Your Life in the Cloud

Cloud computing is a hot topic in the computer world, but if you’re not a tech geek you may be wondering about the term.  In the early days of networking, when system administrators drew diagrams of their local networks they’d have little symbols for their computers, printers, hubs, wiring, but when it came to picturing the connection to the outer world, they’d draw a cloud.  Eventually, they’d draw a cloud and write Internet over it. 

The cloud was just a mysterious place at the edge of their map.  Back in the old days, they’d describe two networks, the LAN (local area network) and the WAN (wide area network), but the WAN just meant all the branch offices.  The Internet tied all the LANs and WANs into one big world wide network.  Any computer equipment you don’t manage is part of the cloud.

The shift to cloud computing means trusting other people with your data, programs, and even CPU processing.  Picture this.  The old way was taking photos, processing them with Picasa, and keeping your snaps on your laptop.  The new way is taking photos, uploading them to Picnik, crop and process them in your browser, and then creating a Show to send your friends to view online.  Nothing really happens on your computer.  You use your computer to manipulate photos at a distance.  It doesn’t even matter what kind of computer you have, Mac, PC or Linux.

Now, there are pros and cons to cloud computing.  If your computer is stolen, you don’t lose your photos.  But if Picnik goes out of business, you do.  But Picnik was just bought by Google, so hint, hint, see the direction of things?  Google already has Picasa, so why would they want Picnik? 

Well, a little story might explain that.  In the fabled old days of writing computer programs, a programmer would develop and test a program, and then take it to each computer in the building and install it, and then wait for the users to find more bugs.  If your business had PCs and Macs, you’d have to write two versions of the program.  If the OSes were upgraded, you’d sometimes have to rewrite your programs.  It was a pain.  If the boss wanted a new feature, you’d rewrite the program, and then walk around and reinstall the program on all the machines again.  A bigger pain.  Then came web based programs.  You write one program that runs on a web server that worked with PCs, Macs, and Linux machines.  No more going around installing on individual computers.

Right now when Google updates Picasa everyone has to download and install the upgrade.  If Google switches everyone to Picnik, all that goes away.  They no longer have to worry about supporting millions of users, or maintaining PC and Mac versions of their programs.  But it does mean they need to offer users a lot more disk space to upload their photos to.  Instead of keeping your photos just on your computer, you can also put them on Google’s computers, in the cloud.  If you are trusting, you could even delete the photos off your camera and computer.  In other words, you are letting Google be your hard drive, at least for photos.  And if you use Google Docs, you are letting them be your hard drive for word  processing and spreadsheet documents.

Cloud computing has tremendous ramifications.  Can you trust the cloud?  Actually, can you trust the companies that maintain a cloud presence?  Many people aren’t trusting by nature.  I assume they might use the cloud, but keep copies of everything they own on their PC and backup drives.  But what if there were more security features to the cloud?  What if you could back up your stuff on Google to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage?  Or what if something like databanks emerged, that offered the same security for your data as they do for your money?  What if there were governmental regulations and safeguards to data stored in the cloud?

Let me assure you of something, you will want the cloud to work and be safe because it will make your computing life infinitely easier.  It would mean the end of viruses, and new computers that run slower and slower, and computers that start acting weird in ways you can’t understand.  Computers could become solid-state devices with no moving parts, and the OS could be burned in ROM, so they can’t be changed, or infected, and your machine could become instant on, like a TV.  And the OS wars will be over too, no more I’m a Mac, I’m a PC commercials, even though they were cute. 

This is explained in “The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash” by Charlie Stross, the cutting edge science fiction writer, and over at TechCrunch in “Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy and Why Lala is Critical” by Michael Robertson.  It’s why the iPad and iPhone are more important now to Apple than the Mac.  It’s why Intel is worried about its dominance of Intel Inside chips.  It’s why Google is trying to take over the world with Android.  It’s why Netflix can get almost any kind of device to stream videos directly to your TV.  It’s why the iPad can run blazingly fast on a 1Ghz processor.

When everything is moved into the cloud, computers can become very simple.  Steve Jobs knows that in the future no one will pay extra bucks to own a Mac.  It’s why the iPad started out so cheap that HP and Microsoft cancelled their tablets.  Computers will go through a paradigm change like when they morphed from  mainframes/minis into microcomputers, that caused the personal computer revolution.  For decades the network computer has been predicted, but it’s taking a while to emerge.  Network computers can only succeed if everyone has fast broadband.

