Tech Is Not Pink

Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle had a front page article entitled How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pink.  Apparently, colleges trying to recruit young women to computer  engineering have been sending out flyers done in curly purple script, with flowers on them.  They create pink web sites for women computer engineers.  They refer to "web divas," in flyers printed on purple polka-dot paper.

Does this make you cringe a little?  It should.  They're trying to sell an actual, well paying career, and they present as if they're selling Barbie dolls.  You would think people running colleges would be smarter than this.  Folks, this approach is insulting - which, to the Chron's credit, was the point of the article.

I speak as a woman computer engineer.  I have 19 years experience in a mainframe data center belonging to a major bank; in retirement I support 3 web sites for local non-profits.  Computer science classes weren't available to women when I was in college - well, they were there (using IBM cards), but no one told women what they were about.  Women of my generation didn't get jobs working with computers, with very few exceptions.  (Grace Hopper was the previous generation.)

I started working with personal computers almost immediately after they came on the market.  I kept department books on an Apple IIe, using VisiCalc, in 1979.  I wrote my own menus and installed my own programs on an IBM PC-XT (10MB hard drive!) in 1982.  I took night classes, read books, took on free projects for experience building databases, and finally lucked into an "entry-level training program" at the major bank.  (If that rings a bell with you, you know what the bank was.  The program hasn't survived.)  When I retired I decided to do web management for non-profits; I taught myself that, too.  I don't do web design, I'm a mediocre designer; but I can set it up, I can maintain it, and if it breaks I can probably fix it.

I hate pink and never wear it.  Little flowery things make me wince. I'm interested in how things work, not how they look.  And while today's young women aren't like me in a lot of ways, if they aren't interested in how things work, they probably aren't going into computer science anyway.

Why do we all care that there are few women in tech?  Because women see things differently than men do.  Women ask different questions, and sometimes produce answers the men didn't think of.  If you ever wondered why the tech world works the way it does, the answer may well be, because it doesn't have enough women, asking those different questions.  Go for it, ladies; ignore the curly purple things.  It's a fascinating field, even if the recruiters haven't got a clue how to sell it to you.

Google Glass Can Now...

I've had my doubts about Google Glass for some time, and not just because I'm not one of the beta testers.  I don't think I can be - I wear actual glasses to see with, and I've never seen any explanation of how a four-eye like me could even put them on.  Over my glasses?  I don't think so.  My metaphysical objection to Google Glass is that it - they? - make it way too easy to get lost in your little digital world, and to forget that your physical body is doing something actually dangerous, like driving a car, or crossing a street.  After all, those are two of the most dangerous things you can do these days, in terms of the death rate.

Google Glass strikes me as a solution in search of a problem to solve.  It can do some very useful things - but that tiny heads-up display could all too easily be a fatal distraction.  Yes, military pilots use heads-up displays in very tough situations, but they also go through hours of intensive training.  Sooner or later Google Glass will kill someone - a man merely texting while driving just killed two people in Santa Rosa (of course, he was also high).  (Sorry, the article is behind a paywall but you can see the headline and summary.)  I'm not the only one who thinks this, either; San Francisco Chronicle columnist C. W. Nevius came to the same conclusion about 10 days ago.

It wouldn't break my heart if Google Glass never came out of beta. But it almost certainly will, and now we learn there will shortly be a video game for Google Glass.  Oh, great, a video game.  Even better, the game is "Global Food Fight."  I am not making this up.  You will now be able to walk down the street, wearing your Google Glass, weaving and bobbing your head and shoulders back and forth to control a Global Food Fight game that only you can see.  Isn't that precious?  Take a minute and imagine what it will look like. And somebody will do that - it's inevitable.

Cell phones are bad enough, useful as they are.  In the bad old days when phones lived in phone booths, if a man walked down the street gesturing and talking loudly to himself, you could assume he was crazy.  Now if a man does that (or a woman), you have to look for the Bluetooth headset before you write them off as short a couple of shingles.

I never walk down the street talking on the phone.  It's a great way to get your phone stolen.

Imagine the joy of watching a Google Glass wearer bobbing and weaving down the street, indulging in a Global Food Fight.  Now imagine them playing the game and talking to someone on the phone about it.  Since Google Glass is a Bluetooth headset, they'll be walking along, talking to themselves, moving their head back and forth and shrugging their shoulders...

