Author: gulley

Roy showed me this site for teeny tiny pilots: Micropilot. The site bears the tagline “Miniature, Low-Cost, UAV, RPV, RC Autopilots and Autonomous GPS Navigation,” which means that, assuming you have the cash, it’s getting easier and easier to be the pilot of a remote control plane. Tell one of these planes where to fly, and it will take itself there automatically. Want to have an airborne camera loiter over your neighbor’s pool? This is the plane for you. These planes are the civilian versions of what the military is used for battlefield surveillance in Iraq. The sinister side of this boon of cheaper and smaller and better is that it’s getting much easier for the other guy too. Want to land a miniature plane on the roof of the White House? This is the plane for you. What you choose to put on that plane is your own business.

Wait till the hornet-sized assassin planes start coming out.

How you feel about this news tidbit is a good indicator of where you fall on the lawyer vs. doctor spectrum. The NY Times has this rather menacingly-titled article: Hire a Lawyer, Forget About a Doctor? A bunch of doctors in Texas put together a website that records people who have sued their doctors for malpractice. They are careful to say this is not a blacklist, but they were obviously fed up with the number of suits going on. This is publicly available information, and accountability works both ways: if you deserve good medical care, don’t physicians deserve reasonable patients?

So what’s the name of the website? DoctorsKnowUs.com. And what do you see on this website? This:

DoctorsKnow.Us has permanently ceased operations as of 3/9/04. The controversy this site has ignited was unanticipated and has polarized opinions regarding the medical malpractice crisis. Our hope is that this controversy will spark a serious discussion that results in changes that are equitable to both patients and physicians.

Too bad. Doctors still need patients to stay in business, and the marketplace of patients seems to hate this idea enough to shut it down. But doctors don’t have to stay in business.

This idea is too good to die here. I predict other sites like it will pop up quickly.

Years ago, while hiking in the Hetch Hetchy valley near Yosemite in California, I came to rest briefly on the O’Shaughnessy Dam that corks the bowels of the valley. Reading the bronze plaque there displayed, I was amazed and impressed to discover that the dam was built by M.M. O’Shaughnessy. This giant structure wasn’t named for a politician… it was named for the engineer who built it. I thought this was remarkably honest and pleasant thing to do (too bad for old M.M. the dam is so unpopular).

You don’t hear about the engineers who make things so often as you do about the architects who design or the astronauts who fly the things they make. And you don’t often hear about engineering marvels worth visiting as such. So I was pleased to come across the Sightseer’s Guide to Engineering. They’ve got eyepoppers in every state. See the
Alaska Pipeline or the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel. I have to confess, I have no idea how they nominate their marvels. There are only five sights listed for all of California, and one of them is the Herman Goelitz Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield. I just hope that Herman Goelitz is the engineer who built the first jellybean.

I saw this on BoingBoing, and it’s been making the rounds, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you really owe it to yourself to give it a visit. A woman who lives in Belarus near Chernobyl likes to go zooming through the “dead zone” on her high-powered motorcycle. She likes it because, as she says, “one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul.” She was a girl when the reactor blew back in 1986, and her father, whom she quotes often, is a nuclear physicist. She sprinkles her remarkable photos with direct, informative, and often heartbreaking prose. The area around Chernobyl is, of course, devoid of all human activity save for a few officials with dosimeters. She has one picture of what looks like a digital clock in operation. Why would they maintain a working digital clock in that emptiness? But she points out the units are not hours and minutes, but micro-roentgens per hour. Here are some highlights.

Chernobyl actually has become something of a tourist destination. But not everyone was happy with their tour of the ghost town it has become.

They charged 210 us dollars for 2 hours excursion and town guard say, they all were leaving in some 15 mins, complaining that silense is tremendous as if one got deaf.

Next to a picture of a tall building, she had this to say.

This is highest building in town and in April 26-27, 1986 after reactor exploaded, people gathered on the roof of this building to watch a beautiful shining that rised above APP [atomic power plant]. They didn’t know this was shining of radiation. they learned it on next day when evacuation began.

If you want a look at a post-apocalyptic world, you don’t need to pick up a science fiction novel. This entire region has been poisoned, seriously poisoned for at least 900 years. It’s hard to believe. Riveting stuff.

Speaking of RSS, Matt had this idea for an online service: RSS aggregation via email. You can do web-based aggregation with services like Feedster, but you still have to go to their site. But if you got your aggregated webfeeds by email, it really would be like the customized morning paper delivered fresh to your door. It would work like this: enter a list of your favorite website RSS feeds, and his (hypothetical) web service would mail you incremental changes to all those sites in one email at the interval you specify. As I mentioned before, this is pretty much what I do right now with Aggie, but Aggie builds a custom HTML page for me.

I threatened to out Matt’s idea on LazyWeb, but he swore me to secrecy. LazyWeb is the site where you put good ideas that you’re too lazy to act on in order to accelerate the natural process whereby every good idea you ever had eventually gets done by someone else. Finally somebody did build Matt’s Good Idea, even without the LazyWeb boost. It’s called TopFeeder. As C.G. Jung would say, Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit: Bidden or unbidden, Lazyweb abideth.

I notice, however, that the TopFeeder site appears to be defunct. So maybe Matt can build it after all.

Naaah.

