Monday, October 10, 2011 by Dick.

Have a little whine with your cheese and crackers? I have mine right here:

Rufus is fond of believing he knows everything and that anything anyone else says is wrong. Period. Paragraph.

That’s healthy.

Except when the anyone else is, well, me.

Rufus particularly likes to dispute pronouncements on technology, on God, and on history. He insists, for example, that there’s no advantage to increasing the sensor size in a digital camera. Doesn’t matter that I’m a pretty knowledgeable daylight photographer. Doesn’t matter that most other digital camera experts agree with me. Doesn’t matter that large format film cameras have already won the “size” battle. Rufus knows better.

The most recent example comes from the very large (about 800 million population and growing) world of very small issues (Facebook). Our mutual friend Brock posted a note about why a cop should take a gun to a knife fight; I added an anecdote about the army adopting the .45 Colt after Philippine-American War. Brockley Mann is the chief of the South Puffin Police Department.

The “suspect’s momentum may continue forward with enough force for the edged weapon to end up injuring the officer” even after the suspect has been shot, Brock posted.

I recalled that the reason the army switched from a .38 to the Model 1911 Colt was to stop the Filipino Moros running full tilt (a “bolo rush”) with their 18″ machete-like swords at the officers who had only side-arms. Even a dead running man can decapitate a soldier on sheer momentum. Experiments showed the .45 caliber punch could almost stop that rush. Almost.

Unfortunately, the M1911 design wasn’t finished and it never saw service in the Philippines.

Rufus responded that he “thought the ’service .45′ was ALWAYS a .45 starting with the original Colt revolver. But you say the Army had a dalliance, for a time, with a little .38. How long did that last? (I could Google it, but YOU brought it up…)”

Let’s keep that thought. Rufus could Google it, but I brought it up…

Another poster commented, “I can’t imagine the Army using .38s. I have a .38 and it is really small.”

I might note that it’s not the size. OK, it’s the size.

Thanks to Liza Arden who spent the 30 seconds on Google that Rufus had no time to do, there is plenty of firearms history available:

• .45 Colt on Wikipedia
• The Legend of the Colt and the Moros
• Living with the 1911

I cited these examples not (just) to pick on Rufus. OK, maybe to pick on Rufus, but also to talk about how so few people are willing to reach out to the sources we have to store our history even when it is crucial.

You might have a problem reconciling your checking account and need to look for calculation tools. You might need to know when Louisville Slugger first produced a bat with a knob on it (Babe Ruth ordered the first one in 1919). You might have a leaking PVC sink drain and need to look for repair techniques.

I mostly enjoy researching, but I don’t enjoy doing your research. Or Rufus’.

Google Is Your Friend.

It was not always thus. I grew up before the Internet so I had to use the books in the house, the books in friend’s houses, the books in the library. Remember e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-as? Me, too. I still have a Marks’ Handbook that I rarely use and a Machinery’s Handbook that I use all the time. Mine is the 18th Edition, printed in 1968, because tap drill hole sizes haven’t changed much in the intervening years. I don’t have the CD version but I do look up work gear temperatures online more often than in the Handbook. And I’m more likely to find the mechanical engineering facts, figures, standards, and practices of the Marks’ online. On the other hand, my favorite reference book here is the Oxford English Dictionary my folks gave me more than 30 years ago.

See, it doesn’t matter if you use an Internet search engine or the local library to find your answer. It just matters that you find the answer.

Of course, where ever one reads the data, there remains the small problem of remembering what you read.

(I found that 2010 essay by Googling.)

Posted in Writing, Sociology, Geekery, Random Access | 3 Comments »

Monday, August 1, 2011 by Dick.

Dick Tracy, eat your heart out!

Chester Gould created the hard-hitting, fast-shooting police detective who used forensic science, high tech gimmicks, and his wits to track down the bad guys Sunday after Sunday. There have been many (not terribly successful) incarnations of Tracy’s famous two-way wrist radio and his later two-way wrist TV.

Cell phones, particularly the push-to-talk varieties, may have outshone that clunky cartoon version but Skype is the real Amen, boys, hitch up two-way wrist TV.

