Live from Austin!

Last night I dreamed about MIT.

Texas Instruments had finally decided to build an RPN-based calculator, and for obvious reasons had chosen MIT for a major promotional event. I had been browsing the MIT bookstore and had seen a promo kit, so I snuck in to the labs to see the hardware in action.

It was "landscape" format, like the classic HPs (12c, 15c, 16c), but had a wide bitmapped display that could show 20 digits easily. It wasn’t just a calculator–they had taken ideas from the mobile phone world, and added a camera with extra low light sensitivity, a Zeiss lens with macro focus, and high speed motion capture, so you could record your experiments with it too. Oh, and it ran for something like 60 hours on two AA cells.

Pondering whether to buy one, I sat in a nearby cafe. The barista asked why I was so excited, when I could be visiting New York or Harvard or something. I explained that for me, MIT was where it had all happened, but in my excitement the only name I could think of was Marvin Minsky. When I mentioned him, the barista snorted, and said he was a hack.

I think this is quite possibly the geekiest dream I’ve ever had. I think it’s all because I was looking at R6RS yesterday.

From a neat blog posting summarizing some research on sex and intelligence:

By the age of 19, 80% of US males and 75% of women have lost their virginity, and 87% of college students have had sex. But this number appears to be much lower at elite (i.e. more intelligent) colleges. According to the article, only 56% of Princeton undergraduates have had intercourse. At Harvard 59% of the undergraduates are non-virgins, and at MIT, only a slight majority, 51%, have had intercourse. Further, only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex.

The bar chart of results from a Wellesley college survey is amusing, with the percentage of students who are virgins ranging from 0% for the Art students, up to 83% for the Mathematics students.

The only mystery is why the figure for Computer Science students is only half that for Mathematics. My guess is that it’s because Wellesley is a female-only college, and female computer scientists can basically get on the Internet and find any number of desperate male computer scientists to hook up with.

Also:

…another revealing finding from the Counterpoint survey was that while 95% of US men and 70% of women masturbate, this number is only 68% of men and 20% of women at MIT!

So the hypothesis is that smarter people have a lower sex drive. Obviously there are going to be exceptions, however.

Two nights in a row now I’ve dreamed about Austin.

Finances permitting, I think we’ve worked out where our house is going to come from. Today we got a Zipcar and went out to Acton, MA to visit Deck House.

The woman on duty at the sample house turned out to be an architect, a recent graduate of MIT who had worked for Autodesk and was now designing houses for Deck House customers. She’s very keen on green design, energy efficiency, and modern architecture, and had just returned from a green building conference in Austin, so it couldn’t have worked out any better, really.

Deck House make custom designed houses using parts prefabricated in their factory in Acton. Prefab components have a number of advantages. Firstly, because they’re assembled using factory equipment, there’s less waste, and the materials tend to be of higher quality (because otherwise there’s a risk of screwing up the machinery). Secondly, the construction standards are more rigorous, because the components have to withstand transport. Thirdly, building time and costs are reduced.

Unfortunately, most prefabricated and modular housing looks really awful. In fact, having looked at literally hundreds of house designs in the last couple of weeks, I have to say that houses in general look really awful. Like any business, the construction industry responds to consumer demand, and consumer demand is mostly for generic boxy ranches with enormous floorplans. Deck House have been forced to respond to demand by launching a line of more “normal” houses called Acorn, and apparently a lot of people ask them if they can hide the wood beams and put in multi-pane windows.

When it comes to architecture, sara and I are both prepared to think inside the box, as we seriously considered the possibilities that Glidehouse might offer. However, I’ve experienced the delights of living in a piece of modern architecture, and the bauhaus influence didn’t really lead to buildings which work as practical machines for living in. There are many good reasons why roofs should be pointy, it’s not just something mankind did for thousands of years for no good reason.

I’ve been reading lots of books on architecture and home construction. As far as materials go, our hope is to use as many natural materials as possible, and avoid chemical exposure. Wood, glass, metal, rock, cotton… and concrete. You can do amazing things with polished concrete. Wool is natural, but I’m allergic, and carpets are a great breeding ground for mold. Again, all this is subject to budget… I’m gradually building up spreadsheets of cost estimates. Next I think I need to select some major appliances, and on Monday I need to chase up the UK estate agents.

