Gray Watson's Blog -- July 2005

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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July 29, 2005

Richard Branson and Burt Rutan are teaming up again to start a spacecraft building company. It's goal will be to research, develop, tes, and certify a 7 passenger and 2 crew suborbital vehicle (SS2) for Virgin Galactic (and maybe others). Cool!
Both rocket ship and the carrier aircraft will draw from Rutans work on SpaceShipOne and the White Knight mothership. The SS2/WK2 system will adopt the reentry concept and hybrid rocket motor design work hammered out for SpaceShipOne, licensing that technology from Paul Allens Mojave Aerospace Company.
Scientists are reporting that they have discovered a large object orbiting our Sun. Here's another article about it from the BBC.
It is one of the largest objects ever found in the outer Solar System and is almost certainly made of ice and rock. It is at least 1,500km (930 miles) across and may be larger than Pluto, which is 2,274km (1,400 miles) across.
The uncertainty in estimates of its size is due to errors in its reflectivity. It might be a large, dim object, or a smaller, brighter object. Whatever it is, astronomers consider it a major discovery.
So another exciting discovery in the astronomy world. The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe has found what looks like frozen water near Mars' north pole. I'm reminded all of a sudden of Dan Quayle's statement about water on Mars which, at the time, was not accepted science. Maybe he was from near there?
The highly visible ice is sitting in a crater which is 35 km (23 miles) wide, with a maximum depth of about two km (1.2 miles). Scientists believe the water ice is present all year round because the temperature and pressure are not sufficient to allow it to change states.

July 28, 2005

Cool page about a fiber optic sunlight lighting system made by sunlight direct. It has a plastic parabolic dish that concentrates the sun's rays to a fiber optic bundle that distributes enought light for 1000 square feet.
An estimated 35% of electricity used in the United States is expended on lighting interior spaces in daytime. Ironically, the working day coincides with the hours that the sun is strongly illuminating the whole hemisphere. At 45%, the demand for electricity is even greater in retail businesses. In a striking case of outside-the-box thinking, instead of focusing on trying to generate more electricity to meet the high business-hour demand, the goal for Sunlight Direct is to reduce the need for electricity with fiber-optic lighting.
Interesting Wiki from Pure Energy Systems merging with the Open Source Energy Network. Has a ton of interesting information about such things as the Bourke internal combustion engine, Cycclone Magnetic Engines, found a link to Other Power -- The Cutting Edge of Low Technology, and other fun stuff. My sort of stuff.
Fascinating account of a near-miss between a cargo plane and Boeing 767, with 262 people on board at Kennedy International Airport on July 6. The cargo plane was empty and the first officer had decided to use full power on takeoff because of the weather otherwise they would have most likely have crashed.
With his plane hurtling down a Kennedy International Airport runway at nearly 100 miles per hour, the first officer of a DC-8 cargo jet looked ahead through the darkness and driving rain and asked the captain sitting at his left, "Is that an aircraft in front of us?"
The captain who gave the account was acting as the co-pilot, and as his eyes alternated between the windows and the instrument panel, he looked ahead but did not see anything. But the first officer saw what he thought were lights, the captain said, and asked again, "Is that an aircraft in front of us?" [The first officer] swiftly took action, pulling back on the yoke and lifting the roaring jet's nose sharply into the air.
So we were talking about how easy it seems to avoid the near miss situation like the next entry. I thought that aircraft already squawked their positions over their transponders. I was incorrect. Here are a couple good links. I can't believe that this hasn't been fixed yet.
- FAA's Future Surveillance project
- Description of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast protocol and systems
- ADS-B Technologies group
- How ADS-B Words
- Aerial Navigation
More from Lance and the Tour De France. Here's an amazing article demostrating Lance's fortitude which was written about at the 2003 Tour, Lance's 5th win. Each paragraph is worth quoting. On stage 12 Lance completely unestimated the amount of water he needed and lost 14 pounds over the last 30 minutes of the time trial, finishing white lipped and 96 seconds behind Jan Ullrich. This is also the Tour where Joseba Beloki crashed out of the race on a dangerous descent off the Cote de la Rochette forcing Armstrong to avoid him by going off the road, riding cross country, jumping a small gully, and getting back on the road.
They should've buried Lance Armstrong this time. They had him laid out like a yard sale on a Pyrenees road. Had him sick, white-mouthed and dizzy. Had him riding in the weeds, riding borrowed bikes and cracked bikes. Hell, once they had him carrying his bike. Had him scabbed and swollen, hip throbbing, saddle sores mounting, out of water and luck and hope.
But they didn't bury him. Couldn't.
I love the Internet Movie DataBase. Every once and a while I find someone who doesn't know about the site and I'm sure I give them this look which says "where have you been?". Here's a very cool page about trivia for the cult movie favorite Fight Club -- one of my favorite movies. WARNING: major spoilers at the end.
- Author Chuck Palahniuk actually found the modified ending in the film to be better than the one he had written in the novel.
- Chuck Palahniuk came up with the story after getting beaten up on a camping trip by some people who'd refused to turn down their loud radio in a neighboring campsite.
- Marla is named for a girl who used to beat up Chuck Palahniuk's brother Sean. Tyler Durden comes from Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus (1960) and a former coworker of Palahniuk's who left under a sexual harassment cloud.

