As part of my weight loss plan, I decided I needed/deserved some form of MP3 player, and with my upcoming birthday, asked the wife that it would be a 20GB iPod. I reasoned that Apple makes excellent computer hardware that just works, it integrates well with iTunes, and it would just work.

Silly me.

I realized before it arrived that to use it on my cheapy HP laptop (2ghz AMD, 512M RAM, Combo Drive) that I’d need a firewire card. Rather than go with a
cheapy one, I decided to get an Adaptec DuoConnect card, which has ports for both Firewire and USB2.0.

The iPod arrived yesterday. The packaging is very cool. I installed the Updater software and iTunes (again), and tried to sync it up.

Here begins the total lack of fun. Upon connection, the little iPod whirs for a while, then I get a popup claiming that it needs to be restored since it isn’t responding. After doing so, it asks to be plugged back into the wall, so that it can finish reflashing itself.

Repeat three or four times. Cue Mark’s ire level.

It appears that PCMCIA firewire cards don’t put out power, and the iPod may not work reliably with Firewire adapters that don’t. Digging around on Adaptec’s website yielded this explanation.

Curiously enough, I did get the transfer to work once, so I do have a day and half of audio on my little iPod. This will tide me over until the $25 power supply gets here.

Why can’t things just work?

Well, it finally happened. My blog was spammed by a whole bunch of comments which linked to Lolita-style porn websites. Thanks for the interest, but I’d prefer if people didn’t hyperlink this sight to all kinds of websites featuring women pretending to be underage. Call me silly, but that’s just
the kind of guy I am.

There is a recent trend I’ve noticed in TV programs. It’s the practice of recapping the show that’s currently in progress after virtually every commercial break. I first noticed this in shows on the Discovery Channel when they doing "Top Ten Countdown" where they would take the time to recap what the previous entries were. It then spread to shows like Forensic Files. Last night, this odious
practice shifted to a drama show, namely Tru Calling.

Do television writers think our attention span is so limited that we
need to be reminded what were watching after every commercial break? C’mon, we’re already watching you show. Don’t insult us by beating us with
repeating the details of your show in progress every fifteen minutes.

This concludes my daily peeve.

Slashdot had a link today to the glofish.com website: a company which will begin distributing a genetically engineered zebrafish in 2004. These fish have an anenome gene cut into them so that they glow with a flourescent red color.

I suspect that I’d be interested in buying some. In scanning their webpage
though, I ran accross this:

Because fluorescent fish are unique, their sale is covered by a substantial number of patents and pending patent applications. The providers of GloFish™ fluorescent fish, 5-D Tropical and Segrest Farms , are the only distributors that have the necessary licenses to produce and market fluorescent fish within the United States . The production of fluorescent fish by any other party, or the sale of any fluorescent fish not originally distributed by 5-D Tropical or Segrest Farms, is strictly prohibited.

So in fact, you aren’t allowed to breed these otherwise normal zebrafish (their color is in fact heritable) to produce more or to hybridize them with ordinary zebrafish.

This brings up an interesting set of intellectual questions beyond just a glow-in-the-dark zebrafish. It seems that large transnational corporations have been patenting not just their own genetically engineered crops, but actual indigenous plants as well. Companies like Monsanto who normally supply farmers with seed for planting now use license agreements to keep farmers from using any of their crops for seed. It’s a wide, wooly area of patent and IP law, and we can
only be comforted slightly that patent terms are limited compared to copyright terms.

Try reading this website for a bunch of thought provoking analysis of the role that IP law holds for a world that still has lots of hungry people.

I hate politics. It’s mostly about the hypocrisy. I’ve been trying to ignore the
recall news for the most part, but every once in awhile you just have to listen.

Schwarzenegger has been accused of a pattern of what can only be described as boorish sexual harassment for incidents ranging from 1975 to 2000. These include crude comments, groping and an incident where he allegedly tried to pull the swimsuit off a woman in an elevator.

I’m not so stupid as to believe that these reports aren’t politically motivated. But quite surprisingly, Schwarzenegger today apologized for this behavior, which lends some credance to the fact that to a certain degree these
allegations are in fact true, at least to some degree.

In the news since, Schwarzeneggar has attempted to downplay the seriousness of any of his misdeeds, and Republican leaders have come out and said that this sexual misconduct, while reprehensible, should not serve as a reason to not vote for him.

They are wrong.

