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Monday, October 26th, 2009
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1:07 pm - Ruled by Vikings
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"It's as if you had been ruled by Vikings, but without the intelligence or the courage. Just the badness."
source
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
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4:01 pm - The Nook, the Cranny, and the Lend Me Not.
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The Nook, Barnes & Noble's answer to Amazon's Kindle, was greeted with fanfare for including a feature which allows users to "lend" a purchased book to anyone, with a guarantee of recovering it later. The first announcement I came across mentioned no other rules governing the lending process. My first thought was that such an option is essentially a loophole - one which would allow almost anyone to circumvent payment for more-or-less unlimited access to almost anything in the Nook catalog, and that this lending feature is (or soon will be) severely crippled, lest the hole expand to highway size and a mockery be made of the very concept of artificial scarcity.
A simple thought experiment is in order. Let's pretend that a Nook book (or any similar DRM'd ebook) could be lent in exactly the same manner as a physical book: to whomever you like, whenever you like, for as long as you like - with the added benefit of instantaneous, guaranteed, and toll-free shipping in both directions. This suggests that one could set up a library - a perfectly legal thing to do with physical books. The library (let's call it Cranny) would consist of an online service which automates the process of requesting a Nook book from anyone who owns a copy but isn't reading it at the moment. It would also allow you to send a request to recover any of the books you have lent out, with the same speed and ease. Consider: how many of the physical books on your shelves are you currently reading? In the course of any given hour? day? week? month? There is no reason to suppose that this situation would be any different for electronic books. The result: once a Nook book has been purchased by some critical number of Cranny users, just about all future readers would be able to enjoy it for free, with the aid of a vast global library. In fact, the entire process of pretending that a limited number of copies of a work exist (with the resulting need to ration access) becomes a farce. The Cranny scenario is clearly unacceptable to B&N, and (unsurprisingly) they have crippled the Nook's lending mechanism to prevent it - just as I predicted upon first hearing of the device. It turns out that a Nook purchase can only be lent once. Here is where things become interesting.
I believe that the Nook may very well relive the fate of Microsoft's Zune, which allowed users to exchange songs via a WiFi connection - with a play count strictly limited by DRM hardware, even under protest of the copyright owner (say, for files licensed under Creative Commons.) I cannot help but suspect that this ill-conceived anti-feature contributed to the Zune's unimpressive sales. A feature that is prominently crippled is worse than a nonexistent one, in that users are made vividly aware of frustrated possibilities - all the more so when the prohibited act is one which is entirely traditional with respect to the electronic medium's low-tech predecessor (whether it be CDs or dead trees.) The Nook's lending mechanism is an ill-conceived attempt to mimic the behavior of physical books - no doubt in hopes of persuading customers to pay a physical book's price for mere bits. The latter seems to be an incurable, lethal (witness NuvoMedia plus a parade of other corpses) obsession of ebook publishers.
My prediction: the best-case scenario from B&N's point of view would be that users simply forget that the lending mechanism exists at all. If, on the other hand, large numbers attempt to use it, waves of frustration will spread. The odiousness of a DRM restriction is not proportional to the absolute amount of freedom it removes; rather, it is a function of just how often and how painfully it thwarts a previously-commonplace (or otherwise natural) act which occurs regularly to most users (in this case, the dastardly deed of lending out a book more than once in its lifetime.) If DRM vendors were anything other than snake-oil hucksters, this fact would be common knowledge.
If DRM-crippled e-books were advertised as being exactly what they are - cheap, inferior, remotely-censorable imitations of actual books - their existence and growing popularity would not be a cause for concern. However, publishers understand that the freedoms traditionally enjoyed by book owners (such as the freedom to lend without restriction) will ultimately lead to the collapse of their business model - and so, they will persist indefinitely in their attempts to make water not wet. I invite the uninitiated to explore what the act of reading would look like were these freedoms to be lost entirely. (When the latter piece was written, the now-commonplace DRM-laden single-use textbooks were still a dystopian fantasy. Students - the perfect captive audience - are the canary in the copyright coal mine.)
Cross-posted at Loper OS.
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| Thursday, September 10th, 2009
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11:19 pm
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| Monday, August 24th, 2009
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10:15 pm - "Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine, Lisp Machine is Fun!"
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| Saturday, July 4th, 2009
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5:08 pm - Quote: The State of the Art
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| Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
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9:01 pm
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I do not believe that scribbling moronic graffiti on desks should be an offense worthy of expulsion - unless you make spelling mistakes. In words of length < 5.
