The Crandall Surf Report 2.0
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Thursday, February 6, 2003
 

Ah the Bush economic miracle

It is something of a miracle that he is still popular given the economy. One wonders what happens if consumer confidence deep sixes, if Europeans slow their consumption of US goods (as they have done to Israel which is having a devasting effect on their economy), the the war is pretty, if people recognize that his plan is only a slightly warmed up version of the failed Reaganomics .... Will he still smirk?
10:00:13 AM    


Hendrik Hertzberg's commentary in the current New Yorker is excellent. Read it!

The same issue has an excellent piece by Jeffrey Goldberg on the unknown and the failure of intelligence - particularly the unimaginativeness of American intelligence. The more history I read on the subject the more I am convinced that getting additional data feeds will be counterproductive. Tools to help improve signal to noise ratios will help somewhat, but the fact that we have a fundamental lack of appreciation for cultures and have a difficultly thinking differently and accepting surprise is a fundamental weakness (along with various institutional weaknesses that have been well documented).

A physics prof friend of mine, then at Cal Tech, mentioned a class assignment he gave in the late eighties to a bunch of sophomores taking their first serious course in classical mechanics. They were to figure out the cheapest way to cause havoc and political problems. There were apparently two standard answers ... the first involved taking out telecommunications and the second involved targeting national monuments with fuel laden transport jets (or in the case of a couple of kids - heavy airliners). There were a few tunnel bombings and the like, but the kids quickly figured out the amount of energy they could pack into something readily available. It seems clear the terrorists used a similar analysis.

There seems to be a case for bringing in some of the tactics of science. Generally science is knowledge derived from the study of nature that is independently verifiable (experimentation comes into play here). It also involves creating and testing hypotheses. Some of these hypotheses are a large leap from linear extrapolations of current expectations and most of them are proven wrong and discarded. A few turn out to be correct (Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman, etc etc...). It takes a very special type of thinking to make these leaps. The thinking needs to be wide ranging and often involves people slightly out of the mainstream of current work. It is too bad that similar approaches are not used to aid in the understanding of threats.

My guess is that it is much easier to think about and predict threats than it is to invent new Physics. Of course dealing with them is more difficult - particularly when you live in a nation that much of the world hates.
6:35:46 AM    


It is common in the computer world for specifications to exceed real world performance. A month ago I exchanged email with Richard who was upset with the performance of his usb 2.0 based mp3 music player. It seems it was slower than molasses in February. He estimated he was transferring mp3s to his machine at a bit under 30 megabits per second .. far from the 480 megabits per second usb 2.0 suggests.

I suspected he had something bad or was doing something wrong, but didn't think much of it until I found myself helping someone with their new Dell desktop and a usb 2.0 based external drive for backups (he wanted something he could use for several machines). We were doing a simple backup and the performance was terrible - about 6 megabytes per second for many types of file transfers. This was with a clean/direct connection. Going through a usb 1.1 hub dropped the rate to under 1 megabyte per second, which is what we expected.

It will be interesting to see if this is common. It is clear that usb 2.0 is faster than 1.1, but the real world experiences I'm hearing about are very disappointing. Unless it gets better you probably won't see usb 2.0 camcorders.
6:35:17 AM    


Our new baby ferrets Chiclet and Hilbert were enough of a reasons to make a short movie. Download the ferret movie. I'll keep it up for a week or so.

These guys are about eight weeks old and weight about a half kilo each. Hilbert has the white tips on his paws. Very very cute little weasels - of course I may have a slight bias.

By the way - the edit is an obvious hack - the tool is new and I don't know what I'm doing. Eventually something good will be done, but for now enjoy their cuteness.
6:34:51 AM    


Finally - if you have .Mac a small company has come out with a blogging tool that works with the service. iBlog is a straightforward editor that does much of what you need to do - particularly if you are new to blogs. There is a free trial period after which the price soars to $19. I'll bite for something else

I'm starting a low volume blog for music issues and reviews. There is an XML/RSS feed for those of you who use news aggregators.
6:33:09 AM    



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