Gray Watson's Blog -- November 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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November 20, 2006

Excellent article with a lot of supporting evidence on how to talk to global warming skeptics. It talks about the Stages of Denial, Scientific Topics, Types of Argument, and Levels of Sophistication. Here are the Stages of Denial:
1. There's nothing happening
2. We don't know why it's happening
3. Climate change is natural
4. Climate change is not bad
5. Climate change can't be stopped

November 16, 2006

A group of scientists are using Google Earth and other tools to find evidence of large asteroid hitting earth. They have found evidence of an asteroid or comet collision in the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago. They are now wondering if the frequency of these super large explosions is more than previously thought. Other sources: Australia Broadcasting. Interesting semi-serious history of impacts. Other blog entries: Congress, Extinction Events.
Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described band of misfits that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the worlds shorelines and in the deep ocean.
Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every 1,000 years.

November 13, 2006

So SAS is the latest (for me) hard drive interface to come down the pipe. It stands for Serial Attached SCSI -- or in full Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface. Yikes. Bare drives are appearing on mail order sites like Buy.com. Drive specs on this Maxtor 15k 75gb drive promise close to 100 megabytes/second sustained transfer rate. Although they store a comparatively small amount of data, they make it up in high speed and are perfect for database processes that are disk bound.
It is designed for the corporate and enterprise market as a replacement for parallel SCSI, allowing for much higher speed data transfers than previously available, and is backwards-compatible with SATA. Though SAS uses serial communication instead of the parallel method found in traditional SCSI devices, it still uses SCSI commands for interacting with SAS End devices. SAS protocol is developed and maintained by T10 committee. The current draft revision of SAS protocol can be downloaded from SAS 2 draft.

November 9, 2006

So I watched the movie Sin City last night via Netflix (imdb). Very interesting movie with very stylized sequences, coloration, and FX. It was directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez and the technology involved demonstrates the future of the industry. It starred among many, Mickey Rourke who was great, Jessica Alba (shwing), and Bruce Willis who's looking a bit older but still good in this role.
[...] Miller got a call from Robert Rodriguez. A young director known for innovative, inexpensive genre pictures like Desperado and highly technical box office darlings like Spy Kids, Rodriguez made Miller a simple offer: Come to Texas and shoot with me for a day. If you like what you see, we'll make a deal. If not, the short film is yours to keep. Miller accepted and flew to Rodriguez's digital back lot outside of Austin. Inside a massive soundstage outfitted with a 30-foot-tall green screen and the latest Sony hi-def cameras, Miller watched as actors Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton performed a scene lifted straight from "The Customer Is Always Right," a decade-old short story in the Sin City series. After the shoot, Rodriguez cut the footage in his editing bay, laid down a few special effects, and added music - all that same day. Miller was floored.
I've mean meaning to blog these for a couple of months. Bruce Schneier writes very well about most of the security issues and these are spot on. His article about our scorecard from the war on terror as well as 10 ways to avoid another 9/11 are very well done and worth the read.
In the twelve months immediately after 9/11, the prosecution of individuals the government classified as international terrorists surged sharply higher than in the previous year. But timely data show that five years later, in the latest available period, the total number of these prosecutions has returned to roughly what they were just before the attacks. Given the widely accepted belief that the threat of terrorism in all parts of the world is much larger today than it was six or seven years ago, the extent of the recent decline in prosecutions is unexpected. See Figure 1 and supporting table.
Much of our counterterrorist efforts are nothing more than security theater: ineffectual measures that look good. Forget the war on terror; the difficulty isnt killing or arresting the terrorists, its finding them. Terrorism is a law enforcement problem, and needs to be treated as such. For example, none of our post-9/11 airline security measures would have stopped the London shampoo bombers. The lesson of London is that our best defense is intelligence and investigation. Rather than spending money on airline security, or sports stadium security -- measures that require us to guess the plot correctly in order to be effective -- were better off spending money on measures that are effective regardless of the plot.

November 8, 2006

So the news today is that Israel fired a series of artillery shells through a residential area killing 19 members of the same family. This is a perfect example about how not to wage war on your enemies. We need to go after the terrorists and capture them if possible or kill them if necessary. But we can't do it the Israeli way where we kill innocents in the process, giving power to the enemy. This is how we need to be fighting in Iraq, in my naive opinion. We need to pull back as much as possible but attack specific groups (in the government or not) when the act out of line.
Raed Ibrahim tells me that all the dead came from the same branch of the same family. "I am angry. I hate the US, I hate George W Bush, I hate of course Israel. I also hate the Arab states which do nothing to help and the international community," said Raed.
But it was not anger in his eyes, it was more like an immense sadness that showed through. That mood was shared by most of the people we saw, many of them slumped tearfully against walls in the street.
Looks like one of the guard is getting the axe as Donald Rumsfeld resigns his post as head of the Defense Department. Obviously fallout from the massive wins by the Democrats yesterday.
Mr Bush said that his administration's Iraq policy was "not working well enough, fast enough", and that Mr Rumsfeld agreed that a "fresh perspective" was needed on the issue.
The US president described the Republicans' set-back in the elections as "thumping". But he said that with victory, there had to be responsibility, and that was why he would be working with his Democratic opponents to get legislation passed.
Mr Bush described Mr Rumsfeld as a "patriot who served his country with honour and distinction", as well as "a trusted adviser and a friend".

November 7, 2006

So the Democrats seem to have won the house and are poised to take the Senate as well. I guess it shows how pissed off the public is at Bush that the Dems won given how disorganized they continue to be. They are the "alternative party" -- the other guys. I still see no enumeration of their mission. I see no Contract For America II. But that doesn't mean that I'm not very happy with today's news. Now let's see how much they can screw it up.
Here's a very cool small GPS board which takes 5v DC and an antennae and outputs NMEA information on a serial line. They are sold on ebay right now for US$25 with shipping the seller also has antennas. Another cool little piece of hardware is this intelligent DC power supply which takes in 6-24v input and outputs computer power.

November 1, 2006

A friend at work just showed me this cool list of the airfoil specifications of tons of different aircraft. Here's another collection of airfoils. Very, very cool. What a resource.

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