WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well, there's one piece of (possibly) bad news for you all this week. I've stopped recommending InfoWorld articles because the advertising (mainly for execrable Verisign) has become so obtrusive and annoying that I can't be bothered to read their material any more. The Scanner section has a sample InfoWorld URL so you can see what I'm talking about. It's a pity, because they have a number of journalists that I rate quite highly.
Still, there was plenty of other news and analysis floating around the net this week, so I picked out the bits that interested me, and which I thought would also interest my readers, and packaged them together in this terribly old fashioned newsletter, which has no pictures, no videos, and no slide shows...
Shorts:
R.I.P. Benoit Mandelbrot, whose name will forever be associated with fractals and the beautiful pictures named after him - the Mandelbrot set. It's not that fractals were exactly new, but the intersection of Mandelbrot with the then latest generation of computers (Intel 368 based PCs) opened the minds of a generation to the implications of fractals with their structure that repeated as you zoomed in.
Fractals turned out to be not just about stunningly pretty pictures, but to have an enormous range of application in the study of the world around us - the structure of such widely differing things as the branching of trees and the shape of the coastline are just two examples of natural fractals.
I suspect that Benoit Mandelbrot will be regarded by future historians as one of the more significant figures of the last century, and we have yet to see all of the implications of his work.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/mixed-signals-10000051/benoit-mandelbrot-
finally-converges-on-infinity-10020788/?s_cid=42
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beno%C3%AEt_Mandelbrot
I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in the EU real light bulbs have been banned and replaced with 'low energy' toxic equivalents. Yep, toxic - they contain mercury vapor - and they are nothing like as good in light terms as the incandescent light bulbs invented some hundred years ago by Thomas Edison. One person, however is fighting back, in spite of the fact that in the EU it's now illegal to manufacture, import, or sell incandescent light bulbs.
Siegfried Rotthaeuser from Essen realized that because the old light bulbs give out 95% of their output as heat, he could import then as 'small heating devices' and sell them legally as heaters. He calls them 'heatballs', and sold out the first batch of 4,000 in three days! A classic example of how humans will always find a way to subvert the dictats of bureaucrats...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69E4EM20101015
http://www.heatball.de/ (This page is in German, but Google does a reasonable translation)
Probably the most surprising bit of news this week is that Microsoft's chief software architect is leaving, Ray Ozzie, who was appointed to the post at the same time as Bill Gates' (husband of the famous Melinda Gates) retirement was announced. I suspect that at the time Ozzie was seen as a replacement for Gates' technical inspiration for the company.
The departure, which will take place over the next few months, comes at a time when there is doubt about the direction in which Microsoft is going in the future. On the other hand I doubt that any programmer that has ever had to grapple with Ray Ozzie's most famous product, Lotus Notes, will grieve for his departure.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20019944-56.html?tag=nl.e498
If you really want to frighten yourself, take a look at the io9 site's '5 times we almost nuked ourselves by accident' page on US nuclear accidents - and the well known '3 Mile Island' accident doesn't feature, because there were worse one in which the radioactive bodies of the operators had to be buried in lead lined coffins.
And if you don't happen to be from the USA, don't bother smirking in a superior fashion. The other nuclear powers have been just as careless in the past, they just don't tell you about it.
http://io9.com/5664390/5-times-we-almost-nuked-ourselves-by-accident
I want to talk about eBooks. Their time is a coming, I strongly suspect, and it is going to turn the whole of the publishing industry completely upside down. The Huffington Post has published an interesting piece by J.A. Konrath on how he and three others produced a new horror book specifically for Amazon's Kindle, with no DRM, and a launch on Halloween, even though they only just finished writing it a few weeks ago! The price is only US$2.99, and the cut for the authors is such that even after they've split it four ways they are still getting nearly as much as any one of them would have got if they had written the book and had it published conventionally (and it would have been lucky to be out for Xmas, let alone Halloween).
