Dixie Dregs, Steve Morse and What If

I just realized that the below piece by Camel, “Ice”, reminds me of “Night Meets Light” by the Dixie Dregs, performed here by the Steve Morse band.

(And you have to watch the following guitar solo).

Camel

Also I guess I never posted that, also while listening to Slacker, I heard Camel for the first time. How did a progressive rock group that goes all they way back to the 1971, apparently with quite a bit of success, get past me?!

Roy Buchanan

While listening to the Jeff Beck channel on Slacker yesterday I discovered Roy Buchanan. I don't remember if I knew of him before.

Solar System in Gainesville

For a while I've wanted to go see the Millenium Project of the North Georgia Astronomers which is a scale model of the solar system. Yesterday, we were in Gainesville and I manged to find the Neptune marker.

The planet body sizes and their distances from each other are to scale in this model. The sun is a sphere on the downtown square. Of course most of the inner solar system is located there as well.

Star Chart Software: Cartes du Ciel

Question: What good start chart software is out there?

An answer: Cartes du Ciel.

It covers all of the basics. You can set the sky for a particular location and time, navigate around, zoom in and out, pick different projections, change the appearance, add and subtract features (like constellation boundaries or the Milky Way), and print charts. You can even control a GOTO telescope with it.

You can change from the colorful star representation to black stars on white (though the dim stars are a bit too small pixel-wise and hard to see). As you zoom in, more stars appear and that feature works well.

A huge collection of deep sky objects are indicated. Most importantly, you can download and add additional catalogues so that you get to a huge number of objects, down to those probably beyond your instrument.

And it's completely free.

The first thing I wish was different is that the program runs on Windows only. That's a disadvantage which I think will grow over time.

The next thing I missed is a feature of other similar programs: when you zoom into a deep sky object, the symbol turns into an actual image of the object so you can see what it looks like (and zoom into the image further). Yeah, this isn't really a property of star charts, but just something that I find I actually expect. I think you may be able to add this to the program yourself, but I'm not sure.

However, if you want that feature, just use Google Sky. Google Sky doesn't work great as a replacement for star charts (IMHO), but it's fun to look at the pictures.

So, I think Cartes du Ciel can act as a replacement for my SC01 and SC02 Sky Publishing charts, Norton's, Tiron 2000.0 or Becvar, and even Uranometria. You can either print ad hoc charts (I haven't tried this, though) or take a laptop to the telescope.

Apollo 11 Source Code

To commemorate [the Apollo 11 moon landing] the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC…

Star Image Out of Focus for Collimation

Here's an excellent video of an out of focus star image being used to collimate a telescope.

The diffraction rings and the little dot in the center (not the star!) are all optical effects. This is all light from a single star but everything you see is caused by the telescope optics or atmosphere.

The dark hole in the center is caused by the secondary mirror obstruction. The whole image is the light filling the aperture of the telescope.

The shimmering and bouncing of light is all atmospheric seeing effects.

The fact that the central hole and the rings are all concentric show that the telescope is well-collimated.

Seeing the Invisible

Wow, these shadowgrams in the New York Times are amazing! They were made by Gary Settles, director of the gas dynamics laboratory at Penn State.

I really like picture 3 of the AK-47 shooting a bullet. The bullet is supersonic and has a nice double-shock cone along with a little trail of turbulance. It's clearly outrunning the spherical shockwave from the main explosion from the gun muzzle. It's also extremely interesting that there is no sound or anything else coming from any other part of the gun than the muzzle.

There's also that dark puff of gas that's moving very fast out in front, leaving it's own cone-shaped trail of turbulence behind.

I'm curious about the spherical shock wave that's a bit in front of the main spherical shock (they look like circles here of course) but only inside the bullet cone. It joins the front of the double supersonic shock where they intersect.

There's also a faint horizontal line in front of the bullet and along its path. What in the world is that? Is it some artifact from the picture making process?

Picture 4 of a revolver shooting is a great contrast to picture 3. Here the bullet is clearly subsonic, and behind the main shock. There's a shock from the back of the gun as well as from the muzzle. The things that I find fascinating here are (1) how the center of the main muzzle shock comes from in front of the muzzle and (2) how the spherical waves from the back of the gun seem to be retarded by the muzzle explosion. They are pulled back and distorted there.

Note how much comes out of non-muzzle parts of the revolver compared to the AK-47.

All of these photos (except for the last one of the insect) show how senstive light travelling through air is to disturbances. This is one of the main problems that astronomers worry about when using a telescope. Any disturbances in the atmosphere in front of the telescope (all the way to the edge of the atmosphere) and inside the telescope have similar effects. They aren't as pronounced but, then again, the high magnification involved, well, magnifies the effects. Pictures 6 and 7 of the hair dryer and candle, though dealing with unusually hot air, illustrate this well. In both picutres take note of the less extreme turbulence in other parts of the room that's still visible.

Telescope users are plagued by warm air rising from people (in front of the telescope), buildings, warm pavement, and then of course the weather. You can easily see the effects in a very similar way, but live!, if you rack a really bright star like Sirius or Vega out of focus. A hand in front of the telescope will have a smoky pattern rising from it, clearly visible, just like the effects in these pictures.

Addendum: Hah! Well, reading the attached article, Prof. Settles discusses how the images are made with a light source, curved mirror, (lens), and a razor blade. That sounds exactly like a Foucalt tester which is used when grinding and figuring a telescope mirror!

Futurescapes

While looking on Youtube I found this interesting video of futurescapes. I think the superimposed adages could have been omitted, and some are a bit unclear.

Many of the images seem to come from WhiskeySierra Graphics.

Astronomical Seeing

Since I recently did a brief class/talk on telescopes, I was poking around looking for examples of astronomical seeing. Here are a couple of videos I found that serve the purpose. In both, you can pretty clearly see the “underwater” effect of seeing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kEXMCQw6VY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vytMN7RBlE

Observing (B)log

I've decided to try logging my observing with a blog and Twitter. The blog is at the location shown here and the tweets will be on stargate149.

http://starrycl.blogspot.com/

Largest Telescopes

What are the world's largest telescopes (currently)?

http://astro.nineplanets.org/bigeyes.html

LIVE FROM THE MOON

Well, it was 40 years ago (actually yesterday) that men first set foot on the moon.

Asteroid Impact on Jupiter

There has apparently been another asteroid impact on Jupiter.

http://tinyurl.com/nxthg4

http://tinyurl.com/ox79yg

http://tinyurl.com/lw2zoo

Steve Eve's 1/10 Scale Saturn V Launch

Steve Eve built and launched a 1/10 Saturn V rocket. I'm just as impressed by the parachutes and landing! That's a seriously reusable launch vehicle.

Youtube

Article

Milky Way Rise

This is a beautiful video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas Star Party by William Castleman. One thing is clear: We are sitting on a rotating planet inside a spiral galaxy! (… that has a dusty, active plane!). Oh, and we are near a very bright star, too!

I also suspect that you can see the zodiacal light in the middle frames as that faint triangular band of light extending upward from the horizon, toward the right. Zodiacal light is scattered sunlight from the faint, dusty plane of the solar system and can be seen from very dark skies well after sunset.

Slide Rules and Calculators

I came across this message I had posted in 2007 in another location.

We learned to use slide rules and were required to use them in high school physics (which I took as a junior). Or, it might have been in chemistry which I took as a sophomore. In the physics class, we also had a four-banger calculator at the front of the room that we could use, until someone dropped it. It was large with plasma-segment digits for the display (the big, glowing, orange ones).

