In an odd twist of fate Joe Adler from my AEPi fraternity days wrote a book on Baseball hacks. I have a copy of it near Madeline's crib but thus far reading from it has not been satisfactory for putting Madeline to sleep. She is a fan of the page with Chernoff faces on it (pg. 188) although I believe that Joe made a special effort to make the Boston Redsox look more evil than the New York Yankees bassed on his personal bias. At a minimum that page could be used for creating a new cartoon series about each baseball team. Toronto and Tampa Bay both look like worried midgets, Anaheim looks like a chinese coolie, and Cleveland is the only team that really looks like a human but looks mostly like A Rod. The book is quite good not just for baseball fans but also for some fun exercises in statistics that could be used to help president Bush to get kids more interested in math and science through the guise of baseball and gambling.

Joe was interviewed about his book on NPR and it can be found temporarily at Future Tense and should be archived at the February 13th episode page.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My mom wanted to understand what fusion was all about in layman's terms. Why not try to think of ways to save the world on Yom Kippur. Fusion is one of the better answers that I have heard. I probably failed but tried to explain it and may have gotten the science wrong since I was doing it from memory so correct me where I am wrong. She was interested in the project called ITER Tokemac.

This is what I sent her.

I'm not sure which part of the chemistry is confusing to you but the basics are this.

Atoms are these stable states of matter, which is probably just bundled-up energy. The stable states are finite, not continuous. So think of them like a staircase with big steps. You can be on stair one or two but not in between because you would fall to the stair below.

So we have a periodic table of atoms. In there we get Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, .... Etc. Each of these atoms has different properties based on things like mass, electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. such that we have the world we live in where Carbon is useful because it can make 4 bonds (a stable state is when you have 8 bound electrons and carbon atoms have 4). All of this is very nice but just something to understand as a backdrop of the stuff we are dealing with.

These atoms have to come from somewhere. The atoms can be created by combining atoms or splitting them up. So atoms are created by taking the stuff (protons, neutrons, electrons, energy) that makes up two hydrogen atoms and make a helium atom (fusion) or by splitting a big heavy atom like Uranium (fission).

But a helium atom isn't exactly two hydrogen atoms combined into one ball of stuff. The system together has a different overall stability and mass that are connected. Stability is like when you are on a stair at the top vs. the bottom. There is a difference at the top - you can fall down the stairs. At the bottom you already fell down and it will take work to get back up to the top. In general things in the universe become more stable and are always falling down the stairs. This trend should be obvious when you mix food coloring with water. It is a lot easier to turn the water green then to suck the food coloring back out into a spoon leaving the water clear again. The same thing is at work. The state that is more stable sticks around after the system is bounced about through states that aren't so likely.

Before we look at nuclear energy you can quickly understand chemical energy. The difference is that chemical energy, burning oil, is not about combining or splitting atoms, but instead about combining or splitting molecules. When you take a molecule like a hydrocarbon and burn it you are rearranging the bonds between atoms. If you have an one bond swapped for another bond then there has been a real change in the sytem because one is stronger or weaker, more stable or less stable, than the other. To break a bond then make a new one therefore either generates a net surplus of energy or requires energy. You can imagine in this case someone breaking down the materials from one bridge to build another one and when they take down the first bridge they use all of the materials from the first one to build the second one. So if it takes more energy to build the second bridge then you need more materials. If it takes less materials then you have extra materials. So when you make and break chemical bonds energy is released or consumed. It takes the sun's solar energy to make the bonds that ultimately created the hydrocarbons that we burn into CO2, etc. and it releases energy when we burn them. The problem is that we only have so much hydrocarbon fuel stored-up from old organic matter.

So the fun part with nuclear energy is that when you combine or split atoms you get a similar effect. But the size of the effect is actually much larger, not smaller because the combination of atoms to form a stable state can either reduce or increase their mass. If you reduce the mass to reach the stable state then you release the lost mass as energy (since mass and energy are basically the same stuff). This energy is released as heat(atoms moving faster) and radiation(energy particles that travel at the speed of light),. The heat is very useful because it can be transferred into systems we can use to generate electricity. The radiation can be an annoying side effect.

