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The iPad: It’s for education

iPad

iPad. Source: Apple

First, some impressions on the iPad:

  • Yes, it’s basically an iPhone on steroids. Which, in fact, is great move.
  • Starting price of $499 for the WiFi model is a lot more aggressive than I’d have imagined. Bully for Apple.
  • According to Ars Technica, it supports Bluetooth keyboards. Hell to the yes!
  • Using ePub format for the book reader is brilliant. I really, really hope there’ll be a way to sync ePub books not bought through the iBookStore (or whatever the official name is).
  • Not pre-loading the iWorks apps feels a bit stingy and effectively tacks on $30 to the purchase price. Although I have a feeling Google Docs will work just splendidly on the iPad. Will probably try that first.
  • A little bit of a bummer to not have a video out port. An iPad would make a nice presentation machine. But that’s enough of an edge case I can see why Apple left it out.
  • Will it be able to print?
  • No camera. Which is good. You’d look like an idiot trying to take pictures with this thing.
  • Wow, calling your own device “magical and revolutionary” takes some brass marketing balls.

All that being said, I think I know why Apple priced the device as aggressively as they did. No, it’s not because Uncle Steve wants to give you a big hug. Think education. Both for K-12 and universities, the iPad is the Real Deal.

At a cost of $499 (and probably a touch less after an educational discount), it’s cheap enough that schools can work up one-to-one programs and scrap their—usually aging and decrepit—computer labs. The price is just little enough higher than crappy netbooks while providing top-shelf quality that it would take a seriously inept school administrator to not see the worth. (Not that there aren’t plenty of seriously inept school administrators out there, mind you.)

And for school IT departments the win is massive—no more fleets of beat-up iBooks to manage. Oh, the happiness.

As a matter of fact, my daughter turns eight in May, and if the thing is out by then, I’m pretty sure I know what she’s getting for her birthday.

Did I mention that I’m sometimes very jealous of my daughter for growing up in a time when this kind of technology is available?

Posted in Big Nerd. Tagged with , , , .

By Niclas Lindh
January 27, 2010

4 comments

Review: The City & The City

The City & The City CoverChina Miéville is mostly known for steampunk novels like The Scar (my review) and Perdido Street Station (my review). The City & The City sees him branching into what might be called Magical Realism Noir. Things are still plenty weird and Kafkaesque, if not quite as dark, bloody, and hopeless as his previous work.

The idea is that in Eastern Europe—probably close to the Balkans though it’s never specified precisely—exists a city that is actually two cities inhabiting the same space: Beszel and Ul Qoma. In certain areas the cities blend into each other and inhabitants have learned to “unsee” things from the “wrong” city. If a person crosses into the “wrong” city or remembers seeing what exists on the other side, that person is considered in breach. Once that happens, a shadowy entity or organization—we’re not really sure which—also called Breach takes the person away, never to be heard from again. So, it’s important to say the least to not breach.

The novel starts off with a corpse being found in Beszel, which turns out to have come from Ul Qoma. This naturally leads to some consternation.

The novel is told in first-person by a weary, hard-drinking cop right out of central casting. Which is actually not a bad thing, as it gives the reader something familiar to hold on to while Miéville constructs his settings and backstory.

The City & The City starts off slow and ponderous as Miéville builds the setting, but speeds up noticeably once all the pieces are in place, and becomes downright action-packed toward the end.

Well worth reading.

Amazon affiliate link—be a mensch.

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By Niclas Lindh
January 17, 2010

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The State of the State

UPDATE Jan. 12: Joe Mullins dug down deep and found the anger and scorn the 2010 Arizona State of the State address really commands. Do yourself a favor and read his piece. /UPDATE

I’ve been somewhat impressed with the way Governor Brewer has been handling Arizona’s fiscal crisis. Not impressed as in thinking she’s doing a great job, but impressed as in she’s been holding back the worst excesses of the kookocracy. So I was hoping against hope for some sanity from her State of the State address.

Alas, it was not to be.

According to Brewer, Arizona’s problems mostly stem from: Too much healthcare for the poor, the federal government, and immigrants. Not as one might think from massive overbuilding fueled by a corrupt banking system which when the bubble burst left the state gasping for revenue.

It’s the poor, the Mexicans, and the feds that are dragging us down. Dang them.

