Gray Watson's Blog -- November 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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November 30, 2005

A judge in North Carolina forces Diebold to comply with the law after the EFF asked him to stop Diebold's motion to seek broad exemptions. Good for them.
Diebold could appeal the ruling, go forward with its bid, or withdraw from the process. However, Diebold told the court that it would likely withdraw the bid if the company did not have liability protection.
North Carolina experienced one of the most serious malfunctions of e-voting systems in the 2004 presidential election when over 4,500 ballots were lost in a voting system provided by Diebold competitor UniLect Corp. The new transparency and integrity provisions of the North Carolina election law were passed in response to this and other documented malfunctions that have occurred across the country.
So some company is selling logs made of used coffee grounds. They claim that coffee grounds burn really well and produce more heat and less residue and carbon monoxide than wood. Sounds like a neat idea for a cottage industry buying local coffee shops grounds or collecting from neighbors and turning it into logs. I went looking for DIY recipes but struck out. Looks like it could be mixed with wax or molasses. Might be interesting to find some bonding agent that could withstand the heat and keep the log from collapsing when being burnt. Anyone?
Farmer in the US are exempt from a ban on the pesticide methyl bromide after the Bush administration argued that it was required by strawberry growers. The Wikipedia article on it mentions that it is a ozone depleting chemical with even small amounts causing considerable damage to the ozone layer. Many farmers grow strawberries without it however. Seems to me that these sort of chemicals at least need to be phased on and pressure put on the industry to find replacements.
The treaty, called the Montreal Protocol, has targeted methyl bromide because it is among chemicals that deplete the earth's protective ozone layer.
It also can cause neurological damage, but methyl bromide's tenacity demonstrates the difficulty of banishing a substance that is wildly successful at delivering what both farmers and consumers want: abundant, pest-free and affordable produce.
So I helped some friends buy a cheap 233mhz G3 iMac from ebay a while back, and I'm amazed how usable it still is. We put 512mb and are now going to put a new hard disk into it. For ~US$200 you could get a pretty nice desktop box for your kid, college student, or backup desktop. Ebay has a number of the 233 iMacs for less than US$80. You can upgrade it's memory and hard-disk for another ~US$100. They seem to run Mac OSX fine. Bargain!
So this is a sometimes sick but usually funny set of bunny suicide cartoons of all things. Not for animal lovers.
A friend at work was looking for rodent traps so I thought I'd post this. I have experience with the Better Mouse Trap which works really well. US$16 for 6. You don't need to touch the dead mouse. Just load with peanut butter and go. Easy to take apart into 3 simple pieces to clean. Another idea is the Kness Snap-E Mousetrap which looks like a good design. Victor Pest also has new traps including a similar "Quick Set" and a "Quick Kill". I've tried the Quick Kill version and it is not as good as the Better Mouse Trap.

