Latest News

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Kindle, chi and the iMac

For all of you who have been anxiously awaiting news, here’s a photo of my Kindle Fire HD 7″ in its Persimmon leather case (“So you won’t go off and leave it in a hotel or coffee shop …”) It is really well integrated into the Amazon ecosystem: If you look closely you can see Sir Humphrey, the Minister, and Bernard. I haven’t tried editing documents, yet, but it’s very easy to upload and read PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.

kindleThe chi part. You can upload 250 songs from most anywhere — your iTunes library, for example — plus unlimited songs that you bought from Amazon, for free. Pretty good, huh? Then I get this email from Amazon:

“You may have noticed that songs from 8 CDs you have purchased from Amazon were added to your Cloud Player library. This means that high-quality MP3 versions of these songs are available for you to play or download from Cloud Player for FREE. You can find your songs in the “Purchased” playlist.” Continue reading →

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Veterans Day 2012

Where I live in South Carolina, we have a Veterans Association, and a couple of times a year, a few of us form up and march in a mini-parade. We have vets from WWII on (you have to be 55 or older to live here), and although most of us are not combat veterans, we feel it’s important to honor those who did go into the line of fire.

My late father definitely falls into the latter category: veteran of Bataan, where he won the Silver Star, and survivor of 3 1/2 years in Japanese prison camps. Later, he commanded the 1st Recon Squadron of the famed 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. I wear his 2A/C unit crest on my hat, next to my Air Force pin.

There is a lot of controversy over our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we need to keep those discussions separate from our acknowledgement of those who served honorably there and in our country’s other battles.

Here’s to you, Dad. Toujuors Pret.

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Another thing to make you feel old

As if I really needed it.

The Department of Energy has announced that the Titan supercomputer is now open for business at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan can clip along at 20 petaflops, that’s 20,000 trillion calculations per second.

Back when I first got into computing, the big kid on the block was the IBM 7030 Stretch, which hit an amazing 1.2 mips, that is 1.2 million instructions per second. The computer we were using, the IBM 1620, could do on the order of 700 – 800 additions per second, which was really fast compared to what most people could do by hand.

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The Casual Vacancy

J. K. Rowling’s new book just came. I ordered it last week from Amazon, the hard copy because it was only a couple more bucks than the Kindle edition. I feel bad, greenwise, but I can loan this to spouse, kids, friends, etc. Would it be too strong to say that publishers are stupid?

Vacancy was just released yesterday. Amazon had promised it by Monday via 2-day shipping — I signed up for Amazon Prime — but it was in today’s mail. A great example of zheng / qi: meet expectations and then some. Amazon is VERY good at this.

This will be my first book by Rowling, although I’ve seen several of the Harry Potter movies. Let you know.

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A little busy

Working on my paper for the Boyd and Beyond Conference in Quantico mid-October. Will post after the event. The characterizations are strong but the plot still needs a little work.

I see De Niro as Boyd and Brad Pitt or Daniel Craig as me.

 

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Dr. Linda P. Beckerman

I just found out that Linda Beckerman died last September 18.

Linda was a close colleague when we were both at Lockheed Martin in Marietta, GA.  She was one of the most creative people I have ever known, in the “How in the world did you think of that???” category. Let me give one example:

One day, the president of the company told our boss that he wanted the mail system fixed. This may not sound like much, but in a large organization like Lockheed, spread out over a number of buildings, mail was the lifeblood of the company. A few facts about the case:

  • This was well before the Internet, and our internal e-mail system was slow and cumbersome. Attachments were problematic at best.
  • It typically took between 3 days and never for physical mail to go between departments. Probably the origin of the term “snail mail.” At the IBM building downtown, employees on different floors were known to send company mail via FEDEX, that is, through Memphis.
  • We were a union shop, so it was an offense even for staffers to walk down the hall with company mail

What she did, which I thought was brilliant, was not design a better mail system, but come up with a process that got the unionized employees in the mail room to create (evolve might be better) a new system.  How good was it? When 100% of our mail was routinely delivered the same day it was collected, we quit measuring. To better appreciate this, one of the first things I had been warned about in my company orientation session some five years earlier was the pitfalls of company mail.

You can read all about Linda’s solution in the paper we wrote.

Linda is probably best known on the Internet for a paper she wrote on the nature of war, “The Non-linear dynamics of war.” After leaving Lockheed Martin in 1989, Linda moved to Orlando, where she was, among other things, a game designer, dog walker, and ultimately head of a systems engineering effort for SAIC.

She was unique; she will be missed.

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A Helluva Game!

Like most Americans, I don’t know enough about soccer to make an informed judgment about the just-concluded women’s semifinal match between USA and Canada, but just from watching the intensity of play and the sportsmanship (at one point, a Canadian player who was walking by helped Abby Wambach to her feet), that was a match for the ages.

Congratulations to both teams, and I’m sorry they weren’t playing for the gold.

In a tactical sense, these multi-dimensional interactions suggest a spontaneous, synthetic/ creative, and flowing action/counteraction operation, rather than a step-by-step, analytical/ logical, and discrete move/countermove game. Patterns 176

I’ll be cheering for Canada in the bronze medal round (I like the French, too, but they didn’t play the US), although I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could naturalize Christine Sinclair in time for Japan on Thursday????