Random stuff

I've been too busy for coherent thoughts, so here's a few disjointed things:

Music. While talking on the phone to a friend who was shopping at Lowe's I overhead the Backstreet Boys "I want it that way" in the background (followed by a Human League song, ugh). So I was thinking, I should lip synch my own YouTube Backstreet Boys video (not really), but you should watch this guitar player, even does the harmonics, and for those of you more classically inclined, Pachelbel's canon in an usual style. He also does a G&R song, using a loop. I think the first time I was aware of an acoustic guitar player using a pedal-activated loop was seeing Phil Keaggy do it (or a more recent version). But for pure slap harmonics, watch this.

Trivia: What is the connection between Phil Keaggy and Jimi Hendrix? Probably nothing.

Then there is always Andy Mckee.

Student evaluations. Interesting article about the notorious RateMyProfessors.com site correlating with IDEA, one of the more famous system for student ratings of instruction.

Costco. ABC News did an nice story on Costco. The maximum mark-up on any item is Costco is 14 percent, and they are one of the largest buyers of cashews in the world. The biggest selling item is toilet paper.

Seed pans. I really like these seed pans from the UK. I first read about them in Sunset.

Of earthquakes and money

The LA Times has a story about the next 30 years of California earthquakes, but what you need to know is summed up in this picture -- Rancho Cucamonga is in the middle of it :) The story has a link to a similar northern California picture. When it does happen, you can track it here.

There's been quite a bit about salaries lately. The CRA posted information about 2006 starting salaries for graduates in SEH (science, engineering, and health):

CS tied for second with health majors for the highest median salary at the bachelor’s level ($45,000) and tied for first with engineering at the master’s level ($65,000). This compared to median salaries among all science, engineering and health fields of $39,000 at the bachelor’s level and $56,000 at the master’s level.

Compare this to the recent AAUP report about faculty salaries (summarized here, full report here). You can look up salary information by college in the appendices of the full report. If you're interested in UC and CSU salaries, you can find out down to the person by going here.

The AAUP report discusses salaries of college coaches as compared to faculty:

Table B presents two years of average salaries for head football coaches, average salaries of full professors, and the ratio of the two for the eleven Division I-A football conferences. In 2007-08, the average salary of the coaches is $1,040,863, a 12.4 percent increase over the $925m683 average paid in 2006-07. By contrast, the average salary of full professors at these universities in 2007-08 is $104,523, 3.5 percent more than the $100,998 paid in 2006-07. In 2006-07, the average head football coach earned 9.2 times the average full professor's salary; that ratio increased to 10 this year.

Remove the receiver gently so as not to jiggle the switch hook

This "four foot" phone dial reminded me of the 1927 film teaching Fresno County residents how to use a dial phone. While you are there at archive.org you can watch the 1949 short film "Life in the Central Valley", or the Kirk Douglas feature The Big Trees where he and some Quakers have different ideas about sequoia trees.

When push buttons replaced the telephone dial, I wonder if a film was made explaining why the numbers on a calculator are arranged differently than numbers on a telephone? :)

Solid smoke

Joe Kittinger (the guy who jumped out of a balloon at 102,800 feet) was honored at the National Air and Space Museum. ABC did a nice interview. Also honored was the NASA Stardust team who flew aerogel through the tail of a comet. Aerogel is weird stuff, I bought tiny pieces on ebay. These pictures from JPL are amazing: a real brick looking like it is floating on smoke, and crayons insulated from a flame, demonstrating aerogel's thermal properties.

Changing the subject, Dr. Dobb's Journal published an article about Byzantine faults. We spent a lot of time in graduate school thinking about Byzantine agreement while formally specifying systems. The topic comes up when you have distributed critical systems that need to agree.

Speaking of agreement, an idea behind mutation testing is that programs written from the same specification should produce the same answers. In high school I was the operator for a payroll system that was replacing manual procedures. Unfortunately, the payroll software was being written while we were using it every week to cut $100,000 in payroll checks. Because of round-off, the software was not getting the same answer the parallel paper-and-pencil process. As this post in Risks says, there was "huge panic, much headless chicken behaviour" (the follow-up Risks post is also good). Our accountants did not like being a few cents off each week :)

In most men there lurks a lesser man, and his presence smells in the sun

Yes that title is from the same book as the previous two blog titles :)

Anyway, summer is about here, so I recommend that you have a pool party and tie dye something. We had great success with pillowcases and sheets (but never did a couch). But now fashion designers are muscling in on my creative space.

