Most years here in the US there’s a public squirming about how to manage both the culturally inclusive nature of the US, and the peculiarly American notion of Christmas. Instead of the (to some) culturally offensive reference to Jesus Christ, variations like “Happy X-mas” and “Season’s Greetings” are introduced. Worst of all is when there’s pretense of inclusiveness by adding things like Hanukkah and Kwanzaa to the mix – but more on this later.

Certainly, mid-winter celebrations are an old notion. Celebrating Winter Solstice predates (by thousands of years) all major current organized religions. The Newgrange Megalithic structure, to give one example, is about 5200 years old (this year some 25,000 people participated in the lottery for one of the 50 tickets to participate). And the reason is obvious: in a society intimately dependent on the whims of nature, the steadily shortening days of sunlight is frightening, and the turning point, with the shortest day and longest night, is a time to celebrate: to say goodbye to the old, and to welcome the new. (And in the case of frigid cultures, to mark a suitable time for winter slaughter.)

Winter Solstice is easily predictable. When it occurs in the calender depends on the calendar. The Julian calendar from 45 BC defined Winter Solstice as occurring on December 25th, a date that in the fourth century the new Christian church under Pope Julius (the first) decided should be the birth day of Jesus Christ, thus coincidentally replacing the Roman celebration of Saturnalia, which in turn dated back to ancient celebrations of the Sun God.

The popular notions that are widespread around Christmas today are largely popularized by the US in modern times. By now most people have heard that our image of Santa Claus was invented by Coca Cola – or specifically, by the (ethnically Swedish) artist Haddon Sundblom in 1931. It was part of Coke’s business challenge to recast the soft drink away from being seasonal, an effort that began around 1922 with the slogan “Thirst Knows No Season”. St. Nick was the icon of winter, so having him drink Coke was brilliant marketing, addressing the business challenge head on. Sundblom took inspiration from Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (also known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”) and the color red from earlier renditions (and supposedly only coincidentally the same color as Coke’s logo).

The Christmas tree as we know it today came through the British royal household. Introduced in the early 19th century by George III’s Hanoverian Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Victoria grew up with the specific tradition of presents around the tree. After her marriage with her cousin Prince Albert reinforced the tradition, the custom gained popularity in Great Britain, and notably was reproduced by Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book for their Christmas issue in 1850. Like Coke, this was no small commercial matter: Louis Godey was the first to copyright every issue of his magazine starting in 1845, and it was the most popular journal publication of it’s day (as a percentage of GDP, I estimated that the magazine in 1850 was similarly sized to the New York Times today).

By 1870, the tradition had become ingrained to the point that Congress declared it a federal holiday (together with Independence Day, New Year’s, and Thanksgiving, though at the time it only applied to federal employees in the District of Columbia, about 10% at the time).

Not coincidentally, just a few years after Queen Victoria’s marriage, in 1843 Charles Dickens published “A Christmas Carol.” A best seller of it’s time, Dickens aimed to “raise the Ghost of an Idea” (his words) of re-casting old traditions of 12-day Yule celebrations, a luxury the common folk could hardly entertain (and that was a factor in the mid-seventeenth century Cromwellian Revolt that abolished the celebration of Christmas as well as the monarchy), and to instead have one day of lavish family celebration.

These secular traditions were all controversial in their time. Christianity as an organized religion resisted them, but as so often, eventually adopted an “embrace and extend” approach (e.g. nativity scenes under the evergreen). You’ll still find religious controversy to this day.

Some brief comments about the misguided inclusiveness notions of Kwanzaa and Hanukkah: Kwanzaa was deliberately invented and promulgated in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, professor and chairman of Black Studies at California State University, as an amalgam of “African” traditions (real and imagined). It’s particularly bizarre since many words in the Kwanzaa tradition (including the word “Kwanzaa”) are from Swahili. Now, Swahili is more of an African-Arab creation. In fact, the word “Swahili” derives from the Arab word “coast”, and was the (Arab) reference to the people “of the coast”, e.g. Eastern Africa. Hardly a genuine old tradition.

Hanukkah (where the leading ‘H’ is the ‘het sound, a sound that doesn’t exist in English but English speakers will be familiar with the similar ‘ch’ sound in the Gaelic word ‘loch’) is almost as artificial as Kwanzaa. Tradition says that Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of the Menorah (a seven-branched candelabra) that the Maccabees found after their victory over Syrian forces in the 2nd century BCE. But the prominence of the celebration did not develop until the late 19th century in eastern europe as a part of the Zionist movement – and the development of a heroic tradition that grew into the creation of the State of Israel. It was more a political and cultural expression of identity than a religious celebration.

