Reviewers of The Eye of the World often cited Jordan as being a modern Tolkien. Jordan was hailed as having created a complex and realistic world that, for once, also contained strong women characters.

I am not as impressed. The first volume begins in a small village and follows several characters as they make their way to the Big City while they battle evil in a world suffused with magic. The women are certainly strong-willed and powerful, which is a great improvement over Tolkien, but the central character is a dim-witted, untutored, uncultured, unsophisticated young male. The magic is haphazard and often illogical; two of the characters are so powerful that the author never generates any doubt in the reader’s mind that they will prevail.

The Eye of the World suffers when contrasted with George R. R. Martin’s 1996 book A Game of Thrones, the first volume of his A Song of Ice and Fire series (also incomplete). Martin’s book contains richly drawn characters and a complex story that dwarf Jordan’s effort. I am currently reading the second volume of Martin’s series, but I don’t plan to read any more volumes of The Wheel of Time.

I experimented, and I discovered that if you really, really want to read the NY Post on your iPad, turn JavaScript off in the Safari settings. Commenters to Winer’s post also suggesting using an alternative browser on the iPad.

Winer writes:

The solution is completely obvious. Apple could stop sending back information to the servers that identify me as an iPad user. Or give me a way to edit that information.

So how does the Post know when you’re using an iPad? I assume the Post’s web server is using JavaScript to examine the user agent string communicated by the iPad on each connection. Winer’s proposal is that Apple change the user agent string so that it matches another browser’s.

The user agent reported by Safari on the iPad (wrapping the line so it fits) is

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J3 Safari/6533.18.5

Apple could change the user agent string to omit mentioning the iPad or allow a user to set an alternative user agent. For example, this is the user agent reported by Safari from my MacBook Pro:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7; en-us)
AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1

I tested the Cyberspace web browser on the iPad, and it is (so far) immune to the Post’s redirection. Its user agent is almost identical to the iPad’s but apparently different enough that it isn’t detected.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Mobile/8J3

Daniel concludes:

Formulaic passwords are never a good idea, yet 15% of all passcode sets were represented by only 10 different passcodes (out of a possible 10,000). The implication? A thief (or just a prankster) could safely try 10 different passcodes on your iPhone without initiating the data wipe. With a 15% success rate, about 1 in 7 iPhones would easily unlock–even more if the intruder knows the users’ years of birth, relationship status, etc.

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. Geniuses practice harder than most.

1. I’ll just retype the docs into this email for you.

and gets even better through sixteen more responses.

Anyone who has served as a software maintainer will appreciate this post.

The biggest problems? There is a looming shortage of qualified data scientists. In addition, managers need to become more data-literate as data-driven business decisions become more important. Third, privacy and security issues may limit the amount of available data. Finally, legacy data is often stored in formats that are not easily converted.

There is no such thing as too much desktop, as far as I’m concerned. In my experience, all software developers can increase their productivity with a second (and even a third) monitor. Data analysts and scientists can also increase their productivity with a second monitor.

At work, I leave my 1920 x 1200 laptop screen open to serve as a second monitor, and for work at home I bought a second 1680 x 1050 monitor a few years ago. What windows do I place on my main monitor? My IDE’s window and the web page I’m currently working on. What windows do I place on my secondary monitor? My email program, my journal document where I track what I’m working on, and my primary Cygwin console window from which I launch additional mintty windows. I often also need to make space for a spreadsheet window and a bioinformatics tool window. If I had a third monitor, I know where those extra windows would end up!

On my second post, I speculated that the volume of comment spam was beginning to decrease. So far, that is true. In March, Akismet filtered 700 spam comments; in April, 2045; but so far in May, only 325 (which rate, when extrapolated, predicts 671 by the end of the month). Lately most of my comment spam is arriving from Polish sites (.pl top level domain), and no one is saving much time anymore.

I hope this means that the spammers are growing discouraged and will leave my blog unmolested in the future.