After all, as the article says, a virtual food fight game "is a fun way to engage people to play with the potential of this new device."

And of course, in San Francisco, it's possible that no one would notice.

Real Men Don't Type

I was just listening to a segment of NPR's Science Friday on teaching seniors how to deal with computers, and a man named Andy called in with a story about his 80 year old father, who is an accountant, and who has for thirty years refused to learn to use computers.  He still does accounts on paper.  Andy complained that his father is underemployed for that reason, and he couldn't understand why all their efforts to convince him to change had failed.

In the late 1970s I worked for one of the (then) Big Eight accounting firms.  I was their office librarian and records manager.  And I remember a phenomenon that may explain Andy's father's reluctance, which he may not have thought of.  This was when personal computers were just coming in; I remember "borrowing" the Apple IIe that the consulting arm had bought, so I could put my department budget onto Visicalc instead of 17 column ledger.

The consultants, as you may gather, were perfectly happy to play with this new toy, but I remember that the older accounting partners were very very reluctant.  And it was obvious then why:  in that era, businessmen did not type.  They didn't use keyboards at all; the closest they came to a keyboard was a 10-key adding machine (and you haven't seen fast until you've seen one of these guys adding a column!).  They dictated or wrote notes to their secretaries, and the secretaries typed, and brought the documents in for review and correction, and retyped if needed.

So these men wouldn't use computers because they couldn't type, and it would have been a major loss of face to try to type and fail.  Andy's father is about the age of the partners I'm talking about, they were in their early 50's and up. He may not want to use a computer for the simple reason that he never learned to type and at 80 years of age, he may not even have the manual dexterity to learn any more.  Andy, he's 80; just leave him alone.

More Template Problems

I was still more annoyed to learn that I can't modify the design and layout of my blog template anywhere except in the Chrome browser.  Trying to rearrange the layout in FireFox just doesn't work.  Grump.  For now, this will be my now blog template.  I still want the old one back but it isn't going to happen.

Be Careful What You Ask For

I've lost my nice template.  I tried one of Blogger's new templates just to see what it looked like - it looked crappy - and now I can't get my old template back because it doesn't fit in their "new" system.  Damn.  Watch this space.

The Anatomy Class

While we were in Denver, we visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  They were presenting an exhibit (it closed July 18) called Body Worlds - the story of the heart, which we visited.  Let's start with the short summary from the museum's page:

Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a German scientist, developed a plastination technique in 1977 that preserves the human body in motion. The anatomical exhibitions by von Hagens showcase the muscular structure of the human body, and have been exhibited in such far-flung locales as Singapore and Spain.

Click the next link for details on the plastination process, in as much detail as you want.  In summary, the plastination process removes water and fats from the tissues of deceased animals, including humans, and replaces them with polymers, which preserves them indefinitely from decay.  In color.  The Egyptians never dreamed of embalming like this.  The Body Worlds exhibits (this is the second one) take human bodies, and organs, which have been plastinated, and display them in motion, showing internal organs, muscles and sinews - in short, everything but the skin, which they normally remove for display.  And the full-sized display figures (the plastinates) are amazing - posed as in extreme athletic feats, like throwing a javelin, or jumping on skis. 

Human bodies?  Yes.  You can will your body to the Institute for Plastination, to be preserved in this way and used for scientific education.  You can choose to be anonymous, or not.  Because the entire bodies are plastinated, organs and joints can be sectioned to display tumors or other illnesses. 

Make no mistake, I was impressed.  The plastinate displays are astounding.  The details of organs, joints, the vascular system - all in details that even doctors rarely see.  You learn more about the human body in this exhibit than you do in most introductory anatomy classes.

And yet - it gave me the creeps.  It didn't upset my stomach - my stomach doesn't upset easily - but there were signs all through the exhibit to notify the staff if anybody in your party felt dizzy or faint, so I guess some people do get queasy.  But really - when you die, is this what you want done with your carcass?  To have it mounted in a museum display, down the hall from the stuffed antelopes?  I have very mixed feelings about the process.  I'm normally all for scientific education, I'm all for investigation and teaching; and the displays of individual organs and joints (all preserved through plastination and all originally human) were fascinating.  But the plastinate displays had a whiff of P. T. Barnum about them that disturbed me, and still does.

