| Thursday,
March 6, 2008 Neat science experiment
Dr. Pournelle,
I’m sure the fed govt and teacher’s union would
attempt to portray this as pyromania or even latent adolescent terrorism,
but I am wondering why the heck I had to learn this from youtube instead of
in highschool science class?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGUKEAEIbAc
It’s a neat trick, and I can see how a science teacher
would get at least a full hour’s worth of teaching out of this simple
demonstration, if not more. And the promise of getting to light something on
fire is a sure way to get and keep student’s attention.
But of course, the union would throw a fit, the
lawyers would rub their hands with glee, and you can be absolutely certain
that one parent in a school of 1000 students would complain and try to sue
someone on the school board for personally trying to kill their child with
10 linear ft of hair styling mousse and a match.
Sean
===========
Identity Theft
Hi Jerry,
Since you have a lot of readers in the tech industry,
I thought I'd pass this one along.
The e-mail below is fraud - they are fishing for
personal information for identity theft. People also do this over the phone
posing as recruiters. If you think it's real, get their information, and
check with the BBB (www.bbb.org) to find out if it's a legitimate business.
This one was easy to spot - the domain name points to
one of those fraudulent search pages, but some are more difficult. One of
the techniques is to 'steal' companies identities, either by using a real
business with a different phone number, or a slightly misspelled domain name
in the respond link in the e-mail.
Bottom line: Don't respond to unsolicited e-mails or
phone calls. Period.
There's also a new scam with e-mail or phone calls
posing as the IRS 'validating' information for the upcoming rebate.
Cheers,
Doug
Begin forwarded message:
From: <deleted> Date: March 5, 2008 4:17:04
PM MST To: "<Deleted> Subject: Doug - Job opps in the bay area
Good Afternoon Doug, how are you?
I came across your resume off of our
database and it is a bit outdated and I just wanted to check your
availability and interest in new job opportunities. I work with some
great companies in the San Francisco/ bay area that are looking for a
Software and other types of engineers. I also work in a team environment
and as a team we work with close to 100 companies around the Bay area. I
have some nontechnical questions here that are very useful for the
companies I work with, please take a moment to answer them, if you are
interested in new positions.
These positions are for fulltime permanant
positions, no contract or part time positions at the moment. Also, could
you include a copy of your most current resume.
What type/title position are you looking
for?
What are your strengths / skillset /
expertise?
What industry would you prefer to work in?
Are you currently open to new
opportunities?
Reason you are looking?
When are you available to start?
What is your salary / salary range?
Are you a US citizen / green card holder /
H1?
Is San Francisco or San Jose a better
location for you?
What city do you reside and what is the
furthest you are willing to commute?
Phone Number(s) and time windows you are
available for phone interviews?
Also, could you send me an updated resume.
As soon as you respond, I will send you a
job description.
Warmest Regards, <deleted> Account
Executive
Thanks for the example. My spam filters have got
rid of that one at least.
=============
Subject: Waldo's on the way!
Jerry,
Browsing Slashdot I ran across a link to this article
and my first thought was Waldo's! These sound really exciting! Resolution of
two micron's and enough resistance to simulate hard surfaces?
Hope your Zaps are going well,
John Mollhoff
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/
dn13410-maglev-joystick-gives-better-feedback.html
New Scientist Tech logo <http://technology.newscientist.com/>
Levitating joystick improves computer
feedback
Movie Camera<http://technology.newscientist.com/
decorator/img/misc/artx_video.gif>
* 17:52 04 March 2008 * NewScientist.com
news service * Jason Palmer
A computer controller levitated by magnets
provides a new way to physically experience virtual objects.
The "maglev" system has benefits over more
mechanical haptic controllers – computer interfaces that stimulate the
user's sense of touch – and its inventors are now working to
commercialising the technology.
Haptic technology has uses ranging from
remote medical breast checks and exploring distant lands, to recreating
the feel of fabrics.
But most haptic interfaces to date rely
upon gloves or robotic arms to provide feedback to a user. The complex
mechanics involved increases weight and friction that can make it
difficult to provide a natural feel.
Super bowl
To solve that, Ralph Hollis <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/rhollis/www/home.html>
and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US, developed
a haptic device with just one moving part (see video, top right).
