Chris and I would differ on this, and both of us would differ with Spoons. I’m pretty sure he’s wed to a Windows box, though Chris would recommend a Linux machine and I would recommend a Mac.

From /var/log/syslog on the laptop:

Feb 3 20:51:56 localhost smartd[6711]: Device: /dev/hda, 190 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

Looks like it’s time to backup the laptop’s hard drive and drag it over to Best Buy for warranty service.

Just a helpful hint for Gmail users: if you catch a spammer in the act of “phishing”, you can open the email and choose “Show Options” to report it. This seems like a good thing to do. I suspect that one of the reasons that spam filters are better in recent years is that people mark items as spam and the email providers can use the information to improve their algorithms. Similar network effects should be useful in fighting phishing.

Lately I’ve been daydreaming a bit about the possibilities of replacing oil with hydrogen for fuel. A check of the news brings me back down to earth:

High-volume hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars are at least 25 years away, says Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A.‘s top fuel cell expert.

Even General Motors, which had been pushing for fuel cell vehicles by decade end, seems to be backing off from its goal of mass production of fuel cell vehicles by 2010.

“The Sequel is a real car and it’s doable in a manufacturing sense, but it’s still 10 times more costly than we would need it to be for volume production; we need to get down to about $50 per kW. By 2010 I really do believe that we will have a validated power system that will be down to $50 per KW. That’s what my boss has instructed me to do.

“I’m feeling confident because we’ve started to validate our feelings about the project. The fuel-cell vehicle has a tenth as many moving parts as an internal combustion car and engineers will tell you that moving parts are expensive to test and make.

“Hydrogen infrastructure is not as big a deal as people seem to think it is. If you have hydrogen supplied at, say, 12,000 gas stations, which is about 10 per cent of all US gas stations, then 70 per cent of the population of the US would be within two miles of a hydrogen pump.

“That’s hydrogen available in the 100 largest cities and a station every 25 miles on the freeway. The cost would be $12 billion, which is half the cost of the Alaskan pipeline. Now why wouldn’t a US government want to do that?

In the more immediate future, we should have fuel-cell batteries within a few years:

THE day of the battery may finally be over as manufacturers usher in the age of the fuel-cell. To prove the point, an engineer from the Japanese electronics company Hitachi yesterday showed the world the pack that will power tomorrow’s mobile phone, laptop computer and personal organiser.

From his pocket he produced a miniature fuel cell consisting of a plastic canister of liquid gas slightly smaller than a cigarette lighter and plugged it into a metallic box slightly larger than a packet of cigarettes.

The cell, which will be on sale in about 18 months, will run all three machines for the length of a short-haul flight.

Steven Taylor links to news that TiVo has announced plans for an integrated high-definition digital cable tuner/DVR using the newish CableCard standard, to reach consumers sometime in 2006. I’d say I want it, but first I’d need that HDTV I’ve been lusting for.

George Will has a good column on the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s publication of his articles that changed physics (and the world):

Einstein’s theism, such as it was, was his faith that God does not play dice with the universe—that there are elegant, eventually discoverable laws, not randomness, at work. Saying “I’m not an atheist,” he explained:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.”

For this reason, physicists postulated the existence of the aether—a substance, otherwise undetectable, through which light travelled. But if the Earth was orbiting the sun, and so moving through space, it must be moving through the aether, too. Measure the speed of light in the direction of the Earth's motion, and perpendicular to it, and you would get different answers, the line of reasoning went. This is what Michelson and Morley did. But they found that the two speeds were, in fact, precisely the same.

The experiment was explained by Henrich Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, who came up with the mathematics required for the answer—that there was a contraction in the direction of the Earth’s movement, just enough to make the two speeds seem the same. Lorentz could not explain how this contraction occurred, though. He speculated that perhaps forces were at work inside molecules, which were, at the time, still hypothetical entities.

What Einstein realised, without adding any new mathematics, but in a profoundly new way nonetheless, was that there was no seem about it. Space really was contracting, and time was slowing down. It is just this that Pais was referring to when he said that Einstein was good at picking invariance principles. Everyone had thought that time was invariant. It is not. No one thought the speed of light was. It is.

Check here for recent FireFox extensions. Tested the Gmail extension and it works fine on a Mac.

If your first thought when reading that your cable modem service is going to increase its downlink from 3Mbps to 5 Mbps this month is that you’ll need to change the parameters to your wondershaper ip-up command, you might be a total geek.

