Mormon Metaphysics » Tech

Tech Blogging

Clark — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:14:31 +0000

We got some huge contracts at work that probably will keep me busy for the next few months. I’ll still be blogging here but don’t really have the time to dedicate to thinking through philosophy. So posting will be erratic. (Subscribe via rss to see when I post)

I do have a more technologically oriented blog I’ll probably blog a bit at as well. That’ll be more busy.

PhilPapers

Clark — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:06:10 +0000

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but if you haven’t used it try out PhilPapers. It’s basically trying to do for philosophy what arxiv did for physics papers years ago. For various reasons primarily, I suspect, tied to the nature of journals in the humanities, the humanities have been far slower to accept the change to open access papers.

PhilPapers started out a bit rough but was much better than some of the repositories with a narrower focus. (Such as Phil Sci archive from the University of Pittsburgh) Anyway I still primarily go to JSTOR first for article searches. But I’m slowly converting over. Note that PhilPapers also has a staggering number of classic papers, including some from the 19th century.

The downside to PhilPapers is that most of these are just links to standard web pages. So while it avoids a lot of cruft that Google tends to find it’s also limited. (i.e. there are more links to Google Books – famous for intentionally missing pages – than I’d like.)

So it’s not really a replacement for JSTOR or related journal searches from your library. More a way to streamline what you’d find via Google.

Kindle

Clark — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:32:29 +0000

There’s a really interesting post on Kindle market penetration. “On Amazon.com, 35 percent of sales of books that have a Kindle edition are sold in that format. That’s up, by the way, from 13 percent in February…” Wow.

If I didn’t do half my reading in the tub I’d seriously consider one. I’m curious as to whether Apple comes up with a competitor or simply allows Kindle software on their products (as is currently the case with the iPhone) There is a fairly substantial rumor that Apple’s answer to the netbook will be a bigger screen iPhone like device. i.e. more like the iPhone than the Mac. If so, then that is an ideal competitor to the Kindle and probably would address a lot of the Kindle flaws. However I can also see Apple not wanting to have to deal with all the publishers the way Amazon does. So it’s a big question whether Apple would expand the iTunes store with eBooks or would simply make use of Amazon.

The other big problem with eBooks (beyond where you can read them) is still the selection as well as not having used books. (Something I make use of a lot on Amazon – especially for philosophy books)

Various Musings (Twitter etc.)

Clark — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:04:27 +0000

OK, this is going to be a catch all for a few unrelated thoughts.

First Twitter. I’ve been getting in to it. (Want to follow me? I’m ClarkGoble on Twitter) I’m still learning the etiquette. One thing I’ve noticed. If you DVR shows the chances you’ll read a spoiler are pretty high on Twitter. (I accidentally found out who won Top Chef this morning)

I’ve also found that following folks who Twitter politics are the least interesting. I follow a bunch: liberal, conservative and libertarian. It’s just not a medium that works for politics. It’s like the worst aspects of sound bite culture magnified.

The most interesting people to follow are the technologists and foodies. There are quite a few chefs online and following them is pretty interesting. Lots of interesting links I’d not have found on my own.

The big thing I’m still unsure of is how many people to follow who follow me. I notice a lot of people follow me as soon as I start following them. Sometimes that’s nice other times I’m never quite sure how to respond. C’est la vie I guess.

Also a lot of people are saying that the whole blogging wave has crested. Perhaps in some ways. However I think what’s happened is that in politics, media and so forth you have some established blogs that are getting all the traffic. It’s much harder for new blogs to generate a lot of traffic. I also think a lot of people got burnt out on blogging. Why I don’t think it’s a fad the way some Internet things are is that it really does allow communities to form along narrow topics. Look at philosophy or science blogs. It allows people to get into a conversation that they otherwise never would be able to. And frankly philosophy blogs are going out of “business” all the time – often because people graduate or simply have a period where they don’t have time.

The nice thing about blogs for technical discussions is that you don’t have to follow them closely the way you do a mailing list. Most mailing lists are dead. Although there are a few I’m on still doing well. While blogs took out many mailing lists what mailing lists do provide is privacy that blogs never could. So you can look like an idiot in a way everyone won’t see.

Pirated Books

Clark — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:51:02 +0000

The problem of scholarly books being scanned and posted online. I confess I’ve downloaded a few of these – but only ones out of print. (HT: Brooks Blog) That said the scholarly book industry is about the only industry worse than the recording industry. Authors get basically nothing. And most books are priced for libraries. (i.e. $80+) The business needs to change, but like the scholarly journal industry, there has been considerably resistance to change.

One can certainly defend the movie industry and recording industry in defending their model. While I think both industries are idiots, it’s clearly just entertainment and a business. The problem with scholarly journals and presses is that it is supposed to be about academics. There just isn’t the justification for limiting access and charging ridiculous fees.

As I’ve oft mentioned physics completely changed years ago by putting pretty much every paper online months before it is published. I think this helped physics tremendously. Other disciplines to varying degrees of success have done the same.

However the scholarly book presses really don’t want this. So you don’t find, for instance, lower priced e-book versions. In other words they explicitly design things so you can only read in libraries the hard copy. They don’t even want you to buy their books. (Otherwise why would so many books be priced above $100?) Further while many point out that recording artists don’t exactly rake up much from sales, with book authors it is even worse. I’ve a lot of friends who have published books. The amounts they say they earn are ridiculous.

As they say, evolve or die…

Magnetic Oil Sculptures

Clark — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:10:18 +0000

OK, so this isn’t philosophically related to anything. But I had to put it up. Wow.

Tell me that’s not the coolest thing you’ve seen today.

Are You a Man or Woman?

Clark — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:56:49 +0000

Some fun following a link Razib posted. It’s a program that checks your browser history to decide if you are a man or a woman.

I guess most of the sites I visit (mainly blogs or news sites) weren’t in it’s database. Interestingly the ones that threw the decision for my being male were these ones: drudgereport.com (2.08:1), macrumors.com (2.08:1), macosxhints.com (2.13) and slashdot.org (1.74:1). Which is interesting since outside of looking at headlines at drudge every now and then I don’t visit any of those sites very often. Of course all the sites they listed still were predominantly male. The only one I got that was partially female was usps (oddly neither fedex nor ups were in their database).

The other funny thing was that my wife was browsing with my computer all morning and none of the sites she visited affected the score.

Misc Tech News

Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:31:22 +0000

OK, just for your interest a few things too long to put on the sideblog. Not the normal philosophy stuff. But pretty interesting.

First up the coolest device I’ve seen in a long time. If I was still single I’d be playing with this for sure. Way cooler than a Lego Mindstorm. It’s the Arduino which is basically a reasonably complete small computer for doing controllers. Use it to control a bunch of lights or so forth or build a robot. At $50 you can get the Nano which is about the size of a stick of gum.

I’d love one of those but I just know I have absolutely zero time to do anything with it. (HT: Engadget)

Next up a weird Google Earth – Mountain Bike thingy. As you pedal you move around Google Earth. Me? I got a TreadClimber and then try to play video games like Halo on it as I walk. It’s harder than you think – some alien comes in from the left and its sometimes tricky to keep your legs from acting as if you were really there. Plus it’s just a lot harder to play while you’re doing an intense workout. Lot’s of fun.

Lastly one of the cooliest things I’ve seen. It’s a water maker that produces water from the air. It claim costs of only 8 cents per gallon. Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot of information on the website nor does it say how well it works in the desert. (HT: Engadget)

Does it end up being like this?

Someone also pointed to this and others suggest the power consumption of these dehumidifiers is quite high.