Coding with Fountain Pens

Hallelujah, Picasa for Mac has been released. I never could get used to iPhoto and it’s foibles, always wishing there was a Picasa release for the Mac. This also allows you to standardize on one photo organizer for all platforms. Fantastic!

Tags: photos

The recent genesis post reminded me of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, and prompted me to check its Amazon listing.  I thought there must be many people who never read it, and would now be trying to sell it used.  Sure enough, there’s more than 100 copies available for $11 and up.

However I also have wondered how much that book was a marketing campaign versus an important work.  Based on some of the more rigorous reviews, I’m now pretty confident the work is going to fade into obscurity.  Or I guess it already did, until I brought it up again.

Interesting article on Wired from a few months ago that was brought to my attention by their end-of-year best-of post:  Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

It’s interesting that there are a variety of primitive bacteria and archaea that are still hanging around the planet, but the simple precursors of them seem not to be present.  Why could this be?

• They are extinct – enable to compete with more advanced forms of life, or were too delicious.
• They are here and we haven’t found them yet – The entire Archaea branch of the tree of life was only recently discovered, with it’s affinity for high-stress environments.  Perhaps the original buidling blocks are right under our nose, or came into being in hard-to-reach or unexpected places like deep in the earth’s crust.
• If you go with the spermogensis idea, the building blocks may have been synthesized on another planet, and their more complex decendants were delivered here by comet or what not.  This seems unlikely, given that these arrivals may have had trouble surviving if they evolved in a different kind of environment.
• FSM

If the family tree of life on Earth involves the genesis of simple machines in a different environment like Venus, followed by an meteoric transplant to the Earth environment, which was more conducive to more complex life but not its basic synthesis, it would seem to reduce the odds of life arising elsewhere.

Tags: life

I have noticed for many years, that when I come into contact with a new concept, word, or fact, that I have seemingly never come across before, it will reappear again one or two times in the following fortnight.  I’ve never had a name for it, but let’s call it the Serendipity Effect.

I used to also observe that when you see a television program the first few times, I would often see the same episode repeated in that small set.  I realized last week this is really a special case of the serendipity effect.

I’m writing this post because it’s happened again.  I was just reading this Slashfood post about brains and eggs a few days ago.  It was memorable, as being none too appetizing, and I was quite sure I’d never come across it before.  Then today, I’m watching Iron Chef, and what does the challenger whip out?  Brains and eggs.  (They were doing a suckling pig battle and they weren’t content with pork chops).

So what is going on with this effect?  Do you hear all kinds of things through your life that go right over your head, and then once you have some understanding you then recognize them?  Or is this just a Poisson Burst, the idea that unlikely events are unlikely to be evenly spaced, and hence tend to cluster?

Tags: serendipity ironchef

Elegant and crisp interface design is an important whether you’re designing an automotive dash or a command-line tool.  I find good design practices can be harvested from a variety of seemingly unrelated sources.  The underlying thread, is to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.  It’s been said a million times, but it’s so true, whether you’re paring down your argument list or making sure your diagrams have functional uses for the colors you introduce.

Some resources:

• Any of Edward Tufte‘s books, the first of which (The Visual Display of Quantitative Data) has the least eye candy, but the most basic truth in it.
• The Art of Unix Programming
• The Universal Principles of Design, a great coffee table book with a different design concept wonderfully illustrated on each page.

Tags: tufte, unix

ArbCamp08 was great, thanks to all the organizers, who had to scramble at the last minute to handle a huge turnout by changing the venue.  With more than 160 attendees, there was a wide variety of interesting breakout sessions and impromptu discussions.

I enjoyed the parallel programming session led by Jon Cohen – I hadn’t realized that graphics processors were up in the hundreds of cores, and that they can be utilized for scientific computing with the help of Nvidia’s Cuda compiler.  Users of this technology were first hand, including Eric Janikowski Jankowski, who agreed that this technology has revolutionized molecular simulation work.