A bowl with electromagnets concealed below
its base contains a levitating bar that is grasped by a user and can be
moved in any direction. The magnets exert forces on the bar to simulate
the resistance of a weight, or a surface's resistance or friction. LEDs
on the bar's underside feed back its position to light sensors in the
bowl.
This approach has "huge potential", says
Anthony Steed <http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/A.Steed/>
, a haptics researcher at University College London, UK. "This system
gets rid of the mechanical linkages that are a major constraint on most
haptic devices."
Six degrees of freedom
The maglev interface can exert enough force
to make objects feel reassuringly solid, says Hollis, resisting as much
as 40 newtons of force before it shifts even a millimetre.
That's enough to feel the same as a hard
surface and better than most existing interfaces, he says. "Current
devices feel very mushy, so it's hard to simulate a hard surface."
The device can track movements of the bar
as small as two microns, a fiftieth the width of a human hair. "That's
important for feeling very subtle effects of friction and texture," says
Hollis.
And it can exert and respond to all six
degrees of freedom of movement – moving along or rotating about each of
the three dimensions of space (forward/backwards, left/right, up/down).
'Totally different'
Stephen Brewster <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Estephen/aboutme.shtml>
, of the Interactive Systems Group <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/gist/>
at the University of Glasgow, says the maglev approach is totally
different from existing systems.
"It offers things that other devices just
can't do – the high forces, low friction, low inertia, and six degrees
of freedom."
After working on a series of prototypes
since 1997, Hollis has started a company called Butterfly Haptics <http://butterflyhaptics.com/>
to market the technology. The first six second-generation versions of
the device will soon be shipped for testing to a consortium of several
US and Canadian universities <http://msl.ri.cmu.edu/projects/haptic_consortium/>
.
The system will be showcased at the IEEE
Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environments and Teleoperator
Systems <http://www.hapticssymposium.org/next_conference.htm>
, which opens on 13 March.
==============
Discussion from View
Subject: Global cooling -
caution in order
Jerry,
I would love to see the alarm about global warming
tempered, if not discredited entirely. But I think global warming skeptics
need to be a little careful about making too much noise about too little
data. (Just think about what Rush Limbaugh is likely do with this story.) As
Dr. Chapman says, this might just be a blip. If so, an excess of high
profile crowing about global warming having been refuted by the data could
look foolish in very short order.
Looking at the data sources referenced by the "watts
up with that" blog, it appears that the excitement seems to come from a
noticeable 3 to 4 month decline toward the end of 2007. Giving a lot of
significance to a 4 month trend in fairly noisy data seems unwise. Don't we
really need to see a clear multi-year trend before before getting excited
(or worried) about this?
CP, Connecticut
It could be a blip; but there is far more reason to
fear Ice than "warm".
==
Global Cooling
Dear Jerry,
With regard to the possibility of global cooling, and
with due respect for Dr. Chapman's analysis, I've examined the data, too,
and it falls well short of demonstrating that the long-term warming trend
has broken.
It's true that the global mean temperature this
January, measured by both satellite- and land-and-ocean-based instruments,
was significantly colder than last January's <http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/
2008/02/11/giss-land-ocean-index-dives-i
n-jan08-matches-trends-for-uah-and-
rss-satellite-data/> , which had been significantly warmer than
any January in at least a century. From one January to the next we've
experienced a fairly dramatic cooling, on the order of 0.7 degrees C. But
when you look beyond the Jan. vs. Jan. comparison, 2007 as a whole turns out
to have been the second-warmest year on record, behind 2005 and in a
statistical tie with 1998. In particular, the temperature data <http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt>
from NASA GISS show that only two months last year were 0.1 C or more colder
than the average for that month this decade, which so far has averaged 0.3 C
warmer than the 1990s. The mean global temperature in 2007 was a full degree
F. warmer than the average for the 1950s through 1970s baseline period,
hardly consistent with the notion of a shift to cooling. If the long-term
warming trend reflected is this data is going to be broken, it will take a
lot more than one cold January--a January that incidentally was still
slightly warmer than the same-month average for 1951-1980--to signal that
we're in a cooling trend, or no longer warming.
At this point the swing from last year's unusually
warm January to this year's cold one--with a warm spring and summer between
them--seems better explained by the current La Niña <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080114085128.htm>
episode than by a quiescent sun and the onset of global cooling.
