Turtles all the way down

My word processing application automatically corrects some typos. For example, if I write “newtork” it knows I really meant to write “network” and it makes the correction for me. For people like me who make lots of typos, this is a great feature.

But if the word is not in the spell checker’s dictionary, the word processor can’t seem to figure out how to correct it. I recently had to write the word “estoppel” a bunch of times in a document. The application should have, after seeing the word several times: (1) either given me an opportunity to put the word in the dictionary or automatically done so, and (2) add it to the words that will now be automatically corrected.

Also the same lines, if the application observes me making the same typo over and over, and it doesn’t know how to automatically correct this typo, it should figure out how to do so from context. That is, it should learn from my own corrections of this word, then add my corrections to the automatic correction database.

This would also work for names with uncommon spellings and words in other languages.

There has been work on similar concepts in the spell checking of search engine requests. I’ve yet to see them used in basic word processing.

I’ll give my wife credit for 80% of this one.

Guitar Hero III is a great game. It’s gotten tons on mileage at our house and no one has even beaten the hard level yet. However, the promise of downloadable content (DLC) has had us waiting for the opportunity to buy more songs. So far, for the Wii, the promise is unfulfilled.

(As an aside I believe that the low memory of the Wii and the lack of a hard drive is the culprit blocking DLC.)

Anyway…remember Quake? It managed to stay relevant for years because the manufacturer released level editing software and directions. People from all over wrote their own levels and released them for free on the Internet.

Could something similar happen for Guitar Hero? You take the tracks from songs, map out the notes onto the four difficulties and share your creation with the world, or sell it for a nominal fee. It would be cool.

Except that it probably won’t happen. While the current environment in music copyright is improving, gaining access to a song and then reselling it as a Guitar Hero track is probably way too much for the music industry to handle…for now.

However, independent artists may find such a scheme advantageous. They get free promotion of their music, which could potentially be downloaded by millions of people. Those people could turn into fans who download thousands of “regular” MP3 versions of the track.

Of course, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft would have to adopt a model that enables user-created downloadable content. Qualcomm did this somewhat successfully with BREW applications on cell phones and the revenue-sharing model could be similar.

Anybody? Buehler?

According to analyses such as this one, of which I’ve seen several, exercise has a negative impact on your carbon footprint.

The actor Ed Begley Jr. has a widely-circulated OpEd piece touting his eco-friendly activities, featuring a proud announcement that his exercise on his stationary bicycle generates the electricity he uses to toast two pieces of bread.

Now those two pieces give him 200 calories, but he burns at least 100 calories on the bike. So half of his eco-friendly exercise is lost because he needs to obtain additional food from elsewhere to maintain his weight — food whose growth and distribution have environmental consequences too, as does the manufacture of his bicycle.

This illustrates the general equilibrium difficulties of so many pro-environmental activities about which the rich and famous boast.

For example, instead of walking to the store, driving to the store may be more green because you burn fewer calories.

This is a classic example of people applying the Law of Unintended Consequences, a concept of which I am a fan. However, applying the Law even further along these lines, people who exercise regularly are generally healthier and need less medical care. Does this reduce their carbon footprint? By how much? And do we even know how to calculate by how much?

And what about people who overeat instead of exercise? Why not go after them?

Or, should we just tax athletes?

Virtually anything you do has a carbon impact.

Sad news in the passing of Edward Lorenz:

Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.

A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere–or a model of the atmosphere–could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.

Twenty years ago I read James Gleick’s book, chaos and little did I know it would influence some of my own research in Internet traffic patterns a few years later.

This will be an interesting experiment:

Late last month, as students returned from spring break, the University of Chicago Law School announced that Internet access would be blocked from classrooms. While individual professors at law schools have created policies banning laptops or allowing them only for specific uses — and while some colleges don’t even have classroom Internet access, or mandate classroom-only use without any enforcement — the move by Chicago appears to be the first institution-wide directive of its kind. Already, there’s been an uproar among students and even senior administrators, while some law professors have stepped up to defend the policy.