You are already living in the cloud if you use Netflix to stream movies.  You are already living in the cloud if you do your banking online.  Most people who did their taxes this year used cloud programs rather than installing TurboTax on their machine.  Most people store their photos in the cloud.  Soon you’ll store your music in the cloud.  Eventually they will make video cameras that have WiFi and your video will be saved immediately to the cloud.  If you watch Hulu, you are getting your TV from the cloud.  When you put your medical records online, they will be filed in the cloud.

I use Safari Books Online, and so I read computer books from the cloud.  Kindles and Nooks could just as easily display pages of books from the cloud instead of downloading whole books.  I read my newspaper on the cloud.  I’m starting to read magazines on the cloud.

Now I’m sure some of you are wondering why invent a new word for the Internet.  Or we could simplify everything by just calling it the net.  Everything will be on the net.  The distinction is that your old computer and hard drive are on the net now.  They are a node on the Internet.  Using the term cloud implies the that node is different.  It should eventually do away with hard drives, and seldom mentioned, but also do away with printers.  If you combined tablet computers with cloud computing you can do away with paper.

One of my tasks at work is to monitor the helpdesk tickets for my college, so I know what kind of problems pester users every day.  Cloud computing will make most of the problems I see now disappear.  Sadly, it will put a lot of tech support guys out of work.  If one geek guru can support a hundred users now, he or she will be able to support five hundred in the future.  But this won’t happen overnight.

Most businesses will not let their workers put business documents in the cloud any time soon, but I expect most students to start saving their work to the cloud now.  Why spend big bucks for Microsoft Office when you can use Google Docs or Windows Live for free?  Poor OpenOffice should just fade away.  All the free cloud computing services will convince home users and students to switch pretty quick.  Business will install SitePoint and create their own private cloud services for awhile, but when security and privacy get better, I bet they will move to paid cloud services.

Using the cloud will cost money.  We see a lot of free services now, but it will be tiered, so if you want more or better functions, you will pay.  Picnik is a good example.  I’m expecting iTunes 10 to incorporate Lala technology in a way that puts personally owned songs into the cloud.  Whether Apple sells us the space or gives it to us is another issue.  I’m thinking as long as you’re a loyal iTunes shopper, Apple might give their customers lifetime space, but we’ll see. 

I’m anxious to see what Steve Jobs announces in June.  Apple has leaped into the forefront of the cloud computing revolution with the iPad and iPhone.  By fiercely controlling its App Store, it controls the quality of its cloud experience.  That was a brilliant move on Apple’s part.  I would expect further control in the future.  It’s great to say you have over a 100,000 apps, but it’s another thing to say you have 10,000 A+ quality apps.  I see the iPad as the model of future computers.  Personal computing wild west days are over.

Right now computer users can muck up their machines by installing anything they want, or carelessly allow hackers to install dangerous programs on their machines.  If all applications came from a tightly control app store, then things will be different.  I expect the replacement for Windows to be an OS tied to an app store, so Microsoft can control the entire experience.  I’m not sure what the Open Source crowd will think.

Right now the iPad represents a hybrid of cloud computing.  It still downloads apps.  A true network computer won’t.  HTML 5 will go a long way towards making everything a web application.  Most iPhone/iPad apps are really just hybrid web apps.  This is a murky area for my crystal ball.  A totally streamlined OS for a net computer will be little more than a HTML 5 browser.  It should also mean the end of the app store.  If you play a game, the game will run at the game server, not on your device.  Your scores and saved games should be saved on the server.  Anyone who is really into thinking about cloud computing will see this as a conundrum for the phasing out of dedicated computers.  Games require the most local hardware, so they will be phased out last.

Other people will say that’s what the Xbox and PS3 have been doing for years, phasing out PC gaming.  Will cloud computing ever have the power to compete with gaming consoles?

JWH – 5/2/10

Why is Apple Killing Lala?

I love Lala, the online music service, and it grieves me that Apple is shutting it down.  I’m not sure how many people love Lala too, but there were three of us in my office.  I get up every morning and put on Lala, and I go to work and put on Lala, and when I come home I put on Lala.  I’m playing Lala as I write this essay.  I’ve been listening to music since the 1950s when my first source of songs was my Dad’s 55 Pontiac’s push button radio, and Lala has been the best system I’ve ever found for playing music.  I’ve been seeking song finding Nirvana for over fifty years.

If you haven’t lived with Lala you won’t know what you’re missing.  Apple is renowned for innovative technology, and when I first heard it bought Lala, I figured it knew a good thing when it saw it, and maybe Apple just wanted to make iTunes the perfect killer app.  But it looks now like iTunes is a different kind of killer app.  The best gossip I can find suggests Apple merely bought Lala for quick access to its cloud music technology.  That’s like killing a person for their kidneys.  Or was Lala music sales model really a threat to iTunes?