I noticed that Stanford is hosting a talk by Randy Breen from Emotiv Systems (the abstract for the talk is interesting). They've devloped a non-invasive EEG neuroheadset (a lot different than where things were back in the day).

But the big story of today was getting a Pegge Hopper signed poster at the sale, and listening to the Radio Lab show about how songs get stuck in your head (featuring Oliver Sacks).

There is a degree of mercy beyond which any man is rude to inquire

OK, the title doesn't have anything to do with this blog post, but I decided another quote from Ernest Gann's Fate is the hunter was in order (you can get a lot cheaper copies :)

The real reason for this post is that I finally had time to watch a video on Tim O'Reilly's blog. Eben Moglen really goes after O'Reilly about how he wasted the last 10 years promoting open source. It gets hot at the end, but worth watching.

Moglen gave a keynote at the December 2006 Sakai conference, then had a lunchtime "discussion" with a Blackboard attorney about the infamous patent. More recently, he spoke at a MySQL conference.

We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand.

Men's Vogue (who knew there was such a thing?) has an article about the world of "freight dog" pilots and their wacky cargo (the author was also briefly featured on NPR).

Delta airlines has a big hit with their new, sassy safety video (starring "Deltalina"), and even released it on YouTube. Is finger-wagging universally understood? On Seinfeld there was no question about what it meant.

Security, and moon dust

Two unrelated things: there are fewer sky marshals than you think. I haven't seen one on a flight for a long time. I would rather have sky marshal than a pilot who's supposed to be flying the landing approach discharge his gun (Wired has a funny picture, the Associated Press has pictures of the bullet hole, and Bruce Schneier has a post about something even scarier :). But, Mythbusters busted the following idea:

Boyd said Saturday's incident could have been much worse.

"At that altitude, you puncture the skin of an airplane, it's going to go down. They were very lucky," Boyd said.

But certainly a plane that's miles off course and unresponsive near Hawaii would certainly attract a military escort, wouldn't it?

“Air shuttle 1002, I've been trying to contact you for the last 90 to 100 miles. I understand you've passed Hilo. I'm going to turn you back to the northeast bound to get you back to the Hilo airport. Is there some kind of emergency situation going on?”...

None of Hawaii Air National Guard's F-15s was alerted, said Capt. Jeff Hickman, spokesman for the Guard.

In fact, the Guard has not responded to any calls for emergency scrambles for civilian flights in Hawaii since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Changing subjects to something less scary, NASA studied why moon dust smells funny in space but not on earth:

Moondust on Earth has been "pacified." All of the samples brought back by Apollo astronauts have been in contact with moist, oxygen-rich air. Any smelly chemical reactions (or evaporations) ended long ago.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Astronauts took special "thermos" containers to the moon to hold the samples in vacuum. But the jagged edges of the dust unexpectedly cut the seals of the containers, allowing oxygen and water vapor to sneak in during the 3-day trip back to Earth. No one can say how much the dust was altered by that exposure.

Books and eyes

Bob Stein was Thursday evening's keynote speaker at the library's "Future of the Book" colloquium. Stein's co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, and was in the digital publishing world from the beginning, and I still use pieces of an ancient CD-ROM from his Voyager publishing company called Defending human attributes in the age of the machine containing video and full text of three of Don Norman's books, including The design of everyday things.

Turning the tables on him, Yvonne Rogers and Frances Aldrich published the results of a usability study of the CD-ROM titled "In Search of Clickable Dons - Learning about HCI Through Interacting with Norman's CD-ROM". More recently, there is a couple paragraphs about how the "Nasty Norman" has turned into the "Nice Norman".

In his keynote talk, Stein also talked about working with Alan Kay. That reminded me that there is a March 2007 TED talk by Kay available now.

Speaking of user interfaces, a Slashdot item reminded me of eye tracking. Using eye tracking to replace a pointing device like a mouse is an idea that occurs to everyone, but it isn't as easy as it sounds. Some of the best eye tracking data comes from the world of newspaper publishing. Check out these these two short videos tracking webpage viewing, and a heatmap (and explanation).

