Gray Watson's Blog -- June 2009

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 30, 2009

So I've been monitoring the output from my solar panels since 2004 so I can now say definitively what all of the locals already knew -- Boston weather sucked this month. June had been pretty consistent in terms of solar output up to this year -- std of 26 without 2009, 86 with. However in Boston, we got less sun in June 2009 than we have received over the past 5 years in _March_ when the sun is much lower is the sky. Given that I grew up in Pittsburgh I should be used to grey, dismal weather but I guess I've grown used to our typical sunny days the the occasional Northeaster. More details about our solar array is online.
Even if you have _no_ plans on seeing the new Transformers 2, you _have_ to read this hilarious review of it.
Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality — but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

June 26, 2009

Wow. A study published in the Lancet reporting on research done by the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, CA has found that globally, alcohol can be linked to 1 in 25 deaths -- mostly through injuries, cancer, cardiovascular and liver disease. Europe is the worst with 1 in 10 deaths being directly attributable. Other sources: CAMH, CBS.
"The big message is treat alcohol like tobacco," not as a substance that is relatively benign except for "those bad alcoholics," Rehm said. "That is not true."... "So we need to rethink alcohol completely as a risk factor. Of course, we will not prohibit alcohol, but we should make it more expensive so it's consumed in smaller quantities and in quantities which are actually not as detrimental for health."

June 24, 2009

The price of the Solid State Drives (SSDs) continue to fall which is pretty exciting IMO. SSDs and store bytes in chips that retain their state even when the power is turned off -- as opposed to RAM. They replace typical hard-drives which store bytes on rotating platters of magnetic material. SSD are more expensive now but are much faster, quieter, use less power, generate less heat, and should be much better in terms of reliability. Prices are all over the place but US$300-400 for a 128gb SSD seems to be about right while you can get 1tb SATA hard drive for US$100 -- making SSD ~20x more expensive.
Performance of these new drives is where it gets really exciting. I've not found a definitive performance study but 100x faster was often cited depending on random-access versus large read/write bandwidth access patterns. Since SSDs are silicon, we should be able to better tap into the silicon improvements. We have seen 10x speed increases of hard drives over the past 20 years while CPUs have increased 1000x. Here's a good article from Rich Coulson with Intel's SSD group.

It is obvious to me at least that within 5 years we will no longer have drives with spinning drives in our computers. Price performance will probably have dropped to 3-5x that of spinning hard drives and performance and density will probably have increased as well.

June 23, 2009

I've always been amazed that we've not adopted another internal combustion engine design. That we basically are using the same design as Henry Ford was 100 years ago is astounding given the engineering innovations that have happened since then. The primary replacement candidate are piston-less engines such as the Wankel and others.
Translating a linear motion (pistons) to be rotary is inherently inefficient which is why coolant and lubrication systems are so critical in modern cars. Ultimately, I suspect, we will be replacing modern engines with electric motors which have 1 moving parts and are far, far less complicated and far, far more efficient.

The basic concept of a (pistonless) rotary engine avoids the reciprocating motion of the piston with its inherent vibration and rotational-speed-related mechanical stress. As of 2006 the Wankel engine is the only successful pistonless rotary engine, but many similar concepts have been proposed and are under various stages of development...

While typically larger than the piston of an engine of corresponding capacity, a rotor may perform many strokes per revolution. The Wankel produces twelve strokes per revolution of the rotor (four strokes per chamber times three chambers) (although the spindle rotates three times faster than the rotor or three times over the twelve strokes), as opposed to two strokes for each crankshaft rotation of a single-cylinder single acting piston engine, or four strokes for a double-acting cylinder such as found in some steam engines. The quasiturbine and MYT engine deliver sixteen strokes for every rotor (and spindle) revolution.
The Obama administration is shifting a large percentage of the funding away from hydrogen technology and to electric cars. I could not agree more. To quote many, hydrogen is the fuel of the future and always will be. Hydrogen isn't really a fuel at all -- it should be thought of as a battery because it must be produced which takes energy. The conversion from electricity to hydrogen and then back to electricity in the vehicle means that by definition, hydrogen is 50-75% less efficient then straight EV systems.
In 2003, after the Clinton administration spent $1.5 billion on a hybrid-electric sedan, the Bush administration touted $1.2 billion for hydrogen technology. Now, with Barack Obama in the White House, the pendulum is swinging back to plug-ins...

