May 2010
1 post
IPad vs. Kindle as a reading device
After several weeks with the iPad, I’ve come to the conclusion that while the iPad certainly provides the perception of a better user experience for sustained reading, it is in fact much less useful for this purpose than the Kindle.
The iPad is by design an enormously distracting device. Its extreme responsiveness leads me to constantly switch context between any of a dozen different...
April 2010
1 post
Working with the iPad
Over the last several days, I’ve been working to determine if the iPad could be an effective on-the-road replacement for my notebook. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
I wanted the iPad to be a Kindle replacement that was easier to use and allowed me to use my personal research library of six thousand PDFs and eBooks without hassle. In this, the iPad has largely delivered, through...
February 2010
1 post
“Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best...”
– Samuel Johnson, Letter to Francesco Sastres, 1784-08-21
July 2009
2 posts
Twenty years later
July 20th, 1989. For several years now, I’ve been involved with a variety of contract research projects with the Mission Planning and Analysis Division at NASA JSC. This has given me the opportunity to actually meet a lot of the old timers at NASA who, back in the day, were the guys behind the guys in the trenches in Mission Control. I’ve met Jack Garman, who made the call to ignore...
Memories of the landing
July 20th, 1969. I have been avidly following the space program since for as long as I can remember. Cutting out every article in Time and Life, building a four-foot high Revelle model of the Saturn V, showing friends the mechanics of rendevous and docking with the plastic models, watching each successive mission for hours and hours on the black and white RCA television in our home.
Living in...
June 2009
2 posts
May 2009
1 post
April 2009
1 post
March 2009
1 post
February 2009
8 posts
Towards glorious future linking to Russian nuclear...
Yesterday was our biggest day ever at bradleypallen.org, when we got close to 2,300 visitors, an increase in visits of, oh, 1,874.24%, according to Google Analytics. It appears that my link to ArmsControlWonk’s link to the Miss Atom 2009 site resulted in our being one of the top results for the query “Miss Atom 2009” on Live Search. We’re number 4 right now, ahead of the...
January 2009
4 posts
Goodnight, Number Six
Sad news just now of the passing of Patrick McGoohan. I was ten years old in 1969 when The Prisoner showed up as a summer replacement series; it had an indelible impact on me, and years later I’m still teasing through the weirdness.
December 2008
7 posts
The ur-demo
Everyone who has ever stood up in front of an expectant crowd armed with only their over-caffeinated wits and a just-completed prototype owes it all to this man. Jeff Nolan has a nice post on the topic today, and I plan to take some time later to watch the video once more. I wish I could be at today’s commemoration at Stanford.
The Road to Epic Fail
The startup-founder-failure-confessional blog post is fast becoming its own little genre. Sometimes such posts appear as bitter account-settling screeds, but typically they present a list of errors carefully arrived at through introspection, presented for the edification of those yet to follow, who perhaps can benefit from examples of what not to do.
In an attempt to provide a contribution to the...
Building numbers 'n narrative blogs
Like many others I was glued to fivethirtyeight.com during the election season, and watched the emergence of Nate Silver as the poster boy for a new web publishing genre: “numbers ‘n narrative.” There’s a great interview with him at the Columbia Journalism Review.
There appear to be two types of 3N sites: trendspotting sites and prediction sites. Trendspotting sites...
November 2008
3 posts
Calculating the date of Thanksgiving
Having a birthday on the 26th of November means that, every so often, it coincides with Thanksgiving. Last night, lying awake in the dark and listening to the rain beat down, I decided to finally address the question of exactly when I could expect this to occur in the future, rather than letting it sneak up on me over the ensuing years.
Here’s the way I came up with, which assumes John...
A half-century goes by
Today is my 50th birthday. It comes at a particularly difficult period for myself, my family and the world at large, but in keeping with the season, I can not be anything other than thankful for the lot that I have received in life. In particular, I give thanks for my wife Becky, our two wonderful children Cecelia and Garrett, my parents Irwin and Joan Allen, and the host of friends that I have...