HAL as a fish

Honda has a 30 second advertisement in which piranha are talking to a car. But why do they sound like HAL from 2001? Not that I'm complaining, just curious.

The crab is also interesting.

Go here and then click on "WATCH THE VIDEOS". The site lets you download the ads as .mov files, which is also sort of odd. Not that I'm complaining.

Danger! Will Robinson

CBS has full episodes of "classic" television shows for you to watch, including the original Star Trek (three seasons), Hawaii Five-0 (one season), MacGyver (one season), the Twilight Zone (two seasons), and Melrose Place (one season). Melrose Place? How did that get in there?

"Where no man has gone before" still creeps me out especially the glowing eyes. It was supposed to be the first episode but the network execs thought it was too much? So it ended up the third episode. Something like that. But it was the "NO KILL I" episode that had me hiding behind the neighbor's living room chair in 1967.

If you don't consider those "classic", TVLand has some full episodes of the Andy Griffith Show, the Beverley Hillbillies, and Gunsmoke.

NBC has Miami Vice (but I can't find the infamous "Glades" episode), the A Team, and Alfred Hitchcock for your vintage viewing pleasure.

ABC is a little light on the classics, unless you consider My So-Called Life classic :)

AOL has full episodes of Lost in Space (ugh), Alias Smith and Jones, the Bob Newhart Show (now there's a classic), and clips from Iconoclasts, which isn't old enough to be classic, but I though the episode of Sean Penn and Jon Krakauer in Alaska talking about making the Into the Wild movie was good.

Microclimates in cube-land

The people who brought you the Aeron chair (Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting description in Blink) have a personal climate device based on Peltier technology. Interesting short video here.

You can use the same technology to keep your "can of creamy corn soup" warm.

On a more serious subject -- James Oberg reviews a book about the Soviet's copy of the United State's space shuttle in "Copying NASA's mistakes".

Some ways to spend your tax refund

As the Apollo astronauts get older, more stuff comes up for auction. Some of it is fairly affordable (like signed panoramic photographs, check out these Quicktime VR views) or Cernan's famous picture of the "full earth".

If you want to go retro, pick up a Chesley Bonestell print, like this famous one.

I don't get it, but some of them have taken up painting, like Alan Bean (he signed a book for me at the Tamsen Munger gallery) and Michael Collins, who seems to like painting fish. I was really impressed with what he had to say in the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. That movie was not at all what I expected.

I also don't really get autograph collecting, but if you do, watch out for autopens.

I would rather get the Apollo 14 scoop used on the moon (minimum bid of $125k, expected to go for at least a quarter million dollars), the Apollo 17 water gun used on the moon to rehydrate food, a Saturn rocket model signed by Wernher von Braun, or gingerbread cookies that are well into their fourth decade.

Some of the Apollo astronauts got into ESP or religion, a topic for another day :)

The Times of New York

By popular demand, the picture of Mike Wallace (and link to the original article) is here. I doubt that he is a member of the Society for Barefoot Living (sounds vaguely creepy), jogs sans shoes or has even read The Barefoot Home.

Enough already about feet. More interesting is an article in the NYT Magazine about single sex education in grade school. Here's a quote:

The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Scandalous toes, revised and expanded

Earlier this month a plea for faculty to dress better (“There is something about the combination of denim and tenure that is inherently preposterous") reminded me of other fashion brouhahas, like flip-flops at the Whitehouse or Marc Andreessen's bare feet on an April 1998 cover of Time, or 60 minutes' Mike Wallace's "pterodactyl-like bare feet" on the cover of the Times.

More recently I was thinking about how folks at Fast Company's top 50 company dressed for their photo shoot -- they're pretty casual at Google.

I forgot to mention two other things the first time I posted this:

• Calpoly SLO's troubled proposal for an engineering program in Saudi Arabia:

  Over five years, Cal Poly would receive $5.9 million from the Saudi government to create an engineering curriculum, build labs and train teachers in Jubail, a sprawling oil center on the Persian Gulf. Only men would qualify to take or teach engineering classes, although the campus has separate classes in other disciplines for women.
  
  "No matter how you cut it, we're supporting the oppression of women," said Jim LoCascio, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly since 1981.

• and more from UCSB Oceanographer Halpern about human impact on oceans. Syvia Earle (saw her downtown six years ago) says:

  “We learned more about the nature of the ocean in the latter part of the 20th century than during all preceding human history,” Dr. Earle said. “But we also lost more.”