Whether this disclosure was politically motivated is irrelevant.
If these allegations are true, we should not vote for him. We should not vote for someone who displays such a complete lack of sensitivity toward women.
When representatives of the Republican party tell you this should behavior should not keep you from voting for Arnold, they are telling you this: that sexual harassment isn’t really a serious matter. That heck, everybody does it.
That grabbing somebody’s ass isn’t really a big deal. That groping their breast isn’t a big deal.

Everybody doesn’t do it. It is a big deal. In virtually any sphere of modern
American society, such behavior would get you fired, and justifiably so. I see
no reason to vote for someone who engaged in behavior that would get him fired.

Today,
Slashdot is reporting that the
BBC has announced that recent investigation of the Columbia disaster has shown that the foam that blew off and contacted Columbia’s wing could have resulted in damage consistent with the
catastrophic loss of the spacecraft.

In the test a 0.8kg piece of foam was fired by a nitrogen powered gun at a panel that was decommissioned from Atlantis. It contacted the wing at 850km/hour, and blew a 40cm square
hole.

Immediately the "cogniscenti" of slashdot set up a huge cry that such a large velocity
was unwarranted: that there was literally no way that the piece could have accelerated to such a
high velocity in such a short span of time. Most are just ignorant assertions, but some people try
to do the math, such as this one:

As far as I can see, I’d imagine that the foam falls from the fuel tank/booster onto the shuttle wing. The rate of fall should be only the relative acceleration that the shuttle experiences during the fall. (Since both foam and shuttle are presumably moving at the same speed when it detaches from the launcher)

So the total acceleration should be the acceleration of the shuttle (max 3G at liftoff according to a couple of web sources) plus normal gravity – call it 4 G. At most, the foam could fall the full 56 meters of the shuttle/booster/tank height (and most likely substantially less than that).

So, a quick (and probably hideously wrong) calculation based on v^2=2 * Accel * Distance shows that the end velocity of a body falling 56 meters at 4g should be about 33 meters/second, or 119 kph (74 mph)

Of course, the factor that they are missing is the enormous drag caused by the very unaerodynamic chunk of foam insulation as it detaches from the tank. The relatively low
mass and high drag of such a chunk causes it to decelerate very rapidly.
When the insulation disconnected, Columbia was 81 seconds into its flight, travelling at
Mach 2. Initial estimates indicated that the impact speed could not have been more than
500mph.

But do the math! At a relative speed of 500mph, a 1kg chunk of insulation has momentrum
equal to 0.5 * m * v^2, which is 25,000 joules or so. What does this mean? Well, let’s say
that I weigh 100kg (dreaming, I know, but it makes the math easier). If I am travelling 50mph,
then I have virtually the same kinetic energy as that chunk of foam.

I suspect that if you threw me at the Challenger wing at 50mph, something bad would happen.

Allrighty, I know, if I am going to get irritated by the ignorance of human beings, I shouldn’t read Slashdot. A recent article detailed China’s desire to
mine the moon for minerals. Never mind that it is absurd (can we name a single element so precious that it would justify the cost of rocket launches to bring it back from the moon. I would have expected someone to bring up that. But no, instead we get gems like the following.

Any of those more versed in physics than myself care to comment on what lowering the mass of the moon could do? I am sure not enough would be mined to raise the mass of the earth enough to cause problems, but wouldn’t a great enough reduction in lunar mass decrease the force of gravity between the earth and the moon, thus (possibely) destabilizing the orbit?

Sigh. Or how ’bout:

Presumably when they talk about “mining the moon” they are talking about going there to mine Helium 3. This is an isotope of helium which, if available in abundance, would be a perfect fuel for clean fusion power generation.

Except of course that nobody has built a working, controllable fusion reactor.

Economically this just doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to imagine the level of technology to make it make sense. Even the most difficult to mine natural resources of this planet will be cheaper to recover
than any resource from the moon or asteroids. Lunar mining is a pipe dream.

I was reading a Slashdot article this morning entitled A Music Industry Case Study, and was suddenly struck by the apparent absurdity of the term the Music Industry.

People never discuss “the Drawing Industry” or the “Sculpture Industry”. Why is music singled out in being labelled an Industry?

