Brent's Law of CMS URLs: The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs. [via Scripting News] 

fyuze works by cooperating with other sites on the internet to collect and distribute news headlines and other data. 

Finally. After 4 weeks of (delaying?) user-hostile tactics, BT admits that our new phone line is usable for ADSL connections. Placed the orders immediately (subscription, activation, and various pieces of hardware). By the end of this week, Murphy willing, we will have a Wi-Fi network up and running (using Apple AirPort and our iBooks). By early next week (praise Murphy) we will have an always-on Internet connection (using BT Broadband and an Alcatel ADSL modem/Ethernet router through the Airport base). Monthly cost of fast (512k) always-on Internet, assuming we're amortizing over 12 months: £44 ($66) — almost triple the cost of a dial-up (56k) solution. Later, I'll probably upgrade my old PowerMac and turn it into a local file+music server. 

A major e-business success at Lands' End, says the NYT: When Lands' End started selling custom-made pants on its Web site last October, even analysts who follow the business closely had trouble predicting the outcome, since no major merchant had tried anything like it. Now, after nearly a year of online tailoring, Lands' End has released results that exceed the expectations of even the most optimistic executives... 40 percent of all chino and jeans sales on the company's Web site [are] now custom orders. Another very positive aspect is the ability to offer tailor-made clothing at close to mass-market prices. They've delivered on the early e-business promise of being customer-oriented. Expect more of this kind of personalised services in other business areas, such as cars and furniture (I'm rather surprised Ikea hasn't yet stepped forward). 

Because man is the measure of all things, we find it extremely difficult to grasp relations in astronomical, geological, biological, climatic, and atomical processes. Stars are born, and explode, or collapse. Rocks form at the bottom of seas and become mountain ranges. Bananas are radioactive. Species appear, evolve, branch out, and are wiped out in massive extinctions. Ice ages come and go. Glaciers carve valleys. Seas become deserts. Electrons have spin. Neurons grow and connect. Human generations last 20-25 years. The Industrial Revolution started ten generations ago. Most of what is known and manufactured today was unknown then. USS Clueless: Most non-engineers (and even a lot of engineers) don't actually have an intuitive understanding of large numbers. (That's why people play the lottery.) For most people, any number above about a thousand is the same size. I am, perhaps, exaggerating but only a bit; people know that a billion is larger than a million but don't really understand how much larger. Maybe the reason I have some idea of the kinds of scales is that as an engineer I'm used to dealing with really vastly different time scales. I'm used to dealing with things in nanoseconds, and over the years I've come to internalize just how small a nanosecond truly is. It can be demonstrated with factoids, but that's not the same. But let's give it a try:

• KHz: A millisecond is to a second as a second is to 16 minutes and 40 seconds.
• MHz: A microsecond is to a second as a second is to 11 days, 13 [less equal] hours.
• GHz: A nanosecond is to a second as a second is to 31 years and 8 months.

My new workstation's processors are running 2.4 GHz. One clock cycle to one second is as one second to 76 years. And when you're talking about energy use at the level of big industrialized nations, the range in the scale is even bigger. 

NYT: The main rivals are all German manufacturers: BMW, which bought the Rolls-Royce trademark in 1998 and plans to roll out its first Rolls next year; Volkswagen, which bought Bentley; and DaimlerChrysler, which revived its dormant Maybach name for a new generation of limousines. ... The target consumer for the Maybach... has assets of at least $30 million. DaimlerChrysler figures there are 40,000 of these people around the world, 8,000 of whom are potential buyers each year. People spending 1% of their wealth on a luxury car every few years sounds possible. For my part, I would rather use my money in meaningful ways, e.g. to develop schools in poor countries. That may be why I don't have assets of at least $30 million. 

On September 27, 1066, William landed unopposed at Pevensey and spent the next two weeks pillaging the area and strengthening his position on the beachhead. ... [After the battle of Hastings] the earls and bishops... soon submitted and crowned him William I on Christmas Day 1066. [British Monarchs] 

See PopTech, The Blog 

Insider's guide to Davos: people generally work better in an open environment, so long as there is somewhere they can retreat to when they need quiet. The most inspiring office I ever visited was Centraal Beheer in Apeldoorn by Hermann Hertzberger. I can't say there was anything beautiful about the architecture, but the offices felt like a lively, main street in an Italian hill town. The informal conversation and meetings that make for organisational dynamism were integral to the design. 

Six teams of architects from across the globe have been shortlisted in the race to redevelop the site of the former World Trade Center in New York. The competition was re-opened after initial plans were rejected The teams, selected from more than 400 submissions from 34 countries, were chosen to develop new design schemes for the site after initial plans for the site were roundly criticised as being too dull. The choice is very simple: erect Frank Lloyd Wright's mile-high building. 

The USA gives away 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. ... Applicants for Diversity Visas are chosen by a computer-generated random lottery drawing. Entries must be received between 2002-Oct-07 and 2002-Nov-06. The INS has a short explanation of how to participate.

See also last year's Green Card lottery results: Approximately 87,000 applicants have been registered and notified and may now make an application for an immigrant visa. Since it is likely that some of the first 50,000 persons registered will not pursue their cases to visa issuance, registration of a larger number of applicants is intended to ensure that all available DV-2003 numbers will be used... Applicants registered for the DV-2003 program were selected at random from the approximately 6.2 million qualified entries received... An additional 2.5 million applications were either received outside of the mail-in period or were disqualified for failing to properly follow directions. The visas have been apportioned among six geographic regions with a maximum of seven percent available to persons born in any single country.

It would be amusing to compute the relative popularity of the lottery in each country based on number of winners/population (assuming a close-to-perfectly random distribution of winners across countries). 

In Edward Tufte's classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he coins the term chartjunk to refer to needless visual flourishes that contribute nothing to the effectiveness of an information design in communicating to its audience. These days, our URLs are loaded down with something very similar: long strings of characters that exist only to satisfy some technical constraint, detracting from the effectiveness of our URLs as communication tools. Call it CMSjunk. Even if one must use a CMS that generates user-hostile, machine-oriented URLs, one can always offer alternative, user-friendly ones. 

