Standards for chargers: Thank you China

An innocent question about organizing chargers produces and surprisingly good Slashdot discussion of power adapter standards.

Did you know China mandated USB only charging for cell phones (so is that why iPhone 2.0 dumped firewire)? Did you know there are people representing the charger industry who actively campaign against an EU standard? (Ok, so that was predictable.)

The ecology and economics of physical connector standards are fascinating; the irresistible force of consumer desire meets the immovable object of proprietary advantage and lock-in (the physical analogue of data lock). Consider the interesting examples of HP's printer cartridges, Apple's iPod connector, and the "authenticated" NEC battery.

Even though I wish the USB connector supported 12V instead of 5V, I am very grateful for its emergence as the de facto universal charger interface. I make USB charging support a very high priority -- which is why the RAZR's quasi-USB support drove me bats (yay BlackBerry, half-yay iPhone/Palm).

All very well, but what about China? This USB standardization is the kind of thing Singapore would do (smart, tyrannical), but when China does it they do it for the world -- much as California's emission standards become the North American rule.

Those anti-standard lobbyists will need bigger offices in Beijing.

Thanks China.

Leahy on McCain's dementia

I've always admired Senator Patrick Leahy.

Today he clearly states something that the GOP prefers to forget -- Reagan was severely cognitively impaired during his second term. During that term Baker governed the US; fortunately for us that was an improvement.

Leahy also draws a rather obvious comparison ...

Talking Points Memo | Leahy Goes There

...Leahy told Vogel yesterday the media has given McCain a free pass on flubs including mixing up Middle East geography, Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and referring to Russia's relationship Czechoslovakia -- a country that hasn't existed for 15 years.

'It was the same way with Ronald Reagan in the last few years he was president,' Leahy said, referring to the belief that Reagan experienced early signs of Alzheimer's disease late in his presidency....

McCain used to be cognitively stronger.

An artificial cat-level brain within 10 years?

I’ve long said that they day we create an artificial mind comparable to a hamster’s we’re toast. I have hoped this thesis wouldn’t be tested in my life-span …

It’s plenty devious, but we still can’t get it to follow orders worth a damn | Good Morning Silicon Valley

DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, is quietly creeping toward its goal of creating an artificial brain … HRL Laboratories, a joint venture of Boeing and General Motors … will spearhead the effort to build a chip with the “function, size, and power consumption” of a cat’s cortex within the next 10 years ..

… According to the news release, spotted by Wired’s Noah Shachtman before it was pulled, the goal is to build a chip with “neuroscience-inspired architecture that can address a wide range of cognitive abilities — perception, planning, decision making, and motor control.” “The first nine-month phase of the program will focus on designing, fabricating, and characterizing synaptic and neural elements and combining them into a high-density, interconnecting microelectronic ‘fabric,’ which will be incorporated into a more complex system-level fabric design,” according to the release. “In the following 15-month phase, HRL will combine the synaptic and neural elements to fabricate and demonstrate ‘cortical microcircuits’ that can model various lower-level brain functions and actually ‘learn’ by interacting with the environment…

Thank Google the partners are GM and Boeing. If they were, say, Google and Intel I’d be more concerned.

There’s a less than 1% chance they’ll succeed at this.

Still.

My first Wikipedia page: Data Lock

I've edited several pages, but this is the first I've created ...

Data lock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... Data lock is the planned or accidental strategy of retaining customers by holding data captive.

Data lock is a common outcome of proprietary file formats. It is a particularly common occurrence in cloud computing, but it is also commonplace in personal information managers and in commercial IT systems in every industry.

Customers rarely make data mobility a priority, so it can be difficult even for well intended developers to invest in data freedom. Google has shown recent moves away from data lock through the creation of APIs and new public export formats for blogs...

Update 8/27/08: Well, that was a short lived article! Wikipedia removed it, apparently because it was too much of a definition, and not enough of an encyclopedia article.

Cosmology and Complexity - almost understandable

This Aaronson lecture is surprisingly readable. Thank you scribe!

