Slightly Off Kilter

Volume Control #2

My sweetie is not only an all-around great guy :-), he's also smart and electrically talented.

Grey squirrel - up close and purrsonal!

Even more fun than Bebop's obvious fascination with the whateverthatis on the windowsill was the fact that the squirrel was obviously just as fascinated with Bebop!

50 years of the Double Helix

In April 2003 , NHGRI and the Department of Energy will celebrate three historic events: the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the DNA double helix, the essential completion of the human genome sequence and publication of NHGRI's new vision for genomics research.      --  National Human Genome Research Institute

ETech Con - Day Three

ETech Con - Day Two

The second keynote, Personal Interfaces, was presented by Kevin Lynch of Macromedia and focused in large part on what Macromedia is doing to turn Flash (an animation engine) into a much more functional development system for creating desktop Internet applications that will still work after being disconnected from the Internet.

The third keynote was an energetic and very interesting discussion of social structure and social software, with the intriguing title, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. This talk was presented by Clay Shirky (without any visual aids; I took 5 pages of notes!). Clay has achieved a place on my short list of "must hear" speakers - no matter what the topic, if he's speaking, attend the talk!

With lots of things going on at home too, we could only attend the morning sessions. I'm sure the ones we didn't attend were just as informative and interesting. So far, this conference has been an all-around winner.

Emerging Technologies

We also attended a talk on semantic search engines, given by a speaker from NITLE - they appear to have some very interesting projects going on.

We stopped by to chat with the folks at the Internet Archive Bookmobile. The Internet Archive is collaborating with numerous libraries to digitize as many texts and books as possible, The Bookmobile is making "out of print" (and/or out of copyright) books available to people one book at a time from the back of a well-equipped minivan.containing an HP duplexing color printer, a couple of laptops, a desktop binding machine, and a paper cutter.

The Bookmobile is a demo of a public domain application. It addresses the basic question: What good is the public domain?
Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile

It was an interesting day. I look forward to tomorrow.

We saw a squirrel!!!

The boys were entranced (they saw it first). I don't know how long they had been watching before I woke up.

This porch is a small deck just off the end of our upstairs screenporch. The porch rail has our sunflower seed feeder on it. The cats love the screenporch - fresh air, a great view of the back yard (and the birds). And today, a treat! ...
       Continue reading "We saw a squirrel!!!"

Space Station Science

Here's an excerpt from the entry for April 21, 2003:

The Physics of Space Gardens

Credit: ISS Expedition 6 Flight Engineer Nikolai Budarin

It could only happen in space: A tiny bubble of air hangs suspended inside a droplet of water. The droplet rests in the cup of a delicate green leaf, yet the stalk doesn't bend at all. Cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin photographed this scene on April 9, 2003. He was peering into the Russian Rasteniya greenhouse onboard the International Space Station (ISS), and his snapshot illustrates some of the strange physics of gardening in space .

First, consider what would happen on Earth: The air bubble, lighter than water, would race upward to burst through the surface of the droplet. Meanwhile, the leaf would be busy tipping the heavy water onto the floor below. Everything would be in motion, the picture a blur.

In Earth-orbit, though, the scene is truly motionless. The air bubble doesn't rise because it is no lighter than the water around it--there's no buoyancy. The droplet doesn't fall from the leaf because there's no force to pull it off. It's stuck there by molecular adhesion.

Be sure to read the rest of the story, with links and explore the archives. I recommend Blowing Bubbles too!

I've been dreaming

Recently, however, my dreams have been a bit more interesting. ...
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Easter Sunday

Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (the paschal moon) — unless that full moon falls on the equinox, in which case it's the next full moon — unless the full moon falls on a Sunday, in which case it's the following Sunday. The reason for the changing date has to do with the relationship of Easter to the Jewish feast of Passover. ...
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Purrrrrrr

Last weekend at Wild Cat Adventure, you may recall we met a cheetah. We were told that scientists were at first unsure whether to classify the cheetah as a cat or a dog. Unlike most cats, cheetahs do not have retractable front claws (it's easier to run in cleats). They don't have glow-in-the-dark eyes and great night vision either (cheetahs hunt in the daytime when the lions are sleeping; lions prey on cheetahs). They don't climb trees.

