How in the spirit of chemistry did she know?! So I asked. She replied “I can just tell.” Baffling! Then I looked down and realized the first corollary and theorem, in my developing theory of how to not behave like a theorist (hereby termed atheorism):

Corollary 1: Chicken noodle soup shrapnel on a shirt is neither necessary nor sufficient to indicate someone is a theorist.

Theorem 1: Chicken noodle soup shrapnel on a male wearing a t-shirt that says “Visionary Women: Challenging assumptions and inspiring change” from 1993 is sufficient but not necessary to indicate the male is a theorist.

It turned out that I had forgotten to bring dining utensils with my dinner to work. Slurping Campbell’s chicken noodle soup seemed like a good idea at dinner time. Forgetfulness is also typical theorist behavior and will be a later theorem, when my sinful theorist nature catches up with me.

Sincerely,
A devoted atheorist

Man did they have issues. As soon as polls opened, each one of their check-in machines crashed at least 10 times. They thought it was due to high activity around the state on whatever servers run the system, but find that sort of hard to believe — it’s not as though everyone was really powering through at 6 am. Though they had tons of issues actually getting people to the polling machines themselves, once I was there, it was surprisingly smooth. Dare I say the voting experience itself was perfectly acceptable. I have no idea what types of machines they were using and my thoughts on electronic voting machines are well known, but absent these more theoretical complaints it couldn’t have gone much better.

This is probably the first election I’ve voted in where there’s some major ambiguity as to who will win (the democratic nomination). Cross your fingers everyone. Cheers.

Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry. If mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry — an aberration which is happily almost impossible — it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science.

Awesome. I don’t think that Mr. Comte would be very happy with me or a number of people here at Vdov.net.

Well, tomorrow I finally rectify this as I’m traveling to Hawaii for Jason & Mica’s wedding. I’m in Honolulu tomorrow night then Molokai till Monday (where I have an 8 hour layover in Honolulu, I think I’ll go exploring). Not only is this going to be an awesome trip, but it will be the 45th state I’ve visited. That leaves only Alaska, North Dakota, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas left on the list.

I really have no idea if I’ll have internet access there so you may or may not see Twitter feed updates from me during the trip. If not, trust me, I’ll be enjoying being completely unplugged and unable to be contacted. Otherwise, of course, I can’t help myself.

Cheers.

“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.

I had to show up and wait nearly 2 hours in line yesterday to get tickets for this town hall, and I showed up more than 2 hours early to get an even slightly reasonable seat. Now, it was a relatively small venue (a high school gym), and pretty much everyone had a decent seat, but I didn’t know that ahead of time. Getting into the venue was more or less going through an airport security checkpoint, only a bit worse. Not only was I “metal-detectored”, but I had a *very* complete wand scan as well. At about 5 o’clock, someone came out to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This was interesting: I probably hadn’t said the Pledge of Allegiance since middle school. Then a pastor came out and gave a prayer. Another 20 minutes passed by before a major political figure in Lafayette/West Lafayette came out and gave a sort of pre-rally pump-up speech on issues important to her and those that would conceivably be addressed by an Obama administration. It was all pretty mundane up until the final speaker introducing Obama to the crowd. He was a regular guy from Lafayette who owned a small business, and who had obviously never given a major speech to that many people (over 3000) in his life. Most striking was his choice of attire. He was dressed in a ratty sweater and kakhis. I imagine this wasn’t intentional, though I have since decided that it was probably a play to the audience: before the big-wigs come out, get someone truly “of-the-people” to speak. Then he introduced Obama.

Obama looks exactly like you’d expect him to. The only other even pseudo-celebrity I have ever met/seen in person was Matt Fox (of Lost and other fame), and he looked completely different in person than he does on TV. Not Obama. I could have sworn I was just watching a youtube video or reading a Drudge Report headline when he took the stage. The only thing I’ll mention about the speech itself was that it was refreshingly original in structure. Yes, he talked about exactly what I thought he would talk about, tailoring it slightly to the Indiana audience, but the flow of the speech was new (at least as far as the videos I’ve seen of him previously … they are numerous). Standing ovations were abundant, as expected. However, it was only after the speech that things got really interesting.

