Bacterial Toxin in the Genetically Modified Corn
April 12, 2007 | Nature & Environment | Science
Hans-Hinrich Kaatz: The bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have ‘altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry.
—Spiegel Online via WorldChanging via Hypsographic Gleanings
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A Genetic Upper Class and a Dim-Witted Underclass?
October 19, 2006 | People & Society | Science
BBC: Human species 'may split in two:'
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
Men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises. Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features.
Thought it was an Onion story.
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The Business Card Menger Sponge
August 28, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Science
If you had 66,000 business cards sitting around, what would you do with them? Make a Menger sponge? Wow, me too!
The primary goal of the Business Card Menger Sponge Project was to build a depth 3 approximation to Menger’s Sponge as shown above, out of 66,048 business cards. This can be done by building 8000 business card cubes of 6 cards each, linking them together and using the additional cards to panel the 18,048 exterior faces of the sponge, giving a more pleasing finish to the final structure.
In order to build the sponge, I devised a decomposition of the overall structure into simple units that almost anyone can learn to make, which can then be assembled into the whole. The finished sponge measures slightly over 54 inches (140 cm) on each side and weighs about 150 pounds (70 kg).
Nine years of effort, with several hundred card folders across the country. And OMG!—includes instructions on how to build your own.
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NPR Tufte Interview
August 24, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Science
Six-minute NPR interview with Edward Tufte.
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Examples of Categories
July 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Software | Technology
Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.)
Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation?
Culture: On media elitism and the "derivative" myth
Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit...
Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart
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Resonant Rice
May 30, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Science
For all the psychoacoustic shamen out there: What happens if you pour rice on a steel plate and subject it to high sound pressure? It makes interesting patterns as the frequency rises.
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Nike+iPod
May 23, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Technology
Amazing advance in product sophistication. Apple partners with Nike on a blockbuster idea. Buy special (Nike) running shoes with a sensor in the footbed. The wireless sensor talks with a small receiver pluged into the dock connector of the (Apple) iPod. A special version of software takes over the display, and adds voice feedback cues over your music. When you get home, the iPod syncs your stats into iTunes and nikeplus.com, where you can get all kinda bling charts and razzle-dazzle trending of your sweat sessions. Of course, coming soon are Nike Sport Mixes, Workout Mixes, and informative podcasts from the iTunes online store. Rocka Rocka or what?
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A High Degree of Mental Extensity
April 7, 2006 | People & Society | Science
Here is an excerpt from a list of psychology tests from 1890.
Mental Time
- The time stimuli must work on the ear and eye in order to call forth sensations.
- The reaction-time for sound, light, pressure and electrical stimulation.
- The perception-time for colours, objects, letters and words.
- The time of naming colours, objects, letters and words.
- The time it takes to remember and to come to a decision.
- The time of mental association.
- The effects of attention, practice and fatigue on mental time.
Mental Intensity
- Results of different methods used for determining the least noticeable difference in sensation.
- Mental intensity as a function of mental time. [p.380]
Mental Extensity
- Number of impressions which can be simultaneously perceived.
- Number of successive impressions which can be correctly repeated, and number of times a larger number of successive impressions must be heard or seen in order that they may be correctly repeated.
- The rate at which a simple sensation fades from memory.
- Accuracy with which intervals of time can be remembered.
- The correlation of mental time, intensity and extensity.
I'm not sure why I'm posting this, except I like the idea of mental extensity, and while cleaning out my email in-box I'm also cleaning out my blogging drafts.
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Flu Simulation
April 6, 2006 | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Science
Real modeling, from rocket scientist guys:
Simulation of a pandemic flu outbreak in the continental United States, initially introduced by the arrival of 10 infected individuals in Los Angeles.... Without vaccination, antiviral drugs, or other mitigation strategies, the entire nation becomes infected within a few months. Depending on the reproductive number R0, effective intervention strategies including vaccination and targeted antiviral prophylaxis can be successful without resorting to economically damaging measures like school closure, quarantine, and work or travel restrictions. This large-scale agent-based simulation involves 280 million people, and uses demographic and worker flow data at the Census tract level, as well as long-range travel statistics, to describe the geographic movement of people.
There's a quicktime movie that visualizes the spread.
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N-Dimensional Web 2.0
April 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Site Maintenance | Software | Technology | Travel
Many people are trying to define "Web 2.0" – what it is, what it means, how to build Web 2.0 apps, what makes a company a Web 2.0 company, etc. All of those efforts fall short, because Web 2.0 is n-dimensional. Web 2.0 is "reflecting more complex multivariable situations.1"
Today I learned of a new dimension to Web 2.0. Chris2 invited me to join a beta of CollectiveX, a new Web 2.0-ish social widget. To invite someone you have to set a temporary password, and when they log in they change it to whatever they want. Chris set my password to "ratdoggy." Ha! Now that's a good one. This made me laugh out loud, and when I told Meg3 she lost it too. What's so funny?
Well, it creates a strong but secret connection between the title of a recent post I wrote – wherein "maybe too much information" was offered4 – and an unrelated client task. Chris' password was an acknowledgment that he read the post. Maybe even he liked it. And he certainly knew it would make me think of that post in the middle of the workday. But in any case "ratdoggy" is not in frequent usage (Google: "Did you mean: ratdog?") and his reference expanded its sphere of influence.
Which is like a link, just not a web hyperlink. It was a link from one mind to another, from one blog post to a work moment, from a concert review to a social software login, from my original post written on a couch in the lobby of a cinderblock hotel in Charlestown to my colleague's laughter at the password in an office building in Hanover, from all that to this post which you are reading now. Links, links, links, everywhere you look. Which makes me smile.
And that seems to be the common element of a Web 2.0 app – that it makes you smile, somehow, in some way that maybe you never have before.
