I don’t want to give too much away, but from watching the trailer you can tell it’s gonna be good.  The story explores “emoticlips” which are a way to digital encode and transmit emotions, like a podcast.  Drama heats up when a viagra ad shows up, something about blackmail.  And my favorite line asks if you’ve tried Googling “omnipotent self-aware botnets.”

I just saw a fun trailer for the play on YouTube, shared here for your convenience…

You can get your tickets now from Brown Paper.

Scores of developers have had iPad’s for weeks now. They’ve had to sign non-disclosure agreements, and have the iPad locked in a separate room that random employees couldn’t access. And even that wasn’t enough. The iPads are literally chained to the desk with steel cable and a lock. Apple comes by the office with a suitcase, installs the iPad in a bolted case, chains it to the desk and locks it there. And they they do occasional surprise visits just to make sure it’s still there.

What’s more, Apple has told developers that they are monitoring the location of the device as well.

Apple.  Gotta love them.

Mike says he can type 50 wpm on it.  That’s really quite cool.

UniXKCD command line console

My favorite webcomic, Randall Monroe’s brilliant XKCD, is running a command-line version of itself today.  A few commands you might want to try include:

• find
• wget http://xkcd.com/
• Make me a sandwich
• go west

Google renames itself to Topeka

In honor of Topeka, Kansas renaming itself Google in a bid to get ultra-high-speed broadband installed, Google has renamed itself Topeka today.  Although Google is well known for April Fool’s jokes I believe this is the first time any have been on the homepage.

YouTube’s TEXTp mode

YouTube has the option to render most any of its videos in ASCII by adding the &textp=fool parameter onto the URL.  Looking at bandwidth graphs I can’t tell if they’re actually sending ASCII over the wire, or doing the conversion client-side.  Fun trick though.

Bing’s funny cows

Bing has one of their defining pastoral pictures, this time literally bucolic, but with fake cows.  They’ve supposedly been bread to only make non-dairy creamer.  Glad you’re trying, folks.

I'm also giving an Ignite talk.  I wanted to make it something of a motivational speech.  Encourage people to think about their own roles in helping bring about the robot revolution.  I also wanted an excuse to share some of my thoughts on how to build an alarm bed.  I'll post my slides after the conference, or at least link to somebody else who does.  But for now, I've got the credits and content licensing posted.

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance.  Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could destroy the planet by creating small black-holes that might suck in the entire earth.  As the good folks at CERN re-assure us, everything is fine.  I pretty much believe this.  That is to say, I’m pretty sure LHC will not destroy all life as we know it.  Pretty sure.  Otherwise, we’ve all got a few more hours to live.

So long as my buddy Stephen Hawking’s theories about black holes are true, we’re fine.  They’ll dissipate by themselves and will not suck in the planet.  But to be clear, we are testing this theory.  (I just heard a scientist on the radio trip all over himself as he tried to spurt out a believable
"there really is no chance these black-holes will devour the entire
earth.")

Last year I wrote about a then-briefly-popular idea that all the world we see is actually a computer simulation.  (Pointless personal anecdaote — I had this idea in grade-school and tried to marry it with special relativity’s universal speed-limit in terms of a primitively digitized simulation where exceeding the speed of light would cause objects to skip pixels during a single time step.  Anyway.)  It’s all as if our whole universe is a game of The Sims on some hyper-intelligent alien teenager’s computer.  In a fairly religious way, this idea is unrefutable.  It’s like a virtual machine trying to hack its host operating system.  Can’t do it.

Some theories of simulated worlds hold that what we experience is a simplification of real physical laws.  If this is true, high-energy experiments like LHC could probe the limits of these simplifications.  It could cause an exception to get thrown in the simulation code.  Us clever scientists set up some extremely complex scenario that caused one of the simulation’s assumptions to fail.  What happens when the simulation crashes?  Maybe it’s a dialog box saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore."  Maybe it’s a universe-scale Blue screen of death.  Teenager’s response?  Maybe Abort.  How different is that from our whole planet getting sucked into a black hole?

