Standing Here Beside Myself

On Stonehenge's Location

2007-11-24T19:25:00.000-05:00

A friend on Facebook who read my earlier post on Stonehenge asked this question:

You hinted at it, but do we have any idea why this location was selected for the building of Stonehenge?

Since Facebook's message system limits the message length, I am replying here.

If memory serves, it so happens that there is a subtle astronomical relationship between the 'standstills' (extreme rising/setting points of the sun and moon) at Stonehenge's latitude. There are 4 particular spots around Stonehenge where there are or have been markers of some kind, such as standing stones. One could use these markers to observe the standstills. The curious thing is that these spots form a rectangle. If Stonehenge had been built a few miles north or south of the spot it is on, i.e., at a different latitude, these markers would not have formed a rectangle but a non-rectangular parallelogram. Thus it appears that the original builders chose that particular latitude in order to take advantage of that fact. The amazing thing is that archaeological evidence indicates that the very first structure at Stonehenge was erected around 8000 B.C., which is basically at the end of the last ice age. So the shaman types who were running the show back then apparently already had enough astronomical smarts to figure that out.

Another factor in the choice of location is that on the Salisbury plains where Stonehenge sits has a relatively clear view of the horizon all the way around. Other places have too many trees, hills, etc. Even so, the ground is not exactly level at the site. Nonetheless, the final architect who designed the actual henge (hanging stone) structure, managed to do so in a way that the upper surface of the megalith ring is within about 6 inches of being level across its whole diameter. This is also amazing given that the builders had only the crudest of stone tools to shape the stones.

There are lots of amazing things about Stonehenge. I'm sure there are more we have not learned yet, and some we may never learn.

Re-Purposing Stonehenge

2007-03-04T15:10:00.000-05:00

Some months ago, I posted an article about a Michigan man who had worked out a set of techniques that Neolithic people could have used to erect megalithic monuments like Stonehenge. That iconic ring of stone has been the subject of the wildest and most bizarre kinds of speculations for years:

The Wikipedia article referenced above provides a good overview of many of these wilder ideas, so I won't bother with trying to include any here. However, a few minutes of Googling and link-chasing will produce a dismaying number of other sites with views at least as bizarre as those suggested in the cartoon. (I found a totally new one just today, a suggestion that Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments were actually cosmic impact early warning systems.)

Still, the serious question remains: "Who built Stonehenge, and why?" Over the last decade or so I have occasionally spent a little time looking into this. The most comprehensive and sensible explanation I have found is given in archaeoastronomer John North's book Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric Man and the Cosmos. Prof. North (and doubtless several generations of trusty grad students) have done an enormous amount of research reconstructing orientations and alignments of hundreds of Neolithic stone and earthen monuments thoughout northwestern Europe. Briefly, North's research confirms that these monuments reflect the development of several different religious practices over the course of millennia:

a star-oriented cult that placed emphasis on the ceremonial observance of star risings and settings that occurred daily
a moon-oriented cult that placed emphasis on ceremonial observance of the complicated pattern of lunar risings and settings that repeats itself over an 18.6 year period
a sun-oriented cult that placed emphasis on ceremonial observance of the rising and setting sun at soltices and equinoxes that occurred annually

The many earthen barrow and ditch structures in England and surrounding countries mostly reflect the first cult. The megalithic structures reflect the second two cults. Stonehenge, in its final form, is best suited for sun ceremonies, but has strong features associated with the lunar cult as well. Of course, both cults might have been active co-temporaneously at different points, as well as a few star cults as well.

Some years ago English astronomer Gerald Hawkins caused a great stir with his well-publicized books claiming that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory or 'calculator', used to predict astronomical events. Although there is certainly an aspect of prediction associated with the monument, North's interpretation points more to its religious uses. This can perhaps best be seen by considering the basic alignment of Stonehenge, which is oriented along a very precise northeast-southwest axis. You can see in the photo to the right the so-called 'avenue', outlined by ditches, leading in a southwesterly direction toward the center of the monument. Hawkins claimed, and supposedly demonstrated, that Stonehenge was oriented towards the rising sun on the day of the summer solstice. If you stand at the right spot in the ring at dawn on that day looking down the avenue, you can in fact see the sun rising over the 'heel stone'.

However, there are some problems with this claim in being the principal way to use Stonehenge for observations. One is that the avenue slopes downhill towards the northeast. Seeing the sun rise at a particular spot on the horizon is totally dependent on whether there are trees at the horizon line, and how tall they are. A change in height of these trees would cause the apparent point of first visibility of the sun to shift left or right.

An even more serious objection to this theory is that only a very small number of people could stand at the appropriate viewing spot to see this supposedly important event. While there are certainly antecedents in various world religions for events that only the high priests can observe, from a believer's point of view, it is much more satisfying to see the event for oneself.

Prof. North noted that one can turn the orientation around 180°. Standing on the avenue, looking southwest, uphill toward the monument, one can also see the setting sun at the winter solstice. This claim has a number of advantages. The first is that, since you are looking uphill, the stone ring forms an 'artificial horizon' which precisely defines the moment of sun's last visibility. There is no vagary depending on the presence, absence or height of distant trees. Moreover, there is room on the avenue for literally thousands of observers, all of whom could participate in watching this event. Finally, based on other archaeological evidence at many other sites, it was much more important for this ancient cult to pay attention to the setting sun at the winter solstice, because it effectively defines the end of the solar year. Sunrise on the next day begins a new year, with each day growing longer and more alive, as it were.

Stonehenge was built in stages, from 3100BC to 1930BC, with some evidence of wooden structures being used on the site as early as 8000BC. The builders were pre-literate, although obviously energetic and well-organized. Other sites in the general area show settlements big enough to house thousands of inhabitants, as well as many large farms. Although theses people lacked metal-working and writing skills, they must have had a robust social structure and a high culture. Building these monuments was important to them, considering how much work it took to cut and move the stones, and to dig the huge amounts of earth involved, all with stone handtools.

By the way, the Druids had nothing to do with building Stonehenge. They didn't show up until 300BC, over a thousand years after the last addition to the monument. And the 'neo-Druids' who dress up and do weird things in the stone circle on Mid-summer's Day are sadly mistaken, or just silly. Real druids tended to shun flat open spaces like the Salisbury Plain where Stonehenge is, and performed their rituals in groves or hilltops. Still, they might have used the monument some, since they were concerned with solar events like solstices.

Nothing New Under The Sun vs. You Can't Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

2007-02-15T21:13:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm doing a bit of 'remedial software engineering' at my new job. This project involves taking a large bit of legacy code, and re-organizing it. After talking about it with several of my colleagues, it occurred to me that the proper way to do this was to split the functionality up into Unix-like filters that can be piped together.

Filters and pipes are just one of the reasons that programmers tend to fall in love with Unix. In general, a program that acts like a filter reads data from a standard input, performs some operation on it (select part of it, change part of it, sort it, etc.), and then writes the result to the standard output. A pipe (or pipeline) consists of a string of filters, each of whose output becomes the input for the next filter in the pipeline.

This is an extraordinarily powerful idea. It allows the programmer to concentrate on having a program do just one thing (e.g., select all of the lines in a file that contain a given string), yet be able to use that program in conjunction with other programs to achieve some more complicated results.

Consider a simple example. Here are some commands that work on my Linux machines here at home:

'ps -e' = list all of the processes currently running, showing their process IDs and their names
'grep ' = read all of the input coming into the program one line at a time, but only write out those lines that contain .
'wc -l' = read all of the input coming into the program one line at a time, but only write out how many lines were input

By themselves, these program are certainly useful, but using the pipeline notion, I can quickly combine them to do something very useful. Suppose I wanted to know how many processes my webserver had running, ready to answer web requests from outside. Since I know that the webserver processes are named 'httpd', I can then answer my question like this:

ps -e | grep httpd | wc -l

(The vertical bar symbol is called, appropriately enough, the 'pipe' symbol.) The above command line first executes 'ps -e' to get a list of all the running processes, then puts the resulting list through 'grep httpd' to select only those lines in the list that contain the string 'httpd', and then counts those. Of course, I could have written a program to answer this question. However, since I have these filter-type programs, and pipes, I didn't need to write anything new, but could simply string together the functions that I needed to solve my immediate problem.

The filter/pipe idea is so powerful and useful that even competing operating systems, like Microsoft Windows, have borrowed it. Microsoft's DOS, which Windows sits on top of, implemented a very similar kind of idea years ago (but of course long after Unix had it). Neither Unix nor DOS, nor any other operating system that I know of, has come up with an approach that really matches the power and simplicity of this idea for organizing computation.

All of the above was just to explain the notion of filters and pipes so that you could understand what I wanted to do with the legacy code I inherited. My idea has two key parts. First, re-group the existing code into discrete, well-defined chunks, each of which takes some standard kind of input, performs a single operation, and then returns a standardized kind of output. Second, implement some sort of framework that allows the user to choose these well-defined chunks, and string them into a desired sequence. With this scheme, one can quickly put together a system to solve a particular problem without having to write a customized piece of code to do it.

All of that seemed like the obvious way to go. Then I began having second thoughts. Perhaps one of the (dis)advantages of growing older is that the absolute certainty of youth slowly gives way to the gray-colored ambiguities of middle age. Was a pipe/filter scheme really the best way to handle this design? Would a more integrated platform be a better approach? Was I so stuck in a particular mindset that I could not see a better way to do it? Is there a better new trick that this old dog just can't learn?

I sometimes fear that is so. When I bump into new software development approaches (Java and its menagerie of associated folderol comes to mind), there are times when I just can't make myself buy into it. In fact, I find myself making excuses to avoid having to use the new approach. It feels like the costs of learning the new system far outweigh any visible benefits of doing so. However, if I am honest with myself, that might simply be because of an old-dog syndrome.

I don't have an answer to this particular question with regard to the task at hand. So, I guess I'll proceed along the path that I can see. Unfortunately, it can be demotivating not be sure of the wisdom of one's approach.

Multiple Desktops

2007-02-01T21:26:00.000-05:00

It's no secret or surprise that I greatly prefer Linux to Windows for a working environment. However, reality being the stubborn and uncompromising force that it is, I've found myself increasingly having to use Windows just to decrease the amount of friction in my life. Ideology is for the young.

That said, there are some things that Linux provides that I have sorely missed in Windows. One of those is the ability to have multiple desktops. That is, under Linux, I can have, say, four desktops active at the same time, with different windows open on each of them. Moreover, I can switch back and forth between them with a keyboard shortcut, or a mouse click in a special widget on the taskbar.

People who have only used Windows are always puzzled by this concept. "Why would you want to do that?" they ask me, with genuine befuddlement evident in their faces. The reason for having multiple desktops is that it allows me to separate my concerns, to organize my work into distinct places that help me keep my tasks straight.

Here's another way to think about it. Would you want to live in a house with only one room, where your refrigerator, your toilet and your bed were all within the same four walls? Unless you are pathological in some way, the answer would clearly be "No way!". However, that is precisely the predicament that Windows users are in every day.

Using four desktops, on the other hand, I can put email on one, iTunes and other media players on another, my current major task on a third, and still have a fourth desktop available if another important task pops up later in the day. When that second task pops up, I don't have to futz around minimizing windows and such to clear things away so that I can work on the new problem. I just switch to a new desktop, do whatever is needed to, then go back to my previous task's desktop. In the meantime, I can also handle a bit of email, and fiddle with iTunes to pick another playlist. And one is not limited to four desktops. There were occasions a few years ago when I made regular use of eight desktops, although that was really more a symptom of a problem with the way my job was defined (or rather, not defined).

Sure Windows let's you minimize and maximize individual windows easily. However, that does not really address the fact that a working context almost always involves two or more windows. For example, when I'm programming, I have at least one window running a code editor, and another where I can test the code. When I'm composing an email message or working on a document, I am usually looking at other email messages, documents, or web pages someplace else. When I'm updating my calendar, I'm looking at email, to-do lists, and the like.

Each of these sets of windows constitutes a working context. You use all of the windows in a given context, shifting your attention quickly back and forth between them. Having to minimize/maximize or shuffle windows around with mouse clicks is a big impediment to productivity. It is this problem that has made the use of multiple monitors more popular lately. However, multiple monitors are not really feasible for the laptop user, or for the budget-constrained.

The real problem arises when I want to go back to an earlier context that I was working in. With a single desktop, I would have to bring several windows back into view at one time, either by maximizing windows that I had previously minimized, or by riffling through all the windows open on the screen to get the ones I wanted back "on top", that is, in view. That is simply too much bother most of the time, so my productivity slowly drops as I lose track of where I am. In fact, I often found that I have had to open the same window two or even three times because I could not find it when I need it.

