Good thing they didn’t find sea monsters….

By AMH

I did a bit of a mental double-take when I saw this article about Russia planting a flag on the North Pole seabed to claim the land as Russian, because it seemed a century or two out of date. On reading it, it turns out that I am not the only one who thought so:

In a record-breaking dive, the two craft planted a one metre-high titanium Russian flag on the underwater Lomonosov ridge, which Moscow claims is directly connected to its continental shelf.
However, the dangerous mission prompted ridicule and scepticism among other contenders for the Arctic’s energy wealth, with Canada comparing it to a 15th century colonial land grab.

The appeal of the underwater site is as access to a significant gas and oil reserve, to which Canada, Norway, Russia, the US, and Denmark all have claim to based on proximity. It sounds like the submarine expedition to the bottom was actually fairly dangerous and sophisticated, and it was not undertaken only to plant a flag but to collect samples to compare to established Russian geology – the flag was merely symbolic. It is interesting seeing a “first-ones there” approach to claim staking still taking place on Earth, though, and not just in space.

Cover to Cover

By AMH

If you know me at all, you will not be shocked that I have a bit of a “completeness” compulsion, particularly when it comes to reading. In its most innocuous form, I cannot leave a book unfinished or skip/skim over parts of it, even if it is nonfiction. This includes the introduction, appendices, and footnote material. The idea of putting a book down because you are bored with it, or only reading the “relevant” chapters just makes no sense. This is why my “currently reading” list can have the same books on it for months (or years….) at a time, as in my mind I have just picked something else up but will get back to it.
Magazines/journals have always fallen victim to the same compulsion – I have to read every article before putting it aside. As a result, while I only have a few subscriptions – mostly related to computing or science – I have ended up with a huge stack of periodicals that I have not touched because of some boring article that is bogging me down. I knew most people just skimmed through reading those articles that appealed to them, but I just couldn’t do that.
I think the internet is finally starting to cure me of all of that. Sure, I have always had a list of sites that I read regularly, but it was a limited enough list that I could allow the same compulsion to apply, reading every single update and going back into the archives if I fell behind. But now that I use RSS feeds, I have subscribed to more and more feeds, some at sites with dozens of updates a day. For a couple of months, I tried to make sure i worked through all of my feeds every day and would go through the backlog on weekends to catch up.
It has become clear that one cannot read the entire internet, or even the complete set of entries from the portion of it that I keep track of. I have given in and will skim through my feed listings only clicking through on the articles that actually seem interesting. If a backlog gets too big, I’ll just read what is new from the past day or two and then delete the rest. And I have realized that I am reading a selection of items from more sources, with less content that I am not really interested in, in less time than I used to spend websurfing. This surely sounds obvious, but it is a bit of a breakthrough for me.
And using this same approach I have actually started moving through my backlog of periodicals, reading maybe the first paragraph or two of most articles but stopping or skimming when I got bored. It is great – I might not read everything new that is coming out, but I am reading more than I was. If I had figured this out years ago, maybe I would have finished grad school a couple of years earlier….

Phased surveillance

By AMH

There’s a very nice summary and assessment of a proposal for a web of surveillance cameras around Pittsburgh over at Pittsblog today. The proposal is presented as an anti-terrorism measure and has multiple phases of cameras being installed, starting with major infrastructure but over time extending the web of cameras into “high-risk neighborhoods”. Besides just a general sense that this much surveillance without a specific justification is problematic, Pittsblog offers the following criticism of the proposal:

The Pittsburgh plan is completely silent on what I call “the human back end.” So Pittsburgh arranges to collect all of this surveillance data. What then? Who sees the data? What’s done with the data? When? And why? For the dystopian version, watch Enemy of the State. It’s not just local law enforcement watching. It’s the bad side of the National Security Agency.

The criticism goes on to note that even if you don’t assume malice, there’s just the simple question of whether the city is even ready and equipped to deal with this data in a useful manner. Overall, this looks like a premature, if not deeply troubling, proposal.

Wooden Adder

By AMH

If I knew any woodworking, I would absolutely make myself one of these beautiful binary marble adding machines. It’s a six-bit binary adder, implemented with marbles and wooden toggles that allow for carrying. The page describes in a good bit of detail how it works, but if you just want the high-level overview, scroll to the bottom and watch the video demonstration. It’s really pretty amazing.

I never did understand en passant…

By AMH

Tomb Chess is pretty fun – it’s like chess, without all of the complicated rules, more randomness, and undead pieces. Basically, the board is a graveyard, and the pieces are “buried” until you decide to release one without knowing what type of piece it is – or even if it is your or your opponents’. There are no tricky moving rules – just left/right or up/down. With the simplicity and the randomness, you can’t think too much, so it moves a lot faster – it truly is the internet version of chess….

