Ok, so understandably this will only have an affect a certain sub-section of the Sci-Fi writing population, but here it is. Today The Planetary Society announced the Catalog of Exoplanets. This is actually a really interesting idea for those writers out there challenged with concocting a plausible solar system light years away from our local Sol centered system. Even better, these aren’t just plausible they’re actually whole planetary systems which have been observed. No more stabbing in the dark unless you really want to.

Tonight I’m bouncing around the chilly northern boroughs of Seattle marking time anyplace I can find that’s warm, has the potential for possible people watching, or might provide reasonable lighting so I can read the novel I picked up earlier today. There is a heavy and wet layer of snow covering the streets outside the coffee shop I’m currently inhabiting right now. Earlier there was lighting striking nearby and the air is just plain, ridiculously cold.

There are some interesting character sketches developing all around me. A woman knitting almost frantically in a comfy leather chair who periodically stops what she’s about, not to sip more caffeine, but rather to flip open her cell phone for a moment. An older guy sitting across from her who rode a bike here wondering how he is going to ride home I’d guess.

Two women talking about other people in their lives, the gist of which I am entirely missing. The one in the vest with the shorter hair keeps looking my direction as I might be gaining important information from their conversation despite my attempts to demonstrate my disinterest.

A couple who are dressed, if not the nines, at least to the eights, with fingers intertwined peering deeply into each other’s eyes, talking for a moment and looking around the room. She likes to toss her curly blond hair and he’s lost most of what ever color hair he might have once possesed. I’d like to welcome them to their 30-somethings, but I doubt that would win me many kudos.

Another woman alone in a corner picks absentmindedly at her nose.

There is a community of people here; I’m not certain how deep it actually is. Who knows who and how well. Maybe it’s just a coat of paint applied in the shade of a community? I can’t tell, knowing no one and not, for the moment, possessing the motivation to bridge this social void I am certainly isolated outside the possibility of inclusion.

Two dark haired beauties are searching for a place to plug their laptops in. I must be threatening, more than I imagine anyways, because instead of choosing the larger table beside me with ample access to many plugs they cram onto a smaller table betwixt two pair of lovers who exchange their ideas with one another with exaggerated interest, gesturing and huge smiles. Now these women have to figure out how they’re going to run their power cords behind and underneath one or both of these couples and I wish I could laugh. Best not, they might get the impression that I am actually threatening.

Back to the people watching.

My lunch time occupation today is to complete the garden design for the read of the house. And who can blame me for taking the time I’d normally spend eating to think a little about where my next meal might be coming from. Besides the sun is out and the air is warming up, after I spend a little time here I plan on getting out into the beds to work on building a solar/cold frame to help get my greens going and maybe spend some time working on the vertical supports for tomatoes and the like. Lots to do, and daily I can feel spring working its way into our lives.

The irrigation system (low volume drip system from Rainbird) will be going in soon after I lift the solarization covers from the beds. This will require some digging if I want to make care of the surrounding lawn possible. Digging that I’m not necessarily looking forward to that’s for certain.

I just completed a bed lay out (which will employ the Square Foot Gardening method devised by Mel Bartholomew). For this outline I plan on layering some acetate sheets over the top so that I can scrawl in what and when for each block. Maybe I’ll even get the affair enlarged and sealed so that it acts like a big white board dedicated to the endeavor. The good news is that the planning is starting to pay off. That makes me a happy, sane gardener who may actually enjoy, literally, the fruits of his labor.

I’m really starting to wish that I had a soil thermometer because it would really be nice to understand where my beds are at these days. I’ve been researching the link between germination times and soil temperature and you can see that for any particular garden crop there is an optimum planting soil temperature. If the soil is too cold you’ll experience zero to no growth and if it’s too high the germination times will likewise be exacerbated. Knowing this about the plants does no me no good if I don’t know what my soil temperatures are or if I lack any sort of trending data which will help me optimize plantings. Without this I’m merely scattering seeds and hoping for results.

So a soil thermometer is another something for me to shop for I suppose. And I’m almost tempted to buy one and try planting some number of beds randomly (as a control to test the effectiveness of the soil thermometer on crop yields) and the rest waiting until the recommended soil temperature is met before planting, but maybe I’m over thinking that a little too much?

Introduction

We here in central Washington can arguably say that the ground hog was wrong this year because we’re starting to experience spring-like weather in-between the periodic temper tantrums of winter as it is dragged kicking and screaming into recent history. This means that the fire I keep warm under my bicycle touring pot is once again stocked and the pot is now boiling over with plans and potential.