Getting atoms to fuse or split isn't as easy as making molecules burn because the amount of energy that needs to be put into the system is much higher before the reaction occurs. In general the image for activation energy needs to be considered to understand this. Basically if you were to look at an activation energy chart for any chemical reaction it looks like a hill with a trough on either side at different heights. So if I am looking relative to sea level and I am currently at 100 ft. and the hill is at 500 ft. but the sea is on the other side of the hill. I can't get to the sea to go swimming without first climbing the hill. If I am riding a bicycle with no brakes it will take me work to get to the top. If I don't put enough work in to get to the top of the hill, since I have no brakes, I will slide back down to where I came from. If I do get to the top of the hill and it is a very slippery hill once I am the slightest bit over the edge my bike and I will fly down to the sea. In this case since the sea is lower (and the next stable state) it took energy to get "activated" so that I could go down to the sea. The truth was that if I had an energy recovery mechanism on my bicycle since the sea is lower than the place I started I would have more energy at the bottom than I had at the top. Since I don't the energy was distributed out somehow, probably as kinetic energy when I crashed into the water at the bottom.

So the idea of an activation energy is very much at play with atoms fusing. They will be very unlikely to fuse without getting enough energy into them to do so even though once they fuse they will release a lot of energy. It's a high stakes game. Luckily for us atoms did fuse because we are made of some pretty complex ones like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur and use even bigger ones like magnesium all the time to work our organic chemistry magic. The way that carbon is created through fusion naturally is in a star like the sun where immense amounts of gravitational pressure cause molecules to get very close together start to heat-up and fuse. So the sun is a big reactor converting hydrogen to helium, releasing energy then converting the helium to bigger molecules up the periodic table. The spectrum of what colors a sun is depends on the fusion reactions currently at work when you see the light from it. Light is that radiation(energy particles that travel at the speed of light). Think red dwarfs, etc. So you can get a good idea of what is going on in the sun by looking at the spectrum from it since the light wavelengths coming out from each fusion reaction has a signature based on the energy that is standardly released from rolling down the mountain for hydrogen combining to form helium.

So we would like to get into this fusion game ourselves but we don't have the benefit of creating a big ball of gaseous radioactive crap in the middle of our planet like the sun does. The activation energy requirements for fusion of hydrogen are quite high by our living standards. The atoms start to fuse and release energy at a few hundred million degrees Celsius. Everything in the sun is a gas which is what happens when you heat mass up. Think tanks of liquid nitrogen. At room temperature the nitrogen just converts to a gas. At a few hundred million degrees celsius a lot of things we like to see as solids switch to liquids, think ice to water. This presents a problem if the metal we are using for our fusion reactor melts and the fusion crap goes flying all over the place at 100 million degrees celsius. Getting hit with stuff this hot could cause a slight burn with uncomfortable itching and rashes for a few days. So the idea of a tokemac was created to keep that hot stuff away from the container. The basics are to make a field that contains the hot stuff as a gas in a torus, think donut, such that the hottest stuff doesn't need to reach the outside of the container. This hottest stuff is heated and condensed by some tricks in the donut using magnetic fields because hydrogen at our temperatures is a molecule, H2, and not an atom H. with an extra electron. Hydrogen is most stable with two electrons close to it which is why it releases energy when it binds to other H. atoms to form H2. But when you heat it up and get the H2s into H.s you have charged particles with a negative charge. Things with a charge move away from things with a certain magnetic field. So if the torus has a strong field everywhere on the inside surface those H. ions will concentrate in the center (not the O) but an imaginary line within the donut circle and not bump into the walls to melt them.

You can then get to fusion and collect the extra energy using the resulting inflow of energy from the fusion to keep the reaction going and since it doesn't take much conversions of hydrogen atoms to helium to generate a ton of energy we would have abundant energy and finally put an end to this silly conflict over oil in the Middle East. Instead we can just fight about religion which is much more fun because nobody can prove anything but everyone thinks they are right. Because of this the fight over religion is a more stable system than fighting over oil.

Posted by Melody at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My dad emailed me the URL for Sling Media
the other day in an effort to solve some of our general television dilemmas. I was thinking I should have invented such a device but was too dense to think of it.

