On Microwaves and Water

 

I recently saw a blog that "proves" that microwaves have a negative impact on water with an experiment performed by some school children where one plant was given microwaved water, and the other boiled water from a stove, and the plant given microwaved water died.

However, that article was so full of egregious scientific errors that I felt compelled to correct them. I will first explain why some of the author's statements are incorrect, and then I will offer more plausible explanations for the results she describes, and legitimate reasons why microwaving your food may not be healthy.

I have an undergraduate degreen in Physics, which means that I know enough about how a microwave works to see the fallacies in this article, but I am not an expert on health or biology.  Also, my intention is not to attack the author, but to educate anyone who comes across this blog.

Scientific Mistakes and Explanations

1. " Microwaves don’t work different ways on different substances." -- This is entirely wrong, by the very nature of how a microwave works. A microwave works by emitting, well, microwaves, which are tuned to a specific frequency which excites a vibrational mode in water molecules. Everything else is heated up by absorbing kinetic energy from their neighboring water particles. And besides that, different substances are affected differently by heat. 
2. "the problem with microwaved anything is ...how it corrupts the DNA in the food so the body can not recognize it" -- This actually has multiple problems with it. First of all, microwaves are very low energy, less energy than visible light. Due to the quantization of light, no matter how much microwave radiation you poor onto a strand of DNA, it will never mutate. To do that you need ionizing radiation, i.e. high-energy UV, X-Rays, or Gamma rays. And even if the DNA did change, your body wouldn't care, it just tears everything apart anyway.
3. "Microwaves agitate the molecules to move faster and faster. This movement causes friction which denatures the original make-up of the substance." -- First of all, friction doesn't really mean anything at a molecular level. At that scale the only thing that really matters is electromagnetic forces. Secondly, "agitating molecules to move faster and faster" is just another way of saying "heating something up". That happens whether you heat it up on the stove, in the oven, or over a fire. So unless the author is suggesting not cooking at all, this isn't an argument against microwaves.
4. "So the body wraps it in fat cells to protect itself from the dead food or it eliminates it fast." -- I'm not entirely sure what the antecedent of "it" is in this sentence, but as far as I know the human body does not wrap any kind of food in fat cells. It does however store some toxic chemicals in fat cells, which may have been what the author was really thinking of. I'll get to that later. Also, most food is dead. And if it isn't when you ingest it, it will be by the time your digestive system has torn it all apart.
5. "What about the nurse in Canada that warmed up blood for a transfusion patient and accidentally killed him when the blood went in dead" -- This is a red herring. Microwaving blood would certainly kill the blood cells, which should be alive during a transfusion. But boiling the blood would also kill the cells. This has no relevence to ingesting microwaved food.
6. If microwaved water is bad for plants, microwaved food is bad for us -- This is a non-sequiter. The biology of plants is very different from ours, and food is very different from water. Even if the experiment is valid, there is no reason why it implies that microwaving food is intrinsically bad for humans.
7. The author ends with a list of supposed negative effects of eating microwaved food. None of them have any explanation or citations. 

Plausible Explanations

So why did the plants given microwaved water die? Here are some reasonable explanations:

1. Bias: The experement was done by school children who had an obvious bias going into it, and the children could have easily unintenianally or otherwise allowed the microwave plant to die. There is also the possibility that the whole experiment was exaggerated or fabricated, but I hope that was not the case.
2. Unknowns: Plants are pretty complicated things, and there are a lot of things we don't know about the experiment. Was the water distilled, purefied, or tap water? What chemicals if any were present in the water? Did both plants get the same amount of sunlight, was the water the same temperature when it was given to the plants? Did the plants always get the water at the same time? Did they get the same amount of water? Was the water measured before or after it was boiled? Any of these could invalidate the experiment, and ther are probably others.
3. Temperature/Energy: Plants are better at obsorbing cooler water. As mentioned in 2, if the microwaved water was hotter when put in, that could have caused the result. It is also possible, that the microwaved water stored more energy in vibrational modes, rather than translational kinetic energy. As a result the water given to the microwaved plants would have stayed hot longer, and therefore more would have evaporated or drained to the bottom before the plant could absorve it. The additional heat may also have damed the roots of the plant. I think these possibilites are somewhat unlikely, and if they are true, have little bearing on the safety of microwave food for humans, other than that humans may not absorb as much water from microwaved food.
4. Container: This is the only explanation that is relevent to human consumption. Water will absorb the material of its container, especially when it is hot. It is probably that the stovetop water was boiled in a metal pot, and the microwave water was boiled in a plastic or ceramic container (probably plastic). Thus the stovetop plant was at least one mineral it needed from the water, while the microwave plant was getting chemicals from the plastic or ceramic, which may have been harmful. Plastic also has a low melting point, which makes it particularly susceptible to being absorbed by hot water. This doesn't mean that microwaves are unhealthy per se, but it could mean that you should be careful what you microwave your food in.