Malaria has killed hundreds of millions of people in recent decades, because of the anti-scientific DDT scare which Rachel Carson launched in Silent Spring. The continuing DDT ban allows malaria to kill millions every year, mostly children and pregnant women in developing countries.

Now The Seattle Times encourages people to honor Rachel Carson by continuing her fight: Forty years ago ... Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring [which] chronicled the devastating impact that DDT and other toxic pesticides were having on our wildlife. ... Carson's book rocked the nation when it was released, and unquestionably launched the modern environmental movement. In other words they want you to support the annual killing of millions of people in developing countries. Anyone who seeks and knows the facts behind the DDT ban, and its direct consequences, will be horrified. 

Motorola unveiled this week a GPS chip for location pinpointing technology that is small enough to fit into portable electronic products such as cameras, PDAs, and cell phones. Potential applications include displaying real-time maps, supporting navigation (as is already available in some cars), locating a local business (e.g. the closest gas station or coffee shop), and hiking in remote areas (e.g. through desert dunes or jungle forest). Another application will be tracking down stolen property (e.g. cars). 

It's only in the rinse cycle that you find out how dirty the laundry's been. We're in the rinse cycle now. Warren Buffett, sage of Omaha 

New Scientist: The acidic clouds of Venus could in fact be hiding life. Unlikely as it sounds, the presence of microbes could neatly explain several mysterious observations of the planet's atmosphere. Venus is usually written off as a potential haven for life because of its hellishly hot and acidic surface. But conditions in the atmosphere at an altitude of around 50 kilometres are relatively hospitable: the temperature is about 70 °C, with a pressure of about one atmosphere. This story is interesting for multiple reasons: first, the scientific process at work, i.e. examining experimental data, correlating with multiple experiments, attempting to integrate with existing knowledge, and finally putting forward a hypothesis that is deemed probable based on all available data; second, the possibility that life is abundant, or in other words that it is a normal occurence given universal physical, chemical, and biological laws we have identified so far. I remember when in the 70s we were being told that Venus was a hellish planet and no life would ever be possible there. 

Solid evidence is mounting that drinking tea can prevent cell damage that leads to cancer, heart disease and perhaps other ills... Tea is loaded with phytochemicals -- a wide range of molecules that can act as antioxidants. Such compounds counteract the damage done to DNA cells by free radicals. 

It is often asked if digital cameras meet or exceed the imaging quality of film. Often the discussion about this issue is heated with both sides claiming their point of view is right. Is there a clear answer? In the experiments I've done, using a variety of films and digital sensors, my data and test results show quite a range of answers. [Clarkvision] 

Sometimes it's (still) easier to get data without using the Internet. ...Snail mail is the leading broadband technology, at least for video movies on demand. The [NYT] states that the 8 to 9 gigs of data on a DVD would take two weeks to download at 56kb, making Netflix' three-day distribution by mail seem speedy... The author estimates Netflix alone distributes 1,500 terabytes a day, which is impressive considering the Internet carries 2,000TB a day... [NYT via /.] 

BBC News | Health: Researchers in the United States believe the wonder drug [aspirin], which is more than 100 years old, delays and may even protect against Alzheimer's disease. Their findings follow recent studies which suggest Aspirin can help fight cancer, heart disease, blood pressure and arthritis among other conditions. 

BBC News | Science/Nature: A British company, Solexa, claims it has developed a quick, cheap method to sequence human DNA. Solexa's ultimate goal is to sequence an individual's entire genome in 24 hours for $1,000. We can expect genetic sequencing services to be widely available within 10 years, costing about as much as a decent suit. Someone will obtain that information and provide it to insurance companies; it is likely to be either your government or a new type of "market research" company. Further, within 20 years, someone else will develop personalized medication for you, one that fits exactly your needs as decoded from your own easily available genetic code — and they will want to sell it to you. 

Corto Maltese... Le nom, déjà, est une invitation au voyage. La mèche lourde et couleur de jais, les favoris taillés à la serpe, l'anneau à l'oreille et un laconisme sans précédent... Un film à voir sans tarder. 

After the [1781] discovery of Uranus, it was noticed that its orbit was not as it should be in accordance with Newton's laws. It was therefore predicted that another more distant planet must be perturbing Uranus' orbit. Neptune was first observed by Galle and d'Arrest on 1846 Sept 23. 

Large parts of England and Wales have been hit by an earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale. I was sound asleep and felt absolutely nothing (in London). An earthquake of magnitude four is equivalent to 1,000 tonnes of TNT - that in turn is equivalent to the power of a small nuclear weapon. [BBC News via Google News, a page generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.] 

Fantastic news from the MIT. BBC News | Technology: The first group of [MIT] courses are set to be published on the internet on 30 September, including subjects like anthropology, biology, chemistry and computer science. ... Over the next 10 years, MIT will move all its existing coursework on to the internet. There will be no online degrees for sale.

Update: also of note is that Cornell offers some online lectures at CyberTower (stupid name, limited selection). 

Fortune: Since 1989 alone--the beginning of the modern age of the Rolling Stones (more on that later)--the band has generated more than $1.5 billion in gross revenues. That total includes sales of records, song rights, merchandising, sponsorship money, and touring. How much money are they making through the Internet? 

