Physics do not apply in the Star Wars universe.

I'm not just referencing Solo's "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" claim, which can be explained away as a boast about navigational and piloting ability rather than ship speed. (Though there may be relativistic reasons for why speed would affect the ability to accomplish the Kessel Run in a shorter distance.)

In the latest BrickMaster (LEGO's magazine), there's a fake ad from Koensayr for the Y-Wing that claims "Goes from 0 to 2,700G in less than a parsec!" I was going to try and figure out what that meant, and then realized that 2,700G is acceleration and parsec is distance! When car manufacturers boast that a car goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, what they are bragging about is acceleration, that within 4 seconds, the power is such that the car can be accelerated to 60 mph from rest. What the hell does 2,700G mean? (Besides the fact that G is meaningless in Star Wars unless it references a specific planet.) If we take G to be 10 m/s^2, then 2,700G = 27,000 m/s^2. At that acceleration, it would take about 7 seconds to accelerate to lightspeed. I'm fairly certain that's not possible in the X-Wing flightsim games. Hyperspeed, yes, STL acceleration, no way.

Why I hate MS more and more...

I used to be fairly positive towards Microsoft in the past: sure, OS X is a much nicer experience, indie applications for the Mac are polished to a much higher degree than on Windows, and the free (!) IDE in XCode is quite good, but Windows has to deal with backwards-compatibility, it is *the* platform for PC gaming, and sometimes Microsoft Research churns out some cool stuff.

Still, I find myself more and more annoyed by Microsoft's UI design sense (or lack thereof). Perhaps I have merely become spoiled by living on a Mac or become more observant due to reading Siracusa's rants (exhibit A, exhibit B). Yes, Apple doesn't listen to its own UI guidelines - everyone (well, anyone in the "know") admits that - but sometimes this gives us good things. (And sometimes, horrible abominations), but at least it has the good sense to make sure at least one engineer brings key interfaces up to new UI standards. (Yes, I'm talking about the control panel UI crap shown here.)

I feel like Microsoft has become a company with no guiding vision - some people work on cool things, some people work on the behemoths known as Windows and Office, but there's no one there with the bullwhip making sure things are consistent. Just look at the Office UI - for something that is the de facto office productivity suite, you'd think they wouldn't just up and change the interface on us. (but that's what Office 2007 did). And then when they released the next update for OS X, you'd think they'd fix things or add functionality, but instead they removed VBA scripting. And if the Ribbon is such a GREAT UI idea, why isn't it in Office 2008? Yes, I hate the Ribbon, but it's super-annoying when I'll work on something at school, transfer the file to home, and suddenly wonder why everything behaves differently. Formatting titles in Excel charts used to be so easy! I do like the fact that Office 2008 UI behaves more traditionally, but what I don't like is the formatting palette that is clearly an Inspector Tool wannabe. Do the people at the Mac BU not know how to make OS X native apps, do they just don't care, or are they hideously understaffed? (maybe all 3?)

One would think that Office 2008 would run faster than Office 2004 on an Intel Mac (because 2008 is a Universal Binary and 2004 is PPC-only and requires Rosetta). Nevertheless, I find that Office 2007 running on emulated Windows XP using half the memory and one core still runs rings around both "native" Office versions. (at least as far as computation in Excel is concerned.) Any version of Excel still seems to be faster than the Numbers app in iWork, though...

I already use Keynote for presentations, and Pages / LaTeX for word processing - can someone please make me a good/fast spreadsheet app so that I can put Office out of its misery?

The quest for resolution independence

I sent this in an e-mail to a friend who was complaining about the lack of high DPI (dots per inch) consumer-grade LCD desktop displays. (Some models do exist, but are intended for the medical community and are pricey.)

