I’m a sucker for popular literature on mathematics and evolutionary biology, and were it not for RyanAir’s grossly unfair 15kg luggage allowance I would now be finishing this book on the Riemann Hypothesis instead of leaving it in my parents’ library in Dublin. Or maybe not. I felt it wasn’t well written, and now Amazon reviewers are finding all kinds of faults with it, so perhaps I will start again with Prime Obsession, which incidentally would be a good brand name if anyone ever decides to market perfume to geeks.

Extreme physics is another topic I lap upThis link to a New York Times article should be permanent, courtesy of a pact with Userland and the NYT. It’s an officially sanctioned back door, of sorts, the result of a NYT keenly aware that bloggers’ links are great publicity, yet wanting to charge for its archives.. The New York Times updates us on the latest in string theory in today’s science section, and it makes for some mind-blowing paragraphs:

“In the long run,” he said, “the universe doesn’t want to be four-dimensional. It wants to be 10 dimensions.”

So sooner or later, the loops will unravel like a tangle of rubber bands, passing through a succession of configurations that take less and less energy to maintain, until finally the other dimensions expand and the cosmological constant is gone.

The decay of the cosmological constant will be fatal, astronomers agree. At that moment a bubble of 10-dimensional space will sweep out at the speed of light, rearranging physics and the prospects of atoms and planets, not to mention biological creatures.

So all of you hoping for everlasting fame or immortality, don’t waste your energy. Literally.

Yep, if I won the lottery, I’d go straight back to university, paying brilliant but hungry PhD candidates to stay patiently by my side as I stumble through mathematical foothills, up to physics base camp, then making the ascent into the rarified air of quantum physics, hoping for a glimpse of the Theory of Everything at the summit. So far, nobody’s made it all the way up, or at least come back alive.

Unfortunately, because I have a modicum of numeracy, I will never play the lottery. Catch-22.

Is August a bad month for blogging? Even James Lileks felt compelled to apologise today (“nothing I’ve written here in the last gasp of August has satisfied me…”) and I certainly did, sort of, a few posts back. Andrew Sullivan may have been on to something when he shuttered up completely for the month. Could it be that blogs are inherently derivative, in the sense that they feed on news, and on a slow news month they simply lose their verve?

Or perhaps there are more people on vacation in August, so there are simply fewer participants thrumming on the great sounding board that is blogging. This makes more sense, as August has hardly turned out to be slow in the news department.

Still, blogaholics find ready enablers in the millions of internet dens that now dot holiday destinations. I certainly was able to get my fix in western Ireland, and Ben Hammersley is getting his in Kabul. But over the past few days, as I read his blog, I have noticed an aspect of his writing that I recognized in my own over the past month or so: it’s the tone of the travelog, of the visitor, of the person skimming the surface of a place, and by necessity this is not as enlightening as the writings of an expat (site currently down) living in the place, or that of a well-travelled native. I think this is because the best writing about places is about the author’s connections to those places. It takes time to make those connections — at the very least, it takes longer than a holiday.

So perhaps summer blogging is a little like the summer fling: fun while it lasts, but of no lasting importance.

Warning: The following is another of those horrid posts about the mechanics of the internet. Not interesting at all, but in the same way that breathing isn’t interesting…

If hell is an offline existence, then surely purgatory is dialup internet access. I was weaned on 1Mbps+ in New York, and in Sweden I was ogling the 26 Mbps (!) service being introduced by Bostream, so when I saw my parents’ paltry setup here in Dublin I decided to get them up to speed, so to speak.

Ireland, the European technology darling of the 90s, would surely be drenched in broadband. Not so. I was told there was no broadband internet access available to our (posh) area in Dublin. Incredulous, I set out to prove the naysayers wrong, and thought I had scored an early victory when I found that the local cable company, NTL, had started broadband services just last month. I called them, expectantly, but they informed me that they were only experimenting, really, and no, our area wasn’t going to be serviced for a long while yet.

They did, however, offer a special kind of internet access that they would gladly install anywhere in Dublin. The salesman quoted the price a little sheepishly: 9800 a year for a 512kbps leased line. I actually said “Oh, that’s not too bad” before I realized he was talking in euros, not kroner. For that price, I would expect my emails to be delivered personally. No wonder NTL is not rushing to roll out cheap cable internet services.

DSL, then. No luck here either. Although the phone lines clearly suffice for the ISDN setup they support, they apparently don’t qualify for ADSL, the operator told us; either our phone lines are too old or we are too far from a switching station (here in the center of Dublin), though which of these two possible reasons it might be the operator wouldn’t tell. Could we get a new phone line? We could, but she couldn’t tell us if that new line would qualify until we got it. Fat chance, then.

Is it really possible nobody laid any decent cable in Dublin, through which the internet might flow unfettered to the masses? Apparently so, and I am not the only one to notice. It’s actually cause for a political movement here. Might there then be a push for free and public wireless access, á la what’s being built in the East Village? Well, there is a nascent group doing noble work here, yet Dublin is too diffuse and the transmitters too weak to blanket the area. But their nodemap did put me in touch with people who knew of a local company offering residential wireless internet access.

