Science

I went in yesterday for routine bloodwork, which I do every few days, to make sure my blood maintains optimum clot-resistance. While there I also decided to ask the medical folks to listen to my chest again, since the pain that started this whole thing — and which turns out to have been a pulmonary embolism, a “moderate-sized” blood clot in the middle lobe of my right lung — never went away. In fact, I still feel like I’m nursing some broken ribs.

The diagnosis is nothing more than slow healing. The broken rib pain is actually residual pain around the scar tissue forming where the blood clot did its damage. The bubbling feeling I get near the pain is probably fluid still in the lungs, and air sacks making popping sounds as they heal, or get used in a new way, or something.

The upshot is that I need to exercise my lungs more. Ride the bike more. Walk. Get up, move around.

All this while I have more writing work than ever, all due approximately now, while also prepping for travel and speaking and event engagements over the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to all of it, but it’s wierd getting up and down a lot. I’m used to sagging into a chair and cranking on the laptop. Like I’m doing now, sort of.

Anyway, people have been asking for health updates, so that’s the latest.

To get (and stay) in shape, I’ve been spending more time off-grid. Less blogging and twittering, more time communing with nature. Some of that time I’m not indulging my curiousities. Or at least I’m resisting them. No electronics, for example. It was on one of those walks that I became curious about the story of infrastructure, past and present. What were these metal plates doing in the ground? Why were they there? Why were there so many of them? What were their different purposes? Which ones were remnants of services or companies no longer in existence? Which ones had found new uses? Why do so many carry the signatures of companies and utilities long dead?

I started on the Minuteman Bikeway, which passes close to our home not far from Harvard, where I’m headquartered these days. With a minimal slope, it’s perfect for active but low-stress strolling or biking. And it connects a lot of interesting historic sites. At one end is the Alewife “T” stop on the Red Line subway. At the other is something in Belmont I haven’t reached yet, because I usually go only as far as Lexington. Most of the stretch runs through Arlington, which combines the former villages of West Cambridge and Menotony. This is roughly the path along which the British soldiers retreated from Lexington on April 19, 1775, losing men (mostly boys, actually) and killing colonials of many ages. Thus started the Revolutionary War.

The Middlesex Central Railroad was born in 1846 and died in 1982. Part of it was better known as the Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad. It began as a vein of commerce, carrying goods from mills and ponds along its path. The Earth was colder in the early days of the railroad, and the winters were longer. Ice cut from Spy Pond was shipped all over the world from docks in Boston. This past winter the pond was thick enough to support skating for about three days.

But I’ve become more interested in the infrastructure story. So, over the last couple weeks, as Spring breaks out along the trail, I’ve been shooting pictures, mostly of stuff on the ground, before it gets haired over with vegetation, in faith that patterns will start making sense to me. I’ve also shot a lot around Cambridge, Boston and other places, but haven’t put those up yet. Right now I’m adding descriptions to the photos in this set here.

This is part of a long-term project, methinks. We’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in following the same threads, tell me in the comments below.

Clicking on the picture above will take you on a slideshow tour of the Grand Canyon, shot from the right side of an LAX-bound 757 that departed from Boston. I have no idea what movie was showing at the time; though I do know I refused, as I usually do, to close my windowshade to reduce ambient light on the ancient crappy ceiling-mounted TV screens. The scene outside upstaged the movie in any case, as it has been doing for the last several million years, as the Kaibab Plateau has pushed its dome upward and the Colorado has stayed roughly where it had been since the many millions of years before that, when it wandered lazily across a flat plain.

As ranking canyons go, the Grand Canyon is almost too grand. It’s freaking huge. From the air I find it far more dramatic to peer down into its narrower regions, such as the one above, which is early in the Colorado’s course through the canyon. The series follows the canyon from east to west, from not far below Glen Canyon dam and the Vermillion Cliffs area to Vulcan’s Throne and Lava Falls, where relatively recent flows have slopped their blackness down across the canyon’s iconic layer-cake strata.

What is most amazing to me about this corner of The West is that it was obviously placid through so many time stretches across the last almost two billion years. The West is painted with the colors of long periods of relative quiet, as sands and silts and gravel and cobbles were deposited by braided rivers and transgressing seas.

All of the Grand Canyon’s strata were laid down before the age of dinosaurs. Younger layers such as those comprising the Vermillion Cliffs to the East, the Grand Staircase upstream in the Glenn Canyon area, in Canyonlands, Arches, and most of Utah’s most colorful layer-cake displays — Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Cedar Breaks, San Rafael Reef and Swell — are comprised of younger rock eroded off the top of the Kaibab Plateau.

Some of the shots were taken with my Canon 30d, and others with my tiny PowerShot 850. which does a better job of shooting straight down through the window. Its smaller lens distorts less through the plane’s multiple layers of bad glass and plastic windows. And the display on the back lets me shoot without looking through an eyepiece. It’s not perfect, but not bad, either.

I still miss my Nikon Coolpix 5700, which took lots of great pictures out plane windows, and was frankly much better at that job than the Canon, mostly because the Coolpix’ objective lens was smaller (again, better for looking at angles through the terrible optics of plane windows), and partly because the camera’s flip-out viewer allowed me to hold the camera to the window at angles I could not put my face, but where I could still see and frame the view.

