The treadmill powered Harry Potter eBook - my greatest invention

My wife is a reasonably disciplined person, but she has a dark secret. She's a binge reader. Lately she's been hitting the Potter pretty hard. Happily she's on the last one, so we're hoping to get her back on the wagon.

Me? Don't believe those Pratchett rumors. Damn you Vinge for luring me to that cursed drink ...

Which brings me to my greatest invention. The Potter powered treadmill. Hook up an eBook to a treadmill, so that there's a relationship between miles walked and page turning ability. If you don't walk enough, you find you can't turn the page any more ...

It won't cure binge reading, but it will extend the reader's lifespan...

Update 10/9/07: Jeff Atwood's post on "The Hacker's Diet" references the "gamercize" which uses exercise measures to limit computer or console access.

Condé Nast and Spam: what's the deal here?

Condé Nast Publications publishes "Gourmet" magazine. Judging by the ads the readership is classically bourgeois. So why do they generate so much spam? It's amazing -- every email address I've ever had gets spam from Conde Nast, usually about "Gourmet". Unsubscribe attempts always fail.

It's easy to eliminate -- I just block "condenastpubs.com". Still, it's weird. I suspect a good portion of the middle class doesn't mind getting spam from Gourmet ...

Update 10/14/07: Judging from a helpful comment, this appears to be a business decision by Conde Nast, not a technical error or a fluke. I think there's a strong case to be made for blacklisting the condenast.com domain.

Incidentally, as of today a Google search on "conde nast spam" has this blog post as the top hit. I suspect someone from Conde Nast is going to read this. They can add their comments below, i promise I'll publish them. They can't email me, since I've blacklisted their domain.

Update 1/18/07: I got another Gourmet magazine spam -- but the domain was erol.com. Turns out this is not a Gourmet spam after all; it's a phishing email. I suspect even Conde Nast hasn't fallen that far. It's a measure of how low they have fallen, however, that phishers are now riding their spammy coattails.

Nokia is the Apple Geek's new best friend

Where can an Apple geek look for help, now that Apple is beating on its most loyal customers?

Into our hour of darkness and despair rides an unexpected savior - Nokia! (emphases mine):

AppleInsider | Nokia launches anti-iPhone campaign amid controversy

Bloggers and hackers aren't the only ones sticking it to iPhone maker Apple Inc. for its closed minded approach to user-customization of the touch-screen handsets -- Nokia has taken advantage of the situation by launching a print and web campaign dubbed "Open to anything."

"We believe the best devices have no limits. That's why we've left the Nokia Nseries open," the Finland-based handset maker wrote on its new "Open to anything" website. "Open to applications. Open to widgets. Open to anything. So go ahead and load it up. What is does is up to you."

The campaign, which was accompanied by the posting of similarly-worded bills in New York City this past weekend, is an obvious response to the latest iPhone update on Thursday...

...The matter is complicated by a number of factors, primarily what is now being perceived by some as a poor job on Apple's part to convey its stance on third-party applications to iPhone users earlier in the handset's lifecycle...

Ahh, balm to our wounds.

Nokia placed two full page ads in the paper NYT about 10 days ago beating up on Apple's control fetish. I didn't comment at the time because I couldn't find any related marketing material on Nokia's web site, but it seems their dysfunctional marketing department is catching up.

This has got to cause pain in Cupertino. Alas this is probably not a good strategic move for Nokia; it's just the sort of thing that might cause Apple (and AT&T?) to change direction. Nokia would be best served by Apple continuing on their current path of self-destruction...

I wonder if Nokia will support iSync?

PS. Nokia has a very annoying flash based web site. I didn't say the Nokia was a smart company ...

Dyer on why Bush invaded Iraq - not the oil

Dyer is no fan of George Bush's rule. In a recent essay, however, he disparages the common belief that Cheney/Bush invaded Iraq to protect the west's oil supply. So what was the reason?

