrollbars"
I say, Watson, that's a bit of asymmetry, isn't it? No matter,
we're just going to design around whatever results come back from
whatever tests Usability Research decide to perform. But maybe
it has something to do with the fact that...
"every other view mode in Windows Vista scrolls vertically"
Oh, right -- we designed the asymmetry into the thing. We should
really follow our own design here, shouldn't we? I mean, if
Usability Research say so. Good thing they've discovered that
people have it out for horizontal scrolling. I wonder why
cognitive psychologists never noticed. . .
Right, well, enough of that! On to the next must-have from the
old U.R. Tally-ho!
See also.
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2006.09.20.1 - Follow-up #
Gaze detector relates to 2005.06.23.3
Link within Google video was requested in 2006.03.27.2
Aging vs. cancer was suggested in 2002.10.11
Wikipedia's timeline of CGI compares to 2001.07.18
Yahoo! Music blog echoes 2006.02.24.1
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2006.09.15 - Tree Cross #
In the spirit of such sports of recent origin as "free" rock
climbing, extreme walking, et cetera, I suggest Tree Cross, a
competitive route-traversal sport involving man-made, indoor
structures resembling tree branches in a forest canopy (think
gnarly jungle gym).
I came up with this in 2000, inspired by the gymnastics of
monkeys and other primates in the tree tops, and the nagging
feeling that the posture of my upper back was being adversely
affected by working with my hands almost exclusively at stomach-
level.
Handholds would perhaps rotate freely, or be made of a smooth,
supple material like leather. Routes of varying difficulty would
be marked with colored flags. A safety net would mitigate
against falls.
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2006.09.14.3 - Five significant video games #
Tetris - Gameboy
Quake - PC
Super Bomber Man - Super Nintendo
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Nintendo 64
Halo - Xbox
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2006.09.14.2 - My favorite music videos #
Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be
Madvillain - All Caps
Radiohead - Just
Royksopp - Remind Me
They Might Be Giants - Ana Ng
The White Stripes - Fell in Love with a Girl
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2006.09.14.1 - Namesake #
Dear ever-loving developers of our future marketplaces,
When next you find yourself profitably constructing a faceless
strip mall of the kind transforming our countryside into an
isotropic, pedestrian-terminating parking lot littered by window-
less structures with 20-year lifespans, please refrain from
exercising the final ounce of gal required to name it after the
thing you paved over.
Near North Wales, Pennsylvania (where my Mom was raised) lies
"Gwynedd Commons". Wait a minute, this isn't a shared lawn, or a
shared anything... it's a privately-owned structure filled with
privately-owned shops and obviously lacking anything at all green
in color.
On my frequent trips between Berkeley and Los Gatos
California, I pass "McCarthy's Ranch" on 880. I don't know what
used to be there... perhaps it was more ranch-like than what's
there now.
Further examples abound, I'm sure,
-Carl
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2006.09.13 - Opera 9 #
My first outing with Opera this decade, and it's looking very
good indeed. It's the only browser I've tested that doesn't fail
to navigate to anchors on large pages. It's noticeably faster
than IE 6 or Firefox, from startup to page rendering, and unlike
those browsers it passes the Acid 2 test.
Other than its speed, I'd say its coolest feature is its ability
to perform different searches from the address bar with single-
letter prefixes (like "g fun" for Google "fun" or "w fun" for
Wikipedia "fun"). You can create these bindings from a context
menu in any web form field ("create search").
And:
() Tabs are above the nav toolbar, which makes some sense.
() It knows to put the focus in the address bar of the active
tab when it gets the focus from the OS.
() All bookmarks in a folder can be opened at once.
() Autocomplete is not quite what I want, but "Find in page"
is pretty close, interactively highlighting all matches
instead of just the next one (as Firefox does).
() Unfortunately, tab closure buttons are located on the tabs
themselves, instead of at the right end of the tab bar. This
adds 'find the active tab' to the list of things you have to
do to close a tab (with the mouse, anyway) and wastes space
on the tab bar (double-click should suffice to close an
inactive tab).
() Ctrl+z reopens the last closed tab, as it should.
() Some XMLHttpRequest stuff doesn't work -- the only thing
I've noticed so far is Quick Contacts in Gmail.
() You can specify page loading behavior. For example, you
can force pages to completely load before being displayed, so
you can keep reading the page you're on rather than watching
the new one load.
() The animated popup blocker notifications are nice.
All in all, a very strong browser.
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2006.09.12 - Three fatal iPod flaws #
. Requires iTunes / no storage class support
. Lacks standard USB connector
. Doesn't play Ogg vorbis or FLAC
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2006.09.08 - Beyond Carbon #
Scientific American is running a "special issue" this month
devoted to "Energy's Future: Beyond Carbon". Some notes...
() pp.46-49: "The debate over global warming is over. Present
levels of carbon dioxide -- nearing 400ppm -- are higher than at
any time in the past 650,000 years and could easily surpass
500ppm by the year 2050 without radical intervention. ... Worries
over fossil-fuel supplies reach crisis only when safe-guarding
the climate is taken into account. Even if oil peaks soon -- a
debatable contention given Canada's oil sands, Venezuela's heavy
oil, and other reserves -- coal and its derivatives could tide
the earth over for more than a century. But fossil fuels, which
account for 80% of the world's energy usage, become a liability
if a global carbon budget has to be set. ...
The U.S. holds less than 5% of the world's population but
produces nearly 25% of carbon emissions ..."
() pp.60-71: "Coal is cheap and will remain abundant long after
oil and natural gas have become scarce. U.S. providers are
expected to build the equivalent of 280 500-megawatt, coal-fired
electricity plants between 2003 and 2030. Meanwhile, China is
already constructing the equivalent of one large coal-fueled
power station a week. Over their ~ 60-year life spans, these new
facilities could collectively introduce as much CO2 into the
atmosphere as was released by all the coal burned since the
Industrial Revolution. ...
To slow climate change, the authors urge power providers to build
integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plants with
CO2 capture and storage (CCS) capabilities rather than
conventional steam-electric facilities. Conventional coal plants
burn the fuel to transform water to steam to turn a
turbine-generator. If CCS technology were applied to a steam
plant, CO2 would be extracted from the flue exhaust. An IGCC
plant, in contrast, employs a partial oxidation reaction using
limited oxygen to convert the coal into syngas (mostly hydrogen
and CO). It is much easier and less costly to remove CO2 from
syngas than from the flue gases of a steam plant. ... The world's
first commercial IGCC project that will sequester CO2 underground
is being planned near Long Beach, Calif."
() pg.38: "Ethanol from corn produces 25% more energy than the
energy invested to produce it, whereas biodiesel from soybeans
returns 93% more. Compared with fossil fuels, ethanol produces
12% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, whereas biodiesel produces
41% fewer. Soybeans also generate significantly less nitrogen,
phosphorus, and pesticide pollution."