The Glass Roots Revolution. A sample:

Here at the Westin in Los Angeles, connectivity is pretty good — about a megabit in each direction. (For a fee, of course.) But the last two days, at the Hilton in Loma Linda and the University of Redlands, were terrible. I’m not sure if it was just because they blocked stuff (as was the case with Redlands), or because the system was bad (as was the case with the Hilton), but I’ve come to the conclusion that two things cause these kinds of problems in general. One is charging for something that ought to be free. The other is subtracting value from something that doesn’t need it and only pisses off users.

In the long run it makes as much sense for hotels to charge for Internet as it does to charge for television. (Yes, they used to do that too. There were coin-operated TVs.) Or for using the toilet. But it’s a business because they know they need Internet service now, and because doing it themselves is too complicated. So they hire these outside outfits to do it for them. (In the case of the Hilton it was iBahn.) And too many of them just don’t do a good job.

Yet we saw in Loma Linda how easy it is to bring fiber to homes, and for anybody to hook by fiber to anybody. The cabling and conduit are progressing upwards in convenience and downward in price, to a point where it will be as easy to put in fiber as it is to install a drip irrigation system. What makes the Interent complicated is that it comes to most places as a secondary service to telephony and television. Yet it doesn’t have to be, and in the long run it won’t be.

You are here.

In this comment to this post, John Quimby writes,

The people “vetting” our election haven’t been “vetted” themselves.

Try this thought on for size…

The reporters we knew and admired when we were young were educated in journalism and many of them served in the Army covering WWII. They invented broadcast news and had combat experience with average American soldiers all over the world. That experience gave them a keen sense of official BS and they weren’t afraid of the risks it took to get the story and send some truth home. They felt they owed it to the humble people they served to get it right. They knew how to tell a story.

See where I’m going?

While you’re following John’s thoughts about storytellers and stories (and please do: it’s a good thread), a few thoughts about the nature of the latter, and what any journalist, regardless of reputation and talent, will have a hard time telling.

In this post about journalism, I wrote,

The basic job of newspaper reporters is to write stories. In simplest terms, stories are interesting arrangements of facts. What makes stories interesting are: 1) protagonists (persons, groups, teams, “issues” or causes); 2) a struggle, problem or conflict of some sort; and 3) movement forward (hopefully, by not necessarily, toward a conclusion). Whether or not you agree with that formulation, what cannot be denied is the imperative. Stories are made to be interesting. It is not just coincidental that this is a purpose they share with advertising.

The story in WWII (John’s example, above) was a simple one. There were good guys (us, the Allies) and bad guys (the Axis powers). Countless war stories — good ones — came out of WWII. Those stories — along with stories about The Depression that preceded The War — were the prevailing narratives around dinner tables for kids growing up in the Fifties, when broadcast journalism was maturing under the influence of Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow and other exemplars. Wars won by everybody working together, and suffering through hardships, as happened with WWII, had many positive effects on the country and its citizens. Our fathers’ experiences in “the service” (as they called it then) during WWII made instant friends of countless strangers who had similar experiences. People meeting for the first time, regardless of class and race differences, often found common bonds in the ritual of exchanging data about membership and service in various military branches, divisions, boats, and battle fronts.

Our parents’ sacrifices gave them great moral authority — and of a kind that none of the succeeding generations would achieve again. Tom Brokaw was right to call our parents The Greatest Generation. They rose to the challenge, but they were also cast in the role.

Same with journalistic veterans of the same war.

Not only have we lost that whole generation of WWII journalists, plus many (or most) of the best of those that followed as well. Meanwhile, there is more journalism than ever, and much of it is good. Just harder to find, or to follow, in the midst of so much other stuff. Many more needles, much bigger haystack.

But the bigger problem is the lack of a single narrative, much less a heroic one. Worse, there is a narrative that needs to be woven, yet has few if any weavers, because it is not a happy one. That narrative is the inevitable decline of Pax Americana, and of our country’s ability to lead the world in the manner to which it has becomed accustomed, and which is proving ever more delusional.

This new narrative is required not only because the U.S.’s percentages of the global economy and populations are shrinking, and not only because its recent president(s) had foreign policy failures, but because what’s “super” about U.S. superpower — a near-limitless ability to make high-technology war, backed by a fighting force of finite size with few allies — is an anachronism. And it would still be an anachronism if most of the world didn’t already consider our approach to foreign relations tragic and absurd.

I’m not sure the people of any Great Nation are ever ready to face the fact that the height of their military and economic powers has passed. Or that the leadership they most need to assert is no longer only a military and economic one. But I am sure that we need leadership — journalistic as well as political — that is anchored in our true and enduring strengths as a people and as a polity.

The U.S. still stands best, and most credibly, for essential values the rest of the world desperately needs to respect: freedom, liberty, democracy, suffrage of women and minorities, and rule of law, to name just a few. The high value we place on eduction, on caring for others, on self-sacrifice, on economic well-being, on the worth of individuals, on respect for land and resources — the list goes on — are also ready-built platforms for leadership in the world.

I don’t know how to frame that new leadership narrative, much less express it. The best advice I’ve seen so far comes from George Lakoff and The Rockridge Institute; but we’re in a partisan season, and they’re naturally taking sides, lately on behalf of Barack Obama.

I believe Obama is in the best position to craft this new narrative, that his aspriational rhetoric has the best chance of transcending the partisan boundaries that divide us. But right now each remaining candidate’s focus is on beating each other rather than facing the challenge of changing our role in the world.

Obama and his people need to fight for the next nine months, and it’s likely that his rhetoric, no matter how well-expressed, will be mocked for its emptiness and the lack of track in his relatively short career. That mockery will get air time becaus we won’t be able to get out of sports and war journalism — and politics — until the election is over.