I’m not a lawyer, but I play one on the internet…

By AMH

There are tons of ways in which the law doesn’t keep up with technical developments, but this is an interesting example of technology perhaps pushing too far ahead of the law. A company was found guilty of unauthorized practice of law by virtue of their online legal expert system. The system was focused on bankruptcy law, and the sales pitch used stressed that this was “an expert system and knows the law. Unlike most bankruptcy programs which are little more than customized word processors the Ziinet engine is an expert system.”
It seems that this use of “expert system” in the description was key to the ruling against the company, as it implied that more was done that simply filling out forms. I’m guessing that’s where the distinction lies between this case and the huge number of tax preparation programs out there. I haven’t seen tax software cross the line into claiming to have AI in them, though I’m sure such an approach would be as fruitful there as in bankruptcy law – and actually suspect that the “AI” in the bankruptcy system is not any more sophisticated than that in most tax preparation software. It’s, in fact, interesting to consider how much of this is about the sales pitch of the system versus the actual behavior of the system.
Interestingly, on the legal side, the American Bar Association actually has a document on Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Information Web Site Providers, though it’s focus is primarily on helping lawyers determine how much information and assistance they can provide through the internet, particularly considering jurisdiction issues of where one is authorized to practice law.

Break out the drinks with umbrellas in them….

By AMH

It’s been a bit slow recently on the contentful updates, but X-Entertainment is holding a summer megaparty, meaning that Matt is going to post at least something every day between now and August 1. Which means, if you aren’t an X-Entertainment reader, now’s a fine time to check it out. The weblog is fun, but the mainstay is the articles, reviewing pop culture cruft such as sodas, snacks, old TV ads and movies, and of course lots of toys – scroll through the list of articles on the front page to get a taste.

21st Century Comparison Shopping

By AMH

I haven’t tried this out yet, but Frucall lets you comparison shop by calling them on your cell phone from a store and entering the bar code of what you’re thinking of buying. [via Physics Geek] Their system will check in their database of products, providers, and prices and let you know a range of prices, where you can get that item, etc. It’s a free service, from what I can see, except for whatever your cell phone provider charges for the call. If you are at your computer, you can also just search their database directly. I tried that much out with a couple of things I had lying around with bar codes on them, and it seemed pretty useful, when it actually had the product listed. It seems to tend towards electronics products, and not so much foodstuffs or random household goods.

This and that….

By AMH

I’m back from traveling for a couple of weeks and am digging out from a backlog of real and electronic email and feeds that I’ve fallen behind on. So, that is going to just be a hodge-podge link dump today of what caught more than my passing attention…
I don’t think I would use the Polar Clock in a web browser or even on my computer, but this would make an awesome digital clock to hang on the wall. The only thing that is a little odd is that the outer ring is the day of the week instead of the year, though that would raise the question of what to use as the starting and ending points, and I suspect haveing an outer ring that changes more frequently than the month ring is aesthetically nice.
This Consumer Reports page lets you watch crash test videos from a wide variety of cars – use the pull down menus to find your car or look for cars that don’t fair so well (Jeep crashes seem pretty dramatic).
Sort of a variant on Galaga with gun upgrades and better graphics, Lone Starship: Defender of the Planet Game is fun and a good balance of challenge with easy controls – I’m usually playing these things on my laptop with a trackpad so games with tricky controls usually don’t work for me.
Don’t go Googlewhacking – go Wikigroaning: my favorite pairs listed in the article are probably “Jet Propulsion Laboratory” versus “Black Mesa research facility” and “List of conflicts in the Middle East” versus “List of furry role-playing games”.

Fantasy, not Sci-Fi

By AMH

This weblog post has a really fun table contrasting current cyberattack techniques to those in classic cyberpunk stories, particularly Gibson’s stories. [via Boing Boing] The comments are also worth reading – it’s interesting to think about whether the difference indicate that we haven’t come as far as Gibson predicted, or whether they reflect dated presumptions about how technology of the future would work on Gibson’s part. The observations about the types of systems being attacked (focusing on the recent denial-of-service attack against Estonia) are particularly interesting, I think:

Cyberpunk stories: Cyber-attack targets were fancy-pants specialized computer installations accessible to few, such as military supercompters in Neuromancer’s backstory or the AI complex in its climax.
Real world: The cyber-attack target was the Estonian internet, which people used for everyday activities, from banking to email to looking at pictures of other people’s cats with funny captions.