July 27, 2005

The Environmental Advocates of New York has released a document detailing the top CO2 producing and most inefficient power plants in the Northeast. The top 5 which account for 20% of the regions CO2 emissions are: Brayton Point (Dominion), Northport (KeySpan), Canal (Mirant), AES Somerset (AES Corporation), Mystic (Exelon).
The regions ten dirtiest power companies emitted 64% of the global warming pollution while producing only 33% of the regions energy. NRG Energy and Dynegy Northeast own the dirtiest power plant fleets in the region, producing global warming pollution at nearly twice the rate of the average power company in the region. NRG Energy alone produced 11% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the entire nine-state region in 2004.

Funny page about the war on terror as viewed from the bourne shell.

$ cd Taliban
$ ls
soldiers
$ rm soldiers
$ cd ..
$ rmdir Taliban
rmdir: directory "Taliban": Directory not empty
$ cd Taliban
$ ls -a
.            ..           .insurgents

July 26, 2005

So I finished watching my Tivo recordings of the Tour De France last night. Lance was awesome. Not as dominating as a couple of years ago but then again he is always the tactician and often holds back -- satisfied to mark his opponents and wait. The last time trial (on the day before the finish) was amazing with him sprinting and descending over a very challenging 55km course 23 seconds ahead of his closest rival Jan Ullrich. I've been watching all of the tours since at least 2000. The day of "the look" really was one of my favorite stages with Armstrong feigning weakness but in the end sprinting up L'Alpe D'Huez to gain 2 minutes on Ullrich. All of the mountain finishes are amazing where the race of 200 riders gets whittled down to a handful of the world's best.
Lance has always impressed me as a very respectful, humble, and well spoken sports emissary for our country -- we need all the help we can get right now. He obviously loves the Tour and is very respectful of its traditions and history. He had to be forced by race officials to wear the yellow jersey (Maillot Jaune) of the race leader after US rider David Zabriskie lost it (arguably) because of a crash. He has always felt that the Maillot Jaune has a responsibility to demonstrate that he is the strongest rider in the Tour which is, I'm sure, one of the reasons that he was on fire on the Saturday time trial.
Right after the Tour De France finished on Sunday, Lance followed through with his promise to retire from cycling. I'm sure he will thrive at whatever he sets his sites. I wish him good luck and say thanks for some entertaining television and a great roll model for us all. It will be really fun to watch the Tour next year to see who steps up to take his place at the top of the podium in Paris.
So I'm of the opinion that since we've screwed up everything in Iraq so completely that we have to spend the time (and unfortunately the lives) to fix it. However, I'm beginning to wonder if they would be better off if we just left. Here's another article on the subject entitled Civil War Spectre Spurs New Iraq Exit Plans by the great Jim Lobe.
[One] model is Israel's 2000 exit from southern Lebanon, noting that, despite deep fears that that withdrawal would touch off mayhem and revenge (in Lebanon), none came to pass.
A prior announcement of "imminent total withdrawal" would serve to "focus the minds of Iraqis considerably", particularly on reconstruction if the U.S. and other countries are sufficiently generous, and "make them far less hospitable to insurgents, especially those who get their impetus from the prospect of a prolonged foreign occupation".
Just found this neat page on lightbulb voltage regulators. Basically this guy has a small circuit which switches the current on and off fast to keep the voltage at the appropriate level longer. I figured that's what a voltage regulator did. This is useful for battery situations when you don't get exactly the right voltage (3v, 5v) that you need.
A LVR2 Petzl Zoom setup, the "Super Zoom", with 4 AA Alkaline batteries and 2 watt 4.0 volt halogen bulb runs for 2.5 hours with constant 100% brightness light. The factory Zoom setup with 3 AA's burns for 2.5 hours as well, but the first 15 minutes are bright, and within 30 minutes the light is down to 70%. The next 1.5 hours the light decreases to 40% and then down to 25% at 2.5 hours. This happens because alkaline batteries start at 1.6 volts per cell, but must be discharge to 1.0 volts per cell to get most of the life out of them. At the same time light output goes down very fast with decrease in bulb voltage. A typical halogen bulb drops by 93% when the voltage is cut in half, thus you get 7% of the light output. This is why regulation is so important to a high performance lighting system.
Cool article about a couple of high school students who are getting recognition for their design of a environmentally friendly, economical air conditioner which utilized peltier thermoelectric devices instead of freon and compressors. Sounds a little too good to be true but maybe with more electric or hybrid vehicles, using electricity to cool directly would be more efficient than using the mechanical compressors. Wonder if I could do something with my solar output. Certainly these units will be lighter, smaller, and cheaper to manufacture/install/service than current auto AC units. Here's a copy of the story. Here's more information about thermoelectric cooling. Another good page about peltier effect.
Furthermore, the product would free drivers from Freon - which despite improvements, remains an ozone-depleting chemical in current air-conditioners. The Peltier chips, which they purchased on eBay for $9.99 each, have a life span of 20 to 30 years and an unfaltering cooling capacity. And like every component in the Space Beast, which can be minimized in size to about 2 inches in width, the chips are recyclable.