Best regards, Geoff Styles
My point is that we don't KNOW. Bayesian analysis
would say we ought to spend money in FINDING OUT, not on economic ruin
through pursuing remedies before we are sure what the problem is. The
downside of warming is perhaps serious but also mixed: longer growing
seasons in Alberta trade off against warmer weather in Oklahoma. We don't
have the foggiest what will happen to rain patterns.
But the downside of cooling is ghastly. See Fallen
Angels.
==
Subject: "a clear multi-year trend" --
Jerry,
"Looking at the data sources referenced by the "watts
up with that" blog, it appears that the excitement seems to come from a
noticeable 3 to 4 month decline toward the end of 2007. Giving a lot of
significance to a 4 month trend in fairly noisy data seems unwise. Don't we
really need to see a clear multi-year trend before before getting excited
(or worried) about this?"
He must have missed the second chart on the page,
which shows that the sun has kinda gone into snooze-mode starting October
2005. That's almost 2 1/2 years, which strikes me as "a clear multi-year
trend."
This is from the "Where have all the sunspots gone?"
page:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/where-have-all-the-sunspots-gone/
This is the graph:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/solar-geomagnetic-ap520.png
Ron
And again I say: it is time to FIND OUT, not to
spend money making Gore a billionaire in carbon offsets. The inconvenient
truth is that the science establishment whores after grants and goes along
with what they know is nonsense lest they be cast into outer darkness.
Fascism in academia has always been a temptation, just as Liberalism grew
from war socialism and has always wanted the power of the sword to make the
world a better place: again fascism. The very essence of fascism. Whatever I
do that works is right, and take your tired old constitutions away...
So in science. This is important so we will not
bother with what used to be thought of as scientific method.
============
Subject: Toshiba to build nuclear plants in the US
Dr. Pournelle,
There's not much information in the article, but
apparently Toshiba's looking to build new nuclear power plants here in the
US:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080306/tc_nm/toshiba_nuclear_dc
I do find it rather ironic that the Japanese will
possibly be building the next nuclear for us
Thanks,
Ryan Brown
I can recall when American companies built nuclear
power plants in France and Japan. Now we have exported much of our
manufacturing. We import stuff and sell off the nation in order to buy it.
We have sown the wind.
===========
Subject: Accurate brain model in silicon?
Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making,
biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer? That is the
tagline for this story in Seed magazine. 2,000 heavy-duty processors just to
model one specific section of a brain: a neocortical column in a
two-week-old rat. A neocortical column is the basic computational unit of
the cortex, a discrete circuit of flesh that's 2 mm long and 0.5 mm in
diameter. The gelatinous cortex consists of thousands of these columns—each
with a very precise purpose, like processing the color red or detecting
pressure on a patch of skin, and a basic structure that remains the same,
from mice to men.
I thought we were closer - but HAL will be here by
2020 if you believe these guys.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php?page=all&p=y
In the basement of a university in Lausanne,
Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and
filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they
form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion
operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent.
When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the
continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain.
-- --Dave
When it can tell jokes let me know...
We are certainly headed for super computers
everywhere. Computing power for all.
========
home schooling
Jerry,
Notice in the quoted article, the whole mess was
started by an "appointed Lawyer" for the Children. Who knows what he/she has
in mind other than furthering a career. Did the kids want a lawyer?
Phil Tharp
Many lawyers were well paid to do all this.
Is anyone astonished?
=========
The Dark Market Of 'Murderabilia'.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article
/2008/03/05/AR2008030503640_pf.html >
- Roland Dobbins
=========
Beginnings of a practical H2
economy?
Perhaps a practical means to store hydrogen?
<http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/nalefd/2008/8/i01/html/nl072325k
.html> Link is to full text as well as the abstract.
"Abstract:
To determine if carbon-based materials can
be used for hydrogen storage, we have studied hydrogen chemisorption in
single-walled carbon nanotubes. Using atomic hydrogen as the
hydrogenation agent, we demonstrated that maximal degree of nanotube
hydrogenation depends on the nanotube diameter, and for the diameter
values around 2.0 nm nanotube-hydrogen complexes with close to 100%
hydrogenation exist and are stable at room temperature. This means that
specific carbon nanotubes can have a hydrogen storage capacity of more
than 7 wt % through the formation of reversible C-H bonds."
Also a piece on zdnet. If true, coupled
with nuclear plants...
