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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2005:
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January 31, 2005 
These set of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business will leave you both laughing and
crying at the same time. What it especially demonstrates that there
needs to be huge overhaul in executive compensation. #2: Withdrawing arthritis medication Vioxx from the market
because of concerns that it raises the risk of heart attacks, Merck
sees its stock drop 39 percent, shaving $38 billion off the company's
market cap. Responding to the crisis, Merck management executes a
bold, daring plana "change in control separation benefits plan" for
230 of its top executives. The plan gives them up to three years of
guaranteed salary and benefits if they lose their jobs as the result
of a merger or takeover.
#18: Hormel Foods is forced to recall
104,000 pounds of Stagg canned chililabeled "hearty beef with a kick
of green chilies"after the kick turns out to come instead from the
ground-up parts of a plastic handheld calculator.
Here's a copy of the famous
picture of Dick Cheney visiting the Auschwitz concentration camp
during the 60 year anniversary of its liberation. Everyone else is in
formal dress black and he looks like he's ready to start up the snow
blower. I can only assume that his front people really screwed
up by not accessing the formality of the event or not forcing him to
wear other clothes.
January 30, 2005
YES Tele.com manufacture a couple
multi-line caller-id and DTMF boxes for PC computers. They can detect
incoming and outgoing calls, various rings types, caller-id of course,
and other phone line information and have a serial command protocol.
US$240 for the 2-line up to $500 for the 8-line.
January 28, 2005
Wrote this letter
to Senator Ted Kennedy in support of the Cape Wind project. He's
against it the fool. So much for liberals being environmentalist. I would like to add my strong encouragement to the Cape Wind Project and related wind efforts. The perils of fossil fuel usage and dependence on foreign oil make projects such as Cape Wind so very important for our environment, economy, and national security.
This article talks
about David Atkinson and his team whose wind measuring equipment on the Huygens Titan probe which was
never turned on due to a human error. These guys put in 80 man years,
18 from Atkinson alone, and have little to no data to show for it.
Poor bastards.
Wow! This dude (and I guess
others) are experimenting with fusion
reactions in their homes. He claims it can be done under
US$1000. People usually cringe when I mention the words "amateur" and "fusion" in the same sentence, so allow me to explain. As I mentioned in the "Fusion Methods" section, Inertial Electrostatic Confinement is a fairly simple method used to obtain fusion reactions. Invented in the late 50's by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the television as we know it today), the "fusor" (as it is sometimes called) uses ordinary vacuum-tube technologies to accelerate and collide nuclei of fusible atoms. Farnsworth's original fusors were rather complex, but the concept is very simple, and can be adapted to your heart's desire.
Article about how the election this weekend is demonstrating that
Iraq is one
nation but divided people. Attacks against Shia targets have increased in an effort to keep them away from the polling booths, security sources say. The Sunni minority is battling furiously to prevent the consolidation of a system in which they forfeit their traditional dominance... The Kurds have had their own government, army and police for the last 13 years and they are not about to let the central government have any say over their affairs ever again. They are for now forced to stay in a nominally united Iraq but hatred between them and 'the Arabs' runs deep.
January 27, 2005
Ok. This image entitled the The Hasselhoffian Recursion is absolutely hilarious and very
disturbing. Here's a local copy of the image
itself. I dare you to view it.
Wow is this a super cool hotel. It
looks like some architectural wet dream or something from a science
fiction movie. It is the Burj
Al Arab hotel in Dubai, UAE. Shows you what you can do when you
have tons of oil money. Absolutely amazing looking. Room rates from
US$1300 per night. Designed to resemble a billowing sail, the hotel soars to a height of 321 metres, dominating the Dubai coastline. At night, it offers an unforgettable sight, surrounded by choreographed colour sculptures of water and fire. This all-suite hotel reflects the finest that the world has to offer.
Turns out that a good friend went there on his honeymoon. My goodness. I sent him mail and here are his recollections of his stay.The view simply took our breath away, one side of the sitting room and the bedroom was just open glass with electric curtains swishing across at your bidding - the view overlooking the coastline simply fantastic. The master remote controlling every conceivable piece of kit - including the butler who appeared from nowhere as soon as you pushed the butler call button (bit like godzilla really).
