Status-Q

Here’s an excellent Nature article by Ahmed Zewail. Extract:

Some believe that more can be achieved through tightly managed research — as if we can predict the future. I believe this is an unfortunate misconception that affects and infects research funding.

I’ve always liked Einstein’s comment that “if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”.

There’s a good post on the Economist blog about the WikiLeaks affair:

My gripe against Mr Assange is that he takes advantage of the protections of liberal democracies, but refuses to submit himself to them. If he wants to use the libel protections guaranteed by New York State, then he should live in New York, and commit himself to all of the safety and consequences of America’s constitution. If he wants to use Sweden’s whistleblower laws, then he should return to Sweden and let its justice system take its course.

It’s a bit of an over-simplification: if you’re an an anarchist, where should you live, since we no longer have Australia set aside for that purpose? But it’s basically a good point.

This makes me think of the observations by Dawkins et al that those who will flatly deny the validity of the scientific process when it challenges their view of the creation of the earth, or the efficacy of alternative medicines, will then happily get on a plane to fly home, where every minute of their very lives depend on hundreds of years of that same process.

This is the point at which, by the way, if you haven’t seen it, you should watch Louis CK’s comments on ‘Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy’:

Anyway, back to WikiLeaks: The other thing that bugs me is that the feeling that some of those who revel most enthusiastically in the WikiLeaks revelations would be those who would protest most loudly if their own privacy were compromised.

Just as ‘superstition’ is often the name we use for somebody else’s religion – and they for ours – so ‘freedom of information’ is often the name we give to invasion of someone else’s privacy, and, one day, might be used for invasion of ours.

Be careful what you wish for… You may get it!

Update: I should perhaps emphasise that I’m an advocate of freedom of information in general! But we’re starting to hear stories which remind me of what we’ve seen with the Human Rights Act in the past: the more such good intentions get formalised into legal structures, the more people come to think of them as unassailable rights in all circumstances, and the more they can be misused by those wanting to make a quick buck or write a sensational story.

One of the monthly invoices I get by email (from those nice people at VoIPtalk) starts with:

Please view this with a fixed-width font.

And indeed, all the columns line up much more tidily if you do that, but come on, chaps, times have moved on! Even people like me are no longer using Pine to read their email, and you can bet that the vast majority of your customers won’t even know how to set their email reader into a fixed-width font.

Ironically, if you want people to view your message in Courier nowadays, you probably need to send it as HTML!

Just discovered Miguel Fernandez’s site, Gegen den Strich, which, if my decidedly rusty German is to be trusted, means ‘Against the Grain’.

Miguel is a cartoonist, and, though the site is in German, a fair selection of them will work across linguistic boundaries. I like these:

This is one of his, but doesn’t appear to be on his site at present:

Thanks to Nick van Someren for the original link.

Dennis Dutton’s TED talk on an evolutionary theory of beauty is very interesting in its own right, but it’s also illustrated by Andrew Park in a phenomenally clever way.

This is about as far from slides full of bullet points as you can get. Wonderful stuff. Worth watching full-screen…

Friends and family sometimes tease me because of their belief that I can’t cook.  

This is of course ridiculous.

I have a 100% success rate on all recipes which begin ‘Remove outer packaging and pierce film lid’…

It seems to me that beverage manufacturers have cottoned on to how profitable homeopathy can be.

Bottled drinks seem increasingly to be pure water with hints of flavour or claims of added vitamins. And the more dilute they are, the more they cost. Isn’t it wonderful that the language provides us with positive words like ‘purity’, indicating the absence of anything else? A marketer’s dream…

[Aside: I had a drink today which boasted about its levels of antioxidants. People should know by now that antioxidants are not necessarily a good thing…]

Anyway, I sometimes wonder if you could take it to extremes and leave out the water?