We understood well what two- and three-digit precision was. Slide rules also made it pretty easy to understand logarithms. I still think about a slide rule scale when estimating the log of a number from 1 to 10.

My slide rule was a relatively cheap Sterling model, but I was a high school student after all.

When I was a senior, I was given a TI SR-51 calculator as my first calculator. Of course the SR meant ``slide rule.'' It had all of the functions found on a slide-rule and also did hyperbolic trig functions.

The next year, when I was a freshman at Ga Tech, there were still people on campus with slide rules on their belts. Of course, we carried our calculators on our belts, too. The cases had a loop for that purpose.

My roommate, who was an older PhD student, used a slide rule throughout my time at Tech, even in the late 70s. I don't think he actually had a calculator, but I don't remember for sure.

P.S. The SR-51 died before it was two years old and I bought an HP-25 and then upgraded to an HP-25C soon thereafter.

Chrome OS?!

What's this I hear about Chrome OS?

To me, this is simple. Everyone in my family sits down at the computer or picks up a laptop, logs on and runs Firefox. That's pretty much it. There are only rare exceptions where they do anything else. I don't think anyone plays any games on computers that aren't on-line. The biggest exception to this I know of is some music editing like Garage Band.

I personally only use the browser, Chrome on Windows or Firefox 3, and a terminal program. That's more than 90% of my computer usage. The occasional exceptions are Fritz chess and MS Flight Simulator. At work, I use Firefox and xterm windows. That's it.

For me, if there's a good terminal app that runs inside the browser, then I'm pretty much done.

Thus, it makes perfect sense to shave off everything else and make a system that's only the browser and nothing else. That's all. And at the same time, make it faster and more secure.

This is not going to be a server OS. I'll personally still need Linux boxes for that.

The implications for the corporate desktop are huge. Hopefully everyone is already using on-line email and probably most corporate apps are on-line. If you can get everyone to use on-line office apps for word processing, spreadsheets and persentations, then you're done. Desktop maintenance as a function is gone. Everyone has a Chrome OS system, or something like it. The IT Crowd fix, “Did you turn it off and turn it on again?” will literally become the only solution to a problem except for replacing the computer.

And no, there's no reason you can't do this now with careful paring down of a Linux distribution.

I think the biggest dilemma may come for someone like me. I have this suspicision that Chrome OS may be so much better as a browser, I'll have to choose between booting/running it and regular Ubuntu which I might want for some other purpose. Yes, I know Chrome will run on Linux but I have this idea that the user experience will be different enough to make, uh, a difference.

Telescopes in National Geographic

Here's a nice article in National Geographic on today's large telesopes by Timothy Ferris.

Ant Megacolony Takes Over the World

It's bad enough that an ant megacolony is taking over the world, but they have surrounded my house and are attacking. Yes, it's the same ants!

Project Euler

Project Euler is a fascinating set of problems.

Making a Demo Video

I recently made a short software demo. There were several tools that were useful for doing this on Windows XP. I used CamStudio to record the screen action and it worked extremely well.

Then I used Windows Movie Maker to record a narration track. It saved the narration as a WMA file. Later, I decided I'd like to add a music track (after some tough negotiations with my daughter to let me use one of her original guitar pieces). Since Movie Maker only allows one audio track, I needed to mix the music and narration externally.

So, I downloaded and installed Audacity. Adding a WAV file of my daughter's music was easy, but the WMA narration file could not be natively imported into Audacity. So, I found a program called SUPER which would pretty much convert any audio and video formats into any others. It's main selling points are that it's free and it already includes the codecs you need.

With the audio mixed, it was easily imported back into the movie. Some titles and credits were edited in adn that was it. I exported it to a WMV file and then uploaded it to YouTube.

Actor Model and Carl Hewitt

I just heard a fascinating tech talk by Carl Hewitt on actor model and semantic integration.

Common sense for concurrency adn strong paraconsistency using unstratified inference and reflection

Opera Unite

Well, this is interesting. Opera has implemented a web server on their browser called Unite so that users can share files from their desktop. Here's a tutorial on setting it up.

This could really faciliate sender-stored email (SST-Mail)!

I'm curious about the security of it, but apparently Opera operates a site that acts as a sort of gateway. The browser connects to that site and access tunnels through NAT-ty firewalls and such. This is all speculation from me, but, if that's close to how it works, that's not bad and it's a lot better than the disaster of Windows running IIS on every workstation.

Since there's a gateway, you can impose access control and specify (via Opera userids) who can access your site. (Wow, that's even better for sender-stored email!) The more I think about it the more brilliant this seems. Surely someone has done this before but, if so, it probably didn't get the kind of public visibility that this implementation will get.

Twitpocalypse

Twitter has hit an interesting limit in their software. They used the four-byte, signed integer representation for their message ids. That means 31 bits to count messages. (Four bytes is 32 bits but you need to save one to use for the plus/minus sign). How much can you count with 31 bits?

Well, you can count to 2³¹ - 1 = 2,147,483,647. Computer users who have been around for a few years will recognize this as the two-billion, e.g., two-gigabyte limit. On old UNIX systems, file sizes were limited to 2-GB. On many systems, memory was limited the same way. It's even the source of the year-2038 limit on the UNIX time stamp. That's when it will have been two billion seconds since 1 Jan 1970, the UNIX epoch.

The prediction was that many Twitter clients wouldn't handle the roll-over. (This is like your odometer hitting its limit and rolling over to 1 mile again. That makes it a little harder to figure out, for example, how far you've driven if you started before the rollover). That seems to have come true.

Since I pretty much just read Twitter from their web site and don't really use a client, I haven't experienced the problem directly.

Other articles:

Tech Crunch

How Google Wave Will Change Your Business, Career and Life

This blog post, Six Ways that Google Wave will Change Your Business, Career, and Life by Ryan Carson is an early but interesting take on Wave.

Insights about Twitter

Hey, I've just had more insights about Twitter.

It's synchronous!  That's the “real-time” aspect that's touted.  This is in strong contrast to the highly asynchronous nature of email and BBS/forum messages.  (And that asynchronous property is highly useful, by the way).

It's UDP!  Twitter messages are like packets broadcast out to the world.  There's no ACK.  You don't care if they aren't received (mostly).  However, just like a broadcast time service has useful information that a computer can pick up when it needs to, Twitter is a highly useful stream of information you can dip into.

Eary Impressions of Wave

Here are some of my early impressions of Google Wave.

• It addresses many of my technical concerns about communication almost perfectly.
• But then the federation approach, while completely appropriate and I think a good thing, may dilute it's effectiveness  in meeting my communication goals.
• But maybe not.  The federated approach may give you a single closed system for corporate communication.  The problem is that it's not sender-stored but, instead,  there's a lot of information exchange.
• There are **lots** of bells and whistles.  Granted, they are all amazing.  Still, they don't quite align with my personal preference for minimalism and simplicity.  8-(
• Ah, a major concern:  The data interchange between clients is very rich and heavy.  Well, it seems so.

More to come.

Migrating Google Notebooks

Back in January, Google announced they were stopping development on Notebooks, though the application would continue to work and be accessible.

