May Contain Nuts

So it was announced today that Spokane would be getting $35 million in funds from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (aka the stimulus package) to complete the southbound lanes of the North Spokane Corridor parallel to the existing operational northbound lanes which are currently servicing both directions of travel.

“Interestingly”, one of the people who wrote a letter to the US Department of Transportation secretary requesting that the NSC receive these funds was Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R), who represents Washington’s 5th district, which includes Spokane. Here’s what she had to say about the funds she was requesting in her letter (PDF):

As we look to the future, investment in our transportation infrastructure helps ensure successful economic growth, development, and global competiveness . Locally , the funding request will support the on going project which is expected to expand the economy through the creation of  750 new jobs and the addition of  $ 140 million in revenue. Regionally, Eastern Washington remains an essential hub facilitating the movement of goods and people throughout the Pacific Northwest, connecting major trade centers such as Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Edmonton, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. Residents and others traveling in the region depend on the highway system to transport agriculture commodities and business goods to other areas of our country.

Once completed, the corridor will connect trade routes through Eastern Washington reducing travel time by approximately two million hours each year, which computes to about $28 million in savings, and will reduce gasoline use by approximately 1.7 million gallons annually.

Now, here’s what Representative McMorris Rodgers said about the bill that created these funds when it was passed in February of last year:

Unfortunately, today’s vote represents more of the same, borrow and spend mentality. This bill increases our debt to $12 trillion. It ignores the will of the House and breaks promises to have 48 hours to review legislation. And the result is a big government, big spending piece of legislation that does nothing to create jobs.

Does this strike anyone else as incredibly hypocritical? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…

Incidentally, I’ve pointed this hypocrisy out to one of our local news stations in Spokane via their Twitter account. We’ll see if anything comes of it… meanwhile, I’m emailing Representative McMorris Rodgers to see what she has to say about this.

(Seriously, who names these products? Microsoft even lampooned themselves on their ludicrously overwrought names with their “Microsoft designs the iPod packaging” video, and yet they keep doing it!)

So, Windows Phone 7 Series. Phones. Yeah. I’ma just call it WP7 for short.

I have to give MS some serious kudos on this, actually. Despite the completely atrocious design-by-committee branding in the name of the product, they’ve taken a pretty damn bold step with WP7. Zero backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5 and earlier, strong emphasis on the retail consumer (to the point of tying media sync to the Zune software platform… will be interesting to see how this device plays out in corporate IT, given the holy hell that was raised about iTunes), minimal multitasking, and a complete and utter departure from the UI of not only Windows Mobile, but pretty much every other smartphone out there.

Conceptually, there is a great deal about WP7 to like, and I think Microsoft can easily position themselves to become a serious contender again in the mobile market that’s basically left them behind over the last 2.5 years (3.5 by the time Wp7 comes out, actually) since the release of the iPhone. Things like the live-updating, rich-content home screen tiles, the broad and deep integration with social networks like Facebook, and the concept- or task-oriented nature of the device’s software, rather than a strictly application-based usage model are things that are very interesting to me, and it’s good to see Microsoft intentionally differentiate itself from the rest of the market in such substantive ways. I think Windows Phone will live or die on this differentiation, rather than its branding as a Windows device (though as always, such branding is probably more beneficial than not).

I’m more ambivalent about the actual execution of the concepts put forth in the WP7 user experience though. The entire platform is built on the Zune HD interface model, and there’s no possibility of carriers overriding this interface as there was in the past with Windows Mobile (something I’m sure HTC is less than 100% pleased about), so I really, really hope you like the way the Zune HD behaves. I, personally, don’t.

Maybe it’s because I get a little OCD with my digital interfaces (having an uneven number of apps on one screen of my iPod is enough to annoy me until I “fix it”, even at the expense of my application grouping methodology… and don’t even get me started on the elaborate and complex maze of folders I use on the Mac to store everything), but the Zune HD’s UI just strikes me as lazily executed because of all the overflowing text and wasted space in many of the screens. I know large, thin, sans-serif type and bold, flat colors are “in vogue” right now, and they do make the device look very stylish, but I don’t think “hip” and “useful” necessarily converge all that often (I mean, have you seen Lady Gaga’s wardrobe?), and I kind of worry that MS is painting themselves into a corner with this UI being so closely tied to the branding of the platform. Chucker argued back at me that Apple’s Aqua interface has made considerable evolutions since its introduction in 2001 2000 with super-glossy buttons and translucent pinstripes, and I agree that Apple has done a very good job with keeping their OS’s interface fairly fresh and in-line with current trends. However, I think the changes Apple has made to Aqua in the past decade are largely superficial: tweaking gradients and transparencies more than anything else. At its core, Aqua is still very much the same as it was 10 years ago in terms of its appearance and behavior. The Zune UI, I think, faces a larger uphill battle against trendiness because so much of its UI is fundamentally not just trendy-looking, but trendy-feeling (again, overflowing text, large monochromatic iconography, whizzy spinny animations). Revamping that UI to keep up with the times without seriously altering the behavioral characteristics of the UI on a fairly fundamental level will probably be much more difficult for Microsoft than it has been for Apple, though I do wish them the best of luck.

