I have just taken delivery of my new FujitsuSiemens Celsius workstation (3.4GHz, 1GRAM, 300+G disk, and a really nifty Nvidia card), and while I wait for installation of Office and other dreary usefulness, I have installed and played around with Google Earth. As Stefan Geens writes in his enthusiastic post, this is really a neat application and something I look forward to playing around with a lot more.
Nothing like decent horsepower, I say.

NYT Magazine has an article (reg req) about moleskin notebooks, which apparently, through clever and almost viral marketing has become the thing to have if you want to appear intellectual or even cultured (that is, if you don’t opt for blogging to show that you’re with it.) There is even a moleskin blog.
I wonder when we will have the same affinity for computers. I’ve had a few, and a some of them have stood out as extremely good, artifacts that were better than their successors (though not as powerful, which is why they were replaced.) So far, my three favorites have been

• The Compaq 386 Portable I got in 1986 (12 pounds, no battery, 2Mb hard disk), at the time the most powerful PC in the world.
• The NeXT workstation that I borrowed for six months in 1990, too bad I couldn’t really do anything with it except create killer reports in Display Postscript and try to understand the practical implications of object-oriented programming, and finally the
• Toshiba Portege 3440CT I still have lying around (mostly used by my daughter) which was a great little computer but too weak in the muscle department to stay on as my work machine.

Each of these computers had a combination of innovation and usability that, at least for me, was a significant step forward at the time. The Compaq was the first really useful portable, as a desktop replacement. The NeXT taught me how to really work with everything electronic rather than a combination of paper and screen. The Toshiba was ultra-portable and allowed me to work anywhere.
Alas, technology marches on, and you have to give up these machines because they wear out or something presumably better comes along. But can you really get attached to a computer, as a professional? With the exception of Macintosh fanatics who can be relied on to whip up their powerbook at a moment’s notice, I have so far only heard writers and nerds vax lyrical about keyboards (in particular the IBM buckling spring variety.) (Lest you think I am MacPhobic, I have had a few Macs as well, unfortunately always a tad underpowered for a number of reasons, primarily lack of software and stupid IS non-fiddling rules.)
I suppose we will have to wait for Moore’s law to taper off a bit, and notebooks to get even more modular and customizable, before we imbue them with personalities and employ them for personality signalling.
Or am I wrong – what is the “cool” computer to have, provided you a) keep Macs out of the context, and b) don’t get into this tiresome Linux vs. XP debate?

A few weeks ago, I taught a class on business strategy, and ended up discovering that many of my otherwise quite capable students had no clue of how things work. The result (aside from much head-shaking on my part) was a little essay – The S-Curves of Sinks, and Technology – which now has been published in ACM Ubiquity.

Joe Speyer, incidentally, was a really nice man. He wasn’t really fond of business school professors, but had the good grace never to tell me that.

I had great fun arranging Cory Doctorow‘s visit to Oslo together with Eirik Newth. Aside from an excellent talk and a lively discussion (about 100 people came to the meeting), I got to have dinner with Cory before his talk and lunch the day after – with a number of Norwegian digerati (Jon Bing, Gisle Hannemyr, Håkon Wium Lie, Jon Lech Johansen, Eirik Chambe-Eng, Jorunn Danielsen Newth and Thomas Gramstad) in addition to the board of the Norwegian Polytechnic Society’s IT Group. (Incidentally, PF is 150 years old and the world’s oldest society of its kind, dedicated to non-partisan debate around matters technological and societal.)

Others have blogged about the talk and their impressions:

• Herman Robak did video: The whole thing, the following debate and a snippet of the highly entertaining debate after the debate
• Eirik Newth (Norwegian)
• Børge (Norwegian)
• Gisle Hannemyr (English)
• Alf K?re Lefdal (Norwegian)
• Brilliant days (English)
• Jon Lech Johansen (English)
• Håkon Styri (Norwegian)
• …and Jorunn Danielsen Newth, from whom I nicked most of the links.

My impressions were more personal: I was impressed with Jon Lech Johansen not being a quiet and difficult geek as portrayed by the newspapers, he is fluent and articulate in several languages and has broad interests (I wonder what the Norwegian police were thinking when they brought the case against him.) I thought Petter Merok of Microsoft Norway quite the hero for standing up for his company with articulated and knowledgeable arguments – which took some doing in that crowd. I thought Jon Bing was rather tough for showing up when he had been wilified for arguing for the new copyright law in a report his law company did for the Norwegian Record Industry Association – but he enjoyed himself and participated in the lively debate.

I found Cory himself incredibly easy to host as a speaker and as a visitor – all he wanted was a fast Internet connection at his hotel room and some time to do email and BoingBoing a bit. Moreover, he managed to suss out Oslo’s best bookstore within two hours of arrival, and showed a keen interest in Norwegian governance, history, geography and culture that had me doubling as a not very professional guide around town. He is welcome back anytime he wants to.

And what a blast it was to participate in a long and lively dinner where the arguments were flying thick and fast about technology, the Internet, literature – and theory about all three – with nobody bothering with or needing to explain the acronyms and references….

In light of Seth Godin’s new digital divide and Scoble’s reflections on those who never get it I thought I might justifiably plug my old essay “Stamp out Technology Virginity” in ACM Ubiquity.
Still good for a laugh with a serious undertone, I hope.

Seth Godin has created a set of categories for the “new digital divide” which will the next meme for a week or so. He has a point, though it could be expanded – as does Karsten Schneider to include behavior such as “uses Google for user support”.
I am also proud to say that I am safely on the side of the digerati here – in every category. And it used to be so hard to be a digeratus – you had to write books and give talks and develop new software. Now, all you do is keep up with a few RSS-feeds and make sure you install the latest and the greatest, as approved by Slashdot and hated by Dvorak.
Life is getting easier. Now you don’t even have to run Linux or buy a Mac.

