Update: Sorry to say, this event has been postponed to January

Most people know a bit about the story of the ENIAC, the first electronic computer. A few years ago, a good friend of mine named Kathy Kleimann discovered a remarkable story about the team that wrote the software for the ENIAC — the world’s first programmers. These pioneers of our field started out working during the war as “computers” — which is to say human beings and worked out military algorithms (mostly ballistics) by hand. Six of the brightest were recruited to make the first software for the quirky ENIAC, as they wanted it to do in software what they were dong by hand.

In a high-tech version of the “Rosie the Riveter” story these first software developers were all women. Math, after all, was one of those things that girls/women were allowed to be good at in that more sexist society. They worked together with the hardware engineers to get the machine calculating, and later converted it from wiring to a true stored program computer. They worked out many of the earliest concepts of software, inventing them from scratch. After the war, several of them went on to careers in software and at the early computer companies.

Their stories were not well reported, and some histories even presumed the women standing next to the ENIAC in demos were decoration rather than the coders making it go.

Unfortunately, it’s now 60 years later, and three of the team of six have died, and the other 3 are not getting younger. So Kathy set out to produce a documentary on these pioneers of our field. Time is running out. To raise some money for it, she has arranged a dinner at Google HQ for Thursday Next (Nov 8) cooked by one of Google’s exclusive internal restaurants. Folks who come will get a chance to meet Jean Bartik, one of those six pioneers of software, hear her story, see some preliminary footage and help the documentary. The mostly tax deductible donation is $100. Bartik, aside from coding for the ENIAC, also helped to design the BINAC and UNIVAC after the war.

You can read more about the project at the ENIAC Programmers and you can register for the event. If you are on Facebook, you can also mark yourself as attending through the facebook event entry though you must also register on the Google site.

Bistromathics was Douglas Adams’ term for the crazy difficulty of dividing up l’addition at a restaurant properly. The very rules of math seem to go wrong, which is why they were able to make a stardrive as long as the ship had a bistro in it.

When groups go out to dinner, many people feel that “Div N” is the safest way to go. Namely divide the total bill with tip by the number of folks and everybody pays that. It has the advantage of great simplicity, avoiding the bistromathics. And it is close to a must with shared dishes and the norm for Chinese/Indian.

For many people, Div-N balances out over time, but many people resent Div-N for various reasons:

• For non-drinkers, they are bothered at paying a bar tab that often is as big as the food tab. Sometimes two totals are given because of this.
• For vegetarians, not only are their dishes usually cheaper, but many have an ethical problem with paying for other’s meat.
• Dieters are as they are due to lack of self-control. Many have a compulsion that bothers them if they pay for food but don’t eat it. (Larger restaurant portions are blamed by some for the obesity epidemic.)
• Women tend to eat less than men, causing a sex-bias.
• Some are just plain poor, and can’t handle the high Div-N bill. Because Div-N encourages liberal ordering of expensive dishes and apetizers, it tends to raise the overall price.

Often there will be somebody (frequently of low income) who wants to break the Div-N rule and pay just for what they ordered. My rule for this now is to hand them the bill and say they are responsible for calculating and collecting the bill for everybody. I do this because there have been times when I have been the banker that people have announced they will only put in for what they ordered after much of the div-N payment has been done. While one can sympathise if they only ordered $10 of food and div-N is $25, what they are asking is that the banker now take the loss. This is why they should become the banker.

I was told last year of a new system which is gaining popularity in Europe. It works as follows. One diner is indeed the banker. The bill is passed around and each is told to put in “what they think they owe.” The banker takes the pile of money and does not count it. It is made very clear that the banker will not be counting, at least not at the table. The banker then pays the bill out of their own wallet, usually by credit card, though sometimes with cash. To avoid counting, paying with cash should typically be done by just taking out a modest number of the large bills from the stack if the banker is short.  read more »

I have written a few times before about versed, the memory drug and the ethical and metaphysical questions that surround it. I was pointed today to a story from Time about propofol, which like the Men in Black neuralizer pen, can erase the last few minutes of your memory from before you are injected with it. This is different from Versed, which stops you from recording memories after you take it.

