The SETI institute has a podcast called "Are we alone?"

I was interviewed for it at the Singularity Summit, this can be found in their when machines rule episode. If you just want to hear me, I start at 32:50 after a long intro explaining the Fermi paradox.

I only post a modest number of EFF news items here, because I know that if you want to see them all, you should be reading some of the EFF blogs such as deeplinks or or action alerts or EFFector or others.

After going through the VHS to digital process, which I lamented earlier I started wondering about the state of digitizing old vinyl albums and tapes is.

There are a few turntable/cd-writer combinations out there, but like most people today, I'm interested in the convenience of compressed digital audio which means I don't want to burn to CDs at all, and nor would I want to burn to 70 minute CDs I have to change all the time just so I can compress later. But all this means I am probably not looking for audiophile quality, or I wouldn't be making MP3s at all. (I might be making FLACs or sampling at a high rate, I suppose.)

What I would want is convenience and low price. Because if I have to spend $500 I probably would be better off buying my favourite 500 tracks at online music stores, which is much more convenient. (And of course, there is the argument over whether I should have to re-buy music I already own, but that's another story. Some in the RIAA don't even think I should be able to digitize my vinyl.)

For around $100 you can also get a "USB turntable." I don't have one yet, but the low end ones are very simple -- a basic turntable with a USB sound chip in it. They just have you record into Audacity. Nothing very fancy. But I feel this is missing something.

Just as the VHS/DVD combo is able to make use of information like knowing the tape speed and length, detecting index marks and blank tape, so should our album recorder. It should have a simple sensor on the tone arm to see as it moves over the album (for example a disk on the axis of the arm with rings of very fine lines and an optical sensor.) It should be able to tell us when the album starts, when it ends, and also detect those 2-second long periods between tracks when the tone arm is suddenly moving inward much faster than it normally is. Because that's a far better way to break the album into tracks than silence detection. (Of course, you can also use CDDB/Freedb to get track lengths, but they are never perfect so the use of this, net data and silence detection should get you perfect track splits.) It would also detect skips and repeats this way.

Most programs that ask for a password will put in a delay if you get it wrong. They do this to stop password crackers from quickly trying lots of passwords. The delay makes brute force attacks impossible, in theory.

You may have heard about a technique which makes ice in an otherwise warm desert when the skies are clear at night. Dig a pit, insulate it (in olden days this was done with straw by Romans and other biblical folk) and expose it to the open, clear sky at night. During the day, cover it with reflective and insulating material. The open night sky is very cold, and energy will radiate out to it. In addition, in the low humidity, evaporation chills the water. It need not be a pit, it can be an insulated tube with high walls.

Listening recently to Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire" I thought about expressing history in single words. One of my favourite conversation starters is to ask people who the most remembered person of the 20th century will be in the 25th. (For the 15th century, the clear winners are Columbus, Leonardo, and Gutenberg, with Columbus the stand-out in the Americas.) When I ask, people will pick names like Hitler or Einstein. Based on Columbus' example, I think Neil Armstrong is a good contender, even though he can walk down the street today without being recognized.

I may be on the extreme, but I use hundreds of different E-mail addresses. Since I have whole domains where every address forwards to me (or to my spam filters) I actually have an uncountable number of addresses, but I also have a very large number of real ones I use. That's because I generate a new address for every web site I enter an E-mail address on. It lets me know who sells or loses my address, and lets me cut off or add filtering to mail from any party. (By the way, most companies are very good, and really don't sell your E-mail.)

The growing social network systems, notably Facebook and LinkedIn, have become better and better places to find old friends. And we're also seeing people search engines, such as zabasearch and the new spock.com to look through databases. If you're determined, you can find many folks.

More and more people are walking around Borg-ified with bluetooth earpieces. It's convenient, and a good idea when driving, but otherwise looks goofy and also wears on the ear. I've been a big seeker of headset devices that are wireless, but meant to be only put on while talking, and thus very easy to put on and remove. Self-contained bluetooth devices, with the battery in them, tend to be hard to put on. Nothing I have seen is as easy to put on (or as bulky) as a typical headphone headband.

I decided to digitize a lot of my old video tapes. Since I have many video capture cards in my MythTV system, I started by plugging my old VCR into that and recording. Turned out that there's not really good standalone capture software for Linux, so I ended up using MythTV itself, which is not very well designed for this. But it worked OK. However, I then foolishly decided to clean the VCR heads, pulled out my old head cleaner, put methanol in it and -- destroyed the heads. It was time for a replacement VCR, something that's pretty rare in the stores.

What is popular now are combo VHS/DVD players and for not much more (on eBay at least) VHS/DVD-recorder combos. These combos all feature the ability to copy from a VHS tape to a DVD. Of course, with just a remote control you can't get nearly the flexibility that a computerized capture system can give you, but you do get a big convenience feature -- the same system is controlling the VCR and the DVD burning, and can start and stop the VCR, detect index marks on the tape, detect end of tape, tape speed and many other things. They all try to give you a "one touch copy" or almost that, so you can just insert the tape, a disk and have it do the work.

