Wikipedia speaks the truth

• The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act is rejected by the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Dow Jones stock market index records its largest-ever one-day fall of 777.68 points.


• SpaceX Falcon 1 becomes the first privately-developed space launch vehicle to successfully make orbit.

On the same day that the government's cronies are falling to record lows, private industry reaches for the stars. I thought up that metaphor myself.

Recording time

I've estimated this before, but I finally had the presence of mind to actually time myself. How much production time goes into a LibriVox recording? I just finished reading Chapter 1 of J. S. Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, so let's see.

The final recording is 16:35 long.

The rough recording was 26:38 long. (I make mistakes, so obviously it is going to be longer.) The rough recording has to be edited to remove the mistakes (and coughs, long pauses while I look up pronunciations, swear words when I stumble over the word illimitable for the seventh time, etc). But I use a play-back speed of 200%, so theoretically, I could jog through a 26 minute recording in 13 minutes. But of course there's a lot of pausing, etc. It took me 17:04 to edit out the mistakes. Then I have to go through and proof-listen to it at normal speed so I can hear if I made any mistakes I didn't catch while recording (maybe I said "covenant" instead of "convent". It's an easy mistake to make). This part is much, much slower. It took me 30:20 to proof-listen. And finally, I have to go through and re-record any mistakes I didn't catch while recording the first time. This time, it took me about 10:00 to re-record the bad spots.

So for those of you keeping score, the total production time was 84:02 to make a 16:35 recording. That is a ratio of 5.07:1 of production to final. That means it takes over five minutes to produce one minute of final content.

I need to drastically lower this ratio, if I can. A 2:1 or 3:1 would be closer to ideal.

But I'm not sure where I am bottle-necking.

• Recording: 26:38


• First edit: 17:04


• Proof-listening: 30:20


• Re-recording: 10:00

I think one way I might speed things up on all levels is to just make fewer mistakes during the first recording. I'm not sure how to do this, though. Are there techniques or exercises that one can do to learn how to read with fewer mistakes? There are three primary forms of mistakes that I make: mis-reading a word, tripping over my own tongue, and emphasizing a word or part of a sentence incorrectly.

Something to think about.

Economic armageddon averted

Since the House just rejected the bail-out bill, it looks like the economy won't collapse within the next few days. Therefore, my series on Survival Tips will be discontinued until that time.

Survival Tip #1

With the Wall Street economic melt-down looming over the heads of us little people, it's clear to me that we'll all become anarcho-primitivists by this time next year. As such, we're going to need all of the wilderness survival skills we can to ... well, survive. And thrive.

So, I'm starting a list.

Survival Tip #1: Mike and Ike candy doesn't store well in the refrigerator.

OpenOffice.org 3.0

My opinion of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is, so far, based on little more than the installation process.

As the install program works on "Validating install", it gives me an error message that the following processes are using files that the install program needs to change, and it lists "Windows Explorer". I don't have Windows Explorer open, so I go to the Task Manager and kill the process with the correct PID. And now I don't have a taskbar or desktop.

I would suggest that an optimal install program would be one in which you don't have to manually kill the taskbar and desktop in order to finish the installation process.

Video: The Empire Strikes Out - The US Economic Crisis

What is going on with the US economy? This guy may have the answer.



This should be required watching in every high school. Though he's an anarchist, so it would be awkward.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Original:



Chipmunk:



3D Render:

Happy Enterprise Day

On this day, September 17th, in 1976, the Space Shuttle Enterprise was rolled out of Rockwell's plant at Palmdale, California.

Members of the cast of the original Star Trek series were present because the Space Shuttle Enterprise was named after the USS Enterprise NCC-1701. The USS Enterprise NCC-1701 was named after the pre-Federation Enterprise NX-01. The Enterprise NX-01 was named after the Space Shuttle Enterprise. We know it was based on two clues: (1) there is a drawing of the Space Shuttle in Captain Archer's ready room; and, (2) NX-02 was named Columbia. The Space Shuttle Columbia was the second shuttle (the first space-worthy shuttle, because Enterprise was a prototype) in NASA's fleet.




