Shadow of the Sun – First Impression

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Today I got my iPad, and the first app I loaded was Kindle. Absolutely one of the things I’ll be using this for is reading. Before I commit to paying good cash money for eBooks, however, I wanted to give a test drive with a title I didn’t have to pay for. I went to Amazon’s top 100 free books.

A surprising number of the free books are books about how to write books. I flipped through the list, and paused at Shadow of the Sun. First, that’s a good title. Second, it looked like fantasy and I like that genre. There was a respectable number of stars next to the title, and it was free. First in a series, which I’ve gone on about at length before, but I have to say that if you give me the first part free and let me decide whether I’m in for money, my anger is less intense.

[And aside here: FAIL for the newbie experience with Kindle’s iPad app. I loaded it, launched it, and poked around for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to get a book. I read the “Welcome to Kindle” book over and over, where it promised access to 920,000 books. But how? Finally I went searching on the Interwebs and discovered that among the new “features” of the latest Kindle app for iOS was the removal of the link to the bookstore. Seems like that might be worth mentioning in the “Welcome to Kindle” message. It’s the core of the business and all. This is the kind of out-of-box startup experience that other companies get right.]

So, back to Shadow of the Sun. Speaking of out-of-the-box experience, there was a grammar error in the fourth paragraph of the prologue. I was reading on the trainer for the first time, so I thought it was just my eyes jumping that caused the sentence to parse funny. I read it again, then broke it down. Yep. Bad Grammar. Hello and welcome.

The prologue is less than a page long and is made to supply tension before a story that starts well enough on its own. Were I the editor, I’d chop it.

By “starts well enough” I mean that it’s a good setup and we get to some real shit pretty quickly. There are some problems, however. Backstory density is high, much higher than it needs to be. Gabrielle’s mysterious parentage can wait. I don’t care if she thinks she’s a good skier. The old “have your main character look in the mirror so you can describe her” trick is used. And there’s no way in hell she wouldn’t have fired her assistant by now. That’s the one piece of backstory I would have appreciated: Why is this bitch still employed? (Side bet: is she really evil or will she come thorough in the end? Really evil is favored 9:2 – my respect for this storyteller will bounce dramatically if Snoopy McBitchybritches isn’t in league with the devil.)

It occurs to me as I write this, that with my new-fangled technology I probably could have marked the grammatical errors as I read, so I could reference the choicest of them now. Not a good sign for a story when errors like that become a statistic. Were I the editor of this book, there would be fewer errors, not even counting the eschewing of the hyphen the way kids do these days. That’s an indictment of the state of publishing more than a criticism of the author, but in the current complete vacuum of editorial involvement (at least as editors), the author has no one but herself to rely on to make sure things are right.

Then there’s the whole “I work in a paranormal research facility but I can’t tell my boss what happened because he’d think I was crazy” logic. Sure, Gabrielle’s supposed to be a skeptic, but that’s the kind of reasoning a character does when she’s trying to make the story work for the writer. Generous of the character to sacrifice her credibility that way for the sake of the story. I’m willing to bet her boss will say, “You should have told me!” far too late.

We’ve met the devil now — or perhaps his lawyer — and I’m hoping he’s not as stupid as he seems. It’s all about the wheels within wheels, or at least the hope for same. Black powerful flaming-eye guy (note hyphen) comes out all big and scary and says, “don’t wake up the angels!” If I’m the devil (and you don’t know I’m not), the only reason I’d act that way is if I did want the angels to be awakened. Just calling them angels in is a blunder on the part of the bad guys; angels have had pretty good press over the centuries.

So there’s a lot of hope that the story is smart where so far there’s no reason to believe it is. Warts aside, I want this story to succeed. It’s an interesting situation, and a character I think I could like, if I got to know her more organically. I’m still reading. It’s flawed, but it might be awesome. It might be… flaw some.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this (er… free) book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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My Thoughts on Joe Paterno

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I don’t feel good about piling on to the media onslaught surrounding Penn State, but there’s a lot of hysteria flying around and some of it’s shit.

Please allow me to summarize the current scandal: A coach at Penn State has been accused of gut-wrenching numbers of child molestation charges. The worst part is that when he retired he was given permission to visit the football facilities but he was not allowed to bring children. (I got that last off sports radio, so it might be false.) If it’s true, however, it implies that the powers-that-be knew of the coach’s deep and intractable evil, and their response was to make sure they weren’t implicated later.

