Sunday Paper

Here's a few things I found while reading the paper Sunday. No big.

A town with a provocative name says 'no' to change [reg required] Also, DFW Star-Telegram

Defining me myself and madonna

The Shakira Dialectic

One market, two approaches

The recent Sony troubles highlight the different approaches companies take to the same opportunities.

Apple went into the DAP (digital audio player) market relatively late. The late, lamented Roxio MP3 players started the whole thing, and their legal victory cleared the way for Apple. But when Apple went into the market, they did some things that made a big difference to what we do with DAP's today. Podcasts, which use RSS as a means of advertizing the availability of MP3 files, were not invented until the relatively open nature of Apple's iTunes cleared the way. A whole cottage industry has sprung up to cater to podcasting. There are tools that allow non-iTunes users to obtain the audio file of a podcast and download it to non-Apple DAPs, even Sony's.

Sony has been in the audio player device market much longer than Apple, and has probably sold many times more players than Apple has. Apple does lead in the niches it plays in. Sony sells flash-based and disk-based players that many consider to be the equals to Apple's players of the same capacities. Before that Sony has of course sold CD-based players and miniDisc-based players. But during the entire existence of Sony's ventures in this area, no one thought, hey, this is a neat thing to play spoken word recordings on, so I'll make a newscast on my PC and send it out over the Internet.

Where Sony has taken the lead, allegedly, is in mass distribution of spyware or adware. Computer Associates' antivirus software has been upgraded recently to detect and remove the DRM (digital rights management) software that some Sony music CDs install on Windows-based computers. As reported in the linked item, Sony's DRM cloaks itself using rootkit technology that is ordinarily used by hackers to conceal the nefarious spambots often installed on compromised computers. Since Sony's rootkit conceals all files that contain a particular pattern in their names, a machine with the Sony DRM software installed can be easily compromised by other parties for whatever ends the third parties might choose. Also it has been reported that the rootkit has various bugs that destabilize the machine it runs on.

Congratulations to Sony for taking the lead in this important area.

Lose 30 pounds in 3 years. How? Don't Ask Me.

Three years ago, they told me my cholesterol was 260. They wanted me to take a pill to lower my cholesterol. I'm against pills, personally. They wanted me to lose 15 pounds in a big hurry. So I made a few tweaks to my diet, and fiddled around and probably gained 5 or 10 more pounds.

I bought some books and forgot about them. The New Atkins Revolution. The Zone Diet Eat More, Weigh Less.

Then the famous Atkins article ran in the New York Times. It was hard to ignore the buzz from that, but I stood pat.

I went back to the doctor for a different issue and the doc looked at my chart. He said, maybe you should try a low-carb diet like the Atkins Diet.

So a week later, I committed to the Atkins regime. My first challenge was to comply with the diet while on a trip, eating a week of restaurant meals. Since the city I went to was San Antonio, this was in fact no challenge. Plus I was able to walk all the time. So I got good momentum. The challenge was at home.

At home, I had to do two things to comply somewhat with Atkins. One was to cut down on fast food. But since I had little time for cooking, the other thing I had to do was modify my fast food choices.

When I cook, it barely matches anything you see on TV except maybe Alton Brown's Good Eats. For my Atkins cooking, I basically took a piece of steak or fish and seasoned it slightly, and then threw it into a pan. In the case of steak, Joy of Cooking guided me to choose pan broiling. I only used a little oil, a coating rather than a pool. In the case of fish, the fish of choice was salmon and the method was poaching. I would use largish cut of salmon steak and save the remainder for later and eat it cold.

For Atkins devotees, it is useful to note that non-lite ranch dressing is 99% fat and has zero carbs. So it may be the dressing of choice for salad.

With fast food, I did two things: I stopped eating the buns on the hamburgers and I stopped ordering fries and a soda. Instead I ordered salad and water. And yes, ranch dressing please.

It only took two months for people to start noticing that I was losing weight. It took me longer because I didn't own a scale. But eventually I noticed that clothing fit better and that certain things were easier. For example I didn't have to hold my breath when I bent over to tie my shoe laces.

I also realized that I had completely broken the habit of buying processed food at the grocery store. The exception being ice cream, which I resumed after about 3 or 4 months. So now I was shopping on the edges of the supermarket, where they sell the raw materials&emdash;bar flour.

Along with all these regular meals, I have a habit of going out every Wednesday night with friends to have a beer. At first I went to nothing but martinis. If you must know, at first these were dirty vodka martinis with two olives but I changed the martini to vodka with a twist of lemon. Once I had lost the first ten pounds or so I started having the occasional pint of ale at beer night. The venue for beer night has a diverse menu that can accomodate almost any dietary macro restriction, like no beef or low carb.

