Gray Watson's Blog -- May 2006

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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May 26, 2006

An UK independant insurance company has put out its list of the Top 100 Most Reliable Cars. 16 of the top 20 are Japenese models with the first American model being the Ford Ka at #22. This, ultimately, is why we lose to the Japanese in terms of car design and manufacturing. Given that many of these models are built in the US, I have to fault American engineers and management with this failure.
1. Honda Accord, 2. Subaru Forester, 3. Mazda MX-5, 4. Mitsubishi Carisma, 5. Toyota Yaris, 6. Honda Civic, 7. Nissan Almera, 8. Honda CR-V, 9. Toyota RAV4, 10. Nissan Micra
So this high altitude aircraft called Proteus is 8 years old but still one of Burt Rutan's coolest designs IMO. Designed to be a high altitude research platform, this aircraft can stay on station at 60,000 feet for 18 hours. In comparison, the U2 reconnaissance aircraft only flew to 70,000 and the F-16 and F-18 have a ceiling of 55,000. Looking at this article about Proteus back in 1998 from Popular Mechanics, it was obvious even then that Rutan was designing for space.
The sky holds no limit for Proteus, which cruises higher than supersonic transports fly. Rutan envisions it as the ultimate high-altitude platform for telecommunications, reconnaissance and commercial imaging, work now done mostly by satellites. As a replacement for a telecommunications satellite, three Proteus aircraft would operate in tandem above a metropolitan area to provide 24-hour coverage of all types of cellular and digital services.
By far the most exotic use for Proteus would be as a space launch platform. For unmanned missions the plane could carry a two-stage rocket with a reusable first-stage to launch a 65-pound micro-satellite into low-Earth orbit.
Interesting piece about a custom, high performance, electric vehicle built by WrightSpeed. Other sources: Cnn.com, MegaWatt MotorWorks.
I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Ian Wright and his phenomenal X1. Uses a AC Propulsion 150 controller/motor combo, and Li-ion batteries. Total vehicle weight of this Ariel Atom conversion is about 1500 pounds. Licensed and street-legal. Rev-limited top speed of 112mph (which it reaches well before 1/4 mile). 0-60mph in about three seconds. When driven on the street, it achieves about 170mpgge (miles per gallon of gas equivalent). The X1 FAQ does a great job of answering many questions!
I may have talked about this beforehand. I have a dream of an Open Source Car. The idea is for engineers and car enthusiastic folk to produce a set of detailed engineering specifications for a simple automobile platform. Then have a list of manufacturers for each component and small assembly shops or end-users could assemble the car like a kit. So you would order the frame from company A who would add the tie points for the powertrain and interior/exterior shells. Then you could order a basic or fany interior and a shell or radical exterior.
This dream comes from my desire to have a small, electric, commuter vehicle much like the Tango but for US$20-30k not $100k. You should be able to do the frame for $5k, electric powertrain for $5k, wheels/brakes/steering for $5k, (bare bones) interior and exterior for $5k and navigation/wiring/misc for $5k. Doors and glass seals may be hard as opposed to just bolting on an aluminum or some sort of composite "skin" inside and over a crash frame. Maybe I'm just on crack. Certainly regulator hurdles may be a problem but kit cars are allowed.

May 25, 2006

Here's the Wiki page showing the $100 laptop project (laptop.org). Pretty cool. I wonder if they are going to pull it off. The idea is to make a very cheap laptop to give to kids from poor countries. I wonder how many people in the US, however, will buy it and cause the demand for parts to rise causing the price to go up.
The computers will be rugged, Linux-based. Ad-hoc wireless mesh networking may be used to allow many machines Internet access from one connection. The pricing goal is currently expected to start at around $135 not hitting the $100 mark until 2008. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child.
The laptop is being developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) trade association. OLPC is a Delaware based, non-profit organization created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute the laptops. OLPC was announced by Media Lab chairman and co-founder Nicholas Negroponte at the January 2005 World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.

May 24, 2006

Sir Edmund Hillary blasted Everest climbers who left a man to die as they pushed to the summit. Experienced climber David Sharp was on his way down from his third climb of the world's highest mountain which has claimed the lives of 1 in 16 climbers. Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were the first to climb Everest back in 1953. Two fabulous books about Everest are Into Thin Air and Surviving the Extremes. Into Thin Air is especially hard to put down. The IMax movie about Everest, which was on the mountain during the Into Thin Air disaster is also interesting but the books are better.
"There have been a number of occasions when people have been neglected and left to die and I don't regard this as a correct philosophy," he told the Otago Daily Times. "I think the whole attitude toward climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top," he told the newspaper.