1) An Introduction to Chemometrics. A report given as Session F of Educational Symposium No. 17, The Use of Statistical Methods in Formulating and Testing of Rubber at the 130th Meeting of the ACS Rubber Division by Brian A. Rock, Ph.D. in October, 1985.
2) Blog updated according to a complex precision timing schedule involving the highway, the moon, the clouds, and the stars.
3) I did not invoice for this minute of laughter, nor did the client utilize any official company time or resources in reaction to the laughter event.
4) Plausible Story, personal communication.
Now, how many new links can you find in the above footnotes?
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153
March 14, 2006 | Science
I had no idea that the number 153 had so many curious properties.
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Another Opportunity for Weird Fear: Toxoplasma gondii
January 20, 2006 | People & Society | Science
Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people?
The Oxford scientists knew that humans can be hosts to Toxoplasma, too. People can become infected by its eggs by handling soil or kitty litter. For most people, the infection causes no harm. Only if a person's immune system is weak does Toxoplasma grow uncontrollably. That's why pregnant women are advised not to handle kitty litter, and why toxoplasmosis is a serious risk for people with AIDS. Otherwise, the parasite lives quietly in people's bodies (and brains). It's estimated that about half of all people on Earth are infected with Toxoplasma.
Some scientists believe that Toxoplasma changes the personality of its human hosts, bringing different shifts to men and women. Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious.
Thinking twice about the litter box....
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The Leap Second
December 31, 2005 | Science
Jamie Zawinski brings us the important details you need to know about tonoght's leap second. Live it up, there's an extra second in our lives today!
(Very geeky) update: How the leap second propagated via the Network Time Protocol the keeps all the world's computers, probably including yours, in sync.
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Or Perhaps Implied Comment
November 21, 2005 | Arts & Culture | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Science
My local paper had an interesting collection of stories on their "Close-Up: Science" page today. I pass them along without comment.
Oral histories show another side of leading scientists
Reviews the Caltech Archives Oral History Project. A storehouse of interviews with giants of American science and engineering, started in 1978, now encompassing 227 bound volumes, with 53 online, and several more in process.Fit muscles, fit brain?
Daily light exercise appears to reduce oxidation in the brain. Oxidation causes damage to lipids and DNA via free radicals. I'm radically simplifying, no doubt, but it appears oxidation bad; exercise good.Study: Trees beat the heat
Southern-dwelling trees and shrubs moved rapidly north 55 million years ago to survive during a period of global warming. "Rapidly" means they moved about 1,000 miles in 10,000 years.Study: No psychological damage from Navajos' use of peyote
Repeated use of peyote produces no psychological problems or adverse effects. In fact regular (monthly) users had better moods and a greater sense of psychological well-being. A series of test involving spatial skills and strategic reasoning showed no difference between users and non-users.
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The Future of Damaged Limbs
September 1, 2005 | Science
Sunday Times: "Scientists have created a 'miracle mouse' that can regenerate amputated limbs or badly damaged organs, making it able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals. The experimental animal is unique among mammals in its ability to regrow its heart, toes, joints and tail. The researchers have also found that when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate."
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Literally Climbing The Walls
August 30, 2005 | Science
NY Times: Geckos, lizards that are notorious for their sticky feet, can run up walls and across ceilings, and hang tauntingly by one toe. They have no suction cups, hooks or glue on their feet, so how do they do it? Five years ago, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; and Lewis and Clark College found the secret: 500,000 minute hairs cover the sole of each foot, and the tip of each hair splits into hundreds more. The hairs are so elastic that they can bend or squish to conform to microscopic nooks and crannies under the creature's feet, even on the glass walls of an aquarium. [....] In a recent issue of the journal Chemical Communications, the team reported that it had indeed produced synthetic hairs, with 200 times the sticking power of the ones made by nature. [....] The synthetic hairs - one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair - are made of highly flexible carbon cylinders, or nanotubes, embedded in a plastic base like bristles in a hairbrush.
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Good Planets Are Hard to Find
August 30, 2005 | Nature & Environment | Science
Fantastic movie of Earth from the Mercury-bound Messenger spacecraft.
Comprising 358 frames taken over 24 hours, the movie follows Earth through one complete rotation. The spacecraft was 40,761 miles (65,598 kilometers) above South America when the camera started rolling on Aug. 2. It was 270,847 miles (435,885 kilometers) away from Earth – farther than the Moon’s orbit – when it snapped the last image on Aug. 3.
via Chris Corrigan.
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Any Questions?
August 21, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science | Software
jumping_in = {
'bandwagon' => 'true'
'initial_impression' => 'good'
'brain_candy' => 'yum'
'project_ideas' => 'too_many'
'time_for_this' => 'false'
}
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Scalable Inman Flash Replacement
April 3, 2005 | Science
Wow. A method to substitute high-quality text (via Flash, when present) instead of boring HTML text. Here's the current release. Here's the Wiki.
“[Find] the exact space the headline fills up if rendered as browser text. [Now] let’s draw a Flash movie that exact size and lay the type out as snugly as possible within it.”
You can see it in action on SixApart.com.
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Google code base
March 29, 2005 | Science
The idea that Google has just one code base for everything they do is mind-boggling.
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Best lego kit ever
March 24, 2005 | Science
You must see these videos: M-TRAN II auto-reconfigurable robot
'Each block can rotate 180 degrees around the link that connects it to its mate, and each module contains a magnet that can be switched on and off, enabling it to connect to other modules in the system. Genetic algorithms allow the robot to discover new ways of moving on its own.'
Also, The OmniTread:'The OmniTread is divided into five box-shaped segments connected through the middle by a long drive shaft spine that drives the tracks of all segments. Bellow s in the joints connecting the sections inflate or deflate to make the robot turn or lift the segments. The bellows provide enough torque for the OmniTread to lift the two front or rear segments to climb objects.'(38MB WMV)"
(Via jwz.)
