Slightly Off Kilter

Wasting Time in Twitter?

“Twitter is a Waste of Time” - it is a criticism that has been leveled at Twitter many times over and while I’m one of Twitters biggest fans I’m also in agreement that Twitter can be a compete waste of time. I’ve wasted time on Twitter and I’ve seen many others do it. In fact recently when I asked my followers about the topic I found that most people could relate to the idea of wasting time on Twitter.

So how do you stop yourself from letting Twitter become a waste of time?

The article is a good one and most of the comments are reasonable. I recommend reading it. Here's my comment, for the record: ...
       Continue reading "Wasting Time in Twitter?"

Gmail Custom Time

Introducing Gmail Custom Time™
Be on time. Every time.*

Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
....
Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).

---

*The term "Every time" is used loosely here to represent the number 10.

Upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard

Since December 2006, we have been running our home server system on a Mac mini, running MacOS X (Tiger). Specifically, this is the "consumer client" version of Mac OS X, not the specially labeled (and vastly different) "Mac OS X Server" product.

Recently, said system become unacceptably slow and Rich's investigations with top(1) revealed Very Large Numbers of pageouts. This told us that we needed more RAM and (perhaps) a faster hard disk. Because the mini is not designed for this sort of expansion, we purchased a gently-used Power Mac G5 (2.0 GHz, dual processor, 4 GB RAM).

Then, because it seemed like "The Right Thing To Do At The Time", we installed Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and prepared to migrate our back-end tools and web applications. After all, we've each been running Leopard from a "user perspective" for a few months. It's stable. How bad could the upgrade be?

Whenever you find yourself asking that question, slow down and reconsider. The upgrade worked, eventually, and it was the right thing to do. However, it was not accomplished without considerable frustration. ...
       Continue reading "Upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard"

Macbook Air

This week, Apple introduced the Macbook Air. I've been reading some of the articles, as well as the whining comments. ...
       Continue reading "Macbook Air"

XO Connected

Rich and I had our monthly "Beer and Scripting" dinner last night - our monthly occasion to get out of the house, eat good food, and chat with fellow Bay Area techies. Last night, we took our new XO laptop along.

One of the other attendees had just picked his XO up at the Post Office that very day, so there were two at the table. ...
       Continue reading "XO Connected"

XO Laptop - First Impressions

Educational. Fun. Technically Cool. Charitable. Deductible. What's not to like?

My XO Laptop arrived on Thursday. I ordered through the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) "Give One, Get One" program. (Hurry! Current program ends Dec 31).

We opened the box when we got home on Thursday evening, popped in the battery, and fired it up. Here are my early impressions. ...
       Continue reading "XO Laptop - First Impressions"

Pleo: Out of the Box

I am now the proud owner of one of the first Pleos - the little robotic dinosaur from Ugobe. I first learned of Pleo nearly a year ago when I read an article by Clive Thompson in Wired magazine.

Say hello to Pleo. From the guy who brought you Furby, it's a snuffling, stretching, oddly convincing robotic dinosaur. You are so going to want one.

Clive was right; I wanted one. As soon as it was possible, I pre-ordered my Pleo. Then I waited while Ugobe changed the schedule, each time making improvements and adjustments. More sensors. An externally rechargeable (and replaceable) battery. And finally, in mid-November. the announcement I had been waiting for.

Study Illuminates How Babies Learn to Speak

A high-tech machine that monitors infants' brain cells as they listen to speech reveals a key element in how babies go from hearing sounds to speaking them.

Lighting Up The Future

A research team from Kennedy & Violich Architecture in Boston has designed solar-powered lamps composed of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) woven into colorful swaths of fabric. The lights are undergoing field testing in a remote mountain community of Mexico's Sierra Madre, ...
       Continue reading "Lighting Up The Future"

Smart Glasses

I've been nearsighted since I was 4 or 5. I've worn glasses since the third grade. When I hit 40, my accommodation went to Presbyopia in a handbasket.

