xpda

Bob's Junkmail, #222

2011-12-16T10:26:00.000-06:00

Big Data

In 1980, IBM introduced the world's first gigabyte hard drive. It weighed 550 lbs and cost $40,000. Today you can get a 500 gigabyte drive weighing a few ounces for less than $100, even after theflood in Thailand....

In the late 1970's I took a course in Data Communications. One anecdote from the class was about a bank that had to transmit a huge amount of data (several megabytes) to and from Alaska on a daily basis.

Today you can download a megabyte in a few seconds on a DSL. With a commercial internet connection you can download a megabyte in a fraction of a second. In the 1970's it was a few thousand times slower, a lot more expensive, and much less reliable. You had to pay the phone company for a leased line, from one point to another, and there were a lot of data errors because the communications line had a lot of noise, echoes, lag, and gremlins. On top of that, the equipment on both ends could only handle a limited bandwidth.

It turned out that it was more efficient for the bank to put the data on computer tapes (20 megabytes capacity) and ship it overnight. This was really expensive (FedEx went public in 1978), but it was cheaper more reliable than the leased line.

Things have changed in the past 40 years. Or have they? When the amount of data grows as fast as the technology, you have the same problem.

BGI is the world's largest genomics research institute. They have 167 DNA sequencers that produce the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day. There was an article in the New York Times about BGI and how they have to ship their data on hard drives by FedEx because there's so much of it.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/business/dna-sequenci...

But when you check the numbers, it looks like it should be feasible for them to upload the data.

The human genome has about 2.9 billion base pairs, which can be stored 4 base pairs per byte, so about 725 megabytes, uncompressed, and less than 10 megabytes compressed. It seems like the largest genomics research institute in the world should be able to upload 17 gigabytes per day. Upperspace has the bandwidth to upload 540 gigabytes per day.

Maybe they transmit the original images rather than the base pair information. Or maybe it's just cheaper for them to FedEx hard drives for large amounts of data. Or maybe there is a lot more information in the genome data they generate than the base pairs. Or maybe I misplaced a decimal point. Or all of the above.

The article says, "One near victim of the data explosion has been a federal online archive of raw sequencing data. The amount stored has more than tripled just since the beginning of the year, reaching 300 trillion DNA bases and taking up nearly 700 trillion bytes of computer memory."

700 trillion is a huge number. It has 14 zeros. 700,000,000,000,000. If you count up to 700 trillion at four numbers per second (which is tough when you get to a billion), it will take you over 5 million years.

But data sets of that size are not uncommon. A trillion bytes is a terabyte. You can buy 2 terabyte drives for your computer, and they're not too expensive. Two years ago, Google processed data at a rate of 24,000 terabytes every day. You can set up 700 terabytes on Amazon Web Services relatively cheaply.

IBM is once again building the world's largest data "drive". It's actually a collection of drives. About 120,000 1-terabyte drives. This drive will hold 120 petabytes. One petabyte is 1000 terabytes, or one thousand trillion bytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That is a lot of zeros and ones.

      http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38440/

This is being built for "an unnamed client that needs a new supercomputer for detailed simulations of real-world phenomena."

Another use for massive data storage is gathering all the internet communications in a country.

      http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203611404...

Internet communications gathering equipment used is governments around the world without individual privacy concerns, which includes just about all of them. Prominent intelligence agencies from the United States, China, Russia, Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, and a host of other countries intercept and save the internet communications of their loyal citizens.

      http://arstechnica.com/news/2011/12/gallery-how-the-sur...

Whether you're planning to start a new country or secede from an old one, you can get your hacking and eavesdropping hardware and software here:

      http://projects.wsj.com/surveillance-catalog/#/

Bad Astronomy

Phil Plait is the Bad Astronomer. He currently writes an excellent blog for the Discover Magazine site, (and maybe the magazine too). He has also written a book or two and has even been known to read Junkmail on occasions of extreme boredom or moments of mental incontinence.

      http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

Here's a good interview from Slashdot:

      http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/11/11/14/0657203/b...

... and a good TEDx talk:

      http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/...

Three things got me sidetracks on Phil Plait. First, Venus is crossing between the Earth and the Sun next June. Don't miss it! Delay your trip to Mars!

      http://www.transitofvenus.org/

Second, here are some cool moon pictures:

      http://www.pixheaven.net/galerie.php?id=22

Third, check out the Heavens Above site. This is a pretty cool web site. You can tell it where and when you are, then it will tell you what's in the sky and when which satellites will be flying across.

      http://www.heavens-above.com/

For example, the unmanned space shuttle X-37B will be visible from Pryor, Oklahoma on December 19, 20, and 21.

      http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=373...

You can see the errant Russian satellite Phobos Grunt on the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th at Key West.

      http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/11/russias-pho...

      http://en.ria.ru/science/20111213/170212896.html

There are also some good apps for smart phones -- you can "shine" your phone at the sky, and it will show you what's up there in your field of view. Since my phone is dumb, you'll have to find them on your own. Or ask any of my toddlers what's available.

Here is a nice composite made up of 1300 images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter'swide angle camera, taken about a year ago. It is one of the most detailed images of the moon ever made, better than images from Hubble and earth-based telescopes.

Here's the 266 megabyte 24,000x24,000 version:  wac_nearside.png...  You may have some trouble reading and printing this with 32-bit Windows.

It's even more detailed than this one:

      http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/...

History Channel

The History Channel began life in 1995 by airing historical documentaries. Sometime since then they've transformed into a clone of CNN, Discovery, MTV, and other "information" channels, with programming like "Ancient Aliens" and "Ice Road Truckers." This prompts just a slight bit of skepticism with some cynics.

John Stewart on the Daily Show (or more likely, his staff) recently made the mistake of trusting the History Channel. Stewart claimed that Congress met on Christmas Day most of their first 68 sessions, which was claimed as an undisputed fact on the History Channel. He has since learned two things about this.

First, Congress only met twice on Christmas Day in their first 68 sessions (the House did once and the Senate did once). Second, instead of trusting the History Channel, you should get your information from a reliable source such as the internet, where everything is true.

http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2011/...

How to Fix Windows 7

Windows 7 is a prime example of the "condescending user interface."

http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/9/2616204/the-condescen...

There are a lot of things in Windows 7 that I find irritating. I have let some of these go for a year or two, but I have finally decided that several Windows 7 "features" have no redeeming social and should be banned from the planet, beginning with my computer. Here are some Windows 7 customizations I have made:

1. In Windows Explorer, if you click on the CD drive while it's empty, displays a message asking for a disk, which might be OK, but it also opens the drive door. And then I have to close it. This is quite rude and I do not like it.

The Solution: Disable Windows CD burning in the drive, using either a registry change or the group policy editor if you have one.

      http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/5942-burning-cd-dv...

This has the additional benefit of getting rid of the desktop.ini that's always waiting to be written onto any disk that happens to be in your drive. You can still use CD burning applications.

2. In Windows XP, there was an icon of couple displays down in the lower right part of the screen that flashed whenever there was internet activity. With those I could tell when some misbehaving software was trying to access the internet without my knowledge, such as Adobe trying to upgrade some utility I have never used. These flashing tubes are missing on Windows 7, but now I've found them. They're here:

      http://www.itsamples.com/network-activity-indicator.html

3. Quick tip: Press Alt-D to jump to the address bar of a browser or Windows Explorer.

4. Classic Explorer Shell is really nice for fixing most of the dumb things Microsoft did to Windows Explorer. And it is configurable, in case you are demented enough to like some of those dumb things. Here are some handy things you can change with Classic Explorer Shell:

Disable Breadcrumbs -- This leaves the file path (such as "D:\junk222\test") in the title bar instead of some odd names with triangles.

Navigation Pane -- The Navigation Pane is the sidebar on the left of Windows Explorer. You can set it like XP was, with the vertical dotted lines. It's not as pretty, but it's a lot quicker to understand at a glance. (To help with this, I also name my hard drives "-" to make it easier to see the letters.)

Copying Files -- In Windows 7 when you copy files, there is a large dialog with too little information unless you click "show more details". You can default to "show more details" with Classic Explorer Shell.

File Overwrite -- When you are copying files with Windows 7 over existing files, a dialog box comes up with big pictures and a bunch of text, and no easy way to make the selection with the keyboard. Classic Explorer Shell lets you replace this with the XP style that is clear, concise, and works with a single shortcut key.

Classic Explorer Shell also comes with Classic Start Menu, which allows multiple columns in the Programs menu. This is important for me because I have so much stuff installed that it doesn't fit in a single column and it's too slow to scroll down to find a program with the original Windows 7 Start Menu.

5. You can turn off the Details Pane and the Preview Pane in Windows Explorer using the Organize button in the Command Bar (that menu that's under the regular menu). After you do this, you can disable the Command Bar itself. This is handy on a laptop that doesn't have a lot of screen height to waste. The settings for the Details Pane and Preview Pane disappear along with the Command Bar, so you can either replace it temporarily or use the registry if you want to change these after you remove the Command Bar. Here are details on all this:

      http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/65416-window-explo...

6. Over the past several iterations of Windows, Office, and Firefox, it has become increasingly difficult to paste something from a document or web page into another document, because it inevitably arrives in some crazy or at least incompatible format. Microsoft once again thinks they know what I want when they don't. All I want to do is copy some text and paste it into another application.

There is a way to paste text only in Office, but it takes a some mouse clicks every time you paste. There should be an option to do this automatically. Until then, I have started using Pure Text. With that you can hit Command-V instead of Control-V to paste plain text.

      http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

      http://download.cnet.com/PureText/3000-2384_4-10069166.html

Download.com has been adding some toolbars and other crapware into applications' installation files, so be careful when you install something from download.com. You're liable to end up with half a dozen toolbars in your browser and a default search engine you've never heard of.

      https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/cnet-apologizes-nmap...

SevenForums.com is the best site I've come across for Windows 7 information. You can search for information, ask questions, and read tutorials.

Carrier IQ

Once upon a time last month, a guy named Trevor had a smartphone. Trevor noticed that there was an app on his phone called Carrier IQ, and it was recording button presses, search queries, and the contents of text messages. He also noticed that there was no way to shut down this unwelcome "feature" of his new HTC Evo Android phone.

Trevor posted this information on his web site, and included some manuals that were available on Carrier IQ's web site.

      http://androidsecuritytest.com/features/logs-and-servic...

Carrier IQ did not like this publicity one bit. They responded with a Cease and Desist order, claiming Trevor was in breach of copyright law and could face damages of $150,000. Carrier IQ also removed its manuals from its own website.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/mobile-...

When this happened, Trevor naturally became an instant hit on the internet, and people figured out that Trevor was right, and Carrier IQ was logging data on millions of cell phones.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T17XQI_AYNo

After all the adverse publicity, Carrier IQ said, "Oops, we apologize, and by the way, we don't record you keystrokes."

      http://www.carrieriq.com/company/PR.EckhartStatement.pdf

Since then, aside from a couple of class action lawsuits against Carrier IQ and cell service providers, things have died down. For a while, anyway.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/carrier...

A guy named Michael used muckrock.com to issue a Freedom of Information Request to the FBI for "any manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ."

The FBI responded, saying they could not comply with the request because they were currently using this information in investigations.

      http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/united-states-of-ameri...

I guess this identifies one place Carrier IQ is sending data from your smartphone.

I really don't think the FBI is recording everybody's cell phone usage, but they can if they want. Some people are pretty wound up about it. I can understand why. It was not too many years ago that they used to jail FBI agents and other police officers for illegal wiretapping. Now it seems like that's just business as usual, and not many people mind.

      http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/12/12/fb...

      http://boingboing.net/2011/12/12/fbi-says-it-uses-carri...

FBI boss Robert said, "The phony emergency text messages instructing thousands of cell phone users in New Jersey to 'take cover immediately' was not issued as a distraction, and had nothing to do with Carrier IQ. It was merely a natural byproduct of gross incompetence and overfunding of the Department of Homeland Security." Or maybe I just made that up. It's hard to tell sometimes.

      http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-716589

I am happy I don't have to worry about that sort of thing. I don't read my text messages very often, and any fake emergency will be long forgotten before I get the message.

Speaking of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was chastised by Congress last Spring for not taking it seriously, and making public relations a major consideration when deciding whether to release information as required by law.

The Secretary’s political staff views FOIA through the prism of politics. Public relations
were a major consideration when the political staff considered how to handle significant FOIA responses. It comes as no surprise that the involvement of political staff lacking a sophisticated understanding of the statute led to a dysfunctional FOIA response process.

The Secretary’s political staff failed to recognize that they are servants of the public. They are entrusted to place the interests of the American people ahead of their own. In the case of FOIA, political appointees were more concerned with protecting themselves from embarrassment than running an effective disclosure program. The extent of the mismanagement of the FOIA function at DHS calls into question the competence and commitment of high-level staff charged with protecting the homeland from serious threats.

During this Administration, the significant FOIA response process evolved from a weekly report of significant FOIA activity to an approval process that caused delays and confusion. This is not what the President envisioned when he proclaimed on his first day in office the arrival of a new era of openness and transparency.

Here is the report....

The Budget Deficit is Solved!

It is clear that the budget deficit problems are over, and the economy is not only on the mend, but booming. State and federal governments are spending like there's no tomorrow!

The state of Virginia will share the cost of your burial in space.

      http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-sp...

I am trying to get them to buy me a trip to space before it's time for my burial, but they haven't come through yet.

From Slashdot...: "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version; and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has so much money that they're fighting the war on terrorism with snow cone machines.

      http://gawker.com/5865847/11700-worth-of-snow-cone-mach...

The U.S. government is buying 1.7 million doses of a new vaccine for Smallpox, which was eradicated 42 years ago, for the low, low price of $255 per dose. It is being purchased in a no-bid sole-source contract from a company owned by a big political donor.

      http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/17/2228251/the-...

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is paying police officers more than $200,000 per year to guard the George Washington Bridge.

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/port-authority-p...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (yes, I know I already did them, but they're big.) bought the LA suburb of Glendale a Bearcat armored vehicle, complete with a turret. This is not such a big deal, as it only cost $205,000 and Glendale doesn't have any big bridges to guard, but Homeland Security has bought hundreds of these things for local police departments across the country.

      http://www.americablog.com/2011/08/la-times-on-75-billi...

Speaking of Homeland Security, they've got a record high 2012 budget of $57 billion, $47 billion of which is discretionary funds. Some of the Homeland Security projects are so bad that I would pay the money not to do the projects.

      budget-bib-fy2012-overview.pdf...

Federal, state, and local governments are spending $75 billion a year on domestic "security," in addition to normal police protection. I would feel much more secure without all that domestic security.

      http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/28/nation/la-na-91...

In 2005, and I assume since then, as the percentages have been growing year to year, more than half the Department of Homeland Security's spending on contracts were for no-bid and other forms of non-competitive contracts. There won't be any corrupt deals, though, despite billions of dollars changing hands. This is Homeland Security.

      http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politic...

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/09/september-11-h...

Ceres

The dwarf planet Ceres wanders around the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, about 2.5 or 3 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. It's about 590 miles in diameter. This Hubble photo is a little blurry. Maybe I should volunteer to go take some better pictures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_%28dwarf_planet%29

LightSquared and GPS

LightSquared has proposed using a radio band next to the GPS band for high-speed mobile Internet service, using 40,000 base stations. The frequency band LightSquared wants to use has been reserved for satellite communications.

GPS satellites weigh 2000 lbs, but they transmit at only 50 watts or less. 50 watts is a decent signal if you're within a mile or two of the transmitter, but GPS satellites are 12,000 miles above the earth. Since the signal received is inversely proportional to the distance squared, the GPS receivers get a really weak signal, and so they have to be very, very sensitive. Like me.

http://www8.garmin.com/aboutGPS/

Each of LightSquared's 40,000 base stations will transmit 1,500 watts, and they will be a whole lot closer to GPS receivers than 12,000 miles. As a result, they are likely to interfere with GPS receivers.

In fact, they are very likely to interfere. The government ran some tests, and the results were leaked, but not on a radio frequency. LightSquared's system interfered with 75% of the GPS receivers that were examined.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-09/falcone-s-l...

LightSquared responded to the tests, saying, "Liar, liar, pants on fire!" and promised to reverse the study's findings with campaign contributions.

Fun with Copyrights

About a year ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security got into business of seizing domain names for copyright violations, to make us safe and to protect us from interstellar aliens.

      http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2010/12/02/u-s-get...

Some of the sites protested.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/media/20musi...

One of the 82 domains seized in the batch of December 2010 was the blog site dajaz1.com.

It's no longer a blog, apparently. After Homeland Security seized it, they never prosecuted, filed charges, or even notified the blog owner, who has records showing the music in question was given to him by the artists, or his attorney.

Homeland Security says they had several court hearings and postponements. However, dajaz's attorney never received any notice. When he asked about it, he was told that the court records were all sealed (national security, I assume), and that he'd just have to trust Homeland Security.

Finally, the domain was released and dajaz was not prosecuted because there was no "probable cause" of breaking the law or copyright infringement. Some people claim that the recording industry and Homeland Security managed to censor the site for a year without due process of law. It's garnered quite a lot of attention lately.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/b...

      http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57339569-281/dhs-abru...

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/senator...

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/12500917012/r...

The site torrent-finder.com is still being held by the Department of Justice. They have not filed any charges and there has been no actual court process, but they have effectively killed the site by keeping it offline for a year. Department of Justice officials apparently have a problem with the way the search engine operates.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111212/17023317058/j...

Undeterred, the Department of Homeland Security seized another 132 web domains last month.

      http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/26/1453227/us-govt-...

Former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now the head of the MPAA, said that if China can censor the internet, then the U.S. should have no problem with it. It seems like some of the McCarthy-ites used to call the movie industry a band of communists, but that might have been a different issue.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/14521817014/m...

Chris Dodd did not comment on Thailand, where the government warned Facebook users they could face 3 to 15 years in jail if they press ''share'' or ''like'' on images or articles considered unflattering to the Thai monarchy.

      http://www.smh.com.au/world/thai-crackdown-on-facebook-...

The Bush and Obama administrations both considered this policy, but were unable to find any photos or articles that were not unflattering.

Chris Dodd is using the integrity and honor of a former U.S. Senator to get SOPA passed.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/04100017081/c...

Meanwhile, the European Union issued a statement against U.S. domain seizures and censorship of the internet, stressing "the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names."

      http://activepolitic.com:82/News/2011-11-17b/EU_Adopts_...

A Spanish sports site accused of linking to streams of sporting events claimed the seizure of their site RojaDirecta.com constitutes prior restraint of speech, and the case was dismissed. The U.S. Government will probably re-file, since Homeland Security is still using RojaDirecta.com for their own advertisement.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/spanish...

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1647 allows someone who notices their copyrighted work on the web without permission to issue a "takedown order." The offending web site, such as YouTube, notifies the poster and takes down the offending content. Then the poster can appeal, and YouTube can re-instate it.

As you might guess, it is illegal to issue false takedown notices. Otherwise, people like me would demand that all lousy songs and videos be removed from the internet. I mean, just think of all the wasted bits!

The big music companies send out a lot of takedown notices for YouTube and other sites. Most of these are legitimate, some are questionable, and some are just plain wrong.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/warner-...

MegaUpload is a site used to store and exchange files.

      http://www.megaupload.com/

A lot of people use it for sharing software and music. Sometimes there may be copyright violations. I haven't tried it. The founder of the site, Kim Dotcom, does not have a stellar reputation. The RIAA and MPAA do not like MegaUpload.com, but some of their artists do.

P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige , Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather, and Jamie Foxx made a song about how great MegaUpload is, and it was uploaded to YouTube with their authorized written permission.

I'm not really a fan of these people, but they are pretty popular. Their MegaUpload song got to be very popular very quickly on YouTube. So Universal Music issued a takedown notice to YouTube, claiming falsely that they owned the copyright to this song. YouTube removed the video.

Then MegaUpload appealed and got the song re-posted. And then Universal Music issued another false takedown notice and got the song removed. They lied about owning the copyright to the song twice! The song is back online now.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCkI5I8vsBg

It's not a great song, but I consider it very bad manners for Universal Music to take down songs that they don't own, even if they don't like the music. (This would naturally be OK if I don't like the music.) The people who prosecute this sort of thing don't seem to mind when a major record label does it.

      http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-label-artists-a-list-stars...

      http://torrentfreak.com/universal-censors-megaupload-so...

