Reasons Unbeknownst

New Blog

2005-08-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

I bought unbeknownst.net last night. $24.95 and I own it until 2010. I've outgrown blogger.com and want to have more control over my site. I'm using WordPress which is free, open source blog software(PHP/MySQL) that's gaining popularity. My new blog is live but I haven't had time to create a new look just yet. I'm planning on moving my better posts over but I'll leave this blog alive and point it to my new home.
Check it out:
Unbeknownst.net

Nanotechnology = a $2,000 Annual Raise for everybody

2005-04-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

I'm piecing together this entry in my spare time. I'll factcheck/edit it in the near future...

Nano-technology is like artificial intelligence, a hollow buzzword that never seems to materialize. Things are starting to change. Toshiba has just figured out a way to make an extremely practical nano-battery that will affect just about everybody and potentially the future of the planet.

Toshiba's new battery is unique in that it can take an 80% charge in one minute. It's also smaller and lighter than the batteries of old so it can be used in cars.

"The efficiencies of good modern Otto-cycle engines range between 20 and 25 percent (in other words, only this percentage of the heat energy of the fuel is transformed into mechanical energy). "

75 to 80 percent of the gasoline we buy is wasted due to the inefficiencies of the internal combustion engine. The heat energy generated by our brakes is also wasted. If our cars could use that brake energy we could cut our gas consumption dramatically, especially in city driving(this is why hybrids get better mileage in cities). The only energy loss would be from rolling resistance from our tires and from wind resistance.

If this battery actually makes it to market in 2006 it could mean the end of gas stations as we know them. If it becomes possible to rapidly charge your car with an extension cord plugged into a standard outlet then we won't need gasoline.

"Electricity ranges from about 5 - 10 cents per kW, so a gallon of gas (more than $2) has as much energy as $1.65 - $3.30 of electricity."

At first glance it looks like gas power and wall power are the same price but gas engines are only 20% efficient so using a plug from the side of your house would be 5 times cheaper. ~~Double~~ that because the cars with these batteries will be able to use the engine for braking which at the same time recharges the engine. In other words your gas bill will soon be 10% of what it once was.

If we assume that the average American spends $25 a week or $1,300 a year then we will have an average disposable income increase of $1170 per driver. Thats like giving the majority of Americans a pretax raise of $2,000. Not to mention the reduction of pollution, noise or otherwise. This will be an even bigger boon in high tax countries like Europe because spending less, as opposed to getting cash in the mail, is tax free.

"for every $10/bbl rise in price overall GDP would be trimmed by 0.3%-0.5% over a year" So we can also expect the equivalent of a 90% or $40 drop in the price of a barrel of oil. That means GDP will grow by 1.2%-2.0% worldwide in a few short years. Inflation will decrease pretty dramatically and interest rates may remain low.

Article ToDo:
Do an inflation calculation
What percentage of oil is used for gasoline?
Oil price will drop if gas is a big portion of oil is used for gas. Lowering prices for oil needed for power plants.
Find efficiency of power plants.
Nuclear Power
Gas in Europe is $6.50/US gallon

Beisbol is Coming

2005-04-01T12:34:00.000-08:00

Baseball is back. Devoid of roids, vacant warning tracks abound. The name Randy Johnson still makes me laugh. Last year I had great field level seats at the new Petco Park, right above the opponent's dugout. My friend and I heckeled Randy for nine beer-filled innings, chants of "Raaaaannnnndaaalllllllllllllllll" seemed only to intensify his awkwardly disproportionate lust for victory. After nine innings of shutout pitching he relinquished the mound, pausing magestically, like an engorged giraffe after a meal of seemingly unreachable saplings, proud of the unusual name bestowed by his forebearers.

As he neared his congradulatory commrades in the duguout he lobbed the ball to an enraged Padre fan picture here. She quickly devoured the ball. Cubs fans have nothing on us.

The picture is from a best of 2004 photo gallery.

A new blog.

2005-03-31T12:32:00.000-08:00

I'm going to move my blog in the next week or so. Blogger.com is apparently abandonware in the eyes of Google. I'm probably going to host a site on my home laptop server here or possibly use Yahoo360 if it's up to snuff...

The Third Party

2005-03-29T11:55:00.000-08:00

Most people view the left and right as polar opposites. They see political worldview as the core of someone's beliefs, there is no lower denominator. It occured to me yesterday that the left and right really have a lot in common. The left finds comfort in a big government that ensures equality and justice. The right finds comfort in god and conservative moral standards. Both sides are willing to ignore reams of data; evolution/human nature on the right and economics on the left. The right believes in the science behind economic theory yet try to ban the theory of evolution. The left accepts the science behind evolution but denounces economic progress as a way to make the world better. Human nature is the lowest common denominator. Both sides just want hope and comfort, and that's exactly what their worldviews provide.

People choose not to face reality and maybe the world is better because of it. I'd hate to see what would become of the world if one day everybody just gave up hope. I'd hate to see what would become of the world if one day everybody just gave up hope. I see poor people buying lottery tickets every day at the local liquor store near my office. Maybe they've given up on a god who lets them suffer like they do but they don't lose hope, they just use the lottery to fill that need. Some don't have hope and use alcohol as an anesthetic. Hope is a good thing but could be a better thing if it didn't come at the expense of civil liberties or economic progress.

There is talk of a new moderate political party. I don't see it working unless it's compatible with hope and provides comfort. So how do you provide hope? Well if you take a scientific view of the world you realize that we have a lot of work to do. We're not created in God's image. That leaves a lot of room for improvement. Science has the potential to cure cancer and AIDS, end hunger, create a global society which might lead to peace. If that party used all of these breakthroughs as a marketing tool to explain that science is a pretty good way to figure out truth. Hope would slowly migrate from God to the lottery and then to the hope that we as individuals and as a whole can make the world better with scientific advances. I'm not talking about better Ipods. Social science, political science, economics, medicine, cognitive science - what makes us tick. Many of these areas are ignored because of biased but comfortable conflicting beliefs.

The left calls for a top-down approach to improving the world. The next big thing according to a lot of people is the grassroots or pro-am revolution. Journalism/Media will improve and hold polluters accountable. Monopolies based on distribution inefficiencies are crumbling due to the rise of the Internet as a nearly free way to do business. We'll still need an SEC and EPA but this self organizing grassroots regulation is probably going to do a much better job than a bureacracy. That's an idea Libertarians should be pushing.

In other news:

David Byrne of Talking Heads fame has a new radio station. Eclectic, kinda weird but good.
Jay Rosen has a great article on the future of the Newspaper business.
Michael Malone has a related article Farewell to Newspapers.
Mulder has a blog. No mention of Scully.

More Google Guessing

2005-03-27T17:38:00.000-08:00

I wrote about Google's purchase of "dark fiber", the unused super high speed connections that form the guts of the Internet. At the time nobody knew Google's motivation, the heart of the Internet is fast enough now. The last mile connections to the home are the limitation. During my last post I had an idea that might explain what Google is up to.

Distributed applications work on a common problem but live on separate computers. Two of the more famous examples are SETI@Home and Folding@Home. They can use your computer to tackle a small piece of a really hard problem like scanning radio signals for signs of life or simulating the movements of human protein. Millions of Internet connected computers when combined act as one big supercomputer. So what does that have to do with Google? Well for starters they embedded Folding@home in some copies of the Google Toolbar which has been installed on millions of computers to block popups and provide easy access to search features. Why? My theory is that they were trying to learn about distributed computing over the Internet and not being friendly to Folding@Home out of the goodness of their heart.

Google has a huge threat to its revenue because it is just software and not a lot of software at that. It happens to have a huge server farm which runs that software but here is the problem: Hardware gets cheaper and software gets Open Source. Google is rich because people trust them and their product is simple to use. Users are fickle. Users will use whatever their trusted tech friend suggests and those tech friends are increasingly fans of Open Source. Google's search algorithm is not open source.

Competition is a big problem for Google. Flickr is better than the Google image search and it may only be a matter of time before something beats their web search. A9 seems to have some ideas about how to do it. So like any rational investor Google is trying to diversify. Why dark fiber?

If you sell software and someone creates a free, open source version of it you will go out of business. If you sell hardware people can copy the design and manufacture it in a country with liberal intellectual property laws and undercut your prices because they didn't need and R&D budget. Google's purchase of Internet infrastructure might prevent the threat of open source software and the threat of cheap knock-off hardware. Basically I'm suggesting they're going to get into the router business. No government wants the infrastructure of the global economy(E-commerce, VOIP, email) running on cheap hardware and they probably also don't want that same infrastructure running on software whos potential flaws are available to "many eyeballs". Obscurity isn't a sound basis for security but Google could argue that diversity is one form of security. The SQL slammer worm flooded the Internet with traffic and shut down all sorts of services including ATMs. It had no effect on Linux or Mac machines, only Windows machines running certain database software.

Google could write an operating system dedicated to routing which wouldn't be vulnerable to flaws found in Linux or BSD based routers. They could install it on proprietary Google Routers which they'll use to turn their dark fiber into lit fiber. They might sell it to governments that wish to prevent terrorist attacks on the infrasturcture which would cause major economic damage. Maybe that's not so far fetched considering Bin Laden wants to attack ports to disturb commerce. If their next generation distributed search algorithm can take advantage of some proprietary technology that's built into their routers then they will have no competition.

The end of Google is Nigh!

2005-03-25T12:02:00.000-08:00

Nobody would argue that the Internet and its side effects (blogging, low transaction costs, transparency, accountability) are gimmicky fads destined to mimic pets.com and other dotcom disasters. I've been thinking about what these new realities mean for business and specifically one facet of business: Size.

If you look the music industry it's pretty clear that much of their power is the result of ownership of distribution channels which they've monopolized. The Internet has removed those distribution inefficiencies and lowered the barriers to entry. The eyeballs of a million web empowered musicians are staring, bemused at the guards to a castle with no walls*.

Large corporations are simply too big to keep pace with innovation so they become venture capital firms, acquiring small innovative startups like Flickr. Their only hope in the land of one man, open source innovation machines (BitTorrent) is that users of their new free services click on ads. Hard problems like poverty in Africa can't be solved by America because we can't just throw money at the problem. These impovershed nations are poor because of their corrupt leaders. Those so called leaders take our foreign aid and buy nice cars and boats. Real innovation is also a hard problem. Throwing a billion dollars at it doesn't work like it used to.

Google will soon die in my opinion because Meta-tagging is no longer just a buzzword. A formula dictates what you see in a Google search result page. Google has recently taken heat for including a neo-nazi "news" site in their GoogleNews search results. Pure technology has limitations. Free technology that turns our brains into the search algorithm is incompatible with the search business. Google figured out the longtail theory early and profited. Early mover advantage is however a relative flash in the pan unless you see a decade as a really long time. I'd even argue that early mover advantage is a sign of applied awareness not innovation. Google is using an old business model even though they're in the tech industry. Learning how to survive as a business when faced with an army of caffeine addicted, crustless sandwich fed, mom's basement jockeys who code for the love of it and don't charge a dime for their efforts, that's the trick.

At the emerging technology conference people were talking about the imporatnce of the "edge". The edge refers to anybody not between the producer and consumer, middlemen. Money could buy monopoly status in the past, Microsoft is a prime example. Monopolies were able to exist between "the edges" because insufficient technology and closed, defacto standards allowed them to. Times have changed. The people in the future with money will likely have actually earned it, that can't be a bad thing. If I'm not full of crap then bonds may be a damn good investment.

Next time: Desktop applications vs. Web apps.
The "server" is the distribution monopoly propping up sites like Google.

Freedom Blogger

2005-03-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

Cracked 300,000 visitors a couple days ago, mainly because of my Tsunami Torrent experiment, it's nice to see things settling down a little bit, there's a lot of pressure when that many people are reading.

A French blogger found one of my posts amusing and translated it to his native tongue. I'm posting the frenchi-fied version followed by an odd Babelfish translation back to English.

On tombe parfois sur des commentaires amusants sur les blogs remarquant avec consternation que Bill est tombé sur la tête. Un exemple :

Il y a une vieille histoire qui dit que le gamin qui casse des fenêtres de voitures la nuit pendant que ses voisins dorment est une bonne chose pour l'économie. Les fabricants de vitres de voitures font des affaires, des emplois sont créés, le PNB augmente, donc tout le monde y gagne, non ? Ca n'est bien sûr pas le cas, mais on dirait que c'est la logique que Gates utilise. Et pour cause, ça fait bientôt 20 ans qu'il casse ~~des fenêtres~~ Windows.

Here's the 3rd generation version in English

One falls sometimes on comments amusing on the blogs noticing with consternation that Bill fell on the head. An example :

There is an old history which says that the kid who breaks windows of cars the night while its neighbors sleep is a good thing for the economy. Do the manufacturers of panes of cars make deals, employment are created, the GNP increases, therefore everyone gains there, not ? Ca is not of course step the case, but it would be said that it is logic that Gates uses. And due, that made soon 20 years that it breaks ~~des fenÃªtres~~ Windows.

I just bought a supposedly amazing book on writing from Amazon. If my posts ~~get better~~ improve I'll post the title.

Venture Capital Funding for Geeks

2005-03-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

Here are my notes from the Venture Capital Funding for Geeks presentation at the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. It's'nt (why aren't double contractions allowed?) well formatted but it has lots of really interesting ideas. I thought I knew quite a bit about this topic before the conference but that wasn't the case. There was a venture capitalist in the audience who, during the Q&A, basically confirmed that the speaker hit the nail on the head.

VC Funding for geeks
Idea isn't as important as the group of people that you choose to work with.
Incorporate before going to the VC
hint at VC competition
VCs don't start new companies. Get customers first.
Angels , bank loans, govt grants.
Consulting to pay the bills.
Flickr grant funded.

Solution looking for a problem?

The best way to get vc funding is not to need it.
Don't stop calling them.

Popular Power. GlenGaryGlenRoss
Chicken/Egg VC TermSheet. Take good enough.
Don't change the idea based on the input.
Funding is a FullTime Job

10:1 pitch to term sheet.

3 term sheets per 1 financing

From pitch to term sheet two months, ten or more meetings

Term Sheet to money

Total time 6-12 months.

VCS are blogging- read them!

VC is a business too book: "No Exit: When Venture Capital isn't right" good blog too.

Funders != founders
investors != inventors

August and december - dead months
VC is a concensus business. September is a good month.

Need:
Powerpoint presentation, 10-15 slides no more!
Executive Summary, 2-3 pages
introduction to a vc.
Don't submit a biz plan only works with Angels.

On Pitches:
feld.com/blog
ventureblog.com - presenting your company

The technologist's trap
Do one slide about the product, the rest should be about the business. The business is as important as the idea.

Get slides online:
The Ten Day MBA.
Biz plans for dummies.

Patents:
Prior Art! Mail the idea to a lawyer.
Provisional Patent. 1 year Statute.

From the VC in the audience: Know your VCs. Personalities in the firm, etc.
Buy the book, MBA in 10 days.

MOBA

2005-03-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

The Museum of Bad Art has an online store, go figure. This should be in a Drugfree America ad campaign.

Blogging Live from ETech 2005 - Thursday

2005-03-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

I'm posting my thoughts live from the Emerging Technology Conference, updating through the day...

I'm watching Lessig talk about remixing. It's nice to finally see him live. "When the tools change, does the freedom change as well?" I think he's making the point that technology makes it easier to restrict the free flow of culture. Great 1984 reference, he's comparing the eyes from the book to technology today. More in a minute...

It's like the death of non-open source code that follows the endo of a company. He's worried that our kids won't be able to benefit form culture in the way people did before the corporations gained power.

He's calling for a techno-jihad, a civil war.

Doctrow is asking about the Creative Commons license. Lessig is explaining that there needs to be balance, both extremes are wrong.

Got a photo, it'll be up soon.

He's pushing for balance, he's not yet totally in agreement with RMS.

He wants a political movement, - shot at Jack Valenti.

WIPO - Using a wiki to gather ideas. CC-Wiki License introduced.

Doctrow - How?
Lessig - Democracy. See, motivate. Makes point about F911 but Moore gave the OK to share it online. Balance.

Verizon - Infrastructure, Philli!! question. Muni wireless, Port blocking. Powell busted them. Network Neutrality. "Layer2" is not powerful. Texas corporate crackdown. Powell Doctrine.

Derivatives License - CC Tested, Wayback machine - Copyright vs. Patent - Grey area, where does a copy end and a remix begin?

Software patents. EU he's arguing that the EU is faux democracy, the Russian side of European politics is too powerful.

Concept as Blogs
Links as Wikis

This is the guy doing the 3d scene camera. Laser Scanning, 1Million data points a second. Weird to see this working for real now. Wow! We've got to use this for trackbuilding in Motorsport.

Power at the edges

Emerging Massive Media BBC
Folksonomy

Anderson - Longtail
Savagely truncated
Tyranny of Choice - Due to lack of information. Maybe that's what google answers are looking to address. 411 specialists, turnaroud. Same with google advertizing.
Custom Streams, not mass markets.
Filters to get the crap out of the tail.
-Six research projects - how does the tail affect the head?
Inverse, time is the distribution bottleneck.
-Fractals??!!
Minitails, hit amplification, the tail is made up of mini-tails. Contradiction?
-Price elasticity - Botique products cost more. Fixed cost.
-Difference between comodification, pyramid and the long tail
-Secondary markets - Used goods, Gray Goods, Overstock Goods
-Watching Lessig watch Anderson, I wonder if this is the first time he's heard about this.
-Waste transistors then, waste storage, bandwidth now.

Excite former exec, Jotspot - this is a good idea, software longtail. Excel for example. VC's are "freaked out" about it. Leverage existing longtail infrastructure!

Blogging from ETech 2005 - My first billionaire sighting

2005-03-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

I'm in a ballroom at the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Crazy thing, I just walked around a corner and was standing face to face with Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) in a hallway. He looked me right in the eye (he's worth about $2.4 billion per eye). He was talking about how RSS had surprised a lot of people. I was going to make a joke about how his one click shopping "patent" has nearly bankrupted me but thought wiser. It's Nerdtopia. I didn't bring a camera but I will tomorrow, I seriously feel like a kid at Disneyland right now.

Update: A speaker from MIT went online and found the genetic sequence of Smallpox and pasted it into a form field on a website by a company that makes DNA to order. Everybody in the audience was sorta freaked out but he said there are measures in place to prevent what that from happeneing. He also explained how DNA is sloppy and redundant, took a jab a creationists. I wish I had a camera, students at MIT created a glob of bacteria that spelled "Hello World" which got an applause out of the audience as that's typically the first thing you learn to do in computer programming.

Nokia had an interesting presentation but the speakers were a little nervous. They did a nice little crowd pleasing demo, an automated contact send feature that works by proximity. Someone astutely pointed out that there could be privacy concerns in a subway.

There was a really good energetic atmosphere there (free Starbucks probably didn't hurt), lots of foreign accents and journalists. Everybody had their laptops and there was a weird sound I've never heard before, 100s of laptop keyboards clicking in unison. It sounded a little like a flock of pigeons taking flight.

Non-MarketSpeak-Synergy

2005-03-09T11:47:00.000-08:00

So I was trying to put into words this idea of open source 2.0. Big things made possible by the maturation of a lot of little things and found a great post referenced by blogdex.

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
and JavaScript binding everything together.

If you skipped over the techno speak it just means that you don't have to wait for things to finish before continuing to navigate the site. The result is things like the new Google Maps project. This link shows a map of my cross street. The neat thing here is that you can drag the map around like you can a window on your desktop. I used to refer to this as Open Source Middleware but it's bigger than that. It's the end result of digital technology and standards. Standards are finally coming together enough to see it happen.

Aha Moment, Tax idea

2005-03-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

Longtail V. Lessig - I figured out what I couldn't before. This quote sums it up.
"What's changed is the presumption that the primary rights-holder is the best at extracting the commercial potential of creative material. Instead, anyone can do it: the advertising company that remixes an old movie to sell a car; the Linux t-shirt done Warhol-style, or just plain old DJ magic. "
What an idea. It's a good argument against the extension of copyright terms or at least against the automatic extension. I wonder if Lessig used the Longtail in his Supreme Court battle vs. Ashcroft. Here's an idea, works are copyrighted automatically just as they are now but after 10 years or so you have to renew that copyright. It should be made a simple process.

