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 May
8, 2008: Meeting Juliana Leigh Roper
Bill & Gretchen returned home from Madison yesterday
with their new baby, Juliana Leigh. They were a little ragged from
the stress of the adventure and spending almost a week in a hotel
room, but the payoff was difficult to calculate: the little girl
sleeping on Gretchen's shoulder. Mission accomplished: Julie is
home.
Gretchen dropped her in my lap and I held her for
a little while, Gretchen
having made sure that her diaper was correctly applied and (as best
she could tell) tight. Julie looked around for awhile and squirmed
a little, but mostly she wanted to fall asleep. Like her sister
Katie before her, she is a very placid and un-fussy baby. I heard
her cry some when Gretchen changed her diaper a little later, but
apart from that she took it easy on Gretchen's shoulder. She lay
quietly in her magic stroller (magic in the way it folds down to
nothing and slides behind the seats in their van) while we had supper
at Sweet Baby Ray's, even with all the fuss that the waitresses
were making over her. Being six days old, she still has the ruddiness
of complexion that one expects of newborns, and the pale blue eyes
that most infants have before their pigment develops. Bill has blue
eyes. Gretchen's, like mine, are very brown. Julie's could still
go either way.
Nothing more to offer this morning than that. I'm
working on Degunking Essentials as I have for the last few
days, and will rejoin Carol later today. Tomorrow we launch south
to Champaign to witness our younger nephew Matt graduate from the
U of I, and with no crisp idea of my free time or connectivity,
it's hard to know when I'll post again, but don't despair if you
don't see anything before Monday.
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May
7, 2008: Odd Lots
- Here at the condo this morning, I can't bring up squat on the
Web because everybody's out there trying to figure out who won
the Democratic primaries last night. So I did an absolutely unheard
of thing: I went down to the White Hen, got some of their great
coffee, and picked up a newspaper. What a notion.
- I'm hearing more and more people say that Wi-Fi doesn't work
as well as it used to, which is weird because microwave physics
hasn't changed recently. But...look at how many APs Windows can
see from wherever you are. From my kitchen table here, NetStumbler
sensed twelve APs...and walking around inside our dinky
little condo picked up four more. Three of the strongest signals
were on default Channel 6—and five out of sixteen were cleverly
named "linksys." I don't think it's the physics, folks.
- After Meetup.com went all-paid (and highly paid) I investigated
an alternative called Gatheroo, which later (in response to another
damfool lawsuit from somebody) became Zanby.
The
site's been redesigned and is worth a look if you want to
start a meatspace social network where you live. There are both
free and paid levels of participation, and it's certainly not
as expensive as Meetup.
- Matthew Reed
(and lots of others after him) sent me pointers to articles about
the
recent implementation of memristors, which are a species of
passive electronic component postulated in 1971 but not actually
implemented until HP researchers made some earlier this year.
Whether this interests you varies directly by the strength of
your passion for electronics, and whereas I understand the concept
now, my head is still spinning trying to figure out what it implies.
Everybody's talking about better computer memory, sure...but what
could this do in simple analog circuits?
- Jim Strickland sent me a pointer to a
YouTube video about a flame triode amplifier/oscillator lashup,
and guys, you gotta see this. It's basically a vacuum tube without
either vacuum or tube: When the electrodes get hot, it starts
amplifying. I don't fully understand the physics yet, but this
would be one fantastic high school science fair project.
The question arose in our local group as to whether this could
be considered steampunkish, and I'm not sure. People in the steampunk
era had no problems generating reasonably hard vacuum and blowing
glass envelopes. What they had problems with was understanding
electrons. Nonetheless, with a big enough flame and some honkin'
batteries, you could have done some impressive things back in
1888.
- Global Cooling adherents have been sending me pointers to Watts
Up With That, and Icecaps.us.
Fascinating reading, including numerous facets of the climate
change discussion that you won't see in Big Media. F'rinstance:
Weather monitoring installations that were built sixty or seventy
years ago out in the leafy countryside have recently become surrounded
by new development, buildings, pavement, etc., and as a result
are now in the middle of heat islands. What might that do to long-term
temperature data? Hmmmm....
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May
6, 2008: Josef Fritzl, Evil, and Dumb Luck
Most of you have probably heard by now of Josef
Fritzl, an Austrian psychopath who created a custom dungeon
under his home, kept his daughter a prisoner there for 24 years,
and sired seven children by her. I haven't been this disturbed by
a crime since the boggling case of John Wayne Gacy, right here in
NW metro Chicago, who tortured, murdered and then buried 33 young
men under his house back in the 1970s.
Like it or not, crimes like this prompt one to ask an ugly question:
If evil like this is possible, why are we still here? Why are we
not already extinct? (Those who have studied the history of the
20th Century might say it was a very near thing.) I have a theory,
though I admit it's a little thin to hang the future of humanity
on: It's difficult to be brilliant and evil at the same time.
Evil as we define it generally comes with limitations, primarily
the limitation of not being able to see yourself and your own situation
very clearly.
Right
Men (as described by A. E. Van Vogt and Colin Wilson) are the
best example: They just cannot conceive of the possibility that
they are wrong. A huge number of Right Men thus never get very far
in life. We see through them easily, recognize them as egomaniacal
psychopaths, and do our best to avoid them. They have a bad habit
of getting injured or killed in conflicts with others. Even when
they somehow succeed in society to a degree, they are almost invariably
humbled at some point, which is unbearable to them and often causes
them to die young.
This is a good thing for us, as truly brilliant evil is extremely
dangerous. What most "ordinary" evil people (like Fritzl) have that
isn't often remarked upon is simple, dumb, statistical luck.
Most criminals get caught eventually, and the worse their crimes
are, the more likely they are to get caught. Some vanishingly rare
few end up skating past justice for years and years (like Fritzl),
and we only see a couple per century who are so lucky that they
end up in command of armies. (Think Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.)
There are a lot of Fritzls out there. Most try evil things and
get caught very quickly; you see them on the news all the time with
their coats over their heads. Some get by for awhile, through a
combination of luck and unusual intelligence. Only a handful are
lucky enough to get away with the sort of depravity that John Wayne
Gacy or Josef Fritzl got away with. Choosing an easily concealable
form of evil is part of that luck, and sometimes there is a lot
of cunning hard work involved. (Like creating a custom dungeon with
flush toilets in the basement, or burying 33 bodies under your house
without stinking up the neighborhood. I still don't entirely understand
how Gacy managed that.)
As for where individual evil itself comes from, I think (against
all political correctness) that it's primarily genetic. We're born
along a bell curve, with Mother Teresa on one end and Stalin on
the other. The optimist in me would like to think that the curve
is biased toward the good. But whether or not we're evenly distributed
across that bell curve, good and evil as success strategies are
not symmetrical. Good is outward-looking, cooperates with others,
and is generally supported by society as a whole. Evil handicaps
itself in various ways. (Read Colin Wilson's A Criminal History
of Mankind for hundreds of pages of examples.) Evil overestimates
its chances, isolates itself, picks fights, and operates within
a seriously distorted view of reality. This is fortunate, otherwise
we'd long be extinct. But every now and then an evil individual
gets catastrophically lucky, and we witness crimes that make us
gasp. Given the huge number of moving parts in our seriously overstuffed
world, this is inevitable, and the real astonishment, perhaps, lies
in the fact that evil remains as rare as it is.
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May
5, 2008: In the Port 2525...
Finally got out to Chicago and spent a mad few days visiting family
and running errands, after presenting two sessions at the annual
conference of the American Society for Indexing in Denver last Friday.
I gave the keynote talk and it was well-received—my position
that pages are essential and reflowability is a fetish that carries
a lot of subtle dangers—but the other talk, which was basically
a how-to on getting Windows to work tolerably well, was SRO. People
are still struggling with Windows, and when I asked, their reaction
to Vista was basically unprintable. I got the impression from their
questions after the session that something like Degunking Windows
needs to be done again, but covering both hardware and software
in the same volume. We did a separate book a couple of years ago
called Degunking Your PC, and if I do something again, it
will draw on both books. I'm taking notes. We'll see if and where
it wanders.
