jameswharris

Kindle DX versus Netbook as Textbook

The holy grail of ebook visionaries is the electronic textbook. Textbooks are huge, heavy and expensive and some poor school kids carry more weight on their backs than soldiers on a march. It’s as common to see backpack humps on college kids backs as seeing cell phones in their hands. Ebook promoters see dollar signs whenever they spot one of those humpback students lugging around all that printed matter.

And those ebook promoters are right. Why carry forty pounds of paper when you can carry 1 pound of electronics? But is the Kindle DX the answer? I don’t think so. First, let me give you a little story. Years ago, before audio books were even common on cassette tape, I took a two semester Shakespeare course. We covered almost 20 plays, each tested with a very detailed 10 question quiz. I remember how I faithfully read and studied the first play and was shocked when I only got six of the ten questions. The professor had a pattern. Half of the questions could be easily answered with a fair reading of the play. One question was always about a very obscure detail that kept most people from getting a perfect 10, and the other four questions divided the class between those who really got into the play and those who didn’t.

I realized a quick reading the night before class wasn’t going to cut it, so I went to the library and got each play on LP. They came in boxed sets of 3-4 discs. The records were old and scratchy, but usable. This was in the early 1980s. I’d play the records while reading the play – it took hours. After that I always got perfect 10s on those quizzes. Now my magic retention rate only worked if I faithfully followed the words on the page while listening to the same words spoken. Reading or listening by itself didn’t work. Other than these two Shakespeare courses I never used this learning technique again in school.

However, when I started using my ears as my main sensory input for reading back in 2002, I started playing around, experimenting with each form of input. I paid attention to what I noticed when just reading with my eyes. Then I paid attention to what I noticed, just from listening with my ears. I would then read something I had just listened to, or vice versa. Each time I’d found details I had missed with the opposite method. I discovered what the eyes learned was different from what the ears remembered.

One book I did this experiment on was Emma by Jane Austen, a book I was reading for a book club. I listened for an hour. Then I reread that hour with my eyes. Listening was great for getting a sense of character and dramatic action, but it was poor on retaining words. Austen immediately introduced too many characters – that made the story confusing. Each character live in a house with a name, often set in a different village, with another name to remember, so I was overwhelmed by people and place names. Seeing all those names in print helped clear up many issues.

Again, I concluded that to study a piece of writing for academic purposes, I needed to see it with my eyes if I wanted to memorize words and spellings. However, by listening, I experienced the nuances of conflict, characterization and plot better. Hearing stories helped me to to imagine 3D action and settings. I saw color and details better when I heard the words rather than read them.

Listening, which is far slower than reading, forced me to concentrate on the subject, and that was especially reinforced when I watched the words while also listening to them. Seeing a word and hearing it made me think about it’s pronunciation and spelling more than when I just read it with my eyes. But listening alone is terrible for learning spelling. There are many books I’ve only heard that I have no idea how to spell the character’s names.

I think these observations are key to the success of future etextbooks. Strangely enough, the Kindle now offers to read books to their owners, but they also allow Kindle users to play MP3 or Audible.com audio books while reading, although I think few people take advantage of this feature. I sold my Kindle 1.0 to my friend who prefers to read with her eyes and loves to travel, but I do have the Kindle reader software on my iPod touch and do some reading with it. However, iPods can’t multitask, so I have to play the audio book on my Zune and read it on the iPod touch.

From this one anecdote you might surmise that the Kindle DX will make a great etextbook, but I’m not so sure. I found the e-ink technology clumsy for random reading, which is often what people do when they study. Also, kids studying will be taking notes for writing papers or passing tests, so I think the future of etextbooks will be on netbooks, and those little devices are great at multitasking, allow reading and note taking and even cutting and pasting of quotes.

To really memorize details for a studied subject, I think you need to see it, hear it, and then write about it. iPhones and Kindles don’t help here. When I write this blog I keep a browser window open, with tabs to Google, Wikipedia and OneLook (a dictionary gateway site).

The computer literacy movement of the 1980s promised so much but delivered so damn little. I’ve always wondered why programmers couldn’t write programs that taught math. Kids will play video games for hours, games that mesmerize them into deep rapt attention, tricking them into learning a myriad of details from game play. Teaching mathematics via interactive computer animation should be a no brainer, but most software that attempted the job came up with dull drills and tedious flash cards. That doesn’t mean the concept of computer aided learning is a bust. Anyone who has played with Mathematica should shout they’ve seen the light.

What’s needed is a synthesis of many learning techniques and technologies. First, I think etextbooks won’t be ebooks. That’s way too lame. Etextbooks should combine video lectures, film clips, audio, computer CGI, and photos to go with old fashion black on white text, plus add tests, quizzes, puzzles, word problems, virtual worlds, games and any other interactive method to get kids to practice math.

If I had the money and resources to create etextbook on mathematics I would build my course around the history of math. I’d take it from anthropological ancient history to theoretical here and now. But I’d build it as a suite of components, usable on different platforms in different study environments. So if the user only wanted voice, in iPod mode, they could spin through the centuries to find MP3 podcasts about the history of math. If they were in a mood to play with their Nintendo DS, they could load up a mathematical game, or install a challenging game app on their iPhone. If they were in the mood for a documentary, I’d let them stream video to their television sets. Hell, I’d even offer to print puzzles for when they have to sit on the pot.

I’d also find some way to create a scoring system, especially one that could be tied to a Elo type rating system, like they use in chess, so students would feel challenged to compete. It would be great if the American Mathematical Society had a way to rank people’s knowledge of the various Mathematics Subject Classifications. Kids love video games because they enjoy beating friends with a specialized skill, and they also love competing against a computer too. Traditional schooling is so boring and passive. Etextbooks need the challenge of competition, but it would be so tired if all they did was offer time competitions on who could finish solving ten equations first.

What if a Civilization type game required various mathematical skills to play, so if a student wanted to build a pyramid in the game he’d need to know geometry, or if she wanted her little Sims to sail across an ocean, she’d have to use celestial navigation to advance the game.