PHYS771 Lecture 20: Cosmology and Complexity

...But that's only one thing that's wrong with the simple "spherical/flat/hyperbolic" trichotomy. Another thing wrong with it is that the geometry of the universe and its topology are two separate questions. Just assuming the universe is flat doesn't imply that it's infinite. If the universe had a constant positive curvature, that would imply it was finite. Picture the Earth; on learning that it has a constant positive curvature, you would conclude it's round. I mean, yes, it could curve off to infinity where you can't see it, but assuming it's homogenous in curvature, mathematically it has to curve around in either a sphere or some other more complicated finite shape. If space is flat, however, that doesn't tell you whether it's is finite or infinite. It could be like one of the video games where when you go off one end of the screen, you reappear on the other end. That's perfectly compatible with geometric flatness, but would correspond to a closed topology. The answer, then, to whether the universe is finite or infinite, is unfortunately that we don't know....

Very fun topic. I finally have a personal story for the limits of information -- when bits become a black hole.

Curious relationship between computation and the cosmological constant.

Microsoft’s love for Firefox is limited – the Windows Live Writer plug-in example

I was surprised that Microsoft management let the superb Windows Live Writer team create a plug-in that supported Firefox.

WLW is unequalled as a blogging tool. Why not use it to drive geeks towards IE?

Well, reality has set in.

The WLW plug-in has never been updated for FF 3.

There’s a way to make it work: Make Firefox 3 beta accept the Windows Live Writer Blog This extension, but FF users expected an update in June.

Microsoft’s FF love has its limits. It’s reassuring to see economics still works!

Update 9/15/08: News comes via comments that an update is in the works - from one of my favorite Microsoft development teams. See the comment from Joe C. I understand corporate bureaucracy all too well. I suspect Microsoft customers would be happier today if Bush hand lost and the DOJ had split the company into more agile components.

Yes, you do want a mongrel

Humanity should be brought up before the Canine High Tribunal ..

Pedigree dogs plagued by disease

... Scientists at Imperial College, London, recently found that pugs in the UK are so inbred that although there are 10,000 of them, it is the equivalent of just 50 distinct individuals...

We should treat our symbiotes with more respect. I don't expect breeders to reform themselves, so we really ought to be adopting mongrels.

Problem is, in Dog City USA mongrels are darned hard to find. There just aren't that many fertile females available these days, and the boys don't get to wander free.

The demand for mongrel pups here is so great that two years ago we had to register for notification across 10,000 square miles -- and to call within hours of a birth notice.

Maybe it's time for breeders to start breeding long lifespan mongrel dogs ...

Biological warfare attracts some troubled scientists

Perhaps Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks.

On the one hand, the Bush FBI's credibility is negative. That is, if the FBI told me the sun was shining I'd get an umbrella. In that vein it's noteworthy that they keep tweaking their leaks...

Doubts over the anthrax case intensify -- except among much of the media - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

... What did the FBI do in response to that rather devastating hole in its theory being pointed out? It just leaked a completely different story to the Post about when and how Ivins mailed ...

On the other hand there are supposed technical developments ...

The Anthrax Case: From Spores to a Suspect -- Enserink 2008 (812): 1 -- ScienceNOW
By Martin Enserink

The scientific evidence against Bruce Ivins, the 62-year-old Army scientist who killed himself while about to be indicted for the anthrax murders, is finally emerging. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) laid some of its cards on the table. One key document, scientists say, now enables a reconstruction of the trail that led the FBI from the deadly letters back to Ivins's lab at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland...

... The key to understanding the investigation is that the anthrax used in the attacks didn't have a single, uniform genetic makeup, a source close to the investigation says. Each of the envelopes likely contained many billions of spores; within such a population, there are always subpopulations of cells bearing mutations that set them apart from the majority. The same minorities would presumably have been present in the "mother stock” of anthrax from which the spores were prepared.

However, standard sequencing--which would require the DNA from thousands of spores--would have resulted in a "consensus sequence" for the spores, in which such rare mutations were simply drowned out. To find them, researchers used a different technique: They grew spores from the envelopes on petri dishes, generating hundreds or even thousands of colonies per dish, each the progeny of a single spore. They then searched for colonies that looked different from the majority; the affidavit mentions variations in "shape, color, texture."... Next, they set out to find the mutations that made those colonies different.

To do that, the FBI used a brute-force approach: It had the entire genomes of the bacteria in the minority sequenced. TIGR--which merged into the J. Craig Venter Institute in 2006--sequenced "probably somewhere between 10 and 20" such genomes in the years after the attacks, Salzberg says. TIGR could not handle live anthrax cells itself; the FBI gave the lab purified DNA ...