I’ve been inspired to investigate some of the new technologies and services that are appearing at various places on the web. One of these, “crowdsourcing”, could provide bicycle tourists the world over with access to a temporary and much needed labor pool. Imagine for instance you’re somewhere between here and there and you realize, miles into a multi-month tour across some continent or other that you need a part FedExed to the next village post haste. You could call Mom, but what if she’s on a tour of her own? Now what do you do? There’s only so much longer that you can continue to limp along with those pig iron rims and it sure would be better than cheese and crackers if someone would take care of getting the replacement pair to the inn you’re now camped out in before your pocketbook is completely drained.

I’ve been testing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to see if this might provide me with the labor I need to fix some of these kinds of problems as the crop up on longer tours. I’ve started to build a little resource pool of worker credit with the intent of learning what it might take to get a complete stranger to help me complete routine tasks all the way to bail me out if and when the situation calls for it.

Many of the worker tasks I’ve found and been qualified to complete at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have been online, but occasionally there’s one that will require more than just a mouse hand and an internet connection to complete. Today for instance I accepted and completed a task to:

• Print a document out twice
• Go around town posting the 16 sheets of the document up in public places
• Take a photo of at least one of them
• And post that photo somewhere the Requestor could see it

It was a pretty straight forward task although the pay is a bit low. Actually, what people are willing to offer for the work they want done doesn’t really make it competitive, but I imagine that this might change over time.

So what is “Turking” and Should I be Offended?

First you should not be offended, even if you happen to be of Turkish descent. There’s nothing derogatory or inflammatory in the statement that would hint at malignant intent. In fact, it’s a oblique reference to the Mechanical Turk; which was an invention of a fellow named Wolfgang von Kempelen in the mid-1700s. The device was billed as a box that contained an expert chess player, but which at first glance appeared to be an automaton of exceptional artificial intelligence.

The idea behind “turking” is that you can use technology to complete tasks that humans are best suited to. Amazon has taken it a step further by making it possible to access large resource pools of qualified humans via a croudsourced model.

I first ran across this idea while reading a novelette by Tobias Buckell called Stoasti-city which is part of a shared creation SF project of many up and coming writers. In the story croudsourced tasks drive the city of Detroit toward a new awakening and the effect is quite profound. Better it all seems to happen on technology and by way of networks that are already in place today. The story itself is an exciting exploration of the framework that I’m sure you’ll enjoy as much as I did.

The reality of turked out networks isn’t quite as grand in implementation today as it is in Toby’s imagination of the future. There are a lot of people trying to get you test or contribute to their projects by way of a mouse and a modem. Step one, go to this web site. Step two, say something about my thing, step three do another thing, et cetera.

What am I willing to do and for how much?

Seems like a pretty easy question to ask yourself before you start asking complete strangers to run all over town for you for what can be arguably tiny amounts of money. How much time should I expect my task to be completed it? How will I find the right person to do what I need at the right time? Other questions abound, but they are all potentially answerable. I figured I’d start to root out the associated answers but acting as the turk for a while.

Last night for instance I accepted a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) that had a considerably more restrictive time limit than was necessary to complete the task. Someone wanted 20 trivia questions, their associated answers, and three plausible answers delivered in 60 minutes all on a single theme. I tried, but the time expired when I had only 13 completed. I never got to submit the task and the requestor lost out on my contribution efforts because the assigned timeline was too restrictive. Lesson learned, give your turk at least the time it might take you to complete the task or maybe a little more.

I’ve passed over other HITs as well because what was being asked of the turk was either very time intensive, the contract did not come with a reasonable compensation, or both. For instance, there have been several article writing contracts that have popped up on in my queue which offered merely a dollar or two in compensation, but would have required an hour or two of my time. I’m not desperate so why bother? Lesson two learned, ensure you’re not too cheap when you ask for complex or time consuming tasks to be completed.

Finally, there are some tasks that appear to have been around since the dawn of time. I’ve passed over these because, frankly, they are boring. I mean like mind numbingly boring. And because there are some tasks that I can accept which are interesting or which represent the potential for a good time these are merely a speed bump on my way to turking success. Lesson three; if you need something done that you wouldn’t want to do yourself because it might turn the contents of your cranium to mush you either need to sweeten the contract with really silly amounts of money or expect that no one will ever complete your task (including you).

Today’s Turk

Today I was paid (albeit just a little) to ride my bike around town putting up posters for someone’s art project. The first thing I want to point out here is that finally someone *paid* me to ride my bike. I mean can you believe it? So what if my sponsorship was only a $1.50 minus paper and ink, I was still paid baby! Yeah! W00t! Daddy got paid to ride his bike!

