Dale Dougherty

As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?

Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse. Few people saw this coming until it hit.

“It was the triumph of data over common sense,” said reporter Adam Davidson on the excellent episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money.” Economist Michael Lehmann in the San Francisco Chronicle called it “the triumph of ideology over common sense.” It’s obvious both common sense and the common man have taken a beating.

It’s hard to stomach that our government must bail out Wall Street. It really means we’ve bet our future on the same people who created the present situation. To paraphrase a joke I’ve heard: It’s like going to a casino in Vegas and rooting for the house. One New York Times reader expressed the frustration that many feel: “Why can’t we take half of the $700 billion and just build something?”

These events shake our belief that free markets work to the benefit of all. The fundamental tenet of capitalism is the “invisible hand”: Adam Smith wrote that “by pursuing his own interest [each person] frequently promotes that of the society.” This year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable.”

A headline in the Christian Science Monitor says: “With finance crisis, hands-off era over.” Government will need to be more assertive in regulating Wall Street. But I think it goes beyond that. I wonder if we, as individuals, have been living in our own era of hands-off. Have Americans become so disengaged that we’ve become dependent on some invisible force to provide what we need? Have we gotten used to leaving important matters to experts, until they turn out to be wrong?

Isn’t it time for us to become hands-on again?

We, the people, face enormous challenges. Apart from the economic mess, we know fundamental changes are coming because of global warming. Our dependence on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Change is coming, whether we want it or not.

Better we meet the challenges head-on rather than hide. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed it up: “We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a ‘liar loan.’ ... The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.”

We have to believe it starts with each of us — not some faceless government or corporate bureaucracy. It’s time for us, individually and working together in business, to reconsider what it means to be productive, not just profitable. It’s time for us to reengage in how our government sets priorities for education, health care, housing, and transportation.

The DIY mindset celebrated in this magazine must again become an essential life skill, rooted once again in necessity and practicality. Our future security lies in knowing what we’re capable of creating, and how we can adapt to change by being resourceful.

A challenge this great can bring out the best in us. We need everyone, because every person has something to contribute. We need a showing of all hands.

Abstract for United States Patent 7,415,666

A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed. In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row.

Full text of 7,415,666

Perhaps patent examiners are unable to tell what's obvious or not because the very language in which patents are written is so obscure. Try parsing this sentence:

A document viewing component, such as in the form of a control hosted in a program, controls the scrolling operation, such as by containing a scroll control.

Most likely this twisted language is the work product of Workman Nydeggar, the patent attorneys on this one. No doubt they are responsible for this closing flourish:

While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof are shown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.

Patent 7,415,666 was submitted in March 2005 so it took three years for the patent office to take in all this mumbo-jumbo and decide to give its approval. So if the USPTO is going to approve nearly every patent -- and I'd love to see a list of rejected ones -- why does it take three years to do so?

Also, 7,415,666 was not the only good news for Timothy D. Sellers of Bellevue WA. This week, he had three patents approved, upping his own total to nine. He re-invented the toolbar, among other things.

Thanks to Richard Forno's of InfoWarrior for his posting to Dave Farber's IP list.

Tiger's adversary was Rocco Mediate, a delightful forty-five year old player ranked 158th in the world. Commentators said Rocco was the crowd favorite, and no one could root against Rocco. He was the everyman, given a special opportunity to "play the best player on the planet, one on one." No one truly expected him to win but he played well, fighting back after falling behind by three shots. He had to overcome his own nervousness and settle in to his own game. Incredibly, he had a one shot lead going into the 18th hole. Somehow, it became believable that Rocco might just win.

As much as I liked Rocco, I found myself pulling for Tiger again and again, as he fought back to tie on Sunday and at the end of eighteen holes on Monday. I have always identified with the underdog, and everything about Rocco made me pull for him. (I have rooted for the Dodgers and Red Sox, never the Yankees, who usually won in the end.) Yet, I realized part-way through the tournament that Tiger wasn't simply a favorite; he had become a superhero. I wanted him to win.