I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. — attributed to Nathan Hale, american hero, executed at the age of 21 by the British on September 22nd, 1776 

In many cases, though, it is not possible to have one person whose job description is based upon information architecture. The project manager may have to nail down the site goals, the code jockey may have to develop the sitemap, the designer may have to test the interfaces and the developer may have to optimize and fine-tune the search functionality. While the role of "information architect" has drawn much attention, the power is in the idea of information architecture and the application of its principles by everyone on a project. [via cognitiveArchitects News] 

The art of storytelling is powerful, but neglected in modern times. Polyphemus's one eye is a single point of failure; when Odysseus pokes it out, he is much less able to defend himself. Polyphemus's alarm is ignored [by other Cyclopes] because Odysseus said his name was Nobody, so he winds up shouting that nobody is trying to kill him... Polyphemus finally has to let the sheep out to graze -- it's a mission-critical function -- and Odysseus and his men then escape by masquerading as legitimate traffic (sheep). [Counterpane: Crypto-Gram] 

Scheduling, issue tracking, source repository, document library, communication management. Successful product development is the result of collaboration. Superior results are achieved by increasing the number of minds working on any given project. Allowing multiple developers to address project issues in an open environment brings products to market faster with greater efficiency than traditional methods. 

a klog apart advocates blogging project status reports and suggest a couple of report formats. While I really like the idea of feeding status reports through blog channels, I much prefer a format that focuses on variance — i.e. signal where and explain why we are not going according to plan. It's easy to scan and helps keep meetings aligned with the objective: raise and manage issues and risks in order to successfully complete the project. Detailing and describing how one is meeting milestones and producing deliverables according to plan is a complete waste of time. Only tell me if you're missing or expecting to miss milestones. Then tell me what you're doing about it, whether you need my help, and what cross-project dependencies might be impacted. 

Radio lets us navigate through a database of our items; render them in html and xml; publish, syndicate, and aggregate them. Radio creates web forms that let us create new content using the blog item structure. ... Take it to the next level of abstraction. Let me blog multiple kinds of payloads. vCards, iCalendar events, event channels, resumes and CVs using the HR-XML and SIDES standards, purchase orders, semiconductor recipes, project management tasks and assignments and status reports. [emphasis added; a klog apart via John Robb] 

Swiss National Exhibition, Land of the Three Lakes. Le Temps propose un guide pratique, assorti de ses coups de coeur, forcément subjectifs, des pavillons à ne pas rater pour visiter Expo.02 avant la clôture, dans un mois. Pourquoi ressentent-ils le besoin pressant de souligner que leurs coups de coeur sont forcément subjectifs? 

In the late 1950s scientists discovered the existence of crystal-free (that is, amorphous) metals. [Liquidmetal's amorphous] alloy based on titanium and zirconium is 2.5 times stronger than titanium or steel and less than half their weight for the same amount of strength. ... Besides its strength, the alloy is easy to shape — just like plastics. Even metallurgy is undergoing major development. [Forbes Global] 

Scripting News: Did you know that there are almost 60,000 ex-Apple employees floating around out there? Organizing a reunion is quite a job, it turns out. On a tangent, I've observed that after their multiple rounds of layoffs, there are more ex-employees of Sapient than current employees (probably in a ratio of 5:1, excluding from consideration the hordes of expensive labour they've retained in India). Thus all the habits and best practices that the company accumulated over a decade have now spread out through the whole industry; so have some worst practices, one would conversely expect. Some knowledge and practices are almost certainly lost when such a large proportion of employees is told to leave over 12 months. 

Marc's Voice: Creating or authoring multimedia is not a real-time process. It's something that's well thought out and methodically produced. This changes the nature of interchange, creativity and certainly conversation. ... What happens when we explore further the spectrum between publishing and communication?

 

I have now created a new category, Current Events, where I'll put stuff that doesn't belong in my intended Quality and Risk themes. I would like to have a voice in multiple themes, but keep them relatively separate. Radio UserLand made it so easy to set up, it's amazing. Now all I need to do for that category is to modify the template and adjust category definitions for postings in the last few weeks (I wish there were an easier way to move a group of existing items to a new category). 

We live in a wonderful age of accelerating invention. Light-emitting diodes -- which create light by passing a current through a semiconductor, rather than heating a wire filament to high temperatures -- are now cheap enough to compete with traditional incandescent light bulbs. [Wired]

Says a producer: consumers don't understand (the technology), [the] key benefit they understand is the run time. In other words, market success is based on saving people's time and/or money, not technical prowess. Most people value their time, not tricks. 

The algorithms and tools that are being used to get rid of spam messages could be put to use in another, more positive context: rating RSS feeds and contents based on similarity with what one is reading. At the moment finding interesting RSS feeds and subscribing to them takes too much research, luck, and manual work. What we need is a higher semantic level of operations on RSS feeds.

Tesugen.com: I would like an RSS client that is smart. ... All entries from the feeds that have the favorite flag are presented, but then the reader selects entries based on a simple scoring algorithm. Since it knows which feeds are my own and which are my favorites, it can compare entries and give more similar entries a higher score, and thus a higher position on the list of unread entries. In addition, it should randomly pick entries that get a high score, in order to provide me with a varied reading experience. 

Today's Mac market is ten times the size of the PC market in 1982, the one that made Mitch Kapor a mega-gazillionaire with his hit spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. ... Basically, [John Doe] is a thoughtless self-congratulatory Windows-only developer with Mac envy. [Scripting News] 

Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, recommends four golden rules for the commander-in-chief. In fact, they are rules of leadership that apply very broadly: maintain the will to succeed, however great the difficulties; require unanimity in leadership, and preserve it; define distinct roles, delegating with trust; and stay on a resolute, confident course. Speed and success are everything... But those golden rules must be kept. [Forbes: Current Events] 

Entry-level software engineers in India earn $4,500 a year. Also, they tend to willingly work 7 days a week, 12-14 hours a day. Unlike manufacturing which can easily be located offshore, software development (especially analysis and design) requires close interaction with end-users and with clients when it's contract work. Thus it cannot profit from cheap offshore labour to the extent that manufacturing does. 

