Haibane.info

Author: Otaku-kun

  • pathological chemistry

    FOOF goes BOOM
    By way of this entertaining tall tale about how really nasty chemical compounds make for the best rocket fuels (with some conspiracy theorizing about “red mercury” and Chernobyl thrown in for fun), I ended up reading about FOOF, and was treated to one of the more entertaining lines of text I’ve read in some time:

    If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic.

    Context is king, so start here and then go here. Any chemists in the house?

    (here’s the paper online with link to full text PDF!)

  • Just Another Day #goodbyeEureka – thank you, @SyFy

    Eureka, the scifi show on Syfy about a crazy town full of geniuses, has ended. They gave us 5 great seasons and I am grateful to Syfy for allowing them to produce the “series finale” episode as a send-off to all the characters, something that Stargate: Universe never did get.

    The best thing about Eureka wasn’t the science fiction or the high concept. It was teh characters – they had more heart and were more authentic than most scifi shows. Firefly was full of wisecrackin’ badasses, but the only person who really was genuine was Kaylee; Eureka had an entire cast full of Kaylees. Stargate Universe was character driven but was more about the high-concept of true exploration of the Unknown, and it did that brilliantly, but the appeal was different. You can’t compare Eureka to SGU in that way. In fact, if anything, the template for Eureka was The Cosby Show, which served to inform mainstream America that here was an upper-class African American family, with the same dreams and problems as everyone else. Eureka took that template and applied it to Science and scientists, normalizing them the same way. The only way you do that is with a cast of genuinely interesting people, with an authenticity to the chemistry and camraderie that clearly isn’t limited to the screen.

    Regardless of why it was great, it’s over, and though of course I have my usual issues about the broken model of television and cable and the perverse incentives that seem to bury the shows I want to watch while rewarding the ones I don’t, I can accept it. Eureka and Farscape and SGU still exist, I did watch them, and I loved them. And I can recommend them to others here on my blog in the hope that others will be enriched by them as I was.

  • Guide to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga

    Mark has posted what must surely be the definitive overview and guide to the Vorkosigan Saga. If you’ve any interest in reading these books, start with Mark’s post.

    For myself, I snagged Warrior’s Apprentice and Mountains of Mourning from the Baen Library. I’ll probably get around to the rest eventually – I’m less interested in Cordelia’s story than Miles’ exploits though. At any rate, figuring out where to start and what to skip just got a LOT easier thanks to Mark’s due diligence.

  • Get well soon, Ubu

    I can’t believe it took me a week to notice – apparently Ubu Roi had a (thankfully mild) stroke last week. He seems to be recovering well but it is still a terrifying thing to contemplate. He’s a lucky man and I am glad he is doing okay, and will pray for his continued and complete recovery.

    It’s a good excuse to post Stroke Stick Guy as a public service – the first few hours of a stroke are the most critical. My PhD dissertation was in Diffusion MRI (one of the main tools to detect ischemia) so it’s a topic I’ve thought quite a bit about. My best wishes to Ubu and his family.

  • forget Obamacare and SCOTUS: it’s Tau day! it’s Back to the Future Day!

    So, apparently there was this big hoo-hah today about some political thing or the other. But the real significance of today is this:

    Back to the Future.. but the Future is NOW!

    That’s right – today is the day that Doc set as the Future in the first Back to the Future movie!

    UPDATE: No, it wasn’t. Three years too early. Sigh.

    What’s more, today is also June 28, or “6/28” – which means it is Tau Day! What is tau, you ask? It’s the true circle constant (6.28), unlike that upstart Pi. For more details on the primacy of Tau and the centuries-old conspiracy that is Pi, see the Tau Manifesto, though really I think this image says it all:

    Tau is one turn

    and here’s a snappy little music video too:

    so, enjoy today, a most historic and important day! And don’t worry/gloat too much about that other thing. It’s really not as important as this.

  • new TLDs could balkanize the Internet

    Dave Winer has some cogent critiques of the idea that companies can register their trademarks as new Top Level Domains (TLDs), from an intellectual property perspective. However I think the danger is more pernicious than that – allowing deep-pocketed corporations to create new TLDs at will risks the destruction of the Internet. In a nutshell, why would Google or Microsoft even bother with www.google.com or www.microsoft.com when they can simply use http://home.google or http://home.microsoft? Ultimately you will see entire ecosystems vanish behind these TLD-walled gardens. Forget about gmail.com; now you get redirected to http://mail.google. Take this further: these companies make browsers (Chrome, IE). So now if you’re locked into the walled garden of Gmail anyway and Google says “use Chrome, you don’t have to type http:// anymore” and IE users accessing Gmail see a moderately-degraded experience, then there will be forced migrations to ecosystems that don’t exist right now. Facebook is the worst offender already; imagine if they got into the same game with Opera or even worse allied with Microsoft/IE.

