The value of predictions

Many organizations and individuals make predictions about all sorts of things. Some of these turn out to be on target and many do not. We have become quite good at predicting things we can make good mathematical models for such as the weather. By quite good, I mean that we can forecast a few days into the future. When it comes to forecasting the outcomes of complex systems (which covers nearly everything else we care about) then the results are typically poor. We tend to hear about the successful predictions and not the ones that are wrong so our perspective is focused on the fact that some people do get it right. Unfortunately we don’t know who those people are and we also don’t know which predictions they will get right and which they will get wrong. Most forecasters get lucky once in a while but the majority of them do not so it's hard to pick someone to follow with any confidence.
The bottom line is that when we make a prediction we are making a guess based on whatever facts we have at hand, which models we are using, our personal intuition and the exact distribution of some tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. The scientific and engineering professions have made some fantastic leaps over the last century or so but few of the significant ones were predicted. We just don’t know what we'll be able to do in five or ten years. Only time will tell.

Outcomes from a neurological interface

If we develop a good neurological interface that can be controlled by a conscious mind in a reliable and precise way and that can also be used to provide input from a computer, there are many different applications for this technology. Some of these are trivial, some complex. Some are of obvious benefit to mankind while others are perhaps not.

Here are some to consider:

Technology requirements for human-computer vocal interactions

From a trivial point of view, the technology increases with the complexity of the task, but at some point it becomes perhaps more of a conceptual battle than a mechanical one. Computer power is increasing at a steady rate and we have applications like 3D computer games that are ready and waiting to consume that power. But some problems are not computationally hard, but rather they are limited by our understanding of the physics, chemistry, physiology and so on involved in the problem. For some years, handwriting recognition made no progress at all then around 1990 a different approach started to appear based more on a mathematical analysis of the overall shapes than on any kind of line following or simple image matching algorithm. Once that leap had been taken, the quality of handwriting recognition improved very quickly, so we might expect to see this effect with speech recognition and the AI required for the vocal conversations we want to have with computer systems. In the technology vs. time plot in Figure 2 I'm suggesting that the timeline is very wide for when we might get good results but the technology span is flatter. In other words, we will have the computing power way before we know how to really solve the problem.

Human-computer vocal interaction timeline

We already have speech synthesis that's pretty good so I'd expect it to be perfected in the next two to five years. Speech recognition is getting better but it's still not very reliable even in controlled environments but it seems reasonable given the progress so far that this might also be perfected in the next five to ten years.


The issues of when we will be able to hold a reasonable conversation with a computer has been debated for a long time and nothing so far is even close to passing a Turing test. But there are applications where we don’t need an abstract conversation, we juts need to tell a car where we want to go or find a good place to have dinner. Once we have good speech recognition, many of these simpler interactive applications become viable very quickly. So I'm going to say that in the next 10 to 20 years we'll have the ability to interact with a computer using voice in a way that is useful and reliable.

Beyond Speech

I am fairly confident that we will see further advances in speech recognition and synthesis to the point certainly where a computer speaking is indistinguishable from a human and hopefully to where a computer can understand what any of us is saying. I don’t mean understand in the sense of comprehension but understanding in the sense of being able to transcribe spoken words into text. I am less confident about the development of Ai to the point where we can hold a conversation with a computer and much less confident now about a computer passing the Turing Test any time soon. But for the purpose of discussion, let's say that we might reasonably expect to be able to dictate a letter to a computer in the next five years with the computer having the ability to ask for clarification of anything it could not transcribe with a high probability of being correct. In other words, we've reached the point where we can all have a personal secretary.

A number of questions arise at this point. The two I'm interested in here are: would we like that and make use of it? And: would we want to go further and develop a thought interface?

There are obvious applications of this sort of technology for the handicapped. I'm fairly sure that Stephen Hawking would be delighted to try out such a system since it has the potential to vastly improve the speed at which he can communicate. But is that right? Would Hawking want to communicate faster than he does now? Perhaps he has adapted to his disability and the time it takes to dictate a letter using his present system allows him time to think and form his thoughts more clearly. My guess is that the majority of people with any kind of speaking disability would like very much to have a machine that could vocalize their thoughts.

For those of us who tend to blurt out the first thing that comes into our heads, it might not be so wonderful to have your thoughts instantly translated into text. "Wow, nice [body-part]"! for example, might be better left as an internal comment rather than one voiced loudly in public. Imagine sitting in a meeting and inadvertently voicing your opinion that the CEO is an idiot. This goes far beyond our inability to control body language - we're going to come right out and say what we're thinking. Personally, this sounds great and I'd like to forcibly apply it to people such as salesmen. Knowing what they are thinking as they try to sell me a car would definitely help my side of the bargaining process.

So let's add a button. You push the button when you want your thoughts translated and the computer picks them up over WiFi (or perhaps Bluetooth if we still have that in five years). That takes care of the gross blunders but does this provide a better interface? For writing a letter, I doubt that it does unless it can question my grammar and make helpful (but not annoying) suggestions for improvements. I'd like it to take dictation and then act as an interactive editor. That sounds pretty good to me. But this is all fairly pedestrian. We are getting pretty close now to being able to dictate with good accuracy and although grammar checkers still need improving, they are way ahead of me.

Instead of thinking about text, let's push things out a bit and think about more abstract things like art. Art is a physical expression of some sort of personal image (in many cases). The artist imagines the outcome and renders it with some physical medium (I'm including computer animation as being a physical tool). But what if you could render a dream? What if I could send you one of my dreams and you could play it back? That raises a lot of questions about dreams and their context. Do you have the right background experiences to feel the true terror I might experience from being in a very particular closed space? Probably not. But it's interesting to think (no pun intended) that we might exchange thoughts in some way.

When Microsoft first produced a speech recognition engine, I tried it out at work. I thought it would be fun to be able to tell the computer to open and close files and do a variety of other mundane things. The results we horrifying. All sorts of misinterpretations occurred with the result that I was terrified to speak at all. Who knew what file sit was moving or deleting? After a bit more tinkering it was just plain funny. We tried it on lots of people in the office with similar results. Unless you had a strong Texan accent, it had no clue and performed some apparently random act. Now let's extrapolate that experience to a beta copy of "Dream Sculptor". I'm assuming by this time we don’t need to get wired up to do thought input to the machine. I'll assume it's got some very sensitive electromagnetic sensors that can produce very accurate 3D data of what impulses are going on inside my head. So we get close to the machine and push the big red "Think Command" button. I'm pretty sure that exactly at that point one of two things will happen. Behind door 'A' is a big, blank, empty space - no thoughts at all. Behind door 'B' is some completely random thought that most definitely does not need to get inserted into my dream sculpting program. Even as I'm typing this (slowly) my mind is wandering off thinking about all sorts of random things that would somehow appear in the output. And even if I do get to craft a decent dream sequence, can I edit it? Can I swap the face of someone I know for a celebrity? I'd like to think so but undoubtedly this won't work. The human mind is far too complex and (mine at least) thoughts are far too obscure to generate any kind of coherent image.