Well, after spending time in a room with a contented cheetah (he was in charge; he was content) I could tell the scientists that the cheetah is unequivocally a cat. Cheetahs purr!

Private manned spaceflight

A private manned spaceflight program was unveiled Friday at a desert airport where it has been in secret development for two years.

A rocket plane, dubbed SpaceShipOne, and the White Knight, an exotic jet designed to carry it aloft for a high-altitude air launch, were shown off in a hangar at Mojave Airport by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan, who developed the program.

Rutan is best known for creating Voyager, the airplane that made the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world in 1986.

Crunchy Mornings

We all troop downstairs after everyone has finished breakfast.

Mezzaluna, who usually finishes early, is sitting tucked into the corner by the bookcase, waiting.

Squirrel keeps a close eye on Vickimom (many backward glances and mews of encouragement) to ensure I don't get lost on the way. I have been known to get distracted.

We arrive at the place where the crunchy treats are distributed; Everyone gathers round.

I get the bag off the shelf. If Squirrel is feeling really cute, he sits up and paws at the air. Unfortunately, I can't get him to do this more often, though I try. It's adorable.

I pour out a handful of treats. These go on the only bit of linoleum at the far end of the downstairs room. Everyone starts to eat. Positions are constant - Mezzaluna in the corner, Bebop in front and facing the wall, Squirrel at the opposite end from Mezzaluna.

I go clean the litter box which is in the bathroom at the far end of the room where the cats are crunching. I can look up and see them. I can see Squirrel leean out, reach a long paw towards Mezzaluna, and snaffle a crunchy treat from her area. I can see Mezzaluna try to extract crunchies from under her tail feathers.

As I finish up with the cat box, Squirrel saunters towards me. This is always a slow and deliberate, apparently "random" stroll, occasionally stopping for a wash. Still, he's always immediately outside the door of the bathroom before I leave.

More?

I follow him back and put down a second small handful (the other half). The cats commence to crunching.

Garbage In, Oil Out

"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, ... "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."

A new process, soon to be in commercial production, uses heat and pressure and water to convert any form of organic waste into oil, natural gas, powdered carbon, and re-usable minerals. The oil can be further refined and distilled into gasoline, kerosene, and naphtha. The process, thermal depolymerization, can convert a wide variety of waste products, from plastic bottles to municipal sewage to food wastes to those heaps of tires that traditionally dot the landscape.

Thermal depolymerization has proven to be at least 85 percent energy efficient (that remaining 15% is used to run the process as the gases are burned on-site to make heat for power). Even the Oil companies seem to be taking a favorable stance; thermal depolymerization can make the current petroleum industry itself cleaner and more profitable.

Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the process can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even more profitable than oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to produce fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC—the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic pipes—yields hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially valuable chemical used to make cleaners and solvents.

Read the complete article in the May issue of Discover magazine.

Tax Day Humor

A woman came in who said she'd been in the Millbrae PO earlier (Millbrae is the next town south of ours) and they were serving orange juice and apple juice and cookies and candy this morning.

I said "Well, that's what they usually do when you give blood". The PO lady and another patron laughed (the woman who'd been at Millbrae didn't get it; the other patron was explaining it to her as I left :-)

Safari has Tabs!

Tabs have been a big deal since Safari shipped the first Beta. There are Tabs in Mozilla and (most) users like tabs (count me among them). Giles Turnbull wrote an article comparing Safari to Camino (formerly Chimera), the Mac OS X Aquatized Mozilla project. He wrote:

No sooner had Safari made it out into the wild, than many users were clamoring for tabbed browsing. Long available in Mozilla, Opera, and other browsers, the use of tabs to bring together a screenload of web browser windows into a smaller, single-window package has become a very popular feature (although there are some who consider tabs alien to the Mac way of doing things).