Don’t panic.

Last week I went to a different kind of Dork Bot meeting here in Seattle called the Catastrophic Cacophony Workshop.  It was a maker-style event where we broke up into teams of people and in 90 minutes had to build a robotic musical instrument out of one supplied motor and whatever other parts we could scrounge together. 

Our team started with the basic idea of a repetitive percussive instrument with multiple hammers hitting multiple objects.  So we constructed a platform to hold the motor and used tennis rackets to make a rotating frame that held a series of arms that struck objects as they went around.  We then built frames to hold up things like pot lids or copper pipes to be struck, and attached everything from small chains to bundles of spaghetti to the rotating frame to strike them.  The real enabling insight came from the women on the team who realized that by spacing the arms un-evenly we could create an interesting rhythm.  The one-two-and-three rhythm across a variety of instruments ended up sounding much like a drum circle that actually got people dancing.

Thanks to Espressobuzz for capturing our creation on video.  Thanks to Josh Kopel for bringing the event to Seattle, and Shelly Farnham for organizing.  And to my wonderful teammates whose energy and creativity made the Spinning Spaghetti Monster possible.

Open your fridge.  If you’ve lived with that fridge for a while, there’s a good chance it looks something like mine does.  Shelf upon shelf of half-used bottles and jars of long-lasting meta-foods.  Condiments, salad dressings, jellies, beverages, chutneys, nut butters, salsas, pickled vegetables, etc.  We expect our fridges to be full of food, so this doesn’t in itself challenge the evolutionary principal of selection.  But taking an inventory shows that there is a strong bias towards foods we don’t actually like.  In fact, the typical selection process for foods in our refrigerators tends to concentrate foods we don’t like, thus running backwards to what should intuitively evolve towards a selection of our favorite foodstuffs.  But for a couple very understandable reasons, that just doesn’t happen.

Consider salad dressings.  Most of us like to have some choices when we’re topping our raw vegetables.  So when we’re at the store, we don’t just buy the one salad dressing we like, but will often try a new variety.  There’s a documented psychological principal called Variety Seeking that encourages diversity in buying because people want to explore different choices.  But what happens when we buy a variety we don’t particularly enjoy?  Like that orange blossom vinaigrette or the honey mustard that’s just a bit too thick and sweet.  We try it once, form an opinion, and the next time we have salad we go for the old-reliable Goddess dressing.  So it lingers.  But we don’t throw it away.  Because there’s nothing WRONG with it.  Besides, one day when we have guests over they might prefer a syrupy honey-mustard dressing.  Or maybe we could dip chicken knuckles into it or something.  Plus the combination of preservatives, low-temperature and food that doesn’t promote bacterial growth in the first place means it can stay edible for years.  So their continued presence provides some small marginal benefit of choice.  The only real alternative is throwing them away  (which makes us feel guilty) since there’s no secondary market for used condiments.

Beyond choice, they do provide marginal benefit in terms of ballast for heat capacity.  Refrigerators run more efficiently when they’re full since there’s a larger thermal mass which is more stable.  But this assumes the fridge has ample space for the food that is being cycled through and consumed.  In many households the need to find space for food you’re actually going to eat creates a selection pressure to remove such undesirable foods.  But the door of the fridge is a niche environment that isn’t very well suited to large, short-lived main courses and thus things like eleven different varieties of mustard tend to thrive.

What’s the take-home lesson here?  How do we fight this scourge on our pallets?  Actually I don’t think it’s that big of a problem.  When we need space in the fridge, we find it.  But otherwise we collect things like Mang Thomas All Purpose Sauce, and pickled cherry peppers.   If clutter bothers you, resist the temptation to try something new and stick with something you know you’ll use.  Heck, get a really big bottle.  Or look for similar reverse-evolutionary processes in your medicine cabinet, liquor shelf, or office supplies, and be conscious that you have the power to change things.  Or just accept that sometimes human nature tends to concentrate our surroundings with things we don’t actually like.

