Funniest line read this morning

"...but now we're talking about a small niche within another niche which is already so small as to be basically nonexistent."

- about a mini-helicopter/jetpack.

Barsoom*

Elias and I have been having fun watching the videos on the NASA site about the various Mars rovers. I was surprised to learn that there are currently two rovers on Mars (Opportunity and Spirit), and another one on the way (Sojourner), and another super-advanced "science laboratory" rover planned to launch in 2010. My treasured issue of National Geographic with 3-D pictures taken by Pathfinder is seeming so passé.

Our favorite video is "Mars Science Laboratory Mission Animation", which looks so real you'd swear John Carter* had a camera crew.

* Annoyingly cute references are to Edgar Rice Burroughs's action-packed Mars series. The start-up, A Princess of Mars, is great fun (especially if you're a 14-year-old boy), but I thought episode 2, The Gods of Mars, is even more so -- I mean look at how creepy-cool the blue "plant men" are.

Trojan Horse 1.0 released

Silverlight 1.0 is released, and official Microsoft-Novell support for Silverlight on Linux is announced. From my point of view 1.0 is not exciting, because it's for building media players, not "real" applications. But version 1.1 is coming up fast, which means .NET+XAML will soon be running on the client. Every client: XP, Vista, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices -- if Scott Guthrie is to be believed, and he seems to be the single most dependable developer-liason Microsoft has.

Bottom line: in two years AJAX apps will seem about as flashy and hip as a 1995 web site feels today. I still wonder if/when Google will stick a toe in the .NET water.

Vic-20

A few years ago I picked up a Commodore Vic-20 off of ebay for $20. Such was my first computer when I was 11, and I really programmed the snot out of mine. This one I planned to be Elias's first computer too. Every now and then we put the box on the floor and he takes all the components out and we talk about what they are.

The other day I decided to actually fire the thing up, which required one trip to Radio Shack for a part they don't make anymore that hooks to the inputs which aren't on TV's anymore. The guy at Radio Shack said the Vic-20 had been his first computer too, but then he got a Commodore 64, and those were his "gaming glory days." Whatever! Eventually I also got a C-64, but I seem to be the only guy who didn't just play games on these things, I did much much more programming.

On the Vic-20 I made a flight combat game, an Indiana Jones'-inspired multi-level game, and I got to where I could write a spaceship game in three (or was it four?) lines of BASIC on any Vic-20 on display at any mall. On the C-64 I learned assembly language and wrote the graphic engine for an Ultima-style game, but didn't write the game itself. I think I wrote a C-64 version of Jupiter Lander too, which had been a cool game on the Vic-20. But my ultimate project was installing a second sound chip in a C-64 and then writing a drum machine app with an assembly-language execution engine. Then I'd program in some Jesus and Mary Chain drums and play along with my electric guitar. I don't imagine anyone is possibly still reading this (least of all my wife), but if you are I hope it is now obvious just how cool I was as a teenager.

Anywho, it turned out that with a $1.99 part from Radio Shack we were in business. Except that as soon as I tried to plug it in, the connector broke, so I had to rummage around for a soldering iron, thus the crazy wires in this picture. The funniest thing was how Dahlia wanted to press the buttons too and watch what happened on the screen. She would bounce from one side of Elias to the other, trying to strain and get a few key pokes in. Elias figured out how to clear the Vic-20 screen off and put a number '5' right where he wanted it.



After the kids went to bed, I plugged in the Jupiter Lander cartridge. Check out that awesome high score! Okay I think this may be the most pathetic blog post I've written, although there's a lot of competition.

Scratch

Perhaps the best first programming language: Scratch.

Sample code:





When I was in college, a professor was hired whose research area was graphical programming languages, and I remember her presentation looked like this.

The death of privacy

It surprises me how many smart, technical people will line up to use a full suite of online applications, such as Google's. When is it going to become well-appreciated that the data which we are now offering to Internet hubs, such as Google, is being integrated and stored in an emerging supercomputer -- and someday AI's which we cannot now imagine will "understand" it all, and people will do things with the results which we cannot now predict?

Here's a small example: Ever notice how people will try to encode their email address when posting to a newsgroup, such as "joe@dont.spam.me.hotmail.com"? This is fine for fooling today's email scrapers (let's presume), but how does Joe know that in a few years the email scrapers won't be clever enough to parse his feeble attempt at data-hiding?