Spent Friday morning clearing up a random disaster… some legacy application that suddenly needed to go out on CD, that had never been designed to run on read-only media. Then I went to the MIT lunch trucks.

I spent the afternoon continuing to learn J2EE and SQL. I now have a simple user registration / login application written, which uses request dispatch and HTML files for look and feel. The book I’m learning from is OK on the Java stuff, but does a really poor job of teaching good systems design; they have all their HTML shoved into the servlets. Ugh.

After that I was hungry and light-headed. Concentrated mental effort seems to make me burn up energy like crazy; I think that’s how I manage to stay a reasonable weight while being an idle layabout. We had curry, but even so I had a mood crash around 23:00. Managed to go to sleep, fortunately.

Now I have to author a DVD for someone at work, process a couple of CDs of photos, and then maybe I’ll do something completely pointless for the sheer pleasure of it.

I have great admiration for the guys at MIT who have come up with a way to make duplication-proof physical authentication tokens that are robust and cost pennies each.

On a related note, MIT is starting to make all its course materials available free online.

Which reminds me, it’s too long since I last browsed the MIT bookstore on the way home…

MIT Technology review has an interesting article on “How the Postman Almost Owned E-Mail“.

I find it interesting—but not for the historical reasons. Rather, it illustrates the kind of delusional state people enter when they work too long in law or politics. The author of the piece seems to believe that if the US government had allowed the US Postal Service to operate an e-mail system, we’d all have ended up with USPS e-mail accounts.

In the UK, the Post Office did get permission to run e-mail systems. They had a system called PRESTEL. It was briefly relevant during the 80s, but bulletin boards grew up around it, then began connecting together. Soon there was a UUCP network. The situation was farcical by the early 90s; UUCP was chugging along at 9600bps or faster, but PRESTEL was still 1200bps to receive your mail—or a mind-numbing 75bps to send it. Then the UUCP networks got overseas links, TCP/IP started being rolled out to businesses, and it was all over for PRESTEL. Something similar happened in France with MiniTel, and I have no doubt that the same pattern would have been followed in the US if the USPS had been allowed to set up an e-mail system.

It’s probably blindingly obvious to everyone likely to read this, but passing laws and setting policies does not make things happen. If it did, there wouldn’t need to be a war on (selected) drugs. Yet even now, politicians who apparently live in a fantasy world are contemplating new laws to prevent Internet file sharing. Record companies apparently believe that if they get themselves proclaimed as the official source of online music, they will own the system of digital music downloads. They will then be able to build in whatever retarded copy protection systems they like.

The Post Office thought the same. They owned e-mail, so why did they need to offer faster downloads, file attachments, or international connectivity? They were the official system, and if they said 1200/75 with no error correction was good enough for the public, then it was. I mean, what were the public going to do—build their own e-mail network?

Microsoft released Windows XP on Oct. 25, 2001. That same day, in what may be a record, the company posted 18 megabytes of patches on its Web site: bug fixes, compatibility updates, and enhancements. Two patches fixed important security holes. Or rather, one of them did; the other patch didn’t work. Microsoft advised (and still advises) users to back up critical files before installing the patches. Buyers of the home version of Windows XP, however, discovered that the system provided no way to restore these backup files if things went awry. As Microsoft’s online Knowledge Base blandly explained, the special backup floppy disks created by Windows XP Home “do not work with Windows XP Home.”

—MIT Technology Review on why software sucks

Yes, it really is 04:30, and I’m annoyingly awake. Rather than lie sleeplessly in bed, I’m going to sit here for a while and play with the new, faster Internet and see if I can get sleepy again.

Spent Thanksgiving with Elaine and Jarkko and a bunch of other Perl people. Generally speaking, Elaine doesn’t cook—but when she does (about once a year), she really goes for it. I took along some fake (vegetarian) chicken to substitute for turkey. Everybody ate way too much, and as usual there was bitching and gossip about people like RMS and ESR. Very little talk about Perl, happily. I haven’t written anything that’s more than a screenful of Perl in a couple of years; but then again, you can do a lot in a screenful of Perl…

I found it interesting that seven out of the eight people there were Mac users (as well as UNIX, of course). You’ll see similar prevalence of Mac users at (say) the MIT flea market, whereas the slashdot script kiddies are mostly wintel. Maybe it’s a hacker-generational thing?