() Article starting on pg.60 is poorly written, uselessly vague,
and doesn't mention the Tesla roadster.
() pg.66: "Almost 35% of greenhouse gas emissions come from
buildings"
() pg.76: I was disappointed that this article (on the future of
nuclear power) doesn't mention pebble bed reactors or other
advanced reactor designs.
() Disappointed that I didn't see microgeneration mentioned
anywhere in the issue.
() Article starting on pg.102 discusses 'pipe dream' energy tech
like fusion, wind, etc. It looks like physicists are pretty sure
the ITER fusion reactor will generate more energy than it
consumes when it comes online in 2016. In the meantime, the
ARIES project aims to show that "stellarators" are better fusion
reactors than tokamaks (like ITER). High-altitude wind is
interesting -- tap right into the jet stream. Two companies are
currently working on prototypes for that.
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2006.09.07.2 - The best of Sealab 2021 #
3- Radio Free Sealab
4- Chickmate
5- Lost In Time
6- Predator
8- Waking Quinn
9- All That Jazz
10- Murphy Murph And The Feng Shui Bunch
12- Stimutacs
22- Brainswitch
23- Vacation
24- Fusebox
32- Frozen Dinner
34- ASHDTV
39- Neptunati
40- Isla de Chupacabra
41- Joy of Grief
42- Green Fever
48- Shrabster
50- Moby Sick
0- Pitch Pilot
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2006.09.07.1 - Douglas Engelbart's Hyperscope #
http://hyperscope.org
See also.
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2006.08.25 - No more money? #
There are two sources of value:
. the environment (raw materials)
. human effort
Existing markets already assign almost no money to value derived
from the environment. That leaves human effort.
Money is a form of exchange. Even considering that some humans
are more productive than others, there seems little incentive to
exchange one man-hour for another. That incentive comes from
collaboration: two men are more productive than the sum of their
man-hours. The simplest collaboration effect is specialization:
productivity tends to go up when the work domain is shrunk.
Labor markets like assembly lines and military hierarchies
capture this.
Newer 'corporate' labor markets are better because they also
capture information-sharing effects. To do so, they had to
manage the considerable transaction costs of sharing information.
Communications technology that lowers these costs opens the door
to new kinds of labor markets, including ones which don't use
money at all.
Collaboration can never be truly free, since finite bandwidth is
a physical law: you can send x or y but not both, so it pays to
know their relative value. However, in practice the difference
in value may be small, and it must be larger than the cost of the
value-assigning transaction to justify a valuation. Given the
efficiency of the current banking system, we're probably already
in the red, but the cost of converting the labor market itself is
the stumbling block. Without this stumbling block, the money
system would be forced to become competitive, and we would
finally see an adequate test of its utility.
Are there jobs (like working in a sweat shop) that can't benefit
from information-sharing? I don't think so. Automation is the
proof of that, and there is no known bound on its utility that
doesn't also apply to humans.
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2006.08.24 - This user approves of approval voting #
The subject of voting systems is thankfully booming, maybe even
reaching critical mass. There's no one system that's obviously
better than all others -- it depends on what you consider
important. And since the subject is so new, there are many open
questions. After spending several hours on the topic, I'm
finally comfortable endorsing approval voting. Here's why:
Unfortunately, what I say in 2004.01.07 isn't true -- no system
is completely invulnerable to strategic voting. And the exact
degree of vulnerability won't be known without new experiments.
So the best we can do for now is choose our tradeoffs, and the
best resource for doing so seems to be this chart.
It seems clear that the choice is between approval / range and
Schulze / ranked pairs. Three questions arise:
1. Would you rather have IA independence or clone independence?
2. Consistency or majority?
3. Can you do without Condorcet winner / loser?
1. These are both ways of defining the spoiler effect (think
Ralph Nader). The issue isn't clear-cut, but IA is apparently
stronger, and ranked systems like Schulze ought to be more
susceptible to spoilers in general than rated methods like
approval.
2. This is the kicker. I got onboard with a bit of text that has
no citation, but which makes too much sense to be wrong:
""Operations research has shown that the effectiveness of a
policy and thereby a leader who sets several policies will be
sigmoidally related to the level of approval associated with that
policy or leader. There is an acceptance level below which
effectiveness is very low and above which it is very high. More
than one candidate may be in the effective region, or all
candidates may be in the ineffective region. Approval voting
attempts to ensure that the most-approved candidate is selected,
maximizing the chance that the resulting policies will be
effective.""
The candidate a majority of voters favor is not as desirable as
the one with the widest minimum level of approval. This makes
perfect sense in terms of something like Metcalfe's law.
Meanwhile, a lack of consistency seems nasty, rolling out the red
carpet for gerrymandering and generally feeling wrong.
3. These would seem to yield to the same reasoning as the
majority criterion.
So approval / range voting win. Which of these is better? A
fanatical but endearing argument by Warren D. Smith shows that
with strategic voters range degenerates into approval, while for
honest voters it's more expressive. But is the extra expression
useful? Monte carlo simulations by Smith aside, I doubt it. Is
it worth the extra complexity of the ballot? Nope.
This brings up a very important point -- approval voting also has
the benefit of simplicity. All systems involving ranked ballots
are harder to implement on voting machinery and harder for voters
to understand. Let's face it: accurately reflecting (an often
'gut') preference about five candidates using a score out-of-100
is beyond the quantitative capacity of 95% of the population.
What about ye olden plurality voting? In 2004.01.07 I speculate
that it's good for coalition forming. Well, the block of text
with no citation strikes again. It seems highly unlikely that
anything good about plurality voting could justify not trying
something else, given the paradoxes it's known support.
Coalitions will form if they need to -- maybe even more easily,
if the text with no cite is true.
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2006.08.23.2 - How odd #
I'm watching an excerpt of the Colbert Report on YouTube. In it,
Colbert shows a home video submitted by a viewer, in which
footage of Colbert has been mixed into footage from a recent
Star Wars movie.
It seems video remixing is more tolerated in our culture than
audio remixing. Perhaps it's because home video recording has
long been more popular than home audio recording. From 8mm film
to VHS tape, the technology of recording and playback has been
better integrated in the video than the audio domain -- LP vs.
open reel tape, CD vs. cassette, and the iPod is playback-
centric. There's always been a major market for camcorders.
Audio recorders have been a niche, and portable digital recorders
with full digital I/O have only just become available.
--->> UPDATE <<---
And now this. Wow.
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2006.08.23.1 - Clique capture #
These guys claim the value of a network with n users is about
n log(n). But Reed claims logistic returns and makes an
interesting prediction...
