Gray Watson's Blog -- December 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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December 31, 2006

Some wireless power proposals including electromagnetic resonant coupling and inductance.
Instead of using acoustic vibrations, the team's system exploits the resonance of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, infrared and X-rays.
Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space. To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of "non-radiative" objects with so-called "long-lived resonances".
So as we hear more about the hanging of Saddam Hussein is seems more and more likely that nothing good is going to come from it -- most likely quite the opposite. The Kurds have not have their day in court for Saddam's massacres and use of chemical weapons, he was hung immediately before one of the most important Muslim holidays (like killing someone on Christms eve), and this will only make the Sunni/Shia divide worse. Other stories: BBC.
One of the witnesses managed to get a mobile phone into the execution chamber, and recorded the entire event, from the time when Saddam is brought into the chamber, his hands and feet shackled, to the moment when his body is hanging lifeless at the end of the rope. It is shocking, of course. But the most shocking thing about it is the sound.
Far from being a quiet and dignified business, the new video shows that several of the witnesses taunted Saddam during the last seconds of his life, chanted the name of one of his many enemies, and told him he was going to hell.

December 29, 2006

Very cool story about an African grey parrot who can communicate at an astounding level with humans.
One N'kisi-ism was "flied" for "flew", and another "pretty smell medicine" to describe the aromatherapy oils used by his owner, an artist based in New York. When he first met Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee expert, after seeing her in a picture with apes, N'kisi said: "Got a chimp?"
He appears to fancy himself as a humourist. When another parrot hung upside down from its perch, he commented: "You got to put this bird on the camera." Dr Goodall says N'kisi's verbal fireworks are an "outstanding example of interspecies communication".

December 28, 2006

Here's an interesting list of 100 things we didn't know last year from the BBC News. Each one is linked to the story which explains it. Here are some of the ones that caught my eye:
- Fathers tend to determine the height of their child, mothers their weight. (story)
- Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth originated on another planet. (story)
- Online shoppers will only wait an average of four seconds for an internet page to load before giving up. (story)
- Up to 25% of hospital keyboards carry the MRSA infection. (story)
- For every 10 successful attempts to climb Mount Everest there is one fatality. (story)

December 23, 2006

Japanese marine scientists have hooked a 3.5m giant squid. Giant squid take my thoughts to a sperm whale, swimming at 1,000s of feet below the surface at full speed with its mouth open trying to capture squid. They have recovered a sperm whale from a depth of 2,200m where the water pressure would be 216,000 mb (3,100 psi). That would be a site to see. It might be cool to put a satellite sensor on a sperm whale if it would only survive the ordeal.

December 21, 2006

Have I blogged this before? It's a map showing the regions of the country broken down by whether they call the carbonated beverages (Coke, Sprite, Pepsi) pop, coke, soda, or other. Very cool. I'm a Pittsburgh transplant in Boston and my use of the word "pop" comes from Western Pennsylvania. Actually, looking at the map "pop" starts there and covers mostly the entire country North and West of there. Boston/New England is a very "soda" place joined by California and a strange spot in Western Illinois and Eastern Missouri. Calling it "coke" is obviously a Southern thing looking at the map.