Work has been going on for long time (certainly since the 70's) on converting nerve impulses into mechanical actions. The driving concept being the production of better prosthetic limbs. This has turned out to be more complex that was originally thought. It's not at all like turning on a light with a switch on the wall. Getting people to initiate nerve impulses for missing body parts takes a lot of practice and it takes a lot of signal processing to accurately tell what the intent was. Imagine how hard it is to do the same thing on the scale of ten of millions of firing neurons. For every pattern we might be able to detect at least part of the time there will be millions of patterns that are similar but which have quite different meaning. So while we might be able to develop a system to translate some very simple thoughts into turning a light on or off, I have great doubts that we can ever develop a thinking interface to an electronic machine. I suspect that a more productive path lies in transferring thoughts to some sort of biological machine but since I have trouble expressing my thoughts to my loved ones who have had plenty of experience in interpreting them, I am not optimistic that something grown in a Petri dish will fare any better.

Nigel

Web Widjets

So here's a good idea that's not quite right in terms of it's implementation. Sites like widgetbox (www.widgetbox.com) offer some rather cool add-ons for your blog site. In theory all you need to do is click a few times, and voila, you have a widget in your blog. This is a two part operation. The providing site generates some javascript and/or HTML and the receiving site (your blog) pastes that piece of script into place. An interface between the two helps to automate the process. Or so it seems. I tried several times to get a countdown widget from widgetbox (and from Krista's blog: http://kristalcs855.blogspot.com/) with no success. What I get is an empty box with the rather sad title of "No widget found". I'm sure this is yet another case where despite nearly 40 years of programming in various languages, I just don’t get the concept. I'm usually trying too hard to understand how it works rather than how one might use it. None the less, I don’t have a working widget and I don’t know why. As I have done in the past, I right-click the page and take a look at the source. This is, of course, the source generated by the server which is often not the 'source' code but rather the intermediate result of a load of code on the server and an HTML page template of some kind. In other words, without knowing the intent of the original author, I don’t get any real clues as to why it doesn't work. If I were to ask Kristal, I'm sure she'd say "It worked fine for me". Oh to be the chosen one. But sadly, that is not my lot. I dutifully register, click the buttons and fail - almost every time.
So based on my experience (not yours, mine) I have to say that although the idea is pretty cool and although it seems to work for the chosen ones, it doesn't work for me and I suspect for many others too. And for those of us for whom it does not work, we have no real way to find out why not. And this is a problem because in the brave new world of Web N.0 (where N is a number in a monotonically increasing series) there will be many widgets and all the cool people will have them on their blogs and on their phones and even tattooed into their skin, but I will be left with a pale grey rounded rectangle containing the words "No widjet found".
To add insult to the programming injury, the failed widget includes a button: "Get Widget" so that you too can have a failed widget. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you will click the button under my failed widget and it will work for you. Please let me know if it does so I can order a bigger supply of anti-depression meds next time around.

Nigel
(without a widjet to my name)

the listening computer

Work started in the early 50's at Bell Laboratories to develop machines which could recognize elements of human speech [1]. Since then there has been great interest in developing systems which can process natural language. Today we find these systems in use primarily in telephone help systems where a computer and a voice recognition and synthesis engine is used to answer questions. The ability of these systems is still very limited and in most cases they are used to recognize just a few words and numbers. The words must be spoken clearly and such systems are often confused by different accents.
Several companies have produced speech recognition systems as commercial products. The author's personal experience with offerings from IBM and Microsoft is that even after considerable training, these tools are poor at best and the resulting manuscript resulting from a dictation session requires so much editing that the overall effort is more than would be required to type it in directly. For those of us who cannot touch type and who are prone to spelling errors and other character reversal mistakes, a good speech to text interface would be a great help. For people with physical disabilities, a good voice interface to a computer could make dramatic changes in quality of life.
The primary driving force for computers that can understand natural language is probably to reduce costs in call centers associated with large businesses. If computers can understand spoken language accurately and this technology can be combined with Artificial Intelligence then we have the potential for really useful support systems which could be far more effective than a poorly trained human reading from a script.
Combining the recognition of human speech with AI systems is being pursued for several research projects notable Project Halo which is funded by Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures [2]. Project Halo's goal is to produce a "Digital Aristotle" - a teaching tool capable of answering scientific questions. Halo has produced some good results with text input - demonstrating the AI part of the program. In subsequent phases the intent is to include natural language processing and to develop the knowledge base using scientific personnel rather than knowledge base engineers.


[1] "Automatic Speech Recognition – A Brief History of the Technology Development, http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/Faculty/Rabiner/ece259/Reprints/354_LALI-ASRHistory-final-10-8.pdf."
[2] http://www.projecthalo.com/.

the speaking computer

There have been numerous attempts at providing computers with some kind of voice interface. The first step was to provide voice output with text-to-speech engines. IBM pioneered this work in the early 60's. Their work inspired Arthur C. Clarke to include a segment where HAL sings a song in the movie 2001 [1]. The initial offerings were effective but sounded poor. Notable users of this technology include Stephen Hawking and even the rock band Pink Floyd [2]. The most common application was probably in computer games because it provided an advantage. If a game developer wanted to provide vocal instructions to the user, the only way to do that before text-to-speech engines arrived was to record someone speaking the text and play it back at runtime. This approach is still used in foreign language learning applications [3]. By compressing the text as much as possible to limit dynamic range, re-sampling at very low sampling rates and only using the least number of bits possible to encode the data, it was possible to pack a reasonable amount of speech onto a CD. An audio CD can normally hold about 70 minutes of stereo music. By compressing the content even modestly using 8-bit mono at 11 kHz sampling rate, a CD can hold nearly 19 hours of audio. By using less bits per sample, that number can be increased quite a bit more. But consider what happens when we have a text-to-speech engine available. Now we can put 700 MB of text onto the CD and have the text-to-speech engine read it. We trade off the space needed for the code, of course, but in practice it's not much code and we get an awful lot of speech in exchange.
Continuing work on modeling the human vocal system has resulted in modern text-to-speech engines which are not only quite realistic but also capable of presenting in different accents with a clear distinction between male and female voices. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) uses text-to-speech engines to read the weather forecasts on the NOAA weather radio channels [4]. Many companies use similar engines in their telephone support systems to read a list of menu items which the user can choose from by pressing one of the number keys on the telephone pad [5]. More recently, some of these systems have added the ability to recognize spoken language.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis.
[2] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe.html.
[3] "Computer Games for Partially Sighted and Blind Children, http://www.tpb.se/barnens_tpb/spel/projekt/report.html."
[4] http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/VIPstatus.htm.
[5] http://www.nortel.com/products/04/ivr/collateral/nn103943.pdf.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb – A review

I recently finished reading Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". This book provides an excellent history of atomic physics and the people involved from the first attempts to determine the structure of the atom to the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The text is an interesting mixture of personal stories, politics, history, chemistry and physics. Most of the chapters start with something about one or more of the physicists and end with progress towards the first bomb tests. If you are an engineer or scientist, this is a great read.