RSS isn’t a very sexy name, but its time has certainly come. What is RSS? It’s a quick summary of what’s most recently changed on a website. What makes it nice is that you can subscribe to feeds that you like and then get notified only when the site has changed and only with the new material and nothing else. I use Aggie to build me a web page every night culled from the New York Times and a variety of blogs and magazines. For me, this is the genuine and successful solution to the build-me-a-customized-newspaper problem that various companies have tried (and failed) to solve. This article from Yahoo News does a good job explaining the dang deal. And it looks like they might be on to a more consumer-friendly term than RSS: webfeed.

By the way, I have an RSS newsfeed for this very site (MovableType takes care of it for you automatically). Look for the little orange tag at the bottom of the right side of this page.

After a recent purchase, my change included a battered dollar bill with a URL on it: http://www.wheresgeorge.com. Where’s George? is a web site dedicated to a money tracking experiment. Just like we attach radio transmitters to albatrosses and migrating antelope, we can attach a URL transmitter to a dollar bill and see where it travels, where it mates, where it gives birth, and so on. My bill was first reported in Woburn, Massachusetts at the beginning of the year, and it has since found its way to me in Watertown, Massachusetts. That’s not a long way, but then again, maybe my dollar is still learning to swim and is just about to set off on its first great road trip.

The most recorded observations on their site is thirteen. That doesn’t seem like a lot.

A year ago I wrote about hybrid electric cars and the statement “that which gets measured improves.” If you put a meter on your car, on your calorie intake, on your television usage, on anything really, you start paying attention to your behavior and you can’t help but change your habits of consumption. If only it were easy to see how much electricity you were using every day, you could probably save a lot without even working at it very hard. In fact, this idea inspired a Viridian design competition a few years ago. The winner was supposed to be fun to look at and easy to use, thereby inspiring lots of people to use it. But I don’t believe anyone ever built one.

Long time Rambles reader Randy was kind enough to send in this interesting tidbit about a more practical monitoring device being marketed by a firm in Newfoundland: Device to piggyback power meters. Sounds like a good idea… after all, there’s already a meter on your house. It’s just a matter of getting at it conveniently.

Better still, here is an article by Mark Frauenfelder about the wireless Zigbee widget: ZigBee Spins The Carousel of Progress Forward. It’s a mass market device to let your computer talk (via Bluetooth and WiFi) to all kinds of things in your house, including electric meters. This looks to finally be the one that people might buy.

And for God’s sake, stop letting the water run when you brush your teeth.

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction novelist, also happens to be the most prolific of the gang behind powerblog BoingBoing. He’s just released a new book, Eastern Standard Tribe, and made the full text available online.

I can’t vouch for the book, but from another site I came across an intriguing way to read it. I can’t imagine sitting down and reading an entire book online; like a lot of people, I’m waiting for the day when some kind of electronic paper gets damn close to the real thing. But a guy named Trevor Smith has adapted a speed reading application so that you can watch the words fly by one at a time. Herewith, the Speed Reader version of Eastern Standard Tribe. (Incidentally, I couldn’t get this applet to run on Internet Explorer, but it seemed to work fine on Mozilla.) It’s a really simple concept. You set the speed, and the words appear and disappear one after another. It sounds like a recipe for a headache, but you can train your brain to manage it fairly quickly. The applet itself is really primitive, but hey! you don’t often come across an entirely new way to read. Even so, I could only tolerate for a few minutes.

I learned about Smith’s reader from Joe Gregorio’s BitWorking blog. He had some interesting thoughts about the experience of computer-mediated speed reading:

At first it’s a very disorienting experience, you have no context for the words, no indication of page or paragraph, and I had to start at a slow speed. After a while my eyes and brain got used to it and I was able to crank up the speed, which is where things get counter-intuitive, the faster I went, the smoother the reading went. … I read the entire book in about 2 hours. … The oddest part of reading a book this way is how it feels. Hard to describe except to say that if feels like to goes into a different part of the brain than if you read it on paper.

It makes me think of that Woody Allen joke: “I took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It’s about Russia.”

Someone has gone to the trouble to translate Harry Potter into ancient Greek, so it shouldn’t surprise you that there are news services out there that specialize in delivering the news in Latin, or rather the nuntii Latini. The Finnish radio network YLE started it off many years ago, and now with the advent of advanced digital media and broadband internetworking, you can go to the Nuntii Latini page, click on the “Recitatio” button, and listen to the latest news just like Julius Caesar would have. The big newsflash from Gaul this week: “Velamen capitis in scholis Francorum prohibitum.”

What’s really entertaining is to listen to the Finnish reader plow through a story, and then listen to the Latin news from Radio Bremen in Germania, er, I mean Germany. It may be the same language, but it sure doesn’t sound like it. Plus the stories are more hip for the sensibilities of the cutting edge Latinist. Instead of French hats, we’re getting moonbases and space travel… check out this coverage of Bush’s proposal for a statione in Luna.

George Bush Unitarum Civitatum Americae praesidens in oratione dixit Americanos viginti annis stationem spatialem in Luna instituturos esse, e qua postea naviculis spatialibus in Martem planetam proficiscerentur. Bush hoc anno iterum munus praesidentis petiturus est.

Now I’d like to hear George W. say that. I am reminded of Dan Quayle regretting that he didn’t brush up on his Latin before his tour of Latin America.