Most of the news stories about Apple shutting down Lala didn’t spend any time mourning Lala.  Anything Apple does is big news, but that’s all.  I just don’t think people know how cool Lala really is, and I want praise Lala before its forgotten, and maybe explain why Apple is killing it off.

It’s all about ease of use.  Lala is far easier to use than iTunes, far cheaper, and even more important, it’s far more exciting for finding new music and sharing that excitement with other music lovers.  All is this is much easier on Lala, I kid you not.  On Lala you can play any song or album for free once.  When the new albums come out on Tuesday you can play them all on Lala for free.  (Or could.)  How fantastic is that?  See an album with a neat cover, well give it a try.  See an album with a funny name, give it a play.  Remember flipping through bins of albums wondering what the music was like from looking at the album covers.  Well, with Lala, it was only a matter of taking the time to try them.

But even more important than that, was how cheap it is to buy web songs on Lala.  A dime a song and you can play it forever, or until a giant corporation comes along and stomps Lala.  I’d load up my Lala wallet with $20 and whenever I heard a song I like I hit the Add Song button, and ten cents would disappear from my wallet.  If I really loved the song I’d click another button and add it to a play list.  The year I’ve been a member of Lala meant collecting just the songs I loved and making playlists.  I could play my friends playlists and not spend a cent.  I could play stranger’s playlists for the same great price.  But if I found a song I loved, it was one click, one dime, and it was mine to keep playing.  And I never had to worry about backing my songs up, or finding the song in iTunes, or in Windows Media, or on which computer, or on a shelf, or where I left that CD.  Lala was perfect for keeping my songs organized. 

Like I said, ease of use is the key factor here.  I own about 1,500 CDs, and I have them ripped to 18,000+ songs in my Windows Media library, but it’s far easier to use Lala.  I also subscribe to Rhapsody and have access to millions of songs.  But I’d rather use Lala.  In fact, it was easier to pay Lala ten cents for songs I already owned than play them somewhere else.  Hell, Lala was even willing to give me credit and link my 18,000 songs to my Lala library, but I didn’t want to do that because I loved Lala and I wanted to give it money and I didn’t want my Lala library cluttered up with thousands of songs I didn’t want to play.

Damn you Apple!!!  I’m playing Lala right now and Laura Bell Bundy started singing “Please” and I went to add it to my collection, but the Add Song button is gone.  Luckily I didn’t ditch Rhapsody when it came up for yearly renewal this month.  Now I’ve got to figure out how to configure it to be easier to use.  Having unlimited access to millions of songs sounds great, but it takes work to manage them.  Lala is great at managing my library.  I had already paid Rhapsody and could play the same songs there as I was paying again on Lala for ten cents a song, and I was more than willing to spend my money again on Lala because it was so easy to use, and because Lala is so great at sharing.

Whenever I discover a song I love all I had to do was hit the Share button and send it to my friends.  And they could play it once for free, or add it to their collection for a measly dime.  And that’s a great bonding experience.  By the way, thanks Apple, you are at least letting me replay songs in my month of mourning without taking my dime.  I would add “Please” to my Songs Rated 10 playlist, but that button is gone too.  I’m playing it for the third time in a row.  Steve Jobs, why are you taking this all away from me?  Is it greed?  Must you destroy anything that is better than something you invented?  Do you merely want to crush the competition?  Do you even know the beauty you destroy?

The rumor mill says Apple is killing Lala for its cloud technology that allows users to add their songs to their online library.  This will be great for iTunes users.  One of the HUGE negatives of iTunes is if you lose computer you lose your music.  Web streaming is so freeing because you don’t have to worry about maintaining your music files.  I’m guessing Apple won’t offer web streaming, but they will sell you a song, and they will validate any songs you own, and then let you play those songs from the cloud.  I bet Apple plans to combine the purchase model with the streaming model, so you won’t be renting music, but you’ll get the advantage of streaming once you paid for the song.

The trickier part is whether or not they can load the song onto your iPod.  That ain’t streaming.  But iPhones, iPads and the iPod touch have WiFi and broadband and they could stream music.  One of the greats features of Audible.com is they remember everything you ever buy, and even if they lose the right to keep selling a digital audio book you still have the right to download it again if something happens to your computer.  iTunes never offered such a wonderful backup feature, but Lala type streaming comes close to that.

