Fugu Talk

Apple’s introduction of the new iPod Nano yesterday reminded me that the Nano was my favorite iPod, at least until the iPod touch. It was (and still is) the best-looking iPod and also has the best name (Classic? touch? Boring)

Up til then, “nano” was getting a bit overused, the gimmick in many a sci-fi episode and even some entire series (Jake 2.0, Dark Angel). And lots and lots of business articles. Here’s a review I wrote way back when on a nano-hype book.

Written on Epinions, May 2003

With the recent dot-com collapse and high-tech recession fresh in our minds, a grand title such as “The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology will Change the Future of Your Business” should ring warning bells.

And indeed, the authors and consultants Jack Uldrick and Deb Newberry exhort the possibilities of nanotechnology (basically, engineering applied at molecular, or nanometer, dimensions) with the brazenness of late-night informercial hosts. In the introductory chapter, the authors rhetorically ask if the reader is “skeptical?” about technology and then later, “still skeptical?” Yes, I am.

They proceed to compare the number of times the term “nanotechnology” was listed in professional articles in 2000 to the frequency with which “Internet” was mentioned in the early 1990′s. Comparing a metric from one year against an unspecified number of other years is questionable, but in any case, who cares? There was one year when cold fusion got a lot of press, but where is the cold fusion industry now? And if we just focused on professional scientific and technical papers, I’m sure that you’ll find far more references to “cancer” or “virus” than “nanotechnology”.

Statistics taken out of context persist throughout the book. The authors state that this year venture capitalists will invest in nanotechnology companies twelve times what they invested in 1999. The VC business, like everything else, has gone up and done over the years, so show us a graph of nanotechnology investment over a period of several years, not a comparison of a seemingly arbitrary year with a projection over this upcoming year. Better yet, show us the relationship of nanotechnology funding versus other high-tech funding, so we can see what increasing weight the VC’s are allocating to nanotechnology in their portfolios.

The authors also skimp on the risks of nanotechnology. They cite the advantages of nanotechnology in assisting agricultural production and modifying food, but there is no mention of biological or business risks, despite the number of countries that currently bar import of gene-altered crops, even those comprising humanitarian aid. The peril of self-replicating nanomachines is dismissed initially by arguing those machines are unlikely to be practical, then ignored when stating later they might be feasible. Similarly, government investment budgets in nanotechnology for various nations are listed, but not in the context of the respective nations’ total research funding.

However, the authors do warn of looming obsolescence to existing industries posed by nanotechnology. (after all, it is the next big thing, and it will change the future of your business) After citing the non-competitiveness of the American big steel companies and reminding us that “no industry is safe from the powerful forces of technological innovation”, the authors claim the semiconductor industry will be the first to “feel the pressure”.

I don’t believe the implied analogy between steel and semiconductor industry holds water – as the authors note, Big Steel lost out to foreign competition and the new management and manufacturing processes of the domestic mini-mills that just manufactured the same product more economically. This is not the same as the semiconductor industry being displaced by revolutionary new materials.

And there is the further implication that the semiconductor business will be caught napping if it doesn’t watch out for nanotechnology, the new kid on the block. But there is arguably no faster-moving industry than the chip business – there is intense competition, repeated cycles of heavy capital investment, and cutting-edge research in physics and material science that has brought on-chip transistor widths from a couple of microns just fifteen years ago down to around a tenth of a micron today.

Although at this size, it would seem that current semiconductor technology borders on nanotechnology (0.1 microns is 100 nanometers), the authors say this is not so – nanotechnology consists of materials formed by manipulated molecules or devices consisting of such. However, it seems to me that many of the nanotechnology applications listed in the book, for example the IBM Millipede memory where bits consist of tiny indentations, don’t necessarily fit this definition.

Despite the hype, some of the ideas in the book just aren’t that imaginative. The authors speculate that when nanotechnology increases chip density, and thus processing power, by a hundred thousand, then computer speech recognition will be a snap and the United Nations will save money by not hiring human translators. That’s how “the next big thing” will change my business? I won’t have to type these Epinions reviews – I can dictate them to my computer?

Finally, to add insult injury, the authors pay scant attention to the historical development of nanotechnology and the technologists pioneering this movement, e.g. K. Eric Drexler, who popularized the field in the eighties with his book Engines of Creation. This book does impart some of the exciting potential of nanotechnology in listing numerous possible applications, near-term and far-term, but by omitting any explanation of the scientific and historical background and ignoring potential risks of the technology, the authors have written a disappointing and disingenous work.