My other gripe is related to the first, and it’s got to do with the design of the “hub” applications. I’m not personally a huge fan of the broad two-dimensional navigation in apps like Windows Media Center, because half the time a number of my options are invisible and inaccessible. Similarly, with the Zune UI, it can be hard to tell what all can be done in an application hub without first exploring it fully, which can take some time. This secretive UI concept also requires the user to maintain a much larger conceptual map of the application, as well as the navigational requirements needed to reach various far-flung regions, which strikes me as far more complex than the model which Apple has adopted for the iPhone. It’s bound to be a great interface for chic geeks, because Microsoft is pretty good at building interfaces that geeks and tech enthusiasts feel very comfortable with. I just wonder if the breadth of the navigational capabilities (and requirements) for some of the task hubs in WP7 will be off-putting to people who are less comfortable with digital devices.

As a furtherance to this point, I think Microsoft has misunderstood the utility of animation in a user interface. The WP7 animations are very slick, very intricate, and very dimensional, but they do very little to aid the user in visually navigating through the device’s software. Tapping a tile on the home screen causes the tile to angle away from your finger (which is a nice touch, assuming it actually responds contextually to where you’re pushing on it), but then everything spins off-screen and new content whizzes in seemingly from nowhere. There’s no real “physical” connection between these two layers of the interface the way there is when navigating through the iPhone. Tapping an application icon causes the program to “float up” to the surface, with the home screen UI proceeding out of the field of view. Movement within the application itself is generally very physical, both vertically (with inertial scrolling) and horizontally (with sliding displays). Exiting an application causes it to recede into the background, and the home screen UI falls back into place. These animations are very basic compared to those in WP7, but they also give the device a more physical and connected feel, whereas the WP7 animations just seem to be there because “everybody likes animation in their UI these days”.

I realize I’m doing a lot of complaining about a device which I said at the beginning of this post was a very good idea. The reason is, I think that it is a very good idea, just that the execution of that idea doesn’t fit my personal tastes.

I would love to see some of the more dynamic capabilities of WP7 come to the iPhone, and I think Apple should focus more on providing platforms for developers to build into, rather than just an operating system to build on top of. For example, the Photos application on the iPhone is very basic, and if you want to get photos from Facebook, Flickr, or MobileMe, you have to go into different applications to access them. Even the Apple TV does this better, with a Photos “category” where you can move between services with comparative ease. Better than even that model, though, is WP7’s, where photos just show up from wherever they’re posted, all collected in one place.

Similarly, the People hub is another great idea, which ideally third parties can build into to expand its functionality without adding full-blown applications to the system. Consolidating Contacts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. into one place is a really cool concept. I don’t think it would work quite as well for geeky folks who have multiple Twitter accounts (unless the UI got really creative and potentially overly-complex), but for the average Joe who may have only just figured out what Twitter even is, it’s a very slick implementation.

I also like the ability to pin pretty much anything to the home screen, from hubs to applications to individual items in a hub (like a person or an album). It gives the home screen much more utility for people than a collection of icons with numeric badges on them.

I think a lot of the initial development for WP7 is going to be oriented towards expanding the functionality of these hubs through plugin-style programs, rather than strictly fully-fledged application-based development. Given that the platform will also run whatever new applications developers create, it will be interesting to see how these two branches of functionality compliment or conflict with each other going forward. I suspect WP7 apps will be held to an even higher standard than iPhone apps because of the increased capacity for integration with the various content hubs, as well as the obviously unique and distinctive Zune-like UI. I just hope Windows Mobile developers are up to the considerable challenge after the past decade-plus reign of Windows Mobile’s often atrociously-designed and now-archaic-looking UI.

I’d also be interested in seeing what exactly Microsoft decides to do with the Zune from here out. Given that the Zune and WP7 share a pretty obvious commonality in their UI department, I wonder if they’re both running the same basic OS, with considerable efforts being made to expand its capabilities for the phone. If that’s the case, I wonder if Microsoft will attempt to do with the Zune HD what Apple has done with the iPod Touch: create a gateway product with a lower barrier-to-entry that people can use and get used to without the risk or expense of a phone contract or data plan. If they do, it will definitely be worth keeping an eye on, because Microsoft always plays to win, and while their efforts thus far in the MP3 player market have been pretty dismal at gaining any traction, coupling the Zune HD with a completely overhauled Windows Mobile Phone 7 to create a new Microsoft-controlled mobile computing platform could start driving greater adoption of both devices.

One last thing that wasn’t discussed at the reveal, is whether updates for the OS will be pushed to all users, either free or for a minor fee. This is something that the iPhone platform does pretty consistently better than anyone else, so hopefully Microsoft is learning a lesson from Apple and pressuring carriers and handset makers to allow OS upgrades without making people buy a new phone or resort to tech-nerd solutions like custom boot ROMs.

It will definitely be interesting to see where this goes from here. Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem Microsoft has now is that they’ve tipped their hand a full 8-10 months before their first product will hit store shelves, which gives the competition (especially the whenever-we-feel-like-updating-it Android platform) a considerable head start on getting their copy machines running.

