Exercise and cognition - I'm still skeptical

I've been skeptical of articles purporting to show a relationship between exercise and cognitive performance. It's not that I don't like exercise (I love it), but I just couldn't see the evolutionary physiology -- and I don't have much faith in case-control studies.

Now I'm moving from more to less skeptical, but I'm still skeptical

Study shows why exercise boosts brainpower - CNN.com

... Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells [in response to exercise] in a brain region called the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that is known to be affected in the age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most humans.

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging scans to help document the process in mice -- and then used MRIs to look at the brains of people before and after exercise.

... They recruited 11 healthy adults and made them undergo a three-month aerobic exercise regimen.

They did MRIs of their brains before and after. They also measured the fitness of each volunteer by measuring oxygen volume before and after the training program.

Exercise generated blood flow to the dentate gyrus of the people, and the more fit a person got, the more blood flow the MRI detected, the researchers found.

"The remarkable similarities between the exercise-induced cerebral blood volume changes in the hippocampal formation of mice and humans suggest that the effect is mediated by similar mechanisms," they wrote.

"Our next step is to identify the exercise regimen that is most beneficial to improve cognition and reduce normal memory loss, so that physicians may be able to prescribe specific types of exercise to improve memory," Small said.

I'm still skeptical, but a bit less so.

It was a pretty small study, and it would be hard to separate the effects of exercise and sleep (since sleep improves due to exercise). On the other hand, it's almost plausible that a mechanism that evolved for muscle learning might secondarily benefit other dependent processes (such as recall) ... but it still seems fishy to me.

It might turn out that the benefit is a one time plus for people going from unfit to fit, and then it's done. Or it might turn out that you need to learn new motor actions to benefit, so for most of us taking up snowboarding would help but bicycling wouldn't.

If there is any effect, I'm betting it's small and that sleeping 7+ hours a night is more important.

On the other hand, if my dementia progresses any more quickly every activity will represent new muscle learning opportunities.

Canada and immigration: the undiscovered laboratory

My limited recollection is that between 1950 and 1980 the province/nation of Quebec switched from a theocratic government, devout Catholicism, an average family size of over 5 children, and economic dominance by an ethnic minority (anglo-english) to a secular government, a secular society, an average birthrate of about 1.7, and the relatively silent emigration of that ethnic minority (including me).

That's a rather impressive amount of social transformation, and yet I suspect it's not well studied. Canada is the "dog" of sociology -- a remarkable species that has been falsely assumed to be "ordinary".

Now another experiment is playing out. Canada is a wealthy nation with, compared (only) to the US, a relatively even standard of living with limited pockets of severe poverty and a relatively intact social safety net. That may be why it has a birth rate similar to Italy, Japan, or Denmark -- very low (of course then one might ask why evolution allows relative wealth and prosperity to end reproduction!). Unlike Japan, which seems destined to slowly fade away (Korea's birth rate is too low to provide immigrants and every other nation is too "foreign"), Canada has returned to its historic roots as a nation of immigration.

There's one key difference, however, between Canadian immigration and the US model. Canada has been aggressively managing its immigration stream, with an almost "eugenic" policy of selecting the most economically productive immigrants. This is why I believe Canada will not have a social security crisis. More below ...

CANOE -- CNEWS - Canada: Census: Immigration critical to Canada

OTTAWA (CP) — Two-thirds of Canada’s population growth over the past five years was fuelled by immigrant newcomers...

The country is on track to becoming 100 per cent dependent on immigration for growth...

... That point won’t be reached until after 2030, when the peak of the baby boomers born in the 1950s and early ‘60s reach the end of their lifespans.

... Canada’s net migration, per capita, is among the highest in the world. According to the OECD, Canada’s net migration of 6.5 migrants per 1,000...

Canada’s influx offsets a flacid national birthrate of about 1.5 kids per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 and just below the OECD average.

The United States, by way of example, accepts only 4.4 immigrants per thousand but has a fertility rate 25 per cent higher than Canada.

... A candidate for the ADQ in the Quebec provincial election was dumped by his party on the weekend after telling a weekly newspaper that native Quebecers need to “boost their birth rate, otherwise the ethnics will swamp us.”