What bothers me with the religious aspects of the holidays is indeed the lack of inclusion. Various religions will independently assert “embrace and extend” around what appear to have been generic, communal celebrations of the season. And grouping a set of non-inclusive approaches into a sentence does not make it inclusive. All you get is a set of separate groups of people.

To be inclusive is to emphasize the underlying theme of this time of year: I’d like to suggest the term used by my Nordic ancestors, and which still lives on, somewhat obscurely, in English: Yule. Though the etymology is in some dispute, I believe (probably for sentimental reasons) the version that the word derives from the old Nordic word “Hjól” which means “wheel”. The reference is to the completion of the year – the turn of the seasons has made a full revolution. Yule itself was a Germanic pagan celebration that dates to well over 1000 years ago. I’ll gloss over the fact that Yule was probably the full moon closest to the Winter Solstice, and not the solstice per se, though this does make 2010 an auspicious year to reset traditions: there’s only been one previous time since Year One (1) when a total lunar eclipse coincided with winter solstice, and that was 1638 (the next one is 2094).

While I’m at it, I will also further suggest that we merge Christmas and New Years into a week-long celebration of life, and change our Gregorian Calendar so that all months have 30 days, the remaining 5 or 6 days (depending on the year) being “Yule” or “Yuletide”. The tree is the Yuletree. This is something all people of the world can celebrate, together (The Southern Hemisphere is reversed, of course, but 90% of humans live on the Northern Hemisphere.) Regardless of religious outlook, we can all celebrate life and family.

So, to all of you: Have a very Happy Yule!

But now my main work horse is the new i7-based MacBook Pros – so again (10 years later) I am now working with 64-bit Unix on a proper file system with multiple processors. So today I pointed my laptop at this old set of files. Mac OS X had no problems at all, and Spotlight reindexed everything in a matter of minutes.

One of the fun things I found was a PowerPoint that I made in 1997. It’s from a presentation I was invited to hold at Svenska Dagbladet in February of that year. SvD was at the time one of Sweden’s two large national newspapers. There was a debate within SvD about how significant the Internet would be for print media. I was somewhat established in the space at the time, having written a number of articles in 1995 and 1996 and held a few invited talks on the overarching topic of the significance of the Internet. I had personal web pages from April 1993, and had one of the first (if not the first) columns in mainstream print media that was connected to a web page where readers could post comments (first such column was in October 1995).

Tomorrow I will be attending IJ-7 at Stanford, so I was curious as to how well my old observations on the impact on Media would pan out.

See for yourself!

It’s seriously slanting towards dated news, but we rolled out the press release today that I have joined Finnish startup Conformiq as VP of Marketing. The official link to the announcement is here.

Conformiq has productized technology in the Model Based Testing (MBT) space, and calls their (our) approach “Conformiq Automated Test Design”. It’s basically generating functional and system unit tests from a formal model of the system under test. Very cool stuff. At the core, there are some very neat algorithms for “inverting” a system model to figure out what the best tests are. Then it’s a small matter of convincing large engineering organizations to adjust their software development process to leverage a new approach…

Sound familiar?

Well, it’s official now: Wind River acquires Virtutech, the company I founded in 1998 together with a brilliant team of four co-researchers from SICS – Bengt Werner, Andreas Moestedt, Magnus Christensson, and Fredrik Larsson.

Simics will live on, but that wraps up Virtutech, and thus the end of an almost 19 year long project. So, for the history books, some retrospective …

In the summer of 1991, I was hired by Andrzej Ciepielewski and Torbjörn Granlund to do my Master’s thesis at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to finish my CS degree at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). There was no office for me, so I got to borrow Seif Haridi’s room and computer. The task was to write a simulator to support the computer architecture and operating system research related to the Data Diffusion Machine (DDM) project, a project that would shortly thereafter be managed by Erik Hagersten. My reference point was a simulator written by Robert Bedichek at the University of Washington. I was given a user account (psm) and a tar file.

The project was supposed to take about six weeks.

Those six weeks grew. By around 1993, I had realized out that a simulation platform that could run unmodified commercial operating system code was doable, despite the fact that this had never been accomplished in an academic project (which we eventually did in 1997). I became convinced (and still am) that this is by far the best way forward to improve software development environments, since, once inside a deterministic simulator, you can do some seriously cool stuff. The technical vision took a little longer than six weeks, though – it took another twelve years; with the launch of Simics 3.0 and the Hindsight technology in 2005 (see the whitepaper), all the core elements that I scoped out on a whiteboard around 93/94 were in place.