That’s when Then What? begins. I’m hoping the new president is good at telling the new story that needs to be told. But I’m not holding my breath. (Or my blather, or you wouldn’t be reading this.)

We’d hardly yearn for Net Neutrality laws if Comcast and other carriers truly understood that the Net is more than an interactive TV channel with troublesome users.

Unfortunately there are technical as well as busines and political reasons why they fail to grok the Net. A big one is DOCSIS, which is the standard framework inside which cable companies funnel Net traffic. DOCSIS all but requires that they think of the Net as just another TV channel. Because that’s how DOCSIS frames the Net. It’s something delivered over analog channels inside a coaxial cable. Carriers can “bond” channels to widen the bandwidth, but they’re still dealing with radio waves going down a coaxial pipe on one or more channels and back up on others. Asymmetry is built in, simply because the return upstream path is, by design, on lower frequency channels with less carrying capacity. It’s also useless to debate with a cable comapny the need (or lack of it) for QoS (Quality of Service), because QoS has been part of DOCSIS since 1999.

Fiber deployments have different capabilities and restrictions, although most of those are modeled on cable TV, for good business reasons. Verizon’s fiber (FiOS) system, for example, is not designed primarily for Internet users, but for couch potatoes. Those tubers are abundant and low-hanging (or ground-dwelling) fruit.

One can’t blame carriers for going after easy pickings; but one can blame them for wearing blinders toward the massive opportunities that appear when they deliver wide-open bandwidth on which nearly anything can run… and to discover their first-mover advantages there.

But, thanks to these ancient frames, the Net is seen by the carriers (and the FCC) as tertiary to their primary and secondary services: telephony and television, or vice versa. That’s why it’s still just gravy on your phone or cable bill.

Bonus link.

So here’s the concept: the end-to-end nature of the Internet is not about “access for consumers”. It’s about creating a World of Ends in which all of us are at zero functional distance from each other — or close enough. That’s why I can listen in on the hearing right now from London, and IM and IRC with people all over the world. Right now, in real-enough time.

The Internet is the universal communications utility that connects us all. As a utility it will, in the long run, come to resemble roads and water systems — in the sense that all of us can connect to it, and to each other over it. The questions that matter most are the ones with answers that get us to this end state.

Right now they’re talking about competition. Two years ago at F2C, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell said that, as a former antitrust lawyer, he favored the “rule of threes” — that is, you tend to get productive compeitition when there are at least three competitors in a marketplace.

We have that at our home near Cambridge. We have Verizon FiOS, RCN and Comcast, all on the poles. The first two bring fiber to the home, and the third has a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) system, that brings coax to the home. Near as I can tell, the only one of those three bothering to compete for the Internet customer is Verizon, although its offering is hardly optimized. No “20 up, 20 down”, as I just heard somebody brag about in the ‘cast. (Was that Tom Tauke from Verizon? Think so.) We get 20 down, 5 up. Right now, if I want non-crippled service (one where I can run a server, for example, with my own IP addresses), I have to pay “business” rates, which are, in the phone company tradition, and without respect to whatever the actual costs are, a multiple of what I pay as a household — a consumer.

All three are going after TV customers primarily — trying to horn into each other’s cable TV business — and treating Internet as gravy on TV and phone service. That makes sense for providers of all three services, on a national basis, but not at the local level, where there is enormous room for innovation and real competition.

Message to Verizon and the rest: the Internet is not about “consumer choice”. We produce as well as consume. We need to be able to run our own servers. We need to be able to exercize supply as well as demand. We need symmetricality, not just neutrality.

It is essential not to frame the Net in FCC terms, or even in communications policy and law terms, which date back to the 1934 act, and beyond that to railroads. Or at least not those alone. The Net is a place, not just a shipping system for “content”, to which “the consumer” should have “access”.

Lot of back and forth about whether or not Comcast blocked BitTorrent. FWIW, I think that::: a) Comcast is still mostly right about the best efforts it makes, but is still weaseling a little bit; b) Comcast’s opponents are looking to paint its kettle black; and c) Talking about it soaks up too much time that would be better spent debating other subjects.

Tag: fccboston08.

Mark Pesce notes,

There’s this great haze effect you sometimes get in the mountains of Southern California in the evening. It’s not smog, though sometimes that’s involved. It’s just enough moisture in the air, nicely layered, to give you these amazing silhouettes that look like Japanese paintings. Or something.

And that’s what I saw whille driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles last Thursday evening, right after CES, when I passed through some low mountains between Barstow and Victorville on I-15. Google Earth is woefully deficient in the mountain-naming department, so I’m not sure what these are. The near ones are close to the road. The far ones are probably in the San Gabriel Mountains, which frame the Los Angeles basin on the north, and the Mojave Desert on the south. At this point I’m on the Mojave side, facing southwest. In any case, I got some nice shots in the set behind the picture above.

And here’s the same effect, in the San Gabriels, shot from an inbound plane.

While trying to make sense of some of what I saw out the window while flying from Los Angeles to Boston yesterday, I ran across Physical Geography of the U.S., an online summary of its subject that is so deep, interesting, well-written and well-sourced that it is hard not to keep reading it, and to follow its many links.