November 22, 2005

Former Democratic senator Bob Graham speaks out about intelligence before the invasion and how the CIA, among others, spun the war leaving Congress misinformed.
The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.
The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.
Even the Iraqi political leaders are calling for a timetable for US pulling out of Iraq. Good for them. They also acknowledged that Iraq's opposition had a "legitimate right" of resistance.
The communique finalized by Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders Monday condemned terrorism but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if their operations do not target innocent civilians or institutions designed to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens.
The leaders agreed on "calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces -- control the borders and the security situation" and end terror attacks.
More news from the uber multi-national corporation the Carlyle Group as it continues on its path toward world domination.
Among those associated with Carlyle are former U.S. president George Bush Sr., former U.K. prime minister John Major, and former president of the Philippines Fidel Ramos. And Carlyle has counted George Soros, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden's estranged family among its high-profile clientele. The group has been able to parlay its political clout into a lucrative buyout practice (in other words, purchasing struggling companies, turning them around, and selling them for huge profits)--everything from defense contractors to telecommunications and aerospace companies. It is a kind of ruthless investing made popular by the movie Wall Street, and any industry that relies heavily on government regulation is fair game for Carlyle's brand of access capitalism. Carlyle has established itself as the gatekeeper between private business interests and U.S. defense spending. And as the Carlyle investors watched the World Trade towers go down, the group's prospects went up.
It's getting increasingly grim for GM as it announced that 10s of plants are closing with 30,000s job being cut. Speculation is swirling that GM is headed for bankruptcy as the company tried to lay out a blueprint for survival. I've got mixed emotions. I certainly have no love lost for a corporate behemoth that has been pushing the SUV and missing the boat on hybrids for some time. On the other hand, I certainly have empathy for the workers who have dedicated their lives (and futures) to GM, only to have it fail them.
Many of the plants that will close, like Doraville Assembly and the Lansing Metal Center, are more than 50 years old and date back to an era when G.M. held a commanding share of the American car market. As Asian competitors with lower labor costs and vehicles that many Americans consider more desirable have cut G.M.'s market share down to about a quarter of all American vehicles, the automaker has grappled to regain its competitiveness. Closing under-used plants and trimming its work force is one way it hopes to do that.
In a rare victory, a judge in Nigeria has ordered the gas companies to stop gas flaring. This is where oil companies such as Shell, Chevro, and others burn off gases that are a byproduct of oil drilling. It's another example of how certain multi-national corporations usually have free reign in the developing world.
Gas is burned off in the Niger Delta because neither the major oil companies nor the NNPC has invested in facilities to convert the gas into commercial use. As the gas is pumped through the grid of oil pipelines that crisscross the Delta's mangrove swamps, agricultural fields, and even villages, it is flared at various stations, sending huge plumes of flame and smoke into the sky with a constant roar 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The practice, as well as the frequent oil spills that have degraded the Delta's fisheries, water and soil, not to mention its inhabitants' quality of life and health, has been the subject of vigorous protests by the minority populations in the Delta, beginning in the middle of the last century when Nigeria was still a British colony.
Another piece about how Kansas School Board has redefined the definition of science. Very unfortunate. I wonder if any hi-tech businesses are going to think twice about opening up a plant in such a place.
The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: "natural explanations." But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.
Distressing article about how demand for biofuelds has put pressure on forests. As demand increases for vegetable oils is causing an increase in rainforest clear cutting. Third world countries are paying the penalty for more interest and legislation around biofuels.
Rising demand for green energy has led to a surge in the international price of palm oil, with potentially damaging consequences. "The expansion of palm oil production is one of the leading causes of rainforest destruction in south-east Asia. It is one of the most environmentally damaging commodities on the planet," says Simon Counsell, director of the UK-based Rainforest Foundation. "Once again it appears we are trying to solve our environmental problems by dumping them in developing countries, where they have devastating effects on local people."
Here's an interesting site which discusses memory and reality. It goes into detail about how some of our memories are true, some are a mixture of fact and fiction, and some are false. It reminds me about the store of tests done by Elizabeth Loftus who changed people's memory of a picture by asking specific questions. "How far was the car from the yield sign" would cause many to say that the sign was a yield sign when it wasn't. I must imagine that police artist's must be very careful when interviewing a victim. Here's some more information on memory problems.
I have seen in myself failures in memory. I've also seen instances when I was sure I said one thing but multiple people heard something else. So many of us consider our memories and brains foolproof when there is certainly much data to the contrary.
What are false memories? Because of the reconstructive nature of memory, some memories may be distorted through influences such as the incorporation of new information. There are also believed-in imaginings that are not based in historical reality; these have been called false memories, pseudo-memories and memory illusions. They can result from the influence of external factors, such as the opinion of an authority figure or information repeated in the culture. An individual with an internal desire to please, to get better or to conform can easily be affected by such influences.

