A modern life

rovers on mars
nano-bots in my blood
waking sleeps
and orwellian dreams

seven toads
half mud covered
sit stop motion animated
in digital screens

heightened senses
and a flattened world
my carbon footprint
has a silicon gleam

cybersludge filters
overstock jeans

amazon bookstores
backserver things

firewalls
monowalls
cyberwalls
bats with a ding

kilohertz sampling
of my whispered screams

Mars rover inspires us all!

The Spirit rover is the ultimate workaholic. On sol 779, its right front wheel failed. The human analogy is, of course, having a paralyzed foot. Yet despite this, Spirit keeps on going, digging a little trench behind it (Spirit was told to drive backwards henceforth in order to compensate for the loss).

Well, the little guy's persistence is paying off. Not only is he still driving around, discovering things, and setting new records, but his trench has unearthed evidence of a previous environment that would have been hospitable to microbes! (read the full story here)

Spirit, you are an inspiration to us all. Keep on trucking!

Spam and phish

It sounds awful, but spam and phish must be a tasty meal. I conclude this on the basis of some spam I received on Monday which clearly comes with some phish mixed in. Here is my favourite sentence in the whole email: "Fortunately for myself, my only sister and mother, our relatives are not aware of the money in Europe which is the reason why my mother wants you to partner with us so we can introduce you as our Next of Kin and beneficiary to the amount."

In point of fact, this is not just any old spam and phish dinner, this is a feast fit for a king. Not only am I treated to this delicious email, but I receive $16 million (US) for doing so. Of course, the feast is not without its price. I do have to hold on to the money for them whilst they escape Iraq, and I do have to be trusted not to simply steal the money. All in all though, it sounds like I cannot lose!

Nevertheless, I must decline. The offer is tempting (with the low expectations and the high payoff), but alas, I am independently wealthy. As it so happens, I have a bank account in Switzerland that I have just inherited from a long lost relative. Now if only there were someone I could send some money to that would help me cash it out!

What if science fiction became science?

When I was a boy, I always imagined that my calculator wristwatch could do anything. Clearly, it could not, but as a child in my imagination it could. Sometimes when I'm watching classic Star Trek or Buck Rogers my imagination slips back and I imagine myself in a world with ubiquitous technology, fantastic gadgetry, and seemingly limitless possibilities.

Perhaps the day when my imagination becomes reality is right around the corner. Today I found this website. Perhaps this is the next super-cool device like the Blackberry and PDA before it. In some respects, perhaps it isn't as fun as it looks. A PDA can perform many of the same functions, and it appears to be roughly the same size.

No, I'm not thinking about its technological appeal, but rather its aesthetics. In all my science fiction shows and movies, technology is not just something you use, but something you wear. It is aesthetically pleasing, and perhaps even fashionable. It is an integrated part of our humanity. Only once technology can become integrated with who we are can it become ubiquitous, and only when it becomes ubiquitous will I have the chance to be Buck Rogers. Needless to say, I would applaud the company who puts one of these watches on the catwalk.

Flat worlds, wrinkled sheets, and Bob from Peoria

In his 2005 book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman postulates the idea that the modern world is not round, but flat. By world, he means the competitive economic world, and by flat he means level in the sense of a level playing field. His belief is that in the flat world it is easier for people to do two things: first, compete with each other, and second, move their work (whether their work represents labour or product or both). While he makes a good point, I offer this as a counter-belief: the world is not flat, nor will it ever be. Moreover, the world is as flat now as it always has been. I offer the law of conservation of flatness.

The law of conservation of flatness states simply this: The world is, on average, just as flat as it always has been, and always will be. Whenever flatness becomes more pronounced in one part of the world, flatness has been lost somewhere else. The sum of these changes is no change at all.

Perhaps the most glaring point on which to propose the law of conservation of flatness is the so-called “flattener #7”, or Supply-Chaining. Friedman wants to propose that the supply-chaining model is flattening the world, and his arguments make some amount of sense. It is true that supply-chaining gives suppliers abroad the ability to market to American consumers with lower barrier to entry, but what if you apply the definition of flatness to the result of the supply-chained world? Supply-chaining is supposed to level the playing field, yet if I wanted to open a general store today, I would find it nearly impossible to compete with Wal-Mart because they have perfected this art and I have not. Nor do I have the capital or the prospect of capital to make competition with Wal-Mart even a remote fantasy. The law of conservation of flatness is preserved. While the world is flattened for suppliers abroad, it is made far less flat for some of us here.