The real reasons microwaves aren't healthy

As mentioned above, cooking food in a plastic container may have negative health effect, because the water and/or food may absorb some of those nasty polymers. Maybe. I don't actually know for sure. The biggest threat of microwaves, however, isn't the microwave itself, but what you cook with it. Microwaves are generally used to cook food that isn't fresh, such as leftover or microwave dinners. These foods frequently have less nutritional value. Even leftovers often have less vitamins and  may have toxins deposited by bacteria growing in it.

I am not an expert, and if I made any mistakes, please let me know.

If you would like to read the original blog, it can be found at  http://usahitman.com/microwave-test/

Text Editors

In my years as a programmer, I have used many, many different text editors.

At first I used editors with the normal GUI interface with a lot of mouse interaction, a regular file menu, and normal key bindings. But then, I started playing with gvim and emacs. I was impressed by the power and customizability of both of these amazing editors, and really like the fact that there was no need to use the mouse at all. In the end I chose vim/gvim as my editor of choice. The learning curve was a little steep, and even steeper than for emacs. However, it has the convenience of not constantly having to press the ctrl key. (I have recently remapped my caps-lock as a ctrl key, which alleviates that somewhat, but I didn't know that was possible at the time). I also worked as a software developer for a year on a team that primarily used gvim, and so I got used to using vim there. I wouldn't say that vim is intrinsically better than emacs, but it is what I am used to now, and I really like it.

HTML By Hand

So, here is the HTML I wrote by hand for the Webcraft school. I have worked with html before, so It only took me one try.

Badges and Webcraft

So, Mozilla (and probably others) are making this new "Badges" system, where you can demonstrate your skills by earning online badges. The idea is that a college degree doesn't give employer's an accurate specific idea of what you do and do not know. The same degree from different universities may include entirely different sets of skills, and knowledge sets. Badges provide way to demonstrate more granular knowledge.

This badges system is very exciting to me, because over the years I have taught myself a lot informally. However demonstrating these skills to employers and/or universities/grad schools, is a challenge.

And so, while these badges are new and in development I am going to try and earn some, both to show off the skills I have already acquired, maybe pick up some new skills, and hopefully help progress this new method of education.

This post is actually part of Web 101 on the P2PU Webcraft school. I am already fairly proficient with HTML, but I have no formal training, and this give me an opportunity to get some form of exterior validation, and possibly pick up something new.

A simple FFT

So, following my PDE's class, I decided to try my hand at writing an FFT algorithm. I ended up doing it in both c and Fortran. Surprisingly, I found it easier to write in Fortran (accounting for the fact that I am more familiar with c, and had to look up the syntax for just about everything in fortran). So, without further ado, here is my code:

FORTRAN:

 module FFT  
   implicit none  
   save  
   public  
   REAL, parameter :: PI = 4*atan(1.0)  
   contains  
   recursive function fft1(f) result(r)  
     !assumes that f is of length n where n is a power of 2  
     !output is zero indexed  
     COMPLEX, intent(in) :: f(:)   
     integer :: N, first, last, k   
     COMPLEX :: r(0:size(f)-1)  
     COMPLEX, dimension(0:size(f)/2-1) :: even, odd  
     N = size(f)  
     first = lbound(f,1)  
     last=ubound(f,1)  
     if( N == 1) then  
       r = f  
       return  
     end if  
     even = fft1(f(first:last-1:2))  
     odd = fft1(f(first+1:last:2))  
     do k=0,N/2-1  
      odd(k) = exp((0,-2)*PI*k/N)*odd(k)  
     end do  
     r(0:N/2-1) = even+odd  
     r(N/2:N-1) = even-odd  
   end function  
   recursive function ifft1(f) result(r)  
     !assumes that f is of length n where n is a power of 2  
     !output is zero indexed  
     COMPLEX, intent(in) :: f(:)   
     integer :: N, first, last, k   
     COMPLEX :: r(0:size(f)-1)  
     COMPLEX, dimension(0:size(f)/2-1) :: even, odd  
     N = size(f)  
     first = lbound(f,1)  
     last=ubound(f,1)  
     if( N == 1) then  
       r = f  
       return  
     end if  
     even = ifft1(f(first:last-1:2))  
     odd = ifft1(f(first+1:last:2))  
     do k=0,N/2-1  
       odd(k) = exp((0,2)*PI*k/N)*odd(k)  
     end do  
     r(0:N/2-1) = even+odd  
     r(N/2:N-1) = even-odd  
     r=r/2  
   end function  
 end module  