Update: Chucker tells me I’m wrong about the intro date for Aqua being 2001. While I was going off of OS X’s general availability, it was demoed much earlier.

(Besides “OMFG Buy a Server Farm!!!”)

I’m sure these will probably end up having to wait for the open-sourcing to actually happen, but I’d like to toss them out for consideration now just the same. Just a couple of “quick” tweaks to the game that would make doing certain things so much easier. (and by “quick”, I mean relatively speaking… I know neither of these things would exactly be simple to do)

1) Add a preference setting to the KI to allow or disallow people to find your KI# via search, and build a KI# repository on the MO:UL website where players can search for others by avatar name and get their KI number (more advanced integration of avatar/account data into the website like being able to add a found KI# as a friend from the web would be awesome as well, but baby steps, folks…). No more lengthy forum threads to search through, and no more incomplete/inaccurate/competing fan-built KI listings. An in-game solution would be even better, but again, baby steps.

2) Put some sort of bot character or device into the game in a relatively public space which can serve as a Marker Missions Exchange. Players can send their missions to this bot/device, from whence they can be downloaded by others (something low-tech but comparatively easy to implement, like a “/requestmission <mission name>” chat command, would work until things are open-sourced and we can get a real GUI for this process).

So Microsoft announced yet another critical IE security vulnerability (shocker, I know…) that enables an attacker to access and view your computer’s entire filesystem. While the vulnerability is mitigated by IE’s Protected Mode in Vista and Win7, 66% of the Internet is still using Windows XP, and 20% of those people are still running IE6. That’s a huge attack surface.

While this once again provides an excellent argument against tying your HTML rendering engine so deeply into the operating system that such attacks are even possible in the first place, Microsoft’s proposed workaround illustrates an even WORSE idea (from the Ars piece):

… enable Internet Explorer Network Protocol Lockdown for Windows XP. It requires editing the Windows registry, but thankfully Microsoft has created a “Fix it for me” for this workaround, available at KB 980088. Just click the “Fix this problem” link and you’re good to go. The Fix It automates Network Protocol Lockdown and can be run on individual systems and deployed by enterprises through their automated systems.

Really, you’re going to let an application with open access to the Internet modify the registry because a very possibly untrusted web page told it to?! What the hell, MS?!

Also, anyone who says “well if the link triggers a security warning that’s okay then” is an idiot. The users who would most benefit from this automated resolution method are the ones least likely to either understand or care about the security implications of such an action, and because of Windows’ tedious tendency to ask the user to approve damn near everything they do, those users are going to be trained to click “OK” just to make the dialog go away. It boggles my mind that such low-level OS-impacting capabilities are exposed to such completely un-trustable resources like remote web content.

It seems like IE6 (and Windows XP in general) is becoming an ever-increasing risk to individual and corporate data security on an almost weekly basis now. I wonder how much longer it will take companies to realize that the cost of overhauling their IE6-only internal web applications is far cheaper than the cost of losing enormous piles of sensitive or even classified information to a hacker in China…

I’ve been ruminating a lot on the approach that various companies, like Microsoft and Apple, have taken to the mobile computing space, and have a few random thoughts that are way too long for Twitter, but not exactly coherent enough to be considered an article or anything, since I don’t really have an ultimate point here. Anyway, I’ll just ramble endlessly as usual and see if anyone cares .

Microsoft’s approach has been very similar to their hugely successful approach to the desktop (and laptop) computer market: provide a powerful, extensible operating system that can run on damn near anything, and set few or no minimum requirements for hardware. This gives hardware partners an enormous amount of flexibility in how they design their phones and other devices, which they love, and it gives the market considerable differentiation between products, which both consumers and manufacturers love.

On the desktop, this approach’s greatest strength is a developer’s ability to write an application and be assured that it will, generally speaking, work everywhere (or at least, on every machine that meets the minimum requirements). In the mobile space, this is perhaps its greatest weakness instead. Because phone manufacturers are very closeted when it comes to hardware specifications, it’s much more difficult to tell if you’ll be able to run a given application. The smaller display space and variable dimensions of the screen make it difficult for developers to build truly effective and intuitive interfaces for their applications, because unlike the desktop’s relatively spacious screen real estate, a phone has very little, and building to the wrong display size can make your app feel either over-crowded on smaller screens or vacant and featureless on larger ones.

Further frustrating Microsoft’s approach has been the reluctance from carriers and/or hardware manufacturers to allow users to upgrade the OS when new releases become available (I’m also aware of tech-oriented work-arounds to this problem, but the average user isn’t going to want to futz with custom boot ROMs). Often the only way to get the new OS is to buy a new phone, and this often comes with a re-extension of the carrier’s contract, which is an unpalatable option for many people. This makes it much more difficult to ensure that users are on a new version of your OS, so developers are hesitant to start using any new features that these new OS releases make available to them. As a result, those users who do manage to upgrade or get a new device see very little difference in the user experience, and this further demotivates people from getting new devices.

