Gray Watson's Blog -- December 2004

Blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness.

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December 31, 2004

So flying back from Akron yesterday, I was reading the skymall catalog and saw that you can get "gift" Visa cards which can be preloaded with money -- basically a prepaid credit card. The fee is 2.5% of the amount loaded on the card. Interesting way for people to use credit cards who have bad credit.

December 22, 2004

So a friend was trying to get a domain back that he lost a couple of years ago and we were looking at domain backordering sites and their prices.
- Enom.com runs the site Clubdrop auction site which has minimum bids of US$10. I've used them to get some good names.
- Name Winner has auctions where a base bid is US$40.
- GoDaddy charges US$19 and if you don't get it you can backorder another domain.
- Snapnames charges US$60 if you get it otherwise no cost.
- Pool.com pre-authorizes your credit card for US$60. No thanks.
- Unpicked.com charges US$20 and if you don't get it you can backorder another domain.
Heard this very disturbing radio program on the Connection this morning on the way to work about the plight of the black "moon" bears in China. Horrific. You can donate money to the AnimalsAsia organization and Jill Robinson who is trying to help them.
The Chinese value the Moon Bears for their bile, which has been used as medicine for thousands of years. Today, some 7,000 of these animals live in small, metal cages with catheters permanently implanted into their gal bladders to extract the coveted bile.
Interesting site called the Global Ideas Bank where people can go an submit ideas about anything. Cool products, social movements, etc.. Here are some of the featured ideas on the sight right now:
FreeBSD needs donations right now to pass the "1/3rd test" for their 501(c)3 non-profit status. You can give donations via paypal.

December 21, 2004

I've been meaning to do some more research into the ethanol-to-hydrogen reactor developed at the by a group headed by Larry Schmidt at the University of Minnesota. Here's another article about it. They've developed a reactor which takes corn-oil and outputs hydrogren, carbon-dioxide, and some impurities. The idea would be for the CO2 to be then absorbed by next year's corn crops. The idea is to use ethanol as the energy medium. Hydrogen is not a fuel source but rather a transport agent -- a battery if you will. It burns clean but you can't mine it and most ways of producing it use more energy than you get out the other end. This would use corn to convert solar power, water, and carbon into corn-oil (ethanol) which would be converted into hydrogen and burned.

Here's a great site about how ethanol is produced from fermented ground up corn. The US produces some 226,000 barrels of ethanol per day as is expected to produce 3.35 billion barrels in 2004 from 82 plants with 16 additional facilities under construction

One bushel of corn yields 2.5-2.7 gallons of ethanol from the starch component of corn with a variety of valuable farm feed and other by-products also produced.

The price of corn seems to be $1.75/bushel right now and ethanol is going for $1.96 (industrial net) per gallon (12/2004).
Story in the NY Times how FBI files describe abuse of Iraq inmates. They also document torture of inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This behavior is absolutely inexcusable. At least the Iraq prisoners you could claim that the MPs had lost friends or something. But the Cuba ones are just out-and-out torture cases.
The documents, released Monday in connection with a lawsuit accusing the government of being complicit in torture, also include accounts by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who said they had seen detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, being chained in uncomfortable positions for up to 24 hours and left to urinate and defecate on themselves. An agent wrote that in one case a detainee who was nearly unconscious had pulled out much of his hair during the night.
Here's another article on the topic from the Washington Post.
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," the FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more."