Joe Paterno, legendary coach, King of Happy Valley (where Penn State is located), has said he is shocked and wishes he had done more when he saw trouble signs. People are jumping all over his ass asking, “How could he have been so naïve? He must have known something!”

But that’s the killer with naïvety. In retrospect you do know. You realize that when you hear that someone in your employ is accused of doing something awful you don’t just kick it up to your boss and assume they will do the right thing. And if you’re an old-schooler living a sheltered life in a town called Happy Valley, It’s hard to picture the guy next to you as being purely evil. You can’t even imagine the crime, let alone believe your friend capable of it.

Someone in that organization knew. I don’t think it was Joe, and I think the administration wanted it that way. They knew Joe the old-schooler would not have let them cover things up. Now Joe’s been fired, and perhaps that will give others the awareness and strength to act when someone close to them is doing something wrong. Perhaps people will be able to see the evil now.

On the other hand, I’m disturbed at the amount of press focussed on what this will do to Paterno’s legacy at the expense of discussing what the (alleged) spawn of hell did to those poor kids. And look! I just added to that.

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I Want to SEE Moore’s Law

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When I first pulled my iPad out of its box and held it, I said, “This little thing has more computing power than most spacecraft.” Pretty sure that’s true; most spacecraft are pretty old and it takes a long, long time to get a chip certified for space. Still, It’d be fun to have some facts. There’s no single metric to compare computers, but I’d still be interested in a chart of computer power through the ages. How does my iPad compare to an IBM 360, a classic mainframe (it’s no contest, really, but how many times faster is the iPad)? How far to go yet before my phone threatens Cray’s numbers?

Somewhere out there, some geek/historian must be compiling this kind of info. I searched a little bit but it was all about fastest on the planet. Consumer devices (other than game boxes which are only compared to other game boxes) need not apply. But those guys are missing the true revolution: that our phones and cars and DVD players are wicked-fast computers. Supercomputers are being measured in petaflops these days. Big Whoop. I’ve got a phone that can understand my words.

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Got me an iPad!

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It was only a matter of time, I suppose, considering where I work. I get a discount on the gadgets, and I sold it to myself as a way to be more productive. “I can read while I work out,” I said. Of course, I could have paid a fraction of the cost of an iPad for a Kindle and done the same thing.

But there’s something about this device. I’m not one to get tech envy; I don’t have to have the latest phone or the slickest TV or anything like that. But when I saw my coworkers with their iPads, I have to admit I turned a little green.

When it first came out I couldn’t decide whether it was too big or too small. Both, I decided. Too big for your pocket, too small for serious work. Then I started seeing the things in meetings where laptops used to rule. The executives who use my work are all-iPad. At least at Apple, it’s proven to be a serious business tool. Not too big. Not too small. A portable conduit to the Infoverse, with a screen big enough to interact with all that stuff out there.

So now I own one. I’ll still be taking the laptop to meetings. Most meetings, anyway. And I did work out today, and read while doing it.

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Class A, Baby!

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Usually I blame the Chinese for every shortage or surfeit, and while they are definitely participating in this particular drought, it would be difficult to pin the blame wholly on them. Much of the problem lies closer to home.

You see, the world is running out of IP addresses. An IP address is like a computer’s phone number on the Internet. When you type muddledramblings.com, you start a complicated series of interactions (“I don’t know where that is, but I know who to ask…”) out there in the Interwebs and eventually it is resolved that what you’re looking for is computer 173.245.60.121. You get the same answer for JersSoftwareHut.com and jerryseeger.com. (That’s actually an IP owned by CloudFlare, who sends things on to the actual IP of 66.116.108.197. But that’s not what matters here…)

At the time of this writing, jer.is-a-geek.com resolves to 98.210.116.58, the IP of my home router. The actual number may change, but there will always be an ip address used up by the router. (Don’t bother going there; there’s nothing to see unless you use ssh and already have a key installed on your computer. (The key file itself is locked with a password I may have forgotten.))