Google’s Andriod platform seems to be succumbing to the same pitfall, in that there are no clear rules to manufactureres for implementation or hardware usage, the application market is already starting to fragment because not every app will run on every device, and once again carriers and/or hardware manufacturers are reluctant to offer the latest version of the OS to existing customers. It will be interesting to see if Google’s Nexus One phone can serve as a good example to other manufacturers on how to build a first-class Andriod device, and if the platform can resist or overcome the fragmentation and poor application device compatibility issues that Windows Mobile has presently.

By contrast, Apple’s approach, while also very similar to their own desktop strategy, has been far more effective in gaining market share and mind share. Apple treats their desktop line-up like a consumer electronics line-up rather than an a-la carte buffet as most computer manufacturers do. As a result, they have easy-to-understand delineations between each product category, and it’s fairly easy to chart their machines in a straight line from least to most capable all the way up the price range. While this does make buying a new Mac easier for first-time buyers than staring at the (admittedly improved of late) sea of complementary options on a site like Dell’s, the lack of cheap, low-end computing devices does limit the reach of this strategy for many consumers.

Apple extended this approach into the mobile space with the iPhone, creating a single, simple product line-up of identical devices differentiated only by storage capacity, and varying in price along a single axis. The hardware line-up has fragmented slightly with the latest iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch devices because of the improved graphics performance, but generally speaking, the target market for an application built on the iPhone OS is “every iPhone OS device ever sold”. This makes things much easier for developers, because they don’t have to worry about market fragmentation and reduced sales as a result. It also makes things much simpler for consumers, because they can buy applications with considerably more confidence, and know that their device will be able to run them. The fact that the iPhone platform provides a built-in place for users to look for 3rd-party applications also simplifies the purchasing process and undoubtedly increases sales, which may explain why Apple’s app store model is being replicated on every other platform under the sun.

A lot of what this boils down to, I think, is the simple fact that people want different things from a mobile device than they do from a desktop or desktop-class computer. With the iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad, Apple seems to understand this difference in usage. On the other hand, Microsoft and – to a much lesser extent – Google seem to be pressing onward with their “desktop in your pocket” usage model, which fits awkwardly into such small devices and creates considerable usability issues. A phone is – first and foremost – a phone, not something to write Word documents or build 3D models with. By and large it’s something that people use incidentally for short periods of time, as opposed to the desktop’s “sit down and stay a while” usage model. The iPhone OS seems much more suited to this sort of interaction than Windows Mobile, though with WM finally getting support for capacitive touch-screens, Microsoft is at least trying to move to a more incidental use-friendly input model.

I will be interested to see whether Windows Mobile 7 turns the ship around and starts pushing into more user-friendly waters, but I think that despite the comparatively paltry collection of offerings in Apple’s mobile product line-up, they are better served by their sales approach when it comes to the average user who just wants something with which they can make phone calls, check the weather, and play a game of checkers. Choice is good (as is competition, which is why I’d rather see MS get their mobile OS into the current millennium than tell them to quit while they’re still [slightly] ahead), but sometimes giving people choices they don’t need to make within a platform just creates problems.

(As an aside, I think it’s interesting that it wasn’t until the iPhone SDK was released that gaming on mobile phones really became a big, profitable deal… Nokia tried entering that market at least twice but their devices never seemed to get any traction, and I could probably count on one hand the number of games that exist on Windows Mobile.)

I think it’s time to turn to the interwebz for help with this one… I’m looking for a simple, snappy TV listings app for the iPhone. I’ve tried several, and while they tended to start out decent, they’ve all suffered from bloat and feature creep in successive releases.

I’ve tried i.TV, the comcast listings app, and What’s On. i.TV ultimately got so bloated and unstable on my iPod that I just gave up on it. Comcast’s app had annoying full-screen ads that showed up on every launch of the app, and had a generally lackluster interface IMO. What’s On was good for a while, but it’s starting to get bloated now too, and is also starting to use more and more ads throughout the UI, including the annoying full-screen ads on launch.

Does anyone have suggestions? I’d even be willing to shell out a couple of bucks for an ad-free app, so paid apps are by no means off the table here.

So it’s been more than a day since Apple’s big announcement, and I thought I’d weigh in on it with my own thoughts, for whatever they may be worth.

First off, I’m not sure if this will be the game changer Apple thinks it will be. I can see potential in it, but I don’t think it will change the computing landscape outside of the portable realm… The desktop and even the pro laptop have too many things that they’re better at than what can be accomplished on a mobile device, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I also don’t see this replacing PMPs and smartphones entirely, since it’s just too big to be practical in those terms.

That said, I can see what sort of market Apple is targeting with this device, and it’s not the computer whiz population. Those of us willing to put up with poor performance and shoddy build quality in exchange for a mini laptop that can run a browser and an email client at the same time, and theoretically run the same applications as a desktop machine, are probably going to be ill-served by the iPad, and that’s fine. I think there is still plenty of space in the market for things like the Eee PC and the MSI Wind for those who want a familiar desktop operating system and the capabilities that go along with it. However, the poor market performance of tablet devices thus far seems to indicate that for the average consumer, the existing products are not the sort of experience they’re looking for.