In another section of the book, Friedman points out that “natural talent has started to trump geography.” It is difficult to dispute that this is true, but once again there is give and take with the model. Consider a talented individual, Rajesh, from India and an average person, Bob, from Peoria. In the “flattened” world, Rajesh now has much more opportunity to succeed, while Bob now has less. Both individuals may have been willing to work with equal vigor on a given project, but Rajesh, now reaping the benefits of a different (not necessarily better) “ovarian lottery” has an advantage over Bob. Whether meritocracy is a just form of government for a human society is a topic best left for philosophers, but suffice it to say that flattening the world with respect to natural talent will wrinkle the world with respect to work ethic. Once again, the law of conservation of flatness holds.

In a qualitative science studying the flatness of the world (dare we call it flatology?), I believe we have one foundational theorem. Our world has a latent flatness, and our efforts and advances will not change that. Human society may grow and develop, and the flatness will thereby shift from one place to another. Perhaps it will even appear to increase when viewed with coarse resolution. Nevertheless, like a sheet confined to too little space, the flatness of the world remains constant. As we smooth the wrinkles of the world, new ones will be made. The fabric of our world will constrain us and leave us with only one burning question: what will we make with the pattern?

When do we quit?

In 1962 the United States began what I believe now to be the ultimate expression of bull-headed foreign politics, namely the Cuban Trade Embargo.

It was designed to be a means to removing Castro from power, and "protecting" us from communism. Our fears were not wholly unjustified, as the Cuban Missile Crisis followed shortly thereafter. Clearly though, after forty-five years, the strategy has failed. Castro is still in power, planning to pass that power to younger, more vibrant leaders, and communism is as alive as it ever was in the tiny island nation.

More to the point, it has not only failed, but may have even strengthened Castro's position by positioning us as a scapegoat for any government failings.

We now find ourselves, lo these forty-five years later, enforcing a policy which impoverishes the people of Cuba in the name of removing a dictator who has proven immune to public criticism for the sake of retaining an image of authority and power in a world which wholeheartedly disagrees with us. This does not sound like a recipe for success!

Recently the United Nations, an organization we helped establish with the intent of providing a forum for countries to abide by a higher law than their own sovereignty, voted 184 to 4 in favour of a resolution asking the United States to cease the embargo. We refused.

It's time to stop the embargo. As a country we have a difficult time admitting failure. We believe ourselves immune to the normal pitfalls of humanity on the basis that we are somehow God's chosen country. Whether we are God's chosen country or not, we have certainly proven ourselves fallable: deadly sin number seven is pride.

What's the problem, if you have nothing to hide?

I am a self-proclaimed privacy advocate. I don't care how much it will help fight global or even local terrorism. I don't want the government to snoop where it ought not. When people I know discover this side of me, they try to dissuade me from my privacy moral ground with phrases like "if you have nothing to hide, why are you concerned?" While it's certainly true that I have nothing to hide, I am, nevertheless, quite concerned. Now I finally have fuel to add to the fire. Those same people who criticize my views on privacy will undoubtedly find most appalling the idea that the government could be allowed to sift through their hard drives without their permission*. With great joy and satisfaction I will be able to turn them back to their own arguments. After all, if the argument holds for telephone lines, why not hard drives? If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?

* see this article, somewhat far down the page it mentions that there is nothing to stop the United States from doing this... meaning our government may have already implemented this plan!

Computing women

Frequently men are known to compare the understanding of women to the most difficult problems they face. As a computer scientist, this implies that understanding women is an algorithm of exponential or even factorial time and space complexity with possibly non-deterministic results. Perhaps this is a reason why men are still blundering about finding incomplete solutions to ill-defined problems relating to the involvement of women in the computer field. Why is computing still a male dominated field? Clearly, it has some appeal to women. My wife and sisters are excellent examples of this. Yet women are still found under-represented at commencement. Are we as men discouraging them from continuing through the degree program? Are we making the field uninteresting to them through our teaching methods and/or hygiene practices? Is it possible that women are simply not interested in the field? In order to find the solution, we truly need a better conception of the problem. The truth is that we don't know what keeps women from becoming prominent and successful in our field, and until we achieve that vital problem formulation, we will never be able to make the changes that we clearly need to make. Has anyone ever thought to ask?

Fly by.... joystick?

I managed to dig up a reasonably well sized image of the Airbus A380 cockpit today. Well, managed is probably the wrong word; Wikipedia pointed me in the right direction. At any rate, here for your enjoyment is the A380 cockpit. Notable features include the QWERTY keyboard for interfacing with the flight computer, LCD display screens, ethernet communication for the plane's components (not visible, but very much there!), and my favourite: the joysticks. Pilots naturally call them side-sticks to sound more professional, but we all know what they are.

Fly-by-wire (the technology which affords the humble joystick a place in a cockpit) is a technology that abstracts the pilot's control of the airplane from a mechanical to an electrical interface. Instead of pulling and pushing the control surfaces manually (or with the aid of hydraulics), the pilot is now sending electrical signals to servo systems. In theory, it is a technology that has been possible for as long as electrical engineers have had reasonably accurate means of measuring and setting angular position on a servo. It is certainly not a new idea, but it is one that has been slow in adoption. Its advantages include ease of use, reduced weight, modular implementation, and modular replacement.