I personally found Notebooks extremely useful.  Yahoo had a notebook feature and, when Yahoo Mail was my main email application and Yahoo was the primary platform I used, Yahoo notebooks was a place where I kept a lot of information.  When the time came that I decided to migrate everything over to Gmail and Google, notebooks was one of the services I was concerned about losing.  I was delighted when I discovered that Google had a notebook service, too, and in fact, it was even better (of course!).  The ability to share notebooks was quite useful.

Now, as Google has decided to move away from Notebooks (effectively) since much of the functionality is available in other services, e.g., Google Documents, I finally got around to moving all of my notebooks off.  I deleted some of them and migrated over 34 to Google Documents.  I don't think the sharing came over, i.e., I'd have to re-share any of them.  That's not so bad since none of the sharing was critical.  Most of my shared notebooks were shared to a Google userid that I don't really use on a daily basis any more.  Some others were for specific activities and projects that have ended.

So Google documents is adequate for the task and may even have some advantages.  Still, I did enjoy the Notebooks app.

Graphene

This is an interesting article on graphene research at Ga Tech.  

Graphene apparently owes this enhanced mobility to the curious fact that its electrons and other carriers of electric charges behave as though they do not have mass. In conventional materials, the speed of electrons is related to their energy, but not in graphene. Although they do not approach the speed of light, the research team found that unbound electrons in graphene behave much like photons, massless particles that also move at a speed independent of their energy.

Google Wave

Yes, Wave is here!

http://wave.google.com/

I'll have more to say later.  I've been using it some.  They hit nearly all of my concerns square on target!  (See Email should die, classifying communication, sender stored, and ideas).  

I'm a little concerned about the complexity of the interface and the fancy features  I'm sure it's significant.

It's number two on Twitter (last time I looked).

Twitterfeed

I just signed up for Twitterfeed.com to use it to cast my Google Reader shares onto Twitter.   Since Twitterfeed uses OpenID it was very easy to plumb everything together.

Logging in with OpenID

Google accounts have OpenID automatically.  Here's the URL to sign in:

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

Bose-Einstein Condensate NOVA

A friend at work told me about this NOVA show about Bose-Einstein condensates.

Famous Fonts

This is an interesting site with famous fonts from various sources listed.

Star Trek

Well, last night I finally saw Star Trek.

Here are some initial impressions.

The movie is good.  I think that message has been pretty consistently communicated from every direction.  If anyone had any doubt about going to see it, they should definitely go!

The movie treats the Star Trek mythology well, particularly the original series and (maybe with even more focus) the following movies.

The casting was pretty good.  The Spock character is probably the best cast, in my opinion.  McCoy may be the next best.  The Kirk character is good and well-played but, looking at him, I can't see the William Shatner Kirk.  Uhuru, Chekov, and Scotty were farther off the mark but all well-played.  Chekov's role in the movie was surprising to me and entertaining.

I have to say, though there were many old, familiar aspects and plot mechanisms (approaching cliche) throughout the movie, the story never stopped surprising me.  It was delightfully unpredictable.

There were many tributes to Star Wars and I wonder if they were intentional or unconscious.  Hm, J.J. Abrams was born on 27 June 1966 and Star Trek first aired on 8 September 1966, when he was a bit over two months old.  Fascinating.  Star Wars was released on 25 May 1977 when Abrams was nine years old.

Anyway, I couldn't help expecting to see Kirk to look out over the Iowa landscape and see twin suns setting.

The space craft were beautiful and the space scenes were nicely done.  I've heard the problem posed before:  How do you make a modern Star Trek about technology that predated the original series without everything looking better.  In this movie, they didn't worry about that problem even a little.

In contast to other aspects of the film, the interiors of the Enterprise paid only the slightest tribute to the original shows.  Everyone was sitting in the usual positions on the bridge, there was a captain's chair, science station, navigation console, etc., transporter room, sick bay, but the similarities pretty much ended there.  The interiors were completely believable and certainly well done.  I kept wishing for more of a nod to the past onboard the ship.

The bridge was particularly cold and hospital white.  (Okay, the way hospitals used to look!).  At least that's the impression I took with me.  The instruments and techology served it's function but there was nothing delightful, notable or nostalgic about them, and I find that a little disappointing.  Abrams' take on the engineering decks gets credit for being quite interesting and different, but almost seemed over the top in some ways.

One notable exception was the shuttle deck.  It was very well done, a joy to watch, and was a nice tribute to the past.

The movie moves fast and the visuals are also fast so it will take multiple viewings for most of it to sink in.

I do have this specific complaint about the technology.  Every filmmaker feels compelled, it seems, to completely reinvent the transporter effect from scratch.  It's almost like a rite of passage.  Again, I didn't see the need to depart so far from the look of the original series.  I'd like to have seen more of a nod to the old show there, mixed in with the obligatory updating.

On the other hand, Abrams payed wonderful tribute to the sound effects of the original series.  They were included in subtle ways but you couldn't miss them if you knew them.  That's what I'm talking about.

And there in the credits, Majel Barrett for the ships computer voice!  She died in December of 2008.  I wondered if she had already recorded voice parts for this movie, or if they lifted them from stock or other movies.  Anyway, that was a delightful surprise.

Finally I'll note this.  Most plot lines introduce a series of tangles and then work to unravel them all by the end.  This story left a big tangle unresolved.  Big.   I'm interested to see whether they simply use it as the canvas for an ongoing series of stories, or if they devote the next movie to fixing it.

Speaking of the future, as my old friend and I got up to leave after the credits  ended, I couldn't help thinking about how Star Trek has been going strong for 43 years and wondering what would be done with it over the next 43 years.

Wolfram Alpha

Okay, this morning I'm trying out Wolfram Alpha for the first time.

About Alpha

I've read about it already and I've been a Mathematica user over the years.  I've also heard Wolfram speak (I think at Georgia Tech a few years ago), so I already think I get what Alpha is supposed to be.  I think search engine is not the most descriptive name for Alpha.  I notice it calls itself a “computational search engine.”   It's really more like a very intelligent calculator connected to a very specific knowledge base or encyclopedia of sorts.  As I understand it, the Wolfram folks have carefully compiled the knowledge base.

Alpha is to a calculator or computer (in the traditional sense of the word) as Google is to the encyclopedia or library.  That's my first approximation to describing it.  Alpha will be good at answering questions that would, in the past, have been answered by an expert if the expert would probably take out a calculator to answer your question.  That means it should be great for the physicist, astronomer and computer scientist in me.  It will initially be confusing to folks in general, but I think they'll catch on over time.  Students will probably pick up on it's usefulness pretty quickly.  

Any rumours of Alpha replacing Google are simply wrong.  It's a different kind of information from a different source.  Both will be interesting sources of information.

That said, there is some overlap between them.

Cities

The first thing I typed in was the name of the city I live in.  That worked well.  It listed the population, showed it as a dot on a world map, listed the current temperature and weather, and the nearest cities.

I tried Macon, GA and it said it's only 77 miles from Atlanta.  That's a surprise.  Having grown up there, Macon was always from 85 to 95 miles to Atlanta, depending on starting points.  I'm surprised at 77.  Maybe that's city limit to city limit and they've changed that much.

Astronomy

The next thing I tried was Saturn.  Good again.  It showed a lot of nice information as well as a solar system diagram (to scale!  Extra points for that!) with the planets in their current positions.  Very nice.

