Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: Power Sources, The Future of Tanning, Amazing Mazes

Aluminum smelters and data centers. Are alike in needed abundant and reliable electrical power. So the Columbia River valley is growing a crop of server farms. The Economist article notes that virtualization technology can be applied to migrate processing to where the juice is cheaper, as well as optimize the number of servers powered up to handle the given workload. Indeed, virtualization management startups are being reflagged as 'green' as fast as the PPT decks and web sites can be rewritten. Remapping the network connections, storage and other resources used by virtualized processes could sink any savings into a sea of management overhead if not optimized as well.

RIP, Robert Asprin. John Scalzi reports the passing of the well-known fantasy author. His Thieves' World was one of the more enjoyable multi-author sword and sorcery creations. Some few us also remember him as "Yang the Nauseating" in days gone by. I can think of far worse ways to go than on a couch, reading an SF novel.

All that time video-gaming was not wasted. At least if you want to join the Army or Marines and use the real thing. Designers of weapons and other interactive systems can now take facility with game controllers, computers, and networks for granted. We've come a long ways from the days when we tracked down (still abundant) naive users to try out our latest designs.

Hope for the pasty white? Perhaps for future generations: While I was paying attention to other things, the genetics behind human skin pigmentation were figured out. Seems that crosses between the melanin endowed and those less so 'average down', towards the paleface end. Not to fear, given the worldwide genome pool, a few more generations of 747s, migration and out-marriage, and everyone will come with a decent base tan pre-installed. It will be a more boring but perhaps more peaceful world, and fewer engineers will have to brave carcinoma to lose their hacker's pallor.

Speaking of microloans for mobiles. Here's a report by Kevin Kelly on a talk by Iqbal Quadir, founder of the original loans for village and family mobile phones program in Bangladesh.

Concrete Spaghetti. You think the MacArthur Maze is a mess? Check out these feats of civil engineering in Japan.

What I've Read On My Involuntary Vacation

Those who've followed this blog for a few months know that I broke a leg around the end of January and have since been recuperating. I'm driving again, but getting off crutches must await regaining flexibility in the ankle of the injured leg. Rehab is under way - all too slowly.

I didn't realize how much time was being occupied by outdoor recreation and hobbies, and other activities requiring mobility, until I suddenly had it all back on my hands. That's resulted in more blogging activity here, but I've also devoted a lot of it to catching up on the reading queue, expanding into some topics that I might not otherwise have tackled, and beginning a few projects that are on the personal 'bucket list'. For your possible amusement, my 'vacation' reading list so far:

Rereading the entirety of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. In the hospital, while more or less under the influence of a Dilaudid drip. Somehow this was perfectly compatible with the adventures of Miles.

Reread all 20 volumes of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels, one after another. Could be the Vicodin helped keep me on track through the entire sea-borne adventure and comedy of manners. Sailing, sailing. When I graduated to plain old Tylenols, I took on some new material.

Timothy Hornyak, "Loving The Machine". Robotics and culture in Japan. I reviewed it here.

Walter Russell Mead, "God and Gold". How the maritime economies of the Netherlands, Britain and the United States came to global power. Not as good as his "Special Providence", but superior to Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" which at times treats the outcome as just a big accident. Yes, I believe in American exceptionalism.

Robert Zubrin, "Energy Victory". Why we should be investing in flex-fuel transportation. Reviewed here.

Neil Shubin, "Your Inner Fish". Human evolution and developmental biology, though the lenses of paleontology and modern genomics. Good sauce for evolution deniers. Found via Clive Thompson and Ole Eichhorn.

Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, eds., "Counterpoints". Essays from the New Criterion magazine. I had bought this largely for the political and foreign affairs related essays. I had already read through them and put the book on the back burner before the fatal day. The remaining 'free bonus' cultural pieces turned out to be a welcome and stimulating goulash of things I might never have otherwise noticed.

Ira Brodsky, "The History of Wireless". How you got your personal Star Trek communicator, a few centuries early. Reviewed here.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". The travels of a young Briton in 1930s Europe from Holland to Rumania, just as the Nazis were coming to power. Written many years after the fact, and well salted with cultural details. A fortuitous train wreck of travel writing and history. This pick was due to one of the "Counterpoints" essays.

