I think of myself as an environmentalist, but I am in favor of nuclear power. It seems like an odd combination of policies to support, but I don’t think it is. To me, it’s an issue that divides how the environmental movement should take on todays challenges. I think it’s being unrealistic to constrain worldwide energy consumption to a level that can be maintained with renewable resources. In America and a few other modernized nations, it would be possible, but very difficult. However the bigger problem are the demands of rapidly industrializing countries like China and India. Those countries will not be able to a generate enough renewable energy sources for decades to come.

Yes nuclear power has challenges, waste disposal being the most daunting one. But it does have significant advantages which no other energy source has. It is clean(yes waste disposal aside) and causes no carbon emissions. It is available widely. It is cheap. No other power source can make those claims. Hydroelectric causes a wide variety of downriver and water rights issues. Solar is too expensive and is not usable everywhere. Wind has similar problems. Coal, oil and natural gas are not renewable and cause varying degrees of emissions.

Yes there is a chance of a Chernobyl type nuclear meltdowns, but the third generation pebble bed reactors are much safer than older designs.

Here’s an article which I just found via StumbleUpon that I agree with. I call myself a practical environmentalist.

It’s silly to prevent people from providing better lives for themselves and their children, it’s better to just take a reasoned approach and provide countries with a usable compromise rather than viewing everything as a black(coal/oil) and white(impractical renewables).

It’s NFL draft weekend and I’m eagerly awaiting the selection of Timmy Chang the pride of Hawaii. It’s a little known fact that he is the NCAA’s all time leading passer and a superstar in Hawaii. Of course he’s going to be terrible in the NFL and might not even get drafted, but it still amuses me that he gets so little respect. Of course he wouldn’t be the first top college QB to go undrafted, I think even some Heismann winners like Charlie Ward didn’t go to the NFL at all.

I’ve been playing some Party Poker Steps tournament. If you haven’t heard of them, they are a series of single tournaments with a large cash payout for advancing to the top. The steps vary in the number of seats that advance, but it’s usually top 1 or 2 that advance. Mostly I’m trying to win a WSOP seat, but I tried a couple of regular cash steps. The structures are very complicated, so complicated that I’m sure they are making a lot of money off of them. That’s ok by me because I am significantly better at single table tournaments than at large multitable tournaments.

Oh and Star Wars fans have a new fan film called “Revelations” to watch. I downloaded it, but haven’t watched it yet. Supposedly the special effects are good, but the acting is terrible. I guess we know what Star Wars geeks do when they have too much time.

And finally this week Guild Wars will come out. I’ll be buying it and hopefully I’ll have some time to play it. I played in a beta for one weekend and enjoyed it quite a bit, plus it’s been so long since I got a new game I figure I owe it to myself.

The Party Poker Badbeat Jackpot is the largest I’ve ever seen. At over 400k, it’s about twice as large as I’ve seen. It’s hard to qualify for it. You need to have four of a kind 8’s beaten, and both hole cards must play(rules here). It’s so large that I’ve even started to play some bad beat tables. I’m pretty sure it’s still a losing proposition, but I only play the tables when the tables look good and the badbeat jackpot is huge and it’s certainly better than the lottery.

As the recipient of all chen.net email(except for those I forward to those who request email addresses), I sometimes get some fun misdirected email. Usually it’s just a single email or two, but once in a while it’s a whole series of emails where everyone does a “Reply To All” with the incorrect email. The past couple of weeks I’ve been getting this neat chain of emails where it appears that two sons are dividing up a deceased father’s estate. It’s a pretty sizable estate, and they are going through binding arbitration to divide up the $3-4 million left behind. Because I’m getting this person’s email, he must feel like he’s been left out of the loop or something. I’m sure a good con man could turn this into a lot of money somehow.

I saw this article the other day on overmedication in America, and it is exactly what I think is driving up health care costs. There’s a prevailing attitude in this country that if there is something wrong with your health, you ought to to take some sort of pill or use some sort of medical procedure to fix it. People are relatively unwilling to take responsibility for their own health. And even healthy people think they need drugs. There are few incentives for health care providers to provide high quality preventative and primary care, because all the money is in specialties and drugs. Something has to change, this country will go broke unless it does. Time to invest in pharmaceutical companies I guess.

Through a friend of our product marketing person, Monday my co-workers and I had a rare opportunity to spend a couple of hours with some very senior engineers on Sun’s Java team. It was a sort of combination marketing/technical issues meeting. Among the attendees was Peter Kessler, a guy who has an important role in Sun’s JVM team, and he answered some of our questions about JDK1.5.

Among the interesting things he pointed out:

Depending on the memory profile of your application, for optimum performce one big JVM may or may not be the best way to design your system. For high performance, you of course need to have some idea of how the garbage collector is designed and how your application allocates(and frees) memory. Here’s some docs on JDK1.5 garbage collection tuning for reference. Our applications are very memory intensive. On 32 bit linux machines, we would like to be able to use all the 4GB of physical memory available. There’s a limitation which prevents us from using it, and limits us to about JVM memory space of about 1.8GB, so we run two of them to increase it. Peter suggested that we try running 4 1GB JVMs instead as an experiment. It sort of makes sense I guess, but it’s something I never would have considered.

