So last night around 2am I sat down at my computer and...no internet. Called Comcast and accepted the automated system's offer to reset my modem. When that didn't work, I asked for a human being. The technician told me there was an outage in the area, but they couldn't give me anymore information, and they couldn't take a trouble ticket because their system was down for maintenance.

Woke up this morning, and it was still down, so I called Comcast and went through the automated diagnostic procedure, which gave up and transferred me to a human tech. He poked around from his end and said everything seemed to be up. He could access my modem, but he said my router hadn't requested an IP address from the modem.

Something didn't sound right about that...oh yeah, I have a static IP address. My router doesn't have to ask for an IP address because it already knows one. Once before, some piece of Comcast equipment had forgotten my address and stopped routing my internet traffic. It looked like it was happening again.

I mentioned this to the tech, and he checked my order and proceeded to set up the static IP service again. For some reason, however, he issued me a new IP address instead of giving me the one I had before. He doesn't know what happened. I don't know what happened. It's just one of those mysteries, I guess.

Anyway, I'm back up. For now.

I think it's fair to say that Scott Greenfield is not a fan of Apple's iPad. From reading his banter with Brian Tannebaum, I gather there's been a lot of hype about how the iPad is a "game changer" for lawyers -- I guess because it can serve as a thin client front-end to some sort of "virtual office in the cloud" web application. Whatever. As criminal defense lawyers, Scott and Brian have no need for such things.

That seems reasonable, but sometimes Scott's hatred for the iPad goes a bit overboard. I always assumed it was an act -- hyperbole for the purpose of emphasis -- but his latest post seems pretty serious:

When President John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that America would put a man on the moon within ten years, it began a commitment to the future that drove us to create innovation which carried us to great heights and banal depths.  And with the last flight of the space shuttle, it's over.  And we have given up.

Actually, I'm with Scott here. We stopped going to the moon almost 40 years ago, and the shuttle has been hideously expensive to operate because it has to be human-rated, and we never developed any sort of unmanned heavy spacelift vehicles, which is why the space station is small and pitiful compared to some of the earlier plans for a permanent station. More recently, I believe they just postponed plans to develop a sort of space-tug for moving stuff around the inner system.

(We don't post about it here, but my co-blogger Ken and I have been complaining about the state of our space program since the 70s. And I'm sure he can correct anything I just got wrong.)

But the most significant thing represented by the last shuttle mission is America's abdication of concern with our future.  To the extent something as self-serving as American Exceptionalism exists, it does so because of our drive to find the future, to dream big and achieve our dreams.  We have no dreams anymore.

...

We have no goals.  As a society, we think we've accomplished something by putting out a fire, never considering that at best we're stagnant.  At worst, we fool ourselves, as the first isn't really out but just left smoldering, waiting for someone else to shoulder the burden of putting it out later.

We're a nation of big shots, every one of us too important to get our hands dirty doing hard work, or suffering personal sacrifice to achieve a future goal.

That sounds a lot like "national greatness," which is how Republicans used to waste our money (and sometimes lives) when they weren't busy complaining that Democrats were wasting our money on social programs. Of course, in our modern times, both parties seem quite flexible as to how they waste our money.

Anyway, guess what Scott sees as a symbol of all that is wrong with us today?

The lovers of technology hold dear to shiny gadgets like the iPad in the belief that they are the future. They are toys, which suck money out of the pockets of those least able to afford toys and give back nothing. Do you really think a great future exists because we can check our emails anywhere, or watch television shows we missed while we were twitting to each other?

I don't have an iPad, but if it's anything like my iPhone, it can also keep a list of everyone I know, and it can show me where they live, and give me turn-by-turn directions to get there. It lets me view a map of all the visible stars, showing exactly what they look like from where I am on Earth, or it can show me the Earth from space and zoom in to show me a single building, and pictures people have taken of the area, and all the nearest restaurants, ATMs, police stations, and hospitals. Or I can take my own pictures and movies, edit them, and share them with my friends.

My iPhone can keep a list of groceries, which my wife can update as I drive to the store, and if I'm not sure what she wants, I can send her pictures of what's available. Then I can find the nearest theater that's playing a movie I want to see and reserve two tickets. And if we're too far from home, I can find the nearest hotel and book a room.

I can read all the world's newspapers, watch all the world's news feeds, find the current prices of all the world's commodities, and read all the world's public domain books. I can lookup the population of Connecticut in 1950 or the address of a good sushi bar in Avalon. If a friend has a book I like, I can scan the bar code and have a copy delivered to my house, or maybe I can just download it directly to the phone. Of course that's only after I've read a few online reviews.