• Cascadian Farm Organic
• Photo of the Cascade Mountains
• Founded in Skagit Valley, WA
• USDA Organic
• Distributed by Small Planet Foods, Inc., Sedro-Woolly, WA 98284 USA

and this text on the back:

When we founded Cascadian Farm in 1972, we knew that good food started with caring for our land. Today, you can still be sure our delicious organic foods are good for you, your family, and the world we share. Stop by and visit the home farm in Rockport, Washington!

But there’s one more label: Product of China.

I find the packaging misleading. These soybeans weren’t grown on “our land” in Skagit Valley, Washington. They were shipped from China, halfway around the world. The Cascadian Farm website extolls us to live greener, “helping to protect the planet for many generations to come.” Shipping food from China is not green.

It is doubtful how organic any food can be that comes from China, a country where adulteration of food seems to be the norm. For example, cheap pine nuts exported from China have been reported to leave a bitter, metallic aftertaste that lasts for up to two weeks. In 2007, pets in the United States died or became seriously ill after being fed pet food from China that had been adulterated with melamine or cyanuric acid by Chinese food manufacturers. In 2008, six babies died and hundreds of thousands of children in China were sickened by melamine-tainted milk.  The adulteration of milk with melamine continues to this day, leading to additional arrests in China last year and early this year.

Our ability to conduct meaningful inspections of “organic” food from China is doubtful. Less than a year ago, as reported by the New York Times and elsewhere, the USDA stopped using a private inspector of food from China because of a conflict of interest. In February of this year, the USDA announced “the circulation of a fraudulent National Organic Program (NOP) organic certificate produced by an uncertified operation” from China.

The lesson for me is to read food packages more carefully. In general, I simply do not buy food produced in China.

More seriously, however, chromatic in an earlier post rages against Linux vendors who are still including Perl 5.8.8 as the system Perl installation. This holds back the development of CPAN modules, which must maintain backwards compatibility with Perl 5.8.8 and thus cannot take advantage of new functionality that has appeared in Perl 5.10, 5.12, and now 5.14.

Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is almost as bad; it comes with Perl 5.10.0, which was released in December, 2007. That means OS X is delivered with a Perl version that is now more than three years old.

[Updated 15-May-2011]

The release prompted a discussion on Slashdot, which, as always, brought out the trolls who claim that no one uses Perl anymore.

This new site has already attracted many interesting questions and answers. The best question so far is: What follows in the sequence unary, binary, ternary?

I have one piece of advice (based on a recent experience while reading résumés) for Perl developers who are looking for a new job: Ask someone to read your résumé to make sure you have spelled Pearl Perl correctly. (Damn you, autocorrect!)

One link Smith provides is to a post from last fall by Drew Conway, who created a Data Science Venn Diagram that defines, for Conway, where data science falls in the intersection of “hackers, statisticians, [and] subject matter experts.”

When I grow up, I want to be a data scientist.

Nicholas Whyte recently posted that an eight-hour version of the Foundation Trilogy, produced by the BBC in 1973, is available at the Internet Archive Community Audio website. I immediately downloaded the eight one-hour MP3 files and began listening to them. This BBC version is performed as a radio play with little or no connecting narration. If you are not completely familiar with the books, this version can be a little confusing. But since I have read this science fiction classic possibly thirty times, I’ve had no problem following the story.

I once owned a six-cassette set of abridged readings of the Foundation Trilogy; I probably listened to it more than twenty times, to the point that I can recite long stretches of the book from memory. This edition was distinctive because it was Isaac Asimov himself who read Foundation on the first two cassettes. Asimov wasn’t an especially good reader compared to David Dukes, who read the second and third novels in this edition. But it was from Asimov’s reading that I learned that Hari Seldon’s first name is pronounced Harry and Gaal Dornick’s first name is pronounced Gale.

I searched for information about the cassette edition and found it on Edward Seiler’s Isaac Asimov Home Page, a comprehensive listing of everything Asimov produced in his lifetime. Seiler’s Asimov on Other Media page lists audio recordings, by Asimov and others, of Asimov’s works, and it was there that I found the following information:

• Foundation (abridged), read by Isaac Asimov. Bantam Audio, New York, 1988, 2 cassettes, 180 min. ISBN 0-553-45114-6.
• Foundation and Empire (abridged), read by David Dukes. Bantam Audio, New York, 1991, 2 cassettes, 180 min. ISBN 0-553-45261-4.
• Second Foundation (abridged), read by David Dukes.Bantam Audio, New York, 1991, 2 cassettes, 180 min. ISBN 0-553-47015-9.