December 20, 2004

Another source of holiday presents may be the Spudgun Technology Center. Just what Jimmy always wanted.
I would like to welcome everyone to the internet's premiere website pertaining to spudguns and all other types of novelty launching devices. Branded "the center of the spudgun universe" by CBS news. Specializing in pneumatic and combustion-based launchers of ALL types, styles, sizes, and feature levels. Find out all you could ever want to know about what is fast becoming a favorite weekend past time for people of all ages.
Article from the always interesting cryptome.org about the bugs found at the UN.
The method of concealment, and the efforts that went into the stealth features of this device indicate that the device was targeted against a meeting where the eavesdropper know the area would be subjected to TSCM/bug-sweep activities, but that those people performing the bug sweep in the area would be assumed to be both poorly skilled, and poorly equipped.
Interesting article about people's response to exercise. Certain people seem to be more resistant than others to increases in physical activity. I bet, however, that this resistance can still be overcome -- it might just take longer. I wonder if it depends on previous athletic behavior either as a child or within X years.
Previous reports indicated that there are huge variations in trainability between subjects. For example, the team found that training improved maximum oxygen consumption, a measure of a persons ability to perform work, by 17% on average. But the most trainable volunteers gained over 40%, and the least trainable showed no improvement at all. Similar patterns were seen with cardiac output, blood pressure, heart rate and other markers of fitness.
Cool breakdown of a Nordex N60/62 wind turbine.
The Rotor Blades are made of glass fibre reinforced plastic. The Hub is made of cast iron. The Turbine Frame is made of ductile cast iron. A superior material with regards to strength, vibration and noise reduction features.
Article talking about gas-hybrid cars and wind turbines being the path to energy independence for America.
With gas-electric hybrid cars now on the market, the stage is set for the second step to reduce oil dependence, the use of wind-generated electricity to power automobiles. If we add to the gas-electric hybrid a plug-in capacity and a second battery to increase its electricity storage capacity, motorists could then do their commuting, shopping, and other short-distance travel largely with electricity, saving gasoline for the occasional long trip. This could lop another 20 percent off gasoline use in addition to the initial 50 percent cut from shifting to gas-electric hybrids, for a total reduction in gasoline use of 70 percent.
Interesting piece about the next generation of AIDS drugs using DAPY compounds. A team at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University have been targeting the AIDS virus flexibility with an equally the flexible diarylpyrimidine family of compounds. Here's another article about the subject.
Unlike other treatments that focus on blocking HIV from entering healthy cells or on containing contaminated ones, DAPYs literally douse a lit firecracker by interfering with any of the 20,000 steps HIV takes to copy itself at warp speed. At the core of this discovery is reverse transcriptase -- the villain in this story and a submicroscopic protein not normally found in healthy human cells. The team believes RT is the ideal protein to disable because it offers so many opportunities to be blocked.
Looks like the neo-cons are gearing up for a military push against Syria. The article talks about a campaign to be tougher on Damascus with renewed calling for military action.
In contrast to the charges that were made against Damascus 16 months ago, the new campaign appears to be based primarily on alleged statements by unidentified U.S. military and intelligence officials cited in the 'Washington Times' op-ed and a subsequent Washington Post news article to the effect that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is being organized, funded and even managed by, as the Post put it, a handful of Iraqi Baathists operating in Syria. One supposedly critical piece of evidence much cited by the hawks was the reported discovery of a global positioning signal receiver in a bomb factory in the Iraqi insurgents' stronghold of Fallujah, which contained waypoints originating in western Syria.
Over the weekend I made 12 loaves of Anadama Bread for our neighbors. My mom used to do this around Xmas time and I thought it was a nice tradition. Very yummy molasses bread indeed.
If you have an iPod you might have enjoyed the RetroPod iPod case made from a old Sony walkman case. Unfortunately, Sony decided to shut them down.
Cool article about Lawrence Lessig, marxism, and IP law. Culture wars between corporate IP interests and the common man.
Looking for some last-minute Christmas or Hanukkah stuff? How about some Chrismukkah Cards for your ambidextrous friends.

December 17, 2004

Financial Accounting Standards Board's decided yesterday that public companies must start expensing stock options by 6/15/2005 and private companies by 12/15/2005. Right now these are used as compensation and are rarely on the companies balance sheet. About time.
FASB chairman Robert H. Herz said the new rules "provide investors and other users of financial statements with more complete and unbiased financial information." Rules for accounting for stock options have pitted the technology industry, which relies on options to attract and retain employees, against some highly influential officials advocating expensing options, including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, and the Big Four accounting firms.
Cool charger which rejuvenates camera batter packs. Very slick.
Not only is the MH-C2000 capable of charging a wide selection of camcorder battery packs, it can also charge either four AA or four AAA NiMH & NiCD battery cells at a time. The MH-C2000 features built-in support for Lithium Ion, NiMH, & NiCD rechargeable battery pack chemistries. Plus, it automatically detects battery pack type and battery voltage. The smart microprocessor constantly monitors the charging process to prolong battery life.
So I migrated back to Speakeasy.net last night as my primary ISP. Although the connection through RCN seemed fine, their inability to serve reverse DNS and provide multiple fixed IPs was a deal killer. Speakeasy has always given good to excellent internet and customer service while RCN is usually frustrating so I'm happy to be back.
Worrying story about how the Bush administration is making plans to disable GPS satellite navigation system in advent of a war or terrorist attack. Given the reliance on GPS personal/car/plane/boat navigation, time reference, and other systems, I wonder what would crash if then threw the switch. Supposedly the project would also disable EU's Galileo system which has been proposed to counter the US governmental control over the critical satellite navigation infrastructure.
The directives to the Defense Department and the Homeland Security Department were part of a space policy that Bush signed this month. It designates the GPS network as a critical piece of infrastructure for the U.S. government. Part of the new policy is classified; other parts were disclosed Wednesday. The White House said the policies were aimed at improving the stability and performance of the U.S. navigation system, which Bush pledged will continue to be made available for free.
An awesome product from Bose which turns an Ipod into the home stereo. Very cool. I bet they are going to get some serious traction on this.