Got it?

Scientific errors At The Earth's Core

From Wikipedia's article At the Earth's Core (novel):

At the Earth's Core is a 1914 science fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in his series about the fictional "hollow earth" land of Pellucidar.

I've been reading the first few chapters for LibriVox and I've noticed a number of scientific errors. I believe all of this information should have been available to Burroughs in or around 1914. Now I will grant you that the whole plot requires a degree of latitude, as any good story does. And I will also admit that, while not a huge fan of classic science fiction, I am enjoying this book so far.

I don't think I'm spoiling much when I say that the main characters travel to the inside of the Earth during the first few chapters. They travel in a mechanical drill called the "iron mole", which has the bleeding edge strength of 10,000 men. It was built by the character "Perry" and funded by the narrator, "David". But things go wrong during their first secret test of the mole: they can't turn the mole to get back to the surface. Perry totally forgot to install power steering. I guess he thought he could turn the nose of the mole against the collective weight of the Earth's crust all by himself.

After they realize their blunder, they sit back and wait for their doom. They decide that instead of sitting a few miles under ground until oxygen runs out, they should continue on until they burn up. Perry suggests that the crust of the Earth is either around 30 miles thick, or the Earth might be totally solid.

(According to Wikipedia, the Earth's crust is about 20 to 30 miles thick.)

The continental crust is typically from 30 km (20 mi) to 50 km (30 mi) thick [...]

The 30-mile mark comes and goes uneventfully for our characters (and the reader, unless you like hearing the narrator read from a temperature gauge). After a few hundred miles, they bounce off an ice layer and their hinged seats swing around. They are heading back up to the surface. Or so David thinks. What has actually happened, according to Perry, is that they passed the half-way point from the outer world to the inner world, so the gravity has changed direction.

Let's say that would actually happen. I don't think they would cross a magical line and have their seats swing wildly around. It would be gradual. If gravity is caused by the mass of the Earth under them, then as they descend, the pull of gravity on them would decrease until it reached nearly zero right at the median. Then it would slowly start to increase.

But that wouldn't happen.

On the outside of a hollow sphere, gravity acts the same as a solid sphere of the same mass (and measured from the same distance from the center). They can both be idealized as a single point of a given mass. But once you get inside the sphere, according to the Gauss-Ostrogradsky theorem, the mass of the shell cancels out gravity. There would be null gravity inside the sphere. That is, the mass of the ground below you will pull you down strongly. But the mass of the ground above you would pull you up weakly (because you are farther away). But there is far more ground above you than below you, so it would effectively cancel out. (Assuming a perfect sphere, though the Earth is a few dozen kilometers thicker at the equator than at the poles, as one would expect of a spinning sphere.)

The theorem was first discovered by Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1762, then later independently rediscovered by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1813, by George Green in 1825 and in 1831 by Mikhail Vasilievich Ostrogradsky, who also gave the first proof of the theorem. Subsequently, variations on the Divergence theorem are called Gauss's Theorem, Green's theorem, and Ostrogradsky's theorem.

Now, considering the Earth is spinning, there would be centrifugal force acting on the inner surface of the sphere. This would obviously be strongest at the equator, which is spinning fastest, and it would not exist at the poles, which aren't spinning.

The inside of the Earth is illuminated and heated by a tiny star. The star floats in the very center of the planet, held there by the equal gravity from all sides.

Okay, a tiny star. Let's give him that. I think a lot more alien and interesting things could have been done using geothermal heat. But okay, a star.

Basically, at this point, Burroughs has described a very tiny Dyson sphere. Since we know that there is no gravity inside a hollow sphere, this tiny star would not stay in place. But even the scenario that Burroughs describes would be akin to balancing one marble on top of another: even the tiniest drift and the whole system comes crashing down.

Unstable equilibrium
(Image by User:Pokipsy76)

That's all the nit picks I have for now. But David and Perry have been abducted by ape-men and by gorilla-men---all in the same day!---so I'm sure there are plenty of nits to come.

