Electric Mini

OK, here's a bit of bit of prejudice for you. I believe most guys have a particular car which they long for to have. I know I do anyway, despite my rather low interest in things-with-motors. And it's the Mini (note the cool url).

I just read an article about a modified Mini, called the
Treehugger: Electric Mini. The novel thing with this car is that it has the engines in its weels and is driven mostly by electricity. Though strictly speaking it's a hybrid car. The advantages with this approach are interesting: it's both more environment friendly and it gives the car more power. Though I bet it costs alot more.

Before the Electric Mini there were only four custom made Mini's that were electric. Those for were made for the 2003 remake of the movie The Italian Job. The thing was, they wanted to drive the cars around in the subway, but weren't allowed to bring any combustion vehicle down there. So they called BMW and had four cars custom made with electric engines only.

So I'm 30 years old

It happened a few weeks back.

Wow.

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

I just happened to trip upon what is "one of the sharpest pieces of satire to appear on the web". It is The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation by Peter Norvig(head of Google research). The reason he made it was to show just how bad PowerPoint presentation get the message across. His initial intent was to spend a lot of time finding bad colors and fonts but he found that the Autocontent Wizard did all that work for him. Hilarious.

Trivia

Today I discovered a rather unexpected piece of trivia about two actors. I was watching the end of the movie Addams Family Values and I noticed to my delight that Peter MacNicol was in the movie. He seems to be a very funny guy, all the characters I've seen him portray have been very special.

When the movie was over and the end titles flashed by I thought I recognized one name. The name was David Krumholtz. And no wonder I recognized him. He's the leading actor in Numb3rs playing the young mathematics professor who helps FBI solve crimes. But when he did Adams Family Values he was only 15 years old. So I don't blame myself for not recognizing him in the movie.

And now for the fun part. Both Peter MacNicol and David Krumholtz had roles in the Adams Family Values. As it turns out they would reunite 12 years later in Numb3rs. Peter MacNicol plays the somewhat eccentric physicist who is the best fried of the mathematics professor portrayed by Krumholtz.

You don't think it's funny? I know it's kind of random. But it's just that I like Numb3rs and discovering that MacNicol and Krumholtz was in the same movie way back was a bit like being struck by lightning. Or something like that.

IntroComp 2006

I spent a couple of hours last week playing text adventure games. Text based games are a relic from the 70's and 80's but they still enjoy a small and devoted community. And people are writing a lot of new games still.

The games I played were all submissions to the contest IntroComp 2006. This contest has a rather interesting setup. Each participant is invited to submit a game which isn't finished. Only the introduction in the game needs to be done. The submissions are rated based on how much the voters want to see the whole game finished. There are some real money involved when winning but there is a caveat. You only get the money after you've finished your game. And the higher your ranking, the more money you get when you finish your game. It's a pretty nice setup to increase the incentive for writers to actually finish their games. Of course, games which are just slapped together to get the money will not receive any.

So I had some fun playing the games in this competition and I participated as a voter. This was the very first time I participated in any way in such a contest and I'm quite likely to do it again. One of the most amusing things with this contest was the announcement of the results. This happen in the IfMUD. A MUD, in case you don't know, is like an online text adventure game. The interface is completely text based and you can walk around in the world and meet other people a solve puzzles. The IfMUD works more like a chat than an ordinary MUD though. The announcements of the IntroComp contest was made in a particular room inside the MUD. I really liked the experience, there was a lot of funny people there and the general atmosphere was very inviting. I'll probably spend some time in the IfMUD in days to come.

Lastly, here are some reviews of the games in the competition.

Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math

I stumbled upon some nice piece of advice for writing articles today. It's called Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math. And I know I'm guilty on all three accounts. But I just got a paper accepted which needs to be finished pretty soon so I'll have a good opportunity to use the advice right away.

Brought up to mental illness

One thing that's been on my mind a lot lately is the mental health of youngsters in our country. A recent article in our local newspaper reports that 1/4 of all 16-year-olds have hurt themselves in one way or another. This is a really scary figure. A lot of young people are feeling bad today and even has to go to such lengths as hurting themselves to get some relief from their mental suffering.

