Cool knives

Saw these Chef Knives from New West Knifeworks at the holiday shops at Bryant Park. Beautiful damascus chef knives. Really great looking, and even look functional. Sadly, out of my price range. (Or, rather, more than I'm willing to pay to have a pretty chef knfe when an equally functional one is less). Bryant Park is pretty cool though.

Spetroscopy and quantum mechanics.

Been thinking about how to write a quantum mechanics textbook. I've grown increasingly disappointed with the way most are written. Most start with a historical overview of how the theory was developed, then work through more and more complicated wavefunctions, and then at the end, if there's time, cram in a little bit of the stuff you actually need to do to do something useful with quantum mechanics.

For some reason, this doesn't work for me. I'd like to see one that starts off right away with a practical discussion of the theoretical framework (and notation) we actually use. I think the minimum background for that is just a discussion of spectroscopy. The existence of line spectra allows one to start with a notion of quantized light, and quantized states (a discussion of the photoelectric effect might also be needed). Then once you have states, you can immediately introduce dirac notation. Later, once you've discussed operators, expectation values, eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, superposition of wavefunctions, transition dipoles, and all the linear algebra like bits that give the "big picture" view, if there's time, you can muck about with the calculus to show how to calculate matrix elements.

Not my most approachable blog topic, but hey, trying to get into updating thsi thing regularly, and it was something I've been musing.

Happy things

You know, a world with Serenity in it is better. I'm feeling happier, and well, more serene for having watched it. Yay.

Great moments in internet history

This was funny

But Rick Astley rickrolling the thanksgiving day parade, that's almost as entertaining as a line from a snakes on a plane pre-release parody making it into snakes on a plane.

Humor aside, I find the way internet culture is merging with pop or mainstream culture, and the way that mainstream culture is pulled in to the participatory net culture interesting.

Amusing picture

A disturbingly cool picture on flickr I picked up off some RSS feed or another.

Cool stuff

Figured I'd just stick in a link to this story from last month about a High Powered New Explosive. This stuff is cool. Melt-castable (probably), as powerful as HMX (pretty much the most powerful production explosive), and chemically pretty interesting to boot (doing some calculations on it as I write this. Just figured I'd add it to my blog, since I'd like to be posting here more (a lot more even).

Can Free/Open Source Software Innovate

The other day in the bookstore I was leafing through a book, and it made the argument that Free/Open Source software was very good at creating (possibly better) copies of existing programs, but wasn't good at breaking new ground.

Personally, I think this argument is stupid. While Tim Berners-Lee's first WWW browser wasn't released under a "free" license, but it wasn't really closed-source either: His announcement said: "If you're interested in using the code, mail me. It's very prototype, but available by anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch. It's copyright CERN but free distribution and use is not normally a problem.", and the (later dominant) NCSA Mosaic was released under an open source/free license. Web servers were similarly free, and honestly, nobody has ever even caught up to Apache and the other free web servers in terms of quality. Netnews was mostly run on free software, as was much of the internet (much of that code from Berkley). Clearly that was innovation.

CVS (the version control system) was open-source, and was incredibly innovative, and there's been incredible amounts of innovation in that realm by open-source projects. Cfengine (the system management tool) was pretty innovative. Perl. Python. Ruby. Rails. PHP. In games we have nethack/rogue etc (which went on to inspire the creation of Diablo), as well as the many MUDs.

So why do people have this absurd notion that Free Software can't innovate? I can think of a couple reasons. The main one is that FOSS development is greatly affected by communication costs. The simpler sharing your source code is, the easier a distributed development model is. Thus, the amount of Free Software written, and the ease of the Open Source Software development model shot up enormously along with the growth of the internet. So anything that pre-dates the internet wasn't going to be developed as Free Software. So yes, Free spreadsheets/WYSIWYG wordprocessors/etc. are fairly derivative. Proprietary software had a substantial head start. But in internet technologies (especially on the server side) Free software has the lead, since you had the internet available to collaborate over if you were writing an internet server.

I suspect proprietary development also allows more rapid development of mid-sized software, so Netscape got all the fame for the Web, because it was able to step in at the right time and make a better browser than Mosaic quickly. But that doesn't mean it's any more innovative.

And, of course, people think it because it's what Microsoft tells them to think ;)