Amsterdam has about 20 times
the average Internet speed of North Puffin.
Hold that thought.

I really didn’t want to Skype. See, I didn’t much want to put on clothes just to answer the phone. I never understood why women in my mother’s generation checked their hair in the hall mirror before picking up the receiver.

The patio stone deliberately has no built in web cam, so I bought a video cam when I needed to pack up the seven tons of astro gear Rufus left in my little house in South Puffin. I got a deal, see, on a pair of [famous brand] clip on bugs that sit atop my monitor. The two of them, in OEM packaging cost a little less than one good one from anyone else. And the quality wasn’t too too bad once I figured out how to turn the darned things on.

No, I don’t use them both at once for 3-D. I have one each in North and South Puffin.

The more we Skype, the more I’m liking this Skyping thing. I’ve been hanging out a bit.

Skype is addictive. On Saturday, I watched Liza Arden eat a Bagel-Shaped-Object as we puttered and hung out and Skyped the morning away.

Skype is addictive. The mobile app works on both Android and iPhones. Unfortunately, the fine print shows it restricts U.S. users to Wi-Fi only calls. Naturally, a developer hacked the app within days of its release to work over 3G. Still pretty clunky there.

Skype is addictive. Seventh graders in Calgary, Alberta, participated in the year-long “Cigar Box Project.” The kids learned Canadian history by using technology to blend historical images and artifacts into their own creations. And they Skyped with National Museum curator Sheldon Posen.

Skype is addictive. Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust in Reading, England, is working on giving the people the option of using Skype to speak to their relatives in hospital rather than visiting them each day. The next best thing to being there and, so far, bacteria haven’t figured out how to travel over fiber-optic cables.

We’re sorry. Your Internet Connection Speed
is too slow to support decent video.

Ms. Arden and I have experienced that pop-up recently as her cable provider switched her from her previously rocketing reach to dial-up speeds. She put in a trouble ticket but our North American infrastructure lags the European fiber-optic networks with their gigabit speeds. The company Level 3 now has ultra-low-latency routes with circuit speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second on some city-to-city cables.

Facebook has announced the launch of
video calling in partnership with Skype.
Can Google Plus be far behind?

Skype is addictive but does Skype — now the face of Facebook — toll the end of social networking? Whether we FOOF or FOOG, the “normal” use of those pages is slightly delayed conversations between a potentially big number of peeps (how many FB friends do you have?). The social part works because we can time slice a little piece out of our other activities to stay in touch.

Video conferencing is real time in a way a traditional phone call never has been.

I’ve written before that time is a finite resource. Balancing expectations remains the hardest part of our juggling lives.

“I do enjoy seeing what we’re doing, but find it tethers me too too much,” Rufus said. “It (can be) a good, clear connection, but I prefer being able to move around and do other stuff while we yatter, so hanging out doesn’t eat into my ability to get other things done.”

The next great addition to our communications arsenal may be a (wait for it) cordless phone. Actually it will be a cordless remote for the computer-with-the-Skype-connection that makes at least the talking and listening from afar easier. Or Skype on the tablet. Or on a two-way wrist TV.

And a faster Internet connection.

Glossary:
FOOF /v intransitive/: Faffing Off On Facebook
FOOG (formerly “GOOF”) /v intransitive/: Doing the same on Google Plus
Gigabit /n/ Really really fast. For now.

Posted in Tech Toys, Society, Geekery, Random Access | 8 Comments »

Monday, March 21, 2011 by Dick.

Which may be little different than “peed on.” AT&T said it will buy T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom. The $39 billion cash-and-stock deal would make T the largest cellphone company in the U.S.

I don’t much care. I went back to the dark side last month.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do hold AT&T and Verizon Wireless stock, some of which I inherited and some I bought myself.

Despite that, I was a semi-loyal T-Mobiley customer ever since the lovely Layla sold me a RAZR with a promise of a $50 rebate at a home show a couple-three years ago. See, AT&T had no presence in Vermont (or many, many, many other places) and I had had bad experiences with Verizon.