December 15, 2004

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe resigns, sending Bush his resignation on Monday. He's been decent but his response to the Columbia disaster was passable at best. It's going to be interesting to see what the Bush administration sees in NASA's future.
In a written statement, U.S. Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN) thanked OKeefe for his service to NASA, underscoring his stewardship during the tragic Columbia space shuttle accident in February 2003. "However, his successor is going to have some serious problems to address," Gordon said, pointing to: Returning the Shuttle to flight safely, dealing with the financial and cost management issues that continue to plague the agency, Ensuring that adequate resources are provided to maintain a world-class workforce and infrastructure, Reconciling the agency's goals with the constrained budgets it is likely to be facing in the years ahead.
Starting to hear good things about SpeedyCGI which looks very cool. Basically it is a wrapper around perl CGI scripts so instead of putting #!/usr/bin/perl at the top of a script you would put #!/usr/bin/speedycgi. This wraps the perl call so when the script finishes, the interpreter is kept around and reused for the next call. When the CGI is called a very small C program is executed which makes a connection with the backend to run the script. Very slick.
There seems to be growing political descent against Donald Rumsfeld. Senator John McCain told the Associated Press this week that he has "no confidence" in the defence secretary.
Discontent is also growing over the ballooning price tag for the war: latest reports indicate the Pentagon will ask for as much as 90 billion dollars more to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005, bringing the total in over three years to close to 250 billion dollars. Yet another major factor that is churning the waters of discontent against Rumsfeld is the still growing and strategically costly scandal over the abuse by U.S. soldiers of detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Iraq and Afghanistan, new details of which appear to drip out virtually daily.

December 14, 2004

Very disturbing article about reporters covering the fundamentalist Christians and their anti-environment stance. Basically many in the religious right think that the destruction of the environment is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and is on the road to redemption. This is also why they support Israel and give money to the settlements because the war with Islam is also on the road.
A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel.
Terrible story about how the military has been refueling planes from a international organized crime gun runner named Victor Bout.
NEWSWEEK has learned, a Texas charter firm allegedly controlled by Bout was making repeated flights to Iraq courtesy of a Pentagon contract allowing it to refuel at U.S. military bases. One reason for the flights, sources say, was that the firm was flying on behalf of Kellogg Brown & Root, the division of Halliburton hired to rebuild Iraq's oilfields.

December 13, 2004

Interesting page about BitTorrent and Konspire which are both mass-scale content distribution mechanisms.
BitTorrent is a system that spreads the load of file distribution among downloaders, reducing (or completely eliminating) bandwidth usage on the content server. The server splits the content file into chunks and creates a map file that describes each chunk. Downloaders retrieve this map file and then connect to a "tracker" server. The tracker maintains a list of downloaders that already have each chunk. Thus, a downloader can obtain the chunks that it needs from other downloaders and in turn serve back the chunks that it already has.
Just looking at this SeriTek/1S2 internal SATA adapter for Macs. I have the Highpoint 1820a but you can't boot from it and it doesn't support deep-sleep. Wasting power is especially annoying to me considering the solar panels on my house. Here's a cool page talking about SATA disk controller speed comparisons.
Pretty cool document about AoE or ATA over Ethernet products. These basically take a raw hard disk and put it on the ethernet for a computer to access. This is different from network storage like NFS or iSCSI devices.
Each EtherDrive Storage Blade has its own Nanoserver to perform the protocol conversion from ATA disk commands to Ethernet frames. As the storage pool is expanded by adding more EtherDrive Storage Blades, the performance is also increased. Standard ATA disk drives attach easily to the EtherDrive Storage Blade. As disk densities increase each year, disk drives can be upgraded without replacing the EtherDrive blade or storage chassis. EtherDrive Storage Blades slide into a simple rack mounted shelf with power supply. Each blade is hot swappable for easy maintenance. Power consumption for EtherDrive is less than half that required by alternative storage products.