""although the total value of optional transactions that involve
pairs and groups grows faster than linearly, the total price that
can be paid cannot grow that fast ... consumers of the value have
money and attention resources that scale linearly ... supply and
demand will kick in, lowering prices until the available
resources ... are saturated ... this saturation process affects
all types of optional transactions ... Group Forming Network
value, peer transaction value, and broadcast content value all
compete for the same resources. Once n grows ... large, GFN
transactions create more value per unit of network investment
than peer transactions, and peer transactions create more value
per unit of network investment than do broadcast transactions ...
as networks grow, peer transactions out-compete broadcast content
in the arena of attention and return on investment ...
remarkably, once n gets sufficiently large, GFN transactions will
out-compete both of the other categories.""
Given recent events involving Myspace, maybe he's right. I've
noticed I tend to read more articles when I'm participating less
on mailing lists, but I always put lists first if they're active.
And since I've gotten into Wikipedia, I've been putting it ahead
of either lists or articles. I practically quit print in 1995,
TV in 1992, and I never really listened to radio.
It's worth pointing out that there's nothing 'broadcasty' about
radio or TV. I realized this while playing DJ for an evening on
Berkeley Liberation Radio a few years ago. If Reed is right, why
isn't CB more popular than FM?
Brainstorming, I'd suggest another version of the story is clique
capture. Everyone I want to e-mail uses e-mail, so new users
aren't valuable to me. But that's because I'm part of a clique
of e-mail early-adopters. Only 1/2 of the U.S. population uses
e-mail (yes, about 1/3 use Myspace). For whatever reason, some
cliques will fail to catch, and this makes it less likely they'll
catch later. One might explain demographics with this... The
network's value per user goes up quadratically (ala Metcalfe)
for new users in their clique until it is exhausted. So the
network's value is the sum of the squares of the cliques it
captures, which is equal to the power law decomposition of the
largest clique captured...
V = Sum c_i^2 = max(c_i)^2 + (max(c_i)^2)/4 + (max(c_i)^2)/9 ...
...which is a constant factor times the square of the largest
clique; in this case...
1.645 * max(c_i)^2
And the number of members of the largest clique is...
max(c_i) = total users / log(number of cliques captured)
So...
V ~ (total users/log(number of cliques captured))^2
...Pretty close to Metcalfe, but perhaps the observed failure of
small networks to merge can be explained, since the number of
cliques will tend to increase maximally after such mergers (?).
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2006.08.22.2 - HCI stuff #
- Why most software sucks -
() It wasn't designed.
() Aspects of it were designed, but not the overall form.
() Everything was designed; the design was then subjected to
focus groups.
() The functional spec was written in English.
() Only something at least as much like an application as a
well-done paper model can adequately describe an application.
() Let's have a look at wiki.mozilla.org/Places.
() "Goals: Improve access to History and Bookmarks"
Beginning in this way, we can make it completely obvious
we don't have any good ideas for software features.
Unless we wrote this *after* coming up them, in which
case we're OK but wasting time.
() "Use Cases"
The 'What kind of person are you?' error. See dell.com.
Software design need not make assumptions about users.
- The 'function mapping' school of design -
"Software design need not make assumptions about users."
The idea is, UIs just map the state spaces of computer programs,
and HCI is just a straightforward application of Cog Psych 101.
In the liner notes to _Switched-On Bach 2000_, Wendy Carlos
mentions her "First Law"...
(1) Every parameter you CAN control, you MUST control.
This is applicable not only to musical instruments, but to UI
design in general...
(2) Users must understand the current state of the system in
order to steer it.
(3) If the system maps different internal states to the same
output, it places an unnecessary burden on the user.
The growing popularity (Yahoo!, Windows XP) of 'task oriented'
UIs denies (2). It says, 'the user can steer without knowing
exactly where he is in state space, if at each node a short list
of guesses has a good chance of containing the node he wants to
visit next'. This might work for fixed state spaces, but if we
expect users to combine tools to build complex behaviors (unix
shell) then we indeed should be following Carlos' Law.
See also.
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2006.08.22.1 - Baby stuff #
Diapers and diapering
Seventh Generation diapers
honorable mention: Tushies, Tender Care, Pampers Cruisers
Lansinoh wipes
honorable mention: Canus Lil Goat's Milk Wipes
Avalon Organics Protective A, D & E Ointment
solves 90% of diaper rash problems
Avalon Organics Soothing Zinc Diaper Balm
for the other 10%
Bedding and transportation
SwaddleDesigns Ultimate Receiving Blanket
both for swaddling and sleeping covers
Bumbo Baby Seat
another miracle brought to you by polyurethane foam
Peanut Shell baby sling
honorable mention: Moby Wrap, BabyBjorn
Sushine Kids Radian car seat
honorable mention: Britax Roundabout
Stokke Xplory stroller
pretty much everything Stokke makes is awesome
Amby Baby Hammock
great for daytime sleeping; night too if not cosleeping
Bottles and stuff
Nuk First Choice Glass bottles with silicone teats
honorable mention: Adiri Breastbottle Nurser
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2006.08.21.2 - The best lighter in the world #
The Prometheus Avatar.
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2006.08.21.1 - Tesla roadster! #
The internal combustion engine is dead.
http://teslamotors.com
0-60 in 3.9 sec, 250 miles per charge, no maintenance for 100,000
miles (not even oil), plugs into an ordinary outlet (no more
pumping gas!), more than twice as efficient as a hybrid (and more
efficient than prototype hydrogen cars), and quiet. It's Lotus-
designed and looks awesome. Two gears, but you can just leave it
in 2nd if you want. A bargain among high-performance cars at
$100,000.
Rumor has it that a mass-produced (and hence more affordable)
sedan will be financed with profits from the roadster (the first
batch of which is already sold out).
My ex-neighbor in Berkeley was one of the proud owners of a tzero
prototype from AC Propulsion, which pioneered the technology that
makes the Tesla possible. That car had a higher specific energy
than the *battery* of a Toyota electric Rav 4! He never let me
test-drive it, though. :( But I did get to drive a Honda EV,
which, even as the dog of electric cars, was one of the most fun
vehicles I've ever driven. I'm sure could have given my VR-6
Jetta a serious problem off the line.
Tesla's white paper makes the excellent point that EVs use the
grid as an abstraction layer on top of fuel sources. So fusion
or hydrogen or [insert your favorite fuel] can be used to power
all the cars on the road as soon as it's available, without
having to update the filling station infrastructure, or even the
cars themselves.
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2006.08.19 - Subways of the world #
http://www.mic-ro.com/metro/metroart.html
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2006.07.31 - American Express to the max! #
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRIMje5VKC0
Wes Anderson is a god.
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2006.07.26 - Thank you Shawn Hogan #
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/start.html?pg=3
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2006.05.11.2 - QEDen #
http://www.qeden.com
Good idea.