I think I’ll try that. I’m going to start a company which sells vacuums in little containers. It won’t be a total vacuum, of course, because we know nature abhors that, and it must, of course, be Natural. It’ll be a vacuum which echoes the purity of the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere. There’ll be a few oxygen and nitrogen molecules in there, just the way nature intended…

You can take it home, open it up and release a little bit of outer space into your room. Breath deeply, focus on your inner energies, and meditate on starlight…

Now, this looks like an interesting app. Called iA Writer, it is almost like a typewriter for the iPad. Formatting is definitely not included. I have several of these basic editors (Elements and Droptext, for example). Writer shares many of the standard features, including the now ubiquitous sync-with-Dropbox.

But what piqued my interest was the fact that it’s the first app I’ve seen to extend the standard iPad keyboard: it adds a few basic punctuation characters, simple left and right cursor keys, and previous/next word keys. Very handy if you sometimes find the process of selecting a precise point with your big fat fingers a little tricky, as I do, though even that is easier here thanks to the large and well-spaced font the developers have chosen.

So far, I’ve only written – let’s see – 170 words with it (it tells me that too), but I can see I could get to like it for any situation where I’m trying to do real writing on the ‘Pad.

More info here.

My dear friend Martin King passed away last week. He was perhaps the most remarkable, intelligent, tall, good-hearted, inventive, generous, and thoroughly frustrating person I have ever known.

Our lives were closely intertwined for many years, despite the fact that we lived thousands of miles apart. He and I filed dozens of patents and started three companies together. Amongst other things not normally associated with business relationships, we also explored antique stores in Amsterdam, flew to Hong Kong for a long weekend, and took long road trips through the deserts of Oregon, discussing pixel-encoding algorithms and the meaning of life between loud bursts of Leonard Cohen.

Martin was always full of surprises. I remember him casually mentioning once that he had sailed single-handed across the Atlantic. I remember his descriptions of tree-level helicopter flights in Vietnam. And even amongst those familiar with the technology which brought him financial success – the T9 predictive-text software for mobile phones – few know it was a direct development of his early work on a low-cost eye-tracking system for those with paraplegia.

Both T9, and the company Tegic which created it, were significant achievements. T9 saved you having to tap the ‘2’ key three times to get the letter ‘C’, for example, because it used a dictionary to establish that a limited number of words – often only one – could be represented by the sequence of keys you had typed. Some disliked or were confused by the system, but for many it was the only way to perform text input at a reasonable speed on the phones of yesteryear.

In these days of iPhone app stores it seems primitive, but there were some serious challenges back then. Memory on mobile devices was expensive stuff, so they had to pack a decent-sized dictionary – 64,000 words – into 64Kbytes. That’s a good problem for a Computer Science project. (And don’t make it too dependent on the structure of English words, because when you need to show it to Samsung you’ll want to throw together a demo in Korean.) But there was a business hurdle to overcome, too: at that time all the software on a phone was written by the manufacturer, and T9 was, I believe, the first third-party software to be licensed and incorporated by all the major vendors. Others can tell the Tegic story better than me, since it happened several years before I knew Martin. But I hope that somebody will, because I suspect in the hands of the right author it would make a cracking good yarn.

Martin could become intensely focussed on a project or topic, to an extent that was sometimes uncomfortable. He became obsessed with things that frustrated him, including, sometimes, people, who usually through no fault of their own would suddenly fall out of favour, and some found themselves encouraged to pursue their careers elsewhere. He was always fair, often very generous, in compensating those affected, but it can’t have been easy to be on the receiving end, wondering where it had all gone wrong…

Yet it was this focus on his frustrations that also made him so incredibly inventive. Things would bug him, and he would ask why they had to be that way. Some of our most enjoyable discussions – and quite a few patents – would come when one of us, usually he, posed a question like “Why do you have to reset your watch manually every time you fly to another country?” And then the notebooks would come out and all plans of getting any sleep on the plane would be cast aside.

When Martin was diagnosed with multiple myeloma five years ago, there were times when we thought he might only be around for a few more months, and times when the prognosis seemed much more hopeful. We’d always discussed life and death pretty openly, so it was easy to talk about the latter now. By way of expressing my gratitude for this, I once told him, rather inelegantly, “Well, Martin, if I had to have a friend who was dying, I’d want it to be you.” He laughed out loud, and quoted this back to me on many an occasion.

Martin, you were an inspiration.