I wear progressive bifocals. Rich has four different pairs of glasses — intermediate, distance, reading, and computer. I sit a little bit farther away from the computer screen than I used to. Our optometrist keeps suggesting LASIK (no thanks). But now, there's something new on the horizon... ...
       Continue reading "Smart Glasses"

Lost and Found

The Journal of Robert Hooke

A manuscript "charting the birth of modern science" and misplaced for more than 200 years, has been found, sold to a private party, and will be housed at Britain’s Royal Society. ...
       Continue reading "Lost and Found"

Science Snack

NewScientist.com Blogs have arrived!

In a new addition to our top quality daily news coverage, we have launched two exciting blogs. We search out the world's most weird and wonderful science and technology news links - so you don't have to.

• Short Sharp Science Blog — A daily round-up of snappy science news

• Technology Blog — All the latest innovations, including videos of next-generation technology in action

Happy Anniversary, ENIAC

February 2006, marks the 60th anniversary of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) a 28 ton behemoth able to handle 5000 additions per second — far faster than any device previously invented. ...
       Continue reading "Happy Anniversary, ENIAC"

SuitSat

One of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age is about to go into orbit. Launch date: Feb. 3rd. That's when astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will hurl an empty spacesuit overboard.
...
"We've equipped a Russian Orlon spacesuit with three batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power," says [Frank Bauer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center]. "As SuitSat circles Earth, it will transmit its condition to the ground."

NASA Science News for January 26, 2006

Weird.

Serendipity in Numbers

In truly random data, data which could just as easily have been labeled with letters or colors as numbers, you'd be right. But in truly numeric data, data that increases or decreases additively (or subtractively), you'd be surprised. In actual fact, values that begin with the digit '1' are much more likely to occur (especially if the numbers have at least 4 digits, e,g, from 1000 on up).

The mathematical rule that describes this phenomenon is referred to as Benford's Law, after the physicist who discovered it. ...
       Continue reading "Serendipity in Numbers"

Night Writing

I keep a pad of paper and a pen by the bed. At night, when I can't sleep because my thoughts are tumbling round and round, I can reach for the pad and make a note. Then, if I'm lucky, my brain agrees that the thought has been captured and allows me to sleep.

There's one problem with this method. It's dark in the middle of the night! ...
       Continue reading "Night Writing"

Model-based Documentation

Rich gave a short talk tonight on Model-based Documentation for the SF Ruby Meetup group. He's been thinking about this area for some time. If you're interested, take a look at what he's got and send him a note...

These pages present an integrated approach to semi-automated documentation of large systems. I have coined the term "Model-based Documentation" for this approach, because a model of the system under study guides the process and unifies the results.

Note: These pages are very much a Work In Progress: feel free to contact me if you have questions, comments, etc.

A Giant Step

[An] all-important discovery made in 1985 showed that in one section of the nervous system, a part of the nasal cavity concerned with smell, nerve fibres are in constant growth - even in adulthood. Though people with a bad cold may lose their sense of smell, it does come back.

The nasal cells have the added advantage of belonging to the patient, so there is no risk of their being rejected.

[ The nose cells that may help the paralysed walk again, The Gaurdian Unlimited, 11/30/2005 ]

Colored Bubbles

... it's not easy to improve the world's most popular toy. Yet the success of one inventor's quest to dye a simple soap bubble may change the way the world uses color

[ The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles, Popular Science, Dec. 2005 issue ]

Eleven years, half a million dollars, innumerable dye-stains, chemical burns, ruined clothes, and noxious fumes later... one of the toy industry's long-sought technical breakthroughs has become a reality — nonstaining colored bubble solution.

Colored soap bubbles! Of course! Everyone loves blowing bubbles. It seemed such a simple and perfect idea, the kind that would leave other inventors slapping their foreheads and saying Why didn't I think of that? [Tim] Kehoe says, "I remember walking down to the store thinking, ‘This is so easy. I'm going to be rich!' "

Up and Running with Tiger

My new PowerMac G5 arrived yesterday afternoon. Hoorah! And yes, I managed to wait until I was done with my work day to start on the Grand Migration (although Rich opened the box and unpack the G5 onto a convenient table.)