So, given the need to have multiple desktops in Windows, what are the choices? Lately I have taken to checking out the ever-growing pile of well-done posts at Lifehacker.com, which is an outstanding multi-author blog devoted to personal productivity. They have done several posts over the last year or so about tools for multiple desktops, or as they refer to them, virtual desktops.

The first of these tools that I tried was Virtual Desktop Manager, which was one of Microsoft's PowerToys. These are apps that you can find on Microsoft's website, but which come with this proviso:

We take great care to ensure that PowerToys work as they should, but they are not part of Windows and are not supported by Microsoft. For this reason, Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer questions about PowerToys. PowerToys are for Windows XP only and will not work with Windows Vista.

Given that ringing endorsement, I thought it only fair to give it a try. Although the Virtual Desktop Manager did in fact more or less provide multiple desktops, it was flat-out buggy. In particular, it kept losing windows. I would open a window on one desktop, switch to a different desktop, and then later switch back, only to find that the window was gone, or at least invisible. I could see from the Windows Task Manager that the application was still running, but there was no way to access the window. I suffered through this for a few days, and then uninstalled it and went looking for something else.

Next I tried Virtual Dimension, which Lifehacker listed as a 'Download of the Day' for 4/27/2006. It worked pretty well, and was nicely configurable. The basic application worked well enough that I never even got around to checking out a lot of the options that it had. Sadly though, it began to really annoy me. Once in a while it would simply close down a window. This seemed to happen most often with Windows Explorer, so there was no real harm done. Also, it had an odd penchant for opening new windows on the wrong desktop. This happened most often with Internet Explorer. When I was using Microsoft's Outlook Web Access in IE to access email for my new employer's mail, Virtual Dimension would sometimes open windows for new mail messages on the current desktop. However, most of the time it would open them on some other desktop, usually one where I had previously moved a mail message so that I could work with it. It took me a while to figure this out, because of course there was no indication that the window I wanted was already open somewhere else. One of the most annoying things was that for some applications (such as MS Access, which my new employer uses to track our time), Virtual Dimension would show the same window on every desktop, thus defeating the raison d'etre for multiple desktops.

My annoyance level got high enough that today I decided to try out another multiple desktop tool. I went back to Lifehacker and found another package called Dexpot, which was the Download of the Day for Dec. 28, 2006. It also had good reviews from other Lifehacker readers. Other good signs are that (1) it was produced by a German software company, who (2) gives away the product for free to individuals, but charges for companies. If they expect to charge for it, you'd hope that they would have spent at least a little bit of effort with software quality.

Dexpot installed easily. It has lots of configurable features that I've only begun to check out. The biggest thing for me, though, will be that it not lose windows, nor put them in the wrong spot. So far, so good.

Of course, I wouldn't have to mess around with any of this in Linux, whose window manager software works reliably, and which doesn't drop windows, move them around spontaneously, or make them show up in multiple places unexpectedly. Microsoft is still trailing behind, not providing features that other operating systems had years ago. I guess I should be grateful that the folks in Redmond haven't made it altogether impossible for third-party software vendors to at least attempt writing applications to make up those deficiencies in Windows.

Radioactive Non-Superheroes

2007-01-28T18:19:00.001-05:00

Numerous comic book superheroes start their careers by being exposed to radiation or radioactive substances of some sort. In those (fictional) cases, the effects are sometimes bizarre (not to mention unsightly), but our erstwhile heroes always find a way to turn their new situations to some advantage.

It turns out that exposure to radioactive substances happens in our much more boring reality, too. Unfortunately, it never confers superpowers. If anything, it tends to produce occasions for great annoyance. This Reuters report describes the rising incidence of innocent civilians triggering radiation detectors at security checkpoints because of the presence of medical radioisotopes in their bodies. The article tells how six people triggered the radiation detectors at this past year's Christmas tree-lighting party at NYC's Rockefeller Center.

"All six had recently had medical treatments with radioisotopes in their bodies," Richard Falkenrath, the city's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, told a Republican governors' meeting in Miami recently. "That happens all the time."

The article also tells of an even more humiliating incident:

In August, the British Medical Journal described the case of a very embarrassed 46-year-old Briton who set off the sensors at Orlando airport in Florida six weeks after having radioiodine treatment for a thyroid condition.

He was detained, strip-searched and sniffed by police dogs before eventually being released, the journal said in its "Lesson of the Week" section.

Something like this happened to a friend of mine a couple of years ago. Ermanno is an Italian-born naturalized citizen. At the time of this incident he was living in upstate New York, but working a lot in Ann Arbor. As a cost-saving measure, he actually drove back and forth between the two locations. He began having back problems, which became increasingly severe. One night they were so severe, he ended up in the ER at the University of Michigan Hospital. He had a whole battery of tests. They finally determined that his back pain was caused largely by the fact that he was sitting on his rather out-sized wallet for those ten-hour drives back and forth to New York.

The good news was that this diagnosis showed him how to eliminate his back pain immediately, namely, always take out his wallet before he went on long drives. The bad news occurred a day or so later, when he drove back to New York. He always took the most direct route, which went from Ann Arbor, to Detroit, through Canada, and back into New York at Niagra Falls. All went well until he tried to cross back into the States. To his mystified dismay, he triggered the radiation detector at the security checkpoint.

The border guards didn't put him through a strip-search, but they did turn his car inside out, searched his luggage, etc. It didn't look good: here he was, a foreign national, driving a rental car, triggering a radiation alarm as he crossed into U.S. territory. (Remember, this was only a year or two after 9/11.)

Finally, after questioning Ermanno about his recent activities, one of the more intelligent border people had the bright idea that the radioactivity might be due to one of medical procedures he had been through. They called UM Hospital's ER and found that, sure enough, one of the tests he had been through involved injecting a radioisotope. If had waited another day or so, the natural decay of the radioactive material would have reduced it to below detectable levels. But alas ...

The Reuters article speculates that it might be wise to start carrying a note from your doctor describing the reason you seem radioactive. This problem is probably just going to get worse, as detectors become more sensitive, and able to pick up radioisotope traces even weeks after their use. It isn't entirely far-fetched to worry that eventually we may all have to start carrying not only our identification papers at all times, but our medical records, too.

Thawed Out But Still Behind

2007-01-28T17:09:00.000-05:00

Once you get behind, it certainly is hard to get caught up again. The power outage of two weeks ago took a big toll in almost every part of our life here, my writing included. As I described a few days later, we eventually got our power back and began to put everything back in place.

However, I was not really able to get back into my normal pace once power returned. I'm not complaining, though, since the reason was that I started a new part-time job, something that my family and I are very happy about.

I haven't worked since March 11, 2005 when I went on medical leave to deal with multiple myeloma. During the intervening months since then, my employer decided that they didn't need my position any more and terminated me in absentia. Their reasoning in that decision was quite faulty, in my opinion, but perhaps it's just as well. The company has continued to do poorly under that same management, and it doesn't look like it will survive long anyway.

Since I was terminated, I have been able to continue my family's healthcare coverage using a COBRA extension. This allowed us to get the same coverage by paying the insurance premiums ourselves. However, doing so is almost prohibitively expensive. Our coverage currently costs over $11oo/month. Worse, one can use a COBRA extension for only 18 months. One way or the other, I knew that I was working with a limited amount of time to find an alternate means to provide healthcare insurance.

My new employer made me a very generous offer that allows me to work at a reduced pace, yet maintain decent healthcare insurance. Moreover, the work itself will be quite interesting, and I should be able to make a useful contribution. Another bonus is that I'll be working with some old friends, whom I have collaborated with a number of times over the past 15 years or so.

I started this new position on January 22, 2007, and I have been quite busy ever since then. There has been the usual bit of administrivia, filling out a seemingly endless number of forms, all asking for slightly different variations of the same information. There has also been a fair amount of computer setup, trying to get my laptop properly configured to work both inside the corporate firewall, and through a VPN connection from home. And of course, I've been trying to learn more about the tasks at hand.

My first project involves my becoming very conversant with a scientific programming language called Interactive Data Language (IDL), which is a quasi-descendant of the venerable Fortran (a language I first used in 1968). My new employer has built up a large body of legacy IDL code that needs to be re-organized and cast into a more readily usable form. I've always said that I'm really a frustrated librarian, so I expect that I'll be able to do some good here.

I find blogging to be therapeutic, so I have really missed my regular writing times. I'll be trying to re-balance my schedule so that I can get back to those. I'm glad that I'm only working part-time. One of my frustrations these past few months is the realization at how much more 'inefficient' my life is now. Everything I do seems to take longer than it used to. Although I am in remission, I still have a large number of medically related tasks that take up significant parts of the day. Also, I need more sleep than I used to be able to get by with. Finally, I am just plain slower than I used to be. Every activity, from eating to walking down a hall, I now have to do at half the speed I used to be able to manage. On off days, I'm even slower than that. I guess I'm supposed to learn patience from this. So will everyone else, if they are waiting on me. My brain still seems to be working at close to normal speed most of the time, so I'm hoping that I can learn a style of working that makes better use of thinking and less of moving.

More On Thawing Out

2007-01-20T12:28:00.000-05:00

I just read over yesterday's post about our various low-power and no-power woes of the past few days. I realized that I sounded pretty whiny, especially when I consider that there were some unfortunate folks who were completely without power from Monday through at least yesterday. I heard from several sources that there were still whole neighborhoods in the western part of Ann Arbor that had been without power since the ice storm. And it's been cold here, well below freezing for a great part of that time.

I should point out that all of these troubles just re-affirm my contention that wires and cables are nothing but trouble.

Thawing Out

2007-01-19T16:32:00.000-05:00

I mentioned before that we had low voltage power in the house after an ice-laden tree branch hit the power line coming into the house, and pulled it partially away from the pole. The line itself was hanging low over the back yard, maybe 7 feet off the ground, much lower than it should. We had what looked like low voltage. Every time we turned on anything with a sizable current draw, the lights would brighten and/or dim. If this went on for more than a few seconds, then the UPS on our main server would start honking out its low-voltage warning.

I reported this on Monday morning to DTE, our local power company. And again Monday evening. And again Tuesday morning. And again Tuesday evening. (Are you seeing a pattern?) And several times on Wednesday. They were always "unable to give an estimate at this time". Eventually, though, I began hearing that someone would look at our power by 6pm Wednesday. No-one came. Later that evening when I called, I was surprised to hear the automated system tell me that my problem should now be resolved. I quickly got hold of a customer service representative and disabused them of that notion. They allegedly made sure that my problem report was indeed still open, and that someone would be out to check on Thursday.

I called multiple times on Thursday, finally getting the promise that someone would come out around 4pm. Sure enough, a DTE tech did show up about then. She poked around for about twenty minutes measuring things, and determined that the problem was an 'open neutral'. The wires bringing the two phases of current into the house were intact, but the main tension cable, which is also the neutral conductor, had snapped up near the pole. This was an unsafe situation, so she completely cut our power, and said that she would report this. Since we now had no power, she said that we would be moved higher in the priority queue for problem resolution. Right. It must have really sucked to be low priority.

I kept calling every few hours, as the house got colder. Thursday evening, Mary, Tim and I went out for pizza, and came back to a cold, dark house. We sat around reading by candlelight in the living room. Finally, around 9:30 or so, another DTE tech came. He had the bright idea (actually, it seemed like a pretty good idea) to see if he could get us hooked back up by using a good ground in place of the neutral connection. He tried valiantly to make our ground connection work, but alas it just wouldn't for some reason. (There were some strange things about the way our house ground was set up, but fixing those didn't fix the grounding problem.) So, he left around 10pm. We were still very dark, and getting colder.

Thursday morning brought no change except slowly dropping temperatures in the house. I kept calling DTE. Finally, around 12:30pm a team of three workers from some electrical contractor in Detroit showed up. (They were not DTE employees.) They restrung the cable, reconnected the neutral, and turned our power back on. It was a good thing, too. The temperature inside had gotten down to 41° before they got us turned on again.

Joy of joys, we had power. I went around turning on computers and network gear, while Mary got a load of laundry going and reset all the clocks. The house ever so slowly warmed up. Some. Well, only a little. After a while, Mary pointed out that the heating zone which covered the living room and dining room was not getting heat. Sigh. I called our regular HVAC repair place, and they sent out one of their guys. He found the problem (apparently a pocket of air had formed in the problematic zone of our hot water heating system during the long inactivity) and fixed it. He left around 5:30pm. Right now it's 6:39pm and the house is up to 51°.

I just took a break for dinner. Mary's sister Karen is here visiting for her birthday. Now I see that the temperature is about 60°, although it is colder than that in the bedrooms still. Here in my office I turned on both my laptop and the big noisy desktop machine to help warm up the place. (I also had some picture editing to do on the big machine, so that wasn't a big waste.)