I tried Orion and Ursa Major.  Then I thought I'd pursue a question that's been bothering me.  I'd swear that, when I look up at the Big Dipper, the star Delta Ursae Majoris looks dimmer than I remember.  I recall that it's a variable star  so I wonder what type of variable it is, what it's period is if it's periodic, and where in the period it is.  In other words, is it getting dimmer?

The Ursa Major page on Wolfram Alpha looked nice enough.  But finding out about this individual star was hard.  The star wasn't labeled on the constellation diagram.  The mouse pointer turned in to a hand/finger meaning it was something that could be clicked on, but clicking on it made nothing happen, as far as I could tell.  And I tried it several times because the hand/finger insisted that something would happen.

So there was no way to figure out what the name of that star was.  There were a number of stars listed below, by name, so I thought I'd just click on some of them, guessing, and maybe a diagram would pop up so I could tell when I chose the right one.

But clicking on any star in the list simply popped up a window of selectable text representing the whole list.  That's weird, IMHO, and way less then useful, at least to my current way of thinking.  I certainly wasn't any closer to finding the star.

So I went back to Google which went to Wikipedia which had a better diagram with Delta labeled.  Okay, I went back to Alpha and typed in Delta Ursae Majoris.  That certainly worked and a page with basic star info popped up.  It definitely listed it as a variable and magnitude at about 3.3 I think, and even noted it's the dimmest star in UMa.  However, there was no more detailed information.  Nothing like you might get from the old Burnham's Handbook.

At this point, going back and searching on Google and going to several sources including Wikipedia yielded pretty much the same, in some cases the same verbatim, i.e., from the same source, information.

Relativity

My next question was a major failure.

I wanted to know how long it would take to travel to Alpha Centauri, in relativistic terms, with an acceleration of one g, one Earth gravity.  What I really meant is that you accelerate for half the distance, then turn around and decelerate the rest of the way.  That's the only practical way we know of to travel to another star system.  That would be for extra credit, but I would have accepted the less sophisticated answer of simply accelerating the whole way and watched Alpha Centari streak past at high speed when you got there.

It's also a perfectly simple problem if you know special relativity and requires little bits of knowledge like the distance to Alpha Centauri, the value of one g, etc.  It should be a perfect problem for Wolfram Alpha to solve.  Alas, I couldn't find any form of my question that Alpha could understand.  I finally resorted to terms like simply “relativity” and “delta-t” but I got no where.  Granted, the problem is hard to express and maybe I just never hit on what Alpha was expecting, but I don't think it should be too hard for Alpha to handle.

So I was hugely disappointed in that failure.  It would have been nice to be able to go on and ask Alpha about how much fuel would have been required for the trip, what percentage of light speed would have been reached at mid-point, etc.  The usual follow up questions for that interesting problem.

It's good at Math

Okay, I have to give Alpha credit for being good at math.  I typed in  “sin(x) / x” and “sin(1/x)” and  it spewed out more than I ever saw about those two expressions.  I'm sure it exceeds my CRC Mathematical Tables book.  Of course Mathematica pretty much already did that.

What about statistics?

Since I've been dealing with them at work lately, I tried “hazard function” and “failure rate” but to no avail.  Alpha didn't understand them.

A better calculator?

So, Google already functions as a calculator (most folks probably don't know that), but where it is less than useful is in building up results.   I'd like to use my previous result in a new computation, and that's hard to do.  The best you can do is to put parens around your previous expression or cut and past the previous answer.

I wondered if Alpha would do better.  So far, it doesn't.  It outputs the results in many different forms, enough to make any math teacher happy, but I don't see a way to get them into the next computation.

Here's my simple example.  What is the period of one rotation for the frequency 33 1/3 RPM?  As weird as it sounds, that was a question on my mind when I woke up this morning.

So, I'd like to take 3 and invert it to get 1/3, then add 33, then invert that.  That's simple and it's easy to do on my RPN caculator (which is now a Python program I wrote).  Alas, I could only do this in Wolfram (like Google) via  (1 / ((1/3) + 33)).

Twitter Responds to #twitterfail and #fixreplies

Twitter has responded.

On Mashable

Original Twitter Blog post
Whoa Feedback! post
We Learned a Lot Post

Remembering Distributed Name and Directory Services

Since it came up in conversation today, I'm trying to remember the distributed naming and directory services that have gone by. Some are still with us.

• Novell NDS
• NeXT Netinfo
• Sun NIS
• Sun NIS+
• LDAP
• DNS
• Active Directory
  

I'll add more as I think of them.

What's All This About Twitter Failing?

What's all this I hear about #twitterfail…on Twitter?

Everyone is up in arms about a feature change.  This article at Read Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick explains what's going on and this comment really clarifies things.  (Give the comment part of the page a few seconds to load).

First of all, I didn't realize the difference between a reply on Twitter where the @userid appears at the beginning of the tweet, e.g., 

@otherguy I absolutely agree with you!

and a mention on Twitter, where the @userid appears somewhere else in the Tweet.

I have to say that @otherguy seems to have a handle on this.

It seems all of the brouhaha is over replies appearing on your home page.

As the above articles point out, this is a feature that I don't think I ever had turned on in the first place and I was already confused about why I wasn't seeing replies on my Twitter home page.

I had sort of punted and was relying on Twitter Search to find posts and replies, but that is a more awkward, per-user-target type of approach.

Why they would remove a feature that only 2% of their users have turned on in the first place, at the cost of such an uproar (even if it's misplaced) is unclear to me.  At least a lot of us are learning more about how to use Twitter in the first place.

Cosmological Dark Energy

Sigh.  Supernova observations leading to the conclusion that the cosmological expansion rate is currently increasing instead of decreasing has lead to models of so-called “dark energy,” sometimes called “quintessence.”

There's a new paper by Dutta, Hsu, Rreb and Scherrer outlining a new dark energy model that has observable results, both in the astronomical-cosmological domain and in the particle-physics, collider domain.

Quoting directly from their paper:

In this paper we present a quintessence scenario in which the dark energy field can be coupled strongly enough to Standard Model particles to be detected in colliders, and which allows for a significant time variation in the equation of state. This time-varying w = w(z) has a characteristic form which depends on only a single parameter, and can thus be excluded by cosmological observations in the near future. Our model only requires a singlet scalar field (or, alternatively, a small gauge sector like SU(3) Yang-Mills theory; other possible realizations are also briefly outlined at the end of the paper) and a new energy scale on the order of milli-electron volts.

This article summarizes their results.

Here's my current question:  These symmetry-breaking ideas as an explanation for “dark energy” with a false vacuum and such sound exactly like the same types of models for inflationary cosmology from the 80s.  How does symmetry-breaking as an explanation for “dark energy” fit with symmetry-breaking for inflation?  I guess the answer will be something similar to:  Since this is a new form of energy, it's a different phase transition from the one that's typically associated with the currently known forces and inflation.  Maybe?

Jawbone-2

My old Motorola bluetooth head set was becoming harder and harder to hear and didn't handle car noise very well.  After looking around I finally settled on a Jawbone-2 which was the current Jawbone head set until the Jawbone Prime was just released.

The best price I found, at the time I ordered, was at Newegg.com.

So far it works well from my side.  While I'm in the car I've left voice mail messages with car noise including the AC on high and the radio on.  I listened to the messages later from home and they seemed clear enough.  It seems to work well.  

I selected the replaceable pieces (ear loop and ear piece) that gave the best fit.  I'm trying the (leather?)-covered ear loop now.

