Apple's G3 software product

Can you guess what Apple software still supports the PPC G3?

Hint: It has its own revenue stream.

So when Apple is sufficiently motivated they don't have to obsolete old platforms.

Funny that.

Snap Circuits – a toy and a company from another era

The following is modified from my Amazon review of Snap Circuits (SnapCirtuits) -- a highly recommended electronics toy (a review by Mr. Verwillow helped sort out the confusing supporting web site story):

Snap Circuits Pro SC-750 (Amazon.com)

... The toy is the work of genius, but the manuals could use a refresh, the web sites are the work of a pre-Internet generation (The company was founded 30 years ago by two electrical engineers), and marketing is not exactly a priority.

As best I can tell the official web sites are www.snapcircuits.net and www.elenco.com. (www.snapcircuits.com now redirects to www.snapcircuits.net). Elenco.com tries to cover their educational market, soldering kits, and non-toy devices, so the Snap Circuits (SnapCircuits) site is a better bet. is your best bet.

The web site parts page includes upgrades kit from the simpler to more comprehensive Snap Circuits kit. I think the SC-500 is the sweet spot for most of us.

I strongly recommend the inexpensive Student Guide (experiments up to SC-300) and the Student Guide extension (covers the added experiments of the SC-500). Some Elenco documents mention a teacher's manual, but I get the sense that's obsolete.

I had to print out a paper form to order these, and even do my own arithmetic! First time I've done that in over 10 years. There is a (third) online site for ordering the manuals and other parts but it was so poorly done I preferred to trust the post office.

This toy really is a blast from the past, but it's wonderful.

Why models underestimate climate change

Members of the church of climatic stability emphasize the limitations of climate simulation and modeling. It would be a fair criticism if they noted that errors go both ways; models can both under and over estimate climatic variability. Alas, that would contradict church doctrine.

Model variability is a reason to be extra cautious, especially because climate models put us pretty close to the cliff.

Unfortunately over the past ten years the models have almost always underestimated climate variability, pretty much putting us, as Dyer wrote recently, over the cliff.

Why should the models be consistently too optimistic? In theory they should err equally both ways.

Turns out this is a serious question ...

Global Warming Leading to Climate Tipping Point | Newsweek.com

... Since the real world is so messy, climate scientists Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker turned for insight to the distinctly neater world of mathematics. Last year, they published an analysis in the journal Science arguing that climate models were skewed in the direction of underestimating the warming effect of carbon. The report reasoned that carbon emissions have the potential to trigger many changes that amplify the warming effect—water absorbs more sunlight than ice, humidity traps more heat, and so on—but few that would mitigate it. The odds, they figure, are about one in three that temperatures will rise by 4.5 degrees C (the top of the IPCC's range), but there's little chance at all that they'll rise by less than 2 degrees C. "We've had a hard time eliminating the possibility of very large climate changes," says Roe...

Reading between the lines climate modelers have been quite cautious; they chose to err towards optimism. That was probably politically wise, the church of climate stability would be even stronger had the models been more often wrongly pessimistic.

The reality is we're over the cliff. The question now is whether we can survive the landing.

America is going to have to grow up very quickly. The Dems alone can't do this. We desperately need a reformed science-based GOP, but instead we've got the Party of Limbaugh.

Are there any rationalist republicans at all?!

Lessons from baseball – the data will be known

I didn’t pay much attention to Alix Rodriguez’s steroid use. It’s been clear for some time that baseball fans, players, coaches, owners, team physicians and so on are all pretty comfortable with performance enhancing drugs.

But then I learned how he was “caught”. That’s much more interesting …

Link by Link - As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes - NYTimes.com

… In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, he participated in a 2003 survey of steroid use among Major League Baseball players. No names were to be revealed. Instead, the results were supposed to be used in aggregation — to determine if more than 5 percent of players were cheating — and the samples were then to be destroyed.

… when federal prosecutors came calling, as part of a steroid distribution case, it turned out that the “anonymous” samples suddenly had clear labels on them…

… the baseball players’ union… is being criticized for failing to act during what apparently was a brief window to destroy the 2003 urine samples before the federal prosecutors claimed them …

So he was caught because he honestly completed an “anonymous” survey, and the union kept the urine samples around. Instead of public outrage at this betrayal, the public beat up on Mr. Rodriguez (though, not, I gather, with much energy).

Sigh.

The lesson, which has been taught before, is that data flows in the direction of profit. Never depend on anonymity, and don’t believe anyone who promises it.

Routine tech tips everyone should know.

A great set of tips for common problems! Here are my personal favorites from Boutin’s article

Basics - Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems - PAUL BOUTIN - NYTimes.com

Cellphone Losing Charge

If your cellphone loses its battery charge too quickly while idle in your pocket, part of the problem may be that your pocket is too warm…

… To keep the phone cooler, carry it in your purse or on your belt.