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2006.05.11.1 - Serious gestural controllers arrive #
The Novint Falcon is a 3-D tactile gestural controller, which is
expected to retail for under $100 (!). Check the hands-on video.
Here's a video of a non-tactile (camera-based) setup.
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2006.05.10 - Sparco 00606! #
Sparco 00606 transparent file folders. Use them.
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2006.04.24 - Self-foaming #
There's a quiet revolution afoot in soap...
http://www.homemadesimple.com/sites/en_US/dawn/direct_foam.shtml
http://www.kissmyface.com/Category/Kiss+My+Face/Sudz+Liquid+Soap/
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2006.04.22 - The Cocoon infant car seat #
Chair-like car restraints are completely inappropriate for
'fourth trimester' infants (0-3 months). At this age, humans do
not know a sitting posture, do not have the neck control to make
chair restraints safe, have no interest in looking out the window
of a moving vehicle, grow too fast to use a restraint that would
also be appropriate for an older infant... Why is their no
reclining-position car restraint available?
Well, turns out there was. And there still is. But you really
have to look, and I'm sure this scant selection could be improved
upon.
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2006.04.21 - Epigenetic inheritance #
In 9th-grade biology we learned that before Darwin, a fellow
named Lamarck said that if a giraffe stretched to reach food in a
tall tree, its offspring would have longer necks as a result.
Darwin said such adaptations arose from variation already present
in giraffe populations. And for much of the interval since,
Darwin's idea has been accepted while Lamarck's very name has
taken the color of an insult. But the two ideas are not mutually
exclusive. And without any other information, it is clearly the
more natural assumption that both mechanisms are at work. And lo
and behold, we now have epigenetic inheritance.
A similar, though less glaring error was made in psychoacoustics
for much of the 20th century, in the assumption that "place" and
"periodicity" models of pitch perception were mutually exclusive.
As it happens, the adaptive significance of giraffe necks isn't
understood. And this touches on another sort of error -- that
all traits are adaptive (which Wolfram addresses in his book).
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2006.04.19 - The best boxes in the world #
Something you (sadly) won't find when googling for boxes...
http://theboxcompany.com/boxes.html
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2006.04.17 - Robot Birth Simulator #
I think this is currently top on my Absurd and Ironic Evidence Of
An Ongoing Apocalypse list.
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2006.04.11 - Google buys Aussie invention #
http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/articles/2005/sep/Orion.html
See also.
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2006.04.08 - Multiple streams for mind expansion #
I always wanted a picture-in-picture TV, so I could practice
paying attention to two+ things at once. But when I finally got
ahold of one, I discovered there was no audio mixing, and this
seemed like the standard implementation. Sadly, Windows Media
Player 9+ has no option for multiple instances. But true to
form, MS leaves us the previous version, mplayer2.exe, which
typically lives in Program Files / Windows Media Player.
Multiple instances can be enabled under View | Options | Player.
Then grab some torrents, drop some acid,* and get ready for
expanded consciousness.
* Dropping acid not strictly necessary.
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2006.04.07 - Public patent auction #
First live public patent auction held in San Francisco
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2006.03.29 - The Bad Plus at Yoshi's #
David King plays the drums like a foley artist. Iverson plays
the kind of piano I've always wanted to, but could never quite
manage. Anderson's bass isn't anything special to my ear, but
his contribution to the writing and direction of the group is
apparently substantial. The latest album, Suspcious Activity,
is at least as good as its best forerunner.
See also.
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2006.03.27.2 - Anchors in Google Video #
The frame-grabs at the right are nice, but what would be nicer is
a URL interface into the videos. For example, the following URL
would queue the video "foo" at 24.7 seconds; a marker would
appear on the timeline labeled "Dancing Starts"...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=foo&j=24.7DancingStarts
...And it would be cool if they also showed, say, the last four
requested anchors on the timeline.
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2006.03.27.1 - Second Life #
A great example of a great idea implemented greatly...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5182759758975402950
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2006.03.22 - Synful
http://www.synful.com
http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/
Both use a similar technique (database-driven synthesis) in the
audio and video domains, respectively. The former is a bit more
clever, since it is actually a synth (one of the most impressive
I've ever heard, in fact), but both are well worth checking out.
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2006.03.21 - Google Finance #
This looks "quickly hacked together"? WTF, peoplez expectations
are impossibly high.
"Stocks from your personalized Google homepage have been
imported."
Sweet dude!
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2006.03.20 - V for... #
Well, maybe not vomit, but this was gawdawful. The first half-
hour was cool, but it didn't go anywhere after that. Except as
the most heavy-handed allegory I could possibly imagine. It was
worth seeing, in a way, just for that. Makes Fahrenheit 9/11
look like a republican propaganda film. The production was
completely unconvincing. As in, it failed to make you think
events were happening. And 80% of the film seems to have been
shot in the one-room set of V's basement. I did get a kick out
of the English Bill O'Reilly, however.
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2006.03.09 - Curing the Cold #
For almost any sickness, I advise a steady diet of ibuprofen.
It's just an unbeatable way to reduce inflammation. My preferred
method is Advil liqui-gels, 2 at a time as needed, not on a
completely empty stomach and not to exceed 3 such doses in 24
hours. For really bad body aches, sprains, etc., naproxen sodium
is stronger than ibuprofen, and it lasts around 12 hours. The
major-label brand is Aleve. I wouldn't combine it with
ibuprofen.
Some swear by NyQuil, but I think taking things individually is
the way to go. Aside from acetaminophen, I think it just
contains DXM and an antihistamine. Nothing really helpful there.
The antihistamine usually just makes me feel worse, and the idea
of DXM as a cough suppressant is really primitive. But vitamin C
is a mild antihistamine, and it's generally good for you. A
glass of Emer'gen-C usually helps my head feel clearer for about
an hour. I wouldn't recommend more than 2 glasses a day, due to
risk of diarrhea and/or stomach upset.
I haven't found Echinacea to be worth a damn. Elderberry syrup
is supposed to reduce the duration of the flu. Problem is, it
can be hard to distinguish the symptoms of the flu from those of
a cold. And as with Tamiflu, by the time you do, it's probably
too late to get the benefits of the treatment (though the
apparent safety and low cost of elderberries may justify
speculative treatment). The good news is that zinc works on
both. I think Zicam nasal gel swabs are good -- just be careful
not to get the gel too far up your nose. If nasal gel isn't your
thing, take 30mg of zinc picolinate 3 times/day -- with food, or
you may get nausea.
Despite the jokes, marijuana therapy is effective against colds.
It dries out mucous, stimulates appetite, and may have systemic
antioxidant and anti-inflammatory action.
Like other forms of inflammation, nasal congestion can be self-
perpetuating. Just clearing it out for a few hours can give your
nasal tissue a chance to get a handle on things. OTC
decongestants like Sudafed don't help this way because they don't
turn off mucous -- they just turn it to water. Plus they make
you jittery, and downregulate immune function.