In Germany, a copyright troll sent out about 70,000 letters demanding money from people who supposedly downloaded music without permission, averaging around 1200 Euros ($1,600) each, a total of €90 million ($120 million). Instead of suing and forcing collections, they are auctioning off the 70,000 claims to the highest bidder.

      http://torrentfreak.com/copyright-trolls-auction-off-e9...

There is a new Russian web site that tracks about 20 percent of all bittorrent downloads, recording the IP address and the files downloaded. You can display the files downloaded from your own IP address or an IP address that you enter.

      http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/

It turns out that people at Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment, and NBC Universal have been pirating copyrighted content. They probably won't get sued.

      http://torrentfreak.com/busted-bittorrent-pirates-at-so...

Statistical Evidence

Correlation equals causation?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/correlation-or-cau...

TSA Fan Mail

The Transportation Security Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was criticized in a Congressional Report... for being incompetent and ineffective. Here are some highlights.

With more than 65,000 employees, TSA is larger than the Departments of Labor, Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and State, combined. TSA is a top-heavy bureaucracy with 3,986 headquarters personnel and 9,656 administrative staff in the field.

Since 2001, TSA staff has grown from 16,500 to over 65,000, a near-400% increase. In the same amount of time, total passenger enplanements in the U.S. have increased less than 12%.

Since 2002, TSA procured six contracts to hire and train more than 137,000 staff, for a total of more than $2.4 billion, at a rate of more than $17,500 per hire. More employees have left TSA than are currently employed at the agency.

On average, there are 30 TSA administrative personnel-21 administrative field staff and nine headquarters staff-for each of the 457 airports where TSA operates.

TSA‘s behavior detection program, Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), costs a quarter of a billion dollars to operate annually, employing almost 3,000 behavior detection officer full-time equivalents (FTEs). TSA has invested more than $800 million in this program since 2007, and it will require more than $1.2 billion more over the next five years. In spite of this costly program, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that 17 known terrorists traveled on 24 different occasions through security at eight airports where TSA operated this program. In fact, GAO found that not one terrorist had been caught by the SPOT program, and the program has not been scientifically validated.

TSA wasted $39 million to procure 207 Explosive Trace Detection Portals, but deployed only 101 because the machines could not consistently detect explosives in an operational environment. After lengthy and costly storage, TSA recently paid the Department of Defense $600 per unit to dispose of the useless machines.

TSA deployed 500 Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) devices in a haphazard and easily-thwarted manner at a total cost of more than $122 million. By 2013, TSA estimates that the total cost to taxpayers for AIT deployment will reach almost half-a-billion dollars. In 2010, GAO examined the AIT devices and found that ―it remains unclear whether the AIT would have detected the weapon used in the December 2009 [Underwear Bomber] incident.‖ While TSA continues to use AIT machines, the effectiveness of these devices in detecting explosives is still under review and remains questionable.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/09/2127231/tsa-fac...

The TSA prevented a 17-year old girl from blowing up a plane with her purse that had a miniature, metallic gun design on it.

http://www.news4jax.com/news/Teen-stopped-at-airport-fo...

Habeas Corpulent

The U.S. Government has decided that terrorism suspects can be detained forever, or at least as long as they are alive, without trial or charges, except for U.S. citizens inside the U.S.

License Plate Readers

They're here! I've wondered for a few years why they didn't use all the traffic cameras scattered around to track cars driven by bank robbers, file sharers, and other criminals. I don't know that I'm in favor of it, but the equipment and technology is readily available, so I figured somebody would be using it.

They areusing it now, in some cities such as Washington DC. That's scary, because I drove my own car there a few months ago. I hope they didn't record all those creative driving maneuvers.

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/license-plate-reade...

They also have portable cameras that beep whenever a police car meets a car with a flagged license tag. Maybe I should pay some outstanding parking tickets around the country before I wash my car. It's a little too dirty to read the tag at the moment.

      http://www.policeone.com/police-products/traffic-enforc...

I am afraid video cameras are here to stay, recording criminals, police, and even university chancellors. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not, but the ubiquitous vidcam is not going away.

      http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/uc-davis-official...

There are even eyes in the sky, and there are more on the way.

      http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/20168...

Road Signs

If I was into illegal activity, I might be tempted to customize some road sign messages. Some electronic road signs are absolutely necessary from a safety standpoint, but some of them ("report suspicious activity" or "warning, bright sunlight ahead") could stand some modification. In my opinion. If it were legal.

Money

An economics lesson.

http://xkcd.com/980/

Here's a large png:

NFL Views

I am not much of a football fan, so maybe everybody but me already knows this: The NFL actively refuses to air any camera shots of all 22 players on the field during a play. That seems strange, but then the NFL doesn't always seem normal to me. Or the fans.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203716204...

Cyber War

There is no such thing as CyberWar. But there are a lot of computers with weak security connected to the internet, and there are cyber attacks. If there ever is a real war between major countries, there will be a lot of hacking and cyber attacks going both ways, at least until nuclear weapons destroy the internet.

Last month there was big news about a water plant control system that was brought down by international hackers. It made national TV, newspapers, and web sites everywhere.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/hackers-destro...

But the problem with the water plant was a bad pump that had been malfunctioning for years. The problem with the news media could get us into a war over imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/w...

Spotify

Spotify is a pretty good program you can use to listen to most songs, free. If you pay them a little bit you get more access and no ads.

You can get some very fine music on Spotify, such as Na Pomoč by Skuter, Talking Fishing Blues by Woody Guthrie, and Fish On by Primus. You can also get music that people other than me like. I have heard that you can capture the music files as they are played, but that might be unethical. I haven't used Rhapsody so it may be just as good.

Here's how Spotify works:

http://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-...

Job Hunting

Career tip: Blackmail rarely gets you hired.

http://www.securityweek.com/hungarian-man-pleads-guilty...

Palantir

This is an interesting company. I am surprised it's not more controversial. It sounds amazingly like the Total Information Awareness system that was killed off by Congress several years ago, but persistently reappears under new names.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/palantir-the-vangu...

Duqu

The Duqu virus is a relative of the Stuxnet virus that damaged the uranium centrifuges in Iran a few months ago. Duqu probably had some or all the same developers as Stuxnet.

When people started investigating Duqu, the people running Duqu shut down all their Command and Control servers, some of which had been running since 2009. Maybe they got worried. (The Command and Control servers are just ordinary infected systems used by the virus people to control other infected computers.)

https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/duqu-attackers-wiped...

Judy and the Retrovirus

In 2006, a group of researchers announced that a retrovirus called XMRV was responsible for prostate cancer in mice. But the results could not be reproduced in other labs. Then they announced that XMRV was responsible for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). One author of the XMRV/CFS paper named Judy landed a position as research director of a private foundation dedicated to CFS.

The relationship of the virus with CFS and prostate cancer never panned out. Judy, however, was not willing to let facts get in the way of her career. Here is the story -- it's pretty good:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/11/how-the-col...

Sulfur Dioxide

Sulfur Dioxide is a gas that turns into Sulfuric Acid when it dissolves in water. When high sulfur coal is burned in a power plant without scrubbers, it gives off a lot of sulfur dioxide. This was a major source of the controversial "acid rain."

Some antipollution measures were implemented a several years ago limiting sulfur output by power plants. Since 2005, levels have dropped more than 40 percent in one problem area including parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76571

FBI Terrorism Plots

Did you ever notice that when the FBI announces the arrest of someone for a terrorism plot, the "terrorists" were working with undercover FBI agents? Some people consider this entrapment, claiming that there would be no terrorist plots without the FBI. I suppose it depends on how far the FBI goes to hatch the plot.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapm...

I am very happy that the FBI or some such organization has plenty of undercover agents willing to buy any plutonium that comes up for sale on the Russian black market.

American in Color from 1939 to 1943

Since the Denver Post has gotten rid of Righthaven and the boss who hired them, I can link to their site again. This page has some good color pictures from 1939 to 1943. I usually think about that period in black and white, even though I know better.

http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

RQ-170 Sentinel

I am hoping to buy one of these on eBay for Christmas. I heard there might be one available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentinel

Chinese Economy

China's economy is booming, but China has a long way to go before it catches up with the U.S. or Europe in terms of personal wealth. They are on the right track, but it makes no sense to encourage the U.S. to emulate China when they are so far behind, and Chinese workers get paid so little.

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=12171

Today's History Lesson

In 1916, German agents blew up a major ammunition depot on Black Tom Island, off the coast of Jersey City near the Statue of Liberty.

The explosion was as powerful as a 5.0 or 5.5 earthquake. Thousands of windows were shattered in Manhattan, including some in Times Square. The outer wall of Jersey City's City Hall was cracked and the Brooklyn Bridge was shaken.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion

In 1919, a huge tank of molasses ruptured in Boston, and a giant wave of molasses flooded the streets. 21 people were killed and 150 were injured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster

In 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain erupted in Logan County, West Virginia. Between 10,000 and 15,000 coal miners confronted an army of police and strike breakers in a week-long battle over forming a labor union.

They estimate that a million shots were fired, but only about 100 people were killed. I guess either the one million rounds figure was exaggerated, or those people were exceptionally bad shots.

At one point, a mining company hired planes to drop gas bombs (probably mustard gas or nerve gas) and explosive bombs left over from World War I on the strikers.General Billy Mitchell ordered Army bombers from Maryland to be used for aerial surveillance against the miners.

After the battle, 985 of the miners were arrested, and UMW membership dropped from 50,000 to 10,000 over the next several years.

A bomb dropped on the miners

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

The Kettering Bug was an unmanned aerial torpedo developed in 1918. It was tested but never used in combat. The Kettering Bug was the forerunner of today's cruise missiles and UAVs.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_Bug

Here is an 1889 New York Times article about the Oklahoma Land Run:

      http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0...

Here is a map of slaves as a percent of population by county in 1860. I didn't realize there were so many slaves in the South.

Warning: hi-resolution, 26 megbytes.

2TB Flash Drives in 2 Years

Intel and Micron have a join venture and have produced a die that should make 2 terabyte SSDs available in 2013.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/worlds-fir...

Adobe Deblurring

Adobe had a big presentation promoting a new deblur feature in Photoshop.

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2011/10/behind-a...

However, the photos they were deblurring in the demonstration had been algorithmicly blurred, making the deblurring a lot easier.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2011/10/18/adobeclarifies

Adobe Flash Vulnerability

InteVyDis, a Russian firm specializing in packaging software security exploits, is offering one for sale that can give a remote computer access to an up-to-date Windows 7 machine running the most recent version of Adobe Flash Player 11.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/another-ad...

That should encourage people to move to html 5.

ATM Skimmer

Here's a nice card "skimmer" that fits over an ATM slot and copies your ATM card's data as you slide it through the slot. It even has a tiny camera built-in to video your PIN when you enter it. It was made on a 3D printer.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/12/pro-grade-3d-printe...

Buying Laws

Two senior aids who helped write the ill-fated (hopefully) SOPA bill have taken jobs as lobbyists in the entertainment industry. The new high-paying positions were in no way rewards for doing political favors for the entertainment industry while they were employed by Congress. You can ask them if you don't believe me.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70149.html

Diploma Frame Dot Com

My two elder toddlers made a web site for a diploma frame company, Church Hill Classics.

      http://www.diplomaframe.com/

It's really sophisticated, with inventory management, multiple stores, lots of reports for the company, customization, and CONTESTS. You could win a $1000 scholarship! Well, you could if you're going to college in the U.S. next year. Enter here:

      http://www.diplomaframe.com/contests/frame-my-future-sc...

Here are the finalists from last year. They're good.

      http://www.diplomaframe.com/contests/frame-my-future-sc...

Michael Stern Hart (1947-2011)

Michael Hart, founder of the Gutenberg Project and inventor of the eBook, died last September.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/michael...

In 1971, Michael Hart typed in the Declaration of Independence on a computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He made it available to all the computer users. After that, he entered the Bill of Rights, and then the entire U.S. Constitution.

He kept it up, founding Project Gutenberg which today has more than 36,000 free books and publications. That doesn't sound like a huge number when I've been nattering on about petabytes, but it is more books than I'll read in my life.

The same file of the Declaration of Independence, no doubt through many iterations, is still available as Gutenberg Press EBook #1, December 1971:

      http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1/pg1.txt

I started getting e-books from Project Gutenberg long before there was an internet. I ordered them on 5.25" floppy, 3.5" floppy, and downloaded them on a 300-baud modem from BBS systems. I noticed the term "sysop" on the Gutenberg site just now, something I haven't seen for a while.

I have made a few contributions to Project Gutenberg over the years, the latest being the Journals of Lewis and Clark.

      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8419

I exchanged emails with Michael Hart a few times, and he was a recipient of Junkmail (though I'm not sure whether he actually read it.)

Project Gutenberg eBooks are available now in several formats, including the Kindle .mobi format. Maybe I'll have to figure out how to copy files from a PC to my Kindle.

Here are the top 100 eBooks on Project Gutenberg (yesterday, past week, titles, authors, etc.). There are some good books there.

      http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top

ICEX, the Connecticut, and Classified Information

U.S. Navy submarine forces have conducted exercises in the Arctic every two or three years since the USS Skate surfaced through the ice at the North Pole in March 1959.

This year the USS New Hampshire and the USS Connecticut participated in ICEX, north of Prudhoe Bay.

http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=59112

Here are some blog entries on the exercises. This is the Navy's official blog, and the entries are like press releases, but it's still pretty interesting.

http://navylive.dodlive.mil/index.php/tag/icex/page/2/

The USS Connecticut 160 miles north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, about 73N 147W.

They didn't just pick a random spot to bust through the ice. There was a team that selected and prepared the area, and cleared the ice of the hatches of the submarine. I guess this isn't absolutely necessary, but it cuts the risk of damage.

      http://navylive.dodlive.mil/index.php/2011/03/24/the-ma...

The Secretary of the Navy, Chief of Naval Research, Lieutenant Governor of Alaska, and a few others visited the ICEX Ice Camp.

While the USS Connecticut was tooling around under the ice, its commander Michael was being investigated for mishandling classified information and then lying about it. He used a portable hard drive in Afghanistan in 2006-2007, and ended up with some classified documents on his Mac Book at home, a big no-no.

I wonder if the people who ordered the Navy to Afghanistan realize Afghanistan is land locked.

Michael lost his command a couple of months after ICEX.

      http://www.navytimes.com/news/2011/06/navy-sub-co-flout...

It's not uncommon for commanding officers to be fired in the navy. The Navy has pretty strict rules.

      http://www.navytimes.com/news/2011/12/navy-2011-co-xo-c...

I imagine you've been staying up late at night wondering what they do with nuclear reactors from submarines when they're finished with them. You can finally get some sleep. They send the reactors to Hanford, Washington.

      http://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html...

      http://playtechs.blogspot.com/2007/11/flying-over-easte...

Some submarine parts were shipped from California to Maine a few weeks ago, along with a batch of black widow spiders.

      http://www.navytimes.com/news/2011/12/ap-navy-bath-iron...

Aircraft Charts

In the past two or three years, there has been a big trend toward digital charts in aviation. The FAA's data is public domain, so companies can buy it cheaply (for the cost of distribution), and you can read the charts on an iPad or other computer easier and cheaper than using paper charts. They're less likely to blow out of the plane that way, too.

In an effort to prevent anything in aviation from becoming less expensive, the FAA has proposed a $150 per year end user charge for these public domain digital charts.

      http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/2082-full...

NOAA handled the production and distribution of aviation charts for a lot of years, until the FAA took over in 2000. The FAA promptly fired most of the smaller aviation chart dealers, and now they're complaining that they're losing too much money because people are using digital charts instead of the expensive paper charts.

I was confused. I thought the FAA was supposed to provide a service, not sell things for profit. Maybe they should give the charts back to NOAA. NOAA still does an excellent job with nautical charts, and their digital nautical charts are free to download.

      http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/download_...

I have been keeping a copy of nautical charts in printable .png format here:

      http://xpda.com/nauticalcharts

Stolen Laptop?

There is a nice open source application called Prey for laptops, iPads, etc. that will track the device if it is stolen. Prey checks in every 20 minutes or so (whatever you select), and if your device is flagged as stolen, it will send a screen image, webcam image, and location information to your email or a web site.

http://preyproject.com/

Electric Catapult

Aircraft Carriers use steam catapults. Steam pressure moves an arm, which pulls the airplane and accelerates it at several g's. (Maybe a max of 6 g's and average of 3 g's for 2.5 seconds, but I'm not sure.Figure it out if you're interested....)

However, steam catapults have some limitations. They are big and heavy. It's hard to control the acceleration along the launch rail. They also are limited in weight and speed of the aircraft because things explode under too much pressure.

New aircraft carriers are using Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch Systems (EMAL). This is like a giant linear electric motor. Some of the advantages are that they can have more power, the power can be adjusted along the launch rail to get a more controlled acceleration, and they are smaller and lighter that steam catapults.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/sys...

Here are some test photos of the EMAL system designed for the new aircraft carrier Gerald Ford. This test was in Lakehurst, New Jersey about a year ago. The USS Gerald Ford should be commissioned in 2015.

Pictures of Today

The Minnow in the Dry Tortugas

A barge on the Potomac River

A Ketchikan seaplane at Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas

Some old brickwork at Fort Jefferson

This boat has twin turbine engines and will go about 220 mph. It's going over 100 mph in this picture.

Bottom Work, Key West

A Malachite Butterfly, Boca Chica Key

Lizard, Key West

Two Lizards and a Bird on an Island, Key West

Transportation from Cuba to Florida

Spanning the Arkansas River

Peak One, Breckenridge

I didn't take the rest of these pictures, but I helped pay for them.

Blue Angels, Jacksonville, last October

A Trident II D5 missile launched from the ballistic missile submarine USS Nevada off the coast of Southern California, March 2011.

The USS Nevada, Bremerton, WA, May 2010.

The fast attack sub USS Pittsburgh, Kings Bay, Georgia, March 2011.

An F-35C Joint Strike Fighter test aircraft returns from a flutter envelope expansion flight, March 2011. That would be a scary test flight.

A house floating in the ocean after the Tsunami in Japan, March 2011

The U.S. Navy's newest destroyer, the USS Spruance at Key West, September 2011, for its commissioning. Fort Zach is in the background.

More Junkmail from Bob, #221

2011-11-01T00:07:00.002-05:00

Google Drivers

Google has been developing self-driving cars for a few years. They have really come a long way. They've logged over 190,000 miles on public roads. They do have safety drivers on board who can intervene, but they rarely have to. They recently drove a car 1,000 miles in the San Francisco Bay area without human intervention. They didn't do it non-stop because they prefer the safety drivers to be conscious.

Photo courtesy of Steve Jurvetson

I think this will be a big deal in the not-too-distant future. Actually, I think it's a big deal now, but I can't have one yet. But before too long we'll be able to buy a car and put it on autopilot instead of just cruise control. A lot of people will be relieved when I do that.
Here is a good article on the cars. The video is well worth watching.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-...
Speaking of Google, the plus operator is gone from their web searches. You have to use quotes now.

Memristors

HP Labs announced a replacement for flash memory and SSDs, expected in 2013. The memristor was formulated and named by Leon Chua in 1971. Three years ago, a team at HP Labs announced the development of a switching memristor based on a thin film of titanium dioxide. Earlier this month they announced the availability of commercially applicable memristor technology within 18 months, as a replacement for Flash and SSD, and potentially DRAM and SRAM.
An array of 17 memristors built at HP Labs, imaged by an atomic force microscope. The wires are about 50 nm, or 150 atoms, wide. Electric current through the memristors shifts the oxygen vacancies, causing a gradual and persistent change in electrical resistance.
This will be a huge deal if it really happens. Memristor memory should take around 100 times less power than Flash memory to switch a bit. The thin film technology memristors can be stacked in an arbitrary number of layers with 5 billion memristors per layer at 5nm.
HP said "The plan is to license this technology to anyone who wants it, and we’ll teach them how to make it."
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/06/10/2011/51...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

Solar Eclipse is Coming!

