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Step the First

Download Miro Player, the free and open-source RSS aggregator for video podcasts. I’m sure there are others, but Miro is, to my experience, the sleekest and most user friendly.

Miro (Formerly “Democracy Player”)

Step the Second

Subscribe to the following shows:

• Nova’s Science Now presents engaging science from a longtime standard in documentary-making.
• PBS has a HUGE collection of classic clips from their documentaries. Awe inspiring, wonderful stuff!
• National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles are great, short clips to enchant you.
• dh love life is Daryl Hannah’s regular video blog exploring sustainable living. Fun and thoughtful (although a bit too new age at times).
• EcoGeeks’ Wild Classroom has it’s misses, but overall it’s a worthy subscription.
• Wired Science often introduces me to the more “out-there” science news.
• Dr. Kiki’s Food Science is fun, entertaining, and involves the chemistry in your kitchen. Highly highly recommended.
• Science Sensei is my favorite of ScienCentral’s videos. His kung-fu is superior.
• TED Talks takes the world’s most intriguing intellectuals and gives them 18 minutes on the soapbox.
• Every episode of Seed Salon takes two great minds and allows us to be a fly on the wall for their dinner conversation.
• Evolution Entertainment is a recent addition to my playlist, also of remarkable quality.
• Life on Terra is my absolute FAV. It’s hard to believe there are documentaries of this caliber for free online.

There are many many more shows out there. You can do a search on “Science” from your Miro Player to find them. There’s more content than I can keep up with. Enjoy!

We had a contest in our Information Services Division (ISD) of the Aircraft Repair and Supply Center (ARSC) of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) last year to design a new logo. Here was my submission, which came in second place:

ISD Logo

Last week, exactly one year later, we’ve got t-shirts for the division. The first place logo got the front, and my logo got the back.

ISD Logo on a Shirt

Yay! I’m cool. : )

In honor of the recently established Hip Hop Chess Federation, which combines the mental discipline of chess with the physical discipline of the martial arts and the intellectual strength of Hip Hop music (I’m not up on the new stuff, but am a longtime Public Enemy fan), I thought I’d post some inspirations for the game.

First there’s this three way chess board that has me leering (Yes, I “leer” at chessboards.):

Three-Way Chess

More on the dynamics of how three-way chess is played here (HT BMF). There’s also a four-way chess variant here, and you can play it against a pretty dumb computer program here.

Then there are chess puzzles, like the classic chess problems found here or daily chess problems presented here.

And let’s not forget Benjamin Franklin’s admiration of the game in his 1750 article, On the Morals of Chess (complete essay linked):

The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn: 1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action … 2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: - the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; … 3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily…

Which brings me to Gary Kasparov discussing how playing chess prepared him for political office, because the same mental strategies required to win at chess are required in rational debate:

My father teaches phlebotomy at ODU, but is a total wuss when it comes to donating blood. He used to fall back on the excuse that his type I diabetes excluded him from donation, but had to find another excuse when that prohibition was lifted.

I’ve been prohibited from donating blood for a year every time I get a tattoo. One time I got prohibited from donating blood for a year because I gave a false positive for Hepatitis B. The Red Cross assured me they did further tests on my blood and found I did not have Hep-B, but asked me to stop donating just the same (I was reinstituted a year later when the FDA approved a better Hep-B test).

I love giving blood. There’s a sense of camaraderie among blood donors at the drives, AND, most importantly, there’s FREE COOKIES and JUICE at the end of it!!! And you have to eat them! It’s mandatory! YOU CAN’T LEAVE UNTIL YOU’VE HAD COOKIES AND JUICE!!! FREE!!! w00t!!!

That’s why I think it’s sad that researchers have found that bad experiences giving blood can dissuade young people from repeat donations. Let me give you an incident I experienced giving blood that should, hopefully, get you kids back into the blood drives:

Yo Soy

About 15 years ago I was walking by a blood drive at Virginia Tech, and decided to step in and donate. No big deal. I knew the routine and within minutes I was relaxing on a cot with my arm being swabbed by a very nice woman. When it came time to stick me, she wrapped a rubber tourniquet-thingy (I’m pretty sure that’s the scientific name for it) around my bicep, let the vein stand out, and slipped the needle in with a momentary pinch…

Then she accidentally pulled it out.

Fssssst!!! A geyser of blood shot into the air.

“Oh dear,” the she understated, watching this crimson fountain uncertainly, her hand to her mouth. She had no clue what to do.