If Apple kills Lala and then puts all its features into iTunes 10 then I won’t hate Steve Jobs so bad.  I doubt this will happen.  There is no reason why iTunes couldn’t let users play songs and albums once for free like Lala.  There is no reason why iTunes couldn’t sell web streaming songs for ten cents apiece.  Zune offers streaming on a portable device.  You pay $15 a month and can wireless stream any album to your player.  I have a Zune, but I don’t like playing music through ear buds.  I like hearing music through big speakers.  And I dropped my Zune subscription because their desktop software wasn’t as good as Lala or Rhapsody.

Apple could recreate all the features of the Zune Marketplace with its Lala technology and offer streaming to portable players, but that would be the end of selling songs for $1.29.  I’ve written many blog posts begging my readers to try streaming music and got damn few takers.  People are all hung up on owning songs.  Paying Rhapsody $10 a month is even a bargain compared to stealing music, but people can’t even comprehend it.  The work of stealing and maintaining the songs is so time consuming that only someone with no money would consider a stolen song a bargain.

Does Steve Jobs want to stomp out rental music?  If the music companies were against it, why do they let so many services offer it?  Lala was much cheaper than Rhapsody.  I spent $40 during my year on Lala, and $120 at Rhapsody.  At Rhapsody I could listen to the millions of songs as often as I wanted.  At Lala, I had to pick which songs I wanted to hear again and pay ten cents for unlimited listening to each.  I played more new albums at Lala because it was easier, and I only bought a few hundred songs because that’s all I discovered I really liked enough to want to keep playing.

We’re getting closer to a new paradigm for owning music.  Unless you’re a music nut you might not understand these distinctions, but here’s the evolution of music ownership.

  1. You bought and owned the physical 78, 45, LP, CD, cassette, 8-track
  2. You bought the physical CD, but could rip it to MP3
  3. You could steal MP3s, illegally possessing the file
  4. You could buy MP3s without getting the physical album, legally owning the file
  5. You could rent unlimited access to all music but you didn’t own anything
  6. You could buy the streaming rights to a song, but keep it in the cloud, so you own the right to hear the song as often as you want, and you don’t have to worry about maintaining it
  7. And it looks like you will be able to buy the song for download, but also have unlimited streaming rights.

I thought step #5 was the ultimate, but ended up loving step #6, which is the sales model that Lala used.  I’m guessing Apple will modify #6 and make it #7.   But instead of buying the streaming song for ten cents, you’ll buy the song for $1.29, and I guess either keep it in the cloud or download a copy for your iPod.  I wonder if Apple will make a deal with the music companies to get you the legal rights to be able to download that song as many times as you like.

Model #5 came in a number of flavors.  Rhapsody and Napster started off charging one fee for web streaming and a larger fee for the rights to put rental music on a portable player.  Lala didn’t rent music, but sold it in a two-tier pricing.  Ten cents for unlimited streaming (#6), and 79 cents for a download (#4).  I’m guessing the Apple and the music industry will consider ten cents too cheap for the rights to listen to a song for the rest of your life.

I have to wonder if you subtract all the manufacturing costs of CDs, the shipping costs, the warehouse costs, the distributor’s costs, the retailers costs, how much does a song really cost, that is if you remove all the cost factors that don’t go into a digital download.  I’m guessing a physical song was probably 20-40 cents of your $12-15 you spent for a CD.  People used to complain bitterly over the prices of CDs, so a $1.29 for a song is actually more expensive if you factor in actual costs. 

Rental pricing is different.  If I played a 1,000 songs for my Rhapsody rental of $10, that’s only a penny a song.  But if I only play 100 songs, those songs cost me ten cents each.  But if I play the same 100 songs next month, it’s another ten cents each.  The beauty of Lala was its pricing of ten cents per song for unlimited streaming.  Plus it had the inherent side affect of tracking the songs you love, and this beats two problems of rental.  You only pay for the song once, and Lala’s tracking of ownership also was a kind of tracking.  I can listen to 6 million songs on Rhapsody but I have a hard time keeping up with just the ones I love.

Steve Jobs is no dummy.  He knows the future of computing is the cloud.  He knows people will get tired of “buying” the same songs over and over again.  I have some songs I’ve bought on vinyl twice (they wore out, or I lost them), CDs twice (first release, then remastered release), once on SASD, then again on MP3, and by more than one rental service.  Ownership doesn’t appear to be forever when it comes to music.  That’s why I like the idea of rental music, why pretend otherwise?

This rant about Apple destroying Lala is getting too long.  But I hope you get my drift.  Lala was a great model for finding, playing and sharing music, better I think than any other sales model I’ve discovered.  I can’t but believe Steve Jobs will take a step backwards from this model, but I’m sure he sees a music sales model that will dominate in the future, something beyond what iTunes uses now, and maybe one that might last awhile.