In 1998, we founded Virtutech to continue developing that simulator, eventually named “Simics” (short for “the SICS Simulator”)

Simics has continued a steady market success in the years afterwards, and it is the future: sooner or later, all software development, testing, and debugging will be done in a fully reversible virtual machine. That future will unfold from Wind River and Intel; it’s hard to imagine a better home for the technology.

Virtutech was the first spin-off from SICS, and Simics went on to become the dominating third-party full system simulation system, with a stellar cast of customers over the years including Sun Microsystems, Ericsson, AMD, HP, IBM, Cisco, Freescale, and Honeywell. The commercial success gave the resources to bring the technical vision to fruition. A very long list of wonderful customers and colleagues made Virtutech an amazing experience. You know how books sometimes include acknowledgment of people “too numerous to mention”? I always thought that was rude. But now I understand. For a vision like Simics to become reality, a lot of great people put in a lot of effort. Thank you, all of you. You know who you are!

This acquisition ends my 19-year-long relationship with Simics. A fitting time period. It’s taken as long from conception to “leaving the home” as a human being. Basically, Simics has grown up, and is now going to college.

Now, I haven’t found any really good sources. And Wikipedia, of course, is not a soap box nor a place for original research. But my blog is my personal soapbox. So I can write whatever I want here.

So here’s the thing: below is my theory of how the mile ended up with 5280 feet. If you have a better one, please point me to it.

First, the conventional version (replicated in various vaguely crowdsourced locations): the mile was originally 5000 feet. It was changed to 5280 feet in Elizabethan times around 1600 (some point to 1592 or 1593) to accommodate the furlong, which was 660 feet. It was easier to fix the mile rather than the furlong for legal reasons, hence, eight furlongs and 5280 feet in a mile. That’s the version you’ll find online, in encyclopedias, etc. It’ll be fleshed out with bells and whistles, including odd theories about horses, but that’s it. Go ahead, look it up.

The problem with these versions is that they don’t explain why this collision between furlong and mile occurred around 1600, and not centuries before. It implies that people suddenly woke up and realized, hey, wait a second, if there’s 660 feet in a furlong … and eight furlongs in a mile … but 5000 feet in a mile …. wait a second !?!

It implies that four-digit multiplication was invented ca 1600. Like a lot of rear-view-mirror takes on history, the “explanation” boils down to: “before time X people were stupid about topic Y, and at time Z they wizened up.”

I have yet to find a proper and complete write-up of the origins. But I’ve pieced together my own theory over the years. And it’s a fun one because the answer (or rather, hypothesis) is simply this: the number 5280 arises out of a collision between organized religion, the military, and taxation. Three powerful historical forces, to be sure, so the fourth pillar to modern society (rationality) obviously had to be the one to compromise!

But wait, there’s more: naked Greeks are involved, and Jesus, and Vikings. In that order.

Our story starts with the “original” mile, the Roman one. The Romans were both practical and militant. Their mile was 1000 paces – a pace being a double step (left foot, right foot) by a soldier in full battle gear. That was a “passus”, and a mile was a “milia passuum”, hence the word “mile”. We still remember this information in our convention of relating pedometers to miles with the relation of 2000 steps to a mile, a trick also used by hikers etc. But we have forgotten that it’s not a “trick”, it’s the whole point. Historically, thus, a mile is defined as 2000 steps.

Furthermore, the Romans had another convention, which was to place stones next to their roads to mark the distance from Rome. Called “milliarium”, these stone obelisks were first erected along the Via Appia, where milestones dating as far back as the second century BC still survive. (The central stone in Rome, from which the “all roads lead to Rome” phrase derives, wasn’t erected until some two centuries later in 20 BC, but is since lost.) Naturally, quite a large number of these stones survived along roads throughout Europe, providing a natural reference point, explaining why their particular measure of a “foot” survives with high accuracy.

It’s worth injecting that the popular notion that Roman roads all had measures of the distance from Rome is a myth: only central Italy and a few exceptions were marked from central Rome, all other roads were measured from the nearest local significant center. The US’ attempt to replicate this myth with the Zero Mile marker in Washington, DC, in 1792 would have a similar destiny, influencing only measurements nearby.