... So why did they invade Iraq, in the end? One motive was certainly the desire for permanent American military bases in the Gulf from which the United States could, at need, stop oil flowing to China. The strategic community in Washington has identified China as America's new strategic rival, and it is becoming more and more vulnerable to interference with its oil imports. (Those 'enduring bases' are still being built in Iraq.) But that is not a big enough reason to explain what happened. I have written tens of thousands of words on the Bush administration's motives for invading Iraq, but in the end I do not know why they did it. I suspect that they don't, either. It just seemed like a neat idea at the time...

More Dyer essays: 8/20-9/17 2007

More Dyer essays:

Gwynne Dyer: 2007

August 20 British Retreat From Iraq
August 27 Sarkozy: The Hyper-President
August 30 Islam and the Idiotic Autocrats
Sept 4 Extreme Climate and Extreme Politics
Sept 6 Terrorism: Lessons from Germany
Sept 10 Marking Time
Sept 17 It's All About Oil

Is schizophrenia the price we pay for an evolving brain?

Schizophrenia is pretty darned common, and it's a terrible disorder with clear inherited roots. So why is it so common?

Scientific American 9/6/07: It's No Delusion: Evolution May Favor Schizophrenia Genes

New research reveals that genes related to the debilitating disorder may also provide developmental advantages..

...Dorus co-authored a report, appearing in this week's Proceedings of the Royal Society B, about the evolution of genes linked to schizophrenia. After analyzing human DNA from several populations around the world and examining primate genomes dating back to the shared ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees, researchers reached a striking conclusion that several gene variants linked to schizophrenia were actually positively selected and remained largely unchanged over time, suggesting that there was some advantage to having them.

"Schizophrenia can be explained by a lot of individual alleles (variations of genes)," Dorus notes. "There are many different loci that impact the actual manifestation of the disease." Over the past decade, several dozen genes have been identified as potential culprits, and scientists believe that several genes cause disruptions in protein formations predisposing a person to schizophrenia.

...the team ... focused on 76 gene variations most strongly related to schizophrenia. By comparing these combinations with the evolution of other genes known to affect neuronal processes, the researchers determined that 28 of the schizophrenia-associated genes have been evolutionarily preferred in recent years by either Caucasian, Asian or African populations.

"Because it's a such a complex genetic trait … you actually expect there to be some variability from population to population, in terms of what genes are playing a role in the disorder," Dorus says. He notes that he was surprised that the study turned up a positive selection for some of the genes most closely associated to the disease, including DISC1 (disrupted in schizophrenia 1), which is involved in the transport of proteins along the relatively lengthy cell bodies of neurons, among them. "The most important thing is we don't really know what the basis of the selection has been," he says. "It could be due to an entire range of neurodevelopmental processes."

Co-author Crespi says that a number of theories have been floating around regarding the persistence of schizophrenia's genetic underpinnings. One holds that schizophrenia is a "disorder of language" and that the illness is an unfortunate consequence of the development of human speech, expression and creativity. "Whenever you get strong selection, it's like a big plus, and you can drag along a lot of minuses," he says. "You can think of schizophrenics as paying the price of all the cognitive and language skills that humans have—they have too many of the alleles that taken individually…might have positive effect, but together they are bad."

Dorus says the team will now home in on the 28 genes fingered in positive selection in the hope of finding new treatments for the mysterious disorder.

The explanation seems to be that it's very hard to construct a functioning human brain, and that the brain is still actively evolving. So in this case there's not necessarily an advantage to a schizophrenia gene, but rather that the diffuse set of disorders we label as "schizophrenia" arise because the human brain is very much a work in progress, one with a high defect rate ...

Update 7/2/2010: Structural variation in the human genome and its r... [Annu Rev Med. 2010]...

... The discovery of submicroscopic copy-number variations (CNVs) present in our genomes has changed dramatically our perspective on DNA structural variation and disease. ... CNVs, to a larger extent than SNPs, have been shown to be responsible for human evolution, genetic diversity between individuals, and a rapidly increasing number of traits or susceptibility to traits; such conditions have been referred to as genomic disorders. In addition to well-known sporadic chromosomal microdeletion syndromes and Mendelian diseases, many common complex traits including autism and schizophrenia can result from CNVs. Both recombination- and replication-based mechanisms for CNV formation have been described.