Cash Registers and Space Ships - Progressive Consumption Taxes
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0308/p01s03-woeu.html
The following argument is based on the fact that cash registers now have more processing power than the Apollo space program which managed to land on the moon. http://www.jimthompson.net/palmpda/Silly/power.htm Flat taxes are successful but problematic because of a wealth divide that ensues. If a cheap point of sales device was created that could do slightly harder math so that more expensive items are taxed at a higher rate then a flat(ish) tax could be adopted in America. The only problem is that everybody would need to upgrade their point of sale devices. The government could temporarily subsidize the manufacturers of those devices to make their use a reality. Maybe 3 classes of items could be created. Cigarettes and booze could be taxed at a higher rate as they are now but you could also create a bare necessities category for things like food, water, toothbrushes, cleaning supplies and other household necessities which would carry little or no tax. You'd also keep the luxury tax for things like caviar and Bugattis but everything else would be subject to the default tax.

Next time
UofSA - Countries as Colleges - Countries will recruit top prospects.
Glen Reynolds on Satellite TV in the middle east.

God I Love Open Source

2005-03-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

Last night I sent an email to an Italian software engineer. I asked him to attempt to write a virus scanner plugin for Thunderbird, the premier open source email client. He agreed.

So if my idea pans out you would be able to download Thunderbird and ClamWin Antivirus, (both are free) and all incoming emails would be disinfected automatically. Clamwin and Thunderbird are not currently compatible, Clamwin will quarantine your entire inbox if one message is infected.

The raw efficiency of the process is what struck me. I emailed this guy in Italy on a whim, proposed an idea, offered him a few dollars and got a response within a few hours. No lawyers in sight, no negotiations with the developers of ClamWin or Thunderbird, no haggling over intellectual property rights; just code that I can put on the computers we donate to schools and foster families to make their lives a little less frustrating. And of course if this plan bears fruit, you or anybody else in the world can make use of it. It's a beautiful thing. Benkler's and Lessig's ideas are starting to gel in my mind. If I were a philanthropist I'd find little open source projects that need a little inertia and get things moving. It's longtail economics applied to charity. Here's a weird idea: Philanthropy, venture capital for an open source world.

I think it's a sign that open source is maturing. The archipelago of little projects that comprise the open source movement are beginning to connect in weird and useful ways. Web 2.0 is used to describe the applications built on the Internet standards that have emerged over the last decade or so. The brain runs much slower than a computer chip but R2D2 remains science fiction because we're enabled by the connections between lots of relatively simple neurons. People wonder why this post dot bomb Internet revival took so long. If open source is following the same path then it would appear that a 2nd open source boom is about to emerge from the maturing simple pieces of the open source landscape that are starting to connect. This is the definition of emergence, for me it's the closest thing I've found to a scientific religion.

Here's a tweaked quote from wikipedia:
"According to an emergent perspective, intelligence(high quality, interoperable global software framework) emerges from the connections between neurons(smaller applications), and from this perspective it is not necessary to propose a "soul"(mega-corporation/government) to account for the fact that brains(the Internet+MIPS) can be intelligent(intelligent?)."

Next Time: Space ships and cash registers

This is your brain on drugs...

2005-03-03T17:21:00.000-08:00

Click the photo for the guy's Flickr site. Wonders never cease.

States Writes

2005-03-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

So somehow I made in on to States Writes: the Progressives' Peer Directory from the American Street. I'm listed along with 50 other bloggers from California including the Daily Cos and Dan Gillmor's site. That's all well and good (and flattering) but I don't consider myself any more left than right. The inner turmoil is unbearable, I can't stand Limbaugh but I think high taxes harm the lower class. Luckily I get to focus on technology for the next couple of weeks.

I have so much going on right now, most of it good but my brain is pulling a French labor union, it wants a 35 hour work week. I was in an nameless, faceless office building today (not my employer's thank god) the size of a football field. I'm just tall enough to see over the cubicles and I was half expecting to bump into Dilbert or Lumbergh, didn't spot any red swinglines. A guy was sitting in his cube, moderately pudgy, leaning back far enough that he could operate his mouse but not his keyboard. He looked like the guy in Alien who was still alive but condemned to an agonizing death by a parasitic creature. Maybe he had the pinkslip virus.

Utopian Infection

2005-03-01T15:53:00.000-08:00

Well it couldn't last forever. Two of my favorite idea people have seemingly contradictory ideas. The good news? I get to harass both of them at the Emerging Technology Conference in two weeks. In fact, I'm going to email Lessig and see if he'll agree to sneak into Chris Anderson's presentation. I have a spare sombrero that might come in handy.

Here's the crux of the contradiction:

In Free Culture, Lessig writes (page 225):
Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright creates incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that tiny fraction, the copyright acts as an “engine of free expression.”

But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short. As I’ve indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.

Contrast that with The Long Tail:

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

Part of the solution, Anderson argues, is a renouncement of copyright in favor of things like the Creative Commons license. I still haven't figured out the rest of his argument and even he admits "We don't yet know how the money will eventually flow through this collaborative network." I find these ideas more interesting than just about anything I've ever come across but they're horribly complicated. Maybe that's why I like computers.

Grassroots Journalism and the Nature of the Media Conglomerate

2005-02-24T15:39:00.001-08:00

If open source is better than capitalism at creating software (even the US govenment says so) and software and journalism have a lot in common which seems to be the case then Yochai Benkler's arguments(pdf) in favor of the economics of open source should also apply to the econmics of grassroots vs. mainstream journalism.

So with that in mind what conclusions can be drawn from Benkler's essay? I'm working on pulling and modifying some choice quotes. Post might slow down this coming week, the un-official craziest week of my life.

EDIT: Three beers later Kirk returned to his laptop; determined to draw some charcoal conclusions. So there are ideas that matter and then there are ideas that matter that nobody wants to think about. The latter category includes things like the singularity. It would be a world changing event and most rational thinkers agree that it is eventually inevitable but there is nothing to write about. It is chaos theory squashed into an hour and a half. I added some names to my link column on the right but I just don't have time to link to their sites.

I just got the OK to go to the Emerging Technology Conference and my employer is footing the bill. That I get to meet the people that I really believe are going to change the world (for the better) is something I find hard to belive. I wish I could plug my employer but people get fired for their blogs and I'd prefer to avoid that, needless to say not all Fortune 500 companies are evil.

I left a comment on one of my favourite websites and received an interesting response. I asked "How can France, Germany, etc. not understand that high taxes are bad for growth? It really isn't very complicated. Do they refuse free markets because they just hate America and are willing to suffer as long as they don't have to admit we might be on to something?"

And the reply, which I probably should have realized:
"They have free markets (insofar as any nation does). The problem (as you mention) is that they also have excessively high taxes. And here the problem is (awkward to say it!) democracy: the citizens will vote out any government that threatens its benefits."

And what a great point it is. So in 100 years people will look back at those that promised easy retirements and 35 hour work weeks as the destroyers of a large part of Western society. Democracy and Socialism are a dangerous mix.

I wrote about relativity a while ago. Relative to Communism and Totalitarianism, Democracy/Capitalism looks frikken genius. Parecon is the best alternative we've seen and it has been labeled Socialism 2.0. It boggles my mind. These systems are really brilliantly thought out, nobody would say that Marx was intellectually challenged but... the thought is infected with utopian idealism. What a waste that these great thinkers build an elaborate framework of ideas on a faulty foundation. Maybe that's why I like science, open source and alternative media. There is no tolerance for weak foundations.

Ubiquitous Servers

2005-02-22T12:24:00.000-08:00

My random thought from the last post got me thinking; PCs are now ridiculously inexpensive relative to their cost only a few years ago but... they're still big and noisy. "Always on" is a phrase used to describe broadband almost as frequently as terms like "high-speed". Most people that hear about IBM servers in ads think servers are entirely different beasts than their humble home PCs but that's not the case. Servers just run different software and are more reliable they're also always on.

So who cares? A lot of people leave on their home PCs all the time anyway. Well with a little magical techno-tomfoolery that PC could become a web server(think blog), email server and web-calendar, an in home music server, wireless access point, home security device(webcam), robotic pet feeding device, podcast server, firewall, and home entertainment server with DVD (plugged into a HDTV). Right now you need a fairly strong technical background to get something like this up and running (I'm going to try at my new house in about a month) but it's not impossible by any stretch.

When someone puts this all in a little box that runs quietly and costs less than a couple hundred dollars AND is really easy to setup and configure, crazy things will begin to happen. The major issue right now is that a static IP costs a bit more money than the typical broadband connections but IPV6 and DynDNS should solve that problem.

Right now a lot of companies are releasing crippled open source versions of their premium products to gain publicity but there is a huge risk that the community will fork the project and add improvements available in the commercial versions. It would be legal too. Software is becomming a commodity so businesses are selling new features and services to make a living in the Open Source software industry. I get the feeling that ubiquitous broadband, cheap storage and reliable distributed networks (bittorrent) are squashing even those niches. Maybe offsite backup for these increasingly complex home servers will be the last bastion of profitable IT in a few years. Then that'll go away when someone invents encrypted distributed file systems running in a RAID 1+ array so all of your close family and friends can participate in the offsite backup of your family photos and other data.

Then... all of us techies will be forced to come out of our caves and solve problems that really need solving like Open Source/Creative Commons licensed education for developing countries. I believe in accelerating change and I think things will be much different, mainly for the better in five years.

Some relevant links:Epiacenter
linITX.org
LinuxDevices

Municipal Wifi - random thoughts

2005-02-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

I don't have time write the 8 page article I'd like to so here's a brain dump that I'll expand on when I find a minute...

There are heated debates surrounding the Philidelphia Wifi project, big government vs. free markets.

I like to think that the Internet is analogous to the early Interstate Highway system. Dwight Eisenhower and South Korea, peas in a pod.

How did Korea get to where it is? A recent study on Korea’s broadband leadership conducted by Britain’s Brunel University cited “pricing, infrastructure, demographics, geography, deregulation and clear user benefits”

http://www.chiefexecutive.net/depts/technology/197a.htm

"Chin says government policies aimed at improving the country’s telecom infrastructure and fast-paced telecom deregulation in the ’90s helped facilitate the journey. Some factors, however, are unique to Korea or Asia. The Brunel study cited the fact that 65 percent of Koreans live in clusters of high-rise apartment buildings, which makes it easier to roll out ultrafast VDSL broadband."

Random idea:
There are hundreds of versions of the Open Source Linux operating system. They are all designed to work with all sorts of hardware and so have complicated systems in place to detect and configure anything thrown at it with success is of varying degrees. My idea - create a linux distribution designed to work with a given set of hardware (mini-itx) which would act as a home router, firewall, Windows compatible file server, wireless access point and optionally as an email/web server. Configuration information would be stored on a cheap USB memory stick (check that, 2 USB memory sticks in a RAID 1 array). It would boot from a liveCD not the harddrive. Upgrades would be provieded in the form of new bootable CDs (ISOs) which would be backwards compatible with the information on the USB stick. The external HDD would be optional as all config data would be on the usb memory stick.

More on the weird hobby...

2005-02-16T20:04:00.000-08:00

Our simulator now has support for multiple cars and tracks. This stunt track was donated by a friend of a developer which we'll use to test the suspension and physics. It's a bit bumpy in places so I raised the suspension to prevent it from bottoming out. I'm fiddling around with engine friction values to try to eek out some more realism before we release it to the public. Modelling a differential is a horrifically difficult task which I'm leaving to others. It's tricky, the car rolls over and crashes realistically but if the tire model, suspension or drivetrain are a little bit off it makes driving very difficult.

Make Love Not War

2005-02-14T10:46:00.000-08:00

"...scientists considered developing a chemical weapon with aphrodisiac qualities that would make enemy soldiers hopelessly, physically attractive to one another so as to paralyze their ranks and destroy morale. The plan was unearthed by a government watchdog group that said it was just the tip of the iceberg of covert chemical and biological programs in the U.S military." Link

It's good to know there are a few romantics left at the pentagon.

DeFringification

2005-02-11T10:59:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of technologies that are hyped up that never materialize. Flying cars, HAL 9000, etc. and we're now hyping new things like nano-technology, stem cells, transhumanism and HAL 2035. The technological singularity is "a predicted point in the development of a civilization at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict." We create better computers which lead to advances in medical imaging, airplane design, materials science etc. The argument is that the synergy is exponential, these improvements bounce around inside the realm of technology in a sort of chain reaction. The computer designed materials are used to make better microprocessors and the loop grows stronger. This is known as the "Law of Accelerating Returns".

The trickle down theory of economics asserts that the wealthy are better able to create progress and therefore lower taxes on them will benefit all members of society in the long run. The new initiative to introduce $100 laptops in 3rd world countries has similar roots; the theory being that sufficient number of smart people connected to the Internet are better able to create progress than an overfunded minority. India has one billion citizens 70% of which live in villages. 700 million people with no access to the information on the Internet. Brilliant minds languishing on small farms, minds that could develop cures for diseases, create new art or maybe even design the elusive flying car... The chart is there as an example of the untapped potential that's about to be unleashed upon the world.

"The whole class of a village school has traveled to this city stadium by bus for a great adventure - the chance to see for the first time something most of us already take for granted - a computer. The boys were jumping up and down and shrieking with excitement, despite the blazing sunshine. Their clothing was worn, many were barefoot."

I think the big overlooked part of the singularity is the awareness that as soon as computers become a little more affordable they'll flood into those villages and hoe wielding would-be Einsteins will take note. $5 billion spent on AIDS research is a commendable expenditure. $5 billion spent on connecting millions of minds to the internet and the resultant potential benefits to open source software and it's effects on productivity are possibly even more likely to lead to advances that cure AIDS.

Open source software will be huge not because it is inexpensive but because it favors open standards. Think railways with different track gauges. IT careers consist mainly of fixing problems due to poorly designed software and learning new and varied systems because of the lack of standards. Open source is changing that hence the recent decline in IT salaries. It's ironic that IT as a profession has a cloudy future not because things change but because they're becoming standardized. That standardization allows the development of automation. Proprietary de-facto standards(Windows/MS Office) aren't going to fly in developing countries as evidenced by the use of Linux on the $100 laptop. 2010 could be interesting.

More on the Simulator

2005-02-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

Here's the first image from our simulator that shows the real potential of the graphics engine. The texture for the road isn't very high quality but the lighting on the parking garage (which you can park in) is all done in real time which is usually avoided because it requires a fast computer.

If you focus on the pillars holding up the garage you can see the shadows being cast and how the interior supports are completely shadowed while the outermost pillars are not. The way this usually works is by choosing a time of day and just painting the shadows on the parking stucture which is much easier for the computer. The problem with that technique is that when the sun sets you have the same shadows on the buildings as you did at 2PM.

The benefit of not taking shortcuts is that a) we don't have to hand paint shadows onto everything and b) we can move the sun across the sky easily to simulate atmospheric effects and even create a race that transitions from day to night. The first real release of the simulator is probably less than a month away, I'm going to document the progress here as a sort of time capsule for future reference.

Sunrise in a Computer

2005-02-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

So I've been a little obsessed with the driving simulator lately. We got the first track working today, just some dirt hills but it's a major step. You can move the sun across the sky and the hills cast shadows on themselves and on the car. In this picture the sun is very near the horizon which is why it's dark and why you can see the shadow from the wheel rims next to the car. I'm having a guy build my dream car, the Porsche 917 so I can put it in the game and drive around a virtual version.

I've been wrong about a lot of things in the past but I think this driving game has a lot of potential. The best case scenario is as follows. Because it's free, our simulator is downloaded by countless car nuts over the Internet (we're somewhere around 5,000 downloads right now). People begin to understand the benefits of Open Source software because our game is something tangible unlike the less than mainstream Linux or Apache.

My deep seated love for Open Source thinking is based, oddly enough, on the belief that it is good for capitalism. Yes, if our simulator is popular it will probably prevent development of commercial simulators. Then again, all of those smart people that have been re-inventing the wheel, no pun, for the last 15 years can move on to projects that push the envelope in areas neglected by open source developers.

Robots and open source are both driving automation. Automation leads to efficiency which leads to a growing wealth divide but more importantly to more average wealth. Of course with more wealth you have more tax revenue which if redistributed correctly (healthcare?) leads to a higher standard of living for the median citizen.

Chuck Wood - Lumberjack

2005-02-03T15:47:00.000-08:00

Some guy scanned a chainsaw manual and uploaded it to his website. The software allows captions to be added which I couldn't resist... Check out my version here.

Sunrise in Iraq

2005-01-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

Five minutes until polls open in Iraq. Regardless of how much you may or may not hate Bush and this war you have to admit that this is a big day for democracy. I read in Foreign Affairs that the Saudi government is much more progressive and tolerant than its people. Democracy would possibly lead to even fewer rights for the people. Many of the quotes about democracy refer to the fact that an informed populace is a requirement for a successful democracy. On that note, the first quote below is from an Iraqi blogger. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine has more links to more Iraqi bloggers here.

UPDATE: Looks like the first bombs are going off. They really need to figure out a way to allow online voting. I don't think many insurgents know how to write a computer virus.

"Tomorrow as I cast my vote, I'll regain my home. I'll regain my humanity and my dignity, as I stand and fulfill part of my responsibilities to this part of the large brotherhood of humanity. Tomorrow I'll say I'M IRAQI AND I'M PROUD, as being Iraqi this time bears a different meaning in my mind. It's being an active and good part of humanity. Tomorrow I and the Iraqis that are going to vote will rule, not the politicians we're going to vote for, as it's our decision and they'll work for us this time and if we don't like them we'll kick them out! Tomorrow my heart will race my hand to the box. Tomorrow I'll race even the sun to the voting centre, my Ka'aba and my Mecca. I'm so excited and so happy that I can't even feel the fear I though I would have at this time. I can't wait until tomorrow."
Ali

"Voting is one of the few things where boycotting in protest clearly makes the problem worse rather than better."
Jane Auer

"I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master."
Thomas Jefferson

"The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld."
Dorothy Thompson

"The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular."
Ghandi

"In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival."
Noam Chomsky

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
Voltaire

"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann Goering

"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time."
E.B. White

"... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
Alex Carey

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."
Aristotle

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
C.S. Lewis

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

Driving Simulator Update

2005-01-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

Lots of interesting things happening with the driving simulator these days. It turns out that the problems I was having with shadows was the result of a bug in the graphics engine we're using. We applied the patch and now our little project is starting to look a lot like a big budget game. We're using fairly low resolution textures for the mountains in the background but those will be upgraded soon.

If you have a Mac and want to help out leave a comment. Our code should work on a Mac in theory but we've yet to try it out. In case you're new to my blog I'm working on a driving simulator project with some gearheads from around the world. In fact, most of our team is outside of the US. We're all doing it for fun in our spare time and relasing it as Open Source software which means it's a free download. Right now it's not much to look at, you can drive around on a big parking lot and flip over the car but we'll eventually have online racing enabled as well as AI. For more info you can check out our website at motorsport-sim.org.

Copyright vs. History

2005-01-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

An interesting act of civil disobedience is happening in the form of a re-release of Eyes on the Prize, arguably the most important civil rights documentary ever made. A quote from Wired:

"Old VHS tapes that remain in schools and libraries were the only way to view the landmark series, until now. Downhill Battle enlisted the help of a group called Common Sense Releasers to digitize the series and convert it to MPEG-4 format for distribution on the internet. The group hopes people will organize community screenings of the series around the country."

You can read more about it at Wired or at the project homepage. I worked with the DownHill Battle guys who helped with the release of the Tsunami Videos which also use BlogTorrent. They really know their stuff. It's amazing what can happen when a group with a cause also happens to know how to write software. The fact that someone is breaking the law if they download this and show it to their kids seems fundamentally flawed to me. If you're feeling dangerous, grab the film here. They've done a good job with the server, I heard from a friend that you can download it at 400kB/s right now, not too shabby.