Other sessions of note included a plan to set up a co-working space in the Arcadian Antiques location on Main Street, and a loose discussion of DIY photography.  Apparently the disposable digital cameras available at CVS are a good source of image sensors for DIY photography projects like kite photography.  Someone has even mounted one inside a volleyball to take pictures on each impact.

The event was, more than anything, a great opportunity to meet some of the interesting people in Ann Arbor, and for people in different disciplines to cross-polinate.

Tags: AnnArbor, ArbCamp08

Completed my first wordpress upgrade, which went fine.  Of course, backpus are key.  Backup processes for apps like this can be a tricky verification challenge, as users can have a long history of different versions installed as the starting point, possibly with custom modifications.

I’ve settled on the killer combination for easy backups to a NAS on OS X, and it involves installing no software.  It’s a combination of rsync, and scheduling with launchd.

The first step is getting your rsync command working.  I like it because it allows you to maintain a mirror of your files on the remote drive, and only copies over files that have changed when you run it.  Being a built-in command, it’s also a lot sleeker than installing a GUIed app of questionable speed. I mirror various key folders like this:

rsync -aSv --delete --progress ~/Pictures/ /Volumes/MACSHARE/rsync/Pictures > ~/scripts/logs/pictures.txt

There’s a number of options you can look at through the rsync man pages. I store my rsync commands in a file called backup.shIn order to Automate this process, you can set up a launchd task. Launchd replaced a lot of unix apps like cron on more recent OS X releases. You need to set up a plist file that points to your backup script and tells it how often to run, and store it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/. Here is the file I use (you can call it something like com.backup.plist):

        Label
        ryan.backup.script
        LowPriorityIO
        
	ProgramArguments
		
			/Users/ryan/Scripts/backup.sh
		
        StartCalendarInterval
        
        	Hour
		2
		Minute
		0
        

You can look at the Apple man pages for launchd to determine what other arguments you can use. This one is set to run at 2am. You can also do some cool things such as running a script when a watched directory changes.Once you have your plist file, you have to register it with launchd.  In the LaunchAgents directory at the terminal, you can type launchctl load com.backup.plist A trick I used to make sure the scheduling was working, is to point to an alternative script (test.sh) containing say hello. I set the schedule a few minutes ahead and made sure the speakers were on to hear it say “hello”.

If hundreds of billions of dollars are to be spent on fiscal stimulus, let’s have some of it spent on re-aligning national infrastructure for more energy efficient and carbon-neutral use.  The effort by Kerry and Spector to provide funding for high-speed rail is a step in the right direction.  I don’t know how much of the construction workforce that is no longer building houses is translatable into builing rail infrastructure, but it certainly seems like a nice synergy.  Making transportation energy sources more fungible would help weather future rises in oil prices, as well as reducing carbon emissions.

And let’s face it, train travel can be much more enjoyable than either plane or car travel.  I’ve ridden commuter trains in Chicago for many years and the Amtrak line from Chicago to Ann Arbor, and I have to say, I never dreaded the commute.  Getting an hour to spend reading, or working was much better than sitting in traffic for 40 minutes.  High-speed lines would open this up to longer-distance regional travel.  Train seats are much roomier than plane seats, and you eliminate the headache of security and allowing time to arrive at the airport early.  Plus, it just takes less energy.

Taking aim at a longstanding rite of passage for 16-year-olds, an influential auto safety group is calling on states to raise the age for getting a driver’s license to 17 or even 18.

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group funded by the auto insurance industry, acknowledged the idea is “a tough sell,” but noted that car crashes are the leading cause of death among teenagers.

“The bottom line is that when we look at the research, raising the driving age saves lives,” Lund said.

I don’t doubt it. But why stop there?  Think of all the lives that could be saved if the driving age was raised to 50.  Do teenagers die on the road at greater rates than other age groups, or do they just have lower mortality from other causes?  Even if they do have a higher auto-death rate, what is the cause?  Inexperience on the road perhaps?  If the driving age was raised to 18, wouldn’t that then increase the number of fatalities in the now inexperienced 18-20 age group?