All modern word processors make
it trivial to change font size, margins and spacing, making it possible
to fit almost any number of words onto a page, from tens to thousands.
But instructors are probably expecting 250 – 400 words per page.  Some
of my instructors have gone so far as to specify that essays should be “6 pages, 1 inch
margins, 12pt Times Roman font, double spaced.”  Wouldn’t it be easier
to just say “2,000 words”?  Every modern word processor has a word
count function.

Aside from being simpler, it allows students to focus on writing great
content rather than getting the content to fit on the page.  I’ve had
to turn in essays with really ugly papers because it was the only way
to fit all of my ideas into the specified page count.  And educators
who aren’t completely explicit open themselves up to students gaming
their assignments.  In college we had a phrase called the “Courier
Transform” (rhymes with Fourier Transform) which one would apply to a
paper that didn’t meet the necessary minimum page count for an
assignment.   By switching to a fixed-width font, we would boost our
content to meet the required page count.

It all started way back in 1928 when Albert Foster graduated from UW Business School.   Not too long later, he founded the brokerage firm A.O. Foster & Co. which was successful enough to enable his family to get into the philanthropy business.  Albert’s son Michael G also attended UW Business school.  Michael G died a few years back and his relatives wanted to honor his memory some how.

Balmer Hall, the building which currently houses the UW Business School is mercifully scheduled for demolition almost as soon as I graduate next year.  The plan is to build three new buildings.  The Foster family intended to name one of them after Michael G, but after seeing the architectural plans thought that maybe one building wasn’t enough to honor his memory so the discussion expanded to multiple buildings and next thing you know they were asking the same question you did.  We can pretend the conversation went something like this.

"How much for 2 buildings?"

"That’ll be another $10 mil."

"How much to throw in the whole school?"

"$50 million is what we’ve been saying all along."

"But we already gave you $3 mil to name the Albert Foster Business Library.  How about we give you $46.5 and we call it a deal?"

And so it was.  It’s good to know that Foster Business School is built on rock-solid negotiating skills.  :)

In all seriousness, it’s nice to see philanthropy with few strings attached.  I hear "generous donors" are often really demanding in how their money is spent.  But not here.  They even released the naming rights for the individual buildings back to the school to help offset more of the construction costs.

Overall I must express heartfelt thanks to the Fosters.  I’ll be proud to earn my MBA from Foster.  I already like it better than UWBS.

Want to read more?  Visit the Foster Business School on the web, or read what a professional information-disperser wrote about the transaction.

This variation of the problem isn’t covered by Microsoft’s KB article on how to workaround the KB931768 problems.  I had good luck uninstalling the hotfix.  (Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Check "Show Updates" -> Windows Internet Explorer -> Security Update for Windows Internet Explorer 7 (KB931768) -> Remove )

[Update 6/12: I spoke too soon.  Last night, Windows installed the hotfix again and IE is back to broken.  My IT department advises shutting off auto-update.  Nice.]

One of my co-workers who was having the same problem went through the MS tech support stack and was told to re-install Windows.  I love it.  MS has 3 ways of dealing with any software problem, and having been spending the last couple of weeks wrestling with Earthlink’s attrocious customer support I’m imagining 3 tiers of support staff to deliver this message:

Tier 1 support: Reboot your computer.  Did that fix your problem?  Okay, let me transfer you.  Please hold.

Tier 2 support: Re-install the application in question.  Did that fix your problem?  No?  I’m very sorry.  Please hold while I transfer you.

Tier 3 support: Re-install your operating system.

The last one is pretty much guaranteed to work since by the time you re-install the OS and all your apps, the computer looks nothing like what you had before.  Because of this, very few people are willing to go through with it.

Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience.  Everything should be back to normal in a few hours.  (If you’re reading this, it almost certainly is.)

Enjoy!

I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard hold out would always say "This ain’t rain.  Back where I come from we have real rain and this ain’t it."  Well last night I feel confident there was a 100% chance of rain.  It was a full on  storm.  Things broke.

