Category: Uncategorized

Random interface design note: I

Random interface design note: I have a Bose Acoustic Wave radio/CD player. It’s a solid machine that has served me well, and it has a digital volume control that goes up to 100. Why 100? I guess their industrial designers considered 100 a nice round number (although, like with the car speedometers that go up to 160 mph, I only ever crank mine up to 30 even on a loud day). But the funny thing is, when you increase the volume, it only goes up by two at a time. So you can only land on the even numbers between 0 and 100. Why avoid the odd numbers? Why not just go from 0 to 50 in steps of one at a time? Now perfect happiness eludes me. I can never be truly happy until my volume is set to 17.

Hard drives just keep getting

Hard drives just keep getting smaller and denser: IBM’s ‘Millipede’ Project Demonstrates Trillion-Bit Data Storage Density. Now you have a place to keep all the files you’ve ever created, all the intermediate drafts of those files, all the movies you’ve ever seen, every song you’ve ever heard, every picture or home movie you’ve ever shot. Okay, there it all is in a great big pile. How will you find anything?

Here’s a good column by

Here’s a good column by Michael Wolff (appearing in New York Magazine) about one potential future for the post-Napster music industry. It’s seems safe to say that the music business won’t disappear, but it sure might turn into something like the book business. Not a terrible business to be in, but also not one with millions of dollars to throw away on frothy extravagance. I recently spent a while talking to a friend of mine who works in the music industry. He said everybody sees the business model imploding, but nobody knows what to do about it. It’s like drifting in a canoe towards the waterfall… Later I sent him a link to this article, and he had not only read it, but everyone at his office was talking about it. It seems to come pretty near the mark: Facing the Music.

The Genome News Network sez:

The Genome News Network sez: “The first head-to-head comparison of draft human and mouse genome sequences can be summarized in one word — fourteen. Fourteen genes on mouse chromosome 16 are not found in humans.” How do you like that? Out of more than 700 genes on chromosome 16, mice got everything we got, PLUS fourteen extra genes. Pretty sad, if you ask me. What genes do you think they are? The stay-really-small gene (TNY), the beady-eyes gene (BDII), and the be-furry-and-have-a-skinny-pink-tail (FZY) gene. I’m betting that’s three of them right there. How do I submit papers to Science? It also brings to mind a fun experiment: make a knockout mouse that’s missing all fourteen of those genes. Then stand back!

Go look. It’s a Welsh

Go look. It’s a Welsh blog. You won’t understand it, but it looks so cool: MorfaBlog. Or as the host, Nic Dafis says, “Yn ôl y geiriadur, rhywbeth A chanddo weflau mawr, cyriog, gwefldew. Neu, cyfieithiad diog o’r gair Saesneg ‘weblog’.” (pause for laughter) But seriously, folks…

I went to my college

I went to my college reunion last week and there discovered that a classmate of mine was actually in World Trade One on the 83rd floor when the first plane hit. I knew that no one in our class died in the attack, but I hadn’t considered the people I might know who had close escapes. People have different reactions when asked to recount a story they’ve told many times, but he was willing to tell his one more time. A few tidbits from his story that I hadn’t heard anywhere else: the flexure of the building due to the impact did all kinds of damage throughout the structure, breaking water lines, knocking marble tiling off the walls, and bending door frames. This last apparently trapped some people in their offices by jamming the door shut. Burning fuel pouring down the stairs diverted them from the first stairwell they came to and sent them running to the second, by which time the smoke in the hallways was already very thick. He also said the stairway wasn’t even crowded until he got down into the 40s. Which he knew at the time was a bad sign.


On the way back from the reunion, I stopped in New York to look at the site. It’s just a big construction zone now, the last remnants of debris having been cleared from the site itself. The scene surrounding the big void is more telling. There’s still plenty of damage visible to the nearby buildings, and a few spray-painted signs (“TRIAGE”) remain on the walls. Lots of tourists. Lots of security. The city hasn’t removed any of the tourist signs that tell you fun facts about the towers. I wonder if they ever will.

Can this be real? Snoop

Can this be real? Snoop Dogg has a blog? Check out the Snoop Doggy Blog. It looks real. It smells real. It’s not real. On the internet, no one can tell if you’re kidding. Fortunately it has a tag line at the bottom of the page: It’s a parody. Get over it. Somebody has a lot of time to devote to this. My favorite line: “If I married Winnie The Pooh, my name would be … Snoop Doggy Dogg Pooh.”

Here’s a good example of

Here’s a good example of new information disturbing the sleepy status quo. A web site at Williams college (called Factrak) lets students anonymously rate their professors. The faculty doesn’t like it. Of course they don’t like it; having people anonymously rate you in a publicly availaible forum is hard for anybody. But what can you do? There’s absolutely no way to stop it. The profs will have to accomodate themselves to this new state of affairs. There are some juicy catty remarks in the article, such as this one by an auditor of university president Morton Schapiro’s popular economy class: “By the end of the course, I think I’ll know more about his Nobel Prize-winning ‘friends’ than microeconomics.” Those uppity students don’t know what’s good for them. Here’s the article (from the Boston Globe): Student Web site for rating faculty riles Williams College. [This link will be defunct soon, since the Globe reaper pulls its content from view after a while. Read it while you can]

One of the fears mentioned by the disapproving faculty members was the specter of grade inflation. If you know you’re being rated every day, will you pander to the crowd? Will you become an affable but ineffective buffoon, or will you risk cyber-humiliation to hold back the tide of rising grades? This
column on grade inflation in the New York Times supports the view that students who expect high grades get them and further that students who get bad grades give bad reviews.