The great feature of an analog microwave oven controller is that setting a time is highly efficient and the effort taken to set the time (at worst) scales linearly with the heating need, which seems like a correct scaling. It has additional features such as easy adding and subtracting of time while in progress.

A digital microwave oven controller, by any measure, is an inferior product. The reasons it might be preferred are (1) to reduce component count and save cost for the manufacturer, (2) to appease consumers with an impression of a product in the “advanced” style, neither of which are excellent reasons.

This is a mistake, and the inefficiency introduced via the digital controller is only ameliorated somewhat by some oddities of the device (enter 99 and the microwave runs for 99 seconds, enter x:99 and the microwave runs for 60x+99 seconds, etc.). So between 60 and 99 seconds, you manage to save a keystroke but no more. (Ok, also between 10 min. and 10 min. 29 seconds.)

This reminds me why I dislike digital book readers, too. They suffer from the analogous problem versus paper books with regard to page turning.

In the news today,

NYC police: Officer kills Times Square scammer

NEW YORK — A plainclothes cop chased a Times Square scam artist through sidewalks crowded with holiday shoppers and tourists Thursday, exchanging gunfire that shattered Broadway theater and gift shop windows, before killing the suspect near a landmark hotel, police said.
…
The slain man was not immediately identified. Officers suspected him and his partner were working a scam in which they would approach tourists, ask them their names, then write their names on the CDs and demand payment of $10.

I’m so glad I didn’t take any of those CD’s hawked to me every morning in times square last summer.

This article is talking about control measures to stop the Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes via the Chicago River. The interesting part is this however:

They have called for the drastic and massively expensive action of separating the Great Lakes from the Mississippi water basin. The two systems were connected in an epic feat of engineering a century ago when the Chicago River was reversed so that the city’s waste would flow away from Lake Michigan — which provides the city’s drinking water — rather than into it.

Never having been to Chicago, I didn’t know of this geographic feature.

What’s more, why is the fish so terrible? I mean all kinds of carps are eaten in China all the time. Apparently, “the fish tend to be boney and have an unpleasant taste to the American palate.” Oh well.

Now that I think about it, fish that Americans like are all meaty and have thick bones.

How fish is often eaten in China:

How fish is often eaten here:

Got an invitation to Google Wave today. The problem I find immediately is the lack of structure. Say what you will about the restrictions of email or IM, but the same restrictions of those ways of communication, namely time-flow or thread-flow, are also well enforced structures to keep things sane. Wave takes away these and substitutes “playback.” Unfortunately, playback is not natural. (The other way is to fall back on social convention to keep order, but that rarely works with more than 2 peers.)

I think there are two options here. Either structure needs to be explicitly enforced or presentation needs to be refined.

In the former, perhaps it is better to only allow replies in certain places. Perhaps it is better to only allow edits in certain places. Perhaps it is better to separate the two and keep the distinction between edit mode, thread mode, and conversation mode, and only allow mixing in very restricted settings (or require some extra steps to discourage its use). After all, in preparing a shared endeavor, the purpose should be defined and known ahead of time.

In the latter, perhaps a lot of hiding and collapsing should be used. Perhaps hyperlinks should be used for in-place edits that often hijack a topic. And now that subthreads can sprout like a tree, it makes little sense to retain the linear structure of conversations. Perhaps a topic based graph, or a conversation stack would be the more appropriate presentation metaphor.

Wave is a good idea, but not well thought out. In its attempt to differentiate, it has forsaken useability for chaotic flexibility, which would have had redeeming value, were it matched by equally ambitious presentation/visualization.

Every once in a while newspapers publish these “popular science” articles that promulgate the latest fads in psychology, anthropology, or some such “fuzzy” social science. Here is one: Did evolution make our eyes stand out? Researchers test ‘cooperative eye’ hypothesis in humans and apes.

The cooperative eye hypothesis is that human eyes have a lot of white for ease of cooperation just by looking at eye movement.

In a new study that is one of the first direct tests of this theory, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany looked at what effect head and eye movements had on redirecting the gaze of great apes versus human infants.