November 14, 2005

Here's some information about vertical wind turbines. I'm interested in them because they are possibly better alternatives to standard propeller units for residential areas -- smaller in size and noise.
- Ropatec Vertical Axis Turbines
- WindSide turbines
- WindAus turbines
- collection of links and discussion.
There's be growing talk of US forces using white phosphorous in Iraq. Extensive use in the attack on Fallujah was reported by Italian TV journalists. NY Times embedded reports talk about US soldiers using WP mortars. Army documents talk about this weapon after the Defense Department denied using it. The problem is not whether people are being killed over there -- that point is obvious. The question is whether WP is a chemical weapon -- which is hotly contested by the US. There are also weapons experts who refute these findings and challenge the reports. There's some interesting comments at the bottom.
In the video, Jeff Englehart, a Marine who served in Fallujah and who maintains a weblog, claims that there was widespread, indicriminate use of white phosphorus in last year's attack on Fallujah.
The white phosphorus hits and disperses into an indiscriminately lethal cloud with a kill zone approximately a quarter of a mile wide -- over a tenth of a mile in all directions. Although white phosphorus often has no effect on clothes, when it makes contact with a person's skin, it will burn it down to the bone. If the gas is inhaled, it will blister the throat and lungs, causing rapid suffocation, burning the body from the inside.
According to the NY Daily News, pedestrians are twice as likely to be killed by a SUV then a smaller sedan. It talks about how SUV bumpers being higher tend to throw pedestrians down causing more head injuries instead of up on the hood of a sedan. My correlation/causality alarms when off on this one but I can't find a problem. One issue is whether cabs count as non-SUVs so that maybe SUVs are much more likely to be inexperienced NY drivers or something.
In the city, SUVs comprised fewer than 15% of passenger vehicles last year - but were responsible for about 26% of the pedestrian deaths from passenger vehicles, according to federal crash reports and motor vehicle registration data from R.L. Polk & Co.
And while the total number of pedestrian deaths has fallen 18% in the last five years in the city, the number of deaths caused by SUVs leaped 27%.
Great alternative billboards from god. They include:
- E=mc.. Yeah, that's one of mine.
- Here's a clue -- if they say they're doing it in my name, they're lying.
- If you didn't hear it straight from my lips, take it with a grain of salt.
- I'm flattered you liked my book so much. Now why don't you read something new?
- Stop smirking, America. I'm talking to you, too.
Good site which has a number of articles on sustainable living and alternative energy. Some nice reading. They talk about: offshore wind turbine design, green power generating, wind power in Kansas, living off the grid, wave power. Good stuff.
Good article about how to fix performance problems on your Macintosh runing Mac OSX.
This FAQ provides recommendations for optimizing Mac OS X performance. Additionally, it provides advice and links to advice for troubleshooting certain Mac OS X performance problems. Comprehensive advice on this topic can be found in the "Performance" chapter of our book Troubleshooting Mac OS X.
Mac OS X loves RAM. Short of buying a new Mac or a processor upgrade, adding RAM is the best way to improve Mac OS X performance. Install the maximum amount of RAM that your Mac will accept and your budget will allow.
Google is collaborating with NASA by building a 1 million sq/ft of offices at the NASA Ames Research Center.
For Google, the new partnership comes at a time when the Internet search engine is expanding by leaps and bounds, hiring on average 10 people per day. Experts say the company, which now employs more than 4,000 people, has ambitions beyond Internet search and could pose a serious threat to Microsoft Corp. for supremacy in desktop consumer computing.
This collaboration with NASA could also portend a new intellectual center for Silicon Valley, one that has been sorely missed since the heyday of Palo Alto's Xerox PARC, a seminal research facility that helped foster much of today's technology.