I pointed to the rubber-strap-thingy wrapped around my bicep, “I think you need to take this thing off–”

“I know what I’m doing!” she cut me off, and then proceeded to place a cotton ball over the pinhole-sized wound.

“I don’t think that’s…” I trailed off as the cotton swab quickly soaked with blood and a stream of red poured off my arm.

Next thing I know, I’m looking at the ceiling emerging from clouds of black from when I’d fainted, there’s a paper bag over my face and someone is coaching me to cough in order to get my blood pressure up. Thankfully, someone got the torniquet-rubber-strap-thingamagig off my arm, but not before half my shirt was sprayed with blood. Then I was escorted over the resting area…

WHERE I GOT TO HAVE COOKIES AND JUICE!!! YAY!!! HOORAY FOR COOKIES AND JUICE!!!

But you know what else I got? A really cool story to tell. My blood donation story kicks everyone else’s blood donation story’s butt! So you kids who won’t go back to the blood drive because you got a little queasy, suck it up!

Take pride in that queasy feeling. It’s a badge of honor, and if a metaphorical badge of honor isn’t good enough for you, they’ve got FREE STICKERS YOU CAN WEAR AS A REAL LIFE BADGE OF HONOR TOO!!!

YAY!!!

Here’s a really neat way to visualize our world in Real Time. twittervision takes the text-messages posted on twitter, and shows them on a google map as they are being posted. Watching this application with the “3D View” turned on, I was able to watch Californians planning their night as I was turning in to bed, Japanese waking up with positive affirmations about the upcoming day, and Chinese twitters that I couldn’t read at all. : )

Check it out:

Twittervision (Click on 3D View for this display)

There’s also Flickrvision, which provides the same application, but shows you Flickr Photos as they are being uploaded all over the world in real time:

Flickrvision

A recent study in the BMJ Suicide and the Internet, found that results for suicide-related search terms most frequently support or encourage suicide.

I like to think of the Internet as one big ecosystem of ideas, or memes, where our minds naturally select out the good ones. Obviously, if most sites are pro-suicide, then we need to get some better memes online.

So if you’ve stumbled across this blog post after googling “how to commit suicide” or “should I kill myself?” or seeking other suicide advice, please take a moment to consider the following reasons not to logout of this great big game of life:

Don’t you want to know what happens next? Like what’s that show Lost all about? I mean, really, what’s the deal with that freaky island? Is it a crazy scientific experiment, a paranormal limbo, or the imagination of some four-year-old girl playing dollies in a sandbox somewhere? If you kill yourself, you’ll never find out! And there’s a lot of other stuff you’ll miss out on too, like movie sequels and xkcd comics and the end of George Bush’s Presidency!

Do some charity work! Giving to others has been scientifically proven to make people happier. Suicide might end you, but everyone else has to live with the burden of your death. Instead of transferring your pain to others, work to easy their pain, and improve your own outlook on life in the process.

Puppies! Ending yourself denies you the opportunity to meet all the puppies still to come into this world!

Puppies Just another reason not to commit suicide. Photo by ehecatzin

Pain isn’t forever. It only feels that way. Death is forever. That means it lasts longer than high school, bankruptcy, heartbreak, and the extended director’s cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (Yuck! Too Geeky even for me.).

People will make fun of you. (Q: How does Kurt Cobain collect his thoughts? A: With a dust buster.)

Kittens! Awwww… Wookie da wittle kee-kees! Aren’t they just adorable? Go pick one up from the SPCA today!

Kittens They don’t want you to commit suicide Photo by Ruskis

Stop taking life so seriously! Look, according to Dr. Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, chances are pretty good that we are living in a computer simulation and Brian Whitworth at Massey University has even got a pretty good explanation of how our physical world is a virtual reality. And I’ve got a short story online exploring the implications of this hypothesis. Go spend some time in Second Life to get some perspective.

Do you know what happens to Super Mario every time he dies trying to complete a level? He has to go back to the beginning and start all over again. If life’s a video game, then you’re gonna have to relive all this until you get it right.

Don’t log out of the game, get into it!

Microsoft has come up with a novel solution to the issue of security in Windows Vista. The basic principle is don’t let the user do anything. You see, if users are prevented from any productivity whatsoever, they can’t screw things up right?

Take for instance User Account Control. This is a new “feature” (note the scarequotes), which asks the user for permission every time they try to do something:

Vista also disables screenshots when this dialog appears, so I had to get this photo with my digital camera.