Our problem is that we have a philosophical problem and a bit of a financial problem paying for television. He already pays for full cable TV at his house in Newton as well as a house in Marshfield. I barely ever watch television in Brookline except for times when there are major sporting events like playoff baseball or NFL Patriots games. So I don’t want to pay for television either. Unfortunately the free stuff in Brookline doesn’t work well because the big buildings bounce the signal back and forth causing ghosts to appear on the screen. I have even tried things like MLB.com but I learned that playoff baseball is not available on the web because of national broadcast restrictions. Hey television network dummies – if you broadcast it on the airwaves you should broadcast it on the net. You are selling ads anyways you nitwits.

So this Sling Media thing seems attractive to us. From my basic understanding of it the device grabs content from your television after it’s been output from the cable box and then streams it to the Internet. This would allow me to watch the same television program that my dad was watching on his living room television, like the Red Sox game. The tool also appears to be able to dig into Tivo programs and can change the channel so basically I would have a remote version of a cable TV box in Newton available wherever I wanted to view it.

I don’t know how long this will stay legal since there are some obvious re-broadcasting tricks that can be done with a tool like this, provided that the person doing so has plenty of bandwidth. For example – they could have one person subscribe to the paid movie stations or PPV TV and then broadcast it to a large number of illicit network subscribers. I can imagine that the Canadians, fearless satellite hackers converted because of silly broadcast restrictions in Canada, would be some of the first to pioneer Internet re-broadcast TV stations. The content would probably be porn from satellite stations like the playboy channel but it could evolve into more sophisticated stuff. All you would need is enough tuners or virtual tuners hooked-up from various folks and some organization around it all through a password protected web site. I’ll wait and see.

For now I think the demand lowered significantly for this device because the Red Sox got swept in three games. So all we have are the Pats and we usually gather for that.

Some other folks have taken notice of it on places like EnGadget. I also noticed that Commerce5, one half of my empire formerly known as ChannelWave is the direct sales processor for this gadget.

Posted by Melody at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

People at ZDNet think that Google might be building a concept around a network PC where the basic PC that you are using is located somewhere else and you don't really have a hardy operating system on your local system. Actually a lot of us geeky people have been doing something like that for a long time. It started with Timbuktu for me and scaring people in other offices by taking over the GUI of their Macintosh to type curses while they were writing business letters but it includes using VNC or remote desktop to get to a PC that is somewhere else. As Jeremy and I discussed but didn't pursue about 15 months ago, I would be quite happy being able to get to a hosted Windows remote desktop with wicked software, performance, and disk space on it. But maybe that isn't necessary and someone can do the same thing with Linux so that you have a remote desktop farm at an ISP with wicked software on it that screams in the shared environment. If I had to go after a market who would use such a thing I'd go after graphic designers and software developers. They are always moving around and need high performance machines that nobody gives them to do their job. So why not give them some remote desktops to work on in a shared server environment with Photoshop, or whatever else on a monthly basis. Software as a service but through a managed desktop through remote desktop. It can happen. It probably will happen. I wonder who will make it happen first?

Posted by Melody at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think baby Madeline has been sending secret encoded messages in the form of invisible pheromones to me. The major effect has been that I don’t sleep well through the night anymore. I get very anxious from 1AM through 5AM about a range of topics relating most often to work and the future of software.

Last night I found myself sending emails to Yuval in California at 3AM about the future of photo management and chatting with Aaron at 4AM. Yuval had sent me a link to Phanfare, a photo publishing tool that posts your photos automatically to a web site in the background from a taskbar tool. I thought it would be cool to avoid having to go through the manual work of publishing to my photo library with HTML editing etc. but since it overlaps rather than integrates with Picasa it looked less appealing. So I was trying to figure out if and when Picasa would finally create a public API/SDK to build these sorts of things and dreaming of creating a software application that would generate a similar feature set for people like me.

Among the areas I was losing sleep on was whether I could organize photos based on a clever algorithm included in a Picasa plugin to pick faces out of photos and learn from past filing which person was which. The basic user interface was going to be a gallery of faces that could be moved between buckets with the software trying to guess the right face match from prior experience and the user being able to correct it where necessary. I may be the only person who wants to organize my pictures by the people in them.

