RFC 1149

The standards that the internet is based on are called STDs.  STDs are created by the IETF from RFCs. There have been thousands of RFCs over the years.

One of my favorites is RFC 1149 which is entitled A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. Yes, it’s about implementing the internet using carrier pigeons. There have been a couple of attempts to implement it, but I don’t think that any of them have been very successful.

There is digital data being transmitted by carrier pigeon though. Here’s the story of how a white water rafting company gets its pictures of the customers back to the office to be printed and waiting when the customers get back.

My understanding is that this is actually an implementation of that tried and true protocol known as sneakernet, rather than RFC 1149 or one of the IETF blessed standards. Sneakernet may be old and nonstandard, but it still has its place. You continue to see it even in trendy, new fields like cloud computing.

Button Fade

We made a new Arduino project today. It’s a code to make a light on the Arduino fade on and off by pressing a button. 
Here’s the circuit diagram.

This is the code.

int buttonPin = 2;
int buttonValue = 0;
int ledPin = 9;
int ledValue = 0;

void setup() {
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
}

void loop() {
buttonValue = digitalRead(buttonPin);

if (buttonValue) {
ledValue += 1;
}
else {
ledValue -= 1;
}

if (ledValue > 255) {
ledValue = 255;
}
if (ledValue < 0) {
ledValue = 0;
}

analogWrite(ledPin, ledValue);
delay(10);
}




The assembled project looks like this:





It was a very fun thing to make and looks really cool too. When you take your finger off the button, the light slowly fades.


The hardest part was figuring out the resistors. The resistors all look the same, but they’re not. You need to read the color code on the resistor to figure out which kind it is. We found this handy chart. With this, we could tell the 10,000 ohm pulldown resistors from the little ones used for the LED.

Grandpa’s Todo List

My parents were visiting this summer to get out of the Florida summer heat. My father isn’t very good at sitting still. He’s much happier if you give him a list of things to do. So before they came, we put together a long todo list to make sure he didn’t get bored. Well, he whipped through that, thought up several other projects on his own (including pouring concrete), and then painted everything that wasn’t moving. It’s really nice to have company like that, isn’t it?

One of Chris’ favorite projects is this one:

Our 1950 cape has a tiny kitchen without much counter space, so we’re always looking for ways to make it a little more efficient. The stove was set into a little alcove. Earlier this year we started a project to open up the alcove and install a cupboard with a microwave mounted beneath. Unfortunately there are some structural beams involved which made it a bigger project than I wanted to get into, so we had to figure out how to live with it. I did manage to figure out getting the microwave installed over the range to free up some room where the old microwave was.

The stove was one of those big old aircraft carrier jobs that filled the entire alcove, but didn’t use the space very efficiently, and there was no counter space next to it. We nursed it along for several years, but when a second burner stopped working (one never worked) along with the second oven it was time for a replacement. Since we didn’t want to get into a kitchen remodel, we stuck with a range, but Chris still wanted one with two ovens.  That thing that looks like a drawer on the bottom is actually a small oven. It’s big enough for things like potatoes and deserts, and it heats up very quickly. The new stove also left a 16 inch gap in the alcove that we temporarily filled with some wire shelves. 

Things had improved, but we had left things a bit of a mess: partially stripped wallpaper, cracks that needed filling etc. Then my father installed a GFI outlet, finished trimming the alcove up, painting the walls (a very bright yellow), and installing a cabinet with a butcher block top. We also added this grid system for hanging things on the wall. I tried to convince Chris that she needed pegboard just like Julia had, but she thought this system looked better.

The result looks great and Chris is much happier having all of her tools close at hand when she’s using the stove, and is thrilled to have a place to set things next to the stove.

Haddock with Green Garlic Sauce

This week we got two whole haddocks from the CSF. Last night we had fillets with Tomato, Caper and Olive vinaigrette, and tonight I decided to bake the other haddock whole.

Pat the fish dry. Rub all over with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.  Grease a baking pan large enough to hold the fish with olive oil so that it won’t stick. If you’ve got some fresh herbs growing, grab a few stems and stuff them inside the cavity – I had sage, oregano and thyme. Make deep cuts through the skin in several places.  Put some of the Green Garlic Sauce into each of the cuts, then pour the rest of the sauce over the top.  Bake in a preheated (375 degree) oven 30-45 minutes until done.

Green Garlic Sauce

3-10 cloves of garlic – depends on how much you like garlic and how big the cloves are.
1/4 cup fresh parsley
fresh herbs – I had  probably another 1/4 cup fresh oregano and a couple of stems of basil
2-3 Tbsp lemon juice
1/4 cup or so olive oil
salt and pepper

Drop the peeled cloves of garlic into a food processor with the motor running to chop. Then add the parsley and fresh herbs. With the motor still running add the lemon juice. Stop and scrape down the sides. Then with the motor running slowly add the olive oil. Throw in some salt and pepper to taste.

