Monthly Archives: April 2005

More fun with Google Maps…

Soren Ragsdale added some interesting Google satellite images to the wikipedia, including an overall view of the Kennedy Space Center. Here is a much tighter view of the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is the building where Saturn V rockets were assembled, and now houses space shuttles as they are being fitted for launch.

Totally blows away my previous experimentation with the Terraserver.

Big Thoughts for a Friday

On a mailing list I subscribe to, Tom Duff pointed me at Conway’s Proof of the Free Will Theorem.

From the background:

In mid-2004, John Conway and Simon Kochen of Princeton University proved the Free-will Theorem. This theorem states “If there exist experimenters with (some) free will, then elementary particles also have (some) free will.” In other words, if some experimenters are able to behave in a way that is not completely predetermined, then the behavior of elementary particles is also not a function of their prior history. This is a very strong “no hidden variable” theorem.

I’m not sure I can wrap my head around this, being a Friday, but it is very, very strange. The idea of free will is something which I had decided was more or less unassailable by the methods of science (it wasn’t even clear to me that the phenomena had any real meaning whatsoever) but apparently someone with the intellect of Conway thought that it was worthy of study, so perhaps I was mistaken.

One of my personal regrets is that I didn’t drop in on John Conway while I was working in the Applied Math department at Princeton. I have little doubt that if I had, I’d have met the smartest person I’ve ever encountered so far.

Need a fun book by Conway? Try ::amazon(“038797993X”, “The Book of Numbers“):: that he coauthored with Richard Guy. Very entertaining, and quite accessable.

Note: “entertaining” here is used in the usual brainwagon sense of the word.

Addendum: Here is Tom’s take on it:

The proof, of course, depends on the underlying physics. What is remarkable is that they only require three physical axioms, which, in typical Conway style, they call SPIN, FIN and TWIN.

SPIN:
spins have the 101 property, i.e. the measured (squared) spins of a spin-1 particle in 3 perpendicular directions will be two 1’s and a zero in some order.
FIN:
there is a finite upper bound on the speed at which information travels.
TWIN:
if a pair of particles has total angular momentum 0 then one has
angular momentum s and the other -s.

SPIN and TWIN are fairly well-confirmed experimentally, and while most physicists believe FIN, it’s not the sort of statement that experiments can confirm. (Conway says: “We do not know if some unknown method allows for instantaneous transfer of information, almost by definition.”)

It’s interesting to me that SPIN and TWIN are quantum-mechanical statements and FIN is true in General Relativity. It’s fairly widely held that QM and GR are inconsistent, which might lead you to believe that Conway and Kochen are skating on thin ice. But there may be other SPIN/FIN/TWIN models that aren’t as problematic.

My head hurts.

United States Patent: 5,533,051

Apparently you really can patent nonsense. In United States Patent 5,533,051, we get the following intriguing claim:

A second aspect of the present invention which further enhances its ability to achieve high compression percentages, is its ability to be applied to data recursively. Specifically, the methods of the present invention are able to make multiple passes over a file, each time further compressing the file. Thus, a series of recursions are repeated until the desired compression level is achieved.

Any first year computer science student taking any kind of discrete math should be able to tell you what is wrong with this claim.

From a comment on Slashdot.

EFF on Blogging Anonymously

The EFF has an interesting article on Howto Blog Anonymously.

What’s a more interesting question is why would you want to?

It’s not that I can’t think of a reason, I’m just curious as to why people feel that they need to talk about something, and then choose to disassociate themselves from their words.

Sure, there is the personal security aspect. When you open the door to the world and allow them to peek in, there is always the risk that something you’d rather not let get out gets out, and somebody you’d rather not know about it will learn about it.

A small variation on this theme is the “my work doesn’t approve of my opinions” aspect, in other words, your job security.

Are there other reasons to try to communicate with others while remaining anonymous? Shouldn’t we all strive to make statements which we will stand by with the integrity of our own names? If we aren’t going to stand by our statements, then why bother making them in a public forum at all?