C:

 #include <complex.h>  
 #include <math.h>  
 #include <stdlib.h>  
 #include "fft.h"  
 double complex* _fft1( double complex*, size_t, unsigned int);  
 double complex* _ifft1(double complex*, size_t, unsigned int);  
 /** use the Cooley-Tukey method to take the fast fourier transform of an  
  * Array of lenth 2^n   
  *  
  * input and output are both complex arrays of length N, which must be a  
  * power of 2. Returns 0 if succusfull, nonzero if failed.  
  **/  
 double complex* fft1( double complex *input, size_t N) {  
   return _fft1(input,N,1);  
 }  
 double complex* _fft1( double complex *data, size_t N, unsigned int step) {  
   double complex *result;  
   double complex *even;  
   double complex *odd;  
   size_t k;  
   if ( (N > 2) && ( N % 2 != 0 )) return NULL;  
   result = (double complex*) malloc( sizeof(double complex) * N);  
   if ( N ==1 ) {  
     result[0]=data[0];  
     return result;  
   }  
   even = _fft1(data, N/2, 2*step);  
   odd = _fft1(data+step, N/2, 2*step);  
   //multiply the odds by the twiddle factor e^(-i*2*pi*k/N)  
   for( k=0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     odd[k] = cexp(-2.0*I*M_PI*k/N)*odd[k];  
   }  
   //generate result  
   for( k =0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     result[k] = even[k] + odd[k]; //first N/2 results  
     result[k+N/2] = even[k]-odd[k]; // last N/2 results  
   }  
   free(even);  
   free(odd);  
   return result;  
 }  
 double complex* ifft1( double complex* data, size_t N) {  
   return _ifft1(data, N, 1);  
 }  
 double complex* _ifft1( double complex *data, size_t N, unsigned int step) {  
   double complex *result;  
   double complex *even;  
   double complex *odd;  
   size_t k;  
   if ( N % 2 != 0 ) return NULL;  
   result = (double complex*) malloc( sizeof(double complex) * N);  
   if ( N ==1 ) {  
     result[0]==data[0];  
     return result;  
   }  
   even = _ifft1(data, N/2, 2*step);  
   odd = _ifft1(data+1, N/2, 2*step);  
   //multiply the odds by the twiddle factor e^(i*2*pi*k/N)  
   for( k=0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     odd[k] = cexp(I*2*M_PI*k/N)*odd[k];  
   }  
   //generate result  
   for( k =0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     result[k] = (even[k] + odd[k])/2; //first N/2 results  
     result[k+N/2] = (even[k]-odd[k])/2; // last N/2 results  
   }  
   free(even);  
   free(odd);  
   return result;  
 }  

What is a miracle

The first definition of miracle on Dictionary.com is "an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause." I don't really like this definition, and this post will explain why.

First of all, what does it mean for something to be caused by a supernatural cause? It would be something that does not obey the laws of the universe, correct? But the universe, and its laws were created by God. And why would God ever have need to break his own laws? God certainly influences things in the universe, and performs miracles on scales from affecting the entire universe to a single individual. But I have no reason to believe that he does so outside of the laws of the universe that he established at his creation. As an Example look at Moses parting the Red Sea. It is entirely conceivable that some natural phenomenon caused the water to stop flowing at some point, and then start again. But why should that preclude the involvement of God. It would be a remarkable coincidence for the phenomenon to occur at precisely the right time for the Israelites to cross on dry land. If it is the case, as I speculate that it is, that God performed the miracle by utilizing natural forces, then Moses' miracle was the result of a natural cause, but it was also a miracle of God.