We know very little of the details of how the Roman army used the mile as a practical tool; not a single significant military treatise has survived from Roman times. The one treatise that has survived, the Epitoma rei militaris is not considered authoritative, and the claims (that the army marched 20 miles in 5 summer hours at regular pace and 24 miles at double pace) cannot be checked against any contemporary sources, and seem (very) high.

You can measure yourself to realize that the miles per hour measure is practical for a human: casual walking is 2 mph, easy walk is 3, swift walking is 4. The available number of hours in a day is similarly small, thus making the mental arithmetic simple.

Hence, 5000 feet to the mile, a general measure that survived throughout Europe as roadside reminders of the might of Rome.

Now, about the furlong. It means “a furrow long” (long as a furrow) and is a practical measure in an agrarian society: it is (approximately) the distance an oxen can plow without resting. That distance was standardized to be 40 “rods”, where a rod (or “pole”) is 5.5 yards (16.5 feet). An “acre” (which means “field”) was 40 rods long and 4 rods wide (4 rods was also called a “chain”). An acre was the surface area that one man and one oxen could till in one day.

At this point, if you’re paying attention, you’ll see that not only do we have the decimal (base 10) concept in the “mile” (one thousand paces), but also in the acre: the proportions of the sides are exactly 10:1.

This tradition of the furlong took root in England between the fall of Rome and the Norman conquest of 1066. With the Normans came the re-introduction of the Roman definition of the foot as 12 inches – a reference foot was carved into one of the pier bases of the new nave in St Paul’s cathedral in London in 1104 (by the son of a banker, interestingly enough).

The Saxon tradition of measuring land had been established in terms of rods, probably based on 20 “natural” feet (i.e. not Roman standard feet but real 9.8-inch feet). 20, of course, was the common “decimal” system prior to the invention of shoes (at which point you can’t see your toes). Vestiges of base-20 remain, notably for our story, in Danish and French. For example, in French you say “soixante-dix” for 70 and in Danish you say “tresindstyve” for 60. So again, we have a “decimal” element here, too; but one that’s older than shoes and technically known as the “vigesimal” system.

The new Norman Kings, with or without shoes, had little interest in imposing a new measurement system. Thus when the Domesday book was assembled in 1086, the basic measure of taxation for the Danelaw counties was the “carucate” which was 120 acres – the amount of land tillable by a team of eight oxen in a plowing season. The measures were very approximate; the Domesday book is not an accurate survey in any modern sense. Danelaw, of course, derives from Danish Viking laws. The eight oxen was the notional “plough team”.

When the Saxon rod was measured with a Norman foot (e.g. the Roman 12-inch foot), it’s 16.5 feet long. If that’s an awkward multiple, the Norman kings didn’t care. The number wouldn’t be used for anything in a regular fashion. Acres were the important measure. There just had to be some official relationship between them: “198 inches in a rod”. It’s sort of like the definition of the second – today it’s defined as “9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”. You probably didn’t know that. But that doesn’t stop you from using seconds all the times. Medieval farmers didn’t measure their farmland using their thumbs any more than you use caesium to catch the bus.

(Edit: I forgot to note that the Norman foot as handed down to us does not appear to exactly correspond to the Roman foot. Estimates of the Roman foot vary between 11.6 and 11.7 modern inches. Versus 12 inches, between two milestones that’s an error of over 100 feet, and not a likely error. More likely, the Normans also had to account for the Saxon yard, and indeed King Edward I around 1300 created the standard yard, and decreed that a foot was a third of it. Likely whatever exact notion of a Norman foot there was around the year 1100, it had to morph a little to fit an exact number of times inside the yard.)

So this left us with the 11th century (tax-and-military) status in England: an acre is 40 by 4 rods, a rod is 16.5 feet, and a foot is 12 inches. There are numerous other measures as well, but I’m trying to keep this simple. (And now you see why there are 43,560 square feet in an acre.)

And so far, we’ve covered the role of the military and taxation. Enter religion.

Between 1382 and 1395, John Wycliffe and friends translated the Bible from the official Latin version (the “Vulgate”) to vernacular English. Now known as “Wyclif’s Bible”, it significantly predated the the King James Version, which was “authorized” and completed in 1611, and was the first complete English language version.

The dilemma is how to translate the greek “stadio”, which of course refers to the standard length of the first Greek Olympic sport, the 200-meter sprint (well, approximately 200 meters, we’re not sure). Consider, for example, Luke 24:13 “And lo! tweyne of hem wenten in that dai in to a castel, that was fro Jerusalem the space of sixti furlongis, bi name Emaws.” Notice the phrase “sixti furlongis”; Wycliffe is translating the Greek “stadio” directly to furlongs. This assumption continued forward to the King James Version (“And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs”).