My online dictionary defines “industry” thusly:

in.dus.try
('in-(.)d*s-tr{e-})
Etymology: MF i[industrie] skill, employment involving skill, fr. L 
   i[industria] diligence, fr. i[industrius] diligent, fr. OL 
   i[indostruus], fr. i[indu] in + i[-struus] (akin to L 
   i[struere] to build) -- more at INDIGENOUS,  
   STRUCTURE]
1) n, diligence in an employment or pursuit
2) a) n, systematic labor esp. for the creation of value
   b) n, a department or branch of a craft, art, business, or
      manufacture; esp.: one that employs a large personnel and 
      capital esp. in manufacturing
   c) n, a distinct group of productive enterprises
   d) n, manufacturing activity as a whole

It appears that definition 2b comes the closest to an explanation.
The reason that we call the Music Industry an industry is that it employs vast amounts of capital and personnel to bring you the latest Britney Spears album. The music industry is a huge lumbering behemoth, supporting a wide array of musicians at levels far below minimum wage in an effort to find the few acts which they will promote into success.

Most of the people I know who are musicians have day jobs. Most don’t really complain that much about the lack of jobs or
money. They enjoy what they do. They’d do it for free. They’d do it if it cost them money (which it sometimes does, either directly or indirectly in the form of lost wages they could be receiving if they abandoned their musical aspirations).

People repeat the glib phrase “it’s all about the music”, but it obviously must be true, because to a first approximation, nobody makes any money at it. Frankly, I think music would be a lot better if we gave up the hope that it would be an industry, and accept it for what it is: art.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that most people believe that it is more important to have an immediate and distinct opinion rather than an actual informed opinion. This was brought home to me in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, when various newsgroups like
sci.space.shuttle were flooded with premature speculations and cries for the heads of NASA management, long before any sober consideration of the facts was possible.

Of course if you are looking for this kind of thing, there is no better place than Slashdot. Case in point, the recent article Slashdot | Pixar Eclipses Sun with Linux/Intel
The resulting flood of messages runs a wide gamut, but many fo the articles which were moderated up held little information, or even actual misinformation.

SuperDug comments:

I was under the impression…

That Sun had tried renderman (or whatever they call it) to run on 32 bit processors and it was a horrible disaster. Something about how it seemed more feasible and cost efficient to use Sun until the days in which the competiting 64 bit processors became cheaper.

I could have sworn that the software couldn’t run at all in 64 bit. I’m just wondering if they didn’t take a step down when they converted 64-bit optimized code to run on regular high cache 32-bit pentiums.

First of all, Sun doesn’t own or develop RenderMan. Pixar Animation Studios does. Until a few
years back, Sun platforms made up the bulk of RenderMan sales. The availability of cheap Intel
boxes and the maturing of Linux as an inexpensive operating system have made it a choice which
a large number of RenderMan customers now use.

RenderMan is a very portable system, the history of which goes back at least 15 years. It has been ported to 64 bit machines, including the DEC Alpha and the Sparc.

TheRaven64 opines:

I’m actually a little surprised they use general purpose CPUs for this kind of task. I’d have thought that a load of custom DSPs might be faster, and probably cheaper – How about 1 DSP per pixel (About 10 million?). I’m sure that would really zip along, if they could sort out the memory access issues inherent in this kind of application. Ray tracing is perfect for parallel execution, since each pixel really is independent of each other pixel, and each frame is likewise independent.

This is a particularly silly opinion because it sounds plausible unless you actually know anything about the scale and scope of what actually producing a movie entails. Pixar used to manufacture special purpose computer graphics hardware. They lost money and they stopped. In its place they created a new portable rendering system, and then have ridden 15 years of Moore’s law to make it 1000 times faster, merely by expending the time of a mid-range software guy to spend a few weeks porting to each new architecture. If the commentor could describe how Pixar could construct
custom hardware with releases every 18 months that double in speed cheaper than that, then I’d like to hear from him.

As for the old parallel raytracing comment, people who make this comment have never tried to write rendering software, particularly software that can handle the large scenes which are typical of movie production. In principle such an application is trivially parallelizable, but the reality has lots of details which are hard to manage.

Jack Balkin, a scholar on First Amendment issues presents some really interesting criticism of the majority opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft that may frame new challenges to the DMCA. Ginsberg asserted in the majority opinion that as long as the traditional boundaries of copyright (such as fair use) are unchanged, Congress is free to expend the term. I find the reasoning itself rather odd, since it seems to me that extending the term is changing the boundaries, but Balkin points out that the DMCA rather clearly operates to change those boundaries by restricting fair use.