Very disturbing article
about crash tests between the Mini and a F150 pickup truck. At 40 mph
the mini's passenger compartment is intact while the F150s is
demolished. The article talks about how the F150 is one ot the top
selling vehicles in the country and is relatively cheap to build but
has terrible safety ratings. I can see the class action lawsuit right
now. The car companies have known for some time that SUVs and other
trucks are less safe but make them more money so they have peddled
them as being more safe. Just got mail from PK who pointed out that you can visit the highway safety records for vehicles online and compared the Chevy Astro and Venture results with the Honda Odyssey. It is obvious that certain car companies make an better effort than others to design a crash resistant vehicle. Here's the one for the Cooper and the F150 (2003). The newer F150 is much safer.
The MINI had almost no intrusion which "indicates that the driver's survival space was maintained very well" - the F150 on the other hand had "Major collapse of the occupant compartment that left little survival space for the driver." I'm interested in how a company could create a modern vehicle that could perform so badly on this test. Furthermore Ford had lots of space to work with to make this a safe vehicle. For BMW/MINI to do the job in 1/4 the space is what engineering is all about.
Here's some sad commentary.
Seems one Derek Kieper wrote an article for the Daily Nebraskan on individual rights to not wear seatbelts. As laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws. There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group.
Three months later Derek died in a Ford Explorer rollover accident.Derek, who was thrown from the vehicle, was not wearing a seat belt, Lefler said. He said [the other two people in the SUV] were wearing seat belts at the time [and sustained non-life threatening injuries].
January 26, 2005
I made some DVD
copies of my SpaceShipOne footage but they've been having a lot of
problems with compatibility with DVD players. It works find on my Mac
and my DVD player but none of my brother's Macs can play it and some
set-top DVD players seem to work and others will work for a while and
then freeze. Looks like there are tons of bad media out there and
even the brand names won't save you. Looks like Prodisc, Infodisc,
Sony, Ricoh, Ritek, Optodisc, and Fujifilm are good buys but YMMV.
One page said that burning DVDs at slower speeds improves
compatibility. In doing some searches today about the subject I found
these links: good and bad DVD media, excellent DVD
compatibility discussion, DVD media ID inspector software for Mac OSX, compatibility
surveys between DVD-R and DVD+R, list of
compatibile set-top players, good online store for
media.
January 24, 2005
FCC chief Michael Powell is
resigning. Good riddance. He will be best known for his record
fines that he imposed against various media because of inappropriate
content. Unfortunately this didn't extend to Fox's news coverage. Fines for indecent programming exceeded $7.7 million last year, a huge increase from the $48,000 imposed the year before Powell became chairman. Powell has praised the record fines, saying the commission was wielding our sword to protect children and viewers who object to racy programming.
Very good article
about how Human Rights Watch
believes that the United States' behavior at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
Bay is eroding global human rights. In its annual report, Human Rights Watch says that when a country as dominant as the US openly defies the law, it invites others to do the same. [...] "The US government is less and less able to push for justice abroad, because it's unwilling to see justice done at home," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW.
On friday for some reason got the
urge to make the Benny Hill theme as my phone's ringer. Played around
with MIDI files, ringtone formats, and my Treo for a while but never
quite got there. Confusing. But here are some links that helped: midi
ringtones on a Treo 300, bunch of mp3
themesongs, ringtonetools conversion software.
Got a ton of snow over the weekend. Very
pretty. Probably a record for us. Hope to take some pictures today.
Huge drifts. The roads look like some picture of Switzerland with 5
foot piles on each side.
January 21, 2005
Cool page about suffix trees where you represent a byte array or other pattern as
a tree of sub-arrays. They can be built linearly and can process text
blocks linearly. It is similar to a trie and a Patricia tree. Suffix Trees can be used to solve a large number of string problems that occur in text-editing, free-text search, computational biology, and other application areas. Some examples are given below.
