P.S. A Column On Things

Craig Reynolds Technobriefs

by Craig Reynolds

Human evolution: there is a tendency to think of evolution as something that happened a long time ago, or that it happens at such a slow rate that it can be seen over only intervals of millions of years. In fact the process of evolution is ongoing and its effects can be observed during a single human lifetime. For example The Beak of the Finch describes the rapid rate of evolution of the Galapagos Finches studied by Darwin. Recent work has looked at the rate of human evolution which not only continues today but seems to be accelerating: Selection Spurred Recent Evolution, Researchers Say and Humans Evolving More Rapidly Than Ever, Say Scientists.

Games: "3d video cameras" provide both a color and a depth for each pixel in an image. My coworker Rick Marks was a pioneer in the use of video as input for games and did early work with 3d cameras. Some new work in this area: New 3D camera eyes Wii-style gameplay.  Also, a new initiative to use game technology as a simulation and training tool for the military: Army Sets Up New Office of Videogames.

Technobits: DNS attack could signal Phishing 2.0 --- Open-source legal group strikes again on BusyBox, suing Verizon --- RIP: PlaysForSure 2004-2007 --- some look askance as Google moves into Wikipedia-like content: Google's Know-It-All Project and Google's Knol experiment to rival Wikipedia? --- The Robots Among Us ("If robotics technology now stands where computing did in the '70s, what can we expect in the future?") --- Mars Rover Finding Suggests Once Habitable Environment --- Bamboo PC is eco-friendly and looks nice, too --- second Ted Nelson reference in as many weeks: When Big Blue Got a Glimpse of the Future --- The New York Times Magazine on significant innovations of the last year.

Sen. Franken? Lasusa Links, Dan Grobstein File

• I love Al Franken, even if he is a Harvard man. As everyone who knows me knows, I subscribe to the theory that you can "Always tell a Harvard man, you just can't tell him much." But he's right on all the issues and so much better than Sen. Coleman of Minnesota it is painful to contemplate. Check out the NY Times story, Comedian Says Minnesota Run Is a Serious One.

Dan Grobstein File

• Spike Grobstein enjoyed this article about Information Technology at the South Pole.

• SPORTS / OTHER SPORTS
| December 10, 2007
Flying Humans, Hoping to Land With No Chute
By MATT HIGGINS
Jeb Corliss wants to fly - not the way the Wright brothers wanted to fly, but the way we do in our dreams. He wants to jump from a helicopter and land without using a parachute.
• BUSINESS
| December 6, 2007
Tracing Business Acumen to Dyslexia
By BRENT BOWERS
A study concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to excel in oral communication and problem solving and to own two or more businesses.
• Erase your searches…

• This report from Dan:
  I saw Malcom Gladwell speak for the third time on Monday night. Went with Spike (first time). Gladwell and Robert Krulwich of NPR were discussing how to identify smart people and get the most bang for the buck out of a group. (He says most geniuses were pretty normal or thought of as dumb when young so he is against putting kids into gifted classes early on because since you get the best teachers you tend to have a batch of kids that do very well, but you miss all the other kids who would also do very well in those classes. He's also found that people who are experts in their fields tell him that it took them 10 years or 10,000 hours. His article this week in the New Yorker about IQ is also tied into the talk. Also he says that normal intelligent people who go to either Ivy League schools or state schools tend to even out after 10 or 15 years in income. And you meet just as many networking contacts in either place. He'd like it if everybody was not allowed to mention their alma mater after graduating.). Gladwell is working on a new book, but wouldn't talk about it. One of the audience questions was about his personal life and he skated around it. That all got me googling him today when it slowed down. He's very secretive though he did say that his mother is a brown skinned Jamaican and his father English white and he grew up in rural Canada and was a nationally ranked middle distance runner in school who used to regularly beat a future record holder which confirms his thesis that you can't pick the best kids early in life.
  
  Anyway, I ran into this interesting quote:
  
  "People impersonate writers all the time. That's why we have to have editors"
  
  I also started re-reading "The Tipping Point" at lunch. It's strange how you hit sections that you distinctly remember reading and sections that seem like they are brand new.

• "Enhanced interrogation" is nothing new.

End Dec. 17 Column

Cronkite Turns Against Another War

Walter Cronkite, a brave WWII reporter for United Press (who also covered the war crimes trials at Nuremberg), famously turned against the Vietnam War in 1968. He is showing similar courage in the present circumstances: Our Troops Must Leave Iraq

There are some who might say that it is unfortunate that Walter left the anchor chair (and that it is unfortunate that his network departed from the Murrow/Cronkite/Rather tradition. A particular departure: when Dan left the chair after the display of multiple profiles in cowardice by the executives and owner of CBS. Bob Schieffer replaced him -- the same Bob whose brother is Bush's US ambassador to Japan.

***

Briefs:

• The slide of Germany towards dictationship in the 1930s. A tale of incrementalism.

