Bag of Beans

How many college students today ever flip through trays of library catalogue cards? Some of them may never have used an actual tabbed file. But the tab as an information technology metaphor is everywhere in use. And whether our tabs are cardboard extensions or digital projections, they all date to an invention little more than a hundred years old. The original tab signaled an information storage revolution and helped enable everything from management consulting to electronic data processing.

• Link (via 43 Folders)

Great retrospective looking back at Clarke’s most influential works.

But relatively little space has been devoted to Clarke’s writing—the notable exception being the essays of his collaborator and friend, Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist and author of many science fiction novels including Timescape, the Galactic Center Saga, and Beyond the Fall of Night (a collaboration with Clarke).

In many of Clarke’s obituaries, there is a subtext (occasionally text) suggesting that while his way of seeing the future was extraordinary, his writing was perhaps not very good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though he wasn’t known for vivid character portraits, his prose was always elegant, and its style precisely suited to his purposes: prompting readers to think and to wonder.

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A nice memorial for the first dog in space.

Stories about how she was selected varied: Some said Laika was chosen for her good looks — a Soviet space pioneer had to be photogenic. Others indicated the top choice for the mission was dropped because doctors took pity on her: Since there was no way to design a re-entry vehicle in time for the launch, the flight meant a certain death.

“Laika was quiet and charming,” Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in his book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine. He recalled that before heading to the launch pad, he took the dog home to play with his children. “I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live,” Yazdovsky said.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

The New York Times has an article commemorating the life of science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who just passed away.

The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.

His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent of war,” giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.

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Read this article on Neatorama to find out how some of our punctuation symbols came to be.

Question Mark

Origin: When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio - meaning “question” - at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem - readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
Touchstone, 1998

In Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Hafner and Lyon take us all the way back to the earliest days of computer networking. We are introduced to all of the central figures that were responsible for building the precursors to the internet we know today. In contrast with the rapid growth we see now, the early days seem glacial. The equipment was primitive and had to be custom built. No one had any idea initially how they could connect disparate computers together and make them talk to one another. The fact that the protocols that they eventually came up with are still in use on the internet today, and have managed to survive its explosive growth, is a testament to the genius and vision of these pioneers. The authors have managed to capture not only the tough technical hurdles that needed to be overcome, but also the motivations and the leaps of insight of the people involved during this historic time. This is an enjoyable book that moves at a fairly brisk pace, but I wouldn’t have minded seeing a little more of the technical details.

Rating: 8/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Related:

• Book: The Computer: An Illustrated History

Adventures From the Technology Underground: Catapults, Pulsejets, Rail Guns, Flamethrowers, Tesla Coils, Air Cannons, and the Garage Warriors Who Love Them
William Gurstelle
Three Rivers Press, 2006

This is a wildly entertaining book filled with colorful characters and powerful, dangerous machines. Gurstelle takes us on a tour of what he calls the Technology Underground with concise run-downs of many awesome devices and the science behind them. Driven by creativity and passion, the builders like to push the boundaries with inventions that have little practical purpose other than to entertain and excite. With any complex and frighteningly powerful contraption, things don’t always work as planned, and this just makes their stories even more amazing. Those who have felt the DIY maker’s urge will enjoy the profiles of these extreme tinkerers. At just over 200 pages this is a short, fun read.

Rating: 8/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

The Computer: An Illustrated History
Mark Frauenfelder
Carlton Books, 2005

This is computer pr0n at its finest. This large, beautiful coffee-table book chronicles the evolution of the computer through hundreds of photographs. Following the earliest counting devices, hulking mainframes, personal computers and game consoles, the book documents the seminal figures who shaped the industry and the complex machines they created. It’s a delight simply flipping through all of the pictures and reading about the genius and vision behind these fascinating devices. The historic photos and the evocative writing both really draw you into the book and make you feel like you are reliving the golden age of computing. The Computer is a wonderfully nostalgic book that belongs on any computer geek’s shelf.

Rating: 9/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Will this settle the debate once and for all? Probably not, but an amusing read nonetheless.

All hope is not lost though. An important issue regarding social norms is whether they are created to increase welfare. Are they society’s response to market failures? One such norm is tipping for service quality. Azar (2003) has shown that the norm of tipping increases social welfare. In this paper, we show conclusively that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down after use decreases welfare and by doing that we hope to convince the reader that social norms are not always welfare enhancing. Hence, there is a case for scientifically examining social norms and educating the masses about the fallacy of following social norms blindly.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Founders at Work
Jessica Livingston
Apress, 2007

This book contains 32 interviews with founding members of different tech startups. Most of the interviews follow the same general format: how they got their idea, their first steps in forming a company, how they executed their plans, and what major obstacles they encountered. I think the author captures the character of many of these startups quite nicely in the introduction to the book: “In its plain form, productivity looks so weird that it seems to a lot of people to be ‘unbusinesslike.’ But if early-stage startups are unbusinesslike, then the corporate world might be more productive if it were less businesslike.”

Far from being a dry business book, the stories are engaging and inspiring. There are lots of great insights to be found in these interviews. Max Levchin tells us how much effort they spent to find ways to combat credit card fraud at PayPal, which became their main advantage as their competitors bled money from chargebacks. Mike Lazaridis was able to leverage their technical skills at Research In Motion to build a robust and reliable system for delivering wireless email. Philip Greenspun’s interview is a cautionary tale on what can happen when venture capitalists bring in incompetent managers to run your company.