The sleep deprivation apparently will be good preparation for when the baby is born and she wakes-up every two hours for feeding during the first month or two. So my not sleeping through the night is going to be very likely in late October and November. Madeline has started to hiccup periodically and it is interesting to feel the rhythms of the hiccups through Sarah’s swollen belly. Sarah can barely fit a meal into her stomach with all of her insides squished, squashed, and moved around.

The insomnia could also be because I can see the world is moving very quickly in information technology with WinFS coming further along, lots of buzz about the extensions to the desktop search providers from their tool bars and side bars, and our need to make a business breakthrough into a vertical market. I get the feeling that I would sleep better if we had a Salesforce.com adapter both for connecting it into desktop search and into our product. But since we don’t have one I can only worry about items. I also worry about the complex issues of getting the business weaned off of good paying consulting engagements since they make me nervous in that they are inherently unstable. I don’t worry so much about job security but about company revenue security. If we don’t have a strong diversified revenue base from products and services then at any point in time everything can blow-up and require rebuilding. Right now the balance is on only a few clients for services and the product is growing from a revenue perspective at a snails pace. So I lose sleep on that every night and every hiccup that occurs in our consulting engagements.

Posted by Melody at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I learned last night that the baby doesn't like to give those big kicks to Sarah when I am watching her belly or putting my hand on it.

Today I found another bug when trying to finally accept that the new build was ready for prime time and kept finding a problem with each successive new release. This experience once again proves Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entymology: There's always one more bug. I haven't found the law for fetal non-kicking but my guess is that this Lubarsky guy is somehow involved.

This afternoon I have dedicated some time towards the August 15th holiday of National Procrastinators Tax Filing Day. I heard from Jeremy that the government is organizing a march on Washington to support the war. So they are organizing people to march to them to show their support. It sounds a bit egotistical and Jeremy thinks it is the beginning of a totalitarian Animal Farm state. I just thought it was a little awkward that they could take money the people paid them to protest that the people were protesting the war that people were paying them to vote to carry out that the people are paying for and dying for. At the moment though I am trying to figure out how to make my ink jet work well enough to print the paperwork that I need to prove that I paid the right amount to them to carry out all this effort in Washington. Unfortunately with all of the billions of dollars spent in Iraq, I am still getting ripped off by the Epson corporation for spare ink cartridges.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The world is conical
While reading the World is Flat I quickly became annoyed in the first chapter about the fundamental premise that the world is flat. I understood the basic idea that the world had evolved in terms of geographic barriers coming down but for me the picture of a flat world looks just like it should before Columbus. At the time geographically things were lined-up on maps so that distances can't be traversed in circles.

A number of geometric rules have been put forth to figure out what geometry that you are in that you can learn about in Feyman's Six Not So Easy Pieces in a chapter on Curved Spaceused to figure out whether Space-Time is curved or not. They generally focus on how a bug experiences their space not knowing it's contour. For example, if a bug tries to walk in a square by turning at right angles on a globe with equidistant measures they won't return to the point where they started.

Now we not only can traverse distances through low cost light speed communications/software, but to me that isn't a flat surface at all. The surface is just redefined where distance is related to the level of sophistication of the communications network and infrastructure. So flat is actually a bad way to describe how things are now. For instance I am closer to Bangalore than to Otis, MA on a telecommunications sophistication map because Bangalore is super wired while Otis hasn't gotten too far in wiring itself.

So if the world isn't flat - then what shape would it look like if we could visualize it. Some smart people at Princeton managed to visualize what the United States looks like through the lens of Presidential politics in the Princeton 2004 Election maps. So why not build some other maps about the world.

