mim’s blog

Marios pointed me to this article from the New Yorker, again by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve been thinking about many of these ideas lately, and Gladwell seems to have come up with them at the same time…

The article is both about coincidences in simultaneous, independent inventions and a company called Intellectual Ventures (IV) with the business model of generating, patenting, and licensing lots of ideas. It’s a story that appeals to everybody who thinks, “I could do that, I have lots of ideas.” My problem with this presentation of the business model is that it’s misleading. Everyone loves coming up with new ideas, so everyone does, and as a result, ideas are cheap. The real business, however, is being able to turn an idea into something that people can and do use. I would guess that if IV is going to succeed, it will be because they’re able to make ideas useful and used and not just because they’re able to come up with new inventions. They appear to have all of the accompanying things necessary to get ideas off of the ground: funding to pay lawyers to file 500 patents a year, research before and after brainstorming sessions, and connections to people who want the ideas. It doesn’t hurt if Bill Gates is pushing your patent, either.

It seems like many people believe that there is a person called an inventor, and this person comes up with ideas, which they send out into the world. These ideas then supply money without any additional work required of the inventor and the only thing that keeps the inventor inventing is a need to tinker or to fatten the royalty stream. This seems very naive to me. As Marios has said many times before, ideas are cheap, what’s expensive is the execution and the follow-through, and what’s risky is whether people will find the invention useful and actually use it.

It seems like a person with answers or potential answers can get around some of these issues by going to a person with a problem. That a person has a problem indicates that a solution of that problem ought to be useful and used. A person with a problem has probably looked around for solutions. The more they need their problem solved, the more thorough they’ve been in their search. If you’re interested in science, then a person with a problem indicates a problem that probably hasn’t been solved yet and would be worth solving.

When I come up with ideas, just about all of them have been thought of before. I enjoy the feeling of elation that comes from discovering something new to me and running through the implications of it, and it’s always disappointing when the internet tells me it’s already been invented. Even so, it’s fun to find out when the idea was invented. “Oh, that was a 1962 idea, that one was a 1998 idea, this one’s a 2005 idea.” I find that as I’ve gone through school, my ideas have been catching up with the present. In a class, it’s a matter of extrapolating from one lecture to come up with the idea that might be presented in the next lecture. Of course, the next lecture will present it with more of the implications worked out, because other people have been thinking about it for more than a week. This process has also made me think about the relationship between my personal history of learning and the collective history of science and how something that’s new to me generally isn’t new to science. Every once in a while, though, it will be, especially in areas where I’m “caught up” with science, whatever that means.

As an aside, Malcolm Gladwell has obviously never experienced the Pfaffian, or he would have included Pfaff in the section on eponymous inventions and not just the section on second-tier scientists.

I’ve been listening to last.fm a lot recently, especially while I’m working. My goal has been mostly to listen to music, but also to be exposed to new music. The problem is that if I hear something new that I like, I need to stop working, flip desktops to firefox, flip tabs to last.fm, and look down the page for the artist’s name. I could use the pop-out player, but then I’d still have to wait for the little scroll-y display to come around to the artist. I have the same experience with my iPod, having to dig it out of my pocket to see what’s playing.

Since I’m already listening to the music, what I’d like is an auditory display of what’s playing, that is to say I’d like a DJ to tell me what I’m listening to. It could say only the artist’s name to minimize interruptions or it could include the album and track name if I’m in a more interested mood. It could be machine generated, or it could be pre-recorded, maybe by the bands themselves. It would help me learn to pronounce band names as well, e.g. !!!. It would be much less annoying than listening to DJs on the radio without the clearchannel audio logos, station IDs, or whatever you call them (cue Family Guy joke).

My parents got me a bike trainer for Hanukkah this year and I’ve been riding inside while the weather is crappy. On Graham’s recommendation, I got the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine. It’s a fluid trainer, so the resistance comes from an impeller stirring a bunch of silicone fluid, which provides resistance that’s supposed to mimic that of the road and wind. The back wheel of the bike rolls on a little metal cylinder that’s connected to the impeller.

When I started riding on it, one of the first things I noticed was that it makes a pitched sound and the pitch goes up as I go faster. I decided that it would be cool to record the sound at different speeds to see if I noticed any regularities. After finding a good placement for the mic (the crappy computer mic again), I managed to get some decent recordings, the spectrogram of which you can see below. The x-axis is minutes and the y-axis is Hz. I’m riding at three or four different speeds, which are pretty accurately represented by the rising and falling of the lines in the spectrogram.

After seeing the spectrogram, I hypothesized that the sound might be the same frequency as the roller and impeller. The roller is 2 1/8 inches in diameter, so going one revolution on it is like traveling 2.125*pi inches on the ground. Using some dimensional analysis, that means that one revolution per second is the same as going 0.379 mph (2.125 * pi inches/s * 3600 s/hr * 1/5280 miles/foot). That means that if I were going 23 mph outside, the roller would be spinning at 61 rotations per second, or 61 Hz and that’s about what I saw in the spectrogram, along with its harmonics.

Unfortunately, My bike computer is hooked up to my front wheel, so it’s useless when I’m riding the trainer. I’d like to see how accurate this calculation is and then make a calibrated audio speedometer for the trainer. Even without that, it could at least track the frequency the trainer is humming and tell me how fast I’m going relative to the rest of my ride.

I’d like to have a firefox memory monitor, like the unix program top. It would show a list of all of the web pages currently open in different tabs and windows and how much of my system resources they’re each using. At the last, I’d like to know how much memory and CPU each is using, but other things like network connections, bandwidth, etc would be nice to know as well.

Since I’ve been using gmail and google calendar, I frequently find myself watching the water level (memory usage) in bubblefishymon rise until the duck flips over in unhappiness. The only solution seems to be restarting firefox every few days. Other times, I can see that firefox is using 50% of my CPU, but it’s not at all clear which tab is doing it. The main culprits of both memory and CPU usage are clearly javascript and flash, but it would be nice to know when they’re running and what they’re using, so that I could turn them off, avoid leaving certain pages open, or just avoid certain pages altogether.

Obviously, I’m not the first person to notice firefox’s memory issues. There was a post a while ago on techcrunch talking about the forthcoming release of firefox 3 and comparing its memory usage to flock. There’s also a feature request on bugzilla requesting an about:memory page in mozilla, which kind of addresses this issue, but only in a very developer-centric way.