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Seasonality
March 21, 2005 | Nature & Environment | Products & Opportunites | Science
Here is yet another fantastic software application from a small (one-person) firm. Seasonality from Gaucho Software is a $25 desktop weather application.
Who cares, you say. After all, weather.com does that for free. But weather.com is slow, and filled with annoying chartjunk and ads. You have to load lots of pages (read, advertisements) to get the info you want.
Seasonality is a small, tight, targeted application designed for users – not for advertisers. It has a four-day forecast, sunrise and sunset, and radar maps. Best of all it has temperature and windspeed graphs looking back from one day to one year. You can set multiple locations and see them at a glance. The UI is clean and obvious. It's a really nice 1.0 release. I'll play with the 30-day free trial for a couple of days, but on first glance I'm almost certain to buy it. Congratulations to Gaucho!
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Four Days on Rails
March 1, 2005 | Science
Since we've been pimping Rails, why not point to this helpful toolbox.
"There have been many extravagant claims made about Rails. For example, Curt Hibbs' Rolling with Ruby on Rails claimed that you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework... The article then goes on to show how to install Rails and Ruby on a PC and build a working "scaffold" application with virtually no coding.
While this is impressive, "real" web developers know that this is smoke and mirrors. "Real" applications aren"t as simple as that. What"s actually going on beneath the surface? How hard is it to go on and build "real" applications?"
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Visualizing Data
February 24, 2005 | Science
This is an amazing data visualization.
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The reality of running a weblog
February 23, 2005 | Science
I didn't pay attention to Notio for a month, and accumulated nearly 900 comment spams. I deleted with extreme prejeduce. This morning I found a new legitimate comment on an older post. If I perhaps accidentially deleted a comment you made, my apologies. Comments are one of the great aspects of weblogs; I'm hesitant to turn them off. Spam sucks; I don't have time to look at each of 900 comments individually. If I check Notio each day then I can delete them more easily.
Moveable Type still doesn't have good tools to deal with all this. Yes, MT-Blacklist is okay. But why can't I say, "Entries older than X days; close the comments." The only choice is to send them to moderation, where I have to manually click a checkbox for each deletion.
And, I notice that I've also got trackback spam. Great. So, show me the entries where trackback is on, and trackback pings are present. No can do good buddy. I will have to go through each of the 133 posts, change a pop-up menu, and manually delete the spam trackbacks. I'm certainly not turning trackbacks on ever again. They're just not worth it.
From a product point of view, it's clear that the pace of change for Moveable Type is very slow, and perhaps still slowing. It's the hobbyist platform, or the "professional" platform, depending on your point of view. I imagine the license revenue is no where near seven figures (just a guess), and that TypePad, the hosted solution, is where all the cashflow comes from. They can make changes there and roll them out to tens of thousands of people in a few minutes.
The idea of running a public weblog is great. The reality is that there is a lot of grunt-work management. Perhaps the reality of all this management will motivate me to write more entries, otherwise why bother?
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Nofollow Atribute
January 19, 2005 | Science
I have installed the Moveable Type "nofollow" plug-in to try and help deter comment spam. If you're running a weblog, most vendors are supporting this, and I highly recommend you install this on your system.
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Revolution In The Valley
December 30, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science
I had intended to read The Wisdom of Crowds, but I woke up with a severely frozen neck and upper shoulders, which was pretty bad for concentration. I cannot look up, and my left to right mobility is about 10 degrees, max. It's hard to tell how this happened, since I have exerted approximately zero physical effort all week, but perhaps I slept in an odd position all night or something. I could certainly use more exercise, and I'm doing my best to interpret this as just another helpful signal along those lines.
Anyway, today instead of reading anything that required brainpower, I read Andy Hertzfeld's book, "Revolution In The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made."
It's something of a coffee-table book, with a square format, lots of photos, and a strong visual design. Based on a series of essays written at his Folklore.org website, the book tries to present a balanced internal view of the wild, intense, and stressful birth of a groundbreaking new product. It would appear to describe, with as much accuracy as any one person could, the events of 20 years ago that led to the revolutionary Macintosh personal computer. The essays were vetted at folklore.org, so any obvious errors or misperceptions were caught early on.
Following on Hackers & Painters, it describes some similar development ideas, made considerably harder since Apple had to tool hardware, print manuals, and hold elaborate press events that were scheduled months before the code was shippable. As Graham points out in H&P, web-based apps are the biggest opportunity since the birth of the personal computer, and you can launch one for less than $1,000 – far less than 20 engineers working for four years on a huge new computer bet.
At the time, the bet was that people would respond to 1) a mass-market personal creatvity computer, and 2) a graphics-driven display. At the time, DOS and CP/M were the "mass-market" operating systems, and they were character-based. Some readers may have never used such a thing, but you can think of it as a brain-dead Unix command line interface. Unix happens to be elegant, powerful, and joyful to use, none of which can be said about DOS or CP/M.
One of the big product development lessons was the iterative nature of the project. This is not news to modern developers, but big companies remain committed to extensive planning and Gantt charting and schedules and deadlines and all that goes with it – primarily high-ceremony over high-productivity. Hearing about the simultaneous bootstrapping of hardware (disk controllers, graphics cards, boot ROMs, serial buses, the mouse) and system software (QuickDraw, desk accessories, clicking, dragging, folders, windows, icons, the desktop) and applications (MacPaint, MacWrite) is simply amazing.
It reminded me of the recent U2 release, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (iTunes download). There is a bonus package that has an included DVD with a 25 minute interview segment and some studio footage. At one point Adam Clayton, the bass player, recounts the development of a particular song. Paraphrase: "Larry [drums] doesn't want to commit his part until the vocals are done; I can't really fit in and support the rhythm until the drums are somehow happening; Bono doesn't want to finish the lyrics until the last minute and he hears what The Edge [guitar] is going to do; and Edge will continue to evolve the song until everyone else hs their part down. It's kind of an all or nothing affair." (I'm sure that's a very rough quote from memory, but the gist is there.)