Comparing the sequence of the variant colonies to an original B. anthracis strain called Ames, widely used in research, identified a number of mutations, says Salzberg; they included single-nucleotide polymorphisms, a change of a single base pair, and tandem repeats, in which a short piece of DNA is repeated a variable number of times.

The FBI then had scientists at other labs develop tests that allowed them to screen any anthrax sample for four of these mutations....

... with the four tests, the FBI examined more than 1000 anthrax isolates, collected from 16 labs that had the Ames strain in the United States and several more in Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In only eight of those samples, they found all four mutations seen in the envelope samples; and each of these eight, the affidavit says, was "directly related" to a "large flask" of spores, identified as RMR-1029, which Ivins had created in 1997 and of which he was the "sole custodian."

... It's also unclear how many of the 1000 samples had fewer than four, but more than zero, of the mutations. "If a whole bunch of them had two or three," that would increase the odds that the perfect match at USAMRIID was just a false positive...

... Science aside, the affidavit relies heavily on circumstantial evidence...

One of the weak points in the affidavit is Ivins's motive, says Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense specialist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia... A glaring omission, meanwhile, is any evidence placing Ivins in Princeton, New Jersey, on any of the days the envelopes could have been mailed from there...

I'll take the skeptical side of things. The FBI has shown a nasty combination of incompetence and aggressiveness over the past decade. There's no evidence that they've reformed.

On the other hand, there's some reason to suspect that biological warfare attracts troubled scientists. The innocent Steven Hatfill was a convenient FBI fall-guy because of a murky past and questionable judgment. Bruce Ivins probably suffered from lifelong mental illness, perhaps a variant of paranoid schizophrenia.

Maybe we ought to be doing a better job of evaluating people who want to work with bioweapons?

Just saying.

Reason without science - the music of the spheres

Fifteen hundred years of fascinating nonsense. That's what I think as I listen to In Our Time's "The Music of the Spheres".

It's all rather like Freudianism - but he only lasted about 70 years.

What drives these examples of unreal reason?

I think of the underlying memes as attractive antigens that bind to our cultural and biological "memetic receptors" (it's hard to escape those immunology lectures). They're hypnotically interesting, and in age of scholarship without science they flourish like metastatic weeds.

The greatest cultural invention of the 2nd millennium, science, pulled the weeds. The Music of the Spheres became astronomy, mathematics, physics, neuropsychology, literature and art.

Science deserves more gratitude.

Microsoft's auto-lobotomy

In a longish article that seems designed to put Cringely on the witness stand, he outlines Microsoft's more recent alleged crimes.

It's an impressive list. Reading it I again wonder about the deal Gates made with Rove to drop the justice department suit against Microsoft. I wonder if we'll ever hear the details.

The part that really caught my attention though, was a small bit about Microsoft's policy on archived email:

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . What Goes Around Comes Around | PBS

... Months after the Microsoft/Burst settlement I received e-mail from a former Microsoft contractor:

“Now that Burst v. MS has moved out of the courts, I thought that I might add a little to what you know about this case. Back about two years ago when the judge told MS to cough up the rest of the emails that was supposed to have floated around between MS execs that discussed the Burst relationship, the team that I was on (Corporate tape backups) was asked to gather all together all of the tapes that were used during that time. Even though there was a corporate policy in place that any *.pst was to be excluded from backup capture, the effort failed. Not only did the Backup Exec software fail to filter out those pst files, but some of the involved blue badges (Microsoft employees) intentionally disguised their mail files so that they would not be recognized and included in the nightly backups. This last effort was even prohibited by policy from the VP level. As I was the one tasked to gather the tapes together from Arcus/Iron Mountain, I know exactly how many tapes were recalled for the involved servers. They filled several 240 tape trunks and were stored in the Building 11 tape vault....

I recently did an internal lecture on using Windows Search to enhance the value of email archives, to make them a part of working memory. Microsoft, as a part of a guilt-induced policy, excludes these files from backup.

The price of crime is an auto-lobotomy.

iPhone remote multiple libraries - what it means

The iPhone Remote app supports connections to multiple libraries.