This same method can be used to preserve your battery should you find yourself away from home without your charger. Turn off the phone and put it in the hotel refrigerator overnight to slow the battery’s natural tendency to lose its charge…

Remote Car Key

Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.

Mr. Pozar explains, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.” Using your head can extend the key’s wireless range by a few car lengths. 

Cellphone in the Toilet

It could happen to anyone: you dropped your cellphone in the toilet. Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits from frying your phone’s fragile internals. Then, wipe the phone gently with a towel, and shove it into a jar full of uncooked rice…

… It is a low-tech version of the “Do Not Eat” desiccant packets that may have been packed in the box the phone came in, to keep moisture away from the circuitry during shipping and storage.

Longer Wi-Fi Reach

If your home Wi-Fi router doesn’t reach the other end of the house, don’t rush out to buy more wireless gear to stretch your network. Instead, build a six-inch-high passive radio wave reflector from kitchen items, like an aluminum cookie sheet.

Follow the instructions at freeantennas.com/projects/template. Place the completed reflector — a small, curved piece of metal that reflects radio waves just like a satellite TV dish — behind your Wi-Fi router..

Dirty Discs

You need to clean a skipping DVD or CD, but as a bachelor you don’t have any sissy cleaning fluids? Soak a washcloth with vodka or mouthwash.

Alcohol is a powerful solvent, perfectly capable of dissolving fingerprints and grime on the surface of a disc. A $5 bottle of Listerine in your medicine cabinet may do the job as effectively as a $75 bottle of DVD cleaning fluid…

Too Much Flash

If your cellphone’s built-in camera flash is much too bright, washing out photos, tape a small piece of paper over the flash…

Crashed Hard Drive

If — no, make that when — your PC’s hard drive crashes and can’t be read, don’t be too quick to throw it out. Stick it in the freezer overnight.

“The trick is a real and proven, albeit last resort, recovery technique for some kinds of otherwise-fatal hard-drive problems,” writes Fred Langa on his Windows Secrets Web site. Many hard drive failures are caused by worn parts that no longer align properly, making it impossible to read data from the drive. Lowering the drive’s temperature causes its metal and plastic internals to contract ever so slightly. Taking the drive out of the freezer, and returning it to room temperature can cause those parts to expand again.

That may help free up binding parts, Mr. Langa explains, or at least let a failing electrical component remain within specs long enough for you to recover your essential data…

Steve Ballmer - comedian extraordinaire

That Ballmer. He's such a joker. Imagine the riotous laughter after this straight faced delivery by Microsoft's CEO...

Slashdot | Ballmer Pleads For Openness To Compete With Apple

... At the Mobile World Congress, Steve Ballmer took aim at Apple's closed iPhone ecosystem with .... plea for openness: 'Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice.' Ballmer has apparently forgotten his company's own efforts to vertically integrate hardware and software (Zune, XBox), its history of vertically integrating software (tying SharePoint into Office, IE, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc.), as well as years of illegally tying Windows to Internet Explorer that only the US Justice Department could undo...

Nothing in that list compares to Microsoft's great triumph -- controlling the file formats for Office.

Sigh. If only people could remember how powerful a move that was ... and is. On the other hand, the Sharepoint strategy is almost as effective. Shall we mention ActiveSync and Exchange Server?

What a hilarious fellow.

It's a shame Jobs isn't well enough to do a competing monologue about how keenly Apple listens to their customers.

Immunizations - origins and necessity

I'm a physician with an interest in history, but I didn't know many of the stories im Jim Macdonald's post on immunizations:

Making Light: Why We Immunize

...Kids Vaccinations in general..
Advantages: none
Disadvantages: enormous

... I suppose that depends on whether you feel “Didn’t have to buy a teeny-tiny headstone” is an advantage....

Great reading for historical and cultural context. It's also a useful antidote to people with a foolish sentimentality for Nature. Remember, we may love Nature, but Nature does not love us.

American right keeps FactCheck busy

I think FactCheck.org thought they'd be able to rest after the presidential election.

Wrong.

Between chain mails (a popular conduit of nonsense for the right) and GOP Senators (another conduit of nonsense) FactCheck is quite busy exposing undeniable whoppers.

People without allegiance to reality are full time employment for an organization attached to the facts.

Bank stock prices are rational now - the nationalization effect

Krugman points out than until recently bank share prices reflected the hope that the Feds would bail out the banks -- and stick taxpayers with the bill.

Now that it's becoming clear that shareholders will get stuck with the bill, bank share prices are returning to a rational level. Meaning about zero...

Nationalization fears - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

So everyone agrees that fears of nationalization are driving bank stocks down. That’s probably true, but those fears have to be carefully interpreted.

