How Big Was That Squid?

Sometimes it takes a non-numeric explanation to make numbers hit home. For example:

A fishing crew has caught a colossal squid that could weigh a half-ton and prove to be the biggest specimen ever landed, a fisheries official said Thursday. The squid, weighing an estimated 990 lbs and about 39 feet long, took two hours to land in Antarctic waters, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t easily imagine a 990-lb, 39-foot squid. The numbers are so far off my conceptual squid scale that they don’t mean much beyond “huge.”

I could try to relate the numbers to something more familiar, but a squid expert saved me the effort with this deft analogy: “If calamari rings were made from the squid they would be the size of tractor tires.”

Ah, that big.

[The quotes are from an AP article about the squid in question.]

Why No Single-Letter Domains?

When was the last time you visited a Web site where the second-level domain was a single letter, like “a.com”?

Considering that shorter is sweeter with domain names, I was surprised that I could not recall visiting any such site.

A little searching yielded the reason: In December 1993, the Internet’s governing organization reserved all second-level domains comprising one character or digit. Excepted were six existing domains (i.net, q.com, q.net, x.com, x.org, and z.com).

In November 2005, the possibility of reversing the policy was raised. This MSNBC article from the time explains why the single-letter domains were restricted in the first place:

Single-letter names under “.com,” “.net” and “.org” were set aside in 1993 as engineers grew concerned about their ability to meet the expected explosion in demand for domain names. They weren’t sure then whether a single database of names could hold millions — more than 40 million in the case of “.com” today....

One idea was to create a mechanism for splitting a single database into 26 — one corresponding to each letter. So instead of storing the domain name for The Associated Press under “.org,” it would go under “a.org.” In other words, “ap.org” would become “ap.a.org.”

Now, engineers have concluded that won’t be necessary. They have seen the address database grow to hold millions of names without trouble, so they are now willing to let go of the single-letter names they had reserved.

That said, I found no indication that the policy was later changed.

So perhaps the way to look at things is: The original reason there are so few single-letter domain names was technical. When the technical problem went away, it left the political problem of how to allocate the new names, a problem that apparently is still pending a solution.

E Ink: A Tale of Two Applications

Last week, in explaining why I was underwhelmed by the Sony Reader, I mentioned E Ink. It’s a display technology that uses tiny microcapsules that can be controlled like pixels. Once the microcapsules are arrayed into an image, they require no further power; they continue to display using reflective light.

Although E Ink—at least in its current state of development—was not compelling to me in the Sony Reader, I’d like to offer a compare-and-contrast with a simple yet compelling E Ink application: Lexar’s JumpDrive Mercury, a pocket USB flash drive with a percent-full gauge.

Exploiting E Ink’s “powerless display” advantage over other electronic displays, the gauge is readable whether the JumpDrive Mercury is plugged in or not. When you think about it, the only time the display can change (and thus need power) is when the drive is plugged in (and thus has power). Nice.

Also, the JumpDrive Mercury leverages another E Ink advantage over traditional displays: the ability to be packaged very thin and light. For pocket USB flash drives, small is beautiful, and the E Ink display in the JumpDrive Mercury adds precious little mass or volume to the device.

Finally, as important as exploiting E Ink’s advantages, the JumpDrive Mercury’s use of E Ink is not penalized by E Ink’s disadvantages against other display technologies. Lack of color and a slow screen refresh are not a big deal for a gauge on a USB flash drive. In contrast, they are problems for the Sony Reader, which is potentially competing with colorful, instant-refreshing LCD devices that can do a lot more (like multimedia) on top of e-book reading.

So, although the JumpDrive Mercury does less with E Ink than the Sony Reader, what it does it does well.

Throwing the Book at Sony’s Reader

I recently saw a Sony Portable Reader System, a new device for displaying electronic versions of books. It failed to sell itself to me, and that was before I saw the price was $349.

