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.