Amazon's Kindle

Electronic books may finally have arrived. I've been looking at Amazon's Kindle reader, and there is much to like. The included wireless downloading function may be the most important part of the equation.

The price is a bit steep. At $400, it’s the early adopters who are getting this thing. Jerry Pournelle (the science fiction writer) says he loves his.

I like electronic books readers a lot, in principle. Electronic readers will solve the problem of books going out of print. I have many books that I would like to read again, but they are so old that they can't be handled very much without doing damage. The paper in some instances is brown with age, and the paper dust sets off a moderately severe allergic reaction. The ereader fixes all that.

I'll be interested in actually getting one of these things when two conditions are met: 1) the price drops, and 2) the availability of older titles is plentiful.

I'll be watching to see if Amazon can do better than Sony did.

Thomas Humphrey dies

I just heard that Thomas Humphrey died Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of 59. Tom was one of the leading innovators in classical guitar construction. His Millennium model was a significant step in guitar design, and it was adopted by a number of well-known players.

New York Times article.

Guitar Foundation of America article.

Infocom Lost Data Found

I found a story on a hard drive that has recently been found that was used at Infocom back in the mid-1980s as a network storage system. It contained many memos and several game files of a never-published game that was a sequel to their best-selling Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The web site is Infocom Lost Drive.

I still remember the Infocom games with great fondness. They were the best. I still have the boxed sets of all the games packed up somewhere around here. Despite having no graphics until very late in the company's history, they were head and shoulders above most games even today. A real pleasure to play.

More on Infocom at this site.

The Scientific Method

There are an amazing number of people who talk about science and confuse it with technology and engineering.

Science is a method of investigating the world and how it works.

The steps of the scientific method are to:

* Ask a Question
* Do Background Research
* Construct a Hypothesis
* Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
* Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
* Communicate Your Results


As an example:

* Ask a Question
(Why did my car stop?)

* Do Background Research
(Look out the window, etc. Yeah, we're stopped.)

* Construct a Hypothesis
(We have a problem with the car)

* Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
(Check ignition switch, fuel gauge, tap on gas tank, etc.)

* Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
(Fuel gauge reads empty, gas tank sounds empty, etc. We are out of gas.)

* Communicate Your Results
(Sorry, dear, we can't go to your mother's place for the week end.)


We use the scientific method all the time. Nothing magical about it.

I like books

Always have. I started collecting books when I was around 9 or 10 years old. My family moved to France in 1954 when I was that age, and we lived in a small village with of 200 people, about 10 of whom spoke English. I had plenty of spare time on my hands and spent a lot of it reading, as there was little radio to listen to, no television, and of course no video games. The library at the Air Force base was a life-saver, as was the Science Fiction Book club.

Back in the US, I got into the habit of stopping at every book store that came along to browse for things on my wish list. Things got added to it a lot faster than they were removed.

Then the internet arrived. At some point, I discovered a web site called the Advanced Book Exchange. It was a database that collected inventory info every night from hundreds of independent bookstores and allowed you to search for books and order them from the stores. You could even keep a wish list of books and it would send you an email if one of the stores got a book on your list. Amazing! I pretty much cleared out my list of things I'd been looking for in about two years. Some of the things had been on the list for 30 years or more.

See? The internet is useful.

The Man Who Did Everything Wrong

I hang around several flight simulator forums. Someone posted a link to a Youtube video of a guy who landed a small GA (general aviation) jet at the wrong airfield, on a wet runway closed to jet traffic, downwind in a 15 knot breeze, touched down halfway down the runway, and then skidded off into a river. After a rescue boat starts taking people off the plane, one of the engines spools up and the plane starts going in a circle in the middle of the river, with people scrambling to get away.

Most of all this was caught by the fellow with a camcorder. It's at: Stupid Plane Tricks.

Warning... there's profanity involved.