A long time ago, in a deal far, far away...
This used to be my office.
It was something Eric tossed off on his way to this.
October 2008
1 post
September 2008
4 posts
The way to build another Google
I watched Kevin Kelly’s TED talk about the One over the weekend, and it reminded me of the fact that Google has only built an augmentation of one part of the ensemble of human memory systems, and that the rest are open for the implementing. What would a Google for procedural or episodic memory look like?
August 2008
3 posts
The Doomsday Rule
John Horton Conway has taught me a lot of things over the years: all about Life, my first computational obsession; how to turn numbers into games; and (most recently) that subatomic particles have free will.
The one lesson that I apply most frequently these days, however, is the Doomsday Rule. Here are S.W. Graham’s excellent notes on the algorithm, with bonus approaches to computing Easter...
ArmsControlWonk: Forden on Safir-e Omid →
A beautiful example of open-source intelligence, where insights are unwittingly provided by Web-based propaganda.
June 2008
1 post
Warholicity
This morning, after dropping my daughter off at her school, I exchange nods with a mom of one of the kids in her class. I later see on Wikipedia that the mom’s 1993 album, one of Rolling Stone’s top 500 of all time, is about to be reissued in digital format on June 28th.
I come home after work to find my wife Becky with our friend Kate discussing Kate’s friend the actor, whose...
May 2008
1 post
It never rains in Southern California
In his 1998 book “Ecology of Fear,” Mike Davis describes in a chapter titled “Our Secret Kansas” the century-long reluctance by Los Angeles newspapers to call a meteorological spade a spade: Although tornadoes are ordinary citizens of Southern California’s “normal” climate regime, they have been persistently construed as aberrations, like mountain lions...
April 2008
2 posts
Good night bicycle man
When historians of the future come to enumerate the seminal technological innovations of the twentieth century, they could do worse than the following list: the airplane, the digital computer, the atomic bomb and LSD. Today the discoverer of LSD, Albert Hofmann, passed away at the age of 102 at his home in Basel, Switzerland. I remember seeing him when he came to Los Angeles in 1988. He spoke at...
Siderean contributes to the DCMI/RDA Task Group
The last four months have involved a lot of effort at work, much to the detriment of this blog. Renewed clarity of purpose and some loose-ends cleanup have given me a fresh reason to get back to blogging, so here’s a start. I’d like to announce that Siderean has contributed funding for the DCMI/RDA Task Group. In doing so we join the British Library, and hopefully others to come, in...
November 2007
29 posts
The death (and resurrection) of the e-book
The internets are buzzing about the launch of Amazon’s Kindle, and David Weinberger leads the charge against biblioluddism, declaring that “our hearts will break a little” but the e-book will replace the paper book within the next century. Let’s assume with the enthusiasts that in the next few years, most if not all of the objections to either of the Sony or Amazon readers...
Explode into space
Against the inky blackness of space, anything lit up by the Sun can be seen at vast distances. I’ve watched objects in Earth orbit the size of a phone booth become the brightest light in the sky from 1000 miles away. So on October 23rd, when a distant and obscure comet half way between Mars and Jupiter shed an amount of ice and dust roughly a fifth of the amount of material spewed out by...
Turkey. Diet. Repeat. →
Via Google Blogoscoped.
Another observation from Defrag
Note to Semantic Web companies (my own included): when giving a presentation about the Semantic Web, drop the slide(s) apologizing for why it took so long to happen. The point is it’s happening now.
Enterprise 2.0 as conventional wisdom
Last week’s conference sweep was a great opportunity to see two very different communities talk about Web 2.0 and its impact on the enterprise. At Defrag, it was the Cluetrain cabal and associated communards who have led the charge to create social software; at the InfoToday conferences (ESS/West, KMWorld and Taxonomy Boot Camp) it was IT people trying to make sense of where it goes into...
Library of Congress: Failure to Launch
I agree with Diane Hillman: having a webcast which no one could view about a much-anticipated report, and then not posting the report discussed on-line until some later-to-be-announced date, is pretty lame.