Blue Dawn

2003-10-06T21:29:00.000-04:00

Steven Johnson's Emergence

I just finished reading Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson. He's done an excellent job of explaining how emergence theory is evolving and how it is being applied in many different ways.

Emergence in this case refers to cases where complex, higher order, collective behaviors emerge from simpler actions of individuals. For example, slide mold is a single celled organism. But when conditions get dry, the slime mold colasce into a single larger organism that slowly moves together. When conditions get wet again, the mass disperses. For years, biologists searched for "pacemaker" cells - a different variety of slime mold cell - that was signaling the individuals to colasce and to move together, but no one could find one. They eventually learned that the complex behavior emerges as a result of each cell following simple rules based on strictly local information about their immediate environment and about their neighbors.

Emergent behavior is being used in the software industry today. Airlines and network providers are applying models of ant foraging behavior to optimize networks. "Swarms" of simple networked sensors are being used to monitor environmental conditions. Corporations are even applying emergence theory to their organizational structures.

Having read this book, I find myself looking for cases of emergent behavior and for places where the principles could be applied. Johnson's exploration of emergence is a good ride. He cites many interesting examples and provides interesting ideas for how this way of approaching problems could change our world in the future. Recommended.

2003-09-14T19:39:00.000-04:00

August 2003 Blackout Cascade

The Department of Energy has posted an initial timeline of the events that evolved into the August 2003 blackout in the northeast. A couple of isolated events in Ohio at 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM started the ball rolling. By 4:10 PM much of northern Ohio and eastern Michigan were in trouble. That's when the cascade really accelerated. In the next 3 minutes, it rippled through New England and Ontario. To a layman, this sure looks like a fragile chaotic system.

2003-09-12T09:20:00.000-04:00

Lake Champlain

I just spent 6 days in Burlington, Vermont at a conference. Had a sixth floor room in the Radisson overlooking Lake Champlain. What an incredible view, facing west. Mesmerizing. I watched the sun set, dawn break on the Adirondacks in New York, and, on the last day, the full moon set as dawn faded in. Every time I looked it stopped me short. There's a great path that runs along the shore for miles. Chilly mornings. Cool afternoons. Plenty of sunshine. Recommended.

2003-08-26T20:09:00.000-04:00

Joining the Thumb Tribe

We finally switched to a latest generation cell phone plan. Went with LG LX4400 phones on Verizon. For the first time, I've got text messaging. Through a simple interface you can send text messages to other text messagees or to any email address. I've heard that Japanese thumbinistas can type faster on a cell phone keypad than they can on a full QWERTY computer keyboard. Not me, but I'm getting the hang of it.

2003-08-19T20:21:00.000-04:00

Classic Haiku: An Anthology of Poems by Basho and His Followers

Just finished this haiku anthology by Asataro Miyamori. Matsuo Basho is the main man when it comes to haiku. A Buddhist priest who lived in Japan in the 1600's, he refined the classic form that has thrived from then on.

I have mixed feelings about this particular anthology. Miyamori's translations don't have the clarity, the concision, the visceral impact of others. On the other hand, the descriptions of the historical context of many of the haiku is very helpful. In many cases this is the difference between "getting it" and not with classic haikus, especially when you don't have the deep knowledge of historical references that are frequently used.

The book also includes others' translations for some haiku. It's interesting to see the wide range of interpretation. There are even a few cases where two translations are diametrically opposed in meaning. Either one translator or the other got it backward.

Bottom line: I wouldn't recommend this book as someone's first haiku book. Something deep and important is lost in the translations. But as a companion to other books, augmenting, it's worth a read.

2003-08-16T09:37:00.000-04:00

Touring the Solar System

A month ago, I took a look at Mars, which is making it's closest approach to Earth in the last 50,000 years. At the time, the polar cap was quite prominent. Mars is even closer now, so I had another look last night. The polar cap is still there, but if my memory serves me, it was larger in July. Makes sense since it is Summer in that hemisphere now. I was able to clearly make out a dark region, probably Mare Serinum. Apart from the polar caps, the surface features are always very subtle on Mars.