First, I had to back up all of the files on my G3 for copying to the G5. The new hardware includes a different I/O interface; I can't just plug in the old disk drives. The good news is I get a nice new 400 GB drive. The bad news is that the backup and restore literally took hours.

Then Rich helped me swap hardware, putting the G5 on my desk (where it fits with a little room to spare and opens on the right side, thank goodness!). We dealt with cabling (power, displays, USB, Firewire, and network). We dealt with troubleshooting and ultimately replacing the one screen that didn't light up. Then I booted 'er up, started copying in all of my files, and headed off to bed. ...
       Continue reading "Up and Running with Tiger"

Tiger Yes, G3 No

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) last week. That was the easy part. Then the problems started.

My cursor was freezing several times a day. Unplugging and replugging the USB cable would get it moving again but... that's just not right. Once, my keyboard stopped sending signals (although the mouse was working that time).

Then there were the crashes. Oy!

I think the crashes may have been brought on by the too-frequent resetting of the USB and mouse but... at least twice a day, sometimes three or four times, always at the worst possible time. Crash. (Actually, Mac OS X is usually very polite. "We're sorry. You need to restart your computer.")

System 6 wasn't this bad. Even Windows isn't this bad!

What could have gone wrong? ...
       Continue reading "Tiger Yes, G3 No"

Scientific American Mind

We have begun a subscription to a new quarterly magazine, Scientific American Mind. The first issue arrived last week and I read it cover to cover. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in how the mind works.

Some of the feature articles in the first issue include:

• Natural-Born Liars — Why do we lie, and why are we so good at it? Because it works

• Sweet Dreams Are Made of This — What are dreams? Why do we have them? The answers are as intriguing as dreams themselves

• True Crimes, False Confessions — How innocent people end up confessing to crimes they did not commit

• The Truth and the Hype of Hypnosis — Though often denigrated as fakery, hypnosis is a real phenomenon with therapeutic uses

• Signing Gets a Scientific Voice — Sign language is as rich and complex as spoken communication, probably because the brain creates and deciphers it in the same way

• Buy This — Companies spend billions on marketing campaigns, but neuroscientists could someday determine which ads best capture consumers' attention

Interesting reading.

License to Shoot

Photos, that is...

I have a new camera. It's about the size of a Zippo lighter (in fact, the case resembles said lighter). James Bond would love it (or so claims the description :-)

I had been looking for an SD-card camera that would work with my Kyocera "smartphone" PDA. I think this is better, however. For one thing, I don't have to pop my memory card out of the Kyocera to use the camera! Also, this is a solid little beastie (at least in its metal case); I'd be somewhat afraid of breaking an SD camera attachment for the Kyo.

The camera uses one AAA battery, can take up to 150 640x480 "hi res" JPEG images, and connects to my Mac via USB. It also has 8 MB of internal storage, a voice record function (12 min max), 30 sec video clip capability, and timed recording mode. Not bad for such a little thing. ... and did I mention it works perfectly with Mac OS X? :-)

The results aren't half bad. I've attached the first image I shot, taken in relatively dim room light at night. It's a bit grainy at full size, much better at half size (as shown here), and really amazingly good for the conditions.

Does this make me a "Bond Girl"? ;-)

Deep Impact

I suppose by now you've heard about Deep Impact, NASA's successful mission to blast a hole in Comet Tempel 1. It's been in the newspapers; I read about it first in the NASA Science News email newsletter. Considering that this all happened 268,000 miles from home, I'm pretty impressed at the accuracy of the mission.

There was another "deep impact" that I never considered, although I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense. It appears that a Russian astrologer is suing NASA, seeking damages for moral suffering caused by the mission. The experiment "ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe" and has "deformed" her horoscope.

Scientists say the crash did not significantly alter the comet's orbit around the sun... NASA representatives could not be reached for comment on the suit.

Uphill or Down?

