Several months ago, in the heat of the republican primary, Yahoo news asked the candidates: Mac or PC? McCain’s response was revealing… and disturbing.

Neither. I am an illiterate who has to reply on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.

Now come some even more impressive quotes in an interview with the New York Times.

He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

…

Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.

I know the internets are confusing and all, but I’m frankly a bit baffled by this. He needs help “getting on”??? To read newspapers? Hard to imagine that there’s not a computer he could use somewhere, already attached to the internet, and probably even with the browser already installed. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have to learn how to set his DNS servers in order to read the New York Times. Is it typing the URL that’s difficult? My grandmother, by the way, who is more than a decade older than McCain, seems to have figured this out just fine, even without a campaign staff to help.

The level of cluelessness here is deep — not only does he admit that he’s completely illiterate, he demonstrates a basic lack of familiarity with the terminology (he also mentioned that his staff shows him Drudge, because “Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge.”), much like his colleague Senator Ted “series of tubes” Stevens, opposer of net neutrality.

And it’s important. At the risk of stating the obvious: Internet policy has direct relevance for our most fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, privacy, and democratic access to information. Computing is increasingly critical to our increased understanding of the Universe, financial markets, and disease. The internet and social networking tools are rapidly revolutionizing the way we interact with each other, citizen’s access to and engagement in government, and government accountability. These things are central not only to innovation and the global economy, but to 21st century democracy in America and the world. It’s really hard to see how you can fully appreciate these issues if you don’t know the most basic things about operating a computer. Leadership matters.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a twitter account. (He also hired one of the Facebook founders to start his myBarackObama site, which has clearly been responsible for a good deal of his internet fundraising and organizing.) He gets it.

I’ve written before about my husband’s affection, or rather, obsession with Apple. Like all good converts, he feels compelled to proselytize, particularly about my perceived need for an iPhone. “But honey, you can check your email!” “Hey look! Google Maps knows where you are!”. I remain unconvinced.

However, the other day, he nearly got me:

“Did you know it can emulate the HP-15C?”

Be. Still. My. Heart.

The HP-15C is simply the finest piece of handheld computing technology ever. (Take that Steve Jobs). I got my first 15C back in high school, and it was the only calculator I used for the next couple of decades. I could operate it in the dark. I lost it in an airplane seat back pocket and have never gotten over it.

I suppose in the intervening years we’ve gotten used to irrational devotion to electronic gadgets, but the 15C had to have been one of the first targets, at least in geeky circles. If you mention the 15C to a nerds of a certain age, our eyes grow misty at the utter perfection of it. It was a calculator that simply got everything right.

The genius of the 15C is multifold. First is the form factor. It’s essentially the same as an iPhone, held in landscape mode, with a nice weight that fits well in the hand. The buttons are large and well separated, and there are no more or no fewer than you could want. (In comparison, modern HP calculators are crammed with a thicket of unusable little buttons. Ick.) Second is the glory of reverse polish notation. The 15C operates with a memory stack, which when operating with RPN allows you to perform complex calculations with no need for parentheses. Third is the 15C’s unnatural durability. A former dog of mine literally mangled a friend’s 15C, and it continued to work in spite of the large teeth marks denting the keys. Fourth (and most critical for getting me through years of physics labs and observing runs) was that it’s programmable. That’s no big deal these days, but huge in the early 80’s. Spreadsheets were hardly widespread, and when one timed balls going down ramps or any other such repeated trial, doing repetitive calculations was a breeze on the 15C.

Now, am I alone if my love for the 15C? No, indeed. On Ebay, a 15C in good shape can go for hundreds of dollars. (And if you buy one, it’ll still work. I’m guessing one will not say the same about the iPod in 30 years.). There’s an on-line petition begging HP to bring the 15C back.

And, there are people out there writing emulators for it to run on the iPhone. If you ever see me with an iPhone, this will be why.

One of my postdocs has turned me on to blackle.com. The simple idea behind Blackle is that it’s identical to Google, except for the energy efficient black background:

It’s a cute idea, though they should have chosen dark blue and gone for “Bloogle”.

We’ve all seen CAPTCHA’s — those distorted words that function as a cut-rate Turing test, separating humans from spambots on any number of websites.

This weekend I was at a Kavli Frontiers of Science meeting at the National Academies of Science office in Irvine, and one of the participants was Luis von Ahn — the guy who was responsible for inventing the CAPTCHA idea. He gave a great one-minute talk, in which he traced his personal feelings about being responsible for something that is so useful, yet so annoying.

CAPTCHA, you will not be surprised to hear, is ubiquitous. Luis figured out that the little buggers are filled out about sixty million times per day by someone on the web. So, as the inventer, he first felt a certain amount of pride at having exerted such a palpable influence on modern life. But after a bit of reflection, and multiplying sixty million times by the five seconds it might take to fill in the form, he became depressed at the enormous number of person-hours that were essentially wasted on this task.