Death is the great mystery that separates us from animals, who don't know that they will die.  It seems to me that it should be treated with more dignity than this.

The Geek's Lament

Or, why are things so hard with Microsoft? (People whose eyes cross at the sound of geek can stop reading here; I just want to vent.)

I've been having a little trouble with my laptop - I decided to buy a faster wireless card, and in the process of installing it, I managed to turn off all wireless connectivity on my laptop.  The built-in card that came with the laptop, which has worked flawlessly for 2 1/2 years including through the upgrade to Windows 7, simply stopped detecting wireless networks.  Any wireless networks, including mine.

In case you want to avoid this nefarious product, it was a TrendNet TEW-642 EC, an N-class wireless express card adapter.  It came with a "wireless utility client" which TrendNet support swore would never leave my system broken like this after uninstall.  As a matter of fact, I think the TrendNet card I received was defective, and I've returned it for a refund; but I don't see how plugging in a defective adapter could shut down a working adapter.  I'm deeply suspicious of that utility software.  But what do I know? 

I've literally worked on this daily, or almost daily, since January 26 - since today is February 5, that's 10 days.  I've busted my brains, tried everything I could think of, researched arcane Windows system commands.  I was reasonably sure that I could get things working again if I could successfully do a system restore to Jan. 22 - the last restore point before I started messing with the new adapter.  System restore rolls your system back to an earlier configuration without touching your data.  I've tried this at least once a day; and every day (until today) the restore failed "because a file is in use."  I learned to turn off the stuff that loads at startup; I tried shutting down ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite; I tried shutting down ZA and telling it not to restart when the system restarts.  Every restore failed with the "file in use" error, and no wireless.  

I finally found, on an Internet bulletin board, a warning that I might have to uninstall ZA to make system restore work, so today I tried that.  And it worked.  The restore succeeded, and my wireless card leapt back to life.  Now, I like ZA because it tells me what it's doing.  But this one has me wondering if I should give Norton another try.

Shrinking Coinage

No, this isn't what you think it's about. Now and then I drop in over at the Bad Astronomy blog, on the Discover site, just because it's cool. Today I dropped by and found a post called Coin Deflation, about a group of techies who "strap a scary big capacitor onto a U.S. quarter and zap it with 15,000 Joules." If you are into techno gadgetry, you should follow the links and look at the slow-mo videos they posted of this process, because they're fascinating - and for the bang-and-flash addicts, there's even a video section entitled "gratuitous explosions."

The point is what happens to the quarter when you do this: it shrinks in size. Quite a lot. It doesn't become lighter, I'm interested to read; so it must become denser.

These guys are evidently total lab rats, because of all the comments (9) on the original site, and on the Bad Astronomy post (20 when I looked), not one single person made the obvious (to me) joke about the value of the quarter decreasing! One guy asked if it was still worth 25 cents (nobody answered); and one guy admitted sheepishly to have "plunked down good money for bad" by buying a shrunken quarter because it was "awesome." No currency deflation references. No bad economy jokes at all. We're in the worst economic mess in living memory, and these folks shrink a quarter to half its normal size, and the connection doesn't even occur to them.

I love the human race. I just hope it can keep from killing itself with those gadgets.

Wotta Week

I just realized I haven't posted in 2 weeks. I have to get more control of things - I have this feeling that I'm overcommitted. In the last 3 weeks I've:

• Finished up the National Hunger Study (my microscopic part in it).
• Gone to a retirement lunch for an old friend from work (now he has even more time to send me weird YouTube links).
• Helped the Oakland East Bay Symphony volunteers set up their forum on Race Relations in Art (and attended same - very interesting, showed clips from the 1936 Show Boat, with Paul Robeson singing Old Man River. If you've seen the happy Disney-style 1951 Show Boat, the 1936 movie would knock you straight off your chair. "Lift that bale" has a whole new meaning after seeing some of those shots.).
• Spent 2 mornings stacking groceries at the local food bank warehouse.
• Attended a board meeting for one of my nonprofits.
• Attended a book signing party for an old friend.
• Attended the annual convention for another nonprofit, and took photos of the events.
• Sang at the dinner after the convention.
• Identified, bought, configured and re-configured a new laptop for a nonprofit.
• Spent hours on the phone negotiating nonprofit discounts for Microsoft Office licenses.
• Attended one chorus rehearsal and 2 rehearsals with orchestra and soloists.
• Sang in a concert performance of Show Boat, plus selected Jerome Kern pieces. Lovely concert, great soloists, great music.