A picture to remember - Rangoon

TIME, September 27, 2007

Pictures of the Week - TIME

Photographer Kenji Nagai takes photographs after being shot by soldiers in Rangoon as the Burmese Army fired on the crowd. Kenji later died.

Send a letter to Rush

Army of Dude: The Real Deal is a post from a former Limbaugh listener, and veteran, who's opinions have changed. Apparently the latest right wing meme is to label any veteran who disagrees with them a "phony soldier". I'm sure someone will send it to Rush as a letter ...

Apple guilty of second degree iPhone murder?

We know there's a civil war brewing between Apple and an arguably critical part of their customer base -- the OS X geek community. If it turns out that Apple deliberately configured the latest OS X update to destroy hacked iPhones, the conflict will move up a notch. Glenn Fleishman of the venerable and respected Tidbits organization says Apple is not guilty of iphoneslaughter, but rather of murder in the second degree ...

TidBITS iPod & iPhone: Staff Roundtable: Apple Should Do No Harm to iPhones

... Apple has changed that equation with the iPhone's latest firmware and operating system upgrade. The iPhone is a powerful little computer controlled by powerful interests. Like almost all electronics sold today, includes a variety of kinds of firmware, or the software that controls the hardware. The firmware may be stored in different places, too, with radio cards and separate modules have their own internal firmware. Part of the firmware handles the boot procedure that allows the device to load the operating system; other parts handle upgrading and installing new firmware. Because the iPhone uses non-volatile, electrically erasable memory, there should be no problem with restoring a phone that has had every manner of change applied to it, as long as the boot routines aren't affected.

The hacks that unlock an iPhone to work with other carriers write special instructions to the firmware that controls the cellular network association to allow the use of any SIM - the authentication module used on worldwide GSM cellular networks - and not just AT&T's. This shouldn't affect the bootstrapping or firmware and operating system restore process one bit.

Gizmodo posted an interview with the iPhone Dev Team, a community effort that resulted in unlocking software. In the interview, the Dev Team makes it clear that Apple could very simply have included in the update a way to check whether the code related to the lock has been modified, and rewrite it. The team says that Apple could also fairly easily restore a default state and then more securely lock the phone down. (The team is also positive they can restore iPhones to a factory default state that have been "bricked," or turned into an unusable hunk of electronics.)

Has Apple lost its collective mind?

Bicycling and Skating: Urban variations?

Minneapolis is a great bicycling city, and Saint Paul is not far behind. On the other hand, we don't have as many inline skaters as one might expect. We invented the darned sport (ignore the cheese heads in the corner please), but our Friday Night Skates occur only twice a month, and we rarely get more than twenty skaters. Our inline skate club is a great group, but we're a bit on the ... experienced side of 40 (I'm going to sign up my 10 yo to drop our average age).

So why do many of these cities have pretty active night skates, not to mention Amsterdam and especially Paris?

... It takes place every Friday night, except when it rains, and can attract as many as 20,000 skaters. Group skates have been around awhile in the United States and Europe, especially since the advent of in-line skates, which provide speed and maneuverability not possible with quad roller skates. But, in scale and longevity, nothing matches the festive Parisian skates, which began in a small way in 1994 and quickly grew to a point where, in 1997, the police decided to become involved for the safety of everyone concerned -- skaters, motorists, and onlookers. Today, the police not only block off roads and provide an escort for the skaters, but about 20 officers on skates join the rolling ranks during the weekly "rando," derived from the French word "randonée," or tour...

Ok, so Paris is bigger and has lots of tourists. Still, you think we'd be able to muster a few hundred!

One theory I've heard is that the bicycling and skating populations are very similar people. In Minneapolis that population bicycles, but in other cities the bicycle routes aren't nearly as appealing -- so skating is more common. Of course that doesn't explain Amsterdam ...

