WorldWide Telescope: A spring gift from Microsoft Research

Microsoft is delivering the universe this spring, dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray.

WWTelescope Frequently Asked Questions

... The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®'s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience...

I remember when Planetaria were high tech -- "... planetarium projection apparatus uses a hollow ball with a light inside, and a pinhole for each star, hence the name "star ball".

Yes, back then I liked to go and watch a fancier version of a flashlight in a tin can.

Now we have Google Sky, and soon we'll have the WorldWide Telescope.

Weird.

I'd like to hook the WWTelescope to a big HDTV and a remote control ...

Billionaire wanted - how to manage a broken brain in the stone age

Bestyoucan is seeking a billionaire with a cognitively disabled child or sibling ...

Be the Best You can Be How do you manage a broken brain? We don't know

How do you manage a broken brain?

...Do you create a profile of all the strengths and weaknesses, a visual representation to analyze and evaluate? An MRI of the mind?

Do we create programs to strengthen the weakest areas, or do we leverage the stronger domains? Or perhaps the middle range?

Can two or three areas of strength be combined to help an area of weakness? What role might cognition-medications have? What role do psychostimulants have?

How do we measure progress? How do we know when to change direction?

How do we intervene in infancy, when surgeons can remove half the brain and a child can still go to college? In early childhood? In pre-adolescence? During the teen years? In adulthood? In old age?

How do we leverage computerized, robotic, and remote human aides to support severely impaired cognitive functions?

We flippin' don't know...

... I can imagine ways to start to make progress. Ways to study developing brains and minds. Ways to create comprehensive profiles of strengths and weaknesses and use those profiles in discussion and analysis. What I can't see is how to make significant progress in my lifespan with the available political will and funding....

Let him know if you find any.

Palm OS Obit #245 - and a contrary opinion on the death of the mobile platform

Yet another Palm / Handheld obit, this time focusing on applications: Mobile Opportunity: Mobile applications, RIP.

There are some interesting bits in the essay. Fragmentation of platforms (esp. Microsoft's numerous platforms) made it prohibitively expensive to reach large numbers of users. Java was mentioned in an editorial aside, I think it deserves more attention as a disaster all by itself.

Greedy/incompetent carriers sought funds through "certification", but never seemed to have much interest in building a platform.

I particularly appreciated the discussion on marketing and platforms. I can confirm that the great free websites promoting PalmOS software are largely gone ...

(Elia Freedman): Then there's marketing. Here too there are two issues. The first is vertical marketing. Few mobile devices align with verticals, which makes it hard for a vertical application developer like us to partner with any particular device. For example, Palm even at its height had no more than 20% of real estate agents. To cover our development costs on 20% of target customer base, I had to charge more than the customers could pay. So I was forced to make my application work on more platforms, which pushed me back into the million platforms problem.

The other marketing problem is the disappearance of horizontal distribution. You used to have some resellers and free software sites on the web that promoted mobile shareware and commercial products at low or no charge. You could also work through the hardware vendors to get to customers. We were masters of this; at one point we were bundled on 85% of mobile computing devices. We had retail distribution too.

None of those avenues are available any more. Retail has gone away. The online resellers have gone from taking 20% of our revenue to taking 50-70%. The other day I went looking for the freeware sites where we used to promote, and they have disappeared. Hardware bundling has ended because carriers took that over and made it impossible for us to get on the device. Palm used to have a bonus CD and a flyer that they put in the box, where we could get promoted. The carriers shut down both of those. They do not care about vertical apps. It feels like they don't want any apps at all.

Michael Mace continues:

...I've always had faith that eventually we would solve these problems. We'd get the right OS vendor paired with a handset maker who understood the situation and an operator who was willing to give up some control, and a mobile platform would take off again. Maybe not Palm OS, but on somebody's platform we'd get it all right.

I don't believe that any more. I think it's too late...f you're creating a website, you don't have to get permission from a carrier. You don't have to get anything certified by anyone. You don't have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don't have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won't even be aware that you exist. It'll just be you and the user, communicating directly.
...

Not bad, but I think there's a flaw in his reasoning. He's clearly stating that Palm built an elegant platform, but failed to create a robust business model.

That's not my recollection.

Palm did build a very elegant platform with the Palm III and V, but after the V their quality went off a cliff. Around the same time Microsoft cut them out of the business market with Exchange, and then Palm chopped off its remaining leg by fighting a no-win battle with Xerox over Graffiti One.

As for a developer community, Palm had the Palm Economy -- not a bad idea. I can't speak to their execution on that, but my sense it collapsed because the platform rotted away first.