The original Greek, of course, is “Καὶ ἰδοὺ δύο ἐξ αὐτῶν ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἦσαν πορευόμενοι εἰς κώμην ἀπέχουσαν σταδίους ἑξήκοντα ἀπὸ Ἰερουσαλήμ, ἧ ὄνομα Ἐμμαοῦς,”. The important word here is “στάδιον” meaning stadium.

In the Hellenic system, a stadium (the precise length of which is not known) is 600 “podes”. A “pous” (the singular form) is the Greek foot. The length of a Greek foot varied but was about the same as Roman foot. However, Wycliffe was working off the Latin version – the Vulgate. The Latin (Vulgate) version of Luke 24:13 is “et ecce duo ex illis ibant ipsa die in castellum quod erat in spatio stadiorum sexaginta ab Hierusalem nomine Emmaus”. Notice the use of “stadiorum”? The Vulgate, dating from the 4th Century, presented a straight translation from the Greek. Greek and Roman feet may be the same, but the Roman stadium was 625 feet, not 600. The Greek didn’t have any distance measure corresponding to “mile” so they didn’t worry about 600 not evenly fitting into 5000. The Romans clearly did, and since the Greek foot wasn’t very carefully standardized, rounding up to 625 didn’t matter (I’m guessing here, the details are completely lost in history).

But there is no notion of “stadium” in English. And furlongs were not meant to be an eighth of a mile. Furlongs were 660 feet, for reasons described above. But from Wycliffe’s perspective, none of that mattered. He was on a mission to simplify – he wanted the common man to read the Bible. And whether the stadium distance of the Bible was 600, 625, or 660 feet, he didn’t care. Or so I infer.

(Edit) A curious but relevant item i omitted: the laws of the English kings from 1042 through 1272 were written in Latin. Laws were not written in English until 1488 and onwards.

By the way, “mile” in the sense of the Roman one is mentioned once in the Bible, in Matthew 5:41 (King James Version): “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” The reason the mile is used here is that the Romans would compel locals to carry their gear for up to one (Roman) mile. So Jesus’ contemporaries would know what was implied. Wycliffe the scholar would surely know this.

Was Wycliffe using the local custom in the late 14th century of fitting eight furlongs into a mile, or was he simply rounding off on his own initiative, knowing full well that there were approximately eight Greek stadia in a Roman (and hence Norman) mile? More on this shortly.

The translation of the Bible into English did not go down well with authorities. In 1428, on order from the Pope, Wycliffe’s body was exhumed, burned, and the ashes scattered, following a proclamation that the translation of the Bible into vernacular English was heresy. Persecution of attempts to spread unauthorized translations continued for well over a century. When William Tyndale became the first man to print the New Testament in English in 1526 (two copies have survived), he had to do so from the continent, and copies smuggled into England were burned, as best as the Church and the Crown were able to. Tyndale himself was eventually burned for his efforts, too.

Tyndale probably didn’t use Wycliffe’s translation at all, but worked from the Greek New Testament. I haven’t found any good quality versions online, but some poorly done OCRs confirm that Tyndale, too, uses “furlong” in his 1526 translation of Luke 24:13 (“And beholde two of them went that same daye to a toune which was from Jerusalem about thre scoore forlonges, called Emaus” – notice how Tyndale inserts the word “about”). Despite the burnings and the “abouts”, a furlong as an eighth of a mile is now in the vernacular.

A clue to what probably happened in this transition comes from Arnold’s Almanac. Written around 1500 and based off earlier, now lost, sources, “Arnold” writes a section on “the Mesur to mete Lande by” he states that “viij furlong make an English myle”, but still considers a mile to be 5000 feet. He mentions rods, but here’s the interesting part: he says they vary, mentioning 18, 20, and 21 feet – other sources use still other measures. This doesn’t matter, however: “but of what lengith soo euer they be C.lx. perches make an akir”. Why not care? Because the accuracy of distance over land is not remotely as important as the accuracy of surface of land.

Today, we consider accuracy of distance as inseparable from accuracy in surface. But these vagaries were intellectually sound prior to the onslaught of the early Renaissance. The revolution in Mathematics was just beginning: Luca Pacioli published the Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita in Venice in 1494 and Gerolamo Cardano published Ars Magna in 1540. A genuine marriage of algebra and geometry would of course have to wait until Descartes and La Géométrie in 1637, but nevertheless the broadening of the mathematics of measurement in England in the sixteenth century must have been dramatic.