After we got power back this afternoon, Mary told me "Little House On The Prairie isn't all it's cracked up to be." I'm glad she is seeing it that way now. I've always thought that. My idea of a recreational vehicle is the Starship Enterprise. That's 1701-D (the Next Generation ship), mind you, a real home away from home. Come to think of it, though, at least 10% of their episodes involve losing power. Never mind. I would like a Honda home power generator, though.

Low Power Blues

2007-01-15T14:30:00.000-05:00

The nasty ice storm that trashed its way across the middle of the continent has made its way to Michigan. It left about a quarter of an inch of ice on all the tree branches. In particular, it weighed down the branches of a tall white pine tree in our back yard so much that all of them bent way down and some of them broke off. Unfortunately, the tree has grown into the path of the power line and two phone lines that come from the pole in the corner of the yard all the way to our house. So a lot of the bent and broken branches ended up on these lines.

Although none of the lines broke, it was obvious that something was wrong. My first clue was when I turned on the toaster oven in the kitchen early this morning, and all of the lights dimmed to half intensity. A few other experiments confirmed that we were facing a low-voltage situation. Mary and I went around turning off and disconnecting what we could. I powered down Tex, the new server that I'm setting up as our new cavnar.com host. I also turned off several other bits of always-on hardware. I left Tesla, our old server, up, since it provides some services to people besides me. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to draw very much power.

Our power supplier, DTE, is swamped with calls from all over the area. When I called the trouble reporting line this morning, I was informed by a cheerful automated voice that I had to wait approximately 167 minutes to talk to a customer representative. I went back down to the dark workshop in the basement where Tesla lives to see if I could eke out enough bandwidth to contact DTE's web-based trouble reporting. I was successful, I guess. The choices for the kind of problem I was experiencing seemed inadequate. The line wasn't down, so I had to settle for checking the box that indicated that our power was intermittent. I've gone back to the site a few times to look at our status, but their system is still unable "at this time" to give an estimate of when they can look at the problem.

I called the phone company, but they won't come out unless a phone line is actually down. I finally managed to call the tree trimming service that did a bunch of work for us about a year and half ago. One of their guys came out about an hour ago. He was able to get all the branches off the wires using just his long pruning pole. However, once all of the branches were out of the way, I was able to see the real problem: the power line, although not broken, has pulled partially away from the pole. I can't tell for sure, but I'm guessing we've lost one of the two incoming phases for our power. So, we're still stuck until DTE graces us with an on-site presence.

Mary and Tim seem to be taking this a lot more cheerfully than I am. Mary has always been much more prepared to go low-tech. (My old joke is that I don't really know how we got together in the first place, because she wants to live in the 19th century, and I'm still mad because it's not already the 24th.) Our son Tim, who spends a lot of time practicing on his electric and acoustic guitars, is off from school because of Martin Luther King Day. When I told him, he immediately replied "I guess this means it's an acoustic sort of day". He knows what to do and isn't whining about it (yet). But old geek that I am, I feel significantly disoriented. It took some soothing talk from my wife and a bit of creative re-prioritizing with her to find a way to use the day effectively without being online continuously. Even so, here I am, sitting in the dark, typing on an old keyboard by candle light (seriously!) just so I can get my blogging fix. In a way, it might have been easier (or at least simpler) if it had been a complete outage.

I hope it is warm, dry and well-powered where you are.

Weather Bonk

2007-01-13T21:16:00.000-05:00

In one of my recent forays into somewhere or other, I ran across Weather Bonk, a very cool mashup of Google maps, regular weather forecasting, amateur weather stations, and webcams. You can enter a city name or a zip code, and then you'll get a page with a bunch of weather and geographically related information. The most interesting part is a Google map of the selected region, but showing temperatures from all of the amateur weather stations in that area. (These are private stations which publish their data to the U.S. Weather Service.) If you position your cursor over one of the temperatures, you get a semi-transparent box showing more detail about that station. Likewise, there may be little camera icons on the map. These represent webcams at those locations. If you position the cursor over those, it shows a small window containing the most recent image. Very cool.

Controlled Avalanches

2007-01-13T20:22:00.000-05:00

I recently ran across this article in Yahoo News about the serious problems that Colorado has been having with avalanches crossing over highways. Several vehicles have even been knocked off the road and carried hundreds of feet. The article starts off with this attention-grabbing statement:

Crews fired artillery shells Sunday to safely trigger avalanches before they could pose a threat to traffic on a mountain highway...

I was struck (sorry, I just had to put it that way) with the cleverness and the directness of this approach. Although I had never heard of it, I figured this idea had been around for awhile. A Google search amply proved that, but I was floored by this claim that there are over 100K explosions per year just for triggering avalanches, in the Western U.S. alone.

Perhaps you half-remember, as I do, various action movies where the heroes or villains deliberately trigger an avalanche by making a loud sound, such as a gunshot. Apparently that is yet another myth, or at least an exaggeration. In almost every case, the avalanche is triggered by a direct force, such as the weight of a person or the concussion of an explosion. According to the page I mentioned above, the preferred triggering technique is for a skier to approach the area from above, light a dynamite stick with a two-minute fuse, heave it down onto the potential avalanche site, and then ski like crazy to get away. If it is too difficult to get to the area from above, the other approach is to fire at the area from a distance with heavy artillery, as was done in Colorado.

I still think it's pretty cheeky to refer to these as 'controlled avalanches', though. It makes it sound like an overly confident military policy of some sort.

Shilling For Google And Netflix

2007-01-08T20:52:00.000-05:00

Over the holidays, I had a number of occasions to chat with family and friends. Toward the end of the break, I began to realize how often I ended up evangelizing for Google and Netflix. This was disturbing to recognize, because in the past I myself had often been critical of people who were overly laudatory about some company's products.

For example, back in the early 1990s, I worked for a large contract research house. One of my fellow employees, otherwise a fine individual, was a monomaniac about Lotus Notes. His basic view was that it was good for whatever problem you had, so he brought it up in every meeting he attended. This greatly irritated me, because (1) I thought the product was over-priced, (2) regardless of what my friend thought, Lotus Notes was not the magic bullet that would cure all our ills, and (3) I wanted to develop such systems myself, and there was no way I would be able to do that if the company spent a lot of money buying one. I needn't have worried. The product was too expensive, and I left the company anyway.

Then there are Microsoft zombies. These are people for whom the answer to any problem is a Microsoft product. There are not anywhere nearly as many nowadays as there were, say, ten to fifteen years ago. Back then Microsoft was the only acceptable desktop application vendor for a large corporation. A Microsoft zombie in a management position was every bit as repressive as any party official in a totalitarian state. Of course, the synergistic interplay of the Internet and open source software has taken a lot of the wind out of Microsoft's sails.

Like Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, other companies have had their own dittoheads. Both IBM and Oracle won my disdain early on because of this, although it seems they both have lost the adoring crowds that once followed them.

Since the late 1990s, I have mostly been plumping for open source stuff. There are lots of reasons for this, including lower costs, usually higher quality for the things I cared about, and more diversity. Nearly all of my geek friends felt the same way. There was something really gratifying about endorsing and using software that was free to download and install. I didn't mind at all telling people about it, and I argued with commercial software dittoheads on more than one occasion about why open source made sense for commercial companies.

Then Google came along. They are not an open source organization by any means, although they make heavy use of an open source infrastructure. Somehow Google managed to establish a pretty lofty reputation among geeks even though they were a commercial outfit. Part of this reputation came from their "Don't be evil" slogan. Probably an even bigger part was the fact that their most useful service, namely searching, was free. Google found a non-offensive way to present relevant ads along with search results, and users gladly accepted that as the cost of getting such a great service. For a good long while, about the only people critical of Google were competitors.

Google began branching out into other products, including the ones that I regularly use: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Google Reader, Google Chat, Blogger and Picasa. These are all 100% free, and they have changed the way I do things every day. It has gotten to the point that if Google rolls out a new product, I almost never bother to look at what competitors have to offer. Even worse, I evangelize for these products. I tell people what great things they are. I have become just like my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. I am a Google shill.

As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself doing the same thing for Netflix. In case you don't know about that (I was surprised that some of my non-geek friends had never heard of it), Netflix provides an extremely easy-to-use DVD rental-by-mail service. For a relatively small monthly fee, you can request DVDs online, and they are mailed to you as they become available (usually there is no waiting). You keep them as long as you want, but you can only have a certain number out at a time. When you are done with a DVD, you mail it back in, and then Netflix will send you the next one you requested. The best part of Netflix, in my view, is the incredible range and variety of material that they have available: old classics, whole TV series, rare and seldom seen masterpieces, etc. Searching and requesting are very easy.

So, here I am . The only thing that keeps me from being a true shill is that I don't get anything out of my evangelizing, at least not in a monetary sense. But then, neither did my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. The real question is whether this change is because I am growing morally weaker, or just mellower.

Showing Their True Colors

2006-12-30T17:19:00.000-05:00

My hometown is Fort Worth TX. It was not exactly at the bleeding edge of avant-garde architecture or design, especially in the 1950s. Thus, when I was growing up, all I ever saw was the most plain, vanilla styles of homes imaginable. They were all earth tones or pale off-white colors, occasionally tinted with very light pastel blues, greens or yellows. It wasn't quite as gray as the Kansas depicted in Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, but it was getting there.

I've lived in Ann Arbor MI since 1975. It is rather a different kind of place from my home town. For example, it is very much a college town, being the home of the University of Michigan. One grows used to seeing somewhat wild bits of external 'ornamentation' with student housing. Certainly, college students typically show a great deal less inhibition when it comes to the choice of the paint colors that they use.

However, I live over a mile from the nearest concentration of off-campus housing. Almost everything around my house for a number of blocks is ordinary, single-family dwellings. Still, these homes are not uniformly bland. In fact, they sometimes manifest a kind of ... daring? creativity? damaged sense of the aesthetic? Whatever it is, here in my supposedly more conventional part of town one can find some very interesting choices for exterior color.

I drove around for about twenty minutes a few days ago, taking photos of some of these unusual paint choices. I didn't go further than about ten blocks from my house. These photos do not do justice to the sharp oddity of the color choices I'm talking about. In bright sunlight they are especially striking. Unfortunately we here in Michigan have now entered into that season of the year that is more akin to the climate of Mordor, i.e., cold and perpetually gray and gloomy. My poor digital camera simply cannot bring out the richness of the colors. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Nevertheless, it is with great pleasure that I present to you ... [drumroll] ...

The True Colors Of Ann Arbor!

The lady who owned this house wanted to know why I was taking a picture of it. I told her that I loved the color. She looked doubtful but let me go without further comment.

This house is what one is compelled to call 'mustard plug yellow'. That is, it is exactly the color of the dried mustard one finds on a squeeze-type mustard bottle that has been sitting out all day at a hot-dog stand.

The purple color this photo really has a kind of electric (shocking?) quality in the bright sun.

This place is sort of a bright, little girl pink. (By that comparison, of course, I do not in any way want to disparage the color choices of little girls. It's just non-typical, if not downright odd.)

The oddness of this teal color, or whatever it is, doesn't come through here at all. However, it is enough to make you do a double-take when you drive by.

This is another head-turner, and it's on the same street, if memory serves. It's not quite a fire-engine red, but more of a Faygo Red Pop kind of red.

My son Dave worked last summer for one of those 'College Pro Painter' kinds of outfits. This is one of the houses they did. Dave and his fellow painters were much amused by the owner's choice of colors, which they characterized as Christmas red and green.

Near our house is a path leading through some woods to an adjoining neighborhood. When you come out of the woods, this is what you see. It is sometimes enough to make you wonder whether you should turn around and go back.

We pass this house very frequently, since it is on one of the two routes into our neighborhood. It's hard to say exactly what color it is. It's not quite salmon, nor is it quite peach. I asked my daughter what color she thought it was. She looked at it, and immediately said "Ugly."

This house is actually not easily visible much of the year because of foliage. However, once the trees and bushes drop their leaves, you can see it from Pontiac Trail, which is one of the thoroughfares leading through our part of town. I guess you'd call it a kind of light purple. Sort of. Maybe not.

My wife said this was 'green apple'. Maybe, but none of the green apples I've ever seen were fluorescent.

One has to wonder why people chose colors like these. Perhaps they feel that they are expressing their individuality or their non-conformity. Maybe they got a really good deal on the color at the paint store. Of course, they could simply be trying to make their house unmistakeable ("You, can't miss my house. It glows in the dark.") We will probably never know.