And I haven't even mentioned that it holds every song I own, lets me buy more from a catalog of millions, and recommends other I might like. It also lets me manage my bank account and cash checks just by scanning them. I can track my wife's flight as it approaches Chicago so I can pick her up within minutes of landing. I also have access to the world's largest encyclopedia, photographs of every landmark in the world, weather reports from anywhere in the world, a notebook, a calendar, a voice memo recorder, and several types of calculators.

In the 1980's, I participated in a government funded educational program that made supercomputers available to students at universities too small to afford their own. The absolute top-of-the-line supercomputer was the Cray 2, which cost $17 million in 1985 dollars. An iPad 2 is just as powerful as a Cray 2, except that it's smaller, produces less waste heat, runs on batteries, and you can carry it in your pocket. For about 1/70000 the price.

And I know this sounds like an ad for an iPad, but remember that there are at least two other vendors making products that directly compete, and most laptop makers have a small footprint model aimed at the same group of consumers.

We are easily played by emotional appeals that distract us from hard realities, the ones the require some small amount of thought.  We're a nation of marketers, liars who string together meaningless words and pretend that by making stuff up we can somehow slip past the mess all around us without contributing anything of substance, without actually doing anything that will achieve a needed goal.

Oh my God. Scott, dude, you're a friggin' lawyer! Talk about people who don't contribute anything of substance...most people would put lawyers very near the top of that list. Those aren't lawyers on that Space Shuttle.

And yet, lawyers are completely necessary in our society. They may not fly spaceships or cure diseases or invent cleaner sources of energy, but they're a part of the vast cooperative enterprise we like to call civilization. As are we all. (I don't talk about my job much on this blog, but trust me, as fascinating as it is to me, it's nothing that will ever be in the history books.)

The space program was only partially about space, though the vast unknown around us offered the potential to survive the damage we do to our own planet because we're too lazy to pick up our own garbage, and too enamored of our shiny toys to worry about where to put the nuclear waste.  As long as it's not in our backyard, we just don't care.

This is nit-picking, I know, but the Space Shuttle only goes up into low earth orbit. It never really got out into the vast unknown. I mean, if you knew where and when to look (something an iPad could tell you) you could see it from your backyard.

The space program gave us a wealth of opportunity along the way, as scientists and engineers created things that could be used to create more things to solve previously unsolvable problems.

That's pretty much the process behind the iPad as well. In addition to the pocket supercomputer aspect I mentioned earlier, iPads also have state-of-the-art LCD displays, state of the art digital cameras, state-of-the-art batteries, state-of-the-art 3G transceivers, and even state-of-the-art glass panels. It's not like Apple spent billions of dollars to invent these things from scratch, they are just one of many products that can be built from high-tech parts that are becoming ever more common.

There was a time when Mr. Fusion might have been a reality someday, instead of oil from the mideast.

Uh, no. I loved Back to the Future, but Mr. Fusion was fiction inspired by cold fusion research, which also turned out to be fiction.

There are still people who have the knowledge and interest to create a future out of the mess that swirls around us today, but the death of the space program reflects our nation's decision to look backward rather than forward.  We have been seduced by the shiny toys, and they are good enough to make us forget that we are doing nothing as a society to invest in our future.

Enjoy your iPad 5. There may not be many new toys on the horizon because the drive that brought us this far is gone. We're too cheap to pay the price of innovation, and we're too lazy and preoccupied with our transitory self-interest to put in the effort necessary to change.  There will be a few tweaks to our shiny toys, which will be touted as wonders and snapped up at exorbitant prices by young people spending their daddy's money, so that they can sit on their couches and eat Cheetos while surfing youtube.

Is this enough of a future for you?

The iPad is nothing less than a personal pocket supercomputer that gives you instant wireless access to a multi-million-node world-wide computer network. That's about as science fiction as it gets. I know we don't have the flying cars, but we are living in the future.

Do you not realize that you've bet the farm that some kid in Cambridge or Palo Alto, with no help from you, is going to come up with some truly incredible brainstorm that will create an industry, revitalize America, drive our economy in a direction that we can't conceive of today?

If I did something like that, I'd be an idiot.

Consider Scott's example of fusion power. Scientists have been experimenting with nuclear fusion for 50-60 years. Getting hydrogen to fuse came early, but the process required more energy than it produced. I believe scientists reached technological breakeven in the 80's, but only on a small scale, and at great expense. Creating industrial-scale economical fusion power systems will be a long, slow process. It's unlikely there will be any giant breakthroughs, just hundreds or thousands of small engineering breakthroughs that eventually advance the technology far enough for us to benefit.

