“Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.” -Samuel Adams

Vdov.net is not normally prone to politicking and this post is mostly about principles rather than politics. The authors here, from what I know of them personally, tend toward unfettered freedom rather than more tempered and restrained freedom. I am personally enamoured of the cause of liberty wherever it arises. I have a soft spot in my heart for all democratic reformers and movements that sincerely want to replace repressive regimes with open societies governed by democratic principles, whether that be anti-theocratic student movements in Iran or the Free Tibet movement.

There are a couple problems that I have with the a Free Tibet movement in general. One is that Free Tibet people (and I have known several) tend to focus solely on freedom for Tibet while turning a blind eye or even sympathy to many other brutal regimes. The other, is that that it is largely symbolic and despite years of protests and political statements Tibet remains no freer today than it has ever been. This is not the fault of the movement so much as the unwavering determination of the Chinese to maintain unity above all other values, including human life and freedom. This is the same country that still views Taiwan as a rogue and unsubdued province, which sadly is echoed in US foreign policy. It is this caving into political sensibilities at the expense of what American’s truly believe that has always shamed me about our country. I have never supported the “hate is illegal in Canada” approach to free speech and I know I have support on that from this site’s authors and many readers. (For a startling reminder of the dangers of that kind of restriction on free speech takea look at the Canadian “Human Rights Councils” and their chilling effect on free speech, specifically speech that offends someone. The case of Ezra Levant and the abuses of Richard Warman. The Wikipedia paints a rosy picture of Warman as fighting neo-nazis but he is currently suing most major conservative Canadian bloggers in an effort to shut down speech he does not agree with.)

The long and short of this is looking at the protests against the Olympics that are currently taking place seemingly everywhere that the Olympic Torch is going. I am sympathetic with the protests as long as they are not violent. I have no problem with police arresting people who disrupt the torch procession, it is their choice to break the law. I believe the protests are doing good by keeping the disgusting abuses of individual liberty by the Chinese government in the spotlight. Will they change much? I doubt it. However, one article did catch my eye and dismayed me to a certain extent. My only problem is why the police immediately hustled this runner off the route and seized the torch? The woman was an official torch bearer. She is a US citizen entitled to freedom of speech. Presenting a flag is a Constitutionally protected act. She was not causing anyone danger. The issue is relatively small but I wish that the officers in charge of the event had acted differently, perhaps in a more “American” way.

It took some not-so-gentlemanly banter to convince the mugger to move along. Had his assault on me escalated, he might have received a smack on the head with the maths text I was reading. I didn’t remember until later that you should never bring a maths book to a gun (or knife) fight. Imagine an analog of the game rock-paper-scissors called gun-knife-maths!

Last week I drove to Midway Airport. While stopped at a light I made a phone call and a man approached my car. He wanted money so I kindly signaled him to move along. He ignored my polite gesture, knocked on my window and yelled something unintelligible. I stared at him blankly. As he turned to go I noticed he was holding a cell phone to his ear. It all made sense. Apparently his cell phone company is over charging him too. He must have been yelling “Can your hear me now?”

There have also been a number of instances of indecent exposure (not by me) during my train rides to and from home; public urination seems to often happen around me or immediately preceding my arrival. So often, I’m beginning to believe that I am a superhero whose super power is inducing public urination. Admittedly, I need to work on better harnessing my power in case I have to battle a supervillain; it’s well known that most other super powers are deactivated by soggy (external) underwear and public humiliation.

Three months and counting, until I move to Cambridge, England. I wonder if my super power will work in the UK.

Update:

Rock-paper-scissors (RPS) is based on the non-transitive property: R > S, S > P but R < P. If RPS were transitive: R > S, S > P and R > P. Transitive RPS wouldn’t be much fun: rock always wins.

Similarly gun-knife-maths (GKM) should be non-transitive so that G > K, K > M and G < M. Correction to my original post: Bring a maths book to a gun fight but never to a knife fight.

UPDATE: There has been a briefing by the Pentagon which has video of the missile launch, the “kill,” and a brief analysis. The launch occurred on time with no delays due to weather (only 2-3 foot seas). It looks like the shoot down was successful and the hydrazine tank was, in fact, destroyed along with the satellite. The collision occurred at 153 nautical miles above the Earth (~283km).
UPDATEII: Also, what do you know… it looks like there is already amateur photography of the debris field and the hydrazine trail, courtesty of Rob in Maui, Hawaii.

As many of you may know the US military is planning on shooting down a rogue spy satellite in a decaying orbit. It is designated USA-193. The satellite failed immediately after launch and was reported by amateur satellite watchers to have a decaying orbit. The official reason for shooting down the satellite rather than allowing it to deorbit on its own is that the ~5000 pound satellite contains about 1000 pounds of frozen hydrazine propellant that could potentially deorbit into parts of North America. It has been confirmed that the USS Lake Erie, a Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser, will fire a modified SM-3 missile to intercept the satellite. This may occur sometime within a couple hours of this post, but it looks like weather might delay the shot. Despite assurances from the US, there has been wide speculation that the reason for shooting down the satellite is to test US anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities, specifically as a reaction to the unannounced test by the Chinese which destroyed a weather satellite dubbed FY-1C in early 2007.

The deployment of military weapons into space has been a matter of concern since the Cold War and the aptly named “Outer Space Treaty” has been ratified by 98 nations. The treaty specifically bans the deployment of weapons of mass destruction into space but does not make prohibitions against ASAT weapons. Both the US and China have tested ASAT technology using the “purposeful miss” method where a missile is fired with the intention of coming within a close distance of a satellite and recording the accuracy. But the last successful satellite “kill” was by the US in 1985 and the Chinese “kill” was after three probable prior attempts. Now the costs and benefits of having ASAT technology and testing it can be debated but the immediate concern is the debris created by such tests. The most significant difference between the planned US shoot down and the previous Chinese one is in the altitude of the satellites destroyed, which has a significant effect on the fate of the debris.

