The Giraffe House is Almost Complete...

Some status and news....

After years of preparation we are almost ready for the giraffes!

The new enclosure is coming along nicely as you can see.  Once the heating system is installed they'll be happy year round.

This particular size will work only for a short while (until they reach a height of about 11 feet).  Then I'll need a taller enclosure.  The advantage of this one is that we can simply jack it up and place another 4 foot wall below the bottom.

On the bird front this little fellow showed up drunk on the screen door the other day.

We're not sure what he is, though, but he looks like an immature yellow warbler from what we can tell. (If not yellow warbler a blackburnian warbler.)

And finally from the garden...

Sweet banana and hot Hungarian wax peppers.

After cutting these up and canning them I cleaned my fingers with bleach to ensure that nothing got burned later.

No luck!

I was happily sitting at my keyboard and I rubbed my eye.  It started to burn so I unthinkingly rubbed it more.

Suddenly my whole eye socket was burning.

Oops!

The chemicals on the peppers weren't removed by the bleach...

Even the next day things still were not right in this department - I went jogging and the sweat ran down, through the hot pepper juice, into my eye again.  Rubbing my eyes made it worse.

On the technical front...

The Mac OS X version of MIDIProbe has been doing well - which surprised me.

There's a big investment in getting set up to create apps, but once you've made it the rest is pretty simple.

The next product is in the pipeline - I am working on audio/MIDI synchronization right now.  Its somewhat tricky because you have to align the sounds made precisely and they cannot drift over time, i.e., an audio loop and a midi loop differing only by a few 100th's of a percent in time will drift out of sync more quickly than you might imagine.

This will also be released in parallel on iPhone/iPad and Mac OS X.

This blog has been active since about 2005 but only kept current since about 2008.  Currently some 3,000 or more folks visit each month.

While its somewhat of a burden to keep up to date (I generally publish posts only one business week days) it gives me a platform to promote what I do.

The End Justifies the Means - How will this affect your retirement?

There's a lot of interesting news in the category I would define as "the end justifies the means."

For purposes of definition we can say that "the end justifies the means" is an example of consequentialism: the idea is that the outcome determines basis for the "rightness" of the conduct.  A classic modern example of this perspective is Bill Clinton's presidency.  While involved in various ethical distractions (such as Monica Lewinski) during his presidency some supporters viewed the overall presidency as a success because he increased employment and reformed welfare.

Consequentialism says that regardless of what might have happened along the way the outcome was a success hence the moral validity of any steps taken along the way must be viewed as "morally correct" because the outcome was the right one, i.e., a morally right outcome must be the consequence of morally right steps to achieve it.  So, for example, Lewinski could not be "harmed" by the process of achieving increased employment and reformed welfare.

At its extreme consequentialism says that, for example to save a dozen people, its ethical to kill one in order to harvest twelve sets of organs to be used to save the dozen.

The opposite of consequentialism is deontological ethics.  This category of ethics differentiates "harm" as follows: harm can only be caused if and only if it is a consequence of the greater good.

An example here will help.  A town draws water from a river which is polluted and causes many people of the town to get sick and die each year.  To reach a new source of water a tunnel must be drilled through a mountain.  In the process of that drilling to create the new tunnel for water some workers are killed.

Now from the consequentialism perspective let's say that there is a person who owns a "bypass" that would allow a simple channel to be dug around the mountain but that person is unwilling to sell his land.  So we kill him and take his land for the "greater good" - fewer innocent towns people die so the act of killing the land owner is of no consequence.

Today there are numerous examples of consequentialism exercised by the government: The use of eminent domain to take land to use for a new Pfizer corporate R&D center.  The attempts by the US Government to prosecute Kim Dotcom by manufacturing new "criminal" law.  The creation of the "fracking debat" in order to stop natural gas drilling.

In each of these cases it is the outcome that is driving the actions of those involved along the way.

In the case of the Pfizer R and D center, for example, the idea was to condemn family homes with "eminent domain" so that Pfizer could create many new jobs and remove what were considered ugly old houses from a waterfront area.  But less than ten years later Pfizer has decided to leave - literally leaving the town of New London holding the financial bag to the tune of more than a hundred million dollars.

The original home owners were "forced out" for the "greater good" - new jobs, an unblighted river front, new corporate taxes, and so on.

But that has now evaporated given Pfizer's departure.

In the case of Mr. Dotcom the governments perspective seems to be that because Mr. Dotcom's company Megaupload was thought to be "stealing movies" ("thought to" because so far no direct evidence has been provided) it was seized outside the borders of the US.  (The image above ostensibly shows that Mr. Dotcom's company was not a significant player in pirated Hollywood and RIAA content - so why was his company selected for prosecution?)

The US is now attempting to mold criminal law into a quasi-criminal/commercial law so that the lax standards of proof on the commercial side can be used against Megaupload (freezing the companies US assets without due process).

In the case of fracking an industry practice, conducted safely for many years, has suddenly become the target of environmentalists.  As such a "witch hunt" has begun for scientists that have deemed the practice safe.

Yet medical research, with its unbelievably low rate of reproducibility, appears to be of no interest to anyone regardless of the consequences to human life.

Here a well intentioned industry has become "evil" overnight as a result of marketing by environmental groups (I am not aware a of a single case where a gas drilling operation set out to intentionally pollute grown water).

The question we must all ask ourselves is do we really want to live in a society driven by consequentialism?

Consequentialism divides the society into those for which the greater good must be provided and those whose property and rights must be taken away to provide that "greater good" regardless of the ethics of the process involved.

Clever marketing can be used with virtually any cause under consequentialism to create a demand by society for "justice" - social, moral, criminal, corporate, and so on.

Consequentialism acts as a set of "blinders" on how that outcome is achieve, i.e., by hiding or discounting unethical behavior to reach that goal.

As long as the unethical behavior does not touch the "believers" in that justice all is well because they have no concept of what was done to achieve a given "end."

But as a society we have a double standard in this regard.  We don't like "big companies" using child labor in foreign countries to make our products.

So why is it okay for our government to bend the law in a case like Mr. Dotcoms?

The only answer I can see is that its the result of "marketing" in a society without any ethical compass.

Given a people that only believe in outcomes there really cannot be an expectation of ethical justice - only "mob rule" outcomes.

This double standard extends into other areas as well:  take the concept of "evolution" and education.

If one believes in evolution and teaches it in school, why don't we as a society practice it?

For example, killing the infirm, the malformed infants, the weak and so on?

Isn't evolution about the survival of most fit?

Yes, but those who market it to schools don't think beyond the basic reasons they wish it to replace religious dogma - so they create this ridiculous paradox.

This duality of mind is becoming a serious impediment to our survival as a society and country.

Without children educated in discriminating between these two  ethical perspectives we can only expect that, as we age, the consequences to be inflicted on us by our uneducated children.

Font Size and "Substantial Compliance" with the Law

From the WSJ

It's not often an interesting typography story makes the news and given my background I can't resist this...

In Michigan a court decision on the "Emergency Manager" law has boiled down to a question of font size.

Michigan's "Emergency Manager" law, Public Act 4, allows a community to take over insolvent or failing school districts and other municipal entities.  Needless to say this created a backlash among the various public unions and employees involved in these insolvent and/or failing entities.

The backlash turned into a campaign by "Stand Up for Democracy" to have the law repealed which in turn required signatures for a state ballot initiative.

So to get the question of repealing the act on the ballot for Nov. 6 of this year a petition was designed in Microsoft Word.  The font Calibri at 14 points was used for the text in the petition.  About 200,000 signatures were collected using this Word-designed form with Calibri as the font.

