The Richter Scale^®

USA Today ran an article in it’s Life section today entitled The Caribbean: Leaving is taxing, which showed the departure taxes for various Caribbean islands.

The island I live on, Bonaire, is often criticized for its high departure tax of $20, but compared to Aruba ($37), Turks and Caicos ($30), St. Maarten ($30), Jamaica (soon to be $30 or 35), and others, Bonaire’s cheap.

What makes Bonaire seem expensive is that due to historical reasons, airport tax is sold independent of airline tickets, whereas most other destinations include (hide?) the airport departure tax in the ticket price you pay the airline.

I just posted a copy of my most recent TechWatch article, entitled Battling For The Sacred Living Room over on my articles site.

The article discusses the attempt by the big three game console makers - Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - to justify having next generation consoles be the center piece of the living room, and why they still have a long way to go to make that happen, including still not understanding how to market to the people that really run the home, namely the wives, mothers, and other women co-residing with game-addled males.

I’ve been catching up on my magazine and journal reading and recently finished the February 2005 issue of MIT’s Technology Review, which has a fascinating article by Sam Williams entitled “Unnatural Selection”.

The article explores using machines programmed with genetic algorithms to create new technology. An example given is NASA having a computer design an antennae for a trio of miniature satellites which feature both wide beam and wide bandwidth. The resulting antennae looks like something of a corkscrew, but is better than anything designed purely by humans (at least so the article implies).

What I found particularly interesting however was in the closing paragraphs, where Stanford University’s John Koza, professor of biomedical informatics, has developed a genetic program to design, among other things, electronic circuits. The paragraphs in particular which drew my interest are:

By the time Koza’s group tested the fourth or fifth versions of their program, however, something even more surprising began to happen: the program kicked out circuit designs unpublished anywhere in the patent literature. Two of these designs—a pair of controller circuits that regu­late feedback—were so original that Koza and his colleagues have taken out patents on them.

As proud as he is of his software, Koza isn’t about to assign responsibility for the new designs to the program itself. The patents credit Keane, Koza, and Streeter, in that order. But there are a few new pseudophilosophical conundrums lurking here: If something is invented with no human near, is it really an invention? Who is the inventor? And if the invention actually works, does it matter if we don’t understand how?

I find this a rather troubling commentary. Section 102(f) of U.S.C. 35, the law governing patents, clearly states:

35 U.S.C. 102 Conditions for patentability; novelty and loss of right to patent.
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless —…
(f) he did not himself invent the subject matter sought to be patented, or...

If it was a machine which invented the new circuit design, then arguably, no person did. Sure, a person programmed the machine at some point, but genetic programming includes by definition evolution of the program. So, arguably Keane, Koza, and Streeter should not be able to file for a patent on something they themselves did not invent. Or should they? In the plant world people are claiming they invented (discovered?) naturally occurring compounds. Perhaps the belief is that as artificial intelligences have no status under U.S.C. 35, then it’s perfectly fine for a human to take credit for discovering the results a machine has produced.

I would love the insight of some others in the patent field on this subject.

If you’re like me - married, with two pre-teen kids whose hands never seem to be clean enough, and whose abilities to put things away without being asked are utterly lacking - you have undoubtedly seen your CDs or DVDs get damaged or even lost.

Further, if you travel a lot, while it’s nice that most notebook computers now have DVD drives, they suck a noticable amount of extra power if you want to play a movie while in flight and power jacks aren’t available.

For CDs, you can simply back them up by ripping them to your computer - my whole collection of hundreds of CDs is stored digitally on my system at home, and the original CDs are put in my storage room.

With DVDs no such simple option exists, or should I say, existed. That’s because the movie industry decided to encrypt DVDs, and then using its political clout, got the U.S. Congress to pass a bill (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - the DMCA) which made it illegal to circumvent encryption. By doing that they technically robbed consumers of the right to make back-ups.

It didn’t take long for ingenious teenagers to figure out the encryption and break it, for the stated purpose of being able to play DVDs on Linux systems. While the simple code needed to break the CSS decryption spread over the Internet like wildfire, the movie industry and U.S. government worked hard to try and curtial this dissemination of information (and failed, in my opinion).

There are now dozens of programs which let one rip a DVD to one’s hard disk (one of the better ones, as I understand it is DVD Decrypter, but the problem is that the resulting files run 4.5-9GB on average, and even with today’s latest 500GB drives, it makes ripping a whole DVD collection (we have over 300 DVDs in ours here at home) unfeasible.

Enter a program called RatDVD, which will take a non-encrypted DVD image and produce a 1.3GB (on average) .ratDVD file which is the entire DVD movie with all menus and controls. The output quality is surprisingly good, with .ratDVD files playing back in Windows Media Player 10 on Windows-based machine.

It takes a couple of hours to convert a 4.7GB DVD to a .ratDVD file on a moderatly fast PC.

The only drawback I have found is that there appears to be no way to fast forward or rewind a movie.