Is that enough? I'm tired all over again just reading it.

This week was enlivened by computer failures. I had to give the photos I took at the convention to someone else, so I tried to burn them to a CD. Got a blue screen of death. Three times. Fortunately, two of those times also produced usable CDs. The system seems fine as long as I'm not burning copies of photos.

Then there's the new laptop. By the way, there are some great deals on Vista laptops out there if you're interested. Bought it, built it out, patched it, everything copacetic. Then we tried to install an ancient version of FileMaker Pro that we've been using (because it was paid for - this is a nonprofit). Couldn't install it; it's supposed to have an auto-play feature, but it wouldn't even run under 64-bit Vista. So I decided to switch to the computer admin user with the install CD still in the drive. The CD drive whirred loudly for a minute and the whole box died. No keyboard, no mouse, no touchpad. Dead. I turned it off, and tried to turn it on again, and it wouldn't come up. To make a long story short, I had to rebuild it from the recovery disk, which took another entire day. I'm really tired of rebuilding computers.

And somehow I still have to make up my mind how I'll vote, Tuesday, on those unspeakable California budget propositions. I don't like any of them very much; I'm in favor of a spending cap (since the Lege has all the spending discipline of a drunken rock star), but I object to using the State Constitution for budget management. I don't like the budget cuts and spending changes the propositions will make, but it's pretty clear that defeating them will cause even more budget cuts. I may never vote for another incumbent again given that the incumbents got us here.

Why I Don't Tweet

The whole Twitter phenom just amazes me. Now, I can claim to be pretty techno-savvy. I was doing stuff online long before most people. I had a PDA when most of my peers were carrying DayRunners around. Hell, I was doing online searches for currency exchange rates in 1978, on a 300 baud TI SilentWriter 800. But Twitter - I don't get Twitter. Or rather, I get it, but I don't want it.

Readers of this blog may sometimes feel that I don't know when to shut up. I feel that if a subject is of sufficient importance to write about, it's important enough to do some research, give it some thought, carefully consider all the angles. This process is impossible on Twitter, because Twitter restricts you to 140 characters at a time. That's not a blog entry, it's a haiku; in fact, most haiku wouldn't fit on Twitter. Maybe in two successive tweets you could do a haiku, but who would know?

I started thinking about this the other day when Adam Felber, one of my favorite bloggers, announced on his blog that he is now on Twitter. I read Fanatical Apathy for two reasons, first, Adam's biting, insightful satire, and second, the charming group of posters who respond to him and to each other. So, when Adam set up on Twitter, I went and looked at his tweets. ("Tweets" - the word itself is just demeaning.) They weren't insightful, or meaningful, or satirical - they weren't anything. (OK, he has a baby under 1 year old. This is bound to have some effect.) In fact, I told him as much.

As far as I can tell, the point of Twitter is either to dribble out your immediate thoughts to the world as the spirit moves you, 140 characters at a time, or alternatively to subscribe to other people's tweets as the spirit moves them. I gather that celebrities have tens of thousands of random people subscribing to their tweets. I assume the tweets come into your cell phone as text messages; so your cell phone is constantly going off.

This is carrying electronic connectivity to absurd lengths. I spent a number of years, in my last job, carrying a duty pager, AKA the Electronic Leash. This went off whenever anything went wrong, or when someone wanted to talk to me about something, or when there was a meeting, or whatever. In fact, after one upgrade, the system would deliver news and sports updates to your text pager - constant buzzing. Frankly, I turned the sound off, except for actual messages to me. I don't want to be that frigging "connected"; and that's my objection to Twitter.