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. — Bernadette Devlin

This captures the essence of extreme human action. To pursue the blessings of liberty for themselves and future generations, the US Founding Fathers pledged their life and fortune. To reach an entrepreneurial goal, one may need to accumulate debt and give up one's house and furniture. And, to take a much less pleasing example, evil men may risk their life and sacrifice millions of other lives in order to gain that which they believe is worth having i.e. to pursue their own values, no matter how evil they may be. It is always difficult to understand the value-hierarchy of evil people, because it doesn't make sense to a reasonable, sane person. Hitler's goals included the systematic murder of Jewish people, and the conquest of Europe in the service of that evil, as he had announced in his book Mein Kampf. Imagine what would have happened if Nazi Germany had succeeded in building atomic bombs before the end of WWII. Only six decades later, Saddam Hussein similarly wants to annihilate Israel and the USA, as he has repeatedly announced. Imagine what would happen... 

According to a US survey, 78% of internet users would rather give up their daily newspaper than live without broadband. And 63% of respondents would even sacrifice their morning cup of coffee rather than lose their high-speed internet connection. I neither get the daily newspaper nor drink coffee in the morning, but I still haven't got broadband access! BT has been claiming, for three weeks, not to know whether my phone line is good enough for ADSL; they've asked me to just wait. What do I need to do, give up my morning tea? 

Do you have a publicly visible bug-tracking database for your application? i.e. something similar to what Mozilla has been using. It is useful for users and testers to see that a bug has already been reported, and/or that there is a workaround, as well as to clarify what priority, if any, the bug reports have. I've used such tools for (large) applications development in order to communicate with both users/clients and testers. It made our lives a lot easier, especially to manage user expectations, to record and rank requests for new features, as well as to track the discovery and fixing rates (which should be displayed in each developer's digital dashboard...).

Soapbox mode :-) — all applications, tools, and yes, in general all products should have such a bug-tracking database made available to end-users! No secrets. Just information. 

A weblog is absolutely a form of "presence" for individuals, and it obviously holds an important social dimension as well. While lots of blog systems offer comment systems, I haven't found any that attempt to attach real-time communication and idea design into the weblog. [Jeremy Allaire]

Each blog should have - next to the time/date stamp, permalink and comment button - a button that says 'IM'. Guess what happens when you click on it? You contact the person who wrote that blog post! [Marc's Voice] 

How do we get there? how soon? I'd love to work with a team on such a project/tool. Rajesh has a mock-up of a digital dashboard available. You can see where this is going. A portal of one. All data on the desktop. Simple, easy to customize, and powerful. [via John Robb] 

Now my friends may understand why I'm using Radio UserLand to blog. Not a randomly named tool. Some crazy Rasta is ranting and raving... [via Marc's Voice] 

Will there be a new niche of platform-independent, Web-orientated development based on the Mozilla platform? Surely Microsoft will not tolerate this, just as it did not tolerate Java. I also wonder whether it is possible to create excellent user experiences with the Mozilla framework.

Mozilla is not just a web browser. It is also a framework for building cross-platform applications using standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XML languages such as the XML-based User-interface Language (XUL), eXtensible Binding Language (XBL), and Resource Description Framework (RDF). ... This [free, online] book explains how applications are created with Mozilla and provides step-by-step information that shows how to create your own programs using Mozilla's powerful cross-platform development framework. It also includes examples of different existing applications to demonstrate the possibilities of Mozilla development. 

Added the date in page titles, e.g. Jinn of Quality and Risk (2002-Sep-19) — this way Google search results will be somewhat more meaningful. Previously all page titles of my site were the same, i.e. Jinn of Quality and Risk. Also moved the XML icons closer to the top of the page for ease of access and subscription.

Macro code for the title with internationally meaningful date shown below (note: beware of the RU aggregator bug with HTML entities). I'm not quite using the international standard date notation yyyy-mm-dd I used to advocate, because many people get easily confused by the position of month and day; indicating the month name in the middle removes any format confusion: yyyy-mmm-dd.

<%title%> (<%local (d = clock.now());
local (monthName = radio.string.getLocalizedString ("monthShort." + string.padWithZeros (date.month (d), 2)));
local (day = string.padWithZeros (date.day (d), 2));
return (date.year (d) + "-" + monthName + "-" + day)%>)  

Hacking Mozilla is like dating a beautiful but crazy woman. Sure she is hot, and sure the sex is great, but the constant attention she demands and the way she freaks out at a seemingly ordinary request just get old after a while. Right. Don't forget the broken promises and an obsession with appearance. [Kevin Burton via The Desktop Fishbowl] 

Warning: due to a bug in Radio UserLand, this search form will not work properly within your news aggregator. But it works beautifully on my weblog hosted at radio.weblogs.com. I wish I had a similar search field to search through my RU entries and stories (i.e. on my local machine) — sometimes I'd like to find older entries on a given subject I'm discussing.

How I did it: Google search can be restricted to a given website with a hidden search parameter (as_sitesearch); an extra, hidden query can require (+) some special string, e.g. one's Radio UserLand userid (+0103811 in my case). Voilà! Add to your template the HTML code shown below — remember to adjust your userid (search opens in a new window; remove "target" attribute of "form" tag if you don't want it). It would have been easier if Google accepted a URL prefix instead of a site name as the hidden search parameter.

It's worse than it looks. The lines below are text-only that display correctly in my weblog but incorrectly in the Radio UserLand news aggregator (HTML entities are translated before the browser sees them!?).

<form action="http://www.google.com/search" target="_blank">
<input name="as_q" type="text" />
<input class="go" type="submit" name="submit" value=" go " />
<input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="radio.weblogs.com" />
<input type="hidden" name="as_q" value="+0103811" />
</form>

 

The price seems right. The Roomba intelligent floor vacuum -- a household robot. $199. [via John Robb] Warning: slow site, heavy use of Flash. 

In 490 BC, King Darius led his Persian army in a second attempt at revenge on the Athenians and the Eretrians, Greeks who had previously backed the Ionian revolt against Persian rule. In the first attempt, two years earlier, a providential storm had destroyed the Persian fleet. The new Persian fleet arrived on Greek soil at Marathon Bay, 35 kilometers north-east of Athens, on September 9, 490 BC.

