Neal Stephenson and Google Earth
Wired has an interesting article on Google Maps / Google Earth this month (Ratliff, Evan, "The Whole Earth, Cataloged: How Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World," vol. 15, no. 7, July 2007, pp. 154-159.). I recall reading an interview with a futurist — in Wired even, I think — who said that the way he works is by reading science fiction novels. He figured that the sorts of kids who end up at M.I.T. and technology companies are also the sorts of people who read a lot of science fiction. They read something that strikes them as particularly cool and then as a technology graduate student or a researcher at a commercial lab, in a position to act on such a fantasy, decide to make it real. This struck me as clever and a little snarky, but it turns out that's exactly how Google Earth came about:
In 2001, [John] Hanke cofounded a company named Keyhole. Inspired in part by the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash — the protagonist uses a software program called Earth, created by the "Central Intelligence Corporation" and containing "a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth" — Hanke and a collection of programmers used their game design experience to create an online 3-D globe by streaming in commercial satellite images stored on the Keyhole servers. They called it Earth Viewer.
...
In 2004, not long after Sergey Brin downloaded a copy of Earth Viewer and interrupted a Google meeting to "fly" to the house of each executive in the room, the company bought Keyhole for an undisclosed amount, renamed it Google Earth, and moved Hanke's team into Building 45.
Since the Earth sequence in Snow Crash is a passage that captivated me as well — one of many in Snow Crash — I reproduce it here:
There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro had heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC [Central Intelligence Corporation] software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of special information that it owns — all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.
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Hiro turns his attention to Earth.
The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it, tells Hiro, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece of software is some heavy shit.
It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems — vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans — and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator — the line between night and day — has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the West.
Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East Coast.
Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse [cyberspace]. He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, sense the change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down at a solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit. (p. 106, 109-110)
This is from 1992. Twelve years later — reality.
Alcohol "Makes Fruit Healthier"
That's the kind of story I'm looking for ("Alcohol 'Makes Fruit Healthier,'" BBC, 20 April 2007). It's kind of nice out right now in D.C. I've already cracked the first bottle of sours mix (I know, I know, I should make my own) and had a few drinks out back, but my doctor is telling me that I should switch to daiquiris this summer. And for my protein I will be having a hefeweizen. Now if only they could pack a shot of scotch in a pill. I need something I can take on the QT at the office. You know, like flax seed oil or ginkgo biloba, for mental performance reasons.
Pigoons
ABC reports that those animal-human hybrids that George Bush warned about are underway ("Scientists Make Part-Human Sheep," 26 March 2007). The article quotes one "international lecturer on biological trends" (read: no other credential available) as warning of the danger of animal-human virus crossover. It falls to Margaret Atwood to warn of the danger posed by pigoons.
It occurs to me to wonder if the pigoons were something of an homage to Animal Farm? I recall the scene in Oryx and Crake where the pigoon tried to open the door being about as terrifying as the scene from Animal Farm where Napoleon first stands up on two legs.
The End of an Era
John Backus, the man who lead the team that developed FORTRAN died on Saturday. It seems an occasion to dig up a passage from my favorite hacker manifesto, "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL":
The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of PASCAL, gave a talk once at which he was asked "How do you pronounce your name?". He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM370 FORTRAN-G and H compilers. Real programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done -- they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a FORTRAN-IV compiler, and a beer.
* Real Programmers do List Processing in FORTRAN.
* Real Programmers do String Manipulation in FORTRAN.
* Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in FORTRAN.
* Real Programmers do Artificial Intelligence programs in FORTRAN.
The New York Times obituary (Lohr, Steve, "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies," 20 March 2007) contains a vignette that is the essence of what it is to be a hacker:
In 1953, frustrated by his experience of "hand-to-hand combat with the machine," Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming. He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a research project with that goal. "I figured there had to be a better way," he said.
Hand-to-hand combat with the machine leading to the conclusion that there must be a better way. There is no more elemental experience in the life of a hacker.
I will confess: I have never used FORTRAN in my life. Worse still, I learned programming the way that many in my generation (AP computer science students) were taught: by learning Pascal.
Google's Worst Nightmare?
The cover story on the latest issue of Fast Company is that Jimbo Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, has decided that he wants to get into searching. The cover splash reads "Google's Worst Nightmare."
This is probably Fast Company hyperbole. So far as I can tell things look a little fly-by-night over at Wikipedia. I imagine that Google's worst nightmare would be a Microsoft that realized that code-bloat doesn't belong everywhere.
On the other hand, there may be something to this. For maybe a year now I have been noticing that whenever I search Google for information on a topic, it is fairly common that the Wikipedia entry on the subject is the first result, or if not the first, in the top five. I choose and find what I am looking for at the Wikipedia link with such consistency that if I don't find the Wikipedia page within the first few results, I often rerun the search with the word "wiki" appended to the list of search terms.
If you were Wikipedia wouldn't you want to cut out the middle man too?
I'm not too enthusiastic about cutting out the middle man because I have also found that most websites have done such a poor job indexing their own content that it is better to search their sight using Google than the local search. The most egregious offender here is the New York Times. I often can't find an article on their site that I saw earlier that same day and even when I can remember the title.
Update: Holly shit! Stop the press! I just went to check out Windows Live, imaging that I would type in the URL, hit Enter, and wait for the page to load like it was reading off a floppydisk, and once loaded face a page more busy than a pachinko machine but instead it was instantaneous and as simple as ... as simple as ... well, Google.
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