For the Mac project, every element was new in a commercial product. There had never been a 3.5" floppy drive, there had never been a mouse pointing device, there had never been a bit-mapped display. The level of invention and innovation required to produce the first Macintosh was beyond most anything I can think of today. I especially liked the series of Polaroid photos that showed Bill Atkinson's evolution of the user interface. Proportional fonts – a big deal! Fast bit-blits to move images around on screen – amazing! Primitive halftone images – first time ever seen on a personal computer! Overlapping windows. Title bar on the botton of the screen and not the top. Title bar for every app (as Windows still remains) instead of for the whole screen. How to cue the user to move the window on the screen – Tabs? Borders? Title bar? It just goes on and on. Sure, Xerox PARC figured out a lot of this stuff, but they never shipped anything! It was all research, and no design. The Mac project was all design, and research meant building something to see how it worked, and then building it again when someone had a good-enough idea about how it might work better.
What today we take for granted was 20 years ago a struggle just to figure out what the use-cases were, much less determine the correct approach to handling them! When Steve Capps developed MacPaint, he happened to put a row of tool icons on the left side of the screen. The lasso, the box, the circle, the paint bucket, etc. Today, you can buy a copy of Adobe Photoshop that costs about 50% of the original price of the Mac 128K, and the tools are still right there on the left.
Ultimately the idea of the Mac has won, hands down. Although they command only 4% of the total market, but perhaps 65% of the creative services market, every single personal computer using the fundamental concepts that lie behind the Mac.
Interestingly, I didn't realize that when Apple sued Microsoft for "stealing" the Mac interface they did not lose the suit based on the theft. They lost because in 1985 John Scully, in order to get Microsoft to renew their Applesoft BASIC application, gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac interface. The suit was about the interpretation of that agreement, not that all the ideas all came from Apple. Ladies and gentlemen, hire good lawyers if you're going to play this game! This was easily the second-most serious business blunder in the information age, second only to IBM buying a non-exclusive license from Microsoft for DOS, creating the competitive market that IBM ultimately lost to the likes of Dell and Compaq. Had Scully hung tough, foregoing Applesoft BASIC (obsolete in just over a year anyway) the Mac interface might have been the dominant computer in the world.
Over the weekend my brother showed me The Cult of the Mac, which I found to be weird and boring. People with Apple tatoos? People who have no life outside of Macintosh obsession? If you're going to be that obsessed about something, make it something you're creating, not consuming. Between Hackers & Painters, and Revolution In The Valley, you should have a good idea of what you're aiming for if you decide to build something that other people will use. And who knows, it might even change the world.
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Hackers & Painters
December 30, 2004 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Science
I read Paul Graham's book "Hackers & Painters" the other day. If you're reading weblogs, you're probably interested in technology, society, or both. If so, you'll enjoy this book. Subtitled "Big Ideas from the Computer Age," the writing is lucid and insightful, and I was filled with ideas while reading. Aaron Swartz thinks it should be called "How to Think Like a Computer Millionaire."
Most of the essay's (along with others unpublished) are available online, though revised and edited for publication, so you can get a taste of the work. You could even avoid buying it altogether, but I like the book format because, well, it's a book. It has nice typography, you can read it on the couch, etc.
If you're a business-person, the important thing to know about Paul Graham is not that he has Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard, or that after grad school he studied painting at RISD and at the Accademia in Florence. No, the important thing to know is that he and Robert Morris started Viaweb in 1995, and wrote what was probably the first web-based application – to build online stores – and three years later sold it to Yahoo! (June 1998) where it became the Yahoo! Store. The Yahoo! Store is the largest online store builder, with over 20,000 users. The code was written by three people, and the company had about ten employees when it was bought ($49MM). That's a nice effort/reward ratio. Yes, it was Internet Bubble pricing, but it delivered a lot of value to Yahoo!, and doesn't seem unreasonable compared to other Bubble-era acquisitions. Yahoo! has 20,000 people paying between $30 and $300 per month for the service – how much would you pay for the technology behind it?
The book starts by getting inside the mind of nerds – you know, those unpopular kids in high school who got beat up and had their lunch money stolen. Kids like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, Larry Ellison, etc. Probably a helpful chapter for parents and teenagers alike. He then offers a defense of free speech, explaining why programmers think the issue is so important, and why societies live and die on their acceptance of heretical ideas. He discusses the opportunities of web-based software applications, and even though I've been offering such services for over five years, I still learned a few things (which things exactly are trade secrets). Well, okay, here's one:
At Viaweb, one of our rules was, run upstairs. [...] What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground.
The last part of the book is about programming languages, especially Lisp, and you might be tempted to skip over it, but if you're at all technical – or work with or supervise someone who is technical – then it's recommended reading. He's trying to describe why the choice of language matters, and how it impacts your ability to succeed in business. Not everyone will agree with his reasoning, but it is hard to dismiss it, if for no other reason than his personal success with this approach.
In the middle is an excellent chapter on "How to Create Wealth," and since this one's not online it's reason enough to buy the book. If you're wondering how exactly the computer enables wealth-creation, this is the place to start. Reading it got me interested in starting another startup – even though I swore it off three years ago, after having started two companies myself and been an early hire at two others, and seen the inside of a venture capital-funded businesses twice. Like making sausage, it's not the for faint of heart.
Finally, the last chapter on Design and Research provides a quick overview of how design matters to people, and the factors that matter to design. Along with Taste for Makers, which argues for an objective standard of tasteful design, you can get a sense of his aesthetics and how to apply it to "virtual" products like software code, and software interfaces.