Computer crankiness always seems to erupt as soon as I kick my
shoes off and get to work at my Chicago-area satellite office. When
I tried to answer some email here, I found to my supreme annoyance
that ATT/Yahoo had changed the game again: Simply blocking port
25 and requiring that all outbound mail pass through their SMTP
servers was not enough. Now they require that every From: address
has to be explicitly registered on their Web site or the SMTP connection
to their servers will be blocked.
Screw that. I did a little research based on a fleeting memory
that some hosting services listen on ports other than 25 for outbound
email, and voila! My hoster listens on port 2525, and after
90 seconds' worth of tweaking Thunderbird's settings, I was able
to answer mail again.
Ructions didn't end there. About ten minutes after booting up,
my video signal started going crazy. I took the SX270 apart, determined
that the insides were squeaky clean and not especially hot, and
was scratching my head after seeing the problem persist after a
couple of reboots. In frustration I gave the Samsung 204B a hard
whack on one side, and the video signal fell immediately back into
line. Because the cables were quite tight, I can only assume that
the damned thing has a loose connection somewhere internally.
Anger sometimes works, heh.
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May
1, 2008: My Last Brin. Really.
Not ten minutes ago, my brother-in-law Bill
Roper called to let us know that they had gotten The Call, and
he and my sister Gretchen
were on their way to Madison, as their second and last child had
just been born there.
Those who haven't been following Contra for very long may not know
precisely
what's going on here, and I still boggle a little myself, SF
guy though I claim to be. Recapping: For medical reasons, my sister
cannot carry children to term herself. After conceiving in vitro
years ago and storing the embryos under liquid nitrogen, Gretchen
and Bill went off to find a gestational carrier to bring their children
to term. It wasn't exactly easy, but mission accomplished: Katie
Beth Roper now has a sister, born at 8:10 AM this morning, central
daylight time. Nine pounds nine ounces, no problems reported.
Deo gratias.
My immediate family is complete. We'll be on a plane Saturday to
head out there and celebrate.
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April
29, 2008: Between Fire and Ice
Sure, maybe
the guy's a nut, but I'm a contrarian and I love heresies. There
certainly seem to be fewer sunspots this cycle than we're used to,
and cooling climate trends are definitely correlated with things
like the Dalton
Minimum and the Maunder
Minimum. I've sometimes wonder if the Little
Ice Age was "little" because we aborted it by throwing
CO2 into the atmosphere in serious quantities. Absent that, we might
all be cavemen in an ice wilderness by now.
Ahh. Maybe the Earth really has a little old lady named Gaia somewhere
pulling strings. Maybe prescient whales (or sentient mushroom rings
in the English forests) saw it coming and carefully guided the evolution
of humanity so that it would control fire. Fire is addictive. Do
enough of it, and you can keep the atmosphere warm through the greenhouse
effect. Maybe the Earth got tired of being cold, and it evolved
us because it didn't have any leg warmers.
Climate is an interesting business. The Earth seems to teeter between
fire and ice, but from what we know of our geophysical history it
prefers ice. If the sunspot dearth is a leading indicator of reduced
solar activity, we may have a few years to do...what? Buy Hummers?
Whoops. We already tried that.
Ok, ok, correlation is not causation. I'll shut up. Still... At
least in Colorado Springs, this was The Winter That Wouldn't End.
And it snowed in Chicago last night. If this keeps up I'm moving
back to Arizona, thank you very much. I hear that when the ice sheets
get as far south as Nebraska, the mammoth hunting is better there.
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April
28, 2008: Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus
Minnehaha sent
me a pointer to an article by Clay
Shirky about the
"cognitive surplus"—excess brainpower not needed
for making a living. Thought-provoking in the extreme; read
it if you haven't already. Shirky's thesis is that free time created
by postwar productivity gains have been sopped up by watching TV,
and if we watched only a little less TV and deployed that wasted
brain-time in collaborative projects, wow! The things we could do!
I'm short on time today, so I'll post a few quick observations on
the article and the idea here, in the hope for more general conversation:
- The consequences of the invention of gin are very well covered
by Colin Wilson in his book A Criminal History of Mankind.
The problem was not solved for 200 years—the urban poor drinking
themselves to death was the primary reason for Prohibition—and
it's still not entirely clear to me how it was solved. My guess:
Universal education and technology (think TV) allowed the poor
to entertain themselves in less destructive was.
- Do we really watch two billion hours of TV every year, or are
TVs simply on for two billion hours? In many households,
TVs provide a sort of background noise to prevent too much disturbing
silence, but how much attention is paid to the box is a lot more
difficult to measure, and I suspect Big Media would prefer that
no one try.
- TV is often watched for the many but very small time slices
that it takes to catch the news or weather. Carol and I watch
very little TV but The Weather Channel, and we watch it in small
chunks of a few minutes a few times a day. It adds up, but converting
those dispersed minutes into productive brain-time may not be
possible. The problem here is not a shortage of time but a shortage
of focus, which is a separate and worthy discussion.
- Almost incredibly, Shirky does not say much about the immense
cognitive energy already spent on collaborative noncommercial
cognitive projects. Think Linux and all open-source software,
tens of thousands of free ebooks scanned and formatted from out-of-copyright
sources (and a few in-copyright sources, like some of mine, sigh)
not to mention the work of all those Pixel-Stained Technopeasants
who had their day (April 23) last week. This is not new news,
though it's good for it to be pointed out now and then.
- Nor is much said about the general rise in volunteering in more
traditional social service pursuits, which by and large are not
cognitive in nature. As problematic as I consider some of his
conclusions, much good data on volunteering is cited in Arthur
Brooks' Who Really Cares? Not all time and energy released
from TV watching now goes into, or would go into, cognitive pursuits.
- And the ugly truth that no one seems willing to recognize: A
huge percentage of people simply don't have the ability
to contribute meaningfully to cognitive projects. This may be
by genetics or by adverse circumstances, but it's true nonetheless.
I keep thinking that a lot of them, if there were no TV, would
go back to gin or to worse things that didn't exist when gin was
invented in 1740.
My early conclusion: There's less cognitive surplus than the article
suggests, and less upside to be gained by turning away from TV.
People inclined to be creative already cluster toward the bottom
of the TV time curve, and a lot of the people I consider brilliant
don't watch TV at all. There is almost certainly an irreducable
minimum number of people who need TV as an anaesthetic, and this
number may be higher than we care to admit. Loneliness, clinical
depression, and other psychiatric problems dissipate and render
useless an immense amount of human energy, and we don't seem any
closer to solving those problems than we were in 1740. Those problems
may not in fact be solvable, though saying so won't make me any
friends.
Still, anything that nudges people away from the box toward creative
or collaborative pursuits of any nature is a good thing. My problem
at this point in my life is not TV but sleep, since I need ten hours
in bed to yield eight hours of useful sleep cycles. The time I used
to spend commuting I now spend wondering why I'm not asleep, and
if I could lick that problem I would get a great deal more done.
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April
27, 2008: Odd Lots
- We had rockfish for dinner the other night, and since I didn't
know exactly what I was eating, I researched it (it's nothing
remarkable; a sort of domesticated sea bass) but in the process
I happened upon a brilliant little animated hard SF short about
an unflappable interstellar sportsman of the future who goes out
with his faithful pet monkeydog and trolls for The Big Catch:
"Rockfish."
- While we're doing animated videos, don't miss the charmingly
inane steampunk short "A
Gentleman's Duel" from the same studio.
- From Frank Glover comes a pointer to an
interesting article about whether there are "habitable zones"
in our galaxy. We're caught between our schedule, our metals
concentration, and our supernovas, and ferdang, somehow we got
placed "just right." I'm always a little suspicious
of charts that somehow get us dead-center. Supernovas may trigger
lots of interesting things, from radiation-proofed cellular reproduction
systems to "novel" stars and planets. I'm far from sure
that zones closer to the Core are so deadly as to preclude the
evolution of any kind of life—just Life As We Know It.