One added bonus - you can take a RatDVD file and expand it to burn back onto a DVD should you want to have a physical back-up instead of one on your hard disk.

In any event, for a free piece of software it’s pretty good, and it meets a so-far unfulfilled need, namely making back-ups of DVDs in a reasonable amount of space. No doubt the movie industry will not be happy with RatDVD, but since it actually does not circumvent encryption, it’s unlikely they will have much ability to stop RatDVD from proliferating. Plus it can be used for archiving home-made DVDs.

I’ve already started using RatDVD to archive DVDs I have made from my own home videos and slide shows I have made of group vacations for friends. And yes, I am making back-ups of some of the movies I plan to watch during my next set of travels so I don’t have to waste power and face potential damage to my original DVDs in transit.

I give RatDVD an 8.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Alan Nelson is the person who helped me make sense of blogging during a flight from Bonaire to San Juan, Puerto Rico a few months ago, and thus inspired me to start this blog (thank you Alan!).

Recently, Alan launched the latest of his many blogs - Seat 1A. (As an anecdote, I should mention that when I met Alan, he sat in Seat 1A of our ATR-72 to San Juan, while I sat in 1B - row 1 being the only row with leg room on these small planes.)

In his latest blog entry, Alan succinctly covers the issue of pruning, as suggested by the author of the most excellent book Getting Things Done (a must-read for anyone who has problems getting through his or her to-do list on a regular basis, and in a timely fashion).

Basically, as I understand it, pruning involves taking what one has written and then removing words without destroying the essence of what one needs to convey.

This is something I have tried to work on over the years as I have gotten involved in patent litigation matters - brevity for things like claim constructions is a highly prized skill, and one that causes great agony as the meaning of each word - and every nuance thereof, must be carefully analyzed before being permanently committed to paper. That’s because the other side will then attempt to rip your work apart, and you must be able to defend what you commit to - every nuance of it.

However, as a matter of practice, I pretty much suck at “pruning”. I find it far easier to write 800 words to say something than to use 400 words to say the same thing. The most difficult writing assignment I ever had was for PC Magazine about 15 years ago, when I was asked to describe in detail this very cool (at the time) technology from a company called Edsun Labs, in a 400 word article. That article took me about five times as long to complete than doing the same thing in double the number of words would have taken. And while my editor liked the result, I was not happy with it because I felt it left too much unsaid.

If you’ve seen Milos Forman’s movie Amadeus starring Tom Hulce, you may recall a scene where Mozart presents his latest composition to the King, who after a moment’s contemplation asks the court composer for comment. The response is “too many notes”, and the King, apparently not wanting to appear ignorant, agrees, although the comment is pretty nonsensical. Mozart then asks “Which notes should I take out, your highness?”.

Any reader of my blog might also note that brevity (at least in writing) is not my strong suit. But for that I make no apology. It’s the way I have learned to enjoy writing (this coming from a person who dodged writing-dependent courses in high school and college as if they were poison), and will likely continue to do so in the future.

And thus I may suffer from “too many notes”, but at least I will have said what I wanted to say, with just the right number of words for me.

I have watched with some amusement as gasoline prices increase in the U.S. to new highs, then back off before rising again.

I’m not amused because I like seeing people suffer, but more that those complaining about high prices are apparently unaware that U.S. gas prices are still among the lowest in the western world.

Prices in Europe, for example, are typically at least 2x the prices in the U.S.

But, for a more accurate comparison, let’s take a look at gasoline prices here on Bonaire - we’re only 50 miles from Venezuela - the biggest oil producer in the region, but it might as well be a thousand miles for all the good it does us price-wise.

Gasoline is sold by the liter here. One U.S. gallon (liquid) is 3.7854 liters according to an online conversion I found.

A liter of Super costs 1.933 NAF, while a liter of Regular is 1.898 NAF. A NAF is a Netherlands Antillean Florin, also referred to as a Guilder. There are 1.78 of these to a U.S. dollar.

So, using all those numbers we end up with a cost of US$4.04 for a gallon of Regular gasoline and $4.11 for a gallon of Super. The average per capita income on Bonaire is probably around US$800/month after taxes, but on the flip side, it’s a small island, so you can’t drive too far without falling into the Caribbean Sea. However, with all the driving to/from school, work, and soccer momming my wife does, she has to fill the tank on her Toyota Corolla every 5-7 days.

Here’s the kicker - in neighboring Curacao, where we get all of our fuel from, the prices (which are all government regulated mind you) are 0.30 NAF lower per liter (based on personal observation about 16 days ago). This could lead into a huge discussion about how Curacao is always shafting its small sister island Bonaire, and that being one of the many reasons a referendum in Bonaire showed most want to separate from the Netherlands Antilles and Curacao and join more closely with Holland, but I’ll leave that for another day.