Of course, I’ve had bad experiences with T-Mobiley, too, starting with the fact that they charged me twice for the RAZR and ending with them trying to charge me twice for my last month of service.

That hasn’t been the only issue.

Both AT&T and T-Mobile use “GSM” to broadcast your conversation. That’s good for the merger. So does Canada’s Rogers Wireless. That’s not. In fact, the Global System for Mobile Communications is the world’s most popular standard for mobile telephone systems with about 80% of the global market. Subscribers on GSM-based networks can use their phones pretty much anywhere in the world, including Canada. For a slight additional roaming fee.

Up here next to the longest unprotected border in the world, T-Mobiley and AT&T users routinely find themselves roaming onto Rogers. That Canadian service often overruns the weaker T-Mobile or Cell-One signal in North Puffin. I often did the cellphone dance in the driveway here because one can’t make cell calls on that service from inside the house. And the dance was sometimes with an alien.

The first time that happened, T-Mobile charged me International fees. I protested. They showed me how to set the phone to select only the specific local carrier and gave me a refund.

The second time it happened, T-Mobile charged me International fees. I protested. I told them I had already set the phone to select only the specific local carrier. They shrugged.

The third time it happened, I knew not to make a call. I still dope-slapped them. I told them I had already set the phone to select only the specific local carrier. They shrugged.

After that, I stopped trying to make calls from my driveway.

T-Mobile recently started getting smart when it detected my RAZR was saying “eh?” to the Canadian towers. They sent me text messages (on the International roaming rates) to tell me I might incur extra charges.

Uh huh. Verizon uses CDMA, a different standard for mobile telephone systems. I haven’t seen the Rogers towers on my cell display since I switched. And I can make calls from inside the house now.

“AT&T is already a giant in the wireless marketplace, where customers routinely complain about hidden charges and other anticonsumer practices,” Parul P. Desai, policy counsel for Consumers Union, told the NY Times. “From a consumer’s perspective, it’s difficult to come up with any justification or benefits from letting AT&T swallow up one of its few major competitors.”

For the record, T-Mobile and AT&T aren’t the only ones with what we’ll call “billing issues.” Regular readers may recall that I needed a phone timer to record my Verizon landline calls because their local usage bills never once came within 10% of the total shown in the log. Not once. My previous experience with Verizon Wireless was exactly the same.

From this consumer’s perspective, I don’t expect to see much change. Prices will go up. Customer service will go down. But hey! You T-Mobiley folks will get the iPhone!

Posted in Business, Politics & News, Geekery, Random Access | 3 Comments »

Monday, June 21, 2010 by Dick.

I am not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on TV. On the other hand, I am uniquely qualified to offer this legal advice because I wrote a rental contract while in college that the landlord’s lawyer could not break. Sam the Landlord learned from that experience (he never signed a contract again that his own lawyer hadn’t written) and I learned how much fun teaching can be.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I are following in the footsteps of 60 Minutes’ Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick in paired blog articles. After reading this article, please go read title for the counterpoint argument.]

Over on the other blog, gekko was spurred by a Safari program called Reader.

Reader is really neat. It strips the page of all the advertisements, sidebars, and inconsequential stuff, and pops up just the text in a translucent overlay. That scares the advertisers who believe they have a contract with the viewers, readers, or users on the site; seeing all the ads is the price they charge us to see the content.

gekko thinks the contract is not between us readers and the fodder provider. The contract, she says, is only between the content provider and the advertiser.

Contract is an important legal term. A contract is actually “just” an agreement between thee and me to trade something I have for something you have. To be valid, the contract must be (1) enforceable by law and (2) equitable.

Trade? That sounds like business and it is. I might have a book you want. You might have a dollar I want. We can contract to trade my book for your dollar and both walk away happy. Even if our contract is no more than this conversation:

“Hey, you got that book?”

“Yup, Cost you a buck.”

That fulfills the basis for a legal contract.

<pedantic mode> Both of us must be old enough and not impaired to buy or sell that book and the contract must be neither trifling, indeterminate, impossible, or illegal.