Documentaries should be released to the public domain after fewer years than a typical film in my opinion. Especially if the owners are unwilling to re-release it for the public good. There are signs of hope. The US Copyright Office is attempting to address this issue and is requesting your input

The Copyright Office seeks to examine the issues raised by ``orphan works,'' i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public. This notice requests written comments from all interested parties. Specifically, the Office is seeking comments on whether there are compelling concerns raised by orphan works that merit a legislative, regulatory or other solution, and what type of solution could effectively address these concerns without conflicting with the legitimate interests of authors and right holders.

Read the whole thing here.

Update: I'm going to pull the old Blogger vs. Mainstream Media thing. The Wired article isn't technically accurate. You can buy Eyes on the Prize here for $775. It wasn't hard to find either. The fact that it's VHS only (and expensive) restricts its availability to some degree but it's a tough call saying that it should be totally free. Should all films with historical value that are only available on VHS be pirated? If the owners are smart they will re-release the documetary on DVD due to the free publicity generated by DownHill Battle and everybody will be happy.

Time is money...

2005-01-25T18:10:00.000-08:00

... and my watch is homeless. I've got a ton of ideas for things I want to write about, must.. find.. time... The sunset is from another San Diego blogger. Check out her site here. It doesn't suck to live here I suppose.

Thinking of trying to create a little Internet radio broadcast with all of this new technology that's coming out. It's changing so fast that I could literally sit here 24 hours a day and not run out of interesting things to read about. Currently listening to a guy with an Internet radio show in Cardiff, my home town. He's one of a handful of SD podcasters. That won't be the case for long.

A really interesting poor man's Ipod is available for $25. The unique thing here is that he actually installs an application and sets it up to autorun - like a CD does - when you plug it in. There is a great writeup on it here. Or if you'd prefer, listen to it here. You can listen because he's podcasting, I'm chipping away at an article on Podcasting. Stay tuned.

The fish was emailed to me by a friend. Apparently it was washed ashore during the tsunami. Unique looking beast.

Podcasting, I-Tunes, Grey Album

2005-01-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

I'm writing a piece on Podcasting. It's basically a marriage of radio and Tivo on the 'net. I'll try to get it up sometime early this week.

For the love of god, if you're using Windows Media Player, please consider ITunes for managing your music library. I don't say that because I hate Microsoft or because Apple stuff is ooober hip. The software is simply better. For instance, Quicktime/Itunes supports Mpeg4 video and Internet radio playlists - like Winamp used to. I'm a fan of ease of use and good user interface design, it's got my vote. Grab 'em here.

Now that that's out of the way why not watch the Public Domain movie Santa Claus Conquerors the Martians. It's Campy like The Gap but even more affordable.

If that's not your style check out the Grey Album by DJ DangerMouse. From the Rolling Stone review:
" It's the ultimate remix record: Underground DJ Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton) takes a cappella tracks from Jay-Z's The Black Album and composes new beats for each song using only samples from the Beatles' "White Album." The result, the aptly titled Grey Album, is an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time."
It's kind of strange that the album is illegal. Books of the past were burned because of their morally corrupt fiber, in the future it seems books will be burned because of copyright excesses.

Media Conspiracy Theory

2005-01-21T18:32:00.000-08:00

Tsunami Videos here.

Some facts then some predictions:
The DRM enabled Cell processor from IBM will be inside the PS3.

DivX allows levels of compression which will in turn allow cheap video distribution over the Net.

Cable set top boxes will move to the Cell processor (my Pioneer HDTV set top box is currently too slow to render the channel guide effectively)

Google is snatching up dark fiber for unknown reasons. A Slashdot quote:
"You can lease dark fiber from a telco... I worked for a company that did it for a short while...
There's probably 100* more dark fiber than lit fiber in the world - when they're putting it down it's dirt cheap to put a few more bundles in. You can get it pretty much anywhere to anywhere (where there's some kind of physical link anyway)."
Maybe Google is thinking that instead of the typical "distribution sky is falling" theories that the demand for content in the near future is underestimated (maybe they read the longtail blog) and that the distribution monopoly of the future will be in fiber optics.
"If Google were to build its own global or national fibre network, the project would likely cost billions of dollars and take years to implement, an investment that would be hard to justify based on the networking needs of most companies. Renting "lit" fibre from carriers is generally a cheaper, and therefore preferred, way to go."
That quote is the current (I'd argue short term) thinking.

I was setting up a content filtering device for schools at the Cox data center and saw the Video on Demand server during an impromptu tour. It's a fairly small (3' high) RAID array considering what it does. Time Warner now has a channel that lets me rent High Definition movies on demand which begs the question: Why do I need a $600 next gen Blu-Ray DVD player if I can just use Video On-Demand and get it over the net? This is different from previous "next big thing"s because it's so damn easy to use.

Pretty much any content will be available at any time and the expense will be lower thanks to better distribution technology and economies of scale from the long tail. The Cell Processor, DRM and things like fiber to the home will also bring down prices. So the question is then how to make money in the media business if you don't own content. My guess is search, filtering, all the fancy new ideas happening with metatagging and blogs except applied to High Definition 1080p video over the net, content journalism. If that's the case then Google's mysterious dark fiber acquisitions and their purchase of Blogger.com starts to make a lot of sense.

Flu = Crazy Dreams

2005-01-19T23:31:00.000-08:00

I've got the flu which lead to some fairly interesting dreams. One was about dropping Ipods on Iraq. Finger muscles hurt... back later...

Blog Photog

2005-01-11T14:19:00.000-08:00

I'm having my photos taken right now for an article in a local magazine about bloggers. I'm trying to look natural so I'm writing in my blog of course. The guy is right next to me with a fancy looking camera with a detachable flash and a light meter. The goal here is to look natural, easier said than done. The lights are off, he's using the glow from my LCD to create the geek ambiance. I laughed and he pounced, snapping a bunch in rapid succession, interesting experience.

I'm migrating my blog to the highly acclaimed but non-free TypePad. Check it out here.

Emerging Technology Conference

2005-01-10T14:11:00.000-08:00

The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference is coming to San Diego and I'm going. Some of my favorite mentally endowed nerds are going to be there... Lessig, Anderson, etc. I'll be keeping you all posted in the spirit of citizen journalism, possibly even moblogging, from the conference. Unfortunately they prohibit the recording of video or audio but I'll be taking a lot of notes. I've been thinking a lot about these topics lately but haven't had time to put my thoughts down in a coherent form on my blog yet. In the mean time check out the following article and movies. If you're interested in culture or the economy they're worth the time...

The Long Tail
"Forget macroeconomics. While you're at it, forget microeconomics, too. The really interesting new work is in nanoeconomics, or economic behavior in markets of a million niches far down the long tail of demand. From Pareto distributions to the rise of secondary markets, the ability to find big businesses in small sums is casting a new light on the dismal science."

Lawrence Lessig Speech (.wmv video file)
Explains his take on culture and common assumptions that we shouldn't be making. Website here.

Mixter is a great site with really good free music, no really... Here's a remixed song I found on it. Yes, it's legal.
And finally, a movie about the emergence of the Creative Commons license in Brazil.

My co-worker has been sick for the last week so I've been teaching his class. I did a nonpartisan brain dump of everything I know about economics, technology, culture, etc. to the kids on a big whiteboard with a bunch of blobs, arrows and colored pens. One of them said "Nobody has ever explained it to me like that before." It was sorta nice, makes me want to be a teacher.

The above creative commons licensed photo made me think about parking enforcement robots of the future. That will be their face (I added the red dot in the O for effect). It's the best way I can explain what the Creative Commons license allows. The song above was remixed into something new becuase of the less restrictive license placed on it. I modified the CC licensed photo above, legally, to get an idea across. This was of course all illegal under copyright law until fairly recently.

Gates, the new McCarthy

2005-01-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

Tsunami Post HERE

Bill Gates has claimed that Free Culture advocates are commies. For an explanation of why he's horribly mistaken, read on. Joe McCarthy preyed on the fears of Americans to create a sort of mass hysteria during the cold war leading to his downfall. If you look up demagogue in the dictionary there is no picture of McCarthy but you will find the following quote. "A consummate demagogue, McCarthy played upon cold war emotions and made charges so fantastic that frightened people believed the worst."
In a McCarthyesque interview with CNET Bill Gates said
"I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."

Unfortunately Bill hadn't done his homework. Lawrence Lessig is the de facto leader of the free culture movement. The uninformed (Gates') assumption is that he's a left wing fanatic, looking to rid the world of intellectual property. If you dig a little deeper you find that he's not anti-IP, in fact he wants to make the system more efficient. The former head of the RIAA (the recording industry's knee breakers) even softened up to him after a debate.

There is an old tounge in cheek argument that the kid that bashes car windows while his neighbors sleep is a good thing for the economy. He creates business for the window repair people, jobs are created, GDP goes up, everybody wins? Obviously that's not the case but that appears to be the logic Gates is using. In fact, he's been breaking Windows for nearly two decades.

Malpractice Insanity

2005-01-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

Tsunami Post is HERE

I used to think that nationalized healthcare was financially logical based on the numbers showing our health care costs compared to European and other nations as a percentage of GDP, 15% in America vs 10% in Canada.. A couple of months ago I realized that the problem wasn't with failings of the free market, it's a failure of the judicial system that allows frivolous and massive payouts which leads to ridiuclous malpractice insurance premiums for hospitals/doctors.
A quote:
"But the lawyers who win those awards for malpractice victims and other opponents of Bush’s initiative say the real problem is insurers who look to raise premiums and, consequently, their bottom line."

It's amazing to me that people still use that argument. The last time I checked there was more than one insurance company in America. That means that like any other business if you jack up rates too high people with flock to the competition. So the implication is that there is a malpractice insurance monopoly yet I haven't heard any Democrats complaining about this implied monopoly. In fact a Google search for malpractice insurance monopoly returns all of two results.

You can't put a price on someone's life. Doctors are only human, they make mistakes too. A 15Billion dollar payment for a family victimized by malpractice isn't sufficient if you consider life priceless. We know life is worth more than money but we have to put a price on it. Not only that but that price can't be detrimental to the rest of society. I've heard arguments about how healthcare should be a right. It is a right in America right now. You can walk into an Emergency room if you're really desparate and legally you can not be turned away. For the rest of us though, the free market is a healthy alternative.

So my thinking goes like this: Malpractice frivolity is fixed - health insurance premiums drop dramatically - disposable income for all Americans increases - that income is spent on innovative new things - the economy benefits - tax revenues increase - we're able to use some of the newfound wealth to pay for new clinics for the needy - everybody wins.

EDIT: Someone left an interesting comment, here's my updated thinking.

I appear to have learned something. 'pubs are blaming malpractice. Dem's are blaming greedy corporations. I'm going to blame nobody, technically I'm blaming the baby boom demographic shift and a newfound ability to make cheap unhealthy food which leads to the counterintuitive rise in lower class obesity.

Lots of Eyeballs

2005-01-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for the tsunami videos check out my last post here.

Well my guess was right. BlogTorrent became the number one way to download the tsunami videos from the Internet resulting in over 100,000 visitors to my blog over the last week. I took down all of my blog images because my server wasn't able to cope. They'll be back in a week or so when things return to normal. There is a buzz in the air about blogging these days, probably due to the Pew Internet and Family Life Project poll. A quick Google News search for blog returned 3,920 results. In fact, TechCentralStation now has an entire section devoted to the blogoshphere.

A bunch of you have been checking out my profile so I've decided to link to my favorite posts about various topics below and took some time to summarize my thoughts on some topics beneath these links.

My thoughts:
For Love of Monkey
Modern Living
Driving Fast and Mortality
The Big Bang
The Media
Standards v. Choice
Artificial Intelligence
Cavemen and the Baby Bust
Necessary Demagoguery
Democracy, Marriage, Human Nature
My Ideal Retirement Situation
The Nuclear Family
Noam Chomsky Answers my Question
God, Coffee, Japanese Warlords
The Driving Simulator
Robots vs Striking Workers -- Woody Allen vs Brad Pitt

Basically my thinking boils down to the following:

Why I Write: It occured to me a few months ago that I write to sort out my thoughts. I learn more when I write than I would if I simply read something and moved on. Hopefully some of you will supply my impressionable 26 year old brain with feedback so I can learn something and write better articles.

Economics: Raising taxes to help the poor is counterproductive in the long run. Of course this has its limits but Germany's high unemployment is a result of extensive vacation time and generous unemployment benefits. America is the richest nation in the world because we nurture entrepreneurialism. Yes we have a wealth divide but our poor are considered wealthy in most countries. In short, raise taxes too much and it hurts the poor. Cut taxes too much and it hurts the poor. I do think the government should spend more on education/youth but that's long term thinking and doesn't really happen in a democracy. Democracy is the best system we've found so far but it's not perfect. Stephen Roach sums up my beliefs about economics with the following quote:
"In the future there are two roads. One is to look backward and hang on to what we think we're entitled to. The other is to recognize what has made America. Our virtues lie in a flexible and open, technology friendly, risk-taking, entrepreneurial, market-driven system. This is exactly the same type of challenge farmers went through in the late 1800's, sweatshop workers went through in the early 1900's, and manufacturing workers did in the first half of the 80's. We've got to focus on setting in motion a debate that pushes us into new sources of job creation rather than bemoaning the loss. There are Republicans and Democrats alike who are involved in this protectionist backlash. They're very vocal right now, and they need to be challenged."

Politics: Bush and Kerry? Both unfit for the job. I don't blame them though, human nature when applied to democracy results in the choices we're presented with. Democracy is no doubt inflenced by the media which is undergoing a major transformation right now due to the Internet and bloggers in particular. So while I don't think human nature will change any time soon I do think that technology will change the media which will in turn give us a purer democratic process. I have a degree in finance, I know a little bit about money and as far as I know there were no multinational corporations in the 1700s with armies of lobbyists. Now they use the 1st amendment as they once did the 14th to shore up their power all in the name of our founding fathers. A quote by Abe Lincoln:

"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

He's right except for the fact that a large slice of corporate power lies in the control of the media which is now slipping away because of the distributed nature of the Internet. I disagree with a lot of Noam Chomsky's points but he does make some valid arguments.

Media: Dysfunctional but recovering. Jon Stewart had a point on Crossfire. I have faith that the Internet is going to come to the rescue here as well. The cable news networks have already split down partisan lines for the most part and it stands to reason that the blogs of the future will do the same. The difference is that the cost of producing and distributing content is now approaching zero. Musicians are producing albums in their bedrooms with laptops and Open Source software. People are making money by adding donation links to their websites even while giving away their art or software for free. Capitalism without Capital applied to culture is a beautiful thing. Ideas can more efficiently proliferate with new media technologies combined with the Internet. Journalists are scared of fact checking bloggers so they check their own facts. In the run up to a presidential election facts are good for democracy regardless of the winner. Dan Gillmore says it best in his free online book We the Media.

"This is also a story of a modern revolution, however, because technology has given us a communications toolkit that allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost and, in theory, with global reach. Nothing like this has ever been remotely possible before."

Faith: My blog isn't strictly political. In fact I don't think any of the topics here are really distinct. Personally I don't really understand faith yet. I grew up reading books about science and believe that we lived in caves 15,000 years ago. I'm agnostic, I don't know if there is a God but I found a quote about faith by a professor at a theological academy that makes sense to me.

"Marx said "Religion is the opiate of the masses!" And I agree with him … to a certain extent. If there is a drop of truth in Marx's words, it's when we forget that religion is a means which God has given us for achieving holiness and salvation. It's when we use religion only as a means of comfort in difficult moments of our life. Religion for us is just a soothing narcotic. It becomes an opiate for us if we forget that salvation is not merely our private business."

Faith, hijacked by partisan interests worries me more than the use of faith as an opiate. Something in me can't accept faith, some say I'm too rational. Strip away the opiates from faith and you're left with something fundamentally good. I simply chose a different means to the same end.

Media Experiment

2004-12-29T09:43:00.000-08:00

8-17-05 These Torrents are officially down. You can try the torrent links but I can't guarantee they'll work.

UPDATES: 1/8/05 TsunamiTorrent V3 released with new footage(now working). Tracker back online should work for most of you now but we need backup trackers!! If you have a server and some bandwidth to spare please leave a comment. The tsunami downloads are beneath the donate links. New satellite photos from Aceh here. Amazon.com is using their One Click technology to good effect: 172,000 people have donated $14Million. Huge thanks to Matta's Blog for providing the backup tracker and to Cheese&Crackers for content. Some articles on tsunami blogs here, here, here, here and here.

Apple.com

BACKGROUND: After watching the demand for satellite photos and tsunami videos bring down scores of websites (including one Indian government site) I decided to make use of some newfangled software to make the files available. That software is DownHillBattle's BlogTorrent, an upgraded version of BitTorrent. Read this Wired article for a good overview of the idea behind 'torrent technology. The point is that the files are available and thanks to BlogTorrent you don't have to be a software engineer to figure out how to download them. The following footage is kid safe, no footage or photos of the deceased included. I don't have ads on my site so I'm not making any money from this. I'm considering changing to a once a week release schedule so people aren't having to hunt down individual files.

DOWNLOADS:(Important! These downloads start slow but pick up speed, please be patient)
UPDATE 1/8/04 New footage released in TsunamiTorrentV3

TsunamiTorrentV1 (164MB)
Don't Have BitTorrent? Click HERE
Do have BitTorrent? Click HERE

TsunamiTorrentV2 (66MB These are new as of 12/30 and not contained in V1)
Don't have BitTorrent? Click HERE
Do have BitTorrent? Click HERE

TsunamiTorrentV3 (86MB These are new as of 1/8 and not contained in V2)
Now Working!! My Internet connection died but it's back up, sorry for the inconvenience.
Don't have BitTorrent? Click HERE
Do have BitTorrent? Click HERE

NOTES:

BitTorrent downloads generally start slow and pick up speed so be patient.
Please leave your downloader open after you finish the download, it helps other people download the files.
If you can't play some of the videos you may need to get the DivX codec which you can find here. It also wouldn't hurt to have the latest version of Windows Media Player or VLC.

Idea to Help

2004-12-28T13:45:00.000-08:00

The guys over at India's department of Space, National Remote Sensing Agency posted a link to an 8MB powerpoint slide of satellite images of the affected areas which effectively crippled their server due to the demand. Nobody can get to any of the data which has the potential to be useful in assessing damage, planning etc due to the lack of communication on the ground. I'm working with a guy from France to get the files up on the P2P networks which will hopefully reduce the strain on the NRSA website and get the information flowing again... more to follow...

UPDATE:
So far it's been a success, here are two working links to the file. Not that many images considering the size of the file but it looks like a lot of maps are going to have to be redrawn.

LINK 1
or
LINK 2

UPDATE2:
This image is hot off of a satellite. Looks like a couple of towns are just gone.

Quote(s) of the Day

2004-12-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

"Why did you do this to us, God?" wailed an old woman in a devastated fishing village in southern India's Tamil Nadu state. "What did we do to upset you? This is worse than death."

Faith obviously has a lot of benefits but when things go horribly wrong and the only thing to blame is God's will it would seem even more painful than simply attributing it to bad luck. More blogger photos here.

"A part of me wants to say f*$@ you to being a journalist and go out there and get involved in the aid work. Carry bags of food to the people who need it. But another part keeps saying my work is here. Making calls and making sure people stay informed. Seen things today I never thought I'd see. Seen things I don't ever want to see. How do you ask a question from a father who saw his 4 year old child being dragged off into the sea and be sensitive about it? Do you say sorry? Does that cut it? 2 friends dead. They were on a romantic beach holiday. I like to believe they died holding each other's hands. 2 more missing. Presumed dead. Find a vehicle in about an hour and head off down South to look for them, or identify their bodies. If anyone had told me the day was going to be like this maybe I'd have stayed in bed."

Harrowing Account

2004-12-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

A blogger was in Phuket during the tsunami and snapped some truly amazing photos. Check it out HERE

Tis the season of sharing...

2004-12-23T15:34:00.000-08:00

... so here are links to my favourite free things on the Internet:

By free I don't mean registration required or trial period or spyware mandatory. I mean free as in someone handing you a beer out of the goodness of their heart. This stuff was all created by people with no profit motive for the good of society.