Be ready. On August 21, 2017, there will be a solar eclipse in North America. If you play your cards right, you can predict an omen and impress your friends.

HVDC

In the late 1800's some people decided that electricity was pretty useful, mainly for light bulbs and electric motors. Being a traditionalist, I use light bulbs and electric motors even today.
Thomas Edison started a business that generated and sold electricity. In 1882, the first central power station in the U.S. started producing electricity on Pearl Street in Manhattan, NY.

Pearl Street Station

Edison used DC, or direct current. This is what a battery produces. By 1887, Edison had 121 power stations, most of them using steam turbines to power the generators.
The power stations produced about 110 volts, and 110 volts was also used in the transmission lines. Edison could only string power lines about a mile from the power stations because of the voltage drop due to resistance in the wire.
Electricity will flow through a copper wire (also aluminum and silver) fairly easily, but there is a little resistance. Electricity will flow through a superconductor with essentially no resistance, but Edison did not have any room-temperature superconducting wire.
In case you weren't paying attention in 7th grade science, amperage is current and voltage is
power
pressure. Current is kind of like the amount of electricity flowing, and voltage is the
power
pressure pushing the electricity along the wire. It's a little like gallons per minute and pressure in a water hose.
The amount of
resistance
voltage drop in a wire depends on the current passing through the wire. In fact,
resistance
voltage drop is proportional to the amperage squared, so it makes things quite a lot more efficient if you use less amperage in power lines. You can do this by using a higher voltage. [Thanks to Earl Massoth for these corrections. I wasn't paying attention in 7th grade science.]
For example, you can get enough electricity for a light bulb (similar brightness) using 1 amp at 110 volts, or 10 amps at 12 volts. But the 12 volt circuit will need thicker wire because it has 12 times the amperage, which causes 144 times the resistance as the 110 volt circuit. The thicker wire will handle more amps with less resistance.
The same way, a power line can carry more wattage using lower amperage and higher voltage. You could convert 100 volts and 100 amps to 5000 volts and 2 amps using transformers. (Practically, there is a little loss in the conversion, but we'll ignore that since the conversion loss is less than the transmission loss would be.) Then we can send the 2 amps and 5000 volts along a power line to a house. At the house we'll convert it back to 100 volts and 100 amps so the people in the house can use the electricity without worrying about 5000 volts causing the toaster to send bread through the ceiling.
Edison's problem was that you cannot use a transformer with direct current, and Edison was committed to direct current with a bunch of power stations, patents, and equipment. George Westinghouse, however, didn't have these problems. He started selling AC power.
Edison didn't like this, so he explained to people that high voltage AC is dangerous, and if its use spreads, hundreds of people will be killed. To demonstrate the point, Edison started electrocuting small dogs and the occasional elephant in public demonstrations.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bowA1xUZpmA
Practicality and economics won the battle of the currents and we use AC today, brought to our homes on high voltage power lines. And Edison was correct. Hundreds of people have since been electrocuted.
Now we have come full circle. It is more economical to use high voltage DC in long transmission distances (400+ miles) and long undersea cables. At either end it is converted from and to AC which generates some loss, but the DC has some efficiencies over AC.
AC current looks like a sine wave. It goes up and down in a wave.

The wires carrying the sine wave have to be able to handle the peaks in the current, at the top and bottom of the humps. With direct current, the current is always at the max, so there the wires are at full capacity all the time. With AC, the wires have to be able to handle about 30 percent more than the average voltage. AC also has some capacitance loss in undersea cables because of the sea water and the metal cable jackets.
If you want to send some hydro-generated electricity from The Dalles, Oregon (home of Meredith Van Valkenburgh) to Los Angeles, you could do it with a stretch of 500,000 volt DC power lines more efficiently than AC power lines. In fact, they did this and called it the Pacific Intertie.

It can carry 3,100 megawatts, about three times the capacity of the GRDA coal power plant at Chouteau, OK.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
Here is the converter station at the Oregon end:

With High Voltage DC power lines, they use grounds at the terminals sometimes instead of (or in addition to) a return cable in the transmission lines. This is how the Pacific DC Intertie works. It cuts the number or size of cables in the transmission line, but the stray voltage caused by all those electrons piling up on one end occasionally causes some environmental problems.
      http://www.teshmont.com/services-design-ground.htm
As you might guess, the grounding system for these power lines is a more than a pipe hammered into the ground. The grounding system at the Oregon terminal consists of 1,067 cast iron anodes buried in a two foot trench of petroleum coke, arranged in a circle over a half mile in diameter. This structure at nearby Maryhill may have been a very early attempt:

On the Los Angeles end of the Pacific Intertie there is a line of 24 silicon-iron alloy electrodes in the Pacific Ocean, suspended in concrete enclosures about 3 feet off the ocean floor. Maybe this is where all the glowing phytoplankton come from.
If you'd like your own Ultra High Voltage Direct Current (UHVDC) transmission line, Siemens can help you out. All you have to do is provide the electricity. Some assembly required. Not responsible for Stuxnet.
      http://www.energy.siemens.com/co/en/power-transmission/...

Patently Absurd

I've used the term "patently absurd" before regarding patents, but it is so ideally descriptive I'll use it again. It seems someone else might agree with me. A google search for "Patently Absurd" and "Patents" got 163,000 hits just now. I imagine that number may be growing.

I doubt if anybody wants to read it, so I'll save time and not write it. But pretend there is an insightful, 4-page, well written rant here on the stupidity, ignorance, and arrogance of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, complete with twenty-seven 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. I'll put some links here instead with some limited commentary.
By the time I was done with this, it was still more than 4 pages!
http://xpda.com/patents
It's a good thing I didn't start in on stupid copyright claims...

Acta, Protect-IP, and e-Parasites

The government is protecting us. They have negotiated and signed the trade agreement ACTA, the treaty that is not a treaty. The Obama administration says it doesn't need Congressional authorization, because it is strongly backed by the Recording Industry (RIAA) and the Movie Industry (MPAA). At last that's the way I understood this.

In the US, there is no plan to constitutionally ratify the agreement. Indeed, this will likely be the main focus of the US signing statement. The document will be an argument to Congress that the executive can pass this agreement alone – legally binding the US to a trade agreement without no congressional authorization – because, according to the Executive, ACTA is fully consistent with current US law.

It was negotiated in secret by some government workers, some Recording Industry representatives, and some Movie Industry representatives. The content of Acta was not disclosed in the U.S., not even to Congress, until it was leaked in Europe. The government said this was due to national security concerns. It's interesting to read about:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_...
Some people in Brazil don't like Acta:
      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111004/04402516196/b...
Protect-IP includes some things that were left out of Acta after a moderate online uproar resulted when the contents of Acta were leaked. This is a law being passed by Congress, and is public. Some people don't like it at all.
      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111018/17503516408/w...
      http://vimeo.com/31100268
The members of the House of Representatives were catching a lot of flack from their constituents for supporting the Protect IP act, so they did the sensible thing. They renamed it to the e-Parasites act. You might think, with this name, that it goes after copyright trolls and the RIAA, but it doesn't. It's more about allowing the recording industry to censor the internet.
      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/house-t...
      http://activepolitic.com:82/News/2011-10-24h/US_House_T...
After the fun and games with the Acta trade agreement, the government decided to negotiate the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, also in secret. This time the negotiations are being held in secret, too. And this time they intend to keep the negotiations secret until four years after the agreement is signed -- only the final text will be made public.
Naturally, there are leaks from the negotiations. This is government we're talking about.
      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110311/00104713434/u...
Here is a summary of the controversial "features" of the TPP (from Wikipedia):

Overall, the USTR proposal for the TPP intellectual property chapter would: (1) include a number of features that would lock-in as a global norm many controversial features of U.S. law, such as endless copyright terms. (2) create new global norms that are contrary to U.S. legal traditions, such as those proposed to damages for infringement, the enforcement of patents against surgeons and other medical professional, rules concerning patents on biologic medicines, disclosure of information from ISPs, etc. (3) undermine many proposed reforms of the patent and copyright system, such as, for example, proposed legislation to increase access to orphaned copyrighted works by limiting damages for infringement, or statutory exclusions of "non-industrial" patents such as those issued for business methods.

Elementary Statistics

If you select an answer to this question at random, what are the chances of being correct?
a. 25%b. 50%c. 75%d. 25%

Facebook Privacy

Facebook has gotten a lot of flack over it's privacy policies lately. They track user browsing habits, and they used to do this even when users were not logged on. But they say they are innocent.
Facebook, September 25, 2011: "Facebook does not track users across the web"http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-denies-co...
Facebook, September 25, 2011: "Generally, unlike other major internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people"http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/26/facebook_sees...
It's odd that they applied for this patent, though.
Facebook Patent Application, September 22, 2011: "A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain"http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2...
I stole this from Uncrunched:
http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/01/brutal-dishonesty/

Global Warming

Guess what? The earth is getting warmer. Arctic ice is melting. And there is a good chance it won't stop in my lifetime or yours. People will not be willing to do what it takes to stop it, and nobody knows at this point how much warming will occur. It's not the end of the world, despite what some politicians claim, and it is definitely happening, despite what other politicians claim.
      http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2096055,...
The average surface temperature on earth rose about 2 degrees (F) in the 1900's. By 2100, it is expected to go up another 3 to 11 degrees.
We hear a lot about sea level rise, but that has not been much of a problem to date, in spite of photos of eroded beaches and houses washed into the ocean. In the past 100 years, sea level rose 7 or 8 inches.  By the year 2200, sea level is expected to rise somewhere between 4 and 30 inches. Sea level is expected to keep rising over the next few centuries. Beaches have been eroding and filling since there have been beaches.
If all the ice in ice caps and glaciers melt, most of which is in Greenland and Antarctica, it will cause a sea level rise of about 220 feet. It will also take well over a thousand years for this to happen.
Here's an interested graph about the earth's water distribution. It doesn't have much to do with global warming (except that's where I found out how much ice there is), but it's pretty interesting.
      http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/waterdistribution.html
Sea ice coverage in the Arctic has been decreasing by about 12% per decade for the past 2-3 decades. In September, the annual minimum, the Arctic sea ice coverage was about 2/3 of the 1979-2000 average. Since the Arctic ice cap is floating, it does not affect sea level much when it freezes or melts.
You can now take a boat or ship across north of North America and Russia (in the late summer).

As in recent years, northern shipping routes opened up this summer. The Northern Sea Route opened by mid August and still appeared to be open as of the end of September. The southern "Amundsen Route" of the Northwest Passage, through the straits of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, opened for the fifth year in a row. Overall, sea ice in the wider and deeper northern route through Parry Channel reached a record low, according to Stephen Howell of Environment Canada, based on Canadian Ice Service analysis. Parry Channel had a narrow strip of ice that blocked a short section of the channel, but it did appear to open briefly in early September.

      http://www.barentsobserver.com/index.php?id=4800813
The U.S., Canada, and Russia are posturing for negotiations on who gets to drill where for oil and gas in the offshore Arctic. Shipping companies are crossing the Arctic in the summer on shorter routes to Asia.
      http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2011/100411.html
Travel companies are offering cruises in the Arctic, and even to the North Pole (on an icebreaker).
      http://www.quarkexpeditions.com/arctic-expeditions/nort...
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
There was a group of physicists who were skeptical of modern climate data, so they did their own research. It turns out that their conclusions, using varied data sources, were an amazingly close match to those generally accepted in the climatology field.
The project was started by physicist Richard Muller, who had previously expressed doubts about the mathematical rigor of climate science. It was funded by the Department of Energy, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, and some others.
      http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/climate-ske...
      http://berkeleyearth.org/study.php
My baby daughter Melinda spent a few weeks on the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy last summer, allegedly doing research.

Princeton University Open Access

Princeton University recently adopted a new policy of open access for Princeton-produced scholarly publications. Princeton faculty members can now post their published articles on their own websites, an online University repository or other free archives for the general public. I like it.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/09/29/28869/

Public Service Announcement

NBC Universal recently put on a contest, through the City of New York, for students to make Public Service Announcement (PSA) videos explaining how copyright infringement is damaging NBC Universal and other movie companies. Some people thought this was not a good idea, and that NBC was getting the students to write corporate propaganda. To add insult to injury, the winning video creator loses the copyright on the video, but gets $500.
Techdirt decided to put on a "counter" contest, for people to create a PSA video showing the impact of technology on creativity today. They're offering $1000 to the winner, and the winner gets to keep the video copyright. I think that's pretty funny.
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/ic/articles/20111006/02280...

Time Zone Ownership

What time is it in Phoenix? Nobody really knows, but you can get a reasonable estimate from a public database maintained by two guys named Arthur and Paul. The time zone database is hosted by the NIH and UCLA. It is used by nearly every Unix and Linux platform to set clocks to local time. The database just tells where the time zones are and the offset from UTC on any particular day.
An astrology company called Astrolabe bought the rights to a time zone data base from American Atlas, which is cited as the source in the one maintained by Arthur and Paul. Then Astrolabe sued Arthur and Paul, saying they own the time zone data. Of course, the time zone data cannot be copyrighted, but that would never dissuade a hungry lawyer and a mad fortune teller.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111006/11532316235/a...
Since the lawsuit, Icann, the international organization in charge of top-level domain names such as .com, has taken over the time zone data base. The mad astrologer has not sued Icann.
http://www.icann.org/en/news/releases/release-14oct11-en.pdf

People

The world's population has more than doubled since I was born.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

German Trojan

Weren't the Trojans from Greece? Or was it Turkey?
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy
A new trojan (of the malware variety) was discovered recently in Germany. It monitors traffic from applications such as browsers and instant messaging applications (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Skype, Opera, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Low-Rate VoIP, CounterPath X-Lite, and Paltalk.)
The thing that makes this trojan different is that it is used and distributed by German police. Here are some details on the trojan:
      http://www.itworld.com/security/214797/german-federal-t...
      http://ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner
Some people in Germany did not like this at all, calling it unconstitutional.
      http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-10/german-troj...
      http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/10/german-gover...
The German government said "That's too bad, we're using it anyway. We've got the Pirate Party (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/german-...) to contend with." The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said, "Who cares whether it's constitutional? We're at war! We want a copy of that trojan."

Thievery

111 people were charged and 86 of them arrested for stealing a total of $13 million. They stole credit info from people and then used the cards for cash and buying stuff. That's must be a lot of credit cards!  I suppose that most of the $13 million was lost by the banks, and they probably recovered some of it.
      http://www.techworld.com.au/article/403490/111_arrested...
That seems like a lot of money, but 11 people were charged for faking disability claims in New York. They raked in 77 times more money than the amateurish credit card thieves, a cool billion dollars.
      http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-27/eleven-char...
I wonder how much it would help the federal budget deficit if all the fraudulent disability payments in the country were cut off.

Redactions

If you make a black background in a .pdf file, you can copy and past the text into another application and read it just fine. It works like this: "Redacted Text"
If you want to hide the text, you need to do more than that. Adobe is happy to explain how (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/8.0/Professional/he...).
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is famous for its ability to send out redacted .pdf files that aren't.
      http://www.hlswatch.com/2009/12/14/7634/
The U.K. Department of Defence learned the same lesson a few months ago when they thought they redacted some secret information on nuclear submarines.
      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/18/dnsr_report_dec...
Well, maybe they didn't actually learn anything. They did it again this month with some air defense data.
      http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/09/how-redact-p...

Homeland Security Searches

The TSA (part of Homeland Security) is now searching people (without search warrants) on trains, ferries, busses, and trucks. That's OK because we're at war. They want a 50% budget increase for this program in 2012. I guess they haven't heard about the budget deficit. I think Homeland Security is just trying to expand their empire so they can eventually take over Google.
      http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/28/1921254/tsas-vi...
      http://tennesseenewspress.com/2011/10/19/tsa-checkpoint... Homeland Security is also spending your tax pennies on a program (called Fast) to predict whether a person will commit a crime in the future. Fast program manager Robert said, "Who cares whether it works? We've got to keep spending money or they'll take it out of our budget!" Or maybe he didn't. It seems like I've seen that movie.
      http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20117058-281/homeland...
Homeland has a new Public Affairs policy. They refuse to give out the phone numbers of their public affairs people because of "privacy concerns". I suppose that's better than their normal "national security" excuse. I am not sure what the public affairs people do at DHS since they can't talk to the public.
      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111012/11465316328/d...
The Air Force is not afraid to disclose phone numbers to their public affairs people. But then, the Air Force is not run by politicians.
      http://www.afspc.af.mil/news1/story_print.asp?id=123275647

Qu8k

Derek Deville and some other people built a model rocket. Then they launched it. It went up pretty fast, peaking out at almost three times the speed of sound. It went up pretty high, too. Almost 23 miles high, 121,000 feet. The rocket was 8 inches in diameter, almost 14 feet long, and weighed 320 lbs at liftoff.

The engine generated 4,000 lbs of thrust for 8 seconds, then the rocket coasted upward for more than a minute, and hit 121,000 feet after 92 seconds of flight. It hit the ground 7 minutes later, 3 miles from the launch pad.
7 minutes is not very long for a 23 mile trip down to earth. The rocket reached 600 mph on the way down, even with the parachute. But there is only 1% as much air at 121,000 as there is in Pryor, Oklahoma, so the parachute didn't generate much drag for a while.
Here are some pictures:
      http://ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html
And it carried video cameras. This is worth watching.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvDqoxMUroA&feature=share
In other rocket news, Iran tried to launch a monkey into space a few weeks ago. The monkey was launched, but the mission failed. It sounds as if the monkey is no longer with us.
      http://news.discovery.com/space/iran-launch-monkey-rock...

New Oil in the Western Hemisphere

Williston, North Dakota is a boomtown. There is at lot of oil around there, in western North Dakota and eastern Montana. The Bakken formation was discovered in 1951, but they didn't get much oil out of the ground because of low porosity an permeability of the rock. Sometime around 2008, better fracking techniques and horizontal drilling started an oil boom in the area.
The Bakken formation probably has about 10% of the "undiscovered technically recoverable" oil in the U.S. at between 4 and 5 billion barrels. There may be 5 times that much oil that is not recoverable using current technology.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_formation
The U.S. uses over 6 billion barrels of oil per year, more than double that of any other country.
      http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx
There are some new oil reserves in Canada and Brazil. Actually, these are prehistoric. But they're new in terms of being technically recoverable.
The Tupi oil field off the coast of Brazil was discovered in 2006. It eluded discovery for a long time because a mile-thick layer of underground (and underwater) salt limited seismic exploration below. The oil is under a mile of ocean and 3 more miles of salt, sand, and rocks. There is somewhere around 13 billion barrels of oil in the offshore sub-salt oil fields of Brazil.
      http://www.economist.com/node/18065645
The Athabasca Tar Sands, or more correctly the Athabasca Oil Sands, are in northeastern Alberta, Canada.

There is no tar in the tar sands, only bitumen. Bitumen is extra heavy crude oil, with the consistency of tar. About 10% of the bitumen deposits can be recovered using current technology, but that still is a lot of oil -- about 170 billion barrels. That makes Canada's proven oil reserves the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabasca_oil_sands
      http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/daniel-yergin-fo...

Transparency

The Google Transparency Report lists the number of requests from governments to remove data from its sites, and the reasons. I think all sites should make this information public.
      http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequ...
Here's the xpda.com transparency report:
      Number of government requests for content removal:  zero.
In news of government transparency, a federal appeals court has issued a ruling in the case of a Gitmo detainee, but the ruling is classified so the public cannot read it.
      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111017/10325216386/w...
Secret court rulings go well with secret interpretation of the law by the federal government.
      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111010/04043716279/n...
The Bush administration was famous for refusing to release information under the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Attorney General told employees in 2002, "When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions."
Not to be outdone, the Obama administration is proposing that federal employees can deny that records even exist, when they actually do. That will save all the time they used to spend making up excuses to withhold embarrassing records.
      http://www.propublica.org/article/government-could-hide...

Snakes in the Everglades

The Florida Everglades always looked to me like a good place for snakes. Now there is apparently a decent breeding population of Burmese Pythons in the Everglades. A few days ago a couple of state workers killed a 16-foot python with a shotgun. The snake had just eaten a deer.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/adult-deer-foun...