- Are you nervous about European-style national health care? You
should be.
- Also from the NYT: The
housing crash will likely cut the US birth rate, which roughly
tracks housing availability and may be the reason that the birth
rate is so low in Europe, with its staggering high housing costs.
- A compendium of
really weird products, including wedgie-proof underwear and
a Hilary Clinton toilet bowl brush. What boggles the mind is that
this is not a collection of hoaxes: All of these items are
real.
- Here's an
eye-crossing but interesting paper that explains a lot of
why I dislike competitive sports.
- From David Stafford comes news of one
of the most bizarre motorcycles ever imagined. It's electric.
It works a little like the Segway. It gets points for design,
fersure, but...you ride. I'll watch.
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April
22, 2008: Nothing Is Sewn Up Yet
By the grace of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, tonight we
may know who will face off against John McCain this fall. Many were
saying that by tonight we may know who our next President will be,
but even though Big Media long ago declared Obama the King of the
Universe, our Great Pretender has been caught saying the same stupid
condescending things about rural whites that the educated white
elite used to say about urban blacks. Hilary's gotten herself caught
in a few gaffes herself, but she's not the naïf that Obama is and
has kept herself closer to the center. It's still a tossup between
them. Tonight may nail it, but it may not.
I don't do politics here very often, so I'll offer a few notes
on the race so far and be done for another month or two:
- There are clearly no such things as "private remarks" or "this
is off the record" anymore. We've taught our young people for
years that politics has no rules, that outright hatred of whole
groups for political reasons is completely acceptable under the
banner of the First Amendment and "political speech,"
and that it doesn't matter how you do it as long as you win. Those
striving for elected office these days have to be very
careful what they say and where they say it, because the blogosphere
is full of people who will gleefully publish it and by doing so
make it eternal. The Internet never forgets. Better to just shut
up and quietly stand on your record, if you have one.
- Something I've noticed in talking with political independents
for many years is that independents don't believe campaign promises.
They understand completely that lying is legal, and that the only
way to judge a candidate is to look at his or her record in detail
(including—or especially—where their money is coming
from) and then extrapolate linearly into the future. When you
give stirring campaign speeches full of promises, you are reassuring
your base, not persuading the center to move in your direction.
Independents call BS on anything candidates say since they first
declared themselves.
- There is a difference between what people say to friends (and
to pollsters) and what they do in the privacy of the voting booth.
It's something like caucusing in the months leading up to the
election: People will say the things that they think they are
expected to say (like "I'm voting for Obama!") to avoid unpleasantness
and conflict within their inner circles. This is a survival tactic
if you live among political tribalists from either side of the
spectrum. On election day, the magic of the secret ballot makes
it possible for "survival centrists" to vote their true hearts,
knowing that no one will catch them out in any lies made earlier
to keep their scalps intact.
- The American electorate is still very closely divided, and
it doesn't take a lot of votes to tip an election. Nobody has
anything sewn up.
Some final speculation pertinent to this last point: Many across
the political spectrum have already written off John McCain, but
that's a mistake. McCain is not seen as a "real" Republican in some
quarters on the right, but Republicans are better nose-holders than
Democrats, and come November McCain will get their votes irrespective
of the Democratic nominee. McCain has cleverly kept his VP spot
open (and generally kept a low profile) and probably will until
he is absolutely sure what he's up against. Having played the race
and gender cards intensely for a couple of years now, the Democrats
have legitimized this kind of tokenism in the public eye. McCain
could easily win against Obama by partnering with either a black
or a Hispanic. He could win against Hilary by partnering with a
woman of any color. In either case, it doesn't matter who.
It's sad that it's come to this, but that's how American politics
is now played, and both political parties had better be ready to
reap the whirlwind in unexpected ways.
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April
21, 2008: We Caught Bigfoot!
Yes, Carol and I caught a Bigfoot a couple of weeks
ago. Big, yes: 25 feet long, and just under 12 feet high. Feet,
no: Our bigfoot has wheels. What we caught was a never-used 2006
Bigfoot Model 30MH24DB RV, and the capture was a bit of an accident.
The local Bigfoot dealer here in Colorado Springs went bankrupt,
and we heard that their inventory was being liquidated. So although
it wasn't precisely what we were looking for, the price asked was
so stunningly good that we decided to give it a shot.
Carol and I have rented RVs before, and I've described
our adventures in this space. We haven't been able to travel as
much as we would like, especially here in the West. Our experience
staying in hotels in out-of-the-way locations has been very mixed
(you can't always find a Hyatt when you want one) and this is one
solution.
We bought it about a month ago, but that was serendipity,
and we didn't have a chance to actually take it out on the road
until this weekend, when we went out with our church's RV group.
The destination was Mountaindale
Campground, which is only 16 miles from our front door, south
down Highway 115 toward Cañon City. We think traveling with
more experienced RVers is a good idea until we get our RV chops,
and that has worked out very well, especially considering that two
of the people in our group are RV repair technicians, one of whom
actually worked for some time at the Bigfoot dealership that went
under.
The Bigfoot is a little taller than a lot of Class
C RVs (Class Cs are the ones with van-ish cabs and a bulge over
the cab) and what that buys is storage space. Beneath the floor
are several compartments that can hold a lot of stuff, one of them
big enough to lug a considerable telescope. Being from Canada, the
unit is much more heavily insulated than RVs built here, not that
I intend to do a lot of cold-weather camping. Insulation works both
ways, and we have hopes that it will take less A/C to keep it cool
in summer.
The weather for our first outing was stunningly good.
Most of what I did was learn how to operate and maintain the unit,
which has a manual so thin and poorly done that it may well be worse
than blissful ignorance. (I had to slap myself to keep from outlining
Bigfoot RVs for Beginners in my head as I was struggling
to make sense of the electrical system.) Carol and I did take QBit
and Aero for a hike up to the top of a nearby hill, but most of
the time we spent taking it easy in the company of friends, and
listening attentively to RV war stories. I may well write my own
damned manual just to keep all the heuristics straight, and if it
gets good enough to go up on Lulu, so much the better. In the meantime,
we have a vehicle in which to see some of Colorado, and attend local
dog shows where Carol will be showing Aero. (There is a lot
of RV culture in the dog show world—and in fact at the recent
Tarry All show north of Denver we ran into a couple who travel in
a Bigfoot unit identical to ours while showing Gordon Setters.)
I'm not sure I could live it for weeks and weeks,
but it will get us around to the mountains I've never seen and don't
want to miss in this life. As for computing in an RV, more on that
as time allows. I learned a lot this weekend, and am learning even
more reading the RV forums online. One addditional thing I learned
is this: Don't use Vista. Really don't use Vista. Every time
I have to rescue somebody from its clutches—as I did this weekend—I
hate it more. Ubuntu 8.04 comes out in three days, and there's a
partition waiting for it, on an SX270 machine that I may "build
in" to the Bigfoot. Again, more on that has it happens.
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April
16, 2008: Odd Lots
- Ok. It's April 16, and outside it's 30° and blizzarding.
There's about two inches on the ground already and we may get
another 4" - 6" tonight. Would you fools please stop
calling it "global warming" and start calling it "climate
change" before the whole world decides we're idiots?
- In one respect the snow is welcome: There
were two very bad wildfires here in the last couple of days,
one of them only about fifteen miles due south of me, and the
smoke was bad enough to make my allergies go ballistic this morning.
- Interestingly, the fire broke out about a quarter of a mile
from where we intend to go RV camping the day after tomorrow.
(As best we know, the
campground has not seen any fire or other damage on their
land.) Snow
seems to follow us on camping trips. (That little adventure
was on the last day of summer, people!) We're hoping this
time will be different.
- Democrats
in Congress are spearheading an effort to compel states to collect
state taxes on out-of-state online vendors. Far from targeting
corporate fat cats, the effort will cost ordinary people, including
some fairly poor ones, a great deal of money. Tell me, now: How
is this supposed to help you win elections?