Both raise interesting questions about unethical use. Propofol knocks you out, so it’s perhaps of only limited use in interrogation, but I wonder whether more specific drugs might exist in secret (or come along with time) to just zap the memory. (I would have to learn more about how it acts to consider if that’s possible.)

Both bring up thoughts of the difference between our firmware and our RAM. Our real-time thoughts and very short term memories seem to exist in a very ephemeral form, perhaps even as electrical signals. Similar to RAM — turn off the computer and the RAM is erased, but the hard disk is fine. People who flatline or go through serious trauma often wake up with no memory of the accident itself, because they lost this RAM. They were “rebooted” from more permanent encodings of their mind and personality — wirings of neurons or glia etc. How often does this reboot occur? We typically don’t recall the act of falling asleep, or even events or words from just before falling asleep, though the amnesia isn’t nearly so long as that of people who flatline.

These drugs most trigger something similar to this reboot. While under Versed, I had conversations. I have no recollection of after the drug was injected, however. It is as if there was a version of me which became a “fork.” What he did and said was destined to vanish, my brain rebooting to the state before the drug. Had this other me been aware of it, I might have thought that this instance of me was doomed to a sort of death. How would you feel if you knew that what you did today would be erased, and tomorrow your body — not the you of the moment — would wake up with the same memories and personality as you woke up with earlier today? Of course many SF writers have considered this as well as some philosophers. It’s just interesting to see drugs making the question more real than it has been before.

The SETI institute has a podcast called “Are we alone?”

I was interviewed for it at the Singularity Summit, this can be found in their when machines rule episode. If you just want to hear me, I start at 32:50 after a long intro explaining the Fermi paradox.

I only post a modest number of EFF news items here, because I know that if you want to see them all, you should be reading some of the EFF blogs such as deeplinks or or action alerts or EFFector or others.

However, something remarkable is happening. As you may know, we filed suit against AT&T because we have evidence they allowed the government to engage in a massive spying program within the US without warrants or other proper legal authority. Special secret rooms were installed in San Francisco and other locations, rooms under the control of the NSA, and massive data pipes with all internet traffic and more were forked and fed into these NSA rooms. We want to get to the bottom of this, and punish the phone companies if they violated the very explicit laws which were set up after watergate to stop the President from doing this exact sort of thing. Congress told the phone companies that Nixon showed us we can’t trust the President all the time, and so they have a duty to protect their customers as well, even if the President tells them not to.

But as our lawsuit has progressed, forces are pushing Congress to not just enable this spying, but to grant a retroactive amnesty on the phone companies that violated the law. In one sense I am glad our lawsuit has scared them so much — you know you are on to something when they try to get congress to pass retroactive laws to stop your lawsuits — but the enormity of such action boggles my mind.

The phone companies and White House are pushing for a “get out of jail free” card for their past activity. Whatever you think about the need for such massive surveillance, retroactive immunities are something else entirely. Allowing such immunities will let the President tell people, “Don’t worry whether this is illegal or not. As you can see, I can make it legal.” Congress might give him the proof he needs to back up such claims. It doesn’t matter that he won’t be able to “make it legal” every time he promises it. The fact that he did it this time is still going to get more people to feel at less risk in joining illegal conspiracies. It undermines the rule of law.

The American people need to convince their Senators and House members not to do this. If your rep has already decided they like the surveillance program — even if you have decided you like it — they must realize this get out of jail free card is a horrible idea.

You can use our action alert system to find your rep and their phone numbers, and give them a call. Calls matter the most. See if your reps are on the right committees and talk to them about it.

The house was ready to pass a bill without immunity and pro-immunity forces scuttled it and are pushing to get it added. Call House Members

The Senate Intelligence community passed a bill with Telco immunity in it. The Judiciary committe is now looking at it. Call Senate Members

After going through the VHS to digital process, which I lamented earlier I started wondering about the state of digitizing old vinyl albums and tapes is.

There are a few turntable/cd-writer combinations out there, but like most people today, I’m interested in the convenience of compressed digital audio which means I don’t want to burn to CDs at all, and nor would I want to burn to 70 minute CDs I have to change all the time just so I can compress later. But all this means I am probably not looking for audiophile quality, or I wouldn’t be making MP3s at all. (I might be making FLACs or sampling at a high rate, I suppose.)

