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There is no try, cont’d

March 21, 2009 in Ideas, Science, VRM | 1 comment

Props to Joe Andrieu for pointing out the Cult of Done, for which I am constitutionally disqualified, but wish I were not.

Why? Because I: 1) Bite off more than I can eschew, 2) Keep more balls on the floor than anybody I know, and 3) Plan for my epitaph to read “He was almost finished.”

But I am at home right now, mostly getting things done while regretably missing Free Libre Planet, happening right now at Harvard, and for which I am registered. Just too much to catch up on, and I don’t know when Wes Felter is speaking. Hope it’s tomorrow, by which time I hope to have more done.

Ah, I see that Wes’ personal servers is up for an unconference session tomorrow. I’ll be there for that. Yay.

Sums of differences

March 17, 2009 in Ideas, Past, Places, Science | Permalink

Here at SXSW there are two conferences happening on the same floors: Interactive and Film. Interactive is mostly computing geeks. Film is mostly film geeks.

The main visual difference: tatoos and laptops. In the film crowd there is a high tatoo/laptop ratio. In the interactive crowd, there is a high laptop/tatoo ratio — lthough many laptops have tatoos in the forms of decals, which are left on tables and handed out to attendees by companies or causes with something to promote.

I’m on the Interactive side, but have attended very few sessions here, mostly because we have a bunch of VRM developers here, and are taking advantage of sharing meet/meat space to get stuff done. It’s been very productive, actually.

Anyway, I decided yesterday to visit one of the film sessions: the enthusiastically titled Henry Selick and Robert Rodriguez talk 3D at SXSW! The room was packed. The only laptops I saw were my own and two others in the back row. It felt only a bit less strange than it did seven years ago when I attended my first Digital Hollywood in Los Angeles. Back then computer users and Hollywood were at “war.” Or so the Hollywood folks said. “Piracy” was the big topic. I didn’t raise my flag.

A little different now. Great session too, by the way.

Top of the fool chain

March 12, 2009 in Science | 6 comments

If you want to keep something in orbit around the Earth, you need it to be flying parallel to the surface at speeds exceeding those of bullets. Get high enough above atmospheric drag, and stuff will continue to orbit as long as the moon does.

The moon has been around for 4,530,000,000,000 years, give or take.

Humans have been throwing junk into space, and occassionally blowing orbiting crap into countless smithereens, for about fifty years. As a result, the risk of impact to large objects such as shuttles, observatories and space stations is one-in-a-few hundred.

Or, in the case of the International Space Station, one-in-what? Today the ISS was evacuated, just in case.

#iss tweets.

Since it’s obvious that it’s a bad idea to fill the orbital environment with junk that’s damn near impossible to get rid of, why do we keep doing it?

Because every species operates in its own flawed self interest, I guess.

Lesson du jour

March 11, 2009 in Ideas, Journalism, Science | 2 comments

Love this line, from Dave: I have no idea how these guys got the idea that they could save the news industry by becoming the tech industry.

Dave’s the only guy I know who reliably schools both the journalism and the tech industries, often at the same time. Well done.

Wanted: à la carte HDTV

February 27, 2009 in Art, Science, Sports, VRM | 8 comments

So our Verizon FiOS home bill has been about $160/month. We were looking to chop that down a bit when I called Verizon this morning.

To put it as simply as possible, it’s complicated.

What I care about most is keeping the 20/20Mbps down/up Internet service. That’s $69.99/mo.

What I don’t care about is POTS, or Plain Old Telephone Service. So I canceled that. We use cell phones, and we’ll find another way to fax, as rarely as we do that.

That leaves TV.

What we still call TV isn’t what it used to be: channels on a dial. They are digital program sources that are organized by “channels”, but that’s a legacy convenience. A few are available over the air, as DTV signals. Those are…

  • WGBH-DT (still called Channel 2, actually on Channel 19). It also has an SD (standard definition) version. These are called 2-1 and 2-2, or WGBG-DT1 and WGBH-DT2. Affiliated with PBS.
  • WBZ-DT (still called Channel 4, actually on Channel 30). Affiliated with CBS.
  • WCVB-DT (Still called Channel 5, actually on Channel 20). Affliiated with ABC.
  • WHDH-HD (still called Channel 7, actually on Channel 40). Also called 7-1, It has a second channel on 7-2 called This TV. It’s SD. Affiliated with NBC.
  • WFXT-DT (still called 25, actually on Channel 31). Affiliated with Fox.
  • WSBK-DT (still called 38, actually on Channel 39). Independent. Owned by CBS.
  • WGBX-DT (still called 44, actually on Channel 43). Four SD channels, labeled 44-1 through 44-2. Called WGBX, World, Create and Kids. Affiliated with PBS.
  • WYDN-DT (still called 48, actually on Channel 47) with a directional signal). The picture is SD. Affiliated with Daystar. Evangelical Christian.
  • WLVI-DT (still called 56, actually on Channel 42 with a directional signal). Affiliated with CW.
  • WMFP-DT (still called 62, actually on Channel 18 with a directional signal). Labeled 61-1 and 62-2. The second is currently dark. Affiliated with Gems TV. Home shopping.
  • WBPX (still called 68, actually on Channel 32, with a directional signal). It’s four channels in one, all SD: WBPX Digital Television, Qubo, Eye on Life and Worship. Identified on the tuner as 68-1, 2, 3 and 4. Affiliated with ION Television.