Thus our next and final point in history is when our current standardization to 5280 became official under Elizabeth I in an act of parliament in 1592. At this point, the popular perception of a furlong was well established that it was an eighth of a mile. Of course, the concept of “acre” could not be changed since it was inherent in the management of land and taxation. The military at this point didn’t do that much marching and didn’t care much about the Roman mile: England was a marine power and ships don’t navigate by counting footsteps. By the time of Elizabeth’s reform, the Age of Exploration was a century old, and navigation at sea was highly developed.

So the furlong was 660 feet because the Saxon foot was smaller than the Roman, and because Oxen apparently tire easily, and because Danish Vikings were good at taxation, and because the Greeks liked running. Naked. And why are there eight of these things in a mile? Because the Bible says so. If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us.

Well that was a long story. So, why, exactly, did we get stuck with 5280 feet in the mile? The short answer is that there is no short answer. But it’s not because people were stupid. Let me try a “summary”:

• The Romans standardized their mile to be 1000 paces, each defined as 5 feet, each foot was 12 (Roman) inches. Since milestones survived throughout Europe after the fall of Rome, and these were marked with distances to local centers, this provided a surviving reference point.
• After the fall of the Roman Empire and up to the Norman conquest of 1066, Britain was ruled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danish viking invaders. The Saxons introduced the “rod” (or “perch”), which is believed to have been 20 “natural” feet of about 9.8 or 9.9 inches. A rod, in other words, is the distance measured out by your feet as you count off all your fingers and toes (and is likely a very ancient measure of distance).
• During this period, and up to this day, and “acre” was defined as an area 40 rods long and 4 rods wide, or 160 “perches” (one perch/rod square), and corresponded to a practical surface definition for a simple (and practical) farming society: the length was about the distance an oxen could plow before taking a break, and the total area was about the amount of land that a single man with one oxen could plow in one work day. The length, 40 rods, was thus called furlong (“one furrow long”).
• The acre became the basis for legal agreements, deeds, taxation, borders, etc throughout Britain, so once established, was there to stay (and still is the same).
• When the Normans invaded in 1066, they brought back the Roman system, notably the Roman foot, which was about 11.65 of today’s inches vs the Saxon foot of about 9.9 inches. This led the Norman Kings to define the rod as 16.5 Roman feet, as opposed to 20 Saxon feet. By this time rods weren’t measured with actual human feet anymore, but with defined reference rods, so the discrepancy no longer mattered. The Norman foot, probably closer to the 11.6-11.7 inches that is the Roman foot, had to stretch a little to fit an even three times into the Saxon yard, and was so defined by 1300.
• Around 1400 the movement to translate the Bible to vernacular English brought a need to translate the New Testament use of the Greek word for “stadium”. The furlong was close enough, so the translations would variously insert the word “about” in their texts; nevertheless, the literary equivalence between the stadium and the furlong was established by default in the 1400s.
• The discrepancies between different definitions of distance were well understood prior to the sixteenth century. But the accuracy of distance was not as important as the accuracy of surface
• The early part of the Renaissance leads to a dramatic growth in the depth and width of mathematical learning in the sixteenth century.
• Finally, with a 1592 act of Parliament under Elizabeth I, the various discrepant measurement systems were sorted through and standardized. With various versions of the mile in use throughout the kingdom, the Biblical equivalence of a furlong with a stadium well established, and the definition of an acre important to keep constant, the mile itself was the most malleable. This left us with the furlong of 660 feet (40 times 16.5) and eight furlongs make 5280 feet.

Google Wave is a smooth hybrid of email, instant messaging, photo sharing, discussion forums, wiki, and document management. It is best described in the words of the brother of its lead developer, who also delivered the bulk of the keynote:

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content – it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Lars Rasmussen, The Official Google Blog, 5/28/2009

The features are impressive, and the demonstration was awe-inspiring. We were treated to a symphony of technologies. What Google is cooking up is a blend of technologies and trends, and is not entirely simple to dissect.

First, let us relate this to the cloud computing revolution. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Google may have upwards a million servers in their datacenters. They are part of a trend towards the world having just a handful of “computers” – controlled by a handful of (for-profit, privately controlled, loosely regulated) corporations. Besides Google, the contenders are Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

The above figure is how I see it. We have gone from big-box, to big-box-with-terminals, to boxes-of-all-sizes, to the cloud. The cloud is new and a little harder to summarize, but I think the essential part is that it’s lots of snippets of code, talking to huge data sets (where reads are cheap and writes are expensive), and lots (and lots) of clients.