December 14, 2006

Here's a great site with a large collection of educational learning games. Don't think that these aren't fun either. Lot of cool brain teasers, card games, strategy games, party games, and more. I always say that if you don't know what to get a child, get an age appropriate book but I'm going to recommend these sort of games as well.
We offer enriching educational kids board games from all over the world for people of all ages! Parents and teachers will appreciate our low prices and huge variety of educational board games. From phonics to fractions- geography to spelling - we have educational games for every school subject so you can enforce what your children are learning or teach them new skills. They'll be having so much fun, they won't realize they're learning! Browse through our educational board and card games catalogs and see how much fun learning can be!
Whatever you want to call it, this piece on the treatment of Jose Padilla shows that we are continuing to torture terrorist suspects -- and he is a US citizen even. This is happening in South Carolina and goodness knows what is happening in our secret prisons across the globe. What have we become in the name of "security"?! If you don't think this is cruel punishment then I dare you to see how long you can last getting this treatment or waterboarding. Or think about one of our soldiers being subjected to this treatment in a foreign land -- is that okay? Will it be okay to do this to other citizens in the name of security?
Last week, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an enemy combatant, released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor(1).
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for a piece of furniture. The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I dont mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
Here's the features from Nature Mill indoor composter. Cool looking product for US$400.
Deposit food and paper waste items at any time, on any day. For best results, cut items into small pieces. Items remain in the upper chamber, where ideal "hot composting" conditions are maintained: mixing, air flow, heat, and moisture (see diagram). The energy released destroys odors, pathogens, and seed germination. The compost is later transferred through a trap door to the lower cure tray chamber, where it continues to compost while you add fresh waste items to the upper chamber.
Empty the cure tray when the indicator light comes on - roughly every two weeks. More than seventy percent of the initial waste disappears into thin air -- literally -- as compost cultures convert it into water vapor. What's left is a very concentrated compost fertilizer. Fresh compost has a mild organic aroma, which people often describe as damp wool, sourdough bread, or mushrooms. You can use it immediately, or leave it in a heap outdoors until you are ready to work in your garden.
Spreadshirt is a very cool t-shirt store. With their webaps, you can design your own tshirts and sell them. You can scale, rotate, place images, on a number of different types and colors of shirts. I've been wanted basic white on black some some time. A lot of community around various designs. Excellent service and cool site. The Flying Spagetti Monster shirts are there for example. There is also a very cool store that does skins for iPods which I think you can also design.

December 13, 2006

Apple's iTunes.com webstore has only sold, on average, 20 tracks per iPod since its launch. These stats from the most popular online music store on the Net again demonstrate that the recording industry is in trouble given the amount of piracy out there.
"People who thought that iTunes would save the music business now have to sober up and realize that's not true," said Josh Bernoff, the author of the study and a principal analyst at Forrester. "Twenty songs per iPod are not enough to save the industry."
Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris disputed that sales have slowed. "The conclusion that iTunes sales are slowing is simply incorrect," she said.
Amusing article about how Craigslist is not out to make money and this confuses Wall Street to no end. The idea of benefiting community and society as your sole goals are just foreign to most of our business institutions.
Wendy Davis of MediaPost describes the presentation as a a culture clash of near-epic proportions. She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn't, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). That definitely is not part of the equation, he said, according to MediaPost. Its not part of the goal. I think a lot of people are catching their breath right now, Mr. Schachter said in response.
Wow, here's a description and a couple of videos of Dutch artist Theo Jansen's kinetic sculputes that are driven by the wind. They use the strong coastal winds in the Netherlands to walk across the sands. Absolutely amazing and magical. To me they look alive. There's more about this on Theo Jansen's site.
Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

December 10, 2006

Here's a cool list of GSM cellphone features that are not well known. They are special # and * codes that you dial into you phone to adjust your call-forwarding, call-waiting, number display, and other settings. Some work and some don't on my T-Mobile phone. YMMV.
Disturbing report about imprisioned and killed journalists show that Internet reporters and bloggers are also susceptible to attacks on the press.
Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, now held for eight months in Iraq without due process; and Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj, jailed five years and now held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
For the eighth consecutive year, China is the worlds leading jailer of journalists, with 31 imprisoned. About three-quarters of the cases in China were brought under vague antistate laws; 19 cases involve Internet journalists. Chinas list includes Shi Tao, an internationally recognized journalist serving a 10-year sentence for posting notes online detailing propaganda department instructions on how to cover the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. The government declared the instructions a state secret.