December 10, 2004

I was recently was recommended the book Don't Think Of An Elephant!. Sounds like an interesting book about how to properly frame topics. Looks excellent. The following quote is from the Amazon.com review.
While Democrats may have valid arguments, Lakoff points out they are destined to lose when they and the news media accept such nomenclature as "pro-life," "tax relief," and "family values," since to argue against such inherently positive terminology necessarily casts the arguer in a negative light.
We were having a discussion about the definition of a "planet" today at work. Interesting stuff. By some definitions, objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy debris past Neptune should be classified as planets. One such is Quaoar which is about 60% of the size of Pluto.
Is Quaoar a Planet? We don't think so. It's about half the size of Pluto and further away, but there are other big objects out there, too. Varuna (900 km in diameter) and 2002 AW197 (also 900 km in diameter) are two of the biggest Kuiper Belt Objects, and they are not considered "planets" either. There are about 600 known Kuiper Belt Objects, most of which are only about 100 km in diameter, and all of which were discovered since 1992 by different scientists who have been looking for them. It's similar to the asteroid belt, but beyond Neptune and contains maybe 100 times more material.
I've been ~~playing~~, no fighting with CSS for the last couple of days trying to put a fixed navigation bar on the left side of the page. What a pain in the ass. You have to do all of these hacks to get it to work with IE. Mozilla, Safari, and Konquerer were cake in comparison. I've probably screwed up Opera though time. It still looks not passable under the text browsers (links and lynx). Here's a helpful page which talks about fixed vertical bars for IE.
Google has put out a new auto-selection search interface. Pretty cool to play with. Not sure how much it is going to be used but it's a neat toy. For a query example, type in "gray watson".
PBS did a program recently entitled Is Wal-Mart Good for America? It's a subject I've been talking about for some time. People aren't making the connection between the cheap crap they buy at Wal-Mart and their cousin losing his manufacturing job.
In Circleville, Ohio, population 13,000, the local RCA television-manufacturing plant was once a source of good jobs with good pay and benefits. But in late 2003, RCA's owner, Thomson Consumer Electronics, lost a sizeable portion of its production orders and six months later shut the plant down, throwing 1,000 people out of work. Thomson's jobs have moved to China, where cheap labor manufactures what the American consumer desires -- from clothing to electronics -- and can buy at "everyday low prices" at the local Wal-Mart.
Interesting article from a couple of weeks back about WiMax companies in large cities who are selling Internet services. They are talking about TowerStream.
WiMax, or worldwide interoperability for microwave access. Unlike WiFi, the radio wave technology in airports and cafes that allows users to log on to the Internet from their laptop computers within 150 feet of an antenna, WiMax delivers broadband Internet connections through fixed antennas that send and receive signals across entire cities.
Here's an article from PC Magazine
Uh, this sounds a little scary. Representatives are starting to complain about the cost of some secret spy program that has been kept under wrap.
For two years, the senators have disclosed, Republicans and Democrats on the panel have voted to block the secret program, which is believed to be a system of new spy satellites. But it continues to be financed at a cost that former Congressional officials put at hundreds of millions of dollars a year with support from the House, the Bush administration and Congressional appropriations committees.
Although this question was seeded by a reporter, troops asked Rumsfield some touch questions during a "morale-lifting" town hall discussion with Iraq-bound troops. There's more reports about how supply vehicles are rarely armored.
Mr. Rumsfeld, seemingly caught off guard by the sharp questioning, responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible, but that the soldiers would have to cope with equipment shortages. "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time," he said.

