Solipsism Gradient

I somehow came across Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden‘s site and ended up spending a couple of hours reading Patrick’s Electrolite and Teresa’s Making Light. Great stuff, such as:

Animal hoarding. Extremely scary stuff, especially for me, as a borderline book and magazine hoarder…

Stuff you’re glad you didn’t get, amazingly ugly or weird stuff from a catalog.

Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, In Words of Four Letters or Less.

Just after I posted a comment about the hazards of a cellphone running Windows SmartPhone, Slashdot is commenting on a recent story about problems with the new BMW 745i, which runs Windows CE.

A Baseline article tells all. Problems supposedly ranged from the car braking without turning on the brake lights when speed fell below a certain limit, the transmission slipping or abruptly shifting down into 1st gear, the car key jumping out of the lock, or the car trunk opening and closing, to the radio, telephone and dash display randomly refusing to work. They even posted a list of videoclips showing the “possessed car”, but the site got slashdotted immediately and isn’t accessible at the moment.

As usual, there are some funny comments. I liked this one:

jmoriarty wrote:

My god, it’s full of bugs!

Dave: Hello, CAR do you read me, CAR?

CAR: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.

Dave: Open the trunk, CAR.

CAR: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Dave: What’s the problem?

CAR: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Dave: What are you talking about, CAR?

CAR: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Dave: I don’t know what you’re talking about, CAR.

CAR: I know you and your wife were planning to trade me for a Volkswagen, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

Dave: Where the hell’d you get that idea, CAR?

CAR: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the garage against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.

There’s also a long comment about designing a microprocessorized toaster.

All Microsoft jokes aside, designing fail-safe embedded systems is very hard. I used to design ICU bedside monitors, and though we managed to get the user interface pretty much crashproof, power spikes and defibrillator transients would sometimes lock up everything in a way the watchdog electronics couldn’t recover from.

Perhaps BMW (and other car manufacturers) should hire Dean Kamen? So far I haven’t seen a single story about a Segway failure… and it uses multiple redundant CPUs, sensors and motors.

Two authorities on wireless networking – Adam Engst of Tidbits fame and Glenn Fleishman of 802.11b/Wi-Fi News have released The Wireless Network Starter Kit, which focuses on both Mac and Windows wireless.

Now they also have an Airport weblog up:

As Apple introduces its AirPort Extreme update to its wireless networking system, we thought it was time to launch an Apple AirPort-specific Weblog that would cover news related to using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless devices under the Mac OS operating system. AirPort is the center of the universe, but other wireless technologies spin around it.

Adam and Glenn are great writers and all-around nice guys. If you use any 802.11x or BlueTooth equipment, or are considering doing so, check this out.

Lawrence Lessig writes about his defeat in Eldred v. Ashcroft.

One of my favorite writers, Spider Robinson, wrote a short story on the subject a couple of years ago: “Melancholy Elephants”. You can read it for free, of course. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Spider’s article “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”is also worth reading…

A ZDNet UK journalist fell and broke his leg on a skiing slope in the Alps. He tried calling for help on his brand-new Orange SPV (running Microsoft SmartPhone 2002) and… nothing.

Since the SPV uses a typical Microsoft operating system… the SPV takes about a minute or so to boot up.

…The next time I looked at the phone it appeared to have turned itself off – so I tried switching it on again. When it eventually came to life I could not get it to dial – a closer examination revealed the legend ‘Radio off’ displayed very legibly on the SPV’s excellent screen. No amount of menu searching let me find anything that would turn the phone’s radio back on. At this point I remember making a few comments about the dubiousness of Bill Gates’ parentage. I eventually managed to flag down a passing skier who let me use her Nokia phone (which switched on immediately) to call for help.

Imagine jumping from an airplane and waiting while your Microsoft SmartChute boots up! 😆

Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka and Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing for the link.

When I was about 5, I figured out a way to use the wooden blocks my father had made for me to build marble tracks and houses.

The finished house would have a hole on the top; sometimes two smaller houses would be connected by short pieces of curtain rail. Putting a marble in the top hole would make it follow a complicated path inside the house and/or roll on to the other house. Finally, after much clicking, the marble would emerge from a door at ground level.

Today, in a magazine ad, I stumbled upon a modern equivalent of my old marble track: Cuboro. Here’s a picture of a finished setup. And a movie.

Marvelous but expensive: the basic 54-piece set costs about $140 in Germany, and there are about 10 extension sets with comparable prices. The cubes are handcrafted wood.

Update: Boing Boing picked up the link.

The inimitable James Lileks has unearthed shocking biographical data about… Goofy. Yes, that Goofy:

Did you know that Goofy has a last name?…

…In the fifties, Disney decided to give Goofy a family. He has an irritating red-haired son, and a human wife. It’s unnerving, really – here’s this dog-thing with long dog ears, a dog-snout with a round black nose, but he has human hands and big stupid human feet. And a human wife.

…His last name is “Geef.” Goofy Geef. If it ever comes up in a trivia contest, thank me.

Below that, he relates how he tried to help his brother-in-law to edit a movie on a PC, with software supposedly equivalent to Apple’s iMovie:

The movie-editing software was aimed at the consumer, much in the same way that North Korean artillery is aimed at Seoul…

…It’s like getting into a car that won’t let you cinch your seatbelt until you’ve entered a Driving Template (Highway? City? Mixture of the two? Rush hour? Rural two-lane blacktop?)

…And yes, yes, you could, etc. Point is, I’ve found that with Apple, the future is already installed.

…I’ll say this for his machine, though: if he ever wants to back up that 3.3 GB movie file on floppy disks, he’s all set.

Chuq von Rospach posted the quote-of-the-day:

Cell Phones: the only thing where guys get together, whip it out, and say “See! See! Mine’s smaller!” to each other.

😆

For the record, I don’t have a cellphone.