I've always assumed that the fundamental reason for this is that parents doesn't care enough about their children. Sweden has a very self centered culture and that can make children be less important that the parent itself. So my suggestion to solve the problem has been to spend more time with and care for the children.

But today I read a very interesting article in Psychology Today called "A Nation of Wimps". This article suggest rather the opposite of my assumption. The problem is that parents micromanage their children, keep them away from anything that might hurt them or make them sad and they do just about anything to make sure that their children get high grades so that they can attend prestigious colleges.
It this way children have no chance to develop the right cognitive tools to make it through life.

True, the article from Psychology Today concerns the US. But it might be relevant to Sweden as well. The International Herald Tribune has a very nice article about Swedes as 'safety junkies' and 'curling parents', a swedish expression for overprotecting parents. It might be that swedish parents are just as bad when it come to overprotecting their children.

It seems that we have somehow forgotten what good parenting is. And commercial interests have invaded the whole parenting area and profits from anxious parents.

The political party Kristdemokraterna (roughly Christian Democrats) is the party which profile itself towards families. Their suggestions for the upcoming election is to put the parents in charge of their children's upbringing and kindergarten and give parents more time with their children. I've always thought that this sounds like a really good idea and a good way towards making young adults feel better. But the above articles suggest that this line, while not bad, won't help this particular problem.

So what can we do about it? I don't know. Parenting courses? But who's to give them? But clearly we need a solution soon. There's a lot of young people who are not feeling well right now.

The Weakest Link in Security

A while ago I attended a workshop drawing together most of Sweden's PhD students working in one way or the other with security. As you might expect the program was pretty diverse ranging from very hard core technical stuff to very fluffy stuff bordering on politics and human computer interaction.

There was one talk that I'd like to comment on. It was titled "Are Humans The Weakest Link In Security?" or something like that. The speakers intention with the title was to be a bit provocative. Many of my fellow PhD students which lean more to the technical side smiled at this title: "Of course humans are the weakest link!" They seemed to think that the question was rather silly.

I have a different opinion. My answer to the question is rather "Humans SHOULD be the weakest link". Otherwise technology has failed. Technology is here to help us. Sure, some of us like technology just for the fun of it. But the adoption of technology can only be motivated if it helps us in some way. This is especially true when it comes to security. If technology is a weaker link than its users what good is it then.

I don't think the question posed by the speaker was silly. I think it is good to ask such questions and ponder upon the answer. It might not be as straightforward as you might think.

Learning Haskell

John Meacham has his own way of explaining how it is to learn Haskell:

It is best to think of haskell primitives as something completely new, they reuse some naming conventions from OO programming, but that doesn't mean they suffer from the same limitations. It took me a few trys to wrap my brain around it. I liken learning haskell to tipping over a vending machine. you can't just push it, you gotta rock it back and forth a few times building up momentum until bam! suddenly the flash of insight hits and it all makes sense.

From the Haskell-Cafe mailling list.

Scientists Say Erie Mirage Could Be Real

I've had a very nice and relaxing holiday for the past couple of weeks. That's why there's been so little blogging. But since I started work today I thought I should do some blogging. So I'll start with a link to a story found via Reddit about an mysterious whether fenomenon acting as a lens. abc News has the story:

Scientists Say Erie Mirage Could Be Real

Dynamism

I hang out at Lambda The Ultimate, a site for discussing programming language design and implementation. Contrary to most such discussions this site usually has very well informed arguments and is almost free of flame wars.

One of the best posters at Lambda The Ultimate is Frank Atanassow. He is very knowledgeable, very brainy, is very good on theory and above all, very funny. I'd say he wins the humor contest hands down. And today I read a post by him which cements his position as the no. 1 humorist on Lambda The Ultimate. You can find the original post here, although I quote it in its entirety below. Enjoy:

"Dynamic" is technical jargon used by programmers, meaning "good". It derives from the Latin dyno mite, meaning "I am extremely pleased", and is first recorded in the historical work Bona Aetas of noted Roman sage and pundit J.J. Walker. Its meaning evolved in the 4th century after monks copying an obscure manuscript on programming linguistics in their ignorance tried to deduce its meaning from context.