Can I have the being-in-college-means-literacy-no-exceptions era back? Pretty please?
current mood:  tired
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| Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
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5:13 pm - Unexpected Textbook
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Quite unexpectedly, I saw a pile of "The Little Schemer" at the University Book Center. It saddens me that when I took that very same class six years ago, it was full of Stupid (for example, the TA knew no Scheme, and asked my help to teach the very threadbare Scheme unit.)
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| Friday, January 16th, 2009
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1:03 am - Book Meme
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Meme stolen from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) faceless_wonder.
Rules:
*Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find the fifth sentence.
*Post that sentence along with these instructions in your LiveJournal.
*Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.
"The Lagrange equations are a big mess so we will not show them explicitly, but
in general they are equations in D^2 c, Dc, and c that will depend upon q, Dq, and F."
- Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom).
current mood: tired
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
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10:59 pm - "Hearing the Whirr of the Servos Inside"
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Setting foot in an Actual Wet Lab again: Feels Good. So Good.
(Even though my sole excuse for being there is to programmatically coax the robot into submission.)
For all the supposed glory of theoretical work, I yearn to get my hands dirty.
current mood:  cold
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
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12:01 am - This should have been a Real Post.
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Me, shivering from the damp pre-winter air:
"There should be a 3D blanket. It would be the greatest of inventions."
"...wait, that's called clothing."
In other news, there was Capclave. But I should be doing homework rather than posting.
current mood: tired
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008
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12:19 am - Twisted Pleasures, or A New Low?
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After a full month of organic chemistry and its pleasures, the urge to draw this icon could no longer be resisted.
My new job, which supposedly involves the molecular modeling of poisons and antidotes, starts on Monday.
Loper's boot block runs.
Math remains hard. And yet I have little desire to go shopping (though I soon must, to buy "civilized" clothing. Yuck.)
The social learning strategies contest is over. My entry was a pale shadow of its planned self.
It appears that only ~36 people competed for the ~$15,000 prize.
I wish I had given the matter more thought.
current mood: useless
current music: the wheels of a passing train?
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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11:21 pm - Science! It works!
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| Friday, June 13th, 2008
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1:09 pm - Top Recurring Dream Motifs
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A) My old dorm room still "exists", in the sense of being preserved like King Tut's tomb - complete with all of my furniture and projects from that period, and awaits discovery. Neither the room nor the building it is found in bear very much resemblance to their real-world versions, however. On the other hand, my memories are edited to obscure this fact entirely. (Just about every dream I have comes with a complete set of false memories.)
B) Someone has monkeyed with a parallel universe and/or timeline editor to remove something I care about. I work on fixing it.
C) Voices singing in perfect rhyme and cadence chronicle my adventure in real-time - a la Greek play.
current mood:  awake
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Saturday, June 7th, 2008
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12:46 am - "Deliver me from temptation, but not quite yet."
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| Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
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2:56 pm - "Before there were junk stores..."
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Apparently, the University operated a vintage mainframe until fairly recently: the wires bin at Terp Trader (the UMCP junk store) now contains power cables tipped with plugs the size of a two-liter soda bottle, as well as various data cables, thick as a garden hose, with connectors I've never seen before. There was also a pile of DEC Alpha machines, $15 each. At last. With great restraint, I limited myself to just two of the latter.
Of course, I originally went there to search for something to scavenge for a polarizer plate. But this is how it always goes.
current mood:  satisfied
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(comment on this)
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1:13 am
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First day of organic chem: uneventful.
Fruitless search for even a small piece of proper Polaroid polarizer: very frustrating. I've run out of screens to cannibalize. Does anyone live nearly, and have a smashed laptop LCD they want to get rid of?
current mood:  frustrated
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, June 2nd, 2008
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1:49 am
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| Sunday, June 1st, 2008
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12:42 pm - Foolish Humans and More
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Recently, someone has seen it fit to link my site from YC News. My very modest web host groans under the strain, and I half-expect a raging mob (having taken up the pitchforks upon finding nothing to download) at my doorstep any moment now.
In other news, organic chemistry lecture starts on Tuesday. I've dreamed of taking the class for many years, and at last the time has come.
The campus is quite beautiful in its summer bloom, but this hardly explains the pathological amounts of time I've been spending there in recent times, setting up shop on random benches and tables. Something about seeing the old familiar walls switches my brain into gear. It "feels like home" - and I have never been in the habit of abusing that phrase.