Mars Rovers

The Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been tooling around Mars since early 2004. They are finally winding down. I think Spirit is finished, and Opportunity has slowed down quite a lot.
Here's a photo of the first two Mars rovers. The smaller one is from the 1997 Pathfinder mission. The big one is either Spirit or Opportunity.

The newest Mars mission is called Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to launch on November 25. An Atlas V rocket will carry a new, larger rover to Mars. It's called Curiosity. Curiosity is twice as long and five times heavier than the rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

Curiosity can travel 200 meters per day over the Mars landscape. It will have a lot more power than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers because it uses a 110 watt plutonium powered Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) instead of solar panels. This should last for at least a Martian year, or close to two earth years. The power capacity of the generator will decrease over time.
The primary communication with earth will be relayed by Mars orbiters.
      http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
The Mars Science Lab, MSL, or Curiosity (whatever they end up calling it) will use a color camera. The previous mars rovers had black and white cameras with filters. So in a few months, we'll find out how close I was with the Mars color from Spirit and Opportunity:
      http://xpda.com/mars/color.htm
      MSL_Fact_Sheet.pdf
There are naturally some Luddites who are against anything that uses plutonium or radiation, especially in a pristine planet such as Mars. They apparently don't realize that there is much more natural radiation on Mars (from the sun) than the 110-watt RTG power supply could ever produce.
Others worry that if the rocket crashes, it will kill a bunch of people by radiation poisoning. They don't seem to realize that there is far less radioactive material in an RTG that in the nuclear weapons that have been wandering around the globe for years. Furthermore, RTGs have been used in space for 40 or 50 years. Some are designed to burn up on re-entry and some are designed to contain the radioactive fuel in case of a crash. Both have happened without the release of radiation.
But even NASA says there's a chance of failure. In fact, they say there's a 1 in 420 chance of a failure resulting in the release of plutonium in the launch area. What happens then? A person exposed to this radiation would only get 2% more radiation than the average person does from normal background radiation on earth.
      http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdfFiles/MMRTG_Jan2008.pdf
      http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/files/msl/APP%20RPS...

In Search of Mediocrity

It always makes me wonder when a big company has an awful web site. The most common problem is a painfully slow site because all the people who test the site are apparently on a local network and have no clue how slow the site is for the customers.
Another very common problem is searching. A lot of companies provide searches for products. Some executive apparently says, "We need a lot more products to turn up in our searches." The developer solves the problem by searching for any word instead of every word specified in the search.
So when I search for something like HP Printer Ink, I get HP computers, Epson printers, and Canon ink. I have to page through a dozen pages before I can find HP print ink, and then there's only one color because the others are buried even further down in the search.
This may sound far-fetched, but I believe this is the main reason bn.com and buy.com are nowhere nearly as successful as Amazon. Buy.com used to have an and search, but they changed to or and made it just about impossible to search for anything on their site. They have since fixed this, but not before a lot of serious financial problems.
Bn.com did this for a while, but they came to their senses fairly quickly and have a decent search now. A lot of other companies still have effectively useless searches if you're looking for something with more than one word. Ideally, a site has an option on whether to select all words, any words, or the precise phrase.
There are other things you occasionally run across that make you wonder who's running the company. The other day I tried comparing a Yamaha P85 and P95 electric piano on their site. The result? A 7-page comparison with nothing appearing in both the P85 and P95 column. For example, there is a weight for the P85 and a blank space for the P95. A few pages down there's a weight for the P95 and a blank space for the P85 weight.
http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/keyb...
NASA used to have a great web site that was searchable with real information. Now they turned loose someone to dumb it down, add changing pictures, limit the search, and hide the detailed information in obscure places. They should have put that money into research. They seem to have no interest in the efficient transfer of information from the web to people, and instead have opted for something flashy and highly limited. In my opinion.

Boston News

The Boston Subway Green Line was almost blown up with a portable coffeemaker a few weeks ago. Luckily the subway was evacuated and nobody was killed.
      http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2011_1008tro...
The Governor of Boston is distressed because he can't keep the extra $15 million from a federal transportation project that came in under budget.       http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20111024...
Boston is famous for the Big Dig project that cost $14.6 billion, almost one thousand times more than the measly $15 million they're whining about now. Those people could flat outspend a budget.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
The TSA has decided to spend some excess dollars at the Boston Airport. To make sure nobody can get into the airport wearing LEDs they are interviewing every passenger before they get onto a plane.
     http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2011_...
Last month a federal appeals court ruled that a Boston College student has to pay the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) $675,000 for making 30 songs available for download. The criminal! The Obama administration argued in support of the award.
      http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/file-sharing-v...
      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/joel-te...
David Hewett caused all of this.

Giant Prehistoric Intelligent Kraken

Stories of a giant, prehistoric, intelligent squid are not true.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/the-giant-p...

AWS Load Balancing

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing provider. This web site (or at least the photos, if you're reading the email) are on the Amazon cloud. It's a very complex problem to be able to allow thousands of people generate and delete their own instances of computers, hard drives, and operating systems in a giant data center with tens of thousands of servers.
When the load balancer gets confused, it's liable to send a couple million Netflix API requests to the wrong customer.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/29/1637219/aws-loa...

Flash Cookies

A computer cookie is a small file with identifying numbers or data. Web sites can store cookies on your computer so they can remember you've logged in, or, in some cases, so they can track which web sites you visit.
Some people like to keep their computer clear of cookies from sites they don't approve of, for obvious privacy concerns. You can do this with browser settings. Some companies don't like you deleting your cookies because it costs them money. Marketeers will pay cash for information on your browsing habits, after all.
So companies figure out other ways to put cookies on your computer. Adobe Flash can store a cookie and keep it on your computer even after you tell your browser to delete all your cookies. Some other software does this too, but Flash is the most common offender.
If you care to, you can tell Flash not to save any cookies on your system:
      http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7302/delete-flash-cookie...
More info:
      http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904...
      http://oregonbusinessreport.com/2011/10/congress-asked-...

Black Plague

It's official. Yersinia pestis caused the Black Plague.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/genome-from...

Galileo GPS

Europe is launching their own GPS system. The first two satellites went into orbit on October 21, launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket. It will be a few years before all 30 satellites are in orbit. The Galileo system is a civilian system and will be available to everybody worldwide. It will have a little better precision than the U.S. GPS system.
The U.S. GPS is military controlled, and the U.S. reserves the right to limit access to the GPS system. Europe decided they didn't want to rely on a system that could be blocked by the U.S. military on a whim.
In the past the military has expressed concerns that the Galileo system could be used by other countries for weapons guidance against the U.S. I think this will be less of a concern in the future because mapping technology will allow more precise weapon positioning than GPS, just like the Google self-driving cars.

Photo courtesy of Thilo Kranz/DLR

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112405321/delayed-s...

Seeing Through Walls

Can "they" really see through walls? Yes, but not very well. Yet. MIT has developed a phased radar system that can "see" people behind 8-inch solid concrete walls.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/ll-seeing-through-wa...

Spy Phones

iPhones have a built-in accelerometer. The iPhone 4 has an electronic gyro that cleans up the accelerometer data. The combination is so sensitive, it can detect small vibrations. In fact, if you lay it on a desk, it can detect someone typing. If you get some good software, you could even figure out, through timing, vibration signatures, and statistical analysis, which keys are being pressed.
Georgia Tech has developed an iPhone app (research only -- you can't buy it) that will eavesdrop on someone typing, with an 80 percent word recognition rate. Pretty cool.
http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=71506

Stuxnet and Duqu

The Stuxnet virus was used to attack some Iranian centrifuges used to enrich uranium last year. I promptly poo-pooed the news reports as hype, guessing that it's nothing more than an ordinary virus and some political spin. I was wrong.
The Stuxnet virus is large for a virus, at half a megabyte, and fairly complex. It is designed to spread quickly and indiscriminately. It uses four previously unknown Windows vulnerabilities to spread and load itself into the kernel and also the user mode of Windows. That is unusual for a virus.
It uses device drivers that were digitally signed so they don't generate a warning when installed, using private keys from two certificates stolen from separate companies in Taiwan. Two websites, in Denmark and Malaysia, were configured as command and control servers for the malware.
The ultimate target of the Stuxnet virus is a Siemens  controller that can be used to drive a number of different industrial machines, or PLC systems. It installs itself on the controller and intercepts the communications between the controller and the device. If the PLC system has a Vacon (Finnish) or Fararo Paya (Iranian) variable-frequency drive, and if that drive operates between 807 and 1210 RPM, then Stuxnet goes into action. These parameters happen to match those of the uranium centrifuges in Iran.
When Stuxnet attacked the Iranian centrifuges, it caused the motors to run periodically at overspeed and underspeed, while feeding normal data back to the monitoring system. This happened over a period of a few weeks. This overstressed the centrifuges, and destroyed about 1000 of Iran's 10,000 centrifuges.
The Stuxnet virus is a fairly complex piece of software. It is definitely not something that only a nation-state could do, as the New York Times claims, but it probably did take several people a few months to develop. It would be possible but harder to write it without testing on a Siemens control system and a PLC device.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
A new variant of Stuxnet called Duqu was discovered on September 1 of this year. It does not have the payload to attack the Siemens controller. It is designed to collect keystrokes, login information, and security information from infected systems.
Duqu was written by someone who had access to the Stuxnet source code, probably one or more of the same developers. The targeted companies seem to be those that make industrial controllers. It looks like whoever wrote this is trying to accumulate information to write viruses for attacking industrial systems.
      http://www.symantec.com/connect/w32_duqu_precursor_next...
Technical Info:      http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/...

1883 Comet Near Miss?

A comet did not come close to hitting the earth in 1883, despite some recent news reports. Phil Plait explains it very well.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/...

The Middle Man

Amazon is signing deals directly with some book authors, cutting the occasionally unruly publishers out of the deal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rew...
This makes a lot of sense. As more and more people buy more and more of their books in digital form, there is less reason to go through a publisher.
Some book publishers don't like this and are punishing the authors who go to Amazon.
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/publishers-find-amazon-s...
The same is true for the music industry. I will be happy when recording artists can bypass the record producers and sell directly to Amazon, iTunes, Google...,and other online sellers. And I believe that day will eventually arrive.

Pi

10,000,000,000,000 digits of pi have been calculated in Japan. You can download the first 5 trillion digits here:
      http://ja0hxv.calico.jp/pai/estart.html
Here's how to compute it. In Japanese. Google will be happy to translate this page for your. Go to Google, click on "More" at the top of the screen, and click "Translate." Then enter the URL in the Window and select Japanese to English, Slovenian, or the language of your choice.
      http://ja0hxv.calico.jp/pai/pietc.html
If you would like to hear some traditional Slovenian folk music while you peruse Pi, click here: (warning - bikinis)
      http://www.mojvideo.com/video-skuter-na-pomoc-sexy-spot...

Privacy

A day in the life of privacy.
http://www.securityweek.com/day-life-privacy

Bones

Did you ever wonder how bones end up forming in the proper place from just two cells of an embryo? Some researchers have discovered the mechanism for part of this.
http://actu.epfl.ch/news/from-whales-to-earthworms-the-...

1961

Photos from 50 years ago.
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/10/50-years-ago...

Bad Lip Reading

This is a pretty funny web site.
http://badlipreading.tumblr.com/
Naturally, someone claimed copyright violation.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/23/0434208/universa...

Shoes on Airplanes?

I may be able to keep my shoes on when I fly commercial! I'm so happy, I may volunteer for strip searches. As long as I can keep my shoes on.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62705.html

Washington DC

A few weeks ago I took the our sailboat to get its bottom painted, in Chesapeake Bay. On the way there, I stopped at George Washington Ditch. I saw a spider.

I also saw a bear in George Washington Ditch. I was on the bike, very close to the bear, and we both decided to leave. Right then. So you'll have to settle for the picture of the spider.
After the bottom of the boat was painted, I went up the Potomac river and parked it in Washington DC. That was pretty neat.

Hains Point and the Washington Monument

Fort McNair and the Capitol

Mount Vernon

As soon as I got to Washington, I took a bicycle ride around town. Then the police blocked the road. I thought the President was coming to see me, but he drove right on by without even stopping to say hi.
      http://vimeo.com/31148060
There were two identical Cadillacs with the same license tag, 800-002. You can find a lot of hits on Google for that tag number.

Last time the President (a different one -- LBJ) was in Pryor, he shook my hand and was very friendly. Probably because it was his birthday. Dad's Band played Hail to the Chief and some other stuff. Anita Bryant and the Kilgore Rangerettes were there, too. The band accompanied Anita Bryant while she sang happy birthday to the President. She did a lot better job than Marilyn Monroe. But she sang in a different key than the band, so the band played very softly.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RZeMEiiaoo&t=2m1s
A little farther down the road, I found this guy riding his motorcycle across a big lawn. I wanted to ask him if I could ride my bicycle across it too, but I don't think he could hear me with that helmet.
      http://vimeo.com/31150175
A few days before I got to Washington, 100 or 200 protesters tried to crash the gate at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The guards pepper-sprayed a few people and then the police arrived and things calmed down.
      http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post_now/post/air-a...
Normally I don't like police beating up on protesters, but in this case I think the guards did exactly the right thing. If that mob had come inside the museum, they would likely have damaged some irreplaceable, historical airplanes and some of the protesters would have ended up hurt or dead.
The really dumb thing is that they were protesting the use of the predator and reaper unmanned aircraft. At a museum. They picked the museum because there is a Predator MQ-1 on display there.

Predator MQ-1

That's like killing the messenger. The Smithsonian certainly doesn't make any kind of defense policy, and the Air and Space museum has, in addition to the civilian, experimental, and non-combat aircraft, ICBMs, battlefield nuclear missiles, the Enola Gay, and lots of things that have done and can do more damage than UAVs.

German Buzz Bomb

German V2 Rocket

Little John Battlefield Nuclear Missile

Enola Gay

Tomahawk Cruise Missile

Soviet and U.S. ICBM

This UAV delivers nuclear anti-submarine weapons. It was built in the 1960's.

UAVs are already a part of history, and they're going to become a major part of aviation in general in not too many years. It would be ignorant not to have UAVs at the Air and Space museum.

Graphing Calculator Application

Pacific Tech has an application called Graphing Calculator that runs on the Mac and Windows. It's got an interesting history. "...so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up."
http://www.pacifict.com/Story/?Programming

Pictures of Today!

I didn't take this picture, but I thought it was pretty funny.

This ship is out in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, used for target practice.

Bridges across the Chesapeake.

The bridge in colored pencil.

Nice satellite dish.

A praying mantis and a monarch, Cape Charles, Virginia.

A real All Terrain Vehicle, at Fort Eustis, Virginia.

Some bugs, Hains Point, Washington.

A deer and a big pot, Teddy Roosevelt Island.

A Presidential Helicopter.

A UAV helicopter for nuclear weapons, 1965 vintage.

The End

Bob's Junkmail, #220

2011-10-02T23:41:00.001-05:00

Pure Text

In recent iterations of Microsoft Office, Firefox, and/or Windows, an evil cabal of international conspirators has decided that I am required to include formatting information when I copy and paste from one document or web site to another. This is really dumb. At a minimum there should be a setting for text-only copying.

When I copy something from a web site into Word, it always comes in at an odd size and a font other than Arial 11, which is naturally what the world should use. It's likely to have some type of formatting that puts it into a text box or some odd object.

The solution used to involve pasting into Notepad++ and copying that text back to word, or, for a single line, the following key sequence: Windows, ctrl-v, ctrl-a, ctrl-x, esc.

I finally found a way to fight these enemies of common sense. Puretext will let you hit Windows-V to paste plain text into a document. It's simple, and it works!

http://code.google.com/p/puretext-plus/downloads/list

Wikileaks

It's been months since the Wikileaks hoopla, when a guy named Bradley from Crescent Oklahoma met fame and misfortune when he gave a couple hundred thousand "cables," or old-fashioned emails, to Wikileaks. There was a lot of misinformation floating around after that. Here's a pretty funny story (one of many) about how some things got all mixed up in the press.

      http://breakingthecalm.blogspot.com/2010/12/musing-on-m...

From July 2010 to April 2011 Bradley was enjoying a private room (i.e. solitary confinement) in Quantico, Virginia, when 295 legal scholars, philosophers, and other miscreants pressured the government into easing up. Bradley is now in Leavenworth Kansas, courtesy of the U.S. Government, awaiting trial or sentencing or some sort of legal action.

Since 2010, Wikileaks has been leaking some of the quarter million or so State Department cables onto the Internet. Then, Wikileaks had a leak. Someone copied the infamous cables from Wikileaks and put them all out on the internet, and sent them to a couple of newspapers to boot. This latest leak embarrassed or endangered quite a few people, and was widely considered to be bad manners.

      http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/WikiLeaks-Blame...

Wikileaks said, "It's not our fault. The newspapers did it." The newspapers said, "We thought Wikileaks was an anti-secrecy organization." The U.S. Government said, "irresponsible, reckless and dangerous," and "new security measures," and "internet?"

In case you got fed up with the blizzard of Wikileaks misinformation a while back and didn't read it (or forgot it), here is the whole story, complete with facts and sans spin:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_c...

You might think the government has given up trying to keep this information covered up, particularly since it's all over the web, but you would be wrong. A guy named Peter who has worked for the State Department for 23 had a link inhis blog... that went to a 2009 cable about the sale of U.S. military spare parts to Qadaffi. Now Peter is being investigated by the State Department for "disclosing classified information."

Peter wrote a book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. The book is is critical of the State Department and U.S. government policy, so this investigation may be partially in retaliation for that. Maybe Peter should carry an umbrella to ward off drone attacks.

      http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/gov-employee-f...

Public Collusion

When a company issues stock to the public for the first time in an "initial stock offering" (IPO, or going public), it may raise several million to several billion dollars. But it has to pay 7% to the underwriters. That's a large fee. It's also 75% higher than similar fees in Europe. Mark, Tim, and Howard from Oxford say it's because of collusion among the investment banks (both U.S. and European) doing business in the U.S. They must not realize that the ethics of the bosses at large U.S. investment banks is beyond reproach.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/06/07/the-us...

http://www.afajof.org/afa/forthcoming/7651.pdf

Solar Storms

I read recently that everyone on earth will be grounded because of the coming solar storms. Also, solar storms cause global warming, ice ages, earthquakes, bad breath, locust infestations.

Here's the truth:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/...

The solar cycle will peak around 2013, and it probably won't be as bad as normal. Even if it is, it won't have a significant effect on society as we know it. Worry about getting hit by a lightning or winning the lottery instead. Your phone will still work and your lights will stay on, subject to terrestrial weather and Phoenix electrical workers.

sfc /scannow

Are you missing some Windows 7 files? Probably not, but if you want to make sure, run sfc /scannow from the command line. It is supposed to repair Windows 7 files that are missing or messed up, but it doesn't solve everything. You can read the results with edit c:\windows\logs\sfcdetails.txt.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833

Cell Phone Cancer

Radiation causes cancer by altering chemical bonds in DNA, RNA, and other important stuff in your cells. Cell phones use microwave signals. Microwaves don't have enough energy to alter molecular bonds. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for this. The microwaves from cell phones cannot cause cancer. While they can increase the temperature of your head, it is a tiny, tiny amount -- much less change than walking indoors or outdoors causes.

There are about 7 billion people on and around earth at the moment. There are about 5 billion cell phones. If cell phones really caused brain cancer, then the statistics would show it. However, brain cancer rates have been declining for the past 20 years. Maybe if they called them something besides cell phones people wouldn't be afraid of them.

And furthermore, HPV vaccinations do not cause autism, artism, or mental retardation!

Airplanes are inordinately dangerous, too, according to the press. Last April, the plane Michelle Obama was riding on a plane (a cargo 737) got too close to a C-17 cargo plane landing at Andrews Air Force Base. They were not in danger of colliding, but Michele Obama's plane was too close to land behind the C-17 because of wake turbulence. So the First Lady's plane did a circle and then landed. This is not unusual. Even I have done it, and I'm here to tell about it.