In other words, if publishers are only going to take the text from their printed books and put it in an ebook, that’s not going to work. Even if the Kindle had full color and resolution to match the printed page, so a Kindle book could contain all the photos and illustrations of the real textbook, I still don’t think it will be equal to using paper volumes. Modern textbooks are gorgeous compared to what I remember I had to use as a kid. If I had the choice between 5 books, weighing 40 pounds, and 1 Kindle weighing less than a single pound, I’m afraid I’d shoulder the burden, because real textbooks are far easier to use, and much more spectacular to look at. I kid you not. If you haven’t seen a text in forty years, go find a kid and look at theirs.

When I owned my Kindle and subscribed to Time magazine, I found it easiest to read from page one to page last, and endure the time it took to page past articles I didn’t want to read. There were navigation links, but between flipping back to the table of contents and to an article to see if I wanted to read it, it was just easier to stay in linear mode of page, page, page, page….

Etextbooks will only be better if they offer a variety of ways to study. Ultimately, I don’t think individual etextbooks will be the answer. I think students will subscribe to an online textbook service, and pay $4.99-$19.99 a month per course, and access a myriad of multimedia features, paying about the same as buying a textbook for a one semester course.

The old way to going to college involved scheduling a class with a professor and studying a book together in a room with other students for a few months. Online instruction means studying on your own with a professor you might never meet who shepherds unseen students through a system of requirements. Wouldn’t you prefer a textbook service that gave you podcasts to listen to at the gym or grocery store or while doing the dishes, and video lectures to watch before bedtime, and online games to play against your classmates, and ebooks to read on your iPhone at break at work. Local college professors may stop lecturing, and end up becoming educational gurus who help their students find their way to enlightenment in the subjects they paid to master.

The textbook of the future will have to be very flexible. I don’t even go to school, but I study all the time. I just finished the audio book The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg about cosmology of the early universe just after the big bang. I’m about to read the hardback and listen to the audio book of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which will go deeper into many documentaries I’ve been watching lately on The Science Channel and PBS, but I also want something more systematic, so I’m going to get a DVD set or two from The Teaching Company. Their great DVD courses would be fantastic to keep on a netbook.

The more I study cosmology and physics, the more I feel the need to study mathematics. I wish I could find something like the RosettaStone language courses to help me. I also wish I had something that tested and rated my knowledge. I don’t feel the need to go back to college and major in physics, but if an astronomical association offered online testing, with amateur rankings, I might be tempted by their challenge. Our K-12 upbringing made most of us to hate learning, mainly because they made gaining knowledge all about passing crappy tests. Video games are a form of test taking, a fun kind, that addict kids.

It’s a shame that most adults study new subjects like snacking on potato chips. We constantly nibble on information but are never challenged to do anything with our empty data calories. People will spend 60 hours a week playing online video games that require an amazing amount of study just to slay imaginary dragons or build pretend lives in Second Life. Why not set up servers and let players build an historically accurate virtual Tudor England, so they could apply their hobby history scholarship to a challenge. What if teachers told their students, “Your homework for this week is to create a virtual Mayflower, and show why the Puritans came to America. Each of you must flesh out one historical character and show that person in twenty scenes from their life interacting with the characters your classmates create. Please tell you’re parents they aren’t allowed to play this week.”

See why I think existing invention of the textbook shouldn’t be converted into a gadget that only displays electronic words and images on an electronic page because it’s lighter than a bulky book? Modern textbooks are already bursting their bindings trying to become multimedia experiences. E-ink would be a huge step backwards. Go find a 2009 textbook, and flip through it. What I’m saying will be obvious. It will also be obvious that the weight of all the knowledge within that tome won’t be easily consumed by your darling rug rat. Today’s kids chow down on HD video and 1080p Xbox games. The Sirens of virtual worlds call to kids and the printed black letter on white paper, or gray e-ink, just won’t charm them.

JWH – 7/3/9

Predicting Technological Change

In the last few days I’ve helped many people set up their new iPhones with the campus Exchange server and wireless registration. I can’t even count how many people I know now that have an iPhone, but they tend to be young, but not always. I don’t own an iPhone myself, but I do have an iPod touch. I’m too cheap to own a smart phone, even though I would love to own an iPhone, I won’t allow myself to pay another big monthly communication’s bill.

I’ve been working with computers since 1971, and have always been gadget crazy, but I’ve yet to join the craze over expensive cell phones. That will change when I see the right netbook.

When people come to me for help with their iPhone, they like to show off all their favorite iPhone apps, and there are an amazing variety of these little programs. Some apps, like games, are built on concepts that developed on the desktop computer. Other apps, like those that help find restaurants or tell you what song is playing have evolved from needs of people on-the-go.

I used to tell people that the way to predict technological innovation was to forecast tech growth in gadgets that were jettison components with moving parts. For example, the floppy disk. It’s been replaced by the flash drive. Soon the CD/DVD optical drive will disappear because of high speed networking. And finally the hard drive will disappear because of solid state devices. Looking at the phenomenon of netbooks shows off this trend. They don’t have optical drives. And many users try to ditch their spinning hard drives for SSD drives.

I should have taken my own advice, and not bought a Blu-Ray player because I have only played one Blu-Ray disc so far, and instead watched 14-15 downloads from Netflix. The no moving parts of the Netflix feature on the LD BD390 is far more appealing than the Blu-Ray player with moving parts.

Now, besides telling people to watch for gadgets that have no moving parts, I tell friends, to keep an eye out for tech with programming geared for on-the-go tech users. That’s part of what I was getting at with my last post “My Life on a Hard Drive.” It appears that netbooks should kindle the same excitement as iPhones.

I was watching Brink, a show on the Science Channel the other night, and they were showing off a wearable video projector that allowed people to use their hands to interact and play with computer screens projected onto almost any kind of surface. This gadget has no moving parts, and it’s designed for on-the-go computing. I can easily imagine future netbooks or iPhones with a built in video projector.