Free Antivrus
I fix computers on the side for beer money and the one thing that annoys the hell out of me is Antivirus companies and their 6 month free trials. Most people don't realize that they run out after 6 months and so believe that they're eternally protected. Virus' take over during month 7 and the inevitable phone call to Kirk ensues. AVG is a free antivirus program that works but there are hoops to jump through and it's generally just annoying. Enter Clamwin, a truely free Antivirus program. It scans my laptop every night at 3AM and auto updates its antivirus definitions as well. There is no trial period, no requests for credit cards, it just works.
DOWNLOAD HERE.

Free Music
The Wired Creative Commons CD has a bunch of well known artists including David Byrne of Talking Heads fame and the Beastie Boys. Here's a quote
"These musicians are saying that true creativity needs to be open, fluid, and alive. When it comes to copyright, they are pro-choice. Here are 16 songs that encourage people to play with their tunes, not just play them."
Download the MP3s HERE

Here is a brief description of the Creative Commons License in case you're wondering why that music is free.
"Creative Commons is a non-profit corporation founded on the notion that some people may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them. We believe there is an unmet demand for an easy yet reliable way to tell the world "Some rights reserved" or even "No rights reserved." Many people have long since concluded that all-out copyright doesn't help them gain the exposure and widespread distribution they want. Many entrepreneurs and artists have come to prefer relying on innovative business models rather than full-fledged copyright to secure a return on their creative investment. Still others get fulfillment from contributing to and participating in an intellectual commons. For whatever reasons, it is clear that many citizens of the Internet want to share their work -- and the power to reuse, modify, and distribute their work -- with others on generous terms. Creative Commons intends to help people express this preference for sharing by offering the world a set of licenses on our Website, at no charge."

More free stuff in my next post

Sad Statistic

2004-12-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

"Fear factor: 44 percent of Americans queried in Cornell national poll favor curtailing some liberties for Muslim Americans" (link)

What!! What century and country am I living in? Didn't anybody learn anything from the Japanese internment camps we set up during WWII? Here's an interesting quote from Lessig.org

"The major civil liberties issue in World War II arose out of the internment of 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, representing 90% of all American citizens of Japanese ancestry. It is useful to compare how the United States dealt with individuals of German and Italian ancestry. All German and Italian citizens who were in the United States during World War II (that is, citizens of those nations) were reviewed by the FBI and military authorities. If they were determined to be dangerous to the national security, they were detained. If they were found not to be dangerous (as was the case for the vast majority), they were allowed to remain in the U.S. under relatively modest restrictions. Of course, no effort was made to round up American citizens of German or Italian origin."

And another quote:
"The forced removal and internment of more than 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from the west coast of the United States during World War II constitutes a dark chapter in American history. More than 65,000 were Nisei (second generation), American born, American educated and American in heart and mind. No charges were filed, no hearing held, only the vague term, "military necessity" was used and it was to destroy the social, economic and cultural lives of a population which had been in existence in the United States for more than 50 years."

I guess 44% of Americans look at that as a bright chapter in American history. I really strongly believe that teaching young kids that America is perfect and doesn't make mistakes can have longterm consequences. Is constructive criticism really unpatriotic?

While I'm on a quoting rampage, here is a quote from "A Christmas Carol" that I found kind of funny (and timely). I guess I could try to reach and say that the doornail is the first amendment and that our ancestors are America's founding fathers, but I won't.

"I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

Democratic Media

2004-12-21T09:09:00.000-08:00

I updated my links on the right side of the page to include some free online books about the media and culture. The Free Culture book is a good read if you have the time.

There is an amazing article at LegalAffairs.org about human nature. It's technically about the need to plan ahead for the inevitable emergence of Artificial Intelligence and its legal status but to come to any conclusions about that subject you need to take a hard look at what we are as humans.

"But some A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) researchers believe that moment might not be far off. And as their creations begin to display a growing number of human attributes and capabilities—as computers write poems and serve as caretakers and receptionists—these researchers have begun to explore the ethical and legal status of their creations. "Strong A.I." is the theory that machines can be built that will not merely act as if conscious, but will actually be conscious, and advocates of this view envision a two-front assault on the fortress of human exceptionalism involving both the physical and functional properties of the brain. And these researchers predict a breach within the next half-century."

Human exceptionalism is why we blame the problems with law on the politicians an not on those who elected them. Maybe faith is the problem. We have food stuck in our teeth but we're supposedly created in God's image so there is no need to look in the mirror.

There is an interesting flash presentation about the future of the media that raises some interesting questions. We blame politicians for the problems with the country just as we blame the media outlets for crap tv and the death of hard news. So here is my idea: Media doesn't shape society as much as it is a reflection of our current level of awareness. Politicians are only as corrupt as we and the systems we've designed allow them to be. The author of the flash presentation doesn't come to any real conclusions about what to do about the problem. If media is just a reflection of who we are then it makes sense to assume that if we put some hard thought into improving education the media landscape will eventually reflect that change. Here's the problem, democracy is as painfully short sighted as the average voter. Low prescription drug prices and entitlement programs trump education and always will. Democracy is the best system available and it has a fatal flaw.

Just a quick software note about strong AI. In my opinion it'd be much much easier to create a system from which consciousness emerges than to try to create consciousness using predefined rules. At least one argument in favor of unplugging the machine from the Law Review article is invalid. Check out my caffeine fueled post on emergence here.

Buy Gillette Stock, NOW

2004-12-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

Brilliant marketing comes in all shapes and sizes as evidenced by Gillette's new vibrating shaver the Venus Vibrance. Here's a not so subtle quote from the article.

"Our testing indicated that there is an upside potential to penetrate more razors at a slightly reduced price," Hoffman says."

One of my finace professors back in college always used to say "The market always wins." Nosy zealots predictably try to ban the local adult gift store but somehow demand always seems to prevail. The puritanical musket has officially backfired. A major marketing campaign is about to get underway for these devices which I'm guessing will be a lot like the Herbal Essences ads that have been running for a couple of years now.

I just had a great idea for a business. The first urban scarecrow, available at all major retailers...

I'm going to add a Gillette stock chart as a sort of experiment to see if it's possible to make money reading blogs. It's at 45.0 as I post this, the chart should auto-update.

Characters

2004-12-16T09:49:00.000-08:00

Changed my blog name. It's a better fit than Zero Comments because people actually comment every once in a while. According to my google search it's also unused as a blog or book title. If by some miracle of capitalism I was someday able to earn a living writing books I'd want to have some memorable characters. I think I've got one I really like, he doesn't have a name yet but here's his m.o. from an earlier post.

"A biologist, studying the habits of small, furry, monogamous woodland mammals understands the cold, inevitable truth that prairie vole love is a byproduct of evolution meant to increase the fitness and therefore survival of the couple's offspring. Unfortunately he's unable to relate this truth to his own life... The main character will have his heart predictably broken before realizing the parallels with the creature he has devoted his life to. He adopts the voles and they live in his home, a perrenial reminder of his failure as a mammal"

The second character I could adapt from another post about my ideal living situation when I'm an old man..
"It's morning and I'm somewhere about a mile off shore in an old sail boat. I don't have on quite enough clothes to keep me warm but my PH Balanced beard and overheating laptop keep me at a perfect temperature. I've created a harness and pulley system for my requisite golden lab. He scampers down the hull of the boat, perfectly counterbalanced, cleaning off the barnicles thanks to the peanut butter I applied at the dock. It's a beautiful symbiotic relationship much like the bird that cleans the alligator's teeth. And so I sit, inspired by the sounds of the seagulls and hungry dog, writing about software and caffeine, not knowing how to steer the boat but content in the knowledge that our coast guard will again prove their heroism."

The third character is based on an idea I had last night. I live in sunny San Diego and there is a tanning salon frequented during the summer months for reasons unbeknownst. The character owns a salon and offsets his energy bills by installing an array of solar panels on his roof. He inevitably succumbs to greed and installs a couple of skylights because of the inefficiency of the solar panels. Everything is going well until the solar panel repair guy starts checking out the patrons through the skylights. Scandal ensues.

Another character works as a coal miner in the future. After fusion is realized as a power source we figure out a way to remove the billions of tons of carbon from our atmosphere, forever plugging the ozone hole. Unfortunately the carbon has to go somewhere so we reopen thousands of abandoned coal mines, returning the soot to its rightful home. He realizes the potential of the raw materials at his fingertips and develops a way to create diamond from the raw carbon, resulting in a cartel that rivals DeBeers.

Hmm, I have a newfound respect for people that write books. It's not easy coming up with ideas.

Toilet Humor

2004-12-15T10:17:00.000-08:00

This is a pretty mindless post, just found this cartoon kind of amusing...

Hollyweird under attack

2004-12-14T10:59:00.000-08:00

I met a smart, thoughful, cute young lady today who unfortunately was interviewing me so I didn't get to find out much about her but she made me think. Why do I write this thing? Why do I put my deepest, weirdest thoughts out there for all to see? Is it because I'm a little standoffish with people so I figure a one way connection is better than none? I think she got the impression that I enjoy solitude. Is there a difference between being used to something and really liking it? I hope isolation doesn't become the new opiate of the masses. Ok enough about me, here's some information about Bittorrent, the next generation of peer to peer file trading systems...

Bittorrent is good at one thing, transferring gigantic files over the Internet. It's starting to get a lot of press now on major news sites because instead of downloading a song or two people are downloading entire uncompressed CDs and 7 gigabyte DVDs. Bittorrent has a system that prevents the RIAA or other antipiracy agency from uploading fake files which can corrupt swarmed downloads resulting in that godawful screeching noise sometimes heard in nefariously acquired MP3s.

A major difference between Kazaa and Bittorrent is that you generally only download one thing at a time from Bittorrent which makes it harder for the MPAA/RIAA to sue for multiple infringement. Think of it as Napster except there is no one server handling all of the transactions, there are thousands of them all over the world. Today the MPAA has decided that instead of going after the people that download, they're going after the people who host the trackers. That's all well and good but news recently leaked about a system in development that would decentralize the trackers leaving the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) with only the downloaders to go after. That's a problem because of the following stats from Suprnova.org:

348668 seeded torrents (563910 total), 7229906 seeds & 9186110 downloaders (16416016 peers), on 1461 active trackers.

9 million people are using it as I type this just on Suprnova and it's still not a household word. What happens when everybody finds out? If 50% of the population is rampantly violating copyrights then at what point does the law become invalid? I wonder if in 15 years when broadband is 50x faster we will have only actors working that really like doing it. Sure they'll get paid, not from royalties or a $20million paycheck but by people who choose to donate through their website because they appreciate that actor's work. It sounds crazy but the guy who invented bittorrent gave it away for free and simply added a "Donate" button on his site. He's now extremely wealthy because 9Million people are using his software right now and so even if a fraction of the BT users donate, it adds up.

Lobotomy Revival

2004-12-13T10:47:00.000-08:00

We humans are a strange bunch. Work is progressing on a Nuclear Fusion Reactor called ITER that would solve a bunch of humanity's problems but Japan and France are fighting over who gets to host the project. We have brilliant minds creating something that has stalled because of political tomfoolery. Why is it that we can be so incredibly short sighted and at the same time capable of such amazing technical feats?

After thinking a lot about democracy I've come to the conclusion that it's broken. How can something that's the best alternative be broken? Because it's derived from an imperfect species known as people. A very few people are proposing Parecon as an alternative. It's basically Socialism 2.0. Here's a quote:
Based on that experience we can predict, with great confidence, that private enterprise market economies in a “second coming” would generate inequality and alienation just as they have the first time around. The only difference would be that “born again” capitalism would surely kill us all since it would begin with “initial conditions” — 5 billion people, modern industrial technology, and an already damaged ecosystem — that would do in mother earth in fairly short order. God has given capitalism the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!"

Sounds great in theory but people, even smart ones, on average tend to look out for numero uno. And if you apply the rationale behind democracy to thoughfulness then the only thing that matters is the average. Yes the occasional Ghandi and Mother Teresa arrive and become famous precisely because that are so different from the norm. I'm sure we'll eventually be able to rid ourselves of our impulsive heritage, maybe through surgery, a lobotomy revival?
"One of the core findings, Davidson says, deals with the interplay between several distinct brain regions, namely the orbital frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala. The orbital frontal cortex plays a crucial role in constraining impulsive outbursts, while the anterior cingulate cortex recruits other brain regions in the response to conflict. The amygdala, a tiny but highly influential portion of the brain, is involved in the production of a fear response and other negative emotions."
The only problem is that we would become horrendously boring, spontaneity would be another relic of our caveman past.

I don't love the theory of Evolution because it contradicts religious beliefs. I love it because if you choose to really believe that we're just hapless, upright walking, fur-deficient apes then everything starts to make sense. It's the equivalent of the awareness that we're all sinners in religion, a guilt pressure release valve. The death penalty becomes irrational because the only reason to incarcerate people is to keep them away from the rest of society. You can replace remorse with a newfound awareness of what exactly we're made of. Ego flies out the window because 0.0001 times 2 is twice as big but still gets rounded to zero most of the time. All of the bizzare social norms based on puritanical idealism (teaching abstinence in school) get replaced with more sensible alternatives. Heaven and Hell are illogical if we're all capable of good and evil depending on our surroundings and upbringing. It's really kind of refreshing even though on the down side I don't think I'll see my parents in heaven or even my future kids. If eternal bliss is awaiting us somewhere up in the sky then it makes sense to take our time here for granted.

Maybe that's what a loss of innocence is. Reaching the age where you realize that finding out about santa was just the tip of the iceberg. As I get older I hear words like faith, hope, redemption, etc. thrown around. Linguistic braincandy for people who can't afford Prozac? I don't think so. Faith I have a problem with but I do have hope, hope that technology will improve education, possibly enough that young people won't just freak out, close their eyes and grab the nearest holy book when the going gets rough. Sure, this paragraph is bound to piss off the majority of my readers but I write to figure things out.

Quote of the Day

2004-12-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my last quote of the day but here's a real classic from Donald Rumsfeld regarding the grilling he took from a troop about a lack of adequate armor on our vehicles. A sentence that starts bad and spirals into nonsense. A quote that has inspired me to reopen my $2 word and alliteration vault... His words a cryptic cacophony of incoherence tragically escaped from a mind pregnant with incompetence.

"I don't know what the facts are but somebody's certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know, and that's a good thing."

That is the most eloquent description of bureaucracy I think I've ever read.

Ignorant Bliss

2004-11-30T14:20:00.000-08:00

I've become redundant in some of my posts so my prolific streak is officially over. Anyway, I remember as a kid constantly hearing "You aren't reaching your potential" Teachers, parents all in consensus about my odd behavior. Now that I understand that my infintesimaly short attention span is to blame I feel like I have a new sense of direction. I've finally figured out why I need to become successful; it's not so I can buy things, my worldly needs are limited to a few high tech gadgets, it's so I can work less and pursue my real interests.

I'd like to teach more. I have a class teaching kids from a high school how to use computers. I read their anonymous class reviews after my favorite group was done and got a little misty eyed. I guess you could say it's very gratifying. My writing is going to become a little less exciting as I age, for instance, in an interview with the lead singer of the band Tool who now has a wife and kid he said "It's hard to be angry your entire life". Anger and passion are almost synonymous and passion makes for good writing. Is happiness boring or am I just looking for excuses to prolong my self pity?

Speaking of happiness, here is a photo of me in NY with a drunk girl napping on me. I think I was petting her hair, anyway, that's not the point, the point is that I have a rare goofy smile on my face. In spite of my
borderline alcohol poisoning and sleep deprivation I managed to find a moment of happiness. Now where do I find a girl like that in San Diego? Maybe that's why I feel the pull of the East coast.

Speaking of real interests, our posse of car enthusiasts, mechanical and software engineers and 3D mesh gurus is proud to present the first working version of our simulator to the world at large. It's for Windows and you need to download two files here and here. Make sure you have data, doc and bin all in the same place. Steer with the 5 and 6 or arrow keys. The attached picture has a modified truck suspension which makes for better wrecks.

Religitics in Vegas

2004-11-23T11:22:00.000-08:00

I just got back from Vegas, I was talking politics with the bachelor, drinking tequila and coffee, eating a waffle and watching the sun rise through the smokey haze of the casino lobby. The couple next to us was sitting there with their kid looking at us like we were complete savages. We were discussing the correlation between American conservatism and belief in god. I had the idea that because a lot of liberals don't believe in god (at least compared to conservatives) they turn to the govenment to regulate society instead. While I see a lot of liberal ideas as economically impractical it doesn't mean that I think the goals are bad. I need to look into the wealth divide some more.

Talking to the vegas locals, it seems that while they have almost unlimited freedom, the town wears on them. The bibles in the hotel dressers in Vegas are page turners. I'm never going to believe in an old bearded caucasian in the sky, watching as the world falls to pieces. Don't get me wrong, I'd give at least one big toe to be able to accept faith and believe that there is peace and justice and eternal bliss is some well catered afterlife but I just can't accept that notion, it seems like the ultimate injustice to everybody but myself.

So as a 26 year old I'm reaching the point where I have to make some serious decisions. I recognize that the world is injust and largely dysfunctional and so I'm breaking it down like this. Marriage can turn out to be a disaster, for a lot of reasons. So before I jump into it I need to figure out why I'd take the leap in the first place. My weekend in Vegas gave me some perspective. Is life too difficult to make it alone? Is the point to find someone and trade help? I mean that in the sense that nobody is perfect so if you find someone with an equal amount of dysfunction you can both work on the problems and offer support without judgement and maybe enjoy the journey, die happy?

I prefer company, maybe it's one of the few good things that have been drilled into humanity by millions of years of evolution. Hunger, lust, lonliness, thirst are all just different flavors of the same thing; amoral needs until fairly recently. I was thinking of behavior like this, some moral actions come from instinct but instinct usually leads to bad decisions in a society where ethics are based on rational thought. So most moral actions are based on rational thought. So isn't lifelong guilt inevitable given our place in evolution. We have a brain just big enough to realize that we're far from perfect but we still have a big enough part of our brain dedicated to impulse to make our lives a constant battle between rational thought and impulse. So I guess ignorance is bliss, especially when ignorant about our own behavior. I need to look at the relationship between ethics and morals.

On two completely unrelated notes. Here are my photos from Manhattan that I promised. Our driving simulator team released a video for the one year anniversary of the idea.

My Big Expensive Toy

2004-11-17T13:17:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you have an inexplicable fascination with blinking lights, you can imagine the joy of working at my job. The photo to the right is my Dell rack with somwhere near 20Ghz of processing power at my fingertips. The white thing on top is a wireless access point, we put a hole in the roof and erected a big antenna and broadcast out free Internet access.

But it doesn't stop there. When I come home from work I fiddle with even more wires and buttons and shiny metal objects. I even do side jobs wiring together people's computers and home theater systems. I'm also a racing fanatic, not the NASCAR dad type though. There is something appealing to me about being in a position where there are major consequences for a mistake. It's a way of motivating myself and focusing. For instance, if I procrastinate at work it's a game of finding my limits. How long will it really take me to code this thing. Racing is about finding the limits of your car and your ability. Driving ability is based on reflexes but also on a knowledge of the car, anticipation. It absolutely saturates the senses like few things do. Even skydiving is a fairly thoughtless endeavour in comparison. So I'm taking the things I love and fusing them together. The driving simulator I'm working on draws on my knowledge from software, networking, home theater installs and cars. We're currently having a debate about the best way to optimize online racing. Here is some of the chat log in case you're wondering how games are made.

