DanKohn.com

Clever NYT article on the nightmare of modern home theater systems:

N artificial intelligence, they have the Turing Test: Can a computer impersonate a human well enough to fool a researcher? In magic, they have the Book Test: Can a magician mind-read well enough to divine a word chosen at random? And in the home-theater field, they have the Baby Sitter Test: Is your system simple enough that a guest can turn on the TV unaided?

Unfortunately, only my best friend and I know how to operate my home theater system, but I haven’t been willing to invest the time to record all the macros necessary to make it user friendly (no babysitters come over to encourage me).

My friends are expecting to deliver their son this week. If, as Bill Kristof suggests, cows will “someday be made to produce torrents of genuine human breast milk from their udders” by splicing in human DNA, then fathers will no longer have an excuse (such as the inconvenience of breast pumps) not to get up in the middle of the night for feedings.

NYT on 3-D TV:

“The only people who want 3-D television all the time are the people trying to sell it,” he said. “3-D television is like caviar. You buy a little. But if you had to live on the stuff all the time, it would be awful.”

As head of Pixonics, I hope people don’t feel this way about HD.

I finally have my “extreme wireless” home music setup working. In my bedroom, I have a Bang & Olufsen Beosound 9000. This is great for playing 6 CDs, but all of my music is now MP3s. So, I got the Rio Receiver, which pulls MP3s off of any Windows machine on the LAN and outputs them to a stereo system or directly to speakers. However, I have no Ethernet jack in my bedroom, so I hooked the Rio up to this wired to wireless Ethernet converter from Orinoco.

My laptop, a Toshiba Tecra 9000, also includes integrated Wi-Fi (i.e., 802.11b wireless Ethernet). So, the music is being served wirelessly from the laptop in MP3 format, sent through the bedroom wall to the Linksys wireless router in the livingroom, and then sent back through the same wall to the wireless card in the converter. From there it goes by Ethernet to the Rio Receiver, is converted to analog signals and sent via RCA stereo cables to the Beosound and its speakers.

Anyway, this was still not quite meeting my needs because it’s hard to read the screen of the Receiver from my bed on the other side of the room. Besides, when I’m using my computer, who wants to locate the remote to change the song or the volume? And so, I was lucky enough to locate these anonymous directions for patching the Rio Receiver (it runs Linux and pulls MP3s over the network using HTTP) so that it is controllable from a web browser. Specifically, the Rio Receiver’s IP address now hosts a web server, including a java applet, that shows an image of the Rio’s control panel. Thus, I now have complete control of my music from a web browser, and I can also use the remote if (amazingly) I’m reading a book instead of using the computer.

Flying Concorde was one of those once-in-a-lifetime thrills (actually, I took it round-trip). The windows get warm to the touch from friction and you reach high enough (55,000 feet) to see the curvature of the Earth. Unfortunately, I expect before too long that another Concorde will blow up and the fleet will be grounded for good, just as will happen with the US Space Shuttles. You can never plan for every contingency, and there is not enough quantity in either fleet to shake out serious bugs. Almost no other aspect of modern life could survive a zero tolerance threshold for failure.

In any event, I do not see myself flying on the new Japanese supersonic jet anytime soon.

Hilbert’s paradox of the (aptly named) Grand Hotel: If an infinite number of rooms are filled, and an infinite number of coaches arrive, each with an infinite number of passengers, are there rooms for them?

Want to cure AIDS? Start with the lowly condom: “Granted, the condom is not glamorous or scientifically sophisticated. It doesn’t use the latest high-tech wrinkles or cost much. It is not the product of endless nights in a lonely lab. No, it is completely devoid of scientific drama. Still, it is the only approach that has been shown to slow the spread of sexually transmitted AIDS.”

ZDNet reports on a $40 K futuristic 3D display from startup Actuality Systems (good name). Star Wars style holograms are still a long way off.

A small website for people with very good eyes. Don’t miss pong (choose flash).

Fortune magazine has a huge article on my former boss, Craig McCaw, and the companies I used to work with, XO, Nextel, Teledesic, and ICO.