... Ontario’s population... increased 6.6 per cent...

...Newfoundland, meanwhile, is on a three-census slide and has seen its population fall to a level not seen since the late 1960s.

Quebec’s population climbed 4.3 percent ... another slight decline in the French-speaking province’s overall share of the Canadian population. [jf: see comment below]

With the federal government poised to bring down a budget next Monday that is expected to reconfigure equalization payments to the provinces and address a so-called fiscal imbalance in the federation, population shifts are of critical importance.

... The census shows that Toronto remains Canada’s biggest metropolitan area, with 5.1 million people.

Montreal, at 3.6 million, and Vancouver at 2.1, were next among megalopoli...

About 35 per cent of Canada’s total population lives in these three metropolitan regions — and they attract more than 80 per cent of immigrant newcomers.

There's a lot here. The writer was careful to steer clear of the extremely sensitive, but inescapable, conclusion that Quebec's "ethnic Quebecois" population is in steep decline, with a birth rate, I suspect, comparable to Japan. Newfoundland is emptying out, rather like North Dakota and much of the American plains states. The nation is becoming very urban, though one should note that all of Canada's cities would fit into a single anonymous urban center in central China.

Canada is one heck of a laboratory. A future US president might learn from this.

Bell's theorem: My reading of it (at last)

It was a supercilious Wired magazine article from earlier this year that inspired me update my 27 you QM knowledge.

Ultimately, the answer is bound to be unnerving: According to a famous doctrine called Bell’s Inequality, for entanglement to square with relativity, either we have no free will or reality is an illusion. Some choice.
- Lucas Graves, New York City-based writer

I turned to the Wikipedia article, but I couldn't make sense of it. Now that I've read a bit more, I think the article is actually quite a mess. It feels like the battleground of a religious conflict, a not implausible scenario. I didn't dare edit it, but I added this as a comment:

I'm not a physicist, so I'm loathe to edit the original article. Based on my slow reading of Gribbin (Schrodinger's Kittens, 1994), however, this comes across as a particularly messy article.

For example, the article refers to von Neumann's proof against local variables, but Gribbin claims that proof was demolished by Bell. If that is true, it should not be mentioned here as it would be of only historic significance.

I'll paraphrase below how Gribbin describes Bell's Theorem and its modern consequences. If this makes sense I suggest it be incorporated with a citation to Gribbin (Schrodinger's Kitten). I think I can see pieces of Gribbin's lucid summary in the article, but the message is fragmented and expressed in unnecessarily formal language.

Bell's Theorem showed that if non-locality ("spooky action at a distance", instaneous correlation of polarization states, etc) were found to occur, irregardless of any interpretation of quantum mechanics, then physics had to abandon one of two cherished beliefs:

1. That the world exists independently of our observations of it.
2. That there is no communication faster than the speed of light.

Subsequently non-locality has been shown, several times, to occur. That means we have to give up on either the "persistent world" or faster than light communications. Not surprisingly, physicists have decided the lesser evil is to accept a faster than light communication -- as long as that communication carries no "meaning". In other words, "meaning" cannot travel faster than light.

How does this translate to Lucas Grave's choice between free will and "reality is an illusion"? The illusion part is easy, that's the #1 choice.

I think the "free will" issues comes as a consequence of "faster than light" communication. In physics "faster than light" has usually been thought to be the equivalent of "traveling backwards in time". If a message is sent from the future and measured in the past, then it seems the future is predestined. The message cannot fail to be sent.

My sense is most physicists have opted for choice #2, but since nobody's figured out a way to send a meaningful or actionable message faster than light, #2 has been expressed (my words) as "Meaning cannot travel faster than light".

I don't know if this gives any options for "free will", but I think that is how the Wired quote came about. A predestined universe seems a bit claustrophobic, so maybe physicists will figure out a way that a meaningless (infinite entropy) message can travel faster than light without implying a retro-temporal signal.

Yech. We need some more options.