Being a clever guy, Luis decided to make lemonade. What we have here is a huge number of people who are recognizing words that a computer can’t make out. Luis realized that there was a separate circumstance in which you would want the computer to recognize the words, even though it wasn’t quite up to the task — optical character recognition, and in particular the problem of digitizing old texts. Apparently, before the advent of the Internet, people would store information by binding together pieces of paper with words printed on them, forming compact volumes known as “books.” In the interest of preserving the products of this outmoded technology, various efforts around the world are attempting to scan in all of those books and store the results digitally. But often the text is not so clear, and the computers don’t do such a great job at translating the images into words.

Thus, reCAPTCHA was born. At this point you should be able to guess what it does: takes scanned images from actual books, with which optical character recognition software are struggling, and uses them as the source material for CAPTCHA’s. The project is up and running, and can be implemented anywhere the ordinary CAPTCHA’s are used. Now, when you get annoyed at having to make out those squiggly words with lines slashed through them, you can take some solace in knowing that you’re making the world a better place. Or at least saving some books from the trash bin of history.

Here is one of the best ideas I’ve heard in a long time - thanks to Matt Searle for passing this on to me!

Computers often do the same thing over and over again. Microprocessors have become amazingly fast, but since they are general purpose, they are not as fast as dedicated circuits which just do one operation, but do it blazingly fast. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been used for over two decades for dedicated operations in high-speed electronics, and now Prof. Frank Vahid and his Ph.D. student Roman Lysecky at UC Riverside have married the FPGA to the microprocessor to create “warp speed” computing.

The idea, like many great ideas, is simple: when a computer program finds that it is executing the same instructions repeatedly, and these can be done faster in an FPGA, the program automatically moves that code section to an on-board FPGA, which will run that section up to a 1000 times faster than the microprocessor.

Lysecky’s dissertation on warp computing won the 2006 “Dissertation of the Year” prize at the European Design and Automation Association.

This is so obviously a great idea, and will speed up computing in so many circumstances that I expect we’ll see it in commercial systems very rapidly. This could be a huge breakthrough…

I love stories like these:

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony’s PlayStation 3 isn’t exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called “gravity grid” of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves — ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light — that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it’s a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

A very interesting lawsuit was handed a very interesting judgment the other day in Colorado, in the case of a woman, Suzanne Shell, who filed suit against an internet search engine spider which “crawled” her site, indexing, as these spiders do, its contents. As discussed over at Information Week, the suit alleges everything from breaking and entering, theft, racketeering, and breach of contract.

It all got thrown out of court, except the breach of contract part.

Huh? Well, she has a warning on her site, profanejustice.org that entering it and clicking on links etc. constitutes acceptance of her terms of service, which include not indexing it or downloading the contents, etc. You get the idea.

She sounds like something of a s**t diturber, anyway, refusing at one point to surrender a .38 in her carry-on, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I am gaining growing respect for the disturbers out there in this strange world. But, you know, pick your battles.

But to the issue: *do* internet search sites have the right, no matter what, to index you and send readers your way? Or index you and use the information for something else? Is it a bad thing to respect someone’s declared intent for you to not do that?

I think the whole argument about whether computer programs or agents or spiders or whatever are sentient is stupid. They are not, but someone hit that return key somewhere, and they are the ones responsible.

There is an informal agreement that robots should obey the restrictions in a robots.txt file on a site, but it’s no more than that, an informal agreement. So that’s not a good argument against the suit.

What happens if she wins this one all the way? Then, any time a site wanted to avoid being indexed, they could simply declare this on the page. The vagaries of our language being what they are, it would be hard to program a robot to be sensitive to any such disclaimers anywhere on a page. But, supposing that can be overcome, what uses might this be put to?

I suppose those might include online stores that don’t want their prices advertised elsewhere, because they are so high! It also might make it easier to protect copyrighted material. It certainly would put something of a damper, in the end, on the open and free nature of the web. But perhaps our diligent readers can think of other evil to do with such a new restriction.

It seems like only a blink of an eye ago that I was on the job market, scared silly about the future and hoping to establish the knowledge, skill set and track record (and have enough plain luck) to land a faculty position. For a young physicist, during one of possibly several postdocs, those are both exhilarating and terrifying times, during which one has precious little else to do apart from one’s research, but has absolutely no job security whatsoever.

For many people in this position (most of us, let’s be honest), part of their “free time” is spent trying to figure out who among their peers is being interviewed for which jobs, and, if it is a job for which they themselves have interviewed, whether the job has been offered to someone else yet.

Once, this might have been a lengthy task, involving surreptitious phone calls, sometimes through intermediaries, to glean whatever information one could from the organic “rumor mill”. However, by the time I started looking for jobs, the process had become much easier thanks, naturally, to the Internet.

The prime source for information about jobs in theoretical particle physics groups is the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill, which was the main site I would visit for gossip when I was on the market. I think it was somewhat later that the Astrophysics Jobs Rumor Mill came along, which was also occasionally relevant to me and certainly involved a lot of people I know. Since then, rumor sites have sprung up in Austria/Germany/Switzerland/Denmark, Greece, New Zealand and the U.K.. Other subfields have also followed suit, in Nuclear Physics and Condensed Matter/AMO Physics.