Anyway, the IP address is a finite number, and so there is a limit to the total number of computers connected directly to the Internet. This is a very, very big number, but when they came up with the number they didn’t think people’s toasters (and telephones, and cars) would be connected to the Internet. (In your house, most likely your computers and other gadgets go through a router or a modem. That router has to have a unique ID, but the rest of your network uses a special range of IP’s reserved for internal networks. So, your household only eats up one of the limited supply.)

We are starting to reach the limits of the IP system, just as in the US there was a shortage of telephone numbers. (Some of the reasons we ran out of phone numbers are similar as well, as I’ll mention in a bit.)

With phone numbers they split areas into smaller chunks, and created new area codes. While there was the inconvenience of people’s area codes changing, everything still worked.

The Techno-Wizards who run the Internet saw the IP problem coming some time ago, and set out to solve it. What they came up with was IPv6 (currently we are using IPv4). The only problem: the two systems are not compatible. So now a new network based on IPv6 is being deployed, and the people on it can’t look at Web sites that have IPv4 addresses without some sort of middleman. Sucks to be one of those guys. (Muddled Ramblings is now visible on the IPv6 network thanks to CloudFlare.)

Meanwhile, at work, my team needed an IP address for one of our servers. We were advised by a coworker to just go ahead and grab a block of 256 addresses, so we’d have them if we needed them. Really? When IP addresses are running out?

Yep. It turns out that long ago, organizations who were on the ball could buy up huge blocks of IP addresses on the cheap. MIT bought a Class A* block, as did Stanford (who has given it back, I believe), the Army National Guard, IBM, HP (they have DEC’s block now, too, I think), and Apple. Each Class A block has almost 17 million IP addresses, and represents a significant chunk of all the IP addresses available.

The US military has several blocks, and the British military has some as well.

Oh, and Amateur Radio Digital Communications has a Class A, along with Prudential Securities. Ford and Daimler. Three or four pharmaceutical companies. (I imagine Merck or whoever bought one, and their competitors followed suit out of habit.)

I think you might now be getting a glimpse of a core problem. The huge blocks of IP addresses were allotted to whoever asked for them, with no requirement that the organization actually show that they needed them or would not hoard them. Does Ely Lilly have a side business as a data center?

A possibly-apocryphal story I was told the other day: Back when IPs were up for grabs, someone at Apple proposed that they snag a Class A. The powers that be decided against the move, so he got the purchase of the block wedged into the budget for something completely unrelated. It turns out to have been a pretty savvy move. Now every IP address that starts 17. belongs to Apple.

Of the companies on that list, I’d certainly say Apple has more business owning a Class A block than many of the others. Whether the US Military really needs all those huge blocks I’m not qualified to argue. But the fact remains that while we would be running out of IP addresses eventually anyway, the careless and haphazard way they were originally handed out exacerbated the problem mightily.

I mean, does the Department of Social Security in the UK really need 16.7 million IP addresses? Really?

* The term ‘Class A’ is a little out of date, but reads better than ‘/8 block’

Note 1: I got my information here and there on the Internet, then found it all here.

Note 2: This episode contains a lot of parenthetical comments, part of my crusade to address the global overabundance of parentheses. I encourage you to use a few extras as well, until supply is back in balance with demand. (As usual, I blame the Chinese for the surfeit.)

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Keep the Shovel

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The official sister of Muddled Ramblings has on occasion told me about a show called “Pimp My Ride.” In this show, photogenic people turn their old, crappy vehicles over to a bunch of talented and resourceful people who “pimp it out”, as the kids say. In this case “pimp” does not mean to use the car to promote prostitution, rather it means convert the vehicle into one a pimp might drive. This means it must have “bling”: conspicuous and profligate disregard for cost, a desire to attract attention at the sacrifice of taste. Money for money’s sake.

Today for the first time I saw (but did not hear) the show. It opened with many scenes of a frighteningly cute young woman driving an old, beat-up Land Cruiser. The vehicle had no doors. I *heart* explosives, a sticker on the front bumper proclaimed. On the left front fender a short-handled shovel was anchored. When you’re in deep sand, a thousand miles from home, a shovel can save your life. Various people in hip-hop attire were shown posing next to the sticker and the shovel. The seats had four-point harnesses and the speakers were in black-spraypainted wooden boxes rattling around in back.