If you’re interested, you can find copies of these editions from used book sellers on the Internet.

audible.com has a very good set of unabridged readings of the Foundation Trilogy by Scott Brick: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, all three of which I have listened to twice.

I visited with the Zipcar people, who were kind enough to give me a Zipcar T-shirt when they learned that Johanna and I have been members for nearly ten years.

I visited at the MassBike table (I am a member), and I bought a new North Shore and Cape Cod map.

I looked carefully at the elegant and functional messenger bags created by Vaya Bags. (I’m not quite ready to decide if I want to switch from a knapsack to a messenger bag.)

And best of all, I talked to the people at the Roll It Forward table and learned that they are taking donations of used bicycles this weekend. I cleaned up my old Raleigh Marathon 12-speed, pumped up the tires, tested the brakes, and took it in. They were pleased to get it and said it looked like it was in great condition. And I was pleased to get rid of it (so I can think about buying another bicycle).

Unfortunately, attendance was low, but I hope word gets around and the New England Bicycle Expo attracts more attention next year.

There are questions that the video does not address, and these are explored by Grrlscientist in her recent post, “What Earth might look like with Saturn’s rings.” Much of Grrlscientist’s information comes from a November, 2009, Scientific American post by John Matson, “What would rings around Earth look like?”

First, how deep a shadow would the rings cast on the surface of our planet, and could the consequent dimming of sunlight affect the Earth’s climate? Second, would the brightness of the rings have hindered the development of astronomy by obscuring regions of the sky and washing out the dimmer stars and perhaps even the Milky Way? Third, is it possible that the Earth once had a ring system?

Among my favorites are a man reading a newpaper in a Manhattan park and the reflection of a passing taxi in a bar window.

(Via Shawn Blanc.)

The latest evidence produced by Molina et al. is that rice was domesticated once sometime between 8,200 and 13,500 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China.

Reference: Molina et al. 2011. Molecular evidence for a single evolutionary origin of domesticated rice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA:10.1073/pnas.1104686108.

More Than Human, which was published in 1953, is a novel in three somewhat disconnect parts. The first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, begins with the story of a man, Lone, who has little intelligence but has telepathic power. Lone gradually connects with four others, Janie, Bonnie, Beanie, and Baby, each of whom is incomplete as a human being but each of whom possesses an unusual, inhuman power (Janie, telekenesis; Bonnie and Beanie (twins), teleportation; and Baby, superhuman intelligence). These five persons form a gestalt (a whole greater than its parts), which shows signs of becoming, as a group, more than human in its capabilities.

The second part, “Baby Is Three,” is narrated by Harlan Ellison. It is told in the first person by Gerry, who has replaced Lone as a member of the gestalt. Gerry is the new leader of the gestalt, but he lacks morality.

The third and final part, “Morality,” is narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. It tells how the gestalt acquires its sixth and final member, Hip, who serves as its conscience and provides morality to the gestalt’s actions.

The only element of science fiction in the novel is the invention of an anti-gravity machine by the gestalt, and this is what connects the first part of the story to the third part in a droll way.

On the whole, this is an unusual and especially interesting novel, and I recommend the audiobook highly. I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager, but I somehow missed Theodore Sturgeon in favor of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Now I view Sturgeon as the best writer of this group of four.

Rating: ★★★★★

I wonder if long distance running has the same effects.

The premise of Drood is that it represents a memoir of Wilkie Collins that is withheld from publication until 125 years after Collins’s death.  (Since Collins died in 1889, the publication date for this memoir would be 2014, still in our future.) Although Collins was twelve years younger than Dickens, the two authors were close friends who collaborated on many projects. Collins is best known today for two novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the latter frequently cited as the first detective novel written in English and Collins’s masterpiece.