Chapter 19, "Tongues of Fire" describes the bombing of Hiroshima in great detail and includes a lot of personal stories taken from interviews of the survivors. If you have any doubt whatsoever that atomic weapons are terrible tools of mass destruction, just read this chapter. The justification for dropping the two bombs on Japan was weak at best and we see government at its worst when it comes to making decisions during war time.

One of the things I found fascinating was that as the physics evolved through better theory and experimental confirmation, plans to make bombs developed quickly down to an almost exact timetable. Once the knowledge had been obtained as to how to create enough Uranium 235 and Plutonium it became a matter of money and manpower. The US government spent huge amounts of money building reactors to make Plutonium and plants to extract U235 and Plutonium in enough quantities to make the first bombs. It is the sheer scale of the endeavor that is so amazing. Uranium was refined using multiple techniques including cyclotrons which separated the isotopes literally atom by atom building up very very small amounts. The number and size of the cyclotrons that were built is hard to imagine. There was not enough Copper in the US to make the windings of the magnets so silver was borrowed from the mint instead. It's hard to imagine a project of this scale today.

This book is worth reading for its history alone but it's especially worth reading as a reminder of what we can do if we want it badly enough and what the consequences of those kinds of actions can be.

Technology's Promise - Chapter 4

The more I re-read the chapters of Halal's book, the less I like it. I was reviewing Chapter 4 again when I came upon this comment: "Turner Entertainment is using holography to store 1.6 terabytes of movies and video".

This caused me to make several comments. First of all several terabytes of anything is pretty small potatoes these days. Both HP and EMC have mid-range storage systems in the multi-terabyte range and some of HP's customers have over a hundred of these systems and that's just to store relatively small bits of information such as shopping accounts and junk mail. When we look at the storage required for (say) an on-demand video system we come up with pretty big numbers. We can do a back of an envelope calculation. Let's say a DVD holds about 5 GB and that's about what we need for one movie. According to IMDB.com there are about 700,000 movies in existence today in one form or another. If we made DVDs from all of them we'd need 700,000 DVDs (duh) or about 3,500,000 GB of storage. That's 3,500 terabytes - or about 2,000 times as much as Halal says Turner is storing with holography.

In a Computerworld article in 2005 (http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,106288,00.html) Turner was apparently considering using holographic storage - although none of the articles I read described the technology in any detail. This move was apparently to get away from magnetic disk storage. But why would you do that unless you only want to archive the movies? Using a medium that does not have random access (CDs and DVDs are essentially serial devices) means you cannot easily stream movies to multiple users where each user is at a different place in the movie - and this is exactly what we need for on-demand movie watching. Magnetic disk storage is cheap and capacities continue to increase every year making it cheaper and cheaper to store data on them. High speed (10K RPM) fibre-channel SCSI disks that form the core of modern storage systems are also very reliable. When you add a redundant controller system with a few GB of cache memory you have a very cheap (relatively speaking) way to store petabytes or even exabytes of data and still have very fast random access.

So the thing I really dislike about Halal's statement is that it's a throw-away catch phrase intended to establish some sort of "wow that's cool" feeling in the reader - but only if the reader is ignorant of the current state of technology. This is the essence of selling snake oil.

Nigel

Notes on Gordon Moore

Since I posted a piece about Gordon Moore's transistor density prediction a while ago I have been wondering if Moore had real insight or just came up with a lucky guess. I don’t think it's really possible to answer that question but I did think that I could dig into his background a bit.

Moore rates his own spot on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Moore
His educational background is in chemistry and physics - a good combination for someone interested in semiconductors. It's interesting that his career turned more into management than engineering. Most engineers don’t make that leap successfully.

He made his prediction in April 1965 which is 11 years after he got his PhD from Caltech. He had spent the entire time in the semiconductor industry in various key roles that led to the creation of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. From these facts alone we might conclude that Moore had some pretty good insight into what semiconductors would sell well. Moore wrote a short piece about his own experience in becoming a manager of a new business: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/moore/index.html which is well worth reading because Moore is quite frank about how some of the business developments were more accidents than planned events. His focus had been as part of a small lab (at Fairchild). It just ended up as a very big company (Intel) partly because they were on the very forefront of integrated circuit (IC) development and partly because there was a great demand for what ICs had to offer. Moore describes how they tried different technologies at Intel, hoping to exploit one or all of them. Eventually one technology of the three resulted in a real product - the Intel 4004 microprocessor. This was a major step forward in the industry. Intel sold directly. They didn't use distributors as they had at Fairchild. Moore and his colleagues had learned a good lesson there and this helped Intel to be more profitable. The rest of the microprocessor story is history.

I rate Moore highly on a lot of different fronts. He's obviously a bright guy and had a good education. He learned well from past mistakes and kept an open mind along the way. These are traits that a lot more managers could do with. He also tried to keep things simple, by limiting bureaucracy and giving his engineers simple ways to get things done. A lot of this is common sense from some perspective but not all that many people seem to be able to keep their common sense when they are running a very large organization.

So does any of this help us to know if Moore had some innate ability to predict the future of the semiconductor diffusion industry? I don’t think so. I think Moore was vectoring from the current state of affairs and riding the top of a big wave. He was looking optimistically at the future from a happy vantage point. In the end, I think he got lucky. There was so much drive to build denser semiconductors because of the emerging markets that the chances are we'd have made Moore's curve or better. It is still a bit surprising that the curve is still valid today. Few things grow with that much stability. As my friend Jason observed recently, people were busting their butts to make sure the industry followed Moore's Law.
Nigel

Web 2.0 - Busy Signal

I thought I'd post a quick verbal blog on Gabcast about Jason's defense yesterday but the GabCast number is busy. Perhaps they are "expecting unusually high call volume" as seems common when I call India for tech support for something made in China that I bought in the US.

Nigel

Jason Defends

August 8, 2008 - Jason successfully defended his DCS research. Way to go Jason.

I took a couple of picture with my cell phone which are posted on FlickR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28718989@N06/

Nigel

SpaceX Problems

SpaceX failed to get its Falcon 1 rocket to orbit on August 2nd. The problem was apparently due to a small timing error during separation of the second stage from the first stage of an otherwise successful launch. At least that's what SpaceX is saying. Before this launch I had been following along with SpaceX's activities via their email feeds of happy PR stuff. I decided to watch the launch live as they were offering a web feed.

Sadly the web feed was very intermittent and it was almost impossible to hear what was being said. It was still cool to see the rocket on its pad on the tiny island which is part of Kwajelein atoll. Approximate coordinates are 9 degrees N, 167.5 East. the US has a pretty big presence on this tiny chain of islands. We did a lot of bomb testing there back when we wanted to see just how big a bang we could make. A scan around the area with Google Earth shows some of the craters.