Macworld | iPhone Central | Remote lets you control iTunes from iPhone, iPod touch

...There is, however, support for multiple libraries. When you start up Remote after associating with a library, it’ll take a second to reconnect, during which time you can change which library you want to use (you can also tap the Settings button in the top left corner of any list screen). That’ll give you the option to add multiple libraries, delete existing associations, and toggle a “Stay Connected” preference (not precisely sure what that does at present)...

The implications are left as an exercise to the reader.

Ok, some hints:

1. iTunes is designed for a single user. It belongs to a user account.
2. iPod and iPhone binding is not to a user, and not to a computer, it is to a user account on a single computer. Unless everyone wants to share apps, contacts, calendar, etc a single iPhone syncs with a single iTunes library.
   
3. DRM contracts are to a single user's Apple identity (formerly .mac), they can be applied to > 1 computer (the number is shrinking over time).
4. DRM is far from dead. If the music industry succeeds in toppling Apple by allowing only Amazon to sell without DRM, then they will terminate Amazon's DRM-free privileges and assume the throne of Sauron. (You knew that, right?)

It's a complex world. Looking at the way the iPhone works, it's possible that we could move to a family account that all devices would sync to -- since iCal supports multiple calendar overlays and Address Book supports multiple subsets. Gives a whole new meaning to "all for one and one for all", a meaning of particular interest to teens.

Consequences, intended and otherwise ...

My brutal Palm to iPhone migration - lessons from refactoring a geek workflow

Sometimes it's tough being a geek.

I'm a "market of one" -- when I adopt a technology I push it to the limits -- and beyond. When it dies, I have a heck of a transition to make.

My Palm to iPhone/cloud migration has been particularly tough.

Gordon's Tech: My Palm to iPhone migration challenge -- summarized

Google Docs - Palm migration is a spreadsheet that captures in a glance how very hard the Palm to iPhone migration is. There's a feed for change notification...

... Of the 10 core functions I have identified migration strategies for exactly 3 of them.

Suggestions are most welcome, but I need suggestions that allow me to migrate my
data as needed. Data lock is not acceptable for this material.

Ok, not "brutal" as in the things life routinely does to us, but tough in terms of lack of sleep and exercise. So far I've more or less migrated my personal calendar - by starting over.

Consider the tasks problem. Of the many, many solutions I've looked at, only ToodleDo (bad name) and ToDo.app come close, but ToodleDo allows operations on only one task at a time (web 1.0). That's a long, long, way from what I've grown accustomed to.

So I have to backtrack. I feel like I've moved into an alternate reality, a "past earth" where the printing press has yet to be invented but millions live on Mars. I can't migrate on a functional basis, I have to refactor what I do into different solutions.

So the combination of Palm and Outlook let me keep a large catalog of ideas and potential actions as tasks, but that workflow won't fit into my iPhone world. All the iPhone can handle as tasks are things I might actually do in the next few weeks. So I'll have to split my data stream, moving 15% forward as tasks and finding new homes for the rest (Evernote, would you please show me you don't want to lock my data?)

There are interesting lessons here that relate to my real-world job. I develop what we like to think of as "advanced" healthcare IT knowledge rich solutions. They all change what people do. Those changes have costs, costs like my Palm to iPhone transition. Even if it's for the better, the near term pain is pretty extreme.

It's good to get a reminder of what that feels like.

Splog war friendly fire - Google whacks me for the sins of others

I think I now see why the indexing speeds of my kateva.org pages wax and wane...

Gordon's Tech: The hidden curse of spam blogs - collateral damage

I've noticed an unhappy correlation.

Periodically spam blogs (splogs) will start harvesting my posts.

When they do that, email from kateva.org begins to be filtered into Gmail's spam folders, my Google PageRank falls, and the site is indexed less often.

When the splogs move on to another victim, things reverse.

I'm just collateral damage.

Ouch.

What hurts the most, really, is the decreased indexing. I like being able to search my memory collection.

Splogs fraudulently assume a part of my "data signature", so Google assigns a part of their reputation to me. Google knows "me", after all, only by my data.

It's a new form of identity theft, one that biologists would readily understand.

In the end I'm collateral damage; splog wars between Google's and the parasites are damaging my reputation -- and my memory.

Cyberwar is heck.

So, what do I do about it?