Transcript of MGM vs. Grokster oral arguments – The Peer-to-Peer Weblog – p2p.weblogsinc.com

You can read the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case MGM v. Grokster on p2p.weblogsinc.com. A couple of brief comments from my skim of it.

Much of the early testimony surrounded the stifling effect finding in favor of MGM would have upon inventing. The justices focussed in on the idea that if you are inventor, your ability to invent and bring new products to market is effectively quelched by the standard proposed by MGM. You’d have to show that there are no substantial infringing uses, rather than what is called for in the Sony decision, which is to show that there are significant non-infringing uses.

The example of the iPod came up, and the Mr. Verrilli argued that it was more or less obvious that the iPod had significant non-infringing uses. But I think that’s incredibly unclear. If you figure out how many songs can be stored in a 20gb player, it probably is the range of 6000, which is maybe 400 CDs or so. While it isn’t unheard of for individuals to have that many cds, I sincerely doubt that the average is anywhere near that total. I think it is relatively easy to argue that the majority of individuals must have songs on their iPods which are infringing, that indeed the product design and marketing of the product itself is carefully designed to take advantage of this huge capacity and the ease with which such a player can be filled with infringing content. I think that were MGM v. Grokster to be reversed, he’d be coming right back to argue the opposite of his claim here in court.

I think similar arguments could easily have been made when the VCR was new. I’d contend that the vast majority of uses for the VCR in the early days was infringing use, and in all likelihood, that continues to this day.

Scalia seemed focussed on the issues related to stifling startup companies who are trying to bring new technologies to market.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Will you give a company ten years to establish that?

MR. CLEMENT: Well, I don’t think

JUSTICE SCALIA: I mean, what I worry about is the suit that just comes right out of the box, as soon as the company starts up. Will you give the company a couple of years to show that it’s developing a commercial use?

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Scalia, we have concerns about that, as well. I don’t know that we would give them ten years of, sort of, free space to do as facilitate as much copyright infringement as possible. I think what we would say is that when you’re — when a suit targets a nascent technology at the very beginning, there ought to be a lot of leeway, not just for observed noninfringing uses, but for the capacity of noninfringing uses.

I also found this exchange interesting:

JUSTICE BREYER: I — and the country seems to have survived that standard. There is innovation. There are problems in the music industry, but it thrives, and so forth. So there is an argument for just following it, because it’s what it is. But suppose it’s totally open. Why should that be the right test, instead of some other test, like substantial use, et cetera?

MR. TARANTO: I — because I —

JUSTICE BREYER: That, I think, was the question, and I’m very interested in your answer.

MR. TARANTO: Right. Because I think any alternative is worse. A focus on intent to profit means that virtually every business which requires money and has the least bit of sensible forward-looking thinking about what the usage is going to be will be subject to litigation, arguing about their knowing that a substantial amount of the value of the product was going to be based on infringement.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But —

MR. TARANTO: Every —

JUSTICE KENNEDY: — but what you have — what you want to do is to say that unlawfully expropriated property can be used by the owner of the instrumentality as part of the startup capital for his product.

MR. TARANTO: I — well —

JUSTICE KENNEDY: And I — just from an economic standpoint and a legal standpoint, that sounds wrong to me.

MR. TARANTO: Well, I’m not entirely sure about that formulation. Sony clearly sold many more tapes because of the illicit activity of Library. Sony presumably sold more machines, maybe even priced them higher, because there was a group of people who wanted the machine for the illicit activity. The Apple iPod, in the 60 gigabit version, holds 15,000 songs. That’s —

JUSTICE KENNEDY: So you think that —

MR. TARANTO: — a thousand CDs.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: — unlawfully expropriated property can be a legitimate part of the startup capital.

MR. TARANTO: No, I — what I think is that, as a matter of general judicially formulated secondary copyright liability law, there is no better policy balance that the Court can strike, and that only Congress can make the judgements about what the industry-wide facts are. And I — let me pause there a minute — there are no industry-wide facts in this record. Every citation in the Petitioner’s brief about the magnitude of harm to the industry is extra-record citation. There are 26 billion…

Interesting stuff.