In this (occidental) manuscript, the Lingua Lambda, the author described how he had stumbled across Miranda, an early ancestor of Haskell, a typed language that had found its way to the West from the Orient, and which, though crude in some ways, supported many fine features and was, in fact, lauded as the language for discriminating hackers. The author wrote an essay about this language, describing its features, and noted (Miranda dyno mite!) how pleased he was with it.

These monks had lived in monasteries for most of their lives, programming only in C; most of them had never heard of languages like ML or Miranda, and, if they had, would have dismissed them as Oriental nonsense. But this century was, for these monks, also a time of change; the last barbarian invasion had been repelled, but the fleeing barbarians had left behind their legacy, the untyped programming languages. Many of these were adopted by such monks — and thus we now call them "scripting languages" — who were dazzled by features such as "blocks" and "duck typing". (One can still detect in these phrases the vulgarity of their barbarian progenitors. Naturally, the West promptly plunged into a dark age...)

In the Orient, though, typed languages had long supported features such as higher-order functions, structural typing, automatic garbage collection, REPL-style interactive interpretation and user-definable syntax. But for the monks laboring in darkness, these were thoroughly new ideas, and they reasoned that they must be uniquely characteristic of untyped languages.

So it was that they translated Miranda dyno mite as Miranda is untyped, and now we must live with that confusion. Given the meaning of the words in our everyday language, it is, when you pause to think about it, strange that when a programmer asks you how you are, the proper response is "Dynamic, thanks!" if you are feeling well and "Kinda static today..." if you are ill, but the history of language is full of twists and turns, and, after all, far from rational...

The Shallow Roots of the Human Family Tree

Yahoo News has a very interesting article called Roots of human family tree are shallow. It's essence is this: Not too long ago, say 2000 to 5000 years, there lived a person which is an ancestor to all now living people. And a little longer while back, between 5000 and 7000 years ago, every person living then either an ancestor to all people living today or their line died out.

It's pretty amazing and sounds ridiculous until you read the article. The math needed to get an intuition for this is dead simple. I won't spoil the fun here, I recommend instead that you read the article. It's a lot of fun!

Time out of mind

In today's very science oriented society we learn that time is something very exact. To illustrate time we draw a straight line and place the time units on equal distance between each others. Each second arrive at a constant rate and disappears just as quickly.

Yet our subjective notion of time is quite different. When we sleep we have little notion of time, for instance. Just as when we're having a lot of fun. Then time seems to go very fast. On the other hand when we are in a car accident time seems to slow down. We seem to be able to perceive things and react much more quickly.

One interesting question is how the physical and our mental notion of time relates. The other day I read about a truly clever experiment which tries to test whether our brain actually works faster when we are in a stressful situation. The setup goes like this: a man is set to do a backwards free-fall of 33 meters. With him he will have a small wristwatch-like device which will switch blindingly fast between two different images. One of the pictures will be a number. Under normal circumstances a person cannot make out the number since the device flickers so fast. But if time actually slowed down for him he might be able to see the number on the screen. It's a pretty clever setup.

How did it go? When the test person landed he said he had seen the number "98". The actual number shown was "96". Close enough for me. Further experiments yielded similar results. So it seems that our brains actually works faster in some situations! Very intriguing.

You can read about the experiment in the bbc article Time out of mind. It has some further goodies on time as well.

More Mammatus

More mammatus clouds! This time it's a link to WEATHER WARS, via reddit. Make sure to scroll down a bit to get to the nice pictures. The clouds shown there look very odd, they don't have the usual bubble shape. More like waves, like an upside down ocean. Anyway, totally sweet.

String Theory: Not Even Wrong.

