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  • Debatable Space
    Debatable Space
    by Philip Palmer

    Hmmm...  it isn't working for me at the moment.  I'll let you know if it does. [EDIT] Nope, still not working.

  • Escape from Hell
    Escape from Hell
    by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

    I liked the original Inferno.  This didn't make the grade.  There's some good stuff in here, but it's marred by too much of the author's own personal politics seeping into the situation.  There were a few preachy bits, especially about scientists who, it felt, rather than disagreeing with god, had the temerity to disagree with Jerry Pournelle.  Shame on the pair of you.

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The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it. Vannevar Bush, 1945

"I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny. Julian Huxley, 1957

A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community

Friday
03Jul

Cultural Differences

There's an interesting post on Transterrestrial Musings, a rare but not unheralded event, about the difference between American and European eating habits. They also link to this piece on Althouse about French food, which is a pile of complete bollocks, wrapped in a turb and served with grilled bullshit.

I've lived in France, I've worked in Paris. Yes you can indeed have bad, over priced food. You can have bad over priced food in any city in the world. Go into a bar off Times Sqaure and order a patty melt if you don't believe me. Bad Mexican food in Paris? See many mexican's around there? Didn't think so. Newsflash. You can have bad Mexican food in Seattle.

Anyway, I was more interested in some of the things that Rand Simberg didn't like. Namely, the feeling of being held hostage to the wait staff.

The European way, I’m a hostage to the wait staff (or, “the state”) until they deign to provide me with the bill (as an aside, I’ve never understood why it’s called a “check”).

I know which one I like. And it seems like a microcosm of the difference between the US and Europe.

Firstly I find the bill arriving while people are still eating, or we're pontificating if there's a Single Malt on the menu worth my attention, to be unspakably rude.  It suggests that you are not a guest in a customer facing establishment but a cash deposit system that eats.

Second, I get really annoyed with waiters in the US who yank plates out from under your nose the second you lay your forks down for a few minutes.  I've actually had to point out that I was STILL BLOODY EATING!

Finally, the US idea that you get the bill, you hand over the credit card and then leave it on the table is THE DUMBEST SINGLE FRAKKING IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF DUMB IDEAS.

At least check the fecking singniture, please!  Just for me. 

Who knows - it might make people think twice about fraud.

Tuesday
30Jun

On the slippery socialist slopes...

Debate over government funded police heats up

Nice piece here on the slide the US is having into Socialism (Tony Benn probably turns incandescent with rage every time he hears that).

That's how I like my satire, just credible enough to have you wondering where the gag is.

Monday
29Jun

Future Shock - The Rate of Change and Step Functions

The BBC are carrying this item on a 13 year old kid who swapped his iPod for a Walkman, which is apparently 30 years old this week.

There are some great quotes, one of my favourites being this one:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

But it did get me thinking about the rate of change of technology again.  There's something of a feeling that the rate of change of technology has slowed down in recent years.  However, I'm of the opinion that that's a selection effect caused by sitting in the middle of the change and of what the change is.

Some things do tend to plateau: Cars, for example.  While in 1949 there was nothing portable like the Walkman or iPod, we did have cars and a person from 1949 wouldn't have too many problems with a modern car - push button ignition might fox them, but it gets me too sometimes.  But generally speaking while performance, reliability, efficiency and comfort are all better, the basic design of the vehicle, the controls and instrumentation remain pretty much the same.

However, the technology in the Walkman, the cassette tape lasted just a few short decades before being replaced as the convienient way of storing music by the CD which, itself, is being replaced.

There's an interesting question here: is there an advance beyond the MP3?  Or is codec based music the limit?  MP3 might change as the preferred format but from now on the core technology of a player for files will remain unchanged for decades or centuries?  

Like the CD, the compact camera formats came and went in a few tens of years, muscled out by the abrupt emergence of digital cameras.  

The phone is also an interesting case in point.  Certainly the technology is backwards compatable.  A kid today would find the dial weird but have no trouble working it.  You might have to explain the buttons to a phone user from the past but the principle of pressing buttons to "dial" a number is graspable.  My 80ish year old mother has no trouble with it.

But what if that changes.  We could certainly move away from buttons to more linguistic and IM based IP interfaces.  Jason Calacanis has called Twitter the "dial tone of the 21st century" because it is already becoming a communication standard.  Now, I'm not making any wild claims about Twitter but there is certainly going to be another seismic shift in communications paradigms in the next 10 years and that might be hard for oldies like us to deal with.

Our neighbours came over for dinner on Saturday.  He was saying his teenage daughter sent 5000 text messages last month...  I thought I was doing well with 500...

Anyway, I hope I can keep up.  And, in case I can't, I've already got dibs on my grandmothers wind up gramaphone with a complete collection of 78s...

Monday
29Jun

Evolving Space Systems

A post on Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings had Paul and I boggling today. There were two interesting money quotes:

But the main thing is that I know exactly what I’d do if I became suddenly wealthy. I’d do the same thing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did, but I’d do it right, because I already know what I’m doing, and wouldn’t have to hire other people to figure it out.

And later in the comments:

My plan would be to build suborbital vehicles and gradually evolve them to become orbital vehicles.

The trouble is that, unless we're missing something critical here, there really isn't an evolutionary path from sub-orbital to orbital.  It's one of those annoying problems that just doesn't scale the way that you want it to.  At least not without the sorts of compromise that end up making you wonder why you bothered with the evolutionary path and didn't just build a new vehicle of a different type.

But the problems don't scale well.  Sub-orbital altitudes might be in space, but you're really not there, anymore than, and, my appologies to Heinlein, you're halfway to anywhere in orbit.

Physics still applies.  Low Earth Orbit is still at the bottom of a gravity well that's quite steep.

I strongly hope we do find better and cheaper ways to get into space.  But people need to ditch the hubris.

Saturday
20Jun

Bleeding Edge of Home Media

There was a link to this article from Engaget on the legitimate uses for Blu-Ray copying.  The thing is, this kind of thing really annoys me.

I have a media center PC.  I'm generally happy with it, but can't wait to get it onto Windows 7 asap.  It's not ideal but as a media viewer, DVD and Blu-Ray player, Hulu and Netflix device it's pretty damn good.  What I also like is, that like with my CDs, I can store my DVD collection on my home server and not have to worry about fiddling around with cases and, as happened to my copy of the Italian Job (the original) not have it go walk about.

I really want to do the same with my small Blu-Ray collection.  But I can't, and that annoys me.  In theory I ought to be able to, but for some reason the Blu-Ray ripping software I have doesn't seem up to the task.  Nevertheless, one of these days I want to have a house with a full media room and access to the stuff I want, when I want it.

I don't actually believe that it's too unreasonable to want that for content I've already paid for!