Life-changing gadget

I got a TiVo in 2000. It immediately changed my life. I no longer had to spend hours every week searching for shows I wanted to see. I'm a fan of old movies from the 30's and 40's, so I had to search through all those listings to find things to watch.

I've been liberated from TV listings ever since. Every few days I pop into the upcoming shows list which is downloaded via a telephone line connection from the Tribune Media service and toggle the TiVo to show only "movies" and "Mystery/Suspense," and browse through the alphabetized list of mystery movies scheduled for the next 10-14 days. If I see something I think I might like, I toggle it to be recorded. No muss, no fuss.

The TiVo is one of the few gadgets that has made a real difference in my life. When I feel like watching something, I turn on the TV and scroll through the list of things that have been recorded and pick one.

I very rarely watch TV live anymore. It's all done on my schedule.

My TV died and so I recently upgraded to High Definition reception and now have to use a non-TiVo recorder which has less user-friendly software with fewer useful features, but that's another story.

OK, I'm a computer geek

I admit it. I got my first computer in 1982 (I think). I recall that the computer was over $1000, the floppy disk drive was $800 (and stored 88K), and memory was abut $150 for a 16 Kilobye module. The CPU speed was an incredible 1.5mHz. Pretty advanced for the day. Within two years I had taught myself how to program and wrote a program to keep track of my books (and later, my videocassette library). Over the years I dabbled in programming languages and learned BASIC, a smattering of C, Pascal, Forth, Modula 2, and several which I've forgotten about.

I quit programming when windowed environments appeared. It was just too much of a hassle, more time was spent fiddling with the code to generate the windows and fonts and such than was spent making it do useful work, and it just wasn't fun anymore.

Stealth book price increases

I went to my favorite book store last weekend. I was looking for some titles that had been recommended by the nice folks at Murder by the Book in Houston via their regular emails.

It took a few minutes, but I noticed that quite a few of the books I was looking for were in what's called "trade editions." This is a format that is a bit larger than the normal "mass market editions." Trade editions are more expensive than mass market editions, probably because they are historically printed in smaller quantities.

Here's my thought:

The trade edition has the same text as the mass market one, but costs around twice as much. It's doubtful that production/shipping or materials cost justify a price doubling. So if he mass market printings are phased out in favor of the trade editions (as seems to be happening), it's more profitable for the publisher. I doubt the author is seeing any of that extra income. Possibly the book store sees some of the extra monay.

Book of the day

"Don't Believe Everything You Think" by Thomas Kida.

I discovered this one several months ago. It's subtitled "The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking."

I'm a Science Channel junkie. I probably watch more science-based programming than fiction-based entertainment programming. I've seen similar material on various programs, but this brings a lot of stuff together in one place with simple explanations with lots of examples.

To whet your appetite:

The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking:

We prefer stories to statistics.

We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.

We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.

We sometimes misperceive the world around us.

We tend to oversimplify our thinking.

We have faulty memories.

I know people don't like to believe this, but there seems to be persuasive evidence that our memories in general are not very reliable at all and that we frequently confuse things we have been told or seen on television with our own memories. It's sort of scary.

Just what the world needs....

another blog, right?

Well, I'm bored today and this is the result. I'm going to use this space for random comments and thoughts on various things as they occur to me.

First subject: guitars.

I've been a guitar player for almost 50 years. The first guitar player I heard was Les Paul.... my mom played Les Paul and Mary Ford records quite a lot when I was very young, so maybe I was imprinted. When I was a teenager I was a big fan of Duane Eddy, who was very popular then (around 1960). Later I bought a Chet Atkins album based on a comment that Duane made and I was hooked. Chet became the guy I listened to the most for many years. I immediately stated to learn to play as Chet did and this was my main style of playing for many years.

Les Paul was born in 1915 and at 93 years of age is still playing today. He has a regular gig at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City. He's been slowed down a lot by arthritis, but still has the magic touch.

Pictures are at www.redhotred.com . He's an amazing guy.