JWH – 4/30/10

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

For the last several years I’ve been rereading the science fiction books that I fondly remember as being great when I first read them back in the 1960s and 1970s.  I’m looking for the books that have a lifetime of meaning, that hold up to a second reading after I’ve acquired an additional 30-40 years of wisdom.  It’s easy to find a mind blowing book at 13, it’s much harder at 58.  I’m also trying to find out why science fiction has been important to me my whole life.

Earth Abides is a novel I’d rank right up there in science fictional vision with The Time Machine.  Unfortunately, it is not as famous.  Earth Abides succeeds magnificently at storytelling and philosophy, the two most important ingredients that I’ve come to admire the most.  Science fiction, like mystery and romance novels, are generally seen as an escapist literatures, but great storytelling combined with deep philosophical insight often produces the classics of each genre, like The Maltese Falcon and Pride and Prejudice.

Earth_Abides_1949_small

Most bookworms classify genre books by general topics, so if it’s about a murder, its a mystery, if its about love, its a romance, if its about alien invasions its science fiction.  I think that’s too crude to define the soul of science fiction.  At its core, a classic science fiction novel needs to have a unique philosophical vision about reality that speculates on the future.  Science fiction is never about predicting the future, but exploring all the possible futures. 

All during my life Earth Abides has reminded of the crucial nature of civilization, and I’ve worried more about its death than my own.  Most people are concerned with the birth of civilization, and learning such history is well and good, but knowing that it can be taken away is more important.  Earth Abides belongs to a sub-genre of science fiction that teaches about the end of mankind.

By reexamining the science fiction books I loved in youth, I’ve sought their secrets by seeking out the very best examples.  From this I’ve learned that certain storytelling techniques combined with the right philosophical explorations produce classic science fiction novels.  Science used to be called natural philosophy, and the best science fiction is written by natural philosophers and not scientists. 

George R. Stewart explores dozens of philosophical issues in Earth Abides, first published in 1949.  Many of the questions he asks his readers to ponder didn’t become common ideas until the 1960s or 1970s.   Stewart creates a plot that takes the reader through many scenes where I can’t help but believe they will stop their reading and start fantasizing about what they would do in the same situation.  That’s a great storytelling technique if you can pull it off.  One of the many reasons why The Time Machine is so great is because readers will ponder where they would go in time.  Earth Abides gets its readers to think about being the last person on Earth, and then when a few more people are found, how would they rebuild civilization.

I first read Earth Abides over thirty years ago, and it’s always stuck in my mind, a very memorable story that I’ve told people about again and again.  This month I returned to that novel by listening to a recent audiobook edition that commemorated it’s 60th anniversary.  

Remember the 2007 book The World Without Us or the TV shows Life After People and Aftermath: Population Zero?  These nonfiction works asks what the world would be like if people suddenly disappeared.  Earth Abides used the same concept in a novel back in 1949, but in George R. Stewart’s story, a handful of people do survive to chronicle the decay of civilization.  I’ve always loved stories like Mysterious Island, Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, about people stranded on a deserted island.  Earth Abides is about one man, Isherwood Williams, who survives an airborne plague that kills off almost the entire world population, leaving only a few survivors in each city.

Isherwood, who goes by Ish, wants to rebuild civilization but can’t.  Ish is an intellectual who understands science and fascinatingly observes nature’s quick reclamation of  civilization.  Stewart was very aware of ecology and Earth Abides explores ecology in a way that was visionary for its time.  Ish hopes he can preserve knowledge and pass it on to future generations, but the book is relentlessly realistic.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction books, and I put Earth Abides on the same level as The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.  This is science fiction at its best.  I love science fiction because it shows the possibilities for mankind’s futures.  I love to think we’ll always march onward and upward, but what if AIDS had spread like a cold and killed like the Ebola virus?

Fundamentally we like to believe this universe follows the anthropic principle.  Because of this we don’t think our species will die out – we’re destined for greatness, aren’t we?   But what if that’s an illusion?  What if intelligent life in the universe is routinely snuffed out, even after the universe has gone to great lengths to create it?  George R. Stewart claims Earth abides, that Earth will go on fine without people, but he really should have said the multiverse abides.  We know the Earth has its own lifespan and future death.

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is an old philosophical Kōan.  Without man, who is here to perceive reality?  Life on Earth existed for billions of years before mankind, and might just as well exist for billions of years without us.  Our egos don’t like that idea for a number of reasons.  Theists want to believe reality was created for mankind by God, and atheists like to think reality is ours to understand.  The novel Earth Abides reminds us the reality is indifferent to us, and we have no special place in it.  We are equal to all things that come and go.  Mankind is one gamma ray burst from non-existence. 