But that isn't my only objection - Twitter is constant "connection," but without any actual human contact. Just because you subscribe to Bill Gates' tweets doesn't mean you know Bill Gates. (Doonesbury nailed this pretty effectively, if you saw the strip about Roland Hedley and his tweets on March 9) I'm all in favor of constant connection if it has a human being attached to it. I want to have lunch with a friend. I want to go to a museum with a buddy. I don't want to get random 140 character blurts from someone I'll never meet.

So have fun, all you Tweeters - but if you want to talk to me, I'll be here, writing in complete paragraphs.

Geek Pleasure

It's amazing how the small things can light up your life. I just upgraded my old Dell desktop to 4 GB of memory - all by myself! This may not sound like much, but as we used to say when nobody could get the video-feed projector to work, I'm a software type: I don't do hardware. What I do, however, is Read The Fine Manual. To give the Dell his due, Dell publishes excellent, detailed online manuals including step by step instructions on how to swap out your system memory and put in new stuff; and I printed them out and followed them, and LO! I have subsecond system response again! What a pleasure!

I suppose I could have stopped running Rosetta@home in the background. In fact, a couple of times lately, I did - I don't know what kind of proteins they're analyzing this week, but even as I type this, the 2 jobs Rosetta jobs running are taking up 650 MB of memory, all by themselves. On the 1 GB of memory I had before, this hardly left enough to bring up WinXP, much less actually DO anything. So whee! I have new memory, I have a newly fast box, and I didn't fry anything in the attempt!

Synthetic Life

In today's San Francisco Chronicle, the article on the TED conference in Monterey centered on yesterday's speech by Craig Venter. Remember him from the Human Genome Project? The guy who said - and proved, as I remember - that a profit-making organization could beat a non-profit to the goal. Mr. Venter, having followed that up by sequencing his own personal genome, is now trying to build, from scratch, the genome for a "single, sustainable, living cell." Mr. Venter imagines

Imagine an organism that consumes carbon dioxide and can be used to battle global warming.

I have really bad news for Mr. Venter. He's re-inventing the wheel. These organisms already exist - they're called "plants." If he ever came out of his laboratory, he might even see some of them.

Moth Spray

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

The latest incarnation of this terrifying phrase is the California State Dept. of Agriculture's plan to spray the city I live in, Oakland, along with basically the entire rest of the San Francisco Bay Area, with a pesticide meant to combat the light brown apple moth. Every night this summer. And every summer for the next five years. Even though the initial spraying in Santa Cruz and Monterey last year produced hundreds of complaints about coughing, wheezing, muscle aches, eye and throat irritation, and asthma attacks.

We're doing this because the light brown apple moth "can damage" a wide range of agricultural crops and other plants. If we don't do this spraying, it'll destroy California agribusiness. The state, and the USDA, say they are trying to "head off a potential disaster."

Yeah, right. Have we got a widespread infestation of the apple moth? Well, no. They've found a few moths in about 11 counties. Does the apple moth cripple agriculture? Well, not visibly in Australia, where it originated; OK, maybe it has natural enemies there. But it's also been introduced into New Zealand, New Caledonia, the British Isles, and Hawaii. I haven't personally heard of the agricultural industry in those places being crippled by this moth; have I missed something??

Look, they propose to fly crop-dusters over the city of Oakland, at a height of 200 feet or less, and spray a chemical called CheckMate over the city (and about every other city in the Bay Area), every night, all summer. To read a professional analysis of the ingredients of CheckMate, review this article in today's San Francisco Chronicle, from Richard Fagerland, of "Ask the Bugman." It is scary. It is very scary. The USDA says the amount of pesticide they want to use "shouldn't pose severe health risks." I'd like to know how they determine what health risks are "severe."

I'm an asthmatic; I also have eye problems due to other chronic conditions. I am seriously concerned about my health if I have to live with this crap falling out of the sky for the next five years. There are bills in the California legislature right now to block this spraying, and I think my next step is to go to my legislators' web sites and encourage them to pass those bills.

This is an attempt to protect California agribusiness at the expense of the health of the majority of the northern California urban population. Well, boys, there are more of us than there are of them, and we vote for you. Or we don't; your choice.