- I just bought an off-lease, nearly flawless Dell Optiplex SX270
3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with a 60 GB hard drive and a DVD-ROM...for
$199. Computers, like books, have gotten so cheap that they're
basically disposable. If this machine dies any time soon, I'll
just buy another, wincing a little to imagine that my 1978
Intersystems DPS-1 S-100 bus machine with a 1 MHz 8080 CPU
cost me $3600 1978 dollars. (It was the first and still the coolest-looking
computer I have ever owned that I did not build myself.)
- The story I could not identify in my
April 10, 2008 Odd Lots (about a guy who extracted gold from
seawater) was "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea" by Arthur
C. Clarke, and it was a Harry Purvis story from Tales from
the White Hart.
- From Bruce Schneier's CryptoGram comes a pointer to a
wonderful little piece on what sorts of books bookstore shiplifters
lift, and what sort of man a bookstore shiplifter is. (You do
subscribe to
CryptoGram, don't you?)
- The lyrics to one of the funniest pop songs ever to hit the
Billboard Top 20 is (legally) online, at the author's Web site:
Dean Friedman's
1976 "Ariel."
It's one of the few songs I would ever consent to perform in public,
though that would require that I learn to play some kind of an
instrument. Maybe this.
- Bob Thompson sent me a
link to one of his posts relating (as my entry for yesterday
did) to catalogs of the 1960s, in this case the Sears Catalog.
His comments pertaining to chemistry sets are bang-on, though
I would add that a significant amount of the value of chemistry
sets lay in allowing kids to imagine themselves as scientists—chemistry
has more identifiably iconic paraphernalia than almost any other
scientific discipline—and what kids can't imagine themselves
as, they generally won't become.
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April
14, 2008: My Favorite (Or Maybe Second Favorite) Year
 Harry
Helms recently sent me something he thought I might enjoy: A copy
of the 1964 Allied Radio catalog. When I opened the package and
sat down with it, I realized that 1964 might well be my favorite
year, if second to any then second only to the magical summer of
1969, when I met Carol. (1969 was painful at times for reasons that
had nothing to do with Carol, first of which being that in 1964
my father was not dying of cancer.) I turned 12 in the summer of
1964, and had not yet begun to feel the hormone storm that would
close in by the summer of '65 and make me crazy for years to come.
Granted, many of the girls returned to IC School that September
with a couple of things they didn't have the previous June, but
apart from a passing fascination with a little girl named Laura
that fall (which she never found out about—whew!) the whole
girl thing blew past me. Halloween was on a Saturday that year—what
luck!—and it was warm. Ten full hours to scavenge sugar
from the neighbors, and we didn't need three sweaters under our
costumes!
But for me in 1964, electronics was the thing. I had discovered
electronics when I was 10, began seriously reading library books
about it and building things when I was 11, and had begun to achieve
some modest success by the time I turned 12. Simple radios were
problematic, because my antenna looked right down the throat of
hillbilly rock station WJJD's 50,000 watt directive array a mile
or so northwest of me in Park Ridge, so I built other things: A
two-transistor organ (with keys made of strips of tin can metal)
a cigar-box intercom (put to good use by the Fox Patrol at Camp
Owassipe that summer) and a capacity-operated proximity relay,
which (being "spooky action at a distance") was about
as close to magic as it came.
 That
summer my father taught me how to take the CTA bus down to Six
Corners (over my mother's strident objection) and always gave
me a couple of dollars to spend at Olson Electronics on Milwaukee
Avenue, back at a time when a couple of dollars would buy a pocketful
of resistors, capacitors, and transistors. Allied was also in town
(at 100 N. Western Avenue) but that was a lot farther away, and
not in an especially good neighborhood. I knew Allied from its catalog
and its catalog alone.
But what a catalog! Anything a boy teetering on the edge of the
Age of Lust might want was right there: Ham radio, CB, shortwave,
hi-fi stereo, tape decks, portable radios, test equipment, speakers,
tools, parts cabinets, resistors, capacitors, transformers, Miniboxes,
plugs and sockets and chassis punches and antenna insulators, everything.
The first 77 pages of the catalog was the full list of Knight Kits,
which were cheaper than finished gear because you put them together
yourself. I later went on to build a few a nd
own many more Knight items, including the wonderful T-60 CW/AM transmitter,
the nice LC-1 CPO, the so-so R-55A receiver, and the totally wretched
T150A VFO transmitter, which wandered across more territory and
with more brute persistence than an alley cat. Interestingly, the
Knight Kit I wanted the most in 1964 I never got: The Span Master
shortwave radio (at left) which I thought then (and may still) to
be the coolest-looking radio in history.
 The
back of the catalog was fascinating, as it listed in minuscule type
endless small electronic parts and hardware, some of which I ordered
through the mail, careful to send enough money to cover the goods
and postage, and often (to be sure I hadn't messed up the shipping
calculations) a little more—which Allied always honestly refunded,
in the form of 4c and 7c credit slips to be applied to my next order.
That part of the catalog is still useful as a reference: If you
run across a Knight 61G466 power transformer at a hamfest, the catalog
will tell you what the output voltages of its various windings are.
Some of the stuff I didn't want, and often had no clear concept
of why it was useful: What good, after all, was a clock radio? I
have an inner alarm clock that I can "set" to any arbitrary
time and have never had any trouble bouncing out of bed at 6 ayem,
often singing. (Carol is a very patient woman.) "You can wake
up to music!" said the ad. Indeed. And you could plug your
coffee pot into the back of the radio, which I just couldn't figure,
as we were a gas household and an electric coffee pot was heresy,
pure and simple. Tachometers and electronic ignition systems—no
visceral response; when you're 12 and "small for your age"
driving is almost unimaginable. The Blonder-Tongue (now there's
a name for you!) TV mast signal amplifiers puzzled me; in Chicago
you could practically get Channel 9 on your fillings. (You would,
if WJJD hadn't already saturated them.)
1964 was the last great year of tube electronics, and the transmitters,
receivers, and test gear units were not only big enough to see,
they were big enough to cause serious injury if dropped on body
parts. (I dropped a Central Electronics 100V transmitter on my thumb
in 1998, and my thumbnail has never been the same since. And hey,
in 1998 I was 46 and careful.) The prices on much of it were
daunting: The Hallicrafters SR-150 SSB transmitter was $689—what
the Inflation Calculator
tells me would cost over $4600 today. The best a 12-year-old boy
could do was look at the pictures and think, Hey, someday I may
have this thing! The Allied catalog was the drool book of all
drool books.
Yes, it was a great year. When my family went out to California
on the Union Pacific that summer, my Allied catalog went with me
(along with several issues of Popular Electronics and a couple
of Alfred Morgan's books) and I got past the endless wheat fields
of eastern Wyoming doodling chassis layouts on a pad of paper. That
fall I built a
regenerative receiver from a Popular Electronics article,
with $15 worth of parts carefully ordered (and paid for by my saintly
father) from the 1965 Allied catalog, which arrived without being
summoned in October. I could never make it work well (though it
picked up WJJD without any trouble) and there were times when I
was tempted to give up electronics and just stare at Laura in English
class like all the other guys did. But no: Girls were mysterious,
and I would be years'n'years figuring them out. (I may still have
a few years to go on that score.) But electronics? You flip a switch,
and things happen. That was my kind of magic, and the Allied
catalog was where it all came from, whether in grand dreams or grubby
reality. I had both, and Halloween was on a Saturday! Life was good.
|
April
10, 2008: Odd Lots
- Those who marveled at the quirky motion of the
Big Dog quadripedal robot should not miss the
(inevitable) video parody.
- And while we're watching videos, make
sure you watch this one, starring a Pope Benedict XVI bobblehead
identical to the one on my bookshelf. While this is what I call
"gentle humor" and I suspect that Good Pope Bennie (with
whom I disagree but whom I do not despise) would have laughed
had he seen it, the usual grump-ass moroons who object to things
like this prevailed to have the ad pulled. Fu on 'em.