In the book The World Without Us there is no man or woman to chronicle the fate of the Earth.  Stewart was writing fiction, so he needed a narrator to hear the tree fall in the forest, and that is Isherwood Williams.  Through Isherwood Williams we feel what life on Earth without humans feels like.  At first Ish is totally alone, but then he meets a few other survivors.  There are so few people left that we’re not sure if humans won’t die out.  Many readers consider this bleak, although Stewart wants us to think humanity will make it, he’s less sure we will recreate technological civilization.

Are We Our Machines?

By the end of the novel, the descendents of Isherwood Williams are simple hunting and gathering tribe.  They have no idea what technology, literature, medicine, history and all our other forms of knowledge are, and even though they know they live in the ruins of a dead civilization, they can only think of the makers of that collapse society as the mythical Americans.  They even wonder if the Americans made the hills and land.  We live with computers, smart phones, cars, televisions, electricity, and so much other technology that we are defined by it.  Earth Abides shows us what it would be like to exist without machines.  Can you imagine such a life?

The great thing about being stranded on an island stories is we get to imagine ourselves in the same situation and wonder what we’d do.  It’s like the TV show Survivor.  Would you be one of the people who build the huts, finds the food and tends the fire, or would you just mooch off the people who do?  How much do you contribute to civilization now and how much are you a parasite of it?  Are you and I even adding to our own destruction of civilization?

What Kind of Survival Person Are You?

George R. Stewart ends up subtly judging people in Earth Abides which turns out to be one of the more revealing aspects of the novel.  Ish is a thinking man who seldom acts, and he knows it.  He is constantly tortured by picturing what might happen and agonizes that he can’t convince the others to prepare for the future.  Isherwood Williams is probably like most bookworms who will embrace this book.  I know I identify with him completely.

I can’t tell you about the other people without ruining the story, but each represents a type of person you already know – so imagine how your friends would survive and what kind of new civilization they would build.  Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky features the same problem.  If you’re a lawyer you’ll want to make rules.  If you are a carpenter, you’ll want to build houses.  I’m a computer programmer – a skill of little use when there’s no electricity.

In Earth Abides, the first post collapse generation lives off of canned, preserved and dried foods, and by scavenging.  If I had been thrown into this world I think I would have started gardening right away, even though I’m not a gardening person now.  Stewart predicts people won’t show initiative and just adapt to the environment, and he might be right.  But I’d like to believe, like Ish, that everyone should take up a skill to preserve, like the characters in Fahrenheit 451, who memorize books to preserve.

How Many People Does It Take To Maintain Civilization?

In Earth Abides, Ish’s little tribe doesn’t have enough people to rebuild electrical generating stations, or even maintaining water pipes.  If half the population dies I imagine we’d have enough people to rebuild civilization.  But if ninety percent perish, it would be hard.  In Earth Abides only about 1 in 100,000 live, so you can imagine no one wants to  work in factories or coal mines.

If you were in this situation and came across a pig and was hungry, could you kill and butcher it?  Would you know how to gather two pigs and start a pig farm?  Would you start a pig farm as long as you could easily find canned hams and spam?  Stewart explores so many fascinating issues in this book that I think reading it would be mesmerizing to most readers.

I’m Not a Back to Nature Person

Whenever I read a book like Earth Abides, or even just watch an episode of Survivor, I realize that I’m not a back-to-nature kind of guy.  Many people believe that living like the Amish might be spiritually better than living in sin city civilization.  Conservatives believe that progress has gone well beyond usefulness.  I on the other hand, think iPads and space telescopes makes us better people.  But the real philosophical question is:  Is the meaning of life more than just surviving?

The documentaries Life After People and Aftermath: Population Zero (both available at Netflix) illustrate beautifully that nature will recycle most signs of civilization within a couple hundred years, but eventually even the pyramids and Hoover damn will disappear.  I love nature shows, and I don’t mind seeing the Earth taken over by nature again, but I wouldn’t want to live there as the last man on Earth.  I find meaning in progress, not survival.

After the Collapse as a Genre

Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man (1826) about a world-wide plague, and Jack London wrote The Scarlet Plague (1912) about another plague, so apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction has been around awhile.  Actually, The Time Machine (1895) deals with this topic too.  We have to assume the black death gave lots of people the idea, but the end of mankind might go well back into prehistory.  Since Stewart, numerous science fiction novels have dealt with the subject, especially during the cold war years.  But out of all the after the collapse stories I’ve read, Earth Abides is my favorite, and probably for three reasons.