So, what I'm betting on is that millions of people in thousands of cities will come up with millions of ideas, each of which improves our life a tiny, tiny bit, and that this process of continuous improvement will slowly grind away to make our lives better. After all, that's how we got this far.

When you've got that many people working together, an awful lot of effort goes into dealing with the complexities of communications and organizing, and while each of those people is a specialist, an awful lot of their productive time is spent doing routine activities outside their area of specialization. Anything that makes those routine activities less time consuming is going to leave more time for people to do what they're best at. This is why we need lawyers and accountants and garbage collectors and teachers and dog walkers. It's also why we need overnight mail and photocopiers and email and iPads. Every little bit helps. It's the story of civilization.

Besides, unless the medical folks figure out how to solve that death problem, it's not like we're going to live much longer than our great grandparents did. And if we can't live longer, than at least we should use our vast technological wealth to live better. And if living better means streaming kitten videos while you're sipping a Frappuchino at Starbucks, what the hell is wrong with that?

Irony Addendum: The last shuttle flight is not the last manned space flight. We'll be using foreign spacecraft to get into orbit for a little while, and there are about five private companies developing various forms of spacelift, several of which will be man-rated.

Meanwhile, the astronauts on this last shuttle flight took a pair of iPhones:

Why the iPhone and not the iPad? "There's no reason in principle why we couldn't have done the iPad," Rishikof says. Yet, the compact size of the iPhone gives the device less mass and volume, and therefore a smaller footprint when calculating measurements. "In the future, the iPad is definitely on our list," he says.

It's a supercomputer that talks to a world-wide cloud of supercomputers. Of course a bunch of rocket scientists can put it to good use.

Yes, You Do Have Staff, But You've Got to Be Staff, First Too Both First and Too

Twitter, the Favor Economy, and the Power of Crowds

You've seen the ad:  some bozo, trying to project competence and connections, tells a potential customer:  "I've got people to handle that."  By which he means he can look up folks in the Yellow Pages, hire some, and take his chances that they can deliver.  After all, they bought an ad in the Yellow Pages, and that takes, competence, commitment, and a checkbook.  Well, a checkbook. Credit card, maybe.

You can do better.  Hell, I do better, and I'm, well, just a guy.  Look it up.

Before I get to twitter, let me tell you about a friend of mine, who I'll call Bob.  (That's not his name; that is his face.) We met something like fifteen years ago, when he was dating another friend of mine, and we've hung out a fair amount, since. 

There are folks who call me a Renaissance Man, but well, Bob's downright Heinleinian:  he can (and does) pilot airplanes, maintain cars, fix stuff, build houses from the foundation up (he's done that, and can do any of the tasks required in all of that), sail a small boat (although it did tip over, that time I went with him, throwing us into the icy cold waters of Lake Minnetonka; then again, I was at the helm), load his own ammunition, and Ghu knows what else.

Some years ago (long past the statute of limitations; chill), he decided that the house he owned then was eighteen and a half inches too short -- he had a cool stove that wouldn't quite fit -- so late on a Friday evening, he and his brother, Al (also not his name) tore off one side of it, put in all the framing and other stuff, including the additional flooring, and put the side back up and had it all painted and sealed up, better than what code requires, by Monday morning.

I could tell you a lot of Bob stories, but let's leave it that he can do damn near anything that can be done with one's hands, and that, from time to time, I've asked a favor or two of him.  The one thing that he can't do is maintain his own computers, and -- very rarely -- I get a call asking just how one farbles a glimrod under Vista, or whatever, and for two reasons, I get to farbling his computer's glimrod.

Yes:  I'm making out a like a bandit, and if I told you more of the stories --

"Yes?"
"Hey, Bob?  It's Joel.  I know it's 2:30 in the morning, but there's water pouring out of the ceiling in my kitchen, and -- "
"I got it. Put on a pot of coffee."
"That'll stop it?"
"Nah.  But I'm on my way, and a cup of coffee would be nice.  Don't worry.  We'll get it done."

-- you'd get it, even more.  (Yes, we do have fun; there was the time that we tracked a stolen car through city streets... yes, "tracked," not "followed." )

I also do some other stuff that Bob thinks is a good thing to be doing -- some of the political stuff -- and while he always makes himself available to help out in that when he can, he's of the opinion that, say, the writing and blogging is something that I can do pretty well, and that he can't do it near as well, and would rather folks like me who enjoy it spend time on.  Works for me.