The notion of “massive distributed” is still being anachronistically bandied about, but this will be phased out, and we’re not likely to refer to these systems in any of these terms in the future. Since we’re only talking about a handful of systems (probably just three), and they will all have slightly different behaviors, and they’re not likely to happily play with each other, we will end up referring to them by individual proper nouns – analogous to how we today think of “Windows”, “Mac”, and “Linux”. Individuals, companies, and institutions will have to chose which system they primarily align themselves with.

Google App Engine shows the way most clearly for this future. There are many ways that GAE is different from some flavor of hosted computing, but to me one of the most striking is ramp-up time. GAE essentially limits you to the top of the abstraction layers. Think of it this way:

A traditional server (e.g. a LAMP setup) is shown on the left. Everything that needs to start in some way is in red. If I’m running on a virtual server in the “cloud”, and I need a new server, I need to boot it up. That takes about 5 minutes, give or take.

Now consider the stack on the right. Here I’ve restricted you to using just one flavor of application code – say, Python, talking to the Google GAE API. The only thing that needs to be “started” is to load some data into the interpreter. And odds are good that that data is already in the cache. The response time for this is about 0.05 seconds, give or take.

The difference in response time is thus about a factor of 5000. In other words, the GAE-style “cloud” ramps up (and down) compute service upwards of four magnitudes faster than a traditional server approach. That is not a quantitative difference, that is a qualitative difference.

This is the key behind Google Wave working. The real-time communication and scalable usage model presupposes a GAE-style cloud.

There’s a lot more to say about this topic. In particular the increase in performance in Javascript to the point where it can be compiled to as if it were a VM comes to mind.

But I need some sleep. Let me close for the night with a shout-out to my Nordic brethren: the Rasmussen brothers join the list of highly distinguished technology innovators who originally come from Denmark. The list includes Bjarne Stroustrup (developed C++ while at Bell labs), Anders Hejlsberg (was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead on the team that developed C#), Janus Friis (co-founded KaZaA and Skype), and Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP). So not only did most of Wave 2 code relate to Danish innovation (C++), and Wave 3 (C# and PHP), but now also Wave 4!

So, fresh from listening to keynotes at Web 2.0 in SF, I found myself settling for a nice beer and catching up on the latest 1 trillion initiative with a NYT at a bar, ordering some too-many-carbs food.

A gentleman had settled down on my left. He made some comments about the food I had ordered and that there was too much food. Well, of course there was. This is America. There’s always too much food. He asked if maybe he could have some – or at least that’s what I thought he asked. I smiled and said “no I don’t think so”, and went back to my NYT.

Shortly after there was some debacle. The man was trying to communicate with the bartender, who in turn was quietly laying down the law.

“What’s the problem,” I asked. “I think he’s on drugs or something,” the bartender answered. I looked at the man again and thought some suitable variation of “there but for the grace of God …” and told the bartender, “don’t worry, I’ll pick up his tab.”

The bartender took a second look at me and asked if I was sure, and I said Yeah, I got you covered.

The man thanked me profusely and we started talking.

He was black, and heavily accented. We started talking a bit about how tough things are in the world. I pointed to the cover of the NYT article I was reading, and made the typical whitey comment about how great it was that a black was in charge. Half Nigerian, I said.

My new friend glared at me. Half Kenyan, he said. I’m related to him. (Distant relation I would assume, but I didn’t ask.)

I was sure Obama’s dad was Nigerian so I whipped out my trusty iPhone.

Sure enough, more fool me. Obama’s Dad was a Luo, from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province.

“40 miles from my village,” my friend told me and pointed at himself.

Well it so happens I’ve travelled in Kenya and love the place. I told my friend about my favorite places – the markets in Nairobi, the amazing fruit stands, the beaches south of Mombassa, the Maasai – whom I was so amazed and impressed by.

My friend grinned so wide it must have hurt. “I am Maasai,” he said, and pointed to his ear, which had been partly cut off in a ritual when he was six.

“Have you killed a lion?” I asked. He turned serious, and said “yes.” “Were you scared?” He laughed – “very!”, and then laughed again.

“That is totally cool,” I said. “I’ve never had a beer in a bar in San Jose with somebody who has killed a lion with his bare hands.”