However, those that oppose this initiative, the Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility, brought suit in state court.  The suit points out that Michigan law states that all petition used for ballot "shall be" in 14 point fonts.

Unfortunately the Calibri font is on the small size and the text does not match what you would have found on such a document had traditional 1950's movable type been used.

So when you actually measure what was used on the petitions you discover the size of the printed letters are a few points short.

All this boils down to one thing: if Microsoft Word "tells you" the font is 14 points does that mean the printed text that results is 14 points?

Anyone familiar with typography knows that when you say "14 points" you mean the "cell" used by the type face is 14 points - the actual letters, including the capitals, are somewhat smaller.  This is because traditional 14 point wooden typefaces were cut into a 14 point high block of wood; the letters were always cut out completely on all sides so letters in the face would always be somewhat smaller that the block.

At this point the case is now in the hands of the Michigan Supreme court.

I think the ruling will depend on whether the type used is in "substantial compliance" with the law (a standard used in other Michigan cases); the notion of "shall be" apparently is no longer good enough.

I wonder how long it will take for the notion of "substantial compliance" of the law to filter down for the rest of us?

For example, if the capitols letters are 70% of the typeface size, i.e., 70% = .70 x 14 points or 9.8, then the actual height of the capitol letters would be 9.8 points.

Therefore if my blood alcohol was .081 I could argue, based on this case being decide that the Calibri font was in "substantial compliance,"  that I was also in "substantial compliance" of the law given my blood alcohol was within 1.25% of the required legal limit (the difference between .08 and .081 being 1.25% of .08).

Driving 70.95 mph in a 55 mph zone would also, but this same standard, be in substantial compliance (29% of 55 mph over 55 mph).

Perhaps "substantial compliance" is not such a good idea after all...??

US Olympics: Full Circle with the GDR

Jim Montgomery

It's with some sadness that I see the Olympics return to the TV this summer.

My sadness is related to what has happened to the United States as an Olympic team in terms of integrity.

That's right: integrity.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's I was a member of the Amateur Athletic Union - an organization created in 1888 to ensure standards and uniformity in sporting events.  I swam competitively and, in order to swim in meets sanctioned for state, national and Olympic access, you had to be a member.

At that time there were only two choices for highschool aged kids: highschool athletics or AAU.  If, as was my case, the highschool hand no pool you were stuck on the AAU track (you could not swim for another highschool).  The AAU required you to compete for only one team - you could not represent multiple teams so you had to choose carefully.

There were a number of nationally known "power house" AAU teams that produced national level athletes: Hinsdale, Illinois was one near where I lived.

Colleges at that time probably produced the most Olympic qualifiers primarily because they had the resources to run programs that included feeder and summer systems such as the one I was involved with.  Many colleges were top swimming teams in their own right (Indiana with James "Doc" Counselman) with producing some of the best athletes in the world.

I became involved in all of this around 1971 when I spent a few weeks as part of one of these feeder teams for the University of Wisonsin, Madison.  I spent several more summers in this program through 1973.

You basically lived in a college dorm - I was about 14 at the time - and trained with and like "the big boys."

The big boys were people like Jim Montgomery: 1972 and 1976 Olympic winner and first man to break 50 seconds in the 100m Freestyle.



This was heady stuff for a fourteen year old kid.

The program ran in the summer with the idea that you came off the college "circuit" - rested and entered the university "summer program" in order to qualify for "Nationals" where you'd move on to Olympic qualifications.  Swimming program from around the state could send kids to this program as well as a sort of "farm system."

The University coach, Jack Pettinger (still associated with Badger Aquatics at least as an email), was Montegomery's "home" coach (Montgomery did not attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison).  There were a number of foreign Olympians that lived in the same dorm with us (Australian Nigel Cluer was one).

We trained in the University pool in the afternoon and the big, 50m Olympic "Shorewood" pool in the morning.

The "Shorewood" out door 50m pool is still in use today much as it was forty years ago:

Typical work outs would include some six to eight thousand meters of swimming in the morning and started at seven AM (you had to ride your bike there).  The pool was eight or ten lanes and the "big boys" like Montgomery trained in the far right lanes.  Those such as myself were distributed with sub-coaches through the lanes to the left.

The big boys swam the farthest and the hardest under Pettinger.

After this you road your bicycle back and ate.  This involved a dozen eggs, a pound of sausage and a half a loaf of bread.

You biked to the "indoor" pool around one PM and swam another five or six thousand meters.  Often after lifting "home made" weights.

You then biked home and ate a large pizza and a gallon of milk.

Later on you had whatever you could find for dinner.

I imagine this was much the same for the rest of the athletes including the "big boys."  Certainly the Olympian's who stayed with us followed suit.

What was remarkable to me about all this at the time and still today is that all of this was done as amateurs.  It was an honor to be a regional or national level or Olympic-level athlete.  This involved pride.  You didn't cheat to win - you won because you worked harder than anyone else and made the best use of your talent.

Most of they people I knew either lived at home with parents or had jobs and worked for a living - not at swimming - but at some other job.  The Australian's, for example, I think were paid as "chaperon's" in the dorms.

You swore, when you signed your AAU card, that you would not take money for your sporting activities - no sponsorships, no payola, no under-the-table salary.  This was considered dirty.

And from what I could see this was largely true.

On the other hand, at this time US swimming held the GDR (East Germany) as the epitommy of "evil" and "the dark empire."  GDR women were, at the time, number one in the world in many events (World and Olympic competitions).

There was only one problem: they all looked like men because the GDR was big on hormone doping and they were always clever enough to ensure that the "girls" passed any "doping tests."

My father used to receive a magazine called "Swimming World" which chronicled much of this.  The GDR girls were certainly fast - but they were big and didn't look quite right.  (See this 1973 Sports Illustrated article.)  It was also rumored that top communist athlete's had lavish lifestyles paid for by the state.

There were similar suspicions about some of the USSR and other communist teams as well - but again more on the women's side.

So to sum all this up from my perspective in 1973 or so Olympic sports were governed by the AAU which required athletes to be amateurs.  There was, at least from my perspective in swimming, fair play and honor.  You got to be one of the "big boys" by working hard and not cheating you way to the top.

And let's compare this to today:  There are some 500 people in the London games just associated with administering drug tests: five hundred people.

No doubt hundreds involved in what kind of equipment is "legal" - full body suites, special materials, on and on.

Where is the honor in this?

And a large number of athlete's in all sport have some sort of "promotional deal."  Whether wearing certain clothes or being on the box of Wheaties.

You have controversy like the US Postal cycling team, the "augmented" disabled athlete's, and all the rest.

Today the game is only about one thing: the love of money - no honor, financial glory is the mark of success, winning at all costs.  Where's my medal - I've got a meeting with my agent after the games.

We, the US, are now and have become the GDR - the "evil empire" of the past.

I had a chance to train for the 1976 Olympics which I declined.  It was simply too much in terms of the physical and mental punishment required.  I dropped out of the sport by 1975 to pursue my interests in computers and software (retired at 17).

Do I miss it?  Not really.

I have competed in various running and triathlon events in the intervening forty or so years and done reasonably well (say the top 10% of finishers which for me has always been doing about as well as the fastest women).

But training at those levels is a lot of really hard work and takes up a lot of time - time you don't have if you have a career and a family.

But I will never forget what it meant to be part of that honor-based system.

(The US Congress changed the AAU model in 1978 - which in my book was the beginning of the end.)

So I'm sad today because I now live the GDR...

Mountain Lion - Veering off the "Social" Cliff?

I am writing today about the new Apple "Mountain Lion" release.

