cars: GreenDriveExpo

Posted on 2010-10-10 by skierpage

After I ate my vegan granola, I pedaled over to the Green Drive Expo to celebrate alternative fuel vehicles (“Stupid smug eco hippies!” – Cartman)

I missed Toyota’s talk, I would have loved to say “What the hell have you been doing for a DECADE since the 2002 RAV4 EV cars parked to your left!” (several owners drove theirs over).

Chelsea Sexton’s talk was great, very reasoned yet enthusiastic.

  • We have to move on from beating up GM over the EV-1 fiasco.
  • “I don’t have a problem with someone buying a Volt.  I’m concerned about as many EV miles as possible.”
  • Her favorite study is from EPRI, finds that the worse-case EV is about as clean as  Prius.
  • The all EV range means it isn’t for everyone, but for those who need more maybe they get rental credits.
  • Tesla played a crucial role in showing what’s possible
  • Utilities might pre-order lots of kW·h from car makers in the form of used batteries [a battery down to 70% of capacity is still very useful as a stationery energy storage] to reduce up-front cost.

Toyota had three plug-in Prius prototypes, it looks identical to the regular Prius. Even though it only goes 14 miles all-electric, after it switches to hybrid operation the plug-in Prius gets better mpg than the Prius, so it’ll sell fine.

The 2002 RAV4 EV gets much better range, and it’s so strange and infuriating to see the future from the past! The owners have to be creative, they unscrew their obsolete inductive paddle charging boxes from the wall and bring them with them and plug them into 240V.

I talked to two Tesla Roadster owners.  It’s well-finished for a low-volume sports car. The way the LEDs light around the charging receptacle is cool.

The only news to me was Ford is going to put its new plug-in hybrid drivetrain that’s going into the Fusion in the new Escape, and it will be available in all-wheel drive. On the other hand, the Ford representatives who said this also maintained Ford doesn’t currently sell an AWD Escape Hybrid! I drove the mule, the ugly bloated current Escape. The car pulled away in EV mode, but even at low speeds the gas engine was running. The Ford representative had stupidly left the air conditioning on, and it is engine-powered, forcing the engine to run! The moment I turned it off, the engine shut down.

There was one display-only Nissan Leaf.  It’s a strikingly weird-looking car, like a hatchback that expanded and melted in the microwave. The interior is fantastic.

All the other electric-only cars compete in the Leaf’s shadow. The Mitsubish MiEV and Think EV (which was also around in 2002) don’t look like the future. Smart was there, but sadly with the current gasoline model (a tiny car that gets much worse mpg than a Prius, for when size is more important than economy), supposedly the electric Smart should show up soon.

Brammo showed their slick Enertia electric motorcycle, and Pacific EBike showed a lot of $900 Chinese-made electric bicycles and mopeds. Electric bikes are an interesting alternative, enthusiasts pay way more than that to “add lightness” so they can pedal further, but these heavy bikes do the work for you. The smaller the vehicle, the lighter and cheaper the battery, so it’s primarily the USA’s car-centric culture that prevents these alternatives to putting your 200 lb ass in a 3,000 lb vehicle to go to work and shops from selling like crazy.

I’ll upload pix soon.

Posted in cars, eco | 1 Comment

open source: YOU are the marketing department

Posted on 2010-10-07 by skierpage

There are hundreds of thousands of open source projects, each addressing a problem and hoping to make the world a better place, and most struggle to gain traction.  It’s disheartening that so many open source contributors fail so badly at the most basic way to promote their project: They don’t say what their project does! I read the planets (aggregators of blog posts) for all the software I run, and every day I come across dozens of blog posts like

“WeboKLavMer 0.6.312 is out! Several fixes and a new DjangoHadoop back-end for SaaS goodness thanks to @Joey. Download it here, patches welcome.”

Great, everyone reading knows you’re an active software developer and Joey helped on… something. This non-communication is an epic open-source industry-wide fail that aggressively and almost contemptuously throws away millions of opportunities to get your message out for no good reason. Instead every time the message is “you’re not cool enough to already know what my pet project is.”

  1. You are the marketing department for your project.
  2. You never know who will come across one of your communications, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

So: The second sentence of every announcement and blog post HAS to be a summary of what the hell your project does. It’s a good exercise to come up with a crisp meaningful one-sentence overview and no one will begrudge you the repetition.

Posted in open source, web | Leave a comment

web: computer NELL learns by reading

Posted on 2010-10-06 by skierpage

The Read the Web team at CMU have come up with NELL, a computer program that learns by reading web pages, extracting facts and improving its reading ability as it does so.

As I blogged a few years ago, we’ve been here before, starting with the Cyc project.  After 26 years, that’s struggled to get to 170,000 facts. The NELL team are proud to have reached 440,000 beliefs, but I suspect the whole project will get sludgy and confused as it tries to turn the richness of language into a set of cut-and-dried belief statements. As I commented elsewhere, the more meanings that you patiently explain to these systems, the less they know. Very quickly they learn “New York” is a “city” which is a geographical and governmental entity, but what the hell do they do with the sentence “I’m in a New York state of mind”?! The context for meaning is vast, it takes years of hard living in the real world to gain meaning from many sentences about the world. (Thus the AI researchers trying to raise a robot like a baby.)