I have varying views of SpaceX's progress. On the one had, I very much like the idea that one person (Elon Musk) can shell out some of their own money and start a space program. That is definitely very cool. On the other hand, it takes more than money and enthusiasm to build complex systems. SpaceX seems to have some excellent people and no doubt some of them came from NASA or Boeing or other companies that have active space programs. But what this team does not have is collective experience. They are a new team and teams take time to figure out how to work well, how to ask the right questions without offending anyone. If you read Gene Kranz's excellent book "Failure is not an Option" you can get a feel for how complex the Apollo program was and the incredible level of detail required to plan for every conceivable failure mode. Despite the qualifications of Musk's team, I just don’t think they are working at level of detail.

SpaceX's PR talks a lot about using fewer people and more automation to make the operation cheaper. I think that also translates to less people asking what can go wrong, and if you don’t ask those questions you end up convinced you're got it all covered. So far SpaceX has tried three launches and none have been successful. In the grand scheme of space flight they are pretty much on square one and to expect more from them is perhaps unfair. But the reality is that their customers will expect more than some crappy web video and a nice bang as the vehicle is detonated by the range safety officer a few minutes after lift off. Customers will expect to get vehicles into orbit.

It was a little sad that part of the cargo on this mission was a collection of human ashes including those of James Doohan - Scotty from Star Trek. Instead of a final resting place in space, Scotty is now part of the general debris that floats all over the Pacific Ocean. He's now part of the food chain. I'll say no more about that.

Overall I am hopeful that SpaceX will succeed because we need more people like Mr. Musk to be a bit adventurous and have a go.

Working with Second Life

As part of one of our other courses I tried to create a robot in Second Life. My own goals were to:

• Get a feel for SL and how it compared to my other 3D programming experience
• See how hard the SL scripting language was to learn
• Try to make some sort of animated mechanical robot with an articulated arm

The process that I followed is documented in my journal files here: http://www.nadtec.to/doc/prog/slprog.htm where you can also find a zip file that contains the scripts I wrote in various stages of their evolution.

The work took me quite a long time and I found a great deal of it quite frustrating because the SL engine and its scripting language did not conform to my view of the 3D world. My previous experience was with more traditional 3D environments in which you are required to build a list of vertices and faces that describe an object and then render that object with shading, texture maps and so on according to a lighting scheme and a few other rules. You can read more about my earlier experience here: http://www.nadtec.to/books/graphics/default.htm.

The results of my work are not that impressive. The robot looks like a trashcan with one candy stick arm and a block of wood for the other. The movement of the robot and its arms and the way that the robot interacts with the avatars it encounters in SL is hardly realistic. Limitations in the SL primitive model and enforced delays in instructions in the scripting language resulted in animation that is fascinating to watch but obviously not what was intended. As the robot's left arm moves it becomes disconnected and the two parts of he arm move independently. They end up in the right place but the movement is awful.

So is SL a bad environment to develop 3D objects? No, not at all. SL has many very advanced features to offer such as gravitational mechanics, the concepts of buoyancy and flotation and, my personal favorite, the ability to make objects that sway with the wind. In fact it turns out that with a little practice you can make trees that bend with the wind, hair that flows as you move, boats that sail and much more.

So why could I not build a simple robot arm? Too stupid? Didn’t read the right blogs (there was little official documentation)? Not enough caffeine? No, the problem was simply that SL offers a rich set of capabilities packaged up in a way that makes those 'tricks' easy to do but does not expose the normal set of 3D primitives used to make them work. So we can make wavy hair in a few minutes but we can't make a linked set of kinematic objects.

It might be unfair to call them 'tricks'. In reality it probably took a great deal of effort to make the physics work - and it works very well indeed. The real problem is that my goals didn’t align with the set of users expected to be programming in SL and that's a problem we are starting to see a lot. Even with something like word processing we are starting to see that cool stuff like flowing text around an image in columns is trivial but detailed control of heading styles and numbering schemes is not. Professional writers struggle with Microsoft's Word 2007 because it makes it hard to get at the low level primitives but easy to do the hard stuff - and its showing off the hard stuff that attracts people to the products.

If you get an expert in SL to demo object creation to you, you'll be hooked in about 15 minutes. It's totally amazing to watch objects stretch, twist and evolve into lamps, chairs, tables, working doors, bunny rabbits and more. With a bit more effort you can apply fantastic texture maps and most fabulous of all bump maps. This isn't the place to describe bump maps but let me just say that by applying an 'image' as a bump map to a cube, you can turn it into a sofa. The 'pixels' in the bump map don’t describe colors but rather spatial displacements to apply to the object on which the bump map is overlaid.

SL is not an environment in which to model complex behavior. It's environment with which you can interact and which is visually rich which helps to make the experience deeper and more compelling. This is to say nothing of the fact that this is also a massively scalable, distributed system which supports millions of users. If we look into the architecture a bit more, we can start to understand why the cool stuff is easy and the small stuff is hard to expose.

To make SL work, it requires that the client computers do a great deal of the work. The servers used to implement the islands are more or less just databases that describe what objects are present, what the attributes of each object are and where they are located. Given that information you desktop PC can create an image of that 'world' from where your avatar is standing and let you see it. As you move about, the set of objects that are in your filed of view changes and the server needs to send you mode information but this information is quite small and does not need a lot of network bandwidth.

If I make myself some wavy hair, that's just one object with a set of properties. The server only needs to tell my PC where the hair is and how it behaves; the PC renders it and implements all the physics. My robot and its arm are just a collection of objects to the server which dutifully sends the details to the PC, but there is no real way for the server to send the details of the behavior I would like to my PC because the scripts need to run on the server so that all the connected clients see the same changes in position and orientation - and send that information our for rendering. The reason that scripts include forced timing delays between object movement commands is so that one script cannot saturate the system by requiring tens of thousands of update commands to be pushed to all the connected clients watching the scene.

So now I have figured out why I can’t make a cool robot. If I want to make it work better I need to either get a job with Linden Labs and build the kinematics into the client or perhaps work for one of the open-source teams currently developing alternative environments that work the same way.

So if you are a programmer, don’t expect too much from SL. Try to put on your artistic hat instead of your engineering hat and enjoy the environment for what it can do and try not to whine about the features that aren't there yet.

Flooding

We had some flooding again today thanks to the fact that Colorado's 12" of rain a year often arrives in one afternoon. Video here: http://www.nadtec.to/dcs/CS855/Flooding.wmv

Successful Predictions - Moore's Law

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel drew a graph in 1965 predicting that transistor density on fabricated ICs would double about every two years.