For eight days, the two armies stood confronting each other. Despite the fact that the Persians were the striking army, their fighting style was defensive. The Athenian hoplites favored offense and close combat battle formations (Athens lacked both cavalry and bows). The Persians had a massive infantry and cavalry which included 48,000 men, outnumbering the Athenians four to one. On the ninth day, the Persians started an advance, forcing the Athenians into the attack.

When the Persians saw the Athenians coming down on them without cavalry or archers and scanty in numbers, they thought them as an army of madmen running toward their certain destruction, according to Herodotus. The Persians were thoroughly defeated, the battle resulting in only 192 Athenian casualties and 6,400 Persian deaths.

Miltiades, commander of the Athenian army, realised that the Persian fleet could still sail and attack Athens. He called upon Phidippides to run to Athens to bring the news of victory and a warning of the approaching Persian ships. Phidippides' 42-kilometer run from Marathon to Athens was completed in about three hours, but he died from exhaustion. The Athenians were warned and prepared to defend the city. When they saw the defended city, the Persian fleet turned and sailed back to Persia in defeat.

Again, Greek civilisation had been saved. Ten years later, in 480, three hundred Spartan heroes would famously fight the Persians and die at Thermopylae (the gates of fire); they delayed the army of Xerxes and allowed the Athenians to organise themselves and win at Salamis. And so Ancient Greece survived multiple assaults, and paved the road to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Western world. 

The engineering problem is now to master the Casimir force and direct its effects in the service of our needs: powering nanomachines, powering electronic devices, counter-acting the gravitational field, etc. Basically we've found physical configurations where force is automatically exerted, a bit like finding mountains with abundant waters streaming down — one may want to build watermills, then hydro-electric dams. Who will build the first casimir mills, and when? The attractive force between two surfaces in a vacuum - first predicted by Hendrik Casimir over 50 years ago - could affect everything from micromachines to unified theories of nature. What happens if you take two [tiny] mirrors and arrange them so that they are facing each other in empty space? ... In fact, both mirrors are mutually attracted to each other by the simple presence of the vacuum. This startling phenomenon was first predicted in 1948 by the Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrik Casimir... For many years the Casimir effect was little more than a theoretical curiosity. But interest in the phenomenon has blossomed in recent years. Experimental physicists have realized that the Casimir force affects the workings of micromachined devices, while advances in instrumentation have enabled the force to be measured with ever-greater accuracy. [PhysicsWeb] 

All through the summer of 1787, State delegates debated and drafted the articles of a new Constitution. The result was signed by the delegates on September 17, to be submitted for ratification by the States. This Constitution, including The Bill of Rights, is the best protection of freedom man has ever had, the embodiment of the principles motivating the Declaration of Independence. While it is not perfect, it is so good one finds it hard to believe! Especially when one compares it to the constitutions of all other countries on Earth. The US Constitution is a magnificent achievement and a major milestone in the history of mankind. 

Seven new books focused on weblogs are being published this year:

• We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan (Wiley)
• The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)
• We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture edited by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)
• Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone (New Riders)
• Running Weblogs with Slash by Chromatic, Brian Aker, David Krieger (O'Reilly)
• Essential Blogging by Shelley Powers, Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena Trott, Ben Trott, Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly)
• Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs by Todd Stauffer (Osborne McGraw-Hill)

[via Universal Rule via Radio Free Blogistan] 

Dave Winer is being harassed and threatened: There's always been an unwelcome personal side to "debates" on technical mail lists, but we've reached a new low. ... I tried to come up with a word to describe how I feel about these people, this is what I came up with: monster. They're predators, lone wolves. Feeling an emptiness within, they're afraid of other people, especially those who have character and visibility. They only feel validated when they threaten and attack others, or steal from them. Unfortunately, such people may often be intelligent and thus attracted to the computer/technology world. The best policy is to submit their behaviour to broad daylight and public scrutiny. 

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. — Woody Allen ... The first longevity revolution occurred in the early 20th century, as infant mortality declined and infectious diseases were conquered; as a result, more young people now enjoy the opportunity to become old. The next longevity revolution, by contrast, will actually postpone old age. 

Cocoa bean prices have increased steadily over the past two years due to deficits in the supply/demand balance on world markets, but speculative buying has sent them shooting up in recent months. Earlier this week cocoa bean prices on London markets surged to fresh 15-year peaks, up nearly 50 percent since the start of the year. On Thursday afternoon, most active second-month futures were trading at around 1,430 pounds ($2,223) per ton, up from 978 at the start of the year and a low of 547 pounds in December 1999. [Yahoo/Reuters story, with no explanation on the evolution of cocoa supply and demand over the past few years — they don't seem to understand that price is a signal, so they don't focus on the causes of such signal.]

What the story doesn't tell you but should: cocoa production has quadrupled over the past 50 years; prices ranged between $400 and $1000 per metric ton from 1949 to 1972, then between $1200 and $2400 per ton from 1972 to 1997 (omitting a $4000 spike in 1975/76). The December 1999 price was very low compared to the last 30 years, which is a signal to producers/farmers that they should stop investing in cacao fields (due to lower profits); note that the cacao tree yields its first crop at 3-4 years old and reaches maturity at 10, so there is a fairly long time lag in the adjustment of supply to price signals. Finally, the current price is simply in the upper range of the last 30 years. No reason to panic... [data source: Global Cocoa Bean Supply/Demand and Apparent Stock Change, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service]

Hershey's annual report, 1999, Assuring An Adequate Cocoa Supply: The 20th century has witnessed sustained growth in demand for cocoa, growth which has been the result of the world's growing appetite for chocolate. Unfortunately, there have been years when cocoa production did not keep pace with the fairly steady upward trend in demand during this period. Supply shortfalls have resulted in periods of higher cocoa prices which, in turn, stimulated increased plantings, growing production and, once again, falling prices. The impact of these swings in cocoa costs has been significant, both for manufacturers and producers. Producers especially have struggled. High prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s stimulated a significant expansion in plantings in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Yet subsequent price declines limited the ability of these farmers to effectively care for the cocoa trees and still make a living. The result has been the widespread loss of whole cocoa-planting regions to low prices, pests and disease. Today, principally as a result of these price and production cycles, only three countries - Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia - account for the lion's share of world cocoa supplies.