- Which of course reminded me of this
famous Far Side cartoon, which incensed Jane Goodall's staffers
but made the great lady herself laugh. My father told me early
on: Life demands a sense of humor. Only cowards cannot laugh at
themselves, and only hopeless slave-collar tribalists cannot abide
humor about their own leaders.
- George Hodous sent me a link to an artist who uses intersecting
lasers to etch a
crystal cube containing a 3-D starmap of our stellar neighborhood
out to five parsecs. Nice work, and if you ever forget, he's marked
the direction to the galactic core.
- Maybe this
is why I started to get muscular in middle age. Thanks to
Frank Glover for the pointer.
- Takahiro Kato of Japan sent me a
link to his page on 12V tube work, including a 30mw transmitter
he designed. It's in Japanese, and (alas) the machine translation
link does about as well as machine translation links generally
do. But look at his construction techniques—I haven't seen
anything that clean and rational for a long time.
- Those who love The Rocketeer (whether the graphic novel
or the film) will want to take a look at this,
documenting a Swedish inventor who has come damned close to making
it real. (Yes, he does look more like Buzz Lightyear than Cliff
Secord.) No explanation here of why his pants don't catch fire,
but hey, wow.
- While hunting for a new standard model thumbdrive to replace
the no-longer-made Cruzer Mini I ran across this
prototype. Not what I need but very cool nonetheless. Let's
just hope they don't pollute it with U3.
- In thinking about non-obvious disruptive technologies, it occurred
to me that using nanotech filters to separate gold from seawater
could be hugely disruptive to nationalk economies if it became
effective. However,
with gold at about thirteen ppt (parts per trillion) in seawater,
it would take a lot of nanofilm to get any useful quantity.
I vaguely recall an old SF story about a guy who pulled gold out
of seawater somehow. Anybody remember what that was?
|
April
7, 2008: Slide Charts Are Still With Us
Reader Kevin Anetsberger is a fan of nomography
(basically, the use of printed charts as calculating aids) and he
wrote to say that the sorts of "slide charts" I mentioned
in my April 5, 2008 entry are far from extinct—and interestingly
enough, the world center of manufacturing for slide charts is back
in my home town, Chicago. Kevin mentions three companies, and their
Web sites are worth a quick look: Perrygraf,
Datalizer, IWA,
and American Slide
Chart.
And although this was posted in the comments on my LiveJournal
mirror, it's worth reposting for everyone else: A
monograph on nomographs, courtesy Bill Leininger.
I spent a little time looking for instructions on my father's circular
slide rule, and by now I'm pretty sure that the device is a Dietzgen/Gilson
Midget Circular Slide Rule. I found what
may be a manual for it, but it consists of bad TIF scans of
the pages, and it is not easy to read—and the rule itself is
so worn that making out the scales in some cases is impossible.
It was evidently made by Gilson but private labeled and sold by
Dietzgen to fill out their product line. The operation is something
I would not have guessed: You position the two sliders separately
to appropriate scales, and then slide the two as a unit to
a third point to read out the answer. The friction clutch is made
such that sliding the short pointer moves only the short pointer,
but sliding the long pointer moves them both. (I had not noticed
this while fooling around with it.) So you set the long pointer
first, then the short pointer (which does not disturb the position
of the long pointer) and then move the short pointer by moving the
long pointer, at which time the long pointer reads out the answer.
Whew.
Interestingly, about 120° of the front face is much
more worn than the rest of it, suggesting that my father did a lot
of calculating within a relatively narrow range of values. What
he used it for is only one of a multitude of things I would ask
him, if only I had the chance. What he probably would have said
(over a grin) is, "I made things not blow up," which when
your stock in trade is bulk methane would be a very good
thing.
If circular slide rules interest you, this
page presents a number of different models, none of which precisely
match the specimen that I have. And if you want to make your own
circular slide rule, here's a
page with a full how-to. And here's another
site that explains how to make both circular and linear slide
rules.
|
April
5, 2008: Application-Specific Slide Rules
I went in for my upper set work yesterday, and spent eight and
a half hours in the chair, from 7 AM to 3:30 PM. It took two solid
hours for the surgeon to cut my upper horseshoe out of my mouth,
consuming (I asked) twelve burrs in the process, three diamond and
eight carbide. The cottage cheese I had for supper last night tasted
distinctly of machine shop.
But let all that pass; the less you know the better you'll sleep.
What I want to talk about this morning is the fact that slide rules
are not dead. By no means; I use them regularly, if not every single
day. The catch is that they're not general-purpose mathematical
slide rules. They're application-specific slide rules that do one
thing only—or perhaps two or three related things.
A good example is something I got from Carol's late father: The
Triangulator, shown above. It doesn't do trig calculations, but
it sets them up for you, depending on which values for a given triangle
are known, and which are unknown. Slip the slide back and forth
until the holes show you the unknown (a question mark) and the knowns
(printed in black) and it will display the formula you need to run
to get the unknown.
I've used the Triangulator a time or two, but the one that I've
used the most is shown below: Allied Radio's coil winding calculator.
The copyright notice says 1960, and I bought it at a hamfest for
a dollar years'n'years ago. You can use it to quickly figure a coil
for a radio project, assuming you know the inductance required,
and if you don't, the flipside of the calculator calculates resonance
and both inductive and capacitive reactance. (Slide rules, like
records of old, generally had two sides.)
I have a similar reactance calculator from Shure Brothers, but
it doesn't have the coil winding feature. Elsewhere in the collection
are a couple of English/Metric conversion items, including one I've
discussed here before. My favorite actually looks like a slide rule,
and isn't made of cardboard:
I scanned all of what came easily to hand this morning, and if
you're interested you can bring down the biggish image files. Image
1. Image 2. Image
3. The most mysterious one in my collection belonged to my father.
It's circular, and he clearly used it a lot, because the scales
on one side are largely worn away.
I've figured out how to do a few things with it, including fraction/decimal
conversions and reciprocals, but whether it's got the ability to
do general multiplication/division or even square roots is obscure.
(The other side is a straightforward circular trig table.) I discern
no equivalent of an A nor a D scale, nor how the two hairlines interact.
I think it's this
item, but lacking a manual I have no way to be sure, and there's
no manufacturer's name on it.
So let it not be said that slide rules are extinct. I'm guessing
that somewhere is a manufacturer still producing cardboard species
as promo items, as I got a world time calculator at a trade show
booth as recently as 1996. I like them, as each one doesn't need
its own damned wall wart, and they can show relationships as well
as values. Toss 'em in a drawer, and when you need one, well, it
still works. "Analog" is a real word!
|
April
3, 2008: The Other Kind of Fifties Moment
 The
massive urban renewal project that is the inside of my mouth got
into high gear again this morning, with what I call a three-p procedure:
It took six hours, with three pee breaks, and (I am not exaggerating
!) fifteen separate injections of local anaesthetic. Uggh.
The surgeon removed my lower horseshoe, which has been in my mouth
since September 2001, and cleaned up what damage had occurred during
seven years in place. Two fillings had to be drilled out and replaced,
and all the teeth had to be re-margined. One tooth, while not infected,
had broken into three pieces underneath the horeshoe (probably due
to my perpetual clenching and grinding during the night) and no
longer has enough structure above the gum line to be retained. It
will have to be pulled, and later this year (once the bone heals)
an implant post will be put in place to carry the eventual crown.
So here I am at home, groggy on painkillers, watching out my window
as a blizzard rages on the slopes of my mountain. What month is
this again? We already have four inches out there and it's still
coming down hard. A friend at church told us that this has been
the wettest, coldest, longest winter he's seen the whole
sixteen years he's lived here.
And tomorrow morning at 7, I go back for six more hours to accomplish
a similar treatment on the uppers. Alas, the upper horeshoe is in
pretty tight (a good thing, actually, for my teeth's sake these
past seven years) and the surgeon will have to cut it out in chunks
using diamond burrs. (I'll be tasting stainless steel for weeks.)
But to the story at hand: I asked the young dental surgical assistant
if I could have the lower horseshoe back so I could put it on my
curio shelf. She said sure, and asked what else I had on the shelf.
I ran down the short-form list:
- A horse vertebra.