It works like this: When you double click on Firefox, you get this pop-up stating that it appears Firefox is trying to run. Do you wish to allow it? You click OK. You try to share a folder, and you get this pop-up stating that it appears something is trying to share a folder. Do you wish to allow it? You click OK. You double click an MP3 and get a warning that Windows Media Player is trying to run. You click OK.

Turning off this “feature” walks you through the depraved sadism that must exist in the minds of Microsoft Developers. I could really feel their contempt for me as a user when I first went to the Windows Security Center and found User Account Control listed there, set to “ON,” with no way to modify it.

There was, however, an unhelpful link below this meaningless status indicator reading, “How does User Account Control help protect my computer?”

How indeed. The help topic unhelpfully explained that User Account Control protects my computer by making me click “OK” every time I want to do something.

Truly fascinating, but as Benjamin Franklin wisely cautioned, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” So despite the immense security clicking all these “OK” buttons was affording me, I decided I would trade security for freedom and efficiency by turning them off.

The help topic on this “feature” had nothing to say about how to do that.

So, of course, I consulted that great oracle of how to’s for usurping Microsoft’s bureaucracy, Google, and found this article, which directed me to “User Accounts and Family Safety.” Where I was able to disable the feature, after, of course, being informed that something was trying to disable User Account Control and clicking OK.

Now every time I start Windows Vista, I get a helpful alert message warning me that User Account Control is turned off.

Windows Vista is extremely pretty though.

I remember making my first international phone call when I was in Junior high school. At that time, while my parents were away at work, my Commodore 128 computer was busy on their phone with its 1200 Baud modem, hacking calling card numbers in a process computer geeks refered to as “Phreaking.” After several weeks of processing and thousands of numbers dialed, I had finally scored my first working calling card.

I immediately took it to school to show my clique of fellow geeks, and we agreed we should use it to call someone in China, since none of us knew anyone who lived outside of our area code personally.

Everyone gathered around to listen.

I hung up, “That was so cool!” I exclaimed, pointing at the phone booth, “That guy was totally speaking Chinese! Way cool!”

“Awesome!” my Dungeon Master agreed, “You wanna continue that D&D campaign now?”

And that was the end of my calling-card number crime spree.

I was 32 years old the second time I made an international phone call to transfer a domain name from company in Australia. I had never made one before, and, after several failed attempts, had to look online, where I learned to precede the many numbers with “011.”

It was totally awesome deja vu all over again! I got to speak to a woman with an Australian accent, a real Australian accent originating from someone sitting at a desk in Australia, not some tourist sitting beside me on the DC metro. It was summer at her desk while it was winter at mine. It was 10:30 AM on my cellphone, while her clock read 12:30 AM on tomorrow’s date. Nearly 9,700 miles separated me on the East Coast from her in Melbourne Australia, and yet she sounded as close as my next door neighbor.

Suddenly the whole “Global Village” groked with me. Like when I had to call Dell tech support last year for help with my DVD ROM. The tech support guy in India asked, “Do you mind if I log into your computer to correct the problem sir?”

“Do you mind if I go wash dishes while you correct the problem?” I asked in return.

Then a help desk technician in India logged into my computer and upgraded my software for me while I washed dishes. Way cool!

How interesting it is then, to think that when Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote about the Global Village, he saw its unifying effect in a negative light, as a path to totalitarianism:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

Seems alien to imagine our WWW playground as a tool for fascism today.

“Some kids get their ears pierced… others it’s a unique haircut… Charles likes people to see his brain.”
- Supervillain Brain Child’s Mother, from The Tick Cartoon

My friend Carolyn and her husband Clint made this really cool animated video from her CT Scan, which I highly recommend. A few months back, I had a series of MRI’s done, but was disappointed to find the quality wasn’t good enough to make my own animated video from the images.

What I have been able to do is turn a few of the image series into animated gifs. The result are what you see below. Click on any image to see a larger version.

Ryan’s MRI Top View of the Head Click Image for 2.1 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Front View of the Head Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Side View of the Head Click Image for 1.5 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Top View of Neck and Chest Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif

Extropia Dance Party

In David Brin’s science fiction book Kiln People, people make copies of themselves to aide with multi-tasking. Something we’d all like the power to do at times. Time isn’t money, it’s much more precious.

Extropia

Saturday night, unable to physically travel a hundred-plus miles to hang out at one of the parties celebrating space flight, I decided to go virtual and attend a party in Second Life hosted by Extropia a community of Transhumanists–an international intellectual and cultural movement that seeks to use science and technology to ameliorate human suffering and shortcomings.