Excel: in contradiction to services oriented architecture

In October of 2001 Joel Spolsky described how Excel was built, and why it worked so well:

In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome - Joel on Software

... I stopped by Andrew Kwatinetz's office. He was my manager at the time and taught me everything I know. "The Excel development team will never accept it," he said. "You know their motto? 'Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them.' They'll never go for something with so many dependencies."

In-ter-est-ing. I hadn't known that. I guess that explained why Excel had its own C compiler.

Not so fast, big boy! The Excel team's ruggedly independent mentality also meant that they always shipped on time, their code was of uniformly high quality, and they had a compiler which, back in the 1980s, generated pcode and could therefore run unmodified on Macintosh's 68000 chip as well as Intel PCs. The pcode also made the executable file about half the size that Intel binaries would have been, which loaded faster from floppy disks and required less RAM...

Uh oh. I've always thought of Excel as the one exception to Microsoft's generally despicable software. So it turns out the secret contradicts my enthusiasms for shared services? Sigh.

Interesting note, by the way, on the value hidden in the archives of blogs. Joel wrote this almost six years ago.

More entrepreneur advice: build your own infrastructure

O'Reilly Radar > Jedi build their own lightsabers is another in an endless stream of 'startup advice' posts, but this one fits into a pattern I like. Recommended particularly for the links.

Are process patents a spammers best friend?

Process patent fears are directly responsible, I claim, for six years of arrested progress in digital image formats. Paul Vixie, quoted in O'Reilly Radar, claims they're also responsible for the spam that's destroying email ...

O'Reilly Radar > Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam

...every potential smtp improvement or replacement that could do anything to actually stop spam, has been systematically patented. the crap that's left isn't going to do any good. we're headed for walled gardens...

This seems credible to me. Process patents have a strangle hold on software development. I assume something will break them, but I don't know what.

In the meantime, I'll put spam into the same category as JPEG -- a consequence of a disastrous decision by the US congress to extend patent law into processes, and then to drastically underfund the patent office.

Quantum mystery, quantum theology

I've been slowly meandering through Gribbin's fascinating book, Schrodinger's Kittens. A chapter on the Copenhagen interpretation of wave function collapse included Wheeler's (serious? frivolous?) speculation that the universe only exists because an intelligent entity perceives it. Bing! A light bulb went off. A small puzzle had just resolved itself.

I'd noticed for a while there were some curious attitudes around discussions of the "reality" (whatever that is) "underlying" the mathematics which predict quantum observations. It's not so much the things that are said, but more the things left unsaid. Now I realized that those curious zones of silence are theological. On one side is a reluctance to state the obvious inference that the First Perceiver would play the role of the typical creator deity, on the other side is a reluctance to admit that the theological implications of the Copenhagen interpretation are very appealing to deists.

Which led me to wonder where the silence is broken. It wasn't hard to imagine a Google search that would expose the discussion: "Did god collapse the wave function of the universe?". The search worked, the Copenhagen interpretation clearly has natural adherents.

The voices are getting louder. In a completely typical bit of modern synchronicity, as I drove home from hockey tonight I heard an NPR guest propose that God could fit readily into the fuzziness of the probability distribution (alas for his credibility, he persistently and repetitively confused "latitude" with "lassitude" -- I hope nobody tells him he was accusing God of laziness).

Quantum physics is bloody weird. It drives big holes in our understanding of time and sequence; it has lots of room for mystery. Humans abhor an intellectual mystery, they always fill it with religion. And so it goes. We shall be hearing quite a bit about the role of God and metaGod in quantum reality. Really, I think theists should focus on the Fermi Paradox instead, but QM is still fertile ground.

Cher, the hidden wounded, and an odd resemblance to WW I

I'd no idea at first how old this Washington Times article, turns out was written in October 2003 (the URL is a clue). I guess the Washington Times hasn't figured out that a web page needs date metadata.

Particularly given the date and her prescience, I'll have to rethink my impression of Cher I had from, oh, about 30 years ago ...

Cher waits turn on C-SPAN call to air views on wounded troops - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics

Celebrities voice their political opinions in many ways. They sign petitions, make donations, appear at rallies and sound off on late-night talk shows.
And sometimes they just stay on hold. That is what Cher did yesterday.