The company that has been tasked with doing simulations of the debris and their paths is Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI). They provide an enormous amount of analysis, modeling, and visualization software to the US military and NASA. They also have a lot of great visualizations that are available to the public. Specifically, they have made a bunch of press release and general interest material available about the US intercept of US 193 and the Chinese ASAT test. The biggest difference between the US and Chinese “kills” is going to be the fate of the debris. As this AGI simulation shows (sorry for the .wmv) the debris from the US “kill” will mostly degrade after only a few more orbits and are expected to only last a matter of days. This is because US 193 will be destroyed at ~250km in altitude. FY-1C was destroyed at ~650km which means its debris will not completely deorbit for literally hundreds of years. AGI has also done modeling of the Chinese “kill” and the resulting debris (see the above picture).

There is a cache of publicly available visualizations of the Chinese “kill” made by AGI here. The Chinese ASAT test is the largest orbital debris generating event in history and increased the amount of “trackable items” (larger than golf ball sized) in orbit by 22%. These debris are also going to be very long lasting considering the high altitude of the destroyed satellite. There is a simulation of the debris from this event here. (once again sorry for the .wmv) The difference in the two simulations is immediately obvious.

I would love to know more about the actual ability of people to model these type of events. Apparently we have the ability to detect objects the size of golf balls in orbit. The military is apparently planning on using sea based X-band radar to target and track the satellite and resulting debris. This radar can apparently detect the spin of a baseball from thousands of miles away (impressive eh?). The other really impressive part of this story is the ability of amateur satellite trackers to not only track but give pretty detailed information about classified US government (and I assume other nations as well) assets.

A month or so ago I was sitting around the Christmas tree at my home in Oregon with my parents, siblings and some extended family of the Beardsworth variety (David, Helen, Michael and Kathleen), who were in visiting Bend from Eugene. Michael is an avid technologist and brought up the then-current introduction of various “E-Book” reading devices. My personal feeling at the time was that these devices were utter crap. However, I didn’t have any particularly well codified intellectual framework for feeling this way, so as is often the case with things that come out of my mouth I rationalized my views on the fly, pulling from anything and everything at the top of my head. This neurological transport is often aided by the introduction of alcohol into my bloodstream, and this case was no exception. At some point during the conversation, I said something to this effect: “E-Books create a new problem where none exists”. This statement may seem at first glance to have no real value, but the point of my comment was to suggest that the consumption of penned books doesn’t suffer from a content consumption problem and that the physical property associated with reading has inherent value. I did, and still, feel this way. I have always loved books, even when they are nothing more than a set of reference documents sitting gathering dust on my shelf. I find reading developed literature and non-fiction in digital form to be somewhat atrocious (yes, I still print out every scientific article I read), and much prefer to have the book in my hands.

“E-Books create a new problem where none exists”. Interesting. It would suggest that there is no inherent value in the digital distribution of large bodies of work, and that the introduction of such a mechanism has major flaws. Certainly it does have major flaws. Digital property rights (on which I have strong feelings but will not discuss them here in any detail), digital distribution, content protection; These are all important topics the majority of which are not yet well developed in our country or in others. So is there some historical precedent on which to judge the value of a paradigm shift from real property distribution to that of digital distribution in something as fundamentally important to our society as literature? Eureka! Music! Let’s take a look.

Since the decline of 19th century classical romanticism and the introduction of the phonograph, the consumption of music by the body public has been inexorably tied to technology. Previously to the 20th century the only method for hearing music was to do one of two things: create music yourself, or go to a concert. Both of these have obvious value even still: the music in my ears right now is being created on real guitars by real people who are doing so for their own enjoyment, and concert-going has a long and uninterrupted tradition throughout all musical disciplines. The record was king in this time of musical upheaval. It may not have been the best system, but it was a decent solution. And music being as important as it is to millennia of civilized human beings, an incredible community was created around the idea of the ‘record’ and perhaps specifically the idea of a codified set of individual works which made up an ‘album’. Incredible. And for quite some time, the album remained king.

It can I think be reasonably argued that the movement of music into the digital realm was necessary and obvious. Even though music was distributed through the sale of a physical product through years past, it was still connected to some mechanism for its translation from the physical product into something that that could be consumed. Thus the art itself was preserved and its basic understanding by the consumer was no different regardless of the mechanism of retrieval. Now of course, it is easy to copy digital content and the idea of a digital work as physical property is horribly flawed, but this leads me down a discussion path to which I will not venture in this post. For sake of discussion I will lump the CD and the digital MP3 download into the same category as they both suffer from these problems. They are both digital content.

This new retrieval mechanism for musical art did, as its predecessor (the vinyl record), have a major impact on the object of artistic desire. Previously it was personal creation and concert-going, which then transitioned into consumption of a physical record or album. Albums themselves had obvious worth: they were the vehicle by which the art was transformed from an abstract encoding into something you and I could actually hear. Perhaps this is much in the same way that the art museum is the vehicle for the consumption of priceless works of visual art. But the introduction of digital content moved the ball into a whole new regime: the album is no longer king. There is no longer a physical vehicle through which music is consumed. None at all. And so what becomes of the album? It dies. It has been dying and will continue to do so. Songs are now sound bytes and albums are now just a collection of songs (An acquaintance of a friend once said to me “You know albums are just a bunch of songs right? You don’t have to get the whole album!” Yes I do, Mr. acquaintance, and you’re an idiot). Much of the music elite in this country and others will tell you that an album is much more than just a collection of songs and sound bytes. Guess what? They’re right. For now. But as has happened previously with any invention of a new content-delivery system, the previous structure that once stood so tall and proud as the be-all-end-all of musical desire will gradually wither away until it is a faint memory for most and an elite preoccupation for few. Perhaps I fit into that elite category; Music is one of the most important influences in my life and I still store all my music in album form (though digitally). I will continue to do so.