• In FISA Speech, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Sharply Criticizes Bush Administration's Assertion of Executive Power
• NBC Decides to Run Conservative-Group Ad. Of course, NBC would have done the same thing for a liberal or Democratic issue ad. Righhttt…

Technobriefs

by Craig Reynolds

ENIAC Programmers: about a month ago I ran across a blog post linking the the web page of a documentary in production about the pioneering women who programmed the ENIAC computer during World War II: Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers. Now ABC has highlighted them and perhaps this will help push the documentary forward.

Charts and graphs on web pages: Google release a great free utility for charts on web pages. The chart graphics are generated on the fly so can display updating real time data: Google Code Blog: Embed charts in web pages with one of our simplest APIs yet. To appreciate the amazing breadth of this utility skim over the graphics in this user's manual: Google Chart API.

Facebook infects users with spyware: Facebook Revamps Ad System, Update: Facebook caves in to Beacon criticism and Facebook Doesn't Budge on Beacon's Broad User Tracking.

Copyright: Digital developments could be tipping point for MP3 and, oh the irony, MPAA's University wiretapping product taken down for violating copyright.

Phone stuff: when iPhone came out everyone said it would appeal to high tech hipsters, but not to "the enterprise" yet: Apple iPhone winning corporate fans despite flaws. Now everyone is claiming to be "open": AT&T flings cellphone network wide open even if they really aren't: AT&T Does Nothing, Convinces Reporter It Has Now 'Opened' Its Network.

Wacky cool architecture: Printing Out Buildings: R&Sie(n)'s Museum of Ice and top 9 unique structures soon to be built.

Technobits: MIT marks OpenCourseWare milestone - MIT News Office and MIT digitizes its courses, throws them online, and asks ‘What now?” --- Harnessing the Power of the Gulf Stream --- Some Airlines to Offer In-Flight Internet Service --- news from Redmond: 'Kill switch' dropped from Vista, Microsoft Wants One Laptop Per Child System To Run Windows XP and Microsoft spikes dirty Santa bot --- Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia --- robots: Driverless Cars and Flexible-jointed robot is no pushover --- Hack: Young Professor Makes Lab-on-a-Chip with Shrinky Dink and Toaster Oven --- Chimps Exhibit Superior Memory, Outshining Humans and Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee? --- Physical therapists prescribe Wii time --- 'Skin cell cure' for sickle cells ---I have a treasured, well worn copy of Computer Lib/Dream Machines from 1974: Unsung innovators: Ted Nelson --- last but not least a great video: Put Your Life Into Perspective

Lasusa Links, Dan Grobstein File

Tom Lasusa surfs the web so you don't have to: Man Sentenced in Bizarre Diagnosing Scam (Did the victims lose their intelligence as well as their cash?)… Ideal stocking stuffer: rhino poop…Julian Beever's Latest 3D Sidewalk Paintings view! McDonald's Advertises On Elementary School Report Cards… Parent Sells Pot Smoking Teen's Guitar Hero III On eBay… Nitwit of the Week: Which Came First -- the Chicken or the Egg? The View's Sherri Shephard says "Neither. Jesus came first." (That's the gal who said she wasn't convinced the world wasn't flat)… Your Honor, I call TweetyBird to the stand… Elvis is Alive Museum isn't dead

Tom also sends along this special item:

Last week was the 27th anniversary of John Lennon's death. Yoko Ono has posted a letter to John. It's a very sweet, sad and poignant note.

The accompanying video includes some very tough images of the victims of war, played to Lennon's song "Happy Xmas (war is over)." But maybe we all need those harsh doses of reality once in a while to remind us how fortunate some of us are...and how unfortunate many are not.

Dan Grobstein File

• Quote:
  I wish that the Democrats would force them to actually filibuster. Maybe then the country will figure out who is causing the problem. (How come when the Republicans controlled both houses the Democrats weren't allowed to filibuster? We were told that it would be the end of representative government if they were allowed to filibuster anything.
  Unquote
• If Iran isn't a nuclear threat, who needs the European missile shield?
• Timeline of Bush/Cheney destruction of civil liberties.
• If you don't care much for Rudy and his serial adultery, you'll like this.
• They Thought They Were Free, University of Chicago Press. Martin Mayer explains what it felt like to be in Germany as it slid into dictatorship.

• I heard on the radio about a service (for $100 a year) from flyclear.com that lets you zip through airport security with your high tech card. I can't figure out how this makes anybody safe. I don't think the current system is done very well, but at least everybody goes through it and you have a certain random chance of a more thorough search. Just because you can pass their background check today doesn't mean that in 4 or 5 years you can still pass it. But you'd have your card and for a small investment of $400 or $500 in membership fees, you can zip onto an airplane and bypass security. Doesn't seem right.

End December 10 column

How I Met My Wife

This is the week, back in 1977, when I met my wife. I love the story, and I love to retell it.