<http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=847>
"Nanotechnology-based clean hydrogen for cars Posted by Roland
Piquepaille @ 10:03 am
According to EE Times, a California-based
company called QuantumSphere has developed nanoparticles that could make
hydrogen cheaper than gasoline. The company says its reactive catalytic
nanoparticle coatings can boost the efficiency of electrolysis (the
technique that generates hydrogen from water) to 85% today, exceeding
the Department of Energy's goal for 2010 by 10%. The company says its
process could be improved to reach an efficiency of 96% in a few years.
The most interesting part of the story is that the existing gas stations
would not need to be modified to distribute hydrogen. With these
nanoparticle coatings, car owners could to make their own hydrogen,
either in their garage or even when driving....."
Regards,
Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE
Our experience with hydrogen in the DC/X was not
encouraging. The stuff really wants to get out, and it really likes to burn.
I wrote favorably about the hydrogen economy in American Legion Magazine
during the 1970's, and it is an interesting and very clean energy
distribution system, but the operational difficulties at DC/X at least were
far greater than we had expecrted.
Still, it is another string for the energy bow, and
this should be looked into.
==============
Subject: Absence of News
http://www.bookwormroom.com/
2008/03/05/when-the-absence-of-news-is-political/
"What was just as interesting to me as the facts
above was the way in which my friend chose to present the email. He said
"not politics, but good news out of Iraq." I know what he meant, of
course: this is not an email about either the elections or specific
Congressional or Presidential actions (or attempted actions).
Nevertheless, buried in that throwaway line is a deeper truth, which is
the fact that the absence of this factual material is actually highly
political. The American media's decision to withhold this information
isn't just about editorial or business calculations. It comes about,
instead, because the media has made the political decision to back the
anti-War horse. Since that horse is stumbling, the only way the media
can avoid losing the race is to hide the finish line."
I've not checked these claims, but I've known of
positive trends in some of these areas for some time. There is a reason I
went from structuring my day to ensure I could catch the news broadcasts to
never watching them at all. I can simply find better sources of news
elsewhere.
Serving Officer
==========
Francis Hamit on Covers
(and see above)
Your cover is essential and I'm not sure that buying
from those "off the rack" services will help that much.
My cover is finally finished and it took six months.
If you look at the Amazon Shorts cover of "The Shenandoah Spy" you will see
a portrait of Belle Boyd from the National Archives was the source image.
And that works well enough for electronic publishing, which is always a
thumbnail. I disagree with the practice of always putting the author's photo
up. I'm just not that pretty to begin with.
If you look at my travel article "Cruising with
the World Poker Tour Boot Camp" you see only a shot I took on that trip out
a porthole, of the sea. It's lovely, a bit mysterious, and certainly says
"Cruising". It is my best selling Amazon Short, but that may be just because
Poker is hot right now and it links to the World Poker Tour brand in the
title. Those Boot Camps cost several thousand dollars to attend and anyone
contemplating going to one can get a very inexpensive inside look from that
article, which has pictures and an account of a side trip to the Mayan
Ruins.
The book jacket is the "sizzle that sells the steak".
You want something that makes someone pick up the book and look at it, and
then read the copy, and maybe take a look inside at some of the text and
then buy it. I hired a professional illustrator to take that same image and
modernize and glamourize it, making Belle look a little more like a modern
woman, and to reinforce the action theme of the narrative, we put a Colt
Dragoon revolver in her hand. This is not hype. Belle actually carried one
during the time this story is set and it is in the National Archives as
well. (You'll have to read the book for the full story on that.)
Because she had not yet been commissioned as a
Confederate Army Officer, she appears in a style of dress called a
Garibaldi, named after the man who'd led the Italian Revolution a few years
before. It was a popular style. Posture, attitude, and sexuality all had to
be conveyed. Belle was not pretty but she was "hot". Then we got into the
background. Originally it was the "Stars and Bars" flag designed by General
Beauregard, but that has come to be a politically sensitive issue with
racial overtones and I did not want to seem to be advocating for "The Lost
Cause". The narrative here is about a part of American history not much
written about, and it is historical fiction rather than conventional
history, but, at the same time, all of the major characters but one are
based on real people and the storyline closely follows actual events.
