Geek of All Trades

Bad luck and bad backup habits - not a good combination

I had a computer meltdown this evening - this was a brand new computer so I wasn't expecting it - and I've lost a bunch of stuff that I might not be able to recover. 

If you've ever sent me email, for any reason, and you'd like me to have your email address, can you please drop me a note?  You can send it to filmigeek at comcast dot net.

Keypads - which way is up?

I am reading Henry Petroski's Invention by Design, an interesting little book about how engineering and invention have been applied to solve such every day engineering problems as clipping papers together, storing carbonated beverages in retail-friendly containers, and crossing bodies of water.

In a sidebar, Petroski notes that telephone keypads and calculator keypads have evolved opposite standards when it comes to key ordering:

Telephone      Calculator

  1 2 3          7 8 9
  4 5 6          4 5 6
  7 8 9          1 2 3
  * 0 #          0 + =

(I hope my attempt at monospace formatting works here.)  In telephones, "1" is at the top left and the numerals proceed across and down to "9" on the bottom right, whereas in calculators, "1" is at the bottom left  and "9" the top right.  I have been a regular user of both telephones and calculators for something like 30 years (though concededly, of telephones having keypads for perhaps only 20 years), and I have never once noticed this disparity of standard. 

Petroski asks, "Do users who alternate frequently between telephones and calculators find the difference to be a serious problem?"  From my own experience, I have to say no, patently not.  How is that possible?  I have no idea what the answer is but I suspect there is a psychological explanation.  There must be a separation in the brain's task space between the act of punching in a telephone number on the one hand, and that of entering numbers for calculation on the other, a separation sufficient that when turning one's attention to one of the two tasks one isn't even momentarily confused by expectations associated with the other.  Or something. 
I am amazed that I never noticed this myself and I'll have to give some thought to why that is. 

Charles river moonrise

I snapped this picture (with my cellphone camera) out my office window earlier this week.

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)  It doesn't fully capture the beauty of the full moon rising over the Zakim Bridge, but it's a start.  This won't be my view very much longer - I'm moving to a different office next week, facing west instead of north.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to see anything other than the next office building. 

Earth: now, in three dimensions

The fascinating Data Mining blog reports that Microsoft has launched a mapping service to compete with Google Earth.  I have played with Google Earth; it integrates Google Maps' satellite images with a cute interface that allows you to fly around on the globe and zoom in and out, from orbiter altitude to the tops of buildings. You can also mark locations of interest and upload your marks so that others can access them.  But Google Earth's images are ultimately the flat, two-dimensional projections of satellite photographs.  According to Data Mining, Microsoft's service includes 3-D models of locations (I'm not sure how complete the 3-D models are; they may be limited to just certain cities at this point).  Data Mining has a post with screenshots of some of the models.  Microsoft apparently plans to generate revenue by selling advertising space on billboards in this virtual world!

In Neil Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, the main character (the aptly named Hiro Protagonist), is given an elaborate piece of software called "Earth" that he uses in his quest to save the world from a  narcissitic zillionaire's nefarious plot to reprogram the human brain.  Hiro's "Earth" program looks on the surface very much like Microsoft's Virtual Earth - Hiro can spin the globe, swoop down on a model of any location he wishes, zoom from place to place just by moving a virtual overhead camera.   

The difference is that Hiro's "Earth" incorporates real-time data from all over the internet - news footage, personal photographs, written reporting - to provide a view that it is up-to-date as information permits of whatever is happening at any spot on the globe.  So when Hiro wants to pinpoint the location of "The Raft," the zillionaire's giant floating city, which he knows is somewhere off the California coast, all he has to do is train his "Earth" program on the western pacific and find The Raft on the virtual model.  He  can see news helicopters buzzing around it so he knows that the information is fairly up-to date, likely based on video footage transmitted from the helicopters directly to the internet, accessed and integrated by the "Earth" program.  He can compute The Raft's heading and speed, and use that information to choose which port he should fly to so that he can meet The Raft and board it. 

I wonder whether these mapping programs will ever approach the integrated power of Hiro's "Earth" program.  That could be incredibly useful.  But it would also carry a great potential for abuse, whether by government agencies or by private organizations bent on disrupting the peace of others. 