Jonah Goldberg, "Liberal Fascism". While Goldberg spends too much time apologizing for his analysis, and goes off on some tangents sparked by his conservative cultural views, this is a useful antidote to the highly selective memory of the Left. In an odd sort of synchronicity, I was reading this book in parallel with Fermor, and reached Goldberg's reference to Fermor's visit with a young German Communist who had just converted to Nazism, while I was only pages away from that scene in "Time of Gifts".

Michael Yon, "Moment of Truth in Iraq. In the autographed edition. As those who follow his blog know, Yon is a war reporter who doesn't hunker down in the Green Zone compiling reports from stringers of unknown loyalties. He's been out on the lines, in the sh**, and has the combat photographs to prove it. This is based on the experiences reported on the blog, but isn't just a compilation. He's added some details that were likely too sensitive at the time, but also rewritten to provide lessons learned and a narrative backbone. Yon is brutally critical of what he sees as bungled efforts in the invasion and aftermath, and thereby gains credibility for his current assessment. There's a good review (not my own) here.

Still in progress, I have:

Rereading all of Shakespeare, for the first time in at least thirty years. I'm through most of the Historicals and have started nibbling at the Comedies.

A volume of European history from 1648 to 1815, back story for O'Brian and also Fermor's travels in the former Habsburg Empire.

A recent personal finance book, along with rereading some I've used in the past, as a review on my own planning.

Got any suggestions? Put them in the comments, which I've opened up for once.

The Roving Eye: Bad Debt Decoded, Stories From The Front, Is No Media Cow Sacred?

Debt Crunch In Plain English. Many of the indirect consequences of the subprime mortgage meltdown have become so arcane and obscure that investors can be surprised when a bit of not-so-prime toxin turns up in a part of their portfolios they thought was safe. DLA Piper has a nice page with a (fairly) plain English explanation of the auction rate securities market meltdown.

No Editor, No Spin The US Army has put up a fascinating archive of debriefings of personnel returning from Iraq and other combat locations. (Click GWOT Oral History Program on the sidebar). There are hundreds of items from the top generals all the way to front line infantrymen. I've only dabbled in the archive, but there's some fascinating stuff there, like this story of the Thunder Run into Baghdad. This should be incredibly valuable for the historian, or for any pundit who's actually willing to read something from those on the ground before spouting off. Anyone up for correlating these reports against the MSM stories of the time?

Last As It Was First. The book was the first medium to go 'mass', back in the day of Gutenberg. Ironically, the advent of the net and the Long Tail phenomenon typified by Amazon, along with well-entrenched habits for print consumption, may have provided an Indian summer for the medium. But the distribution chain was in trouble, first the independent book shops, and now the big boys are being squeezed. (Update: More at the WaPo.) Along with all the time displaced to reading Web pages, we may finally have a successful electronic book with the Kindle. In common with vested interests from other old media, old style authors have noticed, and are screeching about the end of the world as we know it. Labels Studios Publishers are being squeezed as well, and cutting back on their risk-reducing activities of fronting advances to authors and absorbing returns from the channel, leading author Roger Simon to wonder "what's the point of the publisher?"

Sea-borne Owl. This place needs a Friday animal post occasionally. Aw, isn't that cute?? Every carrier group needs a licensed falconer on board.

Review: Ira Brodsky's "The History of Wireless"

I first got into wireless in my early teens. Kit-built an Allied 'Knight Kit' regenerative receiver. Then the obligatory Heathkit superhet shortwave set. Held an amateur ticket for a while, and scratch-built a small transmitter. All vacuum tubes, of course. Bread-boarded a few transistor circuits as well.

Wireless technology was still fairly transparent back then. Once you'd built that much gear, you knew the basic designs. If a neighbor or relative brought over a defunct radio or TV for the kid to mess with, it would have big fat wires that you could easily trace to figure out the circuits and deduce what was probably cooked. A multimeter and surplus oscilloscope were sufficient test gear. Tubes unplugged and could be tested separately. More basics and a lot of the history were available from ARRL publications, my father's old textbooks, even Boy Scout merit badge materials. The whole field of consumer level wireless was then about 50 years old, and much of its history still featured in general science texts.