He turned serious. “I lied, I have never killed a lion.”

“I know,” I said, and smiled. “But it’s a good story.”

We talked about how he got here. He was hard on his luck. His father had been educated and he was sent to the US to go to college. As best as I could figure, things had gone reasonably well, graduating from college with degrees in both Mathematics and, as I understood it, Materials Science. Seems like it went well until about 10 years ago, and now he had been out of work for a few years, and running out of options.

“Have you thought of going back to Kenya?” I asked, but he clearly didn’t want to do that. “What will you do?” I asked him. He gestured at the floor – “I can clean.”

“What? You have college degrees. You’re a Maasai!”

He was overcome with emotion. He excused himself and walked away for a while. When he got back I told him I would stop asking so many hard questions. Let’s talk about Kenya. So we did.

Then we talked about the state of the world.

He gestured to me, himself, and others at the bar. “America is strong.” He said. “We are strong. America will survive.”

Amen, brother. Amen.

Today they announced their Measurement Lab, an effort to make more data available for research on Internet performance issues.

Hidden in this set of announcements is Glasnost, an effort to estimate how much your ISP is interfering with your Bittorrent traffic. Of course, the US has no laws on the books to prevent your ISP from pretty much doing what they want with your traffic. The article on their initial results notably shows that the US is the least free country in the world in this regard – at least as far as data is available.

Furthermore, they demonstrate quantitatively that when Comcast testified before congress on the matter and claimed they needed to do this for performance reasons, the lack of variability between low-audience and high-audience periods demonstrates that (gasp!) the cable companies were flat out lying.

They had published much of these results in October at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2008, but the Google announcement gives their result much higher visibility.

Which, no doubt, is very much Google’s intent.

[UPDATE] The Reuters story made no mention of the fact that the researchers had disproved the notion that the Cable companies needed to do this. Imagine that.

Very down-to-earth topic today: antivirus software. I go crazy at pre-installed 60-day-trial crap that subsequently expires and then keeps bugging me with reminders until I fork up $50 for renewal. On my VMs with old Windows software I have a preference for installing XP, and I’m not interested in buying any new software. I just want to run my legacy code or stuff I can’t run on my Macs – such as Chrome, or old versions of Internet Explorer, or the Office 2007 documents that (thanks, Microsoft) Office 2008 on the Mac can’t handle (!). And not to mention my kid’s computers which all need antivirus protection, but don’t generate much revenue; or the home computers of various friends and extended family members.

So what, if any, are the best options for free antivirus software for Windows?

Here are the obvious criteria:

• Truly free (doesn’t expire; no lame bait-and-switch tactics; no adware). It’s ok if it’s restricted to non-commercial and/or home use.
• Reviewed/tested by independent labs
• Works on a wide variety of flavors of Windows (at a minimum both XP and Vista; does not need to work on server editions)

For lab/testing resources, I’ve looked at the following:

• the Virus Bulletin (VB100)
• the ICSA labs
• Consumer Reports (latest write-up is from 2007)

With those simple criteria in place, and surveying sundry other sources, it turns out that the list of options is reasonably short:

• Avast 4 Home from Alwil Software got passing grade from both labs and was also recommended by CR. Please note that the terms of use for the free home edition is that it must be both non-commercial and home use. Alwil is Czech-based (Prague).
• PC Tools AntiVirus Free Edition from PC Tools. Got passing grades from both labs but wasn’t tested by CR. They seem to be originally an Irish company, but also have offices in Australia and the US. The only tool that’s not an Editor’s pick at Softpedia (where it’s classified as adware due to wanting you to install Google Toolbar).
• AVG Anti-virus free edition from AVG (formerly Grisoft). Passing grade from both labs, and also the choice of freebyte.com, and CR rated it just behind Alwil. AVG seems to be a truly global creature, their management team are from all over the place (I mean that in a good way). Softpedia classifies it as adware because it tries to get you to install a toolbar (which isn’t needed).
• Avira AntiVir Personal from Avira, a German company. Passing grades by both labs, not tested by CR, Editor’s pick at Softpedia.

Seems like some good choices. I was going to go with AVG but then they tried to inject partnership stuff in the download process, so now I’m going with Avast instead. Download and installation went smoothly; they require you to register for a 14-month key (after which you can register again for another 14 months etc). Some apparent quirks for mainstream software (e.g. they think it’s cute to use the computer-generated voice to say “virus definitions have been updated”), but seems to do the trick.