The bubbly young lady was shooed away and the pimping began. In my head, I was imagining how I would trick out this particular ride. They gave the thing new paint (yellow!) and front ironwork with lights. Nice. That eliminated the bumper sticker that everyone had made such a big deal of, but I was sure that the ‘explosives’ motif would be honored some other way. I mean, shit. Explosives.

I was wrong. The pixie came back, jumped up and down with terrific excitement, and fawned over her transformed vehicle. My thought: where’s the shovel? Apparently all that time spent posing next to the shovel was to bury it, not praise it. These urban ride-pimpers had no respect for the rural, self-sufficient, working-man characteristics of the vehicle. What I thought had been a great chance to build up and enhance an iconic vehicle was just another makeover, like taking a great singer and cramming her into the conformity-box of American Idol. A wilderness hero goes Hollywood.

Apparently Little Miss Sunshine, whom, based on her vehicle, I had judged to be an independent desert rat, a rambler, in fact was just in the wrong car to start with. That, or she was good at pretending to be happy.

And you know what? Even in Hollywood, that shovel should have stayed. The businesslike seats should have stayed. The ride would have benefitted from a little bit of badass (big tires on shiny wheels are often mistaken for badass, as they were in this case, but you know the real thing when you see it). All the time the people spent posing next to the shovel is proof that it made an impression.

There were lots of cool things the ride-pimpers added to the vehicle, and I have to admit that if I’d not seen the original I would have just written the result off as another toy truck that some rich kid bought. Knowing its history, though, I know that truck could have been so much more.

Whatever you’re doing out there, make sure you keep the shovel. The shovel is where the soul is.

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Why I Should Be an Analyst for Sharks Radio

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As time was running out against the Penguins, who have been moving the puck all night as well as any team I’ve ever seen, McGinn of the Sharks scored a tying goal. “That’s what we need!” I proclaimed.

No shit, Sherlock.

The game continues, tied in the third.

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Ig Nobel

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The awards are in jest, but at the same time they’re not. The Ig Nobel awards have honored the inventors of pink lawn flamingos (yes, they were invented), and other breakthroughs of science. This year: wasabi smoke alarm, procrastination, and apples and oranges. Not to mention the bug that loves to hump a beer bottle.

(I actually started writing this episode a few weeks ago, when commentary on this year’s awards was actually timely, but the partially complete episode has been sitting, waiting for a time when I don’t have anything better to say. Welcome to November.)

This year the august panel that dispenses these awards honored a paper titled “Apples and Oranges: a comparison.” It turns out you can compare the two, and now there’s science to back it up. Keep that in mind next time you’re accused of arguing in bad faith.

In other news, A Japanese team was honored this year for a study of just how much wasabi was the right amount to emit from a smoke detector. Not enough, people don’t wake up and burn to death. Too much, people burn to death while crying their eyes out.

“A wasabi smoke alarm?” I hear you say, “What a waste of science!” The whole thing sounds pretty stupid, until you give your smoke detector to a profoundly deaf person. Wait a minute, this thing is genius. That’s how you win an Ig Nobel. Discoveries that make you laugh, then think.

With a little funding, I think I could rack up a dozen of the damn things.

I’m linking to an article at ars technica, in which the one real breakthrough of the year is taken quite seriously: The theory of structured procrastination. The author postulates that, to be a high achiever, one must always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid something even more important. Now I ask myself: Can I be wasting my life more effectively?

This principle has already had a positive effect on my life. (Although, to be honest, this last week I’ve slid a little bit.) I ask myself “can I be wasting my time better?” and the answer is almost always yes. Some of the alternative procrastination options are frighteningly close to productive.

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Happy November Twoth!

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November twoth is a big day on the Muddled Calendar, the day I (and tens of thousands of others) wake up and realize we’re already behind our word counts for NaNoWriMo.

In years past part of the tradition has been for me to publish the product of my first night of scribbling here. This year, I’m not going to do that. The product of my first night was more like sketches of three scenes than any sort of coherent narrative. The scenes aren’t even sequential; one is from the first act and two from the second. Alas, the elusive third act remains too ill-defined even to sketch a scene.

So, no excerpt this year. I know you all are devastated at missing out on the prospect of reading a long rough draft of a scene with no hope of ever finding out what happens next. Lost is off the air, after all.

Good luck to all my fellow NaNoWriMo participants, and I’ll see you on the other side of 50K!