This is America. Apart from whatever limits local zoning ordinances may mandate, you are free to paint your house whatever color you want. However, the rest of us are free to marvel at your choice, and maybe snicker, at least to ourselves.

Dreams Of Flight Or Switched-On Daedalus

2006-12-30T13:28:00.000-05:00

Most people have had dreams in which they find themselves flying. Usually it seems effortless, and even exhilarating (unlike dreams of falling, which are another matter altogether). Several days ago, the UK's Daily Mail had an article about Yves Rossy, who managed to do it for real in a very convincing way.

There is a semi-slick music video version of Rossy's feat. There is also a more technical version (still has a music track for the flying scenes). Sadly for non-Francophones, the explanations are in French. His flight looked as good as or better than any dream I've ever had of flying. I never left a contrail in my dreams, either. On the other hand, I didn't need kerosene. But those are just details.

By the way, I suspect that Rossy's flight must have happened some weeks ago. Unless global warming is having a bigger effect in Switzerland than I know about, I doubt if anyone would be wearing shorts at this time of year, as one of Rossy's ground crew was.

There was of course a Digg posting about Rossy's free flying adventure. I was amused to note a nasty comment there, by someone who basically claimed that others have done similar things before, and that Rossy is just engaged in self-promotion. Perhaps so, since he does have his own website (English language version). However, I couldn't help thinking to myself that this particular critic was suffering from severe wingspan envy.

Hiding In Plain Sight

2006-12-26T20:16:00.000-05:00

I have a vision problem. Unfortunately, it's not one that can be remedied with an optometric prescription, laser surgery or medication. The heart of the difficulty is that sometimes I don't see what is right in front of me.

It seems to happen in any number of purely domestic situations. For example, my wife Mary tells me that there is a certain food container in the refrigerator with something in it which I will like. I go stand in front of the refrigerator for long minutes, peering high and low, moving things around, but, alas, I don't see it. I call Mary. She walks up, opens the refrigerator, immediately puts her hand directly on the invisible item (without moving anything), picks it up, and hands it to me. The same thing happens with some regularity for clothes in my closet, almost any kitchen item smaller than a gallon milk jug, and most items in our office. It also happens with tools and materials in my workshop.

A couple of days ago, I had a somewhat more serious episode of this selective blindness that troubled me. Because of the cancer I am recovering from, I take a number of drugs and supplements. Naturally, these come in bottles of various sizes, which run out at different rates. We try to keep ahead of that by periodically checking the levels, and then calling in refills to the pharmacy. After we pick up those medicine containers at the pharmacy, we put them in a special place so that we will be ready to switch quickly when the current nearly-empty containers run out.

On the Friday before Christmas, I went through this level-checking drill and realized that one of the meds I take, which comes in liquid form, was going to run out before the weekend was over. I called in a refill as usual. Later in the afternoon, when I went to pick up this refill, the pharmacist told me that the insurance company had rejected the refill request because it was too soon by at least a week. In other words, according to them, I shouldn't have run out yet. I explained that, whatever the insurance company thought, I would be out of that particular medicine in one or two days.

The people at the University of Michigan Cancer & Geriatrics Center Pharmacy have become great friends, and they always go out of their way to help us. The person there who handles the phone and the insurance went right to work, and somehow bludgeoned the insurance company into accepting the claim. It took twenty minutes or so, but I was glad to wait for it. I thanked my pharmacy friends profusely, tooks the meds, and headed home.

Mary, who had not been involved in this particular refill request, put the new containers in the appropriate spot when I got home. A couple of days later, when I finally exhausted the current bottle, I went to get the next one. The refill bottle I had just picked up was there, but to my surprise I saw that there was also one more bottle. This was the one that the insurance company must have thought that I had. I swear that I looked in the refill spot before I called in the order. And it's not like it was one of a dozen identical little pill bottles, either. It was a relatively big container, roughly the size of a typical cough medicine bottle.

How could I have missed it? Why does this keep happening? How can I miss seeing items that are obviously right in front of me? Certainly it has to do with focus of attention, but what does that really mean here?

One could speculate that perhaps this selective vision has to do with how much one likes or desires the thing looked for. In other words, I would more readily see something I desire and less readily see something I did not desire. However, that doesn't really explain it. When I stand in front of the refrigerator, I am hungry and I desire food. In fact I desire the particular food I am looking for. Why cannot I see it? Similarly, I want to get dressed, so why can't I see the shirt I want hanging in front of me? I want to take the medicine because it is necessary for my health, so how could I possibly miss seeing it there on the shelf?

Upon reflection, I think this kind of vision error has to do with the degree of affinity or liking, not for the item looked for, but rather for the activity which the seeing is part of. I like food, for sure, but I dislike food preparation. It is almost as if, in my juvenile way, I'm still wanting someone to prepare all my meals for me. Mary in fact does the bulk of the food prep here and does a wonderful job of it without complaint. However, she does not and should not have to prepare absolutely everything I eat. I can manage at least a sandwich or bowl of soup without spousal assistance. The thing is, I don't like spending my time this way. I hate putting in more time preparing the food than it takes to eat it. My guess is that this dislike somehow negatively primes my visual recognition ability.

Mary, on the other hand, gets great satisfaction out of doing those very things I dislike so much. She has very little problem seeing things in the kitchen, the closet, or pretty much anywhere else in the house. Now that I think about it, our kids often suffered from the same kind of blindness while growing up, and likewise had to depend on her (e.g., "Mom, where are my shoes?" "You left them under the coffee table.")

However, Mary does have her vision problems, too. I realized this while helping her over the last number of weeks as she learns how to use Windows XP. She does not like computers, but she realizes that she has to be able to use them to some degree given the prevalence and usefulness of email, web browsing, etc. It turns out that Mary has this same kind of selective blindness when it comes to looking at the Windows desktop. I'll say something like "OK, see the little box to the right of the cursor?" or "Now click on the 'Move File' link in the left hand column", but those location descriptions are not useful for her. When Mary looks at the screen, she sees a confusing mass of text and icons. She does not see things that are right in front of her. Needless to say, this has been a continual source of difficulty for her in getting comfortable with Windows.

On the other hand, when I look at a computer screen, I take in the whole thing almost instantly, identifying all the points of interest without trying. I very rarely miss any important detail. In fact, at times I've been able to diagnose colleague's bugs or find typos in their prose with no more than a passing glance at a screen-full of text. You might say, "Ah, but perhaps it is just a matter of practice." Maybe, but I've always been that way with computers, all the way back to when I did my first programming in 1967 in a high school summer program. I took to computers like a bee to a field full of honeysuckle -- I needed no encouragement and no instruction. Obviously, I liked computers. I suspect that preference primed my visual recognition so that I always spotted salient details on a screen or printout very quickly.

So, perhaps one's ability to see things in a given context is modulated by how much one likes the activity that the seeing is part of. If so, what do you do when faced with an activity that you don't like to do, but that you have to do? The kind of seeing or blindness I've been talking about is an unconscious thing. Willpower will avail you little in fighting the unconscious. I'm not sure how I should approach my own issue in this regard. Now that I recognize this performance shortcoming in myself in certain domains, I can at least try to take it into account. For example, I suspect that slowing down will help. I am naturally inclined to hurry through activities I dislike, which aggravates the blindness problem. If I slow down so that I truly look, I'll bet I'll see more than I have been seeing. Also, "no man is an island" (Paul Simon notwithstanding), so I should also just accept the fact that my blind spots and Mary's blind spots are at least complementary.

Merry Something-Or-Other

2006-12-25T11:26:00.000-05:00

I have been wanting to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas for several days, but I've been wondering how I should do it. The PC notion of a completely neutral seasonal greeting still irks me, although I know perfectly well why people feel that is necessary. Of course, I don't want to offend anyone deliberately, or attempt to manifest my allegiance to a Christian American cultural hegemony. Still, it seems obvious to me that, if someone gives me a greeting or blessing or good wish or whatever that is pecular to their particular culture or group, they are doing so with a good intention. If someone is doing something from a good intention, and it doesn't actually harm me, why should I do anything except gratefully receive it? After all, they aren't cursing me or saying bad things about my ancestry.

A number of years ago, my employer sent me to an affiliate company's site in Paris. While there, I was often caught off-guard when people would wish me a pleasant Bon Jour as I passed them in the halls or on the streets. It was the appropriate greeting for them, and they clearly meant it well. Only an Ugly American would have taken offense. Instead, I took some small delight in the greeting and its novelty to me, and did my best to return the greeting (although doubtless my American accent immediately gave me away).

Given all that, let me wish you a very Merry Christmas, and express my hope that you find this day and the whole season a happy time for yourselves and for those close to you.

Reflections On A Red Cross Donor Card

2006-12-20T21:16:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I was cleaning out my wallet, removing some of the detritus of the past year. It's almost embarrassing to see how much useless stuff that I have been carrying around. Anyway, among the items I found was my Red Cross Blood Donor ID card. I've been an RC donor since the early 70s. According to the RC records, in the 31 years or so that I have lived in Michigan I have donated 80 units of whole blood. I have always donated several times a year, and in recent years I have often hit the legal limit of five donations a year.

One of the reasons that I donated so regularly (besides the fact that it's just a good thing to do) was that I have an O Negative blood type. Only about 8% of the population is O Negative, but the really valuable thing about that type is that it makes me a 'universal donor'. That is, pretty much anyone needing blood could take my O Negative blood regardless of what their type was. Every time I donated, I would be reminded of my 'specialness'. Frequently, the RC would also send snail-mail reminders, which always mentioned the need for O Negative blood.

I really didn't mind donating at all. Unlike some of my fellow donors who became faint or dizzy after a donation, I never had any trouble at all. Instead, I always looked forward to the cookies and juice they provided in the 'recovery' area after a donation. Even more valuable to me was the fact that donating presented a good excuse to get out of the office.

This happy situation lasted until about two years ago, when I began having serious health problems. Around Thanksgiving 2004, I contracted a nasty cold/flu of some sort that I just couldn't shake. The RC rules are that if you have an active infection, you aren't supposed to donate. Unhappily, this infection lasted for many weeks, frustrating several scheduled attempts to go donate.

In a previous post, I warned that I might get tiresome talking about the following subject, so don't say I didn't tell you. Going into 2005, the cold/flu thing continued, but I also started developing other unpleasant symptoms. This prompted a number of rounds of doctor's visits to figure out what was happening. Finally, on March 10, 2005, I learned that I had contracted multiple myeloma, a serious bone marrow cancer. The day after I got the diagnosis, I started some heavy chemotherapy, which then continued for a number of months. Later I had a couple of bone marrow stem cell transplants. All of this high-intensity medical activity undoubtedly saved my life, but it also meant that I would never again be able to donate blood.

Rather, over the course of the months following the initial diagnosis, it turned out that I needed to receive a number of blood transfusions. Although I don't think I have received 80 units back, I know I have put a good dent in that number.

There were several reasons I needed the blood. At first, I was suffering anemia simply because my bone marrow was full of cancer cells instead of normal tissue, and so I was not producing enough red blood cells. At the time of my diagnosis, my bone marrow consisted of 70% cancer cells. It was no wonder that I felt tired and out of breath all the time.

As I mentioned, I went through a lot of chemotherapy, which killed a lot of the cancer cells. Then, in preparation for my first stem cell transplant in August 2005, I received a massive dose of a chemotherapy agent called melphelan. This drug killed even more of the remaining cancer cells. However, it also killed off most of the healthy cells in my bone marrow. (This was actually part of the plan for the transplant.) After that treatment, I then received an infusion of my own previously harvested bone marrow stem cells. From those cells, I regrew new bone marrow tissue. Naturally, that took some time, so I needed a few transfusions to bolster my red blood cell supply before my newly regenerated bone marrow could get back on the job.

Finally, in October 2005 I received a second stem cell transplant, using stem cells donated by my sister Bliss. This time there was no preliminary 'conditioning' or 'induction therapy' (kinder, gentler terms for chemotherapy). I simply received an infusion of her stem cells. Over the course of some days, those cells found their way into my bone marrow and set up shop.

It took many months, but eventually my sister's stem cells, which were healthy and vigorous, supplanted my own weakened cells. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but after a number of months the DNA tests the lab did on my blood showed that I was '100% donor cells'. Even more interesting, and perhaps amusing, was the wording in a July 7, 2006 cytogenetic analysis report:

The presence of a normal female karyotype in this sample is consistent with the engraftment of cells from a female donor following peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.

In other words, the transplant had been a complete success. My bone marrow was a clone of my sister's, and the blood cells it made were just like hers. It almost looks like a sex-change operation for blood cells. I like to joke that if I ever commit a crime, and leave some blood at the scene, the cops will be looking for a woman. (Someone else pointed out that this would make an interesting plot device for a CSI episode. But I digress.)