One class of apps that my young iPhone acquaintances are showing me are those that help find places to eat. None of the people I hang out with have an iPhone, we’re all too old and cheap, but one of us needs to get one, because we always argue so much about where to eat that’s new and not boring. The idea of every nearby eatery and their menu popping up on a screen based on location is just too cool, even for us old farts.

Now think about where tech wizards could take this concept. Last weekend I wanted a copy of The Kings of Leon’s latest album, and the only nearby place I could think to shop was Target. I drove over only to be disappointed. What if I had an app that told me ahead of time all the places that were selling the CD and its price. Won’t this trump Amazon.com? Or what if I was in my local Borders and wanted to know where a book was shelved, so instead of asking a clerk, my phone could just tell me. I’m sure you can think of several good apps now, related to being somewhere and wanting instant information.

Of course, this leads to another prediction. Future tech seems to put people out of work. I’m getting very close to not wanting to buy music CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, magazines or books because of technological alternatives. If I can listen to music, watch movies, read books and magazine articles all on a netbook or iPhone, why would I want to acquire all the physical crap required to store media I can get easier via the net?

Notice something? My habits are changing and they just invalidated the suggested ideas I had for new on-the-go apps. Any shopping app I predict shouldn’t involve buying things like CDs, DVDs, and other physical storage tech that’s being outdated by digital tech. We’ll want apps not to buy stuff, but to get services like food, movies, plays, tourist sites, concerts, etc. Again, on-the-go over the impulse to acquire.

Some stuff, like clothes, I don’t think will be replaced by tech. Who really wants to wear a computer? Unless the fabric design is computerized. But I predict we’ll want smaller wardrobes because of our rolling stone natures.

But the same predictions about computer tech can be applied to automobile tech. Electric cars have fewer parts. They promote on-the-go lifestyles. The goal is to get to a point where you don’t buy physical fuel. By the same token, mass transit does away with owning something with moving parts.

Look at computer games. The trend is away from buying discs to getting games off the net, and to carry around devices where you can play games anywhere. Also, the trend is to combine devices. Why have a phone and a portable game unit when you can have an iPhone? Why have a GPS and travel books, when an iPhone can replace them? Why have a camera and voice recorder when you can have an iPhone?

The question becomes: Will the iPhone become the super gadget, or will it be the netbook? The flip phone was too small, and the laptop too big. What will meet in the middle?

As a society become more mobile, all of us get tired of carry around so much junk. Every time I moved in my life, I always had more junk than the previous move, more boxes of books, LPs, CDs and other stuff. The next time I move, I’m going to have less. I’ve already gotten rid of my LPs. I’m thinning out CDs. I’m switching from buying DVDs to Netflix. I’ve stopped buying CDs because of Rhapsody, Zune, Lala and Pandora. I keep my photos on my computer. And my dream retirement would be to travel light and live in a different city every six months. See the trends? You don’t need a crystal ball and a turban on your head to play tech swami.

But here’s a prediction that might not be so obvious. I think programming should be nearing a breakthrough where educational computing makes a comeback. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, personal computing and educational software were all the rage. People felt obligated to buy their kids computers. Everyone talked about computer literacy. But programs that taught never panned out.

Online courses and degrees are a huge growth industry in the education business. Notice the connection to on-the-go people. Eventually the market for apps that help us get more services will saturate. Sooner or later, I think we’ll see iPhone and netbook apps that help us learn and study. We have portable music, portable TV shows, and portable audio books, why not portable lectures? It’s like having a school without teachers. The Teaching Company’s Great Courses would be fantastic on the netbook screen. And see, this educational angle may turn the tide against the iPhone to the netbook as the on-the-go device of just the right size.

JWH – 7/1/9

My Life on a Hard Drive

I wanted to call this essay, “My Life on a Terabyte Drive” because it sounded cooler and more specific, but then I’m thinking about buying a netbook and they only come with 160 gigabytes of hard drive space, something less glamorous to say in a title. I can’t even fit my music collection on that, so it wouldn’t be true either. If you read to the end of this essay, you’ll see I could have called it, “My Memory Book,” but that title wouldn’t mean anything to you until I explained it all.

Either at work, or with friends, I’ve had to help many people move their personal data from one computer to another. When I started this kind of support years ago, all I needed was one floppy. The last time I moved my stuff to a new machine, I bought a 750gb USB drive. No, I didn’t need to fill it up, at least not then. My Mozy.com account says I have 193.3gb backed up with them, but that’s only my life from one of three home computers, and I’ve yet to complete the epic task of scanning all my family photos.

When I contemplate putting my life on a hard disk many fanciful ideas come to mind. I like to compare this goal to mind uploading, a science fictional concept that deals with transferring a person’s personality to a computer. I first wrote about this idea in “My Life in 75 Megabytes,” which lets you know how long I’ve been thinking about this concept. Back then my own expanding universe was much smaller, and could fit on a zip disk.

I find I have seven discrete concepts I’d like to explore in this essay:

What goes into a digitized life?
How is a digital life organized?
How do we synced ourselves across many machines?
What role does the media player play?
How to we span living across local and network drives?
What do we need to protect our digital memory?
And do our files define our personality?

Thinking about buying a netbook that will be my carry-around auxiliary mind, a Mini-Me, so to say, I’d like to think about it’s full theoretical potential. Let’s just play with the idea of what we’d like to have on a computer if one day we found ourselves orphaned from home with only the clothes on our back and a computer in our hand.

What Goes Into a Digitized Life?

Photographs have been the primary artifact that people want to protect and preserve. Photographs are what people cry over the most when their CPU bytes the big one. Next up is music files, either ripped, stolen or DRMed. Few people stuff their machines with essays and fiction like me, but many folks like to maintain a wordy autobiography in the form of an email archive. A few $-minded souls, horde tax records like misers. And I’m starting to see hard drives become the new shoebox for home videos. I myself, have hundreds of audio books that I’ve tediously ripped from cassette tapes and CDs that I’d hate to lose. My wife wants to preserve video games, and their activation codes. I’ve met a few people who maintain databases of things they love to collect. When it comes down to it, there’s an almost endless variety of things people junk up their hard drives with and want to save forever.