Wild Cat Adventure

Several times a year they do a public outreach program called "Wild Cat Adventure". This is a one-hour program to which they bring 5 or 6 cats and give a talk, with demonstrations. I was looking forward to attending as soon as I heard about it (only a few weeks ago) and today we attended the Wild Cat Adventure at Foothill College (just north of San Jose). ...
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It's raining, it's pouring

It's a good day to stay indoors, read a book, snuggle kitties, take a nap...

Jury Duty - Not!

It's good he didn't have to go; otherwise he would have spent today sitting in a room full of bored people, waiting to have his name called, waiting (hopefully) to be excused. We can't afford to have Rich on Jury Duty right now; he's the only one with work :-(

One thing we noticed that was new on this summons note was that it specified a dress code - no T-shirts! And this for the first day (on which I wouldn't have guessed even "selected" people would actually sit on a case). Weird. But, in any case, not an issue because his presence wasn't required.

All clear for another year.

Booklovers' Mysteries

I don't envy Alex his life, however; it contains far too much danger and intrigue! As is so often the case in stories like this, the protagonist keeps getting into trouble with politics, enemies, danger, and dead bodies all around :) A bit unusual, however, for this style of "cozy" mystery series, is that Alex is frequently the initial target of the trouble (usually the "detective" trips over a mystery or a body and is gradually snared).

The books are interesting as well as informative; the characters are real and likable. The series so far, in order: Unsolicited, followed by Unbound, Unprintable, Untitled, Unsigned, and Uncatalogued.

Footnote:
A small chuckle of interest especially to computer people: I looked up the series on Barnes&Noble online (to recommend to a friend) and was interested, then amused, to discover that the 4th book was mis-"shelved" in their online data base, under the "title" A Booklover's Mystery. Given that actual title is, erm, Untitled, I think B&N has a small bug in their database design :-)

Spring Ahead

I hate winter. I hate short days and sundown before 5pm. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is real, as is its milder cousin, the "Winter Blues". But in February the days start getting noticeably longer again. The sun isn't down at 5... there's more light. And then, on the first Sunday of April, we shift an hour of that lovely daylight to the evening. Huzzah!

California actually petitioned Congress for year-round DST! Unfortunately, the request was made in May 2001; that was before 9/11 and Iraq so Congress probably has other things on their minds these days :-(

DST saves energy. Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent each day with Daylight Saving Time. California has a report (PDF format) called Effects of Daylight Saving Time on California Electricity Use. I'm a fan of saving energy... but mostly, I just love the fact that the sun sets an apparent hour later today.

More light. More day! Winter is over for another year.

Not quite a Kraken....

Then again, half a millennium or more ago, ships were much smaller. Columbus's ships averaged less than 3 times the length of the modern London bus. And this was considered to be an "immature" specimen of colossal squid. So... perhaps this is a descendant of the famed kraken after all!

Volume Control

We recently purchased a pair of small radio tuner / CD player units; one for Rich's office, one for the bedroom. These are very nice and have an easy to use (especially in the dark) remote control, but the volume control adjustment was pretty coarse at the low end. And when you're listening before falling asleep (or sitting 2-feet from the speakers in your office), you want a finer volume control at the low end! Worse, we listen to the classical station a lot. Because classical music has a large dynamic range, it was often a case of "I can't hear it" vs "that's a bit loud".

But as I said, Rich is not electronically challenged! He simply stuck a pair of (50 ohm) resistors between the player and the speakers, and lowered the volume across the dial. He says an "L-pad" would be the right answer, really, but this is just fine as a hack. In any case, we're now up in the "mid-range" adjustments, and the adjustment capability is finer and smoother. Delightful!