MFT Records in Windows NTFS

While scanning a hard drive (which contains a damaged NTFS) I'm seeing the errors “Unexpected MFT record” and I wondered what that was.

The MFT is the master file table in NTFS which is described in the web page Master File Table is being like a relational database with an entry for each file (and directory).

This page and the accompanying ones seem to be an excellent resource.

Twitter Tech Talk at Google

This was an interesting talk on Twitter at Google last Thursday by Laura Fitton.

Android 1.5 Cupcake Demo Video

Here's a pretty good demonstration of Cupcake on Android at Engadget,  in spite of the droning, monotonic voice-over.  8-/

More MBV Videos

My Bloody Valentine - I Only Said 

Come In Alone

My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When

My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When

Android Cupcake First Impressions

My phone announced it had a system update this morning and, with permission, proceeded to download the new release code-named cupcake.  Since I have a developer phone, I could have downloaded it long ago, but was waiting for the push since I wasn't that interested in being that much of a beta tester.  This is my actual personal phone that I need to work!

The Upgrade

There was a download that took a handful of minutes, then a reboot, then a picture of a big yellow arrow going from a package to a phone, then a picture of a big  yellow arrow going to a chip (firmware upgrade?), then a reboot, only a few seconds, then another reboot.

The first thing was, during boot, the animation was no longer the little pulsating, green android (which I sort of miss) but the word android with animated highlights moving across it.  It does look neat.

It says it's now Linux kernel version 2.6.27 and build CRB21.

First Impressions

The first thing I noticed was the presence of transparent items on the main screen.    Now the lock display and the unlock screen appear transparently over your normal background.

The second thing is that I would swear the screen is higher resolution.  I'm not sure if it really is higher-res, or if some of the icons are higher res images, or if it's just clever artwork.  Some icons, notably the browser and Gmail, which are on my home screen are different.

On Screen Keyboard

If you don't have one of these phones, you may not realize why this is important.  To me, the flip-out keyboard is essential.  I want to be able to type quickly and accurately with two thumbs and it works well enough.  However, when you just need to type a word or short search term, flipping out the keyboard and rotating the phone is bothersome.  It's nice to just be able to immediately type on the screen at that point.

So far, the on-screen keyboard works surprisingly well.  The ribbon of suggested completions is good.  You just start a word then tap on a matching suggestion if it appears.  Typing is not too bad and it is effective, but it is, of course, slower than the physical keyboard.

At first I had no idea how to access the keyboard.  (Answer:  Tap a text box, only once and lightly!)  Fortunately, under Settings there was a System Tutorial which was really only a tutorial for the keyboard.  That was perfectly helpful.

Camcorder

Now it has a camcorder.  At first I wondered if it would already be downloaded in the upgrade, but it was right there in the Apps.  It works, the controls work well, and it knows how to upload a video to YouTube, essentially with one click.  

The CCD (or whatever it has) on this phone is notoriously slow.  Still pictures are easily blurred and, for the same reason, the frame rate of video is ~low and the frame images are easily blurred.

Snappy Speed

Everything seems snappier and faster.  That's completely subjective, of course.  Menus scroll faster.

Find on page

The worst thing about the older browser was there was no find-on-page function!  You can hardly use the web without this function.

For example, you search for the word “android.”  A page comes up that's many screens long.  Somewhere on that page is the word android.  Where is it?  I'm certainly not going to read through screens of text to find it.  You need find-on-page!

I use it constantly.  Now it's on the browser menu, right there on top.  The implementation is well-done, too.

Voice Search

Google voice search seemed to work better.  I don't know if this is because of Cupcake, because I read that you should hold the phone at a normal distance and maybe I was holding it too close, or if the phone is learning more about my voice.  In any event, voice search has been mostly terrible before now.  This morning I said “android cupcake” and it got it just right.

What's really important, I think, is that Jamie Dupree was talking on the radio in the background, and the volume was pretty loud, and that didn't seem to interfere much at all.

Okay, I just tried it again, saying “italian food” and the name of our town.  It thought I said “italian food snowbowl”.   Hm.  Then I just tried “italian food” and, of course, it knew where I was and listed all of the local restaurants.

Gamma Ray Burst at z = 8.2

A gamma ray burst (GRB) has been observed at redshift z = 8.2.  Ignore everything people say about distance since those numbers are model-dependent.  What you can say unquestionably, is that the universe is now z + 1 = 9.2 times larger than it was when this burst occurred.  That means the universe was about 11% it's current size.

This is GRB090423A observed by the Swift satellite gamma ray observatory.

University of Texas blog

High Precision Strontium Clock

Rick U at work first told me there was some interesting work being done with a strontium lattice.  Then was this recent story from NIST regarding work on a high-precision atomic clock based on strontium.

Here's the actual story on work being done on ultra-cold strontium in the Ye Group at Colorado.

Now on Twitter

This blog is now on Twitter.  Sigh.

http://twitter.com/stargate149

A Good Review of Star Trek

Chris Tookey of the UK Mail Online likes the new Star Trek movie. From the review, it sounds good.

Email Should Die

Here's one example of why email should die, IMHO.

Consider four users A, B, C, and D sending messages in a discussion, maybe to a list they are on.  A sends original message x.  B sends y in reply.  C sends message z and D sends message t.

In a typical scenario, here are what inboxes and sent folders look like after A sends x.

• A
• inbox: 
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x
• sent: 
• C
• inbox: x
• sent: 
• D
• inbox: x
• sent: 

Now B sends reply y.  Note that the message will typically have x quoted at the end.

• A
• inbox: yx
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x
• sent: yx
• C
• inbox: x, yx
• sent: 
• D
• inbox: x, yx
• sent: 

Next, C sends message z, quoting the first two.

• A
• inbox: yx, zyx
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x, zyx
• sent: yx
• C
• inbox: x, yx
• sent: zyx
• D
• inbox: x, yx, zyx
• sent: 

Finally, D sends message t.

• A
• inbox: yx, zyx, tzyx
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x, zyx, tzyx
• sent: yx
• C
• inbox: x, yx, tzyx
• sent: zyx
• D
• inbox: x, yx, zyx
• sent: tzyx

Note that message x has been stored on disk 16 times.  This is just with four users, each sending one messagse.  Imagine a group of 20 to 100 users, and a thread that goes on for a dozen messages or more.

Even if each person is careful about not quoting the previous messages, you have this best-case scenario.

• A
• inbox: y, z, t
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x, z, t
• sent: y
• C
• inbox: x, y, t
• sent: z
• D
• inbox: x, y, z
• sent: t

There are still N users * M messages copies stored.  Granted, these may be stored on different email systems.

Now, compare a BBS or forum system.  All users post to and read from a particular topic in the forum.

A posts message x.

• Forum topic: x
  

B posts message y.

• Forum topic:  x, y
  

and so on…

• Forum topic: x, y, z, t
  

Previous messages are easily read without quoting.  The storage implications are obvious.  Consider also the disk I/O bandwidth and even network bandwidth implications.

When the first scenario above occurs in an enterprise with hundreds or thousands of users, thousands of message threads, and millions of messages, the storage and bandwidth load is massive.

Add to that the idea that the email system they are using is open to the Internet with an influx of spam and other security attacks, and it's no wonder that such systems barely survive.

There are some email systems that implement message storage with one copy and pointers in each user's inbox and folders.  That certainly helps, but I argue that one may as well move to the simpler BBS, forum and topic model in the enterprise.