As a candidate, Obama touted plug-in electric vehicles as a cornerstone of his energy policy, pressing for 1 million plug-ins on American roads by 2015. The $787 billion stimulus bill approved by Congress last month includes more than $2 billion in new battery research grants, which are vital to the viability of plug-ins, but no new money for hydrogen research.

June 22, 2009

Here's an amusing Google maps anomaly. This street view shows up fine as does the street maps. However when you look at the satellite view you can see that it is 5 years old and still showing farmland.
Hitachi and Maxell corporations have developed a new chemistry for lithium-ion batteries. This is another example of battery technology innovation / breakthroughs that will improve battery systems. There is some disagreement in the English language press on whether this technology promises 20x the power storage capacity, the discharge rate, or the cycles -- all important. Certainly cheaper battery systems would be a plus and using less rare metals is also the goal. Other sources: Engadget, IT Examiner, Tech Radar.
Hitachi Maxell, along with Nagasaki University, NIAIST, and Fuji Heavy Industries (the parent company of Subaru, makers of the R1e electric car), announced that it has developed a new chemistry for lithium-ion batteries. Part of the change is dropping the expensive cobalt element and using "nano-infused lithium" with manganese (a very Japanese-sounding element! Pictured left.).

The claim: 20 times more power storage [or faster discharge rates], and the ability to mass-produce it inexpensively. Lets hope it's true and that it will get out of the lab quickly. We'd even settle for only 10 times more power storage...

June 20, 2009

So I got this call on our home phone a while back. Hilarious chatter between two of the agents about her support stockings before she realizes that our phone had answered. Sort of reminds me about how people on cellphones think that they are in a private place sometimes and say the strangest things in public.

June 18, 2009

Here's an interesting analysis of a pro-Ahmadinejad crowd picture from the latest Iran marches that seems to have been adjusted using the clone tool.
Scientists examining salt crystals deep in a salt mine in Kansas has discovered a bacterium that is 250 million years old -- 100 million years older than the dinosaurs.
Bacteria have the ability to go into a kind of semi-permanent hibernation, but survival for this long was unheard of. After lying dormant in the salt crystal for 250 million years, the scientists added fresh nutrients and a new salt solution, and the ancient bacteria "re-animated."

Dr. Russell Vreeland, one of the biologists who found the bacteria, pointed out that bacteria can survive the forces acceleration via rubble thrown into space via a meteor impact. If it is possible for a bacteria to survive being off the planet and to stay alive within a salt chunk for 250 million years, then in a sort of "reverse-exogenesis" it may be possible that earth's own microbes are already out there.
Here's a cool story about how there is a move to have the US postal service deliver local mail in electric trucks. I've had this idea for some time. I should quit my job and make a stab at a conversion kit for the postal trucks. I watch the guy delivering out mail drive 40 feet, stop the engine, get out, put the mail in the box, get back in his truck, start it, and then drive another 40 feet. It would save on pollution, noise, energy, and money.
Besides saving hundreds of millions of dollars in gasoline costs, switching the nation’s 142,000 postal vehicles over to battery power could boost electric-truck development nationwide and provide clean mail delivery for the next century, a new federal study has found.