I think Apple’s take on the mobile space has been vert refreshing compared to the offerings from Redmond. Microsoft wants to put Windows on everything, even when its user interface and complexity get in the way of accomplishing everyday tasks. Apple on the other hand has built an entirely new interface for their mobile platform from the ground up, with the explicit goal of making it user-friendly, touch-oriented (rather than simply touch-capable), and intensely intuitive to use. The key factor to their success with this platform, I think, is how spatially-oriented it is. The interface behaves like a physical object and responds naturally and intuitively to user input. It also provides considerable visual feedback when changing screens, so users have an easy time understanding how they got where they are, and how to get back to where they were. Apple has also done a great job of building an entire interaction system on 3 basic gestures: tap, swipe, and pinch. Without expanding their gesture library, Apple has built much more advanced functionality into the iPad OS, which is both incredible and praise-worthy. It would be easier to create all manner of new gestures for more complex tasks, but Apple has resisted this impulse and built on a simple interface language that their users are already familiar with.

Apple seems poised to capitalize on the ultra-portable tablet computing market by taking what they learned from the iPhone and scaling it up, rather than trying to pare down Mac OS X to fit in the confines of a tablet space. Again, this is a clearly different strategy from that of the rest of the industry, which seems intent on trying to put the familiar Windows desktop on even the lowliest and least-capable portable devices possible. I think Apple has the right idea, though. Desktop operating systems are needlessly complicated for everyday one-off tasks like checking email or browsing the web. The iPhone OS, on the other hand, is built to be always-on, highly responsive, and easy to directly manipulate with your fingers. For a device intended to be used for quick, light computing, that sort of OS makes much more sense than Mac OS X or Windows.

I’ve seen a lot of people decry the iPad as a giant iPod Touch, and while this is true on it’s face, it ignores the depth and richness of the iPhone OS app space, and what additional capabilities a large-format display like the iPad’s can afford developers in the future. In this way, the iPad isn’t really aiming to solve any specific problem; instead, it’s a vessel into which people can put their own problems to be solved.

I’ve also seen a lot of complaints about the lack of multitasking on the iPad, and to a certain extent, I can agree with this as being something that Apple will eventually need to address as the platform matures, especially on the larger-screen devices. Being able to run apps in the background like Pandora or Skype would be a huge boon to the device’s capabilities, and I think it will get here eventually. For now, though, Apple is focusing on making the OS do one thing at a time very, very well, and maturing the OS before wildly expanding what can be done via background processes. In terms of productivity though, a singletasking OS like the iPhone’s isn’t that much farther behind an underpowered multitasking OS on smaller netbook devices. iPhone apps remember their state far better than desktop apps, and in general they launch much more quickly than their desktop brethren too, so little time is lost swapping between apps.

People have also, bizarrely, been lampooning Apple’s decision to develop a version of iWork for the iPad. I think it’s a wonderful idea, and I think charging $10 per app is beyond reasonable considering how much power there is in the apps, and that the desktop suite sells for $80. I can’t help but wonder what Microsoft would charge for an Office suite on this device… (incidentally, I’d love to see Office on the iPad; competition is good!). I think folks who wanted to see iWork on the iPhone are reaching; it’s just not something that translates down to a screen of that size without becoming practically useless. The iPad screen, however, is much larger and the interface far more capable than the iPhone’s, and I think a productivity suite makes sense on such a device for light work that can be transferred to and completed on a primary work machine.

I want to close by presenting a theoretical use case for the iPad, since so many people seem utterly perplexed by who could possibly use it. I will be taking a few liberties by assuming the iPad-specific development of a few apps that already exist on the iPhone, and treating the iBookstore as a mature product, but I hope you’ll agree that none of the assumptions I make are out of the realm of possibility.

Assume, if you will, that I’m a college student with an iMac at home. I also have a 16GB iPad that I got for an educational discount at $479, and have been able to buy most of my textbooks on the iBookstore for a fair amount less than it would have cost at the college bookstore. I have a reasonably sizeable iTunes library, a handful of games, the iPad-optimized version of Notebooks from the App Store for taking notes in class, and the iPad and desktop versions of the iWork suite. While other students are lugging around 10 to 20 pounds of textbooks, an iPod, and a notebook full of paper (and possibly a laptop as well), I can grab my iPad and take off to class with nothing else. After class, I can go to the library to research a paper, taking notes and working on a preliminary outline in Pages while roaming the aisles. On my way home, I plug my iPad into my FM transmitter and listen to some tunes while I drive. Once I’m home, I sync my iPad and keep working on my paper on my iMac. The next morning, I sync it back to the iPad along with a Keynote presentation that’s due today and head back to class. To present, I just plug my iPad into the projector with the docking cable and get started immediately. Between classes, I can hop on the college wifi network to browse the web, or play a quick game of Star Defense while I wait for the teacher to arrive. For the sake of brevity, I will leave out the scene where I get mugged for my iPad in the parking garage.

I think this device will be most popular in the educational market, especially higher education, but its usefulness as a teaching and learning aid can be seen at almost every grade level. If Apple scores big anywhere, it will probably be there, especially with their aggressive pricing and educational discounts.