While trying to figure out the shape of the cyber-world is a wierd question it may not be possible to do and to create a new map structure from it. My first guess was that I could see the world first in a flat structure but upon adding that Bangalor is close to Boston the map would need to somehow put these points closer to each other. A reasonable way to do this would be to first flatten the map into a circle (since it is the base of a cone) with oceans towards the edges as best as possible. Then above the map build a cone ending at a point above it at the top. Rather than having mountains above the map the height of the area would rise upwards through the cone to the top based on how connected it was to the Internet, etc. If the resolution was infinite then two people talking on a telephone in cyberspace to each other would both be stretched to the top of the cone and facing each other. But since this would be an approximate map, just like the flat maps of the world not showing relief, the average in a region of connectedness to the world through a number would set the height of the peak for a region and the pull into the central point of the cone. The distance between any two places would actually no longer be readable on the lower circular map of the world but from their relative heights or a path that factored both geographic distance and the relative heights.

This new cyberworld map unfortunately would be very hard to read because things get pretty dense towards the top of a cone. If 750 cities all ended-up in a point it would have a lot of labels sticking out of it. This isn't a new problem. You can't read road signs on a map of the whole globe. You need to be able to zoom in and out. So one solution is to be able to change the view from the bottom to the top. At the bottom you have standard road sign problems but since the top condenses a lot your views probably should take cross sections - from height a-b and display what's in them labelled correctly.

In another way to approach this the world could be looked at with two dimensions. Each point would be defined A) by a two dimensional E-W land area (like a district, suburb, etc.) and B) by a number from zero to one representing a measurment number. The reason for measuring from zero to one would be to normalize the measurement such that every area was on the same scale, whatever that scale was. An actual number could be used but then a scale would need to be figured out to translate it into a picture. The measurement itself would be important for determining the outcome of the map but it could measure -- % saturation of cell phones, % users with Interet computers, etc. Next the little squares with E-W land areas could be sorted by range from 0-1 into a line. Now this doesn't look like a map yet but it does provide a start for displaying how close things are. The other dimension could be another arbitrary item including longitude and latitude mixed into a variable that would project a full globe onto a line such that Boston would still be somewhat near Bedford.

I unfortunately don't have the time to make such maps. If you are from Wired Magazine or Time or Princeton and you would like to collaborate with me and give me a team of programmers in Bangalore to create the maps... you'll know where to find me. I am somewhere midway up the cybercone near the US cluster.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been listening to The World is Flat in my car as I drive from Brookline to Newton to Burlington to Brookline to Cambridge etc. It is ironic to listen to a book about how easy it is to virtualize work so that I can eek out some learning while I am not virtually doing work (sort-of) in cities that are each twenty to thirty miles apart.

I think that the book is interesting although my main beefs about it are that I already know a lot of what is in the first section of the book going over the history of the past ten years because I lived in it and had my eyes open. But I am willing to suffer through a long explanation of what PayPal is in order to get some inside views and interviews with folks that I never had the time or availability of information to get while the Internet bubble/boom was starting.

I also missed out because I was busy on a lot of areas that evolved and I didn't even notice because I wasn't looking. While we used Open Source software at ChannelWave I never understood much about the history and how short the history was and how it was linked to the Internet itself with the first real big hit open source project being the Apache web server. The name Apache was both because the group wanted to appear to be a defiant and independant organization that was strong. Apparently the Apache Native Americans were the last tribe to surrender to the Europeans. But the word also can be heard as A-Patchy Server. The Open Source concept was to apply patches from multiple sources once vetted to keep improving and maintaining the software.

When interviewed, one of the original Apache leaders stressed that software is more like a vegetable than a building - it gets stale if it isn't constantly refreshed. I like to think of it as more like a living organism or group of reproducing living organisms such that both the code (kinda like the original genetic stuff) will die if it isn't both maintained locally where it lives in the computer ecosystem it is run or become unable to compete overall with other code trying to fill the same niche through the source code improvement process.

