Merry Christmas

I will probably only be posting sporadically until January. There is just too much eggnog to consume in too little time to be able to guarantee that I will be able to devote any time to this project. And I know where my priorities lie...

Have a great holiday! Drive safely.

Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006

On kottke.org [kottke.org], I saw a link to The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006 [foreignpolicy.com]. It is a pretty interesting read. Here is an excerpt:

In 2006, bird flu didn’t become the killer pandemic everyone feared... But the alarm... led to an unexpected—and unfortunate—outcome: A rash of abnormal behavior, hallucinations, and even deaths attributed to Tamiflu, the medicine marketed as a key drug capable of fighting the disease. In November, the Canadian health ministry issued a warning on Tamiflu after 10 Canadians taking the drug had died suspiciously.

I actually hadn't heard about most of those stories. I guess I have been too self-involved lately. Some of those are crazy.

Google and Obscure Bands

Over the weekend, I discovered just how many of my friends were into really obscure bands. I guess that everyone in the group just has very strange musical tastes. I doubt that most people have ever heard of the bands that I listen to, and I didn't recognize a lot of the bands that my friends were into.

One of the band names that came up was an 80's group called The The [wikipedia.org]. And it occurred to me that in this day and age, you just wouldn't come up with a band name like The The. The primary motivating factor why you wouldn't is because no one could ever find your website. Googling for anything where a word like "the", "of", etc. is an integral component won't get you anywhere. And if it weren't for Wikipedia, it would have been impossible to have found any useful information about the band at all.

I'm not sure why it is that my musical tastes include so many obscure bands these days, but I could make some guesses. Part of the issue is that I hate, hate, hate listening to FM radio channels nowadays. There are too many commercials, and I kept getting sick of hearing the same songs over and over. I rarely, if ever, listen to FM radio any more. Part of the reason, though, is that it is so easy to find alternatives to radio right now. In the age of iPods, it is very easy to have a portable device that will give you variety that is far better than any radio station. Back when you had to make mix tapes or burn CDs to listen to, I got sick of what I had recorded so often that radio had the better variety. But that has changed in a hurry.

Another issue is that the barriers to finding obscure music are lower than they have ever been. Music stores and record companies no longer hold the keys to the vault. 10 years ago, if you couldn't hear it on the radio, or couldn't borrow the CD from a friend, it was prohibitively difficult to discover new obscure bands. Now, you can listen to samples of all kinds of weird crap and easily buy whatever you want. If you want to get into a band like Caninus [pitbullgrindcore.com], whose lead vocals are performed by a dog, or Hatebeak [reptilianrecords.com], whose lead vocals are performed by a parrot, there are almost no barriers.

So, it's gotten to the point where my tastes have diverged so far from what is played on the radio that I just can't stand listening to it these days.

Asimo Robot Comments

Yesterday, I enumerated some of the issues that I thought had to be overcome in the process of developing a useful humaniod-type robot. But that was, by no means, a comprehensive list. The post was inspired by a link to a video showing the Honda Asimo robot crashing during a demonstration [autoblog.com].

I've probably commented about this before, but the motion of the robot really isn't that human-like. Take a look at the video again. Look at the movement of the arms and legs. The swinging of the arms and legs isn't the fluid motion that you normally see when a human walks. Instead, the swinging is very "robotic". The fluid-like motion of humans is a result of dynamics that minimize energy use. In contrast, swinging legs and arms stiffly consumes a lot more power. So, the robot can not be expected to be anywhere near as effecient as a human of comparable size.

When a human walks in a straight line, the torso pretty much moves in a straight line. But if you watch the video closely, the robot does a lot of leaning, side to side, as it transfers weight between it's legs. Exaggerated leaning during walking also consumes a lot more power, because it does not take advantage of dynamics. Instead, the large mass of the torso must be accelerated right and left to cause forward motion.

Finally, look at the knee joint. When a human walks foward, the leg supporting the weight of the body is almost completely straight -- the thigh and lower leg lie almost in a straight line. But if you watch the robot, you will see that the knee is always bent at an angle. So, for the leg to support the weight of the rest of the robot, it has to consume a lot more power (if you don't believe me, try to walk around without ever straightening out your legs).

Anyway, it's not that I don't think that the robot is a great piece of engineering -- it is and I do. My point is that we have a long way to go before humanoid robots will be anything other than research vehicles or exhibition pieces.