Now let me talk about my own life. There have been a vast many occurances in my life that are entirerly explainable by human and/or natural forces, which nonetheless I would consider miracles. Often they take the form of something like me, or someone else, being in the right place at the right time, or someone saying something I really needed to hear, or a pathway opening to me that had previously been shut. I believe that these sorts of things happen to everyone. Some may say that they are just coincidences or random occurances. But the frequency with which they have occured in my life is too statistically significant to reasonably accept that as an explanation. I see the work of God in my life, and the lives of others, even when they do not see it. That is what I call a miracle.

You can do incredible things with science and technology. Today's technology would look like magic to the ancients. And our current understanding of the laws of the universe is limited at best. Just look at quantum mechanics. We can make remarkable predictions in that realm, but we have only half-baked philosophical musings about what is really going on. There are many things in this world that cannot be explained by the science we currently have, but they are not considered miracles by most, because eventually when our knowledge progresses we can explain them as natural phenomina. And there is nothing wrong with that. But just because something is natural doesn't mean it doesn't come from God.

One of God's greatest miracles is the miracle of creation. It is a miracle that we can see just by looking around us, and on deeper study the miracle only becomes more profound. If the physical constants that show up in our laws of physics differed by even a small amount, the universe would be the way it is, there might have been no stars, no matter, and certaiinly no life as we know it. And there is a beuaty and symmetry in the way the world works, down from the most complex organisms on Earth (i.e. humans) to the most basic laws of physics.

In order to miss the works of God in the Universe you must actively be trying not to see them.

Thoughts on Unity

This is just a short post. I have finally had a chance to try out Ubuntu's Unity Desktop. In short, it appears to be an attempt to mimac macs. There is a dock along the side which functions pretty well with basic drag and drop functionality. Although I would like a little bit more customizability, such as controlling when it is visible and maybe put special applets on it. Also, the if a program is maximized its menu bar combines with the task-bar. Which is kind of cool, but is inconstant with non-maximized windows, and isn't obvious since the menus are hidden unless the mouse is hovering over them.

As for the Ubuntu symbol in the left top corner, clickin on it gives you something akin to Kickoff in KDE4, where you have an entry box where you can type the name of an application or folder and it will show results which you can select to run. It also lists favorites, and shortcuts to menus for other apps. The downside is that if browsing through you applications is a bit tedious with the mouse, however it gives you hints about uninstalled programs you might like, which I think is pretty cool.

Overall, I am pretty impresssed by Unity, but I still like KDE 4 better. And Enlightenment for when I want something a little simpler.

Apple, iTunes, and DRM

First of all, as a Linux user, I am rather annoyed by the fact that you need to use iTunes in order to purchase anything from the iTunes store. Then again, it doesn't matter all that much, since DRM makes it impossible to play anyways.

DRM for those of you that don't know is "Digital Rights Management," or as some more correctly call it "Digitla Restrictions Management." It is the use of technology to restrict the ways that users can use copyrighted material, and is supposedly intended to combat Piracy, though in reality I think the restrictions it places on users, only makes piracy more popular and illegally downloaded materials more attractive than legal downloads. http://www.slate.com/id/2298871/pagenum/all/gives a very good discussion of the issue.

Anyway, my family recently purchased the Third Season of Merlin (from BBC) in my absense via iTunes without fully understanding the limitations of DRM. Then we discovered just how crippling DRM is. First of all, we can't burn the videos onto a DVD that is playable by our DVD player, which would make it impossible for most people to watch the movies on their TVs. Fortunately we have a (older) computer hooked up to our TV, but that only partly solved the problem. The videos are in the .m4v format, and are encrypted which means that the only program that can play it is iTunes. This would be a little annoying in and of itself (I would prefer to play it with VLC), but it is even worse becuas playing movies (at least these TV episodes) is very glitchy on iTunes, with frames constantly freezing, the audio misaligning with the video, and worst of all, about once every 10 minutes iTunes crashes, and it takes about 5 minutes to stop the not responding iTunes program and start it again. To be fair, I was playing off of a data DVD which might possibly be damagged, and iTunes was unable to copy the files to the hard drive, (another failing for iTunes).

Ok, so I looked around and tried to figure out if there was a way to remove the DRM from the files so I could actually watch the content we purchased. And there was, unfortunately it involved playing the content, and recording it. Well, if iTunes crashes whenever I try to play it I can't really record it again, can I?