  
  
  Much as she knows about oceans, she was not a big fan of the Fresno Sanitary Landfill being designated a national historical landmark:

  It also was made public that the Park Service's advisory board had voted 10-1 to place the landfill on the landmark list. The lone dissenter, ecologist Sylvia Earle, stated, "Being designated as a historic landmark connotes a certain distinction that implies honor. It just doesn't measure up."

  Why would "a dump" be considered for historical designation? Famous garbage anthropologist William Rathje explains:

  You might read that the first sanitary landfill opened in England. Wrong. As the nomination papers document, the first working sanitary landfill was opened in the real world of Fresno by Jean Vincenz, a man with vision–a vision tempered and sustained by his travels throughout the US to learn from what others tried that worked and what they tried that didn't. It wasn't rocket science, but it was extremely creative for its day–with carefully structured draglines to position refuse, techniques to compact the refuse, and at the end of the day the same draglines to spread soil as daily cover that had been dug out to make room for the next day's refuse. This was Vincenz's "sanitary landfill" system, created at the same time that virtually all of the rest of the country and the world were feeding the fires and rats in open dumps or unleashing a black rain of cinders, soot, and ash from the chimneys of refuse-burning facilities appropriately called destructors.

  Dr. Earle must have missed that part.

It's time to git yerself one, or two

If you are an OTA (over the air) television watcher and don't want to replace your analog TVs before the March 2009 official switchover to digital broadcasting, it's time to get your $40 coupons from the federal government, and buy a set top converter box. I went to Wal-Mart today and picked up the RCA DTA800 for $49.87 (so less than $10 after coupon). It's easy to hook up, and has RF (coax) and composite video-left/right audio output. Why no S-video or other output, you ask? Because to be eligible for the $40 coupon the box has to be minimally functional.

Just hook it up between your existing antenna and TV (or recorder). You don't get HD quality since you are still using your old TV, but you do get to watch the multiple digital stations (instead of just one analog signal per station you will probably get two or more) that are already available over the air, and you'll get simple on-screen TV schedule description.

What's available -- analog and digital -- in your area? Use Antenna Web to find out. You don't need to input your personal information, a zip code will do.

So join the 20th century before the first decade of the 21st is over :)

Unrelated trivia: What is the source of the electricity to run your converter box and old TV? See PG&E's "power mix".

Innumeracy, cats, and performance evaluations

Researchers from UCSB helped develop the Ocean Impact Map showing human influence on the oceans. The map is interesting. What really got me thinking is Ben Halpern's oft-repeated oceanographer's lament:

"The deep water is such a vast, relatively unexplored area, we just don't know what kinds of impacts we're having on those ecosystems," Halpern says. "We spend trillions of dollars going to the moon and we don't really know what's going on in our own oceans yet."

Trillions? Really? After poking around on the web a little, it looks like $25-28 billion in late-1960s dollars was spent on Apollo. Throw in another $2 billion to make an even $30 billion 1969 dollars. What's that worth today? About $176.24 billion (exercise for the reader: how does that compare to the cost of the second Iraq war?). What's an order of magnitude or so among scientists? One nice introduction to innumeracy I used in freshmen critical thinking classes was Hofstader's "On number numbness", a column he wrote for Scientific American and reprinted in the book Metamagical Themas.

The space-fans have their own oft-repeated "fact" (but I haven't had time to check the numbers):

During the same time period, [Americans] spent as much money on cosmetics as was spent on Apollo.

A couple other interesting bits of trivia about Apollo: how the Apollo 11 flag was engineered (much more interesting than it might sound), and how much better those awful black and white slow scan television pictures actually looked to the folks in Australia seeing the feed from the dish (a movie that you need to see :)

Two unrelated things: At LAX Thursday I saw several people reading Save the Cat. It's a book about screenwriting that I am thinking of reading to see if any of it is relevant to software engineering. Finally, Bob Sutton has another interesting take on annual performance evaluations of employees. Here's a great quote:

Then there is another, more extreme argument, that the performance evaluation process is fundamentally flawed. That doing it well is like doing blood-letting well -- it is a bad practice that does more harm than good in all or nearly all cases. This is the position taken by the famous quality guru W. Edwards Deming -- he was vehemently opposed to using them at all.