Source: http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/

His prediction was based on observations of the technology used in semiconductor fabrication which was still in its early years. Moore's prediction has stood the test of time quite well. The graph on Wikipedia shows that in fact the number has doubled in fact about every two years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore

How did Moore get this right? First of all, it's quite doubtful that he was looking very far into the future at the time and simply projected past rates of increase based on his experience in the indusrty. In the early 60's a lot of advancement was going on in the semiconductor industry and there was huge competition fueling it. Most of the new developments were well known - secrets in terms of semiconductor dimensions were impossible to keep - you simply cut the top off your competitor's device and put it under a microscope. There you could measure the dimensions of the device geometry. If the device was sliced and stained you could also measure the amount of diffusion down into the semiconductor too. So the results of any companies work were there to see and the physics and machinery required to create the diffusion masks were all well known - expensive but well known. Since there was so much money involved, it was reasonable that steady development would continue and Moore had a pretty good chance of being right for at least a few years.

It could have come out quite differently. There have been few major changes in the way semiconductor masking is done. Mostly it's been evolution with contributions from many areas of science and engineering, ranging from mechanical to optical to chemical. If we'd had one of those stunning breakthroughs that happen very so often Moore could have massively understated the case. Imagine that instead of taking a decade for the engineering and science to evolve, someone just had a thought one day and skipped forward ten years. If that had happened there would be no curve - just one big step.
So from some point of view, Moore got lucky because engineering didn’t advance very fast.

If we look at other areas of science and engineering we can see massive increases over time. The first atomic bomb called Trinity was exploded in 1945. The yield was 19 kilotons. In 1961, just 16 years later a 50,000 kiloton bomb was detonated by the Russians - that's more than 2,600 times as powerful as the first one. If we'd doubled bomb power ever two years it would have been only 256 times as powerful. So by that standard the semiconductor industry has done very poorly. Of course, it's a grossly unfair comparison but it illustrates the math.

So will Moore's law continue on its current trend? There are possibly two major factors: heat dissipation in the device and the need for higher transistor densities. To take the second factor first, the need seems likely to grow since computing power is like garage space or vehicle horsepower, the more we have, the more we seem to want. The heat factor is a real problem though. As the frequency of operation goes up so does heat generation caused by leakage in the devices. Leakage gets worse as the device dimensions get smaller because of tunneling effects. At very small sizes the device needs to be viewed from a quantum point of view. Barriers are not solid - they are walls with probability distributions and the probability of electrons crossing the walls goes up as the walls get thinner. This is a gross oversimplification but the fact is that as the devices get smaller, leakage increases and with it heat generation. The overall problem with the heat is how to get rid of it. If we start making 3D devices the heat problem will get much worse because we will be reducing the surface area to volume ratio and the devices in the inner most parts will need to dissipate heat by conduction through the outer devices - this is one reason why we may find it hard to make 3D devices of any real size. Changes in semiconductor technology may help but I am not hopeful. Not so long ago it was predicted that gallium-arsenide (and other III-V) mixes would quickly replace Silicon because III-V devices are much faster. We see GaAs used in LEDs and some other applications but Silicon still rules today. So a clear speed advantage didn't produce a winner. I suspect we'll see Silicon technology continue to develop for a while but device geometries can’t shrink much more without some new advance.

Instead of increasing chip density we can use more chips. The trend towards parallel computing is really just getting started. We stand more chance of building really powerful computers if we can develop better ways to write parallel programs. If we get to be even moderately good at that we may not need higher density devices at all and Moore's curve will flatten out not because of limited technology but because technology took a left turn. Time will tell.

Never Give Up - A New Prediction

Yesterday SpaceX (wwww.spacex.com) launched the third of its Falcon1 rockets. The launch went OK but there seems to have been a problem with stage separation and the vehicle did not reach orbit.
In a comment on SpaceX's web site, Elon Musk CEO and CTO of SpaceX said: "There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never."
Those are pretty strong words when taken in the context of such an expensive project funded largely by Musk's own money.
I admire Musk's goals for SpaceX and wish him the best of luck.

SpaceX Launch today

SpaceX (www.spacex.com) has a launch today. Live video feed from their web site. This is the commercial future. And it may be the only space future the US has. SpaceX has been contracted by NASA to do resupply missions to the International Space Erector Set.

The Fortune Sellers by William A. Sherden

If you are interested in knowing what the future has in store for you, you should read this book. You should read it before you listen to tomorrow's weather forecast. You should definitely read it before buying that stock your broker is offering and you should most definitely read it before listening to what any consultant might have to say about the future of your business. The bottom line is that with the exception of predicting the tides, the motion of the planets and the weather a few days into the future, all other predictions made by man or machine are mostly less accurate than pure chance.

That's right, the stock graphs you look at are not an indicator of what the stock is going to do any more than the tea leaves in your morning cuppa can predict the weather. Sherden presents very compelling evidence that the great majority of predictions are worthless. Even the weather predictions are not that good. The weather you are going to get tomorrow is best judged by what happened on that day in the last few years. If you predict tomorrow's weather based on that concept, you'll be as accurate as the government forecasts and probably better.

When it's time to figure out what the future in golf ball manufacturing is going to look like for the next five years, Sheriden points out that all such predictions have a terrible track record. Sure, some folks get it right but if you look at the statistics, it's just chance. There are something like 100,000 people involved in the stock market, with a lot of them making predictions on exactly the same information - including insider information. Some of them are bound to get it right. When they do, they make a big noise.

One of the most interesting facts is that a lot of the people who produce stock investment letters are making their money from the letters, not the stocks. They really have no better idea than you do of what GE's stock will do next week. But by selling you a subscription at $500 per year, they can make a killing.

The first two thirds of the book is excellent reading. I found that the last chapter or two were a bit tedious. He'd made all the important points with excellent examples earlier in the book.

Web Tools: Panoramio & Flickr

I was going to write a review of Flickr because I used it recently to post a few snapshots from my cell phone and I thought it was rather cool that I could do that. Just before I got into writing about it, I remembered that I'd also posted some images on Google's Panoramio site and I thought it would be interesting to compare the two.

Flickr lives at http://www.flickr.com/ and my tiny piece of it can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28718989@N06/ It was easy to set up and is also easy to use. You can upload an image file or you can email a picture to it. They have very specific instructions on how to send a photo from your cell phone and I think this is probably the most attractive feature. Of course the resolution and clarity of images from my ancient cell phone are not what I get from my Pentax but for some applications it's fine. It's certainly easier to post a quick picture here than it is to get one on my web site which leads to the question of how web site publishing is going to develop. I suspect that the sort of facility that Flickr provides will become available on all the web site hosting services. It probably isn’t that hard to do and I think this might be popular with people who just want some place to upload images that they can tell friends and family about.