Honda Asimo Faceplant

On things magazine [thingsmagazine.net], I saw a link to a video showing the Honda Asimo robot crashing during a demonstration [autoblog.com]. It's one of those typical demonstrations, where the robot is made to walk around and then walk up a flight of stairs. But something goes wrong, and the robot falls down the stairs.

There's this push for robots that are closer and closer to biological organisms. But I wonder how close we'll ever actually get. It sounds very romantic to try to develop a robot that can walk or run as well as a human, or one that has muscles that are as powerful and efficient as organic muscle. But I think that people think that they'll be able to take the good without the bad.

The thing about humans is that they screw up all of the time. Sure, they can walk efficiently, run relatively quickly, and are flexible enough to do a lot of other complex movements (play soccer, dance, etc). But they also fall down. They break their limbs. They twist their ankles. They trip (due to objects, their own feet, or in my case, even when there isn't anything there).

One of the things that are so attractive about wheels is that they are more robust, and usually don't have these sorts of issues. But as we start seeing more and more legged or humanoid-type robots, we're eventually going to have to figure out what the contingency plans are. Can you imagine having a household robot that trips and falls as much as I do (at least once a week, and unfortunately, usually a lot more)? They're not going to heal like we do. It's going to be a huge pain in the ass to get it serviced (the average person is going to be expected to figure out how to ship a 200lb robot?). Since robots typically aren't soft, they will probably cause more damage to other objects in the process. And they won't have the reflexes to control or break their fall as we do (at least, they probably won't in the appreciable future).

It's a nice idea (especially for fiction writers), but I think it's going to be a long time before these types of robots are commonly in use. More on this tomorrow...

Weblogging and Work

Alison recently wrote about [bluishorange.com] being weirded out that her coworkers have discovered her weblog and may be reading about everything she has done or talked about in the last few years. Having maintained a weblog almost as long as she has (I started in 2000), I knew exactly how she felt.

Earlier this year, I started searching for a job, and felt very strange when I showed up for interviews, and it seemed like many people knew all about me. They would reference things that I had written on this weblog, and the realization that they had read it was startling. Let me tell you, that is very disconcerting.

Of course, I always knew that interviewers finding this would be a possibility. And over the past few years, that has always been in the back of my mind. But I don't know if I was really prepared for that reality. During an interview, I should have been concentrating appearing to be professional, and sounding like I knew what I was talking about, etc. But in reality, I was trying to remember which particularly embarassing drinking incidents I posted to my weblog, and what the probability was that they had read them.

I'm pretty sure that not all of my coworkers know about this (and thankfully, most would probably be bored out of their minds if they read this anyway). But every once in a while, they ask me a question about something, and I know that I have posted an explanation of the answer somewhere on my website, and I have to decide whether I really want more people to know about my website and my weblog or not.

Anyway, I'm just saying that I know exactly how she feels.

Heroes

A number of my friends have recently told me that they enjoy watching the show Heroes [nbc.com]. Apparently, it was created by the same people who made the show Crossing Jordan [nbc.com], which I used to watch for a little while.

Anyway, I decided to give it a shot recently, but I couldn't find a listing for the show in my PVR's schedule listing. That's when I figured out that the show was on hiatus until January. But on the show's website, they have all of the previous episodes available to watch.

Thank goodness that at least some of the media giants "get it", and aren't completely consumed with the crusade against digital media distribution. At least that company realizes that if they allow their shows to be seen on their website, they might get more viewers for their TV broadcasts.

The versions of the episodes on their website are actually alright. They are really low resolution. And unlike watching on a TV, there is no closed captioning (I actually think that this is a huge drawback). Plus, most people don't have a computer hooked up to their TV, so it's kind of annoying to watch them.

On the other hand, though, they download quickly and are easy to watch (you just need Flash [adobe.com]). In the episodes that I have watched so far, each interruption only contained one normal length commercial. So, although I couldn't skip over the commercials like I could have with my PVR, they weren't really that annoying. Actually, if shows only had that few commercials, I bet that the drive for Tivos and time-shifting wouldn't have gone so quickly [adage.com].

Anyway, I'm getting into it. The story lines seem pretty interesting so far, and it doesn't seem like it is just another rehash of a TV show that had aired before. Plus, the sets look pretty interesting. That is one quality that attracted me to the show Lost [abc.go.com].