"Electrification of the Postal Service delivery vehicle fleet is practical, achievable, and desirable, and should be initiated now," concludes a draft study of the vehicle-electrification idea for the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), a five-member body that advises the Postal Service.
Here's a cool gadget, a personal black-box for your car that bears witness to accidents. It is a little camera that is always taking pictures. It records the last 20 seconds of video and data with a 3 axis shock detector. It knows when there has been a crash and writes this information into a memory card that can be viewed. Now was I _really_ want is a little video camera on my window that I can go home and pull out the card and then post online the idiot's car / license who was texting while driving or DUI or whatever.
Measuring an extremely compact 3.19″ x 1.97″, this durable device (it’d better be if it were to survive a fair bit of knocks during its lifetime) manages to cram in a high resolution color camera, digital video recorder, GPS navigation and 3-Axis G-Shock sensor. All of these will work in tandem to make sure it captures whatever that goes on during an accident. The Smart Black Box is mounted on your windshield or rear view mirror thanks to a long-lasting adhesive, where a pre-determined amount of G-force will kick it into action to activate recording automatically, starting from the last 15 seconds prior to impact. Not only that, GPS technology ensures you will have pin-point accuracy on details such as the time and date, vehicle location, vehicle speed, and direction of travel. All of these data will be embedded within the video overlay itself, making sure that exporting to other formats will retain all the relevant data.
Here's another interesting piece from fivethirtyeight.com, this time about the Iranian election results and Benford's law. Benford's law talks about numerical distribution in the real world and shows that the number 1 starts a number (any number) 30% of the time instead of 1/9th (no 0) that you might think. Interesting stuff.
It's not clear to me whether the voting units that Iran's Interior Ministry reported on behave more like towns, in which case we might expect the voting distinctions to obey Benford's Law, or more like precincts, in which case we probably wouldn't. The way the units are described to me in the spreadsheet I'm working from are "city/county", which implies that sufficiently large cities are treated as their own units, whereas smaller ones -- it looks to me like perhaps those that have fewer than about 15,000 people -- have their results aggregated at some level resembling American counties. If there are these sorts of artificial constraints placed on the size of the reporting units, we might expect some anomalies from a Benford's Law perspective.

June 6, 2009

Ok folks. Mark the date. Mitsubishi has launched production of the iMiev, the first major automaker to start full scale production of a new EV. Although the EV1 and other non-starters will go down in history as footnotes, I think this day will be seen as a watershed moment. Other car companies are sure to follow with Subaru already announcing its Stella.
Mitsubishi launched series production of its iMiEV electric car today at its Okayama, Japan factory. Mitsubishi is the first of the major automakers to kick off full scale production of a new EV and will be followed by most other automakers over the next two years. The automaker plans to build about 2,000 units through the remainder of this fiscal year and then crank that up to 5,000 next year. The first cars are going to corporate fleet customers but retail sales are expected to start later in the year.

The iMiEV has a range of about 100 miles from its lithium ion battery pack. The batteries are produced by a joint venture between Mitsubishi and GS Yuasa. With the government incentives available in Japan, the iMiEV will cost about $31,300 at current exchange rates which is a bit higher than the $27,000 price previously rumored. No decision has been made yet on when the car will be offered in the U.S. market, but we do know it will make its way here sometime. First, Mitsubishi needs to develop a production left-hand drive version.

June 5, 2009

A study done by the Environmental Science & Technology magazine has found that the water use of corn biofuels mean that you consume 50 gallons of water per mile traveled. What a crock. This underscores my view that biofuels are nothing more than agribusiness and farm welfare. Other sources: ES&T.
For example, evapotranspiration water requirements in the U.S. necessitate 500−4000 L of water to grow enough feedstock to produce 1 L of ethanol (Lw/Le) (Figure 1); processing water requirements for a typical sugar cane or corn ethanol refinery are only 2−10 Lw/Le (17). Nevertheless, the water used in biofuel processing and other stages in biofuel production is often withdrawn from local point sources and can have localized impacts on water quality and quantity.

A new study done by the University of Twente in the Netherlands has found that sugar beets take 1,400 liters of water to make 1 liter of biofuel and it is the most efficient. Next generation biofuels made from algae or other processes were not included and make be efficient in terms of water usage. Other sources: Alpha Galileo.

An example is biodiesel, which is made from rapeseed, soya or jatropha. On average, it takes 14,000 litres of water to produce one litre of biodiesel from rapeseed or soya. However, the water footprint for rapeseed in Western Europe is significantly smaller than in Asia. For soya, India has a large water footprint, while the figures for countries such as Italy and Paraguay are more favourable. Jatropha, which is increasingly used for biomass production, has an even less favourable water footprint of 20,000 litres of water on average for one litre of biodiesel.

