If you're not absolutely sure you understand the difference between "comprise" and "compose," just use "compose" all the time.  You're much, much more likely to be right that way.

So, ever since I got a smartphone in January (T-Mobile G1, which is way more awesomer than some crappy iPhone), I've been thinking that maybe devices like that are the first sign of something big; maybe as big as any other stage of human development.

I've thought a lot about the progression of evolution on earth, starting from simple chemical responses to stimuli, through the development of a nervous system which allows much more complicated and adaptive responses to the environment, including instincts, and then to the big leap of a brain which can store information entirely separately from the genotype.

The major contribution of our own species, of course, is the ability to store information outside the phenotype as well as outside the genotype, and, even more importantly, transmit it between individuals.  Stephen Hawking believes that, in terms of information created, the last three hundred years have been eventful as the previous ten thousand, which, in turn, have been as eventful as the entire preceding three-and-a-half billion years.

That's a pretty grandiose claim, but I'm not sure it's wrong, and I'm really curious where it goes from here.  I think the global communications infrastructure we're building is the start of the next big leap.  We've spent the last few millennia amassing information, and now we're tackling the problem of retrieval.  With access to a computer and the internet, we've already been able to do that to an unprecedented degree for a couple decades now, but I think the portability afforded by handheld devices really ups the ante.  The ability to arbitrarily retrieve information on demand, from anywhere, is a pretty phenomenal development.  Since I got my G1, I've never needed to stop for directions.  I've never wondered what time a movie is playing.  I can check the calories of a restaurant's menu items from the parking lot, to make sure it's compliant with the Burrito Diet.  I can have a news aggregator and voice synthesizer read me top headlines as they come down the pipe while I drive to Chicago.

Is it out of line to wonder if humanity's future is as a big distributed processing system?  Will our knowledge be stored in one central collection, and our brains function more or less as a local cache?  We're already more than halfway there, I think; with Google and Wikipedia, I can already gain surface knowledge on any topic in minutes.  The only thing missing is a more efficient way to get information in and out of the brain, and I think we'll see that within my lifetime.  When retrieving information on any topic is as simple as just "remembering" it, will individual education be a meaningful concept anymore?

I'm beginning to think that the nightmare of the runaway AI enslaving humanity might already be outdated.  It's looking more and more like we are the runaway AI.  I don't see us developing into a hive-mind like the Borg; I think it'll be more of a gestalt, something like Gaia from Asimov's books, individual minds and a collective whole existing simultaneously.  But I think it will happen, and I think we've already started the stage of our evolution that will take us there.

Okay, so I haven't blogged for a while.  The main reason is...THE BURRITO DIET!!!

Every winter I put on about 20 pounds, and every summer I take off about 15.  This has been going on pretty much since I finished high school, so you can imagine a serious case of thunder thighs has ensued.  If I did that one photo per day thing, it would look like someone took a blow-up doll shaped like me and started pumping it full of jell-o far beyond its normal mechanical tolerances.  And ripping out its hair.  So, I decided that drastic action was required.

And thus the BURRITO DIET was born.  It works like this:

Every day I get 2400 calories, which is supposedly what I'm supposed to eat to maintain my target weight.  So it's not really much of a diet, since I'm eating a not insignificant amount of calories.  But just counting them and keeping myself honest helps.

800 of those calories come from a delicious Chipotle burrito for lunch, which is nice and big and probably has some kind of nutrients, like maybe zinc or something.  I don't go for any of that hippie crap like beans or salsa.  I like tortilla, meat, and cheese, and that's it.  And rice.  Here is my burrito:

Some misguided souls will try to tell you that a Qdoba burrito is better, but they are wrong, and here is the proof:

If that's not some kind of alien slug larva, I don't know what is.  (I ripped off that photo from a site where it came with the caption, "It wasn't very good."  I believe it.)

Anyway, I get 800 more calories for dinner, and then a final 800 calories for whatever crap I want to eat before bed.  And that's the Burrito Diet.

Oh, and I work out a whole bunch too.

Just walking to get the burrito is a mile and a bit, so that's 200 calories right there.  I also climb 20 flights of stairs at work, twice a day, for another 200.  And then I'll walk or jog another five miles or so when I get home.  All told, that's about two hours of pretty solid exercise, totalling maybe 1200 all together.  My goal is to keep doing this until I get my weight down to a point where it won't gelatinize my knee cartilage to go running, and then maybe train for next year's marathon again.

And so far it's been working.  After 7 weeks, I've lost nearly 20 pounds, which, according to my math above, has already bought me four guilt-free years of slovenly overeating, should I return to my former ways.  But I think I'll keep going with it.  If current trends continue, by the end of the summer the ladies should be all up ons.

So I was sitting around tonight, and a thought popped into my head: what happens if you take an image and pretend it's an audio file?  What happens if you compress it as a .mp3 or .ogg file, uncompress it, and turn it back into an image?