You have to eat the pot to get enough of it in your blood for
long enough to get benefits of mucous-clearing, and to avoid
adding smoke to your list of respiratory insults. You also have
to be sure to eat a fantastic meal just as the pot is wearing
off. Pot ramps up digestion and really gets food's nutrients
into you, which is otherwise hard to do when sick. As the 'feed
a cold' folk wisdom suggests, you need nutrition to get better.
Due to the possibility of mucous-drying making coughs turn nasty,
marijuana therapy is contraindicated for cough, pending further
testing.
Click to read more.
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2006.03.05.2 - Fatherhood dreams #
Growing up, I made great plans for my fatherhood. The right
things for it were, as always, fairly obvious. But in less than
three months, the experience already makes it clear such plans
were mere fancy. One cannot make a baby alone. What the child
experiences is not solely under your control, but is rather the
product of a relationship. Given that relationships are not
predictable from a study of their constituents nor static over
time, such plans must bend in the wind. And more, neither is the
child a fixed object to be parented. Even in the first week of
Adric's life, the overwhelming feeling was that of having met
someone new. Again the relationship has its own life and will
not submit to preconceptions. Of *course* it would have to be
this way -- what a fool I was -- and how much better it is.
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2006.03.05.1 - Vaccines #
Vaccination policy in the United States does not reflect an
understanding of viruses or their role in evolution. While most
disease is probably virus-related, vaccination only makes sense
against the minority of it -- where the virulence is very high.
That is likely to be the portion to which it has already been
applied. Standard models of herd immunity fail to take into
account that virulence is not constant.
With varicella, for example, attempting herd immunity against
what is essentially a glorified part of the genome is insane.
And for what? Pre-vaccine morbidity was 1 in 40,000 cases
according to a CDC pamphlet meant to induce parents to vaccinate
their children. Missed school (and hence, work) days are another
dire reason to shoot up. The Europeans are not having it.
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2006.03.01.2 - Great Zorb! #
http://www.zorb.com/media/videos/zorb_prmo.mov
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2006.03.01.1 - Wrong on CROX #
Regarding 2006.02.08, it turns out there are closer to 40M
outstanding shares, and they did $80M in the last 12 months,
making their P/S ~ 13. That's an unlucky number.
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2006.02.24.3 - Anchor bugs #
Both Firefox 1.5 and IE 6 will fail to directly navigate to an
anchor link if the page it's on is long. Looks like a race
condition with page loading. Does anyone actually use these
browsers before shipping them?
Too, browsers have always done the wrong thing with anchors
located on the bottom view of a page -- the bottom of the page is
stuck to the bottom of the view, leaving the reader to skim and
guess the anchor's location. Correct would be to deliver the
anchor at the top of the view (as always), allowing the bottom of
the page to scroll up above the bottom of the view.
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2006.02.24.2 - Google Local not so local #
Is it just me, or does Google local have no ability to remember
your location? I've been using it for a while, and I'm not not
in Kansas anymore (compare to yp.yahoo.com). My workaround has
been to enter my zip with each and every search.
Maps has "Make this my default location", but it doesn't seem to
effect business searches.
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2006.02.24.1 - Yahoo music chief suggests DRM-less tunes #
After getting an almost-fatal dose of money-grubbing businesspeak
at Play, I'm relieved to hear about Dave Goldberg's suggestion at
Music 2.0.
Click for my notes from Play.
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2006.02.19.2 - Compact #
Ricoh GR Digital | Kodak V570 | Fuji F30 | Panasonic FX01
zoom wide 28mm 23mm 36mm 28mm
pixels 8.0M 5.0M 6.3M 6.0M
sensor size 1/1.8" ? 1/1.7" 1/2.5"
max ISO 1600 800 3200 1600
RAW ? Y N N N
thickness 1.0" 0.8" 1.1" 0.95"
If Ricoh had the Fuji sensor, we'd have das Ubercam.
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2006.02.19.1 - Interesting guitars #
Make me wish I could play...
Frame Works Guitars
Mervyn Davis' Smoothtalkers
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2006.02.18.2 - In law... #
French court rules in favor of private P2P use
This is huge.
DOJ Ordered to release spying records
The plot thickens...
Google's official response to the DOJ motion
Three cheers for Google!
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2006.02.18.1 - Better than Pandora #
http://www.gnoosic.com
http://www.music-map.com
This uses collaborative filtering, unlike Pandora, which uses a
database of human-entered attributes.
I like They Might Be Giants. Pandora thinks that means I'll like
the Lackloves, because they both feature "electric rock
instrumentation and a subtle use of vocal harmony". Music-map
suggests Cake, Ween, and the Magnetic Fields. You be the judge.
Unlike Pandora, it doesn't play music, but hell, it's free.
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2006.02.12 - Haystack #
Thanks to Adam for pointing me to this. If they get it to work
well, it'll be the closest thing yet to what they, um, had at
PARC thirty years ago.
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2006.02.09.2 - Linkdump #
Ophthonix
"iZon Spectacle Lenses are the only lenses in the market that ...
include the wavefront measurement of the eye itself."
Pleo
I finally tracked down video of the amazing life-like robot
dinosaur from the creator of Furby.
StressEraser
FDA-approved biofeedback now shipping. I think their slogan is a
bit ironic, though: "You Can Feel Calm in 15 Minutes A Day".
THE HANGMAN Guitar Stand
Now that's a good idea!
The Wisdom of Parasites
Roaches check in, they DON'T check out.
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2006.02.09.1 - ID #
http://news.com.com/2102-7348_3-6031936.html
When I saw Gilmore speak at MindStates IV, I remember thinking he
was being a bit ridiculous by expecting to fly without an ID.
I'm still not sure exactly how to understand the issue of
anonymity, but I've had a change of heart.
I think it happened recently, when I was speaking to Norman Henry
on the phone about his recent move to Colorado. He had his stuff
packed on a moving truck, got a cab to the train station,
presented his ticket, and discovered that he'd lost his wallet
and could board without an ID. He had to spend days dealing with
the DMV before he could move.
Fortunately, his daughter's family was already in Colorado to
meet the movers. But his remark was, 'It never occurred to me
I'd need an ID. How strange. It was never like that. When I
was a kid you just bought your ticket and got on.'
Click to read more.
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2006.02.08 - CROX #
Eek! Yahoo doesn't have detailed stats yet, but I note from
their SEC filing they prob. did at least $100M in 2005 (75M in
the first three Qs; 100M is conservative given the Q4 Christmas
rush).
Since there are ~ 10M shares circulating at ~ $30 each, their
market cap is apparently ~ $300M. Making a good bet their P/S is
less than 3.