All this digital junk can be broken down into two extremely distinct types: Unique, owner created data, that can’t be found anywhere else, and copies of stuff other people created, either received free, stolen or bought. It’s far more painful to have a laptop stolen with five years of digital snapshots than one with hundreds of dollars worth of songs bought from iTunes.

For the purpose of this essay, let’s not worry about the actual size of the hard drive on your buddy computer, but instead imagine this device will contain everything you want to save that can be digitized and if found in 30 years by your grandchildren, or 300 years by a scholar of the 21st century history, would make a statement about who you are. Think about this super-netbook as your library of personally created data, plus copies of your favorite songs, books, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, paintings, poems, short stories, novels, etc. Just think of it as the memory you wished your neurons could records.

The File Structure of Our Lives

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into someone else’s computer and tried to extract what they desperately want to save, but it’s a fascinating task. Microsoft, Apple and Linus all make provisions for storing user documents in a specified place, but users do their damnedest to squirrel important files all over their drives. And even when they stick to the Home directory concept, everyone creates their own folder structure and naming system. In recent years the idea of standard music and photo folders have emerged, which is great, but I think we need to convene a panel of Nobel prize winning eggheads to develop a worldwide standard, to be used across all OS systems, so future archeologists poking through our private digital junkyards can easily find our treasured entombed memories, and make sense of them.

We need to organize our auxiliary brains and keep them tidy for ourselves too, because as we toss more stuff into our net noggins, finding what we want becomes harder and annoying. I love the fact that most applications in Windows now open My Documents as default when you mouse click Open File. It drives me nuts that people want to override this and put their crap all over the desktop or in folders they created off of the root drive.

I’m also glad Microsoft simplified “My Documents,” “My Music,” and “My Pictures” into Documents, Music and Pictures. But now we need to expand on that to include Videos, Movies, Books and other categories. This is where things get tricky, where arguments start, and OS turf wars begin. Under “Jim” on my Vista machine I have:

Desktop
Downloads
Links
Pictures
Searches
Documents – Shortcut
Contacts
Documents
Favorites
Music
Saved Games
Videos

This is how Microsoft divides my life, and they’ve made some mysterious choices to me. I wish I had a Mac so I could see how Steve Jobs wants the same job accomplished. Ubuntu just gives me a home folder, leaving me free to make my own decisions from there Since our computer will define our personality and I said we could save anything digital document that defines us, this means the home folder will become a library of digital files. I’m not sure if the structure set out by Microsoft is a workable Dewey Decimal system for this task though.

What folder do I file my digital audio books? Where do I put my ebooks or .pdf files for magazines and articles? And should I save Gattaca, my favorite science fiction movie under Videos, the same place where I would store my home made clips? And if I collected favorite YouTube videos, should they also be filed with my personal videos?

I think we need to rethink the \Home\ folder concept. \Jim\ should be just for documents I created, and another folder called \Library\ should be used for all files I collect that were created by other people. And the two might even have sub-folders with the same titles, like \Videos\, \Photos\ and \Music\. (That’s assuming I become more creative than I am now.) Thus the new \Jim\ might contain these sub-folders:

Audioclips
Banking
Blogs
Bookmarks
Data
Diary
Emails
Essays
Fiction
HTML
Lists
Medical
Numbers
Photos
Timeline
Video

This isn’t perfect yet, but I hope you see where I’m going. Under \Library\ I might have these sub-folders:

Art
Audiobooks
Books
Lectures
Magazines
Movies
Music
Photographs
Podcasts
Television
Video

In my personal folder, I have Photos, for those I take, but Photographs under Library, for pictures I buy. Art would be for digitized artwork I like. My desktop gallery program could be set to pull from Art, Photos and Photographs.

How to Keep our Digital Life Synced?

I have two desktop machines and laptop at home, and various iPod and MP3 players, including a iPod touch, and I’m planning to buy a netbook. Plus I have several computers at work with years of programming code I created that I never want to loose. At work I have USB drive I brought from home that has a backup of all my home files, but in particularly, my music library so I can play songs at work. At times I also bring USB drives home, so my work is backed up.

The absolute ideal file storage solution would a 100% reliable gigabit network to a federally protected online databank with all my computers accessing one file system library that was perfectly safe until the Sun goes nova. Plus, my data would be preserved for ever and ever, even after I died, for historical researchers. I’m watching The Tudors – don’t you wish the producers of the show had access to Henry’s and Anne’s home directories?

Unfortunately, we don’t have such an ideal solution. The trend is toward owning multiple computers, and by computer I also mean cell phone, iPod, and even video game units, anything that processes and stores digital data you create. And we’re already seeing syncing solutions. You can backup cell phone directories to your home computer, or if you have an iPhone, you can get your email, contacts and calendar from an Exchange server at work, thus syncing your phone numbers in one database.

In fact, the iPhone is a marvelous device, in that it can sync songs, photos, audiobooks, television shows, movies and other files from your mothership desktop to your lifeboat phone. Apple doesn’t seem to like the concepts of netbooks, hoping you will use an iPhone/touch instead. However, I find their amazing little screen too small to be my carry-around computer companion.

The Role of the Media Player

iTunes is also a fascinating program and concept. It’s a program that attempts to manage the \Library\ portion of your file system, and a media player for playing songs, television shows, movies and audiobooks from your library. With a bit of tweaking from Apple, it theoretically could handle my Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher and PDF documents too, if we wanted one file librarian to manage all my computer files, including the personally created \Jim\ files too. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Right now we generally have one program that creates each kind of content, such as a word processer for writing, a spreadsheet for playing with numbers, a database for handling data in tables, a publishing program for making magazine content, web editors for creating web pages, audio programs for recording voice, and so on. But on the other hand, there are two classes of programs emerging that show us the results of what these other programs produce. The first general class of file viewers is the web browser for looking at data files on the net, and the second program is the media librarian for looking at files on your computer.

