Category: Uncategorized

Hey, that’s my brother!

For the last year, my oldest brother and his wife have been participating in a weekly civic protest of the war in Iraq. Up here in the Boston area, you’re unusual if you’re not protesting the war and making fun of George Bush (just ask Mitt Romney), but in a small town in red-state North Carolina, it takes considerably more courage to speak out on a topic like this. Here’s the article about it from my old hometown newspaper, the Winston-Salem Journal: Anti-war protesters join at Elkin corner every Thursday as sign of their concern. Go, bro!

I was also curious to see that the newspaper site features some video content. It’s an interesting little video clip (prominently featuring my smiling, waving brother), but more generally it’s fascinating to watch a newspaper putting up multimodal content like podcasts and video. I’m picturing someone trained as a writer being given a video camera by their editor and being told to “bring home some video.”

Two years ago, I read this interview with Dave Barry in which he talked about the predicament of the modern newspaper. They’re losing money, they’re laying off staff, and they’re telling their people to do podcasts and videos in addition to their day job. As Barry put it, “Newspapers are dead.” He told the story of how his wife, a sportswriter at the Miami Herald was asked to do a podcast for the last winter Olympics in addition to filing her normal stories. It’s hard to guess what newspapers will look like when the bleeding finally stops, but it hasn’t happened yet. I guess the same thing can be said about Iraq.

Self-replicating self-replicators

Back in August, I posted something about a nifty 3-D printing product called the Desktop Factory. Commenter Doug Moore made the following wisecrack:

I have a better way to save money on a 3-D printer. Just print a 3-D printer and then return the original to the store.

Yes yes, ha-ha and all that, but yesterday I came across another 3-D printing tool that has the explicit goal of doing exactly what Doug’s talking about. The RepRap device (RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper) is being built by the ambitious Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath. He wants his RepRap to self-replicate (within certain limitations) so that everyone will have one, thereby eliminating the need for money for all mankind.

So he’s obviously crazy, and his Rube Goldberg replicator (RubeRep) is nowhere close to replicating anything very useful, let alone itself. But he’s very clever, and rhetorically he knows how to sell his story. Let us say that the human spirit is willing but the mechanical flesh, as yet, is weak.

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I know all this because I listened to his talk at PopTech. It’s a darn good talk and I recommend it. Bowyer makes some compelling comparisons to biology, and I believe that something like this will eventually succeed. When it comes to replication, I always think of the garden. That lovely tomato in your hand was assembled on-site using solar power and locally available materials (dirt! air!). It’s an existence proof: we can do at least that well. Someday. You don’t need metals from Peru or petrochemicals from Brunei. You don’t need kilns, chillers, or pressure cookers. You do need cleverness, patience, and a healthy diet fortified with eight essential vitamins and minerals. We might manage it yet.

The Italian campaign in WWII

If history is written by self-flattering victors, then ambiguous and unfortunate battles are in danger of being forgotten altogether. We Americans never tire of the story of D-Day, of the great carnage on the beaches of Normandy that eventually put Allied troops across the Rhine and into the heart of Germany. But what do we know about Italy? The Allied campaign in Italy (1943-1944) is ambiguous at best and a colossal mistake at worst.

I just finished a book on the subject, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy by Rick Atkinson. It’s a great read and does a lot to put the campaign in perspective. Atkinson gives you the viewpoint of commanders and soldiers, although I wish there were more material from the German side of the line. Atkinson refers to Italy as, at times, employing the tactics of World War I with the weapons of World War II. The reason is obvious in hindsight: there was no clear strategic directive. In France there was a simple objective. Drive your tanks into downtown Berlin. In Italy the objective was… what? A diversion from Normandy? A thrust deep into the “soft underbelly” of the Axis? A battle of attrition designed primarily to grind down German divisions? All these things? Even to the commanders, it was never clear.

Although Atkinson shows what the generals are thinking, he gives the last word to war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Here’s how Pyle sums it up.

I looked at it this way—if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives that winter we would save a half million lives in Europe—if those things were true, then it was best as it was.

I wasn’t sure they were true. I only knew that I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.

By the way, one of the nice resources available to the modern reader of military history is Google Earth. If you want to know why Monte Cassino was so important, you can just fly there and inspect the landscape. You can also find map overlays like this one of the Salerno landings.