""With 9.9 million shares in the deal, Crocs raised $208 million
as the richest U.S. footwear IPO ever...""
Awesome!
See also.
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2006.02.07 - IE7 #
I couldn't complete testing because it mysteriously started
always crashing. But I can tell you this:
. it's fast
. tabs
. work with Favorites correctly
. can't drag to rearrange
. closing
. no double-click to close
. no undo close
. focus returns to last-used on close
. better IMO is left-adjacent
. no 'save open tabs'
. Firefox-inspired
. ctrl+T for new tab
. search bar
. can't be moved
. stop/refresh poorly located
. address bar: ctrl+A still doesn't work
. autocomplete returns shortest common URI
. nice idea, but not fast enough as implemented
. submatches should default to most recent, not alpha
. bifurcated history (on back/forward dropdowns) is gone
. thank god!
. Firefox will hopefully follow suit
Conclusion: good but not revolutionary.
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2006.02.06 - Never watch the superbowl again #
Now I never have to regret not having watched the super bowl, or
not having known that it was taking place while I was out getting
high in the sweet California sun...
http://video.google.com/superbowl.html
And here's the best of 'em:
Full Throttle
Hummer
United Airlines
Thank you, Google!
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2006.01.15 - Misleading questions #
Is language acquisition 'hard wired'?
Is suckling hard wired? Walking? The behavior of macrophages?
Erotic attraction to secondary sexual characteristics (which
doesn't show itself until puberty, but which still isn't
experienced as a "choice")? There aren't enough base pairs to
account for it all, in the sense the 'hard wiring' of early
analog electronics accounted for their behavior.
A more precise question is: At what point in the growth of an
organism does the physiology of language processing first appear,
and on what environmental criteria does this depend? Answering
such a question can be hard, not in the least because each stage
of growth depends upon previous stages.
Wolfram (probably inspired by Turing) compares epigenesis to the
evolution of cellular automata. In particular, functions whose
codomains are subsets of their domains rapidly create information
when iterated (by throwing out evidence of their initial
conditions). The patterns produced are characteristic and
repeatable, however, and can be recognized in a wide variety of
natural phenomena, to the extent that the simplest of these
functions are bound to be enacted at some level of generalization
by a wide variety of systems. It's the only mechanism I know of
that could account for the characteristic phenotypes of species,
from basic morphology all the way up to a sensitive period for
language acquisition.
Which evolved first: music or speech?
My guess is that they evolved together. I have a pet theory
which states that the appearance of completely new features in an
evolving system is rare -- most features can be traced back very
far to something recognizable. I came up with this when I
noticed how much revision anthropology has had to cope with
recently. For a long time, it placed human accomplishments in a
linear or hierarchical mold, pinpointing the invention of things
like sailing only several thousand years ago. Usually such dates
were based on assumptions that some other invention had to come
first. But features of evolving systems tend to co-evolve, and
we now know that humans were navigating the globe in boats 40,000
years ago.
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2006.01.08 - Design woes #
Looking into UI design jobs, I've seen a lot of 'eye-tracking
experience required' stuff. Ugh. No wonder most UIs are as bad
as they are. (There are other reasons too... such as that user
markets can select for bad interfaces over time.*)
It's hard to underestimate the utility of things like eye
tracking or (god forbid) focus groups in UI design.
Design isn't rocket science. There are a few first principles to
observe when presenting functionality, and within the constraints
of a given widget system they should allow the removal of all but
trivial degrees of freedom from an interface in, dare I say,
every case. Once you have a 1:1 mapping between interaction and
functionality, someone can start picking colors, and your
product will be as difficult to use as its functionality is to
understand. Which is to say: minimally difficult.
'Usability testing can at best show that non-trivial degrees of
freedom are still present.' This leads to a kind of iterated
bottom-up design that is extremely expensive and mind-numbingly
wrong. Microsoft, the great champion of such studies, have given
us many great examples of the mind-numbing failure that can
result. (See also; thankfully, word on the street is they're
recently changing their ways.)
But it's even worse. The above assumes there's some originating
"functionality" that must be "presented" through a UI. But
there's no such thing. There's no such functionality as a 'grid
that automates business calculations'. It may be a great idea
for functionality, but until you have an image of how a person
could use it, you really don't know what that functionality is.
User experiences are the atomic units of functionality. 'A grid
of cells containing pointers' is NOT an engineering idea; it's an
interface construct. I can write a spreadsheet without using
pointers, but I can't use one without understanding them.
* Since most work involves some degree of collaboration, a few
software systems will tend to entertain a majority of users in
any mature application at a time (for example: music sequencers).
It behooves such systems to be quirky, so migration is hard for
users. It behooves them to take on new features regularly, to
monetize users regularly. And it behooves them that interfaces
to existing features remain unchanged, to avoid disenfranchising
users. Apple are perhaps the most notable haters of this last
trend -- horizontal control over a platform affords many
luxuries. See also.
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2006.01.04.5 - Miracle #
Denali delivered a beautiful baby boy on Christmas day, right
in our apartment. We named him Adric.
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2006.01.04.4 - Bounty County #
http://bountycounty.org
See also.
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2006.01.04.3 - MicroTrack update #
This is to adjust my comparative assessment of the M-Audio
MicroTrack and Edirol R-1. After working with both units, I've
sold the R-1 and, uh, kept the MicroTrack.
As it turns out, the 'Track has all the advantages I said it
might (except note the phantom power is 30V instead of 48V),
while the "possible drawbacks" didn't materialize:
>() How hard is it to replace the lithium battery when it dies?
Turns out M-Audio will do it for you for free.
>() No internal mics?
>For me, this // is a possible deal-breaker. If I need to tote
>mic(s), I might as well tote my laptop... and TRS = yuck.
It's true that TRS sucks the puck, and that real mics are big
enough that I'd also tote my laptop and audio interface, but I
was overlooking the fact there are small mics that are every
bit as good as the R-1's internal mics. Indeed, M-Audio includes
a 1/8" plug-in mic that's quite good.
The only unseen MicroTrack drawbacks are a long boot time and
some missing file management functionality. M-Audio is busy on
the firmware, however, as I learned from this O'Reilly review.
And, the 'Track's bottom edge isn't quite flat, so when recording
with a plug-in mic, you'll need something to prop it up.
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2006.01.04.2 - Excel woes #
So I decided that I'd run afoul of that Excel feature, what
automagically reformats dates and such into their One True forms,
for the last time (no apparent way to turn it off, no answer in
Excel's help, no answer on the web or usenet). I uninstalled
Office.
Abykus and Gnumeric failed to open even fairly basic Excel sheets
correctly. OpenOffice Calc didn't open my admittedly exotic
Excel sheets correctly, and that may be acceptable, but!