- A cow skull that wears my Lane Tech high school mortarboard.
- A radio-controlled rat.
- A Pope Benedict XVI bobble-head.
- A stuffed squirrel that giggles when you press his tummy.
- A meteorite fragment given me by Pete Albrecht.
- A Giant Squid action figure.
- A Tim-Bird ornithopter
- My father's slide rule.
She smiled, nodded, and then asked, "What's a slide rule?"
I explained as best I could. I realized that this was the other
kind of Fifties Moment; that is, when you realize that you're in
your fifties and almost everybody else isn't. I ache for the day—though
I will probably not live to see it—when graying Gen-Y fiftysomethings
talk about their vintage gear collection, and some young punk asks,
in all sincerity: "What's an iPod?"
|
|
March
31, 2008: Tabletop Fluoroscopy for Boys, Circa 1913
 It
took a few minutes of flipping through some books in my workshop,
but I eventually found what I remembered: That one of my "boys"
books contained a description of a tabletop X-ray setup. The book
in question is The Boy Electrician, the first volume of many
from Alfred Morgan, who later wrote The Boys' First Book of Radio
and Electronics and its three sequels, all of which loomed large
in my tinkersome youth. The Boy Electrician was originally
published in 1913 and is now in the public domain. The 1913 edition
has been reprinted by Lindsay Books and I consider it worth having.
There was a significant revision in 1943 that added chapters on
radio and a few other things, and as best I can tell, the copyright
on that edition was not renewed and it too is now in the public
domain. A 40 MB PDF of the 1943 edition is here.
The Boy Electrician explains that "it is possible to
obtain small X-ray tubes that will operate satisfactorily on an
inch and one half spark coil." This does not refer to the coil's
dimensions; it means a coil capable of generating a spark an inch
and a half long. He goes on to say that X-ray tubes cost about four
and a half dollars each (albeit 1913 dollars) and may be obtained
from laboratory supply houses. Hookup is fairly simple, with the
spark coil driven by four of those wonderfully gutsy #6 dry cells
with the huge carbon rod running down the middle. The drawing of
the setup is shown below:
 Morgan
explains that you can either view images directly with a fluoroscope
or expose ordinary photographic plates by placing an object to be
X-rayed between the tube and the plate and leaving it there for
fifteen minutes. This includes things like purses, mice, or...your
hand. If you have the money, he also explains that a hand-held fluoroscope
may be constructed by simply coating a sheet of white paper with
crystals of platinum barium cyanide. It looks like the fluoroscope
screen is used by basically staring at the X-ray tube with the object
to be X-rayed between the tube and the paper screen.
 It
would be interesting to know just how many boys bought the tube
and tried to make it work; though given that $4.50 in 1913 would
be about $100 today, I doubt it was many. Nor do I know how toxic
platinum barium cyanide is, but I'm guessing a little more than
iron filings. (On the other hand, my 1962 chemistry set contained
a little bottle of sodium ferrocyanide, which sounds much worse
than it actually is.)
I remember taking The Boy Electrician out of the Chicago
Public Library when I was 12 or so and pondering the X-ray project.
What stopped me wasn't any fear of X-rays themselves, but concern
that the whomping big spark coil would wipe out TV reception for
a quarter mile in every direction and get me in trouble with the
FCC. My friend Art had an old Model T ignition coil, and we could
hear it sizzling on Art's transistor radio for half a block. The
project had to be safe; I mean, the book was in the juvenile
section of the library...
We knew less about a lot of things in 1913; X-rays were in some
respects the least of it. But the hazard is significant, if
not as bloodcurdling as luddites specializing in radiation insist.
People used to self-treat insomnia by inhaling chloroform; well-known
British scientist Edmund Gurney died by falling asleep with a chloroform-soaked
cloth next to his nose. We know more now, and understand the precautions
a great deal better, which has led to an escalation of conern that
(untempered by any grasp of statistics or risk evaluation) quickly
descends to rank superstition. One has to wonder how much knowledge
isn't obtained these days simply because people are afraid
of small but nonzero hazards. Panic over traces of phthalates—then
heedlessly drive fifty miles to a football game with a car full
of kids. It's the modern way of life.
|
March
30, 2008: Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscopes
 Just
got back from Chicago and there's way too much to do (and I have
a six-hour dental appointment scheduled for Thursday!) but
I did want to report on something I saw on our trip that I haven't
seen for a very long time: A shoe-fitter X-ray machine. People my
age or older may remember going to a shoe store in the 1950s or
earlier, and having your parents and the shoe store man look at
your feet inside a new pair of shoes to make sure they fit correctly.
I know I did this, and I vaguely remember the humming machine, but
I suspect I was just too short to get to look into the machine myself.
(I doubt I would forget a real-time X-ray image of my own bones.
Urrrrp...)
Carol and I stopped at Square Deal Shoes in downtown Des Plaines
last Saturday. We both bought shoes to leave at our condo so we
don't have to pack them on future trips. While browsing the stock
I also looked at their Simplex X-Ray Shoe Fitter. The machine was
disabled (they've been illegal since 1970) but it was otherwise
in very good shape, housed in a marvelous Raymond Loewy-ish Art
Deco wood cabinet.
An excellent short history of this peculiar phenomenon is here.
The machine shown in the article is, I believe, a more deluxe version
of the one I saw at Square Deal Shoes; both were made by X-Ray Shoe
Fitter, Inc., of Milwaukee. The name  plate
(below) indicates that the power supply drew 7 amps and put out
50,000 volts at 5 milliamps. That kind of power will generate considerable
radiation out of an X-ray tube, and the associated hazards eventually
put an end to continuous-beam fluoroscopy by untrained operators,
in shoe stores and elsewhere. The hazards appeared not so much to
the occasional shoe store customer as to the sales reps who ran
the machines and sometimes to professional shoe models who tested
shoes for manufacturers using machines like this; one woman's foot
was damaged so badly in testing shoes that it had to be amputated.
Square Deal Shoes has been in business since the 1920s, and in
earlier times they also made custom shoes. One the current owner
showed me was the shoe of Robert
Wadlow, who at 8 feet 11 inches was the world's tallest man
in the 1930s, and possibly the tallest man in recorded history.
The shoe was technically size 37, and although I placed the shoe
in front of the X-Ray machine in the photo above, it just makes
the machine look small; the damned thing was in fact as long as
my forearm.
As I mentioned in my entry for March 25,
2008, the world is full of odd things like this. Get out, look
around, pay attention, and you'll see them.
|
March
25, 2008: Rail Trails and the Narrowest Storefront
The weather today in Chicago promised to be as good
as it gets this trip, so I decided to do a little exploring. I wanted
to get some exercise and a little sun on my face, and run down to
a neighborhood I hadn't set foot in for almost thirty years: Sauganash,
an upscale part of the Northwest Side where my father's parents
lived in the 1950s and 1960s. I went past the old house (at the
corner of Kedvale and Glenlake), which had not changed at all, though
the tree that my grandfather had planted in 1955 was now huge and
breaking up the sidewalk. I had lunch at a hot dog place at Devon
and Pulaski and parked the car on Pulaski near St. Odisho's Assyrian
Catholic Church. I then did something interesting: I walked the
old rail line that intersects Pulaski near Granville, southward
as far as the Chicago River, roughly at Balmoral. The rails are
still there, but by the depth of their rust I'd guess they hadn't
seen wheels for a number of years. It was a little weird walking
over Peterson on the rail bridge, but I wanted to see if there was
any evidence of there having been a commuter rail platform at Peterson.
I'm not sure why, but I always thought my grandfather boarded a
train for downtown (he worked at First National Bank) on Peterson
somewhere. This was clearly not the place. (Gretchen says he boarded
at Edgebrook, and she's probably right.) Whatever that line was,
it had clearly been freight-only.