My uncle fought in the Italian campaign for several months before being wounded north of Rome and sent home. I’m sending him a copy of Day of Battle to get his opinion, but in the past he has highly recommended Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang as an unblinking memoir of what Italy looked like to an infantryman. Maybe I can get Uncle Bill to set down some of his thoughts for reading on this site…

The coming depopulation

My brother and his wife were recently in town for a surprise visit (my birthday). At one point, over lunch, the conversation turned to population growth and the woes of the world. I pointed out that all was not lost, since the Earth’s population was going to peak in this century and shrink for a long time to come thereafter.

I was challenged on this point and asked to provide a little support for my assertion.

The most forceful description of this situation that I’ve come across is Phillip Longman‘s talk at the Long Now Foundation entitled The Depopulation Problem. He’s written the entire speech out as a PDF file. It’s worth reading. It’s got some startling facts in it. It’s reasonably well known, for example, that industrialized countries like Japan and Italy are producing children at below the replacement rate, which is to say, they’re shrinking. Russia is shrinking at the incredible rate of three quarters of a million people every year. That’s nontrivial shrinkage.

People who are aware of this phenomenon in rich countries still generally believe that it’s more than made up for by high fertility in poor countries. But this isn’t true. Here’s what Longman says.

In no industrialized nation today is fertility high enough to prevent declining population. In countries as diverse as Italy, Japan, Spain and Korea, fertility rates are so low that population loss on the order of 30 to 50 percent per generation are in the works… Yet what is even more surprising is the rapid decline in fertility now seen in the developing world. The phenomenon of sub-replacement fertility has by now spread to ever corner and continent of the globe.

In short, Longman actually paints a gloomy picture of what a depopulating world may look like. That part is controversial, but the basic demographic premise is not: we’re done doubling the world’s population.

As further evidence of this point, look at the organization called Zero Population Growth, an organization that was founded by Mr. Population Bomb himself, Paul Ehrlich. That organization is not even called Zero Population Growth anymore. It’s called Population Connection. They still have plenty of good work to do with overcrowding and environmental issues, but even they agree that the population curve is flattening this century.

For all the wretched things going on in the world, that’s a pleasant thought.

The earliest sunset is here!

Every year this time I am compelled to point out the day in December with the earliest sunset. Where I live, that day is December 9th, which means I am now safely on the far side of the solstitial crepuscular cusp. Since I’m not an early riser, that means I’ll be seeing a little more of the sun every day from now until next summer. That, in my opinion, is worth a stiff drink and some seasonal good cheer.

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I refer you to analemma.com if you’re puzzled as to why the earliest sunset does not coincide with the solstice. Celebrating the earliest sunset is a nicely localized tradition, since (unlike the solstice itself) the day varies dramatically depending on your latitude. Speaking of analemmas, APOD recently featured this lovely animation of the sun’s seasonal progress over New Jersey.

Also, in news astronomical, I’m glad to report that my Sky Clock is back in business again. The data source I use to locate the planets, ephemeris.com, was offline for a while, but it’s healthy again. I made an animation to show how the Sky Clock changes over one day, one month, and one year. Below is the animation for a year. Notice the arm-like lines that indicate sunrise and sunset. You can see them closing like a caliper in late December before releasing us for another year. Thank goodness.

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Pictures of the New York Stock Exchange

Whenever there’s some news about how the stock market was really awful or especially busy, you see the picture. The picture is a shot of men on the trading floor displaying the essential emotion of today’s market. On good days you get the picture on the left. On bad days you get the one on the right.

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There something really funny about these pictures. I always wanted to interview the photographers on this beat. I like to imagine them sitting around the newsroom, smoking cigarettes and playing gin rummy until they get the call: The market is melting down, boys! Hop down to 11 Wall and score me some pictures, pronto! But the truth is the pictures always look the same (aside from slow variations in hair style and machines visible in the background): the busy trader or the glum trader, take your pick. I secretly suspected the editors just went to the filing cabinet and pulled out the shots they needed.

Now I read in Paul Kedrosky’s blog that the trading floor is emptying out. However good it looks on TV, computerized trading means you don’t need to have guys yelling orders at each other. Pretty soon there will be no one left to photograph. But the funny thing is that the New York Stock Exchange really wants somebody to stay on the floor, because it’s good marketing. People, consumers of news, need to put a face on the market. They need to see those desperate, disheveled traders elbowing each other out of the way in order to believe something important happened. Kedrosky helpfully suggests that they hire actors to do the job.

I think the answer is simpler. What we need are stock market emoticons. Chat programs already replace the humble smiley :-) with the jazzier regular_smile.gif. We just need a Dow Industrial feed that displays Mr. Busy or Mr. Glum depending on the motion since the opening bell.