Microsoft, meanwhile, having destroyed all their competitors without actually delivering anything, developed mad cow diseases and drove the Mobile PC platform into the grave for the heck of it. (Hey, how else can you explain their mobile strategy?)

So now we have the iPhone. The browser experience leads people like Mace to predict that the browser is the new platform.

Maybe.

On the other hand, there are a lot of very, very smart developers who want to create the best possible native experiences for millions of iPhone users. Experiences that work on airplanes, cars, trains and lots of other places where the wireless experience sucks. Sure, you'll be able to create disconnected apps using Google Gears 2009 and Adobe AIR 2009, but they won't have the smooth elegance of native apps.

If Apple can prosper while staying clear of Microsoft's Exchange turf (don't go there Apple, it's a death trap) Mace may discover that he's declared the mobile platform dead at exactly the wrong time ...

Using a webcam to help with audio-only phone conferences

I'm certain someone has written about this, but I couldn't find it on a quick web search.

Office videoconferencing has been limited by corporate bandwidth and the dismal state of USB webcams [1]; there's no practical solution that enables one to share whiteboard work over a video link for example. Even so, I've recently been persuaded that for many people, including me, even crummy low resolution images enable better social interaction and higher quality communication.

So I've started using a webcam with Office Communicator 2005. Unfortunately the people I communicate with don't usually have a webcam, so it's one way. They see me. I either see a blank space or my own face.

That's where I made an interesting discovery. It helps me, when on a phone call, to see my own face. It helps me be more patient, and even to be a better listener. Of course, as Emily points out, a mirror would have the same effect -- but a mirror in my office would seem a bit .... odd.

So I'm experimenting with viewing my own face and body language when I'm on voice only calls. I'm guessing it will help me be more conscious of my own reactions, and better able to manage the call. 

I suspect this might be a bigger help for people with geek-genes than for non-geeks. 

This would make an interesting psychology study btw ...

(I'm sure someone has written about doing this with a mirror in the "old days". One could probably use an iPhone with "mirror" wallpaper in place of a physical mirror or webcam.)

[1] BTW, the built-in Mac webcams aren't the equal of the much mourned firewire iSight (best webcam ever) but they produce much better results than my Microsoft LifeCam. It's not just resolution, it's also video rate, color balance, focus, white balance and, above all, adjustment for variable lighting.

The meaning of median compensation with a high school education

The problem with this statement

William Kristol's bad grade in economics - How the World Works - Salon.com

...For American men with only a high school education, Rodrik writes, median compensation has declined by 10 percent since 1980...

is that the average man with only a high school education in 1980 is probably not the same as the average man with only a high school education in 2008. In 2008 we're talking about someone who's either making some very bad decisions or who has a very significant cognitive disability. In 1980 the group would have included many people who would now go to college or trade school; back then these folks could enter the blue collar labor market and be reasonably well paid.

I think if one adjusted for IQ the income decline would be much less than 10%.

Odd to find myself almost defending Kristol here, as I do believe that much of America is being "Left Behind" - economically speaking. It's just that I have a hard time letting an illogical statement stand ...

Sometimes medical progress is exceedingly slow

Much is made of the great speed of medical progress, of impossibility or keeping up, etc, etc.

Sometimes yes, that is true -- though much that is "new" does not last. Often though, progress is glacial.

One of my medical hobbies is using a Pubmed feed to track articles written about aphthous stomatitis (aka canker sores). This is a generally benign (albeit painful) condition that remains almost as mysterious today as it was when I entered McGill in 1982.

For example, today's feed tossed up an article that could have been written thirty years ago: Topical minocycline for managing symptoms of recur...[Spec Care Dentist. 2008 Jan-Feb].

Sheesh.

In 1982 we were pretty sure canker sores would not be a great mystery in 2008. Of course in 1995 we were certain everyone would have fiber to the desktop by 2001 ...

Dark energy is not a force, and another take on fermions and bosons

This December post by CV has been in my queue for a while. He starts out complaining about the popular depiction of Dark Energy as a "force", but soon digresses into lots of basic physics I have trouble remembering.

Here are the parts I particularly liked:

A Dark, Misleading Force | Cosmic Variance

... The wrong part is referring to dark energy as a “force,” which it’s not...

... quantum field theory implies that the ingredients of a four-dimensional universe are divided neatly into two types: fermions, which cannot pile on top of each other due to the exclusion principle, and bosons, which can. That’s extremely close to the stuff/force distinction, and indeed we tend to associate the known bosonic fields — gravity, electromagnetism, gluons, and weak vector bosons — with the “forces of nature.” Personally I like to count the Higgs boson as a fifth force rather than a new matter particle, but that’s just because I’m especially fastidious....