I picked up an autographed copy of Clark Blaise’s Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time a while back at Square Books in Oxford, and just got around to reading it. While I have no doubt that the Scottish-born Sandford Fleming was an interesting individual—in addition to being a driving force between the adoption of standard time zones, he was one of the architects of the unification of Canada and the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway—Blaise’s book almost makes him seem boring.

The narrative flow of the book is horrible, employing no discernable organizational approach, and the book seems semi-randomly to leap into discussions of the use of time in literature—which may be one of Blaise’s scholarly interests, but has little to do with Fleming. Except for details of the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference in Washington and some confused recounting of Fleming’s role in surveying and building the CP, little of Fleming’s exploits get much attention. Blaise’s lament is that Fleming is being lost to history, but if he was such an important figure in Canadian and world history, his book does little to solidify his reputation, except as a crumudgeon who was annoyed that politics intruded on his efforts to create a “universal” reckoning of time.

The BBC helpfully informs us that using your laptop on your lap may have negative effects on male fertility.

However, someone will have to explain to me later why health researchers are allowed to make inferences about the entire human male population from a study of just 29 subjects. They’d shoot me if I tried that. (þ: memeorandum)

Amazon has a new "citations" feature for academic books. If the book is one for which "Search inside this book" is enabled, Amazon will tell you what other books are cited by the given book, and also what other books (with "Search inside" enabled) cite the given book.

For example, take the Amazon page for one of my favorite philosophy books, On the Plurality of Worlds, by David Lewis. In the citations section, we see that this book cites 29 other books in Amazon's catalog, including The Shape of Space, by Graham Nerlich, and Science without Numbers, by Hartry Field. There are 120 books in the Amazon catalog that cite Plurality, such as Supervenience and Mind, by Jaegwon Kim. There are even links to images of the pages where the citations occur.

It's trackback for books!

(þ Brad DeLong.)

I read an article, which I received via Google News, about Gmail. When I finished reading I was surprised to find that it came from a high school paper in Maryland. Very well done.

If you have a olemiss.edu address for me, it is going away in a few days. Update your address books accordingly.

Google has unveiled a new toy of interest to academics: a search engine that exclusively tracks scholarly articles. It’s not perfect, and it may not quite put the print journals out of business, but I suspect it’s another nail in their coffins (þ: Ars Technica).

Jeremy Freese points out that receipts from Best Buy have become ridiculously long as of late—though, in Best Buy’s defense, Circuit City still manages somehow to have both longer and wider receipts.

Maybe I’ve become old and cranky, but this is patently ridiculous:

Abit has just unleashed their first “Fatal1ty” motherboard. For those who don’t know, Fatal1ty is the name used by 19-year old Jonathan Wendel, one of the most respected gamers in the world.

Early in his gaming career, Fatal1ty became the number 1 ranked Quake 3 player in the world. This was followed by wins 3 years in a row at CPL competing in Quake 3, Alien vs. Predator 2, and Unreal Tournament 2003. Fatal1ty also won Quakecon 2002 and became the world’s first Doom 3 champion at Quakecon 2004.

Call me back when he starts acting like most responsible 19-year-olds and goes to fricking college—or at least drops the stupid l33t handle.

The best part is the “badass” pose he strikes in the included photo. That’s worth the click-through on its own.

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh helpfully rounds up all the vote fraud allegations in one place, while Slashdot’s CmdrTaco continues to parody DemocraticUnderground. (Oh, you mean he’s serious? Never mind.)

I’ll just join the bandwagon by complaining that I had to stand in line for 30 minutes in a fire station that was open to the elements at both ends to cast my votes, zero of which turned out to be pivotal. I blame Diebold; they had nothing to do with the electronic voting machines in Hinds County, but I think they’re vicariously to blame somehow anyway.

I had to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop this morning after nothing else would work. And I still haven’t reinstalled GRUB on the boot sector yet, so it’s “all XP, all the time” until I bother to fix that. Grr…

James Joyner is amused that the DoD is testing the use of blimps for surveillance in Washington, something he believes was pioneered by the Goodyear Corporation several decades ago. I just wonder how much the toilet seats onboard cost.