According to a study done by the Vorarlberg Institute for Vascular Investigation and Treatment (Austria), there's a difference in the effect of uphill vs downhill exercise.

Hiking on a mountainside gives the heart a health-promoting challenge, but the nature of the benefit depends on whether one is climbing or descending. A study conducted on an Alpine mountainside suggests that going up improves the body's processing certain fats, while going down enhances metabolism of a key sugar.
...
Both up and down hiking softened the spike of blood cholesterol that typically follows fat consumption, the team found. But only uphill exercise improved metabolism of fats called triglycerides, and only downhill exercise significantly increased glucose processing, Drexel says.

[ Up and down make different workouts", Science News (Week of Dec. 11, 2004; Vol. 166, No. 24) ]

Interesting...

Nuisance Suit

Good Grief! Has it come to this.

Apple Computer has been slapped with a lawsuit by Tiger Direct Inc. for allegedly infringing its trademark with the new Mac OS X "Tiger'' operating system scheduled for release on Friday.

  -- Apple sued over "Tiger," injunction sought, Thursday, April 28, AppleInsider

Give us a break here, people. Where, pray tell, was Tiger Direct a year ago when Apple first started talking about Mac OS X 10.3.4 (aka "Tiger")?

I truly doubt that Apple's use of the name "Tiger" is "causing confusion, mistake and deception among the general purchasing public." Might this just be a bid for notoriety?

At the root of the issue appears to internet search results. Tiger Direct contends that Apple's use of the name has adversely affected its ranking amongst the Internet's largest search engines, Google and Yahoo, bumping the company from its usual spot in the first three results.

Booooo! Hiss!

I hope the judge slaps Tiger Direct... upside the corporate noggin. This sort of juvenile game playing is embarrassing to observe.

Skin Printer

Scientists at Manchester University's School of Materials (in the UK) have developed a printerthat prints... skin!

Using the same principle as an ink-jet printer, experts are able to take skin cells from a patient's body, multiply them, then print out a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to the body. The wound's dimensions are entered into the printer to ensure a perfect fit.
...
"It's not like printing a sheet of paper. We can print a few millimetres in depth and build it up layer-upon-layer until, in principle, we could produce bone fragments the size of a golf ball.

"It is difficult for a surgeon to reconstruct any complex disfiguring of the face using CT scans, but with this technology we are able to build a fragment which will fit exactly. We can place cells in any designed position to grow tissue or bone."

[ ref: Manchester News Online, article, Wednesday, 19th January 2005 ]

Fixed-width fonts

I love fonts. I collect fonts. I especially love "handwritten" fonts.

As a programmer, however, and constant email user, I need to use fixed-width fonts, preferably with easily distinguished characters. So how do I mix and match my love for handwritten fonts with fixed-width programmer's fonts? Take a look at some of the cool fixed-width fonts I've found!

Optomap

I had an eye appointment today. They have a "new" gadget called Optomap (they've had it for about a year now). The patient looks into a 4" diameter hole in the front of a big white box (face turned sideways, nose smooshed into place). A green light flashes and the machine takes a picture of the back of the eye. Repeat for the other eye and then, back to the exam room to look at the pictures. The images are then stored in the computer as a permanent record of the condition of the patient's retina at that exam.

Conventional Retinal Imaging Technology only captures a small area of the retina [about 30 degrees] at one time. ... In contrast to the simple illuminating effects of whitelight in a conventional examination, the Optimap allows review of a 200 degree internal scan which is viewed in separate wavelengths of light."

My optometrist pointed out the optic nerve, which shows as a bright yellow spot in the center of the frame, and the macula, a dark smudge. I could see a bunch of veins running to the optic nerve. I asked if the image showed that I was nearsighted and he said yes. Apparently nearsighted people have some "fraying" around the edge of the optic nerve (although I don't have much of that). ...
       Continue reading "Optomap"

On Intelligence

Are you interested in how the mind works? So is Jeff Hawkins (of Palm OS fame) and he's written a very interesting book about it. Read my review and followup essay.