For reasons that don't bear going into, I found myself suddenly unattached in San Francisco just after Thanksgiving. I went to S.J., who worked with me at Bank of America World Headquarters. He seemed to be a very successful bachelor (although, unbeknown to either of us, he had met the woman who would become his wife).

At the time, fern bars and yuppie singles bars were a recent invention and had spread over San Francisco like kudzu. I am not much of a drinker, but I assumed the way to meet girls was to hang out in bars. I will be forever grateful to S., who said to me, "All you meet in bars is girls who drink. Join the World Affairs Council. It is the intellectuals singles bar of Northern California.

I went down that day on my lunch hour and joined. Lo and behold, the "youth wing," (40 and younger), known as the International Forum, was holding an international wine tasting that night. I still wake up with cold sweats wondering what would have become of me if I hadn't joined that day and gone to the event that night.

I walked into the room, committed to introducing myself to any woman whose head I could see over the crows (I was 6-2 myself at the time--now 6 feet tall). I saw three women; one who brushed me off, one named L that I dated a half-dozen times, and a woman named Vicki, a member of the steering committee who was pouring Australian wine. She was wearing high-heeled boots. I loved those boots. We talked and exchanged business cards. Vicki later told me she'd been on the World Affairs Council for years without meeting anyone special. How lucky am I?

I liked her. She was (and remains) smart, pretty and funny. I asked her to dinner that night. She declined. "I have a rule about not blowing off dinner with girlfriends for a guy." I have since learned she was dining with her friend M.S., who has since told me that when she saw Vicki that night, she was told, "I've met someone special." Amazing, for such a brief encounter. Vicki told me she was leaving for a week's vacation in Mexico. I figured I was being brushed off. A week later, I got a Christmas card at work--it was a mobile, and I had trouble hanging it, but loved it.

We started dating; we had lunch at the long-gone Hung Far Low restaurant on Grant Street overlooking the bank tower at California and Kearny. We ate in her apartment in the Normandy Village in Berkeley. I did not feel it was appropriate to invite her to my friend P's house, where I was renting a bedroom. And then, just like that, on Jan. 10, I moved to Oregon to work for the late, great afternoon daily, the Oregon Journal. Vicki and I wrote each other constantly. In June, she flew up to join me in a drive to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland--a four hour drive. We talked and talked and talked… first on a train ride in a special Union Pacific car to a new switching yard in eastern Oregon, then on the drive south. We talked and talked and sealed the deal. The rest is a story for another time, but it was 30 years ago this week that my already great life moved on to become truly outstanding--the week I met my wife.

Making Caen… er, Garchik

The definition of "making it" in San Francisco used to be a mention in Herb Caen's column. Well, Herb has, alas, moved on to the big all-day paper in the sky. For a long time, Leah Garchik has been sliding towards becoming a three-dot columnist, interspersed with essays--Caen's old style. Last week, she asked people for celebrity dis stories. I sent her mine. She ran it on Nov. 30, 2007:

-- In 1992, during an hourlong interview with Bill Gates, journalist Paul Schindler recalls that Gates told him three times, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

"It only made me feel a little better, later," says Schindler, "to read in several biographies that he has been known to use that endearing comment frequently with subordinates. Thing is, I didn't think I was his subordinate."

We still don't know what happened in Ohio

A prosecution has commenced over what appears to be a $5,000 conflict of interest by a mere deputy director of a board of elections (Franklin County - Columbus, Ohio) which was one focus of the successful theft of the 2004 Presidential election via fraud and unconstitutional racial discrimination. Reportedly, when Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell (now out of office) salted Ohio with about 59 counties worth of electronic touch screen voting machines in 2005 (after being Ohio Chair of the 2004 Bush-Cheney effort), he owned about $10,000 of stock in the manufacturer (then known as Diebold). It appears that as of November 30, 2007, no criminal prosecution of Mr. Blackwell has been filed for what is arguably a conflict of interest specifically banned by Ohio statute.

Grooming the next Ahmad Chalabi. While less than independent grounds, the article at this link provides another good reason to restore the economy by putting Dick ("I made $16 million on Halliburton stock options since 9/11") Cheney and George W. Bush in the private sector now so they can contribute to GNP. As long as Bush and Cheney (aka Shrub and Darth) stay out of the private sector, ethically questionable clowns like Perle will be more effective in advocating use of your tax dollars to degrade U.S. national security while they line their own pockets.

Flung over the transom… the Village Voice says Rudy's real position on terrorism is: How can I make a buck? Also, a Frontline documentary about Spying on the Home Front. Is the Bush Administration and its congressional allies Resurrecting the Star Chamber? A not-altogether reliable website sounds the warning: Help to topple S.1959, Homegrown Terrorism and Violent Radicalization Prevention (actual text here). More domestic spying? (read down further for more on S.1959).