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From the Star Chamber archives, here is a Valentine’s Day story I wrote two years ago. The premise is that there is not a man in the world who loves Valentine’s day.

I recently watched (delayed by the magic of TiVo) a two-hour special on NOVA called the Battle of the X-Planes. The show concerned the recent defense industry showdown for who is going to build the next (and probably last) manned jet fighter for the United States, the so-called Joint Strike Fighter. The stakes were extraordinary: a winner-takes-all $200 billion contract. Since there isn’t much money available for new planes these days, the competition boils down to a mountain of cash for the winner and a bullet for the loser.

I used to work in the aerospace business (here’s a picture of the plane I worked on at NASA), and I can tell you that the NOVA cameras really did get behind the scenes of what goes on at an aircraft company. I work in the software business now, and the difference between the two environments is stark. Partially because of security clearances, you see the same kind of person again and again in the airplane business: a white man (U.S. citizen, naturally), enthusiastic, patriotic, and geeky in a clean-cut, midwestern sort of way. Very little irony. The software industry is a kaleidoscopic cross-cultural riot by comparison. NOVA managed to capture the earnestness and the intensity airplane builders pour into their work. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in top-secret defense industry cabals behind bomb-proof electronically sealed doors, this show is as close as you may get (Note: it’s not actually very interesting). I’ve been there, and now so has public television. I’m impressed with NOVA, but also with the U.S. government and Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. It was a nostalgic treat for me but also a refreshing beam of sunlight deep into normally dark corners of the government.

NOVA has put together a nice website on the the special. For instance, read about Lesson #1 learned by the NOVA film crew at Edwards: Never take snapshots of your C-5 transport plane without official permission, even if your pilot gives the thumbs up.

If you want to learn more about the Joint Strike Fighter, James Fallows has written a good piece about it in the Atlantic: Uncle Sam Buys an Airplane. In it, Fallows describes a conversation with the Boeing team after their loss.

I mentioned a nightmare scenario for Lockheed Martin: that Boeing, while playing the good loser, would get its revenge by successfully promoting unmanned vehicles as the real way to make defense affordable. The Boeing men all laughed when I said this. Of course that is what they have in mind.

That’s why JSF is going to be the last manned jet fighter the U.S. will ever buy. We’d be stupid to by another one now that the robots have finally earned their wings.

The Economist has a good opinion piece about the space shuttle this week (The Magnificent Seven) which says, more or less, after we mourn the astronauts, we do them no disrespect by questioning the program in which they were employed. Here is one line pulled from the article.

“The American space programme must go on,” said George Bush.

Programme? I seriously doubt it. George W. Bush must certainly have said “The American space program must go on.” Would the Economist have Bush analysing the colours of our national flag? Finding space shuttle tyres amid the debris? Throwing terrorists into gaol? It’s an interesting point to ponder. After all, how would we quote an illiterate speaker? Then again, an illiterate is not likely to take offense at your rendering of his words, whereas I would be annoyed to have those extra letters put in my mouth.

How many presidents of Libya are there, what with Qaddafi, Khaddafy, and all the others? Saddam Hussein protects himself by moving randomly among various palaces. Qaddafi does a similar trick by moving randomly among various transliterations.

I often wonder how far to carry translation. If I am in France, it’s a reasonable thing to turn cars into voitures. But in England should I refer to lorries instead of trucks? And if I do, am I being helpful or pretentious? Douglas Hofstadter has written a fascinating book on translation called Le Ton beau de Marot in which he discusses exactly this point, having come across a copy of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye that was “translated” from American spelling to British spelling. Apparently reading about Holden Caulfield studying maths was too much for Hofstadter.

Here’s an article from the Guardian by Ben Hammersley about the ever-growing Wikipedia: Guardian Unlimited | Common knowledge. The Wikipedia, you will recall, is an experiment from the wild edges of the informational commons. Change any page you want. Add any section you want. I fixed a typo on the Guy Fawkes page. It was very satisfying. The Wikipedia has been such a hit, that they’ve launched a Wiktionary to go with it. What next? I think a WikiBible (too late!) or some other such bric-a-brac sacred text would be excellent. There is no distinction between the sacred and the profane in the land of Wiki.

Incidentally, have you ever wondered where the phrase “grow like Topsy” comes from? It derives from the character Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Merriam-Webster site has a nice description as part of its Word for the Wise site. To grow like Topsy is to grow “wild, with neither plan, structure, nor direction.”

Incidentally, have you ever wondered if incidental remarks like the preceding ones are going to vanish into the Googlesphere? Behind the guise of clever instruction, all I did was report the results of a Google search on an unfamiliar phrase. You could have done the same thing. Why did I bother? Does a be-googled, wiki-fied world stifle conversation or promote it? Does the net bring us closer together or send us farther apart? I’m fairly certain it doesn’t stop me from rambling.

I don’t know what your weather was like today, but it was overcast and bleak here. No shadows were cast by man or beast. If the marmot’s prognostications are to be believed, winter is thereby curtailed. Whether or not the predictions are correct, I have a peculiar fondness for Groundhog Day. It is an occasion worth marking: the beginning of the end of winter. We are halfway through now, the days are lengthening quickly, and every step from now on brings us out of the cellar rather than taking us deeper into it.

Groundhog Day is also when you are reminded (as we did five years ago on this very site) to remove, destroy, or vandalize any remaining Christmas decorations that still limply and lamely decorate your neighborhood. Remember: it’s always appropriate, but it’s only illegal if you get caught.