This is only a leading indicator, of course. It’s safe to say that we’ll all be portrayed by actors some day. You’ll still want to see a tall pilot-like character in the cockpit of your computer-operated plane. So also with surgeons, architects, real estate agents, and so on. Walt Disney saw it all coming years ago. At Disney World, there are no employees, only cast members.

Mike O. and Industry!

Hey, I just noticed my old pal Mike O. has revived his blog (Industry!) from its state of suspended animation. He just posted the video of an oddball Tootsie Pop commercial that I also remember from childhood. When seen through my 21st century lens, it seems strangely edgy. What’s up with that blind fox? Right up to the end I was wondering if this was the actual commercial or a postmodern ironical send-up of same. It’s so hard to tell anymore.

While on the subject of old commercials that stick with you across the years, I was glad to find the old Chuck Wagon Dog Food commercial. I loved that little wagon! How did it just melt into the wall like that? It thrilled me every time.

Any commercials you particularly remember? It must be incredibly satisfying for the old retired ad men to see their material coming around again on YouTube. Look at all them cotton-pickin’ Alka-Seltzer ads.

Amory Lovins on Natural Capitalism

I recommend this series of lectures by the Rocky Mountain Institute‘s Amory Lovins. He delivered the lectures at Stanford, and they’re now hosted at the Social Innovation Conversations site.

I first came across these lectures on Jon Udell’s blog. Udell does a good job of describing them.

What you will hear, in these talks, is the distillation of a lifetime of experience in the creative optimization of the use of energy. The principles are all laid out in Natural Capitalism: integrative design, whole-system engineering, radical resource productivity, tunneling through the cost barrier. But it’s something else again to hear Lovins pile up the case studies, one after another, in a plain-spoken but cumulatively overwhelming stream of revelatory common sense.

Natural capitalism is wonderfully straightforward notion: essentially it states that capitalism is a reasonable framework for solving the world’s problems, so long as you assign reasonable value to the natural capital (clean air, forested land, mineral wealth) you consume and create. Everything belongs on the balance sheet. We suffer now because we thought of carbon dioxide emissions as a zero cost economic output that could go under the rug. Integrative design is another trend that I see rapidly becoming more prominent. And I was struck by Lovins’ use of this quote from Einstein: “I wouldn’t give a nickel for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

With these words still echoing in my ears, I was happy to read in this morning’s Boston Globe about a company called H2O Applied Technologies. According to the article, “They find ways to cut energy costs. They make energy-saving improvements. They buy and install new equipment. And they pay for everything.” They make their money by taking a cut of the resulting savings. It’s a beautiful model. No hand-wringing. No theatrics. No appeals to guilt or charity. Just profit-seeking capitalists trying to make money. If we do manage to save the world, this is how we’ll do it.

Here’s the link: Clients get energy savings, H2O shares the benefit – The Boston Globe (article may be behind a registration barrier).

WikipediaVision: Watch Wikipedia happen

On the heels of TwitterVision and FlickrVision comes WikipediaVision, a real-time Google Maps mashup that shows where edits to the online encyclopedia are occurring: that is, where in the encyclopedia and where in the world. Wikirage (rhymes with “vicarage”) does a good job of showing what pages are most actively under revision, but WikipediaVision has the advantage of drawing your eye around a map.

Self-interest is alive and well… it’s fun to watch how well-correlated location and topic are. You can also click through on the “Diff” link and see the actual edit that was made. I watched a Canadian edit a page on New France, and drilled into it only to discover it was, quel horreur! an abusive edit. It was a contemporary anatomical reference having very little to do with New France. My wiki spectating was complete when I watched the editorial wound heal over in less than two minutes as someone (and their pet bot) came along and undid the vandalism. It was a very satisfying little drama. Wikipedia is a constantly boiling pot.

[via O’Reilly Radar]

Go Sox!

As a Boston-based blogger, I can’t let the recent events in Colorado pass without a mention. At this point, I’m just wondering if there are any more National League fields named after beer companies. Beer parks have brought good luck to the Red Sox, first in Busch Stadium in 2004 and now in Coors Field. A quick review of all the parks turns up chewing gum and orange juice, but no more beers. Mmmm… chewing gum.

To my brother in Colorado, who gamely called me tonight and offered a friendly wager (so long as he was allowed to bet on the Sox), I will point out that losing to the Sox in 2004 brought good luck to the Cardinals in 2006.

UPDATE: My beer assertion above is wrong. Owing to a bleary-eyed posting oversight last night, I completely missed the Milwaukee Brewers’ Miller Park. Astute reader Chris K points out in the comments that the stars are now aligned for a Brewers/Sox showdown. Thanks Chris!