Lynne started reading this yesterday, and seems pretty engaged in it too.
Next up on my reading list is James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, which is all the rage right now. It should be an interesting comparison, since Hackers & Painters is about small teams producing something excellent that affects large groups, and Wisdom of Crowds argues that: "Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant – better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future." The Battle of Big Ideas awaits!
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How Sound Works
November 30, 2004 | Science
Any questions?
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Futurists Beware
November 24, 2004 | Science | Science
A friend sent along this photo, which hardly needs any discussion:
Most enjoyable is how it integrates the two most important technologies of 1954, namely, the television and the automobile!
Update: An anonymous commenter says it's fake, and they're right — thanks!
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Futurists Beware
November 24, 2004 | Science | Science
A friend sent along this photo, which hardly needs any discussion:
Most enjoyable is how it integrates the two most important technologies of 1954, namely, the television and the automobile!
Update: An anonymous commenter says it's fake, and they're right — thanks!
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Iterative Development
November 21, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science
New Dog Old Trick has an interesting post called The Train is Leaving the Station about date-driven vs. content-driven software releases. Actually, the New Dog's post points to and is titled the same as Ed Sim's post on the same topic. Excerpt from Ed:
There are a couple of different ways to manage engineering releases. One engineering release is date driven, the other is content driven. In a date driven release, the team knows when the next release is out but does not know exactly what will be in it. The release runs like a train schedule, whoever makes it to the station on time is part of the release. The other release is content driven; the team knows what is in the next release, but does not know the exact ship date. The release runs more like an airplane shuttle, it takes off only when full.
Both Ed and New Dog prefer the date-driven approach. And if I were running Microsoft, or a company trying to be Microsoft, then I would too. Date-driven and content-driven are both from the "waterfall" school of software engineering. Here's a description of the benefits from Builder.com:
Waterfall development makes it easy to keep your project under control. It limits the amount of cross-team interaction that occurs during development, it’s relatively easy to estimate, and it allows for greater ease in project management since plans aren’t constantly being revised.
Yeah, that's what we need in software: less cross-team interaction, and less revision. Instead, let's focus on ease of estimation and project control. [/end sarcasm] Waterfall, it's been nice, but your time has passed.
As a commentator to Ed's post indicates, the problem of date-driven vs. content-driven is much less relevant in software as service businesses. Software as service allows a much more nimble market-driven approach variously called Feature Driven Development or Agile Development. I like the Iterative Development label, which emphasizes the on-going prototype-test-release aspects.
With hosted software, such as the poster child Salesforce.com, fixes and features can be rolled out continuously without requiring customers to install new software. This means that if the vendor finds a bug, they can simply fix it, test the fix, and update a single server (or cluster) and the customer gets the fix on their next login.
In fact, most content-driven releases fail because too much content is loaded into the release. If management or marketing Just Has To Have a certain set of features in time for the trade show, the annual magazine ranking, or the sales conference, then engineering is set up to fail. It's just one manifestation of the larger problem of team silos, lack of organizational teamwork, disconnected management, and departmental competition.
In the iterative model, you might not release for every single feature, but you specify, develop, and test feature-by-feature, and package releases into smaller chunks that can be rolled out whenever you want. Sometimes a significant customer has a great idea, and you can please them immensely if you release that feature a week or two later. That sort of service buys a LOT of word-of-mouth and loyalty.
A very big advantage of iterative development, and one that is not often discussed, is that customers can assimilate software improvements more easily when presented in small chunks. Every new release of Microsoft Word generates a thrash due to the long list of changes. Every time Salesforce.com adds a new feature or three, customers say, Wow, great new features! Then six weeks later there's another release with a few more bite-size features. Customers prefer software improvement via incremental updates over monster releases that require a productivity hit while they learn The New Way.
If you need any final encouragement, you might look to Adam Bosworth. He's a serious engineer, who built DHTML and Internet Explorer for Microsoft, played a key role in defining the XML standard, built the web services infrastructure for BEA, and just recently moved to Google to work on software services like their email product, Gmail. If he says that software as service is the way to go, even if limited to "normal people" apps instead of "power-user" apps, then it's probably a good time to get on board, if it's not already too late.
In summary, if you're going to force your customers to install software, you're probably going to use a waterfall method. My sympathies. In that case, the date-driven approach is probably best. If you are developing new software and it's not delivered as a service, you better have a good reason. And if you've got this great new distribution method called hosted applications, there's no need to be tied to the development approach that drove the IBM 370 team in 1970. Choose a modern iterative method instead, and focus on your ever-changing customer requests and market forces.
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Viruses could be good
November 11, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science | Science
Computer viruses are bad. There's all manner of havoc they can wreak on unsuspecting users. Spyware, adware, popups, data loss, drones, hidden ftp sites, etc. etc. etc. And the talent required to write some of these viruses is astounding. Yes, there are some "script kiddies" who just cut and paste, but original virus authors are often brilliant and insightful programmers.
So what if the energy that creates computer viruses could be put to good use?
For instance, my colleagues and I have spent the last week debugging the HTML and CSS code from a relatively straightforward website design. CSS is great but the various browser implementations are not. Fix a problem for IE 5.x, watch a new problem appear in Firefox. Fix a problem for IE 6.x, watch your Netscape 6.x support tank. To be blunt: This is a major drag on productivity and lessens the utility of CSS. Plus, it totally sucks to work on problems like this — it feels like a waste of human potential. From the client's perspective it was very expensive to get this right. Most clients can't afford this level of detail.
Further, even if the latest browsers and offer good standards support, the installed base of existing browsers is vast and few will ever be updated. My parents are not ever going to update their home computer browser unless I show up and do it for them. Most users won't deal with it. Looking at the web traffic logs for a small northeastern college, I see that Netscape 2.0 hit for 1,574 sessions (out of a total of ~600,000) — and Netscape 2.0 was current in 1995!?!?