As long as the good or service we trade is legal, our oral agreement can constitute a binding legal contract. In practical terms, written contracts are more enforceable because they list all the terms we decided on at the time we made the agreement.

Enforceable means that we each promise to do something for the other guy and that the other guy has specific legal remedies if we breach that promise. A “compensatory remedy” means the Sheriff will make me pay what I said I would and maybe more besides. An “equitable remedy” usually means the Sheriff will stand over me to make sure I perform what I agreed to do and reneged on.

Equitable means fair to both parties. A court would accept as equitable the sale of a used copy of Pocket Shakespear for a buck — both parties benefit more-or-less equally. A court ought not accept as equitable the sale of an original signed manuscript of Macbeth for a buck — here the seller takes it in the ear. </pedantic mode>

Back to the Safari Reader.

Reuters reports that “the Internet is [now] by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the United States.”

There are two contracts in play. In the first, the advertiser contracts with the Internet content provider (the fodder we want to read) to place the ads and other links on the content page so the viewer/user will see them. gekko contends that’s The One. In the second, the viewer/user agrees to view the ads and other links on the page in order to see the fodder we want to read. I maintain that’s The Other One.

In many ways, this is exactly the same model we have used for “free” radio and television broadcasts since 1920 when KDKA went on the air in Pittsburgh.

gekko believes the second contract does not exist, partly because we the viewer/user never agreed to it.

<pedantic mode> An implicit contract (A.K.A. an “implied-in-fact contract”) is one agreed by our conduct, rather than by the words we say. The U.S. Supreme Court defines it as an agreement “founded upon a meeting of minds, which, although not embodied in an express contract, is inferred, as a fact, from conduct of the parties showing, in the light of the surrounding circumstances, their tacit understanding.” </pedantic mode>

So. Does watching American Idol on Fox or reading the New York Times online mean we agree to watch or read the commercials that support it?

Yes.

TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch). The writers and publishers of the information we absorb so easily offer it in exactly the same way I sold you the book and for exactly the same reason you go to work each day. Paying the writer is at least as important as paying your mechanic to tighten the lug nuts when he changes a tire on your car.

I traded the book for a buck. You trade your hours at desk or workbench for, I hope, more than a buck. You may have no written contract with your employer but your boss offered you the position, salary, and appropriate working conditions in return for your appearance on time and performance of the assigned duties. That’s an implicit contract.

VCRs, DVRs, other recording devices, and now Safari’s Reader allow us to breach that contract with the broadcaster or website. The fact that we can breach the contract does not mean we should breach the contract any more than we should rob the gas station down the street just because the President did.

The contract hinges on enforceability but in this day of a Democratic President and Congress ignoring the law or changing it to fit their whims, I would not be a bit surprised to find the Library police reassigned to ad watch duty.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I have written paired blog articles. After reading this piece, please go read title for the counterpoint argument.]

I have no advertising on this page, so there is no implicit contract that you, dear reader, will pay for these words. OTOH, donations via the Tip Jar are always welcome.

Posted in Business, Politics & News, Geekery, Random Access | 16 Comments »

Monday, June 16, 2008 by Dick.

A friend emailed me this Care 2 Make a Difference presentation. “Gotta love the punchline,” he wrote.

Even if you don’t recognize the voice, the credits show it is Eric Idle singing. Yup, that Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame.

Got me to thinking, that did.

Actually pretty much anything will get me to thinking. A pair of white sox. Cornflakes. A boat wake which is not to be confused with a wake for a boat.

I got to thinking about the media my grandfather grew up with, the media my father grew up with, the media my son grew up with, and the media we are growing now.

My grandfather was born before Mr. Marconi plumbed the airwaves. He heard Edward R. Murrow broadcast the news during World War II and watched Mr. Murrow take down Senator Joseph McCarthy on television. He watched Walter Cronkite tell of men walking on the Moon. He saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre on television and he read my email about it. (As an aside, my great-grandfather was brought to us by a Pony Express rider because the Stork was busy. He lived to see jet aircraft but communications, for him were still by radio, telephone, and mail.)