Curious. I do think we ought to try a weekly skate, but since I get free to join 'em only about twice a year I'll have to wait for someone else to make that happen.

Helmets: good for inline, not so good for bicycling?

Inline skaters should wear a helmet. But what about bicyclists? I wear a bike helmet, and so do my children. It seems to make sense anyone riding on a bicycle path, but today I read that it may not work for anyone riding with cars.

The problem, alas, is the car driver.

Cars are not much of a factor in head injuries occurring during inline skating; inline skaters rarely mingle with cars. Bicycles, however, do. Most bike fatalities and injuries are automobile related.

It turns out that automobile drivers, on average, give more space to bicyclists not wearing a helmet. If you wear a helmet, there's a 23% increase in automobiles passing within the 1 meter danger zone [1]

I suspect that this is doubly true for motorcyclists, though the researchers did not study that topic. So much for all my disparaging remarks about bare headed motorcyclists; if my guess is right than the decreased risk of automotive impact will far outweigh the decrease in head protection. Aging boomers -- let your residual hair flow free ...

Maybe.

So what do we do while researchers sort this out? If you're not riding in traffic the evidence strongly favors riding a bicycle helmet. If you ride in traffic, however, things are trickier than I'd once believed. There's a case for putting the helmet on the bike rack when entering traffic, and donning it for the bike trail...

I won't change what I do. For one thing surprising results require confirmation, for another I need to reinforce the children's behavior. For them the helmet is an unadulterated good.

In the meantime, let's find out what other things we can do to get more space from cars. How about a horizontal flag that extends one foot left? Professor Walker, please retest with the flag. Let's see what we can do to get those drivers outside the 3 foot limit. Maybe a flag and a helmet together will provide both head protection and a lower impact risk.

[1] Scientfic American Fact or Fiction, October 2007. Walker et al, Accident Analysis and Prevention, March 2007. The summary didn't mention gender variation. My experience is that women drivers give much less room than men drivers, perhaps because of a greater reluctance to cross the solid center line.

DI - Lake Peigneur

It's only 27 years ago, you'd think I'd remember this ...

Damn Interesting » Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom

...Within two days, what had previously been an eleven-foot-deep freshwater body was replaced with a 1,300-foot-deep saltwater lake....

Turns out there's a good reason I don't remember this. The NYT story from 11/21/1980 is a brief, understated, summary within the "In the Nation" column.

There's a interesting gap between the miniscule national attention given the story in 1980 and what had really happened. Today it would be on FOX and CNN around the clock.

The evolutionary biology of Giardia - no mitochondria

Giardiasis is an annoying and fairly common infection, but we don't think it's not a big deal for a healthy adult. Turns out that the Giardiasis bug, Giardia, has some very interesting biology ....

The Loom : Carrying Ancient History In The Gut

... Giardia, many researchers suspected, was one of those early-branching eukaryotes. This suspicion was generated at first by simply eyeballing the creatures. They are quite weird. Their teardrop-shaped bodies have eight tails for swimming and a suction pad to clamp onto the wall of the intestines. They also carry two nuclei, each with its own DNA. How Giardia manages to keep all those genes coordinated--and why it even has two nuclei--remain mysteries. Bizarre single-celled eukaryotes are pretty easy to find. What set Giardia apart from most other eukaryotes was what it lacked. Scientists could not find a lot of those compartments in which the business of most eukaryote cells takes place.

Most significantly, it was missing mitochondria. Lots of things take place inside these sausage-shaped structures, most importantly the generation of ATP, the energy-bearing molecule found in all living things. Mitochondria started out as free-living bacteria and later evolved into permanent symbionts inside the eukaryote cell. (Mitochondria still carry some DNA of their own, which bears a strong resemblance to one group of free-living bacteria.) The fact that Giardia seemed to be missing mitochondria hinted that it was a transitional eukaryote...

Alas, the story is more complex than this, so you do need to and read Carl Zimmer's essay. Fascinating stuff.

I probably invited this bug onboard during a particularly rough college train trip through Mexico. I didn't realize I was carrying a possible echo of biology's "big bang".