And it is not alone. It is one subject among seventeen at Bob Parvin’s Website, which is dedicated to literacies that range from the celestial to the household. Here they are:

Tutoring for Mastery of Reading and Writing and Arithmetic

Tutoring English Grammar and Composition

Finding and Reading eBooks

Beginning Urban Skywatching

Physical Geography of the U.S.

Economic Literacy

Global Warming and Warning

Approaching the Bible

Islam: One American’s Findings

DNA: Life’s Common Denominator

Nutrition: What should we eat?

Help for Microsoft Windows XP

Bread Machine Baking

Tips for No-Knead Bread Baked in a Pot

Links to Video Performances of Great Arias

The Home Library, an electronic home reference library

Recollections of an Old Farm Boy

I’ve had a few minutes more than the rest of you to explore all this, but what I’ve seen so far is just as engaging as the first item I found.

So, see what you think. I suggest starting with the last item.

Justin Karp: iPhone crushes the competition. All of them. That post sources this post buy jkOnTheRun, which sources this post by Daniel Eran Dilger, which sources Canalys, which says nothing on its site. So the closest I can can get to the source is Daniel, who says,

But I’m wondering if “smartphone” is the right category here. Because when I look at how people use their iPhones — and the way Apple has restricted most development (so far) to what you can put in a browser — it seems to me that the iPhone is really a new kind of phone/browser hybrid, which I suggest calling a phrowser.

Just checked whois. Phrowser.com isn’t taken.

By the way, I got some hang time at the airport in Paris with one of the Swisscom engineers who worked on the LeWeb3 job. He told me a new phenomenon at conferences is the huge number of iPhones that are contending for Net access over wi-fi alongside laptops. I suggest this also supports the phrowser categorization.

My Flickr DNA reveals that I have 383 photo sets among 17,437 photos, and just just one favorite photograph by anybody else, which is embarrasing.

(Thanks to Mike Warot for the pointer.)

So I’m supposed to be in Toronto today. Instead I’m back at home, writing from the Berkman Center. That’s because I forgot my passport. Used to be you could go to Canada and come back without a passport, but that hasn’t been the case ever since Canada has become a full-fledged foreign county, and not just one with prettier and more valuable money.

I forget lots of things in my life, but my passport was never one of them, until yesterday. As a result I not only inconvenienced the other folks in Toronto, but had to burn 25,000 miles to buy a ticket back to Boston. In the midst of that, I endured otherwise unhelpful interactions with people behind the counters at both United and Air Canada, on both of whose planes I was due to fly on the current itinerary. That unhelpfulness took the form of conflicting quotes on one-way Boston-Toronto ticket prices ranging from $700-something to $1500-something (U.S.), to list just two of the many prices I was ran out of patience trying to gather. That’s on top of the high ticket price I’d already paid for a trip I didn’t entirely end up taking.

Side question: Why would people behind airline counters at airports send you to “partner” airline counters, and/or their marginally-useful websites, rather than just give you the help you need? Yeah, we know the answer, but I just felt like asking it anyway.

On top of all that, I had to sit in seat 34A of a United 757, which is tied with 34F as the aft-most seat on the plane, as well as the most cramped, since the seat barely reclines at all. The upside was a relatively clear window, meaning I could get some nice photos, if I lucked into seeing anything other than clouds and darkness. Alas, the whole flight was clouded under the plane, except as the dark began to gather east of Lake Michigan. Still, I got a few nice shots in the gathering gloom as the plane began to descend toward Boston. Among those was the photoset linked to above — all featuring the Niagra River, with Niagra Falls marked by white mists. On the left, Canada; on the right, New York. I know they look similar, but sadly those who now traverse it must present their papers at the border.

Bonus link.

Over in Linux Journal: Let’s keep photography and mapping mashable. A sample:

Now, in an ideal world — that is, one where the Net is truly symmetrical, peer-to-peer and end-to-end — I would rather do the federating myself, from my own photo archive, with my own APIs. That way I could federate selected photos to Flickr, Tabblo, Panoramio and whomever else I please. In fact, that would probably make things easier for everybody. But that’s a VRM (vendor relationship management) grace we don’t enjoy yet. In the absence of that, we need more open APIs between services such as these, so customers’ photos can be shared at the vendor-to-vendor level.

To get the context, ya need to read the whole thing. But you get the idea.

Put up a tabblo of Greenland in blue light at sunset. Another take on this series here.

I don’t know any other way to describe this. Wow.

How long before that shows up in a James Bond movie?

[Later…] That’s a wingsuit they’re wearing.

Perhaps this is the next step.

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything. The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

Eastern Greenland blows my mind every time I fly over it. This last trip was no exception. Imagine Alps, Rockies, Himilayas, buried up to their nostrils in snow and ice across an expanse of Saharan dimensions, all of it moving, less an ice cap than a great spreading mound of blue and white, all of it heavy as magma, hard as stone, abrading away at the mountains, leaving horns and scarps protruding above the whiteness. At its edges icebergs calve off constantly and in great profusion, suggesting a bovine maternal quality to the great mound itself.

Anyway, it’s past the equinox and gaining on the winter solstice, so the sun was quite low when we flew over Greenland en route to Denver from London last week. Still, the subject was still there. Amazing sight.

Many flights aren’t in the air. They’re on the ground. Such as mine, UA7157 from IAD to BOS. It was supposed to depart at 2:35pm. It’s 4:30 now. The plane was delayed out of Philadelphia, and is on the ground now at IAD (Dulles, Washington DC). We’ll board shortly.

