Gray Watson's Blog -- August 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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August 21, 2009

Amazing movie with Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan talking about how Helen learned to communicate. Helen is blind and deaf and when Anne met her, she also could not talk. To listen, Helen basically puts her hand on Anne's face with some of her fingers touching the neck, some the mouth, and some the nose. This allows her to "feel" the sounds that Anne makes to understand. Other: boing-boing.
It’s a fascinating little clip which pays homage to a woman who, even beyond her amazing circumstances, was a radical socialist, suffragist, and supporter of birth control, who was friends with the likes of Mark Twain and who worked tirelessly to champion the rights of both the downtrodden and the physically disabled.
In another example of technologies that are guaranteed to improve the battery systems of electric vehicles, here's a good article about ultracapacitors and how they can help battery systems in both hybrids and EVs (electric vehicles).
Ultracapacitors offer a way to extend the life of a hybrid vehicle's power source, reducing the need to oversize its battery packs. Unlike batteries, ultracapacitors don't rely on chemical reactions to store energy, and they don't degrade significantly over the life of a car, even when they are charged and discharged in very intense bursts that can damage batteries. The drawback is that they store much less energy than batteries--typically, an order of magnitude less. If, however, ultracapacitors were paired with batteries, they could protect batteries from intense bursts of power, Bohn says, such as those needed for acceleration, thereby extending the life of the batteries. Ultracapacitors could also ensure that the car can accelerate just as well at the end of its life as at the beginning.

August 20, 2009

I've been looking at various mosquito eradication methods and thought I'd persist the various links I've found helpful.
- Good comparison of available traps with reviews
- Good species of fish which can be used to seed ponds to eat mosquito larva
- Bat houses for sale and plans
- Good bat management site with houses for sale, etc.

August 18, 2009

Amazing video of a bunch of shepherds from Wales who use their sheep (and dogs) as pixels and do some amazing graphics with them. Other copy.
We took to the hills of Wales armed to the teeth with sheep, LEDs and a camera, to create a huge amazing LED display. Of sorts. For more info search for Samsung LED TV.
Pretty amazingly powerful piece by the New York Times about women in combat in their own words. They have audio and pictures. There's something about this type of reporting that is immensely powerful. Here's the associated article with other video and images.
"Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds," said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus while he was the top American commander in Iraq. "They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues."
I was talking about great kids books with a co-worker and thought I'd blog about my favorite kids book author, Bill Pete. I really dislike the "Mother Goose" stories with their inappropriate language, pacing, and generally boring stories. I know that everyone remembers them from their child-hood but get over it and buy good books for your kids and your friends' kids. Bill Pete's books are colorful, perfectly drawn, and with beautiful stories -- some rhymed, some not. My favorites are "Kermit the Hermit" and the "Wump World". My son and I also really liked the Richard Scary paperbacks and D&K board books.
In Monterey Bay there's a jumble of rock
Stacked up like a castle across from the dock.
The king of this castle, on old crab called Kermit,
Lived all by himself in a cave like a hermit.
There was never a crab who was one half as selfish
Or one tenth as mean as this crusty old shellfish.

August 12, 2009

Here's an interesting piece of work by scientists working at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They are trying to model climate change over time to understand the changes that happen with the planet when it is subjected to abrupt temperature changes like are going on now.
Most natural climate change has taken place over thousands or even millions of years. But an episode of abrupt climate change occurred over centuries—possibly decades—during Earth’s most recent period of natural global warming, called the Bolling-Allerod warming. Approximately 19,000 years ago, ice sheets started melting in North America and Eurasia. By 17,000 years ago, the melting glaciers had dumped so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that it stopped the overturning ocean circulation, which is driven by density gradients caused by influxes of freshwater and surface heat. This occurrence led to a cooling in Greenland called the Heinrich event 1. The freshwater flux continued on and off until about 14,500 years ago, when it virtually stopped. Greenland’s temperature then rose by 27 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) in several centuries, and the sea level rose about 16 feet (5 meters). The cause of this dramatic Bolling-Allerod warming has remained a mystery and source of intense debate.

August 11, 2009

Here's another great piece by the the Onion news organization about Google's new opt-out service which let's folks opt-out of Google products and protect their privacy by moving to a remote mountain village.