On the Monday broadcast, Johnny Miller remarked after Tiger hit an amazing shot out of a fairway trap: "That's a Tiger shot." It's like Tiger called on super-powers. I certainly wanted to believe he had such powers. What's more, Tiger's round of golf revealed a level of vulnerability that made yourself question if you believed in him. He grimaced after shots because of sharp pain in his knee. He was limping down the fairways. It was never automatic that Tiger would win. As the storyline developed, he heroically summoned his own strength, managed to overcome the physical pain, and obtain a victory. In the end, the real battle was not Tiger vs. Rocco; it was each man against himself, as the game of golf isolates for us to see so clearly.

Yesterday, we learned that Tiger won't play the rest of year, as his knee problems were more severe than he let on; he needs additional surgery followed by a long recovery period. It's bad news for golf and for the people who run tournaments. However, Tiger is not merely an action-hero and his accomplishments carry beyond the golf course.

According to Nike's ads, which feature Tiger's father, Earl Woods, Tiger's special strength is his mental toughness. His father says: "'I promise you that you will never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.' And he hasn't. And he never will." David Brooks writes about Tiger in Tuesday's New York Times, adding that Tiger has become "the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude."

Tiger is the best. You want to watch "best"; you want to see what "best" does; you want to learn from "best". Even the best is not perfect, you realize. You wonder how you measure up against the best and you hope, like Rocco, you don't do too badly.

Does Woods vs. Mediate bring to mind the presidential race: Obama vs. McCain? There's the obvious: black/white, young/old, prodigy/warrior. Both seem worthy for different reasons. But, in the words of the old Exxon ad, who has a Tiger in his tank? I hope that we elect a leader who understands our vulnerability and summons our strengths. I hope that person can find the focus and determination to meet the challenges ahead and see us through to the end. I'd like to believe that one of them will prove to be a Tiger and inspire our confidence. I want the best to lead.

Today, in most schools, science is taught as a body of acquired knowledge, but not as much as a set of tools and practices that were used to discover that knowledge and expand upon it. Students are expected to learn from lectures and textbooks, not labs with hands-on learning and experimentation. Nothing quite embodies the practice of science like a chemistry set, a home lab that once was a favorite childhood gift has now vanished from the shelves of toy and hobby stores.

In 1964, Robert Bruce Thompson got what he wanted most for Christmas and his first chemistry set introduced him to a fascinating, new world. He went on to major in chemistry in college. Recently, a neighbor's teenage daughter started asking him questions about science, which she wished to pursue as a career, but she admitted she wasn't learning much science in school. Robert wanted to introduce her to the chemistry lab but realized it was nigh impossible to buy a good chemistry set in a store and he couldn't recommend any of the exisiting books on chemistry. So Robert decided that he could write a book himself and that it would start with describing how to build your own chemistry set and set up a lab.

The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is Bob's seventh book with O'Reilly; he's written previously about PC hardware and astronomy. A man of many interests, Bob has put together a wonderful book that I'm proud to publish and it completely fits with Make's DIY ethic. Bob's book has the subtitle: "All Lab, No Lecture." What surprised me most about the book was how much Bob had tailored the book to home schoolers and other students who might be getting "chemistry-lite" in school. ("A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry lab course.") It also works for adults, like me, who were bored by chemistry in school and did poorly yet could see the fascination of a lab filled with vials, flasks and burettes.

The book is also a great example of collaboration as Bob has worked with Dr. Mary Chervenak and Dr. Paul Jones, each of whom hold Ph.D's in organic chemistry. Their insights are featured throughout the book, not just as subject-matter experts but also as experienced teachers and practitioners. Says Dr. Paul Jones: "Most students are aware of acids and their dangers but are more or less ignorant of the dangers of alkali (base). For instance, aqueous sodium hydroxide can blind you in a matter of minutes if not cleansed thoroughly and I've seen lots of kids who are quick to put on goggles to work with 0.01 M HCI but throw 6 M NaOH around like it's candy. Aqueous bases are every bit as dangerous as aqueous acids."

Concerns about the liablity of practicing science in school have led schools to offer less of it. (Sports is a more common source of serious injury.) This book offers a "real science" alternative. Bob writes: "One of the recurring lessons throughout this book is the importance of assuming personal responsibility for useful but dangerous actions -- understanding the specific risks and taking the necessary steps to minimize or eliminate them."

Bob will be featured at this year's Maker Faire, talking about his love of chemistry and his new book. He'll be in the Maker Shed area all weekend, doing some of the experiments from the b