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For decades now, we all have gotten used to the idea that of course our computer or any other small consumer electronic device should not be plugged directly into an electrical outlet but should be instead be plugged into a surge protection power strip which is in turn plugged into the electrical outlet.  We do this because for decades now we have had hammered into our brains that all sorts of bad things like lightning can somehow enter our electrical wires and if we fail to use a surge protection power strip, the bad things will travel through the electrical wires into our computers and other consumer electronic devices and damage them.  

This blog article tells you that now “whole-house” surge protection is a thing.  Yes if you don’t mind throwing money at the problem, you can add an extra layer of protection from electrical surges at the place where your electrical power enters your house, and it protects the whole house.  Not only is this a thing, but the 2020 national electrical code actually requires this kind of protection in newly constructed homes.  I’ll talk about this kind of protection in this blog article. Continue reading →

In seven years writing this blog, I have not spoken about social or political issues.  Now I speak.  President Biden is right.  “We cannot be complicit.  We have to speak out.”

There is no place for hate against Asian-Americans.  There is no place for hate against people because of the color of their skin.  There is no place for hate against people because of their religion, or because of their non-belief.  There is no place for hate against people because of the country they came from or the country their ancestors came from.

My daily world is the world of intellectual property.  One of the oldest international agreements relating to intellectual property is the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, a treaty that was adopted exactly 138 years ago on March 20, 1883.  One of the purposes of the Paris Convention was to bring an end to laws and policies by which some nations had treated people from other nations poorly in the particular areas of obtaining patent protection, trademark protection, and design protection. 

The treaty is composed of thirty numbered Articles, the first of which names and defines the treaty.  Most of the numbered articles are rather dry legal language spelling out procedures for (for example) filing a first patent application in a first country, and a second patent application in a second country, and linking the two patent applications together in a particular way.  The dry Articles start at Article 3 and continue to Article 30.

Which brings us to Article 2 of this treaty that was adopted exactly 138 years ago.  The drafters of this treaty, after doing the throat-clearing of Article 1, and before proceeding with the dry legalize of Articles 3 through 30, wrote Article 2:

Nationals of any country of the Union shall, as regards the protection of industrial property, enjoy in all the other countries of the Union the advantages that their respective laws now grant, or may hereafter grant, to nationals; all without prejudice to the rights specially provided for by this Convention. Consequently, they shall have the same protection as the latter, and the same legal remedy against any infringement of their rights, provided that the conditions and formalities imposed upon nationals are complied with.

Translated into plain language, this says:

[So far as applying for patents and registering trademarks and protecting designs is concerned,] we promise to treat people from other countries as well as we would treat people from our own country.

Among the first countries to join this treaty were Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, France, Guatemala, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.  Each of these countries promised to treat nationals of other countries as well as they would treat their own nationals (in the specific area of patents, trademarks, and design protection).  In the years that have passed since then, 160 more countries have joined this treaty and have made this promise to treat nationals of other countries as well as they would treat their own nationals, in this area.  

I was not there to see it in 1883 but I’d guess the roomful of people who negotiated the language of that treaty included few if any women and few if any people of color.  Having said this, you can see that on this narrow question of of treating people from other countries the way you would want people from your own country to be treated, they got the right answer.

Now it is 2021 and we see things that happen in the world around us.  Hate against Asian-American people.  Hate against people because of the color of their skin.  Hate against people because of their religion, or because of their non-belief.  Hate against people because of the country they came from, or because of the country their ancestors came from. 

Every one of us must speak out.

If you have a platform that permits you to speak, please use your platform to speak.

If a march or gathering happens near you to support Asian-Americans, or other groups that are targets of hate these days, please join the march or the gathering.

There are many ways that each of us can communicate our support to those around us.  We must communicate our support.  

I told you so.  Four months ago I told you so.  I told you to drop Whatsapp and switch to Signal in my article It is time to switch to a new end-to-end encrypted messaging app.  Now in January of 2021 lots of people are finally realizing they should switch to Signal.  

Please recall this article (August 23, 2020) in which I explain how to be smart about what kind of phone number to use as your user ID for Signal.

If you’d like to try messaging me with Signal, drop me a note at my email address with your Signal identifier telephone number and I will fire off a Signal message to you.

Yeah, I had Covid-19.  I’m fine now.  I’ll say a few words about how it went for me, but my reason for mentioning this is mostly to urge you to consider donating convalescent plasma (see blog article).  Continue reading →

Hello blog colleagues.

A couple of days ago I went to a blood donation center and I donated 650 units of convalescent plasma.

Yeah.  I had Covid-19.  Continue reading →

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I imagine for most people, a file server is not the sort of thing that you have warm and fuzzy feelings about.  But hear me out.  Continue reading →

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(Corrected thanks to alert reader Jarek Markieta who pointed out that 1, 4 and 9 are squares of the first three counting numbers, not cubes.)

(Not one but two alert readers immediately pointed out my mistake about the metal from which the top of the Washington Monument is made — aluminum and not gold.  See comments below.  I have corrected this.)

What word may correctly be used to describe this object?  People call it a “monolith”.  That’s wrong.  People call it an “obelisk”.  That’s wrong. What can we call it? Continue reading →

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I was puzzled and intrigued to learn about something called “the nasal cycle”. Maybe it will turn out that most of my readers already knew about this, but I certainly did not. It turns out that in all mammals, including humans, there is an autonomic mechanism by which a first nostril’s breathing path constricts for a while and the second nostril’s breathing path remains open. Then after a while the second breathing path is the path that gets constricted and the first breathing path opens up. In most healthy humans, this back-and-forth constriction usually takes place in a cycle of about five hours, with two and a half hours during which one nostril gets preference and another two and a half hours during which the other nostril gets preference.  Or, maybe I am just making this up!  Could there be such a thing and people would not already know all about it? Continue reading →

The time is 5AM Mountain Time on a Saturday.  I post a new blog article How long it takes USPTO to issue a patent these days.  Is anyone else awake at this hour?  The answer to this question turns out to be “yes”.  I know this because my blog has a “Site Stats” page that tells me how many times a blog article has been viewed.  And what I see there is that within two minutes of when I clicked the “publish” button, more than twenty people had already viewed the article.

So I think it can safely be said that the hive mind never sleeps.

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It is ingrained in our behavior that if we are going to take a step toward calling someone on the telephone, we need to ask them “what is your telephone number?”  It is is ingrained in our behavior that if we are going to make it possible for someone to call us on the telephone, we need to be able to tell someone “our telephone number”.  This world of “having a telephone number” and “calling a telephone number” is the most prominent aspect of the Public Switched Telephone Network (Wikipedia article).  One way to think of the PSTN is that it is a collective effort by governments and post offices and landline telephone companies to collect money from people who “dial telephone numbers” and who receive telephone calls from other people who “dial telephone numbers”.  

The rise of the Internet has prompted many efforts to find ways that people can talk to each other without paying money to the PSTN.  One of those ways is the SIP URI (Wikipedia article).  Continue reading →