BlackBerry Outage

Sigh - the news brings fond memories of days gone by. When I worked, the entire universe, including me, had BlackBerries. They were so bad some managers forbade people to bring them to meetings, because nobody paid any attention to what was going on in the room. When BlackBerry went down the world ended. I see it ended again today for awhile - in fact, as of around 7:30 ET it was still down with no estimate for a fix. May as well declare tomorrow a holiday - BlackBerry's out. Nobody can work.

NASCAR

No, I haven't got a new hobby. But my usual stationary bike at the gym is down for repairs, so I had to use the ones on the 3rd floor that face a wall-sized plasma TV; and it's impossible to ignore it completely because it's so big. (Also one of the reasons I hate TV is that I find it impossible to ignore.) So I found myself this morning cranking away on the bike and looking at what looked like Highway 880 on a good afternoon with the traffic flowing smoothly along - except that the cars were all plastered with advertising, and the road was oval, and no 2 cars had more than one car length between them. Also they were going 190 MPH, or so the closed captioning said. But there they were, bumper to bumper and hubcap to hubcap, 3 lanes wide - nobody changing position, nobody trying to pull forward, nobody doing anything.

This is entertainment? I can see this on the traffic cams, except for the advertising - and, even the Nimitz doesn't get to 190 MPH. Around and around they go, and they never stop or move or change position or whatever.

Interval follows in which I read a couple of Economist leaders, and I look up again and it's worse - they're all in a single line. Still bumper to bumper, still going like bats out of hell - all in one line. I figure, if this goes on, the guy in the front car has it wrapped. (I think the guy in the front car was Dale Earnhardt, Jr., but if so he didn't have it wrapped - see results for Talladega.) It's all very symmetrical and not very interesting.

Back to the Economist, and a couple of articles later I look up to see a car break formation, roll three or four times while flames shoot out of the engine compartment, and fetch up on its roof in the infield. Following this, 2 or 3 other cars (which are now back in multi-lane formation) bash into each other and the wall, kicking up more smoke and dirt. OK, I guess they do change position occasionally. I was impressed when the first driver disentangled himself and walked away from the wreck - now, that's safety equipment!

But I still don't understand what gets so many people so excited about watching a bunch of cars follow each other decorously around an oval track, even if it is at 190 MPH.

Hang Up And Drive

The California Governator has just signed a law prohibiting 16 and 17 year olds from using cell phones, PDAs, laptops (they're using LAPTOPS??) and pagers while driving, effective July 1, 2008. They won't be able to text message their friends from behind the wheel any more. Tooooo bad. I only have two questions.

1. Why are we waiting until July 1? (OK, this is probably just the way the legal system works) and,

2. Why only 16 and 17 year olds??

Once these kids turn 18, assuming they don't kill themselves and everyone else in the car before then, they will be able to text message their friends while driving, and it'll be perfectly legal. Also, most of the idiots I pass, driving one-handed at 70 MPH with the other hand gluing a cellphone to their ear, are well over the age of 18. I've seen more than one study indicating that driving while talking on the phone is as dangerous as driving drunk - maybe even more so. Just Google "cell phone driving" and look at the evidence for yourself. This is stupid, people.

OK, I'll back off and do the disclaimers: yes, yes, most teenagers don't drive and text. But in this case "most" amounts to two out of three, according to a recent study done by AAA and Seventeen magazine. That means one out of three teenagers is driving and texting, or at least driving and yakking. That's a very high percentage. If they kill themselves while doing this, that may be just Darwinian selection at work; but the odds are quite high that, through inattention, they will kill someone else too, who has done nothing more dangerous than try to drive to work. (Actually, driving to work is dangerous; much more so than the great Terrorist Threat; but that's another post...)

This article lists all the countries, and the U.S. states, that have passed some kind of ban on using cell phones while driving - in some cases just requiring hands-free equipment, but in some cases (New Delhi, India) banning even that. You can potentially go to jail for driving and chatting in Bahrain. There is a reason all these countries have banned driving and phoning: it's dangerous. It kills people. Let's keep your attention on the road, folks.

Oh, yeah, and what about eating while driving, and putting on makeup while driving?? (For that matter, what about the guy I saw wailing down the Number One lane, doing at least 80, with a 3 ring binder spread out on his steering wheel??) Well, they aren't illegal, and not even I am suggesting that they should be (OK, maybe putting on eye makeup should be); but they're just as dangerous as talking on the cell phone. Let's face it, folks: when you're driving a car, your entire attention should be on the road. This is not the time to demonstrate how well you can multi-task. As the old song goes, "Keep your mind on your drivin' and your hands on the wheel..."