Nerds Playing Taboo

Yesterday, I mentioned that I had gone to a holiday party over the weekend. After a suitable number of people had been hypnotized, everyone ended up involved in a massive game of the boardgame Taboo [amazon.com]. In the game, a person takes a card with a password on it. They try to get their teammates to guess what the password is, without saying any of the other words listed on the card. For instance, if the password is "angle", the other words that might be listed on the card (which you're not allowed to say) might be "acute", "obtuse", etc. And you're not allowed to use hand gestures.

Anyway, the game revealed exactly how ridiculously overeducated the entire group was. But that made for some really hilarious moments. For instance, one person had to get their teammates to say the password "thermometer". So, the person with the card said, "This measures average kinetic energy." And his team got it right on the second guess.

Another person had to get their team to say the password "bin". That person gave their team the clue "A subdirectory where you keep your executables." And his team got it right on the first guess (the clue was a reference to /usr/bin in Linux or Unix).

I almost pissed my pants. My friends are so nerdy.

I'm Feeling Very Sleepy...

I went to a holiday party this weekend. One of the people I saw was a person that I hadn't seen in a long time, and he told me that he was learning how to hypnotize people. But he just started to learn, so he hadn't had a chance to hypnotize anyone yet. When I heard that, I volunteered, because I make a total ass out of myself all of the time, even when I'm not under hypnosis. So, why would I care if someone made me cluck like a chicken or something?

Plus, having never had someone try to hypnotize me before, I was curious about the whole process, and whether I could even be hypnotized. And, of course, I wondered whether the entire hypnosis thing was complete bullshit. Before going under, I gave him permission to make me cluck like a chicken, or anything else like that, because although I didn't want to do anything embarassing, I wouldn't really mind it afterward.

The whole experience was very strange. I was definitely hypnotized, but it felt as though I could have snapped out of it at any time if I wanted to (although I didn't try, so I could have been wrong). The part that was the most strange was hearing a suggestion such as, "Your arm will move up", and then feeling as though someone else was moving my arm upward.

Reactions (such as my arm moving) didn't seem to work all of the time. And the amount of reaction that occurred varied a lot. For instance, a suggestion was given that was supposed to cause my finger to jerk upward. But sometimes, my finger only barely twitched. Sometimes, it didn't move at all. And sometimes, it did jerk upward.

I feel like I remember everything that happened. But I don't think that I really felt the passage of time correctly. I thought that I was only under for 10 minutes or so, but the other people at the party said that I must have been under for at least an hour.

When he got to the point where he tried to get my to cluck like a chicken, I felt myself start to laugh. And he never actually could get me to do it. That's the part that really makes me feel like I could have gotten out of the whole thing at any time, if I had wanted to. I have always heard that a hypnotizer can't get you to do anything you don't want to do. And now I feel like I really know what that means, because the suggestions seemed easy to fight.

At any rate, I feel like I have a much better understanding of what hypnosis is, and how it works, although I wouldn't be surprised if the experience would have been totally different by a more experienced hypnotizer.

RIP Monitor

So, my 20" computer monitor just died. I never thought that I'd actually have an emotional attachment to a monitor, but recently, I was reminded a bunch of things that this monitor went through.

I bought it toward the beginning of 1996, for a sum that would seem outrageous for a monitor today. 17" monitors were just becoming the norm, and this 20" (which is probably smaller than the average monitor today) looked like a behemoth. But I was in college at the time, and wanted a monitor that could double as a TV (because we didn't have room for both). And I bought it to go with my brand-spanking-new 120mhz Pentium.

One of my friends reminded me that the first really hilarious thing that happened was that when it arrived at my dorm, I discovered that I couldn't even get the box into my dorm room, because it was wider than the door. Braveheart [imdb.com] had just come out in the rental stores, and we crammed about 20 people into our dorm room to watch it on my new "TV".

I had my sound card hooked into my stereo so that the sound would be great (and be loud as hell). And I used to have a shotgun blast set as my new mail sound (remember Eudora anyone?). Normally, I would shut down my offline mail reader when we would watch TV or movies, but occasionally, I would forget and that sound would go off right at the most dramatic scene of a movie (usually when one of the main characters had a gun in their hand).

Later that same year, one of my friends went out to buy an actual TV for his dorm room, and was going to buy a 19" one, until he realized that it was going to be smaller than my monitor... at which point, he took it back and bought a bigger one.