In one night we got a record 2.2" of rain with winds gusting to 74 mph.  Roads were closed everywhere.  Power flickered all night.  Things banged loudly.  My neighbor’s basement flooded because water was coming up through the drain!  By work I saw a manhole cover that looked like a beautiful fountain with jets of water squirting up through the holes.  My rug in my basement got fairly wet, as far as I can tell because of water coming down the chimney!!  It was a bad time to realize that the last time I pulled my fileserver out to work on it I didn’t plug it into a UPS.  Oops.

A couple friends and I wanted to experience the weather so we put on full snowboarding / mountaineering outfits and wandered out.  We ended up spending a good chunk of the evening standing on a rooftop patio with a great view of the city, watching the city be destroyed.  Explosions filled the night from lightning and transformers blowing.  We could always tell which ones were lightning because the flashes were white and brief.  Whenever a transformer would blow, there would be a pulsing glow that would linger for a second or two.  They were also typically bright green, although we did see one or two redding purple ones.  I’m pretty sure the green blasts were from large amounts of copper wire burning very quickly in a  giant short-circuit.  I’m not sure what metal they’d use in transformers that burns reddish purple.  Occasionally we saw what must have been a whole substation go because the glow would last 3 or 4 seconds.  For some reason we were cheering.  After one such explosion, we saw all of Bellevue go dark, only to light up again half a second later.

It was amazing.

At some point we realized that the street’s own transformer was at eye level less than 20′ from where we were standing.  When we finally connected the large explosions in the distance to the utility pole mounted bomb next to us, we decided to go inside.  Show’s over.  Don’t wanna die tonight.

I disagree.  I think now is the time to

Buy More Stuff!

I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word.  Someday soon I hope to have time to join them.

The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue with them.  My friends have gotten into prolonged arguments with shoppers and other passersby who don’t like the message they’re  spreading.  My friends retort with "How could you possibly tell your family and friends that you love them except by buying them more stuff?"  But even this doesn’t persuade those who are persistently disturbed by this message.

Maybe someday they’ll get it.  But I’m not holding out much hope.

First, a minor quip from page 3 where they confuse atomic number and atomic mass.  There is no element #184.  That’s tungsten’s atomic mass.  For tungsten, Z=74.

The most fundamental problem with the paper is that I can’t find any explanation of how the gamma rays they’re dealing with are even entangled in the first place.  All they say is "Since one electron produces several photons instantaneously, such photons are entangled according to Quantum Mechanics."  (p.3)  This is indicative of a basic problem with their treatment of entanglement throughout their writing — they write as if particles themselves get entangled, which isn’t really accurate.  Some measurable aspect of particles can get entangled — for example, a pair of electrons might have their spin-states entangled, but the electrons themselves aren’t entangled.  In this case we might guess that it’s the polarization of the gammas which is entangled, but they don’t call that out.  And that’s critical for understanding how it would get transferred to electrons in the crystals.  Polarization of the gamma effects the spin of the electron when it gets bumped into the valence band, maybe?  Definitely something they need to be explicit about.

They do cite a whole separate paper they wrote about entanglement with these gammas.  This paper has also not been peer-reviewed and is never cited by anybody else.  This article also doesn’t explain why the gammas given off in this radioactive decay process should be entangled except except by saying "It is well known that low energy photon pairs from atomic radiative cascade are entangled" and citing two other papers.  One of these papers has nothing to do with radioactive decay and the other one (I think it’s here but I’m not sure) has nothing to do with quantum entanglement.  Nice.  They really need to draw some connection about what aspect of these gamma particles is entangled and why.

Overall they seem to treat QE as if it’s some kind of magic pixie dust that happens whenever 2 particles get created simultaneously and that it offers these particles magical properties to defy the normal rules of science.  Moreover, in their analysis these magical properties can be easily conveyed to other particles, whereas in the real world entangled states are extremely fragile.  They explain this by citing research into quantum computing that explains how in very carefully controlled circumstances, entanglement can be transferred from one particle to another.  In reality, entangled states are very fragile — the wave functions collapse very easily, and it almost never gets transferred between particles.  In their world, it’s fairly automatic.