Ok. This is bizarro page about
the rapture when
god comes back and takes all his believers onto heaven leaving the
rest of us in a rapidly unraveling world. Garsh!! The reality is
that there are people who are very serious about this. That see the
modern Israeli struggles as a sign of the end of the world. I realize this web page will be addressing two audiences: those of you who read this page before the rapture and those of you who read it after the rapture. My focus here will be on those who have found this page after the rapture of the Church. For anyone reading this material before the pre-trib rapture, I highly recommend that you ponder the negative consequences of being left behind and seriously consider committing your life to Jesus if you have not done so already.
January 20, 2005
An Alternet piece about
the costs of the
inauguration and the excesses involved: 
A friend has bought a couple
of oil paintings from this online artist named Duane Keiser. He posts a new one every day
via his blog which you can purchase. I love the work and the business
model.
New Gallop poll out on whether
Bush is a divider or a uniter. The country is split 49% each way
with 2% undecided. I'd be willing to guess that there is a high
correlation between voting for Bush and saying that he is a uniter.
Really I can't believe anyone would say this. What has he done to
unite the country aside from going to war? I'm not saying that other
presidents necessarily do better, but he has done little to nothing
along those lines. Quite the contrary. The administration has called
people who are against the war traitors.
January 19, 2005
Doing some quick research on
marine battery systems today. Boy was my knowledge of the problems
wrong. It is not memory that you worry about with lead acids
but repeated deep discharging which kills the batteries -- leaving a
light on which will slowly drain a battery down till its dead. It was
always my [wrong] understanding that we should have symetric battery
banks which we can rotate back and forth. Really we should have a
starting battery and batteries to drive the various components. Here
are some good reference pages for my memory: marine
battery primer, fabulous battery
tutorial, battery bank design, good resource list, solar charging, good battery
lead-acid charger.
It did some quick analysis the other
day to find the queries that one of my pages scored well for on
Google. Most of these are very specific topics so I'm not competing
with a ton of other web developers.
So a friend of mine is using EV1 for his
hosting. They have 2 server load-balanced cluster at $220/month or
value packages starting at $100/month. Another provider is ServInt. They provide virtual and
dedicated servers. With the virtual servers (US$50-$130/month) you
basically have a Redhat 9.0 sandbox of your own. Dedicated servers
(starting at $300/month) can run FreeBSD or Linux.
Ahead of the release of the next Star Wars
movie Hasbro is releasing (wait for it) Darth Tater. I kid you not. Here's a link to the Hasbro press release. Darth Tater will come with a light saber, cape and helmet, in addition to the regular Mr. Potato Head accessories such as eyes, mouth and nose. The Pawtucket-based toy maker says children will be able to "have all kinds of mix n' match, Mr. Potato Head fun with this wacky spud dressed as the infamous Star Wars villain, Darth Vader." The toy will retail for $7.99.
January 18, 2005
The new Airbus
A380 super jumbo airliner was announced today. It can carry up to
840 passengers (really 555 in 3 classes) on its two full decks and
costs somewhere around US$275 million. It can be powered by Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines Engine Alliance
GP7200 engines (General Electric and Pratt & Whitney), each
rated at 70,000+lbs of thrust. It has a wingspan of over 260ft, range
of 8,000nm, and a max takeoff weight of over 1 million pounds. Yow.
So I recently have been looking at
Enom to take over from Tucows on supplying my domain
name reselling servies. I started with them right when the
domain-name space was opening up and they were one of the few, if not
the only one out there. But recently I've not been keeping up to date
with their APIs and the pricing has dropped sub $10/.com with
competitors. I initially looked at GoDaddy which gives $8 domains
however I found a lot of rants against them: here, here, here, here, and here. I
looked at TargetDomain.com but
their Spanish roots (with my experience of the TerraLycos disaster)
and some bad PayPal integration turning me off at the last minute. Enom is currently the top contender.