Apple Trumps Windows PC

From the Apple Insider: Apple trumps Windows PC makers in customer experience study.

Google Voice

I just signed up for Google Voice last night.  Very slick!

That gives me a “permanent, personal number” which I can point at any phones I want to.  You can have filters so that particular callers go to particular phones.  I could have anyone from work that is calling forward to my work cell, while friends and family go to my personal cell.  You can block callers or have some go straight to voice mail.

I you enable it, it transcribes voice mail messages into text like email and  you can read your voice mail just like email.  There's a little button where you can play the message, too.  You can send a reply via SMS (TXT) or call back if you are using the web interface from a cell phone.

There's a listen-in feature, so when your phone rings, the computer voice tells you who is calling.  You can then listen in to their voice mail just like an old-fashioned answering machine and “pick up” on the call if you wish.

If you are talking to someone, say on a desk phone at work, you can press * and transfer the call to another phone in your list, like your cell phone.  Your cell will ring and, when you anwser, the call is transferred, and the caller doesn't even know (except they may hear your cell ring).

Classifying Communication

Okay, these ideas just became clear to me.  Classifying communication with the following scheme helps to sort out all of the options a little.  Let's see how this goes.

One definition:  When I use “BBS,” I mean an on-line bulletin board system, typically with messages organized into topics and fora.  Examples are implemented using phpBB, phpNuke, vBulletin, etc.  You can make a good argument that Facebook and MySpace are fancier instances of BBSs and I think that's right.

When I use Facebook, I'm implying MySpace as well in most cases.  I'll note the exceptions if there are any.

One to all

Apps:  blog, Twitter

This is where one person wants to post messages to the world.  A blog is the next to most recent way this is usually done and Twitter is the newest.

One to many

Apps: BBS, Facebook, subcription blog, Twitter with closed account

In this case, one person wants to communicate to a closed group of people.  Everyone else is excluded from the conversations.

This is a mode I find myself using and it's where the BBS, Facebook and MySpace usually fit.  In the email paradigm, the mail list filled this need.

It just occurred to me that a subscription blog, where the blog is limited to a set of registered users, may fit this instance much better.  The discriminating factor concerns who does the posting.  If everyone posts messages, usually, then the many to many model fits better.  On the other hand, if I'm the one doing nearly all of the posting, then the subscription blog may be better.  Subscribers can comment on the postings and they can even be given permission to post.

I and a small group of friends tried this in a brief experiment with Blogger but there was one feature lacking that made it unusable in my opinion.  If someone went back and added a comment to an old posting, that new information wasn't indicated in any way.  The old post didn't move itself to the top of the list or a notification wasn't sent.  (Hm, there actually may have been a way to receive notifications of new comments).  Just browsing the blog didn't make new comments obvious however.

There's a subtle continuum transition from the one-to-many to many-to-many.

Many to many

Apps: BBS, Facebook, Twitter with everyone using closed accounts

This is when you have a group of people that want to have closed communication, limited to the group.  Everyone sends messages and those messages usually go to everyone else in the group or to a large subset.

This is where the BBS  and Facebook, etc., are a big win, especially over the email model (which I claim is nearly obsolete).  Single storage of messages, history of communication, limitation and control of who is in the group, and even in subgoups, makes such a system easily manageable and programmable.

I also think this spot is where there is the biggest potential for the biggest win.  

Trying to manage this type of communication with email, especially at the corporate level, is now at disaster status.  Any success at all is a result of huge effort and expense.

Using a closed BBS or Facebook (-like app) should represent a corresponding huge reduction in cost and effort with  increased functionality and success.

All to one

Apps:  web form, email

This is the answer to the question:  How do I contact you?  Most sites seem to have discovered the solution to this that I implemented years ago:  the web form.  You put up a web page with a form to fill out that allows anyone in the world a way to send you a message.  But the content is controlled and it requires filling out the form as opposed to just sending email, which subjects the recipient to the spam problem.  You can even use some of the mechanisms to verify that a human is filling out the form, like the so-called captcha schemes.  (By the way, I really hate the name “captcha”).

One to one

Apps: email with white list, Facebook inbox, BBS private messages

This can be done with special features in each of the applications.   Email with a white list handles this pretty well.  The private message features in Facebook and BBS applications also do this.

Twitter allows one person to address another, as does the Facebook wall, but in a very public way.  That's sort of a weird hybrid that's one to one with everyone listening.  That type of public communication seems to be pretty popular, and seems to indicate some sort of declining interest in privacy.

If I did this right, I'd probably have seperate categories for  one to one private and one to one public.

So…

Facebook seems to be a solution to all of these except one to all and all to one.  (Sounds like the Three Muskateers, doesn't it?)  Sure, you can accomplish one to all if you open up your Facebook site so that it doesn't require adding you as a friend, but then you lose the one to many and many to many modes.

The all to one problem in Facebook is only solved by someone requesting that you add them as a friend, and that grants too much just so someone can send you a message, maybe only a one-time message.

For me

What does this mean for me?  

One, I may be putting a lot of effort into maintaining many to many solutions when, in fact, one to many is the problem I need to solve.  I should consider moving to a subscription or hidden blog.  A subscription requires a user account and permission to access the blog.  The hidden case means the blog's URL is obscure and not listed or indexed.  Anyone that knows the URL can access it, but they shouldn't be able to know it unless someone tells them.

This also includes a couple of email lists I've maintained over the years.  Maybe I should move those to subscription blogs.  I need to simplify things some how.

Two, I've already given in and started using Facebook.  Email is more and more like the old hangout that is now empty.  You walk in the door and there's no one there except some weasely sales guys here and there talking to each other and the email administrator behind the counter, wiping it with a cloth, with a sad look on his face.  Or maybe he just looks tired.  When you go looking, you find that everyone is down at Facebook.

Other conclusions and topics

It's time for email to die.  I'm more and more convinced of this.  I'll say more about this later, though most of the reasons are above.

The archival problem.  Everyone is putting so much effort into Facebook and that record of their lives is now stored there.  What happens as Facebook completes its arc and begins to fade.  How do you personally archive all of your Facebook life?  Do you even care?  Maybe not.  I think Twitter has an even shorter arc and of course no one is sure what will come next.  As each of these (probably shorter and shorter) arcs occur, some of us will worry about how to archive each one.  Some will worry too late and some won't care.  It would be nice if there was some homogeneous medium to put it all in and make it searchable.  Please find something better than XML before we go to far down that road!

More About Area 51

Slashdot has a pointer to an LA Times interview with some former workers from Area 51.  

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in “What Plane?” in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels.

And...

And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy.that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO.

In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. “That's a lot of UFO sightings!” Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and “when they'd land in California, they'd be met by FBI agents who'd make them sign nondisclosure forms.” But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51's UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim.

The A-12 OXCART was the single-seat (except for a trainer) predecessor to the SR-71 Blackbird.

More about the A-12 OXCART

One interesting story I read (I'll have to go back to find the citation) said the Blackbird was originally called the RS-71 but Lyndon Johnson flubbed the name in a speech, so they went back and changed all occurances of the name to the SR-71.

Jaguar 1.64 Petaflops

At the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jaguar is now one of the most powerful supercomputers at 1.66 petaflops. (That's 1.66e15 floating point operations per second).