A kid or curious adult interested in wireless today has a much harder task. Take apart the most easily accessible sample - a dead mobile phone - and you've got a bunch of parts opaque to all but experts. Just try to figure out a RAKE filter by staring at a few IC packages and a multilayer circuit board. With the advent of digital signal processing, even getting a start in comprehension involves understanding a very complex two-way system. No one bothers fixing the gadgets. If they flake out, they're eWaste. As far as a beginner building one, just forget it.

The existence of wireless is taken for granted, being over a hundred years old, with the start of effective use now beyond living memory. You may get some mention of twitching frog's legs and spark gaps in a science text these days, but the path from there to the Star Trek communicator you can get for nearly free at the local mobile store has become obscure.

Ira Brodsky's recent History of Wireless is meant to fill the gap between initial discovery and today's mobiles that (along with the Internet) are remaking global communications. The author is a long time technologist and consultant in the mobile phone arena, but he reaches all the way back to the discovery of electricity itself to begin his story. From there we go through the interaction between electric and magnetic fields, the first instances of wireless transmission, and into the vacuum tube era that made it practical for everyday use.

Review: Timothy Hornyak's "Loving the Machine"

This book about robots in Japanese culture has been out since late 2006, so I'm coming to it somewhat late. My goal with the book was to fill in background of one of the major non-US innovators in robotics development, both in both cultural and technological terms.

The book succeeds admirably in framing the cultural context for one type of robotics in Japan. While beginning with an OED definition of robots inclusive of non-humanoid 'bots, Hornyak self-admittedly spends almost all of his attention on anthropomorphic devices, which he refers to as 'real robots'. In fact, the swath through humanoid representations is so broad that it includes pure fictions such as Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) and Gundam juxtaposed with actual mechanisms. The device succeeds well, however, in keeping the story moving in the direction of the book's central thesis: The cultural backing for humanoid representations of devices in Japan will mesh with actual social needs to drive robotics development in a more anthropomorphic direction than in the West. Hornyak succeeds in building a solid case for this cultural framing of bots in Japan.

The Roving Eye: 2/9/08

Ole Eichhorn is blogging again, and has been for about a month. Welcome back!

My favorite new read of the holiday season was Richard Preston's "The Wild Trees"" (Fluffer to Kevin Kelly for the recommend.) It tells the story of men and women compelled to find the world's tallest tress - and climb them. Many of these monsters are in North Coast redwood country that I know fairly well. Not that I've got ambitions towards the climbing, but I'd love to walk those groves. [Shack happy already? — ed. Yes.] The author has a photo gallery section on his site that's well worth a look. Sort of puts my own old growth hunting activities in the shade, so to speak.

If you're anticipating major surgery, voluntary or otherwise, here's a word for you: Acidophilus. Seems the antibiotic cocktails used to prevent post-operative infections are also powerful enough to blow away your internal set of intestinal flora. That's the collection of bacteria that have become our symbiotic digesters in return for a usually congenial host environment. Once they're gone, the old GI tract - um - doesn't work so well. So the Acidophilus capsules with replacement flora, usually ignored by all but diet supplement fiends, are suddenly important in rebooting the system. You can find them at the nearest health food store - that would be Trader Joe's in our case. HT: our doc, who we love for his minimalist outlook on prescriptions.

Best YHOO post. Cruel, but fair, just like the Piranha brothers.

Review: Two Books on Open Source Software Licensing

A short trip to the East Coast over the last few days provided an enforced opportunity (ten hours of flight time) to catch up on self-assigned reading. One area of interest, due to a current project, is the ins-and-outs of open source software licensing in the context of building a system that will be partially open and partially proprietary. There have been enough alarmist horror stories circulated by partisans on both sides (Viral! Unconstitutional! Free-riders! Corporate media stooges!) to have me believe this was a time to avoid the blogs and look for a text, Yup, a good ol' fashioned squashed tree book.

Book Review: Glenn Reynolds' An Army of Davids

(Hey, everyone else seems to have written one; why buck the trend?)