What I would want is convenience and low price. Because if I have to spend $500 I probably would be better off buying my favourite 500 tracks at online music stores, which is much more convenient. (And of course, there is the argument over whether I should have to re-buy music I already own, but that’s another story. Some in the RIAA don’t even think I should be able to digitize my vinyl.)

For around $100 you can also get a “USB turntable.” I don’t have one yet, but the low end ones are very simple — a basic turntable with a USB sound chip in it. They just have you record into Audacity. Nothing very fancy. But I feel this is missing something.

Just as the VHS/DVD combo is able to make use of information like knowing the tape speed and length, detecting index marks and blank tape, so should our album recorder. It should have a simple sensor on the tone arm to see as it moves over the album (for example a disk on the axis of the arm with rings of very fine lines and an optical sensor.) It should be able to tell us when the album starts, when it ends, and also detect those 2-second long periods between tracks when the tone arm is suddenly moving inward much faster than it normally is. Because that’s a far better way to break the album into tracks than silence detection. (Of course, you can also use CDDB/Freedb to get track lengths, but they are never perfect so the use of this, net data and silence detection should get you perfect track splits.) It would also detect skips and repeats this way.  read more »

Most programs that ask for a password will put in a delay if you get it wrong. They do this to stop password crackers from quickly trying lots of passwords. The delay makes brute force attacks impossible, in theory.

But what does it really do? There are two situations. In one situation, you have some state on the party entering the password, such as IP address, or a shell session, or terminal. So you can slow them down later. For example, you could let a user have 3 or 4 quick tries at a password with no delay, and then put in a very long delay on the 5th, even if they close off the login session and open another one. Put all the delay at the end of the 4 tries (or at the start of the next 4) rather than between each try. It's all the same to a cracking program.

Alternately, you have no way to identify them, in which case rather than sit through a delay, they can just open another session. But you can put a delay on that other session or any other attempt to log into that user. Once again you don't have to make things slow for the user who just made a typo. And of course, typos are common since most programs don't show you what you're typing. (This turns out to be very frustrating when logging in from a mobile device where the keyboards are highly unreliable and you can't see what you are typing!)

You may have heard about a technique which makes ice in an otherwise warm desert when the skies are clear at night. Dig a pit, insulate it (in olden days this was done with straw by Romans and other biblical folk) and expose it to the open, clear sky at night. During the day, cover it with reflective and insulating material. The open night sky is very cold, and energy will radiate out to it. In addition, in the low humidity, evaporation chills the water. It need not be a pit, it can be an insulated tube with high walls.

I haven't had a lot of luck finding articles about the numbers on this process, and I presume it's not particularly efficient. But I started asking, could you do it with seawater? Seawater freezes at a few degrees colder than fresh, but most importantly, the ice itself is fresh, and if extracted will have minimal salt. Ice of course floats on brine as it does on fresh water, and if the brine tank is deep enough, you won't increase the concentration of salt a great deal before you remove the ice and replace the brine (though a heat exchanger, of course.)

Most people are interested in the ice because it's cold, but it may be just as valuable because it's not brine, in areas of the world where fresh water is scarce but arid land and clear night skies are plentiful. In these areas, desalination is done with power-intensive means such as distillation and reverse osmosis, so this method need only be more efficient than these to work. The "cost" of this method, if it works, would be the insulated pits themselves, with plumbing, pumping the brine around from the sea, and mechanisms for covering the pits and extracting the ice. The infrastructure cost is high but the energy cost may be low, if we don't have to move the brine very far.

As for the ice, it could of course be sold as ice first, to be used for refrigeration, and then as irrigation water once melted. Or it could be melted in a heat exchanger with incoming brine to keep the brine pits ice-cold and working well. Then, after melting it could be used for irrigation or depending on circumstances, for washing or even drinking.

What I don't know is whether this even works OK on brine, and if it's so inefficient that you use an acre to only get a modest number of gallons, or that even the modest pumping and mechanical needs don't justify the water you get. Should it work, it could be very useful. After all, it seems we get a lot of wars caused by people fighting over water in the desert.