And no - I have not yet downloaded it and I probably won't until I need to. (More on this below.) I say this after the release of the new Synthodeon iMIDIProbe which runs identically on both iOS and OS X.

The big "push" here from Apple with Mountain Lion relates to "notifications."  Notifications from Twitter, Facebook and other similar things.  From the reviews it seems that now these are all more "integrated" - I suppose that means even more dancing, jumping or throbbing icons bouncing around on the screen at the least opportune moments.

There are also supposedly tools to make it easier to "share" things like Safari pages; as if copying and pasting a link is less efficient than fifteen pokes and stabs and drags and distractions to do the same thing.

All this makes me wonder what people do with computers today.

Clearly actual work is not part of any of this.

When I am trying to get something done I like to be able to concentrate.

Again, this (working, concentrating) now seems like something abnormal.  Apparently most people either don't work and sit in front of their computers on Facebook all day doing nothing (while perhaps collecting a paycheck from an unwitting employer) or they can work with intense distractions coming in constantly from a thousand sources.

So why is one of the most valuable companies in the US turning its primary products into what I say are basically toys.  (Now I use the term "toy" to indicate something that's not related to doing something productive or work related.  I suppose that socializing is important if you do nothing else but its hard to see how or why you would spend that much money if there wasn't some value to it.)

Now I have toys - large and small - but they are just that - toys.  I don't expect them to do anything productive other than entertain me.

Now I post this blog to Facebook everyday because there are people there that read it.  And I look at Facebook from time to time to learn about social events.  But there is a huge amount of useless crap posted there as well: "look at this picture of my lasagna" and "my dog made a bad poo poo today (picture attached)" and so on. 

Do I really need this sort of "notification" to arrive every twelve seconds?

But it seems that Apple is turning all of its products into toys.

And I find this troubling.

I've worked hard to create some products that give a seamlessly smooth experience across Apple's products, e.g., MIDIProbe as well as other new products in the pipe line, because I think that in the sense that people like to work "one way" there is a future.  Especially as Apple turns its phenomenally useful work tools into toys.

But Apple's been seduced by the dark side: socialization.

I now have adult children who sit at the family dinner table texting crap back and forth rather than talking.

Huh?

What's the point of this?

Its not even social.  We call it social but its not.  Not when we are interacting via an electronic surrogate while sitting within inches of the partner with which are are socializing.

What's even worse is adults interacting with their children via this same electronic surrogate.

And one of the largest, most successful companies in the world is doing this.

But I think there are some problems here.

For one, there is a limit to how many people will buy and use a "smartphone."  People will change computers for these but then no long pay for their computer (or cable).   So we are shifting away from the "computer" model to the "phone" model.  This is fine and its what technology is for.

But at the same time we are shifting away from computers as some useful tool to computers a mere toys and/or surrogates for socialization.  Does everyone on the planet really need to carry around a toy to play with all day long?

Apparently.

And this is sad as well.

With the only purpose in your life being to socialize through some electronic surrogate you life probably won't be all that fulfilling.  Sure you'll be connected - but connected to what?

Not to a human... (think Siri).

Apple and Samsung and Google will continue to sell toys to the masses - but each step in the process takes us away from being full grown adults that engage in "adult" activities and makes us more childlike - less responsible, more apt to push off responsibilities to others, more self absorbed than we should be, less likely to work and do productive things.

Sure play is good - but not as a lifestyle...

Now with integrated Mac OSX facilities Facebook will continue to chop up your social world into little photographic and video vignettes - parodies of reality - instead of doing anything meaningful.

I will eventually get Mountain Lion - but only for work reasons - I have email, and voice mail, and access to plenty of "social apps."  But I don't need this social stuff pushed in my face 24 x 7.

What will happen if a decent sized solar flare wipes out power for a few weeks?

What will people do?  Stare wide eyed at their blank iDevice waiting for it to come back on?

The modern way to me seems to be based on a large quantity of crappy (or poor or weak or distant or faux) social connections.  (For example, I only get asked to be your "linkedin" friend when you get fired - so you want to be my friend so you can get a new job...)

Like the disaster of US debt (equal to GDP like Spain and Greece) we are veering off into an "all in" introspective world of self gratification and entertainment.  Little wonder few understand the magnitude of the debt problem - they're too busy texting about the "Dark Knight."

With this release Apple is going "all in" too.

I just wonder if its the right thing.

Ars Technica = Internet History FAIL

From Wikipedia

In a burst of Administration-inspired foolhardiness Ars Technica has decided to pick apart a small WSJ article on the "history of the internet" to show that it was, of course, all done by the government.

Xerox PARC did develop the underlying technology for what we know today as the internet - but both articles leave out the facts and details and gloss over the actual truth of the matter.

The ARPANET was a creature of the US Defense Department's Advance Research Project Agency.  It was invented as an experiment in digital packet-switching networks.  It used something called the Imp-16, a specialized computer, that was connected to other Imp-16's in other locations via satellite or leased phone line.  The "customers" (as you can see from the chart above) were primarily universities and research groups, e.g., Xerox PARC.  The systems connected were primarily Dec-10/20's, PDP-11, IBM mainframes and CDC mainframes.

Unfortunately for Ars this technology was nothing like the "internet" though there are some software elements of it that still exist in name only today.

I used the Arpanet in the early 1980's when I worked at a company called Unilogic, Ltd.  Unilogic sold a software package called Scribe developed at CMU.  CMU was on the Arpanet.  As part of customer support for Scribe there was an Arapnet email.

Arpanet allowed students involved in computer research to communicate via email (mail), log into remote computers (telnet) and transfer files (ftp).  While these applications survive in name today (and they work in much as they did then) the systems on which they ran basically no longer exist except in museums.

But the similarities ended there - the sites were physically hard wired.  Imp-16's required university research money to purchase, defense department blessing to use, and serious mainframes to connect them to.  Significant budgets for leased lines were also required.  Speeds were limited as was access.

At Unilogic you would dial into a terminal server (probably a PDP-11) that had a rack of 1200 baud modems connected to phone lines.  The PDP-11 would act as a front end for a terminal (typically a hardwired computer terminal like DEC VT52) for the PDP-10/20 for various installations around the CMU campus.  This technology was the forerunner of the internet ISP-style modem dial-up and PPP protocols to come later (this was as I recall developed by DEC and enhanced by CMU - private entities both).

Ethernet - developed at PARC - is a hardware protocol that revolves around a shared connection resource and collision detection.  An RF signal is sent over a coaxial cable.  Multiple devices are connected to the cable and at any time any one of them can start sending a message.  Each device also listens to what's being sent to see if another device overwrites it.  If another device does it waits a short,  random amount of time and tries again.

Ethernet would languish mostly inside Xerox and at a few universities for a decade after its invention: the PC era's beginning saw Novell's networking system became the dominant player inside businesses (even ahead of Microsoft).

In the mean time (circa 1980 or so) Tom Truscott invented the Usenet.  Access to the ARPANET was limited to a small number of players involved in defense contracting - this left other universities out of the picture.

Truscott seized upon the idea of the ARPANET and figured out how to make it work with UUCP (Unix-to-Unix copy program).  UUCP was part of the standard Bell Labs (another private institution) unix distribution and it allowed a system administrator to set up late-night unattended copies of files between systems over modem connections.  Truscott figured out how to use this to support email.

While Ethernet languished Usenet flourished.

In the mid 1970's the notion of the TCP/IP protocol was developed (as describe by Ars).  However, this was a software protocol designed to run on packet-switched networks (ARPANET as an example).   And while today's Internet uses TCP/IP the protocol runs on ethernet which is not a packet switching protocol.