The cacao tree, theobroma cacao: The cacao tree produces flowers and fruit year-round. The cacao tree is small and comes from the forests of Central and South America. It needs a warm and humid climate, regular rainfall as well as a fertile and well-irrigated soil. It grows in the shade, preferably at an altitude of 1,300 to 2,300 feet, in the tropics 20° above and below the equator. The cacao tree yields its first crop at 3-4 years old. It is an adult plant at 10. It produces from 300 to 1,000 pounds of cocoa per acre for about 50 years. 

People are often surprised to see me travel with only one (relatively small) bag, especially during lengthy holidays; on the other hand, I always feel I should have brought even less with me. Now that I've moved five times within London in the past three years, I feel I should own and keep less material property. Each move is an opportunity to travel lighter, and thus feel lighter. He who would travel happily must travel light. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

Our biggest area of learning was bottom-up information architecture. The first edition was grounded in the type of top-down processes that come with building a new site from scratch. In the second edition, we were able to draw upon an understanding of how to redesign sites that already contain huge amounts of content and applications. Our bottom-up approaches begin with lots of user testing and content analysis and lead into the design of metadata schema, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies and so forth. This requires close integration of software and information architectures, drawing upon content management systems, metadata repositories, and search engines to provide powerful, flexible searching and browsing solutions. [talk with Peter Morville, via cognitiveArchitects News] 

The profit motive must properly rest on enlightened self-interest, not cynical egoism: The purpose of a company is profit, but profit can be made in various ways. Some methods respect the freedom and well-being of others, while some trample other people's rights and lives. When the executives of a company have no principles or scruples to restrain them, it is only natural that they will try the latter methods. It is natural, but that is not an excuse. To accept selfishness as an all-purpose excuse for mistreating others is to reject the whole idea of right and wrong. [Richard Stallman in The Register, via The Desktop Fishbowl] 

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. — Philip K. Dick 

Just heard that I'll appear on the French-speaking channel of Swiss TV, for the September 15th Sunday evening news show (mise au point, Télévision Suisse romande (TSR); showing at 20:00 GMT+1). The subject is capitalism, the unknown ideal. The show will also run world-wide two days later, September 17th, on TV5, the French-speaking satellite channel. The interview was recorded in Neuchâtel, last June (at The Balkan School of English). They're extracting a few minutes out of one hour of interviewing... It will be interesting to see what they've selected. Other people are also being interviewed, I don't know who they are. Here are the online video archives of "mise au point" (RealNetworks format). 

In the summer of 1921, at the age of 14, while plowing a field near Rigby Idaho, 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth was struck with an inspiration [...] As a young boy growing up on the frontier, Farnsworth marveled at the inventions of Edison and Bell. At the age of 6, he confided in his father his heart's desire, that he had been "born an inventor." By 12 he was was demonstrating a natural affinity for all things electrical. Late one night, hidden away in his attic loft with a stack of old electrical magazines the aspiring inventor encountered the fanciful notion of "pictures that could fly through the air" by radio waves — and imagine that he had stumbled upon a problem that he might be uniquelly suited to solving. [via /.]

Also of interest: John Logie Baird is remembered as the inventor of mechanical television, radar and fiber optics. Successfully tested in a laboratory in late 1925 and unveiled with much fanfare in London in early 1926, mechanical television technology was quickly usurped [sic] by electronic television, the basis of modern video technology. Nonetheless, Baird's achievements, including making the first trans-Atlantic television transmission, were singular and critical scientific accomplishments. Lonely, driven, tireless and often poor, the native Scot defined the pioneering spirit of scientific inquiry. 

We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren't engineered for security. — Microsoft executive Brian Valentine, on the painful realization that a $100 million, two-month-long codeathon still hasn't fixed the glaring holes in its software, InfoWorld, 2002-Sep-05 [Ditherati via /.] 

I am perfectly happy for Perl to continue parsing logfiles. Perl has always been, and always will be (I hope), a humble language. When I am 80 years old, even if everyone in the whole world puts me on a pedestal and thinks I'm the renaissanciest man that ever lived, I still intend to take out the trash when my wife asks me to. ... But just as people grow (and are stretched), Perl continues to grow (and be stretched). 

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire
This is true in many different contexts.

It was early June, the project was in trouble. The project leads had previously cut down the resource plan, compressed the schedule, ignored testing, and forgotten about business processes. Most of the "team" (more than one hundred people) was unaware of this. But by Jove, these lowly engineers, graphic designers, and yes, even the project managers, would work day and night, 7 days a week, to complete the project by the promised date, in August. Thus, the "team" was told that all they needed to do was to work a little harder for two months and all would be swell. There was no pay for overtime, according to their employment contracts. But the company gladly paid for them to go to a bar and get collectively drunk once a month.

So, the client was told that the team would work a bit harder and longer hours, and all would be finished in the predicted time, despite having to add major pieces of design and code (an extra 50%), subcontractors, and business processes — none of which had been planned for. They tried, and tried, and many burnt out. Some resigned. They didn't reach the absurd deadline, and the client was furious. The project leads held meetings and told the team they should just get on with it and be done as soon as possible, so they kept working, harder and harder, until they released an incomplete and buggy solution by the end of the year; they had even started system testing while key modules were crashing or incomplete. The client was not happy, the team was burnt out, and the company lost money.

Did anyone speak up and denounce the original absurdities? Yes. They were removed from the project, or told to keep quiet. What about the ones who didn't speak up, maybe because they believed in the lies the project leadership was feeding them, those who worked really hard? The company was losing money, and someone had to be laid off. On the other hand, the project leads repeatedly claimed the project was a major achievement, and got promotions. 