I’m not sure if media librarians are a good idea or not. They are designed to make life easier for the user and isolate the user from knowing about the file system. The entire Macintosh philosophy seems to follow this belief too, that things are easier if you keep the user from needing to know too much about the file system. I’m not sure that’s a good educational goal. Both the web browser and media librarian work to replace the operating system. An emerging class of Linux netbooks work to create an easy-to-use visual menu that sits on top of the OS and hides things from the user too.

The trouble is, if users work directly with the file system and double clicks on one, whether word processor document, or mp3 music file, those files will be launched into an editor program, rather than a player program, assuming the user created the files. Media librarians like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Rhapsody, Audible Manager are great for organizing and playing certain kinds of files, producing playlists, sharing media with other users, etc. The trouble is to select one universal media library program that does everything perfectly.

When I download an audiobook from Audible.com, it goes into my iTunes and Audible Manager, and I can have it also go into my Windows Media Player. Sometimes the download gets messed up and the audiobook doesn’t get filed in one of the players. So I have to find the file and manually add it to the library. iTunes files all MP3 files under Music, so songs and ripped audio books get mixed together. That annoys me.

Plus iTunes only wants to work with iPods, so it doesn’t help me when I use my Zune. But then my Zune Media player won’t have anything to do with my iPods. And all my media librarians fight to own my MP3 collection of 18,000+ songs. It’s a huge pain. I also have multiple programs willing to play my videos too, but none are universal, thus I have to have specialty programs like Amazon Unbox to view videos bought from Amazon.

Right now you can set Windows to launch any program you choose for a particular file extension. Thus if I have Rhapsody set for .mp3, it will launch when I click on a song or an audiobook or a podcast, all of which share the .mp3 extension. I wish Windows would allow a folder override to this system, so for \Audiobooks\ I could set Audible Manager as a my player, and for \Music\ I could set Windows Media Player, and for \Podcasts\ I could set iTunes.

Now that we’re slowly moving away from DRM enslaved files, we will be less reliant on media librarian programs like iTunes. Also, why does your favorite program to play songs also have to be your program to load songs onto a MP3 player? And why can’t I have one librarian for all my devices, including iPods, Creative MP3 players, Zune, phone and netbooks? Every portable device has a limited amount of storage space, so wouldn’t it be great to have a librarian on my largest computer that could talk to all my lesser computers and help me manage a subset of files I want to maintain on each?

I would love a librarian where I could rate my content 1-10, whether songs, movies or word documents, and then when I plug in a portable device, the librarian would show me how much that device can handle by telling me, “This device can hold all content rated 8 and above, would you like me to load it?” Or I could set it to always load personally created data first, then songs as a second priority, and only sync television marked unseen, and to manually sync movies.

Even still, I’m not sure I like one program to do everything for me. I like choice. I like the Unix philosophy of having a tool for each job. I think I’d prefer to pick each app that played each kind of file. That way I could have the perfect ebook reader for me that might be different from my perfect music player. Hell, I might like one kind of MP3 player for playing albums, another for playing playlists, another for random playing of songs, and even another program where I play and manage my all-time favorite 1,001 tunes. And all of these would work from the same \Music\ folder structure. I’d also like a program that would generate reports on the \Music\ folder by listing all albums, artists and tracks, and keep statistics on each. I have no idea how many albums I own, even though they are all on a computer.

Hard Disk Driving versus Network Driving

As the Internet get better, meaning faster and with more features, space on our local hard drives will be needed less, until we only need to store personally created data. If Rhapsody’s library had every song my personal music library did, I’d never mess with a \Music\ folder again. If the network was fast and always dependable, I wouldn’t even worry about putting songs, television and movies on my devices because I’d just stream them from Lala, Rhapsody, Pandora, Zune, Netflix and Amazon. A netbook with a 160gb hard drive would be fine and dandy as my auxiliary brain until I took too many photos or videos. And if I could store unlimited photos and videos reliably online, I’d again be free of hard drive space limitations.

If the the broadband and the network were that great I wouldn’t even need a \Library\ file system at all. However, any experience with flaky network connections will make you horde your favorite content locally.

There’s a reason why they call these cute little computers netbooks. They are gadgets designed to depend on the Internet for their content. I’ve never wanted a smartphone because I’ve never wanted to pay a broadband cell phone bill, but I’d be much more likely to want broadband service with a netbook. And all the cell phone providers are quickly ramping up to sell netbooks with two-year broadband contracts.

Laptops were supposed to be on-the-go computing, but they have been too big, too expensive and don’t last long enough on a charge, to be the always on-the-go computers. I just don’t want to carry an expensive laptop everywhere, afraid I might break it, lose it, or have it stolen, but I might carry a $350 machine everywhere I went, especially if it’s charge would last all day like a cell phone, and I could get access to the net.

I’ve set up a half-dozen netbooks so far, all for women who want these purse size computers. I’ve had several grown women in my office all squealing like girls over purple and pinkness. They don’t even understand the potential of netbooks, all they see is pretty and purse-able. They even buy netbooks with their own money for work use. I’ve talked to other women that bought them for home use at Walmart or from the Home Shopping Channel, and they tell me their kids are buying them too. Netbooks are hot. $250-$400 seems to be the right price for portable computing.

I’m waiting for 8 hours of battery life, which many models have now, and better video processing, which is coming this fall. I’d also like faster processing and I’m torn on deciding between a 10” or 12” screen, and what resolution it should have. I’ve set up a Dell Mini 10 with 1366×768 resolution that’s super sharp but teeny tiny But the Dell’s was properly proportioned at the resolution, something not true of all netbook screens I’ve seen. I hate squashed or stretched fonts!

Netbooks are getting very close to showing 1080p video, so they will make great on-the-road theaters that can replace portable DVD players and iPods, plus they make great Skype video phones. Combined with broadband and Bluetooth headsets, they can be cell phones too. The implications for this auxiliary brain as a communications tool is immense.