I was just reading, in Technology Review I think, about some recent semiconductor innovations that could keep Moore’s Law chugging away, doubling the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a chip every couple of years. I remember when I started my first job at Texas Instruments, transistor widths were getting close to a micron, and some people were saying we’re not getting below that! Ten years later, I somehow fell back into the semi business and the state of the art was less than half a micron, and some people were still saying, they can’t keep this up!

I wish I could say the same about the health insurance industry. They seem to have their own version of Moore’s Law. I’ve been through two insurers since I went freelance and both of them doubled my premiums every two years. If my health risk was really increasing that fast, I’d be dead by now. I feel like taking up smoking and eating a chicken fried steak every day just to get my money’s worth. And the letter I just received announcing the increase from Anthem Blue Cross (Wellpoint, the guys who tried it earlier this year, got yelled at, then just waited a few months to do it again), had the temerity to include the phrase “We’re all in this together.” Really? Take a pay cut, then. Cut back on those corporate retreats. Return your bonus!

My dental insurance was a minor consolation – I paid $90 a year, no muss, no fuss, no worry about preexisting conditions. But then Delta Dental sent me a letter saying they’re dropping my plan, and I had to choose one of two new plans. Instead of just including a signup form, perhaps with a simple checkbox to select a plan, they directed me to their web site. They did include a form which I could fill out to get them to send me information on the plans. So I did both, requested the info and after they arrived, since they still didn’t include an enrollment form (I guess they really, really wanted me to use the web site), I went to the web site, registered a member account only to find out that you can review your account but not renew or enroll in it. Instead, you do that outside of the log in by clicking on the learn-about-plans button (apparently reviewing your benefits requires security, while changing your plan doesn’t). When I started over on the new click path, tried to figure whether I was enrolling or renewing, since it’s a new plan, then submitted a credit card payment, the web server hung.

So I took the lazy man’s approach, waiting to get something in the mail telling me that I’d renewed or expired my policy. I felt I’d given it a hundred and ten percent, considering the first letter said they retained the option of automatically enrolling me in one of the new policies, anyway. But nothing arrived in the mail, and I called to find out yes, I’m not covered anymore. Call me paranoid, but I get the feeling they really don’t want my business.

I found this evidence on the net of my short-lived career as an MIT journalist. I forgot how much fun rush week was – basically, after you get flushed out of a couple of jock fraternities, you run around campus and try out all the activities, like the student newspaper, The Tech. So for one night of paste-up, I’m listed here with the rather well known tech writer Simson Garfinkel.

In one of my periodic bouts of Internet narcissism, I was googling around for myself and ran into this Epinions book review. I can’t believe I haven’t gotten around to reposting it on this blog – it’s about robots!

Written on Epinions, July 2003.

I’ve been to the Armand Hammer museum and SF MOMA a few times, but for the most part, modern art leaves me cold.

So when I found the first fifty pages of Brad Stone’s Gearheads: The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports devoted to Mark Pauline’s exhibitions of large robots wreaking havoc in the name of performance art, I expected the worst. But to my relief, the book moves on to the real action, starting with the Denver Mad Scientists Club, who organized small-scale robot battles for fun at their sci-fi meetings, and ex-ILM engineer Marc Thorpe’s commercialization of the “sport”, with his venture Robot Wars.

In the early Robot Wars competitions, after enduring the sometimes artsy preliminary exhibitions, spectators were rewarded with real metal-grinding, suspense-filled entertainment, and so it is with Mr. Stone’s book. The blow-by-blow accounts of the battles in Robot Wars and its eventual competitors, Battlebots, Robotica and the BBC version of Robot Wars, are vivid and mesmerizing – I can almost see La Machine attempting to ram the whirling dervish, Blender, only to be repelled across the arena, leaving a trail of body, er…machine, parts….

Despite criticism of the violent, albeit machine-on-machine, nature of these spectacles, the robot battles were civilized compared to the legal battles that took place concurrently in the “real” world. Thorpe’s long-running struggle for control over Robot Wars with the litigious Steve Plotnicki of Profile Records set the stage for the birth of Battlebots, probably better known in the US due to it’s presentation on the cable channel Comedy Central. In the meantime, Robot Wars as presented by the BBC has became an even bigger cult phenomenon in the UK.

The boys-and-their-toys aura of the robot battlers and the campy presentation of Battlebots on US television (Playboy centerfolds making sexual innuendoes with nerds) belies the passion behind robot battles. Trey Roski, heir to the Majestic Realty empire in Los Angeles, started Battlebots primarily as a means to continue his avocation while Robot Wars was hung up in court and risked litigation himself despite his father’s business advice. Marc Thorpe created Robot Wars with the intent of securing his financial future, particularly with respect to his case of Parkinson’s disease. But his stubborn refusal to give up creative control over his creation and the ensuing litigation left him with mounting bills, worsening health, and a failed marriage.

Besides the somewhat tenuous connection to Mark Pauline’s SRL performances, the list of participants in the robot battles read’s like a Who’s Who of the hip tech world, for example Will Wright, already a legendary computer game designer (recently, the Sims) when he began participating in Robot Wars, and the founder of Lycos who now has the leisure time and financial resources to build combat robots as a new hobby.

As bonus rounds, Mr. Stone provides a welcome treatment near the end of the book to another two engineering visionaires not directly associated with the commercial robot battles but were influential, nonetheless – Woody Flowers, the colorful professor who presided over the longstanding mechanical engineering student competition that is pretty much MIT’s version of the Superbowl, and Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segue human transportation device, who similarly promoted engineering values among high school students with a cooperative competition called FIRST.

Interestingly, although many robot battle enthusiasts found inspiration from Woody Flowers’ and Dean Kamen’s work, the latter two do not return the favor – they disdain the violent nature of robot combat. However, everyone involved shares the common goal of elevating the status of engineering to that of sports. Given the obsession of Thorpe, Roski, and all those who gave up their day jobs to build the ultimate robot warriors, it’s not just a sport, but a way of life. It’s a movement. It’s art (witness the robot Andyroid, with a freakish Big-Boy like figure wheeling around). And it’s machines beating the crap out of each other. Get me a beer. Hoorah!

Latest Blue Mars client has IME support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) in chat.

I’m published on the MIT Entrepreneurial Review!

HyperBowl is now on the Thousand Apps page. Here’s just a section. Can you locate HyperBowl?

There’s been furor in the past over flag-burning, but to me, the real desecration of the flag occurs when people co-opt it for their own causes. I was recently nauseated by a Facebook campaign against the proposed Muslim worship center in New York, largely by the use of the American Flag as their logo. But I should get over it – the tactic is pretty much a cliche by now.

For example, here is an over-the-top logo for the Huntington Beach Police Officers Association:

A more clever use is on the “about us” page of the Video Game Voters Network:

Nowhere does it explain on that page that the group is founded and run by the ESA, the industry group representing game publishers. That type of omission leads the conspiracy theorist in me (and I didn’t even know I had one) to wonder who was behind the anonymous mass mailings in the IGDA that led to Tim Langdell’s ouster. Anyway, for my civil liberties advocacy, I’ll count on organizations like the ACLU – at least I know who they are.

And liberal groups are not immune, either. MoveOn exercises this tactic (and others normally attributed to Fox News), but with a bit of subtlety here – they have some stars and stripes sneaking in around the borders and background:

It’s an unseemly replacement for discourse. Which flag is bigger, yours or mine?

Despite its pitch as “Gray’s Anatomy in Space”, I started watching episodes of Defying Gravity on the PlayStation Store. (I was looking for Dollhouse, but oddly, that’s listed under Crime instead of Sci-Fi). Defying Gravity is not bad – I like the characters and story arc, could do without the cutesy music, yes, reminiscent of Gray’s Anatomy. But it’s no Firefly. So it’s fitting that when I searched for “defying gravity” on YouTube, I found this homage to Firefly.

A few years ago I attended a talk at the Santa Ana Digital Media Center given an executive from an online gaming company. Someone asked for his opinion on net neutrality and I was startled that he 1) didn’t know what it was, and 2) answered anyway that it didn’t concern him and that the free market would take care of it anyway. I’ll just pose a simple scenario – let’s say Time Warner cable strikes a deal to give broadband preference to a particular game, say WoW or Starcraft, or one of the games developed by a Time Warner studio, and conversely downgrades performance for your game. You’re hosed.

Here’s a nice quick-start graphic on net neutrality, including the latest news of Google once again stepping on and off the moral high ground.

[Via: Online MBA Programs]