December 8, 2004

Here's a cool article and site about prolonging the life of your lithium-based batteries.
Short discharges with subsequent recharges do not provide the periodic calibration needed to synchronize the fuel gauge with the battery's state-of-charge. A deliberate full discharge and recharge every 30 charges corrects this problem. Letting the battery run down to the cut-off point in the equipment will do this. If ignored, the fuel gauge will become increasingly less accurate. (Read more in 'Choosing the right battery for portable computing', Part Two.)
This might a good book on the battery subject too.
Just found the links text browser not to be confused with lynx. It seems to do a heck of a lot better at rendering tables than other text browsers out there. Check out the screen shot.
So I found out today about Hooters Air. Yes folks, it's not a joke, the Hooters restaurant now has an airline. I'm trying but I can't quite make the joke about leg room and carryons. They are run by something called Pace Airlines which is a small charter and specialty airline. You'd think that would be far enough but there's also Naked Air for those people who just can't wait to be naked I guess. I wouldn't want to spill the pretzels or the salisbury steak on me.

December 7, 2004

So I had heard that unusual amounts of airline stock was shorted in the days running up to 9/11 but the specifics really point to a larger conspiracy. Scary.
In the month prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, highly unusual trading activity Stocks involving American and United Airlines stock was noted by market analysts who at the time had no idea what to make of it. Wildly unusual discrepancies in the put and call ratio 25 to 100 times normal were observed in stock options of the two airlines. In one case, Bloomberg's Trade Book electronic trading system identified option volume in UAL (parent of United Airlines) on 16 August 2001 that was 36 times higher than usual.
Worrisome story about how the court allowed police to shave hair to get evidence without a warrant.
At the end of last month, in the case of Coddington v. Evanko, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that police officers may constitutionally shave large amounts of hair from a suspect's head, neck, and shoulders, without a warrant, probable cause, or any basis for suspecting that the hair would provide evidence of crime. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the people the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. But according to the court, the Fourth Amendment does not apply to hair removal.
No big surprise here but there was a lot of fraud with the Iraq reconstruction funding.
"In the early days, there was no record keeping. They were flushed with money and seized assets. People just didn't follow established procedures," said Charles Krohn, a former CPA official. "You were dealing with inexperienced people who didn't understand that there's always a day of reckoning."
More revelations in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. Special forces threatened Defense Intelligence Agency personnel. That's nice.
FBI agents also reported seeing detainees at Abu Ghraib subjected to sleep deprivation, humiliation and forced nudity between October and December 2003 -- when the most serious abuses allegedly took place in a scandal that's remains under investigation.
Interesting page which details 20 smoking guns about the 9/11 attack. It's conspiracy theory stuff but more compelling than others that I have seen.

December 6, 2004

So the JPL/NASA Opportunity and Spirit rovers currently driving around the surface of Mars continue to provide scientific information even though they are getting close to a year old -- 8 months past the end of the project plan. The latest publications as a result of their findings show a wet and possibly habitable environment on Mars in the past.
"Liquid water was once intermittently present at the Martian surface at Meridiani, and at times it saturated the subsurface. Because liquid water is a key prerequisite for life, we infer conditions at Meridiani may have been habitable for some period of time in Martian history," according to Squyres, Arvidson and other co-authors.
It was interesting today to do a search on alltheweb.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com, overture.com, lycos.com, and hotbot.com and get the same series of web results with varying paid content up front. I knew that Overture had bought out Inktomi, Fast, and Altavista but to see the consolidation always takes me aback. I'm sure that it makes good business sense, especially for the stockholder, but the public is almost assuredly not served by fewer sources for web information. We have Google, Inktomi, and now MSN. Ask Jeeves/Teoma probable a tier 2 player.
Disturbing article about how the Army fabricated the cause of death of Pat Tillman, the NFL star who stopped his career in football to train and ultimately die as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan. Instead of being killed by enemy fire he was killed by his fellow Army soldiers. Certainly sad that it happened but also sad that the Army felt it had to lie about it.
It was also a distorted and incomplete narrative, according to dozens of internal Army documents obtained by The Washington Post that describe Tillman's death by fratricide after a chain of botched communications, a misguided order to divide his platoon over the objection of its leader, and undisciplined firing by fellow Rangers.
Finally finished my piece on my trip out to watch SpaceShipOne on its first flight beyond 100km to beat the X-Prize.
The PA announced that it was close to the drop time and that it was to the North East at around 15 degrees off the horizon but we still were looking far too high when the rocket trail was first spotted around 08:12. It was really cool looking at Space Ship One streak upwards through the binoculars. It would have been hard to follow with something with higher resolution. You couldn't see the ship itself but the rocket burn and the resulting smoke trail were very visible.
Went and saw the movie Sideways over the weekend. Very good flick about two guys struggling through life on a bachelor fling week in the wine country of California. Paul Giamatti was fabulous. There a lot of great acting, good humor, and fabulous scenes and my wife and I enjoyed it immensely. After poking around a bit on the excellent Movie Review Query Engine page for the movie I read this review by one Charles Taylor from the usually better salon.com that was so negative that I had to send this email to Taylor because of it.
The problem with reviewers is, of course, that it's very hard for them to think out of the box -- to view a movie without the experience that their job expects of them. However, your review of Sideways is so critical, I can only assume that director Alexander Payne owes you money or something.
Here's a cool 20 questions game that you play with the computer. I asks a bunch of questions and as people play it creates a knowledge base. Very interesting.