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Opportunity Lost

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The other day I opened the cabinet to grab some cold cereal. I wasn’t sure which specific cereal I was going to have, I just knew that a bowl full of yummy not-too-sweet flakes with some almond milk splashed over them would be tasty. Probably I’d slice a banana over the cereal.

So, surveying the candidates with an open mind, I was confronted with… anonymous boxes. Black-and-white panels of nutrition information. I selected a cereal and resolved to put it away with the other edge showing, so my poor tired eyes could identify that box better the next time.

It turns out the other side was no better, and I realized that all the cereal boxes in the cabinet used the side panels as junk space.

Big mistake, I say. In the case of cereal, all the marketing is on the front of the box, with stuff on the back of the box to keep the kids without TV in the kitchen occupied. The packaging designers are missing an important opportunity.

There are two phases to marketing a box of cereal; first you get it off the store shelf and into the shopping cart. That’s what the front panel does. But the marketing isn’t over then; cereals are still competing to get from the box to the bowl. The winner of that contest empties the box faster. It’s about selling the next box.

That competition is all about the side panels. If I were king of a cereal company, the boring stuff would be on the back, and the side panels would be devoted exclusively to “Hey! Look at me! I’m yummy!”

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Earthchuckle

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Episode two takes a more serious turn, with a story of friendship and life, and the end of one but not the other.

[podcast]

So, I set up to record the thing, and I thought this episode wouldn’t take as much time to put together since I already had my template set up. I recorded the story and it went smoothly. I assembled the takes and got it all paced correctly. Then I put it into the template from last time and discovered that, despite using the same room and the same microphone, it sounded totally different. I tweaked some settings and tried again. Still totally different. “Must be the proximity effect,” I thought, and recoded again, with the mic closer to my mouth. Nope. Still different.

I think the difference might be the way I connected the mic to the computer (through a USB adapter the first time, straight in the second). I tried replicating the effect using software, but I wasn’t terribly successful.

Still, once you get past the sudden change in acoustic quality, the story does all right.

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Science

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A few years ago I was at a party, and I was talking to a guy I’d met a few times before. “I don’t believe in X,” he said (I have no recollection what X was), just like I don’t believe in relativity.”

I was young, and perhaps naïve, but I didn’t think relativity was a candidate to be part of a belief system. “What do you mean, you don’t believe in relativity?” I asked. Here was a chance, I thought, to explain the principle to someone who didn’t understand it.

I failed. I failed and got very frustrated, angry at myself for not explaining things better. Angry that I had not even put doubt into the non-believer. It went like this: He explained something he called “the inertia problem.” I assumed he’d picked it up from a book by some ‘rogue’ physicist (more on them later). He described the inertia problem. It was nonsensical and even if you helped it along a bit with incorrect terminology, it still had absolutely nothing to do with relativity.

In retrospect, I enumerated a few options how to proceed:

  • Ask, “What does that have to do with relativity?” and address the incorrect linkages specifically.
  • Say, “Look, relativity has been measured over and over, in different ways, from the orbit of Mercury to clocks in the Apollo capsules. The work my own father does would simply break without it.”
  • Ask “Do you believe in gravity? Because that’s a hell of a lot more mysterious than relativity.”
  • Say, “Fortunately, relativity doesn’t need your faith to work.”
  • I could treat the “inertia problem” as a credible theory, work my ass of to recast it in terms that actually meant something, then demonstrate that my construct was, in fact, not in disagreement with relativity.

I think you can guess which course I took. Perhaps all of the above would have failed (more on that later, too), but just mentioning personal experience and giving a taste of the enormous pile of things that have verified relativity in the past century might have provided enough skepticism that at least the Unbeliever would not spread his Unfaith as fervently. (I wonder if he uses a GPS now? I wonder if he knows he’s using relativity?)

This guy thought of himself as a skeptic, as someone who didn’t just believe what everyone else did. In fact, he was not a skeptic at all. He was Rogue wanna-be. The way to convince him of something was to start with, “The establishment doesn’t want me to say…” and then say something that implies special knowledge that no one else has. Some idiot whose concept of physics is mired in the 1850’s writes a book saying that relativity is bogus, and members of the Rebel Dalliance hoist him on their shoulders. Stick it to the man! Believe a quack for no other reason than he says the establishment is wrong!