First, the storytelling is wonderful.  Second, Stewart provides so many vivid details that I embrace his well thought-out ideas as completely realistic.  And third, and probably the most important, I really identify with Isherwood Williams.  The whole last hour I was so choked up I couldn’t see – good thing I was listening and not reading.

Quite by accident I started reading A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., which could be a practical sequel to Earth Abides.  It’s books like these that define science fiction.  Anyone wanting to write a science fiction classic needs to study them.

JWH – 4/21/10

Safari Books Online

Safari Books Online is a subscription library for computer books and tech training videos, with some additional subjects that also appeal to computer book readers, like digital photography.  They offer individual and corporate subscriptions, and many libraries are subscribers too, so you might check your library first.  Safari Books Online has a 10-day free trial if you just want to get the feel of how it works.  Right now they are offering a 5-Slot Bookshelf for $9.99/month, a 10-Slot Bookshelf for $22.99/month and the unlimited Safari Library for $42.99/month.  You only have access to Video Training and the Rough Cuts (prerelease books) titles with the Safari Library.

I got an offer for the 5-Slot Bookshelf when I registered one of my O’Reilly books to get a 45 day free access to the online edition.  For $10, I figured I’d try it out.  It’s a bit confusing how they work things.  With the 5 and 10 Slot Bookshelves, you can only read the full text of 5 or 10 books at a time, and you must keep your picks on your Bookshelf for at least 30 days.  You can preview all the books, but they only show the top third of each page.

At first I was cautious about filling up my 5 slots, but as I spent time actually studying books, time passed quickly and I usually seem to have 1-2 books ready to be checked back in so I could pick new ones.  I felt for $10 a month, this was a real bargain, but I was disappointed I couldn’t see the Video Training and Rough Cut titles.  Then one day Safari sent me an email offering a 20% discount to the Safari Library subscription, or just $34.99 a month for up to 12 months.  I figured, what the hell, and switched.  I can go back any time to my 5-Slot sub if I want to.

What a Bargain!

One reason Safari Books Online appealed to me was because I was having to switch my entire programming paradigm at work form ASP to PHP and I was about to go out and buy a bunch of new computer books for PHP, jQuery, CSS 2, XHTML 1.1, CodeIgniter and Eclipse.  I tend to buy computer books, use them for awhile, let them sit on the shelf for five years, and then put them out on the free book table at work.  Spending $120 a year and having access up to 60 titles seemed like a real deal.  More than likely I’d probably only read 10-20 books for real, but even that is a huge bargain over buying the books.

Reading Online

Most people don’t like reading books at their computer screen, but if you’re reading computer programming books while programming, ebooks work out great.  At work I have a dual monitor setup and I even turned my left monitor to portrait mode so I can enlarge a full page of a Safari book so I see the entire page at once with about a 50% magnification.  Of course this now makes me want to have a triple monitor setup, with Safari book on left, Eclipse IDE in the middle, and browsers on the right.  But don’t get me wrong. reading a Safari book on the same screen as the editor isn’t bad either.

Books can be viewed in two modes:  page mode and HTML.  I prefer looking at the page mode because it’s just like the printed book, but cutting and pasting is easier from the HTML mode.  However, reading is less pleasant from the HTML model unless I up the browser magnification and narrow the window so the scan line width is reasonable.  In page mode you have nice big margins and the print and fonts are the same as the printed book.  If the original book was hard to read, then page mode is also hard to read.

Slowly I’m learning that hanging on to page mode is limiting.  Once books are freed from the confines of pages, content can be presented in new ways.  I expect Safari to discover this in the future and invent new ways of looking at the material.  Books like the Head First series beg for this kind of treatment.  I also expect in the future there won’t be a division between printed books and video training titles.  If authors start writing titles specifically for Safari Online Books they could teach in new ways.

Selection

As of today, I can select from 9,902 books and 631 videos.  Plus lots of great computer book publishers are a part of Safari Online Books:

  • O’Reilly (Head First, Missing Manual)
  • Sams (Teach Yourself)
  • Packt Publishing
  • Addison-Wesley Professional
  • New Riders
  • Microsoft Press
  • Peachpit Press
  • Manning Publications
  • Adobe
  • Que
  • Apress
  • Sitepoint
  • Sybex
  • John Wiley & Sons
  • Prentice Hall

Most of the titles relate to computers in some way, but there’s lots of books on photography, and occasionally there’s a book that relates to investment or retiring.  I have 80 books flagged that I want to read.