So what does this have to do with books and “E-Books” (I still die a little inside each time I hear that phrase, so I quote it every time). Let’s examine the content consumption mechanism of books with perhaps slightly less intent that for music, simply because the subject historically is far easier to understand. In the year 1440, goldsmith Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press. And we haven’t looked back since. The dominant form of literature (and non-fiction) consumption has been and continues to be the printed word. Printing presses have become more complex and more efficient and applied to huge range of content. Newspapers, books, magazines … there isn’t a point in listing them all. Any reader will certainly understand its significance. And, like the record of the 20th century’s effect on music, over the last near-600 years consumption of the printed word is the single most significant mechanism for which thought and information has been presented to the public. The community that has sprung up around the printed word perhaps isn’t even worth mentioning in the same light as that associated with the musical album only because it is so unbelievably significant that no blog post can ever attempt to do it any justice. It transcends volumes of possible discussion. The shear voracity with which the printed word is regarded in civilized society is no foreign concept to any even remotely educated person. Even I suffer from the “endless library” problem. I love to have books just because I love having books. There is something about a physical collection of printed knowledge that is almost mysterious. I can’t explain it, but I have no problem letting it exploit me. For the purposes of this discussion though, it is only necessary to understand that the book, the printed word, is the vehicle, and you and I are the train station.

“E-Books create a new problem where none exists”. What happens when we move the printed word into the digital age (let’s forget about digital rights and digital property for the time being)? Perhaps the best known example of this in current discussion around the world is the “newspaper problem”. I put it in quotes only because I have no idea what a person educated in the field would call this (though perhaps my father John could better define the problem, as he is a very successful and well-established newspaper editor). Other examples (books to “e-books”, magazines to “e-magazines”) are equally well discussed within this framework and my take on it will be as general as possible.

The musical album used to be the purchased content. Now we buy individual songs, and it could be well argued that this system isn’t working all too well (or at least the RIAA would have you believe that — they’re may be right through the lens of the “old” distribution system). In the realm of the printed word, the vehicle of consumption was the physical product. It was the book, the magazine, the newspaper. When you bought one of these items, you weren’t buying it for a specific sentence, phrase, paragraph, chapter or article. The purchase of such a physical item was in fact the transfer your confidence that the physical vehicle had inherent value (I’m overusing the word ‘physical’ here, but with good reason). And almost 600 years of experience tells me that in fact, we were right. The physical vehicle great value which greatly exceeded the collected worth of the individual printed words. I would argue that this is in fact true of the music album. Albums, as any elite music connoisseur will tell you, have a worth that far exceeds the sum of its parts. When you buy a book or magazine or newspaper, you are not only summing its parts; You are putting your faith in the creation of that work as an intellectual object that has inherent value. What an incredible concept.

So for me to read an article (or, because of digital content restrictions read the first two paragraphs of said article) in the Wall Street Journal titled “Publisher Tests Selling by the Chapter” brings to me great distress. Like the album became song snippets and cell phone ring tones, book chapters will no longer be available as a small but integral part of a consistent body of work, but rather as small, insignificant objects to be judged on their own merit. How absurd. (Warning: sentence fragment ahead) The idea that we will enter complacently into a new era where a collected work no longer has value. Ridiculous. I have consistently resisted the destruction of the musical album, and I will be damned if I won’t do the same for the printed word.

I am quite sure that the people responsible for this brand new marketing idea are simply understanding a general trend and following suit. But at what cost? What are we willing to sacrifice? The longstanding traditions of the printed world are one of the fundamental driving forces in our society. These traditions are arguably among the most important single concepts in this history of mankind. Certainly I am not suggesting that the introduction of digital literature and the segmentation of the printed word will destroy the intellectual precedents upon which we base our society. And I would argue that the length and significance of the history of the printed word will necessarily slow its conversion into a group of only intellectual snippets. I hope I die before this transition takes full force in the same way that the album has been destroyed. But maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe a month from now, it will be possible for you to buy and own rights to a digital copy of only “Leviticus” from the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament and the Torah.

What a sad day that will be.

—

A caveat: I am a huge open-access proponent and technologist. I spent the majority of my life dealing with technology in one way or another, whether that be how I think intellectual knowledge should be distributed or how to do a finite element calculation in a complex geometry where chaos in interfaces is important. This is my first attempt at a discussion of this problem, and my thoughts may not be totally clear. The major point of this post is to spur discussion. I want to talk about this with smart people, and if you think I’m horribly misguided, I want you to rip my ideas apart. I’m not kidding.

Gibberish. It was absolute and total gibberish. Once again, it simply set up a series of new unanswered peculiarities rather than doing a thing to address the 27 plotlines its writers have already laid out. In particular, the revelation that Dr. Jack’s doctor father is also an Invisible Man living in a cabin on the Lost Island — if you’ve never watched, don’t ask — relocated Lost to the land of camp. I don’t think there is now any question that the writers and producers of Lost are just making it up as they go along, that they have created mysteries without first knowing the solutions and that, when they reach a dead end, they just make up another mystery. We’ve been had.

Damn it. Of course, this is exactly the crap that every Lost fan is afraid of, and exactly the type of writing that convinced me in the middle of Season 2 to stop watching (I decided to keep watching, in the end). I hope my feelings on the episode are somewhat less negative, but I doubt it.

Cheers.

Kevin Kelley

is a Wired editor and runs the website Cool Tools (which is awesome… and seriously if the NYT mentions a contributor runs a website don’t you think they could link the name of the website to the actual website?)

He wants candidates to do something similar to Justin Kan and wire candidates for sound and video 24/7 to really get a look at what they are like.

Pros: Its interesting to see candidates behind the scenes and right now that usually does not happen unless a candidate is accidentally on camera when they think they are not.

Cons: No candidate would ever submit to this and if they did I would question their sanity. Its kind of creepy. With news coverage being what it is their lives are already most of the way to this.

Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry

are the founders of Tech President.

They want video questions from “the people” chosen by “the people” with untimed video responses by candidates and the ability to comment and debate associated with each video. With the ability for the people to grade each response.