There’s never been a moon landing! Never mind that the junk is up there, in plain sight. For some reason Russia and China continue to cooperate with the US to perpetuate a hoax forty years later. Why do people believe that? Because it’s fun to style oneself as a rogue. As long as you only talk to other members of the Rebel Dalliance, you don’t have to discover that you’re an idiot.

Which brings me to evolution. Lots of people in this country don’t believe in it. As I could have said to the guy who didn’t believe in relativity, evolution doesn’t require their faith to work. The part that sticks in my craw is the large number of anti-evolution salesmen who claim that there are other scientifically-viable theories. Intelligent design and whatnot. A handful of ‘rogue’ scientists have done well for themselves proposing plausible-sounding stories and selling them as science. People will pay you to tell them what they want to hear.

Those theories are not science. In fact, they’re not even theories. A better name for ‘rogue scientist’ is ‘salesman’. Anyone who claims to be a scientist must always be ready to listen to more evidence and modify or scrap his favorite theory. It happens. But in science, even the guys who are wrong are improving the process, bringing up proposals and, most importantly, new tests to challenge the status quo. Sometimes (well, often) pride gets tangled up in things, but even then they are not rogues, they are stubborn scientists.

Science is about letting go. People who say science is messed up because people used to believe one thing but now believe something else are in fact demonstrating the strength of science. We learn. We grow. We change.

“I believe God made Adam from clay,” is perfectly all right with me. I have no difficulty with faith; it’s about the unknowable, about the places science can’t reach. Just don’t try to clothe faith in science and wedge it into the science curriculum at my local school.

If your theory can’t be tested, it’s not science. This is currently a hot topic at the most esoteric level of physics. The math works, but it’s hard to test without exploding suns to get the energy required. There are a lot of folks, promoters and skeptics alike, searching for planet-earth size experiments to test the math.

So, scientific theories have to be testable. Even that’s not enough, though. How many times have you started a sentence with “A study showed that…?” A bunch of times, right? Me, too. And I will again. Some of those studies are pretty crazy. But while you do it, remember this: A study has never shown anything. Ever. A single study is so vulnerable to mistakes and misinterpretation that you can never draw broad conclusions. The study has to be replicated, by someone else, using methods that answer questions raised by outsiders about the first study.

Remember cold fusion? Some guys were so excited about the result of their experiment that they bypassed normal science channels and went mainstream. The economic implications of their study were so world-changing that the entire scientific community dropped what they were doing to try to replicate that experiment in a hundred different ways. Turns out, the original experiment was flawed. (Somewhere, there’s a ROGUE SCIENTIST selling books telling of the coverup of cold fusion.)

Scientific evidence has to be repeatable. Predictably repeatable. Every measurement has to have an estimate of the likelihood that it’s wrong.

The biggest problem with teaching creationism alongside evolution in schools is that it clouds what science even is. Creationism as an ‘alternate theory’ totally confuses the definition of ‘theory’. When discussing science, creationism is most certainly not a theory. It can’t be tested. I don’t care what you think about dinosaurs; you could leave them out of the curriculum and I wouldn’t mind that much (the kids will supplement their own education on that score), but please, please, teach what science is, and even more importantly, what it isn’t.

Sooner or later our government will be filled with people who don’t even understand the nature of science, its strengths and weaknesses, yet they will be making critical decisions based on science. Ah, shit. That’s happened already.

If we all knew what science was, then when some oil-company-funded pundit comes on TV to ‘debunk’ global warming with feel-good talk about economic growth, the token scientist in studio to rebut could simply say, “that’s not science,” and the nation would nod and disregard the previous bloviations. “Now,” the anchor will say, “We can get to the real debate: what to do about it.”

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Do Not Attempt

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The Title of this episode commonly appears as fine print in television commercials, where the advertiser wants to make sure no one holds them responsible for someone else being stupid.

I may add to this post, but here’s the one that forced me (yes, forced) to write this little episode:

  • Do not attempt an automobile collision while someone is hanging from the side of one of the vehicles, on the side of the collision.
  • Do not jump out of an airplane while holding a sphere of electricity and then hurl said sphere into a cloud that you are falling toward, filling it with lightning.

I know you were going to.