Meanwhile, I’m looking at flight trackers. Flyte.com can’t find the flight at all. Flightstats says it leaves at 4:09. So does FlightAware. Here’s an announcement…

Turns out 7157 has a new plane with 15 fewer seats….

It’s now 5:30. I’m still at IAD, only now on flight 822, which was due to leave at 5:15. I volunteered for it, and got a free round trip voucher for doing that. I still have a window seat, but in 12F on a 757, which has no window, but rather a large blank space from which the rushing sound of the plane’s ventillation system roars.

Anyway, we’re not going. Soon as I sat down in the plane, they announced that a bolt was loose in a wheel, and we would be delayed at least 45 minutes, or perhaps an hour.

The Verizon cell signal is too poor in here to do the fancy flashy stuff that most or all the flight tracking sites use, so fuggit. I’ll try to sleep.

[Later…] Got in at 7:10. The fix didn’t take that long, and I netted a free round trip for the trouble. Coulda been worse. Now to bed for real.

It’s happening again, only this time it’s my right eye that’s giving me blue flashes and vision filled with floaters. Very annoying.

I ran into Jeremie Miller yesterday in an elevator here at the hotel where Defrag is happening in Denver. I last spoke to Jeremie while working on a story/interview with him for Linux Journal. Atlas: Hoisting a New World of Search is now up, and things have been moving along on the Atlas project, now titled Search Wikia.

Jeremie is the father of Jabber and its protocol, XMPP. I see he’ll be among those talking this morning. He’s always sensible and provocative at the same time. Looking forward to what he says. As for where he wants to take search, here’s an excerpt from one of his blog posts that I used in the piece I wrote as well:

By coincidence last night I had a chance to talk with JC Herz about a range of topics that broadly revolve around what I’m beginning think is The Same Thing, though I’m not sure what that Thing is yet. Meanwhile JC will be speaking here as well today, on Visualization of Social Intelligence. Visualization is not a strength of search as we’ve come to know it. (Though I’m glad Technorati has brought its results-over-time chart back. Here’s the one for defrag conference.) So I’m imagining possibilities here.

Yesterday afternoon’s rapid round of mini-keynotes, by Dick Hardt, Esther Dyson, myself and Ross Mayfield (in that order) brought suggestions afterwards that we had attempted to talk about the same basic thing, which was people. At lest we all seemed to be coming at tech from the people perspective. There was, however, no collusion at all. Just coincidence, or something like it. For in-depth reports on this and other Defrag Stuff, look here, here, and here.

The high point for me, by the way, came early with David Weinberger’s opening talk, about what’s implicit, rather than explicit. David’s an outstanding speaker, and this was the best of his best. Deep, moving and just amazing. The first remark from the audience was from a woman who said “I didn’t expect to cry at a tech conference keynote”.

David outlines his talk here, concluding,

Is there a thread that connects between all that he and the rest of us said, and are saying, especialy about search? I think so.

Meanwhile, here’s JP on the a rare convergence.

Here’s what I saw when I looked out my Denver hotel window this morning. That’s venus and the moon, in a conjunction, high in the eastern sky. If you live on the West Coast and it’s clear, you can see the same thing right now (5:20am), and into the morning light.

Same for folks in Hawaii and the Pacific.

The configuration will change by the time dawn reaches Australia and eastern Asia, but will still be impressive, methinks.

An interesting exercise: with the moon so close to Venus, you have a guidepost to finding Venus in braod daylight, just by looking for it to the north of the moon.

By the way, sorry the shot’s a bit smeared. It was a five-second hand-held exercize and the best I could do with no time to spare.

Jewgenics: Jewish intelligence, Jewish genes, and Jewish values is the latest by William Saletan in Slate. If you can, ignore the ethnic side of the story and concentrate on this excerpt: Entine laid out the data. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100.

Note the word “data”.

Saletan accepts it without question. So do most of us. Since the dawn of the Industrial Education Revolution, we have accepted the notion that our most distinctively human quality — our intelligence — is measurable on a single scale. We speak of a person’s IQ (”Intelligence Quotient”) as if it were a measure of a fixed quantity, like body fat or hemoglobin, that each of us posesses in differing amounts. Thus we assume that and IQ tests no less diagnostic than blood pressure guages or engine dipsticks.

Yet IQ tests are puzzle-solving exercizes that in fact say no more about you than whether or not you’re good at solving those puzzles. Every Soduku or crossword puzzle is an IQ test as well. We just don’t use them to tell schools, parents, children and entire races or ethnic groups what they’re worth.

And that’s what we do with IQ tests. We do it as institutions, and we do it as individuals.

If I tell you I have an IQ of 125, can you forget that number? Can it not color what you think of me for the duration?

In fact my known IQ scores have an eighty point range (none of which is 125, for the nothing that’s worth). One of the high scores placed me in the “fast” group in kindergarten, and one of the low ones scores placed me on the loser track to vocational-technical high school at the end of the ninth grade. From the first through the eigth grade my IQ scores declined steadily, along with my disinterest in school itself. If my mother hadn’t been a teacher in the same school system, and if my parents hadn’t believed in my innate worth as an intelligent kid, I would have been shunted down the system’s loser track.

Today I’m sure I’d do much worse on an IQ test than I would have done in my teens or twenties. Does that make me dumber? Fact is, I’m a helluva lot smarter, and far better informed, even if my memory isn’t nearly as good and I’ve been losing neurons steadily for decades.

“I was never measured, and never will be measured”, Whitman said. “I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass.”