Hillary told New Zealand Press Association he would have abandoned his own pioneering climb to save another's life. "It was wrong if there was a man suffering altitude problems and was huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by," he said.

May 23, 2006

ABC News' blog says that reporters calls are being tracked to hunt down leak sources. The comments at the bottom of the page are pretty scary with half of the readers reacting in horror to yet another example of executive power gone too far while the others are talking about killing the communists.
ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

May 19, 2006

Here's a cool product call the Lifestraw. It is a personal water filter designed to be mass produced and very cheap. I always thought that Gates or some rich person should buy the rights to something like this, mass produce them and give them away. Either that or give away the plans and set up factories around the world. Other sources: gizmag, lifestraw.com.
The last chamber consists of granulated active carbon, which role is to take the main part of the bad smell of iodine, and to take the parasites that have not been taken by the pre-filter or killed by the iodine. The biggest parasites will be taken by the pre-filter, the weakest will be killed by the iodine, and the medium range parasites will be picked up by the active carbon. The main interest to everyone is the killing of bacteria, and here our laboratory reading tells us that we have a log. 7 to log 8 kill of most bacteria. This is better than tap water in many developed countries.

May 18, 2006

Marine archaeologists believe that the remains of Captain Cook's ship Endeavour has been found during an underwater survey of Newport Harbor. Cook was an amazing person and is one of my heros. Not only was he an explorer and scientist but he was a just and beloved captain when this was a rare quality.
Four of the ships were discovered in August 2005 by Professor Rod Mather of the University of Rhode Island and graduate student Jamin Wells.
"As is the case with many eighteenth century shipwrecks, the newly discovered vessels were pinned to the bottom of Newport Harbor with their own ballast stones," said Mather.
"Over time, a complex series of biological, chemical and physical processes broke down the shipwrecks, leaving ballast piles onto which artefacts including cannons fell and below which there is almost certainly well-preserved sections of the ships' lower hulls."
Very cool hydrogen demonstration toy car (manufacturer's page). How cool is that!! I'd buy one right now but it looks like they are coming out in June.
The volume of Hydrogen stored in the H-racer is very small and safe that adds to the concept of just how efficient this cutting-edge technology is. The H-racer is the working miniature version of what is being developed in real-size cars of the future. This palm-size fuel cell car contains an onboard hydrogen storage tank, a fuel cell system connected to the cars electric motor, and a hydrogen refueling system linking the cars storage tank to an external hydrogen refueling station.Given its small size, the H-racer is also very safe as only tiny quantities of hydrogen are needed to power the car.

May 17, 2006

Some details a cellphone tapping scandal in Greece back in February. It demonstrates what he NSA is capable of.
Well the software is basically used to attach to commercial communication facilities, like the AT&T in the US, or whatever commercial company it is, and anything that goes over these communication facilities gets picked up, whether it is e-mail, or telephone calls and divert it to the US Government, whoever attached the equipment.
Wild page describing a number of unpowered jet aircraft landings. Most of them are a result of aircraft running out of fuel of all things. One of them glided 115 miles and made it to a runway on the Azores Islands in the middle of the Atlantic.
3 September 1989; Varig 737-200; near Sao Jose do Xingu, Brazil: The aircraft had been on a domestic flight from Maraba to Belem Belem when the crew made a forced landing due to fuel exhaustion. The flight crew had inadvertently entered a 27 degree heading into the flight computer rather than the correct heading value of 270 degrees. By the time the crew had discovered the error, the aircraft was too far away from a suitable landing option. Twelve of the 48 passengers were killed in the emergency landing. The six crew members all survived. The survivors were found about two days later.
I just wanted to write some thoughts about giving advice and other assistance. A while back I heard the results of a study done on the giving of advice. Giving advice almost always benefits the giver emotionally and rarely the recipient unless it was specifically requested. The more I think about this concept, the more it makes sense to me. I remember a x-girlfriend who would complain about something at work. My response was offer advice and to try to help when all she wanted was to get it off her chest.
The question then becomes in what other circumstances is this true? I am reminded about my 4 months after 9/11 page where I talk about how we can't just give money and send food when 9/11 or Katrina or other disasters happen. That helps ourselves and maybe the recipients for a short time but it changes nothing. How have we changed since 9/11? Do we understand the motivations of the terrorists? Are we really any safer or just [hopefully] less naive?
I remember a former co-worker who never voted but was always quick with a complaint about the government and the state of the world. Does complaining about politics or a situation get us off the hook for really rolling up our sleeves and fixing something? Does it give us an opportunity to just throw up our hands and say that it's all broken?
I need to be better at listening instead of advice giving -- I suspect most people have this problem. If you are asked for advice it should be backed up with selfless action. Our reactions to new events should cause us to learn, change mentally, and then act over longer periods of time.
Not sure if I'm doing a good job of tying this all together but I hope it's at least somewhat useful.
So here's some movies that I stumbled on over the last 24 hours for your enjoyment.
- BBC News put a guy there for a job interview (news story) on the TV as an expert on the Apple court case by mistake.
- Will Ferrell as George W. Bush on global warming. "Adam and Eve drove an Excursion. <CUT!>"
- Al Gore opening for Saturday Night Live last Saturday speaking as if he's been President since 2000. Damn. It looks like it's been removed because of copyright. Ugh.