Brad Bird on NPR

While driving home today, I flipped on KQED, our local NPR affiliate and heard a voice I’m rather accustomed to hearing: the director of The Incredibles, Brad Bird. I get quite a few requests about what it’s like to work at Pixar, and you could do a lot worse than hearing it from Brad’s mouth. He’s a phenomenal director, and really knows his stuff. Check out the audio link on NPR’s website.

Gift for Baseball Fans

Baseball Season!I wanted to get a file with the schedule for all the major league baseball games this season, but remarkably, it seemed difficult. Sure, you can surf over to each team in the league, and by clicking through their websites, eventually get to a file with comma separated values in it, but it’s fairly tedious, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the files that are produced.

But, I went through all thirty teams anyway, and did it.

The result is a master CSV file with the dates, start time and who is playing in each game. There is almost certainly a problem or two remaining, a couple of duplicated times, but it still should be useful, and the price is right.

You can download the results here.

Why Blog?

Over at Contentious, Amy is trying to answer the age old introspective question facing most bloggers: “Why do you blog?”

I meet quite a few people who don’t understand why anyone would write a blog. To them, I mostly ask “Why do you bother talking?”

Let’s be brutally honest: most of us don’t have anything really innovative to say, and even if we did, we’d be struggling to say it in a way that won’t leave an audience begging for sleep. So, why do we bother?

We bother because we all have the need to talk.

My blog is at least seventy five percent therapy. I blog to serve as a place to sound out opinions and feelings for which I don’t have another outlet. Even the more nominally pragmatic topics on my blog (such as my many personal geek projects) aren’t written so much inform others as to fufill my own need to talk about the things which interest me.

Personal anecdote: I began being interested in computers at a very young age, probably
10 or 11 years old. By the time I was sixteen, I had bought my very first computer, and was eagerly teaching myself the mysteries of how it worked. Very few of my peer group were very interested, and even those that were interested weren’t motivated enough to spend a year of their part time job money to buy computers of their own. So, I proceeded mostly on my own, aided by magazines and books.

I remember one afternoon when I was at my Grandmother Busch’s house. She was a very kind woman, and I had earned a significant portion of my computer money by performing lawn work for her over the previous year. I was happily explaining some minor feature of something having to do with my Atari 400 to her, and then trudged off to the next room. I recall overhearing this conversation between my her and my mom:

Grandma: “Boy, that kid really likes his computer, doesn’t he?”
Mom: “Yep, he really does.”
Grandma: “He seems to be really smart, like he knows everything about it.”
Mom: “Yep, he’s a smart one.”
Grandma: “I don’t understand a single thing he’s talking about.”
Mom: “Me neither”
Grandma: “He doesn’t seem to mind though, as long as I nod.”
Mom: “Yep, that’s what I do.”

Somethings may have changed, but that aspect of my personality probably hasn’t changed at all.

In the background, I do have some big ideas and consistent themes: technology is fun, copyrights and licensing are stifling individual creativity, and one learns best by doing rather than watching. I hope some of these come through from time to time. But really it boils down to a personal need for an expressive outlet.

Individuals need expressive outlets. The world is better when we talk, and also better when we stop from time to time and listen.

Brainwagon Radio: World Poker Tour Game, Sin City, and Acronis True Image

Where your host reviews a cool $20 video game, World Poker Tour by Toymax, gives his mixed (even muddled) opinion on ::google(“sin city”,”Sin City”)::, and a thumbs up for Acronis True Image disk cloning software.

Still have gmail and Yahoo! 360 invites available, mail me if you want one.

Additional gratuitous links:

  • I bought the World Poker Tour game because Wil Wheaton recommended it after getting one as a consolation prize for competing in the World Poker Tour Invitational.
  • Oh, when I said “video game” above, I meant “video game”, not “video game software”. It’s a hardware gadget. $20. Wow, economies of scale.