We are not talking about fears that leftist radicals will expropriate perfectly good private companies. At least since last fall the major banks — certainly Citi and B of A — have only been able to stay in business because their counterparties believe that there’s an implicit federal guarantee on their obligations. The banks are already, in a fundamental sense, wards of the state.

And the market caps of these banks did not reflect investors’ assessment of the difference in value between their assets and their liabilities. Instead, it largely — and probably totally — reflected the “Geithner put”, the hope that the feds would bail them out in a way that handed a significant windfall gain to stockholders.

What’s happening now is a growing sense that the federal government, in return for rescuing these institutions, will demand the same thing a private-sector white knight would have demanded — namely, ownership.

Pakistan's objections to American drone attacks somewhat less credible now ...

I don't think many people trusted the sincerity of Pakistan's complaints about American drones invading their air space. That number has now gotten even smaller ...

Google Earth exposes a U.S. drone base in Pakistan. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

... The image was freely available on Google Earth until Wednesday, when the News of Pakistan published a story about it. At that point, it vanished, as other sensitive military pictures have done. Today, you can still view it on the Web site of the Times of London. If you're a Pakistani citizen, it confirms that the United States has been launching its killer drones from inside your country, contrary to your government's pretense of opposition...

The bright side of the news is that this is positive sign of US-Pakistani cooperation. The consensus on the drone attacks is that they're killing bad people -- in addition to innocent bystanders of all ages. Their accuracy must be coming from Pakistani intelligence sources, which have presumably deeply infiltrated the Taliban.

The down side is it would have been nice for Pakistan to have had more deniability.

When will Google 2.0 sell a branded netbook?

The great thing about the netbook is price (batteries not included). Of course, like any computing device of any quality, netbooks also need network access -- but I think network access will also be commoditized.

The bad things are quality, cost of ownership, and value delivered.

The Target Trutech that triggered my netbook interests was/is incredibly crummy. The hardware is crummy, the software is ugly, the usability is lousy, and in fairly short order a new wave of virus attacks will destroy the first generation linux-based netbooks.

On the platform side Google Chrome for Linux will address one set of issues. That still leaves hardware quality and virus security as obstacles to Google's Chromestellation strategy. An extra $5 spent on a keyboard will vastly improve user experience, but at the brutal low end of the market there's no brand awareness to justify a $5 price boost.

Google, of course, can address those issues. Unlike Apple they don't have a hardware franchise to protect, and, of course, unlike Microsoft they don't have a software franchise to support.

Google will sell a Google-branded netbook. They'll do the ultra-thin Linux distro, and they'll do the antiviral and security updates. Their device, sold under the Google brand, will be able to justify the $15 higher price point that will take the $135 2011 Google netbook something everyone will own.

Which bring us, inevitably, to antitrust.

Google is now so dominant in search that a revived American antitrust division is already making noises. If they come to own the entire western, and possibly world, netbook industry they'll make the Microsoft of old look modest.

Google will sell a branded netbook, but they'll have to split the company to do it. Google 1.0 will have search, and Google 2.0 will have the netbook.

All stupidity is rooted in tax law

Why have companies learned to finance operations through debt?

The merits of equity v debt | Debtors' prison | The Economist:

... Corporate-finance theory may state that the value of a company should not be affected by its decision to finance itself with equity or debt. But, in practice, interest payments are generally tax-deductible; dividends are not. That gives companies a big push in the direction of debt...

If you ever see something in the world that seems bizarre, like rice paddies in the middle of 1970s Tokyo, think tax law and accounting.

Why are humans such wimpy primates?

Chimps don't look so big. Size isn't everything ...

Why would a chimpanzee attack a human?: Scientific American

... The chimpanzee has strength for a human that is utterly incomprehensible. People watch pro wrestlers on TV and think they are strong. But a pro wrestler would not be able to hold a chimpanzee still if they wanted to. Chimpanzee males have been measured as having five times the arm strength as a human male. Even a young chimpanzee of four or five years, you could not hold it still if you wanted to. Pound-for-pound, their muscles are much stronger...

I don't think it's so much that chimps are exceptionally strong for a primate, it's that modern humans are really weak.

Why are we such runts? We look pretty big, and we still run pretty well, but in hand-to-hand combat we're hopeless.

My guess it's so that we don't damage each other when we fight. We're not a particularly peaceful primate (though we're becoming far gentler than we were), and we're very expensive to rear to adulthood. Maybe it's better for our hand to hand combat to be relatively harmless; a means to establish dominance rather than do harm.

For harm we have tools, fire, pits and cliffs, and we've killed anything that was ever remotely threatening.

We're the Potemkin primate -- at least so far as muscles go.

The rest of the article is worth a read. Briefly, chimps are not, shall we say, domesticated. Dogs are domesticated. Cats are sort of domesticated. Humans are domesticated. Chimps are not.

