Big Dave’s Blog

Gallery – Reflecting on a new generation of mirrors – Image 1 – New Scientist

Continuing on the theme of interesting optics, Andrew Hicks, a mathematician, has created mirrors that accomplish some amazing feats. Imagine looking at text in a mirror, and the text is not backwards. Imagine 360-degree panoramas without distortion. It’s all pretty cool stuff.

All of the surfaces were designed with computers to reflect the light rays across the mirror surface before returning them to the viewer. With the right shapes, you can do some bizarre tricks with light. It’s like Fun House mirrors without all the distortion. Some of the applications of this are in robotics and even automobiles.

I remember back when I was getting my masters, I built a 3D rendering engine for giggles (I wanted to understand the math). If you have ever built one of these you know it’s all about calculating where light rays go and what color and brightness they end up with when they get there. In this case, you need to work backwards. Here is what I want. Now, what is the shape necessary to get there, and that’s a whole different ball game. I wonder if the idea is to solve the same rendering equations in the other direction.

Machine Takeover: Navy Says Combat Robots Multiplying Fast, Need “Battlefield Ethics” Pronto

Things like this make me nervous. I love the idea of technology and robots (building one would be a blast), but my concern is that war and combat will stop being dangerous. When that happens, it will be too easy to resort to war. There is a big difference between committing your own skin and committing a robot. It doesn’t take much before you end up in a video game, and people will separate from the idea that robot or not, real people are on the other end of that robot’s algorithm. Don’t even get me started on the Terminator references.

I spend a lot of time studying military history, and I’ve been honored to meet and thank several Medal of Honor recipients, and I tell you they knew what they were up against. It wasn’t a robot being risked. It was their life.

I remember an old Star Trek episode where two civilizations figured out a way for war to not be “messy.” Basically, computers would “fight” the battles and determine who the casualties were, and those casualties would show up to be euthanized. Without the mess, the war goes on forever. It isn’t until Captain Kirk and company are determined to be casualties that the machines are destroyed and the civilizations are forced to actually fight or end the war. Of course, when confronted with the realities of war, the civilizations figure out a way to resolve their issues. The point of show was that you can’t take the “human” out of the inhumanity of war. Without humanity, you loose a huge deterrent to war.

It’s interesting that many people feel that military people always want to resort to combat first. However, if the military person is a combat veteran, the opposite is more likely because they understand the implications. This is why I always want a veteran in charge. You know they aren’t afraid to go there, but you also know they don’t take it lightly. Usually, the gung-ho person is the one that hasn’t been there before. It’s hard to imagine someone sitting behind a computer screen having the same reservations as someone who has been shot at.

Bottom line, war should be hard. It needs to be messy, and it shouldn’t be a video game. If it becomes a video game, I expect we will see a lot more of it, and no one (except maybe a warlord) wants that.

I’ve been an iPhone user since the first weekend the 3G came out, and so far I love it. Prior to the iPhone, I was a Blackberry user for a while. My reasons for waiting to change were:

1. My contract with Verizon conveniently ended the same month the 3G came out.
2. AT&T had lousy coverage at my home and office. However, for some reason AT&T and Verizon swapped in the months leading up to the 3G coming out. Verizon started to have lousy coverage in my home, and I changed job locations. The new location had lousy Verizon coverage.
3. The price drop made it a great time to upgrade my wife as well. There was no way I was going to get away with a 1st gen iPhone without my wife getting one as well. With penalties, that would have been $1550 instead of $400. I like Apple stuff, but I’m not that big a fan boy.

Fast forward several months, and I’m not looking back to my Blackberry (ever), but there are a few minor issues with the iPhone that I wish Apple would fix. It’s been long enough now that I’m starting to wonder when/if these may happen.

No Indicators on the Locked Page

Why make me slide the bar and enter my code just to see whether I have voicemail or email? It doesn’t seem to be that hard to have a couple of indicators on the locked page to let me know. This would be a great time saver and a good compromise away from that annoying blinking LED on the Blackberries.

No Sound Presets

To change any of the sound settings, I have to go in and update each separately. Having something like Night, Office, Silent, etc. would be great. The silent switch is good, but sometimes I really want silence, and others I want the phone to still vibrate.

Related to this, I want different sound settings for each email account as well. For example, I have error emails from my site(s) sent to me. I want those to complain loudly regardless of what I have setup for other volumes.

The Blackberry does this well.

Signatures for Each Email Account

I have three email accounts configured on my iPhone. I prefer to separate my email signatures between work and personal. Again, I could do this on a Blackberry.

One Global Inbox

It would be a lot easier to read my email if there was a single Inbox where all three of my accounts show up. This is what Apple Mail does on my desktop, and I use it all the time. Right now, I have to go through the follow set of interactions for each account:

1. Tap Personal account
2. Tap Inbox
3. Read/Process inbox
4. Tap Personal to go back
5. Tap Accounts to go back
6. Tap Work
7. Tap Inbox
8. Read/Process inbox
9. Tap Work to go back
10. Tap Accounts to go back
11. etc.

Lot of tapping going on here! Give me a consolidated inbox, and life would be a lot easier for those of us with multiple email accounts. Did I mention I could do this on my Blackberry?

Notice I did not say copy/paste. In seven months, I think I could have used it twice. I can see Apple making the correct decision to cater to the 80% of users out there and not the reviewers.

Don’t get me wrong, I will not go back to a Blackberry without a fight, but give me the above, and I will be an even happier camper.