So how is Arizona going to dig itself out of the $5 billion hole? We will “un-shackle our job creators.” Committees will do this. Somehow.

To give Brewer credit, she does bring up education as an important factor in Arizona’s future. And how do we provide a solid education for Arizona’s children? School choice and loosening teacher standards!

This idea that instead of bringing all schools up to par, we should reward the children whose parents are engaged in the process and punish the children who are born into dysfunctional families is sickening.

Guess they should have picked better parents.

As an extra flourish, Brewer brings out the wingnut trope that “No government ever created a dollar of wealth or a dime of capital.” And then disagrees with herself when she says, “Every one of Arizona’s military bases is critical to our national defense—and to our state and local economies.”

I suppose the military is not government-run.

To be fair, Brewer does hint at supporting tax hikes to help cover the budget deficit. Or at least I think that’s what she meant: “Over the long run I support a responsible pro-growth tax reform package that includes tax cuts. However—we must ensure a revenue base that supports vital functions through this downturn.”

Now I’m depressed.

The full text of the address can be found here (PDF).

Posted in Life in Phoenix, Society. Tagged with , , , , .

By Niclas Lindh
January 11, 2010

2 comments

Review: Justinian’s Flea

Justinian's Flea CoverJustinian’s Flea posits the idea that the Black Plague was a key factor in the final downfall of the Roman Empire, weakening it enough that external forces could tear it down.

Which is an intriguing idea, if one that is hard to prove or disprove after all this time and with the lack of historical data.

What William Rosen has really created with his book is a kitchen sink of the history of Byzantium, which despite being a bit less cool than the Roman Empire when it was based in Rome itself, was a fascinating place at a very interesting point in history, and Rosen does a good job of painting a picture of how Byzantium laid the underpinnings for what would become modern Europe.

Justinian’s Flea is a frustrating book to read in that Rosen has dug up so many facts about the era and especially about the rule of Justinian the Great that he has a hard time maintaining focus—he has so much he wants to share that the book meanders too much and throws way too many people and near-indistinguishable barbarian tribes into the mix. A lot of times reading it I wanted to stop and focus in on a particular event, like Belisarius’s siege of Rome or the building of the Hagia Sophia, only to be thrown into the next thing.

The pacing is a bit odd, too, in that the Black Plague doesn’t show up till the end of the book, almost like an afterthought in the book it is purportedly about.

So, the book has problems, but as a primer on the end of Byzantium that leads the reader to discover areas of interest, Justinian’s Flea does a fine job.

If you buy Justinian’s Flea at Amazon I get a tiny cut, which would be appreciated.

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By Niclas Lindh
January 5, 2010

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Written in blood

NPR had an interesting story this morning about Atul Gawande, a surgeon who is recommending other surgeons start using checklists in their practice.

To which my horrified response was: THEY’RE NOT ALREADY?

The sheer arrogance of rolling in to perform a complex procedure in which the tiniest detail can mean literally the difference between life and death, and to think you are so flawless you don’t need a checklist, is stunning.

Especially when you’re supposed to perform this complicated procedure under high stress and often severely sleep deprived.

Seriously, there are reasons pilots use checklists, reasons written in blood.

Posted in Society. Tagged with , , .

By Niclas Lindh
January 5, 2010

2 comments

Naked and sedated

So another idiot tries to blow up a plane. It’s terrible and I’m incredibly relieved he didn’t succeed.

Except he kind of did.

See, the goal of these assholes isn’t to blow up planes. The goal is to terrorize us. The actual blowing up of the plane is just a means to terrorize.

It’s an important distinction to make. Just like the IRA in London in the ’70s (remember them?) didn’t carry some strange resentment about parked cars—they wanted the British to get scared enough to leave them alone.

It makes a lot of psychological sense for the current crop of bastards to keep trying to blow up airliners: Flying is a scary exercise to begin with, and the thought of some nihilist blowing you out of the sky is enough to push a lot of people way outside the realm of rational thought. As a bonus you don’t need a lot of explosives and you can put pretty much any mouth-breather on the job, it seems.

9/11 was such a massive, overpowering shock to the system that it’s hard to blame anybody for going off the deep end with the response. But that was nine years ago. Plenty of time for the last remaining super power on Earth to get rational again.