So, if your gas prices are under less than $3.00 per gallon, be happy - you’re still paying a lot less than the residents of Bonaire. Of course, higher gas prices are one of the many things we suffer with in exchange for the privilege of living on a small beautiful island in the Caribbean… Poor Internet service is another, but I’ll leave that for future discussion as well…

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Update - June 27, 2005: A reader pointed out that I said the per capita income of the average Bonairean worker was $800/year. That was wrong - it’s about $800/month! It’s been corrected above.

My wife’s recently completed paintings both reminded me that I was long overdue on having expanded the collection of art I have produced and sell at the Cinnamon Art Gallery on Bonaire, and at the same time inspired me to create some new works.

So, over the last week I have let my creative juices flow, and created three special images to add to my portfolio, and I plan to complete several more before I go on vacation in July.

The images below start as photographs, and then I bring them into one or more computer programs to “repaint” them individually. For the first image, if you look at the water, it should be apparent it is not a photograph. For the other two, reducing them down to such small images reduces their “paintedness”, so I have included blow ups of the detail in each of them to show what they would look like if you could see them in person at the Gallery:

Descriptions of the above works, including short stories about these works, can be found at my art site.

I’ve just posted two of my articles from the May 23, 2005 issue of Jon Peddie’s TechWatch (where I play the role of Contributing Editor and Senior Analyst) over on my Richter Scale Article Site:

- Next Generation Console Support Strong - Provides an overview of which games publishers were willing to publicly commit to providing for the next generation video game consoles from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

- And Then There Were Ten... - An analysis of why the next generation game consoles and game pubishers might have problems meeting sales targets because of competition from older generation consoles as well as other home entertainment hardware and media.

As a point of reference, I only publish my articles from TechWatch online only after a newer edition of TechWatch has been released - thus, as today the June 6th issue was released to TechWatch subscribers, I’ve posted my articles from the May 23rd issue.

Well, my talented wife, Linda Richter, has just finished yet another artistic masterpiece - an oil painting entitled Octopus Blooming:

Here’s what she has to say about it:

Sinuous and amorphous the octopus slips over the ocean bottom. Sometimes smooth and pale almost transparent, it can suddenly switch to roughly textured, deep red color and opaque.

This one curls in a shape like the blossoming of a flower – the trumpet of an underwater lily.

The original is 20 inches wide by 36 inches tall, oil on canvas, and features a smokey bronze metal canvas floater frame.

I enjoy playing video games as much, if not more as my kids. I also review dozens if not hundreds of titles a year. So, I tend to be the one in my family to determine (with occasional spousal collaboration) which games are okay for my kids to play and which are not.

My son is 8, and my daughter will be 10 in a couple of weeks, and both have excellent hand/eye coordination and have the potential to become excellent game players, although my daughter gets bored more easily with games where the plot or story isn’t obvious or well intertwined with the game play.

While in some cases I use the ESRB rating on games to determine suitability, most often I first play the games I let my kids play, or at least read some reviews on the games to see if they would be suitable for my kids to play.

The criteria I use are ones that some politicians might find objectionable. There are “M” (Mature) rated games, like Halo and Halo 2, that I let my kids play (in limited amounts), just as there are “E” games I won’t (mostly because they are inane, such as Monster Rancher or Harvest Moon). Some violence is okay when it’s not against current day humans or against definable “good guys”, but foul language is not, nor is excessive carnage (e.g. Mortal Kombat, Tekken) or sexual themes (e.g. Leisure Suit Larry).

You may disagree with my approach, but at least I am involved in what my kids play at home. But my wife and I have recently learned that our level of involvement is quite unusual compared to that of other parents.

Case in point. Our son and one of his friends were discussing a game they played at yet another friend’s house a few days ago, and as they were getting into the details, I was getting this uncomfortable feeling about the game they were talking about. I started asking some more probing questions, like “do you play a bad guy?”, “do you shoot at police officers?”, “do you steal things like cars from other people?”, “do the characters swear a lot at each other?” - sadly each of my questions was answered with a “yes”. Turns out they had been playing some variant of Grand Theft Auto - a game that is definitely well against all the rules in our household for them. Further, it turns out that the child which owns this game, got it as a present from an aunt in France, and said child’s father just assumed it was “just a game”.

We ended up discussing this with the mother of child number 2, who happened to have seen her son playing the game at home when he borrowed it from child number 3, and she had similar misgivings, and had already called the father of child number 3 about the content and subject matter, but so far to no avail. Today is my turn to talk with him.

Laws in various U.S. states are being proposed to ban game sales of certain types of games to minors - I oppose these laws. Parents should take responsibility for what their kids watch and play instead of relying on politicians to raise their children for them. However, as I’ve learned, one must be vigilant not only with what’s played in one’s own home but also at the home of other children whose parents are either less involved, or simply too naive or ignorant to realize that dubbing something a “video game” does not mean it’s harmless and safe for children of any age to play without possible causing some real warped value system from coming into being, especially among younger children who may be unable to separate game play from current day real life.