But the Washington Post said, she "came dangerously close to a 200-ton military cargo jet." When a San Diego paper picked up the story, they quoted the Washington post as saying "A plane carrying first lady Michelle Obama almost collided with a military cargo jet on the runway at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, and had to abort landing." There are many more similar stories. For the real story, read the bottom two paragraphs of Paul Bertorelli's blog. Or read the whole thing. It's pretty good.

http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/AVwebInsider_FirstLa...

New Passport Requirements

Last March the State Department issued a request for comments on a proposed passport application questionnaire. It asks, among a lot of other things, for every address you've ever lived at, when you lived there, every job you've ever held, when you worked, your supervisor's name and phone number, and even some personal questions. This stirred up a little controversy.

      http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/25/state-department-...

I cannot find out what ever happened to the proposed questionnaire. I would guess that they cancelled it and will come out with something similar later under a new name.

Here's the questionnaire.

      ds5513-proposed.pdf

Here's a site about government infringement on freedom to travel. It might be just a little biased.

      http://papersplease.org/

Facebook Shutdown

Want to kill someone's Facebook page? Just claim copyright violation. They killed ArsTechnica's a few months ago, no questions asked. Apparently Facebook doesn't even ask for evidence.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/04/facebook-s...

Cyber War

Cyber War is just like WMDs in Iraq.

There are some people who will try to break into any computer on the internet. Many computers on the internet can be broken into, just like many houses. The difference is, your computer can be broken into by someone sitting in Fulton, Missouri or Kathmandu, Nepal or Wuxiang, China.

But that doesn't make it a war.It means people not using safe computing. It won't get you a lethal disease, but it will make your computer act funny. And in some cases it can cost you some money.

What is safe computing?

(1) Keep Windows (or your other operating system) updated.
(2) Use antivirus software and keep it updated.
(3) Don't click on email attachments unless they're from me.

Presidents Bush and Obama wanted an Internet Kill Switch implemented so they could shut off the internet in the event of an emergency. THAT would be a disaster in itself. Imagine if a couple dozen suicidal idiots decided to crash some airplanes into some buildings. In addition to grounding ALL planes for weeks, they'd shut down the internet just to convince us we need their protection.

If the U.S. has computers that should absolutely never be compromised, they should absolutely not be connected to the internet. It's that simple.

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2011/04/are-we-tal...

Today's Physics Lesson

Antihydrogen has been trapped in a tube for more than 15 minutes.

      1104.4982.pdf

      http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26709/

Supersymmetry probably won't work out after all.

      http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/08/lhcb-detect...

Elsewhere in physics, some people at CERN (in Switzerland) blasted some neutrinos at the Gran Sasso lab in Italy. When they measured the neutrino speed, they showed that the neutrinos were going faster than the speed limit, which is the speed of light in a vacuum. So, they said, there must be some mistake.

      http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/neutrino-re...

But the press caught wind of the story and said things like, "Faster than light travel is just around the corner." I like the press's version better, other than the fact that they're wrong.

Neutrinos pass through matter such as dirt and rock with almost no interference. They went right through the ground for somewhere around 500 miles. The Italian Minister of Education and Scientific Research, a lady named Mariastella, thought someone had dug a tunnel for the neutrinos to pass through. That's an understandable mistake, unless you're a Minister of Education and Scientific Research.

      http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/something-i...

Facebook Felony

Should it be a felony to put a fake name on Facebook? In accordance with to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1847, it is the Justice Department's position that a violation of the terms of service of a web site constitutes a federal crime.

      http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903285704...

But Congress is planning to change this. They want to make any violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act a felony. I think that is not very nice.

      http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legis...

Update:  They added an amendment to the bill that says terms of service violations will not be felonies, but everything else will be.

      http://judiciary.senate.gov/legislation/upload/JEN11A19...

Employment e-Verification

Republicans used to be the party against unnecessary government regulation. When I voted this week, I had to show identification. They would not accept my Sam's card. That must be because it expired a few years ago. Last year there was a Republican nationwide program to get this law passed in as many states as possible, because they figured, probably correctly, that more Democratic voters wouldn't have ID when they came to the polls. I doubt if that had any effect in Oklahoma other than hassling the people who work at the polls.

Now Republicans want more unnecessary government regulation: a mandatory e-verification system for all new employees for all jobs. In other words, when you start work, you have to have your ID checked against a government database to make sure you're a legal worker. They only have 8 false negatives for every 1000 people, so most of us won't be hurt by this unless we're illegal. Those 8 people out of a thousand who are false illegal aliens can get food stamps.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/mandato...

It seems as if Republicans have joined the Democrats in abandoning principles in favor of empowering the party and sticking to the "party line" at all costs. But what am I thinking... politicians with principles?

This might explain why, as both parties advocate a reduction in government, there are 230,000 employees in the Department of Homeland Security. There are more than 58,000 in Customs and Border Protection and about the same in the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with no sign of any reduction in the future. That is a huge number of people.

Art, Lawyers, GEMA, and the Brooklyn Museum

Here's a funny story of a lady named Nina and some art she did for the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum asked Nina to create a set of 11 iconic Vishnu avatars, kind of like this:

They offered her an honorarium, though not a lot of money, but said the images could be under free license such as CC-BY-SA. So Nina made the avatars and sent them to the museum. The museum requested revisions, and she didn't want to do them. The Museum sent her back a contract that she had never seen that provided for unlimited revisions, implying that she had signed the agreement. It got funny from there. You can read about it here:

      http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/05/06/the-avatars-of-vishnu/

You can see Nina talking about Germans taking down her publicly licensed movie here:

     http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/13/gema-frauds/

You can see Nina bouncing on a ball here:

      http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/08/21/bounce-bounce-bounce/

Nina needs a webmeister to move her site. You'll get paid in pizza. I'm not sure about unlimited revisions.

      http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/08/22/new-webmaster-needed/

Truthiness

Is it OK for the FBI to lie in Federal Court?  The EFF, the Freedom of Information Act, and a U.S. District Court play the major parts in this conjecture:

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110506/00174414172/c...

The history of The History Channel defies logic and truth. But why should a documentary on a supposedly authoritative TV channel be accurate? They're competing with The Attack of the Show (which, in fairness, seems pretty accurate.)

      http://badarchaeology.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/i-rememb...

Poverty

The poverty rate has gone up in the U.S., but so has the poverty limit. You are poor (financially) if your income is less than three times the food bill for a typical family in the 1960's. The definition of income is where it gets fuzzy, though. Now you don't have to include things like rent assistance, earned income credit, and food stamps. Democrats like a high poverty rate to show how much tax money needs to be spread around to lower income levels. Republicans like a high poverty rate when the Democrats are in control because it makes the economy look bad. There really are more poor people in the U.S. now than there were five years ago, but probably a lot less than there were in the 1960s. After all, we've had a war on poverty.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/...

Orbit

Here is a good time-lapse video taken from the space station.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/...

Pirate Party

The Pirate Party is a political party formed in Sweden in 2006. They organized after some severe raids and penalties on file sharers. They are in favor of copyright and patent reform. I am also in favor of copyright and patent reform. I might be a pirate.

Last week the Pirate Party won 15 seats in the Berlin Parliament, after getting 9 percent of the vote. The win was a big surprise, and the first time the Pirate Party won seats in a state parliament.

      http://www.myce.com/news/german-pirate-party-legally-ac...

      http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,7870...

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/berlin-state-ele...

Atlanta Video

If you'd like to be in a motion picture, visit Atlanta. The police have about 100 video cameras and are planning to "blanket the city" so they can see everything. Almost.

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/atlanta-increases-surve...

Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, who have thousands of video cameras each, consider Atlanta a rank amateur in the video surveillance game.

http://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Study-Surveill...

Disappearing Glaciers

Greenland has an ice sheet, and Greenland has some glaciers. The glaciers are slowly moving rivers of ice, and the ice sheet just sits there. The ice sheet is much larger and thicker than all the glaciers combined.

There was a minor mistake in this year's Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. They made of map of Greenland with the ice sheet, and neglected to put the glaciers on it. Then someone did some ciphering and figured out that 15 percent of Greenland's ice has melted in the past 12 years. Of course, it hasn't. That number is about 150 times too high. A lot of the glaciers have receded, maybe more than 15 percent, but that's nowhere near 15 percent of Greenland's total ice.

Normally this wouldn't be a big deal. People make mistakes all the time, occasionally in Atlases. But since it's global warming, there was a minor uproar over it. Some people are claiming there's a conspiracy to brainwash the unwashed with false information, and that the earth is not warming.

      http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/09/atlas...

I will make the prediction here and now that Greenland will cool significantly over the next four months, rather than warming.

Here's a very interesting note written by a guy named Matthew who, along with some others, discovered a planet made of diamond. It's required reading:

      http://theconversation.edu.au/diamond-planets-climate-c...

Here's an article about Matthew's planet:

      http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110825-...

Police Videos

Police can (and should, in my opinion) record video while they work. In some states, Illinois, for example, there are laws against taking videos of police while they work. An Illinois state court has ruled this law unconstitutional.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110919/03455916010/i...

People argued against the ruling, pointing out that it is just one more nail in the coffin of the long tradition of political corruption... in Illinois.

The State of Illinois is appealing the decision. There are other Illinois cases, too:

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/special_s...

Tourism to the U.S.

Suppose you are a Chinese native and would like to take a vacation in the U.S. You need a visa. That's not unusual. But it's not free.

In fact, there is a $140 fee just to apply. Next, you need to buy a prepaid phone card that you must use to schedule a visa appointment. After that, there's a long visa application you fill out online, in English. Then, after waiting somewhere between 2 and 100 days (the U.S. government won't tell you how long, which makes scheduling your vacation a little difficult), you travel to a U.S. consulate with complete financial, family, and business records. You can expect to wait in line for 2 or 3 hours for a 5-minute interview. Finally, you will learn whether you are entitled to a tourist visa and can visit the United States.

If, on the other hand, you decide to take your vacation in France, it's easy. France and most other European countries are more than happy to accept your money without the ridiculous visa obstacles of the U.S.

This, along with the world-renown TSA and Customs reception at the U.S., is why the U.S. is losing large numbers of Chinese, Brazilian, and Indian tourists to Europe and other tourist-friendly destinations.

But it's not really a problem. The U.S. economy is doing fine without tourists bringing in more money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/opinion/22iht-edshapi...

River Rattlers

I saw a military jet landing at Tulsa not long ago, so I took a picture of it. When I looked at the picture, I was surprised to see an F-18 with red stars on it.

It turns out that the Navy Strike Fighter Squadron 204 has had a year of "adversary missions." This means they pretend to be the enemy in training exercises.

http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=57857

The Protect-IP Act

This law is being argued and paid for in the Senate, even as I type:

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110923/03004416062/s...

The movie and recording industry are paying U.S. politicians, through lobbyists and campaign contributions, to pass the Protect-IP act. This law limits and bans several legitimate uses of the internet, and they didn't even ask for my opinion!

      http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2011/09/technology...

Meanwhile, the Swedish Film Institute, Sweden's answer to the MPAA, was caught illegally sharing its own movies. Which is not illegal at all, I suppose. But they couldn't catch them in the act because the IP address could not be matched to a single person. That's a bit ironic.

      https://torrentfreak.com/movie-institute-feels-pain-of-...

Quickie Supercomputer

Need a massively parallel supercomputer? Go to Amazon Web Services and build your own. A pharmaceutical company needed some serious computing power, so they had a 30,000-core cluster assembled. It runs Linux and costs $1,279 per hour, a bargain.

      http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/30000-core...

But cloud computing is not necessarily the most cost effective way to assemble thousands of processors for massive computations. At the University of Washington, some people made a computer game called Fold-it, where players get points and compete in accomplishing tasks for folding and modeling complex molecules.

"After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, they called in the Fold-it players. The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. They did it in only three weeks."

      http://scienceblog.com/47894/gamers-succeed-where-scien...

      http://fold.it/portal/

iPad

I got an iPad not long ago, mainly for aviation charts and weather. It's a pain not to be able do some simple things that I'm used to without going to find an app to download. I wanted to save and access the GPS track, since the iPad has a GPS and saves the track. But this requires an external app. So I paid 199¢ to get one.

But the download failed. It failed about 75 times. (I was persistent. I had paid $1.99, after all.) But it never said why it failed.

It said I should download it onto my computer. I thought my iPad was my computer, but it thought my Windows machine was my computer. So I tried to download it on my Windows computer. It said I needed a new version of iTunes before I could use that app. So I tried to figure out how to get a new iTunes onto my iPad.

It turns out that the new version of iTunes I needed was the one on my Windows machine, in order to download the app onto my iPad. It never bothered to tell me this, but I deduced it through trial and (mostly) error.

Eventually I got it all going. Apple seems to have made the iPad easy to use by not letting you do or know things that you might occasionally need. Then, today I read this blog that explains everything:

http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2011/09/we-open-in-we...

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo mail has always been a little flaky for me. Over the past year or two they have started bouncing Junkmails, saying that there have been complaints about my email server. This was odd, because nobody else said I had any complaints, but apparently hundreds of Yahoo email recipients were complaining.

I eventually emailed and called enough people at Yahoo to learn that they send out the email alleging complaints whenever someone's mail server has a significant increase in activity, regardless of the reason or whether they ever get a complaint.

Since I'm the only user on my mail server, sending out Junkmail to a bunch of people increases its activity very significantly. I finally got tired of Yahoo's harassment and deleted the offending Yahoo email addresses from the Junkmail list. So if you've got a Yahoo email address and you're not reading this, now you know why.

Yahoo was recently in the news for blocking any incoming or outgoing email that contained "http://OccupyWallSt.org", without even notifying the sender. That web site is organizing some protests in New York. I think they're protesting the financial system in general. Maybe they want to change to a loan-free economy, or maybe they just like the party atmosphere of protests.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110920/02444416023/i...

This got even more press when one of the policemen pepper sprayed a couple of ladies, and the police public relations people explained that it was justified and they had no choice. However, a video shows otherwise.

https://occupywallst.org/article/Officer-Bologna/

Videos like this make it harder for police to do their jobs, but they also make it harder for the police and their bosses (in this case) to cover up mistakes.

We always expect police and teachers do fine jobs and never make serious mistakes. Almost all of them do. But with hundreds of thousands of them, together with the fact that every last one of them is a human being, there will be a serious mistake now and then.

OnStar

There is a bit of hoopla in Washington about OnStar "invading privacy." OnStar is the satellite/cell phone communications service that tracks your car, can tell you where you're at, and will report any crashes.

The new terms and conditions explain that OnStar reserves the right to disclose your location and history to anybody they want, and to keep tracking you and disclosing this info even after you terminate your OnStar service. Here are some details:

http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=1270

OnStar will be changing that now.

Slinky Waves

You should really know this, if you don't already. What happens when you drop a slinky?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/...

Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein once wrote a touching love ballad called "Cover of the Rolling Stone." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of368QdosR0)

He also wrote a children's book called The Giving Tree. Here's the very condensed version from Wikipedia:

The Giving Tree is a tale about a relationship between a young boy and a tree. The tree always provides the boy with what he wants: branches on which to swing, shade in which to sit, and apples to eat. As the boy grows older he requires more and more of the tree. The tree loves the boy very much and gives him anything he asks for. In the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, the tree lets the boy cut it down so the boy can build a boat in which he can sail. The boy leaves the tree, now a stump."

Many years later, the boy, now an old man, returns and the tree sadly says, 'I'm sorry, boy...but I have nothing left to give you.' But the boy replies, 'I do not need much now, just a quiet place to sit and rest.' The tree then says, 'Well, an old tree stump is a good place for sitting and resting. Come boy, sit down and rest.' The boy obliges and the tree was very happy."

You need to know that to get this xkcd comic:

Well, I thought it was funny.

Patent Trolling

Patent trolls are companies that do little or no business other than acquiring patents and suing companies that actually produce something. The companies being sued usually have never heard of the patents involved, and have not copied anybody's patented work. The patents are typically so broad or obvious that dozens or hundreds of people may have developed the similar products independently.

The companies who get sued often pay the trolls off to avoid expensive lawsuits with uncertain outcomes. The outcomes are uncertain because there is no certainty in patent law, and the patent trolls often file suits in East Texas, where the judges and juries have made an industry out of ridiculous awards in lawsuits that are questionable at best.

A company called SmartMetric was formed in 2002 as a "biometric card" company. SmartMetric apparently never made anything, including money. They show no inventory or equipment in their recent balance sheet, other than about $16,000 in computer equipment that has been fully depreciated. The total shareholder equity is negative $1.6 million.

SmartMetric was issued a patent in 2004 for microchips embedded in bank cards. Never mind that microchips have been embedded in bank cards since the mid 1980's. SmartMetric has a patent, and to prove it they sued American Express, MasterCard, and Visa. SmartMetric lost the lawsuit.

So SmartMetric not only appealed, but they also filed new, almost identical lawsuits against the same companies. Why not? SmartMetric has nothing to lose but the lawsuits. The company is worthless. But if they win, they could get hundreds of millions of dollars.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110923/17444516081/i...

This is not an isolated case. Some Boston University researchers (James, Jennifer, and Michael) came out with a report that says patent trolls (non-practicing entities) have cost publicly traded defendants $500 billion since 1990. That's almost as hard on the economy as a war!

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/study-p...

Here's the report:

      http://www.bu.edu/law/faculty/scholarship/workingpapers...

Lucky for us, the Patent Reform Act was signed into law on September 16. Not so lucky for us, the honorable members of Congress removed any meaningful reform from the law so as not to adversely affect campaign contributions.

      http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/2373-Patent-R...

Here's an article about patent trolls in biotech. This costs lives.

      http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110928/full/477521a.html

What kind of patents are being issued in these sophisticated times? According to federal law, it has to be something novel and nontrivial. Like making a snowman.

      http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/us-inventor-fi...

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110909/09222615881/n...

Intel is taking a step in the right direction. In their $2.5 awards to research centers at various universities, they require open source on all software and inventions. The universities accepting the awards cannot stake claims to any patents. This is the way it should be, of course. Universities should be about distributing information, not controlling it.

      http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2011/09/12/int...

Peacekeepers

In the 1980s, the U.S. deployed about 50 Peacekeeper Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). They built over 100.

Peacekeeper Missile

The Peacekeeper Missile would deliver up to ten 300-kiloton nuclear warheads 6,000 miles with an accuracy of 120 meters. They used inertial guidance rather than GPS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper

In 2005, as part of the Start II Treaty, the U.S. retired the Peacekeeper Missiles. They put the warheads on the older 1970 vintage Minuteman missiles. There are currently 450 Minuteman III missiles in service today. Well, they're not actually being used today, but they are available for use.

Minute Man III

The Peacekeeper rockets are being used to launch satellites instead of nuclear warheads. They've been revamped and renamed the Minotaur IV rocket. The first orbital Minotaur IV launch was September 26, 2010, a "Space Based Space Surveillance" satellite used to track other satellites, space junk, and used Dodge Neons in orbit around the earth.

On September 27 of this year at Kodiak Alaska, the Navy launched a Minotaur IV+ rocket and placed a communications satellite into elliptical orbit. It will be used for military communications in Afghanistan.

http://www.adn.com/2011/09/27/2091263/rocket-carrying-m...

Biggest Company in the World

What's the biggest company in the world? Exxon, by market capitalization (the stock price times the total number of shares in the company). Apple is number 2, Microsoft is number 5, and Google is number 16.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2011/08/does-this-m...

This week, IBM's market cap rose higher than Microsoft's for the first time since 1996.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-30/ibm-tops-micro...

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a lobbying organization that solicits "memberships" from small businesses. However, their lobbying efforts hurt small businesses. A large part of their lobbying efforts seem to be for the benefit of the recording industry and pharmaceutical companies.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110922/12005216053/c...

Patriot Act

The Patriot act was a huge, confusing law passed almost ten years ago. Some people really didn't like the law because it reduced some basic rights, civil liberties, and that sort of things. But over 10 years most people got used to the idea of the government being able to listen to phone conversations and track people's locations without search warrants.

Most of the original law was supposed to expire in 2005 and 2010, but as one of the few laws with bipartisan support, it was renewed twice by Congress and signed by Bush and Obama.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13572833

I didn't like the law in 2001, 2005, 2010, or now. Oddly enough, neither Congress nor the President asked my opinion.