Technology Moves Forward at the Grocery Store

Thirty years and more ago, your local grocery store used cash registers. Prices were marked on all items; the checker punched that price into the cash register and the total was calculated much like a desktop calculator with a paper tape.

Although the first patent for a bar code type product was issued in October, 1952, and the first bar code used commercially in 1966, it wasn't until 1970 that an industry standard was set. By 1970, the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC) was written; this evolved into the Universal Product Code (UPC) in 1973. In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. [ref: The History of Bar Code] ...
       Continue reading "Technology Moves Forward at the Grocery Store"

TV-B-Gone

Several of the restaurants we patronize regularly have televisions going - our favorite diner, the burrito place, one of the Chinese places, the Japanese restaurant (that one's at the far end of the sushi bar and more difficult to see). I often find myself watching (especially the one at the diner). I don't want to... not really. But I get sucked in by the colors and motion.

You're staring at a piece of furniture!

People on TV are not your friends. They're not in the room with you. You are alone in the dark, staring at a plastic box. Think about it. This is like a science fiction horror story; but it's really happening. People have stopped living as humans and connected themselves to machines instead.

Does this happen to you? Do you wish you could just turn it off?

Now you can :-) ...
       Continue reading "TV-B-Gone"

Pramoxine

Today I came up with a theory that fit the facts, then looked up some references that supported the theory. Cool!

At dinner today I noticed a red area on my arm around a small scratch I got a couple of nights ago. Neither the red area nor the scratch hurt particularly. It's not infected. It looked almost like a bit of light sunburn.

We were out in the sun today for about an hour and the red patch was... hmmm, about the size, shape, and diameter from the scratch of the or=inrmtnet I had applied that morning. I wondered...

So I did a web search for the antibiotic ointment - Neosporin, containing neomycin, bacitracin, and polymixin. I found a useful page that told me there were "no problems expected" from sun exposure. Hmmm. ...
       Continue reading "Pramoxine"

Inverse Femtobarns

Rich and I have learned a new unit of measurement - the inverse femtobarn.

What on earth is a "femtobarn," and what does it have to do with the amount of data an accelerator produces?

Rich picked up a copy of the Stanford Report, a daily Stanford newspaper. In the paper was an article entitled Understanding luminosity through 'barn', a unit that helps physicists count particle events.

A barn is the unit used by nuclear physicist for the size of an atomic nucleus of uranium.

The cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus is about 10 -24 square centimeters, small on the human scale, but large compared with other atomic nuclei. "Femto" means a factor of 10-15: a thousandth of a millionth of a millionth. A femtobarn, then, is 10-39 square centimeters ­ an incomprehensibly small unit of area.

The term "barn" was coined by two physicists, M. G. Holloway and C. P. Parker, at Purdue University in December, 1942. ...
       Continue reading "Inverse Femtobarns"

It's Physics

If it wiggles, it's Biology.
If it stinks, it's Chemistry.
If it doesn't work, it's Physics.

If you don't understand it, it's Quantum Physics.

Are Mac Users Smarter?

Well, yeah...Isn't it obvious? I mean, we use Macs!

Duh!

Paul Murphy decided to do a little "scientific research" into the subject for his recent article in MacNewsWorld.

I doubt it's possible to get a definitive answer, but as long as you don't take any of it too seriously you can have a lot of fun playing with proxies such as the average user's ability to read and write his or her native language. This isn't necessarily a reasonable measure of intelligence (mainly because intelligence has yet to be defined) but almost everyone agrees that a native English speaker's ability to write correct English correlates closely with that person's ability to think clearly.

In other words, if we knew that Mac users, as a group, were significantly better users of written English than PC users, then we'd have a presumptive basis for ranking the probable "smartness" of two people about whom we only know that one uses a Mac and the other a PC.

Fun With Meccano

When I was a kid, I wanted an Erector set very much. I think I must have asked for one for ChristmasOrMyBirthday several years in a row before I finally got one! But nothing I might ever have made from my Erector set could come close to the cool stuff that Tim Robinson has done with Mecanno.

