Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

A San Francisco judge has thrown out a ballot initiative, “Care not Cash”, voted by a 60% margin last November, saying only county representatives (i.e. the San Francisco Board of Supervisors) have authority to define welfare standards.

While I have my own doubts about that welfare reform package, I find curious to say the least the idea that elected representatives have higher sovereignty than the people they derive their legitimacy from.

Update (2003-09-18):

The San Francisco board of supervisors has killed the measure. Contempt for voters is not the exclusive province of right-wingers, it seems.

Update (2004-04-30):

A state appeal court has reversed the decision, citing saying it was upholding the right of voters and exercising the court’s “duty to jealously guard the prerogative of initiative”. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine, but also exceedingly slowly

In the film world, the technical quality of the pictures you take is conditioned mostly by the lens and film you use. A $79 Olympus Stylus Epic with a fixed 35mm lens will take as good or better pictures than a fancy SLR (single-lens reflex) by Canon or Nikon, and you can load it up with Fuji Neopan 1600 or Ilford Delta 3200 film for taking pictures in very low light conditions.

For digital cameras, this does not hold – the more expensive digital SLRs (DSLRs) have much larger sensors that collect more light and thus have a higher signal to noise ratio, which makes for smoother, cleaner pictures and higher sensitivity. Compact digicams peak at ISO 400, which means flash is required at night, with the accompanying “red-eyed rabbit caught in headlights” look…

Unfortunately, until recently DSLRs have been out of most peoples’ reach, with prices above $2000. Canon breached this by introducing its flagship amateur DSLR, the 10D, for under $1500 street price. Many believe that prices will still need to fall below the psychological threshold of $1000 for DSLRs to gain wide acceptance. It’s interesting to look at the Japanese camera manufacturers’ trade association CIPA’s statistics, from which it appears the manufacturers’ average wholesale price for interchangeable-lens digital SLRs was about $910 in February 2003. Some pundits think the $1000 retail price threshold will be crossed around the end of the year.

Update (2003-08-20):

The other shoe drops – Canon just announced its $900 EOS 300D, which packs most of the features (and more importantly, the sensor and image quality) of the EOS 10D for less than 2/3 the price. Canon can do this, as they are a vertically integrated company, making everything from the optics to the sensor.

From the San Francisco Examiner

I take the California street cable car to work or back nearly every day. Unlike the more touristic Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason lines, this line is used mostly by locals and commuters. It is also celebrating its 125th year of service (not bad for a city that is barely a century and a half old).

An excellent article in The Guardian summarizes the current attacks on politically inconvenient science in the US. It is instructive to compare this with Stalin’s USSR. The parallel is unfortunately too close for comfort.

Trofim Lysenko was an agronomist who devised a method to improve the yield of winter wheat, an important achievement in a country suffering from famine due in large part to criminally incompetent mismanagement by Communist central planners. He believed in a form of Lamarck’s theories, that basically species evolve by transmitting inherited characteristics, rather than by natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Lysenko led a series of attacks on genetics, beginning in the mid thirties and culminating with the purge of of the father of Soviet genetics, Nikolai Vavilov in 1940 (initially sentenced to death, he died in 1943 while in solitary confinement). Lysenko then assumed complete control over Soviet agronomical “science”, all modern genetics starting with Mendel’s laws were banned (some of Vavilov’s vital work on biodiversity survived, but is endangered today), and the most outlandish theories (like spontaneous generation of germs) promulgated.

The Communist regime found Lysenko’s theories congenial, as they offered the perspective of genetically improving homo sovieticus using the same brutal tactics applied to Russian arts, religion and history.

Vavilov was rehabilitated when Nikita Khrushchev came to power, but Lysenko managed to hold on, in part with flattery, in part with outright fraud to cover up his lack of results. He was finally sacked in 1965, when the damage he had done in thirty years became impossible to ignore.

One of the holy grails of networking is “always-on” connectivity, whether wired broadband or wireless (some telcos even thought there was a market for ultra-narrowband always-on at below 16kbps using ISDN signaling D channels). With the quiet but inexorable progression of broadband, this is coming closer to reality. All sorts of interesting applications become possible when you have such connectivity:

• Home automation: remote monitoring of alarms and thermostats, programming your ReplayTV/TiVo remotely

• Automated unattended network backup

• Self-hosted weblogs

• IP telephony and videoconferencing

One key enabler remains unaddressed: quiet PCs. Most PCs make too much noise (usually around 60-70 dB) to be left running all day (and all night).

Some vendors like Dell hide this information deep inside their websites, when they even bother to measure it. Some, like HP/Compaq list unrealistic figures (I have a Compaq Evo D315 rated at 26 dB (point of measurement unspecified but probably from an “operator position”), which I measured at 55 dB using a Radio Shack sound meter). Apple is the only mainstream vendor that has paid some attention to this problem, but even they have backtracked: the iMac G4, while relatively quiet, is still significantly noisier than the PowerMac G4 Cube it replaced.

Always-on connectivity will not realize its potential until computer makers seriously tackle this issue and make computers that are quiet enough to be left running all night in a bedroom.

This would require a change of emphasis from bleeding-edge processors, that are highly profitable, but also power-hungry (and thus require big noisy fans to cool down) when their power is almost always untapped. Just as many more ultra-thin laptops are sold in Japan than in the US because US consumers are not clamoring for them, the situation won’t change until users demand quiet PCs.

Most of the work on quiet PCs is done in more environmentally conscious Northern Europe and Japan. Some resources:

• A Swedish page on Silent PCs

• The Silent PC Review has some interesting articles.

• A number of quiet PCs using the mini-ITX form factor and the low-power VIA EPIA-M chipset can be found at www.mini-itx.com.