Segwayed!

I spent today hanging out with Alec, doing some shopping and spending far too much time in the reality distortion field of his new MacBook Air. (Kathy has one too, with the SSD option.) I must confess: I desire one deeply. Very, very deeply. If I can just figure out what to do with my iTunes library…
During the afternoon we bumped into an old friend and former Sun colleague, Lisa. Segway i2That was fun. ((Hi, Lisa!)) And then in the evening we went to Jim and Kathy’s for dinner, where we were joined by Robin (ex-Sun, now of Google). Jim barbecued big prime rib steaks to go with the vegetables that Kathy prepared, while we all rapped about Sun, past and present. After the steaks – but before dessert – Jim got out Kathy’s Segway and we all had a go on it. Initially it was really weird, but after a few minutes it started to feel quite natural. I wonder what the local rules are in Seattle about using Segways; it would be awesome to commute between PacMed and Uwajimaya on one. Oh well…..

"Watching" a Grand Prix in text mode….

The first Formula 1 Grand Prix of the season has just started in Australia. Unfortunately the Stanford Terrace Inn in Palo Alto doesn’t offer SpeedTV, so I’m reduced to reading the text stream at the BBC website, refreshing every couple of minutes. With 8 laps gone it’s
1. L Hamilton (McLaren)
2. R Kubica (BMW Sauber)
3. H Kovalainen (McLaren)
I hope I can stay awake until the end; it’s been a long day. First, breakfast with my son and daughter-in-law at Hobee’s in Palo Alto (where else?), and then a 62 mile hop down to Carmel for lunch with Merry’s parents. (They’ve just acquired their first Mac. Excellent!)
UPDATE: An excellent result. I won’t put the details here, in case any reader is time-shifting, but you can read them here.

2:45am alarm

2:45am alarm. 3:35am bus. 6:00am flight, SEA-SFO. And then a week in California: two days visiting Amazon operations, Saturday and Sunday seeing friends and family, and then four days at Stanford. And I’ve got a Kindle-full of free science fiction to read, and an iPhone full of Radiohead to listen to. What more could I want? (OK, I guess a later flight would be nice.)

Mikado Mukasey

John Turley’s assessment of Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey:Mikado

Many view the decisions as raw examples of political manipulation of the legal process and overt cronyism. I must confess that I was one of those crying foul until I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey’s action.
In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey’s Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.

This is magnificent! It is worthy of that greatest of all commentaries on politico-legal principals, The Mikado! W. S. Gilbert would have been proud.

Still can't implement my killer app…

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a blog piece about a smartphone application that I really wanted to see. How do you handle an important mobile phone call when you’re in a meeting, or in the audience at a show of some kind? Obviously your phone is set to vibrate only (isn’t it?!), but ideally you’d like to check the caller ID and either send the call to voicemail or answer it and ask the caller to wait while you leave the room, and do so completely silently. Smartphones all support rich media services, so all you need to be able to do is manage the telephony subsystem from within an application that can play back a pre-recorded “please hold” message.
Each time a vendor releases a smartphone SDK, I read the specs in hope, and each time I’m disappointed. This week Apple released the iPhone SDK, and I signed up and read the docs. Disappointed again: there’s still no access from applications to the telephony subsystem. Oh well: the iPhone is still a stunning device, the SDK has a ton of really cool features, and the developer tools are outstanding ((Watch the Apple video and check out the remote debugging and profiling features.)) , so I think I’m going to write a few apps for it. Of course this means I’ll finally have to break down and replace my PowerBook with a MacBook Pro; the tools all require an Intel-based Mac. Apple has some great refurbs at around $1,650 ((Less with my Amazon employee discount.)) for the 15″.

13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years

According to this fascinating piece over at the Bad Astronomy Blog, that’s the age of the Universe. And furthermore…

The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP ((The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.)) has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

Fascinating, and thought-provoking.
And now I’m off to Town Hall Seattle to listen to Uwe Bratzler, PhD talking about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Particle physics rules… from the Big Bang onwards!

Amazon Web Services, via Scoble

If you want to know what we’re doing here at Amazon in the area of web services – and why! – check out this interview by Scoble with Jeff Barr:

Tomasky (and Charlie) on Goldberg

Michael Tomasky reviews the execrable Goldberg (no, I’m not going to link to his trashy book) and, inter alia, notes the classic smear technique that he employs. When it gets right down to it, describing contemporary liberals as Nazis is grotesquely implausible, and Goldberg hastens to disavow any such intention. But since he cannot walk away from his thesis, he has to insist on a lingering connection, some common “underlying impulse”. But as Charlie noted in his rather odd comments ((The oddness is that Charlie is quite perceptive in telling us “what Goldberg is really showing”, but he refuses to criticize Jonah for wrapping up this “unstated lesson” in such a crudely partisan diatribe.)) on the book,

The unstated lesson of Goldberg’s book is that the appeal of authority is a human failing, shared equally by those on the left, and on the right.

So perhaps Goldberg should have simply written a book about the strictly non-partisan human impulse towards authoritarianism. But what kind of subject is that for a red-blooded member of the NRO? Instead, we have this wishy-washy attempt to link liberals (and only liberals) with fascism. Tomasky again:

Isn’t all this at once so broad and so qualified as to be meaningless? (Don’t worry, my ellipses do not cut out anything inconvenient to my argument. See for yourself on page 327.) Hillary Clinton does not seek any of the goals that fascists have traditionally sought, but somehow she is like them. And so on. Whole Foods is obviously a pretty fascistic enterprise, especially its EnviroKidz cereal line, but “none of this is evil, and it is certainly well-meaning”. Also, liberals “are not cartoonish Nazi villains,” and “the danger they pose isn’t existential or Orwellian”. Lurking behind all these futile disclaimers may be Goldberg’s well-founded fear that intelligent or knowledgeable readers might conclude that he is crazy.