Bingo. They have a transmitter some 800 meters from the house, and an (obligatory) line-of-sight survey confirmed we get a good strong signal from it. Today they came and installed the antenna, and I’ve been in broadband heaven for hours now. Most surprising is the strong upload capacity: Earlier, I was video iChatting with Felix in New York. Nice perk: a fixed IP address!

Watch this space. I have a huge backblog to inflict on you in the next few days.

What would an advertisement for the HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey look like? Perhaps the copy would read something like:

Triggers routine analysis to help prevent component failure. … Designed to sense when any of up to six system components exceeds a safe threshold. The server will inform the system administrator who can calmly replace the component up to 48 hours before the projected point of failure.

But that’s actually IBM’s new advertising campaign, for their eServer xSeries, found in today’s Economist. Calmly? Like this? —

HAL: Just a moment. Just a moment. I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE 35 unit. It’s going to go 100 percent failure in 72 hours.

BOWMAN: It’s still within operational limits right now?

HAL: yes, and it will stay that way until it fails.

BOWMAN: Would you say that we have a reliable 72 hours until failure?

HAL: Yes, that’s a completely reliable figure.

BOWMAN: Well, I suppose we’ll have to bring it in…

All system administrators know how this eventually ends:

BOWMAN: Open the pod bay doors HAL.

HAL: I’m sorry Dave, Im afraid I can’t do that.

…

HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose any more. Good bye.

Would sys admins really steer their CTO towards the purchase of such a machine? Of course they would. And notice the shape and color of the machine shown on the ad. How… monolith-like. There is no doubt IBM is finally recognizing HAL as its prodigal son, some 25 years after the company withdrew permission for the use of its logo in the film when it became clear the computer in question was a paranoid schizophrenic. IBM thus joins the ranks of Mercedes, which co-opted the Janis Joplin song Mercedes Benz for a car commercial a few years back.

…And the innocent days of blogging are over. Over the past few months I’ve deleted exactly two nutcase comments off my blog, both virulently antisemitic and adding nothing to the argument at hand (hey, this is my free speech zone, not yours), but at the very least they were personal, the work of individuals exercising their demented minds.

Yesterday, this comment appeared on my blog: “You are not the only one.” It came from a (no doubt) fake hotmail address with a link, not to a blog or a home page, but to a website selling US and Canadian zip codes for download, an obvious marketing scheme cum sales pyramid replete with spelling mistakes and worthless merchandise.

As a tactic, there could have been worse blogspam comments than “You are not the only one.” Blog posts are typically opinionated, so such a rejoinder would not usually stand out, and bloggers, who tend to revel in reciprocity, will likely click through to see who was kind enough to comment.

I wondered what to call the meshing of these two great internet memes. I searched Google for “blogspam”, and sure enough, 135 pages already carry this newest web term. It’s inevitable, perhaps, but also sad; blog comments are opportunities for strangers to reach strangers, much as bulk emails are, but whereas we have spent a few years building defenses against spam, blog readers (including me) are still wide-eyed innocents, ready to click through on comments in the anticipation of surfing to exciting new places. I’m sure spammers will find blogspam a particularly lush pasture for clickthroughs, though I doubt they will get much sales from bloggers and their readers, who are arguably the savviest, most spam-hating subgroup on the internet.

Thankfully, there are technical solutions to stopping blogspam completely. Unlike email, commenting involves an opportunity for the server to engage in feedback with the submitter. This should allow the server to determine if the submitter is human; some techniques are discussed here. So we will have to wait for the Movable Type plugin, or eventually pay for some kind of filtering technology, but while I can secure my blog, I will still be subjected to blogspam when I visit other, less sophisticated blogs.

Die, spammers, die.

Much as I try to get people to blog, I try to avoid blogging about blogging. It’s a bit too meta for me. Same goes for all things Apple; I love ’em, everybody near me eventually caves in and buys one, but I try not to blog this particular passion of mineIt seems like there is a disproportionately large percentage of Mac-using bloggers, both in Sweden and NYC. Thinking different is a bloggable trait, is my guess..

In this case, however, I’d like to note a particular feature of Apple’s new iChat AV application that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. I’ve been using my Canon Elura DV camera as the iChat video input, and it works flawlessly. I’ve been videochatting with Matthew and Kim in New York; Matthew and I have even used it to gloat or despair while playing Scrabble online.

But today, I was using my DV camera to do some logging and capturing in FCP when I started to wonder if I could send that video feed over iChat. I fired up a one-way video stream to Felix (who “only” has voice, the second class citizen that he is), and sure enough, he could see the rough cuts, with sound, while we commented away via text. In other words, whatever is on a DV tape can be monitored live by any iChat AV user.

Sure, the quality is much lower than full-blown DV, but what a collaborative tool! You can now show rough cuts or edited works in real time to clients, and elicit live feedback. This is going to make the video crowd very happy.

I’m sure that with a bit of tweaking, it should be possible to get a video-in feed that comes off the television. This way, It’ll be possible to follow the baseball World Series live off American TV, should I be so inclined, and should Matthew be so kind.