The measure of us all is what cannot be measured. And with it the ability to prove all measures wrong. We need to remember that.

See ya at Defrag.

Been following the Alum Rock #earthquake via Twitter. Not surprisingly, the USGS (United States Geological Survey) front page has no news about it, even on its newsroom page, where the most recent item is a promo for a podcast recorded Monday. But the USGS in fact has lots of stuff.

Here’s a map showing all the quakes, including this one, in the last hour/day and week:

Here’s the same data and graphics on a map of faults in the Bay Area.

Here’s the report for this earthquake, with lots of links to other pages, including shaking intensity maps.

ABAG, the Association of Bay Area Governments, has long had very helpful maps showing what earthquakes could do to you, where you live, depending on where the quake is located. I haven’t looked at it in years, but just did and found it is “best viewed with Internet Explorer”. Feh. The “static maps” work better anyway. Here’s one that shows what an earthquake on the North Hayward Fault can do to Oakland and Berkeley:

There’s much more I could point to, but it’s 4:49am here in London, where I need to give a talk in several hours that will upstage everything else until afterwards. Hope everybody’s okay.

The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, give or take.

Earth, and the Solar System, are 4.6 billion years old, pretty much.

That means our planet has been around for a little over a third of the history of the Universe.

The Sun is a Population I star: one with high metal content, formed from matter cast off by exploding Type III (oldest) and Type II (second oldest) stars.

The Sun is about half way through its life as a star, and will become a planetary nebula in about 6.5 billion years, and a white dwarf in about 9.5 billion years, more or less. At the end of that time, the Sun will have lasted well over half the age of the Universe.

The oldest rocks in the scene above were deposited in the Pennsylvanian epoch, which lasted from .325 to .299 billion years ago.

Researching all the above (on Wikipedia, of course) followed the utterance of the headline above by Yours Truly to The Kid over breakfast at the excellent Sarabeth’s Kitchen, on Madison near 92nd.

Sarabeth’s has been around for more than a third of the age of myself, and more than twice the age of The Kid.

Better hurry over.

[Later…] Two bonus quotes, courtesy of The Kid:

1) Ignore traffic rules. They are advisory and not binding, unless a cop wants to get technical.

2) Drive in the middle. You need to keep your options open. If a rare dotted line actually marks a boundary between lanes, straddle it.

3) Don’t look for street signs. They aren’t there. Only side streets have signs. And only some of those.

4) Be ready to dodge pedestrians. They don’t look and are dumb as geese, crossing anywhere they feel like it, in complete oblivity to danger.

5) Block intersections. Otherwise the cross traffic won’t stop for you.

6) Pull in front of moving traffic. There are no breaks. You have to make them for yourself.

7) Don’t signal. You might give something away.

8] Park anywhere. There aren’t enough spaces anyway.

9) Don’t expect road names to make sense. The “Mystic Valley Parkway”, for example, appears and disappears in many places all across Boston. And not just in Halloween season.

10) Expect construction delays and detours. It sometimes happens that all bridges and tunnels in Boston are closed at once, with no signage hinting toward alternatives.

The map above is a .jpg I put together from this large .pdf at a link off the San Diego County Emergency page. It’s from 6pm today, Pacific time. I like this one because it gets down nearly to the street level, and answers specific questions in the minds of millions of people who either live there, or know people who live there (as do we, for example).

Other excellent sandiegofire maps are at taoe.org and map.sdsu.edu. Some are more recent than the one above.

The Ranch Fire also continues to grow. This map shows its perimeters. And this aerial photo, taken in January 2006, shows that same area, still covered with vegetation, now mostly burned off:

Paul Watson: Software may let you have 3000 friends but your brain doesn’t.

A few years ago, when Orkut was new and hot, Rael Dornfest demonstrated the standare social software friend-confirmation protocol by walking up to people, pushing his face into theirs and saying “YOU ARE MY FRIEND! YES OR NO!” Nailed it, that.

More than 100 times faster than WiFi? suggests that chips transmitting wirelessly in the 60GHz spectrum, where waves are milimeters long, would be a practical replacement for Wi-Fi, or other forms of wireless transmission.

I think the advantages here are high, but over very short-ranges — feet or yards — given the relatively low penetrating power of radio waves at frequencies that high. But… I dunno. My RF understanding grew up on waves ranging in lengths from towers to tonsils. Could be this new stuff has a lot more promise than I’m ready to guess.

Last night the kid and I drove back down to You-Do-It in Needham and picked up some thin RG-59u coaxial cable to run under the edge of the rug from one side of the living room to the other. Your standard fat black TV cable (the very stuff known as “cable”) would never do it; but it comes in thin versions too. Since both my wife and our landlady don’t want to see any wires, we had to get something we could hide. You-Do-It has approximately everything electronic, including what we needed to get his job done.

So anyway, hiding some cable under the rug made it possible for us to see watch TV in the standard way, for the first time since taking the apartment here near Boston. Our cable company is Verizon FiOS, which brings the signal to the outside of the house on fiber optic cable but runs the last sixty feet with standard co-ax.

At the far end of the cable is a Verizon set-top box (STB) made by Motorola. The “TV” consists of an LCD computer screen and a set of cheap powered speakers. We receive no signals over the air, or even over the cable. Instead TV has become nothing more than an application. “Channels” are nothing more than data streams.