Backing Up is Hard To Do

As we put more of our life on our netbooks, or should we steal a trademark, our Lifebooks, it will be vital to back them up. If netbooks are synced with desktop computers, that’s one level of backup. Asus even sells their netbooks with 10gb of online storage. And there is always services like Mozy.com that backup files to Internet servers. But the main thing to remember, these devices will become our heads we can lose, and we’ll hate the day we experience a digital lobotomy. I’ve always said the Internet is our real sixth sense, and netbooks will only reinforce this belief. Once we all got addicted to electrical devices like computers and televisions, we’d get pissed when electricity went off. After I became dependent on the net, I actually get jumpy and depressed when the net goes down. If we become addicted to our little buddy computers we carry everywhere, losing one will be painful indeed. Like losing part of ourselves. Being able to quickly replicate our digital life onto a replacement netbook will be extremely important.

Do Our Files Reflect Our Personality?

If a team of psychologists with AI tools, found my future netbook with all my writing and all my favorite photos, art, books, movies, television shows, songs, on it, could they analyze the content and produce a description of my personality? If netbooks had been around for hundreds of years, and we could study the content of our ancestors, how much would we know about them? My father died when I was 19, and there has always been so much I’ve wondered about him. I would love to have a copy of his auxiliary brain.

Also, imagine kids starting school with netbooks and keeping all their schoolwork, photos and videos they make throughout their K-12 careers. Boy, I wished I had such a childhood treasure. I wished I had taken photos of all my classmates, all my classrooms, hallways, schools and teachers. I wish I had taken photos of all the homes I lived in, with photos of all the rooms, furniture and the streets I walked. We always focused our cameras on families and friends, but I wished I had also taken photos of objects, like houses, rooms, streets, cars of my life, to aid my memory. I’ve forgotten so much that I’d love to recall. Maybe it has little true value, because I did forget all that stuff, but now I wish I had more evidence of my earlier life. I wish I had photos of every dog and cat I owned. I can barely picture my furry friends now, mostly just recall their names, like Blacky, Chief or Mike, and some I can’t even remember, which is sad.

I seriously doubt there is much real detail to download from our brains, if such a science fictional reality is ever possible. I don’t know if personality profiles can be resurrected from netbooks, but I think my sense of personal history would be much stronger, and my self awareness, far more vivid, if my poor old brain had more solid evidence.

The Future of Netbooks

Thinking about these seven concepts of how we could store our life digitally and have it readily at hand, to help us with day-to-day activities, makes me picture all kinds of possibilities for netbooks. I doubt our futures will include jacks in the back of our skulls like the people in the movie, The Matrix, but the netbook could become the mind-computer interface between ourselves and the net.

With Bluetooth, we could have cell phone like headsets, so we could make calls, but also use our netbooks for dictating voice recordings, to aid our memory with verbal annotations. Photo and video cameras could be combined with Bluetooth so anything we snap or video is immediately recorded to our external brains. Medical monitoring devices could be combined with Bluetooth, netbooks and broadband for new kinds of health tracking and assessment. Netbooks will only expand social networking, and if our youthful population is so close now because of cell phones, think what constant video phoning will do to their generation.

Netbooks might finally bring us into the age of videophone that’s been predicted by science fiction since Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon entertained tykes in the 1930s in the Sunday funnies. Computer pundits thought we’d all be wearing computers by now, but maybe a good device that’s easy to carry will do instead. This makes me predict purses will become common for men, at least leather over-the-shoulder pouches, or we’ll see more men with messenger bags. But netbooks are so easy to carry, they may never get to far from our hands.

If netbooks had reversible LCD touch screens as a standard feature, so they could function like Tablet PCs, netbooks could replace the emerging ebooks devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader. Right now I find it easiest to carry a cell phone in my pants pocket and a Zune in my shirt pocket, one for phone service the other for audiobooks. But if I have a netbook with me wherever I go, or nearby, then all I would need to carry on my person is a Bluetooth headset. Should I predict the demise of the iPhone and iPod?

The deciding factors on buying a netbook is how big the screen and keyboard, and whether or not they are useable for long periods of typing and reading. I bought an iPod touch to be my carry around computer, but I didn’t like typing with a single finger, and the screen was too small for browsing the web. It’s pretty nice for reading text email, terrible for HTML email, very nice for checking movie times and looking at previews, pleasant for reading ebooks, although I might like a slightly larger screen, and very nice for Pandora and Wolfgang’s Vault.

When netbooks first burst on the scene in 2007, their appeal included solid state storage over spinning hard drives, so, “My Life on a Hard Drive” might be a poor title soon, but if spinning drives disappear, I predict we’ll still call solid state devices hard drives too. Technology is evolving away from moving parts, so we might eventually call netbooks, memory books, the name I want to use for them. If the right technology pans out, and the right pricing for broadband emerges, memory books might be very common indeed.

What will you put on your memory book? How will you organize it. How can a memory book improve your life? A good portion of our population has been able to avoid the computer revolution, but if a memory book becomes so personally useful, will anyone choose to be a Luddite in this revolution? As I age, and my memory falters and skips, being able to query a memory book becomes a very useful mental crutch. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Will it make me weaker or stronger?

I do know organizing my thoughts for this blog helps me retain words, and even learn to use new words. Writing these blogs help me refine and distinguish discrete ideas and concepts. In the past year I’ve met a number of people, usually young, who have asked me what my favorite movies, books and songs are, and I had a hard time making a quick list. That disturbs me. Maybe if I constantly worked to maintain a library of favorites on my memory book, or even just keep my memory book handy and constantly annotated a list of favorites, I would feel better. Who knows, I might not even need to open my memory book, but my real memory of such lists would be fresh enough to have something to say in casual conversations.

I don’t know if my memory weakness is normal for someone my age, or if it portends Alzheimer’s in future years. My wife already gets impatient with my slowness to respond, and hates when I tell her she better start acquiring more patience in case I get worse. “You better not,” she warns me. Having a memory book might become the glasses of my memories someday. Or my memory book might become a very large hand to write notes on. Or it my memory book might become a gym to exercise my neurons. This is all fascinating to consider, and I can’t wait to test out these ideas. I’m just not ready to buy a netbook yet.