November 11, 2005

Here are some pictures of the Pakistan earthquake from satellite. Doesn't show the devastation on the ground.
The magnitude 7.6 earthquake that shattered Pakistan on October 8, 2005, caused the most damage in the region surrounding the city of Muzaffarabad, about 10 kilometers southwest of the earthquakes epicenter. The quake flattened buildings and triggered landslides throughout Kashmir. The Ikonos satellite captured an image of a landslide (top) in Makhri, a village on the northern outskirts of Muzzaffarabad, on October 9, 2005. The western face of the mountain has collapsed, sending a cascade of white-grey rock into the Neelum River. The landslide is likely only one of many to occur along the river, which is almost unrecognizable after the earthquake.
Cool collection of Mars photos and information put together by Bob from his famous and fabulous junkmail pages which are always worth a read.
With the Mars Explorer Rovers tooling around on the martian surface, Mars has been in the news a lot lately. I decided to look some stuff up on Mars that I've probably read before, but somehow over the years it leaked out of my brain. I suspect my ears are to blame. Actually, most of this stuff was not in the old World Book Encyclopedia where I did most of my Mars research about 100 years ago.
Sony's it a whole heap of trouble over its DRM software which hides itself using a root kit on Windows operatings systems. Class action lawsuits have been filed and now viruses are making use of the kit which should open up Sony to criminal complaints. Here's more details from siliconvalley.com.
According to a report in the Washington Post, the lawsuit alleges that Sony BMG has broken three Californian laws. At the same time New York lawyer Scott Kamber is planning a class-action lawsuit for all Americans affected.
The EFF is also gathering stories from buyers of Sony BMG CDs protected with XCP. In a statement the organization said: "We're considering whether the effect on the public, or on EFF members, is sufficiently serious to merit a lawsuit".
Cool list of misquotations from Wikipedia. They include the following popular quotations which were never uttered:
"Beam me up Scotty", "Just the Facts Ma'am", "Blood Sweat and Tears", "Elementary my dear Watson", "Me Tarzan you Jane", "Money is the root of all evil", and "Play it again Sam"
Fascinating information about the Defence Department's Able Danger secret data mining program and it's results. A lot of interesting information came out of the system that may have helped unravel 9/11.
The best-selling 9/11 Commission Report never mentions Able Dangers existence, activities, or findings. Yet the following is now known about the program and related efforts:
- At least five professional employees in DOD have stated on the record that Mohammed Atta was identified in name and photograph prior to 9/11.
- Five international al-Qaida cells, including the Brooklyn cell Atta was allegedly involved in, were identified by Able Danger data mining more than one year prior to 9/11.
- Able Danger identified threat data in Yemen related to the Aden port in a brief given on October 10, 2000. The attack on the USS Cole in Yemen occurred two days later and may have been preventable. 17 people died as a result of the attack.
Interesting story about Michael Larsen who won $100k on the Press Your Luck gameshow back in 1983. By examining frames of the show he figured out that the big board was not random but just series of sequences and was able to win perpetually. Absolutely fascinating.
Michael Brockman, CBS's head of daytime programming, was at home when Press Your Luck production assistants buzzed his Batphone. "Something was very wrong," he remarked to TV Guide. "Here was this guy from nowhere, and he was hitting the bonus box every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn't stop this guy. He was going to own CBS in a few minutes. He kept going around the board and hitting that box." Back inside the control room, a decision was made: keep the tape running. The half-hour show was already over an hour. When Larsen's total reached $80,000, already a show record, the studio grew silent.
So I really want one of these remote console boards. It plugs into your server's PCI slot but only uses it for power. It has it's own TCP/IP port and you can then ssh, https, or vnc into it and get access to the server's BIOS, reset button, power on diagnostics, and boot messages. The VNC support is particularly impressive. The only problem is the price which is ~US$500. Then again, you could get a 4-port KVM over IP switch for ~US$1100 and then get a converter per box for ~US$100.

November 10, 2005

Just found a reference to the Moringa tree which sounds pretty amazing. You can use/eat it's leaves, seeds, flowers, and roots. It grows well in arid conditions and is being considered to help with malnutrition in the third world. It just sounds like a miracle tree to me.
As a food, the pods of the moringa tree, called drumsticks, are commonly consumed in India and some other Asian countries. The seeds are sometimes removed and eaten like peas or roasted like nuts. The cooked flowers are edible, and are said to taste like mushrooms. The roots are sometimes shredded and used as a condiment in the same way as horseradish.
The leaves are highly nutritious, a significant source of beta-carotene, Vitamin C, protein, calcium, iron and potassium. For this reason, interest is growing in the use of moringa in addressing malnutrition in developing areas of the world. Moreover it is fast growing and fairly drought resistant thus making it ideal for plating in arid regions and also to stave off encroaching desert sand.