In other^2 news, I have discovered a means whereby ordinary laptop screens may be viewed legibly in very bright sunlight. The experimental prototype is 80% complete, and will hopefully stop eating my attention and desk space in the very near future.
current mood:  hungry
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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10:13 pm - We do what we must because we can
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Miscellaneous Bits and Pieces:
1) The Rube Goldberg Laptop award goes to Apple, for the 12" Powerbook A1010. Fixing clocks is going to look relaxing and trivial after that one.
1a) So now the machine works, looks more or less new, and even has software! Still need to set up SLIME to work in Aquamacs, though.
1b) Apple's OS is polished but slow. And not just in the CPU-time sense. I continue to believe that the mouse is a crippling concept. As are non-full-screen windows and many other customary UI elements.
2) Common Lisp is still great for headaches. For headaches, not against.
3) Bio class is substantially more interesting when one understands things.
3a) Unfortunately the *understand!* feeling is hard to come by when you can't solve protein folding in your head. So boo. Where is my neural upgrade?
4) Why is it that not one consumer electronics store carries the simple amplifier necessary to drive cabinet stereo speakers (the bulky, clothed kind) from devices equipped with an ordinary 3.5mm line-out jack? The choice was between building it myself or ordering from Hong Kong - a full month ago, and now arrived. The need for having done this, however, still boggles my mind. Am I an outlandish heretic for owning neither TV, nor DVD player, nor CD player? Those are the only machines I can think of which come with bare-metal speaker connections out-of-the-box.
5) The semester is drawing to a close.
6) Dreary and grim things not worth mentioning here.
7) Disappointing Maryland Day. Where were the original engineering demos? There is very little excitement to be had from watching off-the-shelf technology do exactly what it's supposed to. A Mac Mini running Matlab is still a Mac Mini running Matlab when on wheels.
7a) The Oobleck Pool (similar to the well-known one) was a welcome diversion, though. I failed to take note of which department had built it.
7b) "Physics is Phun" but considerably less so with screaming toddlers in the lecture hall.
7c) Oddly enough, playing with the inert controls of the visiting war helicopter was the highlight of my wanderings. It was genuinely fun. The Army pilot helpfully explained which did what. War machines have an aura of refreshing honesty about them. The air of fakeness still burning in my nostrils from the engineering demos cleared rapidly. There is very little which is scientifically arousing about the helicopter, for instance, but it still has to fly at the end of the day - thus its designers live tightly under physical reality's thumb. And it shows. Anyone who has suffered my rants on this subject will know what I mean. The others should be thankful for having been spared.
7d) Any contraption designed to work rather than to impress gets my attention. Every time.
8) Nostalgia for the days when my renewed dive into math could have meant something.
9) Looking at the science-demo grad students like a peasant might look on the landed gentry. See (8.)
current mood:  pensive
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, March 31st, 2008
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11:03 pm - The irresistible call of physical reality
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This much-belated post is for everyone who saw this and did a double-take. I am, in fact, taking eight credits' worth of freshman class/lab, while working full time. And will continue in that key, until I have a respectable education.
But do not search my skull for railroad spikes! Kissing sweet good-bye to nearly all of my free time [1] (and every penny of discretionary spending) for the coming few years is a decision for which I had better have a solid explanation. And luckily, I do.
A Computer Science degree is a gateway into the Irredeemable Suck. As a field of research, and as a profession. I've had enough.
The computer is a tool. And I have learned that the existence of a toolsmith is ultimately one of misery and frustration. Most of one's time is spent working around the inadequacies of others' creations - whether you realize it or not. So I have come full circle, back into the physical-reality business. Three summers' worth of full-time lab internship (pre-college) [2] had given me some idea of what sort of destination to march towards, as well as certain skills, which, to my pleasant surprise, have not gone anywhere.
The five-second sound bite regarding why bio wins: I can forgive evolution for generating rampant inelegance and gratuitous accidental complexity. I cannot forgive people. They have minds, and ought to know better.
The pleasure to be had in understanding what makes the real world tick is enormous, though I have had but a small taste thus far. Focusing on clean physical facts after having devoted years to cramming my head full of poorly designed human abstractions feels like a lung-full of fresh air after a nauseating eternity in a dungeon.
Anyone know of a good organic chem text?
My summer will be an interesting one.
[1] This post was originally began on Feb. 10...
[2]
 My old bench. NHLBI, summer 2002
current mood:  excited
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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contemplative
hopeful
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