Ok, just needed to get that out of my system. I apologize to those of you who make vastly larger sums of money anytime you sit astride a saddle and turn a crank. Lance Armstrong, know that if ever our bike riding incomes are compared I will lie and tell them that I made a whole pot of gold. Your bottom line is safe with me, buddy.

The reason I did what I did had nothing to do with the money. This was an experiment in the interest of science! Imagine if you will a situation you could find yourself in should you be capable of putting together a long duration tour across some vast amounts of land astride a bicycle. Maybe you’re helping to pay the bills while you’re on the road by stopping over in various places speaking on the topic of your tour (as it progresses) and presenting digital images of the places you’ve visited to modest crowds at college campuses across the country.

So it occurs to me, wouldn’t it be great if there were posters hung all over these campuses preparing the crowds for your impending visit? You could wait until you arrive there, end up looking around for a printer, and then stumble around an unfamiliar campus trying to find the best places to hang your poster to get said crowd ready for your visit. All the while waiting and camping relatively stationary for a time while the excitement builds.

Or, you could try to turk the task from the road. Days or even weeks before you arrive at your destination.

I accepted the HIT today because I wanted to see what it might actually take, how much time it might cost etc to get something like this done. Even better this is an interesting HIT because I was able to ride around on my bike, poking my head into shops, asking for permission to hang a flyer in the window, riding around campus finding all the bulletin boards, and visiting coffee shops and talking with strangers (while sampling their beans).

Future Turking Experiments

I plan on continuing to build a modest pool of resources by working as a turk when time and availability of interesting jobs allow. Once I’ve built a reasonable reserve I will reinvest the money I’ve earned (plus potential augmentation capital) back into the system to see if I can get people to do some of the following tasks:

• Complete minor or low resource tasks from anywhere
• Complete major or higher resource tasks from anywhere
• Complete minor or low resource tasks from specific locations
• Complete major or high resource tasks from specific locations
• Complete tasks on a timeline
• Use integrated services (such as PayPal) to achieve tasks that exceed the services which can be provided via the MTurk system (e.g. go to a specific location after receiving money from me to buy a thing then send it along. The money would to buy the thing and the shipping would have to be conveyed via PayPal in this instance, but compensation for the task would run through MTurk).
• Help me complete larger scale practical jokes

Perhaps not this year, but at some point in my future I intend to take this show on the road. From time to time I will know that I will need a support resource that I can reasonable count on to get things done for me in my absence. This system has the potential to meet such a role requirement, if I can figure out how best to use it.

I just got off the phone with my benighted internet service provider (I’m writing this message off-line in the hopes that my connectivity will return) and sure enough there is a “major” outage affecting approximately 50,000 subscribers in Oregon and Washington. “Oh joy” he says as he struggles to download the manual for his new phone via G3 network. When that’s done perhaps I can use it as a tethered connection until the main line is restored.

All things considered the network outage couldn’t have happened at a nicer time … if you’re a dog. They were driving me nuts today with their pay attention to me eyes and stealthy crotchings from under the desk. The sun was out and there was a nice breeze so without much of a second thought I grabbed a jacket, the leashes and we headed out.

Originally my intent was to just take them over to the Iron Horse Trail and walk them around the water tower. We arrived there and they ran around like insane canines with V8 engines supercharged with nitrous oxide. There were rooster tails of muddy clay kicked up behind as they rampaged around in circles flying between the sage. They did laps for some time, but I could see that this wasn’t really doing the trick.

“Well let’s head … east!” I proclaimed to two dogs that would be happy to go where the smells happened to be.

We walked to Kittitas and back.

For those of you who don’t know this is quite a stroll. The Iron Horse maintains the easement that was part of the original Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul-Pacific Railroad route so there is plenty of area between the hay fields on either side for the dogs to find and smell interesting things. This they did with great enthusiasm although the photo of Gigi shows that she was getting tired near the end.

I was treated to a very nice “rest day” under the blue sky (with limited clouds). My skin feels a little dry from the sunshine indeed and it’s been a while since there’s been enough UV to approximate that sensation.

In other news today two books arrived via UPS. This has additionally provided much entertainment and enlightenment in the absence of a network connection.

First up, Carfree Design Manual by J.H. Crawford. So far, so good! I’m not very far into this lexicon of design ideas yet, but, as usual, this manual is a well described and presented vision of what a functional urban future might be for us. I’m really looking forward to reading this book and already the images that are included are astounding and attractive. In particular I really like the image of Woonerf, Delft on page 128, but I’m struggling to imagine what the guy near the bike is up to at that window. Additionally, I’m very interested to see what Crawford has to say on the subject of bicycle integration within a baseline design.

