The Hanover Collaboration

Have you guys heard about this?! Basically, there is a bus full of poison that is going to fall out of the sky and we have essentially no idea where. So we’re going to say “to hell with orbital debris” and try to blow it up.

Continue...

If you don’t know about the Darpa Grand Challenge you should read about it a little first. You can probably find some good videos if you look. MIT entered for their first time this year and did remarkably well: 4th. 40 started, 11 qualified, 6 finished.

Continue...

Is the subject of the most recent “Speaking of Dartmouth” email. After reading it, all I know is that 1) it has something to do with the board of trustees and 2) I’m supposed to be mad about the lawsuit.

The lack of substance was pretty troubling. It reminded me of all the constitution mailings I got. i.e. a power grab. I can see Joran’s point that such power grabs are not necessarily bad for the college, I just don’t like when people try to manipulate me.

So with a little effort you can find out that the issue is the following. The alumni elect half the board of trustees. The board votes to add more seats to the board. Should half of those new seats be elected by the trustees or not? Jim thinks no, most of the alumni think yes.

Does anyone know how this problem came to be? If half of the board is responsive to the alumni, how could the other half manage to push such a thing through? And if there is dispute within the board, it should certainly be resolved within the current membership as opposed to after one side has granted themselves extra votes. So it would seem, I too advocate an injunction. I imagine that such would not severely “harm” the college or if it did, I hope it wouldn’t be “immeasurable” nor be too much of a “distraction … to the students faculty and staff”, or be “wildly expensive”.

Background: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly called the “Tamil Tigers” in the States, is a seperatist-terrorist organization in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a West Virginia sized island nation just of the south-east tip of India, with a population of about 20 million. The particulars of the LTTE’s (as I will call them in preference to “Tamil Tigers” so as to seem sophisticated and international) motivation and the righteousness or heinousness of their cause where not discernible in the amount of time I have alloted for this post. Let it be said, however, that the LTTE is not Muslim, and does not seem to discriminate against women. The LTTE wants an independant state in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka, where the Tamil people are in the majority. The Sri Lankan government thinks that “regional autonomy” should be good enough.

Recent news: It appears that the LTTE now have an air force. It is believed they smuggled parts for somewhere between one and five Zlin-143s, a Czech small (one non-turbo prop, two seats) airplane, into the jungle where the planes where reassembled and a secret 650 meter runway constructed. The aircraft were then rigged with makeshift external bomb racks.

The Sri Lankan government has itself a real air force, with supersonic fighters an intercepts made in China, Russia, and Israel. I don’t know how hard it is to shoot down a light aircraft from a supersonic interceptor. It might be easy, it might be hard. I wouldn’t be surprised either way.

Three times in the past month the LTTE air craft have taken off under the cover of night and bombed targets in Sri Lanka. The targets have been the national airport, a fuel storage depot, and a military base. Unlike some other governments, the Sri Lankans were able to respond to the aerial bombardment with anti-aircraft fire. Just like some other governments might, the Sri Lankans also immediately bombarded “rebel targets” somewhere in the jungle that may or may not have had airplanes at them.

I bring this up because I think jungle gorilla fighters with smuggled and re-assembled home made bombers is news more interesting than anything going on in the US right now.

Dartmouth just won the NCAA skiing championship. Something like 9 All-Americans. The last time Dartmouth won was 1976 and that was a tie. Before that it won in 1958. Surprise of the season, Lindsay Mann won the second run of the slalom and came in 4th.

A rule change this year means that every skiers’ score counts while in the past, you could throw out your worst two results. This meant that a team of 11 wasn’t at as much of a disadvantage. Notably DU had a team of 11 this year (so their score is the same as it would have been under the old rules). Looking to see which scores we would ave thrown out, it is obvious that everybody was totally solid. Our worst results were 17 and 21 pts, 23rd and 19th respectively. Those are good worsts to have. Anyway, without those 38 pts, today would have been a lot more of a nail-biter, but Dartmouth still would have won.

Everybody is talking about the Bush Admin taking a step back and deciding to go to the FISA court with it’s wiretapping program. None of the mainstream outlets seem to appreciate that what FISA does is give out warrants for wiretaps. What the NSA is doing is data mining. Unless FISA starts giving out warrants addressed to everybody, it’s not going to work.

Well, Slate noticed.

