Oblomovka

2002-12-02»

I use public transport a lot - even in Silicon Valley, where it sucketh like the Black Hole of Calcutta. To do so in such bus and train deadzone requires exactly the kind of juggling of schedules and careful dead-reckoning navigation that I am utterly lame at.

This is why I depend on online journey planners (like these versions for San Francisco and London). I also walk around quite a bit, trying hard not to get lost. A little pocket GPS and an online street address to latitude/longitude converter have revolutionised my wanderings, around and apart from public transport trips. I hardly ever get lost anymore, and I rarely underestimate how long it will take to get somewhere.

There's just a whole stack of destinations that this tech has let me see are perfectly reachable without a car, even in California.

Now add into the mix services like NextBus, which monitors and shares info on the realtime position of all the buses in San Francisco. Wrap it all into some portable device (or wireless service), that lets me provide an street address, and plots a route and ETA on the fly.

I feel confident with more realtime info, and realtime positioning, a lot more folk would be tempted by public transport, or indeed walking, than now.

That it takes slightly longer to get places doesn't bother me - I get a lot more done on a bus or train than I do even as a passenger in a car. The cost is a pain in the Valley ($4.00 for a day pass), but in most decently-run trans areas that burden is less acute.

No, the largest hurdle public transport has to overcome, I think, is the feeling of powerlessness and unpredictability it induces in most people. I think you can go a long way to reducing that - without requiring any heavy initial investments in public transport itself, by harnassing this new tech. It'll never be for anyone - but it's certainly increased my usage, and appreciation of, even one of the flimsiest public trans system in the world.

2002-12-01»

So I googled for a biography of Winston Churchill, and this was the second hit. It's a fine potted history, but ends on an odd note:

...During all of his life he had served no less than six British monarchs: Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George IV, Edward VIII, George VI and Elisabeth II.

He also possessed a large collection of toy soldiers. However in his book 'My Early Life' he does not mention which make of soldiers he collected. They were probably all made between 1880 and 1900 and therefore some time before Lineol and Hausser figures became available. As a collector he might be the only one of whom also a personality figure was produced.

... and then I realise. This is the biography of Winston Churchill, as it affects the world of toy soldiers. Did that make it any less useful, though?

2002-11-30»

SpinSanity is exactly the sort of site that I don't visit as much as I'd like, but would read every day in a RSS reader like NetNewsWire. And now they've added a RSS feed, I can. Hooray!

Except I'm not using OS X much these days, so I don't have an RSS reader. Time to play around with Straw.

Over seven hundred slides from Peter Gutman's Godzilla Crypto Tutorial. I imagine aliens flipping through this in about thirty seconds to absorb all current knowledge regarding the uses and abuses of crypto. Not particularly mathematically heavy-weight, but pretty techie in parts. The seventy-one slide guide to crypto politics is pretty comprehensive (not entirely up to date though). I got this from the enhyper financial crypto digital library mailing list, which occasionally turns up some great resources.

And I thought burning a video of the ultrasound onto CD-ROM was high-tech. This New Mexico firm is doing 3D ultrasound images, with a haptic interface so you can reach out (in?) and touch your unborn child. I admit to being mildly freaked.

2002-11-28»

One of the first cross-cultural fidgets I learnt in America: the English use "please" on more occasions than Americans do; OTOH Americans expect "thank-you" when English people wouldn't miss it at all (or would be deploying it sarcastically). So this is one way we manage to sound rude and overpolite to each other at the same time. So, thanks. Thanks!

Anyway: New get your war on. New reverse-link engine to see who is linking to your blog.

Rupert Goodwins did the BBC interview on Palladium I mentioned. He says that the Microsoft rep, Stuart Okin said that Pd was being pushed by Microsoft to become TCPA 1.2. That's to say, not complement or extend, but actively replace the old standard. Anyone heard this said in public before?

2002-11-27»

I'm still recovering from flu, which I caught in San Jose, just before flying to New York. I still have it now, here in Portland, and apparently I'm still contagious (I had to abandon going over to a nursing home to help Quinn's grandfather today for fear of spreading it). I got it from Gilbert, and I do wonder if he picked it up from the Boston LISA conference. My hosts in New York caught it while I was there, and I'm sure I must have handed it to at least a couple of the people at the Social Software summit, who will be displacing it all over the world.

I wonder what strain it was? It was the worse flu I've had for years, and snagged everybody in our house by the time it had finished. But the CDC report for this week (permanent link for November 16th flu report here) says that there's been no noticeable flu activity in California.

I wonder if that will change in the next few weeks. I wonder if the strain will spread in other areas, and I wonder that if it does whether I might have something to do with that. I feel like Typhoid Mary.

Less egotistically, Quinn asks how anarcho-capitalist systems without centralised disease control would deal with epidemiology: how do you introduce standards to monitor, control and eliminate, say, smallpox without a central organising force? I wonder if our amazement at vanquishing smallpox and TB by centrally setting standards isn't partly fuelled by a sense that epidemics are rarely controllable centrally at all: that these are the exceptions rather than the rules, and require massive acts of co-operation to work. Disease control is the act of a mature and very sophisticated centralised system: is it fair to compare it with simple models of decentralisation?