I think the Patriot Act was just one of many overreactions to a couple dozen suicidal idiots who flew some airplanes into some buildings. I feel a long rant coming on, so I'll cut it short. Here is my opinion:

The Iraq War was unnecessary

The U.S. should have left Afghanistan in 2002.

The majority of the damage resulting from terrorist attacks of 2001 was caused by the overreaction of the U.S. in (1) lives lost in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, (2) freedom infringed on in the name of security, and (3) economic loss paying for wars, new security regulations, and government security organizations.

I could write a pages and pages on each of these topics, but I doubt anybody would pay attention. Most people I know disagree with me anyway, and are not likely to change their minds. In fairness, I doubt if I change my mind either. But I will pay attention to other views and think independently.

There has been a chart flying around the internet showing that the Patriot Act is being used to catch drug users instead of terrorists. It's partially correct. Delayed notice search warrants allow police to search under a search warrant before they notify the target of the search. These used to be illegal, but under the Patriot Act they were legalized.

92% of the time delayed-notice search warrants were used from 2006-2009, it was for illegal drug cases; 7% of the time was for fraud; less than 1% was for terrorism. Ironically, this is one part of the Patriot Act I think is OK.

      http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/patriot-act/

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act

     http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110922/03520616050/s...

Part of the Patriot Act that I do not like is the part that allows electronic wiretapping without a warrant. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter normally save information on your internet usage and frequently are required to turn it over to the government.

      http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/30/us-internet-s...

Another controversial practice that may have come from the Patriot Act is warrantless GPS tracking. Police can put a GPS tracker on my car without letting me know about it. I think that would be fine, if they'd call me once and a while and let me know where I am.

      http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/gps/

Here's what a GPS tracker from the FBI looks like:

      http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Tracking-Device-Teardown/5250

Not to be left out, Hollywood and the Recording Industry plan to get their own Patriot Act.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110318/02434713536/d...

3.5 Minutes on an Airbus

In 2009 an Air France Airbus 330 crashed on a flight from Brazil to France. Last April they found the flight data recorder using a Remora 6000 ROV.

http://www.bea.aero/fr/enquetes/vol.af.447/remora6000.pdf

Here's what probably happened in the crash:

The plane flew into some icing and turbulence in or near a thunderstorm. The drain holes of the three pitot tubes (airspeed sensors) got plugged with ice, and the airspeed indication was faulty. This caused the autopilot and autothrottle to turn themselves off.

The pilot pulled the nose up and climbed to the max altitude. The stall warning went off a couple of times when the plane hit some turbulence. The airspeed indication varied from 275 knots to 60 knots to 215 knots. There were incorrect airspeed readings.

The plane ended up at a 16 degrees nose up attitude at 38,000 feet, its max altitude, full throttle, with an angle of attack of 30 to 40 degrees. In other words, the plane was pointing up but was in a stall and was losing altitude. The unusually high angle of attack caused the airspeed system to believe it was getting faulty data, and the stall warning system turned itself off.

At one point the pilot lowered the nose a little. This caused the stall warnings to come on, because the airspeed data started to make sense. So the pilot pulled the nose up again, getting back into the stall, and the stall warning went silent again.

Near the "ground" or ocean, the plane was descending at over 10,000 feet per minute at about 16 degrees nose high attitude and 35-40 degrees angle of attack. The throttles were at idle at the time of the crash.

The pilots were apparently confused with the conflicting data they were getting. Maybe they believed the airspeed rather than the attitude and altitude instruments. Three and a half minutes passed from the autopilot failure until the plane hit the water.

Airbus has had trouble with the pitot tubes icing up in these planes, and was in the process of a non-mandatory replacement.

Here is a lot of information on the crash:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Domain Game

There are a lot of domain names on the web, such as xpda.com,exxon.com, and diplomaframe.com.  The last part of the domain name, called the top level domain, may be .com for the U.S. (or Earth in general), .fr for France, .ru for Russia, or .ws for Western Samoa.

The country of a top level domain controls the domains underneath it, subject to international web rules. The web sites don't necessarily need to be located or hosted in that country, and the target audience doesn't can be anywhere. For example, I could register the domain name xpda.ru from a company in Russia, if it was available (it's not), and host it in Pryor, Oklahoma.

Any country in the world is entitled to a top level domain name, with the possible exception of the United States.

A few years ago some people thought that would be profitable to start selling Western Samoan domain names (.ws) and call them "WebSite" domains. It didn't catch on as widely as they were hoping. The .tv domain names (controlled by the Tuvalu Islands) have done a little better, sometimes being associated with television.

When you register a domain name in the U.S., it costs a few dollars per year. Millions of domain names have been registered, many of them unused. I believe the same is true for other large countries.

Suppose you want to give out free domain names. You could register a domain in a small country or territory with less than stringent internet laws, such as the Australian territory of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. It has the .cc web sites.

If you registered cz.cc, then you could give out domain names that end in cz.co, such as xpda.cz.co. People who do this sort of thing are called third-level domain providers. Since it's free, it attracts people who need quick domain they may not be using very long, quite possibly including some people with less-than-honorable intentions.

In fact, someone did this with the cz.cc domain. And then, among others, some people with less than honorable intentions got into it. They used it for domains that botnets contact for instructions, and for domains with malicious code. Now the cz.cc domain seems inaccessible.

A few days ago Kaspersky Labs and Microsoft took over the Kelihos botnet, a big botnet with over 40,000 computers. They directed all its traffic to their own server. This way they can at least control the botnet until the thousands of users with the malware get it removed. They get traffic from 3,000 infected computers every minute. Even so, the Kelihos botnet is about 20 times smaller than the Rustock botnet that was taken down last March.

A lot of the infected computers in the Kelihos botnet were controlled by servers in the cz.cc domain. In fact, more than 250 cz.cc domains were being used to control over 180 different botnets.

      http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/sinkhole-c...

The cz.cc domain was blocked from Google searches last May. Some people complained about it:

      http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread...

Now I can't get access cz.cc or any of its subdomains at all. But don't despair. There are other places to get free third-level domain names for your web site, if you're not particular about your reputation or if you're into nefarious internet activity. Some of the sites they provide domain names for are probably legitimate, but Google has blocked these domains from its searches in the past:

88n.eu, c0m.li, cc.ai, co.be, co.cc, co.tv, coom.in, cz.cc, dhis.org, dynip.com, gv.vg, minidns.net, mx.am, nl.ai, rr.nu, staticcling.org, uni.cc, xe.cx, and yi.org

Neal Stephenson, Innovation Starvation

Required reading. This will be covered on the exam:

http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-...

Pictures of Today!

(or What I Did on My Summer Vacation)

It's been a while since the last Junkmail, so there are quite a few pictures. Feel free to skip a few (or all) when you get bored. Nobody will know the difference.

In June, at home, I took this picture of a ladybug larva at home. It's tiny:

Then Mike & Elizabeth (Webster) and I took the Minnow to Bermuda and Back.

Bermuda Bird

Then I crossed Kansas and a few other states...

Scissortails chasing a hawk, Kansas

...and met Josh in Wyoming. It was my 4th (Josh's 2nd) valiant attempt at Gannett Peak. We made it!

The Top of Gannett Peak!

More pictures from Gannett are here:  http://xpda.com/gannett/gannett-iv/

I headed to Arizona via the scenic route for flight training in Scottsdale

...but I want to go West on I80!

I visited Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona, the largest nuclear power plant in the U.S. They wouldn't let me in.

We were thoroughly PC-12 flight trained. Then we leased the PC-12 to someone else.

A mother and father gila woodpecker feeding babies in a Saguaro Cactus, outside Scottsdale, Arizona

A White-Winged Dove and a Gilded Flicker, Outside Scottsdale, Arizona

A Rooster

After flight training, I went back north to climb King's Peak, Utah. That's the 48th state highpoint for me -- only Montana and Alaska are left.

King's Peak, Utah

A bumblebee on a thistle, in Utah

Moonset, in Utah

Then I headed to Colorado, and about 10 of us went backpacking to Snowmass Lake

Alligator, Fruita Colorado

Cathy fishing at Snowmass Lake

Sean and Russell Mountain Climbing

Wildlife, Snowmass Lake

After a quick trip home, I headed back to Colorado.

A hummingbird on a thistle, Great Sand Dunes, Colorado

A hummingbird in a tree, Great Sand Dunes, Colorado

Night Hawk, St. Jacob's Well, Kansas

Road Runner, St. Jacob's Well, Kansas

Cicada, SW Kansas

Butterfly, Handies Peak, Colorado

More Handies Peak pictures are here:  http://xpda.com/mountains/handies/

Three Connecticut Hikers on Redcloud Peak

More Redcloud Peak pictures are here:  http://xpda.com/mountains/redcloud/

I took a quick detour to Virginia and stayed on the Minnow in Hurricane Irene. It was windy. Then I headed home...

4000 U.S. Naval Cadets

... and went further west to Seattle. Melinda, Josh, Cathy and I climbed Mount St. Helens.

Three lunatics at the top of Mount St. Helens

Then I came home.

A Dainty Sulphur Butterfly. It's tiny.

The End

Bob's Junkmail, #219

2011-06-14T09:29:00.002-05:00

Battle in the Pacific

Fiji has 3,500 soldiers and nine patrol boats. Tonga has 500 soldiers, three patrol boats, a twin-engine airplane, a barge, and a royal yacht. They both claim ownership of two of unpopulated reefs in the Pacific Ocean -- the same two.

I am wondering why in the world Australia gave them boats with 20mm cannons. But I suppose people in Australia must wonder why the U.S. gives a bunch of countries F16's and helicopter gunships.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5132572/Warships-square...

Raw Faith

A guy named George built a boat with his three sons. He quit his job, sold his house, and went to work on the Raw Faith full time. George was not a sailor, and not a boat builder. The boat is a little bigger than most -- it's a 118-foot three masted ship patterned after a 14th century galleon. Or it might have been an 88-foot boat, depending on who you ask.



George's plan was to use the boat to take disabled children sailing.

      http://www.pressherald.com/archive/captain-pursues-drea...

The Raw Faith floated, sailed, and looked pretty cool (in my warped opinion). It also looked none too sturdy. More than one person opined that it was not seaworthy, including the Coast Guard, which categorized it as a "derelict." I think that's also the category the Coast Guard uses for me.



Here's a 2002 article about the project:

      http://www.workingwaterfront.com/articles/Raw-faith-bui...

By the time the boat was finished, George had divorced his wife, and his three sons decided to move on to other things rather than live on the boat. Even so, George went on to start "Raw Faith Sailing Adventures," despite a few bumps in the road.

      http://www.wcsh6.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=84392698001

In 2004, the boat lost its rudder and had to be towed to port by the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard "grounded" the boat until some changes were made.

George made the changes. Then in 2006, the Raw Faith lost all three masts in strong winds and had to be towed in again by the Coast Guard.

      http://www.pointseast.com/template.shtml?id=EkZuZAyZVEy...

      http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?43189-Raw-Fa...

In 2010 George brought the Raw Faith to Salem, Massachusetts at the invitation of the National Park Service to portray a ghost ship for Halloween. After his permit ran out and he was asked to leave the harbor, George was arrested for disturbing the peace and trespassing, according to Salem Harbor Master Sgt. Peter Gifford. Gifford said charges were dropped against McKay when he agreed to leave the port of Salem. There must be a pretty good story behind this.

George left Salem on December 4 for Bermuda. Three days later, the Raw Faith got into 25-30 knot winds in 10-15 foot seas and was disabled. This is rough, but we've managed to get through weather like this in the Minnow.

Two Coast Guard cutters arrived and determined that the hull of the Raw Faith was buckling. They took the crew of two off the boat, which sank the next day in 6,000 feet of water.



      http://freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=52&Su...

      http://bangordailynews.com/2010/12/08/news/mainebuilt-s...

Maybe we'll take the Minnow to Bermuda this week.

It's possible to build a raft and sail it clear across the Atlantic.

      http://www.floatingneutrinos.com/son%20of%20town%20hall...

Perfection

The images in a lot of ads have been altered, or photoshopped. Photoshopping usually improves a photo, espectially when a big company pays big bucks for it. But sometimes they bungle the job.

Check out this perfect girl, for example. Girls are apparently supposed to look good with large, smiling mouths. This poor Coke girl, with the ironic caption "Perfection," had her mouth stretched imperfectly to her right, but not to her left.

It's not a major problem, I just thought it was pretty funny with the caption "Perfection." You can find some major problems on this web site:

http://www.psdisasters.com/

Center of Data

A bit is a zero or a one in computer parlance. You can represent one character, such as "q" or "f" with seven or eight bits. Each bit in a computer's memory requires some electricity, either to assign it a value of zero or one, or to read its value. It even takes a little electricity to maintain a value in normal computer memory.

The more bits you have, the more electricity is required. Then, with a computer, you have to worry about things like hard drives, to save more bits than the computer's memory will hold. A processor is nice, which will allow you to write programs to set the bits in some meaningful fashion. Memory and processors require other chips to do things like move bits around from one part of the computer to another, and supply power to the CPU, memory, and other chips.

You also might want some way to move a bit from one computer to another, whether the other is nearby (local), far away (internet), or really far away (interstellar).

Imagine a setup where you have a whole bunch of bits, maybe 60,000,000,000,000,000. You could pack these bits into some computers, maybe 16 gigabytes each. You could pack all these computers into big boxes, or shipping containers, maybe 1,000 or more per box. Then you could stick about 45 of these big boxes into a bigger building. If you tied them together with 60 miles of power cable and 96 miles of network cable, you just might end up with a data center like this:

This is Google's data center outside Pryor. It's not finished yet, and won't be running until late this year. It probably doesn't even have the computers installed yet. I just guessed on most of these numbers, so I could be off by a lot. But it might be in the neighborhood for a typical data center.

It would take somewhere around 10 megawatts to power all that mess. That's a lot of electricity -- around one percent of the GRDA coal fire plant's output, but still a lot less than a large foundry or smelter.

It's really strange to think about 10 megawatts of electricity being used to do nothing but move around a bunch of zeros and ones. Actually, 15% or so of the power is used for cooling, lights, mechanical bulls, and other necessary data center equipment. Most if it runs the computers and communications equipment. I'm not sure how much power it takes to send a bit through an optic fiber cable, but they send a lot of them -- billions and billions every second.

Google has several data centers. They use them for the search business and related projects like AdSense and Analytics, but also for applications like Google Docs, YouTube, Picasa, and commercial and retail cloud computing.

Amazon has a few data centers. In addition to their retail business, Amazon has a big cloud computing and storage business called Amazon Web Services. In fact, when you go to http://xpda.com, you are accessing data scattered around Amazon's data center in Virginia. Amazon also has some various and sundry sites, like http://dpreview.com and Cloud Drive.

Facebook has a few data centers. They've had to increase their capacity as a result of normal growth, and they had a big bump when people started storing photos on their Facebook pages. Facebook has opened their Oregon data center to the public (mostly). It's supposed to be really efficient in its electricity use.

      http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/16/photo-tour-of-facebook...

Even small companies like Microsoft have some data centers.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPnoKb9fTkA

Google designs and builds their own servers. They use Linux, but only install the parts of Linux that they need. Each server is just a mother board with some attached items like a hard drive, battery, etc.

      http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

With tens of thousands of servers in a building, it would make no sense to have a keyboard and monitor for each. Instead, there are a few computers that allow humans and software to monitor the servers.

When tens of thousands of servers are running, there are likely to be failures every day. When one fails, it would be quite rude, say, if a financial transaction mysteriously changed from $100 to $100,000, or a personal email was sent to half a million people instead of the one it was addressed to. Google and the other data centers have redundancy built in so failures are expected and tolerated. For backup, all data errors that slip by are blamed on Microsoft Windows.

When a hard drive fails it is removed from service, reformatted, overwritten, and tested. If it fails verification, it is shredded.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTm36fcYCOc

One thing in common about all these data centers is that the companies don't say how many servers there are. There may be some competitive secrets involved. And I suppose if someone publicized having 45,000 dual CPU's and associated RAM, hard drive, etc. in a single building, it might attract a couple of recreational methamphetamine users who would try to break into the data center, load $100 million in computer equipment into a 1983 Dodge Caravan, and sell it at the local pawn shop.

A data center is one place that would not be worth burgling. In addition to tight security, 24-hour personnel, instant communications with police, and constantly monitored video surveillance, the computer equipment (CPU, memory, hard drives, routers) has lot numbers and/or serial numbers and would be easy to track. It would be more profitable and personally rewarding to rustle the cattle across the road. Well, maybe not that personally rewarding, but the criminal penalty is not as bad as embedding a YouTube video may soon be.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110601/01515014500/s...

Fourier Transforms

The Fourier transform is a technique of converting waves into their frequency components. For example, you can take a sound wave and display the frequencies making up that sound. If you had a nice single tone like a tuning fork, the Fourier transform of that sound would have a nice peak at the frequency of that sound.

Fourier transforms are used for a lot of things. One application is to compare two sound files and see if they're the same music. This is a lot faster than listening to the two files. The original sound wave of the two files may look something like this:

The top two lines are the same music as the bottom two, the top one a .wav and the bottom one .mp3. I can't tell they're identical music by looking at the audio waves in the files.

A Fourier transform can be done on any section of the music to find what frequencies (notes) are used in that section. If you do that on several sections of the file, you can probably tell whether the files match.

There are about 178,367 other applications for Fourier transforms, including non-sonic frequencies, and I don't understand most of them. Here is a good explanation about how a Fourier transform works:

http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/05/17/understanding-the-...

Learn it. Use it. Or not.

SpaceX

Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. He moved to Canada, went to college in the U.S., and 1995 started a software company with his brother called Zip2. In 1999, AltaVista bought Zip2 for over $300 million.

In 1999, Elon co-founded an internet company that eventually became Paypal. When eBay bought Paypal for $1.5 billion (in stock), Elon's share was worth $175 million. In 2002, Elon started Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX.

SpaceX has built and launched some rockets into space. Last December, they launched their Dragon space capsule into orbit and recovered it, kind of like NASA used to do on manned missions before the Space Shuttle. The Dragon capsule carried a top secret cargo for the test mission.

      http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20101209

A wheel of cheese.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/science/space/09rocke...

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11936711

The U.S. plans for the Dragon space module to dock with the International Space Station later this year, but Russia doesn't like the idea. Russia says it has not been fully tested. Russia also makes billions of dollars carrying U.S. people and cargo to the space station and back.

      http://www.universetoday.com/85129/russia-has-concerns-...

National Anthems

The Turkey has a national anthem, like most countries.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu6tnM7Oscs

Unlike most countries, a group from Germany claims it owns the rights to Turkey's national anthem, and has sent Turkey a bill. So Turkey is passing a law to ensure its national anthem is free.

      http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,733515...

      http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.actio...

Ireland owns the copyright to its own national anthem, but it expires next year so we'll all be able to sing along without paying royalties.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aip-a3qEJ2s

      http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2011/05...

Digital Insecurity

Someone copied personal information on a million and a half customers from Citigroup's computers.

      http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/citigroup-card-c...

Someone copied personal information on 77 million customers from Sony's computers in April. In May, someone copied information on 25 million more Sony customers. Sony shut down its Play Station Network for more than three weeks. Three people in Spain were arrested in connection to the security breach.

      http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/26/us-sony-stold...

The New Zealand Labour party suffered a security breach, and blamed the National Party.

      http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_i...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had some trouble when its boss was arrested for sexual assault and attempted rape in New York. The IMF then had a security breach, but they're not giving many details.

      http://gamutnews.com/20110612/21098/imf-newest-victim-o...

Someone stole and/or copied RSA's SecurID authentication technology code in March. SecurID is a security system that uses electronic keys or tokens to guarantee security for defense contractors and other secretive types.


      http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214800/Caution_...

A few weeks later, someone borrowed some "secure" information from defense contractors Lockheed Martin, L3, and Northrop Grumman, who use RSA's SecurID for security. Then RSA offered to replace their customers' SecurID tokens.

      http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=11122

      http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304906004...

In Mesa County, Colorado, there was a security breach that was self-inflicted. An employee copied a text file to a folder open to the internet. The file had the personal information of victims, suspects, and, most importantly, informants in current sheriff's department investigations. Oops.

      http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/12/informants...