JWH – 6/28/9

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe. I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either. On this third reading, this time via audio book, it seemed quite obvious that The Time Machine is the first science fiction novel.

Now a lot of people are going to argue with my revelation, by bringing up Jules Verne, or Mary Shelley, or many other stories that have fantastic elements in them. And I completely understand because those stories are a kind of science fiction too. No, I’ve come to the conclusion there are two types of stories labeled science fiction. There’s the all-purpose label that imprecisely gets slapped onto almost any kind of far-out tale, and a second type, that’s very rare, that’s illustrated by what H. G. Wells wrote with The Time Machine.

This truer version of science fiction was created by Wells as a method to use science to speculate about the future. Many writers have written stories that extrapolated the future from present trends, but Wells uses what he learned from the sciences, evolution and cosmology, to write what is essentially the matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis.

The Time Machine comes after Charles Darwin, but before Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, but it’s message is just as thrilling and full of sense of wonder being read in 2009 as it was in 1895. If you read this story as an adventure using a time machine, then you are seeing the book as generic science fiction. If you read this book and realize that H. G. Wells is using his current day science to speculate about the evolution of man as a species, and the death of the Earth, then the term science fiction means something different.

H. G. Wells actually present three major speculative ideas for the readers of The Time Machine:

Time travel is the obvious idea that everyone talks about, but few people analyzes Wells theory for time travel.
Just a few decades after Darwin’s famous book, Wells suggests that mankind could branch into new species, and even species that aren’t as intelligent as home sapiens.
Finally, Wells paints a picture of the end of Earth after mankind is long gone.

H. G. Wells produces the essential elements of the science fiction novel out of these efforts. Most people think inventing the concept of a time machine is the main science fiction element, but it’s not. If the unnamed hero of this novel had traveled backwards in time, the time machine would only be a gimmick for writing historical fiction with a modern protagonist. An absolute essential element of science fiction is its speculation about the future.

Many writers have suggested that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, but I don’t think that’s true, because the story wasn’t about the future. It’s a horror novel. A novel about a monster. After reading The War of the Worlds immediately after The Time Machine and I’m struck by the immense difference between the two. The War of the Worlds is an exciting novel, with far out aspects, and even sense of wonder, but it doesn’t feel like The Time Machine, it doesn’t feel like a science fiction novel that The Time Machine was. It’s not about the future. It’s about monsters from space. It’s another horror novel.

Now I understand why I never felt H. P. Lovecraft was a science fiction writer even when he wrote about invaders from space. I don’t know why movies like The Thing, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them and all those other monster stories from the 1950s were considered classic science fiction films, putting them into same the genre as Forbidden Planet and 2001, A Space Odyssey.

When I start to think about this I see the term science fiction as a box for throwing all kinds of odds and ends into that are hard to classify. Most people throw UFO or X-Files type stories into the science fiction box and I think that’s totally unfair. Space travel doesn’t equal science fiction. Aliens arriving in flying saucers is not science fiction, but just monsters from outer space. ESP and all of that are just more monster stories. The human race has a long list of monster stories, in fact most of the oldest stories, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Beowulf, are about monsters.

The Time Machine gives us many clues to what real science fiction is about. Another essential element is it’s speculation about seeing reality through scientific ideas. When the Time Traveler visits the year 802,701 and our pinnacle of culture is forgotten, we are like Dorothy realizing we’re no longer in Kansas. The difference between L. Frank Baum and H. G. Wells, is Wells uses scientific ideas in a different way than they were ever used before. Instead of using science to understand the present and the past, he uses it to understand the future.

We will never know the future. Science fiction isn’t about predicting the future. Wells invented a kind of literature that tries to grok the future through scientific speculation. By this measure Star Wars is not science fiction, but Star Trek sometimes is. The War of the Worlds is science fiction, but not as much as The Time Machine. Both novels are mostly fiction, but Wells weaves in concepts and speculation from the knowledge of 1895 science that he knew. For instance, I’m trying to track down when astronomers first suggested the idea of the sun turning into a red giant. It must be before 1895.

The odd thing about science fiction is you can’t learn science from science fiction. You have to already know science to spot the science in science fiction. It’s like jazz. You can love jazz without understanding the concepts of music, but if you want to know what a jazz musician is doing, you have to understand music theory, even at a simple level. Reading The Time Machine for me, was watching H. G. Wells take the science of 1895 and improvise speculative pictures of the future.

Most modern science fiction never even tries to do this. Most science fiction is escapist adventure fiction. Wells is working as a philosopher, using fiction with the lens of science, making science fiction a scientific instrument like the telescope, to show his readers something about the nature of reality and possible futures. He’s pointing his finger at something, whereas most adventure science fiction doesn’t. Real science fiction, as Wells invented it, points to a speculative concept. It has something to say about reality, usually about the future.

But doesn’t all great literature point to something about reality? The difference between fiction and science fiction is the science. Most people study literary reality through lenses provided by culture, customs, upbringing, religion, and philosophy. You have to study science to appreciate real science fiction, and few SF fans study scientific subjects. Wells invented a kind of literature that many writers tried to copy, but few got it right.

And again, it’s not about predicting the future. Time machines are extremely doubtful, and so are the Eloi and Morlocks. Charles Darwin looks at nature and fossils and says, “Hey, there were probably other species of humans before us.” Wells, takes that idea, and says, “Hey, maybe there will be others species of humans after us.” That sounds very simple now, but try to do it yourself. If you can, then you can write the kind of fiction I want to label science fiction. If you take someone else’s speculative idea and turn it into fiction, for instance Star Wars, something I don’t want to call science fiction, then you aren’t doing what H. G. Wells did.

Yes, yes, I know I’m being very picky and splitting hairs, and probably sounding pretentious like those wine tasters who claim they detect all kinds of rare flavors when you can only taste alcohol. Let me give you another analogy. Watch the History Channel. Can you tell when they are showing real history from made-up crap? Many scholars would say The History Channel should be called the Science Fiction Channel. I’m making two points here. First, anything labeled History should be considered truly educational, and second, they are slamming The History Channel’s crap shows by using the label science fiction.