Listening recently to Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire” I thought about expressing history in single words. One of my favourite conversation starters is to ask people who the most remembered person of the 20th century will be in the 25th. (For the 15th century, the clear winners are Columbus, Leonardo, and Gutenberg, with Columbus the stand-out in the Americas.) When I ask, people will pick names like Hitler or Einstein. Based on Columbus’ example, I think Neil Armstrong is a good contender, even though he can walk down the street today without being recognized.

So I came up with a challenge. Write the history of the 20th century in a single word as it will be perceived in centuries to come. In other words, “what’s from the century will be deemed most significant by the people of the future?” This is easier to do for centuries further past, because what people consider most important about the 20th century will depend on their own more recent history.

You’ll note that with a few exceptions, my words refer to science and technology, not politics, people, arts or philosophy. Because I feel these things affect the lives of the people far more. Wars may redraw borders and decide who is ascendant. History is written by the winners, but there is always a winner to write it. So you won’t see items most historians would list, like WW2, in my top 5.

20th Century

Computer

My first choice, both because computers are now the prime tool of all the other fields, as well as the controllers of almost all industry, and they will be much more. In fact, I believe the people of the future will be computers, or part computer, and thus consider this the most significant invention of the 20th century.

DNA

(Or “genomics” if you don’t think of DNA as a word.) We we rewrite who we are (if we don’t become computers) with this knowledge.

Nanotechnology

This is a tricky one. It was conceived in the 20th century (in the 50s in fact!) but not implemented within it. So perhaps it belongs in another century, but it may as well become the foundation of all manufacturing, and of ourselves.

Nuclear

In the 20th century we came to understand much lower levels of physics, but we’re not done. But if nuclear weapons destroy the world, this will make the cut.

19th Century — Electricity

From our 21st century viewpoint we can see how much that altered the world, along with the things that came from it, like telegraphs, phones, radios and even computers.

Other contenders: Industry, Germs and Evolution

18th Century — America

My one political event. The free constitutional democracy would change the world. We know that today. In 1805 people would have thought this a crazy one to put on the list. Other contenders, the start of the Industrial Revolution, and Vaccines.

17th Century — Science

The scientific method traces back to ancient days, and owes much to some earlier figures like Roger Bacon, but it was in this century that it truly flowered. The other contender: Steam

16th Century — Conquest

Perhaps this is biased by being in the Americas, but this was the century of world exploration and conquest, mostly by European powers. Other contenders: Astronomy

15th Century — Firearms

In particular the Arquebus and Rifle. The musket would come later. The firearm set the stage for all wars to come. Another big contender, Gutenberg’s press.

What are your contenders for these centuries and others?

I may be on the extreme, but I use hundreds of different E-mail addresses. Since I have whole domains where every address forwards to me (or to my spam filters) I actually have an uncountable number of addresses, but I also have a very large number of real ones I use. That’s because I generate a new address for every web site I enter an E-mail address on. It lets me know who sells or loses my address, and lets me cut off or add filtering to mail from any party. (By the way, most companies are very good, and really don’t sell your E-mail.)

As I said, I’m on the extreme, but lots of people have at least a handful of addresses. They have personal ones and work ones. They have addresses given by ISPs, and ones from gmail, hotmail and the like. But I regularly run into sites that assume that you have only one.

One of the worst behaviours is when I mail customer service. That mail comes from my current “private” address. It’s an unfiltered address that only goes out in E-mails to people I mail, and so replies always work. But they usually write back “You must send mail from the E-mail address in our records.” Even when I have told them my account number or other such information. And in fact, even when I tell them what the E-mail address is, they insist it be in the “From” line.

With most E-mail clients, I can indeed put any address in the From line I want, including yours or any of mine. So this is a pointless form of security. Their software has been written to key off this, and won’t let their agents identify the user another way. Unfortunately some mail agents that I use on the road don’t make it easy to enter an arbitrary From, so this is a pain.

Another problem is contact databases and social networks. LinkedIn likes you to know the E-mail address of somebody you are contacting in advance. But which one did they use with LinkedIn? And which one have I used? The address I have registered with some of these sites is not the one you use to mail me, so I can direct that mail. So if you use their systems to check for people in your contact list, you won’t find me, and I may not find you. Not that there’s an easily solution to this, but they haven’t even really tried.