"
	Kirk	we take different lines through turns but they're just about the same in terms of lap times
	STenyaK	or we can store the car format in a spacially special way, so that the car rolls out of the truck, with a side-view of it, as the mesh is loaded ;)
	Kirk	Hey, we can use haba's wireframe mode
	Kirk	like the ghost car in rbr
	Heson	progressive mesh, you start the race against a couplöe of shoe boxes and finish against super nice cars...
	Kirk	I was thinking we should have a bandwidth LOD for online racing. You send more position data to the closest cars
	STenyaK	hmm nice idea
	Heson	iteresting
	STenyaK	possibly relative to distance and camera view angle
	STenyaK	can't remember the technical name
	STenyaK	FOV
	Heson	and more detailed(heavier) prediction on close cars, its not so important if the far cars warp etc.
	STenyaK	yeah. that's a really good idea, i like it :)
	STenyaK	maybe we can extend it to other sytems..
	STenyaK	like... err.. well, there isn't much left.AI and sound
	STenyaK	we can also compress data of "groups of cars" and send just one position (for packs semi-distant cars in nascar for example)
	Heson	When trying to sleep yesterday I got an idea for a first generation online support for motrosport.
	Heson	just connect to irc and send coordinates to the chat
	Kirk	Now there's an interesting proposition
	STenyaK	how many commands would be needed for that?
	STenyaK	join - send messages - quit ?
	STenyaK	i don't know the irc protocol very well
	Heson	not much more
	STenyaK	does it use compression?
	STenyaK	(irc
	Heson	no compression in irc
	Heson	but we can implement some if we need to send lots of data
	STenyaK	position: 32x3, rotation 32x4
	STenyaK	(or 64 bits each
	STenyaK	224 bytes per car for upload
	STenyaK	plus synchronization
	Heson	for a first generation, that might look like the rbr one its enough
	Heson	and we can extend it and test concepts,
	STenyaK	hmm what latency is there in irc, average?
	STenyaK	i mean, the added latency
	Heson	when we need to lower latency we keep irc for lobby and move the rest to direct connections
	Heson	the added latency is abut doubled, i think.

My Wacky Brain

2004-11-12T14:29:00.000-08:00

I'm 99% sure I have ADD, it's good and bad but I think most people just see me as kind of weird. Anyway, I found some good quotes online by someone with it that explain what it's like:

"Attention Deficit Disorder. First of all I resent the term. As far as I'm concerned most people have Attention Surplus Disorder. I mean, life being what it is, who can pay attention to anything for very long? Is it really a sign of mental health to be able to balance your checkbook, sit still in your chair, and never speak out of turn? As far as I can see, many people who don't have ADD are charter members of the Congenitally Boring."
Amen to that!

"In other ways it's like being super-charged all the time. You get one idea and you have to act on it, and then, what do you know, but you've got another idea before you've finished up with the first one, and so you go for that one, but of course a third idea intercepts the second, and you just have to follow that one, and pretty soon people are calling you disorganized and impulsive and all sorts of impolite words that miss the point completely. Because you're trying really hard. It's just that you have all these invisible vectors pulling you this way and that which makes it really hard to stay on task."
That's an understatement. The point is that I try really hard, it just doesn't look like it.

" Lines. I'm almost incapable of waiting in lines. I just can't wait, you see. That's the hell of it. Impulse leads to action. I'm very short on what you might call the intermediate reflective step between impulse and action. That's why I, like so many people with ADD, lack tact. Tact is entirely dependent on the ability to consider one's words before uttering them. We ADD types don't do this so well. I remember in the fifth grade I noticed my math teacher's hair in a new style and blurted out, "Mr. Cook, is that a toupee you're wearing?" I got kicked out of class. I've since learned how to say these inappropriate things in such a way or at such a time that they can in fact be helpful. But it has taken time. That's the thing about ADD. It takes a lot of adapting to get on in life. But it certainly can be done, and be done very well. "
I don't do lines, I can tolerate drive throughs because I have the radio on. The new self checkout things are the best thing to happen to me in a long time. I was talking to a girl at a bar the other day and she said. "You're weird" I didn't reply but I was thinking, "you're boring".

" Many of us with ADD crave high-stimulus situations. In my case, I love the racetrack. And I love the high-intensity crucible of doing psychotherapy. And I love having lots of people around. Obviously this tendency can get you into trouble, which is why ADD is high among criminals and self-destructive risk-takers. It is also high among so-called Type A personalities, as well as among manic-depressives, sociopaths and criminals, violent people, drug abusers, and alcoholics. But is is also high among creative and intuitive people in all fields, and among highly energetic, highly productive people. "
I think this is why I race my car and have a trunkload of speeding tickets.

"Which is to say there is a positive side to all this. Usually the positive doesn't get mentioned when people speak about ADD because there is a natural tendency to focus on what goes wrong, or at least on what has to be somehow controlled. But often once the ADD has been diagnosed, and the child or the adult, with the help of teachers and parents or spouses, friends, and colleagues, has learned how to cope with it, an untapped realm of the brain swims into view. Suddenly the radio station is tuned in, the windshield is clear, the sand storm has died down. And the child or adult, who had been such a problem, such a nudge, such a general pain in the neck to himself and everybody else, that person starts doing things he'd never been able to do before. He surprises everyone around him, and he surprises himself. I use the male pronoun, but it could just as easily be she, as we are seeing more and more ADD among females as we are looking for it. "
I need to learn to better cope with it.

"What I am saying is that their cognitive style is qualitatively different from most people's, and what may seem impaired, with patience and encouragement may become gifted. "
I'm not normal. I got the gifted label when I was a kid but most people preferred weird. My college philosophy teacher probably had it too because she "got" me. She would constantly ask me to tell the class my opinion on the day's topic. Here's a good way of explaining what it's like. I'd get the best grades on tests in class through high school and college but I'd get a C in the class because I never could finish my homework. I was offered a job by my professor as a Calculus tutor in college even though I had to retake the class. I had to take a remedial art class to have enough credits to graduate from High School which was right next to my advanced placement Government class. I can forget someone's name that I've met 15 times but I know little details about their life. That's all totally counterintuitive but such is my brain.

So I hope those of you that know me that read this understand now a little better where I'm coming from. Read the whole article I was referencing here.

Mini Halo 2 Online Review

2004-11-10T14:27:00.000-08:00

I've seen a ton of reviews on Halo 2 but few mention the biggest change made. The online capabilities. Many moons ago I used a laptop and some unofficial software to get Halo working over the Internet. It half worked but since only a small minority of people could figure out how to hook it all up there wasn't a lot of competition. Halo 2 is built for online play... for a price. You have to sign up for Xbox Live to make it work. It's about $50 a year, that's about the price of an Old English 800 and a burrito per month, reasonable. Halo 2 supports progressive scan and widescreen TVs, nice touch. I played Quake 3 a few times and the online audio for Halo2 is lifted, bit for bit from that game. I'm not saying they did it without permission but it is identical.

The menu system to play online is far from intuitive but I suppose that after a few hours it becomes clear. Lag was almost a non-issue, probably because of the gazillion nearby players and possibly because Bungie optimized the online code for more lag / less bandwidth than Halo 1. One ugly feature is the limited options for cooperative play with a friend. They claim that it'll mess up the ranking system if your friend joins as a guest. My thinking is that it's just a sneaky way to encourage people to buy another Xbox live account. It's odd that a feature that worked in Halo1 online is no longer available(though it was unofficial in Halo1).

Back in ye good olde days people used to use pigeons to fly chess moves back and forth, wireless gaming was born. I first played a game over the Internet back in 1998. It was just a sort of curious trial run. I was sitting on the track waiting for the flag to drop and some guy in Italy was next to me and all of a sudden I starting getting nervous. I didn't want to screw up and ruin everybody's race. I was interacting with people albeit in a strange way. People make online gaming what it is.

Halo 2 is going to be the public's first mass exposure to online gaming. My prediction? The Betty Ford clinic is going to need to add a wing or two.
Gotta write this down before I forget it. Consoles of the future are going to act as the router as online gaming becomes more popular. You won't need a broadband router to share internet access you'll just plug your coax cable into the back of the console and it'll share the connection with the rest of the computers in the house. Why? You ask. Because it solves the port forwarding issue. If a game can modify the routing table then anybody with a standard broadband account can host a game, obviating the need for a centralized system and therefore a monthly fee paid to Microsoft. Microsoft is trying to use the exact same techniques to monopolize online gaming that they did to gain a stranglehold on the computer industry. Unfortunately for Microsoft the Home Theater PC is a direct threat to that way of doing business. That's why you see MS now getting into the Media Center PC business.

So you plug your Linux based PC into your HDTV, all of your music, movies(even DVDs) and games are stored on it. You don't have to pay anybody to play online and some of the games are free(open source software). I'm having a hard time seeing how Microsoft extracts money from that configuration.

Brain Snapshot

2004-11-06T23:34:00.000-08:00

After a bit of a writing break my head is full of ideas again. I'm going to try to figure out what the word culture means in the next couple of months.

Culture isn't one thing, what is globalization going to do to culture. Will there only be subculture?

Culture as Religion

Free vs. Permission Culture

Noam Chomsky - challenge - vs ass kissing

banned music.org RCA Squashed FM. ignorant artists?

underground piracy as the crackdown commences

Video Phone and tax complexity - government PR?

Corporations control media - media re-inforces permission ownership?

Mind / Body - Budhism , Monkey brain

Consciousness means we have the ability to question ourselves (closed loop)

Use of weird words for music review because the song can't be posted (archive live recordings)

Radical shift away from tradition of free culture

abiword

Pinback

Wired BitTorrent article

Link to Free Culture Torrent

Creating a virtual world looking at shadows in rl - weird perspective

Extended copyrights

Ubuntu - Simple, synchronized with KDE major releases.

Software and religion - Are technology and religion mutually exclusive?

Cultural Singularity caused by introspection limited by time

Lawrence Lessig background and link to book

Kerr v. Bushy

2004-11-02T10:52:00.000-08:00

Here are some quotes by my favorite president (Lincoln) that point out how disturbing things have become in America.

Lincoln on Kerry
"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met."

Lincoln on Bush
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

Lincoln on being ugly
"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"

"You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time." Abe Lincoln and later Bob Marley
Unfortunately for democracy you only have to fool slightly more than half of the people every four years.

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Lincoln

"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong."
If ever there was an eloquent call for education that's it.

"The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend."
I think he's the original Ghandi. Good advice in the face of the overwhelming partisanship now dividing America.

"No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar."
Hence the overwhelming content at FactCheck.org

Lincoln on Yogi Berra
"Well, for those who like that sort of thing, I should think it is just about the sort of thing they would like."

On the war on Drugs
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

On PACs
"With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed."

On 1917
"Four score and seven years ago"

Sunlight, Costume Idea

2004-10-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

So I put a sun in the sky and turned on shadows in the driving simulator. It looks a heck of a lot better than it did but we're working on fixing the car mesh so the shadows don't look all nutty. I'm thinking of making some simple buildings so we can have a small town instead of just a big flat parking lot. I'm also thinking of making a cop car for the simulator so rookie police can sit down at a computer in the Police Academy and practice stopping cars in simulated chases. Maybe something good can come of this other than just entertainment.

I have an inflatable Sumo costume for Halloween but I think instead of bumping into people I'm just not going to inflate it. All I need is a Subway T-Shirt and voilà, I'm Jared.

Stating the Obvious

2004-10-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

In the course of three weeks I have completely lost interest in the election. I think it's because I'm not a republican or a democrat. The candidates are out at the extremes and they're trying to court me(the undecided voter). That means they have to lie to appeal and it's not pretty. I have the feeling that nobody really knows what's best for the country. It's a crapshoot. The guys that write articles in Foreign Affairs don't make absolute claims and they have PhDs in International Relations.

There are just too many variables to make a rational informed decision about who would make a better president. I think watching the debates with the people who are or could be the leaders of the free world constantly and knowingly using misleading statistics, effectively, made me a little depressed. There must be some reason for democracy given its massive flaws. The fact that it's better than any other system doesn't explain it. I think it promotes stability because it leaves the population with the impression that it has power.

Unregulated capitalism would lead to disaster because shareholders are concerned about their short term interests. Considering corporate status was considered a gift until fairly recently until corporate lawers hijacked the 14th amendment, it seems reasonable that certain rules could be setup to prevent the short sighted destruction of anything that prevents short term profit potential. Of course that'll never happen in a democracy. Seniors are voting for healthcare instead of education funding so I think it's fair to say that the assumption that democracy is sufficient to regulate capitalism is just that, an assumption.

More Simulator Stuff

2004-10-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

Our driving simulator is very close to the first release, we're having some really interesting discussions with an engineer from a Forumula SAE team who's helping us out. It's really nice to hear some of the comments about our little project... "Interesting stuff indeed and all credit to those involved. It sounded like one hell of a task when it was first announced and to have come this far is something." Keeps me motivated remembering all of the people that said we couldn't do it. I keep looking at our unique position and wonder what's going to happen. Here's an interesting quote:
“A console designed to play PC games on a TV may find an audience among PC gamers looking for a unique and new type of game experience," said Schelley Olhava, IDC analyst, Consumer Markets, Gaming. "Historically serious gamers have shown a willingness to try new technologies, and if happy with the experience, will gladly spread the word among the mainstream gamer audience." Thinking about using advertising to pay for hosting services for development. We could include logos on track banners as an incentive to donate.

Creating a simulator is only possible because of its replayability, that just means that people tend not to get sick of the plot because there isn't one. Physics aren't changing any time soon so we just have to translate car specs into C++ and XML. We're one of the first open source game projects to make heavy use of third party libraries (ODE, OGRE) to ease the development process. A lot of that has to do with the fact that people that create games outside of the usual oversight of a publisher rebel against the status quo. Early on I saw a problem with that. We had to cede control of our graphics and physics engine or we'd be at least two years behind our current position in my opinion.

I mananged to get 3d acceleration working on my laptop in Mandrake 10.1 with the Nvidia drivers. It was a lot harder than it should have been. Everything is just gobs more responsive and I should be able to do some real testing of the driving simulator I'm working on now. I get the feeling that Xorg is somehow better able to take advantage of graphics acceleration that XFree was/is. My CPU is now idling at 0 or 1% and it was around 4 or 5% without the Nvidia drivers. It'll be nice when in Linux you aren't forced to recompile kernel modules and modify various text files to make things work. Actually, compiling kernel modules wouldn't be so bad if the user didn't have to deal with the guts of the process. If you've got Linux and you want 3d support, go the Nvidia route. Oh by the way, HP 1012 Laser Printers work in Linux but you have to turn them off and on every few days to avoid errors because of full PCL buffers.

Bold Prediction, Mandrake 10.1 Community Ed. Mini Review

2004-10-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

I don't make many predictions but one thing is a near sure bet. You're probably reading this blog with some version of Windows and the rest maybe on Macs. There is a unknown, superdorky operating system that only a relative few of us computer people know about. It had heretofore been much too complicated to pass the drunken grandma usability test but in two years or so in my humble estimation it will be ready for primetime. I'm writing this post on it from a laptop running Linux. Click THIS LINK to see what I'm talking about. If you look closely you'll see that I'm doing a few things, browsing the web, editing the cat photo and listening to Eek-a-Mouse mp3s from a file server in my living room. So what's the bold prediction? You'll use Linux in the next 5 years and you'll like it.

One of the things I like about Linux is the graphical flexibility it affords those of us that like to constantly fiddle with things. Things you can't do with Windows. There are many flavors of Linux because it's free as in beer and anybody can use the code for free as in libre unlike Windows or MacOS. My current flavor of the month is Mandrake 10.1 Community Edition.

10.1 is currently in Beta so there are a few glitches yet to be fixed. Here's my brief review for those that know a little bit about Linux...

The installation is nearly identical to 10.0 Official. My wireless network card was detected and configured during startup but PCMCIA totally shut down after the first reboot. That probably has something to do with the switch from devfs to udev but I'm not totally sure. I'm using the integrated 3com NIC with no problems. The printer was detected and configured with no intervention unlike WinXP.

No KDE 3.3 yet but I'm happy with 3.2 for the most part. A big improvement is the list of mirrors now included when you add software. None of the provided repository mirrors worked but I manually fixed that with Easy URPMI and some command line hackery. I installed Xchat, Gkrellm, Firefox, Bittorrent + GUI all without a hitch after that fix. It'd be nice if Firefox was set as the default browser but it's pretty easy to go into KDE preferences and add it to the top of the list.

Other major changes are to the audio and video applications. Totem and Xmms have mercifully been dropped in favor of the surprisingly easy to use Kaffeine and amaroK. AmaroK is a worthy substitute for the Windows only Winamp or Xmms. Check out the screenshot above for an idea of the amaroK UI. Gkrellm worked fine this time around, no weird CPU hogging. Kaffeine warrants a special mention though because of the fact that it simply works. I had to compile Mplayer and fiddle with codecs for a long time to make it work. Kaffeine works with wmv, avi, mpg, you name it. Surprisingly low CPU usage using Kaffeine to watch Super Size Me. AmaroK also has no problem playing WMA files out of the box though KDE defaults to Kaffeine. You're going to need at least 256MB RAM as per usual. Tried it with 128 but after an hour or so of use it slowed to a crawl.

Bottom Line. It only took 3 hours of tinkering to make the system work correctly it used to take 6 or 7. Windows XP still has the edge in my living room as a Home Theater PC plugged into my HDTV but Mandrake and Linux in general are making serious inroads. The last requirements? 1280x720(720p) resolution support and better 3D support. 10.1 CE has Xorg as an Xfree replacement but I haven't tested it with the Nvidia drivers yet, fingers crossed...

Super Size Review, Miscellany

2004-10-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching Super Size Me, the documentary about a would-be fat guy. Aside from the facts presented in the movie the thing that really disturbed me was the fact that I began to like our pudgy protaganist. Here's a likeable guy nearly eating himself to death against the advice of his doctors just to make a point. He clearly takes some cues from Moore with the cartoon outtakes but it's a pretty original effort. I started paying attention to nutrition a while ago for some reason. I think it was after I tried to go on a no sugar diet for a week on a dare and nearly collapsed in the shower on the third day. Supposedly god created sugar cane (and all plants for that matter) on the third day. Coincidence? See you in hell.

So we force kids to sit inside overcrowded classrooms taught by underpaid teachers. They can't vote, can't drink or smoke(legally) and perhaps the ultimate indignity, they can't rent cars. So why can't we mandate that they don't kill themselves with food? I remember eating Pizza Hut for lunch back in grade school. I'm sure the school had some reason to allow a corporate presence in a learning institution. I think I know the sinister motive... Subsidized pizza parties. Teachers get deals on pizza to reward the kids with because they allow said eateries on campus. Diabolical.

Robots v. Striking Workers --- Woody Allen v. Brad Pitt

2004-10-13T16:03:00.000-07:00

I did my first automated grocery checkout yesterday. The machines mysteriously appeared in the same grocery store I wrote about earlier "Inefficiency prevents a massive impending wealth divide" in which the workers revolted over wage cuts. A lot of people complain about corporate greed and the fatal flaws of capitalism yet are they willing to stand in a huge line to keep the lower class employed? People scream bloody murder if someone in India gets their job but what hapens when an acoustically aesthetic android takes over? Customers are happier, prices drop, lines evaporate. Maybe my assumption of a wealth divide failed to take into consideration the ability of people to learn new skills and at the same time fear change. It's like we're all capabable of a hell of a lot but it has taken automation to force us out of our comfy caves (apologies for the excessive alliteration) an into the great outdoors. A lot of people join the military because their parents are unable to provide the discipline they need to succeed. Theory of the day: Robots are grocery store drill seargents.

Speaking of change... I'm thinking of moving to Manhattan. I fell in love with that town last week and I've been thinking about how my lifestyle fits into my current locale. I'm a cave dweller. I'm content with an obese cup of coffee and a comfortable chair with no wheels and sweat pants and computer, cable news on the TV, remote control on my hairy chest, buttons down for more traction and maybe a fat cat. Hmm, I like fat hairy things, maybe it's my destiny to become a mall Santa. This all leads to my post title: Woody Allen v. Brad Pitt. If I ever got really buff and tan I'd have a hard time looking at myself in the mirror and not laughing. It just seems goofy to me. I'm like Woody Allen hitting on Jennifer Aniston in San Diego. I go to NY and chat up some girls about Noam Chomsky and they're all over me. Then on the plane ride back from my trip I saw the trailer for Alfie, which is Jude Law as a womanizing philosopher in Manhattan. It was like a sign.

On another totally unrelated note: There is so much I want to learn: graphic design, writing, C++, 3D Modelling, shell scripting, Perl, guitar, philosophy, women... that I'm frustrated that there are only so many hours in the day. I guess I know a decent amount for a 26 year old man-child but that old quote rings painfully true. "The more you know the more you realize how little you know." I don't really enjoy learning as much as I enjoy applying something I already know to the creation of something new.