There's a lot of hype about them on the blogs and I can't find too
many rants against. They have a pyramid pricing structure so people
are constantly hawking reseller accounts. I just hope the excitement
with them is not all about that -- that they provide good services The
blogs recommend that you make sure you are getting a Enom PDQ account
and not a Enom Register Rocket account where you are beholden
to the reseller who ultimately has complete control over the domains
-- i.e. can lock you out of your domain. With a PDQ account you are
logging into ENOM directly and can use any PDQ account to edit your
domains. More information on ENOM reselling: here,
here,
and here.
January 17, 2005
Interesting replacement to Paypal called Ikobo.
The merchant fees look comparable to Paypal. When you send people
money, they get a debit card in the mail.
Awesome interview with Burt Rutan. Man the guy is a visionary. If they
weren't out in the middle of the dessert in California, I could see
working for him. This wasnt done for the X Prize. In fact, when we started on it the X Prize was not funded and did not look like it was going to be funded. This was done primarily because I uncovered some things that I thought were very significant that could make space tourism much safer then space flying had been. You see, its not just a problem of affordability; its also a problem of safety. And also, Paul Allen, I found, was a space addict and he wanted to see it done. We ran the first non-government manned space program.
Another fabulous More JunkMail
from Bob episode (#166). These are almost always interesting and
I usually poach a bunch of stuff from there to my blog.
2% of the nations call-center calls are monitored by third party companies. These
companies hear personal information, passwords, and other critical
information. Some privacy advocates worry that monitors, as well as operators, can steal customer passwords and other sensitive data. Thus far, few documented cases of identity theft have been unearthed involving monitors, and most monitoring companies screen their applicants. State wiretapping laws generally do not provide protection against recording of call center conversations (the taped message at the start of the call is in most cases considered an adequate privacy warning).
More information about the CIA jet that is transporting prisoners to other countries for
interrogation. Many believe that it is transporting suspected
terrorists for torture to countries other than the US where it is
allowed. The idea that these people do not get ethical treatment from
US operatives because they aren't US citizens seems so wrong. How are
we asking our enemies to treat US soldiers and citizens overseas?
Here are some other links: extraordinary
rendition, Times Online, Oregonian, Chicago
Tribune. As the outlines of the rendition system have been revealed, criticism of the practice has grown. Human rights groups are working on legal challenges to renditions, said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, because one of their purposes is to transfer captives to countries that use harsh interrogation methods outlawed in the United States. That, he said, is prohibited by the U.N. Convention on Torture.
What a game it was yesterday
between the Patriots and the Colts. The first half was close with a 6-3
score and the Colts having put together a big drive which stalled at
the end. But in the 2nd half the Patriots just did not let the Colts
get any traction or very much time on the field.
January 14, 2005
Dropping into a subdirectory to
store all of the images and stuff from the Huygens probe which landed today on
Saturn moon Titan.
January 13, 2005
A friend send me a link to
the story about Infrared-sensitive material could lead to better use of solar
spectrum which can be woven into clothing. It's interesting to
read the Reuters version of the story which sounds completely different.
Existing technology has given us solution-processible, light-sensitive materials that have made large, low-cost solar cells, displays, and sensors possible, but these materials have so far only worked in the visible light spectrum, says Sargent. These same functions are needed in the infrared for many imaging applications in the medical field and for fiber optic communications, he said.
Just surfing the Bergey Windpower wind turbine
company pages. Some cool looking turbines, manuals, packages,
installation samples, etc.. Here's also a link to the American Wind Energy Association.
They have permitting information, press releases, links to
manufacturers, etc..
Interesting page about Paypal fraud measures and how they pressure sellers when a buyer cancels a
credit card transaction. Not good although I'm not sure what I'd
do in their place. In this case a buyer's account got phished and the
original owner of the account would not pay. Because the seller did
not use the verified address to ship to, Paypal said that he was
responsible for the charge.
January 12, 2005
Nice piece about how to list your stuff on ebay. Instead of reserve auctions, a much better way to protect your investment is to set your initial listing price just high enough to protect your cost and prevent a loss. Nothing is hidden. Your minimum sale threshold, when built into the initial listing price, is presented for all to see and you've avoided disappointing any bidders and potential bidders by a "did not meet the reserve" auction conclusion.