A comparison of DPI for previous/current Apple computers and display products

Laptops:
13.3" (1280 x 800) = 113.49 DPI
15.4" (1440 x 900) = 110.27 DPI
17" (1920 x 1200) = 133.19 DPI

Cinema displays and old iMacs:
23" (1920 x 1200) = 98.44 DPI
24" (1920 x 1200) = 94.34 DPI
30" (2560 x 1600) = 100.63 DPI

New iMacs: (note that these are now 16x9, suitable for watching "widescreen" video without black bars instead of the 16x10, which is much more common for widescreen computer displays)

21.5" (1920 x 1080) = 102.46 DPI
27" (2560 x 1440) = 108.79 DPI

And while Apple has touted a push for resolution independence (along with 64-bit) for a while now, some things still appear to be broken (at least in the first Snow Leopard release. I haven't installed Snow Leopard yet, so I can't say if it's been fixed since then.):

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/21
(scroll down to the Resolution Independence section)

On a further note, I do have minor gripes about the 16x10 computer displays, since my current HP display scales up widescreen input (via component) to the full size, so video games are stretched vertically ever so much (+11.1%). I believe this is simply because component is analog, and is being decoded by an onboard chip that then gets sent into the analog to digital converter (probably the same one that would decode a VGA signal). Not sure if this is still an issue on the newer LCD displays from HP and Dell that take consumer digital inputs like HDMI. (not that I have a PS3 or 360 to test anyway) I imagine it's still an issue with component video in. On the other hand having 16x10 IS useful for watching 16x9 video, because the black bars allow for UI popup that does not obscure the video at all.

clever spam

For the quick comic intro, see here.

In the latest round of human-blogs vs. spambots, I received this "interesting" comment on an oldish post. Since it's rather long, I'm only going to excerpt a particularly funny bit:

"School officials in Democratic-leaning New England say they have received relatively few charm bracelets." (with "charm bracelets" linking to what I assume is a jewelry site, but which probably sells viagra, too.)

Basically, it seems as though it's pulling random sentences from news clippings and then performing some basic parsing to replace certain phrases with its own links to create sometimes-grammatically-correct-but-always-humorous sentences.

The Snow Leopard Cometh

Well, Snow Leopard is out, and I've read the review. Here's my brief rundown:

Pros:
- performance improvements (resolving that dreaded kernel_task/CPU/overheating issue somewhat, I hope)
- decreased size (freeing up a few GBs for my paltry 80GB hard drive)
- gamma 2.2 (so I don't have to worry about color differences when my website is viewed on Mac vs. PC)

Cons:
- 64-bit apps (breaking the widescreen hack to Mail and the SIMBL-based color hack to Terminal) [these are not insignificant UI fixes that would not be particularly difficult for Apple to implement natively...]

Things I'm excited about that don't affect me at all:
- XCode 3.2 & Clang (cuz who doesn't like a compiler with a metallic silver dragon logo that doesn't support the programming language you use)
- QuickTime X (cuz hardware-based H.264 acceleration is nice IF your graphics card/chipset is supported)

the future of SSD drives

After reading about half of Accelerando and thinking about the nature of technology, I got to wondering about what was going on in the field of SSD development. Last I read, one of the major factors limiting SSD speed had to do with differences between read and write speed as well as write-leveling algorithms to ensure a drive-life as long as possible. However, in thinking about this problem of optimal use of SSD given their physical limitations, I got to remembering that other innovation in low-level data storage: separation of the physical drive from the storage methodology (in the form of zfs). Before I read up on it, I was confused about what zfs really brought to the table beyond traditional filesystems. (And the answer for most consumers is, none.) However, it does present some major advantages for those running large servers. (hence why it is a feature relegated to the server version of Snow Leopard) So now the question becomes, when will we get a filesystem (or operating system) specifically designed to not collide with the physical limitations of an SSD? Right now, Apple is in love with many small files, which makes incremental backups feasible and easy, but runs counter to effective SSD management.

I realize that at the moment, standard magnetic recording is still used in 99%+ of the market, but presumably people are going to realize that having TBs of storage space is not going to be useful when media creation has not drastically increased (nor pipe bandwidth). And if SSD development continues, we should soon see the advantages of dramatically faster / slightly more expensive data storage. After all, to the average consumer, the 1 TB (traditional) has very little marginal value over the 256 GB (SSD).

wonderful security lesson from UCSD

From UCSD (summarized by me):

How to use the UCSD encrypted wireless network:

1. download this file from our website
[note: safari wouldn't let me save it as it was, forcing me to change the extension when saving, and then changing the extension back after it was downloaded]

2. double-click the icon

3. if it asks you for your password, enter it in and click ok

[...]