MoSoSo

2004-10-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

Bunch of ideas coagulating in my head. There are some new ads by a wireless provider which show people with signal meters hovering over their heads. It'd be possible with some not too distant technology to have a visual overlay put on a person with a combination of technology made using GPS, scanned beam displays and something like the technology they're using over at dodgeball.com to create a kind of expression that goes way beyond your standard anti-Bush T-shirt.

Here's the trendy acrony definiton from wired:
MoSoSo
Acronym for mobile social software, a Friendster-like service for cell phones. Coined after the launch of Dodgeball.com, the first MoSoSo provider.

Unfortunately for now the look-at-me-I'm-a-huge-dork factor and price put it out of range but you could for instance have an elphant icon over your head if you were a die hard conservative or maybe a pink flower hovering around you if you were a single girl out on the town. The Hawaiians have something similar if less high tech. "In Hawaii, they say that a woman wearing a hibiscus behind her right ear is single, and a woman wearing a hibiscus behind her left ear symbolizes that she is taken."

Dodgeball.com is a hybrid of Friendster, text messaging and camera phones. The only issue is critical mass which they haven't addressed yet with tools like profile import, etc. I'm going out on a limb and guessing that friendster is going to figure out that they're out of the loop and snatch up the idea if they haven't already. I wonder if it could work using cell triangulation instead of GPS.

Here's an interesting testimonial from their website.
"Tonight night as I came up out of the basement of Lit (around 1:45am), my phone started doing some weird beepy ring I hadn't heard before. "Receiving Picture Message." Picutre Message?!? I was as excited as I was perplexed...who could be sending me a picture messate? While most of my friends have recently purchased phone-cams, so far they're all too numb-skulled to have figured out how to use any of the new features.

I flipped open the phone and it was a notification message from a new application I'd signed up for earlier in the day on dodgeball.com (written by my friend dens). it said "alyssa is at luna lounge. you know her through gregg." and there was a picture of alyssa attached to the message. the only thing more amazing than the fact that there was a pic attached was that alyssa looked super cute! (i tried to curb my excitement because pretty much everyone looks cute in a 100x100 pixel thumbnail).

since luna was only a few block from lit, i decided to stop by and see if i could pick her out in the crowd. i got there to find luna lounge almost empty - so it was easy to spot alyssa at the bar with two friends playing with her phone. i walked up and called her out on her dorkiness: "hey, you're a nerd too, eh?" i showed her my matching phone and we had a laugh. we're SO living in the future."

Better than google, Costume, New blog software

2004-10-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

I found myself doing something repeatedly without even realizing it was becoming a habit. Get your mind out of the gutter, I'm talking about using a combination of google and blogs for research. When I want to learn about something I google search for "blog monkey" for example which gives a very interesting list of responses. I think one of the most interesting quotes about the Internet and its use for research comes from Matthew Austern: "Of course, the best way to get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for corrections" I think blog comments work the same way, same goes for the moderation system over at slashdot.

There is a new jacket in development that promises to end the suffering of animals used in the production of leather clothing. "Using a biodegradable polymer as a base, the team coated it with 3T3 mouse cells to form connective tissue and topped it up with human bone cells in the hope of creating a stronger layer of skin. The jacket is being grown inside a specially designed bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. The group hopes that once the polymer degrades, a whole jacket that maintains its shape and integrity will be left behind."

Here's a hypothetical discussion:
Random Halloween Partygoer: "Cool jacket, what's it made of?"
Me: "Me."

I'm thinking of switching blog software. Blogger is plagued by performance and other issues that are starting to get on my nerves. I'm looking at Word Press, movable type, Radio Userland or possibly just writing my own blog software in PHP or ASP.net. Now that mono is out and .Net is legitamately cross platform I won't feel guilty going that route though PHP is better able to handle MySQL in my hairy opinion. Suggestions welcome.

Next time: Mososo, Camera phones with FLAC support.

Nueva York

2004-10-08T05:02:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: We went to a swanky bar last night. I think I drank more vodka than I've ever had before. Met another girl, she's from the Netherlands, smarter than just about any girl I can remember meeting. Also hung out with the girl that lives upstairs. Had another near death experience using the fire escape to return to my brother's house from hers this morning. I slipped and just barely managed to grab on to the rail which saved my ass but I've got lots of fancy bruises anyway. I think I shaved 6 months off of my life but it was worth it. To answer the question about women out here in the comments... they are way more agressive. The girl upstairs gave me a look at the bar like "your ass is mine" I don't see that a lot out in San Diego.

We were at a bar Friday and all of the TVs had the debate on. I got into a discussion with a guy from some small island country and a older Republican lady. It was a heated debate but I held my own. I thought she hated me but she grabbed me as she was leaving and gave me a sloppy kiss. Man I'd have lots of good stories if I lived here.
We saw the girl from the Sopranos, Jamie-Lynn DiScala at a Sara Fina, a funky little restaurant near central park. She looked me right in the eyes for a second, I should have winked or something, maybe given here the call me hand jesture.
END UPDATE

Just arrived at my brother's house in Manhattan. It's pretty nice but $1500 a month for one room seems a little steep. I drank some Sky Vodka on the plane with the lady next to me. It was a fun flight but I haven't slept since Thursday morning. I'm headed to Central Park in a few minutes to roll around on the well manicured acres of grass and maybe curl up on a park bench to catch some shut-eye. I'll get some photos up when I return.

For Love of Monkey

2004-10-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

I envy the monkey lifestyle. Maybe because we toil in cubicles the majority of our lives so that we might have a chance to go on a brief vacation and live like monkeys for a little while. I think they secretly laugh at our artificial banana flavorings and anthropomorphic arrogance. Like Adam Smith's "invisible hand" the remnants of our ancient poo hurling justice system are still reflected in modern movements like tort reform and the constitutionally protected mud slinging of modern political campaigning.

Two strange things have recently happened, life expectancy is dropping for the first time and birth rates are declining in first world nations. From http://www.taipeitimes.com "Twenty years ago, the US, the richest nation on the planet, led the world's longevity league. Today, American women rank only 19th, while males can manage only 28th place, alongside men from Brunei.

These startling figures are blamed by researchers on two key factors: obesity, and inequality of health care. A man born in a poor area of Washington can have a life expectancy that is 40 years less than a woman in a prosperous neighborhood only a few blocks away, for example."

People are dying young because of our ability to make cheap unhealthy food. People aren't having kids because we're smart enough to use contraception and question the logic of bringing a kid into a world comprised of corrupt politicians, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, pollution, WMD, etc. Who the hell can afford to have a kid anyway? You need a two income family to survive these days which means there is the inevitable lifelong guilt associated with not being there for the kid.

Hairy backs used to be what kids would cling to when we wandered the forrests eating nuts and berries. Now people with back hair are condescendingly referred to as bears. Reverse anthropomorphism as criticism proves my earlier point. I refuse to shave my hairy chest, it's a silent tribute to our furry brethren of the forrest.

Wind, Near Death Experience, Women

2004-10-04T10:11:00.002-07:00

I drove to Arizona this weekend. 360 Miles one way. Not surprisingly the Arizona Highway patrol pulled me over. I was going 81 in a 75 zone. The cop and I had a long conversation about the housing prices in San Diego and how 100 people a day are moving to Arizona from California, I think they get reallly bored out there, patrolling the desert. Anyway, he let me off with a couple of warnings and I was back on the road again.

Monotony will do strange things to a person. I stuck my arm out the window doing 80Mph and started to wonder what it's like to be in a major hurricane. The odds of getting pulled over twice are pretty slim right? Well my car will go about 135Mph. It only does 130 with the roof down as I found out. The overriding sensation of 130MPH winds is the noise. It's deafening. I also realized that although you're going twice as fast as normal, you use more than twice the gas which I guess isn't all that surprising. I averaged 73 MPH on the way back with a couple of pit stops.

I don't have a death wish, I race my car every once in a while and I'm pretty good at it so going fast isn't completely maniacal. I almost drowned once in some big surf when my leash broke. It's not a lot of fun being convinced you're going to meet your maker. I have a funny feeling that my "maker" would just be a primordial bowl of amino acid soup. My life didn't flash before my eyes but I did get very calm and relaxed before someone dragged me out of the impact zone.

And on another completely unrelated note, I was thinking about how I never have relationships longer than 6 months. That's right about when I decide that I need my space back and I head for the hills. Part of the problem is that I tend to date the wrong women. When I go to the local dance club I typically get inebriated and stagger to the dance floor and flail about until the alcohol and exertion conspire to erode my sense of balance. Keep in mind that I'm a quirky uptight white guy. I sometimes with someone would video tape me out there so I can see if I'm making a total ass of myself but then again there is the old Mark Twain quote: "Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth." While I'm writing about dance quotes, here's a good Leno observation " Scientists are complaining that the new Dinosaur movie shows dinosaurs with lemurs, who didn't evolve for another million years. They're afraid the movie will give kids a mistaken impression. What about the fact that the dinosaurs are singing and dancing?
--Jay Leno

So I met this girl a while ago while "dancing". She told me she didn't want a serious relationship which was good because I figured that when I inevitably moved on I wouldn't feel as guilty. So the time comes for us to go our separate ways and I just assumed she didn't have any feelings for me so I told her over the phone that the time had come to seek greener pastures. I heard silence then screeching tires and then CRUNCH. She crashed her car on the freeway seconds after I broke the news to her. She wasn't badly injured but I still feel like a jerk about it months later. I think I'm going to take a college class, something other than computer science, something like philosophy where I might meet someone I can talk to without focusing on not slurring my words. I'd prefer to know someone a little bit before jumping through the bizzare hoops known as dates. That's impossible in my current situation.

I need to grow up, get over my shy tendencies and try my hand at a non-dysfunctional relationship. Even if it's just to figure out if I'm cut out for that sort of thing.

Milestone, Monkeys

2004-09-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

This is my 100th post. I used to hate writing 500 word essays in high school as homework assignments, the last 100 words usually contained lots of filler phrases like "Furthermore, in my not so humble opinion, I think that it is somewhat reasonable to believe that in certain circumstances the chance might exist that... Smurfette was capable of procreation... at least, in so far as she found any of her cobalt comrades sufficiently attractive." Now my problem is trying to find time to write and then trying to write something intelligible.

Today I'm writing about Intelligent Design, education and... the manipulation of the proletariat by evil, conservative overlords. Please keep in mind while reading this that I don't really fault anybody for beleiving what they do and that by "writing evil, conservative overlords" it's a jab at lefties and their equally emotional views. In fact I have that problem a lot, I try to be funny a lot of the time just to amuse myself and my words are sometimes misinterpreted. People who try to promote the teaching of Creationism in public education do so because they believe in God and think they are doing a good thing. Commendable if not misguided.

Before I get into some possibly unused arguments against creationism there are some themes that people seem to grab on to when trying to manipulate public perception. Labelling is a big one. Creationists weren't getting very far with curriculum because it's pretty easy to see a link between State - > Public Education -> Curriculum -> Creationism -> Church. So what did they do? From a Wired Article:
"The institute doesn't need to impress Woese or his peers; it can simply co-opt the vocabulary of science - "academic freedom," "scientific objectivity," "teach the controversy" - and redirect it to a public trying to reconcile what appear to be two contradictory scientific views." The problem isn't ignorance, who really has the time to learn about all of the issues these days anyway? Who is going to object to the supposedly uber patriotic Patriot Act? I bet McCarthy wouldn't. The problem is that school boards and representatives in general aren't doing their homework. What is the moral of the story? I guess it's that "know your enemy" and "if you can't beat them, join them" have a lot in common. Here's a new quote "If you can't beat them, understand them then misuse their language to confuse the hell out of everybody at which point you're more able to gain power in a democracy."

I keep getting back to some big picture themes that come from the basic understanding I have of chaos theory. "While most of the motion types mentioned above give rise to very simple attractors, such as points and circle-like curves called limit cycles, chaotic motion gives rise to what are known as strange attractors, attractors that can have great detail and complexity"So it just hit me that I can look at politics, media etc. through the lens that the chaotic motion is perception and society is a chaotic system. So what can I infer about behavior from that perspective? Well I think that these big picture themes I keep hoping exist do exist in the form of strange attractors rooted in human instincts that evolved to give us a better chance at procreating, not to aid our search for some kind of truth. I'm assuming that the search for truth doesn't have anything to do with the ability to procreate. Based on my recent adventures in local bars I think that's a reasonable assumption.

Our brains are now big enough that we're able to understand inequity. Inequity according to a lot of people I agree with is the cause of war, not religion. Inequity is also a problem because when I go to the bar with my tall good looking friend I know he's going to get "the girl" That is of couse a double standard, how can I be pissed of at the system when I'm equally shallow when it comes to women? The whole game is rigged. These strange attractors, things like high cheek bones and height are in place because of natural selection. The cold, heartless laws of evolution have created a system of inequity if you assume that there is more to life than health. We're like 2nd generation slaves that finally recognize that there is more to life than the salt mines but we're still unable to break free. Disaffected single people have a saying something like "You can take the player out of the game but you can't take the game out of the player".

Self Important Theme Song

2004-09-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

A member of the Chomsky Chat board replied to my post:
PS, am a longtime follower of and appreciative of various technolgies, but fundamentally we need to *organize*. This statement may surprise some who
mistake my organizing efforts, which include spreading the word about technologies, with a view (which I do not have) that technology alone is the answer. Please see, http://economicdemocracy.org/projs.shtml

He's a math professor at a university which is a good sign. The thing I worry about when contemplating donating my time to one of these projects is the issue of demand. "If you build it they will come" is a pretty tenuous assumption when you're dealing with topics like Parecon. Is the goal really to compete with the mass media? If so you have to assume that people are going to want to watch whatever it is you're producing. Maybe a better goal is to make information readily available to those who seek it in the form of documentaries, etc.

My thinking is that in the future we'll have cable boxes that can grab video via the Internet sort of like how Movies on Demand currently works. You will be able to add a channel in the same way that we currently bookmark our favorite websites. But the whole issue of the media monopoly boils down to ratings. Is programming based on ratings or corporate pressure? And if it's both do people even know of care that they're watching an ad and not pure entertainment? Sometimes I grab the sports page and just read ads from the local computer warehouse. Is product placement really that bad? Seinfeld and his Junior Mints didn't seem to think so.

I see a parallel between the production of a successful game and a successful "channel". The games industry is shifting towards a focus on artists and content creators instead of coders and infrastructure people. Maybe the production of documentaries and professional looking, consumable news would be a better direction than the creation of infrastructure. If you build the content the distribution infrastructure will materialize around it. That said, he makes a good point. The focus needs to be on manging whatever direction the new media wagon heads. I think I'm going to email him, what the hell.

My point? We have bloggers which supposedly offer an unbiased alternative to the traditional written media but there is nothing to compete with the stage makeup and self important theme songs of the nightly network news. I emphasize compete because nobody wants to look at a festering pimple on the forehead of their toothless news anchor. If an attractive young woman explains the news to us it doesn't affect the content just the ratings. Fortunately, once the new media realize that concessions need to be made in order to preach beyond the chior, there is room for the dissemination of ideas that might lead to change for the better.

EDIT: Interesting hybrid video news site here http://demandmedia.net/

Theatrical Crooning

2004-09-28T23:44:00.000-07:00

"As the lead singer of the Smiths, arguably the most important indie band in Britain during the '80s, Morrissey's theatrical crooning and literate, poetic lyrics -- filled with romantic angst, social alienation, and cutting wit -- connected powerfully with a legion of similarly sensitive, disaffected youth"

Morrissey is one of my favourite weirdo musicians. I think his more mellow jazzy songs are a lot like something on an Andreas Vollenweider CD. Bjork is to Vollenweider as Vanilla Ice is to David Bowie. She completely ripped off one of his songs. Maybe it was just a cover. I was watching that new show LAX with my roommate. It's really good, and I don't really like TV unless people are being painfully eliminated. Most shows grab a theme and stick to it. LAX has a weird but good mix of comedy, drama, aerobatics. Sort of like Morrissey's music. He almost repels would-be fans because of his over the top self pitty but if you listen to it for a while it grows on you. Louder than Bombs is a great CD.

Speaking of repelling would be fans, I've noticed a trend in the media. People criticize the politicians when they make bold, hollow promises. They have to because it works, we the voters are the problem. Every once in a while the reporters remind themselves of that fact on air. I like Bill Oreilly, he just sqirms when he reports on the soap opera that is the Lacy Peterson trial. He can't stand it and he makes it clear to his boss and viewers. A guy from the Chomsky Chat forum asked me to get in touch with him about the idea I had the other day re. alternative methods of media distribution, trying to figure out if I have enough time to make more than a half assed attempt at it. If I wasn't working on the simulator I'd consider it. I bet Oreilly would be glad to man the anchor desk as there wouldn't be much in the way of Lacy coverage, or ratings.

Human Tetherball

2004-09-27T23:33:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: I have an early version of my cone finished. I made a nice demonic smiley face. I didn't intend it that way but the headlights make it look a little creepy.

I've been posting a lot about politics which I guess I look at as the natural byproduct of ugly side of human nature. Human nature is what I guess I'm really interested in. I was thinking about perspective and how I look at the world. I think I live too much inside my own sheltered, comfortable world. As I get older I'm realizing that by not looking at the truth I'm missing out on a lot of the good stuff too. The truth I'm trying to look at is the relationships I have with friends and family. It sucks that it has taken me 26 years to figure that out.

I broke down and finally bought some clothes. It's nice to go to work without fashion guilt. Water heater is broken again, not looking forward to my early date with a cold shower. I'm in a good mood, New York coming up in a couple weeks, progress on the simulator. It's kind of fun watching the development unfold. The older guys impart their wisdom our young promising coder. We've got a graphics guy that hangs out regularly a guy from Germany that has a ton experience that keeps an eye on the project. We've got a guy from a FormulaSAE team that helps out with the car physics, and a few of us general purpose idea people. It's nice to see the equivalent of the wise tribal elders stopping by with words of wisdom every once in a while. Everybody has this kind of quiet positive attitude about the project that I don't think I've ever witnessed before. If I ever start a business that is what I want the atmosphere to be like.

If you can't catch me...

2004-09-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

This guy would be kind of hard to book without a face or fingerprints. I'm teaching myself how to create 3d objects so I can build odds and ends and maybe a car for Motorsport. This gingerbread man is my first creation. I'm also hoping to create images to accompany my blog posts instead of stealing them. I guess that means this post should be about the cruel nature of the stand up comedy business.

It's kind of funny, I spent $50 on a book that teaches the use of free software. You can download the tools I used to create the bread-man at blender3d.org. My first real contribution is going to be an extremely fancy cone for use on race tracks. I want to have the most accurately modelled cones availible on the face of God's green earth. It'll be my sole lasting contribution to humanity. I'm going to release it under the Creative Commons License so it can be used by anybody anywhere.

Capitalism, Hope, Tribal Sovereignty

2004-09-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

Maybe Chomsky was just ahead of his time and it's taking the eyes of thousands of bloggers to point out to the masses what he already knew. From Reuters:
"But Goldstein, Miller and Tyndall all questioned CBS News' judgment in going with Rather's report in the first place, even if the documents had turned out to be authentic. "It's another WMD, another weapon of mass distraction. That's what this whole campaign has turned out to be," Miller said, adding that "somebody out there is trying to keep this running."

That's a great point, I was watching Fox news over the weekend and the talking heads were all asking, "why are we even discussing this?" I saw that sentiment on more than one occasion. So who is the "somebody out there?" If Chomsky is right it's the government and corportations.

If he's wrong, it's just ratings driven fluff presented to a scandal hungry viewership. And that seems to be the major criticism of Chomsky, he claims the media is manipulating us but maybe we are on average naturally apathetic and not conditioned to be that way by the powers that be.

Chomsky is known for being cynical but hopeful. But by being hopeful is he overlooking the possibility that some people simply won't care to know the "truth" even if the media was not bent by corporate interests? He doesn't believe that capitalism and democracy are the emergent resultants of human nature unlike Reagan and Thatcher. I guess I'm hopeful too but for different reasons. Chomsky said in reply to my question "I'm an innocent as far as the internet is concerned." His problems with democracy lie in the fact that the media holds a distribution monopoly. The Internet, in my opinion, is the answer to that monopoly. Bloggers and BitTorrent are the catalysts needed to break it down. So what happens when news isn't biased anymore? Will people even care? I guess we'll find out in the next twenty or so years.