The first time I went to school, 20 years ago, we didn’t have laptops or classroom Internet, but we found other ways of goofing off.

There are reasons why Internet access is quite useful in class. You can look up phrases and terms in Wikipedia or online legal dictionaries. You can skim cases in Lexis or Westlaw. You can access the class’s web site where the professor just posted supplemental material. And of course, you can stay on top of the playoff game when the professor drones on about the subtle differences between appurtenant and in gross easements.

We felt it about 4:40am in the Western suburbs of Chicago. Nothing major but the bed shook enough to wake us. Lasted about 30 seconds.

Well, it’s settled. Money buys happiness. Story at 11.

The facts about income and happiness turn out to be much simpler than first realized:

1) Rich people are happier than poor people.
2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries.
3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.

Moreover, each of these facts seems to suggest a roughly similar relationship between income and happiness.

It took me a while to bite the bullet but I finally Google-ized my email.

My hosting provider only supports POP3. With no IMAP in sight, I was stuck with out of sync email between my PC and phone. I set up the phone to download copies of my email but to leave the originals on the server.

This creates two problems. The first is, after downloading email to my phone, I still have to download it to my PC and delete anything I don’t want. We all get enough email these days, and having to read some pieces twice is just nuts.

Second, if I leave my PC email client logged in, it would pull down messages from the server and my phone would not be able to get them. I experienced this a couple of weeks ago when my wife was trying to email me a Panera order while I was out. My PC kept consuming the email.

Of course, I could just have both my PC and phone download copies of the emails but then, even more deleting is involved.

So I switched over to Gmail as a front for my personal account. Gmail fetches messages from my POP3 account every 5 minutes. Both my PC and phone now point to Gmail’s IMAP interface and have truly synchronized IMAP access to my email.

It was pretty easy to set up and works quite well.

I suspect Google must know how useful this feature is. And it is a brilliant “take over the world” move on their part, as they get to serve your email, data-mine it for marketing info, and show you a few ads when you log on via the web interface.

His taste is slowly developing. So far it includes Battles, Magma and the Dead Kennedys, with Metallica in the periphery.

No coincidence that the latter two appear in Guitar Hero III.

A recent article discusses an issue with the current TCP algorithm.

In a nutshell, a single TCP session tends to share bandwidth with other TCP sessions in a network in a reasonably fair fashion. Not perfectly fair but reasonably fair.

However if a single host runs multiple TCP sessions simultaneously between itself and one or more servers, that host may exceed its “fair” share of bandwidth. This practice is common for peer-to-peer protocols, as the more sessions a downloader opens, the better their typical performance.

Thus, since the fairness of TCP is based on the granularity of the session, opening more sessions allows a host to grab an “unfair” portion of network capacity. This is particularly an issue in last mile networks where dozens of hosts share a limited-capacity pipe.

It seems as if there is a fairly simple way for last mile providers to resolve the issue: do traffic shaping at the host level or physical port level. A simple token bucket algorithm or weighted fair queuing would likely do the trick, dropping packets so that hosts are forced to share bandwidth fairly, while allowing them to use more than their “fair” share when the network has spare capacity. This mechanism would effective ignore TCP, as it would work on layer 2 or layer 3, and would not require a change to the delicate TCP congestion control algorithm.

However, the article describes a proposal that eschews simple traffic shaping and instead proposes to change TCP. While the details will be published next month, at a high level this seems like a very bad idea.

Changing TCP will require an upgrade to all hosts. With an installed based of hundreds of millions of hosts, TCP will take years to effectively upgrade. For example, will Microsoft support such a change to Windows XP to do this, when they are trying to obsolete that operating system? Additionally, end users will not be motivated to upgrade as it will slow their performance, while early adopters will be punished.

Fairness is not a layer 4 problem. It is a layer 2 or 3 problem. Trying to solve it at layer 4 will be expensive and ineffective.