I had stopped off at the Belmont farmers’ market this afternoon, so we had this with fingerling potatoes and a tomato salad. And yes we do drink red wine with fish when we feel like it contrary to all the rules of thumb.

When a Good Idea Works

The latest issue of Technology Review has a nice article by John Maeda about the early history of Processing. Fry and Reas were students of Maeda’s at the Media Lab, and Processing was heavily influenced by his Design by Numbers, but he makes a point of praising the way that they ignored a lot of his advice and made the thing they envisioned instead of the thing that he told them they should make.

 

You’ll encounter variations of this pattern a lot when you’re developing software. All of the books tell you that you should ask your users what they want. But if you do that, they’ll tell you that they want what they have with a few minor tweaks.The really big breakthroughs happen when a developer realizes that something different is possible. John Nack at Adobe referred to this as Innovation vs. Affirmation, and used a great quote by Henry Ford.

If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

Of course there is a danger in this approach. Sometimes a good idea doesn’t work. Sometimes your vision is cloudy and you’re seeing something that isn’t possible or has a major flaw. An important part of building that thing you can see in your head is being good at realizing when to stop working on it.

25 August 1609

On this day 400 years ago, Galileo demonstrated his telescope in Venice.

When we were in Italy last year, we visited the Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence. They have a number of his early telescopes on display.

They also have a number of interactive exhibits that the kids really enjoyed:

But that’s not all. They also have some exhibits which we found surprising. Our favorite was this one:

 

That’s the middle finger of his right hand in a reliquary.

Charbucks and the iPhone

Ken Perlin has an interesting theory about why Starbucks coffee tastes the way it does and how that relates to the sensitivity of the iPhone’s touch pad.

Why is it that the quality of your branding is more important than the quality of your product these days?

Paleodictyon Nodosum

There’s an interesting article in the NYTimes about the search for the creature that leaves this pattern on the bottom of the ocean.

This pattern was first seen in ancient rocks and were believed to have been made by some sort of extinct creature. But in the 70'’s it was seen in fresh sediment near the Mid-Atlantic ridge. That means that the creature still exists and that it would be possible to catch one and answer the questions about what created these strange fossils.

Jerry Coyne’s blog has some more details.

Age of Wonder

Richard Holmes has a new book called The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. It’s about an interesting period (1770 to 1830) in England when there was no split between the cultures of scientists and poets. It was a very eventful period in history with some of the most intriguing characters (e.g. Banks, Herschel, & Davy)  in the history of science. It’s nice to see a really first rate biographer try to tackle it all.

The New York Review of Books has a good review of the book by Freeman Dyson. He’s always full of interesting ideas. In the second half of the review, he digs into the possibility Holmes raises that we’ve recently entered a similar period driven by software billionaires instead of aristocrats. He sees a convergence of computing and biology occurring with cutting edge projects funded outside of the academic/industrial models that were established at the end of the age of wonder.

In addition, they have a podcast containing an interview with Freeman where he touches on other things he’s interested in at the moment like global warming.

Finally, here’s a list of some books I’ve enjoyed by/about Freeman Dyson.

• Disturbing the Universe – His autobiography.
• Infinite in All Directions – A collection of lectures on all sorts of topics.
• Project Orion – The story of a project he worked on to build a spacecraft powered by atomic bombs. Written by his son George.
• The Starship and the Canoe – Portrait of the relationship between Freeman and his son George. Written by Kenneth Brower.
• Ringworld – A classic science fiction novel based on one of Freeman’s crazier ideas. Written by Larry Niven.

Unreason in America

A lot of commentators are amazed by the way in which a lot of public discourse in the United States has become disconnected from reality recently. For an example, go check out this article in the Independent by Johann Hari. This amazement has been very evident during the health care reform debate with its nonsensical talk of death panels, government takeovers of Medicare, or the idea that Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have survived to adulthood if he had lived in the UK.

A lot of people commenting on this phenomenon seem to think that it is a recent development and have been  trying to find someone to blame. But it has actually been an important part of American politics for a long time. The standard reference on this subject is of course Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Everyone who wants to understand what makes the US tick really needs to read this book.

There are some other useful references in this area. I recently finished reading Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. In a lot of ways it is an update of Hofstadter’s book to include the 60’s and the resulting culture wars. It’s pretty good, although it can get a little shrill at times. That’s probably because she was pretty close to the action through a lot of the period she’s writing about. I would recommend it if you find the 60’s related undercurrents in American politics hard to follow. One of the things I enjoyed most about last year’s presidential election is that it had less obsession with the 60’s than any election I can remember.

A book I want to read next is Leo Lowenthal’s Prophets of Deceit. I haven’t managed to find a copy yet, but my understanding from reading reviews like this one is that it is insightful even though (perhaps because?) it is more focused on a particular example than the others.