Next I hunted down Uranus which was quite close to Mars. Uranus is particularly challenging to find right now because it is in Aquarius, a very sparse constellation with no bright stars to serve as guideposts. I starhopped the telescope at low magnification starting from Mars, using stars too dim to be visible to the unaided eye. After getting lost several times, I finally found a very pale blue star. Upping the magnification to 192X, I was able to make out the planet's disk but certainly no features. (Uranus doesn't ever show much in the way of surface features anyway, even from up close.) At high magnification, the color had a touch of green in it. It looked far away, like an apparition from the deep. And it is far away, about 1.8 billion miles away from Earth right now. So far away that it had taken the light I was seeing about 5 1/2 hours from the time it left the Sun, reached Uranus, and came back to my eye on Earth. Seeing that planet that is four times bigger than Earth as nothing but a tiny blue dot really gives you a tremendous sense of scale.

Next I swung over to the Moon -- dazzlingly bright after dim Uranus. Lots of intricate terrain along the sunrise line. That's when I decided to bring out the digital camera. I got a few good pictures of the Moon. In retrospect, I was probably pushing too much magnification. Between the somewhat soupy Summer air and a telescope mount that is less than rock solid, many of the shots were blurred. I swung back over to Mars, but didn't have any luck there. Got a few snaps of the blurred disk. Mars just isn't bright enough to allow the short exposures needed for a shaky mount.

All in all, a very satisfying evening. I'm glad I got another chance to check in on Mars before it starts to move away.

2003-08-10T11:55:00.000-04:00

Foggy Maine

Just spent a week in Bar Harbor, Maine on an extended-family vacation. Beautiful place right on the edge of the Acadia National Forest. Rocky coasts, conifer and aspen forests, miles of hiking trails (all levels of difficulty), and miles of old "carriage roads" - a network of crushed gravel roads built by the Rockefellers and their buddies back in the good old days.

There's a free bus service with routes to Bar Harbor and throughout the park. Very reliable. So you can basically get on the island and never need a car. Just walk into town for meals and shopping, and catch a bus in the Village Center to anywhere you want to go on the island.

Lots of good restaurants in Bar Harbor. Lobster everywhere, including Lobsters rolls at the McDonalds just before you get on the island. My favorite meal of the week was dinner at the Parkside Restaurant, a seared yellow fin tuna steak coated with toasted sesame seeds. The swordfish at Galyn's is also excellent, with very nice atmosphere. Both on Main Street, of course.

We jogged the six mile carriage road loop around Eagle Lake. Very nice. Mostly quiet, except for a coyote/wolf/fox howling up above us on the ridge a couple of times.

We hiked/climbed the Great Head trail, classified as "moderate". This wound along rocky sea cliffs and through dense conifer woods. There were all kinds of wildflowers along the route. There's a native shrub that grows everywhere, leaves and stems like a rose, little pods that look like green cherry tomatoes, and bright pink-red flowers with yellow centers.

We went to the peak of Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak in the eastern U.S. This spot supposedly has incredible views, but it was socked in with fog so thick you couldn't see more than about 50 feet. There was a good breeze blowing up there too, whipping the fog along like a river. By the time we left, everything on us was dripping.

We went to Thunder Hole, a long narrow channel in the sea cliff that ends in a cavity. The ocean waves funnel down the channel and slam into the cavity with a big boom. The seas were fairly calm when we were there, but there was still enough action to make the crowd go "ahhhh".

The only down side of the trip: it was densely foggy there every day, all day and night, the entire week. Some kind of interaction between a stalled Low to the west and a stalled High in the Atlantic. The scenery was beautiful there, but it must be really amazing on a clear sunny day. We'll go back, but we'll probably try to go at a more off-peak time. It was fairly crowded there. And hopefully we'll have better luck with the weather next time.

2003-07-27T15:26:00.000-04:00

Moon buzzes Mars

On July 17th, the Moon skimmed past Mars. From here in Gainesville, Florida, Mars was just off the dark limb of the waning crescent Moon, playing hide-and-seek behind high clouds before dawn. Farther south, the Moon actually occulted Mars. NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site has a good shot of the Moon's edge biting off a chunk of the Martian ice cap. (The same cap that I just recently saw for the first time.)