Here’s a good example of what SOAP-based web services and an open-minded vendor site can bring about. Amazon encourages people to use web services to build customized interfaces to its book offerings. Here is the work of someone at Kokogiak Media who decided to put all of Amazon into a single page:
Amazon Light. The result is reasonably successful, and it bodes well for the world of interface design. Consider: if you think you can build a better user interface than the folks at Amazon, you can just go try it. And not with fake, cheesy data, but with the real thing. There’s a not unreasonable chance that some clever college student will do a better job than the entire UI design staff at Amazon. That’s good for everybody.

Footnote: It’s a little tricky to figure about who’s behind Kokogiak Media, but it turns out “they” are Alan Taylor, who in addition to being an industrious web tinkerer, is in fact an Amazon employee. Makes sense, I guess. Check out the cool space photos on his nowords.com site.

I was thinking about this Lorem Ipsum text the other day (see my post here, or a few entries down the page) and it occurred to me that there was something oddly genetic about the whole thing. Here is a message that has lost its intrinsic meaning, but nevertheless continues to get handed down from typesetter to typesetter like junk DNA. Geneticists have tools to measure these things, and they can often deduce how long two species have been separated by the genomic “distance” between them.

Why not, I thought, use the tools of a geneticist on this homely passage? If you want to compare two passages, be they poetry or protein, the tool of the trade is the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. It finds the best sequence alignment between the two and returns a score. Starting with the two texts (CICERO for the original and IPSUM for the latter day corruption) we perform a little algorithmic MATLAB mojo and arrive at the following alignment.

CICERO: Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum q
                                         ::::::::::  
IPSUM:  --------------------------------Lorem ipsum--


CICERO: uia dolor sit amet, consectetu-r, adipisci-- 
           ::::::::::::::::::::::::::: : :::::::::  :
IPSUM:  --- dolor sit amet, consectetuer- adipiscing 


CICERO: velit, sed quia- non numquam- ei----u-s modi 
         ::::::::::  :: :::  :::   : : :    : : ::: :
IPSUM:  -elit, sed -diam no--num---my nibh euis-mod- 


CICERO: tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam a
        :       :::::::::::::: ::: ::::::::::::::: ::
IPSUM:  t-------incidunt ut la-ore-et dolore magna- a


CICERO: liquam quaerat volupt-atem
        :::::::   ::::::::: : ::  
IPSUM:  liquam ---erat volu-tpat--

That gives us a total of 44 letter mutations (gaps and changes) out of a 173 letter message. If we assume a relatively speedy mutation drift rate of 10^-8 per letter per generation, and we further assume that a typesetter generation is 20 years, we can work out that Cicero’s original oration occurred 508 million years ago, which places it neatly at the end of the extraordinarily fertile Cambrian period. I understand that Cicero was huge with the trilobite crowd.

The “semantic web” is supposed to be the next big thing for Tim Berners-Lee’s little invention, but I think geospatial links will be a hit much sooner. “Geospatial link” is a fancy name for hanging URLs in mid-air. If your web browser knows where it is (in the purely spatial sense of latitude and longitude), it will be able to ask if any web documents have been posted at those coordinates. As the author of a web page, rather than putting it somewhere in cyberspace, say http://www.starchamber.com, you can elect to put it somewhere in real space. Similarly, you can look for documents in space near your real (or imagined) physical location. Imagine spying a virtual sign outside a restaurant emblazoned with the warning: “Lice-ridden wait staff. Chef has dripping carbuncle on nose.”

Steven Johnson has written an interesting piece on this topic for Discover called Pssst! This Note’s for You. The blog world is going nutty over physical coordinates, too. Go to geourl.org to find the coordinates of thousands of blogs. Who cares? It doesn’t seem to have any practical value yet, but then again it does seem to address an important psychological need. Where are you? It’s nice to know.

Golan Levin, like Martin Wattenberg, is an artist who can write code. This convergence is rare enough to make it a delightful treat to browse through his work. In contrast to various other “new” art forms enabled by computers, such as hypertext fiction or virtual 3-d worlds, this interactive graphical work seems to have real staying power, drawing me back to it again and again. Here is Levin’s old site at the MIT Media Lab. Flong is his current address, apparently. (Can anybody tell me what Flong means?)

Some of these pieces are absolutely mesmerizing. I particularly like Yellowtail, Newyear, and The Secret Lives of Numbers. Yellowtail is a nifty little kinetic sketch piece, similar to (though cleaner than) Scott Snibbe’s venerable Motion Sketch. Newyear lets you draw your own snowflakes, and The Secret Lives of Numbers is a monumental opus that reflects the popularity (as measured by web hits) of every number between 1 and 100,000. The dynamic scaling and zooming of the interface is beautiful to behold. We read in the introduction to “Numbers”

…certain numbers, such as 212, 486, 911, 1040, 1492, 1776, 68040, or 90210, occur more frequently than their neighbors because they are used to denominate the phone numbers, tax forms, computer chips, famous dates, or television programs that figure prominently in our culture. Regular periodicities in the data, located at multiples and powers of ten, mirror our cognitive preference for round numbers in our biologically-driven base-10 numbering system. Certain numbers, such as 12345 or 8888, appear to be more popular simply because they are easier to remember.

Related notes: 2 Jul 2002, 9 Dec 2000, 30 Jun 2000.

Wanna hook up later on this weekend for a war? We’ll have some drinks, eliminate some weapons of mass destruction, and dance all night. C’mon! It’ll be fun! England will be there for sure and there’s bound to be a few others. See for yourself. Evite courtesy of DefectiveYeti.com.