December 8, 2006

Here's an article talking about the open source car project named OSCar. Cool name. If I had more time (and money) I'd do this. I just went back to Wikipedia where I had started the Open Source Car page and it had been removed by some admin. What a pain. It was a minimal page for sure but it was to start the discussion and didn't deserve to be removed.
In the manifesto (which is available in full on the OScar Web site), Merz lays out the goals: "Building a car without an engineering center, without a boss, without money, and without borders. But with the help of the collective creativity of the Internet community . Three or four months should be enough for the project definition phase. Then we 'freeze' the concept, and start developing. With a little luck and a lot of support, within the next year we should be able to build a prototype".
That timeline proved vastly overoptimistic. Merz's manifesto laid out a series of basic rules for people to work together, but they were too generic (things like "everyone has a voice" and "what's on the Web site is fact"). And the tools, mostly software, needed to work on such an ambitious plan weren't yet available. "And of course we didn't have a clue what we were doing, we didn't have a master plan nor clear directions," he adds.
More research is out about how huge asteroid impacts killed off the dinosaurs. Scientists are arguing whether it was one or many impacts. By examining core samples from deep sea drilling, they can see a fine layer of iridium glass which is plentiful in asteroids in a layer almost everywhere on the planet. There are also huge sediment layers that may have been washed ashore from huge tsunamis in response to the impacts. Old blog entries: 2006/11, 2005/03.
The complex scientific detective story involves tiny glass beads, the rare element iridium, and sediments that might be deposits from gigantic tsunamis kicked up by the Chicxulub impact.
Both sides of the debate agree that the glass was created when the Chicxulub event filled the atmosphere with vaporized rock that quickly condensed and rained to Earth as tiny spherules, about a tenth of an inch (1 to 4 millimeters) in diameter.
I've been working on my spam detection and avoidance lately as my MailNull system comes up more and more load -- 99% of which is spam. One of the protocols that I am implementing is called grey-listing where all mail is initially rejected so that the sender has to retry. Since most spammers have robot senders which have no concept of queues, the will never come back -- or at least that is the idea.
During the initial testing of Greylisting in mid-2003, it was observed that the vast majority of spam appears to be sent from applications designed specifically for spamming. These applications appear to adopt the "fire-and-forget" methodology. That is, they attempt to send the spam to one or several MX hosts for a domain, but then never attempt a true retry as a real MTA would. From our testing, this means that in the test environment, based on a fairly conservative interpretation of testing data, we have attained an effectiveness of over 95%, and that is with no legitimate mail ever being permanently blocked.
In addition, with the recent rampant proliferation of email-based viruses, Greylisting has been shown to be extremely effective in blocking these viruses, as they also do not tend to retry deliveries. And since these viruses are fairly large, bandwidth and processing savings are significant versus the standard method of accepting delivery and local virus scanning.
I really hate articles like this one entitled Liberals make wish lists.... It talks about how with the new Congress, the so called "Liberals" are rubbing their hands. All this does is serve to intensify the polarity of American politics. Then they interview the right wing fringe to get comments like these:
"Instead, anticipate the fiercest assault of our time against abstinence, marriage, life, good judges, and religious freedom," Perkins wrote this week in the National Review. "Pro-life Democrats are likely to be marginalized in positions where they have little influence."
Another conservative leader, the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, asserted that the gay-rights bills likely to advance next year will infringe on the rights of those who condemn homosexuality.
Just found this interesting page describing a KVAR Unit. This device plugs into your home electric and promises to save 8-15% of your typical bill. I have no idea if it is vapor or not. Anyone know if it is for real? Here's a couple of places that sell them: Power Save, Taylor Energy Products. This is all around the topic of reactive power.
These capacitors are used to put capacitative loads on AC circuits to correct typical power factors toward a '1.0' power factor from the typical customer's .85 kvar power factor. (.85 is a utility industry accepted typical value) If a you do NOT have such a capacitor, you will always use additional wattage to overcome this .85 power factor. This is wattage you have to pay the utility for, but it does no real work for you. In the typical .85 power factor example it will be 15% of the $ costs shown on your bill.