And next week, we examine War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells and it's awful science fiction. Seriously, the Martians' ship-to-ship communication system consisted of honking at each other. Perhaps these "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" haven't heard of radio?

Rapping particle physicists are awesome!

CERN is really making some revolutionary contributions to the arts. Though rhyming "mass" with "ass" is a bit sloppy, in my opinion.

Manchester, NH, city government maneuvers to stop popular legislation

I did it again. I participated in civic responsibility. I didn't mean to, but there was a bandwagon, and I jumped on.

Manchester, NH, is one of the few New Hampshire towns that does not have spending cap legislation. For the past several years, activists in Manchester have been attempting to get such legislation passed. However, it's an uphill battle.

Obviously, the aldermen are not going to pass such legislation. So the activists have been trying to bypass them by getting a referendum. In order to do that, they must first get 4,000 signatures on a petition. This year, that took a lot of people several weeks to do. And the aldermen have control over when the petition is due. Not surprisingly, they kept moving up the deadline week after week. My friends were burned pink from standing in the sun all day collecting signatures.

Then the language of the referendum must be vetted by the attorney general. In the past, the AG has rejected the language, and thus nullified the petition and the referendum. Year after year, all this work goes to waste. But this year, finally, they managed to get it passed.

But now the aldermen are planning to veto the referendum or override it or something. I'm not really sure what's happening. But I held a sign by the side of the road. In the following videos, I'm the one holding the blue flag.









As I understand it, a spending cap will limit the amount that the city government's budget may grow each year. It's not even a cut-back.

There were a few protesters there to oppose the spending cap and support the aldermen. And there were some representatives of city organizations who benefit from reckless government spending. I'm sure they're impartial.

In the end, we didn't win. The aldermen voted to suspend the referendum until January or November 2009.

On a personal note, it was fun standing by the side of the road, chanting, waving a sign at passing cars. But as an anarchist, protesting our inability to vote on a measure that would reduce the amount at which a city government grows each year was promising. But I remain optimistic and idealistic.

Breaking the unbreakable

Radio DJ: "We're in the middle of a full-hour of uninterrupted classics, here on 101 FM!"

I wonder if he realizes that he just interrupted his uninterrupted hour.

Commander Data

I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation the other day. All of it. It was interesting to see how the series evolved. It didn't come from very sure origins, but it quickly established itself as a pretty good show.

I did notice, though, that the show seems to be about Picard and Data. Unlike the original Star Trek, TNG was supposed to have an ensemble cast. But most of the big shows of TNG---and all of the movies---are primarily about Data and Picard.

• Star Trek Generations, about Data getting an emotion chip and Picard struggling with the loss of his nephew.


• Star Trek: First Contact, about Data being kidnapped by the Borg, and Picard struggling with his history of having been kidnapped by the Borg.


• Star Trek: Insurrection, about Data insurrecting, which leads Picard to insurrect.


• Star Trek Nemesis, Data finds a duplicate of himself in the form of B-4, while Picard finds a duplicate in the form of Shinzon.

Interestingly, after Nemesis, Brent Spiner, the actor who played Data, suggested that it was unlikely that he would continue to play Data because "he has visibly aged out of the role and that it would be implausible for him to continue playing an android whose appearance should not change with time".

Commander Data in "Encounter at Farpoint" (1987).

Commander Data in Star Trek Nemesis (2002).

It's true, Spiner has aged. But we're talking about a show with transporters, and warp drive, and weapons that can destroy stars and planets, and an improbable number of humanoid aliens, and aging and death despite advanced medical technology, and sound in space, and phasers, and holodecks, and wormholes. The fact that one of the actors looks fifteen years older than he was fifteen years ago is not the part of the show that strains my suspension of disbelief.

Nut Lover

The scientific name for the California Ground Squirrel is Spermophilus beecheyi. "Spermophilus" is the best genus name ever. It can roughly be translated as "nut lover".

Scientists are bizarre folks.

Keep an eye on your nuts. He's gonna get 'em!

On the other hand, humans are Homo sapiens, which stands for "wise human", an appellative both boring and inaccurate. I think our species name should be changed to Homo peripateticus, "wandering human". It just sounds right.