Incidentally, speaking of parallels to cosmology, there's apparently a suspicion among some biologists that there's a kind of "dark matter" component to biology. They're looking for terrestrial life forms so bizarre that we don't even recognize them as "living" ...

Apple is at war with its own uber geeks

When Apple last returned from the grave, for the second or third time, geeks were important. OS X is a respectable piece of software, and geeks made it work. In several domains, particularly in communications and knowledge management, OS X now has a better range of solutions than XP.

Today, however, Apple is at war with its uber-geeks -- because of the iPhone. Saul Hansell describes the mood in the NYT, though he's confusing the unlockers with those who want the best possible iPhone on AT&T...

Steve Jobs Girds for the Long iPhone War - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

... This afternoon, Apple did release the update. And the gadget blogs confirm that it does indeed wreak havoc on modified iPhones. Some phones have indeed been “bricked.” In others, unofficial applications have been disabled. And there are worries that hacking the updated phone will be harder.

The result: Serious hackers will keep find new ways to break in. Less technically inclined may well find themselves chastened into technological submission, assuming they can get their pricey toys to work at all. Will Apple really refuse to help people with iBricks?

Speaking in London last week, Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said the company is in a “cat and mouse” game with hackers.

“People will try to break in, and it’s our job to stop them breaking in,” he said.

There is something futile about the way Apple appears to be fighting some of its most ardent fans, those who want to use the full capabilities of the iPhone...

... Since the iPhone is a very sleek, capable handheld computer, people are going to want to run programs on it. They are going to want to hack and see what they can build. It’s a law of nature. And Apple might as well be fighting gravity.

Many other cell phones are locked down, of course. But few other phones capture the imagination of programmers the way the iPhone does.

There are two loosely allied groups of Apple geeks now at war with Apple. The unlockers want to use the phone with other providers; but most of Apple's geeks are willing to respect Apple's deal with Satan -- especially if the iTouch is improved. Everyone, however, is now united for at least a partly open iPhone and iTouch native development platform.

Geeks don't trust Apple to put the solutions we need on the iPhone. Apple's aiming at the mass market, and we're not mass market. We understand Apple can't justify investing in the solutions we need, but that's ok. There are lots of small, low overhead, high quality OS X development shops that will be able to make a very good living off the markets Apple doesn't want. Would it really kill Apple to have a 3rd party bluetooth keyboard added to the iPhone? How about the PIM/Outlook solutions Apple won't build? FileMaker Mobile? The list is long.

If Apple keeps the iPhone closed they'll alienate their uber geeks -- not just from the iPhone, but from the entire OS X platform. Maybe they're ready to run that risk, but I don't think the gain outweighs the likely costs. Keeping the iPhone virus free is a good reason to have a software certification program and a signed secure installation package, but it's not sufficient justification to close the platform.

Apple doesn't need to open the iPhone today, but they need to provide a roadmap in the weeks to come. Otherwise the Apple blogs are going to turn mean ...

Update 9/28/07: Wired has a brilliant summary of what Apple is failing to do -- the iPhone pre and post bricking. Some Apple employee ought to paste the Wired graphic to Steve Jobs door.

My double rainbow

Wikipedia's picture of a double rainbox (left, credit) is lovely, but mine was even better. The secondary rainbow was better defined, and I think I counted nine distinct bands in the primary. It arced, like this picture, from ground to ground.

I wasn't in a beautiful Alaskan national park, I was leaving my office in Roseville, Minnesota. There'd been a downpour, but the rain was now steady but widely spaced, an odd pattern I don't see much. The sun was at about 25 degrees above the horizon, and the western sky had cleared, so the light was completely unobstructed.

I stood and watched in amazement. It lasted only about four to five minutes, then the secondary began to fade. I phoned home when I saw it, but it couldn't be seen even 15 miles south of me. It was a private show.

I don't think I've ever seen a rainbow like that, and perhaps I never will again. It was just one of those odd, unexpected gifts, like a letter from an old friend.