But what if you could write a virus that patched browsers and fixed the incompatibilities? What if a virus writer was clever enough to figure out how to patch the dreaded 4.x browsers to update their HTML/CSS rendering engines to bring standards compliance?
This would be a real win, and welcomed by the web design community. The virus writer who pulled this off would be a hero, and could write their own ticket at any computer programming job in the world. It could be the basis for a hugely successful commercial product. Thousands of hours, worldwide, every month, would be saved by this work. The art and practice of website design could advance to greater creativity because instead of spending 40% of the design budget working around browser bugs, that effort could go toward better visuals, more usability testing, or better photography.
If you are a virus writer wasting your time figuring out how to steal bandwidth to store p*rn on someone's computer, instead consider figuring out how to infect every computer in the world with a good HTML/CSS rendering engine. You'll end up on the cover of Wired, web design babes (and/or dudes) will fall all over you, and you'll have enough money to buy Fiji. I kid you not, this is a real opportunity.
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Viruses could be good
November 11, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science | Science
Computer viruses are bad. There's all manner of havoc they can wreak on unsuspecting users. Spyware, adware, popups, data loss, drones, hidden ftp sites, etc. etc. etc. And the talent required to write some of these viruses is astounding. Yes, there are some "script kiddies" who just cut and paste, but original virus authors are often brilliant and insightful programmers.
So what if the energy that creates computer viruses could be put to good use?
For instance, my colleagues and I have spent the last week debugging the HTML and CSS code from a relatively straightforward website design. CSS is great but the various browser implementations are not. Fix a problem for IE 5.x, watch a new problem appear in Firefox. Fix a problem for IE 6.x, watch your Netscape 6.x support tank. To be blunt: This is a major drag on productivity and lessens the utility of CSS. Plus, it totally sucks to work on problems like this — it feels like a waste of human potential. From the client's perspective it was very expensive to get this right. Most clients can't afford this level of detail.
Further, even if the latest browsers and offer good standards support, the installed base of existing browsers is vast and few will ever be updated. My parents are not ever going to update their home computer browser unless I show up and do it for them. Most users won't deal with it. Looking at the web traffic logs for a small northeastern college, I see that Netscape 2.0 hit for 1,574 sessions (out of a total of ~600,000) — and Netscape 2.0 was current in 1995!?!?
But what if you could write a virus that patched browsers and fixed the incompatibilities? What if a virus writer was clever enough to figure out how to patch the dreaded 4.x browsers to update their HTML/CSS rendering engines to bring standards compliance?
This would be a real win, and welcomed by the web design community. The virus writer who pulled this off would be a hero, and could write their own ticket at any computer programming job in the world. It could be the basis for a hugely successful commercial product. Thousands of hours, worldwide, every month, would be saved by this work. The art and practice of website design could advance to greater creativity because instead of spending 40% of the design budget working around browser bugs, that effort could go toward better visuals, more usability testing, or better photography.
If you are a virus writer wasting your time figuring out how to steal bandwidth to store p*rn on someone's computer, instead consider figuring out how to infect every computer in the world with a good HTML/CSS rendering engine. You'll end up on the cover of Wired, web design babes (and/or dudes) will fall all over you, and you'll have enough money to buy Fiji. I kid you not, this is a real opportunity.
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Opportunity: VW-branded biodiesel
November 8, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Nature & Environment | Products & Opportunites | Science
Here's an example of an important new product opportunity.
Volkswagen has a turbo diesel engine called the TDI. It's available in the US and Canada in their Golf, Beetle, Jetta, Passat, and Tourag cars. It runs on diesel fuel, and depending on the model gets up to 50 mpg. It's also really fun to drive; diesel creates very high torque at low RPMs, so it's quick off the line and sporty. The best part is this: Without modification, it can run on biodiesel fuel. (official industry trade group, Hawaiian producer, Veggie Van, make your own) For instance, you can run used McDonald's fryer grease, or vegetable oil. These are extreme examples - biodiesel is a term that can mean a lot of different types of fuel, but they're all renewable, in the sense that they're grown, or recycled, or whatever. They're not fossil fuels.
Another piece to the puzzle: Volkswagen is having a rough time right now. Profits are down, and they're stretched thin between making "people's cars" and reaching into the high-end $70,000 luxury car market. They have a difficult labor-cost structure, and they've had some quality problems. They need an image change, representing not just a new slogan, but a new focus.
What VW should do is hire me to lead an effort that would introduce VW-branded biodiesel into the market. This might take the form of VW filling stations, a co-branding effort with an existing fuel marketer, or simply "greasing the skids" and moving this idea forward in the industry. This would be a complex product development project. A fuel supply must be ramped up, a distribution chain must be created or tapped into, a brand created, advertising, word-of-mouth, etc.
And the results: Volkswagen would own the mindshare of "locally grown fuel." Or, "normal cars, renewable fuels." Or, "German cars, fueled by American corn." Etc. You get the idea. This could spark a major interest in VW TDI cars. The only other mass-produced consumer diesel is the Mercedes.
VW is in the perfect position to capitalize on the immediate need for new fuels. In Europe, the TDI engine is the best-selling engine, and is available in five configurations. They've got the production capacity to ramp up and own this market. Further, these new fueling stations can be the link to all sorts of other services. Think "Apple Store for your VW."
This would be a positive development in the world, and I'd be happy to contribute my talents.
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Updated
November 6, 2004 | Science
As a prelude to my return to active blogging, I have upgraded to MT 3.121. Last month there were almost 1,000 comment spams on this backwater blog. Hopefully the new tools in 3.x will help manage the junk.
[Update: They do. Much better, thanks.]