New toy

I am writing this blog post using my new work Computer, a Toshiba tablet PC.  I am using the stylus to handwrite the post and the Computer is interpreting my handwriting as I write and converting it to the text you are reading. It is doing an impressive job.  I have had to make a few Corrections, but more because I am still learning how to use the system than because the system did not work well. 

My handwriting is not bad, but David's is quite bad and the handwriting recognition Software was even able to make sense out of that.  One funny problem I am noticing as I write is that the Software has trouble with initial letters like "S" and "C" - it cannot tell if they are capital or lowercase.  I have left these errors in the post, rather than correcting them, So that you may see where they have occurred.

I  am not sure if I will use the tablet for long, or if the novelty will wear off and I will just use it as a regular computer. We shall see.

Cell phone camera

Laptops in class?

I came across this item today - an AP wire story highlighting several law professors who have banned the use of laptops in their classrooms.

I attended law school during a time of transition with regard to laptop use in class.  When I arrived at my school in 1999, the classrooms had only recently been renovated to have power outlets at each seat, and I would estimate that nearly half of my classmates used laptops to take notes.  By the time I graduated in 2002, more like two thirds of my classmates were using laptops, and some of the classrooms had ethernet ports at every seat so that students could surf the web during class.

I was somewhat old school, I suppose, being a bit older than many of my classmates - I was 27 when I started law school - and I took notes in a bound notebook with a pencil.  Although I can understand the appeal of notetaking by computer - most computer-age people, including me, can type faster than they can write - I still enjoy the old-fashioned, pencil-and-paper approach.  I have always felt that there is a hard-wired connection between my hands and my brain, and I remember things best by writing them down.  Typing them doesn't have the same psychological value.  And a good portion of my law school classmates agreed with me. 

Today, though, I am sure that nearly all law students are using laptops in class.  And if they are anything like my classmates, they are using them to play solitaire and to IM their friends as much as they are using them to take notes.  My professors, like the professors interviewed in the AP article, had a variety of strategies for encouraging students to pay attention to the class.  Some employed the good old-fashioned fear of God, the bolt-from-the-blue, Socratic method, Paper Chase approach.  Others had more creative tactics.  One professor, I recall, tended to roam about the room during class discussions, requiring laptop users to keep their wits about them, and minimize their Free-Cell games and browser windows as he approached.  If he happened upon a student who was so engrossed in the extracurriculars as to be oblivious to his presence, he might look over the student's shoulder and offer some advice:  "You can put the ten of clubs on top of that red jack."   

Perhaps I am just a small-minded fuddy-duddy mired in the twentieth century, but it's hard for me to think of any compelling justification for having internet connectivity at every seat in a law classroom.  It is still reasonable, even in the internet age, to assign students material that they are expected to have read before coming to class, and to use class time for lectures and discussions about that material.  The only real use for an internet connection in class is to divert the connectee's attention from what is going on in class.  Even with my pencil and paper, I was not immune to distraction - in law school I was occasionally known to play backgammon or chess on my Palm Pilot.  I know how hard it is to pay attention in class.  It's senseless to make that even more difficult by offering ready access to the nearly infinite temptations of the internet, when the possible benefits of real-time, in-class access are so limited.  I have some sympathy for professors who ban the tools altogether.

What is a picture worth?

In a post about the relative storage size of English and Chinese texts, Language Log's Mark Liberman makes the following observation:

"A compressed copy of all the text I've ever written is roughly the size of one high resolution digital photograph."

It would seem that a picture is worth considerably more than a thousand words - at least in digital storage terms. 

More on nifty international typefaces

In a recent post I mentioned the use of UTF-8 encoding for computer displays of non-Roman alphabets like Devanagari.  There, I included links to a blog in Hindi and the BBC-Hindi page.   

In that vein, I recently came across a blog in Arabic.  (The log-in page of my bloghost includes a list of "recently-updated blogs" that offers an interesting and random window into the blogosphere.)  I think the fact that UTF-8 can handle right-to-left writing systems as well as left-to-right systems is pretty impressive. 

If you, like me, enjoy seeing text displayed in a few of the great variety of scripts that humans have devised, the "What is Unicode?" page is a good place to start - it has links down the left-hand side of the page to the same text in dozens of the world's languages, including those using right-to-left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew, beautiful and odd (to my American eye) scripts like Thai and Georgian, and of course, my beloved Hindi.  Unicode can even handle complex, non-alphabetic and non-syllabic scripts like Chinese.