I am heads-down in various writing projects at the moment, but needed a break for inspiration and found it listening to Douglas Adams’ talk about “Parrots, the Universe and Everything” at UCSB in 2001 (tip by Eirik.)

Aside from the wonders of presentation technique – the only aids used here are two snippets of text he reads to the audience – Adams is fascinating in the way he allows himself to use language and stories to strengthen his points. Notice how he repeats himself (generally in threes) and uses old-time humor (a riotous account of trying to buy condoms (to wrap around a microphone so they could record underwater) in Shanghai) as well as stories of ultra-eccentric zoologists and downright weird animals.

I thought the most interesting idea, however, was his point that science is changing – that we no longer (at least not to the same degree) take things apart to understand them but instead put them together so that we can watch them interact. Shades of Stephen Wolfram – computers allow us to to study the effect of repeated patters – and Mitchel Resnick – we relentlessly strive to discover intentionality in interactions and self-organizing systems. Life is no longer a mystery (since we have sequenced the human genome) – just a process of information (now we have to figure out what the code means.) Also interesting was his observation that we now have a “pause in evolution” by creating a buffer around us of medicine and lack of exposure to the environment – though I would disagree with the word “pause” and rather say “change”.

Nice quote: “We don’t need to save the world. The world is fine. It has been through at least five periods of massive extinction before. [..] The world is big enough to look after itself.” Though he is less specific on what to do about saving the world for human habitation.

What really is the difference between a prototype and a simulation? This discussion came up in a teleconference recently, over the Concours research project TBE: Tools and Techniques for Business Experimentation.
Intuitively, you might say that a prototype is something physical, and a simulation is done in software or acted out in some way. You might say that a prototype is built to show a concept and a simulation is done to investigate the relationships between a concept and its environment. Or you might say that a prototype should be as close to the working end results as possible, whereas a simulation only shows the effects of it, not caring what is behind the curtain.
The trouble with these definitions is that both “prototype” and “simulations” can be used for a variety of purposes. To a certain extent they are defined not by their content but by their use (or even by what environment they are in.)
Classifying techniques and uses of them is useful, but sometimes I wonder if we need to be precise. Back in the stone age of computing there were all kinds of more-or-less well defined classifications of computers, for instance into mainframe, mini and micro. First these were based on technical specifications, such as CPU speed or memory size. Then one tried price. Then you got the light-hearted but surprisingly correct classifications of “a micro is a computer you can throw, a mini is one you can topple, and a mainframe is one you can crawl into” which weren’t too far off the mark. At least for a while, until the technological evolution made the whole classification scheme useless.
Similarly, classifying things as software or hardware becomes more difficult, since they to a certain extent are substitutes. You get finer distinctions such as firmware, and jokey extenstions such as wetware. I am increasingly fond of the saying that

hardware is something which, if you fiddle with it long enough, breaks, whereas software is something which, if you fiddle with it long enough, works.

So, perhaps we should differentiate between prototypes and simulations by saying that

a prototype is something you build to see whether something will work, and a simulation is something you build to see whether something will break….

Oh well, just a thought. And it is still fairly early in the morning.

Tyler Cowen asks “Why is it that older people start going deaf, yet still object more to loud music?”
That one is simple: Human hearing is selective – that is, we have the ability to filter out noise to hear, say, human voices we are interested in. You can talk to someone at a cocktail party in a crowded room, and have no problem hearing them – especially if everone (rather than just a few) are talking.
As you go deaf, your ability to do that decreases – and you will object to loud music simply because it interferes with your ability to filter out signal from noise.
Or it might be that you don’t like the music, of course.

Steroids can be detected, but a little surgery to enhance sports capability apparently is OK.
I just can’t wait for the reality show version of this – follow the teams’ heroic surgeons as they slice, dice and mix for your viewing pleasure….

This blog seems to be degenerating into the usual “this vs. that” technology, so here goes: I recently went from Mozilla 1.7.1 to Firefox/Thunderbird (Mozilla’s new browser/email client). Verdict so far: Mixed. I have gained a better email interface (faster and less errors, and the great ability to save searches as folder). Firefox is also a marginally better browser than Mozilla 1.7.1, with better bookmark handling, RSS inclusion (though I use Bloglines, so it shouldn’t matter much – or perhaps that was Thunderbird?) and more robustness.
However, I have lost the easy integration between email client and browswer, and the (admittedly not wonderful) HTML editor is gone. I cannot click on a link in an email and choose “open in new tab” or even “open it new window” – instead, it will open in the top window of Firefox, pushing aside whatever I had there. I can do ctrl-m to compose a new email message when in Firefox.
A good thing with F/T is that if one app crashes (and face it, it happens), then I don’t have to shut down the whole suite. But the integration I am referring to should be easy to accomplish. And how do I easily link in an editor under Firefox – I would very much like to be able to hit ctrl-e and go right ahead editing.
As it is looking now, I will probably keep Thunderbird but go back to Mozilla 1.7.1 for browsing and editing.

The note from Joi Ito’s web about the arrest of the organizer of something called Bikes Against Bush is interesting (aside from the fact that you can get arrested for being in NY with a bicycle nowadays.)

The technology of the dot-matrix printerbike is very cool, but isn’t it a little too complicated? I remember reading from one of Hemingway’s books about people walking around the streets of Paris with a rolling drum which would paint the word “Cinzano” on the sidewalk in water – which would, eventually, evaporate, hence no need to clean up at all.

This bike, ingenuity aside, strikes me as a high-tech answer to a low-tech problem. Still cool, though.