Which is why it’s so disheartening to see the same kind of knee-jerk response again.

First we had the idiot with the shoes. So, gotta take off your shoes1. Except not in Europe, for some reason, which is where the shoe bomber was coming from. But you have to when you leave America. OK. No reason to be consistent or find a best practice to apply globally. Let’s just all wing it. You fly in America, you take off the shoes. You fly in Europe, you empty your pockets.

This certainly does not make me feel safe. Either one side of the Atlantic or the other is putting our safety in danger or is inconveniencing people for no good reason whatsoever. Or both. I mean, it has to be one or the other, right? Unless there’s some shady gentleman’s agreement between the terrorists and the authorities that is different in different parts of the world. Which somebody like Glenn Beck might actually believe and turn into a three-hour televised extravaganza of insanity2. But which I do not.

Security personnel in different countries looked over the threats and made different decisions. You know, like humans do.

So a dirtbag tried to blow up his shoes, and we ended up putting our shoes through the machine in the security line. And then the next set of dirtbags were planning to conduct a failed high school science experiment on the plane. So: No liquids for you. Except less than three ounces. Because less than three ounces can never be made to explode, even if there are ten of you and you pool your liquids on the plane, turning it into 30 ounces. Because. Well, because, dammit!

Fantastic.

And now we have this latest idiot who tries to blow up the plane by means of his underwear3 right before landing. Which means now we have to spend the last hour of the flight just … staring? Because surely somebody with murderous intent would rather stay home than detonate his bomb two hours before landing? Really? “Curses, foiled again by the western imperialist dogs! Oh, them and their watches!”

Believe me, I want to be as safe as possible when I fly, and I most certainly would like for the insane nihilists who commit these kinds of act to be stopped any way possible, but I also would like to carry on with my life.

If we end up imploding our economy by not flying because it’s been made so goddam difficult by a bunch of security theater, well, they’ve won. And I really, really don’t want them to win.

1Which, incidentally, we’ve been doing for a long time now, and still every time I fly half the security checkpoint line acts like this is complete news to them, just like the 3-ounces-of-liquid-or-death policy.

Do people in general actually pay any attention whatsoever to what goes on?

2What would the Founders think? What? What? Perhaps this random statue in the park will give us a hint. I’ll put on my reading glasses.

3I hope the pain of his burned genitals is utterly unbearable. Not quite 72 virgins, is it, having third-degree burns on your scrotum, douche nozzle?

Posted in Society. Tagged with , , , .

By Niclas Lindh
December 30, 2009

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Home of the dollar

Despite promising myself to stop, I spend way too much time following the news. Which means I exist in a constant state of perplexity and rage.

Nothing new about that.

But lately things have been coming to a head. I don’t know if it’s all some elaborate practical joke, if I’m going nuts, or if the thought leaders out there are, in fact, completely insane.

One current source of confusion for me is the endless obsession and lamentation about housing prices. Yep, they crashed, and they crashed hard. If you, for some reason, bought a house at the top of the bubble you are now in a world of pain. And I feel for you. That really, really, sucks.

However—and here’s where I stop tracking the narrative—there was a huge bubble fueled by incredibly sketchy loans; loans that should never have been given. Those loans raised housing prices to fantasy levels, levels that priced homes utterly out of reach of home buyers.

I live in Phoenix, one of the housing bubble poster children, a metroplex where a lot of people are “paid in sunshine”—high-paying jobs are few and far between. According to RealEstate.com, in 2007 Phoenix had a median household Income of $45,474 and a median home value of $347,000.

Do those two numbers jive to you? They shouldn’t. If your household income is $45K, you simply cannot purchase a home for $347K. It’s called math. You can’t pay the vig. There’s nothing mysterious about it.

But now the bubble has burst, and home prices are back somewhere realistic. Which, again, really sucks for you if you bought your house at the top of the bubble. You are now deep in the hole. So I can see all those people desperately wanting house prices to pop up again so they can at some point actually sell their homes without going bankrupt. Granted. As for myself, yes, I enjoyed the fantasy that my house had made me rich, rich I tell you! Which I was for a while, in theory. Theory and reality are not the same. You are rich when you have the cash in hand.

