Escapable Logic

Doc Searls and a few other acolytes of flight were guests of Intel for a ride on the Zero-G flight experience. Here’s Doc, presumably praying to Saint Spew, the patron Saint of Puke, before the flight:

I never knew a military aviator who enjoyed zero or negative G forces. In fact, most engines’ oil pumps are not specified for more than 1 negative G. Not that it kept us from trying zero Gs in a C-130, while otherwise bored, flying from one place in Vietnam to a similar-looking other place. In those halcyon days, each aircraft dashboard sported a quaint plexiglass map holder, about 6″ by 9″. Meant to hold a Jeppesen approach plate book, it was one half of a terrific Zero-G indicator. The other half was a pencil. I kid you not.

The trick was to drop the pencil into the map holder and start the one maneuver that’s obvious after a few moments’ reflection. In order to attain the maximum weightless time, you want to spend as much time as possible pushing the controls forward into the zero G range. You could do this starting from a high altitude and just push the controls forward, but you’ll get more weightless time if you start at a medium altitude at high speed and then pull the aircraft up at a couple of positive Gs to set up for the negative G phase. From the nose-up position, the pilot pushes the controls forward until the Zero G state is reached. That’s where the pencil in its lucite cage came in.

I’m sure the folks at Zero-G Corp have more sophisticated instruments, but none more direct or accurate; or more analogue. But some subtlety is required. Surely unlike the Zero G 727’s instruments, as the pencil rises from the bottom of the holder, one must gently release a bit of the forward pressure, since it obviously required a slightly negative G force to move the pencil off the bottom of the map holder. I describe this distinction so my pilot friends don’t point out my oversights.

That’s it. Just keep the pencil in the center of the map holder as long as possible. In the Zero Gravity Corp’s Boeing 727, that lasts about 30 seconds. In the C-130, we probably pushed the limits a little further, though we did not have the range of airspeed available to their 727. Here’s how the profile looks using their 727:

It’s really a matter of the airspeed and altitude available to you. In an SR-71, I’ll bet you could get close to a minute of weightlessness, by starting at 60,000 feet and Mach 2.5, arcing up to 85,000 feet or so and pulling it out when pointed straight down at about 35,000 feet, which is where most real men would be staining their tutu.

So that’s it. 2/3 of the people “lose it”, literally, on the Vomit Comet. And that’s why I never want to experience Zero Gs again. Few smart people do it twice.

Mitt Romney is talking about his faith and values this morning. I’ve found myself working very closely with some splendid people in Utah for the last several months, so this is of more than casual interest to me.

My friend and partner, Steve Urquhart, who is Chairman of the Rules Committee of the Utah State Legislature, says that Mitt Romney is one of those "perfect" people – the kind who does what his inner guide tells him to do. You know: all those words and deeds that you and I know we should get it together to conceive, plan, do and follow up with. I’ll take Steve’s word for it. They are characteristics that remind me of John Palfrey, Director of the Berkman Center. I wonder if those two fellas from Massachussetts would realize that. I feel lucky to perform that way for an entire morning.

Doc Searls and I were introduced to Steve by Phil Windley, a Utahn who is admired deeply and warmly by scores of East and West coast liberal types who can’t remember the last time they set foot in a flyover state except Colorado. With Doc and Kaliya Hamlin, Phil is just concluding their bi-annual Internet Identity Workshop. Kaliya is an Identity Geek (the "Identity Woman") from Berkeley who’s as liberal as they get, with a passion for non-conferences that most males still regard as airy-fairy, but not Phil and Doc and anyone who’s attended one, having seen how much better they work than the old format. Many of us became aware of Phil in 2001-2 when, as CIO of the state of Utah, he was blogging every day about what it was like to be the CIO of the state of Utah. In June, 2003, Doc Searls and Phil and I attended the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, just as the Howard Dean campaign was the hot topic on the Internet. It was at that conference that we started discussing the idea that grew into the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-in at Etech the following February. Much of my life since then was shaped by that seminal meeting. Our little ORGware band, of which Phil and Doc are key members, is trying to build what was obviouly needed 4-1/2 years ago, and that still is not available.