Pros: It hits at the two-way nature of the internet. I would love to see what video questions would get voted up rather than picked by new editors. I like the idea of candidates being able to be called out for evading questions because that is the most annoying part of normal presidential debates.

Cons There is an enormous potential for this kind of system to be spammed and/or gamed. There is a thin line between the “wisdom of the crowd” and “mob rule.” If this turns into a digg.com of politics I would have to shoot someone. Also, “grading answers” is a little strange considering there is not necessarily an objective correct answer a candidate could give. It seems that it would end up just being arbitrary and based on too many conflicting factors.

David All

is the president of a Republican consulting firm that helps candidates develop new-media strategies.

He wants to have “community” involvement not just before and after a debate but during the debate. There would be a mechanism for viewers at home and on line to call in, text, click internet buttons, or whatever to indicate whether they thought a candidate evaded an answer. Then if a majority said there was evasion then the candidate would be re-asked.

Pros: I think this is my second favorite because it is the simplest and takes care of my number one annoyance. It doesn’t easily let mob rule happen and it would be fairly unobtrusive.

Cons: It could easily fall in to a state where everyone just votes yes and candidates get re-asked every question. You would have to play with the threshold required for a re-ask.

Tom Brokaw

is a special correspondent for NBC News and the former anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News.”

Mr. Brokaw comes up with a great idea that has nothing to do with “new media.” He basically wants to get the candidates drunk and have them answer questions over their cell phone or BlackBerry (what no iPhone?).

Pros: Drunk candidates.

Cons: While the idea of a drunk Hilary Clinton berating me over the phone seems intriguing I have no idea why this is new media related… this could have happened 10 years ago. Drunk candidates. Also Tom Brokaw came up with it.

Matt Bai

is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.” (I have read some good things about this book, even people that don’t agree with its overall message seem to think it has some good insight into intra-party politics. It has definitely been interpreted quite differently by different reviewers.)

Basically Bai wants to have a little IM window open that shows text that every candidate writes as each candidate speaks. This allows candidates to comment on whomever is speaking as they speak without interrupting. This is probably my other second favorite suggestion.

Pros: This could very easily be implemented and could add a certain amount of hilarity to the event. It would also give the candidates a real chance to use their claws. This would be best for the actual presidential debates after the primary I think. Also it might be the only time in history that presidential touch typing skills and mastery of l33t would be an important issue.

Cons: This has the potential to be pretty disruptive especially if one candidate was particularly hilarious. It could also be a little unserious for presidential debates.

Zephyr Teachout

is a law professor at Duke University who was the director of online organizing for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign

This is by far my favorite idea and shows a real understanding of how to wield “web 2.0″ principles usefully. He wants to have a day long debate marathon where each candidate pairs off against the others one-on-one. Then the videos are licensed in a way that allows remixing etc (I would prefer straight public domain, no restrictions). That way the discussion can continue at any number of levels uninhibited by the shortage of network TV time.

Pros: Having a single marathon day for debates would get people excited. The ability to watch each candidate square off against other individually seems much better than 1 minute canned speeches one after the other. The length of the day might wear down candidates a little and get them to open up a little. Also this is the most “web 2.0″ of the ideas. This way the data would be out there and then the machinery and people of the internet could just have at it.

Cons It seems that it would appeal to people who follow politics but might be a little too much for the casual observer (although the ability to cut and remix the video would mean highlight reels could be easily made). Also with that much verbiage in one day I would be afraid it would devolve into highlight reels of “gotcha moments” (although with their proliferation on the web you would end up with some good analysis and it would just be a matter of finding it). This would also be the most difficult to organize.

So those are the ideas.

I like Teachout’s idea the best and it could very easily be combined with the “live” ideas of Bai and All. Basically the real problem with the debates is that they have become staged, one time shots with canned answers and evasion of any kind of meaningful controversy. I really like the idea of one-on-one debates and making the footage available to the public without restriction. I would extend Teachout’s idea to include a central debate webpage with all the footage and pages for candidates to clarify, respond, and spin after the debate as well as a general forum for analysis with a Slashdot style moderation system for comments. The idea of a one day marathon is also intriguing in that it has the possibility of really engaging the general public and generating some excitement. This format also has room for expansion if it is successful. Imagine whittling down the candidates a little and having the top contenders from each party square off. It might be too much but it would give people an idea of how each candidate handles people that don’t generally agree with them on the big issues.

The “new media” or “web 2.0″ approach definitely has the ability to draw the candidates into meaningful debate and get them to say a few things that they actually mean. Teachout recognizes this in his idea,

The Internet doesn’t just enable cool avatars and the shorter form. It also allows the deeper form: cross-linked blog posts, extensive research, simultaneous screens and raw debate footage that anyone can scan online, at any time. New media are not constrained by the scarcity of TV network time.

Yet also recognizes the weakness in the “new media” approach. Which is the devolving of debate into digg-like “shouting matches” with nothing more substantive than rounded corners and AJAX. If done right you could get a Wikipedia if done wrong you get digg.

Any more ideas from the vdov community?

Each ethnic group has contributed their own take on the meat/bread theme but at this point in time they have so blended and recombined that any one establishment can have and number of different meat/bread products (click-through the above picture). The heavy hitters of the Chicago “city food” scene are gyros, Polish sausage, Chicago style hot dogs, Italian beef, and tacos. With the exception of tacos these foods are much harder to find outside of the Chicagoland area than within it. Chicago style dogs and Italian beef are the most difficult to find but the rate of gyros falls off pretty quickly outside of the midwest and are almost unknown in New York. The Midwest centrism is not surprising considering that gyros were introduced to the US in Chicago in 1968. Italian Beef is also an almost exclusively a Chicago tradition. Tacos are ubiquitous in the US but Chicago’s style remains the traditional Mexican version with cilantro, onion, tomato and a double layer of thin soft shell tortillas, which is superior to the American hard shell version (at least in my humble opinion).