Our channel line-up from Verizon is smaller than what we get from Dish Network on our setup back home. No HBO or Showtime, for example. The picture quality appears to be about the same, although in both cases the quality appears to be limited at the source. Much, or perhaps most, of the HD programming really isn’t. Some of it is plain old NTSC (low-definition) television. Some of it is HD but in a smaller area, surrounded by a large black frame. The user interface is a bit fancier than Dish’s, and appears to be faster, but if you hold down an arrow to scroll up and down the Guide, some of the lines change while others do not, which makes fast scrolling almost pointless. Dish also has star-type reviews (four being max) for its movies, while Verizon does not. Dish’s info from the guide is also better, I think. Hard to tell, without having them side-by-side. The music selection on Dish is also far better, since it also includes Sirius. The kid, who likes oldies, was especially annoyed that the category “gold” covers all of the fifties and sixties, while the service has a separate channel for each of the next three decades.

For some reason “Channel not available” shows up with disturbing frequency. Or so it seemed on our first evening with it, lasting about 20 minutes. The main missing one last night was WGBH, our top local PBS station.

The main reason I’m posting this is to pass along what the kid said after we did a scan from one end of the “dial” to the other.

“There’s nothing on”, he said. And walked away.

What would “something” be?

“Oh, you know. Like on YouTube”.

Blogabarbara reports value subtraction by AT&T on its mobile service to the Santa Ynez Valley. Details:

I tried to post a comment, twice, but it doesn’t appear to have taken. So here it is:

Enlightenment and correction welcome.

Sez here my accent is Northeastern.

Between our Sirius satellite radio receiver, the MP3 player, breaks for public radio and talking to each other, I didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in exploring the high soil conductivities that make AM radio so anomalously advantaged in the plains states. But I did notice that KOA/850 from Denver carried halfway across Kansas by day, and WNAX was audible across all of Kansas, from one end to the other — from Colby to Kansas City and beyond that well into Missouri — with just 5000 watts on 570am from Yankton, South Dakota. (The max power on U.S. and Canadian AM stations is 50000 watts.)

Long disatance AM is no big deal at night, when stations bounce off the ionosphere. But in the day AM stations need to carry along the ground. In most places the ground conductivity is low. In the entire East, much of the midwest, and nearly all mountainous areas, ground conductivity is very low. The lowest of the low are around Atlanta and in Long Island. But in some prairie regions, parts of Texas and Oklahoma, and in flat places near San Franciso and California’s Central Valley, the ground conductivity is remarkably high. For that reason a 5000-watt station at the bottom of the dial (like WNAX/570 and KFYR/550 in Bismark) can go hundreds of miles along the ground. My mother grew up listening to both WNAX and KFYR in Napoleon, North Dakota, which was near neither station. WNAX is helped also by having a full half-wave antenna, which on 570KHz is around 900 feet high. So it’s using an unusually efficient radiator. Most stations at that end of the dial use shorter towers. Signals at those frequencies carry so well that going for the full antenna length would bring diminishing returns. (On AM, the whole tower is the antenna.) And by now they’re all grandfathered with whatever facilities they put up way back when. AM stations require a lot of real estate, so the costs are now, in most cases, prohibitive.

Still, while listening to these effectively huge stations, while driving across the plains, I realized why talk radio — especially the right wing sort — sank roots here. Though I gotta say it was great that WNAX was highly focused (at least when I listened) on “the markets” for agricultural commodities. Made me think the country’s agricultural base was somehow still intact.

First we got up at 3-something AM and drove back into Arches National Park, roughly to the site where Thelma & Louise stuffed the cop in the trunk. There, in darkness, we watched the eclipsed moon sink slowly behind rock spires barely visible in silhouette. It was there that I shot the photo above, acting as a human tripod. Incredibly, it came out. I had no idea until now, abut 20 hours later, in Colby, Kansas.

We went back just before sunrise, crashed in the motel, and didn’t get up and out of town until way late in the morning. Then we drove pretty much non-stop until we were well into Kansas.

I’m uploading photos, in very slow motion. Motel wi-fi is generally bad, whether it’s free or not. (In my growing experience.)

The power went off when the storm came through yesterday afternoon (see the post below). I heard it happen first when I was driving through Baltimore, watching the storm gather, listening to WEAA/88.9 on the radio. Faint hints of lightning blinked in the sky. On one of the brighter blinks, the station’s audio went out. The signal was still there, broadcasting silence; but the audio was gone. A few minutes later, back at the house, I was working on my laptop when the lights blinked a couple of times then went dark … and stayed that way until 5:30 this morning. Of course the air conditioning went out too. So did the fridge, and the washer, and everything else. The baby (my new first grandchild) was oblivious to the discomfort of the adults, still dealing with a hot day and night — and also a wet one, as waves of rain came and went. Over 4000 Marylandians were without power from BGE, which said it would be back up at 5:30, then 9:30, then 11:00. All of which were wrong, it turned out.

Anyway, I’m at a coffee shop this morning, where the wi-fi is free but slow. I did manage to upload some pix of the Grand Canyon, however, shot a few weeks ago from the same flight from LHR to LAX on which I toured southern Greenland. A sample:

Closer to home, firefighters have held the southern flank of the Zaca Fire. Although they’ve got a lot of fighting left to do, it looks like Santa Barbara is safer than it looked a day or two ago.