...dark energy is definitely “stuff.” It’s not a new force. (There might be a force associated with it, if the dark energy is a light scalar field, but that force is so weak that it’s not been detected, and certainly isn’t responsible for the acceleration of the universe.) In fact, the relevant force is a pretty old one — gravity! Cosmologists consider all kinds of crazy ideas in their efforts to account for dark energy, but in all the sensible theories I’ve heard of, it’s gravity that is the operative force. The dark energy is causing a gravitational field, and an interesting kind of field that causes distant objects to appear to accelerate away from us rather than toward us, but it’s definitely gravity that is doing the forcing here...

...Anyone who has spoken about “energy” or “dimensions” to a non-specialist audience has come across this language barrier. Just recently it was finally beaten into me how bad “dark” is for describing “dark matter” and “dark energy.” What we mean by “dark” in these cases is “completely transparent to light.” To your average non-physicist, it turns out, “dark” might mean “completely absorbs light.” Which is the opposite! Who knew? That’s why I prefer calling it “smooth tension,” which sounds more Barry White than Public Enemy.

What I would really like to get rid of is any discussion of “negative pressure.” The important thing about dark energy is that it’s persistent — the density (energy per cubic centimeter) remains roughly constant, even as the universe expands. Therefore, according to general relativity, it imparts a perpetual impulse to the expansion of the universe, not one that gradually dilutes away. A constant density leads to a constant expansion rate, which means that the time it takes the universe to double in size is a constant. But if the universe doubles in size every ten billion years or so, what we see is distant galaxies accelerating away — first they are X parsecs away, then they are 2X parsecs away, then 4X parsecs away, then 8X, etc. The distance grows faster and faster, which we observe as acceleration...

Italics mine. I left out his further discussion on negative pressure, he persuaded me that it's a dumb concept (sort of like "centrifugal force").

Challenges of software as service: Spolsky's version

Amazon's S3 was down the other day. A lot of company's that use S3 were down too.

Such are the woes of 'software as service' -- what we used to call "application service provision".

Amazon didn't say much about the S3 outage, but when something similar happened to Joel Spolsky's product he had quite a few interesting comments:

Five whys - Joel on Software

..Most well-run online services will have two, maybe three outages a year. With so few data points, the length of the outage starts to become really significant, and that's one of those things that's wildly variable. Suddenly, you're talking about how long it takes a human to get to the equipment and swap out a broken part. To get really high uptime, you can't wait for a human to switch out failed parts. You can't even wait for a human to figure out what went wrong: you have to have previously thought of every possible thing that can possibly go wrong, which is vanishingly improbable. It's the unexpected unexpecteds, not the expected unexpecteds, that kill you.

...Think of it this way: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you've just blown your downtime budget for the next century. Even the most notoriously reliable systems, like AT&T's long distance service, have had long outages (six hours in 1991) which put them at a rather embarrassing three nines ... and AT&;T's long distance service is considered "carrier grade," the gold standard for uptime.

Keeping internet services online suffers from the problem of black swans. Nassim Taleb, who invented the term, defines it thus: "A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations." Almost all internet outages are unexpected unexpecteds: extremely low-probability outlying surprises. They're the kind of things that happen so rarely it doesn't even make sense to use normal statistical methods like "mean time between failure."...

Spolsky cares deeply about customer service, his company's response is impeccable.

Others don't do nearly as well. I have trouble imaging large corporations caring enough to delivery truly reliable service, though the phone companies (for all their many ills) managed it for many years.

Even Nader's sympathizers are appalled

James Fallows turns out to have an unexpected history with Ralph Nader. So his judgment carries more than average weight: Ralph Nader: tragedy to farce.

Can someone hand the BBC's Kevin Connelly a clue?

How can he describe Nader's latest curse without mentioning that Nader gets his campaign funds from the GOP?

Legislative review: Obama and Clinton

Daily Kos: State of the Nation is a well researched review of the Obama and Clinton legislative records. Obama gets the nod from the blogger, but Clinton doesn't do badly either.

Personally I think both records show Congress spends far too much time on micromanagement of peripheral issues, but I guess that's what American's want. If we wanted politicians to tackle the real problems we'd elect different people.

Hey, we still have rabbit ears!

This was on a list of "obsolete skills":

Obsolete skills - Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger:

...10. Adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV set.

Huh?

Our sole source of television is a pair of rabbit ears on a 9" CRT. I still have rabbit tuning skills.

The power of video - the beef recall

This really is the video generation.

We're "pithed frogs" about lethally contaminated Chinese manufactured meds, but a video of "downer" (meaning prion-packed, example: CJD/mad cow disease) cattle being slaughtered raises the roof:

The Biggest Beef Recall Ever - New York Times

A nauseating video of cows stumbling on their way to a California slaughterhouse has finally prompted action: the largest recall of meat in American history.