The real point of this article is to point out some of Chicago’s popular food heritage. What you really need to know is how to find these delicacies. The only real thing you need to remember is that there is one on pretty much every block if not more. But you can’t be afraid to swing into a dingy little stand in the middle of some block with a hand painted sign usually proclaiming the vast superiority of their victuals and often with a healthy smattering of superlatives and “#1’s” along with crude pictures of whatever it is you are about to eat. So next time you are in Chicago jump into the closest diner/dive/pizza joint/beef stand/whatever no matter how bad it looks. Just tell them something along the lines of “I want the dipped combination with everything” (this means Polish sausage topped with Italian beef on an Italian roll with giardiniera and dipped in its own delicious juice). You will be in for a treat.

FEMALE VOICE: (Computer voice) Being popular was all I could think about last year. I wanted to, like, be cool with everybody. I listened to music that I didn’t like and laughed at stuff that wasn’t funny. I programmed myself to be a totally different person to everyone.

Computer voice starts to change into a real human voice.

FEMALE VOICE: But I wasn’t myself. Now I’m not pretending to like indie rock or anything like that. And people think that’s cool.

MALE VOICE: Live above the influence. Above weed. Check out abovetheinfluence.com. Sponsored by the ONDCP and the Partnership For A Drug-FreeAmerica.

It turns out this has gotten a fair amount of press on the internet from the usual indie sites (the PSA is actually really old), and I don’t really have anything to add to the discussion. Hence the reason I normally wouldn’t post this. But c’mon, this is absolutely ridiculous.

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs -I {} mv {} `echo {} | sed -e 's/1uFilm/3uFilm/g'`

Then, immediately realizing they are ridiculously stupid since (a) that doesn’t work and (b) the same goal can be accomplished simply and easily, they issue something like …

rename s/1uFilm/3uFilm/g *

… I hate Microsoft. (Yes, I actually did this today … you can make fun of me later). This is by no means news to almost anyone who knows me. However, I read some comments made by Bill Gates today on the topic of “rich user-end experiences” both on the desktop and in web-apps that I thought warranted my opinion and perhaps might generate some interesting discussion here at vdov. So, I’ll quote Gates and then ask a few questions.

And I quote,

The richness of the web experience has a long ways to go. For example, when you shop online today, it is just a two-dimensional list of products. That’ll change to be that you’ll see a three-dimensional store that you can walk around and serendipitously see different, say, book titles and merchandise that may be of interest to you. … In fact, one of the ways you’ll get that is you’ll go into what Microsoft calls Virtual Earth, and you’ll just be walking around the downtown on your screen, and you’ll see a store, you’ll say you want to go in, and there you are looking at all the offerings that they have, whether it’s an art gallery, bookstore, restaurant — and that’s a new experience.

This is indicative of the entire post-web-2.0 (yes I will say that now) philosophy of web applications and it just pisses the hell out of me. Someone please explain to me how on earth this is good for me, the end-user. So … let’s say I want to go to Barnes & Noble. Instead of simply typing in Barnes & Noble into my favorite search engine and continuing in one click, I now have to walk there? What the hell? What if I’m in a hurry? Now I have to run!!?? Don’t get me wrong I’m sure it will look pretty as hell but at some point we run into a design-function boundary that I am simply not willing to pass. Now, Windows and Mac are already past this point for me (I run ion3 on Linux and I love it), but now Mr. Gates is telling me that the wondrous dimensional reduction of complexity the internet affords over everyday life is somehow worth completely abandoning? You’ve got to be kidding me! The internet isn’t successful because it’s like everyday life … it’s successful because it’s better.

(I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up that image from Jurassic Park where the girl navigates a UNIX filesystem in 3D. Imagine the lives saved had she simply known her way around a command line!)

At some point the conversation on this topic inevitably devolves into an argument about the worth of any GUI and where each and every one of them fits into this design-function boundary. To me a GUI is a framework by which visual elements can be arranged on a display. That is all I want from a GUI. And that is why I love ion3 so dearly. Now we can’t expect everyone to know anything I guess so we design reasonable ways to get around a computer, to navigate files and open programs, so that anyone can do it without any real knowledge about what’s going on. By doing that we eliminate the possibility of executing something so wonderfully simple as …

find . -name setFieldsDict | xargs -I {} perl -pi -e 's/4.81e-4\ 1/4.83e-4\ 1/g' {}

which took me approximately 5 seconds to write and a few milliseconds to execute. The next time you’re in your GUI, go ahead and find every file with some name in a directory tree, open it, and make a systematic change to each file. Then report back to me how long it took you. To the first person to establish an efficient mechanism that even comes close to rivaling my one-liner, bravo! But until that point (which will never come), every single new shiny increase in arbitrary visual complexity will detract from the problem at hand. A 3D visual world is just the next step in a pointless and ultimately destructive path in desktop systems.

And that is reason 1 why I hate Microsoft.

Appendix
There are a few things to point out. One is I’m sure (and I hope someone might comment on) the whole visual worlds thing that’s been going on lately (second life, etc.). I’m not going to comment on that mostly because I have absolutely no experience with it. Granted I never want to have any experience with it, but that’s another matter altogether.

Secondly is to mention that Apple is almost as guilty as Microsoft here, and yet I still like Apple and am happy using their products. The reason: they make the computer usable, but they don’t take away the basic/high-efficiency functionality.

The last is, I’m not suggesting we should abandon easy-to-use GUI environments altogether. I also don’t expect everyone to understand complex command line syntax. But I do think we should perhaps think about this form/function problem a bit more closely and incorporate where development effort really gets placed into the thought process. If my application crashes because some kid at Microsoft spent to much time perfecting a useless piece of eye-candy I’ll be angry. I think it can be well established that Windows Vista is already far past this point.

The big difference in this arena between acosta, shollen and myself is that they have a large disdain for the theatrics of election time politics. Whereas, I view it as a national spectacle along the lines of high school prom queen drama. October in even numbered years is really my O.C. In the spirit of glorious political dramatics I have decided to play around with embedded YouTube links to bring you the very best of this year’s political attack ads, ad remixes, and general election brouhaha.