May 15, 2006

Just stumbled onto this interesting company specializing in solar heating. They sell solar heating panels for air heating and cooking through their Amazon store. They have interior and exterior heating panels which can boost air temperatures by 30 degrees F.
Our exterior mount ClearDome Solar Forced Air Heaters come in two sizes for use at work, home and travel. They are made to survive nearly any type of weather and temperature Extremes. (One survived a tornado in the South). Incoming cold air temperatures will rise about 30-40 degrees on a sunny day, depending on sky conditions and panel size. For average size insulated rooms around 250 square feet we suggest using our tough, anodized aluminum 2x4 exterior heat collector. It weighs 25 pounds, comes with a detachable 12 volt 88 CFM fan, and costs only 18 cents to run per month on 110 volt house power using the included plug-in power supply.

May 11, 2006

So now it turns out that the NSA has been tracking domestic calls after all of the hoopla of it only being terror suspects talking to international locations. Here's a good review of the state of misinformation. Oh and the Justice Department has dropped the investigation into the mess because they don't have the security clearance to look at the NSA documents. "Only those involved in national security with a specific need to know are provided details about this classified program." Excellent! Oh, and the guy overseeing this illegal program is now going to be head of the CIA. "Don't worry, we're from the government and we're here to help you." Other sources: CBS news.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

May 10, 2006

9 states have sued the Bush administration because of lenient automotive fuel economy standards. The lawsuit says that the administration has failed to meet federal laws requiring proper environmental impact statements be made on regulation. The regulation is also trying to preempt California's more stringent regulation on tailpipe emissions. So much for states' rights and saving the environment. Another example about how leadership on environmental issues is not coming from Washington these days. Another example about how much the current administration is in the pocket of industry. Other sources: environmental news service, blognonymous.com.
But the lawsuit, joined by the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont, says the move included language that could "create incentives to build larger, less fuel-efficient models" and attempts to pre-empt a California law requiring a reduction of greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions.

May 9, 2006

The European Space Agency has produced a movie of the Huygens probe decent to the surface of Titan. They took various tilt, signal strength, and other data to make the sound for the movie.
The almost four-hour-long operation of the camera is shown in less than five minutes. That's 40 times the actual speed up to landing and 100 times the actual speed thereafter.
The first part of the movie shows how Titan looked to the camera as it acquired more and more images during the probe's descent. Each image has a small field of view, and dozens of images were made into mosaics of the whole scene. The scientists analyzed Huygens' speed, direction of motion, rotation and swinging during the descent.
Check out this incredible animation showing Fedex thunderstorm operations routing its planes around a storm system near the Memphis Tennessee airport. What a dance. Looks like ants going to their anthill. Love the music too.
Last night I finally got around to writing up my content based backup solution that I've been working on and tuning for a couple of months. The general concept is to backup and archive files for both short term failures and long term storage purposes. It reduced the storage of my previous backup tar files solution by 50% and has provided me much faster restores, better statistics, better security, and flexibility. Smaller, faster, better. Choose three. Looks to be ready for prime time although feedback is welcome of course.
So I finally got around to reorganizing my backup scripts to treat each file separately. Any file can be a part of any number of backups. The files are stored compressed in a directory hierarchy by their MD5 signature (could easily be SHA256) and organized using a SQL database. There is a backup table in the database which tracks backups, creating date, statistics, partitions and collections backed up, and other information. The other table is the file table which stores path, signature, backup-id, and permissions information. There is one database row per file per backup so if a file exists in 10 different backups, it has 10 different rows in the file table.