August 10, 2009

Here's a bunch of information with images and video of the Nissan Leaf which will [supposedly] be available in the US in ~2012. This plus the iMiev and the Chevy Volt (a short-range EV with extended range gas engine) means that we may actually have competition and choices of EVs within a couple of years.
That car, the Nissan Leaf shown here, is the reason we find ourselves in the company's brand-new Yokohama headquarters today. Designed as a four-to-five seat, front-drive C-segment hatchback, Nissan says the Leaf is not just for use as a specialty urban runabout, but rather, it was designed as an everyday vehicle – a "real car" whose 160-kilometer+ (100 mile) range meets the needs of 70% of the world's motorists. In the case of U.S. consumers, Nissan says that fully 80% of drivers travel less than 100km per day (62 miles), making the Leaf a solid fit for America's motoring majority, even taking into account power-sapping external factors like hilly terrain, accessory draw, and extreme temperatures.

August 5, 2009

Here's a couple of cool links from the Liberal hippies over at TreeHugger.com.
Friedman tries to put a good spin on a terrible report on the conditions in most of the Arab world. Human security, illiteracy, unemployment, corruption. Terrible.
Another persistent source of Arab human insecurity is high unemployment. “For nearly two and half decades after 1980, the region witnessed hardly any economic growth,” the report found. Despite the presence of oil money (or maybe because of it), there is a distinct lack of investment in scientific research, development, knowledge industries and innovation. Instead, government jobs and contracts dominate. Average unemployment in the Arab region in 2005 was 14.4 percent, compared with 6.3 percent for the rest of the world. A lot of this is because of a third source of human insecurity: autocratic and unrepresentative Arab governments, whose weaknesses “often combine to turn the state into a threat to human security, instead of its chief support.”

However...

Fayyad, a former finance minister who became prime minister after Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007, is unlike any Arab leader today. He is an ardent Palestinian nationalist, but his whole strategy is to say: the more we build our state with quality institutions — finance, police, social services — the sooner we will secure our right to independence. I see this as a challenge to “Arafatism,” which focused on Palestinian rights first, state institutions later, if ever, and produced neither.
Nissan is now the 2nd major car company in recent weeks to roll out an electric vehicle. The Leaf was revealed to reporters on the 2nd. Nissan will begin mass producing the vehicle for Japan, US, and European markets next year. How exciting!
Nissan, Japan's third largest carmaker, has been slower than rivals Toyota and Honda to embrace hybrids, which run on petrol and electric engines, and is instead pinning its hopes on solely battery-powered cars.

Electric cars have struggled to become mainstream because of limited battery life and high costs. But Mr Ghosn insisted that the Leaf would not be a niche-market vehicle. "We need to invest a lot of money to build the car plants and the battery plants at a moment where all the auto companies are saving investments," he said.
Hilarious piece about the obvious birth certificate forgery that caught the birthers with their pants down. It is obvious that someone hacked up the document which looked pretty good so it caught up the anti-Obama movement but was easy to debunk. Kudos to the hackers who accomplished the feat.
First, the hospital is Coast Provincial General Hospital (sometimes said to be Coast Province General Hospital), not Coast General Hospital. Second, Kenya was a Dominion the date this certificate was allegedly issued and would not become a republic for 8 months. Third, Mombasa belonged to Zanzibar when Obama was born, not Kenya. Fourth, Obama's father's village would be nearer to Nairobi, not Mombasa.

Fifth, the number 47O44-- 47 is Obama's age when he became president, followed by the letter O (not a zero) followed by 44--he is the 44th president. Sixth, EF Lavender is a laundry detergent. Seventh, would a nation with a large number of Muslims actually say "Christian name" (as opposed to name) on the birth certificate?

August 4, 2009

Here's a very good web-page performance document for those of us who build web sites. There are a number of common sense rules for limiting images, inloading CSS or JS, and other tips. The trick is balancing these guidelines with Design department constructs and partner integration pressure. Back at Lycos we went through at these 3 company-wide initiatives to tighten up the pages and then as soon as the initiative had finished we'd watch the pages get fatter and fatter over the next months. Frustrating.
80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. But is there a way to build pages with richer content while also achieving fast response times? Here are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests, while still supporting rich page designs.

August 3, 2009

Dr. Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), has said that a survey of 800 of the world's top oil fields shows that they are decreasing in production 6.7% a year -- double what was estimated in 2007. His agency is now forecasting peak oil for the planet in 10 years -- a decade earlier than previously expected.
In its first-ever assessment of the world's major oil fields, the IEA concluded that the global energy system was at a crossroads and that consumption of oil was "patently unsustainable", with expected demand far outstripping supply. Oil production has already peaked in non-Opec countries and the era of cheap oil has come to an end, it warned.

In most fields, oil production has now peaked, which means that other sources of supply have to be found to meet existing demand. Even if demand remained steady, the world would have to find the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias to maintain production, and six Saudi Arabias if it is to keep up with the expected increase in demand between now and 2030, Dr Birol said.

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