There was one niggling detail to spoil this medical success story. My sister was a perfect tissue match for me, as measured by the usual way that one does such matching. However, she had an A Positive blood type. I mentioned earlier that having O Negative blood made me a universal donor. Unfortunately, given the way blood type matching worked, that also meant that I could only receive O Negative blood. This more stringent matching requirement also included new blood cells generated in my own body.

So, while my new bone marrow was busily making new A Positive red blood cells, what was left of my old immune system was promptly killing them off because they were not O Negative. The left hand giveth, while the right hand taketh away, and all that. My new bone marrow was apparently producing plenty of new blood cells, but they never got a chance to do much good before they got wiped out. That meant that I had to keep getting O Negative blood transfusions.

This problem started right after the transplant in October 2005 and went on for a number of months. I received several treatments aimed at correcting the mismatch, but they took a long time to have an effect. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have a permanent problem with this internal blood type mis-match. The prospect of needing blood transfusions in perpetuum was not a happy one for me (or our insurer, I'd bet).

However, right around the end of May 2006, the old immune system finally gave up the ghost, and stopped killing off my new blood cells. When that happened, my hemoglobin level, which had been hovering in the 6-8 range for months, shot up to the 14-16 range, which is normal for an adult male.
(Perhaps you can't quite make out the numbers and dates on the axes of this graph, but hopefully you can see the sharp rise from late May to early July.) Needless to say, we were pleased. In fact, we were overjoyed. I haven't needed a transfusion since that rise. (The graph also shows a little bump around mid-October, but that's a different story.)

This brings me to the insight that flashed through my mind when I pulled out my RC donor card. Ever since the ABO blood typing system was first figured out by medical researchers, a person's blood type was thought to be immutable. Yet, now we know that under the right circumstances, it can change. What other characteristics of a person that we think of as fixed and unchanging are actually mutable, given the right conditions?

I have a friend, a very successful businessman, who fits the classic profile for a Republican supporter. He in fact was a Republican, as evidenced by his financial donations and his participation in party events. Yet, in the years since Bush's election, he has done a complete 180° politically. He now actively (and financially) supports various Democratic candidates, and debates his still-Republican pals in a friendly, but vigorous way. Knowing him as long as I have, I was rather surprised by the switch. Yet for him, the change was necessary, even unavoidable. He was repeatedly and increasingly distressed by the actions of the current Administration, as well as by numerous Republican misdeeds in his own state. As Popeye put it, "That's alls I can stands, 'cause I can't stands no more".

We have all been surprised by people we thought we knew well who did something completely unexpected. A confirmed bachelor finally gets married. A couple we thought had been happily married for decades gets a divorce. A well-known religious figure who had railed against immorality turns out to be a pedophile and porn addict. A hard-core atheist becomes a fervent believer and evangelist.

We may view some of these changes as unfortunate, or even tragic. Other changes, particularly those of a religious or ideological nature, are often viewed with suspicion. Those who disagree with a person's new views are likely to see him as a traitor or a 'flip-flopper'. However, it seems to me that the very notion of free will doesn't mean very much unless it allows the possibility of a person making this kind of deep, fundamental change. And you have to admit that resisting obviously needed change is just self-destructive: staying the course was definitely a bad idea for Captain Ahab.

In many things I am a conservative, in the older sense of being predisposed to limiting change. However, as I grow older, I am coming to appreciate the value, even the necessity, of allowing and accepting change in others, and especially in myself. After all, if I can change blood types, then who knows what other kinds of changes I have in my future?

Wikipedia Über Alles

2006-12-16T19:42:00.000-05:00

Over the past year or so I've noticed a significant change in what Google shows in the top matches for most queries. I have not done any kind of systematic study of this, but it seems to me that I almost always get a match from Wikipedia in the top five matches. What's more, that Wikipedia page usually provides the answer I want. Perhaps this has more to do with the kinds of things I look up, but I don't think so.

Wikipedia of course is one of the great success stories for collaboration software. A few months ago there was a report that compared Wikipedia and Enclopedia Brittanica, and found them roughly equal in terms of depth and accuracy. That is a pretty remarkable finding, considering that Brittanica is a well-established commercial organization with over 200 years experience in collecting and organizing information, whereas Wikipedia is mostly a volunteer organization going back a decade or so.

Of course, Wikipedia is not without its flaws. As do most Wikis, Wikipedia has an open update policy. That means that anyone can update pretty much anything at any time. The Wikipedia staff have had to modify that policy for certain pages. Wiki pages on topics which produce controversy and strong emotion, such as abortion, evolution, Islam, Palestinian independence, Scientology, and the like, became textual battlegrounds, where warring ideologues spent their days deleting each others' corrections. For those pages, the Wikipedia staff have had to step in and lock the pages, and then try to provide some sort of editorial oversight so as to attain to their idea of a 'Neutral Point Of View'. No doubt this is a painfully time-consuming process, but the end result is more likely to represent the different sides of an issue more accurately and completely. I'm glad someone is doing that.

Apart from these more vigorous kinds of disputes, Wikipedia is pretty accurate. Every now and then, however, one does run across an error that no-one recognized, but which later seems to have been a pretty pointed attack by someone. For example, prominent journalist John Seigenthaler recently discovered that he is mentioned by name as "a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert". That kind of thing can ruin your whole day. He got that one fixed.

Happily, those kinds of problems are rare. I mentioned the comparison with Encyclopedia Brittanica. On Dec. 15, Wired News published an article summarizing the current state of things. With four million pretty good articles already, it's not so surprising that Google finds those pages so readily.

Update 12/26/2006:
Scoble also notes how WikiPedia often has a better, more focused answer than Google does.

A DIY Stonehenge

2006-12-15T17:56:00.000-05:00

Megalithic monuments of all types have been a special interest of mine for many years. Off and on I've done a fair amount of reading about them. The quintessential megalithic monument is of course Stonehenge. I've read a lot about that site, and the related ones around it. There is something about Stonehenge which invites, even demands, an explanation of its purpose and its manner of construction. Naturally, the fecund imaginations that gave us the world's great conspiracy theories are not at a loss to explain Stonehenge: aliens built it, the Atlanteans built it, the Egyptians built it, the Druids built it (even though it preceded the Druids by some thousands of years), etc. Likewise these armchair theorists are not shy about proposing more exotic techniques the ancient builders must have used to move the massive stone blocks around: levitation (either alien or Atlantean), telekinesis, magic, harmonic resonances (especially those using Ley lines), and so forth. There are also some more reality-oriented explanations, such as the idea of using huge numbers of people, the way the Pyramids were supposedly built long ago, and the way the Chinese have built things in more recent times.

Just yesterday I ran across a story about Wally Wallington, a man from Flint MI who has worked out some exceedingly simple but highly effective ways to move very heavy objects. Using these techniques he can single-handedly move and lift multi-ton objects, without any metal tools, pulleys, hoists, or any of the gadgets one would normally expect to use. In other words, his techniques are precisely those that a neolithic culture could manage. He even wants to build s scaled-down version of Stonehenge on his property, and he's on his way to doing that. Take a look at this video showing some samples of Wallington's work.

One of the more interesting legends associated with Stonehenge is that the wizard Merlin built Stonehenge by himself in a single day. Watching Wallington move these huge concrete blocks around by himself gives you the feeling that such a legend wouldn't necessarily have been just a tall tale. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a Stone Age David Copperfield doing some elaborate setup with big stone blocks, and then making Stonehenge appear in a very short time for a suitably prepared audience.

By the way, Wallington has a website appropriately named Forgotten Technology, which gives a bit of the history of his work. Wallington is obviously proficient in the use of technologies that would have worked well even 5000 years ago. For me, there is inescapable irony in the fact that his website 'is best viewed using the latest version of Internet Explorer' , a likewise [ahem] less-advanced technology. If you find his pages ugly or hard to navigate in, be persistent. I have to admit that I couldn't make all of the images on the site appear in Firefox, and I haven't yet stooped to looking at the site with IE, although I may.

Sometime I'll have to write about what I've learned of Stonehenge's design and purpose. It's fascinating stuff, and there are a few legitimate archeoastronomy researchers who have come up with explanations that strike me as very solid.

VGPR

2006-12-13T11:44:00.001-05:00

Back in March 2005, I was diagnosed as having multiple myeloma, a very nasty cancer of the bone marrow. My family and I had an especially strong reaction to this diagnosis because this was the same cancer that killed my father in 1985. Since my diagnosis, I have been through a lot of stuff, including four rounds of intensive chemotherapy and two bone marrow stem cell transplants. The second transplant used stem cells from my sister, and was ultimately successful. There were several significant complications, including a relapse around July of this year. But thanks to medical advances, a very effective round of additional chemotherapy, and the mercy of God, I have now reached a condition called Very Good Partial Remission (VGPR, in the trade). If I can maintain this state for three years, I can claim the Full Remission label.

My family and I are thrilled. Of course, being a stodgy, emotionally repressed white American male I find it uncomfortable doing a Snoopy-style happy dance, or anything like that. But don't let my lack of shouting and whooping it up fool you. This is the best news I've had in two years. I will probably become tiresome talking about it.

If you would like to read more about my Adventures in Cancer Land, you can peruse the WBC Remission Network site.

Update 11/4/2009: I had to take down the above named website, which had been implemented as a straightforward forum. It was getting hammered by hundreds of spammers trying to post their crap on my forum, and I got tired of dealing with the messages and alerts. I hope to convert my content from that site into a more conventional blog through Blogger/Blogspot soon.

'Contra Ancoralia Redux' Redux

2006-12-13T11:27:00.000-05:00

Doubtless you remember how I complained in a Nov. 1 posting about the nastiness of dealing with the loosely tied Gordian knot of cables behind my desk. Then I wrote again on the same subject, this time about a supposed 'wireless extension cord' sold by ThinkGeek. Well, just now, I found myself somewhat chagrined when I went back to ThinkGeek to add this item to my wishlist. This gadget is an April Fool's joke! The description was so well done, and the technology mentioned so plausible, that I and everyone I know who looked at it were completely taken in. Or were some of you aware of its false nature, and just let me stumble on to embarrassment?

It seems that increasingly one has to double-check everything! For urban legends, there's Snopes and such. But has it gotten to the point that one has to try ordering a product to find out if it is real? How far can a joke like this go? After they take your credit card number? What other kinds of pseudo-information are out there that one has to be careful of?

How Do You Keep Up?

2006-12-10T17:11:00.000-05:00

Over the years, I've often complained about how fast stuff (mainly information and tasks) pours into my life. I regularly said things such as "It's like trying to take a sip from a firehouse -- it's a good way to lose a lip." I'm certainly not unique in feeling this way. Moreover, as is now obvious to anyone with an internet connection, this problem has not gotten any better with the march of time. Knowing that I am at home on extended medical leave, you would perhaps think that I would have more time to stay caught up, and fewer required tasks to deal with, but alas, it is not so.

Periodically I go through cycles of blissful obliviousness, shocked recognition, stolid denial, bleak despair, sullen resignation, and philosophical acceptance about this issue. Once in a while, I learn something interesting that just possibly might improve matters. A couple of days ago I ran across an essay by Kathy Sierra entitled "The Asymptotic Twitter Curve" which makes clearer for me what the real problems are. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the issue is not so much the volume and speed of incoming stuff, but rather my ability to focus my attention on that tiny fraction of the torrent which genuinely warrants attention. However, Sierra's analysis of the mechanism of the offending behaviors was really insightful. Again, it is not the facts that surprised me, but the degree to which those facts impacted my ability to work.

Sierra's essay starts off talking about interruptions, and how each succeeding technological development seems to shorten the mean time between interruptions. She has a wonderful graph that illustrates this perfectly:

(Image used without permission, but Hey! I want you to go read her post! This is just an appetizer.) Twitter, it turns out, is like the hellish union of inane blogging and inane IMing. It's sole purpose is to allow a group of people to provide for each other the answer to that cosmic question "What are you doing now?", in real time of course. Far, far worse than useless.

Twitter is of no interest to me. What does interest me greatly, however, are Sierra's comments on focus, flow and interruption. 'Flow' is a notion from human performance psychology. It refers to that wonderful state one enters when completely engrossed in a single activity. In such a state, one is able to function at a very high and effective level. If memory serves, the notion of flow was first applied to describe how very talented athletes 'got into' their performance. They learned to concentrate so completely that they become aware only of the game, the competition, their performance. They forget about themselves, their anxieties, the crowd, the arena, the officials, and so on. Sometimes this condition was also called 'getting into a zone'.