I’m in one of the yellow areas in the dopper radar map above. My wife and kid are in a rental car in a dark red area, driving into BWI for a flight home that I suspect may be delayed. Meanwhile power is out at my daughter’s family’s house. I’m sitting in a chair on the front porch, enjoying the thunderstorm, connected to the Net by EvDO on the cell system. It’s an old neighborhood, so the yard and road are shaded by large old oak, maple and elm trees. The rain drips twice in front of the porch, once from the sky onto the house and trees, and once from the leaves onto the ground. I don’t see much lightning, but the thunder is a low, almost constant rumble, tumbling across the sky, as if vast boulders were rolling around on an invisble metal ceiling. Tire treads from cars rolling by make long kissing sounds on wet pavement. These too have doppler effects, rising in tone on approach and dropping as they depart. There is an urgency to driving I don’t share here on the porch. We are in two different Newtonian states: bodies in motion and bodies at rest. Observation by drivers is mandatory, but only through narrow cones of relevance, one constantly oncoming, the other receding in rear-view mirrors. Observation by trees and porch-sitters is optional. Which makes this post an indulgence.

I have Linux Journal work to do. That’s fun too, watching from afar what’s happening at Linux World Expo in San Francisco. The Net too is a natural environment: a true public marketplace of the ancient type — a noisy place where people gather to do business and make culture. Yet even as we enlarge this place more every day, it seems we understand it less. The Net, for all its finite and fully revealed complexities, is no less mysterious the rest of Creation. Life is nothing if not extravagant and original and mysterious at its original core — on the Net no less than ground soaked by rain.

Recently at Harvard we had a meeting where the subject of the Internet as a “public good” was discussed. For all the excellent thought and conversation we shared, it seemed to me we failed, unavoidably to grip a fundamental question from which all answers must be gounded. Namely, What is the Net?

We have knowledge of this no less than we have knowledge of life. We know it, we experience it, yet we cannot explain the origins of its origins, which are neither chicken nor egg. Whitman writes,

The press of my foot to the earth
springs a hundred affections.
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.
They are not original with me.
If they are not yours as much as mine
they are nothing or next to nothing.
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing.
If they are not the riddle and the undying of the riddle
they are nothing.
If they are not just as close as they are distant
they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows
wherever the land is and the water is.
This is the common air that bathes the globe.

Is the Net no less a globe than the one on which we walk? I wonder.

We made the Net. We are its gods. Yet our voices are not those of burning bushes. They are the buzz of the public marketplace. Is this place — where you and I are now — any less holy, or even primeval, than a forest floor? I suggest it isn’t, because at its core is a fecund nothingness: a zero-distance void between you and I and each of us who choose to connect on it. The working distance between you and I right now is less than between myself and the family inside this house — a fact that slightly bothers me. Yet, when I shut the lid on this laptop, the distance between you and I will return to the finite: no less close than that between readers and the authors of books. Now the proximal is returned to advantage: I will step inside a door to visit a baby just a few days old: a full self where a year ago there was none. When he becomes conscious of his own original mysteries, what will he see?

Here’s what Whitman saw:

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me.
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing,
the vapor from the nostrils of death.
I know I was even there.
I waited unseen and always.
And slept while God carried me
through the lethargic mist.
And took my time.

Long I was hugged close. Long and long.
Infinite have been the preparations for me.
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing
like cheerful boatmen;
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings.
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother
generations guided me.
My embryo has never been torpid.
Nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb.
The long slow strata piled to rest it on.
Vast vegetables gave it substance.
Monstrous animals transported it in their mouths
and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employed
to complete and delight me.
Now I stand on this spot with my soul.

I know that I have the best of time and space.
And that I was never measured, and never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey.
My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes
and a staff cut from the wood.

Each man and woman of you I lead upon a knoll.
My left hand hooks you about the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes and continents,
and a plain public road.

Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born
and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine,
and let us hasten forth.

Humans are traveling animals. More than upright walkers, we are runners. I have read that a healthy young adult, or a small pack of them, can run almost indefinitely, and surely exhausted many a meal. The human diaspora spread out of Africa like a stain across everywhere on water and land, all in in the span of a few dozen millennia. Now our shouldered duds are laptops and cell phones, and no longer just staffs cut from wood. Is this bad? I suggest it is no less natural. We are less “digital natives” than beings that extend their senses and powers by making tools and then making things from those tools that further extend their senses and powers. By powers of indwelling our vehicles become extensions of our greater selves. It is not for lack of fact that drivers speak of “my fender” and fliers speak of “my wings”. We are skilled at being far more than our fleshy sleves. And we lean toward movement, always hastening down the public road.

Whitman concludes,

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me.
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any
on the shadowed wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the desk.

I depart as air.
I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt and grow
from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
And filtre and fiber your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place search another
I stop some where waiting for you.

Here, for example. Wherever this is.

Friends have been turning me on to Zaca Fire perimeter pictures. Here’s one:

GeoMac is another.

This too.

That’s in additon to news such as this and this and this.

Ray Ford at the Independent added this, with lots of maps and detailed coverage.

I’m in Baltimore for about a week, enjoying good times with family. And with the city. In spite of all the publicity by Poe, Mencken, Levinson, Waters, and a pile of fine sports teams, Baltimore remains one of the most overlooked cities in the world — a singular center of shipping, education, industry, medicine, science, history, government, art, sports fanaticism and other signs of advanced civilization. All those virtues make for fun exploration, too. Which I’ve done every time I’ve come here.

Of course, I’ve shot pictures. Click on the one above (from Fort McHenry) for all 244 shots I’ve tagged “Baltimore”. In addition to photosets here, here and here, it includes shots from the sky — such as this one, taken at night from high overhead on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston.