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.

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!

I was going to blog about iPhone development, but given the holiday, I’ll reprint a review of a self-published novel, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, written by a Vietnam vet that I received at an Epinions meet and greet. I was pleased to hear later that the author, Paul Clayton, found a publisher for the book.

From Epinions, May 2005

Finally, I’ve gotten around to reading Paul Clayton’s Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam after receiving a copy at an Epinions Meet and Greet last year. In truth, I made a few abortive attempts at starting the book, but the first-person narrative by young draftee Carl Melcher begins slowly – the tone of the first chapter describing Carl’s transport to Vietnam for his tour of duty seems sterile and his travelling companions uninteresting and somewhat unlikable.

In the context of the whole book, I think it works. The autobiographical feel of the book is strengthened by the understated narrative. Carl is not a poet or activist or John Wayne. Carl is the Everyman soldier who’s in Vietnam because he doesn’t feel he has a choice. Yet when he arrives, the experience is almost a disappointment. It’s almost like a trip to summer camp, bunking for a few months with some new buddies, and despite the helicopters and bombing runs and mortar fire and wounded and dead, contact with the enemy is so infrequent that Carl develops a half-serious theory that the whole thing is an elaborate hoax.

There are casualties among Carl’s friends, much of it self-inflicted by “Keystone Cops” bungling, but Carl’s fatalistic go-with-the-flow attitude seems to be working – he even falls for a local girl (and I mean girl – she’s just a teenager, which seems a bit shocking until you realize so is Carl) and plans on prolonging his stay in Vietnam to be with her. There’s even a bit of Catch-22 bureaucratic fumbling with his personnel file, so it seems like there might be a happy ending in store for Carl.

But this is not a story, it’s real life and real war, and in particular it’s the Vietnam War where politicians posture at peace talks while soldiers try to survive their tours of duty despite themselves, an unpredictably hostile populace and an often faceless enemy. Carl survives, but his friends don’t. He returns home as if awakening from a bad dream, but as the book leaves off, it seems it’s not a dream that he can shake.

This may seem like a pointless ending to the story, but that’s the point. Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam may lack the morality implications of Platoon, the existentialism of Apocalypse Now or the detailed battle intensity of We Were Soldiers, but it feels real enough that I’d like to know how much of it stems from the author’s experience.

I’ve been on a Scott Turow binge, lately. He’s by far my favorite writer of legal novels, so I snapped up his latest book, Innocent, the sequel to Presumed Innocent. And then I had to reread Presumed Innocent. And then I went to a used bookstore and found one his stories I hadn’t read, Pleading Guilty. And then I saw him interviewed on Book TV during their coverage of the Printers Row festival. It was a fascinating talk, covering not only his writing but issues such as the state of self-publishing and ebooks, and Illinois politics. Readers of his fiction may not realize Mr. Turow was appointed to a commission examining the death penalty in Illinois a while ago and wrote about his experiences. I won’t say it’s my favorite of his books, but it may be the most important. Which reminds me, I still need to read Bleak House (a reference that I hadn’t understood until I was informed by review comments on Epinions).

From Epinions, 2003.

The death penalty, like abortion, is one of those issues that seems to inspire strong opinions in just about everyone, regardless of personal experience or knowledge. Like most people, I consider myself a moderate – I have been uncertain about the morality of capital punishment and haven’t drawn any conclusion (read, done any research) about its effectiveness as a deterrent, but I have been firm in believing that the government should not be in the execution business.

I am hardly an activist, but even so I’ve been drawn into vigorous debates about the death penalty with several of my coworkers over the last couple of decades, ranging from a conservative friend right out of college who considered my stance just another part of my liberal pro-Dukakis platform (this was a while ago, and really, I did like Bush Sr.), to one of my project managers several years later who apparently considered my opinion too cerebral and said I should “think with my heart instead of my head”. It seemed to me that heartfelt vengeance wasn’t an improvement over thinking about the issue, but damn my Vulcan logic.

Fortunately, before spending another twenty years repeating and receiving the same arguments, I was rescued by Scott Turow’s Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. Turow is best known for his legal fiction (it would be crass to lump his work in with the other “legal thrillers”) that frames personal conflict within the complexities and moral ambiguities of the legal system, and his writing resonates with authenticity gleaned from his own practicing legal background. Turow brings the same drama, precision and sincerity to Ultimate Punishment, a factual account of Turow’s experiences with capital punishment, culminating with his service on the Illinois commission that motivated Governor George Ryan to commute the sentences of all death row inmates on his last day in office.

The commission’s initial charter was to propose reforms for an obviously-flawed system that found, though appeal after appeal, one-third of death-row inmates eventually undeserving of the death penalty, or occassionally even wrongly-convicted. Similarly, Turow doesn’t dwell much on the moral and philosophical debates. As a criminal law attorney Turow is familiar with perpetrators of horrible crimes who are unlikely to redeem themselves, and he considers the European view, and alarm, about government-held executions less relevant to the United States.

But that still leaves plenty of more “pragmatic” but no less problematic issues faced by Turow and the comission – for example the death penalty as a deterrent (it’s not), racial criteria in applying the death penalty (it turns out it’s the victim’s race that seems to be the deciding factor), the need for closure by the victims’ families, the risk facing prison staff and inmates from the irredeemably violent, political momentum to apply the death penalty to an ever-widening group of crimes, and inflamed passions of juries and law enforcement in death penalty trials, sometimes extending to outright misconduct by prosecutors and investigators.

Despite the serious and in-depth treatment of this subject, the writing is accessible (although some references elude me – “In the Bedroom” and “Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce”?) and the book is not dense, just over 160 pages. Turow’s book is though-provoking and enlightening enough that some references to other readings and resources on capital punishment would be appropriate, e.g. its history in other states and in other parts of the world, but that is more a tribute to this book than a fault. The death penalty is a subject worth constant reevaluation, (even my young ultra-conservative friend had second thoughts after seeing exultant demonstrators at an execution) and Ultimate Punishment should be required reading.

Looking back, it seems I’ve made a major career change every seven years so far. Nothing dramatic, like dropping programming in favor of gymnastics, but after my first seven years of employment in various R&D environments (MIT, Texas Instruments, BBN…), I switched to commercial software. And after seven years of startups in graphics, games, mobile internet, and really boring stuff, I tried my hand at self-employment.

So, somewhat to my surprise, I’ve spent the last seven years working as a consultant/contractor, and according to the pattern, I’m due for a change. I don’t know what it’ll be. Maybe if I can support myself solely with iPhone apps, that’ll count. Or maybe it’s time to start working on that screenplay again.

The first career change was an easy call since the dot-com boom was just starting, and it was hard to time a departure so that you didn’t leave at the same time as other coworkers (sorry, boss!) The second change was tougher, partly because that was the dot-com bust and it’s hard to explain how being a consultant with no clients is different from being unemployed. But a couple of years in, I read Po Bronson’s book, which inspired me by others’ example to consider that everyone should have at least a couple of careers in their lives, and also annoyed the heck out of me because no one likes hearing someone judge your choices, which it seemed to me Mr. Bronson indulged in frequently. Anyway here’s my review of that book:

Written on Epinions, April 2005

Like his previous work, The Nudist on the Late Shift, Po Bronson’s What Should I Do with My Life: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question has an irresistible title. I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t had a moment of doubt about how his or her life has been spent or where it’s going.

In a sense, What Should I Do with My Life doesn’t disappoint. The assorted stories of real people all interesting and some are compelling – I was most moved by the lawyer who became a long-haul truck driver to spend more time with his stepson. I found myself absorbed in the first third of the book, reading about diverse characters such as the apparent slacker who turned out to have a passion for improving golf equipment, and the Hollywood exec who left to do something more worthwhile and ended up back in the movies with renewed appreciation and skill in scriptwriting.

But the book gets more irritating with the increasing mention of Mr. Bronson own experiences. How he turned down a lucrative financial career and turned to writing, how he put together a writer’s commune in San Francisco, how his dependence on his ex-wife held back his writing – these come off as self-absorbed anecdotes. At least he exhibits some embarrassment when describing a side business he ran at his regular workplace without even trying to do a competent job at his paid position.

Even more distracting are the author’s conversations with and judgments of his subjects. Despite his introductory protestations that he doesn’t have the answers, he seems to fancy himself a therapist and career counselor. He’s critical of those who flit among occupations, maintaining that one should stay several years to make a mark. He chastises an accomplished screenwriter for not completely disengaging from Hollywood as originally intended.

No matter how well-intentioned, I find this advice as welcome as the guidance counselors in my high school who told students what careers they were suited for based on a standardized form. The author’s judgments are based on his own experiences (this isn’t my interpretation – he points to his own experiences each time he makes a judgment), but the variety of paths taken in these stories should make clear that one size doesn’t fit all.

Some people are just trying to survive, some are searching for validation, some want a career that defines their lives, and some want jobs that allow them to live one. Mr. Bronson has performed an admirable job in collecting these stories, but I think he’s missed the point – while he expects and urges people to find their calling (which is easy for a successful writer to say), it seems to me the important thing is the journey, not the destination.

Yesterday’s blog reminded me of a truly awful book on managing programmers I read years ago. The only redeeming value of a bad management books is that it at least it helps you find people you don’t want to work for (the author, and anyone who likes the book).

In the following review, I should have also pointed out any book with all-capitalized words in the title are suspect (same rule applies to forum posts, tweets and emails)

Written on Epinions in 2003:

From the title Leading Geeks: How to Manage and LEAD People Who Deliver Technology, I expected Paul Glen’s book to be asinine and useless. I was half right – it’s asinine and worse than useless.

The author both warns against buying into the geek stereotype and promotes it, sometimes in the same sentence: “We will move past useless sterotypes and look into patterns of geek attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that make them both unusual and unusually difficult to lead and understand.” Is this on the Discovery Channel? Or perhaps on one of Fox’s “When Animals Attack” episodes.

“Geeks are different from other people”. Besides the patronizing and often contradictory characterizations (geeks are introverted, how do you identify extroverted geeks?), there are the useless theories and models: “The tripartite relationship” of Geeks, leaders and geekwork, and the “Hierarchy of Ambiguity”, a pyramid with three layers, environmental, structural, and task ambiguity. Apparently, you just need three different words to produce a model.

The author cites project leader Tom West’s political maneuvering in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine as an example of resolving ambiguity and specifying a purpose for his group (developing the Data General Eclipse minicomputer), but here again the point is muddled. West vocalized different purposes for different audiences, and the ultimate purpose was to get a piece of the “glamor” work performed by another division. Which is not what I would call focus. And in the end, the Eclipse, while completed, was not a particularly successful product. However, Tracy Kidder’s book is a good read and provides at least a better anecdotal portrayal of geeks.

There are other teaser bits of valid information that go nowhere. The author recommends that geek project leaders use the iterative “spiral” project schedule rather than the monolithic “waterfall” method. (Is he talking to the geek project lead here, or is this more like a football commentary, while we watch?) Really, there is quite a bit more to software development methodology than that, e.g. the now in-vogue Extreme Programming (in which paired programming is one of the well-known recommendations, not quite consistent with Blum’s statement that geeks like to work alone).

The abundance of software practices and metrics, all produced by “geeks”, refute Blum’s blanket characterizations that geeks don’t care about the big picture and that it is difficult to quantify geek productivity (he settles for a qualitative assessment of how well the geek knows his stuff). In fact, Blum lets geeks off easy when he states that it is unreasonable to ask geeks for time estimates on tasks they are unsure of. That is bad project management, almost as bad as the typical management practice of either dictating or negotiating those estimates. Any engineer, actually any employee, should be aware enough of past experience and comparable efforts by others to make a reasonable prediction. Otherwise, there is no point in trying to manage a project – it’s just an exercise in self-denial.

Which points to what I believe is the real issue in leading geeks – it’s not the “geeks”, it’s the “geekwork”, to use Blum’s terminology. If you hire ten engineers from MIT, it’s still extremely unlikely that you will get any of the hardcore geeks behind the well-publicized pranks – you will more likely get an assortment people with varying social social skills, competence and dedication to their work. The management challenge is in managing an engineering problem, and the succesful manager will be knowledgable in the problem domain, problem-solving methods for that domain, and exercise good judgment, which is not “geek” management. It’s just good management.

Chapter Three, “Groups of Geeks”, begins with “If you want to lead geeks, it’s not enough to understand them as individuals”. The author has it backward – we use generalizations as conveniences (in the context of physics, someone once said “all models are wrong, but some are more useful than others”) and fodder for humor, not as a productive way to deal with individuals.

I’ve refrained from reposting my more negative-toned reviews from Epinions (when you’re on the receiving end of reviews, you start to appreciate “Do unto others…”), but I don’t feel like writing anything today, and I’ve reposted most of the positive ones. So, laziness triumphs…

Written: May 29 ’05

Reading Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything! is like being on the receiving end of the most maddening and pointless conversation you’ve ever had:

I-have-the-last-word-in-the-argument – In the preface, the author states that he won’t discuss the debate about cell phones causing brain tumors, then immediately adds, “The claims are unsupported by medical evidence.” That’s like my previous boss who would say something rude, followed by “let’s not discuss this anymore,” then toss in a final insult. Anyway, even if I were to trust a professor of media studies to assess medical data, a book ostensibly about the cell phone’s impact on society should at least describe the not insignificant concern about cell phone radiation.

the provocative and ridiculous assertion – The author claims the cellphone has had a bigger impact on the world than the Internet. Yet he devotes much of the book to the advances of the Internet. (In fact, much of the book is devoted to the history of telecommunications starting with the telegraph and to non-unique aspects of the cell phone, like the Pavlovian response to phones ringing) He asserts that the videophone coverage in the Iraq war was completely objective, with Geraldo Rivera’s disclosure of his unit’s location as an extreme example of objectivity, while the one exception was Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who interrupted his broadcasting to administer emergency medical treament to a two-year old Iraqi boy. (The author says Dr. Gupta’s objectivity was questioned, but doesn’t say by who). What about Rivera’s relentless self-promotion – that counts as objectivity? Perhaps it’s time for Geraldo to start a new talk show using videophones, that would really add some objectivity.

dumb analogies – The author cites cites Stephen Jay Gould’s explanation of “preadaptation”, how evolutionary products such as walking limbs later can transform into other functions such as wings, then proposes that thumb-operated cell phone buttons also qualify. That’s ridiculous – cell phones are designed (or mis-designed) for our digits, not the reverse. It’s called user-interface design or human factors engineering, but definitely not evolutionary preadapation, unless our thumbs have started changing shape to match cell phone buttons.

facts out of context – The early laptops, circa 1983, are described as limited by their operating system incompatibility with CP/M, DOS and the Macintosh. Well, those three operating systems were incompatible with each other, and there were plenty more at that time – just about every line of computers had its own OS. (even within Apple, there were the mutually incompatible Apple II, Apple III, Lisa and Mac OS’s.)

rambling – the book is 256 pages, with surprisingly little dedicated to cell phones, but snippets of just about everything media in the twentieth century. Like postcards?

shameless self-promotion – The book is filled with “See my book…”, and the bibiliography section at the end of the book lists thirteen works by the author.

annoying coined phrases – The author describes anything cell phone related as “cellphonic”. From now on, I’ll call everything about books “bookolic”.

Cellphone reminds me of my stoned friends pontificating aimlessly and circuitously over technology, society and philosophy. (At least I hope they were stoned – broadcasting several minutes of such interminable discourse would be a more powerful anti-drug message than a two-second display of sizzling fried eggs). I’ve often grumbled about how today’s cellphone culture contributes to short attention spans and disconnected thought – it never occurred to me that a book about cellphone culture could be the worst example.

A while back, Goodreads changed their Terms of Service to include one of those all-encompassing indemnification clauses that I detest. When I complained about it on one of the Goodreads groups, a member asked me to explain the issue “in layman’s terms”. Now, that’s a problem if web site users are implicitly agreeing to a contract without the ability to understand it.

Some sites don’t have this broad indemnification clause, e.g. Twitter, Facebook and last I checked, TripAdvisor (this clause is particularly disquieting on a site that relies on user-written reviews, so it’s disappointing that Goodreads has it – what if someone sues Goodreads because they don’t like a book review you wrote? Don’t laugh – it happens on Tripadvisor)

I can mostly avoid sites with that indemnification clause (I stuck with Goodreads, but limit myself to just rating rather than reviewing books). It’s hard to avoid using Google, though, which uses this clause on everything including YouTube. So I was hoping that Vimeo had something better, especially since I just noticed that Vimeo now works on the iPhone and iPad. My hopes are dashed, but they deserve kudos for putting a “Vimeo Speaks” column of explanatory text alongside the TOS legalese. Here’s their indemnification clause in “layman’s terms”:

One thing I liked about The Sarah Connor Chronicles is the brief history lesson on chess computers and the reference to Deep Blue (and also the idea that a chess computer would dominate mankind – take that, Tron and Colossus!) So I dug up my old Epinion review on Feng-Hsiung Hsu’s book “Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion”:

I’ve never been a particularly good chess player – when I played on my high school chess team, my rating peaked at just above 1700, which is, well, decent. But ever since I played and lost to my first chess computer, I’ve aspired to writing a great chess program.

I never got around to it, only writing a series of Othello programs on various platforms, but the dream is still there. So I’m quite taken with Feng-Hsiung Hsu’s twelve-year quest to build a chess computer capable of beating the world chess champion.

There are really two major contests in this autobiographical account – the well-publicized final match between Deep Blue and world champion chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and the early political tension between the original Deep Thought team at Carnegie-Mellon University and the more established computer chess group led by Hans Berliner at the same institution.