You non-burner blog readers are probably sick of the flood of Burning Man stuff this time of year, but I need to tell a few remarkable stories from the Playa this year about how sometimes, it all works out in amazing ways.

I was quite surprised to read in the coverage of the arrest of Star Simpson at Boston Airport for having a handmade shirt with LEDs that lit up in a star pattern (to match her name) that State Police Maj. Scott Pare said "She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."

I have generated several of my panoramas for this year's Burning Man.

This year featured a double rainbow, and of course much of the week with no man on his pedestal.

As you know, I took photos of the burning man arson and put them up very quickly, so we did not yet know it was arson, or the reason.

Like most people, even before knowing it was arson was shock. Would this cancel the Saturday burn? Even to the jaded, the burn remains the climax of the event. It is the one time the whole city gets together and has a common experience. (This year the Crude Awakenings burn also did that.) My photos last year are Burning Man's only "group portrait" I would expect. It has, however, become very much a spectator rather than participatory event. The days of volunteers helping to raise the man are long gone.

The burn has also become overdone, under the burden of having to be the climax of an already extravagant week. Each year they feel they have to outdo prior years, and that's a slope that can't be maintained. New burners (virgins) would be impressed by any level of burn, I think, so I presume they do it for themselves and a perception of impressing the old-timers. Still, it was disturbing to think the climax of the event would be removed, and good when it was clear the fire was not so bad as to stop a restoration or rebuilding.

But then I was surprised to see how positive the reaction was. Aside from the team that had their work destroyed (and would now have to give up several days of their event to rebuild) I would even judge the overall perception of the arson to be quite positive. Addis claims it was done with care to assure nobody was under the Man. Having had my own art vandalized (not nearly this badly) at Burning Man, I know how deeply that wounds. So I can't approve of how it was done. But there was a large amount of support for what it meant. (Reportedly even from Larry Harvey.) In fact, since I didn't talk to the rebuilding crew, I can't say I met more than a handful of people who expressed any particular disapproval (or even non-approval) of it. And that surprised me, at first.

Burning gasoline is ruining the world. It accounts for 40% of greenhouse emissions, and a large percentage of other nasty emissions including the particulate matter that kills millions each year. Getting it has driven the world to wars. When you burn it, you pollute my air, hurting me, and you owe me something for it, which is a reason that gasoline taxes make sense even in a libertarian context.

I wrote earlier this week about selfish merging and traffic jams and this prompted some to ask if the selfish merge is really selfish. Update: There is more and new thinking in this later post on selfish merge being not so selfish.

Background: Burning Man is an astounding annual gathering in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada where up to 50,000 people create a temporary city for a week, which then vanishes. The city is devoted to art, creativity and radical self-expression. Since 1996, each year has had an "art theme" which provides inspiration for about a third of the art created that year, as well as the central Man.

I have written before about the selfish merge which is a tricky problem to solve. One lane vanishes, and the merge brings everybody to a standstill. Selfish drivers zoom up the vanishing lane to the very end and are let in by other drivers there, causing the backup. The selfish strategy is the fastest way through the blockage, yet causes the blockage.

I've created a new blog category "Burning Man" to track my posts on the event. I was using a simpler tag before.

Today I want to talk about the Burning Man Exodus problem, a problem you might find interesting even if you don't come to Burning Man. This year, even at 8pm Monday there was a long line and a 2 hour wait to get off the playa. Normally by about 5pm there is no wait. With 45,000 or more this year, and I presume at least 15,000 to 20,000 vehicles, and various chokepoints limiting traffic to 450 cars/hour, how do you drain the playa when everybody wants to go Sunday and Monday. (In addition, with so many now leaving Sunday, it makes Monday less interesting driving some who could leave Monday to leave earlier.)

It has now been routine to see waits of 5 hours or more at the peak times. I believe a solution should be possible involving some sort of appointment system, where cars are given a set time to leave, and they leave then. If they want to go at a peak time, instead of waiting 5 hours in line, they spend 5 hours in the city, or doing more cleanup, instead of idling their car in a giant line. Not that the line doesn't become a little bit of a party, but it's still not like being in camp. And for my exodus on Monday night there as the worst dust storm ever for Exodus, you could not see the car in front of you, or the fence beside you.

However, a good system to hand out appointments is hard to design. First of all, we have a mostly volunteer crew, and they don't have much law enforcement power to stop violators or ticket them. (More participation by the police in this, when the city truly needs them, instead of having them be there for pot busts that nobody wants would be a great thing.)

Here are some of the constraints:

Update: I now have a whole Burning Man area on the blog!

I've not been blogging of late because I'm at Burning Man, and while normally I don't report breaking news in this blog, we just witnessed a strange event. Through accident or arson, the Man was set alight this evening shortly after totality began in the eclipse of the moon.