But I got over 10 years of use out of it, which is far beyond what I could have expected. The monitor outlasted 4 different desktop computers (a 120mhz Pentium, a 300mhz Pentium-II, a 600mhz Athlon, and a 1.2Ghz Athlon). The year after I bought the monitor was the last year that the Cleveland Indians seriously had a shot at winning the World Series. And at the time, we were playing Descent [wikipedia.org], Mechwarrior II [wikipedia.org], and Command and Conquer [wikipedia.org]. In 1996, the first version of Microsoft Visual Studio [wikipedia.org] hadn't come out yet, and we all were still running Windows 95 (but beta-testing NT4). I guess you're a computer geek when this is how you measure time...

But I'm really going to miss that monitor. All 70 lbs of it.

Car Design Pet Peeves - Remotes

I guess is the week where I just rant about car design...

Over the past couple of years, I have rented and borrowed a couple of newer cars (albeit almost all from Japanese manufacturers). And one of the things that really annoys me is how when you hit the unlock button on the key fob, it only unlocks the driver's door. Ok, why?

Why wouldn't you design it such that when you hit the unlock button, it unlocks all of the doors? That means that a large percentage of the time, you have to hit the unlock button twice so that your passengers can get in. I just don't understand why something would be intentionally designed in that manner.

I'm trying to imagine a scenario in which only unlocking the driver's door would be desirable. And I really can't think of anything reasonable. I mean, are people worried that they'll be walking to their car, and they'll want to get in, but not let some attacker in from the passenger side of the car? That doesn't really make any sense, because if you're getting attacked, they'll either be on your side of the car (unless they're stupid), or they will just point a gun at you and tell you to unlock all of the doors.

What's next? Are they going to start programming the door unlock button on the inside of the driver's door to only unlock that one door unless it's pushed twice?

Car Trunks

One of the things that really annoys me about cars is how anything put into the trunk of your car ends up flying all over the place when you drive.

For instance, when you buy groceries, it's hard to put them into your trunk (unless you buy a lot of groceries), and be able to get home without lots of things coming out of the bags. It's annoying.

I know that a lot of new cars have hooks that you can hang bags from, or netting that you can use to hold stuff. And I know there are cars like the Vibe, which are made for tie downs to be used in the trunk. But not all cars have those, and I would say that more new cars don't have things like that than do. Plus, there are a lot of cars where netting isn't even an aftermarket option. The trunks are just completely featureless.

Now that I have a long commute in my car, I have been trying to put together a box of stuff in my trunk that I might need in the winter. You know, things like a small, collapsable shovel and kitty litter. But I don't want the box to slide all over the place every time I turn. Trunk netting is an aftermarket option for my car, but I think that the stuff I have would be too heavy to have in the netting 24/7. So, I guess that I'm going to put a bunch of empty boxes into my trunk so that nothing can move.

Casino Royale

I got to see Casino Royale [imdb.com] this weekend. The short story was that I enjoyed seeing the movie, and I'm glad that I got to see it on the big screen.

The action scenes were amazing. Especially the opening sequence where the new James Bond is introduced. That whole sequence was amazing, and immediately had me riveted. This movie had it all -- car chases, fight scenes, and then crazy stunt after stunt. Those made the movie so much fun to watch.

The new James Bond is a great fit. I don't remember seeing Daniel Craig in any other movie before, so I had no expectations. Unfortunately, the main female lead (played by Eva Green) had this really annoying fake accent. And not only was it really obvious that it was fake, but because she talks really fast, it was also sometimes really difficult to understand. There were several times during the movie when I wished that I could have gone back and listened to the dialogue again, because I didn't understand it the first time. I guess that's one of the many drawbacks to seeing the movie in the theaters.

The Spiderman series is another group of movies where the female lead is really weak. And they're stuck with her. Fortunately for the Bond series, we know that this actress won't be in the next one.

There were little bits and pieces here and there that I didn't like, but I would really be nit-picking if I were to bring those up. I guess the only part that I really didn't like was the long drawn out love story in the middle of the movie. They took a great, fast-paced movie and brought it to a screetching halt. And it's not that I'm opposed to love stories, but that part of the movie was way too slow, and it took way too long to move to the next part of the plotline. OK. WE GET IT. HE'S IN LOVE WITH THE FEMALE LEAD. Like we didn't know that was going to happen anyway...

Other than that, the plot was pretty good. There was a lot of the plot that everyone could see coming. But then there were some odd twists that I never would have been able to predict. Thoroughly enjoyable.