Anonymous and unsolicited, the singer joined the line of callers for C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" shortly after 7 a.m., remaining on hold for about four minutes until her moment came to speak on the war in Iraq.

"Thank you for C-SPAN," she said, simply as a generic "caller from Miami" who offered an immediate and graphic description of wounded soldiers she had met, including "a boy about 19 or 20 who had lost both his arms."

Alert for bogus claims, on-air host Peter Slen pressed the female caller for more information, establishing she had seen the soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, working as an entertainer.

..."Why are Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president — why aren't they taking pictures with these guys," she demanded. "I don't understand why these guys are so hidden, why there are no pictures of them."
Cher also chided the news media for omitting the "devastatedly wounded" from their coverage.

"Don't hide them. Let's have some news coverage where people are sitting and talking to these guys and seeing their spirit," the singer said, adding that she watched C-SPAN's morning show daily, along with the BBC and World Link.

I searched Google trying to figure out the date and discovered Cher is widely mocked and despised by the right wingnuts. Thirty years is a long time, apparently Cher moved on. I'll have to reset my expectations and pass on a belated "thank you".

I came to Cher via Frank Rich, who, in an article explaining why Libby will be pardoned (the man knows far too much about how Cheney and Rice cooked up the nuclear story), provides a useful summary of what Cheney/Bush have done to keep the reality of war out of the minds of the American people..

Why Libby’s Pardon Is a Slam Dunk

... The steps the White House took to keep casualties out of view were extraordinary, even as it deployed troops to decorate every presidential victory rally and gave the Pentagon free rein to exploit the sacrifices of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman in mendacious P.R. stunts.

The administration’s enforcement of a prohibition on photographs of coffins returning from Iraq was the first policy manifestation of the hide-the-carnage strategy. It was complemented by the president’s decision to break with precedent, set by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among others, and refuse to attend military funerals, lest he lend them a media spotlight. But Mark Benjamin, who has chronicled the mistreatment of Iraq war veterans since 2003, discovered an equally concerted effort to keep injured troops off camera. Mr. Benjamin wrote in Salon in 2005 that “flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night” and that both Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda barred the press “from seeing or photographing incoming patients.”

A particularly vivid example of the extreme measures taken by the White House to cover up the war’s devastation turned up in The Washington Post’s Walter Reed exposé. Sgt. David Thomas, a Tennessee National Guard gunner with a Purple Heart and an amputated leg, found himself left off the guest list for a summer presidential ceremony honoring a fellow amputee after he said he would be wearing shorts, not pants, when occupying a front-row seat in camera range...

The answer is simple: Out of sight, out of mind was the game plan, and it has been enforced down to the tiniest instances. When HBO produced an acclaimed (and apolitical) documentary last year about military medics’ remarkable efforts to save lives in Iraq, “Baghdad ER,” Army brass at the last minute boycotted planned promotional screenings in Washington and at Fort Campbell, Ky. In a memo, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley warned that the film, though made with Army cooperation, could endanger veterans’ health by provoking symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder...

Advanced medical technology means many who would have died 15 years ago now live, but this means a much higher cost of care and more longterm disability. The use of the so-called "IED" (no longer improvised) means many of our injured have severe brain injuries and, until we learn to repair brains, a high probability of lifelong disability. Cheney/Bush have tried to keep this from our sight, but there's only so much they can do. It's leaking out.

Which brings me to an odd connection. Our soldiers are not dying at even a small fraction of the rate of WW I veterans, but there's one odd resemblance. The medicine of 1912 meant that most injured warriors died, but those who lived had very high amputation rates, and, in an era of manual labor, extended disability. Our warriors, in an era of cognitive labor, may share a similar story. We can't do anything about this until we face the wounded. That, I suspect, will be a task for the next President.

The limits to DRM: my new car stereo

I'm not, by nature, an optimist. I tell my friends that not only do I consider the glass half-empty, I suspect the dregs are poisonous.

So it is not surprising that, for some time, I was pretty pessimistic about Digital Rights Management. The public had no reaction to the DMCA at all. Would the voting population figure out the real costs before Microsoft started selling DRMd retinal implants? I didn't think so.