Unfortunately I think conservatives tend to watch Fox News because they like the bias, same goes for liberals and CNN. The danger is that TV will turn into talk radio. No journalists, just one person re-inforcing the juicy, misguided bits of human nature. Is it possible that the media monopoly could actually work if it had an army of critics in the form of bloggers fact checking? It worked with the Rather flap at CBS. This is also the theory behind the belief that Open Source software is more secure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" the quote from the Cathedral and the Bazaar might apply here. The many eyes aren't coders they are the bloggers, bugs aren't software problems but false information reported by the media. The many eyes theory might just work for journalism though, there aren't hackers looking for security flaws in a weekly column.

Speaking of Thatcher, here are a couple of interesting quotes.

"It is always important in matters of high politics to know what you do not know. Those who think that they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge." -- Margaret Thatcher,

"Tribal sovereignty means that; it's sovereign. I mean, you're a — you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004

Forget for a minute that he's talking utter nonsense. To say that tribes were given sovereignty was a slap in the face to Native Americans because "American Indian tribes hold their status as sovereign nations with an almost sacred reverence; an inherent standing as self-governing, independent bodies dating back millennia, something that's always existed."

Bush thought he knew what sovereignty meant but he was mistaken. He then acted by opening his mouth which was dangerous to his re-election bid. Bush does not know what he does not know.

Noam, Torrent, Game

2004-09-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

"The resultant `mistrust of the mass media' would at best be a political hunch or at worst a loose accusation, if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one of the world's greatest minds. And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live." Article HERE

Believe it or not, Chomsky just read my blog post on blogger/media and replied to my question...

I found a website I can relate to politically and as I was poking around I noticed that Noam Chomsky contributes to a blog and in the forums. I made a small donation which gave me access to a discussion board in which Noam and some of the other progressive brains congregate and discuss the issues. Now I have a problem. What do I ask him next? It's kind of intimidating because you can find him listed in philosophy textbooks next to names like Plato, Galileo, Descartes, Marx, Rocker, Freud, etc. Not that Freud and Marx weren't crazy but they were pretty damn influential. So what do you ask a guy that's a living legend among people like me that are into philosophy? I'm going to ask him what he thinks about the fact that his documentaries are available for download over the internet. What is more important, profit or the spread of his ideas? If he gives the OK to release his documentaries, I'm going to buy the DVDs, rip them into an Internet friendly format and start uploading them with BitTorrent.

I'm also going to ask him about his theory of language in relation to AI because he seems to be sort of an expert... Here's a weird linkage of ideas I just came across.

"In a much more radical way, philosophers in the tradition of Wittgenstein (such as Saul Kripke) argue that Chomskyans are fundamentally wrong about the role of rule following in human cognition. In a similar way philosophers in the phenomenological/existential/hermeneutic traditions oppose the abstract neo-rationalist aspects of Chomsky's thought. The contemporary philosopher who best represents this view is, perhaps, Hubert Dreyfus, also famous (or notorious) for his attacks on artificial intelligence."

His critics attack AI which means he probably has some interesting theories on it. Reference the article on deaf kids inventing a language. I'm going to ask him about my code that builds a vocabulary for research. It's really strange how all of these ideas are linked. Just had a crazy good idea that I'm going to propose to the guys at Wikipedia. They need to install bit torrent servers to make high bandwidth content available. I bet someone has already thought of it.

Just found the less than exciting reply from Noam...
" I'm an innocent as far as the internet is concerned. I
don't even know what blogger.com is. Better raise the
question with others.

Noam Chomsky"

How can a guy that smart not wonder about how the Internet is influencing the mass media. There are constant debates these days on the major news channels about the influence of bloggers. It's a little disappointing frankly. I think I need to spend a little more time clarifying my next question to him. Should make for some interesting blog posts in the near future.

In other news, our driving simulator is on the cusp of it's first basic release. We haven't got sound working just yet but almost everything else works. The highschool interns I work with are interested in this project and my boss gave me the green light to spend working hours using it to teach the kids about how technology and software work. It's pretty nice being able to get paid to work on this thing.

.

God, Coffee, Japanese War Lords

2004-09-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know if there is a God or not but I think it's human nature to want to believe in some greater order of things. That idea of intelligent design is at odds with my belief in evolution and the fact that our brains are made of chemicals which are subject to the laws of physics. There is a PBS show called the Sacred Balance that I identify with because it explains our existence in relative terms. We're not an island unto ourselves according to the narrator, we're all part of one interconnected planet. It seems to have some Ludditite undertones which I'm sceptical of.

Emergence sums up my take on why I'm sceptical of the existence of a soul.
"According to an emergent perspective, intelligence emerges from the connections between neurons, and from this perspective it is not necessary to propose a "soul" to account for the fact that brains can be intelligent, even though the individual neurons of which they are made are not." Ironically it's the same theory that leads me to believe that someday I might accept some kind of spirituality in my life. "Emergent structures are patterns not created by a single event or rule. There is nothing that commands the system to form a pattern, but instead the interactions of each part to its immediate surroundings causes a complex process which leads to order... What distinguishes a complex system from a merely complicated one is that some behaviours and patterns emerge in complex systems as a result of the patterns of relationship between the elements."

So what about the preceding quote appeals to me? Well, the maddening complexity of the interactions that are abstracted from the relative simplicity of the laws of physics that govern the components of the object in question, the mind in this case. It's a loophole in my argument against dualism. The coffee is wearing off, I guess you could argue that a lack of caffeine lowers my ability to think by an order of magnitude because the components of the brain increase by at least an order of magnitude by virtue of the fact that there may be some truth to the idea behind the butterfly effect. Coffee being the butterfly in this case. I have a good book called the Essence of Chaos I bought a long time ago, interesting read if you're into this stuff.

I saw The Last Samurai last night. It got pretty bad reviews but I liked it. Now I'm not sure if it idealized their way of life but if not, that life seems pretty close to perfect. It's hard to have guilt and no one repent to. I wonder if Japan will ever ease their immigration policies. I'd like to find a job that encourages tellecommuting so I can live in a small village in Japan with a good Internet connection and wise old people to keep me in line.

Back to tech.

2004-09-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

I think I've learned more in the last month than in my entire extended tour of duty in college. I've got ideas piling up in a draft post, don't have time to get it all into a legible form.

Had an idea on the way home from work today while listening to 1984 on CD...

User clicks a dowload link that is mirrored by Universities, misc other bandwidth benefactors.
Server checks to see if the user has a bittorrent client available.
If no torrent client exists, the data is sent via a traditional FTP like system. If it does exist, it can take advantage of the aggregate bandwidth of the active neighborhood.
All downloads would work via the bt:// protocol similar to how you can download a file now in IE or Firefox via ftp using ftp://server/filename.exe

Here's the good part though. The hybrid servers are able to dynamically shift load priority based on demand. Not demand for the files on that particular server though, the server is aware of demand on all of the servers in it's neighborhood. A neighborhood could be a bunch of Universities in collaboration. Now if there is a sudden spike in demand for lets say a 3GB breakthrough video documentary the server that is getting swamped by requests can send a copy of the video to one or more of its network neighbors and then add the other server(s) to the "tracker" so that there would be a seamless increase in bandwidth. So how's that different than just adding a torrent client to all of the servers? Well the difference is that the seed files would be handled separately based on an awareness of load. A file could be added and removed almost instantaneously to the other servers. Its a client server system but weird in that the servers are actually the main part of the distributed network because of their huge bandwidth. If the server has surplus bandwidth then it doesn't care if the client isn't sharing bandwidth unlike the current incarnation of BitTorrent. Initial client installation would be provided by the java wrapper being used by bannedmusic.org.

The beauty of it is this: You don't need overworked sys admins to upload files to University servers. The file would propogate (like DNS) to all "neighborhood" mirrors within an hour or two of the release of the MHBF (must have big file).

I was thinking of using the theory behind DHCP to create flexible work schedules for businesses with limited parking availability or even based on home locations and traffic data. Maybe I need a hobby.

Manufacturing Consent

2004-09-09T23:26:00.000-07:00

Some ideas while I'm watching a Noam Chomksy documentary called Manufacturing Consent. I'll update this when I get a chance.

I read that as many as 30,000 Iraqi civillians have died since we went into Iraq. "As many as" means that the number is probably on the high end so lets say it's half that, 15,000. Five times as many people (not including US soldiers) as in 9/11. That's some interesting food for thought.

Chomsky's theory is that media is controlled by advertising dollars and therefore the corporations that advertise. The government/elite then use the media to leverage the flaws in Democracy to retain their power (they call it "stability"). Here's my theory: Wouldn't the emergence of the Internet and then blogging as a source of news for the masses be a threat to the establishment? And if that was the case wouldn't a corporation try to buy Blogger.com? (Google just did) And if the content can only be manipulated by independent users wouldn't the advertising model be imposed on individual users similar to the way it works with traditional media? (Blogger is now partnering with Adsense).I don't believe that I'd be lucky enough to come up with an original idea linking Chomsky's theory to new media but I just noticed some text from the Blogger.com homepage that really freaked me out...

AdSense Invite
Did you know that you can turn your blog into a source of revenue with Google's AdSense program?
Would you like to sign up? Yes, please.

A quote "Previously there were AdSense ads embedded in all of Google's free Blogger sites, but the bloggers didn't get any of the financial action." So what made blogger all of a sudden decide to pay users? "Blogger.com wants to make its customers rich" Why? What happened to Capitalism? Who owns google? Google recently had privacy protests due to their email scanning system.

Another quote "Another piece on Google's bizarre no-hate-ads policy, but this one suggests it is applied with a conservative bias. The author had a political commentary website which included an article which called the President "secretive, paranoid and vengeance-filled". His site was taken down." I'm not the first with this idea apparently...

From http://www.perrspectives.com/articles/art_gagorder01.htm
"Far more important to American society, Google's pervasiveness has given it a unique and privileged role as the information gatekeeper of the 21st century. “To Google” someone or something has become synonymous with using the Internet to find information, images or news. The New York Times has detailed the emergence of Google as an alternative to the traditional library for research. As individuals, businesses and publishers leverage its search, email and advertising tools to reach readers, sell products and assemble communities, Google is on the verge of becoming the Internet arbiter of the First Amendment.

As I learned this week, however, Google may be playing a darker, more sinister role in American society: corporate censor. On June 15, the Google Adwords team informed me that it had discontinued all advertisements placed by Perrspectives.com due to “unacceptable content” on the site that includes “language that advocates against an individual, group or organization.” As we’ll see below, this may or may not be blatant bias against liberal viewpoints. There can be no doubt, though, that the current Google editorial guidelines, evenly applied, would bar almost any newspaper, magazine, opinion journal, political party, advocacy campaign or even religious organization from advertising on its site. And that puts Google dangerously at odds with core American values of free speech and assembly."

Another idea. Google results are based on an algorithm. Talk about the perfect method of shaping people's world views.

Audiobooks, Fahrenheit 9/11

2004-09-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

Weird quote of the day: "Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things." - George Carlin

Couple of thoughts today. I've found a new way to stuff even more stuff in my brain. Books on tape. You can download a whole book in the form of a bunch of MP3s(chapters) and burn them onto CDs. I think this might be a good time to get an MP3 player. My commute is 30 to 40 minutes a day so I figure I can "read" my current book, 1984, in a few weeks. I can't read normal books because of my short attention span so this is a good compromise.

There are obvious licensing issues here so I was thinking that someone should setup a website and convince James Earl Jones to read the classics. Nobody owns Shakespeare's works, the only cost involved in producing Hamlet in the form of a book are the printing and distribution. Those costs evaporate when you can distribute digitally. Maybe I'll setup a website. Needs a catchy name though. Project Gutenberg has a few Sherlock Holmes books read by a human as well as a bunch read by computer which sound like Steven Hawking. The few sites that aspire to do the same thing are all offline, most likely due to the bandwidth requirements. That's where Bit Torrent comes in.

It has to be inevitable that Bittorrent will be seamlessly embedded in to the KDE and Gnome windows managers for Linux and into the Longhorn Windows Shell. That way if you clicked on a .torrent link you would get the usual "file downloading" dialog box but with the file coming from multiple users instead of just one server. Maybe I should look into coding that. The only problem is that people would have to configure their routers for port forwarding. Not something to be taken lightly. Great blog post about this idea here. UPDATE: Looks like the minds and ears of BannedMusic.org have created a nice Java based wrapper(not a musician) that simplifies the download process. Should be interesting to watch. Another good blog discussion about it here.

I used BitTorrent to dowload and watch Fahrenheit 911 last night. I wasn't that impressed with the movie to be honest. It's a good documentary but his whiney, patronizing voice narrates you into insanity. I may just dislike Moore as much as Bush. The movie fits on two CDs and it is very nearly DVD quality. How you ask? Because DVDs use an old crappy compression mechanism, MPEG 2, and computers are capapble of better compression (MPEG 4). If anybody I know that reads this wants to borrow it just let me know.

2004-09-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

I think a lot of people have different motivations for writing, mine wasn't very clear until recently. It was strange reading the following snippet from The Age of the Essay because it explained my though process almost exactly.

"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.

But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea."

But what the hell am I trying to figure out? I sit down to write this thing, maybe with an idea and that's about it. So this stuff you're reading is just a glimpse of what goes on inside my head all day, scary as that may be. In fact, when I go to bed I have to consciously force myself into a vegetative state or I just won't sleep. Sometimes I read my old posts and can see where I was wrong, I learn more about how I think. For instance, my dad always claimed I had a fear of success. Looking at it now it's clear that I simply have a fear of hiding from reality behind piles of "work." A quote from The Underground History of American Education.
"When a Colorado coalminer testified before authorities in 1871 that eight hours underground was long enough for any man because "he has no time to improve his intellect if he works more," the coaldigger could hardly have realized his very deficiency was value added to the market equation."

Automation has changed things, the majority of the workforce is now knowledge based. So if the author of the above quote is correct(I'm not entirely sure he is) then my hatred of school was a logical response to the outdated, industrial era bureaucracy that is K-12. If I ever have kids I'm going to seriously consider home schooling them, I just need to find a weathly lady with child bearing hips first. Maybe I'll just get one of those robotic vacuums and re-program it instead of homeschooling a real person.

2004-09-07T21:36:00.000-07:00

I bashed my head on some office furniture and aside from the gash I think I may have a mild concussion. If this entry trails off into nonsense you'll know why, for instance, the dogs have no relevance to the post but in my haze it looked like they were aquapedal, waking on water.

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks has some theories about the future of digital content distribution. "Well hopefully you'll be able to buy or rent a hard drive with 5, 10, 20 movies on it. And you'll use your DVR, your PC, or your Media Center PC, and just through a 1394 port or a USB 2.0 port, you'll connect the hard drive. Or we might do a deal with Netflix or Wal-Mart where every month you get a new hard drive loaded with movies, and then you ship back your old ones, just like you do now with Netflix, when you ship back your DVDs when you're finished watching them. Why not just ship back the hard drive?"

I had NetFlix for a while and there was a major problem. Spontaneity. I don't want to wait a week or two for the mail to arrive so I can watch a movie. In fact I may have lost interest by then. Cuban is obsessed with high resolution. Now I have a HDTV so I know how much better it looks than the old 480i signals that have been around for over half a century. The problem is that at some point it's good enough. At some point people trade quality for convenience.

Michael Moore admitted he wasn't bothered by the fact that people are downloading his movies. “I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I’m happy this is happening.” I'm a software guy so I know all of the tools available to get big files off the Internet. Kazza can't handle files this big very well but there is an interesting, relatively unknown tool used in conjunction with a website for this sort of thing. I downloaded a surprisingly high quality copy of Roger and Me, Moore's first documentary, in about two hours, Fahrenheit 911 is slowly making its way onto my computer as we speak. What the hell is Cuban thinking? Who's going to want to plug in an external hard drive to watch a movie?

Right now, few people have heard of BitTorrent. It's finikey and hard to use but it works very well as my flickering router lights can attest. Actually, now that I think about it, I have a biased point of view. I download documentaries, ideas with a video backdrop. I don't need 5.1 surround sound to get Noam Chomsky's critique of the Media. Lots of people want sensory immersion especially when watching Art Films and the like. Don't watch Fahrenheit 911 if you're squeamish by the way, there was just footage of a guy getting his head lopped off. Some things are better left low-def.

2004-09-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

Unforutunately intelligence and insanity aren't mutually exclusive. Osama bin Laden has a degree in Economics. Supposedly part of the reason he hit the World Trade Center is because of the Trade that would be disrupted. Here's a lovely quote from Stephen Flynn's essay The Neglected Home Front "The Bush administration is spending more every three days on the Iraq war than it has in three years on the security of all U.S. commercial seaports" The articles quotes the Bush admin as saying that critical infrastructure will be protected because it's in the interest of Business to prevent it from happening which is as stupid as saying that the creation of the Interstate Highway system would have been done by a few corporations because they would have seen the need for it. Some things are best left to the government. National Security comes to mind.

We're rebuilding Iraq and we can't even protect ourselves. Of course Bush is up in the polls right now because he's claiming he'll protect us all. Osama is smart enough to exploit our weaknesses, the author of the article points our our infrastructure weaknesses and how Osama could create panic by attacking our food supply. Not panic in the sense that people will run around screaming and burning fridges, but longer term panic in that the average joe will vote for a guy that starts hacking up the constitution so we've got a better chance at finding a handful of terrorists among the billions of inhabitants of earth. Again, I'm not a Democrat and I don't think Bush is evil, just incredibly incompetent.

Osama wants to create fear in Americans to disrupt our economy. Bush wants to create fear in Americans to get re-elected. So isn't Bush then helping Osama by fueling the paranoia? I'm pretty convinced we're going to get nuked in the next ten years because I've read a dozen or so non-partisan critiques of Bush's flawed agenda. I haven't heard any real numbers but today on CNN some guy said "It is more likely than not." CNN is going to have a big report on this on September 12 by the way if anybody is interested.

Next Time: Human Capital, applying capitalism to democracy.

2004-09-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

OK prepare to be depressed. I'm not sure I sould even be writing about this but here goes. I was at an open house type event for a major defense contractor. No classified information was on display, just your run of the mill carnival type kiosks except for one booth. I was leaving and noticed out of the corner of my eye what looked like a bomb going off in a city on their big LCD display. I stopped, turned around and went back to ask the guy what this was all about. He said that it was a demonstration of explosions, stuff they couldn't do in real life any more since nuclear weapons testing was banned. He had a very high resolution 3D map of what looked like a major city. on one of the streets, a virtual bomb went off. I've seen a bunch of documentaries on this stuff, Blinding Horizon, Trinity and Beyond, etc. and what I saw in this booth was scarier than anything in those documentaries. I know a lot about this stuff, it always interested me so I was able to hold a fairly intelligent conversation with the guy. He said they run the simulations at Sandia National Labs which didn't surprise me, they have some of the biggest super computers know to man. Looking at the explosion on the screen just tearing apart buildings in a huge radius, I knew it wasn't a truck bomb I was looking at so I asked the guy if I was looking at a nuclear bomb. A one kiloton a-bomb is the equivalent one thousand tons of TNT. He said that it was a ten kiloton bomb that I was looking at in the simulation.

Now here's where it gets weird. George Will is probably my favorite writer, he's the only reason I read newsweeek. I was reading one of his articles and it struck me...
"In December 1994, Czech police seized more than eight pounds of HEU in a parked car on a side street. A senior al Qaeda aide's proclaimed goal of killing 4 million Americans would require 1,400 9/11s, or one 10-kiloton nuclear explosion — from a softball-sized lump of fissionable material — in four large American cities...In 1993, U.S. officials used ordinary bolt cutters to snip off the padlock that was the only security at an abandoned Soviet-era facility containing enough HEU for 20 nuclear weapons."