December 3, 2004

A colleague at work mentioned the Asterisk open source PBX yesterday. Seems pretty cool although the site lacks a FAQ or description of installations.
Chris is using Keyboard Maestro on his Macintosh. It looks really cool.
With Keyboard Maestro you can design your own shortcuts and activate them at any time, you can navigate through running applications and open windows with Program Switcher, and you can work with an unlimited number of clipboards - all by pressing simple keystrokes.
Lot of funny jokes on this site. Here's one of my favorites.
A pirate walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender notices that he's got what looks like steering wheel down his pants so asks, "Hey matey, do you realize you've got a steering wheel in your pants there?" Pirate says, "Arr... it's drivin' me nuts."
Norway has a Government Petroleum Fund currently worth US$150 billion to save money for their people when oil and gas resources run out. That sounds incredibly sane and demonstrates a level of planning unheard of from the US federal government. I wonder if we are going to see it run out in our lifetime. Scientists have been saying so for a while but it seems recently that there are more and more discussions of the topic. The problem is that it will take us decades to find replacements and to get a new energy system and consumers distributed around the country. Hopefully we will have enough time to realize this and implement new energy programs before the world economy self destructs.
The Bush administration has blocked the removal of a book which explains the creation of the Grand Canyon from a biblical viewpoint. Sigh. The PEER group is documenting cases of what it calls the Bush Administrations Faith-Based Parks agenda.
The Bush Administration has decided that it will stand by its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noahs flood rather than by geologic forces, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Just found out about the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer aircraft built by Burt Rutan for Richard Branson and Steve Fossett. Fossett will be attempting to fly it single handedly around the world without refueling. It will take him 80+ hours meaning that he will either go 3 days without sleep or will take naps. Rutan's Voyager aircraft did it but with 2 pilots. Here's a news story about the craft too.
Aerodynamics are key to this aircraft, and its configuration is optimized for range and fuel efficiency. The aircraft's aerodynamics have been designed using extremely sophisticated computing technology that uses computational fluid dynamics to predict how the aircraft's surfaces will behave in flight. The aircraft is so aerodynamically perfect, that the only practical way to descend is using drag parachutes, like the ones in the picture above. As the aircraft is only required to land once, these won't be detachable and will take time to reset.
Interesting article drawing a parallel between P2P file share networks and gun manufacturers.
A recent proposal from the Copyright Office purports to hold manufacturers responsible for "technolog[ies]" that "cause" copyright "infringement," if those technologies (1) rely on infringement for "commercial viability," (2) derive "a predominant portion" of their revenue from infringement and (3) rely on infringement to "attract individuals" to the technology.
Cool paper airplane site. They have lot of technical information and planes that you can download and fold yourself. Pretty cool!