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The Smart Phone that’s (Almost) Smart Enough

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I’m told a lot of people were disappointed by the announcement of the iPhone 4S, and I guess I can see why. The hardware sports a much faster processor, but it’s not 4G! My current 3G phone is plenty fast enough for what I do, and that has included tethering it to my computer for Web access where there’s no WiFi. So, 4G doesn’t really seem that important to me.

Tethering the phone to my computer, now that’s a big deal, and something that iPhones can’t (or at least couldn’t) do without cracking them first. So I don’t currently have an iPhone.

The 4S is the one that finally has me tempted, however. To understand why, let me tell you what I wish my current smart phone could do.

1) I wish I could pick it up without looking, push a button, say ‘navigate home’, set it back down, and have the GPS system take me to my current address. Naturally I want this function when I’ve taken a wrong turn and I don’t want to mess with a damn phone, I just want to get out of there. I don’t have any spare attention to work through menus or wait while the phone processes ‘navigate’ and I can then tell it my address (which includes a street name that the voice recognition never gets right).

2) Again I’m driving. I want to pick up the phone, say, “I’m in traffic” and have the phone notify my boss that I’m running late, and send a message to anyone I might have an appointment with in the next 30 minutes. This would lower my stress immeasurably and remove a temptation (which I never succumb to) to make a phone call while driving.

Enter Siri, your humble personal assistant, and the real thing that’s exciting about the 4S.

Here’s a story an Apple board member told today at Steve’s memorial service. He related that on the day Steve came before the board to resign as CEO, he stuck around for the rest of the meeting. It was the day Siri was demonstrated to the board, and after a few minutes Steve said “let me see that thing.” The presenter hesitated, saying the phone had been calibrated to his voice, but really he knew that Steve was going to throw something unexpected at the device to see how it handled it. You never said no to Steve at a time like that. Steve started by asking the phone a couple of typical questions, then said, “Are you a man or a woman?”

Siri responded, “I have not been assigned a gender.” Steve, I believe, was pleased.

Al Gore, also a board member, told another Siri story. Al’s theme was that people genuinely love Apple’s products (there is, apparently, neurological evidence supporting this). He pointed out, however, that technology really doesn’t love you back. To illustrate the point he told of a friend (daughter, maybe? I’m a bit sketchy on the specifics) who asked Siri, “do you love me?”

Siri said, “I respect you.”

Oh, yeah, you can also say “Siri, text Katherine and say I’ll be late,” and it will. “Katherine says no problem,” Siri might say a few minutes later. Not as fun, but a lot more useful. I’m confident that with a little fiddling Siri can actually do my two use-cases above.

If Siri is as good as it seems, it will be remembered long after people stop putting ‘i’ at the front of everything. Our robot overlords will remember Siri as a turning point. It is the next user interface, the hands-free, eyes-free, give-me-what-I-need-without-interrupting-my-current-task interface. The one from Star Trek and Galaxy Quest, only, unlike in the latter, anyone can talk to it.

Siri says, “I am your humble personal assistant.”

Thanks!

Speaking of Flash…

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Long ago, as a follow-up to my giant hit “Duck!” I undertook a much more elaborate project. Once more, Jose provided some of the key images (William Shatner, mainly), and I did the rest.

I never finished. I got close, and I put a lot of time into it (lip-syncing is time-consuming, to say the least), but it’s not quite there yet. There are flat spots. I haven’t got the easter eggs in yet. No credits, and no preloading. It looks like the audio has been shifted a frame. Still, there’s a lot to like about it, too. It’s Shatner, after all, at his psychedelic best.

I’d finish the thing, but I don’t even own a version of Flash that will run on my current hardware, and Flash is expensive. Hard to justify shelling out that kind of cash just to put the final touches on this monster. Still… It would be cool.

Note that this animation is interactive — don’t take your hand off that mouse just yet! Your final score will be displayed at the end. Also, there are a couple of things that happen differently each time, and a lot of things going on you won’t notice the first time through. Not as many as I planned, but the project is stalled.

If someone who has Flash would be interested in helping me get across the finish line, let me know!


Notes: It may look like it’s running, but you need to right-click the animation and select ‘Play” to make it go. (Controls are obviously something that didn’t get put in before the project stalled.) I optimized this animation for slightly larger display; if I could figure out why there’s no full-screen option when you right-click I’d fix that, too.

Enjoy!

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Thanks!