Judy Baar-Topinka vs. Rod Blagojevich (inc.)

In the Illinois governor’s race Blagojevich has done a bang up job of making everyone hate Topinka mostly by simple association with George W. Bush. For example this fine ad in the “What’s She Thinking Series:”

More in the “What’s she thinking?” series: [1], [2]

I think that this just about captures the message:

Here is another by the same author.

And one final remix:

From this one responding to Topinka’s attack ads which was just screaming for the cut and paste.

A couple more fun ones

anti-Ron Kind (WI congressional race):

Ben Nelson killed a giraffe! (Nebraska senatorial race)

Vdov.net official campaign endorsement: Reelect Senator Ted Stevens

Why systems like Pandora suck
The problem with things like Pandora is that it relies on a keying system. Those of you that have gmail might make the same type of correlation to “labels” in their interface. This system is completely arbitrary in complexity and in inputs. There is an incredible amount of data out there but each individual person (input) is responsible for organizing their own sets, and no real intelligent analysis of the problem happens past that point, other than basic, basic statistics. So here’s a question. Is the key for ‘genre’ actually a significant one? How significant is it? What keys are most significant? What keys are least significant? Does my assignment of genre X and theme Y to one particular song actually differentiate it at all from any other items? How do I quantify that? This keying system is a supervised approach which absolutely sucks for this type of data.

Factor components
Factor analysis or, in the simple case principal component analysis (PCA), is generally capable of making unsupervised decisions about the significance of arbitrary factors, and creating a series of column vectors describing the most significant ones. I encourage everyone to look PCA and factor analysis up if interested.

Initial application to music classification
Screw manually organizing music into genres and ratings. I want my computer to tell me what I’m going to like without having to do anything other than analyze my current collection. If I had the processing power, I would probably assign some sort of 1D value to every 1/10th of a second second of a song based on some calculation. A perfectly reasonable example might be a frequency/amplitude analysis in the simple case, or perhaps something very fancy like a Fourier/superposition-type deconstruction. Regardless, I would end up with a column vector of values for each song. Then I’d normalize then length such that each column vector for each such is exactly the same, such that a rectangular matrix could be constructed, representing the entirety of music known to my computer. Then I’d probably do a 2D factor decomposition (although this can be done in any dimension, and often is for good reason). The eigenvectors/eigenvalues I get out of the analysis represent the most, and second most variance within the data set. This is generally most easily done with a singular value decomposition (SVD). I would bet almost anyone reading this site that most of the music you actually listen to falls within one quadrant of Factor 1 vs. Factor 2 on Cartesian plane.

Even if your musical taste is extremely eclectic, this would easily give you great differentiation of genre (probably represented in Factor 1, the factor describing the most variance in the data set) without having to actually manually key or classify anything. To those of you who know what I’m working on currently, the similarities between this and my work are, I’m sure, not lost on you.

Other systems
Now you can ask questions: Is genre a separable quantity given the vectors I have constructed from the raw data? Is any key used in the Pandora or Google model actually useful at all? If yes, great … now I can arbitrarily understand a new mp3 or email based on factors that actually have some real significance without having to do any manual classification or introduce any personal bias into the system. I can, of course, write very clever code to do this all for me. This is a general technique applicable to really any system in which you can construct column vectors describing one data point, and in which you want to differentiate between types (for instance, mass spectra). Here’s an example of a 2D plot for such data. Note that the data I used to construct this (and ran my code on) was completely arbitrary and random and therefore no separation was observed.

Google labels suck bad
So let’s extrapolate to a system that everyone is extremely familiar with: Gmail. Even though I get a lot of crap from friends for this, I really like Google. 99% percent of the time they produce products and services that are just downright impressive and well done. However, one of my least favorite concepts is this manual labeling of emails and of RSS feeds, etc. It’s a terrible system. Really terrible. So instead of manually labeling stuff, let’s analyze all your email and figure out everything we need without having to do a damn thing.

1. Take emails and normalize them.
2. Build column vectors describing something about each set of characters in the email.
3. Do the factor analysis.
4. Ask a question: are these N labels significant?
5. If so, apply.
6. Build a new set of vectors describing something different about each character set.
7. Repeat the analysis.
8. Ask another question: do we do better with this vector type?
9. You get the point …

For those of you who love your calculus I could even imagine some very fancy multidimensional function/model describing the way in which we build column vectors to describe character sets in each email, a minimization of that function giving us the best way to construct these column vectors from the data.

Now, when a new email comes in, I know everything about it based on its relationship to the vectors I’ve calculated! Sweet! There’s obviously a little more to this to get it to work right, and this does require fairly large data sets. This would be of basically no use to someone with only a few emails in their account, although there could be a global set calculated from averages of each Gmail user from which initial vectors are calculated for new/small system users.

I will kill spam with this technique
The stuff I’ve described above deals with fairly complex systems. One type of system that is absolutely not complex is spam. Spam filters work in nearly the same way as any keying mechanism in the other systems.

1. if (email_contains_word_viagra) total_score += significance_of_contains_word_viagra;
2. if (email_contains_unresolved_link) total_score += significance_of_contains_unresolved_link;
3. …
4. if (total_score >= spam_score_limit) mark_as_spam(email);

You can see this in action in any email just by looking at the X-Spam: headers (of course, there are other mechanisms that don’t work this way). Go ahead, give it a try. One of the problems with this system is that it assumes everyone gets the same type of spam. They may be right: word N might be the most significant globally, but if I don’t get any spam of that type, what good is it to me? Therefore I think it might be reasonable to address spam as a non-global issue. So, here you go Google, here’s another idea.