Hsu’s irritation with these two major rivals comes through clearly, but he does attempt to at least sound understanding of their respective positions. The emotional level of disagreement and surprisingly petty behavior (during and after the match, Kasparov insinuated that the Deep Blue team cheated) highlight the fact that this was not just a game to Kasparov and not just an academic exercise to the CMU researchers. All the participants had the pride and work of a lifetime at stake, no less than that of athletes seeking a championship ring or Olympic medal.

Chess and technology enthusiasts should find the level of computer hardware and chess detail interesting, although others may find it tedious. Hsu fails to provide any substantial discussion of other computer chess research, which could lead the reader into thinking all the interesting developments occurred during Deep Thought/Deep Blue’s development, when in fact, computer chess has been a rich topic for decades. For example, one surprising omission – International Master David Levy defeated Deep Thought in an early game, but Hsu doesn’t note that Levy is a well-known computer chess authority and would know how to exploit typical weaknesses of chess programs as well as anyone.

Considering he’s not a native English speaker, Hsu’s writing is passable, and his vocabulary is impressive, although the style is somewhat stilted. There is at least one misspelling/typo (the Sports Illustrated “swim suite” edition), but the most distracting aspect of the writing is structural – Hsu recounts some events out of sequence, referring to them back and forth, so I felt a little bit like the time warping traveller in Slaughterhouse Five. For example, Hsu recounts a 1995 international computer chess tournament in Hong Kong before discussing a 1994 tournament in the next chapter.

Compounding this confusion is the succession of names for the various incarnations of the hardware – Deep Thought, Deep Thought II, Deep Blue, Deep Blue Prototype, Deep Blue Jr. It’s hard to remember the differences between them (it’s still not clear to me how Deep Blue Jr. is different from Deep Blue, aside from being “scaled down”), and I had to flip back the pages a few times to keep track of which version of the hardware was playing at what tournament and when against whom.

The naming issue does provide the most humorous anecdote in this tale – when the project was adopted by IBM, corporate insisted on changing the name from Deep Thought, largely because of the trademark issue (Deep Thought was named after the unhelpful computer in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), but also because a surprising number of people, including a nun, kept referring to the computer as Deep Throat.

In an attempt to explain his ambition and tendency to bump heads, Hsu intersperses his narrative with some background on his early school years in Taiwan, required service in the Taiwanese army, and his activities at Carnegie-Mellon, but it’s really unnecessary. His personal style comes through loud and clear throughout the rest of the story and there’s no need to explain – some people just have the combination of talent and contrariness to create something like Deep Blue, and in this case, the world had the fortune to watch Hsu and Deep Blue bump heads with a no less intense personality, Garry Kasparov.

Before I go to sleep, I try to recount my accomplishments for the day. Sort of a personal scrum meeting. Also, it helps avoid insomnia. I won’t inflict that on you readers in the form of daily blogs (that’s what Facebook statuses are for), but it’s been a busy month, so I’ll list the highlights:

• Got an iPad. I considered waiting until my birthday (that’s how I rationalized getting my first MacBook Pro), but I felt I should get a move on in updating my iPhone apps. Besides, they were in stock at the Apple Store.
• Updated HyperBowl for the iPad. Not too bad – it took a couple of days, got rejected because now it needs to support multiple orientations (at least upside-down), resubmitted, and got accepted.
• Filed my taxes. I actually start in December, filling it in and itemizing deductions over the months until I can’t stand it anymore. I always leave some money on the table in return for keeping some last bit of sanity. It’s a fair trade, I think.
• Celebrated my birthday by spending a couple of days in San Clemente to relax. Instead of visiting the beach, I raided the local used book store, Mathom House Books. Picked up a dozen sci-fi novels.
• Updated the individual HyperBowl lane apps for the iPad.
• Dropped by the doc for a periodic blood test. Whereupon they called me up and said they got the results and I needed to come in immediately. Whereupon they said, never mind, sorry about that.
• Watched the season DVD set of Breaking Bad.
• Watched the season 2 Blue-Ray set of Sarah Connor Chronicles.
• Updated Fugu Bowl for the iPad.
• Brought my car in for an oil change. Good news is I only drove a thousand miles since my last oil change five months ago. Bad news is I still ended up spending three hundred dollars.
• Caught up on Flash Forward on the iPad using the ABC Player.
• Caught up on Lost on the iPad using the ABC Player.
• Did some major work on Blue Mars. You’ll see it in the next beta release.

Now I need to get going on the next set of iPad releases. But first, I’m going to start catching up on Caprica episodes…