Yes, I was told to download a file, open it, and enter in my computer's password. Hmmm, if I didn't know what was actually going on, this would set off all kinds of warning bells. It is so nice that UCSD neglects to explain what it is I am doing and why I should click the "always trust" button when "this root certificate is not trusted", because any potential scammer/botnet creator/hacker/identity theft is sure to explain the mechanics behind why a root certificate is not verified and why entering in my password is ok.

Mmm, technology

There's an interesting new feature on Amazon, where you can "upgrade" your book purchases, allowing you to view the entire contents online, make annotations, and print pages. Seems like an excellent idea, except for the price. For the benefit of viewing the books you already bought, you have to shell out some extra dough. I'm not sure exactly what the rate is, but it looks to be around 20% of the book's retail price. That's quite a lot of moolah to digitize your collection. I understand that redoing old works in new technology costs money, but there should be few costs once the infrastructure is in place. Plus, I'm sure there is the potential to have much higher volume of sales for pure digital works via Kindle and the like.

My belief is that if you buy a book, you shouldn't have to pay extra for different formats of the same thing (well, audio recordings are a bit different, as are different editions). I think a better business model would be to charge some sort of flat rate for books of different genres/lengths that is reasonable, rather than something based off of retail prices. (Actually, I'm not sure what the pricing scheme is, it would certainly be ridiculous if they charged more to upgrade a hardcover book than the identical paperback version.) As it is, I'm already miffed at the prices to buy things for Kindle. I would like to see a world where pure digital downloads are 3/4 price with the option to have the physical copy packaged and shipped for the 1/4 difference, with free digital versions included for all physical purchases.

Why Carbon Sequestration is Probably a Bad Thing

The US Department of Energy is planning to start this week on a large-scale project for carbon sequestration in Illinois. So why is this a bad thing?

Well, let's suppose, in hypothetical candyland where government projects do what they are supposed to, without negative side effects, on-time and on-budget, that this project succeeds. Ok, good for us, we've removed CO2 from the atmosphere. I applaud your efforts DOE.

This does NOT solve the problem of rising energy needs. Rather, I believe the effect may even be in the opposite direction. Psychologically, the idea that CO2 emissions can be reduced "magically" will diminish efforts to change behavior to reduce CO2 emissions in the first place. And that IS a major problem. Fossil fuels WILL run out (or be hideously expensive) within a few decades at current rates of consumption (and growth in consumption). Running out of fossil fuels without the energy infrastructure to replace them is going to cause a major global crisis that will not be resolved easily. Not to mention, petroleum by-products (plastic) have vital uses and are even more important for a lot of products we commonly use.

Climate change is only one of the major global problems that needs to be addressed in the near future (i.e. this century). And CO2 emissions are only one facet of that problem. As reported by Arstechnica from the AAAS meeting, the numbers for replacing fossil-fuel energy production with "renewable" sources is already extremely daunting. The most economical/efficient way to address that problem is to tackle it from multiple directions: improved efficiency (less usage, less waste), increased production from "renewable" sources (e.g. solar, tidal, wind, etc.), and finally carbon-scrubbing to reduce CO2 concentrations back to pre-industrial levels (i.e. 280 ppm atmosphere, and slowly equilibrate the oceans to that level). Introducing a carbon sequestration project is putting the cart before the horse: we should be focusing on the SOURCE of the problem (energy consumption) rather than simply mitigating the aftereffects because it is the most publicly recognized facet of the problem.

But, in the end, I guess Congress is a lot better at punting the problem and buying time, than in spending preemptively to alleviate future problems. Unfortunately, I happen to be one of those young'uns who is going to end up paying for the mistakes of the past. (*cough* war on terror, social security, etc.)