My experience with Panoramio is quite different. I found out about it when I was using Google Earth one day. The main site is here: http://www.panoramio.com/. My photos are here: http://www.panoramio.com/user/1120690. The big feature of Panoramio is not that you can publish your images on the web but that they show up in Google Earth. Mine are from two trips. One trip was up part of Barr Trail on Pikes Peak and the other was a trip around Rocky Mountain National Park. I used my Garmin GPS to record the coordinates for each photo and then used the Panoramio site to upload the images and place them correctly on the map. this takes some practice and you need to understand Latitude and Longitude coordinate formats. Some camera already record GPS information and I can see Panoramio adapting perhaps to the methods Flickr uses for uploading.

One feature of Panoramio that is interesting is that all images are reviewed before being made public. This takes several weeks. There are a lot of rules about what can and can not be posted but mostly the rules keep the images devoid of offensive stuff and anything that is personal. I like Panoramio mostly because I enjoy just surfing around on Google Earth and for some places it allows you to effectively zoom way in and see things very clearly - if only from one person's point of view.

Moon Base – Failed Prediction - Part 1

The Apollo program that was started by President Kennedy in 1962 with his famous speech at Rice University (http://www.hbci.com/~tgort/jfk_rice.htm). captured the hearts and minds of much of America. It provided an exciting prospect and allowed the US to show the Russians how good our technology was. Despite a shaky start with the Atlas and Redstone rocket projects [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redstone_(rocket), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_rocket], and Russia getting Gagarin into space first on April 12, 1961, the US soon caught up and past the Russian achievements.

The Apollo program injected over 20 billion of dollars (1960’s dollars – equivalent to about 50 billion dollars today) into the US economy partly through the many contractors involved in manufacturing parts and sub-systems for the Saturn rocket and other parts; partly through money spent in the US colleges solving difficult problems like the flame instability in the rocket engine bells (See: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm).

By 1975 we were planning on putting some kind of structure on the moon. Boeing even built part of it in Seattle. Predictions had us putting some kind of colony on the Moon by around 1975 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program).

But after Apollo 17 it all stopped. The funding was cut and the program cancelled. The last of the giant Saturn V boosters ended up as tourist attractions and we still have not gone back. Only twelve men have walked on the surface of the moon and the last of them left the final human footprints there December 1972.

In October 2003 (http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/shenzhou5_china_archive.html) the Chinese launched their first manned vehicle and on Jan 14, 2004 President George W. Bush announced that the US would be going back to the Moon and on to Mars (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040114-1.html). He boldly stated that we would conduct the first of the new manned missions to the Moon by 2014 - which is only 5 1/2 years away. It took seven years just to build the LEM last time.

Apollo was a publicity stunt in many ways. Kennedy wanted to show the Russians that Americas had the technology, financial resources and skills to do something impossible. And we did it with remarkably little loss of life. Compared to aircraft development, the entire space program is about as safe as growing roses. It’s certainly safer than driving to work every day. But Apollo was a very expensive program and despite the fact that it provided the US with many new inventions and discoveries such as Tang (which my teenage son rediscovered recently) and all sorts of material science, its public interest waned and many thought the money could be spent better elsewhere.

So why did so many people predict we’d be on the Moon? I believe they were too close to the project, too caught up in the enthusiasm to show how superior the US was to the Russians and too ignorant of how easy it is for the US government to make sweeping changes in spending on a whim. It’s far too easy for a single person to alter the course of technological spending. If you can’t show the results of a project on TV and say “look what we did” then the politicians that are backing that project don’t get re-elected. The entire technology investment process is perhaps a chaotic system. Small changes made by one or two individuals massively affect the outcome and the outcome can be massively different depending on lots of small factors that are in play when the initial decision is made. This means that nobody could have predicted when we’d put a base on the Moon. Sure, the Apollo project managers could generate a plan based on available resources, known risks and project goals but that plan is about the engineering, not about the fickle nature of the funding controlled by the US political system. It’s scary to think that so may potential technological advances could happen or not happen depending on which politician needs to make himself look favorable to a lobby group for a couple of months.

So will we go back to the Moon at all? I think we probably will, but I’m doubtful that the US government will foot the bill. We’re about to stop flying the Space Shuttle (Officially called the Space Transport System – hence the STSxx mission numbers) and we have no replacement. We’re using Russian boosters and systems to supply the International Space Erector set with food and other supplies. This is technology we were laughing at during the cold war. If we go back, my guess it will be with companies like SpaceX or perhaps Richard Branson will fund a new spaceline - Virgin Heavenly Bodies.

My Web Tools

I don’t spend a great deal of time online. Most of my computing is done between me, and an IDE that churns out compiled C++, C# or Java. So my rather mediocre set of tools is as follows.

For general communication, I'm still on email. I don’t Twitter and I don’t use text messaging much except with my sister in the UK (and more recently with my younger daughter who just got a phone). Speaking of phones, I don’t use that much either. I much prefer to send/receive email that I can process off line.

I do use MSN/Windows Messenger for IM at work and occasionally at home. Once again this is mostly a link to my sister in the UK but I've used it to keep up with the latest school scandals etc.

My web development tools are rather dated. I use MS FrontPage to build my web site which I do infrequently and WordPress for my blog. I didn't choose WordPress - it came free from my ISP and I decided to give it a go.

I most recently tried Google's Reader which accumulates RSS feeds quite well and I tried Twitter which is completely pointless and time wasting as far as I can tell. I also tried Flickr while we were in the residency but I doubt I'll use it again.

I have posted some images on Google Earth (via Panoramio) but again this was pretty much a one-time deal.

I'm not very creative and have pretty much no art skills so I tend to use the tools as they come configured. This means that I end up with the boring looking web site but at least it works and I don't have to spend any time tinkering with it.

So on the Internet tools scale which goes from zero at the John McCain end to 10 and the Dr. C end I'd say I was about a 3.

Voice Blogging

I tried out gabcast.com and posted a 15 minute segment on nothing much in particular. The concept of blogging by voice is interesting in that it allows more or less anyone to effectively have their own radio station. I'm not sure if this truly warrants a separate tool/service. I already have a blog and can post my audio clips there for the two people who might want to listen to them. Of course, if you are a famous scientist/politician/game writer/author/actress/etc I can see the attraction of potentially getting your message out 'in person' to millions of people - assuming those people know to visit gabcast.com and dig around for the keywords you inserted in your voice clip.

In terms of storage it's obviously not very efficient when compared to posting some text but storage keeps getting cheaper and there are plenty of cases where the actual person's voice (or voices if it was a conference call) has real value. A lot can be inferred by the intonation of a speaker's voice not to mention that you can provide pronunciation guides that do not require you to be a librarian to understand.

I found the implementation at gabcast.com to be a bit weak. There is no way that I can see to move a clip from one channel to another. It also refused to upload a file as either a Windows .wav format or as an MP3. They do have their own recording tool but I have multiple input devices and could find no way to tell it which one I wanted to use. I think that this is the simplicity vs. flexibility problem that we run into all the time with web tools. If you make them simple enough for the masses, the geeks get annoyed because they can't configure them the way they would like to. There was also no way to test if my input device was working other than to attempt a recording and then play it back. A simple green/red light would have been enough. A level indicator would also be nice - I'm assuming they have not implemented compression/limiting in the tool.