New Scientist article

Some brief specs:

• Cray XT4 with 84 racks
• Cray XT5 with 200 racks
• XT4 board, four nodes, one AMD quad-core Opteron 1354 Budapest, 8-GB DDR2-800
• XT5 board, four nodes, two AMD 2356 quad-core Barcelona 8-GB DDR2-800
• SuSE Linux
• Node-node communication: MPI, OpenMP SHMEM, PGAS
• Liquid cooling with R-134a refrigerant on the entrance and exit of air
• Lustre-based shared file system
• Storage: 48 DDN S2A9900 = 13,440 1-TB SATA drives and 192 Dell OSS servers.
• High-speed intra-cluster network: Infiniband DDR @ 889 GBps on three 288-port Cisco 7024D IB switches. 48 24-port Flextronics IB switches. Zarlink IB optical cables.
• External networks...
• 2 Cisco 6500 routers and a Force10 E1200 router
  
• Internet2: 1 OC-192 connection
  
• DOE ESnet: 1 OC-192
  
• DOE Ultrasciences: 2 OC-192 connections
• TeraGrid: 1 OC-192
• Archival storage on 28 Dell servers, two STK PowderHorn robot with 14 STK 9840 tapd drives and 11,000 tapes. Two Sun StorageTek SL8500 robots with 16 9940, 24 T10000A and 24 T10000B tape drives and 9800 tapes. Four DDN 9550 with 1500 TB of disk for disk caching tier.
• Job scheduling is apparently via PBS (portable batch system).
  

Looking at the top500 site's most recent listing, Jaguar was number 2 in November 2008. It looks like that was only the XT5 and was rated at 1.05 pf max and 1.38 pf peak. It also looks like the recent boost is from linking the XT4 to the XT5.

The number one system in Nov 2008 was the Roadrunner IBM BladeCenter system at LANL at 1.11 pf max and 1.46 pf peak.

Why am I posting this? Well, it's a nice super computer and I think a record at computing capacity (I wonder if anyone is actually turning out data from the combination of linked systems yet) and I was interested in the exercise of digging the specs out and seeing what they were actually using.

If OC-1 =~ 55 Mbps, then OC-192 =~ 10.1 Gbps (okay, I found 9953 Mbps).

Surprise Comet Yi-SWAN C/2009 F6

From Sky and Telescope alerts:

A small 8th-magnitude comet is now making its way slowly across Cassiopeia toward Perseus. The surprise visitor, called Comet Yi-SWAN, should be within reach of small telescopes for most of April and May 2009. However, bright moonlight will make it a challenge to spot until the second half of April.

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

The next Ubuntu, 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, is now available in beta.

Blackberry Flip Pearl 8220

During my recent phone shopping (back at Christmas) I was really impressed with the Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220.  It has a QWERTY keyboard emulated on a smaller phone keypad, two letters per key, but it's quite useable and better than a regular phone key pad for typing.  It's predictive text works pretty well.  And, it's a blackberry with all of the apps.  It's also a Wi-Fi device!  Additionally, it has this neat message notification system (txt, email messages) in the outside window of the flip phone.

T-Mobile has dropped it's price to $50 (at least the phone upgrade price).

No, none of us have actually owned one of these since we headed off into the Android smart phone direction instead.  But, if I was just getting a phone, this is one I'd look to get.  Truthfully, the Android (HTC Dream, G-1) and the Blackberry Curve (8320) are harder to use as phones  than an actual phone and I find myself missing the Razr sometimes.  (That said, I use those devices as a phone probably 10% of the time and as an Internet device  and PDA most of the rest of the time).  So, that 8220 seems to be a great solution to what one needs.  Also it's a step up from the txt-ing and Facebook-messaging user from a regular phone.

Oursource Enterprise Email to Gmail

Here's a pretty good article by David Berlind of Information Week on why one should consider moving enterprise email to Gmail.

Recommended!

Amazing RC B-29 and X-1

Watch this amazing Youtube video of a B-29 with a model Bell X-1 under the wing!

Whither Perl?

Sigh.  I guess I'm really a hard core Python programmer now, because I just spelled Perl as “Pearl.”

Square Root Day

Jim K sent email pointing out it's “Square Root Day,”  3/3/09.  I guess the last Square Root Day was 2/2/04 (02-02-2004) and, as Jim points out, the next one will be 4/4/16  (04-04-2016).  Oh, and I shouldn't forget the trivial solution, which was 1/1/01, the first day of the millenium!

Somehow I keep thinking it should be called Square Day.

So these were all repeated in the last century (which nearly all of us lived in, as strange as that still sounds to me).  I was here for 8/8/64, 9/9/81, and 10/10/100, well, if you count 2000 in that Perlish way.

WOW Tenspace

WOW Tenspace. This is a nice video. Think of Fantasia if the subjects were integers instead of musical pieces and the creators were Japanese.

Fireworks

This is a great fireworks video!

Electrolized Water

Jerry Pournelle commented on this LA Times article about electrolyzed water in the View from Chaos Manor and it does sound amazing.

They say:

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water—hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso—the miracle liquid.

That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.

And

It turns out that zapping salt water with low-voltage electricity creates a couple of powerful yet nontoxic cleaning agents. Sodium ions are converted into sodium hydroxide, an alkaline liquid that cleans and degreases like detergent, but without the scrubbing bubbles. Chloride ions become hypochlorous acid, a potent disinfectant known as acid water.

However, some mail at Chaos Manor points out that this is nothing more than weak bleach.

App Engine Can use HTTPS

I must have missed this announcement before, but App Engine does support HTTPS. I found this out because I saw a discussion about it and had also needed/wanted it within the past week.

Design Beyond Human Abilities

This is a very interesting paper on a talk: Design Beyond Human Abilities by Richard P. Gabriel (PDF file).

Twitter vs Facebook

I've heard (but am not going to take the time to find references) that Twitter is overtaking Facebook in popularity (either in user population or rate of increase, I expect, but I'm not sure which).

This article by Shannon Clark is insightful.

I'm not sure I get Twitter yet.  I'm not even sure I get Facebook yet other than it's qualities as a closed email system that I've talked about before.

The array of communication options is dizzying and I'm having trouble finding  a comfortable place to stand.  I clearly understand it's not a place to set up shop, put down roots, or find a solid foundation to stand on.  The information world, web world, etc., evolves much too rapidly for that to be an issue.  It's a matter of finding the best place to stand at the moment.

Right now blogging works for me, and unfortunately email.  It's unfortunate because I think email's architecture is the most inefficient and troubled in spite of being the most widely adopted. Now pretty much everyone has email.  Everyone.  And Gmail is beautiful and a joy to use, nonetheless.

But, then, maybe email doesn't work for me.  Lately it's been seeming more and more like an empty room.  I get very little email other than from spammers that I've asked to receive it from.  Sending email feels more and more like speaking into an empty room.  Hm.

Back at Emory, I held the position from the time of LiveJournal and MySpace that the students had already found effective and useable solutions to their communication problems while we struggled to provide a barely successful (at best) email solution.  What we really should have done was provide a way for them to all connect together, and make sure we knew how to reach them officially, then let them carry on.

Maybe the rest of the world is catching on to these post-email solutions.

Interesting Time Stamp

Hey, another interesting UNIX timestamp is upon us (thanks to a note from Simon on the dreaded Facebook).  It will soon be 1234567890 seconds since the UNIX epoch of 1 Jan 1970 0:00 UT, and on Friday the thirteenth no less!