Since I was on the right of way, I just kept going. The tracks
continued, rusty and weed-choked, as far as I went. Just a block
south of Bryn Mawr, a second line merged with it, and I found that
the city was in the process of making a walking trail out of the
old bed. So I cut north again on the walking trail, passing people
and their dogs and a father flying a kite with his preschool son
in a schoolyard. The trail is quite new, and in fact the walking
bridge over Peterson was not complete yet and was fenced off. (The
trail goes north as far as Devon.) So I skidded down the embankment
and walked east back to Pulaski along Peterson to my car. It was
a nice two-and-a-half mile stride, and when the sun was out it was
quite warm.
That accomplished, I drove back west toward Des Plaines, and stopped
in Park Ridge to do a little more walking. I wanted to visit Hill's
Hobby Shop, and walked there only to find that they have moved to
Buffalo Grove. I did, however, snap a shot or two of what is certainly
the narrowest storefront in Park Ridge (and perhaps the whole Chicago
metro area) at 147 1/2 Vine Avenue (60068) directly across the street
from Park Ridge City Hall. I didn't have a tape measure in my pocket,
but I'm guessing the whole thing was between four and five feet
wide.
I'd seen it before, and remembered that it had been a knicknack
shop a few years ago. Sure enough, googling the address showed it
to have been (aptly) The Miniature Gallery, and there was a 2007
business registration sticker on the window. However, the counter
and window displays had been ripped out, and it looks like it's
being converted to something else, probably a hall to the rear.
The art gallery in the rest of the building was also vacant, and
the building as a whole was not in terrific shape.
No serious point to be made here, other than you miss some odd
and occasionally wonderful things by driving everywhere. Spring's
coming—so get out on shank's mare and see some of the weird
stuff in your own neighborhood!
|
March
24, 2008: Odd Lots
- I've had a difficult week here; new dental problems have arisen,
culminating in an unplanned root canal this past Thursday, followed
almost immediately by a much-delayed flight from Denver to Chicago
for an Easter visit, where they happened to be having a blizzard.
(The earliest Easter since 1913 corresponded with a lingering
winter across the Midwest.) Tooth troubles continue, so if my
posts have been (and continue to be) a little sparse, that's most
of the reason.
- Our early Easter this year caused some people to ask how the
date of Easter is calculated. Well, it's
not pretty. At least next year it happens in April, whew.
- Here's a
nice article describing a problem that is by no means recent:
The split between people in the Catholic Church who can worship
with a light heart, and people who invariably equate reverence
with grimness . This has been an issue at least since Pope Pius
IX lost the
Papal States in the mid-1800s, after which the Papacy became
obsessed with its authority and lost any ability to laugh at itself
or anything else. (Pope John XXIII bucked the trend, but we didn't
have him anywhere near long enough to make a permanent difference.)
Roman Catholicism needs a sense of humor far more than it needs
a Pope, but this may be one of those things that won't be solved
within my own lifetime.
- In keeping with its long history of contempt for the consumer
(which, in all fairness, is rife in Japan) Sony attempted to charge
purchasers of its laptops $49 not to install a crippling
load of crapware on the machines. Apparently they've taken so
much flak for it that they
recently dropped the fee. What I find boggling is that they
willingly cripple their own machines by selling huge numbers of
crapware slots, which makes you wonder how much money they
make in the crapware business. We may be heading down the same
path here for laptops that printers have followed, in which the
printer is a thin, shabby thing sold for very little that makes
money for its parent company by consuming artificially expensive
ink/toner cartridges.
- It seems that I've been hearing a great deal within my own circle
of contacts about people who try to help nontechnical folks (often
parents) make Vista work with existing peripherals and software.
The script goes like this: Nontechnical person brings home a new
Vista PC or laptop from Best Buy and tries to install older software
or connect it to various external hardware devices. Install fails;
system aborts in various weird ways; technical person tries to
fix (or simply understand) the failure, to no avail. Moral here:
Do not use Vista. Everything that isn't needless window
dressing is there for Microsoft's or Big Media's benefit, not
yours. (Reread the venerable Vista
Failure Log if you haven't read it for awhile.) You can still
order PCs from vendors like Dell with XP preinstalled. Do it while
you still can. And failing that, start researching Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
- Speaking of failure, WiMax (which we have seemingly been waiting
for since the last ice sheets retreated) may be a failure because
it's lousy technology. The wireless DOCSIS technology mentioned
in the linked article as a solution has been around for some years
and doesn't have a much better reputation. We may in fact be asking
too much of low-power microwave broadband systems—fixed point-to-point
broadband is totally at the mercy of topography and even vegetation—and
I keep coming back to the conviction that some sort of "roof-hopper"
mesh network may be the best path to follow. People
are doing this in some areas; why it isn't seen as a more
general solution puzzles me.
|
March
19, 2008: The Big Dog Walking Quadriped Robot
Don't have much time today, but I did want to call your attention
to an item aggregated on Slashdot: The Boston
Dynamics "Big Dog" robot prototype, developed as a
cargo mule for DARPA. Here's a
must-see video of Big Dog in action, climbing up a wooded hillside,
tramping through snow, and walking on ice. At one point a technician
kicks the device hard on one side, and it recovers its balance beautifully
without falling over, all the while carrying a load that weighs
30% more than itself. It uses a gait that looks more like a show
dog's than a draft horse's, and while they do not demonstrate it
in full gallop, they're clearly trying to teach it to run.
Scary item, considering that this would have been impossible just
a few years ago. I flashed on Cordwainer Smith's Manshonyoggers
(from the German Menschenjaeger, man-hunter) which are human-scale
Berserkers that run around a ruined world and kill any human being
they see. Though hardly stealth creatures now, that's mostly engine
noise and is a minor engineering problem. It'll be interesting to
see what we do with them in a few years—or what the Bad Guys
do with them in another fifteen or twenty.
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March
18, 2008: The Final Odyssey
I had breakfast with Isaac Asimov. I shook hands with Robert Heinlein.
Kate Wilhelm did a tarot reading for me. I've workshopped with Gene
Wolfe, George R. R. Martin, and A. J. Budrys. Nancy Kress is still
a close friend. David Gerrold wrote for my magazine for ten years.
I saw Keith Laumer from a distance once, and have had several conversations
with Larry Niven and David Brin. But I have never been anywhere
close to Arthur C. Clarke. Now I won't get the chance; as I learned
on arriving at home this evening, he has died in Sri Lanka at age
90.
Arthur C. Clarke was my favorite SF writer for a long time. Asimov
was a little dull, and Heinlein's stridency bothered me at times,
but Clarke was as close to perfect as SF writers got for me, at
least in high school—and maybe still. His SF was about ideas,
and he let nothing else get in the way of those ideas. I began writing
SF by imitating his short stories. When I later began writing SF
novels I was imitating Keith Laumer, because I knew damned well
that I could never imitate Against the Fall of Night or Childhood's
End.
As I
have reported here more than once, when I was seventeen I gulped
and asked a beautiful girl to go out with me and see 2001: A
Space Odyssey. She said yes. Seven years later, Carol said yes
again, when I asked her to share a different kind of odyssey with
me. Yup, Arthur C. Clarke landed me first a best friend, then a
lover, and finally a spouse. (One doesn't get that kind of service
from Barry Malzberg.)
There's not much more to say. When a man gets to be 90 before he
dies, I don't mourn, I celebrate. We had him a long time, and now
he is free of all the suffering and limitations inherent in flesh.
I happen to think that I may meet him yet...but let that pass. We
have his stories. He worked his magic on me, and I would not be
the writer I am if he were not the writer he is.
Just one more word: Thanks, Sir Arthur. Really. And thanks again.
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March
17, 2008: The Secret to Making Good Wine
Basically, charge more for it. That's all it takes, and
I roared when I read the
account on the Boston Globe site. Take that, ye wannabe
wine snobs! In summary, when people have not learned the subtleties
of wine flavors, they fall back on the assumption that good wine
is more expensive than so-so wine, so when told how much a bottle
of wine costs without being told what it is, they overwhelmingly
declare that the more expensive wine is the better wine—even
when all the wines in the tasting are exactly the same wine.
Heh.