DRM comments

Here is the comment I sent to the FTC for their upcoming workshop on DRM:

I share the opinion of several others that there are aspects of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that are particularly disruptive for consumers such as myself. Specifically, making the bypassing of Digital Rights Management (DRM) illegal is restrictive towards the needs of certain users. I built my desktop computer with a high-end monitor, and surround-sound speakers. In the interest of playing blu-ray high-definition (HD) movies, I began considering the purchase of a blu-ray drive to install in my computer. However, upon further research, I realized that playing back blu-ray movies would not be so simple. Because of High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), a form of DRM on blu-ray discs, I would need to purchase a new video card that supports HDCP, a new monitor that supports HDCP, a new sound card that supports HDCP, a new receiver, in addition to software and "upgrading" to Windows Vista. Similarly, if I were to purchase a consumer blu-ray player (such as a PS3 or other device) I would need to purchase a new monitor and receiver to view/hear HD content. Needless to say, I was disheartened. Alternatively, if I downloaded blu-ray movies from the internet, there would be no such restrictions and I would be able to play HD content without

I fully support the entertainment industry by purchasing content legally. My personal feeling is that artists, writers, producers, etc. should be rightfully rewarded for their efforts. However, I do not like being forced to purchase hardware because of these restrictions. In effect, I am being punished for trying to play HD content the ONLY legal way. In addition to downloading content (a copyright violation) I could also use software to “rip” HD content to my computer for playback without needing a new video card / monitor / sound card / etc. However, under the DMCA, this manner of bypassing DRM is illegal.

As many have pointed out and will continue to point out, DRM is ineffective: it restricts users such as myself from enjoying the full freedoms of legally purchased content that are enjoyed by those who obtain such content illegally. As noted by security experts, DRM will always be imperfect: there will always be people who will be able to hack/crack/break the encryption and make the content freely available on the internet to download. DRM only creates shackles for legitimate users.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that this issue has been present for some time. DVD's which have CSS, a form of DRM, require a player that is capable of decrypting the content. However, such players, to my knowledge, were never legally available for users who run Linux operating systems. As such, a program, DeCSS was created in 1999 that bypasses this form of DRM and is illegal under the DMCA. The Motion Picture Association of America (spec. its former president, Jack Valenti) had promised to create legal DVD player software for Linux that would enable users to view DVD's with CSS encryption. However, to my knowledge, they have failed to follow through on this: thus, users who wish to play CSS-encrypted DVD's on a Linux computer can only use illegal tools to bypass the DRM

Industry CANNOT be trusted to follow through on their "promises" to facilitate use of legally purchased content for consumers and end-users. The only option for individuals, then, is to bypass DRM illegally, download content illegally (copyright violation), or forgo such content. The primary purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals. Thus, the FTC should regulate the ability of industry to abuse DRM: creating additional exceptions to the DMCA for individuals to bypass DRM to enjoy content legally is a vital action to protect individual rights and freedoms.

You go, NASA photo caption person

While browsing NASA's website for the latest multimedia from Cassini-Huygens, I stumbled across this excellent reference to Star Wars in the caption for this photograph of Mimas. I guess Yavin and Saturn were both gas giants...

Social Networks

I attended Matthew Jackson's talk today on modeling social networks. Besides the obvious shortcomings of using models to simulate real-world phenomenon, it seems that there are some lessons to be learned after applying certain analysis techniques to real-world networks.

More specifically, the structure of a social network (connections and their weights) determines the speed of convergence for opinions (at least as abstracted by the model). This has some interesting ramifications in the two examples that Matthew provided.

In the first example (managers in a small firm), the influence (characterized by the final convergent opinion if only that individual had that opinion initially) of individuals varied significantly, and actually corresponding quite closely to the actual hierarchy of executives within the company (the CEO and vice-presidents all had high influences).

In the second example (teenagers in a high school), the visual representation clearly showed the a segregation of groups (mostly on the basis of race, at least that's what the coloring of the graph seemed to portray). This segregation seemed to limit the overall convergence, as the analysis indicated that the second-largest eigenvalue was 0.98. (in other words, in each cycle of opinion updating, the error for convergence decreased by 2%)

Matthew also discussed the conditions under which social networks could converge "wisely". Basically, if each individual had some initial state of belief that was randomly distributed but centered around the "truth", under what conditions would the social network converge to an "accurate" value of belief?

Essentially, the answer is: true democracy (surprised?). A key requirement is that no one individual has strong influence (otherwise the error in that individual's belief would propagate), and that large groups of people pay attention to a majority of individuals in the social network.