The iPad may essentially be a giant iPod Touch, but there is a ton of potential in such a device for people who want an appliance-like computer, not a car-like one. Apple is going after the 10,000-miles-without-an-oil-change “it should work like my microwave” crowd with this, not the gearhead crowd that replaces their car’s computer ROM or changes their own transmission fluid, and I know for a fact that there are more of the former than the latter in the consumer marketplace.

I have some more thoughts to expound upon, but it’s late and this post is already beyond long enough as it is.

So as those following me on Twitter already know, I went to see Avatar yesterday. Overall I was very impressed, and while I can see the similarities, I think the “Avatar = Pocahantas” meme is reaching a bit. You could similarly argue that The Lion King = Hamlet; despite their common theme, both films have unique plots, characters, and details. I also get the criticism of it as an environmentalist film, because it is yet another “seriously, live responsibly and respect native peoples” film but really, you could do much worse with the preachiness (think Fern Gully). Considering that you can make an attack on pretty much any film’s message for being political or offensive or whatnot (like Wall-E’s “jesus people, stop throwing away so much shit and acting like fat-ass slobs” message), I think protesting Avatar on those grounds is kind of silly. After all, science fiction is largely allegorical in nature, and in growing up as a genre it’s also tackling much more complex themes like war, terrorism, leadership, and environmental stewardship.

Anyway, on to the main point of this ramble.

I’ve spent the better part of an hour today trying to work out why exactly Pandora’s atmosphere is so deadly to humans. I first wondered what the composition of the atmosphere was like, and whether it could differ substantially from Earth’s considering that it seems to have a similar ambient temperature, pressure, green plant-life (and thus chlorophyll, photosynthesis, and oxygen), and isn’t immediately fatal except when inhaled (since walking around in a t-shirt is fine). It also looks similar to Earth’s (in that it’s blue during the day and shows no additional signs of coloration), and chemical reactions like fire are similar to those on Earth as well in terms of color and behavior.

Based on this information, I rejected the notion that the air had to be composed of substantially different compounds and instead went looking for something that could occur naturally in relatively small quantities, not change the appearance or behavior of the atmosphere, and cause serious respiratory problems in human beings without being damaging to the rest of the body.

My first thought, after Googling for “deadly gases” (I am so going on a terrorist watch list one of these days) was that it could be phosgene, since the Wikipedia description only referenced respiratory symptoms, Other websites such as the CDC, though, indicate that it can also cause burns and legions on the skin, in addition to blurry vision. Phosgene could be produced in significant quantities on Pandora by combining a chloride byproduct of some biological process with the naturally abundant oxygen and bombarding it with UV light, which would be plentiful in such close proximity to a gas giant planet’s radiation belts (and the gas giant itself seems to be nearer to Earth’s orbit than Jupiter or Saturn’s, increasing the amount of solar UV radiation as well). Despite the plausibility of this process, the additional physical side effects of phosgene make it seem like an unlikely candidate, as human characters are often seen walking around without protective clothing on, just breathing masks.

Other possibilities include relatively more common gases such as sulfur dioxide, which can cause respiratory problems in humans at concentrations as low as 8 ppm. Given the likelihood of tidal stresses on Pandora due to its parent planet’s gravitational influence, it’s possible that a chain of active volcanoes exist somewhere on the moon which outgas significant quantities of SO2. I’m not sure how likely this is as a scenario, given that SO2 is water-soluble and produces acid rain, and the choking smell of sulfur isn’t mentioned at any time in the film by either the humans, the human Na’vi avatars, or the Na’vi themselves, but it’s another possibility.

Also, in addition to the atmosphere question, one of the friends I saw the film with brought up another interesting biology point. Terrestrial creatures such as mammals and lizards generally as a rule have 5 appendages (2 arms, 2 legs, and a tail, or 4 legs and a tail) and a head. While humans don’t have tails due to evolutionary changes, we do still at least have a vestigial tailbone. On Pandora, lizards and mammals seem to have, as a rule, 7 appendages (4 arms, 2 legs, and a tail, or 6 legs and a tail), yet the Na’vi have the more familiar (to us) count of 5. I’m not sure why evolution would have given rise to the kind of 6-legged creatures we saw in the movie to begin with (I’m willing to just go with that), but it seems odd that the Na’vi would have evolved away from such a common and seemingly important appendage as an extra set of arms the way humans have grown out of their tails. I’m not saying it’s impossible, it just seems unlikely, especially since even the relatively closely-related lemur things have 4 arms and 2 legs.

I could be shooting blindly here, since trying to predict natural evolution is always going to be a shot in the dark, but it’s something that struck me as somewhat odd and perplexing, like someone at Weta decided the alien fauna needed to look more alien-ish, and stuck an extra set of limbs on without focusing on the implications it would have for the Na’vi, evolutionarily speaking. However, given how well the entire biosphere seems to work together in the film (implying a considerable amount of thought went into it), I somehow doubt that such a simplistic decision could have passed muster during the design process. It could also just be a case of there being a directorial commandment that the Na’vi only have 5 limbs instead of 7 to make them more relatable, in which case I give a big wet raspberry to James Cameron for that decision.