Well, maybe it shakes the shingles for a day or two.

This is what you get after 8-12 years of the GOP taking apart American government (depending on how you measure GOP control during the hallowed Clinton years).

The video was supposedly done randomly, but even if it wasn't there's nothing in our system to suggest that this isn't routine. I suggest a prayer to George the II the next time you eat a hamburger, feed your pet, buy a child's toy, or give a medication to your child.

Or save your energy and use it to campaign for whoever gets the Democratic nomination.

I destroyed Facebook

I knew this would happen ...

BBC NEWS | Business | Facebook 'sees decline in users'

Social networking site Facebook has seen its first drop in UK users in January, new industry data indicates.

Users fell 5% to 8.5 million in January from 8.9 million in December, according to data from Nielsen Online....

...Nic Howell, deputy editor of industry magazine New Media Age, said the site was no longer as popular among its core audience of young people.

"Social networking is as much about who isn't on the site as who is - when Tory MPs and major corporations start profiles on Facebook, its brand is devalued, driving its core user base into the arms of newer and more credible alternatives," he said...

After all, I did this.

Imagine the horror of a 17 year old seeing a geezer's face.

Heh, heh.

I enjoyed doing them in.

So, who do I take out next?

Word file formats: the Nisus achievement and a gentle wish for .DOC

I use Nisus Writer Express for OS X, and one of these days I'll probably upgrade to Nisus Writer Pro. There are many fine features of this high quality product, including the fact that they don't emulate Microsoft Word. The key features for me [1], however, are that:

• Nisus uses RTF as a native file format
• Nisus can, optionally, use Word .DOC files as their native file format and do a pretty reasonable job of editing existing Word files without messing them up too much.

I've learned many times over many years that data mobility is a critical requirement of my digital world [2]. In 2008 RTF is the closest thing we have to a mobile word processing file format, .DOC is next, and the Oasis OpenDocument File format is a very distant third.

Recently Microsoft released the specification for Word's .DOC binary file format [3]. Joel Spolsky tells us a bit about that format:

Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds) - Joel on Software

...The assumption, and a fairly reasonable one at the time, was that the Word file format only had to be read and written by Word. That means that whenever a programmer on the Word team had to make a decision about how to change the file format, the only thing they cared about was (a) what was fast and (b) what took the fewest lines of code in the Word code base. The idea of things like SGML and HTML—interchangeable, standardized file formats—didn’t really take hold until the Internet made it practical to interchange documents in the first place [jg - 4]; this was a decade later than the Office binary formats were first invented. There was always an assumption that you could use importers and exporters to exchange documents. In fact Word does have a format designed for easy interchange, called RTF, which has been there almost since the beginning. It’s still 100% supported.

...Every checkbox, every formatting option, and every feature in Microsoft Office has to be represented in file formats somewhere. That checkbox in Word’s paragraph menu called “Keep With Next” that causes a paragraph to be moved to the next page if necessary so that it’s on the same page as the paragraph after it? That has to be in the file format. And that means if you want to implement a perfect Word clone than can correctly read Word documents, you have to implement that feature. If you’re creating a competitive word processor that has to load Word documents, it may only take you a minute to write the code to load that bit from the file format, but it might take you weeks to change your page layout algorithm to accommodate it. If you don’t, customers will open their Word files in your clone and all the pages will be messed up.... [6]

Hats off to Nisus. Their ability to work with .DOC file formats [5] is a great achievement, and a testimony to coding excellence and true grit.

Beyond Nisus (buy it) this is another illustration of why we need to care about file formats. Is the Word 2007 .DOC binary file format really the a good way to carry our documents forward?

Today uber-geeks like Schneier seem to be discovering lock-in - decades after I put (small) audiences to sleep with it. A bit late, but it's a start.

Die .DOC die.

--

[1] Nisus doesn't really promote this as a feature. I think they should, but I'm a market of one.

[2] My biggest concession to data-lock is iPhoto. Even there I know that with AppleScript I could extract the majority of the data structures in my photo libraries - not easy, but doable. If I'm every lacking for work to do I might turn that into a product.

[3] A grudging effort to appease governments. I suspect China is a big driver.

[4] Spolsky used to be a Microsoft guy, which is probably why he doesn't remember that WordPerfect, Ami Pro, MacWrite and many other extinct applications used to read and write Word's .DOC format. It was "practical to interchange documents" eons before HTML/SGML - in fact it was a necessity as Microsoft rode its proprietary file formats and trade press control to victory.

[5] Not perfectly of course. Even Nisus Writer Pro can't read and represent an style-generated Word table of contents -- a feature I use extensively.