May 5, 2006

There is a huge 300 foot and growing rock "fin" coming out of the Mt. Saint Helens volcano near Seattle. It is growing 5 to 6 feet per day. Can you imaging the forces at work here. Wow! Here's the US Geological Survey page about the volcano. Here's a cool image about the growth of the dome. Here's more images from the USGS.
The volcano has continued pumping out lava ever since. Eventually, scientists expect the volcano will rebuild its conical peak that was obliterated in the May 18, 1980 eruption that left 57 people dead.
The current growth of the new lava dome has been accompanied by low seismicity rates, low emissions of steam and volcanic gases and minor production of ash, the USGS said.
"Given the way things are going now, there's no hint of any sort of catastrophic eruptions," USGS geologist Tom Pierson said. "At any time, however, things can change."
So this is old news but I can't find it in my blog so I want to put it out there. Back in 2004, the Pentagon did a review of national security concerns around global warming. Very interesting report which seems to have been entirely ignored by the administration and Congress. So much for leadership. I look at the 9/11 commission which talked about a "failure in imagination" at all levels -- that we weren't able to imagine this happening so we weren't prepared for it. My response to this is what else are we not imagining? Seems to me that we don't understand what environmental changes are happening around us and when we do, it will most likely be too late.
Commissioned by esteemed Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall, the report paints a scenario under which global warming could pose a threat to the world "greater than terrorism" -- complete with mega-droughts, widespread famine, and rampant rioting. But while it has sounded alarms on Capitol Hill, it hasn't provoked so much as a peep from the White House.
When Muckraker contacted White House Council on Environmental Quality spokesperson Dana Perino for a statement on the report, she responded, "I haven't seen it, I haven't read it, and I don't want to make any comments on the matter. As I understand it, this is a 'what-if' scenario -- not a diagnosis, not a prophecy, and not a foundation for new policy."

May 4, 2006

So Lucas is releasing the original theatrical releases of the Star Wars films without the changes that Lucas put in later which has so annoyed the zealots. Also coming out is Lego Star Wars II with the first 3 episodes which will thrill my son.
"Over the years, a truly countless number of fans have told us that they would love to see and own the original version that they remember experiencing in theaters," said Jim Ward, President of LucasArts and Senior Vice President of Lucasfilm Ltd. "We returned to the Lucasfilm Archives to search exhaustively for source material that could be presented on DVD. This is something that we're very excited to be able to give to fans in response to their continuing enthusiasm for Star Wars. Topping it off with a new interactive adventure makes September 12 a red-letter day for Star Wars fans."
Interesting article about a new design in internal combustion engines. They have a compression cylinder and a drive cylinder with a shaft between them. It's operation can best be seen via this animation. They claim that this increases the efficiency of the classic Otto cycle from 33% to 44% while dropping emissions by 80% because it limits peak temperatures. As a junior inventer, it seems very strange that the best we've been able to do in terms of engines is 45% efficiency.
Specifically, Scuderi's cycle is much like the Miller cycle in that it attempts to delay the opening of the exhaust valve as much as possible to take full advantage of the expanding combustion gases. Traditionally, the Miller cycle -completely unrelated to Miller Time, by the way - uses a mechanical supercharger to prevent reversion of the exhaust gases into the intake tract. Scuderi uses the compression cylinder and a poppet valve and check valve arrangement in the crossover passage to the same effect.

May 2, 2006

So last month I attended a forum for Deval Patrick, candidate for governor here in Massachusetts. He spoke for 20 minutes and then took questions for maybe an hour without a scrap of notes. He was eloquent, passionate, and intelligent and I was very impressed. It's been a while since I've seen a Democrat so passionate about his beliefs. He was speaking at a college and it was obvious what all of the "correct" answers were but he didn't take the obvious political bait. He showed leadership and often took the crowd of mostly students in a different direction than I anticipated. He's for the Cape Wind project for example (his press release) which is politically tough but the right thing to do but he wants to negotiate a fixed electricity cost from the project and said that we need to be mindful of locals who are worried about their future and livelihoods. I need to send him some money.
In Hull yesterday, Patrick said that "every project - every project - has some flaw. There is no perfect project, there's no perfect place. But there is a project today that has run through four years of extensive environmental and ecological review, that has been thoughtfully considered, that should be thoughtfully reviewed within a context of a comprehensive regulatory framework for development of ocean resources. "That project, I believe, is the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound and I am proud to announce my support for that project," he said, to cheers and applause.

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