I started to become a less pessimistic when I realized, a bit ahead of the curve, that it was very hard to manage any DRM solution in a world of disparate disconnected embedded computers [1]. I became slightly optimistic when I formally admitted that humanity's actions, on occasion, seem inexplicably less-than-dumb.

Recently, my new SONY car music player has tipped me into the moderately optimistic range. Ironically, and perhaps not coincidentally, this product comes from a company with a historic (truly) DRM fiasco. I wonder if Jobs was thinking of this sort of product when he wrote his "Nixon in China" essay.

So why does this car player possibly signal the doom of today's DRM? The key is that the player supports MP3/AAC [2] CD-Rs and USB mass storage devices in addition to the iPod. The iPod support is great, but the data CD-Rs are ultra-rugged, cheap, disposable, reliable and very simple to use for playlists. [3] They're also very well supported by iTunes -- as long as you don't have music from the iTunes store. The stereo doesn't support FairPlay, and it can't.

Until now I've allowed a few DRMd tunes to leak into my collection. Freebies mostly, one or two impulse buys, and some gift cert music for the kids. No more. Sure I can easily build iTunes smart lists to filter out protected music [5], but I'm a geek. Even so, it's a nuisance to have to burn my kids favorite tunes to a CD, then re-encode as non-DRMd AAC [4].

Americans live in cars these days. Large personal music collections are a natural fit and devices like this excellent Sony product will become ubiquitous. DRMd music doesn't work in this setting. We are going to hit the limits of this generation's stab at DRM for music very soon. I'll be a rampant optimist and predict complete collapse within 18 months.

---

[1] Our sump pump has an embedded computer system monitoring its health. That computer crashes every few weeks and has to be rebooted. My alarm clock crashes every few weeks. My car stereo has a reset button. The Daylight Savings Time transition is going to remind everyone how many embedded, disconnected, non-updateable, computers they own; we'll be resetting our camera and video clocks four times a year until the last one dies.
[2] And Sony's irrelevant ATRAC standard.
[3] See my review for more details. Using Apple iTunes it's trivially easy to burn a half-dozen data CDs made up of both AAC and MP3 tunes, and very convenient to pop them in a play them. I find it easiest to treat each CD as a unique playlist and not bother with folders, navigation hierarchies, etc. A 700MB playlist is not bad really.
[4] Sure there are applications to do this, but we have so few that matter the CD solution is easier.
[5] Omit KIND contains "protected".

Does Google understand hyperlinks?

Does Google understand how a hyperlink works? I'm beginning to wonder.

I rag on Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 big time for creating a supposed "web" product that uses the file system semantics to generate the URL, thereby ensuring that any file system manipulation will break any link, but really, Google is no better.

The original Blogger allowed users to change blog titles without breaking links, but after Google bought the first revision made the links reflect the title -- so editing a title broke links. The newest Blogger revision [1] changed that, the url is based on the original title but it doesn't change on editing the title -- however changing the date will break the link.

Then there's Google's Picasa Web Albums. Try this experiment:

1. Create an album.
2. Share a link to the album.
3. Edit the album properties and change the name. Note there's nothing to warn you of the consequences of this seemingly benign act.
4. Every link to the album returns a page-not-found. No redirects.

Google's supposed to be composed of very bright math majors, so I'm guessing this isn't mere stupidity. I can only speculate on what's at work, but it's more than annoying. I believe, but have not confirmed, that SmugMug, for all its recent buginess, does at least get this right.

[1] Google may have some warped beliefs about links and metadata, but I can now say, with great caution and trepidation and painful memories of a semi-botched data migration process, that the new Blogger is far better than the old one. Now that I've said that Google will certainly proceed to wipe out all my data ...

Google and data lock -- not being evil

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Google has taken a public stance against using data lock to retain customers ...

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Not trapping users’ data = GOOD

... We build a very good targeting engine and a lot of business success has come from that. We run the company around the users–so as long as we are respecting the rights of end users and make sure we don’t do anything against their interest, we are fine,” Schmidt said. He noted that history has shown that the downfall of companies can be doing things for their own self interest. “We would never trap user data,” he said...