Online Networking

The online networking sites seem to be past it. Old news. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, it's too, too exhausting to maintain an active social life online. "Social networking fatigue", they call it.

I'll admit I've been following the flap over MySpace and FaceBook and all the other online hot spots. I actually joined one of the "class reunion" sites, after my high school class had a reunion; but I've never found any real information there (why would you put real information up on a site like that?), and no one ever really tries to contact me. (My email address is there, not much else.)

The networking sites do remind me of something, though. They remind me of The Naked Sun, a novel Isaac Asimov wrote in 1957, when Tim Berners-Lee was 2 years old, computers took up entire rooms and had 64K of memory, and the World Wide Web wasn't even a hallucination. Except that the Inimitable Isaac hallucinated, in The Naked Sun, the planet Solaria, where people live one to a dwelling, miles apart, and never come together in person at all; where they communicate with each other by projecting images of themselves, through which they speak. Electronic communication in place of human interaction.

It isn't possible today to approach the astounding isolation of the Solarians; for one thing, there were only twenty thousand of them on the whole planet, a number which seems as absurd to us now as it did to Asimov's detective Elijah Baley, who lived on an Earth that was a massive rabbit warren of crowded multi-level cities, with no open space left - Baley is an agoraphobe. But it's possible for, say, an addicted gamer living alone to go for days without leaving the terminal except to get food, sleep, or relieve himself; never to see another human face or have a direct conversation. And in the cases where we approach this, we approach the Solarians - they were afraid of germs, of contagion, and so they stayed apart and only spoke with each other through electronic media.

It's dangerous for us to do this. We're social beings; we need other humans. We need to talk, sing, dance, eat with each other, even if none of it has any deep significance. The trouble with the networking sites is that they foster the illusion that you don't actually need to meet people in order to be their friends; and that is a contradiction in terms. Unless you actually meet someone, you will never know if they are honestly describing themselves, or merely sustaining a brilliant, coherent lie. As the cartoon says, "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog."

It isn't, by the way, necessary to have a purely electronic connection in order to lie to someone; I've read cases of extended deceptions done entirely by letter in the 18th century, when travel was very difficult. It's just easier on a terminal.

Leaving apart the issue of honesty and dishonesty, we need direct contact with each other because that is the kind of animals we are. We need to hear each other's voices, touch each other's hands. We need to get out in the sun, feel the wind, walk in the rain. If we isolate ourselves and never go outside, we harm ourselves; and we harm each other because we forget how to deal with each other. Let us try to be more together, to be in the real world, and not place a flat-screen terminal between us and reality.

And for those of you who comment on my blog, please don't take this to mean that I think you're lying to me about yourselves; in fact, I don't. I'm just aware that I'm accepting your word, the evidence of things not seen; as you accept my word about me.

Unclear on the concept

The ever-reliable (as a source of weirdness) San Francisco Chronicle had a lead article today in the business section on the joys of broadband wireless. This is a wireless card for your laptop that talks to your cellphone, so you don't have to waste time finding and negotiating a Starbuck's hot spot: you can sit down right there in the parking lot and email away. You'd probably be more comfortable at Starbuck's, but that's a detail.

We used to do something like this back in the day when I was on 24-hour pager support. Of course, at that time the duty cell phone was a brick that weighed 10 pounds (we bought a luggage cart for it), and the connection with the laptop was a phone cord plugged into a dial-up modem; but I remember one of my colleagues troubleshooting a mainframe problem with this rig while seated cross-legged on the grass at a company party. Since this was not only pre-wireless but pre-Starbuck's, it was pretty fardling advanced. (Full disclosure: I stole the epithet from Anne McCaffrey's Ship who Sang series...)

Anyway, back in the story about the 3G broadband, I loved the last quote in the story:

"It's phenomenal," Ask said. "It's great being able to open your laptop and get Internet access and not get nickel-and-dimed for service everywhere you go."

This was from someone who is paying $60 a month for access. Yeah, I guess it's fair to say she's not being nickel-and-dimed...