The pixie dust theme continues with their explanation for what’s going on within the oven which is the signaling mechanism in their FTL communicator.  "Entangled electrons, as the experiments show, do not appear to exit from the traps as the temperature increases except at very discrete and narrow characteristic trap emptying temperatures."  No citation or further explanation.  QE electrons just kinda do things differently from all other electrons in the world.  Because they’re special, I guess.

The data are pretty sketch too.  They never plot the temperature of their ovens — seems kinda important IMHO.  But at this point, there’s not much point in complaining.  There’s no explanation (beyond pixie dust) for why the random changes in luminescence would replay themselves while increasing and decreasing temperature.  As if the macroscopic object had a memory of what it did at a previous temperature because of its special QE electrons.  No attempt to explain this at an atomic level except to refer to the "particular behavior of the entangled electrons in the traps."

Sigh.  I’m glad the professori emeriti are having fun in their near-retirement.  It’s not the first time I’ve been duped by a research paper.  I remember in college taking a class on scientific ethics and wanting to cite a fascinating paper (I think it’s this one) about research into a longevity gene that was conferred truly amazing properties onto mice and fish, until I noticed the paper was published on April 1st.  But it had lots of references to other articles, so I started checking them.  This was in 1993 or so, so I had to go to the library.  I couldn’t find most of the journals they cited — maybe they didn’t exist or maybe our library just didn’t carry them.  But one was in a reputable journal I recognized, and it was about a critical piece of science that led to this research.  Excitedly I pulled out the thick bound volume from the shelf and started leafing towards the page.  I expected a full page ad or a table-of-contents page or something, but no there was a real article describing the first discovery of this gene.  And then I noticed that this article too was published on April 1st.  Sigh.  The paper was due the next day, and this article was a big part of my argument.  And it was a class on ethics.  What a quandary.  I was up late that night.

Thanks to Charles Armstrong for putting this together.

Every slip of paper says the same thing: "Encapsulate it."

Back in the 1980’s we all knew that global variables (or common blocks in Fortran) were evil.  They led to subtle, hard-to-find bugs.  We all know the kind — you call a function and don’t realize that it has some subtle side-effect outside of what you want it to do, and that breaks something else.  The irony is that you don’t need global variables to get this kind of bug.  (But they sure do make it easy.)  This is a totally common description for a hard to find bug.  A great way to avoid this is to encapsulate your code so it doesn’t do anything outside of the playground it’s supposed to be working in.  The only access is through well-defined interfaces.

My first glimpse at this came with Borland’s Turbo Pascal which
offered to make sets of variables only visible to certain blocks of
code.  Object Oriented Programming (OOP) takes this the next step with polymorphism and the still-unrealized promise of code re-use.  But I’d argue the true value of OOP is the ability to organize your code into chunks that have nothing to do with each other execpt through well-defined interfaces.

Some languages like .net provide mechanisms to enforce encapsulation
of entire libraries from each other — this assembly cannot call
anything in this assembly.  DLLs can only call certain DLLs.  Good java programmers take careful note of which packages include which other packages, but AFAIK the language doesn’t offer much in the way of tools for enforcing this.  A friend of mine spends his entire job
trying to enforce this kind of library-level encapsulation on the Windows codebase.
(Keep up the good work, Mark, please.)  The trend towards service-oriented
architectures (SOA) can be seed as a way to formalize this kind of higher-level encapsulation.  If the procedure you’re calling is on a different machine, you’ve got a high degree of confidence in its encapsulation.