1. if (i_mark_something_as_spam) label_email(email, “spam”);
2. factor_analysis_for_spam(factor_results, set_of_real_email, all_current_emails_marked_as_spam);
3. int any_good = can_i_differentiate(factor_results, “spam”);
4. if (any_good) develop_filter_from_factor_analysis(factor_results, “spam”);
5. if (any_good) store_new_filter(factor_results, filter_structure);
6. remove_obsolete_filters(factor_results, filter_structure);

Without having to do anything at all, I have organically developed a new filter for a specific type of spam that I get. These aren’t run in order as their listed but they are just concepts necessary to build such a spam-vector data set.

There are a lot of good answers to good questions about this type of methodology. For instance, applications to visual pattern and facial recognition. Feel free to ask them, but for the brevity of this post, I’m leaving a lot out. It’s already far too long as it is. I’d also like to point out that I think this is the first time I’ve ever used six category “keys” to describe a post. Fitting, isn’t it?

Cheers.

This is Susan. She grew up in LA and has several children who live with her mother-in-law. She had a baby on the streets a year ago; he was taken away by the police and turned over to Susan’s family. The local police know her by name and are the ones who take her to the hospital when she has seizures. She spent last week at Huntington Memorial, was released and now holds a sign that says “Hungry Please Help.” Her and her husband have a tent in an empty lot over the wall of the freeway a few blocks East. He works, landscaping people’s lawns. They sometimes eat at the Salvation Army.

“How did you end up out here?”
“I did bad things.”
“What bad things?”
She looked back at me, then to her shoes, “things you shouldn’t do.”

I handed her a sandwich, and asked if I could take her picture. “You don’t want my picture,” she shuffled her feet, “no one wants to look at me.”
“You’re beautiful.”

On my way back, I had a sandwich leftover. I gave it to her for her husband. She thanked me. “As soon as you left, before, the four police officers over there, they looked over here and” she shook her finger at me, “telling me I can’t be out here. They don’t want me here.”

******************************************************************************************

I stopped to talk to Jason because he said hello to me. I asked him what he was doing just sitting on a bench and he said he was trying to figure out how to get money for gas. “My van’s empty.” He had a Target receipt and said he was going to try to return something. I don’t know what he could have been returning, he didn’t have much else with him. “I’ll give you some money for gas if you let me take your picture and talk to you.”

He graduated from high school, lived in Pasadena his whole life, and worked in groceries, telemarketing, ballots, and a Mexican restaurant. “You looking for a job?”
“Yeah. It’s impossible here though. I have to, like, get out or something.”

I asked him if he had a resume. “It’d be a lot easier to get a job if you had a resume. You know how to make one?”

“No.”

I pointed at the Kinko’s across the street and asked if he wanted to learn, but he “was about to go over to [his] people’s house for a shower.”
“Here, if you give me all the information: addresses, phone numbers, etc. I’ll type one up for you and print it out.”

******************************************************************************************

Carlos was selling bouquets of roses. He didn’t speak a word of English except “Flowers, five dollars.” I knew the word ‘casa’ and could point. I found out he lived somewhere south of Pasadena with his familia. We had 10 minutes worth of useless conversation and I offered him a sandwich. I deciphered the proposition that he would teach me Spanish and I would teach him English. He asked if I had a cellular…numero…something. I didn’t understand what he was trying to get at at all…. I laughed and said that I would be around. Maybe mañana. I shook his hand and said goodbye. He handed me a bouquet of roses.

“Por ti. Gratis.”

******************************

Another woman I came across was talking to herself or someone else who I couldn’t see. I said hello and asked her what her name was.

“I don’t give out my name.”
“Okay, do you want a sandwich?”
“No. I’m not here for that.”
“Then what do you want?”

She had a shopping cart very neatly piled with pieces of junk in between layers of blankets and organized garbage bags of bottles and cans hanging from the handle.

“Nothing. I don’t want you here. I want you to leave me alone.”

I said goodbye and walked away. She resumed her jabbering and rocked back and forth on the cement wall.

******************************************************************************************

Chuck’s story is heartbreaking. He was brought out to LA from Memphis three months ago by a preacher because his dad was dying. When his dad passed, he slept on the floor of the preacher’s house with 100 other homeless and wanderers. He had worked in a warehouse in Memphis and was trained to operate fork lifts and leg presses; he had been trying to get a job out here. He was mugged by a Mexican gang and lost the rest of his money, his ID, and his birth certificate.

“No one’s going to hire you without your birth certificate.”

I asked him if he was going to get another, he said he was going to. He wanted to find work, he doesn’t like being on the streets.

“Did you see them just now? The police just kicked me off the street. Now I can’t work. I’m just trying to eat and maybe sleep and clean sometimes. I’m not doing drugs, I just can’t get a job. And God, God was with me, but he must’ve left with my dad, ‘cause he’s gone now.”

I gave him the oranges I had left. He has a mom in Oklahoma and a sister in college. “They don’t know where I am now. I don’t want ‘em to.”

“Can you buy me a soda?” I was out of money. I really didn’t have any left, I hadn’t brought my wallet and I told him that. I don’t think he believed me. I wished him luck and walked away, he called after me, “Pray for me, tell God to listen to me. Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

Tom Sims Apollo Whiskey Decanter
–“Contents intact.” Awesome.

**FLOWN** 16 mm camera cable
–This is a PIECE OF WIRE shorter than my fingernail.

Replica Apollo Fisher space pen movie prop (Used in the filming of Apollo 13)
–This is memorabilia from a movie about space.

Possibly flown Apollo 15 foil.
–Possibly flown Reynolds’ Wrap. Excellent. Hope this sells well.

½” sq. Kapton foil in 3.5” dia Lucite
–I leave the cleanroom covered in pieces of Kapton almost every day. I should start saving little bits of it and encasing it in plastic. In 10 years I’ll be able to make a living off of Kapton garbage.

Flown shuttle spacesuit urine collection device.
–This comes with flight documentation. Which means that actual astronauts peed in here. We may still be able to collect forensic evidence, folks.

Bolts (flown)
–As far as I can tell these are standard stainless steel ¼”-20 bolts. Oh but they were on a spaceship. They held something critical together. Maybe they took them out of the rails on the space station.