Interesting legal
case where a judge has allowed use of vehicle tracking device without a
warrant. They make a good point here although I wonder how they
attached it to the car and whether the car was on public roads all of
the time. Certainly you would not want police to have access to your
GPS phone's location without a warrant even though you were walking
around in a public park. Hurd opined that authorities wouldn't need a warrant had they decided to follow Moran, so using a GPS device was merely a simpler way to track his car "as it traveled on the public highways," he wrote. "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway. Thus, there was no search or seizure and no Fourth Amendment implications in the use of the GPS device."
Funny piece about the
different types of the folks who send email. I'm afraid that I may be
close to being a digital diarrhea-ist. I hope not but I'm sure to
some of my frugal email contacts, that my mail has a filter attached
to it.
Wild story about how a hacker penetrated
T-Mobile computer systems. He had access to all of T-Mobile's
16.3 million customers including many social security numbers and
birth dates. He also had access to a lot of Secret Service internal
documents because agents use their T-Mobile sidekick PDAs a lot.
Anyone else worried by this? What stupid security officials send
secret documents in the clear like that? Fools. Twenty-one year-old Nicolas Jacobsen was quietly charged with the intrusions last October, after a Secret Service informant helped investigators link him to sensitive agency documents that were circulating in underground IRC chat rooms. The informant also produced evidence that Jacobsen was behind an offer to provide T-Mobile customers' personal information to identity thieves through an Internet bulletin board, according to court records.
January 11, 2005
Thanks to the WayBackMachine, you
can peek at my sorry excuse for a homepage from
letters.com back in 1996. Pretty funny with the typical
blue-ribbon pointing to some EFF page about Internet privacy rites or
something.
I
may have posted this before but here's another copy of Google's
20 Year Usenet Timeline from 1981 to 2001. Interesting posts
which really take me back. My first post on Usenet was in Feburary 1988.
Dahr Jamail from the always
interesting Tomdispatch.com
posted this story about Iraq, The
Devastation. It is not going to make you feel good. Iraq is
looking more and more like it is going to explode in a very messy way.
And to think that the fools that started this are still in power.
What a nightmare. Then, as now, for Iraqis, our invasion and occupation was a case of liberation from from human rights (think: the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib which are still occurring daily there and elsewhere); liberation from functioning infrastructure (think: the malfunctioning electric system, the many-mile long gas lines, the raw sewage in the streets); liberation from an entire city to live in (think: Fallujah, most of which has by now been flattened by aerial bombardment and other means).
Man does the new Mac Mini computer from Apple
look cool. It lists for $499 and comes without a monitor. It weights
only 2.9 pounds and is 2" high and 6.5" square meaning that it has a
smaller footprint as most mouse pads. It has: USB 2.0, ethernet,
modem, dvi/vga, firewire 400, audio, and CD-R/DVD-ROM. They also
released the iPod
shuffle, a $99 iPod with 512mb flash memory which is lighter than
an ounce and smaller than a pack of gum. Even more cool products from
Apple.
January 10, 2005
Very cool piece entitled What Do You Believe
Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It. They have responses from
a number of "who's who" scientists and science-minded thinkers. Here
are some sample answers from their panel: 
Here's a case study of the Hull One
wind turbine in Hull Massachusetts. Capital costs including
installation were $753k. They are getting $0.128/kWh with operations,
maintenance, and insurance costs at $30k/year. With an annual energy
production of 1,590,000 kWh or $203k, the simple payback is 4-5 years.
I don't understand why there aren't more sites like this out there.
Sigh.
Here's some other stuff I learned
from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Seatbelt Use in
2002. January 8, 2005
Just placed an order for the
book Five Hundred Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown.
Sounds like fun. Over five hundred simple mechanical movements from America's first one hundred years of the Industrial Revolution. For those who share an interest in mechanical things, this book is addictive. Through the use of simplified, concise drawings, here are 507 of the small components which make up complex machinery, in areas as diverse as C.R. Otis's safety stop for the elevator, Pickering's governor for a steam engine, Arnold's escapement for watches, compound parallel rules, piston rod guides, the grasshopper beam engine and a self recording level for surveyors. The list goes on and on in fascinating variety.