For all the advantages of fly-by-wire, it has one glaring disadvantage: warm fuzzies. Most of us realize that electricity is sometimes less reliable than physical control in the domain of our homes and appliances. Whether this is true or not in an airplane, we extend this belief to the airplane, and we avoid boarding just because we don't have the warm fuzzy happy feeling evoked by knowing that a competent pilot has final physical control over the airplane. So strong is this feeling that airplane manufacturers have been loathed to use it on a grand scale. Even those airplanes which currently use it do so with an interface indistinguishable from more primitive airplanes.

Like it or not, the A380 is using the joystick as its fly-by-wire interface. It is in production, and the first one was delivered this week. If you are one of the many passengers who relied on the warm fuzzy feeling of physical control, you may need to supplement your flight with something else warm and fuzzy. May I suggest a teddy bear?

Privacy and security in the digital age

How much does your freedom cost? Most of us would say that our freedom is priceless. Most would say that freedom is our right. Most would say that nothing can take our freedom from us. Most would be wrong.

Much like the agrarian and industrial revolutions which came before, the information revolution has changed our lives. Instead of living to produce, we live to inform. We are no longer defined by what we can craft physically, but what we can craft with words, music, decision, deals, or style. Gone forever are the days of Marx's free artisan. We live now in a society driven, produced, and destroyed by knowledge.

So great is the importance of our own information that business sectors have been founded merely to protect it. We buy information and we buy protection for our information. We pay for services which do nothing but monitor our information to ensure it isn't changing without cause. We pay so that we can have information delivered to our house instantaneously through internet and cable access, something our forefathers may have scoffed at; yet we do it willingly.

There are some who believe that nothing is free. If we are blessed with quick and (mostly) accurate information, then are we cursed in some other facet? If we have been given the gift of technology that allows mothers and sons to communicate face to face over a span of hundreds of miles, have we sacrificed something in exchange? The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, father of Taoism, once said "If you would take, you must first give." We are clearly taking, what have we given?

Most commonly we have given something rather benign: time. We send encrypted messages in order to maintain informational integrity whilst traveling the internet. We willingly sacrifice the time required to encrypt and decrypt our messages. We willingly sacrifice the time required to send passwords to authentication servers. We willingly sacrifice the time needed to scan our email for viruses and filter out dangerous or invasive email.

The more cancerous of the gifts we lay on the altar of information is our privacy. We feel threatened by the ease at which hackers, terrorists, and other such villains break through the barriers we have created around our information. When we feel threatened, we turn to our government. When we turn to the government, we are doomed - as Lao Tzu wisely observed - to "give first."

September 11, 2001 was a day when our course as a nation changed. Until that day, we fought constantly to regain those privacies sacrificed to the gods of the Cold War. After that day, we gladly brought our sacrifices again to the altar in the form of the Patriot Act. Our own government bureaus responsible for protecting us now have access to any of the most personal and intimate facts they desire. On a whim and without hard evidence any citizen of the United States has the chance of being put under government scrutiny. No secret may be held inviolate, and no information may be too private. We know, but we trust. We trust in the rule of law, the respect of our peers, and common decency for a fellow member of society.

Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg and instigator of the first high profile hacker chase in history, believed that the internet in its infancy was held together by trust. In some respects he believed the internet to be an extension of the society we live in. He expressed his own sadness in the breach of that trust by those seeking personal gain. If we cannot trust internet users at large to respect the bounds of normal society, can we expect it from our government?

Our rights come at a price. When the price is met, we exchange our goods and depend on trust.

How much does your freedom cost?

Family history and me

What do you get when you cross genetics, politics, history, geography, and a crossword puzzle? Why, genealogy of course. Backed by the bible, and supported by the church, we as members of the church are all (even in a small way) part of the most complicated and difficult puzzle the world has ever seen; one unlikely to be solved in my lifetime.

I was bit by the genealogy bug when I was around thirteen years old. My parent bought our first IBM-compatible PC, and so we could finally run PAF. After some amount of searching, our local family history guru located a gedcom in the church's own files submitted by a relative which detailed our family's history as far back as the 1100's. (in reality it stretched back further, but of course we all know that pedigrees were bought and sold routinely back then, so the probability of true data is vanishingly small) I could never have imagine how much fun it would be to look back at the names of people long since dead and imagine how many of their traits I still carried in my own genes

Later on of course, computer evolved, I matured, and a dot matrix printout seemed old hat. I married a beautiful midwestern girl with no documented genealogy to speak of (finally my chance to do new research!). A brief stint working technical support at MyFamily.com (parent company of Genealogy.com and Ancestry.com) ingrained the bug even further, and here I am today. With software, laptop, and internet in hand I forge through old records the way earthworms break through mounds of dirt. I'm covered and surrounded, but I'm loving every second!