Yes, I like the idea of doing for books what an iPod does for CDs: putting a whole collection in a single, portable device. (Actually, I don’t care whether the device stores the stuff or streams it from a network, just so long as I have access when and where I want it. However, like iPods so far, the Sony Reader requires the user to download and store full files on the device, via a connection to a computer; there’s no WiFi.)

Yes, I am intrigued by the Reader’s E Ink display, based on tiny microcapsules that can be controlled like pixels. Think of an Etch-a-Sketch displaying a computer screen, and you’ll have the general idea.

The E Ink display’s key feature is, once a page is drawn, it requires no further power. Like a book, it does not need to be turned off.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, the display is monochromatic, with four shades of gray. Although the text looks pretty good, contrast is diluted with a grayish background. And when the display refreshes, as when you go from one page to another, it does so inelegantly, taking perhaps a second to wipe and redraw itself.

As for usability, the device was fine for turning pages, but everything else was somewhere between awkward and absent. For example, you apparently can’t specify a page number you want to go to, or search for pages containing specific keywords. But, strangely, you can push dedicated buttons to reach the pages that are 10%, 20%, 30%, etc., through the book. Also, the unit I saw somehow ended up in the “Utilities” section of a particular book, and no one could get it out of that state.

Finally, Sony’s e-book store only has on the order of 10,000 titles, although you can supplement those offerings with text files, Microsoft Word documents, and PDFs from anywhere else. You apparently can read RSS feeds too, although I assume clicking links in feeds gets you nowhere except frustrated.

Bottom line: I can imagine reading books on a Reader-like device, but not this one. E Ink’s big advantage in power efficiency just isn’t worth the color, contrast, and refresh limitations. Give me a high-contrast, color LCD screen, and I’ll recharge it at night, thanks.

And while you’re at, I’ll take a more complete computer on the inside, so I can follow those RSS links to Web pages, play videos, and do all the other things that now come with the online “reading” experience. However, since this is a portable media reader, I don’t need a keyboard or a full slate-style Tablet PC; a beefed-up PDA is probably the closer cousin.

Am I asking too much for $349 worth of today’s technology? If so, then let’s just call the above my threshold for when a Reader-like device will get interesting. Maybe Sony’s Reader will evolve there. In the meantime, perhaps it will find niches (school textbooks?) where the current version can take hold. I wish it luck, because I think it will need more than its share.

CMU’s TrafficSTATS

Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Study & Improvement of Regulation recently introduced TrafficSTATS (STAtistics on Travel Safety), a Web tool for analyzing traffic-fatality data. It is based on two U.S. government databases, one that tracks all accidents that involved a fatality, and another that estimates the total amount of driving done in the U.S. by various characteristics such as region, vehicle type, and such. The time range covered was 1999 to 2004.

I took a quick look, and here’s what caught my eye:

• Accidents with fatalities were extremely rare—much rarer than I would have guessed—in terms of the amount of driving done. On average, an accident with a fatality occurred once in 100 million “person miles.” (A person mile counts one mile for each person that traveled that mile; if a car with three passengers travels one mile, that’s three person miles.) A fatality could be anyone involved, including nonmotorists.
• That said, if you multiplied the number of people in the United States by the number of person miles they traveled, the result was on the order of 40,000 traffic fatalities per year.
• A motorcycle was 30 times as likely to be in a fatal accident than the average personal vehicle. (That’s in terms of person-miles traveled, so the metric is something like the risk per mile traveled.)
• Females were less than half as likely as males to be in a fatal accident.
• The average weekend day had 35% more fatal accidents than the average weekday (although Friday was a well-above-average weekday, enough to look more like Saturday and Sunday than its weekday peers).
• In terms of person miles, people in the “East South Central” region (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee) were more than twice as likely to be in a fatal accident as people in the “New England” region (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont). Those were the two regional extremes.
• In terms of person miles, age groups 16-20 and 75-84 were each more than twice as likely as average to be in a fatal accident. 21-24 was slightly less than twice the average. Between 25 and 64, everything was under the average.

There are hints of messiness in the underlying data, but for simple analyses like the above, it’s probably not a big deal. For those that want to work with the raw data sets, they are available.