2003-07-23T12:25:00.000-04:00

Doc Searls - Saving the Net

Good editorial by Doc Searls on media concentration and protecting the Internet as a public domain and a natural habitat for markets.

2003-07-21T06:13:00.000-04:00

Mars Up Close

This August Earth and Mars will be the closest together they've been since Neanderthals walked the Earth. Right now it's 42.7 million miles away. I've never been able to see any details on Mars through the telescope - just a light orange disk.

This morning I went to have a look. This was the first clear morning we've had here in a couple of weeks. The sky was very clear and seeing was steady. I centered Mars up with a low power eyepiece then switched to my highest, 198X, which I just recently ordered. The view literally took my breath away. A polar ice cap was bright, white, and clear at the top of the disk. The edge of the cap was surprisingly sharp. I looked for several minutes, allowing my eyes to acclimate. In moments of steady seeing, I could make out a faint, fairly concentrated darker area in the upper left quadrant. Occasionally I could see a similar spot on the upper left limb. Quite an amazing view.

I swung around to the last quarter Moon. I seldom get a telescope out at 5:00 am, so I don't usually see the Moon with the Sun shining at that angle. Through the new 198X eyepiece, the terminator, the edge where the Sun was setting, showed intricate detail all the way along. There was a plain out on the edge with a peak in the middle that was casting a shadow that must have been hundreds of miles long. There was an mountain range right on the edge of the termiinator that was incredibly rugged, a jumble of peaks and valleys sharply highlighted in the oblique Sun.

All of this observing was done using my trusty 30 year old Criterion Dynascope RV-6. It's dinged up, a bit dusty, but it still does the job.

2003-05-25T12:37:00.000-04:00

Ping Pong - Matrix Style

Spectacular ping pong match using low tech Matrix effects (Windows Media format). (Thanks Byron Scott)

2003-05-23T22:58:00.000-04:00

Gibson Digital Media Talk

William Gibson posted the talk he gave at the Directors Guild of America's Digital Day. Commentary on where film and media in general is headed. It's just plain fun to read his stuff.

Which is to say that, no matter who you are, nor how pure your artistic intentions, nor what your budget was, your product, somewhere up the line, will eventually find itself at the mercy of people whose ordinary civilian computational capacity outstrips anything anyone has access to today.

2003-05-16T08:43:00.000-04:00

Lunar Eclispe

Nice one last night. As the last sliver of sunlight faded on the limb, the dark side was monochrome fading into a deep rich amber-brown. It's always strange to see so many stars out under a full Moon. Something in the hind brain just doesn't like that.

2003-05-14T13:52:00.000-04:00

Event-driven Architecture

The next wave?

2003-05-14T13:50:00.000-04:00

Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek

When in doubt, reverse the polarity. (Thanks Happy Fun Pundit)

8. Reversing the Polarity

For cripes sake Giordi, stop reversing the polarity of everything! It might work once in a while, but usually it just screws things up. I have it on good authority that the technicians at Starbase 12 HATE that. Every time the Enterprise comes in for its 10,000 hour checkup, they've gotta go through the whole damned ship fixing stuff. "What happened to the toilet in Stateroom 3?" "Well, the plumbing backed up, and Giordi thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity."

2003-04-20T17:11:00.000-04:00

Avian Faucet

The Chuck-Will's-Widow is the dripping faucet of the bird world. Apparently it's purpose in life is to sit in a tree all night long and sing the same little riff over and over and over and over. Easily loud enough to keep you awake at 100 yards. And then the chorus starts in...

2003-04-11T13:57:00.000-04:00

Shirky on Permanet versus Nearlynet

Yet another good essay from Clay Shirky. This time drawing parallels between how cheap cellular service marginalized the value of in-flight phones and how WiFi could do the same to 3G data services.