Can you see why I want to make a precise definition of science fiction? One that will represent the best creative intentions of H. G. Wells, and not the one-size-fits-all box for weirdo ideas?

JWH – 6/24/9

Manned Space Flight – Is it even on your radar?

During the glory days of NASA, between President Kennedy’s great 1961 proclamation committing the United States to going to the Moon within a decade, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in July 1969, there were three great space programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Each manned rocket launch during those years was covered by all three television networks. ABC, CBS and NBC would stop broadcasting game shows and soap operas and the missions would become national events. The 1960s represented a tremendous time for the public’s interest in the space program.

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the Moon. Popular interest in space exploration appears to have dwindled significantly ever since Apollo 11, with even Apollo 18, 19, and 20 being cancelled. Our lunar exploration years only lasted from July 1969, through December 1972. And when was the last time you took off from school or work to spend the day watching television of a space mission? I would have taken vacation days to watch the recent Hubble repair mission if any of my damn 200 cable stations had covered it live.

Since 1982, the Space Shuttle has been our vehicle for traveling into space, but it’s scheduled to be retired next year. The Space Shuttle never left low-earth orbit (LEO). I wonder how many people know about our next manned space system that’s currently on the drawing boards? It’s called the Constellation Program, that will use the Ares 1 rocket combined with the Orion space capsule, both in early design development. It is a dramatic change from the 30 years of Shuttle flights, in that Orion will eventually leave LEO.

The Constellation program was conceived officially in 2005, and scheduled to blast-off in 2015, with the exciting goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020. How many Americans know about this, and do they care?

NASA plods on, year after year, with a decent budget that’s prone to suffer booms and busts depending on the political weather. NASA goals are constantly up for debate. NASA is a prestige agency for the United States. Space flight has always been political, and the only real reason we rushed to the Moon was not for science, but as competition in the cold war. The current Constellation plans probably came into being because of China’s new space program that’s aiming at the Moon, with India and Japan echoing Chinese ambitions.

Like atomic bombs, manned space missions are the symbol of national pride. Only the most elite of nations belong to the club. Even though NASA doesn’t get a lot of public support, it’s budget will never be zeroed out because the President and Congress fear the United States would be seen as a declining world power if it did. Within Congress and NASA the debate has always been how to get the biggest political and scientific bang for our buck. There are two factions fighting for dollars: those campaigning for exciting manned missions and those who advocate scientific robotic missions. Robots have been our real space explorers, going where no man has gone before, or likely ever.

Many scientists, and maybe most of the public would be fine with letting robots have all the glory when it comes to space exploration. Let’s be honest here. The only real value of exploring space beyond thumping our nationalistic chests, is science, and it appears that the public has little interest in real scientific research. NASA’s web site for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have had millions of unique visitors, showing the biggest peak of interest in space exploration since the 1960s, but how many people does that represent?

Let’s say seven million. There are nearly seven billion people on Earth. Do the math. 1 million people is 1/1000 of a billion. Let’s even say NASA has seven million hard core fans world-wide. That would give them one tenth of one percent of popular support. Probably more people spend time thinking about drinking beer than exploring space. (If NASA only had the money people spent on getting high.) Seven million people seems like a big political block, but really it’s just a tiny sub-culture.

And are there really 7,000,000 people on Earth who actively spend a lot of their time thinking about space exploration? That’s saying 1 person in a 1,000 has a serious interest in the final frontier. These people would keep up with news on Space.com, read books about space exploration and technology, sign up for Twitter news feeds covering space vehicle development, and are members of one of the many space societies, like The Planetary Society, The Moon Society or the National Space Society. But membership in The Planetary Society is only around 100,000. What if the real figure is only 700,000, or .01%?

My guess that real world-wide space advocates number far less than seven million. “Revision for Space Vision?” from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, a blog by Alan Boyle, gives a listing of recent news articles about the Ares rocket that’s being built for the Constellation project, and other related news stories that would interest space advocates. When I ask my friends if they knew there was space program in development to return men to the Moon, they say no. For all I know, we could return to the Moon in 2020 and most of the people of the world won’t even notice this time.

Why is something as exciting as the universe get so little attention? Why does the latest iPhone get more press than NASA’s latest lunar mission? Did you even know about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that’s scheduled to reach the Moon on Tuesday? Or about Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that will crash into the Moon in October hoping to discover water ice? The orbiter will take photos so detailed they will be able to see the tracks left by the Apollo astronaut’s rovers. A lot is happening on the Moon right now, with spacecraft from many nations exploring it remotely, or will be in the near future. But how many people care?

Within the very small community of humans that are interested in space exploration, the Moon is becoming a hot destination. There is even a web site, Moon Daily, for keeping up with all the activity. Over at Asimov’s Science Fiction, James Patrick Kelly has an story in the current issue set on the Moon, “Going Deep,” which he reads for an MP3 audio edition, so the Moon is still of interest to science fiction writers and fans. And NASA recently held an art contest called “The Moon: Back to the Future,” with a very nice gallery of winners.

Hopefully, between now and 2020, the public will take a fresh interest in lunar exploration, but is that being too hopeful on my part. Most people consider learning about the Moon as exciting as studying rocks, and geology has never been one of the glamour sciences like astronomy and biology. (And when was the last time you met someone at a party talking about those topics???) The public is probably more than willing to let scientists play with the Moon as much as their little hearts want, as long as they aren’t asked to listen to any of the boring facts.

I’ve always cherished the assumption that space was the final frontier, and the manifest destiny of humanity was to explore the cosmos, but I’m starting to believe that is a false assumption on my part. I’ve started writing a novel about colonists on the Moon, but I’m wondering about its potential audience. If I want to make any money, I’d need to call it “Vampires on the Moon.” Science fiction is very popular in pop culture, but interest in science fiction doesn’t translate into interest in space exploration. I wonder if space exploration was as popular as rock music or professional sports, if humans would have already visited all the places our surrogate explorers, the robots, have reached?

JWH – 6/21/9