Update 8/18/08: Here's one view of the splog effect -- it's a list of splog posts generated in the past few hours from recent Gordon's Tech articles




Google is not yet omniscient. All it knows is that these posts are found here -- and in some very bad neighborhoods. We are the reputation of our data.

David Brooks - caught again

Incredibly, David Brooks is paid to write nonsense. I do it for free

Happily I can read James Fallows, who is a superb journalist. He points us to the Language Log's annihilation of Brooks. 

In addition to the obvious blunders, pay attention to the basic structure of the experiment. It's insane that people are able to publish this junk, and hilarious that Brooks transcends the junk ...

Language Log David Brooks, Social Psychologist

Those who've followed our previous discussions of David Brooks' forays into the human sciences ("David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist", 6/12/2006; "David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006) will be able to guess what's coming.

In this case, Mr. Brooks has taken his science from the work of Richard E. Nisbett, as described in his 2003 book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why, and in many papers, some of which are cited below. I was familiar with some of this work, which has linguistic aspects, and so I traced Brooks' assertions to their sources. And even I, a hardened Brooks-checker, was surprised to find how careless his account of the research is. ...

... Is it correct that if you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing, while if you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all, it wasn't a representative sample of Americans, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at the University of Michigan; and second, it wasn't Chinese, it was undergraduates in a psychology course at Kyoto University in Japan; and third, it wasn't a fish tank, it was 10 20-second animated vignettes of underwater scenes; and fourth, the Americans didn't mention the "focal fish" more often than the Japanese, they mentioned them less often.

The research in question was reported in T. Masuda and R.E. Nisbett, "Attending holistically vs. analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans", J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 81:922–934, 2001.

The subjects were 36 Americans at the University of Michigan and 41 Japanese at Kyoto University, who "participated in the experiments as a course requirement"...

Who's more absurd - Maureen Down or David Brooks? It's a tough contest.

What does it say about America that both are very influential and widely read?

Ouch.

Spooky action 10,000 times FTL. Yawn.

On the one hand, completely boring. Another test of QM is in complete agreement with theory.

On the other hand, this is almost as creepy now as it was when a 2007 Wired magazine article on a 1999 entanglement experiment casually noted that observer-independent reality was up against the possibility of free will. That set me off on my extended review of quantum mechanics; along the way free will seems to have come out ahead of reality.

Not quite as creepy though, because I'm getting used to living in a universe that's infinitely weirder than it seems. Here's the latest edition ...

Quantum weirdness wins again: Entanglement clocks in at 10,000 times faster than light: Scientific American Blog

No matter how many times researchers try, there's just no getting around the weirdness of quantum mechanics.

In the latest attempt, researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland tried to determine whether entanglement—the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another—is actually transmitted by some wave-like signal that's fast but not infinitely fast.

Their test involved a series of measurements on pairs of entangled photons (particles of light) that were generated in Geneva (aerial view at left) and then split apart by optical fiber to two villages 18 kilometers (11 miles) apart where the team had set up photon detectors. (In 2007, researchers transmitted entangled light 144 kilometers between two of the Canary Islands.)

The idea in the new experiment is that the photons in each pair of entangled pair are hitting the distant detectors simultaneously, so there's no time for them to exchange a signal. By comparing results from the two detectors, the researchers determined whether the photons were entangled or not, using a test known as Bell's inequalities.

The photons were indeed entangled, the group reports in Nature. But in reality, no experiment is perfect, so what they end up with is a lower limit on how fast the entanglement could be traveling: 10,000 times the speed of light....

.. It's always conceivable that quantum mechanics might break down (read: show some signs of everyday normalcy) if experimenters could test it the right way. In a 2007 study, researchers in Vienna tested the idea that maybe the instantaneous-ness of entanglement (called nonlocality) was consistent with hidden "variables" that can explain the randomness of quantum measurements. But no dice for that idea...

... Rudolph says we're probably stuck with instantaneous entanglement, which seems impossible to us because we're stuck in everyday space and time. "We need to understand how quantum mechanics sees space and time," he says. "I think there's probably much deeper issues.

Yep, we're stuck.

I recommend Gribbin for a layperson explanation of how bad things are, though his preferred model for understanding entanglement is currently out of fashion (and incompatible with free will).