>>> time.ctime(1234567890)

'Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 2009'

Remeber when the timestamp was 1000000000?

>>> time.ctime(1000000000)

'Sat Sep  8 21:46:40 2001'

(The times I've shown here are Eastern Standard), i.e., 

>>> time.ctime(0)

'Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969'

and of course these are from the Python interpreter.

As always, we live in interesting times!

P.S.  And I can't talk about time stamps without reminding us of UNIX's equivalent of Y2K, when the timestamp reaches the maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer (i.e., a 31-bit number):

>>> time.ctime(0x7fffffff)

'Mon Jan 18 22:14:07 2038'

Mark your calendar!

Old Apple Promos

I suddenly wondered if some of the old Apple promos presenting a vision of the future were on YouTube.

The classroom of the future:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgZQhSESM-g

And this one!  We used to show this to freshmen students during their IT orientation at Emory University in the 80s.  Interestingly, the video implies that it's 2009.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8

OLED TV!

Wow, a organic LED TV from Sony. It's three mm thick!

RIP Rick Wright

I only found out this weekend that Rick Wright died on 15 Sep 2008.

I never saw Pink Floyd in concert.  In the 90s they played at Grant Field during the “Pulse tour.”  I had taught a lab at Georgia State University that evening.  Afterward, I drove by the stadium and stopped briefly where I could see some lights and hear some of the music from North Avenue.  I should have gotten a substitute and gone to that concert.

Carmel

Carmel is one of the more beautiful places I've seen over the years.  Imagine being simultaneously in the mountains and by the ocean, where trees smell like fruit and flowers are everywhere.  This is also a (the?) home of Thomas Kinkade for fans.

The Android (Dream) Phone

So I received a new Android Dream phone for Christmas. Here are some initial thoughts after using it for about 3.5 weeks.

• It's very neat.
• The accelerometer still amazes me. I have a bubble level app which makes the phone into a bubble level that really works.
• The GPS support is very neat, especially in conjunction with Google Maps while driving. The little blue dot tracked my wife and I right into the shopping center where we parked, into the very parking spot. The updates were very fast with high precision.
• The downside is that GPS really sucks out a lot of power from the battery.
• A major minus is that the battery barely lasts a day. If you use the phone much, a charge doesn't last a day. With only occasional use, it will barely make it to the end of the day.

Another minus is: Making calls is really hard. I'd say that making a call while driving is sort of like trying to change clothes while driving. Okay, I've never actually changed more than removing a sweater while driving, but I can imagine what it would be like. If I use this phone much in the car, I seriously doubt I'll live much longer. Granted, there's a voice dialing feature which has come and gone from various Android releases, and it's due in a coming release.

That said, I really miss being able to flip open my Razr and press a quick-dial key, basically by feel.

• Having to constantly swipe the pattern to unlock the phone is annoying. I finally turned off screen blanking so that I have to blank/lock it manually with the red hang-up key. Okay, given I can swip the pattern with one hand whereas the Blackberry Curve requires two hands to key in the unlock password.
• Voice quality while holding it is good.
• The Bluetooth integration works well.
• I had zero problem with WiFi so far. I was able to put it on my home net easily.
• PacMan is a really neat game. BUT, I couldn't download it until I put in my T-Mobile SIM card and subcribed to the data service.
• Data service is too expensive! 8-(
  

Overall I like reading on the Android phone less than on the Blackberry. On the Blackberry I've forced a serifed font which is beautiful on it's screen and perfectly readable. I can use the space bar to page down while reading.

On the Android, the pages are almost universally in a sans-serif font (i.e., in the native page font). I can zoom in by pressing the zoom button but this usually takes more than one try. For some reason, one finger will stop working and I have to use my other hand. I suppose it has to do with my hands being too cold or fingers too dry or something. So, using the touchscreen is sometimes wonderful and sometimes highly annoying.

Scrolling the touchscreen however is nearly always annoying when reading. Finger scrolling takes a lot of work and movement. Also, though the browser nicely reformats the text to fit the screen after zooming, scrolling with the finger will cause the column to slip left or right so you have to work to keep it centered. Arg. Scrolling with the track ball also works but it's never the right speed or sensitivity.

It's probably telling that, after all of that, I'm still using the Android and not the Blackberry to read. We'll see where I am after say six months or so.

Also, I think there are other browsers that I haven't looked into yet. It should be noted that most of my complaints about reading are related to the browser software and not the phone or Android itself. I think.

• Having YouTube is really great and it works pretty well.
• Having to flip out the keyboard for landscape is annoying. I've heard about improvements so that merely turning the phone will switch it, a la iPhone.
• ShopSavvy is a pretty and highly useful app though I've only used it once, but it was correct and did help!
• Gmail works. I am still using and responding to the message notification but I don't like keeping up with email that much. That's like the so-called Blackberry adiction that I've never had. On the Blackberry, the only time I check email is when I log into the Gmail app.
• Gmail is nicely integrated in to Android and works well. I think I actually like the look and feel and functionality of the Blackberry version, though, especially the brand new one.
  

I'll add and report more later.

New MacBook

The new MacBook 13-in. Wow!

Okay, how did I become such a Mac fan…?

Hocus Pocus by Focus

Hah! Earlier I posted about Rick sending me a link to Frankenstein by The Edgar Winter Group. Everyone knows Frakenstein was a major hit in 1973. While I was watching it, I thought about Hocus Pocus by Focus which was also big on the radio then and which I always thought was pretty fun. Amazingly enough, after Frankenstein, You Tube popped up a link to a video of that very song!

ELP Videos

One of my favorite Emerson, Lake and Palmer videos, Take a Pebble from Belgium TV c. 1971 is back on-line! It's great because it's around the time they were new, it's based on the first album, and the performance really shows off their range of music and what they did with the traditional keyboards-bass-drums trio! (Compare to Vince Guaraldi, e.g., the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack).

• Part 1
• Part 2

Wireless Power

Hm, charging with magnetic induction.  It's an interesting idea.  I guess we don't have to worry about floppy disks any more since no one uses them.  What else is susceptible to oscillating magnetic fields?

One can easily argue:  Well, they are in every transformer! 

Three-D and Wii Head-Tracking

This video came to me via my brother from my nephew Brent.  This is amazing.

Perfect Pen?

I needed to buy a pen for a family member and it occured to me to do a little web search for the perfect writing pen.

• Uniball Jetstream (review)
• Bic 30 Atlantis (review)

Evening Planets!

I saw them! The Moon and Venus (easily) and Mercury and Jupiter (very dim, relatively, and close to the horizon). I forgot all about the apparition last night, New Year's Eve, but thought of it tonight while I was out and looked up and saw the splendor of the Moon and Venus.

I found a great place with a good horizon. For anyone that lives near us, the parking lot of the Best Buy, though there are shopping center lights below the horizon, provides a wonderful western horizon!

I saw two candidates for Mercury and Jupiter though I would have expected them to appear much brighter. It was about 18:45 EST and this is 1 Jan of course. I was also looking in the general vicinity of Hartsfield, so I waited to see if they seemed to move. In fact, they didn't move or twinkle so I concluded they were definitly astronomical and probably the planets.

Back at home just now, I consulted the Sky and Telescope interactive star chart (which now requires that you set up a login account) and verified that indeed I had seen all four bodies.

Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Ga Tech

The Georgia Tech School of Physics has created a new Center for Astrophysics.

There is an on-line series of lectures.