Monthly Archives: October 2005

EPROM burner arrived…

EPROM burner

Well, my EPROM burner from mcumall arrived, and I’m now got all the hardware bits ready to burn a cartridge for my old Atari 2600. Now all I need to do is finish the programming. I worked on it a bit last weekend, added page flipping and worked on getting the user interface better. In the process, the display itself has gotten a bit crufty, I hastily put in some calculations that added some blank lines, I haven’t quite gotten the plugboard interface in, and sound. But a good productive afternoon should tidy up all those bits.

This is the silliest project I think I’ve ever done. But still, a good excuse to get an eprom programmer.

Bill King passes away

Legendary Bay Area sports broadcaster Bill King passed away today, and I must admit, it bums me out. A great talent, I know him mostly as the radio voice of the Oakland Athletics, but he previously did play by play for the Oakland Raiders and the Golden State Warriors. He has one of the great radio voices, and listening to him call innings for the Athletics was one of the things that I enjoyed the most.

Bill, you’ll be missed.

How not to make it to the World Series

You begin by leading 4-2 in the top of the ninth, and then bring in your reliever to get two quick outs:

– B. Lidge relieved D. Wheeler
– J. Rodriguez hit for H. Luna
– J. Rodriguez struck out swinging
– J. Mabry struck out swinging

Then, you let some speedy kid bang out a single to left, and then let him advance to second.

– D. Eckstein singled to left
– D. Eckstein to second on fielder’s indifference

Then it would be good to walk Edmonds so that you could bring up Pujols, and let him crack a game winning homer over the fence.

– J. Edmonds walked
– A. Pujols homered to deep left, J. Edmonds and D. Eckstein scored
– R. Sanders struck out looking

3 runs, 2 hits, 0 errors
St. Louis 5, Houston 4

It goes back to St. Louis. If the Astros don’t make it to the Series, this will go down as one of the most amazing ninth innings in baseball history.

DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide

Xerox printers use a watermarking technique to insert codes onto all printed documents from their Docucolor color laser printers. These identify date, time and printer serial number with a grid of yellow dots which appear in the printout. Presumably these codes are inserted to make the job of the Secret Service simpler in tracking their use in creating counterfeit money. What’s kind of cool though is that the EFF has figured out how to decode them. Interesting bit: the dots are simple to see when viewed under an intense blue light, like one of those blue Photon LEDs.

Of Prions and People

Wow: another terrific article from The Panda’s Thumb, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite destinations on the web. This article is discussing some of the interesting research surrounding prions, self-propagating variants of certain proteins that are the infectious agents behind diseases like scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and variant Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease. What’s really interesting is that they may enable a form of Lamarckian evolution where traits which are not encoded genetically but are rather acquired through infection can be passed to offspring, subject to normal natural selection.

In certain conditions, for instance when an organisms recurrently but unpredictably encounters a specific, strong selective condition, prion systems may result in the environmental induction of adaptive, acquired heritable phenotypes.

At this point, we don’t have any bona fide examples of this actually happening, but in principle it’s possible. Moreover, this model provides a real, testable mechanism to explain such a phenomenon, should it occur (scientists don’t mind testable mechanisms and hypotheses, even when they are “heretical”).

Nothing stimulates science better than a good heresy, I always say.

Mysteries of the Universe Revealed

I admit it: I hate it when I don’t know stuff. I find not knowing what’s wrong with my car infinitely more annoying than knowing it will cost $500 to fix. It’s just part of my personality.

It’s also somewhat annoying that I’m a pretty light sleeper. Little noises can wake me out of a sound sleep, like when my son’s alarm clock goes off at the other end of the house, or a door opens, or someone opens the refridgerator down in the kitchen.

These two eccentricities collided this morning. I’ve been awoken a couple of times to a sort of low frequency booming sound, kind of like the resonant sound you get when you slam the lid on one of those big plastic trash cans, but it happens repeatedly, as if someone was doing it multiple times, just to annoy. And, of course as is the case so often, by the time I pulled on some pants and went outside to investigate, it would stop.

But I finally figured it out: it’s pidgeons.

They are apparently landing on my chimney, and doing something which booms down the metal lined resonant chamber and echoes into my skull. The little blighters have been plaguing my next door neighbor’s house, but a few seem to come and settle on mine, usually in the morning, and that’s why I can only get six hours of sleep instead of the nine I really need.

Still, I feel better now, although I suspect that maybe a chimney inspection is called for before the winter season really begins. Who knows? Maybe there is a pile of dead pidgeons (or, more likely, pidgeon droppings) lodged in my chimney.

Now I have something new to worry about.

Thought of the Day

I’m currently reading ::amazon(“0670033847”, “The Singularity Is Near”):: by Ray Kurzweil, and it’s kind of an over-the-top utopian view about the future. His basic hypothesis is fairly radical: that the accelerating innovation in the world will result in a vast leap in human evolution in the 21st century.

I don’t know that I buy the hypothesis, but I’ll address that more in a later post. Today’s idea for the day was on depreciation. Much of our current economy is tied up in technologies which will be realistically only worth half as much in as little as 14-18 months (namely, computer power). No other capital investment depreciates this quickly, and yet the overall industry is the very model of growth. This is because unlike the old historical economic view, computers aren’t capital assets, they are resources: exploitable resources whose price is racing to the bottom, and who is carrying many other industries (biomedical, communications, and manufacturing) straight to the bottom with them. This “deflation” that we fear in (say) the price of our homes is actually driving innovation and economic expansion.

I just hadn’t thought of it that way before.