I don't want to overanalyze this -- well, more than I already did -- but it's a pretty common thing: friends do favors for friends, and it all makes the world a better place.  Other than the fact that we enjoy hanging out together, both Bob and I do pretty well -- not just by the favors that we do for each other, but by those we do for others. 

Not a big deal, but a friend of Bob's once needed a quick carry class; he called me and asked me, and yeah, she got a quick carry class.  I'm not asking for a medal, which is just as well -- nobody offered me one, after all.  I just want to make the point that this doing stuff for folks stuff won't go only in one direction.  For long; you know the kind of person who acts as though they think a favor is something that you do for them, because they're too busy with their own lives, and all.  How well does that work out for them? 

Which brings me to twitter.

A few months ago, I followed the lead of some friends-who-I've-never-met-in-the-flesh, and -- while I thought it was silly -- took out a twitter account.  Mainly, I use it as an ongoing party line, a way to play with other kids while I'm doing something else, and that's fun.

But . . .

You'll see it now and then.  A tweet something like, say:

Request: anybody got a link to a good javabuttons generator? I'm thinking something like http://twurl.nl/vcpzki , but Open Source.

Which was quickly followed by:

Check this site out. Tons of great java ideas if you have never been here: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/

Which is how I ended up with javabuttons and a neat nav bar over here, over the weekend. I like it. 

Here's another one of mine.  I'd been looking into a lawsuit in another state (never mind quite why) and tweeted:

Anybody got a shortcut to information about case C 05-04532 JW in US District Court Northern District of California, San Jose Division?

A few minutes later, an attorney (I'm grateful, but I'm not going to name him without permission, lest other folks think that they get to importune him for legal research -- and I'll get back to that in a minute, I promise), tweeted:

Ask, and ye shall receive. http://is.gd/B7NB

And, if you go to the link, you'll find -- as I did -- that it was just the document I wanted, and would have looked for myself, if I'd known where to.  (I don't know exactly where he got it, or how -- but it's public information, and if I had access to the sort of tools he has at his fingertips and the knowledge of where to find that sort of stuff that he's developed, I could have found it, too.  And if my zayda had breasts, he would have -- but I digress.)

But I don't, and I didn't. I just relied on whoever was a: listening on the party line that is twitter, b: had, in the past, found what I contributed interesting or valuable (in his individual opinion; nobody else gets a vote, and that particularly goes for me) enough to take some time out of his day to look something up for me, and c: -- and this is one of the keys -- wasn't being importuned by me for "yet another favor," without me doing anything for anybody else in return, because, at least among some of the folks I meta-hang-out-with, I've contributed enough (in their opinion; mine doesn't count) putting a few work credits into the favor economy is worth the trouble, to them, even though, smart folks they are, they're probably thinking the same thing that I am when a neat query comes across:

Cool.  I can find that.

So, yeah:  the world in general -- and twitter, in particular -- is full of folks who know stuff, many of whom  will be happy to lend a hand, from time to time, and all you have to do to tap in on it is, well, obvious: Go out and do stuff.  Have fun.  Talk to folks; solve interesting problems.  Get your own work credits in, but have fun with it. Help folks, and put a call out there for assistance.

It'll be fine.  Trust me.
 

 

My wife is flying back home right now, and I've got to pick her up from the airport.

In one window, I've got a display of the plane's flight track from FlightAware. In another window, I'm running a Google Earth satellite image with her plane's current position superimposed, thanks to fboweb.com. In yet another window, I'm running streaming audio of the airport tower courtesy of LiveATC.net.

They cleared her plane to land a few minutes ago, and it just dropped below 5000 feet. Time to get in the car and drive out to the airport.

I first saw this technology concept video about 20 years ago at a presentation at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Part of NCSA's mission was to explore personal computing applications that required supercomputer-level processing at the time, but which would make sense in the future when everyone has a supercomputer on their desk.

I vaguely remember my impressions at the time:

• I was skeptical about the voice recognition and natural-language in the interface. That seemed like an awful hard thing to do back then, and it still seems pretty hard to do. Modern voice recognition is a lot better, but it's still hard to get a computer to understand the structure of natural languages.
• I was also skeptical about the document searching capability shown in the video. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to do useful searches of millions of documents without natural language processing to understand what the documents were about, but it turns out you can do a useful amount of information retrieval using relatively simple keyword algorithms. We even have some form of the video's query completion.
• I thought the talking-head to represent the computer was excessive and pointless. I think the world-wide hatred for Microsoft's "Clippy" proves I was right.
• I thought the streaming video conferencing was excessive too. I was mostly wrong about that. The technology is well within reach, and we could have it whenever we want, but we don't seem to want it very much. Phone calls are intrusive enough without having to worry about how we look.