January 7, 2005
I've no idea if this would
actually work but I love reading this page about Boron, a possibly better
energy carrier than hydrogen. Hydrogen is not a fuel source but
rather a battery -- a power transfer agent. Boron is
much more dense than hydrogen, is much less explosive, and stores and
releases much more energy during it's conversion. The idea would be
for cars to burn boron fibers at high temperatures using pure oxygen
and store the boria ash. This ash would then be exchanged at a
refueling station and taken to be chemically converted back into boron
using energy from a solar or nuclear facility. Instead of oil being
transported over the ocean surfaces, ash could be taken to solar sites
an returned as fuel. To be burned in a car, it would need close to
100% pure oxygen so an onboard oxygen purifier would be necessary
which may take 30% of the power of the engine but still be much more
efficient than hydrogen and gasoline. It also burns at extremely high
temperatures so new engine designs would be necessary. Interesting to
think about.
7 US troups were killed
yesterday after a roadside bomb hit their armored personnel carrier. That must
have been an extremely powerful explosion. That brings the total
number of US military
casualties in the Iraq war to 1393. The blast flipped the 50,000-plus-pound Bradley Fighting Vehicle upside down and into a ditch, said Lt. Col. James Hutton, a 1st Cavalry spokesman. Rescue efforts were hampered by flames and secondary explosions, he said.
BMW has a hydrogen research
project with a concept car and plans for a sedan. Here's another link to the
hydrogen project. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe - and the lightest. When hydrogen is combined with air, compressed and then ignited, it creates three times the amount of energy generated by the same amount of gasoline. What's equally amazing is that the exhaust it creates is virtually nothing but water vapor.
Found this intesting site dealing
with a Quasiturbine engine. Terrible name but pretty cool engine. It
works on any pressure source and has Stirling engine versions that
generate mechanical energy from a heat differential. The Quasiturbine (Qurbine) is a no crankshaft rotary engine having a 4 faces articulated rotor with a free and accessible centre, rotating without vibration nor dead time, and producing a strong torque at low RPM under a variety of modes and fuels. The Quasiturbine is also an optimization theory for extremely compact and efficient engine concepts.
Went looking for some
passenger car versus SUV safety information and found this great PDF
report from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Traffic Safety Facts
for 2003. Here are some choice nuggets from it:
Interesting site called
Bitpass which can be used to charge micropayments for web content. Prior to BitPass, no single system provided an economical way to process payments for low-price content and services coupled with secure access control. The BitPass solution is based on the founding belief that the most important criterion is ease of use for both Spender and Earner. The result is a system that makes buying as easy as surfing the web and selling as easy as uploading a file. To purchase online content or services, Spenders buy a virtual prepaid debit card using trusted pay-in methods, such as PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express. The intuitive service seamlessly integrates into the Spender's browsing experience with no software downloads required.
January 6, 2005
I
finally found the documentation I needed to complete my page on Paypal encryption of buy
buttons, shopping carts, and other transactions. The problem [that is solved on the page] is that the HTML is out there for many to see. Spiders can see and visit where paypal will return you do when the transaction is done (return field). Phishers and spammers can (and do) harvest the email address which receives the paypal amount. Hackers can change the value or quantities meaning that your system has to verify the amounts before delivering the product. There are best-practices and hacks that work around some of these problems but they don't go far enough.
Something I've been saying for some
time has been reiterated in a NY Times Op Ed piece entitled The
Saudi Syndrome (local copy). Oh my goodness
is it right on. The next time you consider the purchase of a family car that matches satisfying heft with infinitesimal mileage per gallon, you might want to think about where some of that gas money will ultimately be going. Part of the price of every extra gallon helps, albeit indirectly, to finance mosques and religious schools all over the world that spread a fanatical variant of Islam that sees legitimacy in terrorist attacks. This financing, amounting to billions of dollars a year, comes from the government and private charities of Saudi Arabia, a country that is now taking in roughly $80 billion a year from oil exports.