Tigers and chimps are playful prior to puberty, but unlike dogs or humans they're not playful as adults. Adult chimps are very aggressive, and, to us, unpredictably vicious.

Stay far away from chimps.

Update 2/20/09: Another explanation would be that chimp muscles take a lot of energy to run and produce a lot of heat. We need to feed and cool our hungry brains, tools mean our main problems are microbes, entropy and each other, so we sacrificed our muscles. I couldn't find any publications on this topic, but the energy balance idea isn't novel.

Update 3/1/2009: Aha! Chimpanzees aren't as strong as we've been thinking! They're stronger than we are, but not fantastically stronger. On the other hand, we're clearly wimpy primates. John Hawks mentions a couple of genes that may have been important in the loss of human strength. He doesn't mention his thoughts on what's going on, perhaps, based on his past practice, because he has relevant research underway. From what Hawks has taught us about evolution, I suppose some of those genes might have been knocked out in the cause of re-purposing them for something related to human cognition.

Reading and hand signals

The opening paragraph of an article on hand motions and representing arithmetic reasoning

The value of handwaving to arithmetic | A handwaving approach to arithmetic | The Economist

HUMAN language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk...

Is an excuse for me to again reference an old idea that doesn't seem to have caught on.

Almost thirty years ago, puzzling about why humans are able to translate written squiggles into concepts and thoughts, I wondered about evolutionary antecedents. I concluded that we humans are able to interpret letter and word forms because we already had the brain mechanisms to read hand shapes, and that we probably had those mechanisms before we could speak.

So it's not surprising that deaf persons can read; reading may be older than speaking.

Super science 2009: The Economist at the AAAS meeting

The Economist today highlights a few of the recent super science (AAAS) meeting.

Cooking is humanity's "killer app" (emphases mine) underscores that we are not natural, we are a creation of our own technology. Perhaps cooking is the oldest profession ...

...without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals...

...even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved...

...Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is....

What goes into a dog breed emphasizes how plastic our forms are, and how fungible ...

Dr Ostrander has already used dogs to track down the genes behind certain cancers that the species shares with people, and to work out the dog family tree. At the AAAS she described her search for the genes controlling three of the most important features of a breed: its size, its hair and the length of its legs...

... The size of water dogs, she found, is governed mainly by variations in a gene called insulin-like growth-factor 1—and that is probably true of other breeds as well...

...Short legs, a phenomenon known as chondrodysplasia, are characteristic of many dog breeds, perhaps most famously dachshunds and corgis. In people the condition is known vulgarly as dwarfism. Dr Ostrander’s work showed that in dogs it is caused by the reactivation of a “dead” version of a gene involved in the regulation of growth. Chromosomes are littered with such non-functional genes; they are the result of mutations favoured by natural selection at some point in the past. Here the gene in question has been reactivated by the arrival within it of what is known as a LINE-1 element. This is a piece of DNA that can jump about from place to place within a genome, sometimes causing havoc as it does so....

...Dr Ostrander found that 80% of the variation between breeds in coat form and furniture was explained by differences in just three genes. Different combinations of these result in different mixtures of coat and furniture...

Now that you're thinking about how a few gene variations can cause amazing changes to shape and size, you're prepared to contemplate another genome ... that of our brother Neandertal ...

Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, chose Darwin’s 200th anniversary to announce what would, until recently, have been thought an impossible discovery in evolutionary biology—a draft of the genome of Neanderthal man.

Dr Paabo made his announcement to the AAAS meeting via a video link from Germany, and followed it up by a lecture in person on the 15th. The Neanderthal Genome Project, as it is known, is the culmination of a career devoted to the examination of ancient DNA by a man whose work provided inspiration for Michael Crichton’s novel and film “Jurassic Park”...

...one-fold coverage gives you about 60% of the genome, and that is what Dr Paabo’s first draft has achieved...

...the Neanderthal line and that of modern humanity parted company only shortly before the oldest known Neanderthal fossils were alive...

...The team has also looked at a few genes of particular interest. The most famous of these is FOXP2, damage to which prevents speech in modern humans. Neanderthals turn out to have the same version of FOXP2 as Homo sapiens (and thus a different one from chimpanzees). Researchers are divided about how significant FOXP2 really is, because it is involved in the mechanics of speech production, not the mental abilities that lie at the root of language. But some regard this discovery as evidence that Neanderthals could speak.

Much more information should emerge as Dr Paabo increases his one-fold coverage to 20-fold, the point at which almost every base pair is represented. At that moment, science will have in its grasp the genetic details of what is probably modern humanity’s closest relative...

Min-pin and Newfie look less alike than Neandertal and us. They cooked, of course, but perhaps not as well as we did ...