But. If the house prices go back up to bubble levels, nobody can buy the houses without insane loans, and we would be back in another bubble. Which by its very freaking definition is not sustainable. Houses can’t cost more than people can afford, or people can’t buy them. Unless we can start paying our mortgages with unicorn tears, that’s just how it is.

So why am I reading all these stories lamenting the lack of lift in housing prices? Isn’t it a good thing that houses are affordable for working people again?

So people can actually, you know, live in them?

Posted in Life in Phoenix, Society. Tagged with , , .

By Niclas Lindh
December 30, 2009

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Hummingbird heaven

Kingpin hummingbird

Kingpin hummingbird. Click for larger size.

One of the great things about living in the Valley of the Sun is the hummingbirds. Stick a hummingbird feeder in your backyard, and soon enough you’ll see the little critters come feed at sunup and sunset.

It never fails to put a smile on my face.

One thing, though, you wouldn’t know about hummingbirds just from looking at them is how unbelievably aggressive they are. A feeder is pure gold to them, and they’ll squabble non-stop, which involves lots of angry chirping, aerobatics, and dive-bombing. I’m not sure if it’s the change in weather lately—yes, we had rain and overcast days—or if it’s mating season, but our local kingpin hummingbird has gone into a total ’roid rage. Get close, and you’ll get an earful. Be another hummingbird and get close, and you are in for a can of whup-ass.

I live on sugar water, dammit! You want some of this? You want some of this?

If you’d like to see more pictures from my backyard, please check out the set on Flickr.

Posted in Life in Phoenix. Tagged with , .

By Niclas Lindh
December 16, 2009

3 comments

Morning conversation

Walking Andrea to school today, we had the following conversation:

“I hate school.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. What is it you don’t like about school?”

“We have to work all the time.”

“But after school, when you get a job, you’ll have to work even more.”

Sigh. Pause. Smile: “But then I’ll get money.”

Posted in Fatherhood. Tagged with , , , .

By Niclas Lindh
December 9, 2009

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Review: Klipsch IMAGE S4i headset

Klipsch IMAGE S4i retail box

Klipsch IMAGE S4i retail box

I wanted better headphones than the ones Apple ship with the iPhone, but still wanted the mini-remote and microphone on the cord. After some googling, the Klipsch IMAGE S4i (Amazon affiliate link—show some love) seemed like a good choice, despite the capitalization nightmare Klipsch has wrought upon the world.

I was a bit apprehensive about them being in-ear headphones after having read stories about people with oddly-shaped ear canals not being able to get a good fit, and thus not good sound, but they are comfortable and fit easily. We all have different ear canals, obviously, but as far as I’m concerned, no problems. And they ship with different size cones, so if the medium won’t do it for you, at least you can try the other sizes.

The sound. Well. I’m no audio engineer, and since I paid for these things with my own money, I couldn’t afford to do extensive comparisons with other headsets, but as far as I’m concerned, they sound freaking amazing. The bass stays crisp, even on torture tests like Bill Laswell’s subwoofer-killer Dark Massive/Disengage. Mids and highs have great separation and clarity.

Going to the S4is from the Apple-supplied headset is like going from standard-def to Blu-ray—the difference is huge.

One issue—and I feared this would happen—is that they’re useless for exercising. When your ear canal gets sweaty, the buds slip out like little greased pigs. Seems like it’s an issue with the whole concept of in-ear buds, although I’d really like feedback if anybody out there has found a set that stays in even when the canal gets sweaty. At this point I don’t think there’s anything short of Crazy Glue to be done.

UPDATE Dec. 8: As noted by the indefatigable Joe in the comments, the Comply foam tips work great for exercising, and are also a bit more comfortable than the Klipsch-provided tips. /UPDATE

Another thing with using in-ears for exercising is that since they work by blocking the ear canal you hear your own heartbeat and breathing. An odd sensation.

Actually, while we’re on the topic of headphones, what the hell happened to the neural interfaces we were supposed to get? No buds, just a wireless signal to subcutaneous receptors that feed the auditory nerve.

It’s like I just wasted all my time in the ’80s reading Cyberpunk.

Sheesh.

To sum up: Far as I’m concerned, the Klipsch IMAGE 4Sis are worth the hefty price.

Posted in Reviews. Tagged with , , , .

By Niclas Lindh
November 29, 2009

2 comments