In the 1970's Bill Joy at the University of California Berkeley developed what became known as BSD: Berkeley Standard Distribution.  This was his version of Unix that incorporated much software developed by his group including an implementation of TCP/IP.

TCP/IP was a complex undertaking because of how packets and datagrams are handled.  Basically nodes in a TCP/IP network need to handle "partial" packets as data is moved from point to point and, as far as I know, the Berkeley BSD TPC/IP version was the first written for Unix which was accessible to the public at large.

Again, outside universities and private companies this languished throughout the 1980's.

Also during the 1980's SGML (Standard GML) became an ISO standard.  SGML was a precursor to HTML and XML developed from IBM's GML.  SGML was developed as a means for creating documentation that a variety of systems could view, i.e., a standardized way to indicating bold, italic, paragraphs, and so on that could be displayed on any SGML viewer.

(Mary LaPlante, someone who I worked with at Unilogic, Ltd. for many years became head of the industry SGML group.)

SGML's primary issue was that a viewer was very complex and not easy to implement.

There were also many companies at CMU during this time that built software and tools that used hypertext links - this was a common idea at the time.  Some with SGML - others with proprietary versions.  Many ran as private business - most often involved in corporate training.

This left SGML as a mostly defense/aerospace standard for documenting things like airplanes and weapons systems.

So the "Internet" of Berners-Lee was comprised of technical elements that had all been developed a decade or more beforehand.  Berners-Lee assembled them into a new configuration that became popular.

Of course, things like BSD, ethernet hardware, and all the rest had been worked on for a decade by students and industry.  Bell Labs, the inventor of Unix (a private company) seeded the US University system with Unix so people like Bill Joy could create BSD (which still survives in various forms today - the Mac software I am using to write this has a BSD heritage).

Xerox tried and failed to make money with the Xerox Star office (Alto/Ethernet/Dover laser printer).

Again, it donated technology to Universities (no doubt for tax write-offs) so that students would learn what was done and take their ideas to industry.  (CMU had an ethernet interface in its coke machine in the computer science building which allowed students to query the state of what drinks were available and cold from anywhere on the ARPANET.)

To waive your hands (as did Ars) and dismiss decades of hard work by probably tens of thousands of computer science and EE-types to take these technologies and turn them into successful industrial tools is simply beyond comprehension.

In the days of BSD parents still paid to send their kids to college out of their own pockets - is that government funding?  I doubt it...

Bell Labs probably did the most in terms of releasing Unix into the world - Bell Labs was created by the Bell Telephone company - an "evil" big corporation.  Without this contribution Universities would have had to develop these technologies independently and somehow create a standard - an endeavor that would have added significant time and effort to the process I think.

Universities spun off thousands of "high tech" companies to build everything from ethernet cards (for VAX computers such as used at Berkeley) to SGML viewers.  Most privately funded by business and personal capitol.

Did big government play a role in all of this?  Of course.

(Though mostly through the Defense Department - a fact which seems to bother no one.)

But so did state and local universities, private companaies like Bell, incubator and start-up venture capitalists, private industry, and virtually everyone else.  (For example, Sun (now Oracle) was one of the first to seriously prescribe to "network computing.")

The ARPANET is one of many clear ancestors of today's internet - but only a distant ancestor.  But so is Tom Truscott who found a way to escape the "clutches" of the government controlled monopoly of the ARPANET and build the Usenet for "the rest of us."  So is Bell Labs.

In the 1970's DARPA's job was to do just what it did with the ARPANET - advance technology for US defense.  The ARPANET was the inspirational source of a flurry of activity over many decades by many private individuals to create today's internet.

To argue that the government "did it all" is to argue that Defense funding should be increased to do more of the same.

Yet the defense budget is cut.

As a college student in the mid-1970's things like the ARPANET were inspirations - not to accept "as is" but to view as something to better.  And there were many other inspirations: Gene Amdahl, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Per Brinch Hansen all gave talks at the school I attended.  These were designed to inspire students to do more than what had been done before.

I have founded a dozen companies over the last several decades - I have employed hundreds of people - all through this inspiration.

But I myself did all the work and, when things didn't go well, no one from the government came to save me.

Which is the most telling I think.

While you can say "the government did all this" or "none of this could have been done without the government" the fact is that the government never cared what I did as long as I paid taxes and did not break the law.

It never helped in any way.

And in the mid-1970's you could only read about things like the ARPANET in private publications like IEEE journals.

To try and steal this computer science legacy from probably millions of people over three decades is truly a crime and a FAIL by Ars Technica.

[ There is no time to include many, many other personal friends, collaborators, and acquaintances from the last thirty years who I know of that contributed in some way or other.  Some are now dead, some are now retired.  But this Ars article is literally a theft of my heritage as a "high tech" businessman. ]

The High Cost of Losing Your Way...

Seppuku - from Wikipedia

It seems hard to imagine the things that we see on the news today: the debacle at Penn State, the killings in Colorado, the US debt catastrophe, the violence in Syria. Yet at the same time these things go on there are still good things in the world: people helping each other, all the rest.

What's most troubling is that much of this I think are all symptoms of a much deeper, more troubling problem:

A lost moral compass.

Our compass has been faltering for some time; decades probably: 

- We love money more than anything in our culture today.

- We like to win at all costs.

- We don't want to upset anyone for any reason.

This last one is new - probably only in the last five to ten years.

As a child I recall learning the harsh realities of the adult world - older cousins and adults "telling you like it was" - making sure you learned the hard lessons required to be a responsible adult: greed was bad, don't think only about yourself, help others.

Those lessons were difficult and upsetting for a kid.

When you're a kid you think you know it all - you can do no wrong  - etc., etc.

Nothing like an older cousin to take you down a notch or two in order to get you thinking right.

But today, with our highly stressed-out American way of life that's no longer considered a good thing because it involves unpleasantness, bad feelings, having to deal with things you don't want to deal with.

So we no longer upset anyone.

Instead we let the stress build up until everyone is on some kind of anti-depressant.  The real feelings held inside.

We've set about eliminating the idea of "unpleasantness" from our culture.

But of course its still there - eating away at everyone.

I liken all this to being a parent.  When you first start out you think "this will be easy."

You imagine the child cooperating with you, being your pal, and everything going "hunky dory."

But it doesn't.  The kid always has a mind of his own - and rarely does it follow along with the parents model.

Unpleasantness results.

Parents have to become stern and resolute.  Otherwise how will little Jr. learn?

But today that's all bad - little Jr. rules the roost and mom and dad are failures if they think little Jr. is not happy.

In the old days you had to learn to read and learn discipline in school.  Today you don't have to learn anything to a pass.

So everyone goes on anti-depressants to feel better about a bad situation.

Everyone focuses on what they can do for themselves because what's left?

Nothing.

So we build cheap products that don't last so we have a job next week.  Too bad that people buy products based on the return policy and not the quality of the product.

We lose ourselves in sports because our lives suck.

We get the culture we have today.

I know a guy who's from Syria.  He still has family there.  He came here legally to get away from what's happening today because he saw the writing on the wall fifteen years ago.

Yet no one is helping Syria.

It might become another Vietnam.  Somebody might complain if we did something.

So we do nothing.

So people die.

But we feel good here because no one's kid is being sent "over there."

Being an adult and a "grown up" is about making hard choices.  Choices no one likes but that are, none the less, the morally right choice to make. 

These kind of choices are not popular but they have to be made and sadly they are no longer made.

Penn State is learning this lesson - the sky won't be blue and white for many years to come.

We'll probably let a thousands of Syrian's die so we don't have to feel bad or uncomfortable.

Without integrity and morality what are we?

Nothing.

Even our science and educational system reflect our lost way.

People wonder why there are "dooms day preppers" on TV.