I'm not the first to observe that there are really two books inside the covers of Army of Davids, each occupying about half the page count. In the first, Reynolds speaks of what he knows first hand: citizens' media, the forces that have created them, and much of the social impact. As living proof that you don't have to build a portal to wield influence in the Web, Reynolds brings the credibility that he can surf that particular set of waves. In the second half of the book, he opines on matters such as space, nanotechnology, and biotech, where he has no direct experience. Reynolds is not a technologist or businessman, and it shows.

Listening to the Dormouse

Before leaving on vacation, on the recommendation of a friend I picked up a copy of John Markoff's 'What the Dormouse Said', a history of some of the early days of Silicon Valley and what became personal computing and hypertext technology, told in terms of the interaction and overlap between technologists and the developing Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s. I did not count this against my 'no work' pledge, since many of the dramatis personae of the story fall in the range between nodding acquaintance and longtime colleague. Part of the fun of this book was learning the backstory of those in the former category, in a few cases explaining attitudes and behaviors that I'd just taken as given before. Markoff has done a great job at extracting the tales of those days while they still last, and presenting the characters and stories in a sympathetic treatment. (He's not a photojournalist, though. The pics are the same I've seen for years. There have to be more good blackmail historical images in attics somewhere around here. I've seen this great one of Larry Tesler in a 'fro...)

The greatest value of this book is in not only showing the countercultural roots of the Valley, but in dissecting out and exposing the fundamental differences of philosophy between those who saw computers as a tool for augmenting humans - the Engelbart/Nelson/Kay school, and those who saw them as a potential replacement - the strong AI school of McCarthy and others. This is a nuance that has been lost on most other historians and journalists, particularly those without a technical background, so kudos are due.

Since I'm now going to lay some critique on the book, and on those in the stories, I should first acknowledge my own debts. It was Stewart Brand's 'II Cybernetic Frontiers' - still on my shelves - that in my undergraduate days influenced me to drop a biochem dual major and focus on computing, by showing there was more to it than punch cards and assembly language. A copy of the first Xerox PARC Smalltalk report, bummed from a friend, deeply influenced my coding style while I was still a practitioner. Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg's seminal 1976 article, Personal Dynamic Media (PDF), set a vision of computers as media that has been a guiding light for my entire technology and business career (though I diverge on specifics). Much later, Stewart Brand was an instigator of one of my favorite projects at Apple, the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, one of the earliest experiments in CD-based multimedia publishing. And Doug Engelbart was a gracious colleague to us upstarts during the Dexter Hypertext Workshops.

While it's an inherent problem that any retrospective of events has to adopt a point of view for the sake of narrative, the weakest point of 'Dormouse' is its treatment of how these ideas transitioned into common commercial practice and thence to popular culture. Playing off the countercultural theme, Markoff seems to jump straight from the earliest days of the Homebrew Computer Club to the open source movement of today. That's leaving out over 25 years of entrepreneurial history to try to drag the anti-capitalism of the 60s and 70s into this decade.

Regardless of the seminal role of the ideas outlined, it must be acknowledged that not a single one of the projects described in 'Dormouse' achieved a commercial success. They were works by cognoscenti, for cognoscenti. Like it or not, scale adoption is the means by which personal computing technology impacts culture and economy. Markoff at times seems to adopt the view heard from these pioneers that their work was misunderstood, or ignored, often in the rush to commercialization. For instance, I have heard Alan Kay be even more acid in person regarding the bowdlerized, fragmentary implementations of the PARC ideas that finally saw market.

These problems were of the pioneers' own making. The most poignant portions of 'Dormouse' describe the organizational problems lurking behind the creativity. In fact, none of these organizations and systems managed to scale beyond the size of a modest startup, or survive a single generational turnover of computing technology. Meanwhile, Gordon Moore became one of the creators of an organization that lived in exponential time over many generations, and coevolved with a Valley technical and business ecology that could also do so.

Grand visions have the risk of becoming idées fixe, if not salted with market and social feedback. Organizations and cultures do not become augmented without fundamental transformation. Literary machines must be open in an open society, and cope with the inevitable bad actors. The intellectual challenge of programming recedes into the platforms that carry new media to all the niches of the Long Tail. It's no disrespect to the those who listened to the dormouse, to say that they needed the entrepreneurs of the Valley to make this happen.