Research is continual, and, as part of the final revision, I was reading
Henry Kyd Douglas's memoir "I Rode With Stonewall". (Douglas is one of two
eyewitness accounts of Belle's amazing run across the battlefield at the
Battle of Front Royal to deliver critical intelligence on May 23, 1862. This
is the central event of the novel.)
In there is a reproduction of a map, used during the
Valley Campaign, used by Stonewall Jackson himself, with his pencil marks on
it. I had this scanned and sent it to my designer, who swapped out the old
background and substituted this one. Anything that old is in the Public
Domain. Then we got to the typography, and the logos for Brass Cannon Books,
my new imprint. The final result is spectacular! David Martin is the
illustrator. He is an artist who lives in New Mexico and who we met at the
science fiction convention in Albuquerque last year. The designer is George
Mattingly, who has his own design firm in Berkeley, California and is
someone I've know a very long time; an old friend from my Iowa City days. I
guess I acted as Art Director since it was all work for hire. My total cost
is about $2,000. That raises my breakeven point for these editions quite a
bit, but I'm betting that it will produce enough additional sales to more
than make up for the additional investment. I was at a meeting last night
where I showed one of the cover cards I had made up yesterday at FedEx
Kinkos (you can do this from your home computer). These cost me about $1.50
each, but I ended up signing and giving away two or three of them to promote
good will for the book. Found out I can also get a 24 by 36 inch poster made
there and mounted on foamcore for $90.00, which will be handy for book
signings.
So think very carefully about that cover. What do you
want it to say? How will it make potential buyers pick up and look at the
book? If you can get them to actually pick up the book, you are halfway to
selling the book. Physical actions breed commitment. The cover is as
important as the text itself in generating sales.
They did a study on wine labels recently. Those with
public domain images of famous paintings outsell those with plain type
labels, regardless of price or the quality of the wine. An interesting
lesson. You can probably find public domain art that expresses the theme of
your book and use that as the basis for your cover.
Francis Hamit
===========
Continuing the Global
Cooling discussion
Subject: cooling
Dear Dr. Pournelle, Like many it seems, I've used your
site for free too long. I sent in a subscription just now and feel better
already about reading your site.
I'm on a field trip and have had some time to
catch up with your site and have noted two things in particular I wished to
add: first, I'm glad to hear that the zapping seems to be helping and wish
your continued recovery. I think your description of your illness and
treatment is both brave and fair (it's amazing how reports of medical care
always seem to be either that the docs are miracle workers or that they're
evil and ruined the life of the writer; it's nice to see reports that are
grateful for the help received but acknowledge that the docs aren't perfect
or all powerful).
Second, I'm intrigued by the global cooling
discussion. The ground certainly seems to be shifting under the debate,
doesn't it? I recall you often saying we need more (and better) data and I
agree entirely. I would argue, however, that Dr. Chapman is taking an
extreme view of a short trend, much in the way the warming crowd does
(perhaps this is intentional, I don't know). Certainly, an ice age with mile
thick ice over North America is possible (and will likely happen someday),
but it seems much more likely that what we'd be in for would be on the lines
of the Maunder Minimum. This would certainly cause a change in lifestyles,
but it wouldn't be a disaster of biblical proportion. I could certainly do
with snow when I'm at my in-laws for Christmas in upstate New York. And, of
course, it could just be a fluctuation in a never ending chaotic variation.
Really, that is the point, isn't it? We simply don't understand the climate
nearly as well as we'd like (and some think we do).
Again, best wishes on your recovery and thanks for the
great site. It's a pleasure to read.
-Paul
PS
I just re-read Dr. Chapman's note and it's fairly
clear he was extrapolating this short trend to a longer trend and then doing
a what-if. I'd like to just state that I can see he's not trying to be
alarmist, just making some interesting hypothetical observations.
-- Paul Jones
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry
Wake Forest University
We do know that England went from deciduous trees
to a hundred feet of ice in under 100 years back at the last Ice Age. I
agree entirely that the likelihood is higher for a Little Ice Age, but if
you read the histories of that era you will find that it was no fun: ice and
cold and short growing seasons are very hard on everyone.
But as I have said often, the important thing is to
find out what is happening. Spend what it takes to find out, not to build a
fascist consensus among people pretending to be scientists. What is the
solar output doing? That is going to be a far more important driver than
CO2, and anyone rational knows this.
Paying tribute to the carbon offset people does
nothing for the environment.
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