No, I was not smoking pot.  This time.

I've actually wondered about this for a long time, ever since I started reading about how different compression algorithms worked.  When I discovered JPEG in 1994, I was blown away by how much compression you could get with very little loss in quality, and I've been fascinated by stuff like that ever since.  (Down, ladies!  I'm taken!)

In theory, there's no reason it shouldn't work.  Raw images and sound files are both just streams of bytes.  With a little handwaving, you should be able to trick software into thinking one is the other.

So I found a nice pretty test picture:

and did my magic.

First, I decided to give the audio compression a fighting chance.  I know that lossy compression algorithms like MP3 typically rely on having a little continuity of the data, so that they can predict patterns and so on.  The problem is, a 24-bit image like the one above is stored as a series of 3-byte values (for the R, G, and B values of each pixel).  This means the data can vary dramatically from byte to byte, which will make life very hard for compression routines.  So I took pity, and broke the image into separate R, G, and B channels.  This means that, instead of one 24-bit color image, I had three 8-bit grayscale images.  Since the test image has a lot of smooth sections (the sky, the shading of the ground), I figured this would give the compression routines at least a little to work with.   I would run the compression on each channel separately, then combine the three resulting files back into one color image at the end.

So I downloaded Audacity, imported the channel images as 8-bit unsigned mono at 11025 Hz, saved them as compressed audio, re-imported them, saved them as raw audio, then turned them back into a single color image.

And...it worked!  It worked pretty darn well, actually.  Even though it was meant for a totally different kind of data, the audio compression didn't do half bad with images, both in terms of quality and the amount of compression.

Here's the same image, compressed as an MP3 with a 128k bitrate:

Not bad at all.  And a 1.36:1 compression ratio (PNG was 2:1).  Not great, but what do you want?  You're saving an image as an MP3!  Why don't you just back off, okay??

But what I was really hoping for was to get an idea of what kind of compression artifacts you'd see with MP3.  So, naturally, I turned the bitrate way down (to 16k) and tried again:

And there you go: the answer to the long-pondered question of "what does an MP3 look like?"  Little splotchy lines, that's what.  And the compression ratio: 5.4:1, baby!  That's on par with an average-quality JPG (which, to be fair, does look a lot better).

I guess the fact that I finally played Mass Effect means I've given up my quixotic struggle against DRM software.  I'll write about that later, but I'd heard a lot of good things about the game and my curiosity finally got the best of me.

I feel conflicted about reviewing it and I'm not sure where to start.  On the one hand, it's one of the slickest, smartest, best-written role-playing games I've seen.  On the other, the gameplay is mediocre and needlessly padded, and in fact about a quarter of the way in I turned the difficulty down to the minimum so I could sleepwalk through the combat sequences and get to the next part of the story.

The setup is familiar to anybody who's read or seen much science-fiction: It's two hundred years in the future, and humanity is a relative newcomer to the galactic community.  The Alliance, a coalition of human countries and colonies, is sort of a junior member of an interstellar federation called the Citadel Council, which has governed a large portion of the galaxy for millennia.  You play Shepard, an elite human soldier, who becomes the first human candidate for the Spectres, the Council's covert law enforcement agency.  Your first assignment, an investigation into the theft of an archaeological relic, leads first to the discovery of corruption within the Council, and then, of course, to a terrible secret which threatens all species.

So Battlestar Galactica aired its final episode last Friday, and...well, it sucked.  If someone made a vacuum cleaner powered by a black hole, it would still suck less than the BSG finale.

What I don't understand is, why?  Why in the world did they start down this road with no idea where they were going?  Why introduce mystery after mystery, year after year, with absolutely no idea what the answers were?  Were they hoping a coherent explanation would magically present itself somewhere along the way?  Were they hoping the fans would forget, or just wouldn't care?

And, even more difficult to comprehend, why does this keep happening?  Why do shows like Battlestar Galactica and Lost not learn from the mistakes of The X-Files and Twin Peaks?  If you're going to make a mystery the centerpiece of your show, you have to resolve it!  I have a lot of difficulty comprehending how Ron Moore, who is clearly a talented writer and who has given us some of the best drama ever seen on television, could fall prey to this incredibly basic error.  I mean, seriously, this is Creative Writing 101 stuff.

Dead Space is a game with a lot of promise and occasional flashes of brilliance held back by the cliches of the survival horror genre and some very frustrating gameplay decisions.

The formula is tried and true: contact has been lost with the USG Ishimura, a huge, Red Dwarf-style mining ship which is currently engaged in a planet-cracking mission wherein it blasts a huge chunk of a mineral-rich planet's crust into orbit and then feasts on the tasty, tasty ore inside.  Apparently having never seen any sci-fi or horror movies before, the mining company sends a tiny repair ship with a crew of five to assist the Ishimura with its "communications malfunction" (yeah, right).  One wonders why a ship with a crew of thousands, a ship so large it requires its own internal tram system to get around, needs help from a scow the size of a large Winnebago that can cruise into one of its docking bays without even tickling.  Seriously, if the Ishimura were a woman, she would totally be saying "Are you in yet?"  If I were designing a miles-long city in space, the first thing I would do is make sure it had several Winnebagos' worth of spare parts, and a repair crew of at least five people.

