Gray Watson's Blog -- June 2007

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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June 12, 2007

Interesting and controversial theory that nerves run on sound waves not electricity. Seems that scientists have not been able to explain how anesthetic blocks pain receptors. This new paper implies that electricity is a byproduct and not the main signal carrying source which the traditional Hodgkin-Huxley model of our nervous system.
But Jackson and Heimburg say that the inability to explain how anesthesia works, combined with other counterintuitive aspects of the theory, mean that nerves don't rely on electricity to carry messages.
For example, the Hodgkin-Huxley model still hasn't accounted for observations made a century ago by scientists Hans Meyer and Charles Overton. They demonstrated that the strength of an anesthetic could be predicted by its solubility in olive oil rather than its chemical structure. The more soluble the anesthetic, the stronger it was.
Since olive oil is similar to the lipid molecules that make up nerve cells, Jackson and Heimburg started questioning the generally accepted belief that anesthetics block electrical pulses by fitting themselves into pain receptors on cells. That seems next to impossible, they said, because anesthetic molecules come in many shapes and sizes, and it's difficult to imagine that they all happen to physically fit into all receptors.

June 10, 2007

More news about advances in fuel cell technology. Acumentrics Corporation is improving the solid-oxide fuel cells and are producing kilo-watt sized units which are twice as efficient as generators and can use: natural gas, hydrogen, bio-diesel, propane, ethanol, or biogas.
Acumentrics manufactures 5000-watt solid oxide fuel cell systems (SOFC) for power applications. They are also developing combined-heat-and-power units (which are like boilers that produce electricity) for the home market. In 2000 they acquired a novel fuel cell technology. Since then, they have increased the output of a single fuel cell tube from 1 watt to 60 watts. Today they have over 30 units working in the field, including ones that power visitor's centers at Exit Glacier National Park in Alaska, and Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio.
One of their key innovations was making ceramic fuel cell technology shatter resistant. It is shatter resistant because of its shape -- it is a tube, not a thin sheet as most others have used --with a special composition of layers that prevents them from flaking off. Solid oxide fuel cells must handle temperature swings from 20 to 800 degrees C. Many other solid oxide fuel cells crack when they are cycled on and off, because of thermal shock.
Interesting glimpse behind the vail at some of the science behind Google's ranking algorithm. The team responsible is continually taking user feedback and looking for ways to improve the search experience -- to move from 'get me what I typed' to 'get me what I want'.
Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its "ranking algorithm" -- the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user's question. It is a crucial part of Google's inner sanctum, a department called "search quality" that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.
Google values Mr. Singhal and his team so highly for the most basic of competitive reasons. It believes that its ability to decrease the number of times it leaves searchers disappointed is crucial to fending off ever fiercer attacks from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft and preserving the tidy advertising gold mine that search represents.
Rumors are out there that Sun's ZFS filesystem will be used in the next OS X version Leopard. ZFS is Sun's next generation filesystem with some very cool features which include: transactional operations, large scalability, backup/revoery check-pointing, data replication, pipelined IO, .... Leapard's famed backup systems sound like they will be utilizing these features.
Perhaps overcome with excitement (and forgetting that Apple doesn't like such pre-emptive disclosures), Sun's Jonathan Schwartz announced today at Sun event in Washington D.C. that Apple would be making ZFS "the file system" in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard (video link, requires RealPlayer). In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10.
Rumors of Apple's interest in ZFS began in April 2006, when an OpenSolaris mailing list revealed that Apple had contacted Sun regarding porting ZFS to OS 10. The file system later began making appearances in Leopard builds. ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+.
Interesting study nicknamed "Hubble" which is charting the regions of the Internet which come and go. Looking at the internet from a network of cyberspace probes, a research team from the University of Washington looked at 1,500 sites every 15 minutes and found that 10% of them couldn't be reached now and then as the packets fell into "routing black holes".
"A single unresponsive ping is likely to mean there are widespread problems, Katz-Bassett said. The larger system, which Katz-Bassett plans to build over the summer, would treat an unanswered ping as a canary in a coal mine, instantly triggering multiple probes from around the net.
Routing problems can be caused by a number of factors, ranging from problems with a particular router, often a new one, to ironic problems with a technique called "multi-homing" -- which supposed to make it easier for packets to reach their destination by allowing an internet site to simultaneously have a number of different addresses and network connections.
Parellels has put out a new version of its OS virtualization software for Macintosh. You can run Windows and Linux virtual OS sandboxes on your Mac at the same time. Very cool. Given that I am using my new MacBook Pro (which I love) as my development desktop but will be installing and running in live service on a Linux varient (CentOS?), I could see having a virtual Linux instance for testing.
Parallels Desktop for Mac enables you to run Windows, Linux, and more side-by-side with Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Mac, without rebooting. With Parallels' award-winning virtualization technology, you can run Mac OS X and your favorite Windows applications at the same time. You can even drag-and-drop files between desktops!
The latest release of Parallels Desktop for Mac comes packed with 50+ new features and enhancements, including SmartSelect, Snapshots, and 3D graphics. Learn more about the new capabilities in the latest release of our award-winning product.
Article by the Boston Globe about the growth in home wind turbine installations. Many are it it for the bill savings and off-the-grid capabilities but many more are out to save the planet -- my big reason for my solar array. I've been thinking of a home turbine but haven't pulled the trigger on a system yet.
Usually a home is connected to both a turbine and the local power grid . When the wind dips below an average of 8 miles per hour, a home will then draw power from the utility company. If a system produces more electricity than it uses, the excess can be sold back to many utility companies, which is called net-metering.
According to Durrenberger, the average price of a wind turbine sufficient to power a 1,500-square-foot home that uses 9,000 kilowatt-hours a year is between $11,000 and $14,000. His Skystream 3.7 is designed to replace one-third to one-half of a home's power usage.