November 9, 2005

Just found out about the Focus Fusion Society whose goals are to produce small fusion systems for eventual decentralized electricity generation. I want one for my garage!
The goal of the Focus Fusion Society is to turn the dream of safe, cheap, clean, unlimited energy from nuclear fusion into a practical reality, to do it as soon as possible, and to ensure that this technology is made available to all mankind.
We will pursue this goal by developing the Plasma Focus Device for hydrogen-boron nuclear fusion. To finance the research needed, we will raise funds from the general public and publicize the need for government funding of research aimed at developing this ideal energy source.
Great story about how the Vatican says that the faithful must listen to secular science. That we must avoid the fundamentalist reactions that caused Galileo's teachings to be considered heresy. This comes at a time when the Kansas school board has redefined science to not be explicitly limited to natural explanations. Sounds like they should consider calling science education in Kansas something else. I wonder if they are going to start teaching about how you can live after you die and that you can walk on water in physics classes. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, just ousted 8 republicans who voted for "intelligent design" education proposal. Good for them. I laud the Vatican for taking a stand against such nonsense. About recognizing that it is only a limited view of the bible that invalidates science principles of evolution. That science is about observing our natural world and using scientific method and peer reviewed hypotheses to further our basic knowledge of our world -- it is not about faith.
"The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future," Poupard said.
But he said science, too, should listen to religion. "We know where scientific reason can end up by itself: the atomic bomb and the possibility of cloning human beings are fruit of a reason that wants to free itself from every ethical or religious link," he said.
"But we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism," he said.
Interesting article about the worst software bugs from history. They include: the ping of death, Pentium floating point error, and some radiation treatment systems. All pretty bad. I'm surprised that the Y2K "bug" didn't make the chart given the enormity of the issues surrounding the problem.
... a club that began in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."
Sixty years later, computer bugs are still with us, and show no sign of going extinct. As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don't just inhabit our operating systems and applications -- today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. And now, in our cars.
So this is very old but it still is pretty cool. It's a site which documents the evidence against computer hacker Kevin Mitnick compiled by Tsutomu Shimomura. They have captured login sessions that you can play back with a telnet program so you can watch Kevin hacking the Well and other systems in real time. Very cool technology.
While he was on the run, he broke into countless computers, intercepted private electronic communications, and copied off personal and confidential materials. Among the materials he copied off and stashed in readily accessible locations around the Net were personal electronic mail, stolen passwords, and proprietary software. Much of the stolen software was the trade secret source code to key products in which companies has invested many millions of dollars of development effort in order to maintain their competitive edge.

November 8, 2005

Inventor Tom Lee has developed a wind turbine platform concept for accessing the higher winds that are typical further out to sea.
Lee refers to a "wind shadow" that extends from between a quarter of a mile to as much as a full mile out from the coast, dampening the strength of the wind as it comes ashore. "We can go far out beyond that, to where the wind is," he said. "Offshore wind resources can be vastly more power productive than onshore winds, particularly if not influenced or affected by large land masses".
"In addition to global oceanic deployment, this technology is also ideally suited for deployment on Lake Michigan, on Lake Ontario, and other Great Lakes", he adds. If shipping lanes allow, this would enable power development without needing to use up valuable land in this highly-populated region.
Fascinating article by Peter Gutmann about secure deletion of magnetic data. This guy is the world expert in the field of data remanence. He recommends overwriting a hard disk block 35 times with various patterns in various orders to ensure (as much as possible) that the data has been erased. Combined with cacheing, bad-block mapping, RLL encoding and other issues, it is often impossible to guarantee that a hard disk has been scrubbed. Now I understand why companies physically shred hard disks.
To erase magnetic media, we need to overwrite it many times with alternating patterns in order to expose it to a magnetic field oscillating fast enough that it does the desired flipping of the magnetic domains in a reasonable amount of time. Unfortunately, there is a complication in that we need to saturate the disk surface to the greatest depth possible, and very high frequency signals only "scratch the surface" of the magnetic medium (this phenomenon was used to good effect when HiFi VCRs were introduced by writing the stereo FM audio signal at a lower frequency beneath the higher-frequency video signal, a technique known as depth multiplex recording). Disk drive manufacturers, in trying to achieve ever-higher densities, use the highest possible frequencies, whereas we really require the lowest frequency a disk drive can produce. Even this is still rather high. The best we can do is to use the lowest frequency possible for overwrites, to penetrate as deeply as possible into the recording medium.
New design for a vertical wind turbine. Looks like a bunch of patents so far with no products to buy. Here's the manufacturer TMA Global Wind Energy Systems.
Company officials said traditional propeller-driven turbines are able to convert 25 percent to 40 percent of wind power into transmittable energy. But TMA's design is 43 percent to 45 percent efficient, creating up to 80 percent more power from the same wind.
That power is generated even though the blades are moving slower than on traditional propeller models, meaning the turbines are less noisy and less dangerous to birds, the company said. And since they stand no taller than 96 feet, the turbines can be used in industrial areas where taller propeller-driven models are not allowed.
Cool story about how there are research groups and companies using nanotechnology to combat cancer and other diseases.
he technologies now being developed are not the complex miniature machines usually associated with nanotechnology, but particles a few nanometers wide. (As a point of reference, the average human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide, and a red blood cell is 4,000 nanometers in diameter.)
The first cancer nanotech applications will likely involve detection. Nanoparticles could recognize cancer's molecular signatures, gathering the proteins produced by cancerous cells or signaling the presence of telltale genetic changes. Researchers have already used a protein called albumin -- considered a naturally occurring nanoparticle -- to detect proteins found in ovarian cancer tissue.