Drood is an impressive feat of scholarship on Simmons’s part. Clearly he did a great deal of research (attested by two and a half pages of notes and references in the acknowledgments), and this shows in the amount of detail he provides concerning the lives of both Collins and Dickens. The book begins with a recapitulation of the Staplehurst accident, a train wreck that killed many people but spared Charles Dickens, his secret mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother, all of whom were riding in a first class carriage. After helping Ellen and Mrs. Ternan escape the wreckage and assisting with caring for other injured passengers, Dickens returned to the train carriage to retrieve the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend (my favorite of Dickens’s novels).

It is while aiding other injured passengers that Dickens encounters Drood, a vampire-like, cadaverous figure with a head like a naked skull, dark vertical slits in place of a nose, and widely spaced, pointed teeth. It is Dickens’s impression that Drood’s aid to the injured and dying is to hasten their deaths, but Drood soon disappears from the scene. The plot of the book is driven by the search for Drood in the darkest neighborhoods of London by Dickens, Collins, and London police and private detectives.

The book is rewarding, but the reader must be patient because the book is long (771 pages). The first chapter is splendidly thrilling, but things quickly slow down thereafter as the fictional Wilkie Collins tells more than many readers really want to know about his and Dickens’s lives, collaborations, and secrets. Collins, who is addicted to laudanum (a tincture of opium), relates a tale that becomes increasing fantastical and doubtful, and the reader begins to wonder what is true and what is the result of the hallucinations of an opium addict.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Mark Pilgrim, who works for Google, responded unsympathetically in a post titled “The ‘Book’ Is Dead,” contending that Google does not encourage piracy merely by providing links to pirated material, although he ends with

The “book” is dead. Long live “content.” And God help us all if world-class writers like David can’t make a living from it.

There are many, many interesting comments to both posts; some are the usual outrageous trolls, but others are thought-provoking and worth reading. Dan Liu makes the best comment: Books contain and communicate ideas that cannot be found with a quick search of the Internet.

I buy a lot of technical books (currently I’m on a binge buying books about Python). I read the books cover to cover and add notes and annotation in red ink so my notes are easy to find. During this process, I often make additions to the index.

I also have a subscription to Safari Books Online ($23 per month), and this has more than paid for itself many times over. Sometimes I want to read only a chapter or two of a book, in which case it isn’t worth buying the entire book. In other cases, I decide that a book is not useful, in which case I save money by not buying a book I won’t use.

I thought that I would quit buying books, since my Safari Books Online subscription allows me to download and print five chapters each month for no extra charge (the terms are that I am not allowed to distribute the PDFs to other people). But the reality is that when I find a really good book, I buy the printed copy, mark it up, and put it on the shelf next to where I work. It’s easier to reach over for a real book to get a quick answer.

This is a list of online resources for Perl, mainly for my reference.

Perl

Perl Programming Language: A comprehensive site with links to everything in the Perl world.

Perl Programming Documentation: The complete documentation for Perl.

Modern Perl

Enlightened Perl Organization: “Enlightened Perl is a membership organization which is built around a movement within the Perl community. Its goals are complementary to the Perl Foundation. Specifically, we support certain Perl development efforts that ensure perl’s future as an enterprise-grade development platform.”

Modern Perl Books: A modern Perl blog, by chromatic.

Catalyst: The Perl MVC Framework.

Moose: A postmodern object system for Perl.

CPAN

CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network: The place to go when you need a Perl module.

CPAN Testers Reports: “Find CPAN testers reports for all the modules on CPAN.”

CPAN Testers Wiki: “This wiki is the online reference for everything related to CPAN Testing. HowTos, Tutorials, FAQs and Notes are all here to help both beginners and experienced CPAN testers. If there is any aspect of CPAN Testing missing from this site you are encourage to update it.”

The Voyagers detect the direction of particle flow using low energy charged particle detectors combined with the known orientation of the spacecraft. Voyager 1 is now in a region of space where the velocity of the solar wind is measured at zero. Recently, NASA has begun rolling the spacecraft into different orientations to determine the prevalent velocity of charged particles, and the data are being analyzed now. Scientists expect that within a few years Voyager 1, the most distant of the two, will enter interstellar space.

Voyager 2 tweets regularly at http://twitter.com/#!/Voyager2. Voyager 1 doesn’t seem to have an official account on Twitter.