So yeah, I’m a HUGE nerd. Anyone have any other insights for me to mull over on these or other topics?

From an Ars Technica piece that has the recording industry comparing music piracy to global warming (I wish I were joking):

… the music business has now tried its hand at being “innovative” and “customer focused.” It disaggregated albums, it allowed music to go up on everything from Amazon to iTunes to Spotify to Last.fm. It sued users, it launched education campaigns.

Because suing users is totally innovative and customer-focused… what planet are these people from?! (Also, I’m surprised that none of the commenters on the Ars piece have picked up on this little nugget of stupid.)

The RIAA, the MPAA, and the rest of the audio/visual media industry (TV studios, film companies, etc.) need to get it into their heads that the world today is not the same as it was in 1990. 20 years ago, it was perhaps maybe somehow acceptable (or at least, possible) to release a movie or TV show in Australia 6-12 months later than in the United States without negatively impacting the product’s performance, because the ability to openly connect Australia to the US was largely limited to phones, post, airplanes, and boats. Now, with the internet and high-speed connections to it, films can be read about, reviewed, and even posted online (albeit illegally) for advance consumption by people who haven’t been deemed worthy enough to get the product locally. The industries’ own refusal to accept that the world is more connected, and that staggering releases internationally is likely having a huge impact on their revenue in those countries because rather than wait for the studio to get around to releasing content in their area, people will go and get it wherever it’s available, and in most cases, it’s illegally obtained on the internet in a matter of hours (or even minutes, if you’re in a country that actually values its communications infrastructure, unlike the US).

The music industry can hardly be said to be behaving in an innovative manner by any stretch of the imagination. They’re reacting defensively to the encroachment of a new content distribution platform and its resulting global connectivity, doing only the bare minimum of what is necessary to appease the demands of their customers. It’s hardly surprising that their revenues and profits have shrunk in the past 10 years. When given the choice between buying a CD for $18.99 at Barnes & Noble and buying the same album on iTunes for $9.99, or even just buying the tracks I really want for 99¢ (which may be only one or two songs), I’m going to go with the cheaper option, especially now that music from the iTunes store is DRM free.

Further, the industry seems to be doing a pretty good job of colluding with one another to set prices at different levels for different online distributors (iTunes: 99¢/song, Amazon MP3: 79¢/song. Um, what?) in an attempt to try and force the market into the shape it prefers, rather than going where their customers are and catering to them there. They also fought with every fiber of their being against internet radio stations like Pandora by trying to bury them with drastically more expensive licensing fees than what they require of broadcast radio. These are hardly innovative behaviors, unless you define “innovative” as “acting like an asshole”…

Similarly, the TV and film industries are also failing to get out ahead of the needs of their customers, instead only choosing to do the least amount possible to not lose a portion of their revenue stream (which is selling viewers to advertisers). Efforts like Hulu are interesting, but ultimately disappointing, because while the Hulu team seems to understand the importance of their service to viewers, industry execs who are still fearful of time-shifted content distribution are stifling its ability to really flourish in a way that would please the people who are most willing to use the service and thus generate additional revenue for the industry.

Case in point: both the Hulu website and the Hulu Desktop application prohibit users from interacting with the service or installing the software on a device that is connected to your television, and Hulu has gone out of their way, at the request of the industry, to block applications like Boxee from accessing the service. The problem is, most people don’t want to watch time-shifted television on their computer. They want to watch it on their television, where they have a big screen, a really nice sound system, and a comfortable couch to sit on. Despite the sometimes horrific performance of Hulu’s Flash player in the Boxee builds for the Apple TV, I watched a considerable amount of content on Hulu, and sat patiently and understandingly through the 2-3 minutes of ads inserted into each show (though like many of the ads on TV, I ignored them as much as possible because they’re annoying). Since they blocked Boxee, I’ve watched two things on Hulu: an episode of Family Guy, and the Cosmos series from PBS. By trying to artificially restrict their content to specific platforms, the industry has lost revenue from ads it would have gained by showing them to me. Since often I watch time-shifted content because I missed watching it on the air, they’re also already not getting ad revenue from me looking at the TV when their show is on, so it’s a double loss on their part.

I also continue to be annoyed at the fact that I can’t rent a movie through iTunes on the day and date of the DVD release. I can go to Blockbuster, sure, but that’s often more expensive, and even has additional costs associated with it (gas, time, uncertainty about whether the movie is even available [which results in wasted gas and time], dealing with people [you'd be surprised how much this factors into my decision-making sometimes...], etc.). Warner Brothers has even successfully convinced Netflix not to allow the rental of WB films through their mail-order service for a month after the DVD release, so as to not negatively impact retail sales. That’s bullshit, plain and simple.