Somewhat later performance researchers recognized that the notion of flow also applies to many other disciplines ranging from the arts to brain surgery. I have certainly experienced this state many times in my software work over the years, but far less frequently in recent years. The fact of the matter is that the best way to be happy when one is working is to be in a flow state. This is probably one of the reasons why I have been unhappy in my work this past decade or so. I almost never had a chance to get into a flow state with my work.

I was particularly struck by Sierra's analysis of the truly insidious nature of interruptions, and why they are so deadly for flow experiences. She has two graphs near the end of her article that show this. One depicts how a person would typically perceive interruptions over the course of an hour. The other depicts what really happened over that hour. The killers are the little interruptions that we cause ourselves. As she says "WE cause interruptions because we are addicted to 'staying in the loop'." That is so, so true of me. I love being connected. It is amazingly addictive. In my last job, the company made heavy use of IM. The excuse was that some of our co-workers were located elsewhere, and that it was more efficient to pop quick questions to them through IM. Really, though, I think that the real reason was that most of my co-workers , who were much younger than I (roughly 25-35), were used to and even dependent on IM. They used IM to talk to each other, even from neighboring desks, particularly if the subject was not one that a manager should overhear. Likewise, they spent a lot of time talking with people outside our work.

It didn't take long to suck me in. I have to admit, there is a certain warm, wicked glow that non-manager-type personnel feel when making sardonic anti-management IM comments to each other during meetings. (Yes, we even took our wirelessly connected laptops into meetings.) I kept exploring other IM possibilities, even setting up a Jabber server on my home machine for a group of friends. At one point I was using three different IM clients to talk to people on a bunch of different IM networks. (One is sobered by the realization that taking medical leave to deal with a life-threatening condition might have been the only way to disconnnect thoroughly from this compulsive real-time communication.)

When you add in blogs and feeds and feed readers, not to mention email and discussion groups, it is exactly like a drug addiction. No matter how much you get, it's not enough. One of my particular weaknesses is news, both of the Google News kind, and the more specialized kinds typified by Digg, Slashdot and now Google Reader. One could spend all day spelunking through this maze of twisty little passages all alike, and never, ever come up for air. I act as if it is dreadfully important to assimilate all inputs, and miss no possible bit of incoming information.

So, what is one to do? Sierra semi-jokingly refers to a 12-step program for 'in the loop' addicts. That may be what it takes. In the meantime, simply turning off those distractions is a start. I know this is blindingly obvious, but I could simply choose not run any email client all the time, nor any IM client, or any feed reader. If they are not running, they will not interrupt me. Instead, I should limit their use to specific, limited periods of my work day.

Another culprit is trying to do several things at the same time. Like a brightly-colored, highly attractive leech, the seductive idea of multi-tasking actually drains one's ability to focus. If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that trying to flip back and forth between two or more tasks gives all of them short shrift. A task that is truly worth doing should have my attention, all of it.

I remember reading an article several years ago about how little of a typical work week goes toward completing useful tasks. I was struck by the article's claim that in reality we spend only a small fraction of our work hours, say 5-10 per week, on tasks we should be working on. Another way to look at it is like this: If I could completely focus my attention, I could get the equivalent of a typical week's work done in a single day, and then take the rest of the week off. This claim very much resonates with me. I'm certain that there have been many, many weeks in the past few years in which I got less than 5 hours of honest-to-God useful work done.

So, here's my plan, starting now:

Avoid having any email client (Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc.), any IM client (Google Chat, AIM, etc.) or any source of news (Google News, Google Reader, etc.) open except when I am deliberately using them.
Avoid multi-tasking. If this means I have to wait for some painfully slow process to complete, then I will wait for it, rather than flipping over to some other task in order to 'make better use of my time'.

Nothing startling here. What would be startling, I suppose, would be if I manage to hold to this discipline for any substantial length of time. Check back with me in a while.

It is interesting to look at the behavior of my kids and their friends. They claim that multi-tasking works for them. For example, they insist that they can listen to loud, driving music while studying Spanish. I don't know, but it's hard to see how that can work. I know that I can't write at all if there is any music playing that has lyrics in a language I have even the faintest understanding of. (Admittedly, I can sometimes write fairly dense prose while listening, say, to Russian choral music, or Dwarvish chants from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. But then, I don't speak Russian or Dwarvish.) Likewise, I cannot do math or programming if there is any music going on at all. Still, my kids claim that I'm just old-fashioned (not to mention just old), and that they can handle it even if I can't. I once caught my son Dave talking on the phone, while playing music on the computer, carrying on several IM conversations, and watching TV. (He probably was supposed to be doing homework as well.) I would probably have had a nervous breakdown trying to do that. I rather tend to agree with Sierra on this point:

We're evolving much, much, much too slowly... Brain 2.0 isn't coming anytime soon.

The Amazing Slow Downer

2006-12-08T03:13:00.000-05:00

If you are a serious musician, you probably have run across the problem of how one learns difficult music that is played quickly. Trying to play along with a recording can be an exercise in extreme frustration. New guitarists in particular struggle with this. The real obstacle is that you cannot just play the recording back at a slower speed, since that will change the pitch. The issue can be a show-stopping bummer in trying to master a new song.

A few months back I ran across a reference to a software application that changes all that, the Amazing Slow Downer (ASD). Despite its incredibly unhip name, ASD performs the miraculous feat of playing MP3 files at a reduced speed while maintaining all pitches. I was completely floored by not only how well the software worked, but that it worked at all. The application reliably slows down everything (vocals, instrumentals, percussion, etc.) by up to 400%, but maintains the pitch of every sound. When you think about what it has to do to achieve this, it is even more amazing. When you slow a sound down, you essentially spread it out in time. In order for every sound wave to keep its pitch (i.e., its shape), the algorithm has to "fill in the blanks". That is, for every frequency present, it has to slip in as many new wave forms of each frequency as necessary in order to fill in any gaps caused by the slowdown. There has to be some pretty clever digital sound processing going on here. I'll bet this algorithm wouldn't have been feasible even a few years back because the computers we had then just weren't fast enough.

I read about ASD one morning during my usual net reading time. In one of those wonderful bits of synchronicity that gives our lives mystery, purpose and a means to thwart the skeptical, that very evening at dinner my son Tim, who is an aspiring guitarist, wistfully wished for some way to play songs slowly. He had been working for days on a particular solo, but had been frustrated by the difficulty of figuring out how to play it. He had the tablature for the song, but just couldn't seem to make his fingers do what needed to be done at the required speed. I gleefully told him of what I had learned. After dinner we downloaded a trial version of ASD to his Mac, and in a matter of a few minutes he was up and plunking on this song, only at quarter speed. With this advantage, he finally was able to master it. After a few days, he decided that he wanted the full version of the software, so he sprung for the $45 to buy it. Although I am not much of a musician, it seems worthwhile to me, and I'd recommend the product highly based on what I saw of his experience.

Sherlock Holmes In India and Tibet

2006-12-06T01:19:00.000-05:00

My wife surprised me the other day by bringing me a book that she found in the Ann Arbor District Library, a book I hadn't been looking for or asking for. This is the first time in 30 years of marriage that she has done that. She just happened to see it on a shelf, and thought that I might like it. She was right -- I did enjoy it.

The book was Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years by Tibetan author Jamyang Norbu. The subtitle is The Adventures Of the Great Detective In India And Tibet. Published in 1999, The Missing Years is a pastiche, an interesting attempt at combining the fictional worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. The author, a contemporary Tibetan, begins the tale by describing how he came by a remarkable manuscript written by Hurree Mookerjee, who appeared in Kipling's Kim. In this document, Mookerjee describes a two-year period in which he traveled across India and Tibet with Sherlock Holmes. The period described covers the 'missing years' between Holmes' supposed death at Reichenbach and his re-appearance in London. Mookerjee plays a Watson-like role, both as a foil for Holmes' deductive brilliance, and as a stalwart companion who on more than one occasion saves the day himself.

Norbu has done a very nice job of weaving together numerous tidbits of story-lines from the two fictional worlds into a coherent whole. However, I must point out that I was fairly surprised by how the story changed gears from a skeptical, scientific adventure into a peculiar supernatural thriller. During the first half of the story, there are numerous typical Holmesian kinds of events, faithfully recorded by a perpetually astonished Mookerjee. Then, somewhere around the middle of the tale, various bits of supernatural and spiritual phenomena begin appearing, until by the end there are long passages that seem to be more like something from a fantasy story. I must confess that I never read any Kipling, who I know did write stories with strong supernatural elements, so perhaps these parts of The Missing Years owe more to that side of the union. By no means do I object to such stories, it's just that it caught me off-guard to find those elements in a Sherlock Holmes story. Still, if one accepts the supernatural parts, the resulting story is certainly exciting and coherent, and quite enjoyable.

I mentioned that Norbu is Tibetan. As is true of every Tibetan I have ever heard of, he has no love for the Chinese. He manages to weave into the story some of the long history of China's repeated aggressions against Tibet. I didn't find that these bits were at all heavy-handed. In fact, they set the background for much of the story's action in a thoroughly believable way.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Norbu's facility with English. He must have been well educated in English-style schools, because he has the various idioms one would expect from upper-class men from the Victorian era empire down pat. Mookerjee also turns out to be a scholar, so a lot of the 'manuscript' is written in a scholarly way. Norbu treats all of this with appropriate seriousness, even to the point of providing footnotes and cross-references. He even provides a glossary at the back of the book containing numerous Hindustani, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Afghan, etc. words.

I am always reluctant to recommend books, movies, etc., so I won't say that you'll definitely enjoy this book. However, I did enjoy it, and was glad it crossed my path. If you read it, let me know what you thought of it.

Google Reader

2006-11-28T13:41:00.000-05:00

It seems like I am always late to the party. That is, whenever there is some new trend in the computer world, I never manage to be an early adopter even when I would like to be. No doubt the wisest course is as Alexander Pope described:

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Nonetheless, I usually find myself on the 2nd line of this quote rather than the first. Perhaps you'd think that being at home full-time recovering from a major illness would give me more opportunity to try things sooner. Unfortunately, about all I seem to run across early are funny videos on YouTube.

Anyway, philosophizing aside, I did want to describe a relatively new Google service that you may not have had a chance to look at. You have probably heard about RSS feeds and aggregators. The whole subject is quite complex, with the usual convoluted history and politics that rapidly evolving technology always has. Over the last few years, there have been a number of different approaches to handling feed aggregation. Attempts at comparing these different approaches are, frankly, unusably complicated. Because of all of that, I just hadn't been able to make much progress in figuring out what, if anything, I wanted to do with the whole area.

Some months ago, Google (as part of its overall plan for benign world domination) introduced their version of an aggregator, dubbed Google Reader:

http://www.google.com/reader

It was easy to set up, easy to use, and certainly meets my modest needs for reading blogs and other feeds. Implemented as a web application, it is available from any computer without needing to download anything. You login using the same ID you use for Gmail and the other Google services. Once you login you see a straightforward multi-pane browser. The left pane lists the feeds you have subscribed to, and which of those has new entries. Upon choosing a particular feed, the right pane shows postings from that feed in reverse chronological order, with the newest ones naturally at the top. Depending on how the feed is set up, what comes through in the right pane is either the full text of each posting (although not necessarily formatted quite the same way as the original) or a short version. Either way, you can click on the posting's title to get a new window with the full posting as seen in the original blog or feed.

Google has made it particularly easy to add more feeds with an 'Add Subscription' link. Clicking that brings up a small dialog box in which you can enter either a URL for a new feed, if you happen to know it already, or a search string, in which case the reader brings up in the right pane a list of matching possibilities which you can then subscribe to with a single click.

The Reader has other features which you can easily find for yourself, such as how to arrange your feeds into folders (which are really more like Gmail labels). So far, Google's Reader is complete ad-free.

I suppose I should wrap this up by recommending a few blogs. Let me hasten to say that it has been my experience that whenever someone tells me "you'll just love" book X, movie Y or website Z, there is at least a 60% chance that my reaction will not be one of love. (Why this is true remains one of the great mysteries of my life. The persona I project and the person I am on the inside must be truly out of sync.) So, I will simply say that I have found these blogs interesting and thought-provoking. They tell you very little about my own views of things.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog: The Bad Astronomer. 'bad' here does not mean 'poor in quality', but it could mean several other things. Covers a wide variety of science related topics.
http://www.pandasthumb.org/: The Panda's Thumb. Written by Francis Collins, an evolutionary biologist who wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Although himself a devout Christian, he spends a lot of time working against the Intelligent Design crowd.
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/: The Dilbert Blog. Remarkably insightful yet usually very funny observations and commentary by Scott Adams.
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/: The Long Tail. Commentary by Chris Anderson, the senior editor of Wired. His book with the same title explores in depth the impact that the widespread adoption of computer technology has made in the sheer number of choices consumers now have available.