Founders at Work is a good read for anyone curious about turning a wild idea into a sustainable business.

Rating: 7/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Check out these fantastic cakes posted on mental_floss. The Super Mario cake is simply beautiful:

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This looks like an interesting documentary that examines the reality of piracy. You can watch and even download the documentary for free.

Each day, millions of youths from Canada and around the world download music and movies off of the Internet. This epidemic of “unauthorized” downloading has been cited by the record and film industries as being the prime cause for billions in losses. Politicians have come under tremendous pressure to pass legislation on the issue.

But despite all the media frenzy on the piracy crackdowns, there’s been very little attention to the topic itself. At the very best, news reporters regurgitated the contents of an industry press release. There was nothing of substance, which is where this documentary fits in: we wanted to cover the issue in-depth. We interviewed industry execs, copyright lawyers, pirates, consumers, artists, and everyone we could think of - and made you this film.

• Link (via Digg)
• The official website of the documentary is here
• View on Google Video: Part 1, Part 2
• Download the DVD ISO image torrent from The Pirate Bay

A Damn Interesting article that explains where the term “cargo cult” came from.

One day in the early 1940s, the relatively isolated group of islands was descended upon by hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who arrived by sea and by air. The world was at war, and America had plans to build bases on the Pacific islands. The newcomers recruited the locals’ assistance in constructing hospitals, airstrips, jetties, roads, bridges, and corrugated-steel Quonset huts, all of which were strange and wondrous to the natives. But it was the prodigious amounts of war materiel that were airdropped for the US bases that drastically changed the lifestyle of the islanders. They observed as aircraft descended from the sky and delivered crates full of clothing, tents, weapons, tools, canned foods, and other goods to the island’s new residents, a diversity of riches the likes of which the islanders had never seen. The natives learned that this bounty from the sky was known to the American servicemen as “cargo.”

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Gizmodo has posted a great rant on people with more money than sense.

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place.

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Vanity Fair has profiled the popular torrent tracker site, The Pirate Bay.

Pirate Bay has now taken careful steps to ensure that any future raids will inflict minimal disruption to the service. “We have divided the servers up geographically—they are hidden,” explains Svartholm. “If they come after us again they will only find our front end. A single metal box with a short message stuck on the front: ‘You forgot to take my label writer.’”

In reality Svartholm does not expect another raid: “At this point it would be political suicide,” he says. Shortly after the raid more than 1,000 citizens attended Pirate Bay rallies in central Stockholm and Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, events which were captured by the quickie documentary Steal This Film. The recently formed Pirate Party doubled its membership, and even mainstream politicians—mindful of Sweden’s million or so file-sharing voters—weighed in on the Pirates’ behalf.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Wired has published an intriguing series of articles on cybercrime. Definitely worth a read.

With so many fake IDs in play it was unclear to police exactly who they had in custody. Then as they read Thomas his rights, he told them: “Get me some federal agents and I’ll give you a case involving the Russians and millions of dollars.”

Thus was the beginning of Thomas’ turn to the other side. For 18 months beginning in April 2003, Thomas worked as a “paid asset” for the FBI running a website for identity and credit card thieves from a government-supplied apartment in the tony Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.

From bedrise to bedrest, seven days a week, he rode the boards and forums of his and other carding sites using the online nickname El Mariachi. He recorded private messages and IRC chats for the FBI as “carders” schemed to, among other things, sell stolen credit and debit card numbers, defraud the George Bush and John Kerry campaign sites, drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from bank and investment accounts, sell access to Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account and run phishing scams against U.S. Bank and the FDIC. He did it all while battling denial-of-service attacks against his site and dodging attempts by his old partner Taylor and other carders to track his whereabouts and out him as a fed.

Just as his enemies were closing in on him in September 2004, the FBI pulled the plug on his work and cut him loose. But not before Thomas had given authorities a valuable look at the internet’s underworld, even though the strain of leading a double life nearly broke him.

• Part 1: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
• Part 2: Tightening the Net on Cybercrime
• Part 3: Tracking the Russian Scammers
• Part 4: Crime Boards Come Crashing Down

Here’s a post on how community-driven sites like Digg succumb to their own popularity.

The idea is fine, but one thing is forgotten… People are sheep. People don’t vote things up they disagree with, don’t like or don’t know anything about. So we see a kind of convergence. The stuff that toes the community line, that most people agree with and that doesn’t challenge people too much gets voted up, whilst the stuff on the fringes, the niche stuff, disappears. The community attracts people who enjoy its content, and so content becomes stale, repetitive and dull.

• Link (via reddit)

This is tragic news for the Kim Family. If you haven’t been following the story, James, a senior editor at CNet, and his family were reported missing when both James and his wife, Kati, failed to show up for work last week. They were returning from a Thanksgiving road trip, but had gotten lost along the way. On Monday, Kati and their two daughters were rescued, but James had not been found since he had gone off to search for help. Kati kept herself and her daughters alive by burning their car’s tires for warmth and nursing the girls. Today, rescue crews located James, but were too late to save him.

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• More here
• Website set up by friends and family