Payload bay “mil” blanket
–Almost positive they meant MLI blanket. Another entry for the same type of item says “shiny silver blanket.” Do these people know what they’re even selling??

Bunny suit for clean room.
–You know you can still buy these… There are about 200 in our gown room at the moment.

Menu Items:
*Flown chicken noodle soup (w/serial #!)
*Flown crackers (10/10/96) (w/ s/n)
*Flown:
-pears
-mac and cheese
-green beans and broccoli
-strawberries
-tropical punch
-shortbread cookies
-sweet and sour chicken.

Flown on APOLLO missions:
-rye bread
-dried apricots (Apollo 17….YUM)
Also: Apollo food “bites.” (no further description)

Thought I’d share this quality information with the crowd. Especially because, personally, I was so amused by it. You’re also probably not getting March’s Sexy Science article until next week sometime…because I’m lazy and likely preoccupied. Consider this jewel of a post my compensation for that.

Now, this is nothing in comparison to say, JPL/NASA-type organizations, but it’s something. No other research university (including those affilliated with various contributors to vdov.net) comes even close. Of course this statistic is limited to mass media — we’re not talking important science literature. The reason I actually went through and searched a bit was because today there was yet another Cooks article on PhysOrg here. This isn’t anything new, but it’s something I’m at least slightly involved in. Wait, scratch that. Might be involved in in the future. Let’s face it … I don’t have a real project yet other than simulations, although perhaps spring break might cure that.

Cheers.

Secondly, I’d like to say that my favorite show of all time, Arrested Development, is now officially off the air. This is a very sad day for me and indeed for television in general. One of the smartest, most well written and developed shows ever to be created has been axed after only 2 and a half seasons. I’m not sure who I hate more … the vast majority of America who didn’t appreciate it or the network execs who’d rather create another crappy reality show. So, it is in that spirit that I call on everyone who reads vdov.net to show the world how great AD really is and get it back on the air. Hey, it happened with Family Guy …

Last but not least, I’ll be glued to my TV in the next couple weeks due to the Winter Olympics in Torino. I’ve got a couple friends who are there, and so to you I say hello. I’m very jealous that you’re all there. The downhill is going to air on NBC tonight at 7 EST, and although I already know the results, I can’t wait.

Cheers.

UPDATE: Somehow I’ve managed to break the RSS fead for the main articles. At some point I’ll get around to fixing this but for now you’ll just have to actually visit the web site. Of course if all you’re doing is RSSing this site right now … you won’t get this info for quite some time.

UPDATE 2: I’ve fixed the main RSS feed for both dopefulhopefiend.com and vdov.net. The main and comments feeds should work as expected. Just reload them. It’s a bug in the Wordpress 2.0.1 /wp-includes/classes.php file with the $comments_rewrite variable.

The kids’ teachers are flying to Houston this weekend with a couple JPLers (I was supposed to go, actually) to start the program, among other teachers and mentors from schools across the country. Our flights are on next Thursday and Friday and the equipment will be loaded on the plane to fly 30 parabolas in each direction, with a 5 minute turn around time. This is skydiving 60 times in one hour. How I missed the opportunity to be on that aircraft I do not know, but God be damned that I did.

The teachers will run the experiment. In addition to recording the bubble lifetimes and trajectories with two perpendicular cameras, we are monitoring acceleration on all 3 axes, the pressure, temperature, and humidity in the bubble chamber, and we will be testing two different bubble solutions for longevity and trajectory.

The kids have been doing ground-based experiments for comparison for the last several months, and once they have all of their data back, they will spend time analyzing it and determining the effects of gravity on soap bubbles. Another interesting note is that these observations really haven’t been made before. It is hard to simulate zero gravity, and no one has been interested in putting the money into bubbles. So, cheers to 10 year olds who rock at science.

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing of one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s (2005) winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate’s disease.

12. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

13. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

14. Glibido: All talk and no action.

15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

17. Beelzebug (n.): a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

18. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

I would like to comment on the oddity that all the people with personalized plates seem to park in the same lot. There is a huge concentration of plates in this lot and others I’ve found are much more drastically dispersed around lab. This makes me wonder if the cars with the cool plates are behaving exclusively towards other cars. You know…like middle school and brand name clothing. Anyhow, I’d really enjoy some insight into the social dynamics of the JPL personalized plate clique.

I’ve also realized that everyone who parks on lab has to register their car with the transportation people, and thus there is a list somewhere of all JPL license plates. But until I make friends with the employees down there, you’re stuck with my wandering around and occasionally paying attention.

The complete list:

RKT TECH (personal favorite)
UNVMPHD
SPACE X
LEOBY45
JPL USAR
I FX SVRS
O 2 FLY

**(older)**

2 SATURN
2 SATRN
MTY PYTHN
MARS DOC
NO PLUG (hybrid)
GOT MARS
DR MAG

Selected explanations:

UNVMPHD—read the letters out loud.
I FX SVRS–see! there are people here that do things with computers other than LabVIEW.
LEOBY45—I did some research, and in 1945 Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey) suggested we use satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) for communication (ref).
SPACE X–private company launching rockets. The CEO also co-founded PayPal, by the way, and a lesser known company (that may actually be known around these parts) Zip2, which was sold to Compaq for $307 million back in the 90s.
JPL USAR—unless this is Spanish, I just don’t know. United States Army Reserve? Possible.

*BONUS*
In the spirit of celebrating the end of 2005, I would also like to refer you all to JPL’s year in images, which is spectacular.

One more thing: Profile of MER by the NY times (very succinct, worthwhile read).

Me, however — I had quite a night. Basically it involved a margarita, some beer pong in my basement, and then a party at someones house that was filled with about 5 people I know well and about 40 people I had never met — ever. I have to say I love Bend, but it really leaves something to be desired on New Years Eve. Anyone else? I’m looking in the direction of all you kids who were in New York … where I should have been.

I’m back to Indiana tomorrow. So, I’ll get back to doing laundry and watching Zoolander on TBS. Cheers.