After writing my first post, I wanted to add what I thought was a silver lining to our self-destructive tendency to abandon long-term adherence to our principles in favor of short-term expediency:

There's a limit, and it's lower than I expected.  The line between idealism and practicality becomes blurry.

When gas prices in the U.S. topped $4/gallon last year, there was serious talk about alternative energy.  SUV sales plummeted, and dealerships couldn't keep hybrids in stock.  Similarly, this financial meltdown has inspired a populist uprising against the disparity of wealth bigger than anything I can remember seeing in my lifetime.

My dim view of human nature told me that we wouldn't even begin to think about changing our ways until we were on the actual brink of collapse.  As horrible as the things I mentioned were, they weren't even close to that.  So, there's some reason to hope.

Now the problem becomes one of bringing the important issues to the public's attention in a way that affects them directly.  How does one do that with the national debt, when the consequences are subtle and largely applied to future generations?  How does one do that with the war on drugs, where it's easy to dismiss the victims as "those junkies?"

Still, there's reason to hope that we don't have to take ourselves to the absolute edge of catastrophe before we begin to wise up.

So, partly as an outlet for ideas that I have rattling around inside my brain, and partly to get some more experience with web design and content management software, I've decided it's time to have a blog.  I am on track to discover Twitter sometime around 2017.

As you can tell from the site design, I am not blessed with artistic talent.  In fact, I'm pretty minimalist when it comes to visual design.  But that doesn't mean the same thing has to apply to functional design, which leads into one of the ideas I currently have rattling around inside my brain: idealism vs. practicality.

Nice segue, huh?  It came into my head while debating how much effort I should expend to accomodate users of Internet Explorer 6.  As anyone who has touched a web page in the last couple years knows, IE6 is the bane of web developers worldwide.  It supports standards incompletely and incorrectly, contains too many layout bugs to count, and has a general "fuck you!" attitude left over from the good ol' days.  Trying to make a page render correctly both in IE6 and modern browsers is a herculean task, and often requires betraying some of core principles of good web design, such as abstraction and semantic layout in favor of numerous hacks, kludges, and conditional statements.  It's a nightmare, and makes good web design at least twice as hard as it would otherwise be.

And yet, the latest polls show that 18% of all internet users are still using IE6.  Should those poor deluded souls – nearly one in five – be excluded just because they would require some extra work?  Thankfully that market share is decreasing every month, but it's a point that's been lingering in my head.  Clearly the general question is where the balance between idealism and practicality should fall: one of the  fundamental controversies of modern social sciences.

I'm following a pretty typical pattern so far: from pure idealism in my childhood, to nearly pure practicality when I grew up and realized what was actually involved in making the world function, and now, as my years grow ever more wizened, firmly in the middle.  For years I called myself a pragmatist, but the older I get, the more I find myself edging back toward principles.

Even though I was blessed with some of the best teachers in the world, I was never any good at history in school; I just don't have a head for names and dates and geography.  It's only because I'm beginning to have lived long enough to see some history unfold in real time that I get a good appreciation for the types of relationships involved, and the more I see of those, the more I think that sticking to principles is the practical thing to do – in the long run.

I saw Saddam Hussein go from being a politically expedient ally against Iran to being the bogeyman of the last 20 years.  Same deal with Osama bin Laden.  Going further back, our good friend Stalin in WWII.  In finance, decades of deficit spending are taking a serious toll in the form of devaluation of the dollar and a per capita debt burden that dwarfs the average yearly salary.  These situations are clearly ill-advised in the long run, yet we keep on doing them for the short-term gain.  And we'll keep doing it with our dependence on oil, our unwillingness to demand respect for human rights from our major trading partners, and the tragedy of our war on drugs.

Our shortsightedness reminds me of a young person who puts all his money in low-risk, low-return investments like bonds and CDs while ignoring the fact that higher-risk choices such as stocks will most likely provide much higher average rates over the 40 years until he retires.  Yes, it's easy and gives you less to worry about in the short term, but in the long run you'll just be shooting yourself in the foot.  We're shooting ourselves in the foot a lot these days, as our national compromises of the last century come home to roost.  Would we not be better off now if we hadn't been so quick to jump in bed with some questionable decisions in the interests of fixing the here-and-now?

So, all that is a long and boring way of saying: No, I'm not supporting IE6 on this site.  I'm coding to standards, organizing semantically, and using the generally supported subset of presentation rules.  Making life easier for users of substandard technology just removes any incentive for them to upgrade to something better.  IE6 is holding back web development as a whole, and it needs to go.

Now, if I could only convince my bosses of that...