non-standard deviation

On the 9th December 2008, it will be 40 years since Doug Engelbart’s Mother of all Demos (as it’s come to be known, thanks to Steven Levy using the phrase to describe the event in his 1994 book Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything).

More information on this seminal event, including clips and commentary, can be had at the MouseSite page covering the demo. And a complete streaming video of the demo is available via Google Video.

To quote the Wikipedia article:

The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext.

Go, marvel as a future we are only now lurching towards is laid out for all to see on a stage in California, 40 years ago.

Be incredibly frustrated that it’s two generations later and we still haven’t made it as far as Engelbart could already see us getting only a year after the Summer of Love.

Despair further by slipping off and reading Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, ‘As We May Think’. Bush was thinking mechanically, not computationally, but his Memex still presages the Internet and interactive computing with remarkable prescience.

For the final kick in the pants of your optimism, consider that this 1945 essay is a fairly minor re-working of an earlier piece, ‘Mechanization and the Record’ which Bush wrote in 1939.

For those with at least a little optimism left, there will be a big celebration of the Mother of All Demos at Stanford University, California, on the actual anniversary. Stanford is also hosting a Program for the Future conference on December 8 and 9.

If you’re in the area on the day, I’d recommend going.

If you aren’t, there’s always the pages covering the 30th anniversary celebration, engelbart’s unfinished revolution, also hosted by Stanford.

I’m confident they will distract you nicely. I take no responsibility for any further despair (or hope) they engender.

First up, just knowing there is an Octopus News Magazine makes my day. It only gets better to learn they have a wonderfully Cthulhu-esque logo which I can get on a t-shirt.

As for the articles, I don’t know I’ll ever have a practical use for this, but it’s good to know the giant squid can accidentally eat parts of itself. And it’s a grand thing that there is a real beast swimming the world’s oceans called the Vampire Squid from Hell.

The fact this beastie isn’t anywhere near as fearsome as its name suggests is no disappointment, especially when you consider it’s likely a ‘living fossil’, having first appeared in much the form it is now way back in the Carboniferous.

On the ‘that’s really cool and good news to boot’ front, Go Sun Solutions reports on ‘a [new] manufacturing technique that could boost the efficiency of a… type of solar cell by up to 50%’.

Only problem here is, I want to know more.

The specifics of the technique have been published in the Journal of Applied Physics. The abstract is available for free but the full paper is only available for subscribers. And the University of New South Wales‘ media release on the technique is heavy on how nifty the technique is and light on the specifics of said niftiness.

I’m not suggesting there’s anything dodgy in the claims; just that the basic outline of the technique:

[the] new approach involves depositing a thin film of silver (measuring about 10 nanometers thick) onto a solar cell surface and heating it to 200° Celsius. That breaks the film into flattened spheres, called islands, which are about 100 nanometers in diameter. When struck by light, these islands achieve the same feat as etching by a natural but complex process.
— Go Sun Solutions
— ‘No Silicon Needed’
— Thursday, 26 April 2007

whets my appetite to know more.

Staying on the green front (for want of a better segue), Carol Lloyd’s article, ‘Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards‘ on SFGate.com introduced me to Jay Shafer and his Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

Which led to a quick Googling that lead to this small collection of photos of Shafer’s home (and Shafer) on flickr.com. Which, of course, led to a well-spent wasted hour digging into Telstar Logistics, learning what it was, where it had come from, and who was behind it all.

Next on my ‘things I’d rather think about than work’ tour, there’s Rachel Hillmer and Paul Kwiat’s Do-It-Yourself Quantum Eraser in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American. I think they overstate the ‘readily available’ nature of the equipment you need (polarising film isn’t as common as they hint) but it’s a simple experiment to conduct if you do have the equipment. And it’s impressively effective at making quantum effects real and tangible (at least it was for me when I conducted the experiment here at Casa de Forte).

Wandering from physics back to the biological sciences, Kerry Grens has a article in The Scientist on the possibility a single transcription factor (ie a protein that controls whether or not a gene is expressed) might be the key to understanding and perhaps even treating or preventing addiction to a range of drugs of dependence.

Proteins are also discussed in Melissa Lee Phillips’ report on the discovery that sea sponges ‘possess protein components of synapses, even though they don’t have nervous systems‘. The article doesn’t mention it (‘coz, let’s face it, why should it) but discoveries like this always give me a small thrill of schadenfreude at the whole ‘irreducible complexity’ nonsense still being schilled by Michael Behe, Michael Denton and co.

Staying with biology, but getting back to humans, Stephen Oppenheimer, in conjunction with the Bradshaw Foundation has produced a spectacular and fascinating interactive look at Humanity’s migrations, starting in East Africa and eventually covering almost the whole world.

I’m not normally a fan of Flash, but Oppenheimer’s journey would be difficult to take using plain-old CSS and HTML. It’s worth noting, however, the use of Flash makes their admonition to turn off your pop-up blocker more than a self-interested statement.

If this isn’t enough to get you into deadline-slippage territory, the folks at the Bradshaw Foundation have lots more high-quality time-suckage to help you understand the epic human journey while away several days learning fascinating stuff that won’t help in any practical way at all.

I should, of course, be meeting a deadline. Actually, I should be chasing two deadlines that whooshed by thanks to a nifty infection that put me on the loo or flat on my back exhausted from walking to the loo and explosively emptying my guts for half-a-week.

Which means the following quick e-mail from a friend was the perfect distraction:

This is not just any belly-aching, whining, moaning and/or griping.

No. This is public belly-aching, whining, moaning and/or griping sung in harmony to a musical accompaniment with a rap solo!

The Complaints Choir of Birmingham.

But that’s only 10 minutes or so of non-productive time. So let’s get serious.

It turns out the whole idea of a Complaints Choir comes to us thanks to Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen. They’ve done interesting things apart. And they’ve done interesting things together.

And, walking together one winter’s day in Helsinki, the pair ended up discussing

the possibility of transforming the huge energy people put into complaining into something else.

As it happens, there is a Finnish expression: “Valituskuoro”.

It means “Complaints Choir” and it is used to describe situations where a lot of people are complaining simultaneously. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen thought: “Wouldn’t it be fantastic to take this expression literally and organise a real Complaints Choir!”

The Springhill Institute in Birmingham, England, took the idea and ran with it. Happily, others have followed their example.

So we’ve now got the Helsinki Complaints Choir; the Hamburg Complaints Choir; the St Petersburg Complaints Choir and several others, all dutifully noted on the Complaints Choir web-site.

FWIW, I’m torn between the Helsinki and St Petersburg choirs as my personal favourite.

Even better, so far as Gilles Roy is concerned, all this apparently pointless effort is more than cranky kvetching:

in the context of a group song, complaining appears to be many things, not just the whining wheedle of the quietly desperate, living their misery out in isolation. Rather we find here a chockfull of insight, small-mindedness, fatigue, expressions of injustice, powerlessness, etc. from the individual voices heard through the multitude, both in solo and unison.

Maybe we should get a few Complaints Choirs going here in Oz? If nothing else, it might make the Federal Election coming before the end of 2007 more interesting (or interesting at all, given the way elections are played out these days).

After all, if it doesn’t get us anywhere, we can always complain to Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen about the whole exercise being a waste of our valuable time.