There are tens of thousands of other choices available, of course, and I encourage you to go forth and read!

Addendum: Ron Jeffries recently wrote about his experience switching from Bloglines to Google Reader, which very much mirrored my own. His posting was prompted by an earlier posting by Gina Trapani on the same topic.

Back In The Saddle Again

2006-11-28T12:38:00.000-05:00

I was astonished to see how long it has been since I had last posted here. Of course, part of the gap was caused by the great hubbub around my house since Nov. 17, when the first of our far-flung children began arriving for our Thanksgiving holiday. (See photo below.) Since then, I had managed a few reply postings on several of the existing threads, particularly the most recent one about wireless power. Nonetheless, I had intended to be much more faithful about writing. I will endeavor to make up for that now!

From left to right: Shelby (Sam's wife), Sam, Dave, me, Mary, Audra (Mike's wife), Mike, Tim, Becky, and Steve. Missing are Tom and Becky's husband Nate. At the lower left you can see the shadow of our friend Armando, who fortuituously arrived just in time to take our picture.

Standing Here Beside Myself

2006-11-19T11:19:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've wondered about the title of this blog. The phrase comes from a light-weight science fiction comedy called Short Circuit, which is about a death-dealing military robot, Number 5, who comes 'alive' when accidentally zapped by high voltage. A lot of the humor in the movie comes from the dialog between the robot's inventor and his Indian computer scientist side-kick, Ben Jabituya, played by American actor Fisher Stevens. The Jabituya character speaks that wonderful kind of twisted English one often hears in highly trained technical people from India, and his speech is full of malaprops, malaphors and other forms of unexpected and difficult English. The other characters also have plenty of funny things to say. Anyway, my favorite of all these is when Jabituya, in a moment of confusion and uncertainty, says to no-one in particular

I am standing here beside myself.

Certainly I've felt that way a lot.

More On Wireless Power

2006-11-18T10:56:00.000-05:00

As you recall, a couple of weeks ago I whined about the lack of any practical wireless power transmission technology suitable for reducing the clutter of wires that desktop computers require. Several days ago, my friend (and wireless power skeptic) Erik passed on to me the news that MIT professor Marin Soljacic had announced that his research team had come up with a simple scheme to transmit useful amounts of power for short distances. Using "non-radiative" resonance between two precisely tuned coils, the system injects a high frequency current into one coil, and extracts induced power from the other. Here is a diagram from the BBC article about this:

1) Power from mains to antenna, which is made of copper

2) Antenna resonates at a frequency of 6.4MHz, emitting electromagnetic waves

3) 'Tails' of energy from antenna 'tunnel' up to 5m (16.4ft)

4) Electricity picked up by laptop's antenna, which must also be resonating at 6.4MHz. Energy used to re-charge device

5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as not resonating at 6.4MHz

I have tried to find more details about what Soljacic means by 'tails' of energy 'tunneling' between the coils, but have so far found nothing. The text of the paper he was going to present is not online yet. Soljacic claims that the system can work with up to 50% efficiency, which is good enough for small applications such as delivering power to peripherals on and around the desktop. The system he describes is designed to provide power within a 5 meter radius, but he also claims that similar systems could work both at nanoscale and at the scale of a factory floor.

Of course, all of this remains to be proven, since as far as I can tell no-one has actually built a system yet. It's all just theoretical results. Also, it is not clear whether there will be any significant side-effects, either for living things or for other electronics. I eagerly look forward to further developments. Interestingly, what inspired this bit of research was Soljacic's repeated irritation with forgetting to plug his cellphone into its recharger.

Addendum:
I finally located a preprint of Soljacic's paper on arxiv.

Blue Mania

2006-11-14T21:25:00.000-05:00

Mary and I had a wonderful visit to Chicago this past weekend to visit our oldest son Sam and his wife Shelby. They just moved there in May, and we had not had a chance to see their new home. We took the train down, which is much better than driving, but still not stress-free. Sam and Shelby took us around to a few favorite places of theirs, but the highlight of the weekend was an unexpected treat Sam came up with. On Saturday afternoon we went to see a matinee performance of the Blue Man Group. It's hard to describe them, since mere words fail. Inspired lunacy? Exalted silliness? A mystical clown act? There's these three guys, see, and their heads are painted blue, and they are fantastic drummers, and they never say a word, although the narrator does sometimes, and they are very ... messy, and ... well, you should definitely go see them if you have the chance.

The audience obviously had a lot of Blue Man fans who were familiar with their performances. It reminded me a little of the zaniness that regularly went on when people watched The Rocky Horror Picture. The raucous behavior of a bunch of Girl Scouts I can understand. But the weirdnesses exhibited by middle-aged women were a bit odd to behold. Anyway, after the performance, the three Blue Men were in the lobby of the theatre so you could take pictures with them. They stayed totally in character and never said a word. We took our time leaving, so by the time we got to the lobby there wasn't a waiting line to get a picture. That's when we got this:

You can't make it out very well, but the Blue Man is holding my cane. I handed it to him to see what he would do. He said nothing, but turned around several times just looking at it. Then when we took the picture, he held it up as you can see.

I even got a little Blue Man blue on my shirt from my close encounter. Mary didn't seem to mind. She said that she wasn't going to wash the shirt.

Contra Ancoralia Redux

2006-11-14T20:33:00.000-05:00

As a follow-on to my Contra Ancoralia posting from Nov. 1, Eric pointed me at this new product that does indeed deliver power wirelessly. Eric also pointed out the circumspect warning at the bottom of the product writeup:

Warning: Even though these microwaves are about as harmful as the leakage from an ordinary microwave oven (not much), do not put computers, televisions, other sensitive electrical equipment, food, liquids, paper, glass, flammable substances, magnets, or living things in between the base and satellite units. Just in case.

which would certainly give one pause. However, at only $35 for a base-satellite pair, I may just have to try this out. Since this design uses beamed power (beamcasting?), it would appear that it is not as wasteful as power broadcasting would be. Unfortunately, as implemented, this scheme does not directly address the problem of reducing the wire clutter behind a computer.

Audiospam

2006-11-06T17:46:00.000-05:00

I know without asking that anybody who would be reading this blog (or maybe any blog) is sick to death of automated junk political phone calls. Here in Michigan these calls all have a certain frantic tone to them that is pathetic. I've heard from both Democrats and Republicans, and even one Socialist. I say 'heard from' although I never listen to the whole thing. I can usually tell that it's a junk call before I answer it, because it has an 800 or 888 area code. If I can get to the phone on time, I can answer and then hang up without having to hear a word. Otherwise, it goes on to our answering machine, and the offending ad echoes through the house from the loudspeaker. It's all intrusive and offensive.

It occurred to me that these messages must be like spam email. Everyone hates them, supposedly. No-one ever listens to any of them if they can help it. So where is the benefit to the parties and candidates? There must be at least some unfortunate souls who are so bereft of sense and decency that they actually listen to these ads and are influenced by them. I figure that these are the same folks that spammers are trying to reach, that tiny fraction of 1% of email recipients who will buy the advertised questionable products and thus justify the cost of sending the spam to huge numbers of other uninterested recipients.

We haven't been able to legislate spam email away. But we were able to get the National Do Not Call Registry to prevent commercial solicitors from calling us. Unfortunately, political parties and other non-profit organizations were able to lobby their way past this, so they are not bound by the NDNCR. Hmmm. Do you think that might be because the congresspersons who wrote the legislation might have an interest in being able to use phone soliciting for their own purposes? No, couldn't be.

Do you know the worst part about automated phone advertising? You can yell, and scream, and curse all you want, and nobody hears you. And there is no-one to whom you can demand "Take me off of your phone list. I never want to get another call from you."

Relocating, The Hard Way

2006-11-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

As sort of an interesting postscript to my earlier comments about wires and cables, today my family watched a well-organized team of workmen, engineers, drivers, technicians, police, etc., orchestrate moving a house through Ann Arbor. I've occasionally seen house-moving projects before, but this was by far the biggest and most impressive. The house in question is a two-story, 160-year-old brick structure. I hesitate to guess at its weight. The platform it rested on was massive. The two front-loaders that towed it were massive. Even the cop out front waving people away was massive. One of the onlookers I was with commented that she had read reports that the whole operation, from original acquisition to final setup, was going to cost around $1M. The owner must really have a thing for this house. Oh, and its original location is going to be replaced with some sort of multi-function residential/commercial thing.

Anyway, I thought of the wires and cables discussion as I watched the incredibly arduous work that the various crews had to perform to carefully take down power lines, telephone lines, cable lines, street lights, traffic lights, etc., so that the house could pass. You couldn't have avoided taking down the lights, but all the rest of it would have been so much easier if the various cables had been run underground, or better yet, not even there (i.e., replaced with wireless equivalents)!

I know, I know. It's too much to ask for. After all, do you really think you could run an arc welder on wireless power? Some things probably will always require wires. At least until, we get our own Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactors that can run off of kitchen waste.

Storing Your Data On Somebody Else's Machine

2006-11-03T23:48:00.000-05:00

This posting is more of a question than a comment. Over the last several years, there has been a surge in various web-based services that encourage you to store your data and documents on machines that you don't control. The winner in this category is, of course, Google, who provides the world with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Documents & Spreadsheets, Google Base, Google Notebook, Picasa and most recently JotSpot. There are other companies that provide similar services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Flickr, etc. These services are very attractive because of factors such as

large (or even unlimited) disk storage
universal accessibility (i.e., you can get to your data from any machine you would like)
reliable data backup and other maintenance
highly functional and constantly improving software

All of these services seem to make their money by showing you advertising along with your data. That's OK, I guess. They all seem to provide decent password-based security so that only you and those you specify can access your data and documents. The main drawback to such services is simply that you are depending on somebody else to take good care of your data even though they have no direct financial or legal incentive to do so. Also, in nearly every case, there is no easy way to get your data out of these systems. You are pretty much locked in unless you do some clever hacking.

This last point would seem to be an especially serious obstacle, only it's not, at least for me and millions of others. I've thought about it a lot of times, but I keep making the choice to store my email, my files, my data, etc. on these services because of the factors listed above.

What do you think about this situation? What do you do?

Contra Ancoralia

2006-11-01T16:43:00.000-05:00

Around the turn of the Millennium, it was common to hear complaints about why the future wasn't here already. As one friend put it, "I desire rockets. Why aren't there rockets?" Those of us who grew up on 50s and 60s TV shows had a clear idea of what the future was supposed to look like. For the most part, we aren't anywhere close to that stream-lined high-design vision. True, there have been some astounding and largely unanticipated developments, but almost none of them moved us to a Buck Rogers future.

Instead, we are surrounded by technology that may work, but which is clunky, ugly, boring, and unpleasant to use. That pretty well describes most of the devices we have to work with in our daily lives. The most extreme example of this problem we typically encounter is a desktop computer. Such a machine usually has the following:

a box containing the processor, memory, disk drives, and various interface cards
a monitor
a keyboard
a mouse
a set of speakers
a printer
lots and lots of cables, including power cables for the processor, monitor, speakers and printer; data/signal cables connecting the monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and printer to the processor box; a network cable connecting the processor to some sort network port

The result is a setup that is hard to move or change, and which has an incredibly ugly and awkward rat's nest of cables strung behind and under it. It is no wonder we prefer so-called "tower" configurations, since those usually let you leave most of the cabling on the floor and out of sight.

One solution to the rat's nest problem is to put as much as possible into one box. Apple went that way with some of its designs and really worked at minimizing the number of cables. This is one of the reasons that Apple computers are considered to be more attractive than the typical PC. However even the admittedly classier Apple machines still have some cables. Laptop and palm computers represent other attempts to put everything into one package. However, they too reveal substantial shortcomings of one kind or another due to their small size and limited battery life.

Cables and wires make computers ugly, but they make other things ugly and awkward as well. For instance, go to a gym and watch someone trying not to drop a CD player as they struggle with the headphones while they are madly pedalling away on an elliptical trainer. (That problem has been slightly alleviated by the smaller and lighter Ipod, but even it has a wire to get tangled up in.) Also, you have doubtless seen someone fighting with a microphone cable on a stage, or perhaps have yourself cursed at the electric cord of your vacuum as it once again flops into your path while you are sweeping. Interestingly, the creators of the Star Trek: The Next Generation science fiction television series depicted the Borg (who are the primary villains in the series) as having cables and tubes connecting various parts of their own bodies. Cables, wires, and tubes represent the very soul of technological ugliness.

By contrast, one of the reasons that wireless household phones and cellphones are so wildly popular is simply because they have no wires. Likewise, coffee shops and bookstores have attracted a whole new clientele by providing cheap or free wireless Internet connnections. One of the oldest wireless technologies is the lowly pager, which is now essential in many professions such as medicine.