If we believe that this method of modeling real-life social networks approximates the ways in which actual social networks work, this poses a number of problems for disseminating accurate information. For example, if we take the case of HIV denialism, clearly the group of HIV denialists is not swayed by a majority of the world (who accurately believe it when *ALL* medical doctors agree that HIV causes AIDS). Moreover, this group includes some highly influential people, including some musical artists.

However, there may be some hope yet: given that real-life social networks are "flawed" in this manner, it only makes sense to use the tools we have rather than trying to dramatically alter the way in which society forms opinions. Wikipedia accomplishes this rather well, by establishing itself as a highly influential source of information, that maintains accuracy by receiving input from any and all users, thus allowing it to converge to an "accurate" state. In fact, since Wikipedia requires external sources to verify information, it removes the need for contributers to be randomly distributed with respect to their "accuracy". As individuals, we can seek to benefit society by establishing ourselves with high influence via maintaining popular blogs...

New Camera!!

Being without a digital camera is annoying in many ways. Ever since giving my mom my previous digicam (a Canon powershot s45), I've been reading reviews, hoping that Fuji would release an update to the venerable F30 that supports SD memory. Alas, they did, but it was called the F40 and nowhere near as good (although the pixelcount got bumped up to 8mp). I was compelled into waiting for a while, as the grapevine seemed to indicate that the F40 was really a successor to the F20, which was the black sheep of the F10, F30, F31 high-sensitivity-super-ccd family. Unfortunately, it seems as though the F50, the supposed successor to the F30 fails in a number of ways: namely, the sensor is slightly worse than that of the F30 as far as image quality (this is most likely due to the bump up to an unnecessary 12mp! even changing the settings so that pictures are 6mp in size, the F30/31 still retains a slight advantage) At least it supports SD memory. In the end, it seems as though it was certainly possible to take excellent pictures using the F40, F47, or F50 equal (or nearly equal) in quality to those taken by the F30/31, but the F30/31 is just easier to use (or at least, easier to take good pictures with). Plus, the loss of aperture and shutter speed priority makes HDR impossible in the newer cameras.

Anyway, after a couple of days of browsing the web and checking the forums over at dpreview, I discovered that a refurbed f31fd could be gotten through Fujifilm's online store. I placed an order, and patiently waited.

and waited.

and got a tracking number after 2 weeks.

Then there were some wildfires.

At this point, I was somewhat doubtful that my camera would get to me by the scheduled delivery date. Originally, I didn't really care when it arrived, as long as it was sometime before Thanksgiving, but with the wildfires throwing tons of ash in the air, I wanted to head down to the beach to grab some awesome sunset shots (air pollution => particulates in the atmosphere => light scattering => red sunsets).

So, with camera in hand, and battery fully charged, I headed down to SIO earlier today to grab some shots of the beach, the pier, and the sunset. You can see some of the results here. I debated for a bit about whether to use picasaweb or flickr for a while. Overall, flickr has a number of advantages to it, including unlimited storage (even for free users), and a better community system in place. Unfortunately, I found myself unable to see my photos in resolution higher than 1024x768, which is puzzling, because I only had 40 photos, but had already hit my 100MB upload cap for the month (this is how Flickr restricts free accounts, a monthly bandwidth limit). In other words, it seems as though for a free account, Flickr will resize your photos to a max size of 1024x768, but the original size is what is taken into account when computing bandwidth usage for the month. Well, I think 1024x768 is a worthless size for certain images, so I went back to picasaweb, which has since increased the storage limit to 1GB for free accounts. Yes, I lose the community structure, but hey, I don't participate in social networking anyway. (BTW, once you start to pony up money, Flickr seems like the better deal, as you get unlimited everything (as opposed to just increased storage with picasaweb). The only downside is that you need to use Flickr's own uploader as opposed to a mechanism built-in to picasa. Although, I guess if you are paying money to store photos online, you're probably already using something more fancy like Aperture or Lightroom to manage photos on a local computer.)

FYI, if the last photo in the set looks funny, which it should, that's because I used photomatix to play around with some HDR. Although photomatix does have an image matching system, I believe it is probably designed to make only minor corrections, and so it doesn't handle my using a bench as a tripod very well. At some point in the future, when I have an actual tripod, I may play around with the trial version of photomatix some more before deciding whether to buy the software before or after a DSLR purchase.