This is a radically different stance than almost any company I can think of in any industry. The use of data lock to retain customers is almost universal -- even when it isn't an overt tactic [1]. Google's stated opposition to this strategy is probably more a marker of exceptional confidence rather than true virtue, but I'll give them some "non-evil" points.

Not a lot non-evil points, however. As far as I can tell Google's photo service (Picasa web albums) still locks in data. I don't believe there's an API for transferring images and metadata, or even an XMP-sidecar export option. If Picasas changes course, then I'll give Google full credit. At the moment: B-. Of course everyone else has a big fat F.

[1] The de facto covert approach is to fund development with feature-based ROI. There's no ROI for building migration capabilities, so it never gets funded. Migration capabilities can be expensive. Of course customer demand might change this, but consumers haven't figured that out. Or rather, they hadn't a year ago. I think that may be changing.

How to fight the Cheney/Bush torture machine -- assault the weak points

I'm surprised this hasn't come up sooner. It handn't occurred to me. The American Psychological Association is a legitimate target for non-violent pressure -- starting with shame....

Hamilton Spectator - News

... next step -- we need to metaphorically kneecap the doctors, nurses and psychologists working on the literal kneecappings within Guantanamo Bay. Every one of these interrogations is supervised by people who have sworn a Hippocratic oath to do no harm. They should be immediately stripped of their medical licences. The American Psychological Association (APA) has refused to do this. In an attempt to bargain for more cash and influence from the Pentagon, the APA have even placed a loophole in their ethics code that allows any supposedly legal military order to supercede all the other rules: effectively, the Nuremberg Defence. An organization representing liberal professionals should be easier to shame than the Bush White House; if we can, we can severely hinder the smooth operation of these torture chambers.

I'd have preferred a word other than "kneecap", even when preceded by "metaphorically". APA members should be threatening to resign en masse, if they aren't doing that then they are playing abetting torture.

I'm going to write the American Academy of Family Practice and ask what the AAFP's policy is in participation in government sanctioned torture. If I get a response I'll post it here. If I don't, I'll post that instead.

One caveat. Licensure is typically set by the state, not by a professional organization. The board organizations, however, can take a stance.

Beyond the Gonzales Eight - the prosecutors who did the GOPs bidding

Paul Krugman continues to make me feel good about paying the NYT $50 a year just to read his columns. His is the first article I've read that talks about the darker side of the latest GOP scandal -- the prosecutors who played along ... (emphases mine)

Department of Injustice - New York Times

...The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: “We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.”

And let’s not forget that Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove’s time in Texas: “In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.”

Fortunately, Mr. Rove’s smear-and-fear tactics fell short last November. I say fortunately, because without Democrats in control of Congress, able to hold hearings and issue subpoenas, the prosecutor purge would probably have become yet another suppressed Bush-era scandal — a huge abuse of power that somehow never became front-page news.

Before the midterm election, I wrote that what the election was really about could be summed up in two words: subpoena power. Well, the Democrats now have that power, and the hearings on the prosecutor purge look like the shape of things to come.

In the months ahead, we’ll hear a lot about what’s really been going on these past six years. And I predict that we’ll learn about abuses of power that would have made Richard Nixon green with envy.

We have balanced on the knife edge of history ever since the Dems barely took control of the senate. I think Krugman is correct that Cheney/Bush will eventually make Nixon look squeamish. It will take ten years to reform the GOP.

Software evolution and the DST mess

[Update: I'm wrong about the Java update. Sun went with a utility that updates the JREs, rather than a JRE replacement. In retrospect that makes far more sense, they had to make an exception this time and update the individual class separately. I think the 'tightly coupled' story still sort of works, it explains why Sun had to do things differently this time.]

Recently I bloviated about loosely coupled life and the evolution of software. It occurs to me that I might as well say something about the Daylight Savings Time mess that might reinforce that message. Or not!

The DST transition, from my perspective, is worrisome. I personally think Congress committed legislative malpractice when they mandated this change with a relatively short notice. They should have given us 10 years. I suspect I'm not the only person who feels this way, but we geeks are reluctant to say much since humanity mostly survived the Y2K transition [1].