To me, the greatest contributor to the whole problem is the very notion of the cable. Somehow we have fixated on the idea that to get power or signal from one point to another we have to have a wire between the two points. What would a proper replacement to wires and cables look like? We have various wireless technologies to use for the signal portion of this problem, and a few of those (such as Bluetooth and 802.11*) are starting to make real in-roads in some applications. Still, it is not at all common to use those technologies within a computer. We still have printer cables, video cables, speaker cables, etc., to connect the various components. There is a considerable ways to go on that front.

Even if we are making progress on handling the wireless transmission of signals, we continue to neglect the other part of the problem, namely power transmission. At this point we really only ever see two solutions for powering our devices: batteries and power cables. This continues to baffle me. Nikola Tesla had working wireless power systems in use in his laboratories in the 1890s to power appliances on his workbenches. Have we really made no progress at all in this area in the intervening 110+ years? It would seem to me that one could do a great deal with inductive coupling. Tesla's system used this idea, with a coil running around the perimeter of a room's ceiling, and every appliance having an antenna coil to pick up the radiated power.

If you are uncomfortable living inside such a coil there are other possibiities. Imagine, for example, this power system:

The basis of the system is a floor consisting of interconnecting squares.
Each square has AC power connections to its four edges, so that power can flow freely among all the squares in the floor.
Each square has a large, flat induction coil built into it, with the axis of the coil perpendicular to the square.
Each square has a small bit of circuitry to control whether power is applied to the inductive coil. This circuit would be similar to the loop sensor embedded in streets to detect the passage of vehicles.
Any appliance needing power, such as a floor lamp, has a foot or pad that contains another coil similar to the ones in the floor squares.
When you place such an appliance on a floor square, the square's detection circuit senses that there is an inductive load above the square, and applies full power to the coil. This in turn induces an AC current in the coil in the foot, which then powers the device.
You may move the device anywhere in the room, being limited only to placing it so as to adequately intersect a floor square.

Once you see this basic idea, other implementations suggest themselves. For example, it would seem pretty straightforward to use the new flexible circuit technologies to create similar power transmission flooring materials that you can unroll and lay like linoleum. You can also extend this idea to the table level, by having a table or desk whose surface is constructed in a similar way with a set of power squares. To power your keyboard or monitor, you simply set it on a powered surface wherever you like. You can also extended it to handheld devices such as electric mixers, flashlights, cordless drills, cellphones, etc. Such gadgets would have to have small batteries to power them while they are in use, but once you set them back down on the table, they would start to recharge themselves automatically without having to be plugged into any special socket.

I'm not sure that the above scheme is the best one, but I'm certain that some scheme like this could work. More importantly, just using this idea in a thought experiment helps free one from the literal shackle of the power cable. I might point out that the Latin word for cable in the title of this posting (ancoralia) comes from the same root as the word for anchor. A cable is an anchor and keeps you fastened to one spot. If you want to live like Buck Rogers, you must be free to move, and cannot afford any kind of anchor.

Updated 1/20/2007:
Other posts related to this topic:

Pass Algorithms Vs. Passwords

2006-10-31T20:51:00.000-05:00

Pretty much every web-based service one uses nowadays requires some sort of login and password. I have a list of most of the sites that I have registered on, and at the moment it has almost 100 entries on it. Probably 40 of those I still use at least twice a year, if not weekly. It became clear to me some years ago that I was going to have serious problems if I used the same password or small set of passwords on all of them. If someone managed to get one of my passwords, they potentially would have access to all of the other sites on which I registered using that password. This is an unacceptable risk.

The problem of course is that it would be hard to remember and keep straight separate passwords for all of those sites. There is password management software available which will help you with this by storing all of those login IDs and passwords and then entering them for you automatically when you go to those sites. Still, that strikes me as a poor solution when one uses more than one computer regularly; keeping two or more master lists of passwords synchronized would not be trivial, and would likely cause you a problem when you were most in a hurry. I wanted a solution that gave me separate passwords for every site, yet did not require any kind of additional complication of some sort of 'helper' software. I did not want to be dependent on anything but my brain.

The answer is actually an old idea which I read about, believe it or not, in a science fiction story more than 30 years ago. The key insight is to use a pass algorithm rather than a password. Such an algorithm will allow you to compute the password on the fly from the information at hand rather than having to remember it. This is much easier than it sounds. Here's a very simple algorithm one could use (although it is so simple I would not recommend it): use the name of the service as the password. Thus, the password for my Gmail account would be 'gmail', while the password for my Ebay account would be 'ebay', etc. As you can see, if this were my algorithm I would not have to remember any passwords. I would just look at the domain name of the site in the URL, and use that name for the password. Instantly every site has a unique password, but I only have to remember one thing, the pass algorithm.

As I said, this algorithm is too simple, since having seen one password, it would be easy to guess how the rest of your passwords were set up. So let's make a modest improvement. Look at the keypad of your telephone and you will see that most buttons have letter labels. Using this as a key, you could take the domain name of the site and translate it letter by letter to the corresponding digit. Thus, my Gmail password would be '46245' while my Ebay password would be '3229'. Now this is much better. It is unlikely that anyone who hasn't read this blog would be able to guess at this algorithm from just looking at one password. Still, it's possible. You could complicate it a bit more by always adding a prefix or suffix of some sort. (Be sure to make it a nonsense prefix/suffix rather than an English word or name.)

Here is another possibility: use your computer's keyboard as your key. For example, you could look at each letter in a domain name and map it to the character above it on the keyboard. With this scheme, the Gmail password is 'tjq8o' and the Ebay password is '3gq6'. The only real criterion for an algorithm like this is that it has to be simple enough that you really can do it in your head (or on your keyboard) and it has to scramble the name up sufficiently to make it hard for someone who obtains your password to figure out what you are doing. There are other kinds of mappings you could come up with. You could also combine a couple of methods in some way. However you do it, you should come up with your own algorithm, and then experiment a little to see how easy it is for you to execute it. It may take you a couple of tries, but believe me it is worth it. I find it very satisfying in a way to have a separate password for every site, yet not have to remember a single one.

Oh, by the way, the algorithm I use is not like any of the ones I described.

Addendum 12/5/2006: I just ran across this article, which describes several approaches to passwords like the ones I described above, plus a bunch of others.

The Journey Metaphor Doesn't Go Anywhere

2006-10-28T20:59:00.000-04:00

Everyone has heard the journey metaphor. Sooner or later, every political or religious leader facing the necessity of taking an unpopular course of action always tells his faithful "Remember, we are all on a journey together, and we have to be ready to act accordingly." Somehow this is supposed to help people tighten their belts, gird up their loins, and brace themselves as they go back out into the storm. Having heard variations of this line all of my life, I'm afraid I now take a rather jaundiced view of it.

There are some problems with the journey metaphor. For example, you may realize that rather than being on a journey, i.e., going from one point to another, in reality you are just going in circles. An example of this came up a couple of months ago when I was talking with a friend about cancer and the impact it has on a family's life. We talked about my bout with multiple myeloma and her father's struggle with some other kind of cancer. I no longer remember exactly what brought it up, but somewhere in the middle of the conversation I remarked "I really hate the journey metaphor", and she vigorously agreed. She mentioned how when her father was first diagnosed, he was in a lot of distress, as were she and the other family members trying to care for him. Some social worker at the hospital, in trying to be helpful, told her "Now, remember, you are all on a journey together ... ". Before the social worker could finish, my friend interrupted her and said "This is no journey! It's a nightmare!" Certainly my own experience with cancer seems very far from being journey-like. Yes, there were constant changes, but they were cyclic, or even chaotic, to the point that it seemed at times I was making progress more on the basis of Brownian motion than because I was actually going anywhere. (Happily, I eventually did start improving, and am now in much better shape.)

Another problem with the journey metaphor is that it encourages the wrong set of priorities. If you are on a journey, then you won't be coming back to the point again. So you have no incentive whatsoever for cleaning up your messes. It's easier just to pack up and move on, leaving your trash behind. Even figuratively this is not a good idea. Unresolved problems left behind can certainly come back and bite you, especially if it turns out that you are not journeying, but going in circles.

A much better metaphor, it would seem to me, is construction. You are trying to build something, whether it is a healthy body or a new organization. With construction, you have to pay attention to the details. You have to make sure that you have the tools and materials you need, and you have to take care of the trash.

A grimmer but more apt metaphor sometimes is war or battle. If you are facing a genuine obstacle, perhaps other people or even the perversity of nature, you might well find yourself conducting metaphorical military operations. However, don't get carried away with this. The war metaphor is way over-used, too.

Nevertheless, if you are facing a problem and are responsible for getting a group of people to deal with it, for heaven's sake, don't tell them they are on a journey. Be honest with them, and tell them that they have a problem, and they have to deal with it, perhaps by fighting something or building something. Going on a journey is just running away.

Another Marketing-Created Term I Hate

2006-10-18T17:20:00.000-04:00

I have come to thoroughly detest the term 'user experience', as in 'these new features will enhance the user experience'. I'm sorry, but I don't want to experience your software at all. I may want to use it, but that's all. I'll keep my experiences to myself.

Problems with Google's AdSense

2006-10-18T16:27:00.000-04:00

I just spent some interesting but ultimately fruitless minutes looking for a particular blog entry I saw somewhere a few weeks ago. It was on a scientifically-oriented blog of some sort (like The Bad Astronomer) that had Google AdSense ads on it. What struck me at the time was the irony of the fact that the particular posting on that page was a rant against some pseudo-science while AdSense provided an ad for a service based on exactly that pseudo-science. That got me wondering how often it happened that an ad was diametrically opposed to the content of the page it appeared on. So I tried a very small experiment. I got onto my Gmail account, and sent myself a message containing the one line:

This is a rant against water dousing and water witching.

When I read the message in Gmail (which also shows AdSense ads), it showed these four ads over on the right side of the page:

New Winner Every Day
Win 5 Pet Peeves Characters(tm) Enter the Free daily Contest here.

Pendulum of Pendulums
Dowsing results you can trust -free shipping

Spiritual Dowsing
Beautiful Pendulums & Great L-rods Dowsing Books & Dowsing Services
Innovative health product
Preventive, non-invasize technology Subtle Energy Technologies

As you can see, two of the ads are exactly for services based on the pseudo-science I mentioned in my mini-rant. I tried the same thing again using different text and, as I expected, got essentially the same outcome. Google searches (upon which AdSense is based) are very effective for finding matches for words and phrases such as those that occur in a blog page or an email message. The problem is that AdSense cannot distinguish between positive and negative mentions of these terms. (BTW, I have no explanation for the 'Pet Peeves' or 'Subtle Energy' ads.) So, the moral of the story is:

If your page uses AdSense, and it is showing ads you don't like, try changing the wording of the problematic phrase, or try rendering it in some clever way that human readers can easily read but which AdSense will not pick up on. For example, space the p r o b l e m w o r d s out.

It's About Time

2006-10-02T21:34:00.000-04:00

I've been a long time coming, but I'll be a long time here.

People have been telling me that I should start a blog somewhere. As my friend Karen Fenton once put it "I'm having a moment of inertia." In my defense, I've been kind of sick for a while.

In March 2005 I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a very nasty bone marrow cancer. After extensive chemotherapy and two bone marrow stem cell transplants, I'm definitely doing better, but I'm not out of the woods yet. Recently, I have relapsed. (Although since the doctors never declared that I was in remission, I'm not sure telling me that I relapsed is all that informative.) Anyway, there is a protein called immunoglobulin gamma (IgG) which is indicative of how active my particular form of myeloma is. From January to June of 2006, the IgG level steadily fell. However, over the summer it started rising again, to the point that it got almost back up to the January level by mid-August. The doctors put me back on thalidomide, which is one of the drugs I was on for all four rounds of chemotherapy last year. It apparently is pretty effective against so-called 'refractory' myeloma, so we are hopeful that this will help. Unfortunately thalidomide has some pretty serious side effects. The most serious is probably peripheral neuropathy, which is the degeneration of nerves in the limbs, particularly in the hands and feet. The problem manifests itself first with a tingling, pins-and-needles sensation in the fingers. So far that hasn't happened, although I did experience that last year when I was on higher doses of thalidomide. The main problem I'm experiencing now is dizziness, nausea and general dopiness. The only upside of that so far is that thalidomide has cured my insomnia.

Regarding writing, I've been storing up a long list of topics about which I have something to say. At least I think I do. Having never actually written out my thoughts on these topics, it's hard to say how coherent they will be when finally put down as bytes in a database. We shall see.