So perhaps my body has decided that I have way too much food energy to burn off, and can’t do it laying in bed. In fact, I felt too hot in bed, and feel OK now even though the thermostat has the heat cut way down overnight, so that seems plausible.

Honeybear, Elaine’s Saint Bernard, was mostly banished to the yard; though he did get to spend some time shedding on us during the evening. He’s getting old, and no longer leaps up at me since I wrestled him to the ground and showed him where he was in the pack hierarchy. Still, as usual I found myself thinking that he is just way too much dog. Even though small for a male St Bernard, he’s big enough that you can feel the house shake as he stomps around.

As a child, I was terrified of dogs. Racheline still is, and when she visited a year or two ago and we called on Elaine, there was a bad scene with Honeybear and a neighboring dog and Racheline standing in the way… I still feel guilty that I didn’t manage to do anything, even though there wasn’t really anything I could do—I went to grab Honeybear, but there was nothing to grab, and even if he had had a big, grabbable collar on, he probably would have just dragged me off my feet anyway. Oh well.

I hear that Harlan Ellison will be making an appearance at MIT. I’m very tempted to go, given that I’d probably class him as the greatest living American author—but as I think I’ve mentioned before, my general rule is to avoid meeting artists whose work I admire. And Harlan Ellison is known for being particularly prickly.

I got in to work, and my boss passed me in the hallway and said something about terrorist activity and a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I thought he was talking about a little Cessna or something, so I got in and sat and started on my coffee, glanced over my e-mail, and then hit the BBC News web site to see what was going on. I soon had the live BBC News video stream going, and sat watching it in disbelief. I cried a little. I wanted to hug someone, but the only person around was our Latvian admin assistant Evija, and I decided that would probably be a bad idea.

I sat on three separate chat networks (AOL IM, DALnet IRC and our internal one), passing information back and forth and putting together a summary as things happened. Working together with people on IRC, we collected information from several channels of news media, filtered out the contradictory stuff, and noted what was confirmed and by whom. Since a lot of people internally seemed unable to get to news sites, I also posted screenshots from the video. It reminded me a little of Tienanmen Square and the shelling of the Russian Parliament—in both of those cases, I got the news from the Internet.

Around 11, my boss said that unless there was a compelling reason to be in the office, senior management was advising us to go home. The Hancock and Prudential buildings had been evacuated. What with two of the planes being Boston ones, I think it was probably justified paranoia. So I left the office and walked back towards Kendall. I had a bad feeling about the T initially, and instead went to the MIT lunch trucks and had something to eat. After that, the red line seemed pretty empty, so I chanced it and got home around 12:30.

Sara was watching the news on NECN, which was OK, but really full of wild speculation. We switched to BBC America, which was giving over its entire lunchtime news slot to the… crisis? disaster? outrage? I’m having trouble finding the right word here. We made various attempts to call friends and acquaintances in Manhattan, and I sat online with the ThinkPad. Eventually people showed up online and we were able to confirm that they were OK; the phone system stayed useless all afternoon. I couldn’t reach my mother either—I knew she’d be worrying, as I’ve made business trips to IBM Madison Avenue in the past. I sent SMS messages, but they didn’t arrive. Finally e-mail made it.

Right now I’m mostly feeling apprehensive. A lot of people online seemed furiously angry, patriotic, and ready to string up anyone the government identified as responsible. Maybe I’m too Zen; I just didn’t get angry. My feeling is that anger is inappropriate and unhelpful. But right now, it seems like I’m in a tiny minority, and that probably means a big crackdown on immigrants and troublemakers—and of course, I’m both. Sure, I have white skin, but bad laws are color-blind. The trial by media has already started—I’ve seen pundits reminding everyone how previous terrorist actions have been carried out by resident aliens. Politicians are talking about “eradicating”, and language like that from people in power always makes me nervous.

So I’ve been offline, trying to get away from it all. The next few days are going to be bad—endless speculation will be the order of the day. Was it Osama bin Laden? Was it a CIA conspiracy to introduce martial law, confiscate firearms, and place the USA under the control of FEMA operatives in black UN helicopters? Who should the drunken gangs be beating up?