Politics are for children

I'm getting so tired of this election cycle. All of the ads that are running seem to have this "bipartisan unity" theme. That sounds good, but they're not trying to turn us into a group of independent and responsible adults working together. They're turning us into a bunch of whining children demanding a new toy from mommy government. It's a bit sick.

This one in particular is horrifying to me.



Let's look at each of those line items in turn, shall we.

TO OUR LEADERS:

They're not my leaders. And they're not leaders. They're followers. Politicians, by nature, have to be. They are experts at finding the existing parade, jumping out in front of the parade, claiming credit for organizing the parade, being mocked on The Daily Show for having opposed the idea of the parade last year, and finally ruining the parade for everyone.

FREE US.

I'm with you here.

FREE US FROM OUR ADDICTION TO OIL.

Um, our addiction to oil exists because of "our leaders".

FREE US FROM $4.54 PER GALLON GAS

High gas prices are a good thing. Gas prices don't go up in a vacuum. They go up because India and China are demanding more gas. The Chinese are not going on Sunday drives in the country with that gas. They're using it to ship the sweatshop labor products they make to our country. This means cheaper crap for Americans.

Gas prices seem about right. What I want freedom from is having half my money stolen from my paycheck every other week. I'll use that extra money to pay for my increased fuel costs.

SAVE OUR ECONOMY.

Say what? Is the next line going to be "LET'S ROUND UP ALL PEDOPHILES AND GIVE THEM UNSUPERVISED JOBS IN OUR DAY CARES"? What kind of dumb-ass statement is this? Save our economy. Yeah, and let's have the fox guard the chicken coop. I'm sure he's good at it.

The IRS spends $400 billion dollars each year to collect about $800 billion in taxes, all of which goes to pay off the interest on the government's debt. And Americans lose about $900 billion dollars each year in productivity while they fill out IRS paperwork. You want to save our economy? Let's give it a trillion-dollar boost and eliminate the IRS.

(In case you're wondering where the government gets the money for it's $3 trillion dollar budget if the IRS only collects a net $400 billion in taxes: tariffs, corporate income tax, deficit spending, and inflation.)

SAVE US FROM THIS CLIMATE CRISIS.

What are they going to do? Wave their magic wand of legislation and make all pollution go away? You realize that anything the government can do to "save" us from this climate crisis will both ruin the economy and increase the price of gas? This point negates the previous two.

You can save the climate by liberating the economy. History shows that countries with developed economies have cleaner climates. America is magnitudes cleaner today than it was 100 years ago. Russia today is far cleaner than the Soviet Union was. Beijing, as we learned from the recent Olympics, has a horrible air pollution problem, where as Hong Kong does not. The difference? The economy.

GIVE US TRULY CLEAN ENERGY.

We have it. It's called "nuclear power". And, yes, if I had to have a power plant in my backyard, I would want a nuclear power plant. As long as it's owned and operated by a private company.

(Actually, I'd want a tidal power plant in my backyard, because that would mean that my backyard is a beach!)

USE THE WIND.

USE THE SUN.

You realize that manufacturing solar panels uses up more energy than they will generate? And they are a horrific environmental problem when it comes to disposal? And they are an eyesore? Same with wind.

WE DEMAND THAT WE USE THEM.

Why are you waiting for mommy to give you permission? Grow up and go do it. This is the "land of the free", after all.

WE DEMAND THAT WE REPOWER AMERICA.

The government grants power companies a geographic monopoly. Perhaps if we got rid of that, we would have competition that would improve quality while decreasing price. Plus, you could buy your power from the company with the greenest rating, if you so chose.

THERE IS A SOLUTION.

THERE IS NO TIME TO WASTE.

WE WANT A BETTER FUTURE.

WE DEMAND A BETTER FUTURE.

Again, grow up and go do it. Aren't we supposed to be adults in this country. When did we become a country of spoiled children?

WE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE NO LONGER ASKING.

Do they speak for me? I don't recall giving them permission.