Future Warriors

The Economist's latest Technology Quarterly has an article on the "future force warrior" (which you won't be able to read unless you subscribe, unfortunately; but if you Google the phrase you'll come up with a whole list of public sites). The gist of it is that the U.S. military has decided it needs to protect its soldiers better (about time, too). The technology bug has bit them, however, and instead of just investing in more Kevlar body armor, they propose turning each soldier into a walking internet node (wireless, of course), complete with sensors to tell not only where he is but how he is (vital signs, asleep or awake, etc.), portable power sources, all under lightweight Kevlar armor plates (black, of course); and with a fully integrated night vision/heads up display with video feeds from robot drone scout planes, and a data link to every other soldier and vehicle.

I'm sorry, these guys have been reading too much science fiction. They have seen Matrix and Star Trek one time too many. I'm not suggesting that your basic GI can't handle all this; with training, he probably can. I am suggesting that the designers have lost sight of the K.I.S.S. principle, and of the fact that the more complicated a system is, the more likely it is to fail in unexpected ways. I do not think it's a coincidence that the picture of the proposed outfit looks exactly like an Imperial Storm Trooper, only in black.

These designers are the same people who thought the Star Wars anti-missile defense was a good idea, despite the fact that it would have required tens of thousands of lines of software code which couldn't be debugged except under fire. Virtually every computer programmer in the world thought it was a Bad Idea, and so is this. This "battlesuit" - yes, they use the term - is so complicated that the likelihood of system failures is quite high, and the early wearers of this will be, I'm sorry, sitting ducks. The only good thing is that they'll be sitting ducks wearing Kevlar armor. In addition, if the whole thing is based on the GPS and the wireless data link, what does our soldier in his battlesuit do if the other side comes up with some easy way to jam the transmission frequencies?? Or simply blow up the transmission towers? Wireless still required line of sight, last time I looked.

Go back to the video games, guys, and just buy the boys overseas some better armor. The lightweight Kevlar armor plates are the only good idea you've come up with. The really good idea would be to come up with some way to settle international disputes without shooting at people, but that's apparently way too far out.

Meditations of a Gadget Freak

I've been fascinated by the DARPA Grand Challenge, won in October by a team from Stanford. The January issue of Scientific American has an article, Innovations from a Robot Rally, which is a must for every red-blooded gadget freak, it goes into detail about how the various teams solved their technical issues. (The link above is to the article on the SciAm site, but you could just go buy the magazine. In fact, if you want to see the photos and diagrams, you have to get the magazine; it's only $11 - in the U.S. - and they're worth it.) Between March 2004 and October 2005 these teams went from no vehicle even completing the course (I don't think any entry got farther than 3 miles), to 4 vehicles doing 132 miles in under 8 hours: the winning time was 6 hours 53 minutes. That's an average speed of just over 19 MPH.

Some of the most interesting tweaks weren't even done by the winning team:

One of the obvious problems was, how do you track where the robot is? The obvious answer is, give it a GPS, or maybe several; but how do you track distance and direction if it gets into a canyon where the GPS signal is blocked? The team of high school students from Palos Verdes, CA (yes, they competed) developed something they call a GroundMouse, based on the principle behind optical mice: with a camera, a bright light, and an optical tube, they built a 2 dimensional odometer with 1 millimeter accuracy in any horizontal direction. (The team staffed by professional engineers built something similar, but they used a Doppler radar. Isn't money nice?) I love 2 things about these kids: first, that they tried at all. Second, that their solution used stuff you could buy at Radio Shack. There's hope for the next generation yet!

The Indy Robot Racing Team solved a problem that won't even (really) exist until autonomous vehicles go commercial, if they ever do, but without this solution or something like it, they never will: these guys built a network protocol for swapping "plug and play" sensors and software modules in and out of their vehicle. They built the interface. Them's my kind of engineers! (Disclosure: I used to be a systems programmer.)

These are not the only fascinating technical solutions: you have to see the picture of the one with the bank of 64 lasers on the vehicle roof, on a motorized circular platform, spinning 10 times a second, and backed by a bank of signal processors programmed in Assembler. Obstacle detection: could spot something the size of a person at 500 feet.

I strongly recommend any fellow techno-weenies out there to take a look at this article.