All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near [the enemy], make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. Anger his general and confuse him. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. Keep him under strain and wear him down. When he is united, divide him. Attack where he is unprepared; sally out when he does not expect you. These are the strategist's keys to victory. It is not possible to discuss them beforehand. — Sun Tzu, The Art Of War 

Ray Ozzie: The most critical thing to optimize is our time. And in order to do that, we need more appropriate technology, not just simpler tech. ... [We need] software that embraces mobility, synchronization, security, and manageability as transparent core attributes. Software that recognizes "people" as being just as important as "documents". Software that recognizes transparent peer communications as being equal in importance to server communications. Software with a new model that synchronizes applications and activities, not just data or documents. We need to use multiple devices as seamlessly as we use one device; we need to be able to use them collaboratively as intuitively as we've used them alone. Yes! 

Interesting illustrative sentence. Pari passu: PAIR_ee_PASS_oo adv: At an equal pace or rate. Expand the state and its destructive capacity necessarily expands too, pari passu. [Webshots, word of the day]

After some research, I've identified five options to watch TV in the UK: i) aerial antenna, get 4-5 "free" channels; ii) digital receiver for £100 and aerial antenna upgrade (up to £150?), get 14 "free" channels courtesy of the BBC; iii) cable with Telewest, £50 installation and subscription from £18.50 per month, get a bundle of channels and a phone line -- pay about £6-10 per month for each additional specialty channel; iv) satellite with Sky Digital from £16 per month, get a bundle of 65 channels -- or pay £37 per month for their largest bundle; and v) don't watch TV -- what I've done in the past three years. I suppose there should be a sixth option with broadband access to TV channels. In addition to the above costs, a british colour-TV license will set you back £112 per year.

Napster is dead. Long live P2P! 

Since moving to London, my romantic life has been characterized by last-minute text messages, incomprehensible drunkards, first-date coke bingers and split bar tabs, Ms. McLaren, who clearly had better luck at home in Canada, wrote in [The Globe and Mail]. Describing a series of disastrous dates with a series of disastrous men, none of whom laid even a finger on her, she concluded that most English males suffer from glaring sexual insecurity and secretly prefer the company of other men. English women also tend to be incomprehensible drunkards. [NYT via Best of the Web] 

Pixar should get into the (short) cartoons business for TV channels. They seem to have all the necessary ingredients. ("Mike's New Car" requires QuickTime.) 

John Robb put together a list of professional newsfeeds for Radio users. Very useful, but too manual. I'm longing for a better way to manage my newsfeeds. I'd like support in finding (can Google help?), ranking and relating (a la Amazon), grouping (categories), merging, and suspending them. I'm also frustrated by feeds which offer a mere title or (worse yet) an incomplete sentence. I make a decision to read based on recommendation, source, title, first sentence or paragraph, and picture, if any; if I don't have enough information to determine how interesting an item may be, I simply don't read it. I wish for tools that manage my newsfeeds (coming from blogs, professional publications, wherever) as first-class objects, not aggregates of files. That will truly allow anyone to put together their own digital dashboard. We've got something very nice already with RSS and Radio Userland (as well as other tools and people's efforts). Now I thirst for more :-) 

See, Steve is an elitist and an innovator, and damn good at both. His greatest achievements are novel works of beauty and style. The Apple I and II were Works of Woz; but Lisa, Macintosh, NeXT and Pixar were all Works of Jobs. Dave Winer says Doc Searls totally nailed it. [On This Day in 1997, Scripting News]

I think Steve's achievements are ultimately works of love for revolution. Just ponder Here's To The Crazy Ones:

Here's to the crazy ones.
  The misfits.
    The rebels.
      The troublemakers.
        The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
...

 

A giant machine has started burrowing its way under London, carving a new route for [the Channel Tunnel high-speed trains from London to mainland Europe]. Where will it go -- and how close will it cut to the capital's labyrinth of tunnels, pipes and passages? A friend's PhD thesis in civil engineering (at Cambridge) is related to this project; I believe his work involves the application of new materials to "strengthen" tunnel walls while such gigantic machines are boring in unstable rock/sediment (disclaimer: I'm not the expert). I love the kind of engineering project where, when one's mother asks "so, what do you do at work?" one can simply point and generate well-deserved awe. "Showing" an impressive software solution requires much hand-waving, conceptual context, patience, and abstract knowledge. By contrast, there is perceptual glory in the building of bridges and skyscrapers. 

This sheds an interesting light on current debates about patents and copyrights: If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it. — Margaret Fuller (biography)

As Thomas Jefferson wrote, If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispose himself of it. Further, He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. [both quotes found in Copyrights and Copywrongs, MSNBC, July 2001]

Jefferson would have loved computers and weblogs. 

Updated my weblog neighbourhood (last time was in June). It's grown by 30%; the page size is now close to 300KB. Need to check who the new neighbours are. 

John Robb checks his credit at Equifax and finds erroneous information about him: They are recommending to lendors that they provide me a loan without any info on employment history, assets, or potential for future income. Absolutely crazy.

Amusing coincidence: yesterday I requested under the Data Protection Act that Equifax UK send me the credit rating they give out for me. Here's why: This week I wanted to set up a cable TV subscription with Telewest, the local cable monopoly. But they told me I have a bad credit rating and must give them £250 in deposit, while letting them directly debit £18.50 per month from my bank account. The thing is, I have no debt at all, pay all my bills on time, and no other company has asked me for such a deposit during my three years of living in the UK! I know there is a mistake somewhere and Telewest doesn't care — and doesn't get my money, which they don't seem to be very interested in, as I could have also subscribed to their broadband and phone offerings (that's £50 per month they'll never get, because I can choose among their competitors for those services). All they offered was that I could try again in 3 months time, to see if my rating changes... Now Equifax is going to charge me £2.50 so I can find out what the problem is. Then I'll have to spend time trying to get them to correct their records. These rating agencies seem to have a bit too much power and built-in inertia. We'll see.