What the permanet people have going for them is that good vs. lousy is not a hard choice to make, and if things stayed that way, permanet would win every time. What they have going against them, however, is incentive. The operator of a cheap but lousy service has more incentive to improve quality than the operator of a good but expensive service does to cut prices. And incremental improvements to quality can produce disproportionate returns on investment when a cheap but lousy service becomes cheap but adequate. The good enough is the enemy of the good, giving an edge over time to systems that produce partial results when partially implemented.

2003-03-30T09:30:00.000-05:00

Smart Mobs

Two thumbs up for Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. He's done a good job of covering the latest developments, research, and commentary about the patterns arising from ubiquitous communications and emergent behavior. The i-mode Thumb Tribes in Japan. The WTO protesters in Seattle. Big Brother. Collaborative filtering. WiFi meshes. Smart Dust. He also runs a good web site about this space.

2003-03-30T09:05:00.000-05:00

Spray-On Organs

On a whim, Douglas Chrisey at the Naval Research Laboratory decided to try a laser deposition circuit building technique with living cells. The result is a tool that can apply fine layers of most any cell to a surface. They're trying to scale it up to build organs one layer at a time and to integrate circuitry into living tissue. The Extropians are gonna love this.

2003-02-20T12:22:00.000-05:00

NewsMonster

There's a new news aggregator that's getting all kinds of buzz. Builtin reputation system. Cross-platform portability. Looks like it might have a feature to help you track what you have and have not read, which is something I've been wanting. Stop over at NewsMonster. It's in beta now. This one bears watching.

2003-02-20T07:42:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow Now

Finished Sterling's latest, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. As usual, another good ride. Sterling is a great at envisioning cultural and social forces and where they will take us. What will it be like to live in a time of rampant biotechnology, when people can change their physiology at will? Recommended.

2003-02-09T12:16:00.000-05:00

Swarm Music

Tim Blackwell is working on the spontaneous music creation using swarms. Swarms improv'ing off each other. Swarms improv'ing with people. Listen.

2003-02-04T20:07:00.000-05:00

Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei

There is a Japanese Tendai Buddhist sect whose path to enlightenment includes a series of extreme marathons over the course of 7 years. In the first year, they start running 19 miles per day for 100 consecutive days. They work up to the 7th year where they run 52 miles per day for 100 consecutive days. (Equivalent to two 26 mile marathons per day.) Each gyoja carries a cord and a knife when running to remind them that they should take their life by hanging or disembowling themselves if they are unable to complete their term. Two monks have completed two full terms. Another died by suicide on his 2500th day trying to complete 3 terms. It is amazing the feats that you can accomplish if you have enough determination. John Stevens wrote a book about this.

2003-01-29T20:05:00.000-05:00

Kudo-Fujikawa Kamikaze

Comet Kudo-Fujikawa is diving around the Sun this week. I hunted this comet down in the pre-dawn sky back in December. The SOHO satellite took a cool movie of Kudo diving in. There's some amazing Sun movies at this site. They really give you a sense for how violently active the Sun is. Have you hugged your ozone layer today?

2003-01-27T20:51:00.000-05:00

Incredible 3D QVTRs

Amazing 360 Quicktime spaces can be found here. I particularly like the one of Mount Fuji. (Thanks BoingBoing)

2003-01-24T20:11:00.000-05:00

Another Comet

Hunted down another comet: C/2002 V1 (NEAT). It's just a fuzzy ball at the moment, but it is supposed to brighten as it dives into the Sun where it will pass so close that they're not sure it will survive. NEAT stands for Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking, an automated two-telescope system NASA is operating to identify asteroids that pass close to Earth. One side-benefit is that they spot all kinds of other objects.

2003-01-19T08:27:00.000-05:00

Evolving Inventions

Scientific American (February 03) has an article about the use of genetic programming to evolve electrical circuit inventions. They've already used the process to re-invent 15 patented circuits such as the ladder structure low pass filter. They've applied for patents on both improvements on existing patented circuits and entirely new circuits. They're using a 1,000 node Beowulf cluster to crank these out. In some cases they don't even know how the solutions work. Should you be able to patent something that you neither created nor understand?