November 7, 2005

Congratulations to the Mozilla browser teams. A web analysis company says that Mozilla has a 11+% share in the worldwide browser market (14% in the US).
... Mozilla's browsers have a total global usage share of 11.51 percent. The total usage share of Mozilla increased 2.82 percent since April 2005. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 85.45 percent which is 1.18 percent less as at the end of April.
"The global usage share of Mozilla's browsers is still growing and it seems that Netscape users and some Internet Explorer users are switching to the Firefox version. It also looks like that browser users of Internet Explorer for Apple's Mac are switching to Safari because the global usage share is still growing. It is also interesting to see that Microsoft's Internet Explorer has less global usage share in the USA as in the UK. Mozilla's browsers are more popular in USA and Canada as in the UK" said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.
Here's an update of the Honda Hydrogen vehicle being driven by a family in California. They were chosen because they lived close to the Honda plant and already had a Natural Gas Civic. Here's another copy of the piece and another on truthout.org.
So grandiose is the experiment that Honda has made arrangements with a distributor of hydrogen to have a refueling station built near the Spallinos' house. Not that they can use it. The local fire department, wary of this elemental zeppelin gas, has yet to let the station open.
So the car is being refueled at Honda's American headquarters in Torrance. Putting compressed hydrogen in a car sounds more like putting air in a tire than filling up with gas.
Honda is also working on upgrading an existing station that is near Mr. Spallino's office, and California is financing refueling stations to form what is called a "hydrogen highway" in the state.
The Massachusetts Information Technology Department is busy defending its decision to require OpenOffice document formats.
Hamel was testifying before the Senate's committee on Post Audit and Oversight at a hearing regarding the state's switch to the OpenDocument file format. Sen. Marc Pacheco, who is chairman of that committee, called the hearing after reports indicated that Secretary of State William Galvin would not support the switch.
"If we look at all the groups in most we are finding Microsoft funds behind that group," Hamel said, although she did make the point to exclude those groups that represented disabled government employees from her criticism.
Google is throwing some development resources at the OpenOffice project.
Google has shown an affinity for open-source software, which are programs developed in the open and available for free. Many of the company's programmers came of age in the open-source era, so advancing the open-source agenda comes naturally, DiBona said. But the company also has business reasons to justify its open-source embrace.
"We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry," he said.
Wow. It turns out that Honda has a natural gas version of its Civic. Why is it the Japanese cars which seem to be pushing the envelope on alternative energy these days? As I've said before, thank the powers that be that Japan doesn't have any oil. The natural gas tank holds 7.2 gallons @ 3000 psi or 8.0 @ 3600 psi that gives you ~200 mile range. You refill at home using the Phill station from FuelMaker. I guess GM has an alternative fuel fleet.
Just stumbled on another Gray Watson who is online. This one looks to be a realtor near Anderson, South Carolina. Another Gray Watson is an artist, art lecturer, and author in England. Here's a story in the Memorial Mirror about Reverend Gray Watson who was "a true gentleman, in the full sense of the word". There is also a Gray Watson's Penstemon species of North American flowering plant. Heh.