Why is it worrisome? Well, there are a lot of reasons, and I think most corporate IT departments have already run into them. One of the more interesting examples, however, is Sun's Java runtime environment (JRE). (BTW, the same thing would be true of Microsoft's .NET, but it's less widely used, there are fewer instances in widespread use, and Microsoft learned from some of Sun's mistakes.)

The Sun JRE was an attempt to decouple the software environment from the underlying hardware and operating system. That's a seemingly admirable goal, but the implementation had a perverse consequence of different sorts of very tight coupling. Sun has updated the JRE as one large, somewhat integrated, chunk of code. It's a large and powerful collection of software services, and it all gets distributed together. In theory Sun could have updated one class at a time, but I'm guessing they found the JRE would be even more unreliable if the classes weren't synchronized. (Another example of the disappointments of classic object oriented software.). This means that all the services in the Sun JRE are tightly coupled.

The next part of problem was that, by my recollection, the Sun JRE was a huge and expensive disappointment in its heyday. Each tiny release seemed to break something different. Software that ran well on one release broke on the next one. Inevitably software distribution became dependent on a fairly specific version of the JRE [2]; the software was tightly coupled to the JRE version.

So now we have the situation of tight coupling between the classes in a specific instance of a JRE and tight coupling between a specific instance of a software product and a specific instance of the JRE. Bad enough, but along comes a significant mandated update [3] like the Daylight Savings Time update. Sun is not going to update very version of their JRE, only the most recent versions. So to get the DST update, software may have to jump several JREs to the current version. Ahh, but remember that "tight coupling" between the software and specific instance of the JRE? That's where things break. The software has to be fully tested with the new version of the JRE and it may need to be patched. Then the patched software has to be distributed ...

Well, maybe we'll all do just fine after all. Sun's JREs seem to be much better than they once were, so maybe all the software will make the transition better than they would have three years ago. We'll see!

[1] I personally think we mostly got through Y2K in good shape because thousands of people worked liked demons to fix things. In other words, on the spectrum from over-reaction to under-reaction, I think we were just a bit to the "over" side of "just right". That's pretty damn good for an ape, and it's a great example of how we do better than it seems we ought to do. Unfortunately we're still apes. Prevention is never rewarded or admired as much as recovery, so the popular perception is that the Y2K scare was grossly exaggerated. I suspect this has led a lot of people to understate the DST risks, but I know folks are still working hard to avoid problems. So we'll probably get through, though maybe a bit on the "under" side of "just right". It does help that Y2K eliminated a lot of software that would have been hard to patch for DST.

[2] Lots of bad things happen when you have multiple JREs on a single machine, but that's another story.

[3] Getting the rules around DST right is non-trivial.

HD Photo - can anyone trust Microsoft?

Microsoft may submit "HD Photo" to a standards body...

HD Photo: Microsoft's next standard?

Last November, Microsoft renamed its JPEG competitor from Windows Media Photo to HD Photo... Ars has learned that the company plans to announce that it will begin seeking standardization for the HD Photo format, essentially bringing it one step closer to becoming the next JPEG.

HD Photo's feature set includes fixed or floating point high dynamic range, wide gamut image encoding; more efficient compression compared to JPEG; lossless or high-quality lossy compression; the ability to store 16 or 32 bits of data per color; and a design intended for use by digital cameras. HD Photo also supports CMYK, RGB, and monochrome as well as embedded ICC color profiles.

I've waited years for JPEG2000 to come to widespread use, but fears of patent vulnerabilities on the underlying math have kept it mostly in the labs. (Adobe Acrobat can use it for image compression, but it's an almost-secret option.)

Microsoft is, needless to say, tough enough and rich enough to fight the patent battles. So this is all about how they handle the patents, and the risks of future patents. Will they, for example, contractually commit themselves not to strike a side-deal with a future patent claimant that would leave competitors out to roast?

If Adobe and/or Apple support HD Photo we'll have a real alternative to JPEG. It's way past time to retire that old warhorse. I'd love to have something like HD Photo as a storage format for my images.