    It can get worse. There are numerous limitations and flaws in the HTTP protocol since we have shoehorned all sorts of functionality onto what was originally just a hypertext linking platform. And support for HTTP starts at the browser. Today it’s already hard enough to write webpages for all browsers, and designers can’t code for the latest and greatest CSS/HTML spec and be confident it will Just Work. Imagine if Chrome decides to create a new protocol, g://? shorter, saves you characters on Twitter, built-in URL shortening, and much faster handling of video and pictures. Built right into Chrome! Interoperability between browsers itself is at risk here if the fundamental communication protocol itself starts to fragment; we’ve seen it happen already with HTML and CSS and browsers, but with custom TLDs the incentive to do worse will be irresistible.

    The key is the ecosystem. Apps have shown us how companies move away from open protocols like RSS towards custom and closed APIs. TLDs will just accelerate and worsen the trend. Eventually your browser will run heavily customized and feature-extended HTML, with an optimized variant of HTTP that works best with the ecosystem it was designed for (be it Chrome/Android/Google or Facebook/Microsoft/Ie or Apple/Safari/iOS). Try to do anything outside that ecosystem and you’re forced back onto the “old” tools that will be slower and more unpleasant; sure, Hotmail will work on Chrome, but if you use IE it will be so much easier… switch! (to quote the Oracle of Pythia, “All this has happened before. All this will happen again.”)

    Remember the old days when if you were on Prodigy or Compuserve, you couldn’t email someone on AOL without a complex extra header? We could be looking at the same thing, with the Internet. We will have to call it the InterIntranet.

  • Twitter doesn’t innovate

    Twitter may be at the peak of it’s innovation. They haven’t really made any substantial improvements in user interface or functionality in a while; hiding replies on user profiles is basically a minor hack. What would be far more useful is marking a user (or hashtag) as “read” temporarily hiding their tweets from your stream (analogous to marking emails as read in your inbox).

    But fundamentally, there really isn’t much more Twitter really CAN innovate on. It’s a micro-messaging service. They missed the boat on becoming an identity service; Facebook Connect beat them to it. They seem to have de-emphasized SMS as an interface (at least for the US market) – imagine if they had aimed at taking on BBM and WhatsApp? And they still insist on the 140-char limit, though they could easily allow for a “read more” type extra text (the way it’s done in blog software) or take other simple measures to alleviate the crunch, such as not counting http:// towards the char limit in links, or even allowing links to be metadata the way that photos and video are (the link would still be displayed in-line). You can’t even do simple markup like bold or italic. If links were meta like photos, you could even have a “Recent links” sidebar the way they do for your photos on your profile, but nope.

    Twitter has no built-in emoticons, has no elegant way to show a conversation between more than two people, and when you click on the new “view conversation” link, doesn’t show it to you in the original chronological order. Twitter is deprecating RSS which means most bloggers use a plugin to embed tweetstreams; lists are usually not supported.

    And of course, as Dave Winer has been saying all along, Twitter isn’t open. You can’t export your data and you can’t really even access older tweets (and did I mention that search is broken?).

    It’s also worth pointing out that Twitter’s advantage of the network effect isn’t permanent. Look at what happened to MySpace and FriendFeed. Users will leave if they have a better option; you just need to woo the early adopters like Scoble and make a big splash at SXSW. Plus media attention will be lavish upon any company that has the balls to actually say, “we are out to eat Twitter’s lunch”.

    Twitter doesn’t need to be beaten, it just needs to be threatened so it gets out of its comfort zone. Right now it’s chasing after NASCAR and trying to give users tailored content; that’s a fool’s game. Users will never warm to an algorithm’s suggestions – just ask Netflix (or better yet, ask a user).

    And Twitter isn’t thinking big at all. What could they achieve if they wanted to? How about aiming for the moon – like becoming a defacto replacement for email?

  • Blogger Shrugged

    Atlas Doesn't Care
    My friend Dean Esmay is reading Atlas Shrugged, out of a misplaced sense of due diligence. To stay sane, he’s blogging it. I actually read and even enjoyed The Fountainhead, but Atlas is pure literary masochism. I mean, come on:

    Her leg, sculptured by the light sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel’s hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body.

    It’s like someone wrote an entire book out of Bulwer-Lytton contest entries.