Another key benefit of encapsulation is that when it comes time to change something — say swap something out for a replacement that does it better.  If the new code follows the same interface, all the other code that works around it should keep working unchanged.  Herein lies the true wisdom of the magic hat: if you’re ever not sure how to write a piece of code, take whatever it is you’re not sure about, and encapsulate it so that you can change that aspect of it later.  It might seem like a pain in the ass to decouple these things, but the fact that you’re not sure about which way to do it probably means it’s a good place to put an interface layer.  Now it’s up to you to decide if this interface is just a class-boundary, or something higher-level like a package/DLL/assembly boundary or even has to go through an RPC/SOAP/service layer.  But you’ll rarely go wrong with extra encapsulation.

It brings up fond memories of repeatedly running into them playing on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica.  Aside from a bunch of fun groovy surf music, their lyrics crack me up.

"I got so drunk I sank my boat.  It couldn’t spoil my happy smile.  I swam from Moscow to New York: five hundred thousand square miles."  (in Tango)

Harriet is another of my favorites — a sweet ballad that turns painfully sideways about halfway through.  Reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s Weiner Shnitzel Waltz.  Maybe I’ve just got a thing for campy Elvis impersonator bands.  But as the Elvises always say during their shows, "if you don’t like our music, we have T-shirts and bumper stickers too."  If you want a smile, lend your ear to Red Elvises — quality entertainment from Siberia!

"Where is the Paramount Theater?"

"Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work.  It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off.  It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!" 

"Oh, I’m sorry.  It’s actually on Pine."

Personally, I’ve given up trying to keep them straight.  I just call them both Pinke.  (Pronounced with a long I sound.)  It’s much easier this way.  I don’t need to think about it.  When I get there I can generally figure it out.  Many people I talk to don’t even catch that I wasn’t specific and understand the general idea which is perfect.  Some people hear it and understand my intent instantly.  Some ask.

I think this generalization stresses out the people I’m talking with less.  I think that if I were to specify one of the two streets specifically, people would sit there and rack their brains trying to remember which one I had named.  Since they’d have probably a 30% chance of misidentifying the street in their heads, and I’d have about a 40% chance of having said the wrong one in the first place, the odds of successful communication would be just 54%.  That sounds no better than a coin-flip to me, especially considering that 12% of the time communication would have worked because we both got it wrong!  I think information is actually being conveyed more effectively by not specifying Pike or Pine, but instead just saying Pinke.

It’s parodying a song by Chamillionaire that glorifies smuggling drugs.  Nice work dude — way to be a positive influence on other people’s lives.  This is one of the reasons I really love Eminem.  He sings about how crappy life in the hood is.  You can call me white and nerdy for liking white rappers, and you wouldn’t be far off — I got a soldering gun and I edit wikipedia.  But I don’t encourage strangers to pick up my bad habits.  Like Eminem says, keep off the addictive drugs.

In Seattle, when the forecast says 80% chance of rain that means if you ask a random sampling of 100 people on the street “is it raining right now?” 80 of them will say “yeah, it’s raining” and 20 of them will say “no, this isn’t rain.”  For those of you who haven’t ever been in Seattle in the Winter, it’s never quite dry here.  And it rarely actually rains either — real rain with lots of big heavy drops.  We tend to have this persistent heavy fog that moves downward and gets things wet.  Sometimes it’s lighter and sometimes it’s heavier — it’s pretty arbitrary when you’d call it rain and when you wouldn’t.  Thus the consensus model.

Right now I’d actually say we’ve got about a 60% chance of rain.  80% is pretty darned heavy IMHO.  I don’t think it’s possible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some transplanted diehards from monsoon territory will always hold out and say “this ain’t real rain” as their goretex hats turn into buckets.  Likewise, in Winter I suspect the minimum chance of rain is about 5%, owing to the bitter so-cal transplants who whine that it’s always raining here, regardless of what’s happening in the sky.

So grab a double-tall skinny hazelnut latte and hunker down by the fireplace for a few months.  Here’s looking forward to snowboarding!

You can also be pretty sure that surgery’s a good option in your future when you can dislocate your shoulder just by trying to wipe your own ass.  Yay for modern surgery!

It’s also a good thing I managed to get my arm back in its socket before we had to do all that.