Also in the box from my favorite book seller was a work of fiction which I have not had the opportunity to crack yet. World Made by Hand only recently hit the market and J.H. Kunstler is a regular blog stop for me on any given day. He also wrote the forward for J.H. Crawford’s first book Carfree Cities.

Finally, I got Scout down from storage today. Pumped up her tires and dusted off the horizontals. After that I plugged in the headlamps and headed off down the road to get some wine for dinner and a couple of supplies. First impressions, what was I thinking about with that rash notion of changing the perfect ride? I mean seriously, minus a couple of pounds of air in the rubber there was *nothing* wrong with this machine. I mounted the saddle and it still fit my butt perfectly. Maybe I could use a new pair of fenders and a chain guard, but I think I’m sticking with the gear that’s on there for a while longer.

The ride to the store (not a long one) was chilly, but there is a new moon tonight. Even with the scattered cloud cover above the Milky Way looked like silver river in the black. Saturn was so bright that it was showing ice rings all the way around it (think of what it’s like to see the moon through high altitude atmospheric ice crystals only smaller and from much further away).

Had I had any more energy I think I might have just continued to peddle right out of town.

I was really hoping to hear two things today at the National Clean Energy Project : Building the New Economy online summit:

• That the lowest hanging fruit on the energy independence tree *is* unquestionably the American home. Improving the efficiency of the American home should be a primary concern of anyone interested in achieving national energy independence. Legislation and incentives need to be offered directly back to the American citizen to accomplish this task universally.
• De-coupling and localized point-source generation need to become the second major part of this dialogue. The days of very large corporations generating very large collections of energy may not be over, but the American people need to the liberty to create human-scale power generation projects. Small is beautiful.

Both of these sentiments were voiced by President Clinton. For this I am grateful. Carbon-caps, using natural gas as a large scale transition fuel, smart-grid technology, and Wal-mart’s efficiency improvements are all nice, but they don’t have an immediate or palpable effect on me or my family.

American’s really need to reach back a little bit in time and realize that they’re part of what ever community they happen to live within. These communities are the basis for a Local Sufficiency movement that could be in the best interests of its constituent membership.

Three days in a row, that’s how many. We’re starting to experience a pattern of weather that’s not, if memory serves, unlike something they call “spring”. Blue sky, warmer temperatures, little growing things poking their little growing heads from underneath last year’s layer of dead stuff. There’s still that undeniable nip to endure when the sun hides behind the horizon, but there’s the very distinct possibility that we’re now headed toward warmer days. All together now, sigh with general relief, winter may be in its death throes.

This year I’m getting back to a saner/healthier kind of living (or at least that’s the resolve). That means many things. I’ve begun to prepare my garden beds so they’ll be ready to host the vegetables I’ll soon plant in them. The house has had an initial “spring cleaning” run-down. Projects, indoors and out, are being addressed as time and resources allow. It also means that it’s time to get Scout out of storage and back on the road again.

Some of the leather looks pretty rough and the paint job has started to show its age, but the bike remains essentially sound. I have a short list of modifications I’d like to make sooner than later:

• I almost never use the drop-outs on my handle bars. Not even when forced to ride directly into gale force, hurricane winds. For that reason I’ve been considering switching to a Nitto Albatross CrMo.
• This would necessitate a general change in the breaking leavers and shifters I currently employ. This time around I think I’m going to stick with simple systems. No more indexed shifters, back to the fraction shifters. Nice compact break leavers are being shopped for as well.
• This year new fenders are a necessity. Ok, not really. But I really want a new pair. I’ll be looking for something that will fit and, as an added benefit, look really groovy. Maybe something in a nice clear maple with a red-ish stain?
• The cantilever breaks on this old girl have seen better days. For cantilever breaks they are extremely compact which means finding replacement parts may be difficult. This may mean I get to spend a really long time sitting with steel wool and a tooth brush, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
• I’d really like to look into a better way to carry my laptop around. Maybe this will be a bag I have to buy, or maybe I can fabricate it for myself? Ideas are still in a very fluid state.
• Last but not least, I need a new lock. I lost my key to the old one when we moved to central Washington and so I’ve got a very heavy piece of steel floating around inside my seat bag that serves no immediate purpose. Chuck the old, find something new (and lighter).

Finally, while Scout is an excellent utility bicycle for getting around town and even taking short (camping) tours up into the hills it’s not really designed for hauling large loads. Once Scout is made road worthy again I’ll continue to look for and/or design a cargo bicycle for myself. Also the human powered expedition vehicle (HPEV) has not been shelved. I’m getting there only it’s taking me more time than initially anticipated. There’s always something else to take care of.