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Contract opportunity: formatting outlines
August 9, 2003 | Science
I have a desire for some Mac OS X "glue" code, and I'm looking for thoughts on whether it would be affordable for me to contract the work. If this can be built for a small fee then I'll be happy to contract for it. If it's a bigger project than I imagine, perhaps I could float my small budget to someone who is interested in making this a shareware or commercial product. Perhaps my vision exceeds my budget, and that's just the way it is. [End disclaimers.]
I use OmniOutliner for writing and organizing fairly lengthy documents, on the order of 15 - 60 pages. They get longer every project. I use Adobe InDesign to layout and format these documents. I love both of these apps and it's the most productive writing environment I've ever had.
The most time consuming part of my workflow is applying typographic styles to the documents in InDesign. A 60-page document has headlines, body text, interview quotes, sub-headlines, section headings, footnotes, citations, etc. Here is an example workflow: In OmniOutliner, export the outline file as text-only, usually as a MORE document; open the InDesign template and load the text (get text); select all and apply the "body text" style; go through the doc paragraph by paragraph and apply the styles; if there are any character styles apply those last. When you apply styles you have to select the text and then click on the appropriate style in a palette. Styling a 20 page document takes around two hours and is very error-prone. When I'm done the index finger of my "mouse hand" is nearly numb from repetitive motion.
OmniOutliner has multiple columns. While I'm writing, wouldn't it be nice to have a column called "Style" where I could enter the style name as I go. I would type the "Head-A" text, hit tab to the next column, and type "Head-A." Basically I'm styling the doc as I create it.
InDesign has an SDK and a tagged text format - I haven't looked at it but plug-ins rule the world in publication production so it's probably pretty powerful. What I want is to import the OmniOutline document, or the text export, and if an InDesign style of the same names exists as the label in the column named "Style," apply that style on import. This, truly, would be heaven.
A couple of approaches come to mind. The full-blown method would read the OmniOutline document directly as a legitimate InDesign "Get Text" format. A less intense approach might be an AppleScript to export the OmniOutline document as an InDesign tagged text document. The Perl-ish approach would be to take the output of the standard OmniOutline export and transform the text doc into an InDesign tagged text doc, or even a full-blown InDesign document. I'm sure there are other approaches that might be better informed as to the pros and cons.
InDesign SDK info: http://partners.adobe.com/asn/indesign/sdk.jsp. The "Exploded SDK" is browsable online.
Wadda 'ya think? Is this a day-long project or a month-long project? Are there any existing plug-ins I could use? Your thoughts and proposals welcome!
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SMBmeta and rapid adoption
February 12, 2003 | Science
At the Harvard event I mentioned that I thought geographic search was still a hot topic, and how Dan Bricklin's SMBmeta proposal was a good approach. Here's what I wrote when I first heard about it. My main point got sidetracked into a discussion of how Vindigo delivers much value, but what I was coming around to was how Dan's approach could lead to rapid adoption a la Really Simple Discovery.
Dan's got a tools page with a file crator and a registration utility both implemented as web forms, but also allow you to download the code and modify it for your application. There's a weblog with current information. The idea is straightforward enough to build it quickly, and the idea makes sense. This may be another good case study for rapid evolution of a product.
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Bob Frankston
February 12, 2003 | Science
After the webloggers roundtable 14 of us went to dinner at Bombay Cafe on Mass Ave. I ended up sitting next to Bob Frankston, who, with Dan Bricklin (also in attendance) invented VisiCalc, setting fire to the personal computer revolution and effectively defining the very essence of "killer app."
I have a lot of respect for Bob. He talked a mile a minute, so fast that words slurred, especially while eating, and he's full of ideas. We talked about abstraction, .NET, shipping prototypes, "datoids", innovation, the tension of "management", writing, essays and editing. It was an honor, in a way. Not hero worship - enough time backstage at rock conerts will get you over that - but more along the lines of "what a learning experience!"
He gesticulated wildly - more than a dozen times he came within an inch of hitting me in the face while swinging his arms. After a while it became normal, and I stopped flinching, but I also noticed that sub-conciously I was leaning into my plate of food only when he was eating.
At one point he said, I paraphrase, "All these ideas, I don't have any time to create them. I'm just trying to leave a trail so other people can run with them. They're all opportunities, some big ones, for someone else. I can only define them." Having just turned forty, this comment struck me. Bob's not got enough time _in this _life__ to realize all his ideas. Neither do I. He's solved the puzzle in one way. I'm still young enough to solve it in another way, potentially, for now.
At the very end, several of us were commenting that only two women came to the roundtable, and only one came to dinner. And Betsy, at dinner, was the one who coordinated ordering, paying, etc. Bob said, with all ernest intent and goodwill, "You know the real value of women?" - a couple of us exchanged glances and rolled eyes, this was dangerous territory and we'd never go here - "The real value of women is that they hate dirt more than we do!" After the stunned laughter and awkward silence, Dave said, "That'll never get you laid Bob." Betsy said, "So true."
I should also note that on the other side of me at dinner was Mike Rogers who is also a great guy. We had lots of run talking about how 4D hits a nasty scaling wall when your app gets too big or has too many users. Mike's really into software project management and development team coaching, and I get the sense he's good at it.
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Rapid product development
February 12, 2003 | Science
These are rough thoughts and I'd be interested in your comments. Some of the discussion last night got me thinking (again) about product development and why sometimes it works really well and sometimes it doesn't.
For me, the key question is: When developing products, how might users specify what they want? It's well-known that users don't actually know what they want, and if you build what they say they want it won't sell. Innovation doesn't come from focus groups, though optimiztion might. So, when developing a fast-changing product like anything built in software, how can the developers figure out what to do?
One example of a technology that was designed, built and integrated quickly was Really Simple Discovery, by Daniel Berlinger. This is a scheme to make it easier for client software correctly configure itself for server-side apps. It was designed with consideration, a demo was built quickly, and then other people integrated it into their apps. Dave Winer built it into Radio. Ben Hammersley made a module for Moveable Type. Jake Savin added it to Manilla. Brent put it in NewNewsWire.