Meanwhile the UK's Daily Telegraph also has a piece, this time a polemic, suggesting that the book publishers are about to undergo the same sort of bonfire of the business methods that has affected the music and movie businesses. Massive levels of 'piracy' are forecast by the piece, unless the costs of eBooks come down to a more realistic level. As the article makes it clear, the wolf is already at the door for the publishers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ja-konrath/ebooks-and-self-publishing_b_764516.html
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/adrianhon/100005867/your-time-is-
up-publishers-book-piracy-is-about-to-arrive-on-a-massive-scale/
On a slightly different aspect of this issue, I'd also draw your attention to a carefully thought out article on the 'shadow locked' site, exploring the implications of Internet 'slideshows', articles with short multiple pages, and video interviews. The author, Leo Porter, calls this linearisation of the net, and explains the business implications for making the net more of a linear experience, like TV, rather than a jump around browsing experience. Linear experiences are, it seems, easier to monetize than browsing experiences, since it's more difficult to avoid both the ads and the dross. Definitely worth a read.
http://www.shadowlocked.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id
=747:why-the-web-mustnt-become-the-new-tv&catid=80:offworld&Itemid=86
However, having drawn your attention to the perils of slide shows on the net, I now propose to suggest that you point your browser at one now! This is actually a legit use of a slide show format. Since 1974 Nikon has been running a competition called the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, and Scientific American magazine has a slide show of the top 20 winners. It's got microscope photographs ranging from fish scales to a very freaky shot of an aquatic fly larva show magnified 25 times. My favorite though, is the first slide, a 20 times enlargement of thale cress.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=small-world-microscope-photography
Homework:
I have a TED video for you to look at this week. It's a talk given by Eben Bayer, a product designer who has been researching a new, fungus based packaging material that can replace polystyrene as a packaging and insulation material. Unlike the polystyrene which lasts tens of thousands of years, and uses up valuable oil to make, Bayer's mycelium based material uses agri-waste as the feedstock, and can be safely disposed of simply by sticking it on a compost heap! The new material is already in use for packaging in some companies - it's an impressive achievement.
http://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic.html
I mentioned Benoit Mandelbrot earlier. When I was looking through material for that item I came across a serendipitous reference to Olbers' Paradox, which I hadn't seen before. The paradox concerns the fact that the night sky is basically dark. If there are an infinite number of stars and the universe is static, then the night sky should be brightly lit. I'll let you discover the rest, and Mandelbrot's solution, for yourselves - just don't get stuck in the Cantor dust!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox
Ok, I don't really expect you to read the stuff at the URL for this piece, unless you are a maths wiz. However, I thought I'd alert you to the fact that there has been a mathematical breakthrough in algorithms for solving systems of linear equations. In practical terms the new algorithm should speed up any computer applications which need to solve such systems. And there are a lot of them, including machine learning, computer graphics, scheduling, and simulations. It'll take a while to get through the system but within a year or two we will start to see the effects on the desktop with vastly faster and more sophisticated graphics and more efficient scheduling on the net.
For those of you who like buzz words, the algorithm is a method of solving a class of problems known as 'symmetric diagonally dominant systems'. Make sure that can roll off your tongue at the next dinner party!
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2010/October/oct21_speedyalgorithm.shtml
Geek Toys:
Do you like playing with Nerf guns? Do you like reading Judge Dredd? Then you will be insanely jealous of the latest guns issued to the US 101 Airborne. It's a smart rifle. Actually, it doesn't look much like a rifle at all, it's more like one of those pictures you see on the front of science fiction books.
It's called the XM-25 and it shoots a smart shell - a heavy 25mm exploding slug, whose precision time fuse is set automatically by the gun's systems at the moment of being fired. There are buttons by the trigger that allow you to change the automatic settings before you fire, if you want it to explode earlier or later. Coming soon (the army hopes) are other smart shells including flechettes, canister, shaped armor penetrators, a stun warhead and a door breacher.
I can just imagine crouching in a foxhole with someone charging at me with a bayonet while I try to figure out which bullet you use to stop bayonet charges, and what settings to give it!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/15/xm25_and_exacto/
Scanner:
Extremely annoying advertising
http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/why-facebook-selling-you-
out-and-wont-stop-322?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2010-10-21
The flash future of the MacBook
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20020257-260.html?tag=nl.e703
How to make a White Hole in your kitchen sink
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/kitchen-sink-white-hole/
The rise and fall of America's jet-powered car
http://jalopnik.com/5662006/the-rise-and-fall-of-americas-jet+powered-car
Pentagon Investigation: Wikileaks documents don't reveal key intelligence, but risks remain
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/10/16/wikileaks.assessment/index.html?hpt=T2
Inside the lawsuit that could ground the CIA's Predator drones
http://www.fastcompany.com/1695219/cia-predator-drones-facing-ip-lawsuit
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Jason, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
24 October, 2010
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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