Last month, I was impressed with Phil Windley’s personal statement, My Faith, where he tells his family background:

[in the first half of the 19th century,] Members of the Church, referred to as Latter-day Saints or Saints, were driven from town to town and state to state. In spite of this persecution and the murder of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Church has flourished and now has over 12 million members around the world in over 160 countries.

My own ancestors joined the church in England and Scandinavia in the mid 1800’s, emigrated to America, and crossed the plains in wagon companies as pioneers. These people were part of the great colonization effort made by the pioneers of the Rocky Mountains, settling in Southeastern Idaho where I was raised. When I read their stories, I’m constantly amazed at the trials they endured.

Mormons are Christians. Christ is the center of my religious life. One of the core beliefs of the Mormon Church is that after the death of Christ’s apostles the church fell into apostasy and the authority to act in God’s name was lost. We believe that the Church is Christ’s restored church on earth.

… the Mormon Church believes in, and is founded upon, the idea that God still speaks to men in the form of visions and revelations to His prophets. Most of Mormon scripture has come through modern revelation. Such revelations continue to guide the church today.

For most of the people I deal with every day, the vocabulary of divine faith and revelation are hard to listen to. Some of them have a hard time with the notion of the invisible hand of the marketplace, so we’re talking about a kind of extremism here. But what if we parse Phil’s description as we would a new Internet protocol? What does the LDSTP (The Latter Day Saint Transport Protocol) really describe? Yeah. I know. "Conestoga Wagon". Enough with the one-liners.

The Latter Day Saint Transport Protocol "LDSTP"

So some people in the US, a couple of hundred years ago, lived in communities which were dominated by the local church, and usually just one. Each of those town churches was run by a guy who was a full-time Religious Authority whose job it was to tell everyone else what sinners they were and to appear better than they were. We must assume that these guys were as fond of money and boys and girls in the same ratios as their counterparts today, perhaps even worse in that repressed society. Some of those devout churchgoers looked on this hypocrisy and decided that it’s better to download their spiritual code base directly from God to each person, rather than through the intermediaries who probably made "The Office" look like a model of competence and sincerity. They used the word "revelation" to describe those downloads. Presumably, they kept the insights that worked and abandoned the ones that didn’t.

It looks a lot like disintermediation to me, and the established clergy surely greeted this independence with the affection that the telecoms feel for David Isenberg and Susan Crawford. The persecuted believers in this new LDSTP protocol for a Spiritual Operating System ("SOS"), had to get out of town, so they headed west, and stopped on the other side of the mountains where it was most beautiful and where the local residents talked funny but were a lot more neighborly than the white folks back home. Life was good.

Forbidden from paying their clergy, every man was allowed to share his insights. Since life was so demanding, I assume they were forced to keep embracing what worked and let go of what didn’t. It sounds like the practicality of the team behind the Linux kernel. By any objective measure, they prospered more than the rest of America. It’s no wonder that their beliefs and vocabulary retain much of their beginnings, since what they kept worked so well.

If Mitt says it as well as Phil does, he’ll comfort the rest of the country.

Doc’s picture here was like a 2×4 to my forehead:

A zillion years ago, I was accustomed to flying USAF tankers from Sacramento to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a couple of weeks of weird weather and flying. On the way and back, we flew over the Brooks Range, where the serious peaks barely rose above the snows that filled the spaces between them:

As a hiker, I knew that it would take a full day to hike between peaks just like these in the Sierras, but only a couple of hours on snowshoes and minutes on a snowmobile.

The Brooks Range is, for some reason, a picture I will carry in my head forever. Thanks, Doc!

What’s the most hated part of broadcast politics?

Easy: Robocalls.

Robocalls have been used to pervert every aspect of representative government and to undermine the free-access voting system which makes a republican democracy possible. Politicians have passed laws to ensure that they can interrupt our dinner in 23 states where businesses cannot.

We know there’s no demand for messages, and that there is deep disdain for robocalls. So here’s the conundrum du jour:

Tonight, in the state of Utah, a well-funded Robocall campaign is launching against the forces of devisiveness. Over the next week, these uninvited calls will exhort voters to . . . read a blog.