2003-01-18T20:34:00.000-05:00

Zatoichi

The Independent Film Channel (IFC) runs "Samurai Saturdays" every Saturday morning at 8. There's a series centered around Zatoichi, a blind gambler slash gangster slash masseur slash master swordsman wandering through 19th century Samurai Japan. The 26 movie series was filmed in the 60's and 70's. I enjoy seeing the culture of that time. Totally different from our Wild West. Great characterization. Interesting themes.

IFC also ran Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, a mid-50's Samurai classic. Kurosawa influenced many of the movie directors that followed. An extraordinary movie. Recommended.

2003-01-10T08:17:00.000-05:00

Ubiquitous Web Cams - Part 2

Add streaming biometrics to the vision of crowds with multi-faceted streaming video eyes. The first flatline would make the 6 o'clock news.

2003-01-09T20:00:00.000-05:00

Ubiquitous Web Cams

The Register has an article about a service enabling bloggers to post from their video-enabled cell phones. Reading that conjured a vision of live video streaming to the world from lapels all over a crowd. How will that kind of coverage change society? Tiananmen Square. JFK. The West Bank. Concerts. Synthesize the feeds into a live 3D navigable space. Be there. Anywhere.

2003-01-09T14:24:00.000-05:00

Emergent Behavior

Interesting commentary by John Udell on emergent disruptive applications of web services and the nature of trust networks in blogspace. This is timely for me because I'm reading Michael Crichton's Prey, which is about emergent behavior (in nanomachines), predator/prey relationships, etc.

2003-01-09T14:14:00.000-05:00

Telescope of the Gods

Awesome gravitational lense picture on the Hubble Space Telescope site. This is the best gravitational lense example I've seen. The bundle of billions of stars in the galaxies in the foreground warps the light of distant galaxies hidden behind them into arcs of light. I like the way the arcs and the little quad of local stars emphasize the 3D perspective. When you're viewing events of this scale, events on the local scale pale.

2003-01-02T21:21:00.000-05:00

(Below the) Surface Tension

There's a moment in a successful vacation when an invisible substratum of tension silently sloughs away. Life becomes that much clearer.

2002-12-28T21:38:00.000-05:00

Melpomene, Massalia, and Iris

Hunted down three asteroids tonight: Melpomene (magnitude 9.8), Massalia (magnitude 9.0), and Iris (magnitude 9.6). I also found galaxy M33 which I've been trying to hunt down for years. I think I'm getting the hang of this.

2002-12-28T06:35:00.000-05:00

Found Comet Kudo-Fujikawa!

Looks like I didn't spot Comet Kudo-Fujikawa on my first try because it is dim. I tracked it down this morning. A cold morning, clear and crisp, although the last quarter Moon was washing things out. The comet was right where it was supposed to be in Hercules. It looked like a faint fuzzy star in the 9x63 binocs. Only visible with averted vision. Noticeably dimmer and smaller than nearby globular cluster M13. The comet is supposed to get brighter as it approaches the Sun next week, but it will never be a star.

2002-12-27T17:07:00.000-05:00

Armadillo Mindset

If you were basically invulnerable in your natural abode and you lived in solitude most our your life, how would your life be different?

Careless Armadillo
Your silence
Is not my silience

2002-12-26T07:00:00.000-05:00

Venus, Mars, and Zubenelgenubi

Got up before dawn to search for Comet Kudo-Fujikawa. It was a beautiful cold morning. Waning gibbous Moon high overhead. Off to the southeast, Venus blazing like a beacon, with Mars and Zubenelgenubi, a blue-white star in Libra nearby, making a nice trio. Looking through the gaps in the high clouds, no luck on the comet. (The high clouds are courtesy of El Nino. Thank you so much.)

2002-12-25T17:31:00.000-05:00

Personal Jet Power

Remember the jet pack Bell developed for the US Army in the 60's? Bond rode one in Thunderball? This guy's building one of his own, with a gas turbine no less. Or if you prefer a less exotic power, buy yourself a set of plans. Or stay on the ground with a pulsejet powered gokart.

2002-12-24T08:20:00.000-05:00

Haiku

Quick clouds low - Winter storm coming - The Moon fades