June 4, 2009

Here's a really cool improv group in New York that have done some cool events. This one was a surprise wedding reception where they got this couple coming out of city hall who just got married and gave them a reception. Excellent!
For our latest mission, we picked a random couple getting married at the City Clerk’s Office in Manhattan and threw them a surprise wedding reception. The couple was treated to dancing, toasts, cake, and gifts, all with complete strangers. Enjoy the video first and then check out the mission report and photos below.

June 3, 2009

Here's a cool Wikipedia page about Hash Trees. I've been wanting for some time to use this technology to build a digital time stamping site on top of my Dstamp.com domain name. Sigh.
In the top of a hash tree there is a top hash (or root hash or master hash). Before downloading a file on a p2p network, in most cases the top hash is acquired from a trusted source, for instance a friend or a web site that is known to have good recommendations of files to download. When the top hash is available, the hash tree can be received from any non-trusted source, like any peer in the p2p network. Then, the received hash tree is checked against the trusted top hash, and if the hash tree is damaged or fake, another hash tree from another source will be tried until the program finds one that matches the top hash.

The main difference from a hash list is that one branch of the hash tree can be downloaded at a time and the integrity of each branch can be checked immediately, even though the whole tree is not available yet. This can be an advantage since it is efficient to split files up in very small data blocks so that only small blocks have to be redownloaded if they get damaged. If the hashed file is very big, such a hash tree or hash list becomes fairly big. But if it is a tree, one small branch can be downloaded quickly, the integrity of the branch can be checked, and then the downloading of data blocks can start.
¡¡ǝɹns ǝq oʇ sʇsod ƃolq ǝƃuɐɹʇs ǝɯos ɹoɟ sǝʞɐɯ ʇı ˙uʍop ǝpısdn sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ǝɥʇ ɹoɟ sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ǝpoɔıun ǝɥʇ sʇndʇno ʇɐɥʇ (ssǝnƃ ı) dɐ ʇdıɹɔsɐʌɐɾ looɔ ʎʇʇǝɹd ɐ sı sıɥʇ
Although the title of the article is unfortunate, the store that Lake Mead has lost 50% of its volume since 2000 must be scary for the cities out there. Other sources: Boing Boing.
Lake Mead stores water from the Colorado River. When full, it holds 9.3 trillion gallons, an amount equal to the water that flows through the Colorado River in two years. The water from Lake Mead is used for many things. It irrigates a million acres of crops in the United States and Mexico, and supplies water to tens of millions of people. Its mighty Hoover Dam generates enough electricity to power a half-million homes. Additionally, the power from Hoover Dam is used to carry water up and across the Sierra Nevada Mountains on its way to Southern California.

In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high. It’s been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was enjoying one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years. Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the last 75 years, we’ve been partying like it’s 1929. Farmers grow rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead; residents of desert communities maintain front lawns of green grass; golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.
I'm waiting for these cool cable clips by Blue Lounge to become available for purchase -- they are due out in a week or 3. They look like handy ways to stop that network or power cable from sneaking down the back of the dusty desk.
FIxed behind or on the desktop, even onto a facing wall. Anywhere in fact where you wish to have cables temporarily held yet easily removeable or extended. CableDrop gently grasps your power and peripheral cords so they do not fall off your desk every time you unplug your laptop.

Cabledrop’s unique design makes cable management fun and can also be used as a general purpose clip in a multitude of creative ways.
Cool article about the ARM's low-power CPU chips. Given my interest in power savings as well as my love for running 24/365 servers in my basement, this story is obviously very interesting.
While not impressive on processing power, such modest chips also draw less than quarter of a watt of electricity -- a huge benefit for companies looking to design ever smaller devices with long battery lives. Before green computing was hip, ARM was walking the walk out of necessity to meet the requirements of its device-building customers.

ARM may have some chips today that eclipse the 1-GHz mark, but "it's not just about raw megahertz; it's about how effectively you use them," Drew said, adding that's why "we prefer to use different metrics, like megahertz per milliwatt of electricity."
Fascinating look into the economics and statistics behind Google's ad auction systems. They revolutionized the industry an continue to be the ground breakers.
Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company's seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google.

The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn't generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online.

When the American Economics Association meets next year, the financial crisis may still be topic A. But one of the keynote speakers has already been chosen: Googlenomist Hal Varian.

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