If, as a nation, we want to succeed, we need to change course.  Morality needs to again become the standard.

You're published science turns out to be something no one else can reproduce - resign in shame.

You're defensive coach turns out to be a child molester - resign in shame.

You're country runs up a debt equal to annual GDP - resign in shame.

(Oh yes, and don't take your pension or "health benefits" or a comfy job elsewhere either...)

But we no longer expect this from our leaders.

So they continue to fail.

The Japanese Samurai understood this was bad.  It was better to die than bring shame onto yourself or others. 

That's why they invented ritual suicide: seppuku.

People thought twice about what they did.

Better to die than bring shame to yourself, your family, your boss.

Today resignation (from you post as football coach or your seat in Congress) if you fail should be enough (no pension or benefits).

Your city runs up a debt it can never repay - resign in shame.

People need to start expecting more.

More from their leaders and less "comfy living" as a result.

Why Our Medical "Science" is Doomed to Failure

(Spending on welfare - a large portion of which is "health care" - is at the point of exceeding what is spent on education.  Our way of life and health is literally collapsing under the weight of our own ignorance.)

So I have written here quite a bit about health care and doctors; quite often being critical of what's being done in the name of "heath care."

So, you might ask, what is the right thing?

First off I think there are probably only three "ingredients," if you will, that really matter in health care:

1) The placebo affect.

2) Accurate and unbiased double blind studies.

3) The lack of a systematic model for "debugging" health problems.

"The Placebo Effect" - These ingredients matter because they affect nearly every aspect of your health starting with what you believe about it, i.e., the placebo effect.  While most people thing of the "placebo effect" as getting better while being secretly given a "sugar pill" instead of some medication in fact I think the effect is far, far more important.

For example, you can convince yourself that you have a disease and even create the symptoms and you can be affected by the placebo effect even if you know you are receiving a useless sugar pill.

So clearly the placebo effect is a stand in for a huge mental aspect regarding health.

And yet no one understand this at a scientific level: why does it work, why is it so strong, how can the body do things it might otherwise seem impossible to do.

I think this "affect" extends to practitioners as well - I believe in the "science" hence it must be working even if the patient says it doesn't.

(This is also a common aspect of debugging large, complex software systems - separating the "facts" about what is wrong from "beliefs" that influence you  and often take you down the wrong path.)

The bottom line here is that we don't know how this works or why.

"Accurate and unbiased double blind studies." - This is the antithesis of the placebo effect - basically a process designed to eliminate it by ensuring that no one - neither practitioner nor patient - has knowledge about the real state of things so they cannot be influenced.

Of course, studies have to be unbiased or they are useless as well, i.e., I don't want drug manufacturers designing a testing protocol for a medication that ensures it will be a success - particularly if it really isn't.

Today the "greed" factor is strongly influencing science - greed for "success," for "funding," for recognition.

In some sense this is almost like a reverse placebo effect at the societal level - Society says "I want to believe that all this high tech medicine is good" and so people create positive results out of whole cloth to fill that need.

Imagine, for example, a topic like "climate science."

Does the placebo effect (or the reverse) affect those with strong opinions one way or another?

I think that it most certainly does.

And it helps that "climate science" is not amenable "double blind tests" of any sort.

So there is nothing to counterbalance the placebo effects by individuals or groups.  (Say as opposed to a sigma 5 signal in the Higgs Boson world at the Large Hadron Collider where everyone decides on the theory and the nature of what's being looked for in advance and then merely compares technically generated experimental results.  Though even this device, the LHC, is biased I think to some degree because only the most "powerful" or "influential" scientists guided its design.)

And don't forget that, as I have written here, as many as 1 in 20 medical "studies" are not reproducible.

"The lack of a systematic model for "debugging" health problems." - There is actually no science I am aware of regarding the process of "fixing" something broken.  Certainly it does not exist for software which is A) basically mathematical and B) subject by this nature to systematic analysis.

So if I have a large software system I cannot estimate, if its considered to be "broken" in some way, how long (or how much it will cost) to "fix it."

Software (and mathematics) itself is not subject directly to the placebo effect, i.e., the software, given the exact same initial conditions should do the exact same thing each time.  But those "debugging" it are - for example, I may believe there is a particular "symptom" or cause of that system for what amounts to basically an irrational reason.

But since I am doing that and not the software I will go off on what's called "a wild goose chase" trying to fix something based on faulty data.

Now imagine how this applies in the medical world: both the patient and the doctor are susceptible to the placebo effect.

There is not established protocol for how the biology of a human should work (yes I know there is at a "high level" - you're fasting blood glucose is X at point Y therefore you are diabetic - for example.  But this is complete nonsense when you consider whether or not other factors could have come into play - disease, deficiencies in other unrelated health areas, differences in human genetics, etc. etc.

Triage for heart attacks in the US is a good example of this.

But there is no consensus on why the Standard American Diet (SAD) is killing people: is it really cholesterol, or is it inflammation, is it diet, or exercise, is it A or B, etc.

So what path of science took the person from a supposedly healthy newborn to a terminally sick adult?

What's the process?

At the end of the day the process of modern medical science (and probably many other "sciences" like climate science) is terminally broken.

Until human's figure out how to take the "placebo effect" out of the process (funding, publishing, career, and so on) it will always be tainted.

Until human's can create accurate, unbiased and unambiguous tests for truly "complex" and open system the placebo effect will rule at the societal level (like phlogiston and ether).  (And yes, I understand the science got the bottom of ether - but its not the same as other things and I think there is significant "lacking" in our tools and techniques.)

Until we have a true science that deals with "debugging" things like the human body that's "free" of bias and the placebo effect we will continue to thrash.  For me "debugging" a human problem, say the reaction to an environmental change, must become a true science - with theory and a process and reliable outcomes.  (And of course fixing the root cause as opposed to papering over a symptom.)

Today most of humanity believes in a scientific process that is by and large a failure - a failure that's growing exponentially into a full blown, planet scale disaster (as the SAD proliferates around the world killing untold billions of inhabitants, for example).

I think we all need to "wake up" from this nightmare.

M.D. = No Knowledge of Nutrition

An interesting development in Europe: Dark chocolate is a "health food."  Cocoa flavanols can increase blood circulation (see this).

I have posted here a lot on health - this fact about cocoa being just another "point" on a growing picture of how the modern medical system is failing us...

Yesterday I was speaking with a local nutritional expert. He is very interested in how your body systems work: digestive, endocrine, and so on at the biochemical level.  He addresses how proper nutrition helps and/or hurts these systems.

As we were speaking he made an interesting comment: "I have a lot of doctors as patients."  He went on to describe how he had various doctor groups as patients.

Now this guy was a chiropractor, not an M.D.

I thought this was an interesting point.  I wondered how he got whole groups of M.D.'s as patients (I always thought that M.D.'s looked down as chiropractors because their profession was not part of the "AMA" world).

He told me that one had contacted him, his nutritional program had worked well, and that the M.D. had told the others in the practice.  Soon the entire practice was a seeing him for nutritional issues.  This spread on to other practices and doctors.

I found this odd.

I wondered why doctors would do this - after all - didn't they have to to to medical school and learn all this biochemical and nutrition stuff as M.D.s?

The surprising answer was a resounding "no."

Medical school does not teach nutrition nor how nutrition affects the biochemical pathways in the body.

He told me that doctors were amazed to learn this information.

I wondered what M.D.'s did learn in school if it wasn't how the body's biochemical systems worked or what was important about nutrition.

Unfortunately we didn't get to discuss that...

So what do M.D.'s learn in school I wonder?  I guess they learn from big pharma what pills people need - but not why and certainly not why they work or don't work or are good or bad for you.