The Future of Books

For special purposes, like these technical books, a subscription library really makes sense, and I’m perfectly happy to do without the printed edition.  I expect publishers to even do away with the page mode and eventually optimize everything for HTML mode which also works with mobile devices and ebook readers.  I would even buy a subscription to a science and history book library if I owned something like an iPad.  For fiction I prefer audio books or a device like a Kindle.  I wonder if subscription libraries for other subjects will catch on.

I think the future of books is paperless publishing, and Safari Online Books even hints that rental libraries might become an alternative to owning books.  However, rental libraries are rather specialized.  I’d be interested in a science and history rental library if its selection was as broad as the Safari Books Online is for computer books.  Also, I imagine that a rental library for school textbooks would be appealing to kids if durable iPad like devices caught on.

In my quest to give up paper, I’ve stopped getting magazines and newspapers, and now I have an alternative for technical books.  For fiction I prefer audiobooks.  Before now, I would have said art/photography books could never be replaced by ebooks, but while my second monitor was in portrait mode, my desktop background cycled through some art pieces, and they were very impressive magnified that way.  Freed of the confines of the printed page, art might do very well in ebook editions.  I saw a comic book on the iPad which had a mode of showing the page panel by panel and it was obvious the iPad is now the best way to look at a comic.

JWH – 4/25/10

The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy

If you are the kind of person who believes that science explores reality and would love to catch up on  the latest explorations in cosmology and subatomic particles, then The Edge of Physics (2010) by Anil Anathaswamy is the book for you.  For years I’ve wanted to know where the big experiments are taking place, and even daydreamed of being a science journalist whose nine-to-five job would be to visit them, well Anil Ananthaswamy has my dream job.

The Edge of Physics is mostly a travel book, and Ananthaswamy even has photos for each of the sites he visited at his web site, collected chapter by chapter.  What Anil has done, and I hope he pardons my familiarity, because typing his last name is work, is weave science history in with his travelogue and then explain what each experimental site he visits hopes to achieve. 

To enjoy this book does not require a deep understanding of experimental physics or math, just a sense of wonder.  I’m praying to Einstein that  PBS’s NOVA makes a multipart series based on this book.  The average person is afraid of science, and Anil really goes a long way to making it accessible.  Anyone who hates that we’re spending billions on theoretical science needs to read this book too, because it makes you wish they’d spend billions more, because in the end, Anil helps us understand the mysteries that are remaining to be discovered.  And I hope I live long enough to hear those results reported too.

On the day I started this book I experienced a bit of serendipity.  The first chapter is about Mount Wilson and why the work it did back in the 1910s and 1920s is so important to the work being done today.  While listening to the book on audio I wished I could see pictures of what Anil was writing about.  Well, my wished was grant that very day, because that night NOVA started a two part Hunting the Edge of Space that featured photos and films from the early days of the Mount Wilson Observatory.  This documentary overlapped wonderfully with The Edge of Physics. 

Now, if NOVA would only film the other chapters.  Most people are familiar with visual telescopes but how many have heard of a neutrino telescope?  One of the more adventuresome trips Anil makes is to Lake Baikal, to where scientists brave the Siberian winter to build an underwater telescope beneath the ice of a large freshwater lake.  Anil also visits two sites in Antarctica, Chile, Hawaii, South Africa, deep underground in Northern Minnesota, India, and of course Switzerland where the LHC is located.

I read Sky and Telescope every month but I never knew there was so many big telescopes around the world.  I wish someone would build a web site for telescopes like they have for the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites.  And I also wish someone would build the Top 500 largest science research sites.  And reading The Edge of Physics I could imagine a new tourist industry based on visiting scientific research.  I don’t have the money to take up that hobby right now, but I’m inspired to see if I can find web sites for all the places Anil visited in his book:

All this travel is glamorous but the real value of The Edge of Physics is what Anil reports about the status of all these experiments.  He really is trying to show his readers where the edge of physics lies, and what that means.  I can’t summarize that, you need to read the book, but if you haven’t read any science books in a few years, you’ll be surprised by how far science has gotten to explaining all of reality.  We are far from finished, but wow, scientists are hot on the trail of explaining almost everything.  Research in particle physics, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic background radiation, string theory, multiverses, radio astronomy, neutrino astronomy, are converging towards filling in missing puzzle pieces. 

It’s like doing a Sudoku puzzle.  Finding any one number can solve problems in all nine quadrants.  Breakthroughs at any one of these sites Anil visits means more evidence for the other sites.  Everything is interrelated.  I’d love to be able to list all the areas of research covered in this book with hyperlinks and explanations, but I’d have to write a book and Anil Ananthaswamy has already done that for us.  Be sure an visit Anil’s blog for newer reports.

JWH – 4/24/10