He took questions. And the questions from the audience were interesting. The first question came from a middle-aged to slightly-over middle-aged woman who had obviously experienced some significant hardship in her life. There’s no question that she had real, serious problems that she was concerned about. But her 15 minutes of fame was ill-conceived. Instead of asking a well thought out question, she instead droned on about everything that was wrong with her life in great detail, to the point where it just sounded like she was whining. Then she says “what can you do for me *before* you get elected to fix all my problems?” Absurd. Here she actually has the opportunity to ask a real question and instead decides to kill her opportunity. I realized afterward that her question effectively boiled down to and would have been equivalent to her asking Obama to come over to her house and fix her broken down TV, an obviously ridiculous way to spend your time with a direct voice to the candidate. Obama did what he could: in this case all he could do is address some of the issues she brought up and those he had specific plans for, and try to come out of it looking good and with a cheer from the audience. He certainly succeeded.

The rest of the questions were fine. A cute little elementary school girl came out and asked a question her parents had obviously written down on a card for her about national and sub-national testing in elementary and secondary education, for which she received a standing ovation. It was a good question, and the audience responded in kind. Other questions were directed at specific issues, such as his thoughts on the election of supreme court justices (the most interesting of the questions and a policy of Obama’s I had not heard before), environmental policy, free trade agreements, etc. etc. etc. At the end Obama thanked everyone for their time and gave his farewell. After which he shook a lot of hands and exited the gym.

All in all it was a very interesting experience. Obama is a charismatic speaker, I think we can all agree on that. And regardless of your politics, I recommend trying to attend a “Town Hall”-like event in the future. It was really a lot of fun.

Cheers.

Then Shawna sends me this birthday message:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
you are a quarter of a century now
which if you live to be old means you have already lived 1/4 of your life
and you have chosen to waste it doing chemistry
at least now you are doing physics masqueraded as chemistry

I laughed. Cheers.

I won’t belabor points that have already been made. Why? does not conform to genre, or at least we haven’t come up with a good genre for acts with keyboards AND guitar AND an electronic sound. I get the impression that this fact causes a lot of lazy reviewers to miss their sound entirely because they can’t slap a genre on them and call it quits. The Tiny Mix Tapes review above by Jeffrey Canino is the best I have read at hitting on Why?’s sound. It is true that it is something very hard to pin down in one genre, but that is not what makes it interesting. The best part of Why?’s sound is the stolid demand to meddle in a little of everything. The most common category for Why? is hip-hop, but that encompasses the minority of sound on Alopecia. The Fall of Mr. Fifths is the closest to a true hip-hop track even “white guy” hip-hop. Just because Yoni puts his lyrics to a distinct cadence and rhythm rather than a more “white guy” sound (although there is plenty of that as well) does not hip-hop make. It is not so much that Why? defies genre but more that their sound is an organic amalgamation of influences. After the rhythmic spitting of Mr. Fifths you find tracks like the opener, The Vowels Pt. 2, which is a glorious condensation of what makes Why? so unbelivable wonderful.

The Vowels Pt. 2 is a showcase of the intensely personal and nearly incomprehensible but wonderfully melodic vocals that strike right at the heart of the listener. The Vowels takes a touch of the dark, serious edge of the lyrics with the wonderfully cathartic refrain (cheeri-a, cheeri-e, cheeri-i, cheeri-o, cheeri-u…). Following that opener with Good Friday you get a taste of the almost spoken word nature of Why?. The lyrics are a total baring of a lifetime of quirks and psychosis which flows out like a hideously interesting torrent of intimacy which is hardly expected until you are at least half way through the song. The third track, These Few Presidents, shows the recurring themes of life and death that Why? is incomprehensibly able to throw around in the way people talk about the weather or sports. There is a beauty in the turns of phrase that seem to cram into every song without becoming trite or overwrought. “You are a beautiful and violent word…”

The album overall rises above Elephant Eyelash primarily in that it is more comfortable in its own shoes. The songs flow better even though they are little different from their predecessors in content or sound. There is a certain ineffable quality in them that is clear to almost any listener. The tone of Alopecia is most often described as more serious and dark than Eyelash but that smacks of a lack of listening to Eyelash rather than an actual analysis of Alopecia. It is not a matter of (as Chris Dahlen seems to think) understanding Why? or frontman Yoni Wolf, but simply an experience to be enjoyed. You might get a glimpse of the internal monologue of Wolf but it is not understanding that comes forth from every song. It is a strange journey in unknown territory. Why? remains unknown but not without incredible beauty and more than one catchy hook.

Microsoft Ultra Genius Clean complimentary laundry detergent! Made with a sprig of Galileo and a hint of Einstein. Feel the zest of your future!

Has your genius lost it’s zip? Need some help to restore your drive? Don’t be frustrated even the brightest of the bright need refreshing sometimes. Introducing Ultra Genius Clean! Concentrated cleansing agent that invigorates your genius and freshens your mind. Wash away inanity and restore that clever bounce with the suds of your future …. Ahhhhhh …..