So you really have to ask: what's nutrition?

Does the guy who "sun gazes" all the time really get something from it?

A placebo effect?  Actual energy?

Sun gazer's certainly think so...

And what about foods and herbs?  Do they work?  Some certainly seem to...

And things like "Dr Dan's Water" - this too...

But medical science is not like a "whole earth" catalog of how your body works apparently.  It seems more like a menu of "if A and B then big pharma offers C".  If you can't find A or B on the menu, then they can't help.

Which is why the US is full of alternative medicine - because most people don't fall into A and B in one way or another.

Our health is being thrown over a cliff in the name of "access for all."

Access to what?  Prescriptions?

By people who do not understand the biochemical processes in your body?

What can they really do if they don't understand how it works?

And more that just me is seeing this today.

Its time to pay more attention.

MIDIProbe: Now Available on OS X in the App Store

Now for OS X!

After quite a bit of work Synthodeon, LLC has finally launched the Mac version of MIDIProbe (its officially called iMIDIProbe in the Mac App store).

To see it you'll have to open the OS X App Store program and search for iMIDIProbe or use the link at the right.  (It's called iMIDIProbe because apparently you cannot have Apps with the same name in both stores - though I am not 100% sure on this.  I had to create the App in the store a couple of times to get things to work and I may have screwed this up myself.)

So if you don't have a Mac you are pretty much SOL at this point as far as this post is concerned...

Basically the Mac version is identical to the iPhone/iPad version - the code base is almost exactly the same.  The only real difference is related to the code that makes it work on OS X.

So at the end of the day this gives me the ability to write non-trivial applications that are the same on both iOS and OS X.

I tried to create an iPhone-like simulation under OS X so the app would like like its running on an iPhone/iPad.  This was tricky because there would no doubt be a legal problem duplicating the appearance of the iPhone Simulator (a tool available to iPhone developers).

I came up with a strategy to make it "look" okay.  I chose the layout above and placed the logo of the app in the upper right corner - that way if you had multiple apps running as simulated iPhone's you could tell which window was which kind of app.

I wanted to use different icons for closing and hiding the app - but the App Store wouldn't allow it so I used the standard OS X red and orange circles.

The core application consists of eleven common Objective-C files: all related to the functionality of the app.

I have ten common Objective-C files that make up the various controls (buttons, etc.).

A dozen or so common files related to MIDI.

And another dozen related to audio stuff.

So a total of about 50 or so Objective-C files that work on OS X and iOS - eleven of which make up the actual app functionality.

The Mac side has about ten more Objective-C files that make up the "container" that manages the Chameleon library, the "window" code that makes the iPhone-like border, the code for managing the App store receipt, and so forth.

The iOS side has far fewer files as the basic code was designed to fit that environment: basically four for everything.

I did not want to move forward beyond this app until I knew what was involved across the board for the OS X and iOS side: I could have done something wrong on either side that would have made the app not work in either store.

But I was successful and now its time to move ahead.

The next project I plan will be in the same order of magnitude as this - with different functionality.  But at least now I know what to do and not do to get things through the store.

In thinking ahead I've been wondering what it would take to move these apps to Windows.  There's a lot involved to do this and I am going to punt for now...

All things considered selling this way is probably going to be the wave of the future and at least now I have a mechanism to do this on multiple platforms.

Is Grilled Food Really Killing Us?

I have a really fundamental question to ask, and, at least at first, it might sound stupid.

I was reading an article about the dangers of grilled food: heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) - carcinogens - the results of burning carbon and grilling organic things on a fire.  (Just Google "grilled meat bad"...)

Now the question I have is really simple: "What would people be eating in a 'perfect food world'?"

You know, the one where everybody didn't do the all or even some of the stuff scientists tell us are bad: like eat grilled food, twinkees, cholesterol, and so forth.

Do you think there is a person like this on the planet somewhere?

I doubt it very much.

Certainly its not natives living on some forgotten Amazonian back water - they eat food grilled on a fire or fish with parasites.  Nor is it, say, Eskimo's - they eat a diet almost exclusively made up of fat and blubber.  Not us here in the US, in fact, my guess is that there isn't anyone who is perfect this regard.  Most "natural" foods have pesticides on them, or fungus, or bacteria - all bad.  Or they may have a concentration of bad elements, aluminum, for example.

Yet virtually everything we eat is "bad for us" in some way.

Unhealthy...

So I have to ask myself this: is this kind of "study" really science or medicine?

We all have to eat, don't we...?

I doubt there is anyone alive on the planet who has never eaten food cooked on a grill or over an open fire - perhaps one or two somewhere - but mostly no.

So why do we think about this as part of this kind of science?  You might argue that studying the "bad things" in what everybody on the planet eats is important because we need to know about what's "bad" for us and we should be eating less of that. 

The problem, though, is that virtually everything is bad in one way or another.

Another problem is there isn't some "test population" somewhere who is in perfect health that we can compare are test results too - or people who have only eaten "the right foods" all their life.

So does it really make sense to "study" why grilled food is bad?

Everyone eats it and its not likely to be eliminated any time soon...

Most people live longer today than they did a thousand years ago when cooking on a fire was the only alternative to eating your meat raw.

Instead, I think, we should be studying the big picture of how life operates - human and otherwise - in what I would call "the real world."

When developing complex industrial processes the approach is not like the one followed by medical science.  Businesses try not to have processes (computer, electrical, etc.) they depend on that they do not understand.

Would it make sense to have a business built upon a process you didn't really understand?

I think we have to accept that our bodies "work" in "the real world."

They are "designed" that way (by whatever means you like) - we can eat cooked food, raw food, and so on - we extract the nutrients - we eliminate what we don't need.  And depending on what we eat there are consequences.  Depending on the consequences our life might be good or bad.

We also have to accept that whatever it is that we eat their always going to be some "scientific" problem with it.

But this is dumb as well.

We don't exist as human's in a "vacuum" by ourselves.  We exist in an environment with other things as well (like fire, plants and animals).

Why does "science" separate "us" out from our environment?  Aren't we an integral part of it?

If, for example, you believe in evolution then we are all part of the same "thing?"

Do they plan on banning cooking meat?  Probably.

The bottom line is that most of this kind of "science" is not really science at all.  Its fact collection based on presupposed concepts - like cooking is bad - meat is bad and so on.  Then we "study" things to find reasons they are bad, e.g., burnt food is a carcinogen.  Then we can tell people what to do because we know what they do, e.g., eat meat, is bad.

But that ignores the larger picture of our environment as something we are "part of."

Isn't it entirely possible that our bodies are designed to separate the important and nutritious parts of what we eat from the bad parts?  After all, if we "evolved" in a context of using fire wouldn't we adapt to it?

After all we can evolve complex body parts out of nothing - why not a tolerance to burnt food?

In general I think "we" as human's are well beyond science's ability to study as a whole.  We and our environment are simply too complex.  So science loafs around studying bits and pieces here and there for political or economic purposes.  The problem is that these studies may not be valid on their own when trying to understand the concept of the "big picture."

But it doesn't matter because science today is about money and grants - no grants - no science.

No customers, no science.

I think it time that we start looking at things differently if we really want to start understanding...

My Island Home is Sinking Into the Sea...

The other day I watched a 2008 movie called "Someplace with a Mountain."  This is a documentary made by Steve Goodall.  The portion I found most interesting was where he shows some pacific islanders a portion of Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

You can see the portion of the film he showed them (at least from what I could see) here:

The idea was to inform the islander's that their island was "doomed" to be flooded by "global warming."  Below is what Florida is today and next to it what Al Gore predicts in his movie (the amount of the rise is unclear but it looks like a few meters as Florida is mostly flat):

The "old" outline of Florida is visible still under the water.