Calc is already half the size of Excel at 200 MB. And it has the
same frickin' AutoFormat "feature"! And after running afoul of
it, and trying to edit around it, a little pop-up light bulb
asked me if I wanted help!!
"Ok, I'll bite." [click]
"D'oh! You found a bug..."
The open source movement seems to say, "You don't have to pay
money for crap software. We'll give you that for free!"
Back to Excel (2003). I'm paying sandwiches and ice cream for a
workaround that doesn't suck.
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2006.01.04 - Dangerous ideas #
Every year, the Edge asks dozens of popular science authors to
answer a question. This years question, "What is your dangerous
idea?" provoked a number of interesting responses...
Simon Baron-Cohen
Stewart Brand
Paul Ewald
Brian Goodwin
Sam Harris
Geoffrey Miller
Irene Pepperberg
Steven Pinker
Lee Smolin
Frank Tipler
The Tipler response is included for dark comedy. Re. Paul
Ewald's answer, see also.
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2005.12.24.2 - Childbirth in the West #
I've scarcely encountered a field more riddled with nonsense than
obstetrics. Topics like labor pain analgesia, premature cord
clamping, and routine circumcision all deserve attention. But
let's start with caesarean abuse.
According to Surgeon General Reports, 5.5% of all births in the
US in 1970 were c-sections.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics...
""The primary cesarean rate for 2003 (19.1 per 100 live births to
women who had no previous cesarean) was 6 percent higher than in
2002 (18.0). This rate has increased by an average of 5 percent
each year during 1998-2003 ... The rates for low-risk women
(i.e., primiparous women with full-term, singleton deliveries,
with vertex presentations) have also increased by an average of
five percent per year since 1998.""
Then, this just in, c-sections were 29.1% of births in 2004.
The Bandolier institute is a cutting-edge group that does
statistical meta-analysis of medical studies.
""A systematic review of the influence of epidural analgesia
during labour and the caesarean section rate ... answers the
question: "how much extra risk is there of a woman having a
caesarean if she has an epidural?" ... The authors (from
California) ... read 230 manuscripts before settling on six for
inclusion. Four of these were retrospective design -- three
reviewing all women delivered during a specified period, and one
with a matched case control design. The other two were
randomised controlled trials (RCTs). ... There was a consistent
increase in caesarean section rate in women having epidural
analgesia. The overall weighted difference was 10%, generating
an NNT of 10 ... This means that for every 10 women in labour
having epidural analgesia, one more will have a caesarean
section, who would not have done had they had another form of
analgesia.""
Here's a study involving 5,418 home births in the US and Canada
in the year 2000, published in the British Medical Journal...
""655 (12.1%) of women who intended to deliver at home when
labour began were transferred to hospital. Medical intervention
rates included epidural (4.7%), episiotomy (2.1%), forceps
(1.0%), vacuum extraction (0.6%), and caesarean section (3.7%);
substantially lower than for low risk US women having hospital
births. The intrapartum and neonatal mortality ... was 1.7 deaths
per 1000 planned home births, similar to risks in other studies
of low risk home and hospital births in North America. No
mothers died.""
In other words, for low-risk mothers, the chance of going to the
hospital with a home birth is 12% (compared to 100% for a planned
hosp. birth), the chance of c-section is 4% (compared to 18%),
the chance of the baby dying is 0.17% (about the same), and the
chance of the mother dying is 0% (about the same).
Backing up, your odds of having a caesarean if you plan to
deliver in a hospital are greater than your odds of ever going to
a hospital if you plan to deliver at home. Think about that long
enough and (to quote Lewis Black) blood will start shootin' out
your nose.
The only reasonable author I could find on the subject is Michel
Odent. His web presence isn't great, but there's good info at...
http://www.birthworks.org/bwodent.html
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2005.12.24 - Meghan Daum's modest proposal #
Daum is either less obvious or more sincere than Swift, and the
result is more practical (despite her apologies) but just as
shocking to all parties (perhaps even herself). Splendid!
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2005.12.22.3 - Google's future #
At the rate Google is growing, we are obliged to expect real
magic. And indeed, they are rapidly building an infrastructure
of slick applications. Slick, but not quite magic, and the
infrastructure remains less complete than Yahoo's. One of
Google's most popular products is Orkut, which is overrun by
pornography, has no domestic growth, and is plagued by design and
scaling problems. Apps like Gmail start showing age before
they're even launched. Yahoo obtains Flickr and delicious while
Google shells out for AOL...
In advertising Google magic is more evident, but advertising is
just advertising, and it happens to make up 100% of Google's
revenue model. Even in its golden age, TV did not enjoy the kind
of growth expected of Google based on its September value...
http://www.lifgroup.com/Internet_Advertising_9_07.pdf
...which was only two-thirds of its current value. And selling
discourse is ultimately not how we would like non-evil objectives
to be funded, though Google's contribution to making advertising
less obnoxious is certainly appreciated.
On the plus side, if APIs are the real gold, as conjectured in
this Tech Review piece, Google is indeed making good progress,
capturing the imagination of the Valley. And who knows: maybe
Google will be the largest ISP in the US in three years. Though
the prevelance of rumors like this (and the "Google PC") smacks
of dot-com bust, if anyone can pull it off, it must be Google.
See also.
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2005.12.22.2 - I stopped using Gtalk #
Google Talk updates itself without notice, and there's no way to
turn this off. Besides obvious security considerations, this is
an unacceptable intrusion on the user's mental space. "Am I
going crazy, or was that button on the left last night when I
went to bed..." Worse, it doesn't report a version number
anywhere, so the user can't verify if an update happened, or log
a bug. I see they've added a "diagnostic logging" mode as a
remedy to this latter shortcoming. Whatever. If it saved my
chats locally, I might reconsider.
See also.
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2005.12.22 - Hospital error #
On visits to hospitals, I can't escape the impression that nobody
knows what the hell is going on. Recent trends in hospital
consolidation can't have helped (I thought that perhaps
Metcalfe's law should apply where patients are nodes, but I've no
time to flesh this out). And indeed...
http://www.kron.com/Global/story.asp?S=4101848
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2005.12.04 - Letter to Future Systems Solutions #
Dear fssdev.com,
Writing to say what a positive experience I just had with
Casper XP 3.0.
Upgrading the drive on my laptop, I wanted to clone my main
partition to a partition on the new drive (over USB), then switch
the drives. I did not want to copy the entire drive, only the
main partition (I didn't want to keep the EISA partition on the
new drive, but I did want to create a small FAT32 partition there
for my swap file).
I could probably do this with Windows setup and/or the recovery
console, but I thought a utility that ran inside of Windows would
be much more convenient.
I bought Norton Ghost 10 assuming this operation would be
possible. Wrong I was. First, there was simply no documentation
on even the few options provided by their wizard interface. Not
in the help file, not on their site, and not even on the web or
usenet. So I tried them all, at 2 hours a shot. But nothing
made the new drive boot.