Another zinger:The Saudi government, itself under assault from Al Qaeda, is not in the business of directly financing terrorism, and since 9/11 it has responded to American pressure to control the flow of charitable funds to active terrorist groups. But what it still pays for, and what the religious charities its citizens are obliged to contribute to pay for, is a worldwide network of mosques, schools and Islamic centers that proselytize the belligerent and intolerant Wahhabi variant of Islam that is dominant in Saudi Arabia. As a result of this oil-financed largess, the teachings of more tolerant and humane Muslim leaders are losing ground in countries like Indonesia and Pakistan. Wahhabi mosques that glorify armed jihad have also made alarming gains among the Muslim populations of Europe and the United States.
January 5, 2005
Scientists at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a minuscule
atomic clock believed to be 100 times smaller than any other.
Here's the Chip-Scale
Vapor-Cell Atomic Clock home page. The chip-scale clock is less accurate than larger atomic clocks such as fountain clocks. However, the clock's small size, low power dissipation and potentially low cost make it ideal for a variety of commercial and military applications. Compared to quartz crystal oscillators, the most precise time and frequency references of equivalent size and power, chip-scale atomic clocks potentially offer a 1,000-fold improvement in long-term timing precision.
Old news by now but a woman paid $50k for a clone of her cat that had died. Pretty
cool although it has been pointed out that she could have saved a lot
of strays for the same money. The first cloned-to-order pet sold in the United States is named Little Nicky, a 9-week-old kitten delivered to a Texas woman saddened by the loss of a cat she had owned for 17 years.
A lot of people showed up
recently at a hearing for
Cape Wind on Martha's Vineyard last month. Sounded interesting.
A lot of supporters and opponents. Listen to this bureaucratic
nonsense for the local Congresscritter. Sounds like his "proven
commitment to renewable energy" is to block it. Most high-profile of them was Congressman Delahunt, who was the first to speak from the stage and unlimited by the traffic light before he left to deal with legislation in D.C., unable to listen to the public testimony. He defended his proven commitment to renewable energy, but said that Nantucket Sound is sacred, and a place that has been recognized for decades as such. "It not just about a view," he said. "It's our economy, the heart and soul of what we are a national treasure for all Americans."
Just
for my records, Wired did a study of iPod
replacement batteries. Wired News tested a $40, high-capacity, 2,100 mAh (milliamp hour) replacement iPod battery from Newer Technology. It was easy to install and delivered 22 hours of continuous play -- more than double the play time of the original battery.
Going back over old mail. Here's
one that I didn't record earlier. After 9/11 Cheney and the Defense
Department worked in secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war on terrorism. Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II. The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress. White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.
Cool
article about Richard
Branson and his Virgin Galactic. More about Branson then the
project. Virgin will pay up to $21.5 million for an exclusive license to SpaceShipOne's core design and technologies. Another $50 million will go to Rutan's company Scaled Composites to build five tricked-out passenger spaceships. An equal amount will be invested in operations, including a posh Virgin Earth Base somewhere in the California desert. Total outlay: $120 million. Business plan: 50 passengers a month, paying $200,000 each. Core product: a two-hour flight to an apex beyond Earth's atmosphere, wrapped in a three-day astronaut experience. Lift off: T-minus three years.
I've been wondering
whether we'd be returning to a centralized system for corporate
desktops for some time. Here's a page about diskless workstations which is relevant to this. You can see
people with a thin monitor, keyboard, mouse, sound hardware device on
their desktop while the storage, backing up, upgrading, expansion part
of the computer is in a cluster in the machine room somewhere else.
I've stumbled across the Dr. Fun cartoons two times
today from different sources. Hadn't seen one of them for a couple of
years. I'd forgotten how funny they are. The latest link isn't good
but here's a funny one entitled Donald Knuth finally sells out.
A friend sent this to me
last month. It's a list of the 100
oldest dot com domains including: symbolics.com, bbn.com,
bellcore.com, and wyse.com. Sigh. Reminds me of the old days.
January 4, 2005
Out of
date software at Delta contributed to the flight routing disaster
over the holidays. At the core of the problem was an application created by SBS, a subsidiary of Boeing. What happened on SBS's system is that the massive ice and weather delays necessitated an abnormally high number of crew reassignments which overflowed a hard limit of 32,768 changes per month.