Worth a read.

A great post-mortem of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft decision is going on Lawrence Lessig’s weblog. I’ve decided to add it to my newsfeeds on the right.
Click through and remain active.

I took the time to post a thank you to Larry and his efforts on behalf of the public. I urge all who come to my modest little blog to do the same.

The story is just now breaking that the Supreme Court has upheld the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act as constitutional in a 7-2 decision. I have only read part of the briefs, but had a couple of quick comments:

I expected this outcome, but I must admit I am still surprised that the Justices abandoned their responsibilty to act in the public interest as directed by the Constitution and hand what amounts to perpetual monopolies for intellectual property to publishers.

My brief skim of the majority opinion shows that the Court chose to focus on two issues, whether the Congress has the authority to extend the term of pre-existing copyrights, and whether such an extension represents a violation of the the First Amendment freedom of speech clause. The majority opinion held that the petitioners would like the “limited time” clause empowering Congress to establish copyrights means “inalterable”. I find this remark to be erroneous: the petitioners clearly argued (quite correctly in my opinion) that if Congress is able to continuously extend the term of copyrights, their powers are not limited. I think the SCOTUS has virtually handed infinite term copyrights to publishers by this action by allowing absolutely no end to the legislation that can extend their terms. The majority opinion goes on at great length to justify the retroactive nature of this application by historical precedent, which will require some additional headscratching before I can make sense of it all.

Overall the Court decided that the CTEA was within the power of Congress to enact, that the Justice department is not in the business of second guessing Congress as to policy.

The Court found as unpersuasive the argument that the CTEA represented an attempt to generate perpetual extensions. I find this rather remarkable, given the comments of Sonny Bono’s widow upholding the idea first voiced by Jack Valenti that they desired copyrights to be “forever minus one day”. They echoed
the earlier court finding that the CTEA was designed merely to bring US copyright law into parity with laws passed in the EU. I guess we will have to wait
another fifteen years or so to see if the Court was correct in their assessment.

The two dissenting opinions by Justices Breyer and Stevens are excellent in
their clarity and insight. It is a pity that more of the Justices could not see their duty to uphold the principles of the Constitution for the public benefit.

I’ll almost certainly rant more when I have more time to think about it.

I admit it. I have a hard time with names.

Actually, that isn’t true. I actually memorize names fairly well. The only problem is that I can only memorize them well when I see them in print. If you walk up to me and tell me your name, without tons of real effort, I can’t keep it in my skull for very long. It helps if I stare at you and write your name a few times. Then it works pretty well.

Of course the world would be a lot simpler if we all took the advice of
Scott. Scott decided
that he’d wear a nametag. All the time. Everywhere. When at the beach he
wrote his name on his chest with a marker.

He’s a bit of a nut, but he’s got a nice philosophy, that we spend far too much
of our time trying not to make eye contact with others, trying to shun the
interaction with others that we end up craving. Why not make the simplest
gesture possible, and make it easy for everyone to call you by name? What
difference could that make?

Apparently it makes quite a bit of difference. He’s got lots of interesting
stories. It is a fairly compelling idea, especially to a borderline recluse
introvert like myself. I might have to give it a shot.

Every once in a while I have a chain of thoughts that connects seemingly unrelated
things together into a new set of ideas. One of those happened to me over the last week or so. I’ve previously complained that the creation of our “culture” is increasingly a manufactured entity: that our music and stories are increasingly the result of commercial interests carefully screened for marketing purposes rather
than the stories and music that we create as individuals. We have become a world of watchers rather than doers.

But there are some interesting counterexamples. One that I’ve begun to find interesting is fan fiction and art. Recently Slashdot ran an interesting story on
Star Wars Second Strike,
a fan fiction story rendered as an audio play in the style of old time radio. It is
a fascinating attempt at collaboration: over 40 actors in five countries participated in producing the first hour long episode. I’ve listened to just a bit
of it (the rest will wait for my anticipated long trip to Monterey next week), but
the production quality is quite high. Audio dramas present interesting challenges for story telling, but this would seem to be an area where amateurs could make
significant and interesting new contributions using the Internet as a collaborating
medium. I dug around a bit, and discovered an interesting set of links for
Radio Drama Resources. The idea of creating new dramatic works in the audio format
seems very compelling, and more within the budget and resources of amateur
productions.

I’ll ponder it some more…