From Microsoft. Yes this box (pictures here and here, apologize for the crappy resolution iPhone takes terrible pictures in low light) was placed on my desk in my office at work last week. I still don’t know who it’s from, but it made me laugh. There’s also a web site associated with it: http://hey-genius.com/. It sort of reminds me of that Google billboard advertisements for people. You know, this one:

{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com

The solution is easy. A really cheap easy solution is here, though there are others. Please forgive the formatting of that post … it was a long time ago and vdov.net has changed substantially since those days.

Also, check this picture out. I took this at a gas station in West Lafayette, IN about a week ago. See if you can figure out why I think it’s funny.

Vdov seems slightly more alive as of late. Cheers.

Slashdot: Scientists solve the mystery of traffic jams

This is fine and well, but unfortunately these people fail to mention the most important work on the subject which initially came from the theory of nonlinear wave equations, and was more or less solved in 1974. It was summed up in a classic text on linear and nonlinear waves so titled and written G. B. Whitham. The book is out of print but it’s around on Amazon as well as other stores and any self-respecting science library should have this book sitting on the shelves. The main problem is one of wave propagation leading to “shock fronts” in traffic. If one person brakes for no reason, shock waves develop and travel backwards (for most flow problems) relative to the moving frame of the cars. Consider a velocity function for cars as a function of the density.

It’s quite simple to assume that must be a decreasing function of which starts from some maximum value at and decreases to zero as , and the maximum density flow occurs at some specific value of . Guess what? Actual observations peg the value of at about 255 vehicles per mile and the maximum flow density at about 80 (or 1500 vehicles per hour). Amazingly these values scale in a near linear fashion as lanes are added to the flow on a simple highway. It turns out the maximum flow rate is actually achieved at about 20 miles per hour. If we then develop a simple expression for the propagation velocity:

Since the derivative of the velocity function is less than 0, propagation of shock waves in a traffic flow travel backwards, and according to Whitham, “warn the drives of disturbances ahead”. Unfortunately this has some pretty negative consequences for you and I, the driver, who will inevitably be fed up with random stoppages in the road for no particular reason. Whitham continues to make some elementary arguments on the status of a wave near the stoppage density of traffic on a road. It turns out that the second derivative of the density flow function is less than zero, which means that a local increase of density propagates backwards, and shock forms somewhere behind the initial disturbance.

Now I’m sure that people have made some improvements in the mathematical description of this problem since the pioneering work of Whitham, but don’t be fooled: pretty much everything you read about “new developments” in this area in the popular media have been solved for more than 4 decades.

Cheers.

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.

Where is the surface tension, is the radius of the sphere, is the permittivity and is the electric field. The following derivation follows simply by application of a little algebraic gymnastics and Maxwell’s equations/stress tensor (where is the charge density and is the total number of charges).

Therefore,

This is remarkably similar to the actual Rayleigh limit (the only difference being a multiplier coming from the fact that this is in fact a sphere), which is given by:

The painting is very somber, almost depressing. It depicts a man with very little definition walking away from the point of view of the painter. The color palate is very dark, as I remember. I would estimate that only 15% of the frame is taken up with the walking man and the rest by his surroundings on the street he is traveling down. This is how I remember the painting, though I never fully studied it and my memory could be very flawed. But, he’s definitely walking away from the point of view of the painter.

If I could remember who showed that painting to me (over 4 years ago now), I would just email him/her. My memory is not that good.

Cheers.

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.

On an unrelated note, I was talking with afischer tonight about some random things and brought up my previous ‘Gmsh’ post. He said mostly what I expected … that is, “no one will remotely care about Gmsh”, but then said (paraphrasing), “no, I bet there is some ridiculous vdov.net groupie out there somewhere who feverishly anticipates anything new that comes onto the site”. I replied, “yeah, there may be, but I’m pretty sure if I met this person I would likely hate him/her … what does that say about vdov.net?”.

Nothing good, that’s for sure. Ha!

Oh and it does a fantastic job of optimizing elements. This was done in 30 seconds on a single processor in a ~3-4 million element tetmesh, and basically completely eliminated the bottom 2 quadrants of mesh quality (the range in “mesh quality” here (I won’t explain the details), is 0 -> 1). If you can’t see it (someone who knows please explain to me why firefox on linux screws up image scaling so bad … I’m sure there is a simple solution but I definitely don’t know it), a blown up version is here.

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.

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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.