I tried fussing with the mbr with various utilities. It seemed
fine. The boot.ini file seemed to be fine. But no luck.
Bought Casper XP and 1.5 hours later everything was working just
as I wanted. The docs were complete and accurate. The software
provided both a wizard and an "explorer" interface, which was
great. I didn't want to keep my EISA partition, but Casper
recognized it and gave me numerous options on how to fit it onto
the new drive. Casper was faster than Ghost, to boot (pun
intended). The only drawback: the time remaining estimate was
less accurate than Ghost's.
There was one problem with the operation: one file was locked and
couldn't be copied. And which file was that? That's right, it
belonged to Ghost! I took care of it as soon as I was booted on
the new drive...
Casper XP cost about $20 less than Ghost. And it didn't install
numerous obnoxious services on my PC. Such as Norton LiveUpdate,
which apparently downloads and runs code on your machine without
telling you. And it didn't require activation over the network.
It didn't even require an obnoxious reg. code. Norton Ghost 10.0
download size = 165MB. That's right, 165MB. Casper download
size = 4MB.
Bravo, three cheers. Casper XP rocks. This is software as it
should be.
-Carl
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2005.11.24 - Politics on Microwave #
Politics Itself
Position statements on voting
Things I'd like to do more regularly
Pledgebank
Politics itself
On handing out papers at the movies
Absurd discourse
Intellectual Property
Scarcity
Think open
The public goods problem of propriety
Free as in Microsoft
Democracy
Thirty thousand
Direct democracy
Voting
Ballot reform
On strategic voting
BlogNomic
Corporate Capture
Corporate capture
Big Pharma
Microsoft anti-trust
Specific Interventions
Mandatory labeling
Parasitic tolls
Rent credit
Patentalia
Specific Issues
Going to the bathroom
Cause for war
Narcotics
The law enforcement industry
Apples
Illinois v. Caballes
Feminism
Republicans
Broadband adoption
"Homeland"
Leo Strauss
Republican victories / traffic citations
The 2004 Ballot
Berkeley ballot measures
California ballot measures
Results
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2005.11.19.3 - Narcotics #
Criminal law is an inappropriate way to address narcotics abuse.
While many users are not dysfunctional (and far fewer would be if
criminal law and attitudes were revised), narcotics addiction is
at worst a health problem that requires medical intervention.
One can argue that insurance and/or the State should not pay for
this intervention since the user is a victim of his own behavior.
However, there's some evidence to suggest that only a certain
fraction of the population is at risk for dysfunctional narcotics
addiction -- many who try them don't like them. This is true of
alcoholism also. So perhaps it really is just another genetic
health problem. Meanwhile, many other health problems currently
covered by insurance are completely preventable through lifestyle
choices -- type II diabetes most glaringly. And indeed, why
should I pay for your drugs if you fail to follow the dietary
and exercise recommendations of your doctor?
In the end, I tend to feel a cut-your-losses approach is best for
health care. Everyone needs it, a lack of it is not commensurate
with a civilized or humane society, and nickel-and-diming it to
death doesn't work. Remove the obscene bureaucratic overhead
that private insurance has created, use the "evidence-based"
approach to make treatment guidelines more efficient, attempt to
calculate the total cost of problems like narcotics abuse, mental
illness, and hypochondria and just write them off, and charge
everyone a flat fee in their taxes. Then get on to making
society more pleasant and maybe fewer people will get sick. Sin
taxes on things like cigarettes, alcohol, and high glycemic index
foods are a good idea. Mandatory labeling of glycemic index and
caffeine content, for sure.
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2005.11.19.2 - Anarchy with police #
One argument against anarchy is that the police would be let
loose on society without any safeguards. Anarcho-capitalists
reply that there would be more safeguards, since the police would
no longer have a monopoly. That is, when in trouble you would
call your favorite police service, which market forces would keep
in line.
I think this argument is better suited to schools, though.
Deadly force is the kind of thing that naturally tends toward
monopoly. In some ways it is better to have no disagreement
over such matters... "Cops-R-Us wouldn't have shot her!"
On the other hand, the police are far from free of market forces
today. How many local newspaper articles (at least in the
Eastern US) have I read where the DA or Sheriff or Police Chief
argues that since drug busts are up lately, more money for drug
busts is required! The busts are simultaneously the problem and
solution. On Peter Jennings' Pot of Gold special, an Oregon
drug buster was asked point-blank if drug seizures were
profitable. He replied that without them his program could not
afford to function. These seizures are of course a stretch by
any interpretation of the Constitution. An internet Classic on
the subject is:
http://deoxy.org/lawenfor.htm
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2005.11.19 - Of religion and war #
The viral nature of the God-of-Abraham religions is interesting.
Many interpretations of Christianity involve a requirement to
proselytize. Islam forbids its followers to even discuss matters
of faith with anyone who might convince them otherwise. As I
think Richard Dawkins says, most people subscribe to the religion
of their parents. This is made explicit in Judaism. Yet all
three of these religions have some degree or other of 'you're
screwed unless you're with us' action. But the notion of someone
being screwed simply because they were born in a place where
their parents were likely to believe something else doesn't jive
with the supposed fairness of the supposed God...
Insofar as religions are implementations of 'software' that is an
inseparable part of the human phenotype, they tend to be
competitive where differentiated. As good a reason for fighting
a war as a difference in genes (race). Surely, the only two
causes in the history of war.
It has been said (even by myself, in a past life) that all war is
economic in nature. But this is incorrect. Those who share a
common race/culture tend to share resources; those who don't,
don't. So all war does aim for profit (in the long term), but
the existence of resources does not explain contention over them.
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2005.11.18 - Drug patents #
Now here's a good idea: start drug patent timeouts from the time
of approval instead of from the time of discovery...
http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/02/0502patents.html
...and consequently shorten their duration from 20 to 15 years.
(I think 10 years would be even better.)
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2005.11.16 - Alternate input #
A survey of new and unusual input devices, in answer to a
question from Kurt...
Ergodex
User-configurable keyboard. A review at Tom's Hardware was
glowing, and revealed its 'polyphony' to be 6. Possible music
applications. $150.
Gyration
A whole line of gyroscope-enable mice that can be used normally
or in mid-air. $80 for the standard wireless model.
NaturalPoint
Head-tracking for as little as $200.
JazzMutant Lemur
Programmable multitouch LCD display, which I featured in the
Feb. '05 New Gear section of Keyboard magazine. Didn't have very
good response time at Winter NAMM. $2500.
Haken Audio Continuum
3-dimensional MIDI controller that I reviewed for the Aug. '04
issue of Keyboard. Did have quick response time. $5300.
See also...
2005.06.23.2</