For what it’s worth, I get all those on my laptop with a little adapter. Meaning that I don’t need cable for them. They’re free. They cost $0.00.

Okay, so Verizon offers two channel lineups in our region: Essentials for $47.99/mo. and Extreme HD for… I can’t find it now. $57.99/mo, I think. Essentials has the about same minimun channel line-up I get for free over the air. Extreme HD has what you want if you watch in HD: all the main cable and sports non-premium channels. Add DVR rental (for which one has no choice) for $12.99 and I’m at $140 or so, if I want the Extreme HD.

TV now is an HD deal. If you want TV, you want HD, because that’s the new screen you’ve got, even if you’re watching on a laptop.

The problem is, HDTV costs you. Unless you want the minimal legacy lineup of local over the air channels.

Anyway, here’s what I want: a la carte. Across the board. I’m glad to do Pay Per View for everything.

And right now I’m thinking hard about cancelling the Extreme HD I just ordered. We like the sports and the movies, but we can go to a bar for the former and get the rest from Netflix or something.

Meanwhile, kudos to Verizon for providing fiber, and the 20/20 connection. Here’s another message: I’d gladly pay more for even more speed. Especially upstream.

[Later…] Now I’m looking at the Verizon Massachusetts channel lineup and it seems like the only thing extra I get with Extreme HD is some sports channels. Is that right? Sports-wise, all I care about are NESN, ESPN, TNT and other Usual Suspects.

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And porn soon followed

February 25, 2009 in Geology, Past, Science | 5 comments

Says here that sex came along at least 365 billion million years ago.

Magma roots

February 25, 2009 in Geology, Science | 2 comments

capitol reef

The problem with “grass roots” as a metaphor is that it reduces its contributors to the miniscopic. Not microscopic, because then you couldn’t see them without a microscope. But miniscopic, meaning they’re small. You have to get down on all fours to eyeball them and say hi.

So I’ve been thinking about alternative meaphors where large movements are involved. For that you have to go deeper. Not into the dirt, because that has connotations of filfth and death. Rock roots is okay, in the sense that serious rock for the most part is solid, or what geologists call “competent”. You can build on it, and with it. The largest slabs of it are “tectonic”.

But maybe we can go deeper than that, below the Earth’s crust. How about “magma roots”? That occurred to me while reading Ron Schott‘s post, Building a Google Earth Geology Layer. Ron is a hard rock geologist who has been a good source of wisdom (and occasional correction) toward my own geology obsessions. What Ron proposes (in both his posts title and its detail) is a great idea — for Google, for the geology field, and for the rest of us.

Ron’s goals are modest in manner and ambitious in scale:

What I’d like to do here, with the help of the geoblogosphere (via the comments to this post, initially), is to set out some goals, examples, and use cases that could guide the development of a Google Earth geology layer. If there’s interest in building on this idea, I’d be happy to set up communications tools, create KML tutorials, or do anything else to facilitate a coordinated effort to develop such a layer. Hopefully, by leveraging the knowledge and efforts of the geoblogospheric community, along with excellent new resources for developing KML, we can make a real start toward building a useful geology resource.

For now, what I’d like to do is to begin to collect best practices/examples of good uses of KML in illustrating geology in Google Earth. I’ll start by pointing out the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program’s collection of Google Earth KML files and another collection of geologic KML resources at San Diego State University. These should give you some idea of the sorts of things that will be possible. Also helpful would be use cases – how would you like to use a geology layer in Google Earth? Suggestions here will offer us guidance as to what the most important elements of a Google Earth geology layer should be.

I’m not a geologist, but I want to do everything I can to help raise this barn. Or, to keep from mixing metaphors, uncork this volcano.

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Window blobs

February 23, 2009 in Art, Life, Places, Science, Travel | 5 comments

Form the inside of a de-iced plane, it looks like they poured clear syrup all over it. Or so I was reminded when waiting to take off from O’Hare on Saturday night after a snowstorm. What I found, when I tried to shoot pictures through this rippled ooze, was some fun photographic effects. The shot above is one example among many.

Lights outside were optically exploded into large spongy-looking blobs that resembled models of the universe, cooled meteorites, series of vertebrae, asteroids from old video games…

Anyway, I shot a lot of them.

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Q & Hey

February 17, 2009 in Ideas, Science | 1 comment

What’s the tweeting protocol? An inquiry at Linux Journal. Lots of good and helpful responses. And thumbs up to Dave’s Where is Twitter’s WordPress?

As does the flat Earth

February 13, 2009 in Science | 2 comments

Great mind-opening post by David Reed:

  …the policy issue is that such systems for multiplexing such EM fields don’t fit the “law of the land” regarding sharing the medium. So, like UWB and spread spectrum underlay, and white spaces, all that capacity will evaporate in attempting to fit the technology into the procrustean bed of the FCC’s “property rights in spectrum” legal framework.
  The “property rights” model of spectrum allocation and radio regulation is based on physics-by-analogy, ignoring the reality of propagation. It’s time to end the ignorance of economists and lawyers, and replace physics-by-analogy with better physical analysis.

My concern is that it will be, like the Net as well, analogous to nothing we know — and in the meantime we’ll be stuck with the notion of spectrum as property, for the simple reason that most of us understand the model, and it works.

Bonus link.

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