No need for GPS

This post via Steve got me thinking about the old strip maps I have from the 1920s and 1930s (Fresno to Huntington Lake, etc). USC has a nice collection of AAA strip maps from that era. Here is LA to Bakersfield, and LA to La Canada and Sunland.

Strip maps are an old idea, check out this one from over 300 years ago.

Strip maps have been extensively studied, such as in "A linear view of the world: Strip maps as a unique form of cartographic representation". This discussion of cognition:

One reason for the success of strip maps over time and across cultures is the advantage of process over state descriptions for route following. In addition, continued popularity of the format and potential for its expanded use may also relate to advantages of such maps in helping people develop a cognitive map of an unfamiliar environment.

reminds me of Edwin Hutchins' book Cognition in the wild, which you should have read by now.

David Rumsey let you play with his collection of historical maps online way before Google maps. We've looked at the user interface as part of the graduate HCI class.

About ten years ago I picked up one of the 1000 copies of California 49:

California was an unusual corner of the world. The Spaniards kept what little information they had under tight wraps. There were few reasons to visit today's California - little water, no obvious gold, and few people to exploit, so it remained a backwater for centuries. European mapmakers tried filling the vacuum, struggling with a lack of accurate information but always ready to copy from one another. This is how "the island of California" was born.

This intriguing anomaly has fascinated map collectors for years. The California Map Society decided to pull together important historic maps as a state sesquicentennial project. Their 1999 publication, "California 49," included forty-nine such maps. Printed in only 1000 copies, it quickly sold out. You might look for a copy in your local or University library.

Finally, sometimes I occasionally turn a map upside down, but I find this disturbing.

It's full of stars

Two quick things:

• Some amazing astrophotography (scroll down after clicking) taken from Bear Mountain near Meadow Lakes (famous for TV and radio transmitters). I thought their description of why and how they picked the site was interesting.
• What happens with all that stuff you leave curbside for the recycling service to haul away? It goes into athrough an eddy current separator, of course.

  ... a magnet pulls out any ferrous metals, typically tin-plated or steel cans, while the non-ferrous metals, mostly aluminium cans, are ejected by eddy current. Eddy-current separators, in use since the early 1990s, consist of a rapidly revolving magnetic rotor inside a long, cylindrical drum that rotates at a slower speed. As the aluminium cans are carried over this drum by a conveyer belt, the magnetic field from the rotor induces circulating electric currents, called eddy currents, within them. This creates a secondary magnetic field around the cans that is repelled by the magnetic field of the rotor, literally ejecting the aluminium cans from the other waste materials.

Now you know.

Space Food Sticks

A few blasts from the past:

If you were a kid in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, you probably yearn for space food sticks (and remember this advertisement), washed down with Tang. Yes, space food sticks are available again. NPR did a "beyond Tang" story last summer.

Boingboing reminded me how kooky television was back then. It inspired me to find the Willie Mays warning that must have run daily after school, I think right after Gilligan's Island. I've still haven't seen a blasting cap.

A couple of things that aren't ancient history: I was surprised to see a paper in the January/February 2008 issue of Transactions on Software Engineering ("Applying formal methods to a certifiably secure system") describing techniques similar to what we were doing in the mid-1980s at UCSB with formal specification of critical systems. I've always liked the approach of formally defining a top level specification (TLS) and the critical properties, then showing that the TLS maintains the properties. The authors also talk about specifying "no changes", which was the topic of my first professional paper, presented at HICSS in 1986 :)

Speaking of formal specifications, at JPL we worked on formal specs in John Kelly's group. This is how I met PVS and John Rushby, whom the authors of the recent paper cite several times.

In any case, John Kelly has moved on from JPL and is at NASA headquarters. He is quoted in an interesting two-page article "Inspecting the history of inspections: An example of evidence-based technology diffusion" in the January/February issue of IEEE Software. Here's an excerpt:

“What was really convincing was the personal testimony and experience of people at JPL, plus they had data. Data is what speaks. If you’re going to take things to engineers, you have to have data." A common theme throughout our conversation was the need for both hard, quantitative numbers and anecdotal experience reports to convince potential adopters. Both data types played a role throughout the dissemination story.

Fresno State people can click here and Hawaii people here for the article.