December 2, 2004

War on the web between SorryEverybody.com and at least 8 pro-Bush sites including WereNotSorry.com. Then there's the spoof site www.WeIsNotSorry.com.
Sorryeverybody.com started the duel the day after the polls closed, with a picture of its creator holding up a "Sorry World" message. Since then the site has racked up more than 27 million hits as other people post pictures and view the growing gallery of images. But the site has also seen the creation of at least eight other websites set up by supporters of president George W Bush who believe there is nothing to apologize for.
Interesting piece about processor counts in modern systems. They mention Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne aircraft -- the first civilian spaceship.
The SpaceShipOne design reminds me of what Albert Einstein Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. The 15 or so processors in SpaceShipOne add up to fewer than are in most cars today, as there has been an explosion in microprocessors in automobiles during the past decade... Think about it. You can reach the edge of space in a vehicle that has about 15 microprocessors, but driving your car, on the ground, can require the coordinated action of 50 or more!
Article with a lot of details about google.com. Pretty interesting. Their biggest achievement, in my opinion, was to handle the data automation. To be able to have distributed clusters of systems each taking care of itself, its set of documents, and its associated indexes.
Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed. Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster. Over 30 clusters. 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog. One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10 ^ -15 begin to be a real issue. Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster. An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters. No complete system failure since February 2000.
Pretty funny piece about the famous Microsoft interview question about round manhole covers.
Interviewer: Do you believe there is a safety issue? I mean, couldn't square covers fall into the hole and hurt someone?
Feynman: Not likely. Square covers are sometimes used on prefabricated vaults where the access passage is also square. The cover is larger than the passage, and sits on a ledge that supports it along the entire perimeter. The covers are usually made of solid metal and are very heavy. Let's assume a two-foot square opening and a ledge width of 1-1/2 inches. In order to get it to fall in, you would have to lift one side of the cover, then rotate it 30 degrees so that the cover would clear the ledge, and then tilt the cover up nearly 45 degrees from horizontal before the center of gravity would shift enough for it to fall in. Yes, it's possible, but very unlikely.
I've told the story of how the microwave was invented but I was a little off.
Like many of today's great inventions, the microwave oven was a by-product of another technology. It was during a radar-related research project around 1946 that Dr. Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer with the Raytheon Corporation, noticed something very unusual. He was testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron (we are searching for a picture of an actual 1946 magnetron), when he discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted... Doctor Spencer continued at Raytheon as a senior consultant until he died at the age of 76. At the time of his death, Dr. Spencer held 150 patents and was considered one of the world's leading experts in the field of microwave energy, despite his lack of a high school education.
This is exactly right. It talks about how John Kerry was not able to connect to the voters. Exactly right.
In January 2003, when his campaign was still young enough that Kerry would actually sit down with reporters in a relaxed setting, he and Crowley met for breakfast at the Holiday Inn in Dubuque, Iowa. "I'd like to start out with some green tea," Kerry told the waitress, who stared at him for a moment before responding, "We have Lipton's." Lipton's would be fine, Kerry said, but the memory stayed with Crowley. "There were many green tea instances," she told the sell-out crowd of 450 at the Kravis Center's Cohen Pavilion. "There's a very large disconnect between the Washington politicians and most of America and how they live. Bush was able to bridge that gap, and Kerry was not."

December 1, 2004

Chris and I were justing looking at the Deck Snorkel rig. It is a compressor, tank, hose, regulator combo with which you can scrub the bottom of your boat, find anchors, winch handles, or dive around recreationally. Sounds like some basic dive training is required however.
I need to give some money to the Rockridge Institute. The left whines about how the right has think tanks so we need to better support the think tanks and organizations who push progressive and left positions.
The Rockridge Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to strengthening our democracy by providing intellectual support to the progressive community. We partner with advocates, activists, and policy professionals to articulate the system of American values and ideas and reframe public debate.
Our goal is to empower people to effect positive change by reframing the public debate and facilitating consensus toward progressive policy goals. We do this by applying the discipline of cognitive linguistics to reveal the underlying frames and assumptions that structure American political discourse.
Here's an unfortunate report about how the Bush administration and scientists aren't getting along. For one thing, science shouldn't care. Scientists should not take political opinions, they should only publish research and data. But Bush has always used questionable science for backing for his policies and sooner or later the lack of support on the environment is going to bite the Republicans in the ass.
The scientific community has made a strong case. The Union of Concerned Scientists distributed two damning reports in 2004 accusing the administration of suppressing and manipulating research and stacking independent scientific advisory panels with ideological or industry-connected members.
Interesting article about John Perry Barlow, the so called Thomas Jefferson of the wired generation.
Barlow recently surprised many of his libertarian friends by announcing that merely living a bohemian libertarian lifestyle was no longer sufficient. For most of his public career, Barlow had emphasized staking out one's liberty in your personal life and in the arena of ideas, not the scrum of partisan politics. Now he feels very differently: He believes that the combination of George W. Bush and the rise of "plutocratic" corporations requires direct political engagement, and that getting rid of Bush overrides any other personal or political concerns.

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