Extropia Dance Party

However, I was also very busy that night. So while I was at the party, I set my avatar to dance automatically, while I caught up on some writing. It was awesome! I got to dance with hot cyborg ladies in one window, while keeping up on research in the next.

Extropia Dance Party

I had a great time, and just like real life parties, I don’t remember much of it. Unlike real life parties, I didn’t get behind on my homework.

Extropia Dance Party

Also unlike real life parties, I’m an excellent dancer in virtual reality… after downloading the appropriate dance moves that is. : )

More photos here.

This Saturday Night! Be there! BE THERE!! BE THERE!!!

Head out to Yuri’s Night World Space Party, a series of parties being held across the world to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of Human Space Flight, and Yuri Gagarin

Find a party in your area, attend, and then tell me about how cool it was… since there aren’t any parties within 150 miles of where I live.

I had a good chuckle while working on a Database Procedure today, when I spotted the following entry in the Revision History notes:

Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This was a huge advance over my 1977 Atari 2600 game console, which ran “Pong” and “Space Invaders” on a scant 128 bytes of memory. Today my dual-core Pentium uses a gigabyte of RAM, about 7.8 million times as much memory as the Atari, and, after upgrading to Windows Vista, even that doesn’t cut it anymore.

From bits to bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and, with impending DVD technological advances, terabytes, our computing power grows exponentially. This empirically observed fact is known as Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated component doubles every 18 months. In other words, computers double in power every year and a half. This Law of Computing has held true now for over 40 years in an explosion of processing power that allows for what history will record as the Information Age, the times in which we are currently living.

Now it’s time to familiarize ourselves with a new measurement, the exabyte. We can thank research firm IDC’s white paper The Expanding Digital Universe for introducing us to this latest milestone, which estimates the human race collectively produced 161 exabytes of data in 2006.

So what’s an exabyte? To visualize this number, it’s helpful to begin at the smallest measurement of data, the bit. A bit is a 1 or 0, “on” or “off,” “true” or “false.” Up one level from this binary state we have the byte, which is 8 bits. If you open Notepad on your computer, type any one letter and save the file, you have generated one byte of data, which you can verify by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Properties.”

Every additional character typed and saved will add another byte to the file’s size. Every 1,000 characters is a kilobyte, and every 1,000 kilobytes a megabyte. A 90,000-word novel translates into about 0.5 megabytes¹. An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, or 500 billion novels. That’s 77 novels written for every person on Earth², and we are producing 161 times that much data, 230 billion CDs worth³, or nearly 12,400 novels for every person on Earth every year.

We produced more data last year than has been produced in the last 5,000 years of human history. That’s just for 2006, and that’s only the beginning. “In 2010, the amount of digital information created and copied worldwide will rise six fold to a staggering 988 exabytes,” that’s 12 Petabytes short of having to adopt yet another term of measurement, the Zettabyte.

The search engine Google is named after the largest number the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner could think of, the googol. It is the number one followed by 100 zeros. By one recent estimate, it takes 450,000 computers networked on server farms to run the Google search engine, indexing 8 billion Web pages every year. I wonder when we’ll be talking about our hard drives (or maybe they’ll be flash drives by then) in terms of googlebytes?

And then we still have the googolplex waiting for us in the distant future, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes.

¹500,000 characters in Novel based on a Microsoft Word Count and Character count of one of my novels, which came out to 450,000 characters for a 82,000 world novel. So this is a very conservative estimate.

²1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes translates to
1,000,000,000,000 megabytes which translates to
500,000,000,000 novels divided by 6.5 billion human beings

³CDs hold 700MB of Data
700,000,000
161,000,000,000,000,000,000
230,000,000,000

So I got my OLPC XO-1 in the mail about a month ago, and I’m still wrestling with my opinion of it. Personally I think it’s the bee’s knees. Everyone who comes into the comic shop fawns over it. I’m the envy of the local geek crowd.

I love it when people ask me, “What’s that?” and I get to extol the virtues of Nick Negroponte’s beautiful vision of supplying underprivileged children all over the world with their own laptops to learn art, reading, mathematics, programming, science, and connect them with the entire world as their classroom. Just like so many people here in America have done through the Internet.

“Huh. But don’t those poor kids have more pressing concerns, like survival, that need to come first?” they always reply in some form or another, and the heart-bubbles floating around my head all pop and I wake up, blinking dumbly.

Which brings me to my conflict. While I dig the OLPC XO-1, will it serve its purpose of enlightening young minds all over the world? Even I laughed at Newt Gingrich when he suggested we provide the homeless with laptops, but now I’m not so sure.