Of course, another source for those of us who find all of this baffling is Aristotle’s Rhetoric. He said that the three ways a speaker could persuade their audience could be divided into three appeals. These are ethos (ethical appeal), pathos (emotional appeal), and logos (logical appeal). The type of nonsensical argument we’re seeing here gives up on logos, but it still has the power to persuade using the other two appeals. It is a mistake to think that there is a single “right” form of political discourse. Political discourse uses all of Aristotle’s appeals, and when someone doesn’t have logos on their side, it is in their interest to rely heavily the other two if they want to prevail.

Filming in Lexington

This evening when we went into Lexington to have dinner and go to the library we found many extra people milling around and massive bundles of cables running up and down the sidewalks. It turns out they're in the midst of filming some scenes for a new movie, The Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams and Christian Bale. Apparently our local movie theater, The Flick, has the right look for the period of the movie (circa '92-'93), and there used to be a 'Flick' in Lowell where the movie is set. The bead store to the left of the theater has been changed for the movie, but the pharmacy and the barber shop have been there for decades and needed no makeup. The marquee has been changed to Belle Epoque, a movie that came out in '92.

If you're familiar with Lexington, it may look like those lights are facing the wrong way (away from the Flick). That's because they have these giant reflecting panels suspended overhead. They had also put yellow signs with 'GIX this' and 'GIX that' along with an arrow all over town. We've seen similar signs in the past and wondered what the heck they were for. It turns out they're to let the crew and others where to go to film a scene. They're obscure so that the general public don't all show up to harass the actors. As we were leaving a line of cars that would be filmed showed up. When Tom was at the Clubhouse today he had heard there was a casting call out for pre-1993 cars with dents and scratches. The cars we saw were definitely ones with 'character'.

The Minuteman had an article last week with a little more detail about the filming. You can see the rest of our pictures on Flickr.

Equations of the Undead

At work, we love to see the work that our users are doing with our products. This paper has been a big favorite at the office recently. You can hear an interview with one of the authors here.

This is actually some math that I hope I never find useful.

Obama’s Big Startup

TechDirt and Anil Dash each have interesting articles (link, link) about Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra. Those are the guys that the new administration put in charge of overhauling the federal government’s IT infrastructure and actually implementing a lot of the administrations transparency in government promises. The article argues that what they’re doing is the most interesting tech startup of the year. That’s not the sort of thing you expect to hear someone say about the federal government.

They have done a pretty impressive job of actually getting useful product out the door, which is an important part of the startup mindset, and not typically part of entrenched bureaucracies.

For examples, go check out the Federal IT spending dashboard, data.gov, the stimulus package maps, and the apps at Sunlight Labs.

One area where this hasn’t gone well is the cash for clunkers program. It would be nice if we could get a nice chart like this one from Good magazine that was getting updated as the data rolled in. The reality is that the administration seems to have been very slow to release any numbers and reluctant to publish them in an easily accessible way.

Meteorite on Mars

The Opportunity rover is still chugging along after more than five years on Mars. Look what it recently discovered on its way to Endeavor crater.

Yes, that’s a meteorite. It’s about 2 feet across and composed of iron-nickel.

You can read more about it here. There’s a lot of interesting science behind this because the present atmosphere of Mars is too thin to slow down a meteorite this large enough to allow it to survive impact. In addition, it’s not sitting in any sort of crater. That means that it has moved since it landed. What caused it to move?

Illusion of Accomplishment

Infinite Summer (which I mentioned earlier) is sort of an online book club which is reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. I don’t want to spoil the book if you haven’t read it, but a lot of it is about addiction and whether having choices is empowering or enslaving.

Matthew Baldwin wrote a post recently about this aspect of the book that I thought was pretty good. Be sure to click through to this post on the Wolfire gaming blog about how to make video games addictive.

Some people (for example Clay Shirky) have predicted that the addictive, passive nature of television will be swept away by a following wave of interactive media that demand more out of the user. I don’t think that DFW believed this. It is certainly possible to see how interactive media can be used to demand worthless effort from the user in return for worthless rewards, while addicting the user even more thoroughly than television can. It’s also pretty easy to see why companies would have a financial incentive to use media in that way. That combination gets depressingly close to what DFW was envisioning when he wrote the novel 13 years ago.

 

And on a lighter note, this mention of Infinite Jest is a good time to link to our favorite article on how to increase your writing output.

Fields of Fire

Today we went snorkeling (not unlike any other day in Aruba). We were snorkeling in Mangel Halto, which had amazing amounts of fire coral. All this fire coral I have named the Fields of Fire. The picture on the left is the gate to the fields of fire. Fire coral is very cool looking, but is also dangerous. My mother was very scared of the fire coral because of the intimidating sight of the pain inducing coral stretching on forever. The fire coral is the yellowish coral that looks like lasagna noodles edged with white. The big one standing up in the middle is a sea fan. We also saw some beautiful sea fans on this dive. And here is the real fields of fire. Just imagine this coral stretching for ever and ever.