As an example, I’ve seen @ddfreyne post several times on Twitter about Moon, and decided that I should probably look into watching it since it sounded interesting, and the trailer piqued my interest. Lo and behold, it came out on DVD recently and is even available for purchase in iTunes for $14.99. However, not knowing if I’ll actually like the movie, dropping $14.99 on it seems like a bit of an outlay for me. I’d much rather rent it for $3.99 (or hey, $4.99 in HD! You hear me movie industry?) and see if it’s something I like, and then spend $14.99 on it (and yes, ultimately, I’ve spent more on it if I end up liking it, but I’ve saved money if I don’t). But I can’t rent the movie until some time in February (I forget when), and knowing me, I’ll have forgotten about it by then, which means the movie industry gets nothing from me.

The internet is a serious came-changer, and as it matures, it continues to impact industries in ways that seemed impossible (or at least, unlikely to happen outside of Star Trek) just a few years before. Music, TV, film, and even print media are all struggling to compete with each other and themselves in this space, but are hampered by obligations to older content distribution channels and an apparent desire to legislate the future away rather than embrace it. The media landscape is evolving at an astonishing pace these days, and the major stakeholders are doing a pretty poor job of keeping up. Maybe they’ll catch on, or maybe not. All I know for sure is that the one thing that isn’t going to work is shouting at the ocean as the time comes in. Standing still is irresponsible simply from a business standpoint, and it amazes me that the shareholders of these companies aren’t boggling at how ineptly their interests are being handled by those in charge as we march (or, in the media’s case, are dragged kicking and screaming) into the future.

The thought has recently occurred to me that there seems to be a rather considerable logical disconnect in the thought processes of deniers of global climate change (i.e. global warming), especially the anthropogenic (“man-made”) variety.

It has long been a pretty mainstream idea that the easiest way to terraform a planet like Mars into one which is habitable by humans is to set up a bunch of carbon-belching factories all across the planet’s surface and run them 24/7 for a couple of centuries to increase the density of the atmosphere and trap more solar radiation, warming the planet in the process.

So why is the idea that doing the same thing on Earth for over 400 years will cause a similar effect so unfathomably controversial? Science and reality rarely deal in special cases. If dumping mountains of CO2 into the atmosphere of Mars would make it habitable by warming the planet and increasing the density of the atmosphere, doing the same thing on a planet like Earth would logically cause the already habitable temperature to increase, perhaps to a point where the planet is no longer habitable.

People are constantly arguing that the Earth is too massive and too self-correcting to be affected by anything that we comparatively tiny human beings are doing. However, these same people seem to have no issues with the thought that mankind could terraform other worlds equally as massive as Earth by doing to them exactly what we are already doing here. Either terraforming a planet is impossible for mankind, or our ability to impact the environment of our home planet is far more substantial than people seem to commonly accept. We can’t have it both ways.

There are over 6 billion people on this planet. We are producing 29 billion of tons of carbon dioxide exhaust every year… even considering that the Earth’s atmosphere has a total mass of over 5 quadrillion tons, and that plant life on the planet can parse at least a portion of the CO2 we dump into the air back into oxygen, over the 400 years since the Renaissance and the ensuing industrial revolution, that’s a lot of CO2 to be dumping into a finite amount of space. It’s a proven scientific fact (the Mythbusters even tested it!) that CO2 traps radiant heat in a given space, and we only have to look next door at Venus to see just how far from habitable a runaway CO2 greenhouse effect can push a planet’s environment (for those unaware, Venus’s atmospheric pressure is 90 times greater than Earth’s, and the surface temperature is over 900ºF). Realistically, Venus is an extreme example, but the extreme outcome is nowhere near what it would take to turn the Earth into a lifeless cinder as well.

People argue against the science of global climate change because 20 years ago there was a concern among scientists that the planet might be cooling off. Scientifically, there was a good reason to suspect this may happen: on a global scale, destroying things like forests to build roads, cities, and fields creates a brighter overall surface reflectivity for the Earth. More reflectivity means less light is absorbed by the planet as radiant heat, and thus the planet would cool. However, it just so happens that the result of burning millions of years worth of trapped carbon, releasing it as CO2, over the course of only a few centuries has greatly offset any change in reflectivity, creating a larger greenhouse effect and ultimately warming the planet at a considerably faster rate than is scientifically considered to be “normal” for this planet, based on the analysis of tens of thousands of years worth of geological data.

Say what you will about science sometimes being wrong, but science, like nature, is self-correcting; if evidence changes, so does the scientific consensus. If it weren’t for the self-corrective nature of science and its encouragement of free and open inquiry, we would never have landed on the Moon, or flown space probes to Jupiter and Saturn, or defeated countless ravaging diseases, or even have developed the technology with which I am writing this perhaps somewhat irksome treatise. Science, like life, must be taken as a whole, and as a whole science is right (or at least on the right track) far more often than it is wrong. You can’t pick and choose which scientific facts or evidence you want to adhere to, and ignore what doesn’t fit your preconceived worldview. Well, I guess you can, but you probably won’t get very far in the real world, which really doesn’t give a damn about your preconceived worldview. The Earth doesn’t stop being 4.6 billion years old just because you say it’s not, any more than saying that it’s flat, or at the center of the solar system, or the center of the universe make such things true (which they demonstrably aren’t).