Why did this happen so fast?
One reason is that in the world of weblogs both client-side and server-side product companies are small and can move quickly. The owners of the companies involved are engineers (or perhaps designers) - they _get_ the web, weblogs, and know a good idea when they see one. Further, the idea was easy to implement so it was a no-brainer to build. They weren't building a space shuttle.
In this example, the users are the developers. That's the key. The users can specify what they want by building a prototype and showing it to colleagues. The idea is then improved until it's "good enough" and it ships.
Regular users can't build anything themselves. All they can really do is complain about why Word does something in a stupid way. Even if you could write a specification for an improvement, where would you send it? "comments@microsoft.com"? I don't think so. Even when there are feedback forms or email links it's hard to know whether it's worth the time. Will anybody really read it? Will the Right Person read it? Will I just get another corporate thank you note? What's the point, let's move on.
For developers, it's often faster to write code than to write a spec. Users can relate to the screen, and developers get feedback. It's especially cool with weblogs because the community is building the publishing tools (Radio, Moveable Type, etc) the syndication technologies (RSS, RSD) and the news aggregators (Radio, NetNewsWire, Synderella). Developers can advance each piece together and rapidly make progress in an entire realm. This is _a lot_ different than traditional packaged software applications. The "killer app" becomes a "killer set" or "killer platform."
This places a burden, perhaps even a responsibility, on the developer to help regular users along the curve. I know this is sometimes controversial, but for the sake of argument let's say that in at least some cases, developers want users to use their products. Maybe even buy them so they can build more products.
I propose that well-designed, well-documented and well-supported applications do better than apps that have no sense of design, are poorly documented, and are not supported. This is a base level of user support. Going further, a community may develop around a product providing user-to-user support. This is a developers dream because it lighten's their load while providing better support. You still have to have the basics though, to jump-start the community.
The next level, pioneered by Novell and perfected (like all 2.0 implementations) by Microsoft: The certification program. This creates classes of people with credentials that regular users can call on with a better sense of knowing what they are getting from their support visit. It's a branding thing, good for both the vendor and the customer. But it's especially good for the vendor becuase it can be a profit center. Customer support is hard to turn into a profit center, but this is one way.
I'm interested in your ideas about how users can be better involved in requesting and designing software, and products in general.
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Weblogs at Harvard
February 12, 2003 | Science
Brett and I went down to the Dave Winer's Harvard weblog roundtable last night and had good fun. A great group of creative people.
Donna wrote a live blog of the event. And Dan Bricklin took a lot of great photos. I had nice conversations with Henry Copeland and Betsy Devine. Other good reports by Frank Field, Derek Slater, Dan Cederholm, Aaron Johnson, Adam Medros.
Very striking was Peter Rukavina's comment that he blogs for his two-year old son, "so he can know me as I am now, as his father." That's a very beautiful thought.
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Train kept a'rollin'
February 8, 2003 | Science
One thing I love about Mac OS X is how reliable it is under heavy use. Yesterday, all day, I just pounded on it. Six or more Terminal windows ssh'ing to various computers; Internet Explorer; Safari; Mailsmith - I love Mailsmith; Acrobat; Word; Excel; Photoshop; GoLive; BBEdit - I love BBEdit; NetNewsWire scanning RSS feeds every half hour; multiple Fetch and Transmit FTP windows; Palm desktop; iTunes playing in the background, getting music from another server across the room. The machine never hiccupped. I just love it.
Contrast that to a day on OS 9, and you know why we're all excited about X. Now, if only the Quark situation would resolve (not linked for a reason), or if everyone just moved to InDesign, the platform would be happy.
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The power of power laws
February 8, 2003 | Science
Clay Shirky has an interesting article on power laws. Most people know about power laws because of the "80/20" rule, or Pareto's law. It turns out that power laws accurately describe any social system "where many people are free to choose between many options" - his example is the popularity of webloggers, but the theory can be applied to many other important aspects of social life. I immedately think of income and wealth distribution, hit products (crossing over the tipping point), and media stars.
Dave rebutts that weblogs are not like BBSs or The Well. Key quote: "How many of the weblogs he mentions have you heard of? I found that most of them were strange to me. So if we're hitting a scaling wall, why are these blogs becoming popular, even dominant, without any of us knowing about them?" Good point.
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State of the Blogging Union
January 31, 2003 | Science
It's all the rage today: Guardian Unlimited's New biz on the blog article pretty much sums up where we are in the world of blogs.
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Printing organs
January 24, 2003 | Science
I worked as an engineer at Spectra from 1988 through 1990 developing ink-jet printing technology for high-end color office printers. Now, New Scientist reports on experiments to "print" living tissue using ink-jet technology. That's some pretty advanced technology.
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Apple keynote at MacWorld
January 7, 2003 | Science
Lots of news from MacWorld today:
- New 17" PowerBook
- New 12" PowerBook
- Fast web browser, Safari (definately beta)
- Keynote presentation software
- Final Cut Express, mid-range video editing package
- iLife bundle with iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD ($49)
- Free upgrades to iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD
This is all much more than I expected. The PowerBooks look great. Safari will be great after some v1.0 shakedown. Not sure about Keynote (at $99), but there's not much to love about PPT, so could be good.
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The future of music playback
January 3, 2003 | Science
Reports from The Well are that this Ethernet MP3 player is a great thing. I don't doubt it - looks fantastic. Listen to your digital music collection (real-time, random-access) on your stereo (good sound quality, comfy chairs), with a typical IR remote or browser-based control. Works with iTunes and the usual Windows stuff. No Ethernet jack at your stereo? Add a tiny $100 Ethernet to WiFi bridge and keep your music server in the basement.