Now to hear Al Gore you'd think that the world was ending.  But in fact, this is not the first time coastline's have changed significantly (I wrote "Gobal Sea Level, North Carolina, and Responsible Public Policy" relative to North Carolina here a while back). 

Below is another example.  The green area shows the coastline of New Zealand during the last ice age (link to page here).

During this time the two island's were actually one.  The sea level rose after the ice age some 120 - 130 meters according to the site.

Now clearly the ancient New Zealand islander's faced the same predicament as Steve Goodall's islander's: things are going to change.

Yet today there are still New Zealand natives - presumably the survived the "cataclysm" - what it might have been (though according to the Wikipedia link the rate of change was something like 10m every thousand years or 40 generations). 

So during this time the sea would rise by about 1/4 meter (9 inches) per generation.  Probably something that someone would notice, particularly if they lived by the sea, but not something alarming.

During the melt-off of the last ice age an enormous amount water was stored as glaciers above the surface of the earth.

So the question become very simple:

A) Is the last ice age already over and we are embarking on a disaster?

or

B) Is the last ice age not yet over?

To me, based on this Wikipedia graphic, its not really clear:

While it looks like things are nice and "smooth" at the right end of the chart that's no reason to think its actually the case.

Interestingly its hard to find much about what the US coastline, for example, looked like when New Zealand was a single island.

So you might want to think this: what if Al Gore ran his map further backward in time?

What you would see is that Florida would be much larger than it is today, i.e., the light under-water areas in the "today" Florida image would be land.

So while Goodall is telling the islander's what's coming its actually something the islander's have been living with for 20,000 years!

And, according to the map below, 65 million years ago the coastline of the US looked something like this:

So there would appear to be A LOT of variability in water level.  One has to imagine that, since 65 million years ago it was thought to be some 10 degrees C hotter than today that there was no above-ground ice, i.e., glaciers.

What does this all mean?

Well, at least compared to Pacific Islander's we are living in "internet time" relative to sea level changes.  Their coastlines have been changing significantly for 20,000 years and their habitable land mass has shrunk.

But we are panicked over the inevitable: coastlines will change and have been changing.

Its a disaster only because we make it so - in fact its a simple fact of life that sea level's change over time.

Even by today's standards (recorded history) there is disagreement about where coastlines were:

Follow the map link to some interesting historical stuff (for example, a presumed map of the Antarctic Ross Ice shelf without out ice).

Even at its most rapid rate of change (during what we can see which is admittedly limited) the change of a few inches in a generation is not a lot.

And what can we do about it - especially if we don't even know if its "climate change" or just the wrap up of the last ice age...

The Sitting Disease: Is Sitting Killing You?

The other day I came upon www.juststand.org.

The question the graphic at the right asks is simple "Is Sitting Killing You?"

Sitting?

Sitting...

The idea here is simple. 

The longer you sit each day the more likely you are to die (94% more likely than someone who doesn't according to one part of the site).  A Mayo Clinic cardiologist goes so far to say: "For people who sit most of the day, their risk of heart attack is about the same as smoking” ~ Martha Grogan"

Now who ever it is that creates this site is convinced that sitting is bad.  They even have a number of studies that back it up (listed here).

But if you think about the big, historical picture of humanity, particularly for the traditional rolls that women fill (and some of these studies target women) sitting around doing whatever you need to do to raise your family, gather, make food, etc.

You see, the studies only "suggest" links between a sedentary life style and early death - they don't show "causal" links.

For example, and I quote "[the study ] suggests that the more people sit, the shorter their average life span."  Might it be that these people have a variety of other issues as well and they sit simply as part of these other issues? 

Of course.  But you won't read that here... 

They present "statistics" to make their case but the question is are they "meaningful" statistics?

Now the work I do means that I sit a lot - probably in the "danger range" as described in these studies.

Should I be afraid?

I don't think so, and here's why.  I have my little, four legged work buddies that I have written about.  Someone's bladder is always full, someone's noticed turkeys outside, someone's notice we're about to suffer a catastrophic attack by horse or deer.

So I have to get up - get up and run around the house to find out what's going on.  To tend the wounded if there's a particularly nasty deer or horse attack.  Change water for the tired warriors.  So I don't sit at a stretch for more than probably an hour.

If I am lucky I might get two or three hours of uninterrupted time at a stretch to get something done.  But normally not.

So is sitting as bad as smoking?

There's an interesting idea.  The sitting police will now come and take away all the chairs in your house so that you cannot sit.

The real truth is far different, I think.

Yes, modern life is crap: too much stress, too much sitting, too much bad food, too much bad medicine, and on and on and on...

Sites and "theories" like this are probably true in the sense that if you look at the modern working person one of their "problems" is too much time sitting in one position.  Along with a thousand other problems.

The question is not "is modern life bad" - it is - the question is what are you going to do about it?

Many people aspire to a job "in the city."  With a company car - an expensive house in the "suburbs."  With power and money and travel and all the rest...

But with that comes problems: smoking and other "stress relief" behaviors that are bad.  Sitting.  Too much bad food.  Too many problems at home.

So to pick out one thing, like "cholesterol" or "sitting" and say that "its killing us" is stupid.

We're busy killing ourselves because of "greed" and "the love of money."

We have to go, go, go to get where we want to go.  To hell with Little Jr - shove him off to daycare so we can kill ourselves sitting...????

I think the real solution is to sit down and ask ourselves this:

Why are we here?

Things, like a 50" plasma TV, do not make your life better.  If you are competitive and your neighbor has a 40" plasma then you might think your life is now better - but its not.  The neighbor, also being competitive will go out and buy a 52" plasma TV just to tweak you.  So how do you win?

You don't.

(See "The Sneeches" by Dr. Seuss for details.)

Truly we have lost sight of what's important.  Working fourteen hours a day for a better life might be a good thing as long as you know when you've actually found "the better life" - but what if you don't know - you just keep going.

Piling on more and more "bad things" in life: bad food, too much travel, too much sitting, too much of everything.

You must ask "why" are you sitting for many hours a day.

I sit because I have specific goals for myself - and its easiest to accomplish them sitting.

But I have changed many, many other aspects of my life and health - I am not obese, I am in good physical shape, I am properly nourished.

So my belief is that if I need to sit I should sit.  If I need to stand I should stand.

And I should not worry about it because it causes stress.

Wired "Science" - Trumped by Kids in Highschool

"Build a Particle Accelerator In Your Living Room!" - or so shouts the headline in this Wired article.

As a geek I am always intrigued by this sort of headline.

Unfortunately I was sadly disappointed on a couple of fronts.

First off the "particle accelerator," from the description provided (which is minimal here):

"The piece [ particle accelerator ] consists of a series of organically-shaped hand-blown glass bulbs – each attached to a pump via a tube to create a vacuum. When the button is pushed, a voltage of 45,000V is applied across two electrodes. The huge potential difference forces the electrons to gather at the tip of the brass cathode tube inside the rubber bung. When the opposite voltage is applied to the anode disc at the other end of the internal tube, it rips the electrons, accelerating them towards the end of the glass bulb. As the electrons reach the disc, they begin to collide, losing energy and emitting some of this as visible light. Some, however, accelerate through the anode dics, and collide with the phosphorus lining of the glass vessel. This reaction causes photons of light to be released, resulting in visible specks of light."

Okay - surprise!

This is basically a description cathode ray tube (CRT) like you used to have on your desk attached to your computer on on the TV stand in your living room. 

This history of this goes back into the 1890's:



Not remarkable at all.