Doesn't answer the question, though: Q thinks that this is up there with National Defence as a life-without-the-state showstopper. It's one of those warning flags that makes most of us feel that radical decentralisation might tumble into something rather more horrid than the bright lights of Libertaria.

2002-11-26»

When you meet Charlie Stross, he gives you a business card CD-ROM. Being a SF author, not only does it contain all his published work to date, it's also got a large chunk of his future output on it too. I'm about two-thirds through his almost-imminent space opera, Festival of Fools (It'll be called Singularity Sky in the US). It's great fun, especially if you like singularities, time-travelling godlike posthumans, sassy future UN weapons inspectors, and superintelligent space-faring viral hive minds that appear to be based on the cultural flotsam of the Edinburgh Festival. Or, indeed, if you've ever wondered what would happen if Imperial Russian Navy tried to take on a post-scarcity nanotech orbital flotilla.

All of those descriptions apply in bucketloads to me. Maybe Stross just has a script that burns a personalised novel onto each CD-ROM just before he hands it over. That would be slightly less impressive, I think.

Plotsk was barely recognizable today. Whole districts were burned-out scars on the ground, while a clump of slim white towers soared halfway to the stratosphere from the site of the former cathedral. Burya gaped as something emerald green spat from a window halfway up a tower, a glaring light that hurtled across the sky and passed overhead with a strange double boom. The smell, half-gunpowder and half-orchids, was back again. Sister Seventh sat up and inhaled deepy. "One loves the smell of wild assemblers in the morning. Bushbot baby uploads and cyborg militia. Spires of bone and ivory. Craving for apocalypse."

2002-11-25»

Seth has linked to a Google search for "Moen's Law of Bicycles", in order to explain what "Moen's Law Of Bicycles" is. Unfortunately, the blogosphere being what it is, Seth's own diary entry is now the number one hit on his own Google search. The second entry is currently another blog entry from someone else, noting that Seth is now the number one hit on his own search. In an attempt to prevent the link spiralling into meta-uselessness, I'll now invoke fair use to quote Moen's Law of Bicycles in its entirety, and hope my overuse of the phrease "Moen's Law of Bicycles" will throw this somewhere near the top:

MOEN'S LAW OF BICYCLES

In the mid-1970s, bicycles suddenly became very popular in the USA. Massive numbers of people were suddenly in the market, few of them knowing anything about bicycles, and many could distinguish poorly if at all between good equipment and bad; good customer service and bad. Consequently, poorly made bicycles (which cost less to make) undercut well made ones (and poor customer service out-earned the good variety), because their superior value ceased to be perceived. Over time, the overall quality of available bicycles declined considerably, almost entirely because of this dynamic with customers, recovering only after the fad ended, years later.

Moen's Law holds that "Good customers make for good products." Quality thrives only when people can tell the difference. When they haven't a clue about the products and how they work, schlock merchandise prevails.

(From A First Look At You-Know-What, Blue Notes, Sept/October 1995 Issue)

- nobody seems to know about oral rehydration therapy.

Stuck in the Basque country in the eighties with not much of the language and a lot of food poisoning, ORT kept me off an intravenous drip and nursed me back to life in a couple of days. Since then, whenever I've had really bad diarrhea, oral rehydration salts been the first thing I've bought or mixed up to get me back on my feet.

ORT is was described by the Lancet as "the most important medical advance this century. It was discovered by US researchers in 1968, and is now used by 38% of all diarrhea cases in the world, saving millions of lives. It's also fantastically cheap - it's just a magic ratio of sodium and glucose and water.

Unfortunately, I have a really bad memory, so I can never remember what the magic ratio is. So, for the record, it's:

• 1 Liter of Clean Water
• One level teaspoon of salt
• Eight level teaspoons of sugar

Mix it up well, and drink in small sips. It's as easy as that.

I was stumbling around New York, very ill, this week, and asked in a pharmacy about ORT. They said they'd never heard of it, and to buy some Gatorade. Apart from the fact that Gatorade is more expensive, it just isn't the same thing. Gatorade has too much sugar and not enough salt for the magic to work.

In cases of diarrhea, it's really difficult to get water into the human body, because the usual method - absorption through the intestinal wall - is broken. ORT works because the glucose provides an alternative transport across the intestinal wall for the sodium, which increases the concentrate of the salts behind the wall, which means the water moves across far more easily.

But you need to get the ratios right. Gatorade doesn't have it. Apparently the kid's electrolyte fluids (like Pedialyte and Kaolectrolyte) are better, but even they seem to be full of weirdness (like Pedialyte 'goes bad' very quickly). And why just for children? I don't get it.

DELTASS looks like a real life Thunderbird 5. I hope John Tracy is okay up there.

I've let this lie fallow for far too long, but perhaps RSS feeds mean that not watering a blog doesn't mean that it dies beyond recovery.

Aaanyway, the BBC is looking for someone to stand up against the boys from Microsoft and Intel when they explain how great Palladium and LaGrande will be for consumers, producers, and - oh, but who else could there be? It's for a TV interview in the UK next week, and they've already asked Alan Cox and Ross Anderson. I can't think of anyone off the top of my head, which is generally an indication that I'm being dense. Do you know someone? Are you that someone? Let me know, and I'll mail the BBC.

Hooray for the Lazyweb!