Via /. I found the following intriguing article:Northwest Florida Daily News: Has string theory tied up better ideas in physics? It argues that String Theory really hampers the advancement of our knowledge in particle physics. The theory (which isn't really a theory at all) has failed to produce any kind of predictions, be them testable or not. The author further argues that it is just the latest fad, scientists has to pursue it or say goodbye to an academic career. But if many of these new scientists would have tried to make advancements through other means than String Theory, perhaps we would have gotten further?

I, for one, was rather surprised by this article, as I've read a lot of positive things about String Theory. But I think that the author has a valid point. And I hope that this and similar articles will result in a diversification of the field of particle physics. Perhaps we can finally make some progress after 30 years of stand still in the field.

Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development

I just read a very interesting paper on software methodology. What makes a software project succeed? That's the basic question the author tries to answer.

I tend to think in terms of tools when I think about software success. Program in a better language and you're much better off! Use a better IDE! Automate test generation using QuickCheck! All these suggestions are good. But according to the author of this paper called "
Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development" tools are a second order effect. The single most important thing for software projects is the people in the projects. The programmers. It feels obvious when I write it like this. But think of all the methodologies developed to improve programmer productivity. What we should be focusing on are the people. Who they are, how they behave, what habits they have. We need to embrace that people are different, prone to errors, reluctant to change their habits and tend to communicate best face to face.

Reading this paper was a liberating experience. Having a human centric view is just right. We need to have this perspective even in other parts of society. A swedish politician once said that those political systems that fail are those that are based upon a false or too narrow view of what people are. Such as communism for instance. We need to understand ourselves and accept each other as we are. Only then can we be truly happy and truly productive.

Btw, I found the article via Shae Erisson's blog.

Adventure

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

- G. K. Chesterton

The Death of the Save Icon

I noticed something strange the other day. In my text editor the icon for saving the document looks like floppy disc. A floppy disc?! I can't remember the last time I used a floppy disc. That's so last millennium. Do people still use them? As far as I know computers don't even ship with floppy drives anymore. Just out of curiosity I had to check some other programs to see what icon the use for saving. All the programs I checked, including MSOffice, OpenOffice, Adobe Reader (although their icon looks more like a zip disc), Google Skethup and GIMP, had a floppy disc as their save icon. The only exception I found was jEdit which used a pencil.

Since we don't use floppy discs anymore we need to come up with a better icon for saving. The floppy disc used to be a good symbol but in a few years it will just be confusing as people will have forgotten what it is. The question is then what icon to use. I certainly don't know. And perhaps it's not even the right question to ask. Maybe we shouldn't be saving things anymore at all. At least not manually. What if the text editor automatically synchronized the copy of the text document in memory with that on the disc? This is already happening to some extent with automatic saves but I think it could (and should) be taken much further.

But is it possible to completely eliminate manual saving? Probably no. I often download PDF documents which end up in the browser cache when I view them for the first time. But sometimes I want to save a copy of the document in some specific place on my hard drive. Then I really want to save manually. Or perhaps copying is a better word for it. Anyhow it will need an icon and the floppy disc icon is outdated. So, all graphics designers out there, I'm waiting for a better save icon!

The only acronym I know of which takes longer time to pronounce than the words it stands for

Try for your self: WWW vs. World Wide Web.

Cars in the next lane really do go faster

Since I bought myself a car about a year and a half ago I've spent an increasing amount of time in traffic jams. Sitting in a traffic jam is the perfect place for pondering the mysteries of the world. Such as why the other lane seems to move faster on average than the lane I'm in. This might seem like a logical fallacy but it is not. The time a driver spend in the slower lane is longer than that of a driver in the faster lane. This is simply because the slower lane is, well, slower.

So, this is roughly how my thoughts have been going every time I've been in a traffic jam. And I was very much delighted today when I read an article called Cars in the next lane really do go faster which confirms my theory albeit with a slightly different explanation. It turns out that this result belongs to the field of observation selection effects and which has all kinds of interesting applications. I'll be sure to learn more about this in the future.