Robinson says he's always been fascinated wwith Meccano, "almost exclusively with mechanism and models that 'do something real'." He recalls building "astronomical clocks, orreries, looms and other textile machinery, a gear cutting machine (which cut usable gears in brass), and perhaps most enduring, the differential analyzer (an analog computer)."

Wow. ...
       Continue reading "Fun With Meccano"

Make Your Motor Cortex Dance

"Brain areas that are used to perform an action are also needed to comprehend words related to that action," ... "Remarkably, just the reading of feet-related action words such as dance makes [the motor cortex] move its 'feet.'"

[cf "The Brain's Word Act: Reading verbs revs up motor cortex areas", by Bruce Bower, in Science News, week of Feb 7, 2004

"Roll 'em" gets a new meaning!

In a major step toward electronic paper that works like a computer monitor yet feels and behaves like a page of a book, researchers in the Netherlands have made electronic-ink displays on flexible plastic sheets.

Verse Meter Analyzer

In The Eyre Affair (a Thursday Next novel), author Jasper Fforde describes Thursday's introduction to the Verse Meter Analyzer: ...
       Continue reading "Verse Meter Analyzer"

Terra-cotta warriors show their true colors

The terra-cotta warriors buried near the tomb of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, present a fierce challenge—to modern-day chemists. Since the site's discovery near Xi'an, China, in 1974, archaeologists have unearthed more than 1,500 of the life-size figures. But once the warriors see the light of day after more than 2,200 years of burial, their paint disappears, sometimes within minutes of exposure.

With an estimated 8,000 more figures still buried, scientists have been looking for ways to lock the paint in place. Now, a group of chemists in Germany has a technique that just might work.

Although the terra-cotta warriors excavated so far have lost their original color coats, a novel restoration technique could preserve the paint layer on the thousands of warriors that remain in the ground.

[c.f. The March of History: Terra-cotta warriors show their true colors, Alexandra Goho, Science News Online, Week of Nov. 29, 2003

What's even more interesting (to me :-) is that this article's abstract arrived in my mailbox yesterday, the day after we watched the latest Lara Croft movie Tomb Raider II: The Cradle of Life. (Yes, I enjoyed the movie very much). The terra-cotta warriors are featured in a "bit part" in the movie. Synchronicity strikes again.

Powers of Ten

Back in 1968, designers Charles and Ray Eames made a 10-minute documentary film, titled Powers of Ten , showing what the universe looks like at different scales. Philip and Phylis Morrison were scientific advisors on the movie, which Philip narrated, and it was chosen in 1998 for preservation in the National Film Registry, which selects "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant motion pictures" for preservation. The Morrisons' book translates the film onto paper.

Starting with a view of a billion light-years, the book (like the film) moves inward, with each page being at one-tenth the scale of the previous one. In 25 steps, you're looking at a picnic by the shores of Lake Michigan, then plunging into a human hand, down through the cells inside it, the DNA inside the cells, the atoms inside the DNA, and the subatomic particles inside the atom. By the time you've gone a total of 40 steps, you're in a world of quantum uncertainty.

There is no better guide to the relative sizes of things in the universe, and no better teacher about what exponential, scientific notation really means. --Mary Ellen Curtin

[c.f. Amazon.com editorial review for the book version of Powers of Ten by Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison, Office of Charles & Ray Eames ]. Also available on DVD.

Now, the Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida has recapitulated Powers of Ten as a Java applet (also available as a Windows screen saver).

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

Java works so nicely on Mac OS X :-)

November is for Nuts

November isn't just for turkeys anymore.

November has been designated Georgia Pecan month. Is pecan pie a traditional part of your Thanksgiving feast? Add pecans to your stuffing this year! (I've always added almonds and hazelnuts; pecans would be tasty too). Or... try my family's recipe for cranberry gelatin salad, a tasty and light side dish to complement your Turkey Day dinner.

November is also Peanut Butter Lovers Month. Yummmm. (National Peanut Month is in March). I'm not sure how to add peanut butter to Thanksgiving... maybe some peanut butter cookies? Or peanut butter-stuffed celery as an appetizer! If you live near a Safeway store, try their house brand "100% natural peanut butter". It's our favorite.