Here are a few more examples of Data Insecurity this year:

      http://www.guardianedge.com/data-breaches/

Want to get in on the fun? You, too, can become a computer criminal!

      http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/06/criminal-classifieds...

National Academies Press

All .pdf versions of books published by National Academies Press, about 4,000 books in all, are now available for free download. I like that.

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.asp...

Here's one that RSA, Sony, Citigroup, and the other companies in the previous section need:

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12997

Homeland Domain

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a policy of seizing internet domains (web sites) they suspect are guilty of copyright and trademark violations. They do this without a hearing. They do this without prior notice or warning. They don't offer the web site owner the opportunity to reclaim the domain, at least not in a reasonable amount if time. The owners are not even notified of the seizure, let alone the reason for it.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/media/20musi...

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101214/02371412269/o...

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101217/01190512310/h...

Some people, unpatriotic communists, no doubt, have a problem with this. They say that Homeland Security is pulling down innocent web sites. Sure, they accidentally seized 84,000 web sites and put up a child pornography notice in their place. Anybody could make a mistake like that. And they released the web sites and took down the child pornography notice only three days later. (They had apparently seized a DNS server rather than the targeted site.)

      http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/145...

Someone came out with an extension for Firefox that allows seized domains to be easily replaced online. Homeland Security is trying to get people not to use the extension.

      http://torrentfreak.com/homeland-security-wants-mozilla...

Homeland Security recently seized a Spanish domain (rojadirecta.org) that was twice found to be legal by Spanish courts. It's a Spanish site operated by a Spanish company, and its only connection to the U.S. is that it has a .org domain. The site has no copyrighted material, but it links to torrents which link to copyrighted material.

      http://torrentfreak.com/us-resume-file-sharing-domain-s...

Oddly enough, the Spanish government did not appreciate this.

Most of the domains seized by Homeland Security, including Rojadirecta, come back online in a matter of hours or days. For example, you can now get to the Rojadirecta site at rojadirecta.es, rojadirecta.me, or rojadirecta.in.

      http://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-se...

Some people have the unmitigated gall to claim the Department of Homeland Security is operating outside the U.S. Constitution, and that they have no business messing with the internet in the first place. But they obviously have not heard:  We are at war! NOBODY should question the Department of Homeland Security.

      http://torrentfreak.com/5-reasons-why-the-us-domain-sei...

The Department of Homeland Security has corrected all these naysayers, explaining what a great success the program of domain seizures has been, and is encouraging other countries to join in.

      http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110608/20310614626/i...

TSA Budget

The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to reduce the budget of the TSA by $270 million, or 4%. I bet it ends up as a budget increase of over 10%, although I would prefer budget cut of at least 50%.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/politics/house-vote...

Police Videos

Last Junkmail I mentioned that people are taking videos of police in action. Some police officers don't like this. Some privacy fans don't like laws against videoing police.

I thought this story was interesting. Someone took a video with his cell phone of a police shooting in Miami. After the shooting, the police came after the guy taking the video. He managed to put the memory card from his phone is his mouth when he was arrested with his girlfriend. The video is now on YouTube with a bunch of hits.

I don't know whether the police were correct in the shooting, but they didn't look very good when they took the guy's cell phone. Then the police publicity people made some pretty dumb statements. It's almost like they are denying everything that is in the video. To their credit, the guy and his girlfriend have not filed a complaint, and the police have not pressed charges against them.

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/08/6812110...

1,093 Angstroms?

A miss is as good as a half mile. The Associated Press released an article a week or two ago saying the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is almost 11 football fields long. That's 3/4 of a mile! The longest ship in the world is not even a quarter mile long. The Carl Vinson is really about 3 football fields long, 1,093 feet. Think about landing a jet on that! The runway at Claremore International is almost five times that long.

Pacific Ocean, June 3, 2011

Arabian Gulf, April 4, 2011, an E-2C Hawkeye approaches the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson

Pacific Ocean, May 19, 2011, a C-2A Greyhound lands on the USS Carl Vinson

The Old Man and the Salt

Archaeologists found someone thousands of years old in an Iranian salt mine. Iran decided to leave him (and any others) there indefinitely. They have recovered five other people from the mine before (dated between 540 B.C. and 640 A.D.), but decided they don't have the resources to do it now. That may be a negotiating ploy, though, so they can get a better deal with some Germans.

      http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070703-...

People found some worms in some South African mines, over 4,000 feet underground. They're the deepest living land animals ever found.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13620701

A lady in Birmingham, Alabama named Sarah found some underground pyramids in Egypt using infrared satellite data:

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13522957

Scrap Scrap

Some people just live in a different world than I do.

http://www.wpxi.com/news/28168639/detail.html

Actually, my family claims I live in a different world than everybody else. But I like it that way.

Distressing Law

If you put a distressing picture on the internet, such as Flickr or Facebook, you can go to jail in Tennessee. For example, I find this photo distressing:

      http://www.flickr.com/photos/xpda/5826807830/sizes/l/in...

Next time I visit Tennessee, since I'm the one who posted the distressing image, I'll expect to get a few months free room and board in a fine state facility.

      http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/10/tennessee-law-bans-d...

More Joplin tornado photos:

      http://xpda.com/joplinTornado/

Missouri Bombs

What do you do when you get a package with the wrong name on it? If it's an Arabic sounding name, you take it to the police station, where several police cars, a fire truck, and the Mid-Missouri Bomb Squad can give it to the proper recipient. Or not.

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2011/06/11/bo...

Pictures of Today!

Driving

Bugs

Wood Bee Face

Two Aviators

Nero

Skeeters

Young Lady Bugs

A Tiny Fly

A Dragon Fly Eating a May Fly

May Fly

Tree Frogs?

Toad Bug

False Katydid

Mean Spider

To me, this looks more like a mushroom cloud than an hourglass.

Bob's Junkmail, #217

2010-12-03T22:57:00.001-06:00

Atomic Ramblings

Klaus Fuchs was born in Germany in 1911. He went to college in Germany, joined the Communist party, and then had some run-ins with the Nazi Party. So he went to England to study physics in 1933. He got doctorate degrees at the University of Bristol and the University of Edinburgh. Then he taught physics at Edinburgh.

When World War II rolled around in 1939 (for Britain), Fuchs, as a German citizen, spent a few months in detention camps. Some of his colleagues got him released, however, and he became a British citizen and started work on the British nuclear weapons program in 1942.

In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Here are some photos of the Red Army, most during World War II.

http://www.themysteryworld.com/2010/11/red-army......

In August 1941, a lady named Ruth contacted Fuchs. Ruth had also been a member of the German Communist party, and was then a major in Soviet military intelligence. When Fuchs started his secret nuclear weapons research in 1942, he also started spying for the Soviet Union.

In December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The Japanese bombed and torpedoed Pearl Harbor, but they also used midget submarines in the attack.

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/hydro......

In 1943, Fuchs went from Britain to Columbia University and Los Alamos, New Mexico to work on the U.S. Manhattan project. He continued to spy for the Soviets, working with other Soviet spies in the U.S. nuclear program.

On July 16, 1945 the Trinity Test was conducted and the first nuclear explosion exploded. Actually, the first man-made nuclear explosion exploded. The Sun had been at it for a few years already.

A portion of the Alamogordo Bombing Range was chosen as the site for the Trinity Test. This section of the test site was located at McDonald Ranch, which served as assembly headquarters for the atomic device. All of these temporary buildings were removed after the test.	Plutonium for the Trinity device is moved from the sedan that brought it to McDonald Ranch.	Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the test tower. Later, he became the director of Los Alamos, after the departure of Oppenheimer. Bradbury would serve as the director for several decades.

		The famous mushroom cloud at 12 seconds after detonation.
"Jumbo" atomic device being positioned for "Trinity" test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. (hi-res)	"Jumbo" atomic device being positioned for "Trinity" test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. (hi-res)

A few weeks later, the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Around 200,000 people were killed, including those who died within a few months of the bombs. As bad as this is, it almost certainly saved many more lives than this by ending the war. Japan had already lost over 2,000,000 military and 500,000 civilians in the war, with about 200,000 dead in the Battle of Okinawa alone.

Fuchs kept passing nuclear weapons research, designs, and other information to the Soviets throughout the war and after he returned to the U.K. in 1946, until he was caught and confessed in 1950. In 1950 Fuchs identified Harry Gold as a Soviet spy in the U.S., who identified David Greenglass as a spy, who identified Julius Rosenburg as a spy. They were all convicted of spying.

I don't know about Fuchs's mental state, but his grandmother, mother, and sister had committed suicide, and another sister was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Fuchs was sentenced to 14 years in prison, the maximum sentence because the Soviet Union was considered a British ally. Julius Rosenburg and his wife Ethel (Greenglass's sister) were executed in 1953.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs

In February 1944, when Klaus Fuchs was in the U.S. working on the Manhattan Project and spying for the Soviets, the U.S. landed on Enewetak Atoll and took it from the 2,500 Japanese defenders.

The U.S. built a 6,800 foot airstrip.

The U.S. administered the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, including Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, after peace broke out in 1945. The U.S. nuclear weapons program went ahead full steam because the Soviets were doing the same, and each country was more than a little worried about being blown up by the other.

The U.S. used Bikini and Enewetak Atolls for nuclear weapons testing.They conducted 43 nuclear explosions on Enewetak from 1948 to 1958. Luckily, they evacuated the residents to Ujelang Atoll before they started blowing up stuff. They also evacuated the bodies of the U.S. service men buried there during the war.

OnBikini Atoll, July 1946, a 23 kiloton sub-surface burst 90 ft underwater was used to test the effects of nuclear explosions on ships, part of Operation Crossroads.

  (hi-res...)

In 1952, the first fusion explosion (hydrogen bomb) on earth was detonated on Elugelab Island, one of the islands of Enewetak Atoll. The island was vaporized.

The "sausage device" of Ivy Mike nuclear test on Enewetak Atoll:

   (hi-res)

The 10.4 megaton blast is considered the first U.S. fusion explosion, but 77% of the 10.4 megaton blast came from uranium fission, and only 23% from fusion energy.

      http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAME...

In March 1953, the U.S. performed a blast test on a wood frame house 1,100 meters from a 16-kiloton nuclear blast.

On May 23, 1953, the world's first atomic artillery shell was fired from the Army's new 280mm cannon in Nevada. Hundreds of high ranking Armed Forces officers and members of Congress watched.

In 1954 the U.S. exploded "Castle Bravo" on Bikini Atoll, about 200 miles east of Enewetak. This explosion was the first ever powered primarily by nuclear fusion. The 15 megaton blast was and is the largest ever exploded by the U.S., and was three times larger than they thought it would be. That must have surprised some people. An extra 10 megatons is hard not to notice.

     http://www.sonicbomb.com/modules.php......

There was also three times more radioactive contamination released by Castle Bravo than they expected. This was considered very bad manners. Among those exposed to radioactive fallout were the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru.This led to an anti-nuclear movement in Japan and inspired the movie Godzilla.

In 1959, one year after the nuclear tests were stopped on Enewetak Atoll, Klaus Fuchs was released from prison. He moved from the U.K. to East Germany where he was received as a hero. He was later appointed deputy director of the East German Institute for Nuclear Research.

Local (former) residents of Enewetak Atoll were allowed to return in 1970. The U.S. began decontamination of the atoll in 1977. This seems backwards, but there is some distance in the atoll between the nuclear test sites and the residences.

The decontamination was an extensive project. They scraped and dug up more than 75,000 cubic meters of radioactive soil. They mixed this soil and other debris with cement, and dumped it into a blast crater at the north end of Runit Island.

The crater was about 365 feet in diameter and 30 feet deep. The crater became a mound 25 feet high. They capped the mound with an 18-inch layer of concrete, and it became known as Cactus Dome, named after the Cactus "shot" that created the crater. The Cactus shot was a "small" fusion explosion of 18 kilotons in 1958.

You can find the crater on Google Earth and Google Maps.... It's odd that on Google Earth, Cactus Dome is blanked out with gray pixels, but it appears in Google Maps. Google Earth does link to some photos.

In 1986 the Marshall Islands, including Enewetak Atoll, became an independent country. In 2000, the U.S. paid $340 million to the people of Marshall Islands for loss of use, hardship, medical difficulties, and further nuclear cleanup. In addition, the U.S. pays the Marshall Islands about $6 million per year for education and health programs. About 62,000 people live in the Marshall Islands, less than a thousand of these on Enewetak Atoll.

The U.S. continued above-ground (atmospheric) nuclear tests until 1958, with a total of 192 nuclear explosions. In 1958 the U.S. and Soviet Union stopped atmospheric nuclear tests, each unilaterally.

In 1961, the Soviets broke the non-agreement of 1958. On October 30, 1961, they detonated a 50 megaton bomb at an altitude of 13,000 feet, the largest ever exploded on earth. Buildings, both wooden and brick, were destroyed at a test location 55 km away from the blast. Even though it was detonated at 13,000 feet, the bomb created a seismic event of magnitude 5.0 to 5.25. The weapon was a 100 megaton design, but they dampened it by replacing some of the uranium with lead in order to eliminate 97% of the radioactive fallout.

      http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html

In late 1961 and 1962 the U.S. retaliated with 124 atmospheric nuclear tests. Not all of these were huge bombs. The last above-ground nuclear explosion at the Nevada Test Site was a test of the Davy Crockett .02 kiloton warhead in July 1962.

      http://www.sonicbomb.com/modules.php?name=Content...

The Davy Crocket had a range of 1.25 to 2.5 miles. It wasn't very accurate, and was more deadly from the radiation than the blast itself.

The Davy Crockett was deployed in the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1971.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_d...

In the early 1960's people said we kids shouldn't eat snow (in Oklahoma) because of radioactive fallout from Nevada.

After 1962, the U.S. continued underground nuclear tests until 1992. Most underground tests were at the Nevada Test Site, although there was a small one in Mississippi (5.3 kilotons) and a big one on Amchitka Island, Alaska (around 5 megatons).

I was meandering across Mississippi last October and ran across this helicopter:

The 1964 Salmon Test was a 5.3 megaton underground blast about 25 miles west of the helicopter. The helicopter was not involved. They blew a hole in a salt dome so they could learn to measure seismic signatures of underground nuclear tests.

Warning sign at the Salmon Test Site:

From 1945 to 1962, there were more than 500 nuclear explosions in the earth's atmosphere.

      http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/atmosphr/index.html

Upper Income

An October Headline in major news sites: "Highest Earners' Pay Quintupled in 2009, Government Data Shows."

      http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/Highest-Earners-Pay-Qu...

This story appeared in a lot of newspapers, TV networks, and web sites. It naturally makes you think that most of the country's rich people are making five times more than they did last year. But such is not the case.

They said that the people in the U.S. who made more than $50 million in 2009 made an average of 5 times more in 2009 than in 2008. They neglected to mention that there were 131 people who made more than $50 million in 2008, and only 74 people who made that much in 2009. They also didn't point out that, since people move in and out of the $50 million income club every year, those with income above $50 million would normally average higher income than they did in the previous year.

Aside from these statistical liberties, there is one more minor flaw with this data:  it is wrong. The Social Security Administration and/or IRS, who came up with this gem in the first place, counted a couple of W2's twice. They naturally blamed someone else. But even with the statistical tricks above, the average income of those who earned more than $50 million in 2009 was 7.7 percent below their 2008 earnings.

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-02/-invalid-multi...

No matter what, the average increase of income for people who make more than $50 million in 2009, or any amount, for that matter, is an obscure statistic. Someone in the government decided to take this and present it as proof that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I don't know whether that is true, but I do know that you can't tell by the average change in income of those who made more than $50 million in 2009. It makes me want to call someone an idiot.

Stupid Software Patent

Microsoft has patented the "to-do list." In fairness, the list in the patent is also located in the comments of programming source code, and changes in one changes the other. But it's so dadblasted simple and obvious that there is no way it would deserve a patent in the world of the sane. But we're talking USPTO here.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/regulation/2004/06/09/micro...

In other news, USPTO has decided that Facebook now owns the word "Face."

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/23/patent-office-agrees-t...

Alice's Piano

Alice Sommer has played all of Chopin's etudes on the piano. By memory. While in a Nazi concentration camp. More importantly, she likes Beethoven. She's 106.

http://shop.odemagazine.com/blogs/......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Herz-Sommer

Jammie Thomas

About three years ago, I did some ranting and raving when a jury decided that a single mother named Jammie who made $36,000 per year owed the U.S. Recording Industry $222,000 because she shared 24 songs on Kazaa.

http://xpda.com/junkmail/?issue=195#File-Sharing

Luckily, there were some appeals and more trials and legal stuff. Now Jammie owes a more reasonable amount to the Recording Industry. $1.5 million. I guess she'd better find a higher-paying job.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-fir...

That makes me want to go download some music. Legally, of course.

Placebo Buttons

I have noticed that walk buttons at stoplights rarely work for me. I'll admit I usually don't have the patience to wait more than 5 seconds, and generally walk across the street before I even get to the corner. But when I do hit the walk button, nothing seems to happen.

I get the same feeling when I'm on an elevator and hit the close-door button. Nothing closes until it's good and ready.

The machines of the world are not out to get me after all. Well, they probably are, but not with the impudent walk buttons and close-door buttons that won't take orders from me. It turns out they behave this way for everybody, because they are cosmetic buttons that may have never even seen a wire.

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/11/04/placebo-buttons/

Roger Davidson Music and Computing

Sometimes when you have a laptop with a problem, it may be cheaper just to buy a new one. This was the case for musician Roger Davidson.

http://www.rogerdavidsonmusic.net/

Roger was having laptop problems in 2004. He took his computer into the Mount Kisco computer store to have it fixed. It turned out to be a virus.

Computer store owners Vickram and Helga convinced Roger that government intelligence agencies, foreign nationals, and Opus Dei priests were after him through his computer. For the low, low price of $160,000 per month, Vickram and Helga would protect him.

After losing somewhere between $6 million and $20 million (musicians don't count very well), Roger went to the police, and Vickram and Helga went to jail.

http://news.techworld.com/security/3247975/man-loses-20...

I was going to buy one of his songs on Amazon to help him out ($0.99) but I couldn't find any I liked.

Elections

After (and before) winning control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republicans announced that there would be no more earmarks in government funding, blaming Obama for the decades-old practice. But it was not long before the newly elected politicians figured out that all funding bills originate in the House, not the White House, and that their constituents are expecting paybacks of a monetary variety. So now Republicans are once again in favor of earmarks and pork barrel politics -- at least enough to preserve the earmark tradition. I think The Who had a song about that.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/7318216.html

Arizona Senator John Kyl was one of the most vocal critics of earmarking. Three days after he voted for a ban on the practice, Kyl slipped $200 million for Arizona Indian water rights into an unrelated bill. I find that reassuring. It would be distressing to find a politician without a shred of hypocrisy.

Stars

There are now 10.3 trillion stars in the observable universe per capita. How big is that? Bigger than all the dollars in the U.S. National Debt. (2009)

http://www.visualeconomics.com/gdp-vs-national-debt-by-...

Windows Phone 7

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 had not been a huge success so far. I haven't tried one, but if they ignore the customer needs like they have in their recent software applications, I can see why they're not selling.

One funning thing is that the phone uses microSD cards, like most other phones and many other small devices. Except the Windows Phone 7 requires a microSD card that is certified by Microsoft for the Windows Phone 7. And there are no certified cards in existence. And the non-certified cards really won't work. Brilliant!

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/12/atandt-tells-samsung...

A380

A Qantas A380 had an engine failure. Normally that's not too serious, since there are three more engines available on that plane. But when the engine failed, it took out one of two main hydraulic systems, hampered the fuel transfer system, punched a hole in the forward wing spar, and caused a major fuel leak. Oops.

http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1772-full...

Leapfrog

A couple of years ago, Mike and I took a hike with a small group in the Himalayas, in Nepal. I didn't take a computer, and it was the longest time I'd been without a computer for at least 15 years. The withdrawal symptoms were horrible. I almost became a normal human. But not quite.

Jeff Greenwald was with us. He has spent a lot of time in Nepal, and has even written some books about it: Mister Raja's Neighborhood (my favorite, but maybe not his) and Shopping for Buddhas.