    I’m not interested in debating the merits of any philosophy so pretentious as to label itself objective – to me, Atlas is a work of literature, and should be treated precisely as such, nothing more and nothing less. However, since the Randians roam the internet like the Burning Legion, laying waste to blogs that dare refuse to prostrate at Ayn Kiljaeden Rand’s throne, I can’t resist a little visual defiance, hence the admittedly rude image above for which I humbly beg my regular readers’ forgiveness.

  • even more exercise that I should be doing

    My workout regimen is an elliptical machine and a Bowflex at home. At least, I have the machines, but I’ve been slacking of late in actually using them. My intention is to follow the schedule:

    • M, W, F: elliptical for 30 min
    • T: Bowflex for chest and back
    • R: Bowflex for arms and shoulders

    Unfortunately the time I set aside for the above tends to get eaten by work or family stuff, so I need to do a much better job of adhering to this. My saving grace is that no matter whether I’ve worked out or not, if the weather is good we go out biking as a family in the early evening, which is a nice 6 mile circuit with some big hills. I look at this as recreation and not exercise, but it definitely is a workout (especially since I’m pulling a trailer with 40lbs of 5-year old in it).

    However I do need to supplement this with some sort of daily routine. So I was glad of this lifehacker post which reminded me of the 100 Pushups program that I long-ago stated I intended to pursue, along with new programs I hadn’t heard of before for similar at-home exercises. Here’s the list:

    100 pushups
    150 dips
    200 situps
    200 squats

    There’s also a 25-pullups program in the works but lets start with the above at least. I need to figure out the best way to integrate these into my week. I havent even read them in detail yet, so this is sort of a placeholder post while I develop a plan. Suggestions and ideas are welcome!

    I invite critique and suggestions!

  • The end of Facebook? not if it goes Prime

    Is Facebook toast? I’m not asking because of it’s IPO, which despite whining from the tech pundits was perfectly calibrated. I’m asking because it’s basic business model is still such a clunker:

    Facebook currently derives 82 percent of its revenue from advertising. Most of that is the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people’s Facebook profiles. Some is the kind of sponsorship that promises users further social relationships with companies: a kind of marketing that General Motors just announced it would no longer buy.

    Facebook’s answer to its critics is: pay no attention to the carping. Sure, grunt-like advertising produces the overwhelming portion of our $4 billion in revenues; and, yes, on a per-user basis, these revenues are in pretty constant decline, but this stuff is really not what we have in mind. Just wait.

    It’s quite a juxtaposition of realities. On the one hand, Facebook is mired in the same relentless downward pressure of falling per-user revenues as the rest of Web-based media. The company makes a pitiful and shrinking $5 per customer per year, which puts it somewhat ahead of the Huffington Post and somewhat behind the New York Times’ digital business. (Here’s the heartbreaking truth about the difference between new media and old: even in the New York Times’ declining traditional business, a subscriber is still worth more than $1,000 a year.) Facebook’s business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users.

    The basic problem is that Facebook’s major innovation is to facilitate social interactions, but unless you charge people 1 penny per like you can’t actually monetize those interactions (and any attempts to do so would act like a brake).

    But there is an obvious way to monetize Facebook that I am surprised few are talking about. Consider the numbers: Facebook is valued at $100 billion, has about a billion users, so each user is “worth” $100. But Facebook only makes $5/user annually in revenue from ads. So, why not offer users a paid option? If Facebook followed Amazon’s example and offered a “Prime” service, they could charge users $75/year (or $8/month ongoing). In return, that user could get a pile of perks:

    • no ads anywhere, of course
    • free digital gifts and an expanded menu of “pokes” (bring back the sheep!)
    • a “premium” version of the Facebook app with built-in Skype functionality
    • more search filters and automated searches for friends (akin to LinkedIn’s subscriptions)
      the ability to track who views your profile

    this is just a basic and obvious list but I am sure there are other perks that could be offered. For example, given that Craig’s List hampers innovation in the classifieds space, Facebook can and should leverage the social graph and offer it’s own (as well as compete with Angie’s List, or buy them outright). Facebook Prime users could be rewarded with better access or free listings.

    And then there’s the coupon space – Facebook has all the data it needs to outdo Groupon or LivingSocial. If Facebook acquired the latter in fact it would have a headstart, and again Facebook Prime users would benefit with specialer-than-special offers or early access to deals.

    People have already compared Zuckerberg to the next Bezos, but unlike Amazon’s profligate revenue streams, Facebook remains stubbornly focused on one thing. It’s time to diversify and leverage that social data in ways that people actually use. And let the users pay for it!