November 3, 2005

The first annual Space elevator competition was held at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA on October 21-23. The Elevator2010 competition tested climbers who used a high intensity light source to climb a 200-foot cable and teathers who created high-strength, low-weight ribbons. Here's the NASA press release about the event.
According to many engineers, within a couple of decades it will be both possible and cost-effective to construct a fixed line from the Earth's equator to a satellite 60,000 miles out in space. The tether would likely be made of carbon nanotubes, a still-experimental material with the potential to be 300 times stronger than steel. According to current imaginings, elevator cars weighing up to 20 tons would go up and down, powered by high-intensity earthbound lasers aimed at photovoltaic cells on their undersides.
After many promises, internet connectivity over power lines may be possible now. The technology is called Broadband over Powerline (BPL) as is also known known PLT or Broadband Powerline Carrier (PLC). Here's the Wikipedia page on PLC. Here's a commercial provider in Virginia. Here's a movement against it from ham radio enthusiasts which say it produces too much loose signals. Here's a FAQ on the subject.
In Manassas, 700 households are already using BPL, and another 500 customers have signed up for the service, according to the provider, Chantilly, Virginia-based Communication Technologies. The company shares revenue from the service with the city of Manassas, which owns the electric utility.
Customers plug a BPL modem into any electrical wall socket, and send data over the city's electrical wires to substations. The substations are connected to the net by city-owned fiber-optic cables. Because the data travels at higher frequencies than electrical current, the two do not interfere with each other.
The photovoltaic businesses are starting to garner investor interest. This is a possible sign of the start of viable solar businesses at larger scale. It's a real shame that this had to come entirely from consumer pressure. Big business and government still aren't recognizing the energy independence and national security benefits implied by such technology.
Evergreen Solar (ESLR), a maker of solar cells and panels, currently trades above $8. A year ago, the stock was below $3. Another developer of solar cells, DayStar Technologies (DSTI), has seen its stock surge in the past year -- from a low of $2.24 to just above $9 now. Energy Conversion Devices (ENER) and Spire (SPIR), two other solar players, are also up sharply for the year. That said, solar stocks have dipped in recent days, in concert with a drop in oil prices.
Researchers from Sweden claim that they can predict earthquakes. Scientists from the Swedish Defense Research Agency studied the relationships between major and minor quakes (b-value) and are saying that they have a model which should help predict future events.
"We found that all of the major tremors were clearly visible in a time perspective. The b-value dropped drastically before the big quakes," said FOI researcher Leif Persson in a statement.
And the biggest drop-off was four months prior to the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale.
Article about the Cape Cod and Long Island wind farms and associate battles. The Long Island farm may actually get built before the Cape Wind array. Here's another article about how environmental groups are pressuring to have some turbines shutdown in the Altamont Pass turbine array. The Altamont turbines are in a spectacularly bad place for eagles and other raptors which is different than Cape Wind.
A smaller wind farm has been proposed by the Long Island Power Authority, or LIPA, which submitted its first application to the Army Corps of Engineers in April. The 40 turbines, about four miles offshore, could generate up to 140 megawatts, enough to provide power for 44,000 Long Island homes, according to Dan Zaweski, LIPA's director of energy efficiency and distributed-generation programs. He said that coal and nuclear power plants typically generate 500 megawatts, and many put out upward of 1,000 megawatts.
Though the $300 million LIPA wind farm is years behind Cape Wind in the permitting process, Zaweski said it is moving faster and he expects the turbines to be in operation by late 2008.
Oh my goodness. First Chinese SUV to arrive in European markets gets a "catastrophic result" during crash tests from a German automobile club. Here's the video of the test and the external view. Notice how the air bag does deploy but then it gets shoved up into the dummy's face. Here's a test at 35mph where the front left tire goes into the passenger compartment. Here's some commentary on the car.
This car seems to belong in the 1990s in terms of engineering, said Chris Patience, head of technical policy at the AA Motoring Trust. We will wait for the official Euro NCAP results, but if it really is that bad we hope people will think very carefully before buying this car.

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