In spite of these caveats, I recommend this book, particularly if read alongside two earlier works cited by Markoff: Steven Levy's 'Hackers' and Freiberger and Swaine's 'Fire in the Valley', alternate narratives of overlapping events. These are most often mentioned by those who lived the stories. The 1988 collection A History of Personal Workstations, edited by Adele Goldberg, pulls together some of the academic output of the times of 'Dormouse', for those inclined to dig into primary sources.

For the later Valley and personal computing history, you'll have to search the used book sources for Frank Rose's 'West of Eden' and Paul Carroll's 'Big Blues', respectively treatments of Apple and IBM during the 1980s, and both reasonably accurate from my first or second-hand knowledge. The definitive history of Microsoft during this period is still to be written.

For the engineering and entrepreneurial cultures that became dominant, no one has ever done it better than Tracy Kidder with The Soul of a New Machine. Nominally fiction, Doug Coupland's 'Microserfs' is a humane treatment of the less machismo culture of the early 90s. The voice of the engineer who has to make a product out of a vision is still best expressed in Florman's classic 'Existential Pleasures of Engineering'. If anyone has written a classic memoir of Valley venture capital, I haven't seen it.

What I Read On My Winter Vacation

I hate traveling during the holidays, so usually we hang out at home and hope for the best as far as the weather goes. No such luck. If you paid any attention to CA weather of late, it's been like that old Al Capp character with the cloud always over his head. It rained, then rained some more, and while considering what to do next, it kept on raining. So I caught up on the reading queue a bit, between trawling the net for translation information and new blogs. A few mini-reviews from the turn of the year:

Kenneth Timmerman, The French Betrayal of America. Don't read this book if you have ulcers, high blood pressure, or need to sleep well tonight. Also don't expect a blow-by-blow of the whole Iraq/UN Security council affair. This is background which makes that affair understandable, not as an outlier, but as a direct continuation of a pattern of perfidy and support for Saddam by the French government in general, and Jacques Chirac in particular. Read this and you'll never look at the news from Paris the same. One thing I found wanting: Timmerman at times cites 'rumors' that US oil or arms companies were engaged with either Iraq or Iran, which were used as justification by the French for some of their own activities. He never pays off on these hints - were they self-serving disinformation, or something more serious? It's a small but significant weak point that these rumors are not clearly sunk or substantiated.

Scott Ott, Axis of Weasels. When the tooth grinding from reading Timmerman gets to be too much, put it down and pick up this book of snark and comic relief from the mad genius behind Scrappleface. There is no international crisis or political outcome so dire that it can't be lampooned. There are a few snags in the dish - I was periodically reminded that Mr. Ott and I do not share views on religion, abortion, gay marriage, and evolution. (Evolution? Just what century is it?) But fortunately, he's not running for office, so I can skip past the offending bits and enjoy the residue in good conscience.

Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn. This history of the invasion of Northern Africa, the US Army's first action of World War II, was recommended over the dinner table during my visit to Army War College. This entire campaign is in danger of falling out of school book histories, and Atkinson does an admirable job of digging into the archives of the Army and our adversaries of the time to bring it back to life. Those who have some notion that the efforts of the Greatest Generation were meticulously planned need to read this book, and compare to today. In spite of numerous errors, Operation Torch also marked the point when the productive and logistical capabilities of the US began to eclipse our allies, an event that is still playing out. Atkinson's work is marred only by the occasional descent into 'people journalism' marginal to the outcome of the action.

Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains. This is number four in the author's series "Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890". I've had an interest in the war in the Northern Plains since touring several of the significant battlegrounds some years ago, and working on related content as part of a multimedia educational project even further back. The size and price of this volume is likely a bit much unless you share that level of interest, but I enjoyed it. The contents combine contemporary newspaper articles and military reports, and later recountings by the participants, including some from the Native American side. Here you will learn that the history of 'embeds' goes back a long way, and had serious risks of being a 'hair-raising experience' at the time. Personality journalism, criticism of actions that led both to defeat and to eventual victory, and the duels between hawk and dove are just as old. Those brought up on Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee will find that neither of those actions was decisive. It was the ability of Col. Nelson Miles to supply his troops and relentlessly follow the Sioux villages through the harsh winter of 1876-7 that finally broke that proud tribe to the reservations. There are honors and horrors enough here for both sides of that long-ago war.