Apache and Open Source made the evolution of software able to operate more like the evolution of living organisms and gave a difference between the good old monoploid - the host continues it's own line to a diploid/sexual recombinant model. So even if it is free it is also free to expand and change rapidly. It will be interesting to see the long term war of the worlds between the open source software and tools and the Microsoft tools. At some point there might be a tipping point, which is what the Open Source folks are hoping for, where the balance of power shifts away from Microsoft. But for now it is safe to expect that if you want to sell desktop software then sending checks to Redmond is the best way to pull it off.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Thursday afternoon Deloitte and Touche was running their fourth annual play bocce at the Tech Center afternoon networking event. The main draw suggested that we would be able to play bocce with venture capitalists and potential investors. Actually the main draw was also free food and an open bar. Since Jeremy doesn’t have a car I had driven him over to Burlington in the morning and he didn’t have a way to get home other than to go to the VC Bocce thing Aaron, Jeremy, and I all wandered over to this Waltham event in two cars. Upon arriving both Jeremy and I were lacking in the pre-registration category so we didn’t have our nifty name tags pre-made. So we got the low-budget ghetto hand written name tags. Jeremy was one step lower on the name hierarchy because I at least had a card to drop in their bucket of who attended. Jeremy had to write his name onto one of my cards. I suspect they use these business cards for witching ceremonies creating broths fed to CEOs for special corporate events like IPOs and FEC investigations. “Eye of newt, tongue of frog, business card of software engineer, cackle, cackle.” Actually business cards in buckets perform an important role in the economy. They are consumed by hungry interns who diligently enter large buckets full of them into spread sheets and then generate beautiful but useless reports to new employees at consulting firms who then roll-up the reports to real partners who ignore them and are glad to not be distracted by the underlings but also happy that the underlings are miserable and staying-up all night making reports.

The bocce game itself was quite fun for almost an entire game. The people we were playing with were not venture capitalists. I actually didn’t meet more than one venture capitalist the whole night. Most people were either other entrepreneurs looking to find the venture capitalists, a ton of young accountant/consultants from Deloitte clustered together and chatting about how they were going to make a great report out of the business cards later, and some service providers looking to sell things like part time CXOs, leasing at high rates on office equipment, executive recruiting, and IPO document management. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place or not but since the bar was open and the Corona’s had limes in them I wasn’t going to complain too much. So we played Bocce against a pair of people, one of whom I swear was Slobidan Milosevich or Mikhail Gorbachev but since he spoke very little English I never figured out his name or nationality. His business partner was a tall guy who thought that bocce wasn’t quite as much fun as boule, a similar game with an oblong shaped throwing stone that processes and spins in cycles after being thrown. I’m still waiting for space bocce although the game might take too long.

In my defense the Waltham Tech Center is at the top of a hill overlooking a large reservoir. The road itself that leads to the parking lot is at the bottom of a cliff that is at the end of some woods with a steep incline that are at the base of the hill where the grass forms a slight saddleback where while there is a stone barrier, the stones are mainly level to the grass, especially where the saddle reaches it’s lowest point into the woods leading to the cliff leading to the road. The bocce courts we played on were defined by string rather than regulation wooden border bocce courts. The end of the court was at the top of the saddle leading down to the woods. We did manage to play until the score was seven to five when I decided to go for a long and high shot where the white ball was near the back corner of the court. The big green ball bounced once and then started rolling first slowly and then more quickly down the hill. One attendee stood by and watched the ball roll past him and then proceeded to watch the ball tinker down the saddle through the grass to the low point in the stones lining the border to the woods, hop over a stone and then roll down through the woods.

After looking carefully for the ball in the woods and nearly spraining my ankle I was unable to locate it anywhere. Part of the problem was that it was a dark green ball in the middle of some fairly dark green wooded area. I went all the way down the side of the cliff to see if there was a ball at the end of the road but even if it had reached the road it would likely have rolled another half mile down the winding road until it reached the street in front of the reservoir. So Jeremy and I switched places and he went to look for the ball while I continued to play the two folks with only three balls. I was doing fine and then Jeremy returned so that we could play some more.

Among the highlights of who I saw at the event was Mr. Jim Levinger, formerly of Pixeldance and now working at a new start-up that produces software for reading encoded messages through camera phones. The camera phone takes a picture of some dots and it then knows what to do next. It looked quite cool but I couldn’t think of the killer application for this other than in an upcoming spy movie where messages could be hidden in paintings or walls and a camera phone with the decoder software was the only way to read the message. That would be quite cool. He should call the DOD. Some other folks were doing some RFID work and I told them that the killer application for RFID would be a system to find the bocce ball lost in the woods.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)