The majority of [8,875 data protection] complaints received by the [information] commission over the past year dealt with accuracy of credit and financial information collected by companies such as Equifax and Experian. [Guardian Unlimited, July 2001] 

The Great Firewall of China has started blocking Google -- ah well, there's a doomed civilization. How true. Another bizarre twist of a dictatorship's fight for survival: prevent citizens from using the best search engine in the world. Imagine growing up in a country where the State systematically does that to you — because their standard of judgment is not life, nor liberty, nor the pursuit of happiness. [via Boing Boing Blog] 

I've gone back to original Web pages in order to find the permalinks corresponding to posts I had recently routed through my Radio News Aggregator. These updated posts will therefore reappear in my RSS feed. Apologies. Surely there is a setting or trick I am missing in RU. 

John Robb found this weblog, and likes it: Kalle has a wonderful Radio weblog.  It feels smooth and the ideas are fresh.  Subscribed.  (one suggestion -- he should use permalinks to the sites he links to).

Thanks! I'd certainly like to include permalinks, but they don't appear in my Radio News Aggregator. Here's what John's post looks like to me:

where is the permalink? I can get it from the Web site, but there must be a way to have it appear in the news aggregator.

Nothing like such a public link to make me notice my spelling mistakes, remember that my weblog template needs improvements, and want to write a bit more about deep issues. 

Siebel offers stock-option relief: The software maker says it will allow employees with worthless stock options to exchange them for stock or cash. My stock options at a previous employer were so deep under water (the stock value had gone down 90+% since I had joined the company) that new employees could possibly hope to make money within 2 years, whereas people who had been with the company for one or more years had absolutely worthless options (not likely to be worth anything for another 10 years). I raised this issue with the then-CFO, but he told me that this (obvious injustice) was not considered important enough to act on. Thus stock options were turned into a major disincentive. My advice is to ask for a higher salary, and basically ignore stock options (even if, or especially if, the CEO tries to sell you on them). 

A sybarite is a person devoted to luxury and pleasure. Derived from Sybaris, a celebrated ancient Greek city noted for the luxurious, pleasure-seeking habits of its citizens. I would like to see more creative sybarites in the modern world. [inspiré par une grande rousse] 

What went wrong on Mount Everest on May 10, 1996? That day, twenty-three climbers reached the summit. Five climbers, however, did not survive the descent. Two of these, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, were extremely skilled team leaders with much experience on Everest. ... [Many publications] have attempted to explain how events got so out of control that particular day. Several explanations compete: human error, weather, all the dangers inherent in human beings pitting themselves against the world's most forbidding peak. A single cause of the 1996 tragedy may never be known, says HBS professor Michael A. Roberto. But perhaps the events that day hold lessons, some of them for business managers. [Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge]

A very interesting article and interview. Here are some salient lessons:

• leaders must pay close attention to how they balance competing pressures in their organizations, and how their words and actions shape the perceptions and beliefs of organization members;
• an unwillingness to question team procedures and exchange ideas openly prevents a group from revising and improving their plans as conditions change; in other words, insufficient debate diminishes critical evaluation; and
• people dealing with risk are very susceptible to overconfidence, an unwillingness to "cut one's losses," and a reliance on the most recent information (psychological factors in high-stakes decisions).

 

Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. ... Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors — economic, ideological, technical — but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force. Some problems are: lack of leadership, hoarding of information, memorisation instead of reasoning, paranoia in the name of hierarchy, indifference to fellow human beings, trust in relatives only, and conformity as a major social virtue. 

Good article on computer games and the graphical desktop revolution in IEEE Spectrum, August 2002 (pp. 42-47; unfortunately, access to past issues seems to require IEEE membership). We [now] have the fundamental tools necessary to be doing games that are a simulation of the world says John Carmack, lead programmer and cofounder of Id Software (Mesquite, Texas). 

The bit density of disk drives is doubling every year, which means that it is growing faster than the transistor population of microprocessor chips (which still obeys Moore's law, i.e. doubling every 18 months). By 2010, a single disk drive will hold 50 terabytes, the equivalent of 8000 DVD movies. By that time, PDAs will be more powerful than today's desktop computers. If the duration of copyright protection had remained 14 years (as it originally was) all movies (and TV programmes) made until 1995 would be in the public domain in 2010, i.e. they would be freely viewed and copied. 

The controversy over the UCITA has been growing in past years. The basic problem with it is that it is an attempt to abolish common law rights around sales contracts, and substitute licensing contracts that give customers few rights, if any. The UCITA attacks four key legal doctrines that normally underlie commercial transactions that involve intellectual property: first sale (allows you to sell a used product or to give it away); fair use (allows you to reverse-engineer other manufacturers' products); free market competition (allows you to know the contract terms before buying a product, and to publish the results of benchmark studies); and minimum fairness standards (prevents enforcement of unreasonable license terms).

Since many manufactured products include a growing proportion of embedded hardware and software, the UCITA could be used to prevent the sale of e.g. used cars, coffee machines, and dishwashers. ["UCITA: A Disaster In Progress," IEEE Spectrum, August 2002, pp. 13-15] 

When a company announces US $1 billion in restructuring costs and 10 000 layoffs, the outgoing CEO shouldn't still be getting a multimillion-dollar guarantee on the cash-in value of his stock options. When two companies conclude a controversial merger and 15 000 people are laid off, top executives don't deserve hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses. [IEEE Spectrum Lines, Unemployment Hits Home, August 2002]

In the US, the average CEO is paid between $9 and $13 million, the equivalent salary of about 100-150 engineers (based on the median IEEE member salary, $93 000). The 10 highest-paid US CEOs in 2001 (seven of them from technology companies) were paid about $1.7 billion — enough to employ almost 20 000 qualified, experienced engineers. Are CEOs so much more competent, effective, and innovative than engineers?