Scientists are
trying to explain the Pioneer spacecraft gravity anomalies. It looks like the
spacecraft are being pulled back towards the Sun by an unknown force.
There is talk about a space launch to specifically test theories.
Here's the Pioneer mission home page at NASA. In 2002, Anderson, Turyshev, Nieto and other team members published the most detailed analysis of the Pioneer Anomaly. The dense, 54-page paper, which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review, considered seemingly every conceivable space event: effects of solar radiation and solar wind, the force of radio beams used to communicate with Earth, gas leaks, helium leaks, and gravity from the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune that contains Pluto and a number of small, planet-like objects.
Another example of an
entertaining and informative article from the Straight Dope
about the Boston molasses disaster of 1919. Cecil rarely lets me
down. He, and his cohorts, talk intelligently on any number of
interesting topics.
In response to some bet
or something, this guys has been working on a super-small P2P file sharing
system in Perl. Just as people were writing small versions of the
DeCSS code on t-shirts when they were trying to outlaw the code, this
would be appropriate for printing now that Congress is passing more
and more laws outlawing file sharing systems.
Here's a similar
service which produces inexpensive custom circuit
boards. They have some great technical resources and link to Stencils Unlimited which
helps you do your own surface mount boards in a toaster oven.
How cool is that! Our board manufacturing service makes top quality two and four layer PCBs. Use our MiniBoard service (3 boards 3.8 x 2.5 inches) and pay only $51 for three boards (plus $8 shipping).
The tsunami from last
month has again brought up the subject of "mega-tsunamis" caused by huge landslides. They think that if
volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands, off North Africa collapses,
a wall of water no one has seen before will sweep the US East coast in
a matter of hours. Yow! Another article from the
BBC. Good page about surviving a tsunami. Scattered across the worlds oceans are a handful of rare geological time-bombs. Once unleashed they create an extraordinary phenomenon, a gigantic tidal wave, far bigger than any normal tsunami, able to cross oceans and ravage countries on the other side of the world.
Wikipedia, the
online user
contribution encyclopedia, is starting to get critical mass of
articles and information. Here's their page on the 2004
Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Pretty good stuff. I've
started contributing to it here and there. Added an eggnog page of course.
Cool article about Harry Hillaker, the so called "Father of the F-16". We used the technology available to drive the given end, that is, or was, to keep things as simple and small as we could. Our design was a finesse approach. If we wanted to fly faster, we made the drag lower by reducing size and adjusting the configuration itself. If we wanted greater range, we made the plane more efficient, more compact.
The Bush
administration is considing lifetime detention of suspected terrorists that they can't
convict in courts. This is just horrifying to me. That we would
compromise our own moral basis of liberty and law so easily is a sign
that the current administration is completely off base. The end
doesn't justify the means. As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask the U.S. Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, defense officials told the newspaper.
Interesting service which can machine custom parts from a
large number of materials including: aluminum, steel, stainless,
copper, sheet metal, brass, bronze, wood, nylon, acetal,
polycarbonate, polystyrene, acrylic, plastic, and fiberglass. You
basically use any number of CAD programs, draw and spec out the part,
and the upload the specs to their site for manufacturing. Most of the
cost is setup of course meaning that Q10 and Q100 quantities are often
very close to the same price as Q1.
How
to work with engineers on a web development project. Applies to
most interactions between product management and engineers.
Representative Billy Tauzin, principal author of the new Medicare drug
law, has become the president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of
America, the chief lobby for brand-name drug companies. At the
very least it looks terrible. More likely it is a an indicator about
how screwed up the drug law really is. Drug makers said that the job was not a reward for Mr. Tauzin's work on the Medicare bill, which followed the industry's specifications in many respects. The law was signed by President Bush on Dec. 8, 2003, a few weeks before a lawyer for Mr. Tauzin began talks with the drug trade group.
January 1, 2005
Cool site with many green products including items
made from recycled materials, low waste containers, environmentally
friendly houses, etc..
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