WTF? Has the world gone mad? Political interests are paying good money to convince voters to join a conversation? Can representative government be far behind?

Yes, it’s true. Blame it on Stephen Urquhart, whom you might remember from posts by Doc Searls and me last summer. He’s the visionary behind Politicopia.com and he wants us all to go over there and join a conversation among responsible adults to discuss whether the people of Utah should pass a referendum supporting vouchers supporting private education of students curently in public schools.

Because it wouldn’t hurt for a bunch of bloggers and bloggees from other states to join the conversation–not just to sell their personal point of view on school vouchers, but to congratulate the leading-edge Utahpians on yet another contribution to computers and connectivity.

After all, this is the state that brought us WordPerfect, Novell, Evans & Sutherland, and where Alan Kay did his postgraduate work. Who’d guess that they’re leading us again, this time toward a more perfect union?

Yesterday, I provided a chart showing how well the stock prices for the so-called Big Tech Big Ten had done over the last 5 years. I had a couple of complaints that the chart with Google included unfairly overstates the PDSI – Patent Deformers’ Stock Index, yielding a tripling of the conspirators’ combined stock price:

And surely it does, so here’s the same chart with GOOG not included:

Now we see how unrosy the half-decade has been for the remaining nine: a mere doubling of their average stock price.

Tom Stites* wrote the following in the form he knows best, as a newspaper column. Tom found out about this human drama when I introduced him to Claudio Ballard. I met Claudio Ballard because he is a man on a mission: return manufacturing to the United States, which he believes we can do by building and managing supply chains online, aggregating the amazing small machining and production shops that supply the big companies. To do that he needs ORGware, of course. So that’s how we found out that, no matter how accustomed one is to the cesspool in Washington, an occasional creature rises out of that black lagoon that smells so bad it horrifies even the jaded.

Cheer for David vs. patent Goliath

By Tom Stites*

Goliath enters from stage left, in the guise of the American Bankers Association, pushing an amendment to the Patent Reform Act that is suddenly on the move through Congress.  This rivets the attention of David, in the guise of Claudio Ballard, founder of DataTreasury Corp. and inventor of technology that allows the banking system to move images of checks securely through the interbank system.  The amendment is a lethal weapon aimed squarely at Ballard and his company.  He springs to his feet.

Hold your hat.  There’s going to be a big fight.

Almost no one knows about this impending fight, much less how important its outcome is not only to Ballard but to inventors and entrepreneurs all across the U.S. – and to entrepreneurship itself, one of the great engines of vitality that drives the American economy, that gives it an edge in brutal global markets, that creates jobs and prosperity.

So I write this to alert like-minded people that the Goliath that Ballard is confronting has many muscular allies, in the form of transnational corporations trying to gain an advantage in the use of patents, and that Ballard is going to need all the help he can get.  With or without the bankers’ amendment the legislation is packed with provisions that would undercut entrepreneurs’ ability to get patents and, if they do, to protect their patents from global corporations the law would give the upper hand.

Why should a veteran journalist like me care?  No one likes an unfair fight, and this is an ambush of innovative, small-scale entrepreneurs by vast corporations.  On a deeply personal level I care because I can imagine the ambush hurting me – in an era when journalism’s institutions are crumbling, I’ve spent much of the last year developing ideas for robust new ways to publish quality journalism on the Web.  If patents are required to make this work, whether the Web journalism is for profit or not, I don’t want Rupert Murdoch coming after them, wielding this new law.  I’m hardly alone among innovators and wannabe saviors of journalism or, thus, hardly alone among journalists and publishers to whom patents could matter.