The most interesting part for me was the computing technology behind the real-time climate simulation. The NCSA had one of the most powerful computers available---a multi-million dollar liquid-cooled Cray-2 supercomputer---and it would take thousands of them running in parallel to perform that kind of climate simulation at the speed shown in the video.

The capability shown in the video implied some sort of computing utility---the term "grid computing" would later become fashionable---that could quickly and cheaply provide massive amounts of computing from a shared resource pool, much the same way you can quickly grab a few kilowatts of electricity off the power grid whenever you need it.

We are tantalizingly close to reality here:

• Making some rough assumptions about relative computing power and speed two decades ago and now, think I could rent the modern equivalent of 1000 Cray-2 computers from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service for about $40/hour. It's not quite like the video yet because it would take about 10 minutes to bring them all online and get them running a particular program.
• Every time you do a Google search, you probably grab that much computing power for the split-second it takes to do the search. Google's datacenter has their search software pre-installed on pre-provisioned hardware, so you couldn't do that with an arbitrary computer program of your own design like in the video.
• A 3D graphics gaming card for a personal computer uses specialized graphics processing units. Although optimized for shading computer-generated images, modern GPUs are becoming complex enough to perform general purpose computing. A top-end gaming card for under $500 is probably comparable to hundreds of Cray-2 computers for solving certain specialized problems.

It won't be much longer.

I found this video at Google Blogoscoped, which also has some interesting examples of more recent concept videos from other companies.

My wife and I got my mother a Tivo DVR this Christmas. It was a calculated risk.

My mother is in her 80's and doesn't like learning to use new stuff. On the other hand, she has a VCR which she manages to use, but she gets confused about the whole tune-the-TV v.s. tune-the-VCR issue, and sometimes she uses the wrong remote or gets some part of the system (TV, VCR, remote) into a state where she doesn't understand what's happening.

Our thinking was that the Tivo system is simpler. A single remote controls everything, and it doesn't allow you to get into any difficult situations. It avoids the confusion inherent in tuning both the TV and the VCR. The basic functions are pretty simple.

At least that was the theory, but we stopped in on my parents yesterday, and now I'm not so sure. My mother is having trouble with the concept. She comes from a time before mice and menus, before everything was a computer. She comes from a time when your tools didn't have a mind of their own.

We knew all that, of course, but we thought she could probably puzzle it out anyway. (After all, my mother used be a bookkeeper, which meant she could run one of these. How hard could a Tivo be?) My gut reaction is that she's just resisting the change, but she'll like it once she gets used to it.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago we bought an alarm system and remote starter for the RAV4. While driving to see my parents, I noticed the alarm's key-fob remote control beeping a few times in my pants pocket. My leg was pressed against a part of the car and it was pressing the buttons. That's happened before with every alarm I had, so I didn't think much about it.

When I got out of the car, however, the remote control didn't work anymore. The signal LED flickered, and I could hear the remote beeping, but the car didn't respond at all. I had to leave the alarm off and lock the doors the old-fashioned way.

My working theory was that I had accidentally pressed the buttons too much, and the alarm control module had decided to ignore my remote. I don't know if car alarms actually have such a feature, but I know that computer network applications do things like that all the time: When they receive too many spurious requests from another node, they decide for reasons of efficiency or security to lock it out and ignore it. The effect usually wears off after a while to allow for the possibility that the misbehaving node has been fixed.

When we left my parents place several hours later, my wife's remote worked fine, but the car was still ignoring mine, which shot down my theory.

I thought about it some more on the way home. Alarm remotes have to be registered with the control module in the car before they'll work. Could the control module somehow have forgotten about my remote? That seemed possible, but unlikely. Computer failures are rarely so specific and clean. Whatever was going on, the alarm system was doing what it was supposed to do. But what did it think it was doing?

It came to me as I was crossing the parking lot at home. I'd bought one of the more featureful systems, and I remembered something I'd read in the instruction manual: The system could be programmed to allow one remote control to work with two cars.

I dug up the manual and found the section that explained the multi-car control capability. It explained how to tell which car the remote was set for, and sure enough, it was sending signals for car number 2. I punched in the sequence that switched it back to car number 1, and everything was working again.

I think I just got a taste of how my mother feels in this new high-tech world. I wonder if someday I'll be too old to adapt to the technology---if someday I'll be remembering the good old days while eyeing the new household matter transmutator with unease...