I do not see the business model. If this is the audio version of UTube, then I think they are a bit hopeful. gabcast does have the ability to record a conference call which could be very useful. You could use this to record an interview with your favorite famous person - assuming you can corner them for a while.

The concept of recording from my cell phone intrigued me and I was tempted to make a recording of my drive to work (yes, I do have a hands-free device to use) but I find it hard to think about what I'm saying and do almost anything else at the same time - a limited CPU bandwidth problem. So I don’t really approve of (me) driving whilst on the phone. There is also the issue that a recording of my drive to work would have no value at all unless I happened to see a crime being committed which is pretty unlikely out where we are in the boonies.

Overall, I like the idea that there is a simple way to record a voice blog and post it. I'm just not sure what I'd do with it.

In case you are bored enough to want to sample what I posted, the channel numbers are 21662 and 21664 and I'm registered as NigelT.

Spelling & Other Problems

For no particularly good reason, I occasionally review the stuff I've posted to my blog. I don’t post very often and most of the ones that make it there are some form of complaint. So blogging is therapy? Anyway, I usually write the postings in Word because my spelling is so awful. Once I've gotten rid of all the squiggly red lines I'm a happy camper and post it to the site. Re-reading a few of the posts reveals not only that I also have terrible grammar in places but that I apparently also use random words here and there. This crops up in all of my writing and allows me to identify my own work. If you plagiarize from me you get a sprinkling of stupid words in with the other stuff. This also shows up in comments that I put in the code I write. No, you didn’t read that wrong, it clearly says that I write comments in my code. It's a form of madness. By this point one or both of my readers may have thought ahead a bit and started a response telling me to turn on the grammar checker. I have that on but it's pretty easy to confuse it. Some of my longer, more wandering sentences live forever with green squiggly lines under them. A quick mouse-over reveals: "Fragment (consider revising)" which is what I do. I consider revising it and then move on. Once I've accumulated a lot of green squiggly lines and a few red ones under the words like 'blogging' which I can’t be bothered to add to the Word dictionary, the arrival of a real hint of a mistake is lost in the weeds. So if I type is instead of as or was or instead of wash or saw, Word hasn’t got a clue that I've goofed. So this is my candidate for an AI project - let's help Nigel get his writing in better shape. If you have a copy of "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White, you'll know that there are a whole bunch of rules that can be applied to writing so that it doesn’t read like crap. Surely those would be easy to code up in Prolog? Add to that some wisdom from a few hundred editors as to what sort of structure to use and I'm pretty sure you've got something useful. After all one human editor could easily find the goofs with a single pass. It's all about practice and recognizing the faults in what should be clean patterns or prose. That's supposed to be what AI systems are good at. Any takers?

Hydrogen-powered cars

There is a lot of talk and much advertising recently on the subject of water being expelled from hydrogen-powered cars instead of C, CO and CO2 (as well as the other stuff). This all sounds great. Fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen directly into electricity and water. How cool is that? Clean, simple and expensive. Oh sorry, that's supposed to be cheap except that it isn't. The cost is only one of the problems. There are two much bigger issues with hydrogen-powered cars and they have nothing to do with storing the hydrogen or how a hydrogen pump station will work or safety or even cost. The first issue is that electric cars cannot function directly from a fuel cell very well. The fuel cells are OK at generating a constant power level but cars need short peaks of power to get up to speed and this means you need some form of electrical storage. Until we get really huge capacitors with adequate life, we are stuck with rechargeable batteries and these are both heavy and costly to make in terms of pollution. The extra weight increases the mass of the car which means it needs more torque to accelerate and bigger brakes to stop. The batteries themselves are generally made from materials which are nasty pollutants if the batteries are not properly recycled and they need to be every year or so because the lifetime isn’t that great. Even if we ignore the battery issues - let's say we can make big enough super-capacitors in the next 5 to 10 years from materials like grass, corn and sea water; we still have to deal with making the hydrogen. Hydrogen is made (typically) by electrolysis. This is the process that uses an electric field to cause the H and O ions in a solution to migrate apart from each other towards the electrodes supplying the potential. This ion movement constitutes a current and requires energy to make it happen. In a big generation plant this means pulling lots of power from the grid or perhaps building a power station nearby. And the power station is fueled by what? That would be predominantly coal or gas in the US with a sprinkling of nuclear power thrown in so we don’t look too backward to the French. So the bottom line is that your nice new hydrogen-powered car might cause just as much of exactly the same pollution (C, CO, CO2, S, H2SO4, etc) as the gas-powered car does now. But as a purchaser you can walk with your head held high knowing that your tail pipe only spits out water.

Stephen Hawking on Ted

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe.html

Hawking asks all the big questions. It's always interesting to hear him speak. The pauses as he constructs his own thoughts allow us to ponder his commentary. I loved his comment: "Maybe we should patent the Universe ...". He obviously doesn't believe we've been visited by UFOs because he comments that they appear only to "Cranks and wierdos". He also observes that SETI has found nothing yet. So are we alone? He thinks that we should ensure that we try to survive and continue in case we are. He sees our resource usage as growing exponentially and our genetic disposition towards aggression as being serious problems. He thinks we need to expand into space.

"If we want to continue beyond the next 100 years we should continue in space."

He views his disability as helping him by providing time to ponder the big questions.

Hawking was asked if he thinks if we are alone. It took him seven minutes to answer: "I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years. The alternative is that civilizations don't last that long."

Excellent stuff.

Innovating or Exploiting?

While cruising around on ted.com I came across what looked like it might be an interesting video by Hector Ruiz called "The power to connect the world". I thought this might fit quite well with my whole rant about getting everyone informed about what's going on beyond their own villages. I had no idea who Hector Ruiz is and so I read his bio while listening to him introduce himself. Based on his own introduction, mannerisms and dress I was rather surprised to find out that he's the CEO of AMD and his mission is to promote a commercial project that AMD has going to get 50% of the World's population on the Internet by 2015. His initial talk, whilst very dull, seemed as though it might be altruistic in nature. AMD is a pretty big company and I thought perhaps they were trying to do some good. Alas this is not the case. As Ruiz points out several times during his uninspiring speech, AMD wants (presumably) to sell semiconductors to the companies who make backbone routers, switches, power supplies and so on but with the side-effect of somehow connecting half of the planet. Of his 18 minutes, he spent at least half of it working up to saying why it might be a good idea if Africa had good Internet connectivity. By 12 minutes I gave up and stopped listening. This leads to a couple of questions. First is how a man with so little presence could have become the CEO of a large international company. I know nothing of his skills as a business man but his ability to pitch what should have been a very cool idea makes me wonder how he pitches a business plan to his board. The other question is: why does AMD think it can help get coverage if all it's going to do is come up with a project name (50x15) and not fund anything? Surely Mr. Ruiz does not think this is an original idea? Many people have proposed getting more people connected to help counter the effects of local propaganda and any educator on the planet could do a pitch for why the Internet might be useful in a general educational sense. All in all this was very disappointing and also rather boring. Such is the way of business at AMD I suppose.