Now as I said, I create these emails on the fly, and from reading them, I can tell what site they are for. But that doesn’t mean I can remember what I created after the fact. Sadly, many sites are also demanding you log in using “your E-mail address” rather than a userid that you pick. While this assures that IDs are unique, it’s also not hard to come up with a unique ID to use that’s not an E-mail and can be the same over all the sites you wish it to be. Sometimes to log in or do certain functions, I have to remember what E-mail I generated for them. (If I can get them to mail me something, I can solve that.)

Of course, many of them will mail me my password. Which is hugely, terribly wrong. No site should be able to E-mail you your password, because that means they are storing it. They should at best be able to reset your password and send you an E-mail which will let you log in and create a new password. While you should keep unique passwords for sites where real damage can be done (like banks) most people keep common passwords for sites where compromise of your “account” is not particularly bothersome. But if sites store it, it means they all are getting access to all the rest, if they wish to, or if they are compromised. I wrote this blog post to give people something to point at when sites expect you to have just one E-mail. I probably need another to point sites at when they are storing my password and will mail it to me. (Especially ones that say they dare not send you messages by E-mail because it is not secure, but which will send you your password by E-mail.)

The growing social network systems, notably Facebook and LinkedIn, have become better and better places to find old friends. And we're also seeing people search engines, such as zabasearch and the new spock.com to look through databases. If you're determined, you can find many folks.

Facebook lets users develop applications, but one I have in mind would not work as a developed app, since it requires access to people who have not installed the app. Right now on Facebook, you can type in a name and see all the people with that name (and variants) as well as their picture. You see their networks which sometimes tells you where they live, what school they went to and perhaps where they work. In theory you can't see anything else, including useful stuff like their age. You can, however, see their list of friends in most cases.

Often you will find many people with the same name, and this will only get worse as the systems get bigger. If a name is common it can make the search very difficult. Facebook uses an algorithm to put your likely hit near the top (it seems to be people with things in common with you, like locations, hometowns, etc.) which is a very good idea, but even so, you can still be in the dark, especially if the picture thumbnail makes it hard to see the face, or it's been 20 years.

You don't learn things like their age or hometown directly, which would be a privacy violation. You can often guess it by looking at the list of friends -- if they have only young friends still in school, they are probably young. If many of their friends are older, they probably are too. If many of their friends are from a town, they probably lived in that town or still do.

So you may end up sending a blind E-mail saying, "Are you the Fred Jones who went to Valley High?" But if the number of matches are too high that doesn't work either.

What would be nice would be a way to specify you are looking for a person with a given name, and to provide other data like their age and perhaps school. Then, all the people who match that would get a notification with the brief query. This would not be a full blown e-mail, they would just see a notice that somebody is looking for "the Fred Jones born around 1965 who went to Comdex." and if they were that Jones they could follow-up on it (or ignore) and if they weren't they would not see it again and could block seeing any further notes like this.

However, the real gold would come if the query could be stored, so that every new Fred Jones who joins sees that, and perhaps finds people already waiting to reconnect.

Key here is that while it would be a privacy violation to let me search for "The Fred Jones born around 1965" because multiple queries would let you pull out the person's age (which they have hidden from strangers or even friends) it is not so much a problem to present the searches to the people and let them decide if they want to respond.

You tune it so you would hopefully be less bothered by these queries than you would be the direct "are you the..." queries you would get. Of course, the more tuning information both parties give, the fewer people to get a notice. In fact, you could require the searcher to come up with something that only notifies fewer than some set number of people. So if there are 300 Fred Jones, you can't bug them all, but you could make the query of the 10 who are closest in age to a given year, for example. There are ways to game this a bit to search for private info, but it's harder, and users who respond can be notified about what they will be confirming by responding.

The "search for new users matching a name" query could be a Facebook app, but the above could not be, unless it were an app only for those who want enough to be found this way that they install it. But the main goal is to find people who don't realize they are being looked for.

LinkedIn is better at qualified queries, but doesn't let you email the people who match, except for money.