HEU is highly enriched Uranium. The guts of one of these bombs. So what I was looking at was a 3D, birds eye view of the most likely scenario of what's likely going to happen over here in the next few years. Reading Foreign Affairs isn't helping my nerves either because most of the people that write about this stuff are convinced that this is inevitable. Even the articles that claim to explain how to prevent it debate how we should respond and what the world will look like afterward.

I wish I knew what city I was looking at in the simulation. It didn't look like San Diego which is kind of nice I guess. There is an equation used to predict the existance of life on other planets. One of the major factors that decreases the odds is a variable for the likelyhood of a civilization blowing itself to pieces with nuclear bombs.

It makes me wish I hadn't seen that simulation. Ignorace is bliss right? Sorry for ruining your day.

UPDATE: Lockheed Martin just visited my blog. Now it's sorta scary because they've never visited and now I post about defense contractors and here they are. The weird bit is that my post was today and Google hasn't updated yet so how the hell would they know to come check it out?

2004-09-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

Well I was mid way through this post and I saw an article on CNN about how scientists have discovered a weird signal coming from what could be little green men on another planet. It's probably a mistake but if not, it would be the biggest news story in recorded history. Yes, even bigger than the Republican National Convention.

It's interesting being in the thick of a trasformation of an industry. Open Source is taking the software industry by storm. The game industry is huge. Software of the kind we're creating is a threat to the billions in revenue created by the current proprietary production methods.

Governor Scharawerzdzeeggger. Governor Arnold is pushing for the adoption of Open Source software as a way to decrease IT costs for the state of California. Great article on him on Wired.

Prediction for Florida. Insurance companies are going to begin to wonder if the recent rash of Hurricanes is the result of global warming. Premiums for coverage in Florida explode. People can't afford coverage and move. Homes get cheaper, I buy some land and build one made of some of that new Carbon Nano material which would be impervious.

2004-08-31T11:38:00.000-07:00

Well this is scary. A few days ago I was rambling about the problems with Democracy and said
"Should the president simply explain to people that the war on terror can not have an exit strategy? Yes, but if he does he wouldn't get re-elected."
And today we have the news article from Reuters...
"NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Reuters) - One day after saying the war on terror could not be won, President Bush on Tuesday sought to calm a political storm by asserting he had been less than articulate and that America would prevail."

Hillarious in a "I think I'm going to puke" kind of way. The president was honest. He had to turn around and lie to protect his re-election bid. If that doesn't prove that Democracy is full of holes, I don't know what will. It's hard to know what is going on inside the heads of Bush and Kerry except on the rare occasion that they slip up and tell it like it is. I was reading an article last night about how it's entirely possible that the entire American economic system may collapse because we're shifting the burden of the deficit to our youth. They're going to have to pay massive taxes to keep the baby boomers happy. The young generation will have little or no say in the government because they will be outnumbered by baby boomers. The youth will pay the majority of the taxes though because they will be working. Que meltdown.

So if you're old and leeching off the system the best thing you can do for the next generation is max out your credit cards, donate the money to poor kids and then call Dr. Kevorkian. I'm kind of joking but if I get to the age where I'm just sapping money from my poor kids and therefore their kids college funds then it would seem the only honorable, decent thing to do.

It will be interesting to see what happens in Europe and Japan in the near future because they're about 5 years closer to meltdown than we are.

2004-08-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting quote from the creator of Gollum, the handsome little guy from Lord of the Rings when asked about whether or not we will ever see computers create real-life human actors.

I hope not. I don't see why we should. I can create a Humphrey Bogart that will look like Bogart, act like Bogart, sound like Bogart. But what made Bogart so special is what he had inside. You can't create a soul from a computer. And I don't think we should try. If you want to have Tom Hanks in a film, you ought to go out and hire Tom Hanks.

He says we can't create a soul from a computer but then immediately says he doesn't think we should try. I think I know what went on inside his head after that sentence. Oppenheimer was good at what he did. What he did was create the first atom bomb. Upon witnessing the detonation of his combustive concoction he uttered the famous quote "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Gollum's dad may have been thinking "I am become virtual life, destroyer of the screen actors guild." He realized that it would be possible to fool people into believing that a computer generated actor could have a soul. Why else shouldn't we try if it's not possible? Here is an interesting scenario... Some film studio is going to create a virtual actor and sneak it into a film. It won't be a lead character, maybe someone with a couple of lines. But nobody will notice. It'll cut down on production costs and suddenly producers begin to question the sanity of a $20 Million salary for Adam Sandler.

You can't deny human nature. If I met a brilliant supermodel who was kind and devoid of emotional baggage I'd marry her without hesitation. Maybe we'd grow old together with a couple of adopted kids and I'd die happy. Why adopted kids? Because the perfect girl doesn't exist unless she was a robot and simply lied to me about why she was unable to concieve and had a deathly fear of microwave ovens. Now would the fact that she didn't have a soul matter? Even if I later found out that she wasn't human it wouldn't bother me personally because I don't believe that a soul exists in the religious sense of the word. It's another creation, like god we use to try to make sense of the chaotic world we inhabit. So maybe in a few centuries when this happens we will still be slaves to evolution but we'll have an answer for it. We will have beat the system. Of course real humans will be on average hideous in comparison, the thought of actually having a relationship with another human would be laughable.

2004-08-27T10:09:00.003-07:00

Some facts. The average age in 1st world countries is increasing. The cost of healthcare is increasing. Immigration helps America because it lowers our average age compared to European countries and Japan. Lower average age is good because older people are extremely expensive especially if they aren't working. Old people vote for better health care instead of better schools which is damaging to the country in the long run. Terrorism is bad for imigration. Immigration is essential if we're to remain competitive in a global economy. 9/11 was tragic and cost the lives of 3,000 Americans. The total number of people killed in highway crashes in 2001 was 42,116. Terrorists will never be completely eradicated. Big fences will never stop the McVeighs of the world. Should we spend trillions trying to prevent the inevitable? Should the president simply explain to people that the war on terror can not have an exit strategy? Yes, but if he does he wouldn't get re-elected. That's another glaring problem with Democracy. Ignorance is bliss. People like to be lied to. Would any marriage last more than four years if people were really totally honest with eachother? Dishonesty is a requirement for democratic leadership because of our lack of acceptance of human nature.

Democracy is the best system we've found so far and it still sucks. Here's my proposal. It's based on Abe Lincoln's astute observation that "The nation needs a foundation more durable than the sand of opinion that can be easily shifted in each election" It's called Chimpocracy. Chimpocracy would be founded on the awareness that we're basically slightly less furry monkeys with the ability to occasionaly reason. We are on average short term thinking creatures. Instead of taking the best ideas we take a mushy average of what might make sense if we were rational compassionate beings. We're not. Not even close. So our nature isn't compatible with Democracy. What are we compatible with then?

2004-08-26T23:10:00.000-07:00

Just saw a movie. Fairly standard issue sappy thing called Love Actually but I actually kind of liked it. It made me realize a few things. These aren't real revelations for most but it just hit me. I'm getting older and life is way way too short to walk in circles. I like the technology, philosophy, and various other words ending in y but they're just scenery. Here's an analogy. I had some nice luggage but it got lost at the airport and I've been waiting for it for a long time. Nothing I can't live without but some illogical chunk of my brain won't let it go. That's why I liked the movie. The airport scenes, because I came to a conclusion about something other than software and business logic for once. It's time to quit bugging the baggage handler, time for some new luggage, maybe something with wheels and a combo lock.

I did come to a conclusion about another thing I'm working on. If we make this game work, and it's a big if because it's so damn ambitious, we may be able to popularize open source software with a heck of a lot of people. More so than Linux because only us computer nerds are using it right now. It's something I think about that helps me sleep. I'm pretty confident we'll succeed.

2004-08-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

More news on the driving simulator. Some engineering gurus from Force Dynamics want to work with us to make their motion simulator work with our driving simulator. It's pretty interesting stuff, the prototype looks like a giant spider and the legs expand and contract based on the current state of affairs in the simulator. I'm willing to drive to test out that beast. I'll post some photos if it ever happens.

Here is some nerdy discussion with the Force Dynamics guy from our chat room ..
Kirk] I'm going to test upstream, this could be good
PeriSoft] heson-- at the moment, packets to a special port
STenyaK] is it possible to send packets to 'any port'?
PeriSoft] not sure about port, but you can broadcast to any machine
PeriSoft] problem is that loads up all the machines on the network with packets they have to toss out.. now, not a big deal, but i'd prefer to have specific

There is a new article in BusinessWeek claiming that flying cars will be a reality fairly soon. We've been able to communicate via the Internet over large distances for years and now, hopefully these new forms of transportation will allow like minded people to interact. I only wonder how many miles per gallon they would get.

The reason I thought of this is because I did the E-harmony thing just to see what would happen. It found a few matches which in retrospect makes sense. I'm a fairly strange animal so I wouldn't expect my profile to match up with hundreds of women. The women it did find were mostly in other states. Now if people could jump in their sky car and go meet these ultra-compatible people, we'd probably see a lot less dysfunction in the world.

I had a dream last night. I was in the future and I was looking back on the way things are today and how little we really know about the world or ourselves for that matter. I've always heard that famous quote "The more you know, the more you realize the less you know" and wondered if that was really true. Maybe it's arrogance. I have a set of beliefs that I'm fairly sure are representative of reality. Although I'm not sure you can really call an agnostic a true believer in anything.

2004-08-23T16:57:00.000-07:00

Today was a good day for my little side project. One of our graphics guys created the first test car for Motorsport. As of today we have 115 people signed on to help and we gain one or two a week. We've been forced to create a new car from scratch to avoid any legal issues. Ferrari is very touchy about this sort of thing apparently. In fact, even though we're not planning to get rich off of this they still don't play ball. We're having a hard time coming up with a name for the blue beast. If you have any ideas click the comment link...

2004-08-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I remember thinking about the similarities between distributed software development and democracy. There is an article called the Cathedral and the Bazzar by Eric Raymond that explains how a decentralized decision making process is a sound management philosophy. I'm among the minority of Open Source proponents that disagree with his conclusions. Linus Torvalds is the self proclaimed benevolent dictator of the operating system known as Linux. It is the result of thousands of developers working together on a project that is now at the top of Microsoft's threat list.

Here is a quote from the guy that commented on my blog about a quote from a philosopher "Yeah, Socrates was right when he said that rule by the many can do the least harm, but also the least good." In fact the whole electoral college system is designed to prevent the majority from dominating the minority...

"Thus, the intent of the college is to favor a candidate whose appeal is more broadly distributed on a geographical basis across the nation (see the 2000 election, below). This may lead to the rare circumstance of giving the election to a candidate who did not win a majority, or even a plurality, of the popular vote. This is seen as preferable than giving the election to one who is favored by a majority of voters but whose support is concentrated in a minority of regions or only by voters in large states."

I think my point here is that people are only proponents of elitism because our current system creates the exact opposite. They say "find a job you love and you'll never have to go to work again" People who love philosophizing about political ideologies will gravitate towards a system where their voices are heard. That system doesn't exist in America today. OpEd pieces are too slow, rebuttals in Foreign Affairs take two months to appear.

If we think of a democracy as an open source project where the source code is the constitution and law then couldn't the same ideas that work for Linux and other massive collaborative projects work for government as well? I was reading about how the Republicans were having a hard time finding someone to run for an office because it would cost $7-$10 Million dollars. Nobody wants to run for office these days. What if all of those great thinkers without $10Million burning a hole in their pockets could actually have a say in how things work? I guess the problem isn't whether or not it would work but the more practical issue of how to change the momentum of the most powerful nation on the planet.

Here is an interesting read with similar ideas. And a Free Book about the subject.

My entire blog is a rough draft, I need to cut the fat off the edges and edit some of my posts.

Next time:

Ferrari Lawyers
Sandia Labs

2004-08-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

The new copy of Foreign Affairs arrived today. The only article that jumped out at me was Riding for a Fall by Peter Peterson. He talks about the aging population of 1st world nations and how our spending habits will most likely cause some major problems with the economy in the next few years. I'm optimistic that because of technology the majority of the world will be better off in the future.

What happens when technology replaces a worker? Are we better off because prices go down or does the increasing underemployment counter those gains? I was reading some economic data just for kicks the other day; it turns out that corporate profits are booming while wages are stagnant. Based on what I've read the counterintuitive trend is the result of the rise of "process automation". Outsourcing gets the bad press because it has a face. It's more gratifying tormenting a cabbie than a can opener.

I guess I'm just trying to get a grip on what exactly an economy is. In one article in Foreign Affairs the author catches himself lamenting the slow demise of 1st world dominace when he knows that the standard of living for billions of others is increasing. There is depressing humor in the fact that we live in a democracy where we're supposed to have faith in the opinions of the majority yet we ignore the majority of the inhabitants of the world. Maybe that's the root cause of my anti-Bush sentiments. Unilatteralism isn't democratic. Wikipedia is democracy. Maybe the best hope have for the future of the planet is Moore's law. Computers are becoming commodity items. Access to information is getting cheaper at the same time that content is appearing at exponential rates.
It's a sort of singularity. Increasingly cheaper technology increases access to information. That information increases demand for the technology. I took the software used for Wikipedia and used it to create my own Wiki for my driving simulator. It's interesting that the monetary value of the software I downloaded would be hundreds or thousands of dollars if the license wasn't open source. Check it out here it's the same stuff that's running http://wikipedia.org.

I think I need to read more and write less.

2004-08-18T09:05:00.000-07:00

"Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies. And they're doing it by manipulating the political process. The telegraph didn't prevent the telephone, the railroad didn't prevent the automobile. But now, because of the immense amounts of money that they're spending on lobbying and the need for immense amounts of money for media, the political process is being manipulated by incumbents."

A quote from a Howard Rheingold interview. Read the whole thing here.

I was driving to work today and heard the new Green Day Anti-Bush song. It wasn't on a Clear Channel station. I flipped to Clear Channel owned 91X, and they were playing Green Day too, just not the Bush song. Coincidence? Perhaps but it's most likely a massive conspiracy ;)

Someone actually posted a comment on my blog. I think it's the result of that new button at the top that takes you to a random blog. It's surprising that they didn't have that earlier. The text reads 1 comments. I wrote some software once that counted the number of items and would remove the s from the end of comments if only one item existed so it would be gramatically correct. The code looks something like this: != means does not equal.
if (intComments != 1)
{ strComment += "s";}

Here's a lesson maybe you readers can take from me so it never happens to you. I went to the gym last night, did a bunch of cardio stuff, probably dehydrated myself. So I get home and the Padres are winning and the beer begins to flow, exacerbating the dehydration. I'm not sure beer is a good word to describe what I was drinking. Stone Imperial Russian Stout. It's over 20 proof. Gnarly hangover this morning but my mud-like coffee quickly cured me.

Next time: Redefining Capitalism on Wikipedia.

2004-08-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

There are two circumstances I find myself thinking about that leech stress from my troubled mind. The first involves me on a boat.

It's morning and I'm somewhere about a mile off shore in an old sail boat. I don't have on quite enough clothes to keep me warm but my PH Balanced beard and overheating laptop keep me at a perfect temperature. I've created a harness and pulley system for my requisite golden lab. He scampers down the hull of the boat, perfectly counterbalanced, cleaning off the barnicles thanks to the peanut butter I applied at the dock. It's a beautiful symbiotic relationship much like the bird that cleans the alligator's teeth. And so I sit, inspired by the sounds of the seagulls and hungry dog, writing about software and caffeine, not knowing how to steer the boat but content in the knowledge that our coast guard will again prove their heroism.

OK I guess the other situation also involves a boat. I'm cruising through the Caribbean sea. Not a soul in sight. I don't have a laptop this time but I'm stark naked and I have a boatload of beer. And limes. No dog or peanut butter this time, although...

And so it appears that I enjoy solitude. I enjoy the company of people but spending your entire life with one person sounds a little utopian. My use of utopian refers to Tomas More's book Utopia which "depicted a society organized along communist lines."
Well intentioned but with only an ideallic understanding of human nature. Now that divorce rates have surpassed the 50% barrier and considering the fall of the Berlin Wall I don't think it's a huge leap to compare communism and marriage.

I can see myself as an old man with two or three dogs, maybe one fat anti-social cat, some good friends and maybe a boat.

2004-08-14T01:56:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with my co-workers on my side project and noticed that we all type our email addresses in a certain weird way to prevent the spam 'bots that scan chat rooms for easy prey. kirk@oogabooga.net is translated to kirk AATT oogabooga DOT net. We're already trying to outsmart supposedly dumb software.

I'm headed to New York in October to chase around ladies with attitude and fancy shoes. It should be interesting to learn about all of the weird beach living tendencies I have that I assume are universal. I really want to go to Europe though, all of my code buddies from the Motorsport project are over there and I'd probably have a lot of fun if I made it over.

I've had a business idea for a long time. I've been working on it, tweaking it, etc. And I think now is the time to grab it by the balls and run with it. My motivation is the articles that point out the growing wealth divide. My scary vision of 1 man and 50 robots / applications running a business isn't so scary if I'm the guy behind the robot polished desk. My new office has a window. I can see the sky now and I find myself in a more relaxed mood. I changed my wallpaper to the blue water, 3 treed island that comes with Windows XP.

2004-08-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Signed up for the gym finally. They tried to use every weird tactic to extract as much money as possible from me. I figured out the loopholes in the system though. You can upgrade your membership to include other gyms but you can't downgrade it. My degree in finance has emboldened me to mess with sales people. I guess it's sorta mean. You can't transfer your account to another gym either, you have to either upgrade to the multi-gym package or cancel and restart your membership there. On the plus side, I slept better than I have in years last night. I even woke up earlier than my alarm clock for once.

I'm thinking of buying a motorbike. Specifically this one. I have a little two seat car that I drive the hell out of so going to a bike wouldn't be a huge change. I guess it would suck on rainy days but we have maybe two of those a year here in San Diego. Could be dangerous though. The one time I got my hands on a bike it didn't turn out well. Many moons ago there was a yellow moped, its owner had long since given up on the sad looking little guy. A little TLC and a few hours later and we had a living hog. Being invincible I didn't need a helmet; shoes or shirt either for that matter. So I'm racing around the block faster and faster, eyes tearing up from the wind, when I just pushed too hard and crashed. I was laying face down in the middle of the sreet, bike in pieces and I had so much adrenaline in me that I didn't feel much pain. Hopefully I learned my lesson.

It's Friday and I'm forcing myself to stay home tonight. I find myself going out to the local bars about every other night. That's a bad habit unless you're rich. And if you are rich it's a really bad habit.

2004-08-10T23:59:00.000-07:00

Just saw the new Cruise cab movie. Not too bad though it was kind of long. 4 CrackHouses out of 5.

I'm joining the gym. Not because I think its cool to have no neck but because I want to have more energy. Supposedly exercise is good for the brain too. I hate the fact that mindless, monotonous activity is required for the human body to work correctly. Robots aren't going to go to the gym.

Speaking of robots... We bought our tickets online for the movie and the were spat out at the machine in the theater lobby. There was a huge line next to us, there is no going back.

I read some interesting information about emergence and how it creates complex behavior in farily simple systems. I was trying to figure out the code necessary to create self awareness in AI in an earlier post and the emergence idea makes the code unnecessary.

Duality - " The representation of the higher (spiritual) and lower (mental) aspects of consciousness held by an individual. " Emergence is similarly two layered. I'll expand on this in the next post...

2004-08-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

As usual on a Sunday, I was watching "Meet the Press" with my big cup of Joe and small hang over and heard an interesting point. We tax corporate profits which increase the cost of goods which supposedly has the same effect as regressive taxes like sales tax. The politician argued that we need to only tax personal income so corporations aren't burdened by the regulatory impediments that are supposedly harming our(American) global competitiveness.

He forgot to mention that wages would have to jump as well to counter the increased personal taxes which would cancel any cost benefits from reduced corporate taxes. The only benefit, and it may be large, would come from the reduced complexity of the current system. Another consequence is that the cost of employing workers would go up, increasing demand for automated smart systems which would cut employment starting with the working class and moving its way up as technology improves. It reminds me of the Butterfly Effect. Things are changing too fast because of technology for these old school thinkers to predict the consequences of their policy decisions.

If we had a president with the brains of Bill Clinton and the heart of Tim Russert the world would be a better place.