June 3, 2007

Cool post to Slashdot talking about a 7.7 terabyte SAN/NSA for US$4,200.
Get a CoolerMaster Stacker enclosure (just the hardware not the software) that can hold up to 12 SATA drives. Install OpenSolaris and create ZFS pools with RAID-Z for redundancy. Export some pools with Samba for use as a NAS. Export some pools with iSCSI for use as a SAN. Run it over Gigabit Ethernet. Fast, secure, reliable, easy to administer, and cheap. Usable from Windows, Mac, and Linux. As a bonus ZFS let's me create daily or hourly snapshots at almost no cost in disk space or time.
Total cost: 1.4 Terabytes: $2,000. 7.7 Terabytes: $4,200 (Just the cost of the enclosure and the drives). That's an order of magnitude less expensive than other solutions. Add redundant power supplies, NIC cards, SATA cards, etc as your needs require.
Here's an update on the Scaled Composites' progress towards Virgin Galactic. They are designing a expanded SpaceShipTwo spaceship and White Knight Two mother ship. Very exciting.
Like its X Prize-winning predecessor, SpaceShipTwo will fling passengers to the edge of space at 3,000 mph. But while the original craft was barely a three-seater, the new version is designed for six passengers and two pilots. New features maximize the wow factor: bigger windows, more room for weightless floating, and Virgin-cool details sprinkled throughout.
The SS2 is simply a bigger version of the original rocket, but the jet-powered WK2 is a total redesign. The first mother ship had a single fuselage. The new one accommodates the expanded ship with twin hulls that hold the SS2 suspended between them. The interior of one hull is a replica of the SS2: Passengers will ride along in training for a full-on space voyage the next day. FAA permitting, the second hull will carry cut-rate day-trippers into the stratosphere. The vehicle is being engineered to perform zero-g aerobatic swoops on the way down.
This piece entitled As Comrades Search, Fatal Bomb Wreaks Havoc from last week's New York Times is still with me. Make sure to play the audio and photos multimedia piece. So very powerful. To think what our kids are having to put up with over there in name of our failed policies.
The bomb was the third planted away from a road that the soldiers had discovered since May 12, when they began searching for three soldiers from their unit who had been captured after an ambush that left four Americans and an Iraqi soldier dead.
After the attack on Saturday, the reality of the threat set in: the fields they had been crossing on foot for months might now be as dangerous as the roads they had learned to avoid. What they had just witnessed -- a homemade land mine, or what the military calls a dismounted improvised explosive device -- could be anywhere.
Some of the soldiers began to move more slowly. Seeking cover, they traced one another's footsteps to an abandoned house. Sergeant Simonovich continued to kneel alone.
I'm worried about my guy out front, Sergeant Wisniewski," he said. His Ohio accent was thick enough to sound southern. Blood had splattered his face, which was bruised but intact. "I have a question," he said, pointing to the left side of his head. "Is my ear still there?"

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