Also, many of the things that NELL has figured out are already well-explained and codified in information sources on the web, such as the mighty Wikipedia. The New York Times article about the project gives the example

Peyton Manning is a football player (category). The Indianapolis Colts is a football team (category). By scanning text patterns, NELL can infer with a high probability that Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts.

But just go to Wikipedia and in the source of Peyton Manning’s page you see [[Category:American football quarterbacks]] and in the template, {Infobox NFLactive ... |currentteam=Indianapolis Colts}} ! Almost every fact simple enough for NELL to learn that’s notable is already codified on Wikipedia! Already the DBpedia project takes such semi-structured data from Wikipedia pages and maps it to computer-readable semantic statements using standard vocabularies like rdf:Description, skos:subject, dbprop:currentteam , etc. DBpedia has millions of such bits of information about the millions of things that have Wikipedia pages. Does it know more then NELL’s 440,000 facts? Well, what does it mean to “know” something anyway? What does it mean to mean something? What is what? Huh?

It’s cool that NELL has amassed so many beliefs by reading, but that’s dwarfed by the millions of machine-readable “facts” already out there. NELL knows enough to get confused and require human correction, but that’s a weak kind of intelligence. If a NELL or DBpedia can’t do original research or come up with insights, then is either system better than Googling “What is Peyton Manning’s football team?” and scanning the results for an answer?

When Doug Lenat started Cyc in 1984 it was all about reading a “newspaper”, a quaint set of articles printed on a dead tree. Now it’s all social and webified. You can read NELL’s tweet stream and see it get things right, and wrong:

I think “Steel Mobile Phone” is a #buildingmaterial (http://bit.ly/b4V0HU)
I think “dutchtown high school” is a #sportsteam (http://bit.ly/bCh4YY)
I think “doubletree hotel and waltham” is a #hotel (http://bit.ly/aanr6j

Scanning NELL’s apparent representation:

  • The team’s scrunchedtogethernames willfully ignores the Wikipedia friendly naming approch, e.g. Building_material.
  • I wonder how NELL will handle naming conflicts.  Again, Wikipedia has a fine approach: Steel (band), Steel (comics), Steel (film), etc. NELL needs to learn to disambiguate its names by matching Wikipedia articles, otherwise it’s going to wind up terribly confused between all the Michael Jacksons out there.
Posted in search, semantic web | Leave a comment

Mannerism and the end of post-modernism

Posted on 2010-09-22 by skierpage

Maybe this aperçu from Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker explains why the noughties of this new millennium have been underwhelming. I want to live in the modern age, even if I have to go retro to do so!

… As the Mannerists toiled in the twilight of the Renaissance, so do we in relation to the modern age—the word “modern” having been torn from its roots to signify things that loom behind us.

Mannerist pose: a Bronzino nude, circa 1545-60.

He goes on to link mashup/remix culture and other cultural efforts to Mannerism:

The movie “Avatar” strikes me as Mannerist through and through, generating terrific sensations of originality from a hodgepodge of worn-thin narrative and pictorial tropes. Ours is a dissolving, clever culture of mix and match. We are ready for Bronzino.

But <whiny voice> “I don’t like Mannerism”.  The accelerating pace of technological change is a given in our society, even if art has trouble keeping up.  Maybe that’s why architecture manages (sometimes) to stay fresh—there are new technologies and techniques of making modern buildings in post-post-modern times even if some architects “only” use them to drape expressive forms.

he movie “Avatar” strikes me as Mannerist through and through, generating terrific sensations of originality from a hodgepodge of worn-thin narrative and pictorial tropes. Ours is a dissolving, clever culture of mix and match. We are ready for Bronzino.
Posted in architecture, art | Leave a comment

Blogger import and maintaining old blog URLs

Posted on 2010-09-18 by skierpage

I exported my site from the Blogger console, which produced a big XML file of my site in Atom feed format.  Now what? I can import by

  • Adding the Blogger import plug-in to WordPress, which seems to ignore the export and may assume it can access my blog on blogspot.com.
  • Using the WordPress RSS importer plug-in to import the XML file
  • Using the Blogger2WordPress online tool to convert the XML file into WordPress .WXR format, then import that.

So much to decide, and most guides on the web are all from 2006 and 2008.

While I puzzle this out I want to keep my old blog URLS working. WordPress let me have Permalinks (using Apache mod_rewrite rules) for my blog entries that have almost the same structure as Blogger posts, except the link appears as a directory ending in /, not a .html file.  Since every URL that Blogger produced (not just to posts, but archives, and labels) ends in .html, it seems there’s no conflict between a WordPress “Permalink” like /blog/2010/09/blogger-import-or-maintaining-old-blog-urls/ and a Blogger static file like /blog/2006/04/skiing-salomons-missteps-since-xscream.html.  So all I had to do is add the WordPress script to my blog directory and the new URLs intersperse with the old… It seems to work!, and it’s simpler than writing my own mod_rewrite rules to point to a /blog-old directory.

Posted in web | Tagged | 1 Comment

Shifting to WordPress

Posted on 2010-09-18 by skierpage

Blogger stopped supporting FTP, so I haven’t been able to update my blog, nor have people’s comments on pages shown up.

I finally got Monkeybrains to install WordPerfect (their page says “Email monkeybrains, and we’ll set up a WordPress blog for you — it takes us less than 30 seconds (once we get to your email).”

Now trying to figure out how to keep my old blog working with Apache mod_rewrite rules, and/or how to import the XML backup.

Posted in web | Tagged | Leave a comment