In The New Populism and the iPod Economy Nathan Smith looks at changes in the work force and wealth driven by the information revolution and globalization using restaurants and iPods as examples. Middle income white collar jobs are becoming relatively more scarce and their salaries are stagnant or declining while minimum wage jobs are stable and top tier jobs are becoming more lucrative.

Most work has physical and intellectual components and the information revolution reduces the relative value of routine intellectual tasks while increasing the value of unique, design work. This strikes some as unfair, which may have contributed to the evident rise in populism int he recent U.S. elections. This seems unfair to many and humans do seem to have a fairness gene. Can we make things more clearly fair without killing the golden geese with protectionism and oppressive taxes?

Putting 24 microprocessor cores on a small, low cost chip as intellaSys is doing is made possible by the simple communications between processors and minimal instruction set of the processors. They take the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) concept to the extreme. They call it MISC (Minimal Instruction Set Computer), but it strikes me as extreme RISC.

We've had nice weather most of the month, but now we're being dumped on. Here in Lyons, we got about six inches of snow overnight. It had almost stopped by daylight, but while I was shoveling the drive, it became heavier, coming down at about an inch an hour.

In a Technology Review interview, Bjarn Stroustrup defends software, including his own C++ language. He argues, rightly, that software like that runing the Mars Rovers is excellent, but average software tends to be of rather poor quality. Better training and methodology would help, but Stroustrup feels that programmers are rewarded for quick and dirty solutiosn, so that's what we get.

He's critical of those who promote something as THE solution to our software problems because while their pet methods help in some cases, there really is no silver bullet. He notes that C++ targets expert programmers while the quality of education for programmers has been declining. It's been successful as a systems programming language, but some who use it, shouldn't.

The Feynman Processor - Quantum Entanglement and the Computing Revolution by Gerard J. Milburn looks at the potential of quantum computers. Richard Feynman first realized that computers that take advantage of quantum mechanical effects could be very powerful. It is, however, not easy, and we have yet to see a functional quantum Turing Machine.

This book is a good introduction to an curious field. It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of quantum computing in our time.

Since I've had to migrate to a new server, I'm taking the opportunity to change my weblog software to Quills 1.5 on Plone 2.5. Quills is more full featured than the SimpleBlog product that I have been using and fits the way I work better. While still a release candidate, it seems solid.

intellaSys is a startup developing multi-core chips for embedded applications. Each core is an 18 bit stack based computer with a Forth instruction set. At a billion instructions per second per processor, it promises a great deal of computing ability at low cost and with low power consumption.

What can one do with an embedded supercomputer? I haven't use Forth for years, but maybe I should brush up on it and find out.

We didn't have any guests for Thanksgiving and didn't want to go far, so we decided to visit the big city. We stayed at the Brown Palace, a unique and historic hotel. It's within walking distance of museums, shopping, etc.

I'm up and running on the new server, but it'll take a while to migrate everything from the old one.

Supercomputing 06 wrapped up today. There look to have been a lot of interesting sessions and exhibits. Terrasoft was at the IBM booth showing off their Power PC based systems, including the Cell Processor powered Sony PS3, running Yellow Dog Linux. They report that they could have sold hundreds of them at the show if the hardware were available. Mercury Computer Systems announced that they'll introduce several new Cell based systems over the next year.

I attended my first meeting of the Front Range Pythoneers last night. This is a local Python users group. It was an informal meeting with discussion ranging from data mining to web applications to the Boulder Sprint held a couple of weeks ago. It proved interesting, so I'll be back.

Milton Friedman has died. He was the most important economist of the 20th century. May he rest in peace.

David Leonard has gleaned a little more information about yesterday's Blue Origin test, but there's still on official announcement from the company.

Blue Origin seems to have had their first test flight today in West Texas. They're developing a reusable vertical takeoff and landing rocket for commercial service. Maybe they'll have something at next year's X Prize Cup.

Hat tip to Rand Simberg.

Alex Tai, Virgin Galactic's first pilot and Vice President of Operations, talks about their plans for commercial spaceflight at Space.com. He confirmed speculation that Virgin Galactic plans to follow up their initial business of suborbital excursion flights with point to point rocket service, and eventually orbital flights.

There are a number of Veteran's Day pieces over on Winds of Change. This is a good one, but you might want to read them all.

Nokia's Wilbur semantic web framework for Common Lisp has been ported to Python. It seems that Python runs on their cell phones, but Common Lisp doesn't. This is way cool!

Happy birthday to the United States Marine Corps! On 10 November 1775, the Continental Congress voted to raise two battalions of Continental Marines.

An electric Mitsubishi Evo would make a dandy all weather commuter for the green enthusiast.