I stumbled into knowing about this fight because I’ve taken a part-time position as the publisher of Politicopia.com, a site that makes it easy for citizens to understand, debate and even shape legislation that affects their lives and communities.  Britt Blaser, who has invented new software that will enrich Politicopia’s potential for civic empowerment, is part of a network of inventor/entrepreneurs that includes Claudio Ballard, and Britt called me up, all excited, wanting to pick a journalist’s brain about what was going on.  Conference calls started happening, I heard Ballard’s passionate account, emails flew, the links piled up, I jumped on Google and read a lot in a hurry, and here’s the story:

For six years patent reform legislation languished in Congress as lobbyists and legislators from both parties negotiated behind the scene.  A little more than a week ago, they reached agreement and the House and Senate judiciary committees suddenly both passed similarly sweeping bills on consecutive days. On its website Forbes says the legislation passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and predicts that it may pass in a big rush, possibly even before Congress goes on its August recess at the end of next week.

A broad range of voices from left to right on the political spectrum, and not just Ballard and Blaser and their network of entrepreneurs, sees the many provisions of the bill as adding up to a comprehensive disaster. The most detailed and informed critique from this perspective that I found comes from Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, in this article summarizing his July 12 speech on the floor of the house.  It takes the bill apart provision by provision and describes the harm each would cause and why.

Rohrabacher is passionate:  He calls the bill “legalized larceny” and cites icon American inventors starting with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to Cyrus McCormick and Thomas Edison, to George Washington Carver and the Wright Brothers.  He calls them heroes and says the new patent law would make their contributions difficult if not impossible, that it hands patent control to what he calls globalist forces. Among these, he says, “are the leaders of multinational corporations . . . an elite whose allegiance is to no country.”

Ballard, the entrepreneur, is no less passionate. “This is a challenge to the backbone of entrepreneurship in this country,” he says.  “We’re in danger of killing off innovation.”

The bill’s biggest supporters are Microsoft, Apple, Research in Motion, Cisco Systems and other huge tech corporations that make products that Forbes says typically include hundreds of patented items.  The big opponents, so far, are the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, Caterpillar, major patent holders like Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, the AFL-CIO, which is concerned about outsourcing union jobs to overseas patent thieves, and the Innovation Alliance, an association of innovative companies, mostly of modest size.

So Ballard’s David has some help, but it remains to be seen how many of the opponents oppose the whole bill and not just some of its language.  “There is a fierce lobbying effort under way,” Forbes.com says.

The global tech firms’ PR megaphones support their lobbyists’ mantra, repeating and repeating the idea that big firms are victims of “patent trolls,” speculators who buy up patents and sue big corporations in pursuit of settlements.  The firms complain about their legal costs, saying their use of so many patents in so many products makes them easy targets, that they are often sued for inadvertent or minor violations.  But clearly not all patent violations are minor – Alcatel-Lucent won a $1.5 billion judgment against Microsoft (the judge said the violation had not been willful) earlier this year.

Proponents of the “reform” bill call attention to provisions designed to reduce litigation as if the companies that draw suits are always innocent victims.  For another perspective, which doesn’t yet have a PR firm pushing it but should, you can read Jim Moore’s blog called I Love Inventors for story after story about how big corporations take advantage of the little guys, the innovators with new ideas that make a difference and create jobs.

Which brings us back to Claudio Ballard and DataTreasury, the company he founded to bring the technology he developed and patented into the market.  After he showed them how his system works, big banks set up their own system for moving interbank check images.  He sued and won a long, costly battle charging that the banks had copied his patented technology to avoid paying royalties.  To the banks this may have seemed like a minor or inadvertent infringement, but to Ballard his whole company was at stake.

The fight seemed to be over. Ballard started on his latest invention: VEEDIMS, the Virtual Electrical Electronic Device Interface Management System, a new approach to automotive wiring that eliminates the traditional concept of a harness. Claudio just can’t stop inventing things.

The sad news is that despite his legal success his company is still at stake:  The ABA’s Goliath got a friendly senator to add an amendment to the bill that bears the title, “Limitations on Damages and Other Remedies with Respect to Patents for Methods in Compliance with Check Imaging Methods.”  Aim carefully with your slingshot, David.

*Tom Stites‘ long journalism career includes ranking positions at major newspapers including managing editor of The Kansas City Times; national correspondent, national editor, and associate managing editor for project reporting at The Chicago Tribune, and night national editor of The New York Times. Projects he has directed have won every major journalism award, including the Pulitzer Prize. (source)