Slashdot ran a feature today chronicling something of an anti-simplicity backlash in the design world. Several important points were made, but one comment, by alleged design guru Don Norman, is absolutely bathed in idiocy:

“Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use [than Google’s].”

Yeah, I know. Blog bait if I’ve even seen it. But such specious reasoning demands a swift and solid refutation.

Continue...

Oh, Sony. How you’ll soon pine for the days of Playstation I, when your marketing gurus made the loudest statement since Leisure Suit Larry that the 18+ crowd had gamers in it yet. You saw an open market, made a competent machine that was easy to develop for, and became the industrial force in a notoriously tricky field. That was 1996; ten years later, your outlook is bleak. Continue...

I finally found a job. I’m doing “development” for a company that is trying to do content management for high school and college kids. Think Blackboard or OpenCourseWare plus Myspace or Facebook but with more emphasis on collaboration e.g. posts/comments, forums or Wiki-style pages.

That is pretty darm broad. Right now we are still feeling out markets, as in “Who are the users going to be?” and “How do we make money.” Next (at the same time, really) we have to figure out what they’re going to want¹.

The point of this is to ask for your ideas. I’ll have more specific questsions later but for now let’s just go with,

1. Tell me about your dream site and,
2. Tell me whether or not you were particularly pleased or displeased by anything in something that you use[d] (which for me might include, Blackboard, OCW, Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Wordpress, Textpattern, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, Plone).

Thank you, I eagerly await your rants.

¹ long digression In the software biz this is called “Requirements”, the phase when you decide on functionality. The next phase is “Design” where you say how you intend to meet the requirements. Finally the “Design” is translated into something codable, for instance, object design, protocol descriptions, timing diagrams etc. Then at the end, somebody writes some code.

For most people, the salaries involved with these tasts are somewhat counter-intuitive. The coding end is the end that looks like “work” while just imagining how it is going to work looks like the sort of stuff you dream up on a Sunday afternoon. But the money says that’s not right.

In fact, the hard end is the requirements. After that it is more or less a matter of translation. The closer you get to the coding end, the more mechanical this translation becomes. (The base level of coding has been handled by the compiler for decades. And the line is being pushed upward—for instance the auto-generation of code from UML).

It’s true that the translation implies an amount of refinement—to code something you need to be able to specify it with mathematical precision. At the same time, I would counter that at the coding end, the development cycle is much more tolerant of errors. This is because coding errors are of limitted scope and can be relatively easily fixed. On the other hand, an error at the design level might require than a large section of the code be redone and an error at the requirements level is typically fatal to the entire project.

Happy election day, everyone! Here’s the email I just sent to my friends around town: mostly a heads up that there is a tricky amendment.

I’m just writing to let you guys know how lucky you are to be living New Hampshire’s second congressional district, which looks like it will be a tight race between incumbent Republican Charlie Bass and Democrat challenger, Paul Hodes.

The voting is at the Middle School which is north on route 10, across from CRREL. Any of you can borrow my car to go vote. key location deleted

Also there are two amendments to know about. The first one is to prevent eminent domain takings for private usage (i.e. to counter the New London Supreme Court case) and should be an easy call. The second one is about dealing with reapportionment and was pretty tedious. It looks prudent except for that it looks game-able (perhaps deliberately so). Given the current problems with gerrymandering, I wish I was better prepared to know if it represented an improvement or not. I’ll give you some links.
vote yes
vote no

I was looking into getting a wireless guitar controller before Guitar Hero II comes out when I notice that Lik-Sang has been shut down. For those of you not geeky enough to know, Lik-Sang is where you go to import the games and electronics that you can only get in Asia¹.

I stopped reading slashdot ages ago, but I figured they would have interesting things to say. Well, they had okay links at least.

The stuff about certifications etc. is so obviously crap that it’s tedious that they would even mention it. Make no mistake, this is not a win for the consumer. The part that matters are the “rights” parts. Sony has “rights” to dictate where their products are and aren’t allowed to physically be?! There is now a new class of legally enforcable intellectual property called “Design Rights”? I thought that the DVD region code was bad. This could end up worse.

¹ People around here think that they are getting the most cutting edge stuff, like the USA is the technology capital of the world. In fact, we are often getting the dumbed down version. If you’ve ever tried to use a blackberry in a way that wasn’t intended, you’d know what I mean.

I just voted “no” on the thing. I’m sympathetic to the conspiracy theory that the new constitution was a direct result of the petition candidates success in the trustee election.