Seattle Metro Bus

One of my favorite mailing lists just got a letter which I really enjoyed. Seems that there are some regional endeavors to help people live car-free/car-light and this city-by-city approach should really help people leverage the experience of the neighbors who may have good methods for dealing with specific challenges in those areas.

Living car-free/car-light in Seattle for instance meant that I had to routinely deal with crowded bike racks whenever I needed to cross Lake Washington. Routinely there was a queue that formed in the morning at several of the west side bus stops. There were several options for bike riders who wanted to get to the east side.

• Wait in line, eventually you’ll get a bike slot
• Buy and ride a folding commuter bike and carry a copy of the Metro policy which allows you access to the inside of the bus with a folded bike
• Ride around the north end of the Lake
• Ride across the I-90 bridge
• Ride a “dead-head” or “EB” bus to the arm-pit of Redmond

All of these options worked for me at various points in time, however, it took me years of riding over the bridge, or around the bridge, to come up with that brief list of options and for me to understand how each might affect the rest of my day.

Each region, each city, has its own challenges and if you’ve just moved, for instance, welcome back to square one.

I wonder what it would take to get something like this for every major metropolitan area and its surrounding region in the US? What would happen if people started exchanging information about getting what they needed from their local and regional transit authorities as well as the tribal knowledge that’s so important to success in this kind of social endeavor? Maybe a regional, state and national scorecard on how citizens are actually becoming oil independent? Some great possibilities.

Tess just stormed into the office with a sincere scowl on her face and said “MATT!” I know I’m trouble now because there was an “!” behind my name visible in the air after she said it. “In this house there is an unwritten rule.”

I looked at her submissively and inquired, “Put down the seat?”

“No that’s one, but there’s another one. Possibly more important.”

It turns out there is an unwritten household rule to always replace a cold beer in the fridge after you’ve taken one. This makes sense, and I’d be happy to comply. There is the problem of my very limited memory. Thus I have concocted the following list of formerly unwritten household rules. Please feel free to add.

• Always replace the beer you just took from the fridge with another one so the next person will have a cold one at hand when they desire.
• Put the lid down.
• Remember the months associated with loved one’s Birthdays. Better remember the *exact date* if you can.
• “Piles of stuff” are not an organizational unit.
• Read your snail mail sometime before the paper degrades from the acids used to bleach it years ago.
• It’s the cat’s chair.
• If someone is going to take a bath clear your bladder before you must interrupt their cozy warm and wet fun.
• Never ask Dad for help choosing colors.
• There’s always room for more Ska in the collection.
• The sooner the walk is shoveled the easier it will be to shovel.
• Recreational digging is not allowed in garden beds.
• There is a calculus of dirt collection in any house, however if you spend your time measuring the rate the crap collects you’ll never get your room clean.

Within the disciplines of design and engineering it’s rare one feels the hand of fate pushing a project one way or another. Today I was working on a requirements document for the next version of my human powered vehicle (this one intended to operate under “expedition” conditions over long periods of time) when I decided I’d solicit some help from David Gordon Wilson the author of “Bicycling Science“. A couple of brief web searches brought me to his web site snooping for his contact information. It has been a while since I visited his site so I was surprised to read his “innovative policy” proposal which is a rational approach to managing consumptive habits and their associated external costs.

King Canute and rollbacks

Where the free market operates, as it does to a great extent for motor-vehicle fuel and some interstate electricity sales (where there has been substantial deregulation in many areas) prices have increased considerably, although not in general to the levels of much of the rest of the world. US legislators at every level have been calling for caps on prices. They have not heard of the early Danish-English King Canute, whose sycophantic courtiers proclaimed that he was so powerful that he could order the tides to roll back. Canute was happy to prove them wrong. US legislators have also called for the fuel consumption of vehicles to be set by regulation at extraordinarily low levels, in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics and of the law of supply and demand. They have even required that a proportion of cars sold shall be “zero emission” vehicles, but have excluded bicycles and other human-powered vehicles, which come closest to this worthy but misguided goal.

The US Administration’s policy towards addressing the problem of energy shortages is to find more sources of energy in the few remaining wild areas of the world, and to spend tax money to pay technologists to develop more-efficient vehicles, power plants, nuclear energy, and so forth. US citizens are told that they can have it all! They deserve it!

This policy is not an engineering solution to a problem. It is what engineers pejoratively term a “Mickey Mouse” approach. Engineers are trained to look at all possible solutions to problems, including the ridiculous extremes, and to pick an optimum somewhere along the spectrum.

Highly recommended reading if you have a moment and probably something you should consider forwarding to your congressional membership for consideration.