As a teenager I used to look at Scientific American articles call "The Amateur Scientist."  These were written for many years (into the 1980's) beginning I think in the late 1950's - one of the more interesting authors was C. L. Strong.  His projects (which were submitted by those who actually did them) included (from the link):

• He-Ne laser: 9/64 with an addendum in the 12/65 issue

• High altitude chamber for biological studies: 9/65

• Hand pumped discharge tube: 8/66

• Argon gas laser: 2/69

• Molecular beam apparatus and mass spectrometer: 7/70

• Proton & deuteron accelerator (along the lines of Lee’s machine): 8/71

• CO₂ laser: 9/71

• Two transmission electron microscopes: 9/73

• N₂ laser: 6/74

• Mercury-vapor ion laser: 10/80

These include actual particle accelerators - not simple TV CRTs.

I spent a lot of time studying these articles, going to the local library to try and understand the physics and electronics involved, and attempting to build these projects from scraps of technology laying around the house or from dumps (I had a cousin who was interested in this as well).

As a kid (thirteen or fourteen) I built "particle accelerators" too, I guess.

I used to collect old TV's form road-side household garbage.  Often they still worked too some degree but had blurry or miss-aligned pictures.   These all contained tube-based multivibrator circuits (as below save for tubes were used; source: Wikipedia):

These drove what was called a fly-back coil which was basically like a Tesla coil or a spark coil from an automobile engine (circa 1960's).  This created about 15,000 volts - just like the power supply in the "particle accelerator" article.

The CRT had a "mask" which you connected to the high voltage output and an electron gun (heater element) that you provided 6V AC too to produce electrons.  The high voltage caused the electrons to flow from the heater to the mask.  Electrons would penetrate the mask and strike the phosphor on the front of the CRT screen.

Just like in the description above of the "particle accelerator."

But I went further.  You could take aluminum foil and sandwich it between pieces of plexiglass to build high-voltage capacitors that you could "charge up" with these circuit.  You could build "ion engines" that spun around using high-voltage as the power source.

And I was not the only kid doing this.  There was a state-wide science fair I attended in about 1971 in Milwaukee, WI - I was in ninth grade.

There were probably at least six highschool kids that year with various "particle accelerators" of various sorts - though most were more sophisticated than what is described in Wired.  One guy, for example, was vaporizing gold, I think, and using high voltage to accelerator it through a tube and "sputter" it onto a target.

(Another guy had a voice recognition system that could understand words based on a mechanical clock and some old TV electronics.)

How sad is it that a magazine like Wired would print something like this as exciting "news!"

What about the catholic boys highschool (C. L. Strong link) where they built a 10,000x electron microscope as an "after school project?"  (Even today I find this article quite motivating: some old monk and a bunch of bored highschool boys with nothing better to do - so they build a workable electron microscope.  Compare that with how kids whittle away their time today...)

Wired unfortunately (and even though I am often inspired here by their topics) doesn't get it.

We are a technical shadow of what we once were.

Apparently no one there knows enough about anything to see this nonsense for what it is: a CRT.

No, I write here about things like climate change and other "modern science."

But the adult "scientists" at Wired can't even remember what was done 40 years ago by kids in highschool - often at home in the basement or garage.  If they've forgotten this then what do they know really about what's going on today?

Probably these things only exist on printed paper or CD "compilations" sold by Scientific American - hence they cannot be Googled - hence they simply don't exist in their minds...

This is so very, very sad.

Crowd Skimming: A Fool and His Money...

There's a new model for making a buck.

Its exemplified by the IP (Intellectual Property) trolls and places like www.kickstarter.com.

IP trolls, which I have covered here in the past, currently have a model that works something this:  Find a porn flick on a site like Bitorrent that a lot of people have downloaded illegally for free.  Approach the film's maker and acquire the rights to pursue the copyright offenders.  Next collect a list of IP addresses (an IP address is how your computer uniquely identifies itself to the internet) that are associated with the torrent.  Given the IP list you can use a subpoena to get names and addresses of account holders using those IP addresses.  Finally you send out threatening letters claiming that so-and-so at a given IP address (and some actual name and address) has violated copyright law by making a free download and ask for $1,500.00 USD.  For a given torrent this might mean some 20,000 names - quite a bit of potential income.

www.kickstarter.com is a little more savory and a bit different - but I think its the same principle.

You submit a "project" that needs funding to kickstarter: this includes a video describing your project, a "funding budget", and other information.  The staff at kickstarter reviews this and, if they pass on it, it goes on the kickstarter site.

According to the site "millions of people visit" kickstarter to find projects to "fund" - in this case funding can mean anything from $5 USD up to quite a bit.  Your project is given a "time frame" in which to meet its "funding budget."  If you get enough donations in the given time frame you get your money (and the funder's wallets are lightened as appropriate to each pledge).  Failure to get the funding means you get zero and no one contributes a penny.

The idea of this is captured, I think, in an example along these lines.  Suppose I'm a poor but talented highschool kid that can sing.  I want to cut a demo CD but that costs $2,000 USD and my parents and family cannot help.  I create a video "demo" for kickstarter and ask for the $2,000 in 30 days.

If I get "funded" in 30 days kickstarter turns over the money, otherwise I get nothing.

Both of these are obvious forms of "crowd sourcing."

But I think this points at a new "model" for business: crowd mining.

The "crowd" - whether Bitorrent porn thieves or idle folks with $25 USD to spend on a "random act of kindness" - is a vast pool of "natural resource."  Not unlike a giant ore reserve of copper or other minerals or a giant school of fish in the ocean.

Humanity, being humanity, can't leave an obvious, giant resource pool unexploited.

Modern internet technology can make these pools of resource visible and available to those interested in an "exploitation" - whether indirectly via a pool of torrent IP addresses or directly where people actively visit a site like kickstarter.

This is also similar even to the idea of the Apple "app store" for the iPhone.  Again you, as an app developer, have to jump through a variety of Apple-defined "hoops" to be granted "access" to exploit the "resource pool."

The unit of resource in general is probably around $5.00 USD - an amount virtually anyone would be able to pull out of their wallet and hand over to someone or something they felt was worth it.  Something you might spend at the app store or on kickstarter.

My guess is that from the troll perspective if you take 20,000 potential targets and multiply it by 20x $5.00 ($100) you might collect $2 million gross (not bad for something that might cost $50K to $100K as an initial investment).

If we look at the entire US nation of 315 million or so, then $5.00 USD x 315 mill = about $1.5 billion USD.

Now anyone with a computer and internet connection probably has at least a $50 cell phone or cable bill plus a device (phone or computer) on which to access it.  So my guess is that the $5.00 could be spent once or twice a month without issue.'

So almost without knowing it there's a pool of some billion dollars a month waiting to be skimmed by whatever technology finds its way the quickest.

We can call looking for a quick "hit" on a crowd as "crowd skimming."

Taking the financial cream off the top, or, more accurately, separating a fool from his money.

The only real question what does the "crowd" get in return?

Not much from a place like kickstarter...

Did I help the kid make his CD?

Sure... but what if he had to do the hard work himself to the get the money - clean toilets, flip burgers, etc. to save the money?  

Would his or her character benefit?  Would not the lesson of hard work translate into music?

(It seems to me that today most in music are unwilling to put in the real work required.  Does this help or hurt the situation?)

Will the kid just learn that overcoming the next financial hurdle is just a kickstarter video away?

Does this really help the kid or just make me feel better about myself?

And what about the trolls?  Judges don't like them for the same reasons...

The internet has exposed a vast new trove of "natural resource" - people's wallets.

When there's "gold in them' thare hills" the get rich quick crowd is soon to follow.