Perceiving the subtleties of wine is like playing the piano, or
most any other musical instrument: It takes years of practice, and
(though we may mightily deny it) many or even most people have no
talent for the skill and cannot learn it. Add that to the fact that
human taste perception varies wildly from individual to individual
and cannot be quantified, and, well, it cooks down to this: Buy
what you can afford and learn to like it, as the odds are that you
cannot tell the difference between good and ordinary wine anyway.
From the article:
After the researchers
finished their brain imaging, they asked the subjects to taste
the five different wines again, only this time the scientists
didn't provide any price information. Although the subjects had
just listed the $90 wine as the most pleasant, they now completely
reversed their preferences. When the tasting was truly blind,
when the subjects were no longer biased by their expectations,
the cheapest wine got the highest ratings. It wasn't fancy, but
it tasted the best.
The larger issue, that expectations color what we consider "objective"
perception, is worth close study, as it applies to a lot more than
just wine. People say that house brands are inferior to name brand
only when they're told which is which. Our sense of taste is not
as good as we think, nor are our skills of perception. I don't buy
brand name Rice Chex anymore, nor real Diet Mountain Dew. (And we
buy Joe's Os when we're somewhere that they're sold; they beat Cheerios
all hollow.) I save money, and I'm just as happy as I was going
with name brands. Objective quality is perceptible (and thus definable)
for some things, less so for other things, and not at all for a
great many (perhaps most) things. Being able to tell which is which
is an important skill. Don't assume that you know more than you
do, nor that you can discern more than you can.
A recent phone conversation with Michael Abrash triggered some
insights in this area. More on it when I find the time. And thanks
to several people who sent me the Boston Globe link; I believe Rich
Rostrom was the first.
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March
15, 2008: How (Not) to Wire Up Hotel Broadband
Was cleaning out my digital camera and came upon a shot I had forgotten.
Some time back we were in a hotel room with $9.95/day wired broadband
(via DSL) and I happened to look under the desk in the room. Boy,
there was a mess down there like I haven't seen in a while. I never
quite figured out what all that wirework was for, precisely, but
it included two hasty splices partially wrapped in plastic electrician's
tape, plus a hotel pen that had fallen off the rear edge of the
desk and become lodged in the wad. (Dead center.) Wires had been
pulled out from behind the telephone jack plate and spliced into
a 4-pin phone jack that was literally dangling over a hanked-up
data cable. Remarkably, broadband worked just fine—and that's
the reason I didn't try to rescue the pen.
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March
14, 2008: Odd Lots
- While chasing an interesting "out of the blue" idea
that came to me while exercising the other day, I happened upon
an
RV surplus shop. Not surprisingly, it's in Elkhart, Indiana
(Ground Zero for the American RV industry) and it sells leftovers
and overstocks of RV parts and interior furniture. If I were to
want to built a custom RV dinette table with a built-in keyboard,
well, this might be the place to start.
- Good grief: Has Big Media run out of Republicans to torment?
ABC News posted this
story about the pastor of Obama's Chicago church, who repeatedly
condemns the US in his sermons and tells his people that they
should be singing "God Damn America" instead of "God
Bless America." Expect those sermons (which are offered for
sale by the church) to become very popular in coming months.
- Illinois is famous for a lot of things, but being the historical
capital of manufacturing of fraternal organization initiation
and hazing equipment is not one of them. However, the
De Moulin Company of Greenville, Illinois, now known for making
band uniforms, used to do a big and almost unimaginably bizarre
business manufacturing expensive
gag items used to make new Masons and Elks feel like one of the
gang. The precise psychology here is obscure to me (the last
remotely fraternal organization I joined was the Boy Scouts) but
the
devices are just insane. Browse and boggle.
- Here's another source
for home-made telescope optics and truss
telescope kits up to 32" in clear aperature. Even though
I'm not a big Dobsonian fan, the scopes look good, and if you
want light-gathering power above all else something like this
is as good as you're going to do short of a full-concrete observatory.
The optics are not cheap, but
they're good. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Also from Pete comes a link to a site selling Swiss
Army Ohmmeters. Should the Swiss Army encounter resistance,
well, they'll be ready.
- Mike Burton (who worked in the industry for some time) wrote
to say that "double shot" keyboards are no longer produced
due to their expense. A double-shot keyboard is one in which the
keycaps are molded in two steps: One step to mold the body of
the cap, with a void in the shape of the letter, and a second
to fill the void with black plastic. Such keycaps never lose their
legends, like my decal-equipped Avant Stellar is now doing at
great speed. I guess I had better stock up on period Northgates.
- We have evidently found
the gene that triggers the onset of puberty. One wonders what
suppressing this gene would do long-term. What would be the psychology
of a 75-year-old boy who had never gone through puberty? Larry
Niven toyed with the idea in World Out of Time, speculating
that stopping puberty would stop aging, but I intuit that much
more could be done with it. Would I give up sex for a shot at
becoming immortal? (Answer from this side of the fence: No. Ask
me in 1962 and you might have gotten a different answer.) Much
depends on whether emotional maturity is a process inherent in
or only affected by puberty. Sooner or later some renegade will
try this, and we'll know.
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March
13, 2008: Borders Focuses on Impulse
An
article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal basically
confirms Borders' ceding some territory in their war with online
booksellers both used and new. (And "gently used," i.e.,
read once and resold online.) Borders has begun a new shelving strategy
in which a great many more books are shelved face-out rather than
spine-out. To make room for all those additional face-outs, the
chain will be reducing the numbers of titles carried per store by
5%-10%. For the larger stores, that will mean 4,000-9,000 fewer
titles carried.
The doofy marketing consultant quoted in the article tells us that
"People don't want choice, they want what they want."
I hope Borders didn't pay him too much, because that's an abysmally
stupid statement. People who want what they want order online at
a steep discount. People who shop at Borders (and other large bookstores)
often don't know what they want—which is precisely why
Borders is changing to face-outs on their shelves. When I know precisely
what book I want, I order online, in part because I'm contrarian
in my book tastes, and in part because I don't like to drive when
I don't need to. I go to bookstores these days mostly when I have
to hit the mall for something else. (My own experience shows that
buying shoes online is an exercise in futility.) On those occasions
I budget some time for Borders or B&N, specifically to buy a
few titles on impulse. Impulse will be easier now. Serendipity
has value, and prowling bookstore aisles can broaden one's tastes.
(Ordering only what one wants tends to narrow one's tastes, just
like hanging out only with people like oneself tends to create a
social circle of people a great deal like oneself.)
For impulse buying, covers can matter. A big bold title and interesting
graphic make it more likely that an aisle-stroller will stop and
pick the book up, which is the big win in any kind of merchandising.
It may take publishers a little while to realize that their covers
may actually catch the eye of impulse buyers now. We might hope
for better covers, or—gasp!—better back-cover or dust-jacket
summaries.
I expect there to be a lot of bitching and moaning about this,
but it's actually a wise decision on Borders' part. They're emphasizing
one of the few facets of bookselling where they have an edge over
online merchants, and thus helping guarantee that they remain in
business. And from an author's standpoint, they're leveling the
customer attention field a little: If you can get into Borders at
all, you have a decent chance now of being face-out. One of the
guerilla tactics of small publishers used to be sending junior staffers
(often attractive young women) to stores to pretend to be browsers,
picking up a spine-out title published by their employers, flipping
through it for a second or two, then slapping it back on the shelf
atop a face-out title fielded by a competitor. I don't know how
well this worked. I do know that certain enthusiastic young swirlies
(as Coriolis staff started to call themselves at some point) spent
an insane amount of time at this. Now there'll be less cause to
do it, and I'm good with that. If I want to buy The Catholic
Experience of Small Christian Communities, I'll order it online.
If I just want to surprise myself, well, hey—I'll go to Borders.
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March
12, 2008: Junkbox Telescope Gallery
Some years back I posted Jeff
Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery, and for reasons unclear
it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction
may not be quite dead...) So a while back I wrote up and
(almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built
out of junk since 1966. Longtime Contra readers have seen some of
the photos, but a few are new scans of prints I've had in a box
for decades.
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