December 6, 2006

Very, very interesting piece on burning wood chips for home heat. This can be sustainable if you have the land. Just about any small trees, twigs, and underbrush can be used. They are using new furnace technology to burn green chips that you'd get out of a chipper ($15 and $30 per ton) -- even with 50% water content. Even with the loss of 11% of heat because of the water, they are seeing efficiencies around 80%. Not bad considering the cost.
Vermont Heat Research was formed to explore and provide data for practical methods of utilizing solid biomass fuel. The green chip furnace is a primary focus. Several smaller experimental furnaces were tested in February and March of this year, and the larger prototype was built by July. Initial outdoor tests in summer conditions showed promise and verified the concept as viable, but did not test it in service under real winter conditions connected to a dwelling.
To begin a true test process, the furnace was installed in its own building in October 2006 along with a 2500 pound hot water storage tank and connected to the home heating system. It has been providing full house heat since then. Preliminary estimates are that it is producing about 175,000 Btu of hot water per burn at about 80% efficiency but this won't be verified until the combustion chamber and tank receive final insulation, and instrumentation can be calibrated. and verified through test.
The Iraq Study Group report is out. Here's a local PDF copy (1.8mb). It is basically a condemnation of the Bush administration's management of the war. This plus Robert Gates' confirmation hearing testimony make me hopeful that positive change is in the near to mid-future.
The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved.
In this report, we make a number of recommendations for actions to be taken in Iraq, the United States, and the region. Our most important recommendations call for new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region, and a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly.
Analysis of images taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor in 2004 and 2005 have led scientists to state that water may still flow on Mars. Story on BBC. They have already found ice at Mars' poles but they now think that more recent water may be spurting to the surface from time to time. NASA has been unable to talk to the Global Surveyor satellite since early November and it may be at mission's end. It has transmitted 240,000 images of Mars back to Earth since 1997 after far exceeding its 2 year mission.
"The shapes of these deposits are what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water," said Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. "They have finger-like branches at the downhill end and are easily diverted around small obstacles." Malin is principal investigator for the camera and lead author of a report about the findings published in the journal Science.
The atmosphere of Mars is so thin and the temperature so cold that liquid water cannot persist at the surface. It would rapidly evaporate or freeze. Researchers propose that water could remain liquid long enough, after breaking out from an underground source, to carry debris downslope before totally freezing. The two fresh deposits are each several hundred meters, or yards, long.

December 4, 2006

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has come out with a sweeping condemnation of the security of all electronic voting machines. Wow. Here's a link to NIST's voting research site. They are holding meetings today and tomorrow about this topic down in DC I'd guess.
Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.
Sun Microsystems has open sourced key portions of Java. I've been a C hacker most of my life and have only switched to the dark (light?) side and started programming in Java over the last 18 months or so. I must say that I am impressed. The language and the toolsets seem mature and robust. The systems don't perform as well but the performance per software-engineer hour is very hard to beat. I now find C clunky. I've believed for some time that as computers get faster, we should be using higher and higher languages, that provide programming features at the expense of some performance. Just makes sense. At this point, except for some small situations, I am willing to sacrifice performance for the security and maintainability of Java. You can still write crap. You can still get a NullPointerException. But thinking in modular objects, interpreted byte-code, relocatable objects, etc. are all good things.
Cool article about how companies could start to print carbon cost on each item. The idea is to give people information about what a particular product costs in terms of dollars and the environment. Certainly a certain percentage of the population wouldn't give a crap but I would think the majority, if educated, would choose to pay a couple of pennies to get a "greener" product and many would pay a lot more. I heard a report on the news the other day that a British company was shipping shrimp caught in Scotland to be peeled in Thailand, 19,000km away. Crazy. Market forces only encourage such behavior.
Imagine, though, a future version of Amazon.com where the price for each product is reported in two different ways: as dollars (P1), and also as carbon-adjusted dollars (P2). Now consider a pair of competing products, A and B, under two different scenarios.
In one scenario, As P2 is lower than Bs, but As P1 is higher than Bs. Some people will be willing to pay the higher P1 (more dollars) to reward As lower P2 (less environmental impact), but most won't.
In the other scenario, however, As P2 is still lower than Bs, but its P1 is about the same. In other words, there's no penalty to the buyer for rewarding As lower environmental impact. If the P2 data is available, its a rational choice.

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