At the beginning of 2004, I had achieved a satisfying loss of weight. I felt sure I had met my doctor's goal of 10-15 pounds lost. So I finally bought a scale, and confirmed my achievement.

The diet at that time had evolved to allow carbs in limited amounts and limited forms. The next move was to go almost the other direction. For a couple of months I worked bean burritos into my diet. I cooked the beans myself. This didn't go as well as I hoped, except that I was still slowly losing weight. Beans are a challenge to eat regularly. So I switched to tofu. This I would fry in oil and seasonings and put in the burrito. The disadvantage was I was frying tofu everytime I made a burrito. And then I read a fairly negative article about soy and tofu and I decided not to eat so much of it, meaning zero at home.

Now I'm operating in a zone where I am used to healthy food that is not dripping in trans fats or coated with a layer of candy, and so I can trust myself to eat out and buy the right things at the supermarket. I know how to make omelettes which are pretty healthy if you don't have too many eggs a week.

And by the way I way about 30 pounds less than when I started this whole thing. I had to go out and replace a lot of clothes that were too big by more than a size, and I am certain of staying the right size to fit these new clothes for a while yet.

Doing Space

I have just downloaded the Aldridge report and skimmed it. I smell corporate welfare, and it smells bad. But I could end up with a different view in a few days. This blog entry should show my biases prior to being, perhaps, informed by digesting that report.

I'm an outsider in this, unconnected with the Military-Industrial Complex. I'm more an Entertainment-Consumption Complex guy. But to the extent that NASA and Space is something I vote about, I have a thing or two to say.

As a principle, I am so over "do this for the jobs." Do something because it needs doing. There is so much to do for its own sake, there is no excuse for jobs programs.

There is no fixed lump of Space Work to be parcelled out to NASA or privatized. Business will always see to what it really needs to do. First of course it will look within itself. If the numbers don't add up, then Business will look to Congress and in our present case NASA, which should both look back skeptically. The rest of Space Work will be work that Society wants, and of course that can occasionally be done by encouraging Business to do it, but not always. But even Society's needs are 99% routine.

We shouldn't be doing a Mars program in NASA. The Moon program in the Sixties was exciting and catalytic. But that catalyst is in the system, the energy hump that needed to be climbed was lowered and climbed. Lowering that one again is pointless. There is no drama there beyond what the Chunnel provided for a few years. The most and the limit to what Business should expect from Congress if Business wants to go to Mars is a loan guarantee program.

I make no mistake: If Business wants to go to Mars for some profit-making reason, it will be a "stretch goal" and require technology development in fairly exciting directions, at least for logistics people. But let us accept that Space has been reached and if someone wants to go to Mars they basically just have to do more and better of what has already been done. We've sent a fleet of vehicles to Mars, not counting the ones that might have worked but didn't.

NASA's job should be in leading-edge scientific work with indirect applications. Within the science work that NASA does, NASA should hive off programs that work to sustaining agencies. NOAA should be the sustaining agency sponsoring routine satellite-based studies of the Earth's atmosphere, for example. Other sustaining agencies would include EPA, USAF, DOE, and FAA.

Another example I would cite is Hubble Space Telescope, which is at a trenchant juncture. HST should be thrown over the transom to a sustaining agency which would take primary responsibility for its continuation in orbit and its replacement. If there is a hard problem to solve in keeping HST operating it should be up to that agency to decide how to fix that problem, which whatever it is, is not a NASA problem.

I suppose that this looks like a smaller NASA. It's revenue-neutral except for dropping men on Mars. If there's a business case for men on Mars, then it's GDP-neutral.

Holes in the 9/11 commission statement

Dan Darling has written a two-part comment on the 9/11 commission's statement. This entry in my blog is about the first part.

Mr.Darling is not very admiring of this work by the commission's staff.

This statement, which has been referred to a lot of late:

We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.

gets a generous share of ink in the comment, to the effect that it is one answer to a false dilemna. This is indeed what has troubled me about the commission's conclusions and the response in most of the press. Suppose that Iraq and UBL are at odds and don't cooperate on anything, except that when UBL proposes to blow up some key US buildings the Iraqi government says, here's some money. Or suppose to the contrary that Iraq and UBL are buddies, with constant satellite phone calls back and forth between Saddam and Usama but when the latter brings up the idea of blowing up US buildings the Iraqi government demurs. These two are not the only possibilities. It seems to me that these two hypotheticals are simply diagonal corners on a whole field of possible relationships between two separately-agenda-ed, independent entities. One should not extrapolate solely from the matter of cooperation between entities on a particular operation to the matter of links between entities.