July 22, 2005

Another sign of global warming is the very apparent evidence that most of Austria's 925 glaciers are melting. As soon as environmental change reaches a level of significant social and economic effect, I can just see people screaming that science never warned them and blaming science for not being able to easily (and cheaply) fix it. I look at this much like pre 9/11 intelligence. The evidence for catastrophe is here but it is being widely ignored by policy makers -- certainly on the right. Absolutes are easy with faith were you can causally write off that which does not agree with your dogma but in science there always exists contradiction and the unknown. If people expect "science" to provide some sort of universal judgment then they will be disappointed. Science is [unfortunately] beholden to human scientists (and worse human science reporters) with their politics, mistakes, agendas, and fraud. This means that individual studies have to be reviewed carefully and taken into context of broader scientific thought.
But then came the summer of 2003, when record temperatures and lack of snow and rain accelerated the melting, exposing patches of rock, earth and tree trunks of long-gone forests in the middle of ski slopes. Seeking relief, Wintersport Tirol AG & Co, which runs four Tyrolian ski resort regions, contacted scientists from the Alps alpine research center and Innsbruck University glaciologists.
More information that people using cellphones are more likely to get in an accident. Research from British Medical Journal looked into the cell phone records of 456 drivers from Perth Australia and found that they 4 times more likely to get into an accident if they were talking on their cell-phone -- even minutes beforehand. Hands free made no difference. There are some correlation warnings here since they have already selected people who have gotten into an accident. Here's another article about it.
Driver's use of a mobile phone up to 10 minutes before a crash was associated with a fourfold increased likelihood of crashing. Risk was raised irrespective of whether or not a hands-free device was used. Increased risk was similar in men and women and in drivers aged 30 and <30 years. A third of calls before crashes and on trips during the previous week were reportedly on hand held phones.

July 20, 2005

Another sign that our planet may be in trouble is the record number of dead seabirds washing up on West Coast beaches.
On Washington beaches, bird surveyors in May typically find an average of one dead Brandt's cormorant every 34 miles of beach. This year, cormorant deaths averaged one every eight-tenths of a mile, according to data gathered by volunteers with the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, which Parrish has directed since 2000.
"This is somewhere between five and 10 times the highest number of bird deaths we've seen before," she said, adding that she expected June figures to show a similar trend.
France won the bit for ITER the international fusion reactor project. Here's another article talking about the project.
The details of how the project will be financed have still got to be hashed out, but the EU is expected to pick up 40 per cent of the tab, France a further 10 per cent, with the remainder shared between the other international partners: the US, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China.
Once the facility has been built, experiments are expected to start in about 2015. The research is likely to continue for around 20 years.
In clearing off some old email I came across this screen shot from my tenure at Lycos which showed a terrible ad system screwup back in May of 1999 which rendered porn ads on all pages. This included, unfortunately, the Lycos children Internet safety page.
Here's another interesting breeding situation from the natural world. A fire ant from Central and South America breeds by cloning.
Both queens and males reproduce by making genetically identical copies of themselves - so males and females seem to have entirely separate gene pools.
The only time they reproduce conventionally is to produce workers, says Denis Fournier from the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium, a member of the team that discovered the phenomenon (Nature, vol 435, p 1230). But workers are sterile and never pass on their genes.
So it's been a while since I've blogged. One of the big reasons is that I started a new job earlier in the month and my id and schedule have been a bit funky. In addition, the Tour De France is in progress and I've been watching it for the past 6 or so years. This screws up my evenings and I've been spending less time on the computer at home.

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