So, Apple is not going to get any business from me anytime soon, and never if they don't start offering products that are more interoperable with products provided by companies other than Apple. And I am going to avoid DRM as much as possible, which might mean that I will be sticking to DVDs and hard copies until the Movie Industry realizes that DRM is restricting their profits and making consumers unhappy. The music industry figured that out eventually, I just hope that the movie industyr figures it out faster. And I would really like Congress to repeal the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is in contradiction with the Fair Use Act anyway.

By the way, if anyone knows of a way to legally obtain movies that are playable on Linux besides ripping DVDs, or to remove the DRM of iTunes movies, please let me know.

Installing Peppermint OS without a CD

In this post, I will describe how I installed Peppermint Linux onto my harddrive without burning a CD and the issues I ran into.  First I should warn you that this method is not for the light-hearted. It involves manually editing GRUB configurations, chrooting, loop mounting, etc.

The first step is to prepare the partition.  In my case I formated an existing partition as ext4 using the mkfs command. I won't go into the details of how to do this, because I assume that you either already know how to do it, or are intelligent enough to find a howto somewhere else. 

The next step is to get the installation ISO of the desired distro and make the filesystem accessible. In my case I just downloaded the 64-bit ISO from the Peppermint OS website.  Then I mounted the ISO image using a command of the form "mount -o loop path/to/isofile.iso /mnt/mountpoint" which needs to be run as root. While you are at it you also need to make sure that the partition you want to install to is mounted (from now on I will refer to that mount point as /mnt/new).  Finally, you will also need to find the squashfs filesystem on the ISO, I believe for PeppermintOS it was in the Casper folder, but it could vary from distro to distro. You will either need to extract it or mount it.  I mounted it because I didn't have the squashfs tools installed, but you could probably extract it directly into the desired partition. In my case I mounted the squashfs with the command "mount -o loop -t squashfs filesystem.squashfs /mnt/squash." Then once I had it mounted I copied the entire contents into the new partitions with "cp -R ./* /mnt/new". 

I had a slight problem in that the squashfs only appeared to have a broken symlink instead of a kernel, so make sure that you have a kernel (vmlinuz26) and an initram disk (prabably initrd.img or something like that). It may be in the root directory or in the boot directory depending on the distro.

Now you need to modify grub so you can actually log into your new OS.  In my case (I am using grub 2) I added a new menu item with the following lines:

set root="(hd0,5)"
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img

The last part is the trickiest, and most likely to change from OS to OS.  I was unable to log in because there wasn't any account created, so I went back to my original OS and chrooted into the partitions (note you will need to mount with the exec option). Then I created a new user account, and granted it sudo priveledges. While in the chroot I also ran dpkg-reconfigure on several packages, such as the locale packages, and edited /etc/fstab and a couple other /etc files to behave properly, and for some reason I also needed to give the /tmp folder world writeable access (don't know why it didn't have it before). Unfortunately I am still having some kind of trouble with dbus, and I am not sure what is causing it.  I've tried reinstalling it, recnfiguring it, etc.  But since my Arch Linux works fine, and this was more of an experiment than anything else, I haven't worried too much about it. 

So, installing Linux this way is a lot of effort, but if, like me, you like to do things the hard way and are too cheap to buy a CD :), or if you don't have a CD drive on the computer you want to put it on, this is definetely an option.

On the Art of Science

Today, I will write about a somewhat common misconception about science. And it is centered around the phrase "It's an art, not a science." When someone says that, what they generally mean is something more along the lines of "It is a non-algorithmical process." Or equivelently, "It is something that can't be done by a computer." But I think that that phrase is damaging to the public perception of science. In fact we could use that phrase to describe every field of scienc that I am aware of, becuase they all require a significant amount of creative, imaginative, and distinctly non-algorithmical thinking. And these days, many of the parts of science that are simply precisely following a set procedure are done by computers, or are otherwise largely mechanized.