Some people seem to want to hear that there was no link between al Qaeda and Iraq, and therefore that one of the Administration's stated motives for invading Iraq was mistaken. I have all kinds of trouble with the current Administration and do not wish to see it last beyond Jan. 20. However, the Administration was consistent with itself in invading Iraq, having found a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, and having asserted that states which and persons who support terrorism are mortal enemies of the U.S.

Nigritude Ultramarine

Anil Dash mentions a phrase that has no hits on Google.

Search Optimization is one of those phrases that means exactly the opposite of what it should have meant. Search Optimizers try to game the search engines so that searches return links to the page the opimizer wants the searcher to find.

Quick Thoughts on the Iraqi Coup de Main

Basically it turns out that the Iraqi Governing Council has sprung a government on the UN and USA. I would be very approving of this (not that anyone cares) if the IGC were constituted differently. From here, and I'm guessing from certain vantage points in Iraq, the IGC lacks legitimacy not just because it was formed by the CPA, but because it was formed by the CPA as a group of mostly exiles.

If the IGC had been constituted of resident Iraqis then I would be more approving, and if they had been elected so much the better. From such a body, this coup would be an excellent assertion of ownership and responsibility. As it is, it's one group of elite outsiders taking over from another.

I call it a coup de main because Talking Points Memo did.

Update at 1:28 PM

On Healing Iraq, there are a few positive comments about the new President of Iraq. And a quibble, but a largely positive blog entry.

Some links about Hydrogen and Fuel Cells

DOE has a site about their "hydrogen economy" policy.
HydrogenAppliances.com sells equipment for small scale energy generation. This includes electrolysis equipment which they suggest as a way to use hydrogen gas for energy storage. There is also a demo project for using a water wheel to generate electric power using generators they sell. This site is highly surfable. Look for the analysis of the "energy content" of an empty aluminum beer can.
A listing of various alternative fuels.
LLNL had a project which developed regenerative fuel cell technology. Refueling this stack is accomplished by running it "backwards" to electrolyze water and store the resulting hydrogen. This page has some figures on power requirements for an auto in various modes of operation, and a solution for high performance acceleration.
Specifically,

Mode	Power
idle	< 5 W
Cruise	10 W
Climb Grade	40 W
Freeway entry	up to 100 W

The LLNL proposal seems to be to design a 50 W capacity with plain fresh air and provide auxiliary O2 to achieve sufficient wattage for acceleration. Note that the article is from 1997. It is a webified version of their Science & Technology Review magazine, which you can browse.

My opinionated rant

I like traction motors, for no particular reason.

A fuel cell power plant in a car would be a good way to have a car operate with traction motivation. A car with a fuel cell stack and traction motors would be able to operate on the best known transportation network.

The best transportation network across all levels of technological advancement is basically rolling around on the ground using a wheeled vehicle. Note that for exploring at "ground level" on Mars or the Moon we didn't set up a people mover or subway, we sent automobiles.

When people make the same trips over and over, roadways are a good idea. They still allow wonderful freedom of movement yet certain energy savings can be realized by guiding traffic into patterns with gentler grades and so on. Dividing traffic into groups with similar velocity vectors is good for safety. In some spots it even helps to segregate traffic by momentum vector, which you can see in the form of truck bypasses at busy interchanges between interstate highways, or truck climbing lanes, or dedicated lanes for trucks that need to descend a steep grade carefully.

Hydrogen has lots of energy per pound, in fact just a bit more than gasoline. That's BTU's per pound. Notice the units.

Pure hydrogen has not so much energy per liter at STP. So folks are looking into storing hydrogen in various ways:

• Carbon nanotubes
• Metal hydrides
• Hydrocarbons and reforming (methanol, ethanol, gasoline, etc).
• Direct use of methanol.
• Cryogenic storage of liquid hydrogen
• Compressed gas

A popular exemplar of fuel cell technology is the direct methanol fuel cell. It is interesting to consider a world where this type of cell is in use as the power plant for electric vehicles.

It would be feasible to gradually switch gas stations and the distribution systems that supply them from gasoline to methanol. Since methanol and gasoline are both volatile solvents, general and widespread use of methanol is not inherently different environmentally from the situation now with gasoline. We should expect people to care about the fact that the substances are not the same and to want to review the environmental protection regime we use to keep gasoline out of the ground water and from evaporating straight into the air to make sure that these measures either work for methanol or are modified to work for methanol.