Black on White

I've scored two for two so far visiting blog sites that use white letters on a black background: http://mechanicalmongeese.com/ and http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/. Is this some sort of trend? I hope not because I find reading these 'colorful' sites more tiresome than those with more conventional black on white text or at least some sort of very dark font on lightish background. Perhaps the CS types are more prone to using some color on black because the early electronic terminals were like that. My earliest terminals were definitely black on white - and that's black ink stamped onto white paper. Later we graduated to black ink punched with little wires onto white paper with green lines in the background (the origin of the green lines like mini music staves is a mystery). Along the way these mechanical terminals got a bit faster - all the way to around 120 characters per second. Somewhere in the 70's (or perhaps a bit earlier - I'll have to find out) we got super whizbang electronic terminals which used a CRT (look it up yourself) to show green or orange text on a dark background. The background was actually a grayish color but it looked black by comparison to the brightly glowing text. We started with 24 rows of 40 characters which seemed pretty good at the time. Somewhere in the 80's there were a few attempts to make black text on white backgrounds using the electronic terminals but the focus of the CRTs wasn't that hot and the resolution and contrast tended to be a bit poor so the overall effect was like trying to read a newspaper that had a very bright light behind it. Today I have several very nice flat-panel monitors which do black on something-a-bit-like-white quite well. The whites aren't white of course and vary a great deal between manufacturers. Despite the ability to set the color temperature, color balance and so on, it's still very hard to get them all to look like the same white. Overall though it's better. The result is better than the 110 baud teletype I started with in the 70's and it's getting to be somewhere near the quality of printing that any printer could do 50 years ago.

Book review: "As the Future Catches You" by Juan Enriquez.

I have two views of this book. The first is that is rather tedious to read, lacks scientific accuracy (especially with regard to physics) and is very much in line with the post-AOL merger CNN - it goes for the shocking not the real news.

The second view is that it obviously took a lot of work to assemble this data and as the author notes at the end, the research provided enough material for three 'real' books (his term not mine).

Overall this is a lot like Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth". There are a lot of facts which we could dispute but which I think are probably mostly correct. There is a lot of interpretation which is probably a lot less accurate because it's the interpretation that requires the skill, knowledge, wisdom and genius. Mr. Enriquez makes a lot of very bold statements that are based on a very few facts - taken totally on their own merit. How many of these facts turn out to be causal in terms of global change we'll have to wait and see. He's certainly got some good bets. His analysis of education in the US vs. other countries is a sad trend that has been known about for years. Are we going to change any of that? Perhaps - but we'll need to shut of ESPN and get of the couch first and that may just be too hard.

He comments that most doctors will be focusing on prevention rather than cures in the future. I've got news. They have been doing that forever but nobody is listening. The very people that could do with a little prevention are happy to eat at McD's, watch TV all night and don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. Your doctor can’t affect cultural change. What we need is a good TV virus so we can get back to doing other things like talking to each other - in person, via email or in SecondLife - your choice.

I found a lot of small 'facts' with rather distorted physics and Computer Science. Since these are areas in which I have an interest, it leads me to wonder if a biologist might find similar problems. Perhaps a chemist would too. Perhaps he sold out to AOL and no longer reports accurate news but rather focuses on ratings. Perhaps I am being too harsh. It is impossible to find one person that can be perfectly knowledgeable in all areas, yet books like this tend to be popular with those who see themselves as scientifically informed but who do not know what the difference between Silicon and Silicone is. These people will reproduce this material at parties - with just a slight variation and we'll be into another 'global warming' debate pretty soon. This time the focus will be on whether you want your genes to be inserted into pigs. It's (possibly) wonderful that we might get new hearts without the need to extract them from other people but how much like you do you want pigs to become?

As a test, I asked my 11 year-old daughter to open the book anywhere, read a bit and tell me what she thought. She sat reading quietly much longer than I expected. Her summary was that it was "mostly about old people" and that it was "a bit weird". So, no Earth-changing party conversation piece there and I suppose that means I could be wrong about the whole thing but, like Mr. Enriquez, I'm pretty confident that I have it correct.

Voice Blogging

I tried out gabcast.com and posted a 15 minute segment on nothing much in particular. The concept of blogging by voice is interesting in that it allows more or less anyone to effectively have their own radio station. I'm not sure if this truly warrants a separate tool/service. I already have a blog and can post my audio clips there for the two people who might want to listen to them. Of course, if you are a famous scientist/politician/game writer/author/actress/etc I can see the attraction of potentially getting your message out 'in person' to millions of people - assuming those people know to visit gabcast.com and dig around for the keywords you inserted in your voice clip.

In terms of storage it's obviously not very efficient when compared to posting some text but storage keeps getting cheaper and there are plenty of cases where the actual person's voice (or voices if it was a conference call) has real value. A lot can be inferred by the intonation of a speaker's voice not to mention that you can provide pronunciation guides that do not require you to be a librarian to understand.

I found the implementation at gabcast.com to be a bit weak. There is no way that I can see to move a clip from one channel to another. It also refused to upload a file as either a Windows .wav format or as an MP3. They do have their own recording tool but I have multiple input devices and could find no way to tell it which one I wanted to use. I think that this is the simplicity vs. flexibility problem that we run into all the time with web tools. If you make them simple enough for the masses, the geeks get annoyed because they can't configure them the way they would like to. There was also no way to test if my input device was working other than to attempt a recording and then play it back. A simple green/red light would have been enough. A level indicator would also be nice - I'm assuming they have not implemented compression/limiting in the tool.

I do not see the business model. If this is the audio version of UTube, then I think they are a bit hopeful. gabcast does have the ability to record a conference call which could be very useful. You could use this to record an interview with your favorite famous person - assuming you can corner them for a while.

The concept of recording from my cell phone intrigued me and I was tempted to make a recording of my drive to work (yes, I do have a hands-free device to use) but I find it hard to think about what I'm saying and do almost anything else at the same time - a limited CPU bandwidth problem. So I don’t really approve of (me) driving whilst on the phone. There is also the issue that a recording of my drive to work would have no value at all unless I happened to see a crime being committed which is pretty unlikely out where we are in the boonies.

Overall, I like the idea that there is a simple way to record a voice blog and post it. I'm just not sure what I'd do with it.

In case you are bored enough to want to sample what I posted, the channel numbers are 21662 and 21664 and I'm registered as NigelT.

Nigel

Unreliable software

I've had to temporarily move my blogging to here because the wordpress installation on my own web site at www.nadtec.to has mysteriously stopped working. I've already wasted a few hours trying to figure out why it's stopped after months of happy operations. In frustration I'm blogging here now.