The rumor mill sites elicit mixed reactions in the community. Most people who are on the market seem to like them and find them to provide a desirable service. Among search committee members feelings are less homogeneous; some are unperturbed about their, and others’, shortlists being public, while some clearly feel they have a right to keep the information secret.

There are a couple of different worries that I have heard some candidates and more people on the other side express about the rumor mills. The first is merely that the deliberations of hiring committees and the resulting offers they make are the private business of the universities and the candidates and nobody else’s business. They understandably don’t like the idea that, for example, if they make an offer to their first choice candidate and are turned down, then when they make their next offer it will be to someone who knows they weren’t the first choice.

The second worry is that there is a fear of a herd mentality developing, in which once it becomes clear that a couple of universities have decided on the same number one choice, this may influence the decisions at other institutions. After all, several fine institutions can’t all be wrong about a particular person being the best choice, can they?

From my perspective, having been on both sides of the hiring process, there is some merit to each of these worries. There is often very little separating the exceptional people who make it to an ordered list of people to whom a position will be offered, and if one is, say, third on the list and is ultimately offered the job, it is seldom a reflection on your absolute talent. I think the rumor mills can make it harder to see past that, when the information is clearly out there for anyone to see.

A herd mentality can sometimes develop, it is true. Often its only effect is to slow down the process as one person garners multiple offers and then sits on them for a while negotiating with the various institutions. Sometimes, however, this can derail the hiring process at some places. On the other hand, if an institution does not follow the herd, the information provided by the rumor mill can be invaluable, enabling the hiring committee to make an attractive offer to someone else, and to snap them up while other institutions are tied up playing the waiting game.

However, my attitude to the rumor mills has always been that the various pros and cons I’ve identified above are, at the end of the day, irrelevant. If one thing is clear on the Internet, it is that information that is out there will be made public whether one likes it or not. All that technology does in this situation is to formalize, simplify and make very efficient, the dissemination of the kind of gossip that people have always shared in the community. Like it or not, one just has to live with it - what are you gonna do?

This week, I learned from my friends at Berkeley - cosmologists Martin White and Joanne Cohn - that rumor mill technology is taking another leap forward. Joanne and Martin have set up an Astrophysics Job Rumor Mill wiki which, rather than individuals emailing in their information to a moderator, as they do now, can be directly edited by all contributors. As Martin put it

The idea is to take some of the burden off of the person(s) running the Astrophysics Job Rumour Mill by letting lots of different people edit a Wiki. A successful Wiki could result in an accurate and up-to-date page with little work for any one person if the community embraces it.

If you’re interested in how our rumors get propagated, take a look; and if you’re in the field and use the rumor mills, I’m sure Martin and Joanne would be interested in any feedback you might have.

As many of you know, the Mac OS X platform is just a gift for those who want cross-platform adaptability, good and clever design, elegance, fun, and serious tools all combined. Forgive my enthusiasm, but it’s just perfect for the kind of job I do and I can’t get over how well stuff works even after a number of years of using it…..Ok, better stop there, since I’m bound to annoy someone.

Anyway, I just learned of another excellent tool. Many of you may know of it already, but those of you who don’t might find it a major boost to communications. I use Instant Messaging a lot to communicate a lot with collaborators, students, and friends and family. I use iChat for IM, adding iSight for video sometimes.

Well, my undergraduate student Jeff Pennington IM-ed me last night to tell me about Adium X. It is a new (at least to me) IM program for Mac OS X, and if you have Equation Service installed (don’t tell me you don’t have Equation Service installed!!!), when you type an equation in LaTeX (enclose it inside double dollar signs, e.g., $$\LaTeX$$), it shows up fully processed in the IM window!

Here’s a screen shot of a chat I did with…er…. myself, which explains the repetition in the dialogue (well, nobody else seemed to be awake when I wanted to generate the test chat….sigh):

This is just so great for those more technical collaborative conversations…..cuts down on faxing equations, or trying to point your camera at your notebook (especially if you don’t have it with you on your travels, etc….) And of course you can save the whole conversation. I’ll bet there are a lot of other features I don’t know about…but the instant LaTeX-ability just makes it click for me. Now if only they’d allow me to connect my iSight camera into it as well….

(Oh, yes, I’d be very happy if someone wrote in and told me that LaTeX works just as well for iChat too…. if so, how do you switch it on?)

You can get Adium X (and read more about it) here.

Enjoy!

-cvj

Things have been far too busy recently for me to do any substantive posting. But I have noticed that our discussions of topics such as race and gender and interpretations of quantum mechanics are far too genteel and rational for my tastes. (Seriously, why is it that people just cannot resist the temptation to argue with people who say outrageous things, even if they know perfectly well that those people are absolutely immune to reason?)

So I’d like to broach a more controversial topic. I’m thinking of buying a new laptop. Tell me: Mac or PC? I’ve used both quite a bit, so I’m not a fundamentalist either way. The Macs are of course Linux FreeBSD-based, which is useful if you’re a scientist. And there’s the fight-the-evil-empire business. But one cannot deny that there is useful software that isn’t available for Macs. And the variety of laptop hardware is much more diverse in the PC world, including attractively thin ultralights. So — reasonable cost-benefit analyses on either side? Your thoughts are welcome.

And play nice.