The same principle -- that tommorow's AI will crack today's data -- applies to every email or blog post you now write, to any documents or spreadsheets you upload to Google Office, and to your browse and search histories. All your data goes onto the hard-drives of network computers -- which are relatively relatively dumb and inert, now. But in 30 years those computers will not be dumb. They will, somehow, be part of a supercomputer which will parse language and make (artificial) conceptual connections among all of your data; an integrated, subtle, accurate picture of you will emerge. This cannot be in doubt. We have every reason to believe that Google's fundamental strategy is to build that supercomputer. And why wouldn't they (or someone else) do it? There are six billion market forces behind such a strategy. All that is in question is the length of time until that supercomputer exists, i.e., the length of time before privacy as we now know it is dead.

We cannot predict what will be done with the data we are thoughtlessly dumping onto today's servers, but we can predict that someone -- maybe you, maybe me -- is not going to like it.

Etymology search

Want some hints about the etymology of a word, and somehow you've misplaced your 145-pound Oxford English Dictionary? Etymonline might be a good place to start. (Found via The0phrastus.)

Best Pleo video yet

Yet another article on the forthcoming baby dinosaur robot, this one has a good five-minute video without any monologue, just an example round of playing with a Pleo: waking him up, poking at him playfully, inducing him to peer over the edge of a table, then picking him up until he goes back to sleep. The user in the video is the inventor. The three-page article is interesting too, giving background on the Idahoan inventor, who use to be a mime before creating the consumer-sensation Furby (which looks almost as annoying as those singing-and-dancing snowmen advertised during the holidays) and earning himself $10 million.

To be released in March at $250, the Pleo seems an unlikely purchase for us, but it sure is tempting. I'm just fascinated by the fact that we are at the cusp of the age of robots, and this will go down as one of the first mass-market attempts at a life-like robot. But then I am not sure if I want the kids to be around a robot pet just yet. Would it be fun for more than a week, then become a very expensive toy mistake? At the other extreme, would Elias get so emotionally attached to it that he'd cry when it breaks? What if he breaks it himself, will he be devastated? And is it just wrong to love a robot -- or is it good to develop a sense of both what a robot is and isn't? And isn't having pets and toys which need gentle care while they are alive/functioning a good part of life? Et cetera.

For my own part, I want to know more about the AI ware to get a good idea of how complex and therefore interesting this thing really is. Sounds like it is programmable to some extent (or maybe you can't write scripts, as you can for Lego bots, you can just set the Pleo's personality parameters), but there's not much it can physically do besides sleep, purr, wiggle, walk, and respond to pokes and pets. Hmm, sounds like a cat, minus the barf and litterbox ... that's starting to sound like a pretty good investment. Maybe this should be the marketing line: It's cheaper than a year of cat food.

UPDATE: Bill Gates compares, in five pages, the robotics industry today to the software industry of 30 years ago. Carr takes a quick glance.

Gates confirms something for me: the biggest challenges in robotics are software problems. But I'm skeptical of his suggestion that robotics is especially in need of multi-threaded software. His example of a robot too busy adjusting its drive motor to notice an imminent cliff is silly -- even Office bloatware is rarely that unresponsive -- and his praise for Microsoft's "concurrency and coordination runtime" just sounds like an ad to me. (Microsoft is obviously playing catch-up in robotics to other software giants ... like Lego.) If we've learned anything in software, it's that task switching on a Von Neuman architecture is a really, really good way to achieve virtual simultaneity. Moderately complex multithreaded programs are not just "difficult" to write, they're just shy of impossible for humans to get bug-free.

The Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera Mechanism, in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. I don't remember seeing this in 2000 when we were there.



This is 2nd century BCE technology that was more sophisticated than anything to come for the next 1,000 years. I want a recreation of it for Christmas.

Interest search engine

This search engine is great for when you aren't looking for a specific answer, but just for more information relevant to an interest:

Clusty.com

The results are in two panes. The right-pane lists links in the classic ordered fashion, very Googlish. But in the left-pane is a small tree of browsable clusters of results, the clustering being pseudo-topical.

I tried "Piaget's epistemology", and the clusters were immediately interesting and required no scrolling or page-nexting. I like it.

The only drawback? Seems to take a few seconds longer than Google to return results.