Balloon Fishing

Every evening outside the house we're renting, there are a number of people standing on the reef blowing up party balloons and throwing them into the water. It turns out they're fishing. Malmok reef is on the leeward side of Aruba. That means that the wind is always blowing away from shore. If you tie a long handline to a balloon and then release it on the water, it'll float out over the reef to the deep water where the big fish live. They generally bait the hook with squid from the grocery store. Once when we were walking along the reef in the morning, we found some leftover squid from the night before. Some frigate birds had also found them and were swooping in to grab them. The rig to connect your line to the balloon looks something like the one described here. After the hook gets to the deep water, you disconnect it from the balloon and pull it in. The balloon continues towards the horizon. Here's a link that describes it all better than I can. It's really kind of festive to see all of the balloons bobbing on the water in the sunset every evening.

Perseids and Baby Beach

Last night and tonight, we all sat out on the beach and watched for meteors. It's time for the Perseids. It's really nice and dark here on Aruba, but we weren't very successful. We found it very hard to orient ourselves because we're not used to how the sky looks at a latitude of 12 1/2 degrees north. Polaris is almost sitting on the horizon. Half the sky is full of things we don't recognize. Anyways, we did manage to see a couple of good ones. Tom was the most successful. He didn't seem as bothered about not being able to get oriented and he just took in a lot of the sky at once. That seemed to be the best strategy. Earlier in the day, we went snorkeling at baby beach. The name comes from the fact that this is the beach that the locals take their babies to. It's a very sheltered lagoon and there are almost never any big waves. There are two inlets to the lagoon. The one on the left is full of a lot of large, friendly parrot fish, but the coral is pretty chopped up. The inlet on the right has heavier waves and doesn't attract as much of a crowd, but the coral is much better. There were brain corals that were about 5 or 6 feet across, and sea fans that were 4 or 5 feet across. But the kids seemed more impressed by an enourmous school of blue tangs. The one odd feature of baby beach is that it is overlooked by an oil refinery. That gives it a sort of surreal atmosphere.

A Good Day

We snorkled the length of the Malmok reef today. Peter, who is notorious for not being able to resist touching anything, found a pair of ugly fish sitting on a big anchor on the bottom. We didn't get a picture, but they looked something like this: That's a spotted scorpionfish. The reason it was a good day is that Peter poked them with a stick. If he'd used his finger, we'd probably have spent the afternoon in the emergency room instead of at the butterfly farm. Although we didn't get a picture of these guys, we have been getting some good photos from our dives. You can see some of the highlights here.

Political Flag Waving

When we first landed in Aruba, we immediately noticed all of the cars zooming around that had big, colorful flags on them. There were also flags flying in the front yards of houses along the roads. They were colors like red or green, with letters on them like MEP or AVP. At first we thought they were football teams, but it turns out that they are related to the upcoming election. Each color represents one of the poltical parties. Isn't that a neat way to support a party? We're thinking of trying to start it in the US when we get back. Politics in Aruba are pretty interesting. It's sort of the classic European parlimentary system, but the scale is much smaller. There are only 21 representatives, so a ruling coalition can be formed with only 11 members. You can read more about it here. Today we ran into a rally for the AVP party. That's the local version of the Christian Democrats. Their rally included this big truck that was booming incredibly loud music as it moved through the streets. One of the cars following the truck saw Peter and gave him a big, green AVP flag. He was extremely excited by this and wants to know all about Arubian politics and has been asking lots of questions about why different people are voting for different parties. Here's a picture of Peter with his flag: He wants to hang it up in his room when we get back.

Donkey Odie

Tonight during supper a donkey walked up to the gate in front of the house. It was a wild donkey. We guessed it was wild because we had heard there were wild donkeys on the island, and it didn't have any harnesses on it. He was friendly and let us scratch his head. He seemed particularly friendly after we gave him part of a left over carrot we had in the fridge.

We named him (or maybe her) Donkey Odie (say it out loud).

Today we went scuba diving with Bero and Tito. Here is Bero with the boys, and Tito is in the background.

There was some purple coral that was soft like a sponge that we got to touch. But most things were not ok to touch. We also saw loads of fish including a purple, blue and green parrot fish. There were a lot of miniature crabs that Bero found and showed us.

Gone Fishin'

There's not going to be a lot of posts for a while, because we're here:
View Larger Map We'll tell you all about it when we get back. Until then, there's not going to be a lot of activity on the blog. Here's a picture of our beach until then: The reef is pretty wonderful. In a couple hours of diving today, we saw a couple of moray eels, a lobster, an octopus, lots of squid, a flounder, and schools of other fish.