Steven Taylor has comment on a complaint by a student at another college that a class cancellation was not announced via email. Steven writes:

I also find it amusing because as a professor who does use e-mail quite extensively (and yes, I do send it when I know I have to cancel, if at all possible), many of [my] students don’t always read it. Further, most of my colleagues don’t maintain mailing lists for their classes, so couldn’t send a mass e-mail if they wanted to do so.

I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the pervasiveness of e-mail at Millsaps, even if I could do without the idiosyncracies of Microsoft Outlook and its web interface. We have mailing lists for every class and—critically—the students have been acculturized into using and checking it. Of course, it helps that almost everyone lives on campus and virtually everyone who does has a computer in their room, if not one of their own.

Sunday’s New York Times has an interesting and balanced look at electronic voting in the November 2004 election, including a really cool zoomable map that shows what voting system is used in each county in the Lower 48. Particularly noteworthy is this passage on paper trails:

While it is too late in the game to make it possible to produce a paper record for each vote on every machine already deployed, Mr. Miller said that vendors would be willing to include that feature in the future if the market demanded it. Most of the major vendors have models that can supply a printed record, but in most cases, Mr. Miller said, election officials have not required it.

Paper receipts are not automatically required because no such universal guideline has ever existed. Mechanical lever machines, for instance, which have been in widespread use since the 1930’s – and will still be used by millions of voters this year – have never produced a paper record of each vote. And states have traditionally established their own definitions of what constitutes a ballot. [emphasis added]

Hinds County (home of Jackson) is apparently using WINvote touchscreens this fall. All I can say is that I do hope they’re using something a bit more secure than 64-bit WEP.

For those of you without Arial MS Unicode, the biohazard character (☣) is available under Linux using the “FreeSerif” font in the “freefont” package; in Debian, it’s called ttf-freefont. Mysteriously, the archives at Savannah for this font have disappeared, so the only way to get it may be by downloading the Debian binary or source packages.

I just downloaded Mozilla Firefox 1.0 PR, and like BigJim I’m liking the new Live Bookmarks feature immensely—it reminds me a bit of the approach David Janes took with BlogMatrix Jäger, but the Mozilla approach is significantly less featureful (for starters, I can’t see any way to go to the root URL specified by a feed, and it doesn’t keep track of what you’ve read in any way that I can tell; nor does there seem to be a way to add a RSS feed without a LINK element—so I can’t add the Chronicle of Higher Ed feeds). On the other hand, it’s integrated in the browser nicely, and you can put a folder of feeds in your Bookmarks Toolbar, and use the menu to surf posts seamlessly (so it doesn’t take up real estate when you’re reading), or you can open the “Live Bookmarks” in the sidebar. And it does have Atom support, which is nice. So, for now, I’ll give it 3 out of 5 stars.

In other changes, it looks like Gtk theming has changed slightly yet again, and apparently the “disappearing cookie” bug has been somewhat, but not totally, squished. And it does seem a little more zippy than 0.9.3 did on my Linux box (though that could just be due to the Mozilla.org builds being i686 builds, as opposed to Debian policy-compliant i386 builds). So it seems like a worthwhile upgrade.

Like James Joyner, I have some more GMail invites to give away. Email me (lordsutch@gmail.com) for yours.

I think this whole “forged documents” thing is taking off.

Meanwhile, Occam’s Razor suggests that the theory that the documents might not be forged (discussed by Gary Farber) is unlikely. I find it difficult to believe that by coincidence, someone would produce a document with a 1973 typewriter that would look essentially identical to the output of the copy of Microsoft Word 2002 on my desk, down to the inter-letter spacing [not the kerning - Ed.], superscripting of the ordinal “th,” and margins, or that someone would go to the trouble of purchasing a non-standard typewriter ball for a military-issue typewriter (were these golfballs even in the GSA contract with IBM?) and install it just to write memos about a particular officer for filing—but switch back to the standard one for other correspondence. (But Gary is to be commended for at least taking the time to seriously think about this, something a lot of people haven’t done.)

I think Colby Cosh nails it in a sentence:

If the reports are accurate, CBS—estimated annual news budget: one squillion dollars—has been taken in by a fraud that, roughly speaking, anybody over the age of 30 in the industrialized world could have spotted.

Of course, I strongly suspect the people doing the real legwork on this story either (a) are like my students and don’t remember an era before ubiquitous computing or (b) are folks like Dan Rather who haven’t touched a typewriter in 30 years. Speaking of Dan, CBS News is saying we don’t need no—investigation. That stand, er, does not seem wise.