Herzlich Wilkommen Symphony!

IBM recently announced that Lotus, a primary part of IBM's Software Group, is releasing (for free) an OpenOffice based productivity suite called Symphony. For those in the know, this is a rebirth of a long-since departed Lotus brand. For those out of the know (present company included) this is a polished, well-mannered, and generally simpler OpenOffice. It's polished because, well, anything is polished by comparison to OpenOffice (before I get flamed, let me contend that OO has improved monumentally in the last five years!). It's well-mannered because by night it masquerades as Superman (or possibly just because IBM engineers like to produce quality products). It's simpler because it lacks some of the features that OpenOffice users may expect it to have. That could be a good thing, especially for that someone in your life who routinely uses about 1% of the features in Microsoft Word.

So why use Symphony? Here's my list of good reasons:

1) It's free
2) It's simpler than Office. How many of us need all those features anyway!
3) Tabbed windows in one window frame. I mean documents, spreadsheets, and presentations all cohabiting on the same window. Neat!
4) Did I mention it's free?

Download Symphony here

Where do you draw the line?

If I work for a software company, who's responsible for the software?

On one hand, here am I. I am the one actually coding it. I know intimately the reasoning behind it. I am the most likely person to be able to perceive its faults. If there is an exceptional circumstance, should I report it?

On the other hand, here is my employer. They employ knowledgeable people to act as architects, technical leads, or committee members on boards. These people are the ones who design the system, define an acceptable range of parameters, and generally guide the constraints on the software.

Now here is the dilemma. Suppose I'm busy coding the software to the specification generated by experts who rule over me, and I see something that I don't think is right. What do I do? Most of us may question the problem, but then back down if there is seen to be a good deal of thought (or intra-office political weight) behind our 'problem'. But perhaps I'm not convinced, as many of us aren't. How far do we press the problem? Do we lose the job and threaten the livelihood of our family on account of our insistence that a problem exists when in fact it may not be the committee of experts but rather us who is wrong? It is possible that we are right, but will quitting over this problem actually solve anything?

Where do you draw the line?

Mac attack!

The war has been declared over! It isn't by an official from either of the warring factions, of course, but here it is: http://www.democrasay.com/node/102. Most of us have been following the fight for years. Some of us (nay, many of us?) have even defected, jumping a ship we saw likely to be sunk, or perhaps just looking for a little more chlorophyll. Of course, is it still blog-worthy to mention that Apple's interface is cleaner, simpler, and generally more intuitive? Is it blog-worthy to beat a horse who has no more space for bruises? Perhaps it's time that we realize MacOS is the nicest shell on a posix system, Microsoft rules the world, and linux is still more of a frankenstein than Windows has ever been. Enjoy!

Something old, something new

I've come to understand that every person, no matter how lowly has a purpose in the Lord's plan. Some are meant to be great bishops, some great home teachers, other perhaps great primary teachers. I am none of those. In point of fact, only one principle of the gospel really comes easily to me: family history. Perhaps it is my love of puzzles (genealogy after all is one of the greatest, most complicated, and most deviously difficult puzzles ever devised) or perhaps it is sheer stubborn-mindedness, but I love genealogy.

It seems a paradox that one so engrossed in a world of technology (even enthralled by it) should be so excited to dig into archaically scribed, partially completed records penned by people long since dead. Yet here I am. Lucky for me the church is on a mission to bring those very records into the new century with technology bursting from their cracked and faded pages!

Am I talking about www.familysearch.org? No. It's probably a wonderful resource if you don't hail from a long line of avid genealogists, descend from early church members who failed to pass on records, or know a great deal about relatives from 1880 sans census records. Unfortunately I am not one of those. My real point of interest is the so-called "new familysearch.org." I have heard precious little about it apart from a few tidbits thrown to me in a Scandinavian family history class nearly a year ago, but what I have heard is remarkable. The church is reputed to be merging technology and family history in a phenomenal way: records being harmonized, categorized, digitzed, and publicized. A veritable oasis to weary genealogical travellers who are tired of finding rides to the Family History Library every other day.

Want to learn more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FamilySearch

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If monkeys had wings

What if monkeys had wings?

I would buy a monkey with wings

Not a large one

Just a small monkey

to sit on my coffee table

and start conversations.

My monkey would fly about the room

and people would point

and stare

and I would be that guy

you know

the one that has a monkey

with wings.

Of course

no winged monkey can live anywhere

that isn't a castle

What if castles had wings?

How big would they be?

Would castles like to fly?

Would the other flying creatures accept it?

Or would it be an outcast...

lonely and sad.

I would hug the castle

and tell it that everything would be alright

those birds are exclusionist anyway

who needs them

you have the monkeys to keep you company.