Excuse me, I have to take a call now…

I just finished reading The Secret in Building 26: The Untold Story of How America Broke the Final U-boat Enigma Code. What a fascinating read! I’ve written before about the UK’s contribution to code breaking during WWII (Neglect of Bletchley condemned and Bletchley Park Update), but this is the first time I learned about some of the details of the US contribution. I always thought the majority, if not all, of the work was handled by the British, but this book details how it was much more of a partnership between the British and Americans. Most of this stuff is only recently declassified, and most is still classified. However, the information available is a great introduction to the dawn of the electronic computer.

Computers were born from two basic military needs. First, I want to blow up the other guy so I need to calculate the ballistic trajectory of my shells. Second, I want to read and learn my enemy’s secrets. The first (ballistics) is a fairly straight forward calculation (although a lot harder than you think), but it is such that you can create tables and distribute rather than recalculating every time. It’s not exact, but it gets you pretty close. The second (code breaking) is much harder because the codes and the techniques are changing all the time. This book covers those americans working in Building 26 of the NCR Corporation. With their British counterparts, they help cracked the Nazi Enigma machine, allowing the allies to shorten the war.

What is so interesting about this story? As a computer and math geek, I love learning how computing was born. Most importantly, I’m interested in the people that made it happen. For example, one the foremost code breakers of the time was Agnes Driscoll. In the 20’s and 30’s is was not very common for woman to hold such a high scientific and strategic position. “Madam X” or “Ms Aggie” as she was referred to took a lot of heat because she was a woman, but damn she held her own and is credited with breaking several “unbreakable” codes — all by hand! My favorite story of the crap she had to put up with was when a gung-ho Navy officer dared question her application to renew her security clearance. The young officer barged in and yelled “Ma’am, in this section where you are required to list five references, you have listed the names of five admirals. You are supposed to list the names of people you know well.”

Driscoll looked up at the young man with a squint in her eye and said, “Sonny, I knew all of them when they were ensigns and lieutenants, and if you don’t straighten up, I’m going to tell them to never promote you.”

Another interesting person was Joseph R. Desch. He was the lead for the entire effort. Most of the pressure fell on this man, and no one ever knew what he did. Never mind 14-hour days, 7 days a week, and often 7:30AM to 2:30AM the next day, 7 days a week for months at a time. All of this work to develop a machine call a Bombe. The German Navy’s Enigma machine had 2.0 x 10¹⁴⁵ ciphering possibilities compared to 1.0 x 10⁸⁰ atoms in the known universe, and it was the Bombe’s job to crack the code. It couldn’t do it alone, but by the end of the war through a combination of Bombes, cribs, lax German procedures, and good guesses, the teams could read German messages often before the German recipients did. Fascinating stuff.

In 1947, Joe Desch received the National Medal of Merit in a secret ceremony for his work in developing the U.S. Bombe. Unfortunately, no one ever knew until after his death why he had the highest civilian honor for wartime service. Not even his family had a clue until the 90’s.

Don’t forget Alan Turing was part of the effort to build the British Bombe. You all recognize the name Turing, right?

If you are at all interested in world and computing history, I highly recommend this book. If you do read the book, don’t skip the acknowledgements. It’s impressive to see how much went into gathering the information for this book.

Above is a US Bombe machine with a WAVE operator from 1943. The US Bombe machines were 10 feet wide, 7 feet tall and about 2 feet deep. They weighed over 2 and 1/2 tons. The American machines used mechanical relays, vacuum tubes, various motors and clutches, and were run by the women of the WAVE section (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) of the United States military.

Today, I was scheduled for Jury Duty. Actually, I was an alternate with instructions to call a number after 3:00 PM the day before. The instructions said there would be a recording to let us know whether we would be needed or not. Like a good citizen, I called the number at 3:15 PM, but instead of a recording I heard:

“Jury pool. Leave a message.”

Not particularly informative. I tried again several times throughout the afternoon without any luck. After looking around the web, I was able to find another information number that I called. After many questions and a long wait, I finally got to someone that let me know that I “probably” will not be needed.

Now, it snowed pretty good here last night, and my original letter from the court said to call the same day after 6:30 AM if there is snow. I did, and this time I heard:

“Enter your extension.”

Again, not very informative. I entered by group number, thinking that maybe that is what they wanted. I was rewarded with “That extension is busy.” Nice.

Anyway, I’m going with what the person at the info line told me, but you would think they might have this process figured out by now. Hopefully, I don’t end up with a big fine down the road because you know that part they probably have pretty well figured out.

Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet | Wired Science from Wired.com

This is really interesting. It’s a planet that is twice the size of earth, and it orbits a star similar to our sun. The main similarity is that it is rocky instead of a gas giant like all the other planets found so far. However, the similarities end there. It orbits its star once every 20 hours (can you say dizzy?), and its orbit is so close that the surface temperature is estimated at 1,830 to 2,730 degrees Fahrenheit. It might be a little hot to hang out on, not to mention the “rocky” nature of the planet would most likely be an ocean of lava.

What is interesting is that another new scheme was used to discover the planet. COROT (Convection, Rotation and Planetary Transits), a European Space Agency spacecraft, hunts for planets by searching for changes in a star’s brightness caused by a planet passing in front of it. The other main scheme looks for a star’s wobble, but most rocky planets are so small that their sun’s don’t wobble much.

Interesting stuff…