That isn't to say that collecting and cataloging data using precise repeatable procedures isn't an important of science, but saying that that is all of science is like saying that the mechanics of applying paint onto canvas is all of art. But there is some much more to science. For one thing interpretting the results require a great deal of creativity. If the universe worked the way we expected it to there would be no place for science. Science progresses only because of people that are able to think outside the box and come up with plausable explanations for data that doesn't fit the currently accepted models. For another, scientists most come up with increasingly more inventive ways of collecting data. The experimental methods of the 1600's are entirely inadequate for exploring the internal structure of atoms, much less finding the Higgs boson, or analyzing gamma ray bursts (forgive me if my examples are a little, well a lot, biased toward physics and astronomy, that is what I know best). Science is not, simply applying the rules of the universe to certain problems, although that is the way it is often taught in primary and secandary school. Rather it is trying to discover what those laws are, and there aren't any preset rules on how to do that.

On Operating System

As an avid Linux user, I have seen a lot of debate about the pros and cons of various operating systems (henceforth referred to as OSs). And my current opinion is that there is no best OS for everyone. For me Linux is the best operating system, specifically, Arch Linux, with its extreme customizability, is the best OS for me. But not everyone loves taking things apart and putting them back together the way I do. And probably the majority of computer users don't want to spend multiple hours at a command prompt just so that they can have a system that is customized to their specific needs and wants. And so I will not religiously recommend GNU/Linux to anyone and everyone I meet. And although I personally hate using Mac OS X, I can understand why so many people love it. To put it simply: Macs make easy things easier and hard things harder, while Linux makes easy things harder and hard things easier.

Now, technology is pushed by competition, and so, much as I love Linux, I do not want it to dominate the operating system market. I want there to be competition and I don't care whether it is proprietary or open-source. But for this same reason I have a very big problem with Microsoft Windows. The problem is that they hold way too much of the market, and thereby stifle a good deal of competition. Furthermore, Windows isn't that great of an OS. I have used Windows for many years (including Windows 7), and I have used Linux for a couple of years, and I have used Macs from time to time. Of the three I like Windows the least. Here is a list of the advantages that Windows has, if anyone has something to add to it please post a comment:

1. It comes preinstalled on cheap hardware (admit it Apple hardware is more expensive).
2. It's what most people are used to. If you use it at work or at school, why not use it at home as well?
3. There are a lot of good programs that are only available on Windows. Especially games, and professional software.
4. Hardware drivers are sometimes only available for Windows
5. Compatibility with the rest of the Windows using world

The thing about this list, is that everything on it is a result of Microsoft's near monopoly, not the quality of the product itself. I'm not saying that Windows is a terrible operating system, because it isn't. But it isn't great either. In my opinion it is mediocre, and it relies far too heavily on market power. If computer distributors distributed desktops and laptops preloaded with Ubuntu, and schools and businesses used Ubuntu on all of their computers, then the above list would apply to Ubuntu.

For the betterment of technology through greater competition, I want a more even playing field. The OEM deals that put Windows on just about every consumer computer should be outlawed as monopolistic behavior. Consumers should have the opportunity to choose the Operating System of their choice when purchasing a computer, without having to uninstall an unwanted operating system and installing a new one. The government, and ideally businesses and organizations as well, should support open standards such as ODF, which are OS independent. And perhaps most importantly, schools should have computers running every major OS available to students, so that they can try each one, and find which one works best for them. I understand that some schools may not be able to afford this luxury, but then why are they paying for Windows licenses when Linux is free?

I would like to end this post by saying that although I support Open Source Software, I am not strictly opposed to proprietary software. I am, however, opposed to monopoly. I am perfectly okay with other people using Windows, and OS X. What bothers me is that I have to pay for an operating system I do not want in order to get the hardware I do want, and that when I go to a library or any public (or even private) computer lab, I have to use an operating system I don't really care to use.

Office in the Clouds

I recently heard that Oracle, recent acquirer of Sun Microsystems, and current owner of OpenOffice.org has released a product called "Oracle Cloud Office" in parallel with their latest version of Oracle Office (essentially the paid-for version of Open Office). The thing that interests me is that the Desktop version of the office suite could be integrated with the cloud version. However, I intend to migrate from OpenOffice.org to Libre Office in the near future. And I started thinking, that a really nice feature for Libre Office would be the ability to integrate with Google Docs. After all, many people already have Google accounts, and can easily access Google Docs. Or better yet, Libre Office could simply provide an infrastructure which would developers to create plug-ins that provide interoperability with any cloud office suite.

For simplicity's sake let's just look at Libre Office working with Google Docs. With this set-up multiple Libre Office users could collaborate on a document, using the full editing power of Libre Office, while taking advantage of the collaborative power of Google Docs. And if a collaborator doesn't wish to use Libre Office they can still edit the document using Google Docs. Or conversely, someone who doesn't want to use the Google Docs interface could edit a document using Libre Office.