Have a nutty month.

Does Winter make you SAD?

Winter is too dark. The days are too short. It's bad enough right now, but on Sunday Oct. 26, we'll turn the clocks back. Then it will get darker even faster in the evening. Full dark by 5:30 pm. Yuch. ...
       Continue reading "Does Winter make you SAD?"

iChat, iSight, iSign

For Melvin Patterson, who has been completely deaf since he was a toddler, communication is a visual experience.

In the past, conducting a conversation using traditional nonvisual telecommunications tools like telephones and pagers was frustrating. Text messages or sign language conversations on jittery Web video screens were a pale substitute for a face-to-face exchange.

But that changed dramatically when Patterson tried iChat AV, new videoconferencing software, and iSight, a new Web camera, which Apple Computer Inc. introduced during the summer.

Read the rest of the article from Monday's (Oct. 6, 2003) San Francisco Chronicle.

One Very Big "Oops"

Ooooouch.

As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the "turn over cart" at approximately 7:15 PDT today, it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. (See attached photo). The 18' long spacecraft was about 3' off the ground when it fell.

c.f. spaceref.com - Sept. 09, 2003

Hooray for Peanut Butter

Eating low glycemic index foods such as peanut butter, yogurt, beans and broccoli along with a diet high in cereal fiber can significantly reduce the risk of non-insulin-dependent diabetes in women, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

c.f. Peanut Butter Lovers.com

Last week's blackout

I know a couple of people who were within the black-out zone. ...
       Continue reading "Last week's blackout"

The Ambient Orb

The Ambient Orb is a device that slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or friend is on instant messenger. It is a simple wireless object that unobtrusively presents information. ...

The Orb arrives set to indicate the Dow - glowing more green to indicate market movement up and red to indicate movement down... It can be customized to a set of free channels, such as market indices...or weather in select cities. Optionally, you can upgrade to access more premium channels, such as your customized portfolio, local weather, pollen count, or IM buddy watch. There's also a developer interface where any semi-savvy web programmer can control the color of their Orb with a simple http "get" call. Track how full your hard drive is, traffic on your website, Slashdot posts, or your credit-card debt.

See more at Think Geek

Close Encounters

Earth and Mars are rapidly converging. On August 27, 2003--the date of closest approach--the two worlds will be 56 million km apart. That's a long way by Earth standards, but only a short distance on the scale of the solar system.

Between now and August, Mars will brighten until it "blazes forth against the dark background of space with a splendor that outshines Sirius and rivals the giant Jupiter himself." Astronomer Percival Lowell, who famously mapped the canals of Mars, wrote those words to describe the planet during a similar close encounter in the 19th century.

[c.f. Approaching Mars, Science@NASA]

Gadgets and Gizmos

The first, Gizmodo ("The Gadgets Weblog") is for techie toys: PDAs, cellphones, cameras, etc. Take a look at the article about the iBOT 3000, a wheelchair that climbs stairs!

The other site is a bit more prosaic. If you're not into computer tech, you may prefer The Gadget Source, ("The Authority for Kitchen Gadgets"). They even have a Kitchen Gadget of the Month Club. Oooohhhh... And me without a steady income :-( ... I found this site while looking for a source for a metal sink strainer I bought a few years ago at a (long-forgotten) store. (The strainer is a most excellent sink accessory. I recommend it highly).

Hearing New Voices

Though there's a lot of talk about newspapers and politicians and celebrities having weblogs, we are continually reminded that the most amazing thing about weblogs is how they let average people share their unique perspectives on life.

The Forrester Electronic Toy Show

Some things were neat, many were... strange. Several gadgets caused us look at each other, raise our eyebrows, and mouth "Why would anyone...?". The one thing I came away lusting after was the Veo Network Camera. Nevertheless, it was a fun presentation, all in all.

Is that fruit ripe?