And on that note, do politicians watch TV and see these ads? Is that how they make policy decisions?

"Shoot fire, my constituents want clean energy and a better economy? Thank God for this informative ad!"

GIVE US 100% CLEAN ELECTRICITY WITHIN 10 YEARS.

Well, hell, I didn't know you could just demand something and get it. I'm sure John or Barack will jump right in and start working out the physics and engineering challenges involved.

But why stop there? How about "GIVE US PERSONAL SERVANT ROBOTS WITHIN 1 WEEK"? Or how about "GIVE US A CURE FOR CANCER BY TOMORROW AFTERNOON"? And throw in a free enchilada while you're at it. We the people demand it.

Speech Recognition

Well, it's September somewhere, and that must mean its time for my monthly blog post. I'm thinking of switching to a bi-monthly schedule. No one knows if "bi-monthly" means twice a month or once every two months, so that gives me some breathing room.

I've been using speech recognition software a lot lately (a/k/a "voice recognition" and "speech-to-text"). I learned last year that Windows Vista has built-in speech recognition software. I switched to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.5 a few months ago, only mere weeks before version 10.0 came out :(

I used to dictate to the computer in real-time, wearing a headset microphone like you always see in the videos.



But that doesn't work so well for me, because my computer is really slow so it takes several seconds for the software to figure out what I said. That interrupts my train of thought. And when I notice mistakes, I have to go back and correct them immediately.

So I switched to NaturallySpeaking's "transcription mode".

In transcription mode, you record your dictation to a media file (*.MP3 or *.WAV) or you can use a digital voice recorder or a tape recorder. And then you transfer the file to the computer, and NaturallySpeaking transcribes it for you. This is far preferable for me. The accuracy goes way up because the software can take its time. Also I don't have to worry immediately about mistakes. I can go back and correct any mistakes after the transcription is completed.

One of the major selling points of speech recognition software is the speed with which you can input data. But I haven't noticed any net increase in speed. In fact, I am probably slower using dictation than I am typing. When I dictate, I frequently have to paused for several seconds to figure out how I want to format my sentences.

Also, when one dictates, one has to say all of the punctuation marks, which can really slow you down. Most punctuation mark seem to have three or more syllables. Per-i-od. Sem-i-col-on. O-pen-quote. As-ter-isk. Ex-cla-ma-tion-mark. (NaturallySpeaking has an "auto-punctuation mode" where it will insert commas and periods for you, but it doesn't work very well, and it destroys the accuracy when it mistakenly puts a punctuation mark where one doesn't belong. So I turn this feature off.)

Also there is an overhead in copying the file to the computer, running in transcription software, and proofreading the file to make sure there are no transcription errors. And in correcting errors.

The reason I use it though is because I spend all day using computers at work. The last thing I want to do is come home and write blog posts or short stories with tired wrists.

Speech recognition has come a long way since I last used it in the late 90s. But it still has a long way to go. It is still very finicky. It is sensitive to noise and the so-called mondegreens.

I seem to recall reading somewhere online that IBM and Microsoft have dedicated themselves to creating better than human speech recognition software by the year 2010. IBM seems to have dropped out of the game. As far as I know, only Microsoft and Dragon are actively producing speech recognition software.

We only have about 16 months until the year 2010, and this is technology has a long way to go. I think Google is getting into the game. Allegedly, GOOG-411 is a service designed to collect speech patterns to create training data sets for their speech recognition software.

I don't know much about the speech recognition technology, but it seems to me there are two requirements. 1) Information about how people use a language. Language is all about consensus, and Google seems to be on top of the game in terms of collecting information. 2) Hardware and processing power, which isn't really Google's area, though they may figure out a way to offer speech recognition services using their processing clusters. Or perhaps it'll find its way onto Android.

Time will tell.

(PS. Yes, I did dictate this post. And I found three errors in the transcription. "GOOG-411" was one of them. The emoticon was another. And "mondegreen" was the third. All of the formatting was done in post.)

(EDIT: Actually, there were four. It wrote "along" when I wanted "a long". Dumb software.)