People get stuck in this idea that other nations need to repeat every step of America’s history to achieve America’s quality of life. China can either work through America’s entire history of building a middle class that will demand its own fair workplace standards, or Americans can exert economic pressure on China to do away with its sweatshops. Similarly, third-world countries can step through fossil-fuel power plants, or they can skip straight to renewable energy.

Why reinvent the wheel? The OLPC is a shortcut for lesser-developed nations. Why not help them skip being a second-world country and go straight to the Information Age, with all its collaborative memetic innovation? I say get them into the Global Village ASAP. The sooner they start using LEDs, solar panels, and well-water pumps, the sooner they’ll start contributing their own inventions, software, art, and literature to the world.

On the downside. This laptop is hand-me-down softwares and technologies. The hand-me-down 433mhz processors with hand-me-down 256k RAM. Hardware-wise, this brand new laptop is my brand new PC from 1993. Software-wise the hand-me-down Sim City is the same one that ran on my Apple IIe in Junior High, but I’ve got a better opinion of the rest of the software suite further down.

So is the $200 price tag justified? The software’s open-source, so there’s $0 of the total. A refurnished Thinkpad runs $200-$300, but this is brand new. Former OLPC CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, is now working on a $75 laptop. How they intend to accomplish this when they couldn’t accomplish it with the OLPC is anybody’s guess, but the competition among charities will definitely spurn more innovation. The $200 price tag is very prohibitive to the OLPC’s ultimate success.

On the plus-side, the hardware has features that are uniquely perfect for the OLPC’s intended recipients. Practically speaking. This is a rugged little #$%@ of a machine. A fully charged battery runs for hours (three hours for one of my sessions). The twin wifi antenna are rubberized and folded in to serve as a locking mechanism for the laptop when closed. With flash memory storage, I don’t have to worry about bouncing it around and wrecking the hardrive, and stuffing all the main components behind the screen means it doesn’t make your sperm-count decline uncomfortably when it sits in your lap.

The keyboard is a rubber mat, which is awesomely spill-proof and would feel great if it wasn’t so tiny. I read one hacker’s first mod to his XO-1 was to convert it to a Dvorak keyboard layout. What’s the point? I’m reduced to hunt-and-peck mode using my forefingers when I type on it, but that’s okay because the keyboard isn’t meant for my adult hands, and when my friend’s five-year-old daughter got her hands on the laptop, she looked like a pro typing utter gibberish into it’s Journaling Software.

The monitor flips completely around and folds flat on the laptop, turning it into an e-book reader. This is a really nice feature, and one that makes this laptop a real keeper for me. If nothing else, I’ve now got a screen bigger than my cellphone to read all the free books I download from Project Gutenberg, and a laptop with the battery life to survive a long flight.

So this is a sweetly innovative, however overpriced, bit of technology. Which brings me to the second most common objection I get to the OLPC, “Are kids in third-world countries even going to be able to use that thing?”

The assumption here is that this learning toy is beyond the technological grasp of children living in villages without electricity. That somehow people deprived of Best Buy, Cinema Multiplexes, and the mind-numbing inanity of American Idol lack the cognitive foundation for Computing 101. Whenever a Baby Boomer raises this objection, I just remind myself that they are from the same generation that couldn’t program a VCR.

The reality is that the OLPC’s linux user interface sorta takes me back to my Commodore 64 days, when computing was just the basics. Only my Commodore’s interface was a command line, (LOAD *,8,1 anyone?), whereas the OLPC is cartoony and graphical. Kids will get into this thing and make it sing in ways the developers never anticipated. Just like kids run technological circles around their elders in modern America.

The OLPC provides plenty of pre-loaded software that will educate in a well-rounded fashion. The Video, Picture, and Sound Capture capabilities using the built in video and microphone introduce students to multimedia. The journal provides a creative writing outlet, while the Paint and TamTamJam softwares allow for art and music creative outlets.

Etoys and Turtle Art introduce kids to programming logic, while Pippy introduces kids to the joys of Python Programming, the easiest, most advanced programming language out there. Through these, kids are introduced to mathematics, building their own software toys, and logical constructs.

Most of all, the web browser introduces them to the world’s knowledge. The chat introduces them to world’s people.

They’re doing all this on an open-source operating system, where they can eventually incorporate what they learn into publishing their own improvements and innovations to the World Wide Web, where the rest of us will enjoy them.

That’s dream worth supporting, not to mention a huge return on our investment.