I think the idea behind it is to avoid having a lot of tenured, but not permanent objects. He said the garbage collector is extrememly fast for very short lived objects, it can collect them faster than they can be created. Very long lived objects are a necessary evil, but the greatest expense is in getting those objects to be long lived. When the objects are recognized as very long lived they don’t need to be checked frequently to see if they can be collected, but in the middle ground between when they are long lived and when they are short lived, they have to be checked and that incurs a significant expense.

They will continue to have multiple GC models for performance tuning, don’t expect that to go away. The old incremental train algorithm was only removed because the new concurrent mark and sweep collector is better in every way.

They are already encouraging people to try Java 6.0 aka Mustang. A quick look at the feature list doesn’t show me any compelling reasons our application needs it. Although I am personally interested in the scripting language stuff.

They admirably tried to convince us to switch to Solaris 10, which we may try at some point(only for x86, no chance at us going with Sparcs).

It was great to be able to talk to some JVM engineers and they were excellent and helpful(not that I didn’t expect them to be).

Kojo pointed out HedgeStreet to me the other day. It’s a fascinating business model. It’s a futures market for all sorts of financial predictions. They are regulated, so you have some assurance you aren’t getting scammed. I just saw this site for the first time today, so do your own research before trying it out.

Here’s how it might work. If you think the Consumer Price Index will rise, instead of having to buy an S&P futures contract as a proxy for the CPI, you can take a position on the CPI itself. That’s very neat. But that’s only the beginning. They have a variety of new types of “Hedgelets” as they call them which are new types of futures contracts. Their contracts are between $1-10 so you can take a lot of small positions if you want(though the transactions have a $5 minimum fee so you almost certainly don’t want to).

But that’s not the best part. The best part is that you can apply to be a market maker and create new types of Hedgelets for lots of different things. I am really kind of curious how that works, so I might send them an email asking them about it. You are required to open an account and have positions open both buy and sell side, but that’s about all they say. I have to assume that there’s a significant set of limits on the things you can create markets for. And they mention a fixed spread, so I am guessing that there’s a cap on the size of the spread.

It’s a unique and interesting business model but it has a couple of things to think about. First, they are regulated, so compliance and securities laws are going to be a constraint on some of the things they can do. Second and the bigger issue is building a market. They could be the next eBay, or they could be the next dot com failure. If they can build a reasonably sized market quickly, then they could grow into a megamarket where you shop for all your securities needs or hedge against a precipitous drop in value of your house.

For instance here in the bay area it’s pretty common for people to have a disproportionate amount of net worth tied up in a house. A lot of people have $150-200,000 of equity in their homes that they can’t really tap into. Taking out a home equity loan would help, but in the event of a crash in housing prices, then now you have a bigger problem because you have to repay the loan with something that is worth much less than before. It would be great if you could place a hedge against that crash by taking a position so that if the housing market crashed, you could minimize your losses. Hedgestreet is a long way from being able to do this in exactly a way that I would want to do it, but I can see the potential.

We’ve launched our open beta of Become.com, so registration is no longer required to try out our results. Tell me what you think.

I’ve tried out Poker Tracker, and I may buy it. It can give you invaluable information about yours and other people’s games. It helps me monitor my variance, win rate and other important statistics. I can also use it to pick out bad players more easily. There’s some question of the ethics of using a program like this to have perfect recall of how an opponent plays. Is it wrong to have a complete history of how someone has played? Is it any different if everyone has access to the same information? Is it different if they do or do not know that you have access to it? How much is that data worth exactly?

It reminds me of a story I heard before one of the highly touted human vs computer chess matches. World reknowned player Gary Kasparov complained that IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer had a significant advantage because the programmers could provide it with all the games that Kasparov had ever played, while Kasparov could not study Deep Blue’s play at all because it was a closely kept secret. If I recall correctly, some international chess federation agreed with Kasparov and he was allowed to have a history of Deep Blue’s play.

Separately, I had an amusing incident the other night where I was playing for 40 minutes of 3/6 stud hi thinking that I was playing stud8. Oops. Good thing I only lost $40. This just reinforces my opinion is that stud hi is a terrible game(the fact that I don’t know when I am playing at it, and that that I am terrible at it even when I know I’m playing it has absolutely positively nothing to do with why I hate the game).

I’ve decided to allocate a bit of my precious free time to a fantasy baseball league. I have no idea if my team is any good, but I suspect it’s mediocre. I figure it’ll help me learn a bit more about current baseball theory. Unlike fantasy football which I actually know something about, this isn’t for any money and I don’t care if I do well at all. I’m still not even totally sure about the rules yet, and it started last week.

We’re nearing our public launch at become.com so we’re putting in even longer hours than we have been. Our results are pretty good, but it’s clear we need a true product search to go along with it. It’s coming of course, but it really can’t come fast enough. There will be more press releases soon and they are always available at the Press Center.