In the study, a human experimenter did one of the following:

- Closed his eyes, but tilted his head up toward the ceiling
- Kept head stationary while looking at the ceiling
- Looked at the ceiling with both head and eyes
- Kept head stationary while looking straight ahead

Results showed that the great apes … were more likely to follow the experimenter’s gaze when he moved only his head. In contrast, the 40 human infants looked up more often when the experimenter moved only his eyes.

Now, look… something must have gotten lost or this is a piece of pointless research that says nothing. I don’t see how this is a test of the hypothesis at all. Human eyeballs are more visible than ape eyeballs, so humans are more used to following eyeballs and apes are more used to following heads out of necessity. But this has nothing to do with evolution, has it? How does it show that cooperation necessitates more visible eyeballs? And what about cats and owls, who also have highly contrasting eyeballs?

Something in the news says Chrome OS got a demo today. I don’t even care, since I don’t think what’s being demonstrated — a glorified PDA with internet connection — is, by itself, very interesting. What’s important is what runs on it that can’t be run in another way or with as much ease. What might that be? It seems to me this “novel experience” (not necessarily novel technology) is in the roadmap of Google and other big companies — but only in pieces spread among them, with none of them seeming to have the entirety of it. And that is ridiculous…

So Google has the ideas. Microsoft has the delivery mechanism in the form of the installed base and the ready platform with the ability to propogate via a simple update. Apple has the hardware designs and marketing to get people to adopt. Yet, each is missing the critical pieces held by others. And so we stall in Year 2009 as each company tries to replicate some existing thing that another company is already good at.

(This very good article gives too much credit to Google, I believe. The situation is a lot more symmetrical and Google should not be elevated to a privileged position. The current Chrome OS for netbooks, I believe, is a clear misread of the market. People want a better phone, not a worse computer, and Google will likely fail with this if they make the latter without the former (Android?) catching on first. I think the “PC companies” are not that far behind either. It’s much harder for inexperienced Google to make a good cloud client than for say Microsoft to deliver good cloud integration. In some sense, Microsoft’s lack of execution on this front is due to politics, i.e. lack of will-power to lose a cash cow until it is inevitable, not due to technical barriers.)
(Read the article)

This video uses the Kangbashen New District (康巴什) of Ordos City to describe the misallocation to fixed asset investment, which of course exists.

In most developed countries with anemic growth, this would be disastrous. And beyond a point, this would be so in China as well. However, as is, one should look at the dynamics of the thing. I mentioned here the scale of urbanization that must take place, so the demand is there, just with a time offset. While this time offset may be infinity elsewhere, this is probably on the order of a few years here. One only needs to recall how “empty” Pudong used to be.

Nice. Used one today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_integral

I guess it happened like they say in the brochures, the guys in my college dorm started a company (called ‘apture’), now with millions of dollars of initial funding. This by itself is a great feat and I’m impressed that these guys, who could have been you or me in other respects — I know them so I know — made it happen. (But please, this is not to say there is something wrong with being Joe Codemonkey or Bob Engineer.)

At first I wasn’t too impressed with the technology. In terms of conception, popping up content on a page isn’t too much different from what people naturally do by opening tabs or what designers do in more laboriously manual fashion. Sure it looks nicer and saves work, but is that really going to revolutionize the web? Does that befit the ridiculous moniker web 3.0? Of course not. If that’s all there is, it’s a flash in the pan and stupid. But when I realized that server-side embedding is really what they’re doing, I recognized the Trojan potential in this, and I must say it’s a brilliant business move and sets up for potentially much more exciting technologies once they get around to implementing them.
(Read the article)

Came across this the other day.

Climate engineering may happen but it seems like the energies available to control the weather/climate is not nearly enough (not even the same magnitude) to make this a stable plant. Frankly it seems like a bad idea at this stage of technological development. On the other hand, it is a valid point to say that the climate is already being engineered anyway (more and more) just by the very fact that we take input and commit output to the system. It doesn’t much matter that we still don’t know what we’ve been doing.

In this sense, I think the entire argument about whether global warming is happening or not or is the model believable or not or is it actually global cooling is beside the point. The actual effect doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we’re engineering any system beyond our capability to understand it, much less to control it. One day there may be a way to engineer the climate in a controllable, stable fashion. Before that, it is prudent to be paranoid about the inputs driving the system unless there is proof that said inputs do not drive one of the unstable modes of the system.