The whole thing smells bad to me. First of all, everything I received by the “vote yes” side was all fluff and no meat. They really failed to convince me that a new constitution was necessary:

1. As was pointed out on Volokh you don’t need a new system to address the simple rule of “no campaigning”.
2. As we recently discussed, approval voting does not “split votes”.
3. I don’t see how making a new alumni governing body will do anything but further insulate the establishment from the voting alumni.

The obvious question is “Why a whole new constitution and not a set of amendments?” The only answer I can think of is that people are trying to piggy-back items that would fail as amendments.

Related, the ballot says right on it what you’re supposed to vote for?! That makes it look even more like a power grab. I’ve got to admit that I didn’t read the details on the last couple ammendments and just voted for them because they told me not to.

Chewing up Reuters yesterday seems to have given me a taste for half-baked media. So for today’s lunch, I sampled a little Slate magazine, brazed in a light sauce of urban myopia, and served with a touch of upper-class condescension. Though well-presented, the dish combined flavors that were flatly incompatable, and left me with a decided aftertaste of half-assery.

This past Monday (Oct. 23), Slate magazine announced the Slate Green Challenge, a collaborative effort with eco-friendly ad magnet Trehugger.com, attempting to get Slate readers to realize the size of, and hopefully reduce, their collective impact on the planet’s ecosystem. I thought it a noble enough end, and being the sort who likes to gloat about their eco-friendliness, I eagerly began taking the quiz.

Problems arose immediately. What if your home is heated with something other than natural gas or oil? The quiz offered all sorts of transportation options (“Subway” “Bus in city”, “Bus on highway”, “Motorcycle” or “Taxi”), but plenty of folks live places without cities, highways, subways or a reliable taxi service. Do their carpooling, biking, walking, Segwaying, and scooter-riding miles not count toward reducing impact? The quiz also assumes all its takers own and use a dishwasher and washing machine. To top it all off, the quiz failed to produce a result the first time I took it, and rebuffed my repeated attempts at a retake.

I wasn’t the only one to see these shortcomings. A brief look at The Fray shows plenty of other readers taking up similar issues (not that Slate acknowledged any of this in their Fraywatch section). But I figured, hey, this quiz is just to establish a baseline. What really matters are the improvement suggestions, right? Yes – so long as you don’t realize the magazine’s suggestions suck. Just look at their transportation tips ; it’s all “tire pressures”, “air filters” and “fly less” – no “use mass transit” or “buy a bicycle”.

I can understand living in the city and not being aware of things like pellet stoves. But it’s all of 3 miles from Jersey to the Bronx – does Slate not think that’s manageable on a bike? Or perhaps using the largest subway system in the world? God forbid someone mention a bus. It may just be a touch of rural-bred Bryanism, but why do I get the feeling this article ignored obvious transportation solutions based on the social perceptions of its author and target audience?

Progressivist ranting aside, the real pièce de résistance from these self-indulgent chefs was not served until a few hours later, when the e-zine published this lovely article on the gasification of coal. Yes, on one page, they stressed the importance of reducing carbon emissions and curbing the greenhouse effect, while praising an inescapably inefficient means of producing cheap gas on another. Is this obviously self-defeating juxtaposition reflective of the ineptitude of Slate’s editors – or just their opinion of the readership?

Check out this Reuters news capsule (you might want to pause the accompanying video before it gets past the ad) about burlesque star Dita von Teese. Now check have a look at the corresponding Wikipedia article about Ms. von Teese. If you’re inattentive or pressed for time, these two DeepQuote links cut straight to the chase.

I’m not entirely sure Reuters plagiarism republication of that Wikipedia article fits entirely under “fair use” in the GPL. It’s surprising, frankly, that this problem doesn’t occur more in the opposite direction, with ill-informed netizens copying wholesale onto Wikipedia from existing pages; at any rate, people have been fired for ripping off The Free Encyclopedia before.

Robbie’s mailing address is:

CPT ROB DAPICE
A Co. 4-23 IN, 172nd SBCT
APO, AE 09322

Juliana Dapice writes that her husband, our beloved friend and former teammate Robbie, scheduled to return home from Iraq this fall has instead had his service in the 172nd Stryker Brigade extended indefinitely, and will be redeployed to Baghdad in the near future.

Best wishes Robbie and Juliana.