A harbinger of things to come?

I just did a Google search for “Project Gutenberg.” Rather than finding the Project Gutenberg website, Google filled the results with entries from its own e-book catalog. A Bing search took me right to Project Gutenberg.

I filled out a complaint form (Google has a link at the bottom of the page.) A few minutes later, it was giving correct results. Questions: was this a broken server, or a normal result? Was my later search influenced by my complaint? If so, did it only affect my search results? No matter how well-intentioned the folks at Google are, there is too much incentive for bias, and it is too hard to detect* for bias not to creep in over time.

*See Appendix A of this academic paper for a discussion of the dangers of search engine bias.

How to avoid Harry Potter (hint: Tiffany Aching)

For the past year or two, I’ve been reading Harry Potter to my seven year old daughter for a bedtime story. It started out at about her level, but by the fifth book it’s definitely at a teen level because of dark themes, including sadism and torture. (Professor Umbridge, I’m looking at you.) We’re up to the last book, and I’m avoiding it. Not just for the adult themes, but also for fear of what to read when we’re done. After all, when she’s misbehaving, the only threat that always works is to threaten that we won’t read Harry Potter that night.

Happily, my friend and coworker suggested The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. It’s the first of a four-book series about a no-nonsense girl named Tiffany Aching who wants to be a witch, and how she teams up with a band of fairies whose three skills are fighting, drinking, and stealing.

That was the first book I’ve ever found that can compete with Harry Potter. And boy have I tried. We’re already on the second book (A Hat Full of Sky), and I’m not sure which series she’ll want to finish first.

If you have a child under the age of 10 who has not yet read all the Harry Potter books, I strongly recommend The Wee Free men as a speed bump after the first two books.

How old is modern?

I will never forget the day Jordan and I were strolling through the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin and stopped in our tracks when we saw a face. It was painted on a Roman-era Egyptian casket head-board. It was as clear and detailed as any portrait. The colors hadn’t faded. I could have recognized that person walking down the street, a possibility which seemed eerily likely, except for the ancient hairstyle. A gap of two thousand years collapsed, with the ancient world suddenly seeming modern.

One reason for my seventh generation project is to expand my descendents’ notions of who is contemporary. The thinking is that the farther back they consider someone modern, the less remote the far future will seem. But I wonder what effect modern technology will have on future generations’ sense of the contemporary.

In my mind’s eye, people from the 1940s seem as real as people living today, but before that they start to fade to black-and-white, then sepia tones, then oil paintings. Oddly, Albert Einstein seems modern while the Wright brothers seem historical, even though the Kitty Hawk flight was in 1903, two years before Einstein proposed general relativity. Laurel and Hardy seem more modern to me than others of the 1920s, since I’ve seen them walking and (later) talking.

Which makes me wonder how the preponderance of color photos and videos, searchable on Flikr and YouTube and potentially archived permanently, will change people’s sense of the contemporary. If I could see a video of my great-great-great grandparents, they’d seem a lot more real to me.

With that in mind, I think I’ll take some videos of myself and my relatives at Camp Unistar this year. It will be at the same time that I’m writing this year’s letter to the descendants (I’ll be writing to my grandkids for the second year in a row.) It should be easy to archive a video for 30 years. More interesting will be archiving a video for the seventh generation. Unlike text or a photo, I can’t just post it on my blog and coerce the Internet Archive to grab it. Videos are big enough that archivists avoid them.

The three skills high school graduates should have if they want a job…

…that weren’t mandatory a decade ago:

  1. Spanish
    Sure, you can get a job at McDonalds without speaking Spanish— so long as you aren’t competing against a Spanish speaker. But how are you going to move up into management, if you can’t communicate with your Spanish-speaking employees and customers?
  2. Web design
    When was the last time you saw a business that didn’t have a website? Even if you only know enough to update a Drupal site with current photos, you can quickly make yourself invaluable to an employer who doesn’t have these skills. Plus you can navigate the modern world much more easily if you can tell the difference between a web browser and a website. (It’s important to know, for example, that not everything you type into a computer is seen by Google.)
  3. Computer programming
    At a minimum, if you can think like a computer, you can make sense of the world better than most. With all the predictions that computer programmers would be outsourced to India, it turns out there’s still a lot of demand here in the US— while young lawyers are getting outsourced to India. Indeed, the more we use computers, the more demand there is for someone local who can automate this and customize that. And most companies with a website could use a little JavaScript tweak here or a slight bit of custom PHP there— or at least a bit of guidance as to what’s easy to do and what’s hard.

    But it’s not not just about being a professional programmer; knowing how computers work makes you a better doctor, lawyer, salesperson, manager, artist, or independent business owner. Because in all those cases you’re going to be working with computers. Just like Spanish, you can add computer programming to any resume and possibilities open up.

Don’t follow your dreams

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

This NY Times commentary struck a chord with me. I was always told to follow my dreams, but my dreams tend to either be pure science fiction or things that wouldn’t really make me happier if I achieved them.

Digital Archiving: paper is still best

The Internet Archive has announced a project to preserve physical copies of scanned books. There are two reasons for this. First, the original book is more authoritative than the scan. Second, books last longer than hard disks.

I find this interesting in the context of my Seventh Generation project. The letters I’m writing will be printed, but I’m planning to have electronic versions as well, hosted here at leppik.net. And I’m relying on the Internet Archive’s wayback machine to keep those available long since leppik.net has gone away.

Hail

Between golf ball sized and baseball sized. Kept the kids up late to hide in the tornado shelter. Came up to see the hail when it sounded like people were stomping around upstairs.

R.I.P. RAM?

It occurred to me last year when the iPad was introduced that RAM may soon become a thing of the past, replaced by larger on-chip caches and super fast flash SSDs (solid-state disks.) Of course, something like this has been theorized for decades (consider Tom Baker’s endorsement of bubble memory in the 1981 Dr Who episode Logopolis.) But now it’s starting to look inevitable.

In the old days, chip speeds were so slow that RAM chips could be read almost as fast as processors could use the data. But as chips got faster, it became necessary to add more and more caches of memory between the processor and RAM. Today’s processor clocks are measured in gigahertz—meaning that a clock tick propagating at the speed of light can barely make it across the chip in time for the next tick. Traditional RAM chips, which might be a foot of wire away from the processor, have no chance of keeping up.

It’s hard to compare speeds between Serial ATA (for SSD) and memory buses, since SATA is measured in gigabits per second, whereas memory buses are measured in megahertz. The latter measures latency, or how long a bit takes to travel, which is the more important measure for replacing RAM with SSD. But my guess is that SATA 3 is within the “close enough” range, where a computer designer could start to consider throwing out the RAM and just having SSDs.

The iPad takes a step in that direction. The processor is designed to have its single RAM chip stacked on it like a layer cake, in a position which resembles an on-chip cache. (Desktop CPUs often have “on-chip” caches on a separate silicon chip, but packaged in the same plastic “chip.”) Future desktop processors may well have a similar configuration.

Indeed, there’s talk that down the road, supercomputers may need to have their “disks” (SSDs) on the processor chip simply to reduce their power requirements. That’s because if supercomputers continue to become more powerful without becoming more energy efficient, they’ll soon need dedicated nuclear power plants. But on-chip disks would also be useful in phones, tablets, and laptops.