Making the change from letters and newspapers to radio was life changing in the way the printing press changed lives. Making the change from the instant transmission of radio or television to the instant transmission of email is simply humdrum. I love technology, but email is just a new technology for the same old letters.

See, email is cool, but it’s not revolutionary. After all, email is just a badly spelled letter that gets there really really fast. Think Ben Franklin meets The Flash. Likewise, HDTV is a really neat media but it’s not revolutionary. After all, it’s just movin’ pitchers attached to your radio set.

But the YouTube digital movies and the Flash-based presentations like Mr. Idle’s, that’s a revolution. Thanks to advertising, we are overwhelmed by imagery in color and sound and motion. Like any predator, we need more and more and more color and sound and motion to retain our attention. Movies have color and sound and motion innit.

Oddly, the revolution isn’t the technology this time. The revolution is what we do with the technology that lets us make our own color and sound and motion and deliver it in almost real time to our viewers.

Darn it, now I need to relearn Flash. I’ll try to resist using it on this blog, though.

Posted in Society, Media, Geekery, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Monday, March 10, 2008 by Dick.

No. Bad for Us.

Are common baby lotions bad for babies?

A small study conducted by the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute showed that exposure to phthalates caused reproductive problems in mice.

Lotions made for babies (and grownups) include phthalates to add the fragrance or color that separates a Johnson and Johnson shampoo from a Proctor & Gamble product.

I looked on the back of a baby shampoo bottle and found cocamidopropyl betaine, sorbitan laurate, sodium trideceth sulfate, and even the dreaded polyquaternium. Say, what? The latter would be a quater that marries several iums.

“If it’s difficult to say and it’s not commonly known, it’s probably something we should wonder about,” Dr. Lori Racha of University Pediatrics told the local Channel 3 News.

Dr. Racha says it is too early to know if those products actually harm human babies but she wants us to switch anyway. “If it smells really sweet, it’s probably not something we should be using on our babies,” she said on the news.

Hello?

This is a medical doctor–a pediatrician–who wants us to make a crucial decision based on what she doesn’t know.

I can apply that technique in all facets of my life, can’t I?

The National Institutes of Health’s DailyMed reports that nadolol is a “nonselective beta-adrenergic receptor blocking agent.” It is chemically identified as “1-(tert-butylamino)-3-[(5,6,7,8-tetrahydro-cis-6,7-dihydroxy-1-naphthyl)oxy]-2-propanol.” It even contains microcrystalline cellulose.

Anybody here have any idea what all of that means? Any at all?

Yeah, yeah, I know somebody can answer yes, but Corgard® or nadolol, its generic equivalent, has been prescribed to thousands of people who have absolutely no clue about its chemical makeup, let alone any of the scientific names it has. In those patients it successfully treats their high blood pressure or prevents the chest pain called angina. A beta blocker, nadolol slows the heart rate and relaxes the blood vessels so the heart does not work as hard as it might.

I wonder. Should people with hypertension not take nadolol or its pharmacological stable mates because they cannot pronounce the ingredients?

consumersearch.com reports that experts choose the Graco SnugRide as the best infant car seat. One of the reasons is what Graco calls its “EPS Energy Absorbing Foam Liner.” EPS is the abbreviation for Expanded Polystyrene. Polystyrene is made from an aromatic monomer styrene.

Maybe that’s scary, too. Dr. Racha thinks that chemicals that smell good are bad for our babies. We’d better ban the Graco SnugRide. But, wait. Aroma therapy is all the rage. It’s supposed to be good for us. Or maybe that’s not what the aroma in aromatic means. Who knows?

What is going on here? Does Dr. Racha honestly believe that just because she thinks something might sound bad for us it really really is? When a second grader imagines that a dog ate his homework, he honestly believes that is true. One of the tests of growing up is that we stop blaming the dog.

The problem here is not whether babies should be exposed to phthalates or polystyrene.

The problem here is whether we should be exposed to fear mongering backed up by imaginary science.

Posted in Science (real), Science (not-so-real), PC, Geekery, Dick's Dumps, Random Access | 1 Comment »