Personally, I believe that while Cloud Computing is useful and interesting, it will never entirely replace traditional desktop computing, at least not for me. At the moment at least web applications are not as feature rich, or as fast as desktop applications. And with Cloud computing, an internet connection is absolutely necessary. When an internet connection is unavailable, or prohibitively slow, Cloud Computing simply can't compete with desktop computing. So the optimum solution is to have desktop applications which will work with or without an internet connection, and can interact with Cloud Computing services when an internet connection is available.

The future of film

My family recently tried the free month-long trial of Netflix. While it is kind of a cool service, I was rather disappointed in the "watch instantly" feature. Many of the movies that we were interested in were only available on DVD. I have been unable to find a pattern in what movies are available for online streaming and which aren't. Movies that aren't available include both old black and white movies and recent releases, popular movies and not-so popular movies. And while I can understand that obtaining licenses to stream popular films is expensive. Consumers would undoubtedly be willing to pay more for the service.

On another note, Disney has said that starting in 2011 they will no produce their movies on Blu-Ray only. DVD's have been protected by DRM for quite some time, which produces a legal roadblock to storing your movies on a hard-drive or flash drive (including iPods and other media players). However, the technical matter of overcoming the DRM was (well still is) incredibly easy (I won't go into the details, because they are easy enough to find, and I could get into legal trouble by "distributing" a means of circumnavigating DRM). Blu-Ray discs on the other hand have stronger DRM, and it is difficult to rip a Blu-Ray disc, in fact it is difficult simply to play a Blu-Ray disc with a computer (or so I have heard).

Now, my operating system of choice is Linux, which creates even more problems for me. I'm the first to admit that Linux is not for everyone, but it allows me to have much finer control over my computer than the two more popular OS's, and some of my favourite apps are only available for Linux. However, when it comes to playing movies, Linux does not prevail. In order to play most DVD's you need to install a library which is illegal to distribute in binary form in the United States, which means you either break the law, compile the program yourself, or don't watch DVD's on your computer. With Blu-Rays it's worse. At the moment the only way to watch Blu-Ray's is to first rip the disc, and then play it. Which is rather inconvenient if you just want to pop in a DVD and watch it once. And then there is the annoying fact that Netflix specifically blocks Linux from streaming from their service. Talk about discrimination.

So, what is my point? My point is that the film industry should be more concerned about the internet than about the next generation of digital discs. Our technology is becoming increasingly reliant on the internet, and increasingly more mobile. Blu-Ray's are nice, but I don't see them surviving long as the primary format for films. Rather I expect that soon, when we watch a movie it will be streamed from the internet. Look at the popularity of services like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix Watch Instantly. I foresee that companies that provide similar services, if they provide quality products, will slowly replace physical media. But what such companies should remember, is that for it to be successful the streaming needs to be available to all platforms. Yes Linux is used by a small minority, but that is still thousands of potentially paying customers, and Android is based on Linux. All these millions of Android users will certainly want to stream movies on their phones. In today's technology world, physical media is becoming less and less relevant. Software is now downloaded and installed from the internet rather than installed from multiple CD-ROMs, music is played on portable media players and on hard drives, and is often streamed from the internet as well. In fact Google has recently released its Chrome OS with the intent that everything will be stored in "the cloud," meaning that all the user's data is stored on the internet, rather than tied to a single computer. I'm still waiting for the film industry to realize the importance of the internet though. You might object, Blu-Rays will still have a place in Blu-Ray players connected to TV's. However, I disagree, many Blu-Ray players are actually able to connect to the internet, and in fact a small, special purpose computer designed for streaming from the internet to the TV can actually be cheaper than a Blu-Ray player. And besides, if like me, you happen to have an old computer that you no longer need, you can convert it into a streaming device for your TV.

The internet is also already starting to change the movie industry in another way. That is, by allowing amateurs and hobbyists to cheaply produce and distribute their own creations. At the moment most amateur created content was created independently, and is generally low quality and short. However, it is possible that hobbyists from around the world could collaborate over the internet and produce full length films, that could then be distributed, either for free or for a price, over the internet.

I don't pretend to know the future, but I would be very surprised if the internet did not play an important role in the future of film.