• Fruits that NEVER ripen after they are picked: soft berries, cacao, cherries, grapes, citrus fruits, lychees, olives, pineapples, and watermelons.

• Fruits that ripen ONLY after picking: avocados.

• Fruits that ripen in color, texture, and juiciness but NOT in flavor or sweetness after picking: apricots, blueberries, figs, melons (except watermelons), passionfruit, peaches, and persimmons.

• Fruits that get sweeter after they are picked: apples, cherimoyas, kiwi, mangoes, papayas, pears, sapotes, and soursops.

• Fruits that ripen in EVERY way after picking: bananas.

So those incredible baseball-sized peaches we get at our local grocery this time of year, that go from hard to juicy in 3 days, were that sweet and nice to begin with?! Interesting.

I wonder if plums and nectarines fit in with peaches... ...
       Continue reading "Is that fruit ripe?"

Re-defining the commuter car

The Tango, the first vehicle produced by Commuter Cars, is a glimpse into the future of commuting where we hope wasted time, energy, and freeway real estate due to traffic jams will be things of the past. The safety, size, and efficiency features of the Tango will be found in every vehicle we ever produce.

At 39 inches wide and 8 feet 5 inches long, it's skinnier than some motorcycles and shorter than many a living-room couch. It runs on batteries, not gas. ...zero to 60 in less than 4 seconds ... 80 miles per charge; three hours to recharge in a dryer socket.

San Francisco Factoid - BART Transbay tube

== The San Francisco Factoid ==
Essential local trivia you'll probably forget almost immediately

BART's landmark transbay tube was completed in August, 1969. Constructed in 57 sections and reposing on the bay floor as deep as 135 feet beneath the surface, the $180 million structure took six years of seismic studies to design, and less than three years to contract. Before it was closed to visitors for electrification, thousands of adventurous folks had walked, jogged, and bicycled through the tube. It received a dozen major engineering awards and rapidly became famous, seeming to capture the imagination of visitors from all over the world.

Eat Fish? There's a catch...

Microsoft's Patent Problem

Science Buddies Mentoring Program

Science Buddies is a peer e-mentoring program for middle and high school students involved in science fairs. The hands-on program is structured with a schedule, deliverables, and a final goal of completing a science fair project and entering it in a Bay Area science fair. Top high school science students (Mentors) are matched with less experienced students (Investigators) and take the lead mentoring role on a science fair project. The Investigator does the actual work; the high school Mentor offers guidance and feedback. Adult advisors, usually professional scientists, complete each team and back up Mentors when they need it.

Read more at http://www.sciencebuddies.org or in the San Jose Mercury News article from March, 2002.

I never did a science fair project... maybe if something like this had been in place when I was in High School, I would have.

Doctors carry out first successful tongue transplant

A patient who doctors say is the first-ever recipient of a human tongue transplant is recovering and shows no signs of rejecting the new organ, his Austrian doctors said.
...
Dr [Rolf] Ewers said the team of doctors had been preparing for two years to carry out the tongue transplant, but had until now either lacked a candidate for the operation or an appropriate donor.

"And now finally after long training we were able to carry it out," Dr Christian Kermer said.

He said there is no evidence in the medical literature that such an operation has even been carried out on humans and that his team felt convinced they were the first.

Read more in this article from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Rubber Ducky you're so fine...

Curt Ebbesmeyer has been tracking plastic ducks at sea. Dr. Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, says that anytime now the plastic ducks, and three other plastic species from the same shipment that's already washed up, in part, in Hawaii and Alaska, could turn up in Iceland, Canada or New England.

Herbal Mosquito Repellant

Try catnip! Apparently it repels mosquitoes (and your cats will love you for it). ...
       Continue reading "Herbal Mosquito Repellant"

Miracle safe bee spray

So it's time once again for me to share the recipe for the Miracle Bee spray - harmless to humans and pets, lethal to bees, cleans your windows while you're at it. ...
       Continue reading "Miracle safe bee spray"

Volume Control #2

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

The earth moved (but we didn't notice)

Map of the Quake Area