I thought it was interesting when I was there that the people had leapfrogged wired telephone service. People had cell phone service in towns where there have never been any landlines and where the electrical service consisted of solar panels and a few generators.

Today, there is 3G cell service throughout the area, and even on top of Mount Everest. Jeff recently wrote a good article about 3G cell service being available on Mount Everest and in that area. I was happy to see that he presented a realistic view of the technology, rather than the normal "we're ruining the culture" story you see so often.

"Access to the Internet is starting to seem like a human right, so let me offer a disclaimer. There is no rational downside to the arrival of broadband on the flanks of Everest. I'm not a Luddite, and would never suggest that developing nations should be denied, for any reason, the global access that technology can provide. This 3G network will undoubtedly save lives -- not only by providing weather information and support to Everest climbers and trekkers, but as an alert system for the nearby villages threatened by flash floods from Glacial Lake Overflow (GLOF), another peril caused by global warming."

This article presents a glimpse into the technological changes of Nepal in the past couple of decades. It's changed about 5 times faster than it has in the U.S.

http://www.salon.com/life/life_stories/index.html?story...

Who knows? Maybe someday we'll even have 3G cell service in Pryor, Oklahoma.

Chinese UAV and RPA

The U.S. Air Force has been building fighters, bombers, and other military planes for close to 100 years. The U.S. has the most sophisticated military aircraft on the planet for most, if not all, of that time.

Today, some of these aircraft don't even require pilots, at least, not inside the planes.

These have been called UAVs, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. I thought it was unusual in this day and time to use the term unmanned instead of unwomaned. But the term UAV is being phased out in favor of RPA, or Remotely Piloted Aircraft. This term keeps clear of the gender police, but RPA may have an accuracy problem as autonomous unpeopled aircraft join the world.

(hi-res...)

UAVs won't replace manned military aircraft any time soon, but they are useful in many situations. With a UAV, You don't have to worry about a pilot getting shot down. You don't have to have seats, ejection systems, pressurization, instrumentation, windshields, and other heavy stuff used to keep people alive. UAVs can be built to take higher g-forces than people. However, UAVs require communications with a remote pilot, and their autonomous flying is not quite up to the level of human pilots.

China is getting into the RPA and/or UAV business now. Maybe they're leapfrogging manned military aircraft.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703374304...

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/uav.htm

Meanwhile, China will be opening some of its airspace for General Aviation. You will be able to fly below 1000 meters without a flight plan and below 4000 meters without the hard-to-get prior approval that is required today. Maybe I can fly around China someday.

X-37B

The new space shuttle is an unmanned vehicle. The X-37B is a lot smaller than the manned space shuttles, and is operated by the Air Force instead of NASA. Last April 22 they launched one from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V rocket.

(hi-res...)

Since there are no people to keep alive, the X37B can stay in orbit for a long time. The one they launched in April landed at Vandenburg Air Force Base at 1:37 am Friday, after more than 7 months in orbit. I guess they didn't need to worry about runway lights since nobody was on board.

(hi-res...)

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security...

http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?...

Computer Science

If you learn a little computer science, you could become President!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAY4TKIvSZE

Quick Start

"Thank you for your interest in the DotNetNuke Quick Administration Guide. The nearly 400 page Guide is designed to quickly get you up and running with DotNetNuke."

400 pages? Quickly? I've got to learn to read faster.

Photo Shop Disasters

I don't look at ads much, so I was surprised to see how many blatant errors there are in photo editing. If you're going to cheat, you should cheat well.

http://www.psdisasters.com/

Google is Hiring

Some of these may even come to Pryor.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1953977/google_...

The Secret of Life

Not long ago, Physicist Bob Parks recounted the celebration in the Eagle pub of the discovery of the structure of DNA, as told by James Watson in The Double Helix. Raynor Smith sent him a response that put it in perspective: "These great men did indeed discover the secret of life. The secret is to gather with friends in a warm pub, and raise your glass to celebrate your accomplishments, and likewise those of your friends, whether large and earthshaking or small and humble."

Quantitative Easing

This is funny. Some of the facts are wrong, and I disagree with a lot of it, but it's really funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k&feature=...

Homework Assignment

Learn about sea snakes.

In 1932 millions of sea snakes were seen from a steamer in the Strait of Malacca off the coast of Malaysia. They formed a line of snakes 10 feet wide and 60 miles long.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_snake

Wiseguy Tickets

Four guys, Kenneth, Kristofer, Faisal, and Joel, got some CAPTCHA solving software. They installed it on a bunch of computers. They used these computers to buy a bunch of the best tickets to concerts and other events. Then they sold these tickets for a huge profit, since they had bought a good percentage of the best seats. Then they were arrested for hacking and wire fraud and things like that.

Kenneth, Kristofer, and Joel pled guilty, and Faisal is on the run.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/111910-wiseguy-sc...

Antihydrogen

Some people at CERN made some antihydrogen. Antihydrogen, and antimatter in general, is hard to carry around, because when it comes across regular matter, the antimatter and an equal amount of matter are converted into light and kinetic energy (for the most part).

A nuclear fission reaction releases about 1 million times as much energy as a chemical reaction with the same amount of fuel (energy per unit mass). Nuclear fission is about a million times more powerful than chemical reactions

Nuclear fusion is about 100 times more powerful than fission. An antimatter reaction is about 100 times more powerful than nuclear fusion. The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would make an explosion of about 43 megatons.

So, why has CERN not been converted to a bunch of energy? They only made 38 atoms of antihydrogen, and it only lasted about .16 seconds. But this is still pretty important. Nobody before this has ever made enough antihydrogen that lasted long enough for it to be tested.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/researchers...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

Texting in the 1700's

It's common for people to send hundreds of text messages every month. Before that? We were stuck with instant messaging. Then email. Then phone calls. Before phones? There was a long period, thousands of years, when people were stuck writing letters.

Some people wrote a lot. The second U.S. President, John Adams, and his wife Abigail ended up with a collection of 1,160 letters to one another from 1762 to 1801. They're available on online:

http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/letter/

When they were active in politics, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were rivals on opposite sides of most issues, and they did not get along well. After they retired, they became internet buddies, or the 300-year-ago equivalents, through correspondence with many friendly arguments about everything from politics to religion to society in general.

On July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died; Adams at home in Massachusetts and Jefferson at home in Virginia.

You can still read their letters:

http://www.amazon.com/Adams-Jefferson-Letters-Complet...

Wiping Phones

Some employers have the right to erase everything on your cell phone, even if you own the phone personally with a personal account. Some employees have been very surprised by this, especially when it's done inadvertently.

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/22/131511381/wipeout-when-yo...

FBI Wiretapping

The FBI wants Google, Facebook, and other internet companies to make it easier for the FBI to eavesdrop on users.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/technology/17wiretap.html

They've come a long way since 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that wiretapping requires a warrant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States

min.us

Sometimes it's nice to be able to upload a picture on the internet to share with people, without making a web site for it without using something like Flickr or Facebook. I do this sometimes when I want to post a photo on a forum, for example.

Here's an easy way to do it: http://min.us

All you do is drag a photo from your hard drive onto your browser when this page is loaded. Then your picture comes up with its own URL. You can make it public or private. They plan to have a few text ads, but nothing like the big mess of ads you find on similar sites.

Bird Lists

Here is a list of every wild bird species ever seen in Oklahoma. I'm not sure how they know this, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I am quite distressed that there are no wild penguins in Oklahoma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oklahoma_birds

If you go down to the bottom of this page, you can get the bird lists for most states and three provinces, including Nunavut:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_of_Nunavut

Nunavut also has no penguins.

P2P

P2P, which stands for peer-to-peer is a method of communicating between two computers directly without going through a central server.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security owns, in addition to the U.S. Coast Guard, TSA, and U.S. Customs; the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, whose motto is "Protection is Our Trademark." Homeland Security also attempted to gain control of Congress, but, to their consternation, Congress had long been bought and paid for.

      http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/newsroom/highlights/target_c...

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center as a new effort to protect American consumers from potentially harmful trade goods. Instead, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center has shut down 82 web sites in the past week.

One site was torrent-finder.com, which had links to other sites that had links to files (torrent files) you could use to share files using P2P networking. Some of the torrent files linked to copyrighted songs such as music, books, and movies.
      http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/211985/gr...

      http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-based-dns-to-counter...

The site torrent-finder.com quickly moved to http://torrent-finder.info. One thing about this takedown that upset some people is that torrent-finder does not have any copyrighted material, does not link directly to any copyrighted material, and does not even link to any torrents which link to copyrighted material.

      http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/us-government-seiz...

I felt obligated to check out this devious web site, so I downloaded a book:

      http://xpda.com/newtonspmathema00newtrich.pdf...

Isaac Newton's The Mathematical Principals of Natural Philosophy should be out of copyright by now, depending on when Disney last paid off Congress.

Big Integers

Microsoft .net Framework 4.0 has a Big Integer class that supports integer arithmetic at arbitrarily large precision. That could be a lot of fun to play with.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.numerics...

Wikileaks

There currently is a big foofaraw afoot about Wikileaks, the U.S. State Department, and a guy named Julian. I won't regurgitate all of that stuff, except to mention that the Army guy (Bradley) who original copied all this stuff is from Crescent, Oklahoma.

Bradley was arrested last May, and the government knew exactly what documents were copied, so none of this Wikileaks stuff should have come as a surprise.

One U.S. Congressman claims Wikileaks is a terrorist organization. And to think when they passed the Patriot Act they promised me it would not be abused.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/congres...

Someone mounted a DoS attack on the Wikileaks site and brought it down for a while. Then Wikileaks moved to Amazon Web Services, a cloud, which also happens to be where http://xpda.com, http://rubicite.com, and http://reddit.com are located.

      http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/11/wikileaks-...

To get set up on Amazon AWS, you pay some money and they give you one or more virtual servers and hard drives. It's really flexible, because you can expand or reduce your system on the fly. It's also cheap.

When Wikileaks went to Amazon, I imagine nobody at Amazon realized it. They don't prescreen their customers. It was just a new customer with a web site. Then people figured it out, politicians got (or pretended to get) upset, and a U.S. Senator named Joe threatened Amazon, thinking Amazon was intentionally supporting Wikileaks. Joe is kind of old and probably thinks the internet runs through pipes that get clogged up.

Then Amazon told Wikileaks, "Hey! You! Get Offa My Cloud!"and kicked Wikileaks out.

Amazon Web Services said they did this because Wikileaks violated their terms of service by having content on their site without owning the content or the rights to the content.

      http://mashable.com/2010/12/02/why-amazon-dropped-wikileaks/

I think Amazon would have been hard pressed to ignore this, even without political interference, because Wikileaks was in blatant violation of their terms of service.

So Wikileaks went back to a Swedish server. Then Wikileaks' DNS server EveryDNSdns.net kicked them off.Here's what they said.

I did download all the new Wikileaks data (using P2P) a couple of days ago and noticed that they had only posted about 500 of the 250,000 documents. This could be a long, drawn-out affair. Julian seems to be milking this for all the publicity he can get. If he was really concerned about making the information public, he'd put it out on a torrent so it would spread around the world in minutes.

I think Wikileaks might have given all their documents to the New York Times, who is handling it reasonably responsibly.

I did a search through the documents I downloaded, and there was no mention of Pryor, or even Oklahoma. But there was some stuff on 1966 Argentine fishing limits.

For the moment, if you want to browse the Wikileaks documents (currently 600 or so), you can do it here:

      http://46.59.1.2/

More info:

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/wheres-...

Windows Live Blogs

Windows Live is a project by Microsoft. I never did figure out what its purpose was, beyond installing a bunch of stuff on your hard drive.

Windows Live has a search and some tools, including a blog system. They've since abandoned their blogs and are sending people to Wordpress.com. So far, they've moved more than half a million blogs from Windows Live to WordPress. I probably won't have time to read all of them.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/a...

XM-25

The army has a new gun. At $25,000 apiece, the XM-25 is pretty expensive. But it is not just another gun. It fires exploding projectiles about an inch in diameter and an inch and a half long, with a point range of over 500 yards.

The gun's range finder measure the precise distance to a target. Then the projectile can be programmed to explode up to 10 feet before or after that distance. This allows someone, for example, to shoot over a wall and have the projectile explode 2 feet past the wall.

The projectile starts spinning in the rifled barrel, and measures the distance traveled by the number of rotations it has made while traveling through the air.

The Army plans to buy 12,500 of these and have them deployed in 2012. The XM-25 is considered a grenade launcher, although the grenade is more like a large exploding rifle round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_Individual_Airburst_W...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/11876041

TSA Searches

I ran across this post from someone outside the U.S. on an online forum this week.

"lol, America, where's these freedoms that you're out invading other countries to protect? Your own government has taken more freedoms away from you in the past 10 years than terrorists ever have."

I agree. It's obvious even to those who don't live here.

I was going to go off on a serious, long-winded rant about TSA and airplane security and Homeland Security and such, but I got tired of thinking about it. In fact, I'm willing to make a deal. I'll let the TSA touch me all they want so long as I get to keep my shoes on.

This first link is pretty good. All the others are optional and will not be covered on the exam.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101124/14002512014...

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/fda-sides...
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/full-body-scanner-lobb...
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/tsa_bac...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-07-16-ts...
http://www.wate.com/Global/story.asp?S=13407686
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/new-y...
http://www.examiner.com/county-political-buzz-in-san-...
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/no-secu...
http://motherboard.tv/2010/11/29/make-a-tsa-agent-s-day...
http://www.securityinfowatch.com/Transportation+Facil...
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/11/12/travel.screening...
http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-t...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/kswb-man-faces-f...
http://gizmodo.com/5690749/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101117/12023811913...
http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/AVWebInsider_Scann...
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/airport-patdowns-g...
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/12/the-physi...

Pseudoscorpions

Pseudoscorpions are tiny bugs (arachnids) that look like scorpions without tails. There are 3,300 species of Pseudoscorpions, one of which, the Book Scorpion, is common in houses.

Most pseudoscorpions have a venom gland in their claw they use to capture and immobilize their prey. Even with the venom, pseudoscorpions are harmless to people. In fact, they are nice to have in your house because they eat things like clothes moth larvae, carpet beetle larvae, booklice, ants, mites, and small flies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscorpion

In 2006, Jean Krejca discovered a new species of pseudoscorpion in Yosemite National Park, in a cave caused by rock falls a few hundred years ago. She didn't realize it was a new species at the time, but she did take a four of them for identification. She went back a couple of times in 2009, and found some in a cave a half mile away.

Jean and some others at Texas Tech eventually figured out this was a new species, and they published a nice paper about it September 30, 2010.

The new pseudoscorpions are about 0.16 inches (4 mm) long, not really noticeable under a pile of granite.

I would probably never have known about this important new arachnid if I had not seen the calm, conservative article at Discovery.com: "New Venomous Animal Discovered at Yosemite," describing a scary animal that "waits for prey with its venom-filled claws at the ready." Never mind that the animal is a tiny bug, harmless to people, and was discovered four years ago.

http://news.discovery.com/animals/new-venomous-animal-d...

Don't Hack Politicians

A student named Mitchell brought down some conservative web sites using DoS attacks in 2006 and 2007. He was sentenced last month to two and a half years in jail.

http://www.securityweek.com/former-student-gets-30-mont...

The guy who read Sarah Palin's email was sentenced to one year and one day in jail.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/palin-h...

I might rather spend a year in jail than read Sarah Palin's email. That sounds painful.

Botnet Battles

Botnets are groups of hundreds or thousands of computers that have been compromised by malware (trojan, virus, etc.), allowing the computers to be controlled remotely. You can join a botnet when you click on an executable email attachment, for example, or visit a flaky web site without updating your browser.

The botnet owners do not even write their own malware any more. It's available for purchase on the internet. All you have to do is buy a malware kit, get it into some spam or onto a web site, and wait for unknowing participants to join your botnet.

Once you have the malware installed on someone's computer, you can install keyboard scanners to search for credit card and password info, you can also use the computers in your botnet to send spam, and if you're good you can even steal a World of Warcraft account.

Internet security people have been taking over botnets occasionally, essentially stealing them from the original botnet owner. Then they can check out the latest malware and learn to shut down entire botnets at once. They do this by setting up closely monitored computers that join botnets.

So now, the botnet software designers have designed fake botnet controllers that can be hacked by the good guys so they can learn and block the techniques the good guys are using to hack the bad guys.

      http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/05/botmasters-include...

This could go on forever.

It is illegal to run a botnet. In October the FBI arrested a guy named Oleg, the largest botnet owner in the world. Oleg was living in Russia, but was arrested when he visited Las Vegas.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/how-the...

The FBI got a warrant to go through Oleg's gmail account, but they went through someone else's email by mistake on the first try.

      http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/fail/fbi-typo-tr...

      http://www.computersecurityarticles.info/security/oleg-...

Terrorists are Everywhere

A plastic toy robot brought Denver to its knees Wednesday.

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16755220

Those Denver people must be wimps.

Korea

North Korea shot at South Korea a few days ago, and South Korea shot back. That's just about all you could find in most news articles, aside from dozens of pundits and politicians either (a) trying to act tough, (b) criticizing other politicians, (c) replying to questions about the shooting with completely unrelated answers, or (d) all of the above.

I finally checked Wikipedia. They actually have some facts. North Korea shot about 170 artillery rounds at the island of Yeonpyeong, but only about 80 hit the island. South Korea shot about 80 shells at North Korea. For a quick summary, read the timeline in this article. Or read the whole thing. It's interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_Yeonpyeong

Pictures of Today!

AnEA-6B waved off due to a fouled deck on the USS Ronald Reagan, November 5, 2010.

The first carrier model of the F-35 arrived at Patuxent River, November 6, 2010. These will replace the AV-8B Harrier.

Harrier, April 21, 2010

Austin Hazard took this picture.

Harrier, November 29, 2010

Bob took this picture.

The Amarillo Cadillacs, November 2000.

Question Mark

Bugs!

Monster

A butterfly tasting a bug.

Windswept

Moon over Peak 2

More Junkmail from Bob, #215

2010-09-19T21:49:00.001-05:00

Artificial Retina

Last Junkmail I mentioned artificial retinas. Here's an article from Lawrence Livermore Labs about their research on the project.

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2010/...

Solar Dynamics Observatory

Last February NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a 3-ton satellite that looks at the sun with four telescopes and some other sensors.

SDO telescopes:

The SDO takes more photos at higher resolution on more wavelengths than the earlier solar observatories SOHO and STEREO. The photos show a lot of detail I miss with my eyes or even my digital camera. Incidentally, it's bad for a digital camera when you let the sun shine on the lens.

This photo from SDO shows the extreme ultraviolet wavelengths of the sun on March 30th, 2010.

To get these photos (and a bunch of other data), the SDO transmits data to earth at 150 mbps, the equivalent of about 100 internet DSL downloads at once, or enough to send half a million photos from my digital camera per day. This data rate is close to 50 times that of any other NASA spacecraft.

In order to send this much data, the satellite stays connected all the time to a single ground station outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. This allows the satellite to stream data at its max rate all the time, rather than storing it up and sending bursts. There are two dish antennas at the ground station, each almost 60 feet in diameter.

      http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/avalanche.html

A geostationary orbit would allow a constant connection to the ground station, but the SDO is in an inclined geosynchronous orbit instead. That means that the satellite orbits once every 24 hours, but instead of remaining over a single point on the equator, it moves north and south from a point on the equator every day. It still stays in constant contact with the ground station, but this allows it to remain in sight of the sun all the time, except for two or three weeks twice a year when it makes a daily crossing of the earth's shadow. SDO also crosses the moon's shadow three times per year.

When I look at the sun, all I see is a bright spot. Even after I stop looking at it. But the sun is pretty complex, with atmosphere, storms, and strong magnetic fields. It spews stuff in fountains and jets, some of it all the way to Earth and beyond. Powering all this is a mass of nuclear fusion reactions, enough to heat Oklahoma to more than 100 degrees in the summer. It's impressive to do that from distance of 92,955,807 miles.

In addition to light, the sun gives off a bunch of other stuff. There are some exciting events that happen regularly on the sun, and I usually don't even notice. For example, Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) happen once every couple of days during the low season and a few times per day during the high season of the 11-year solar cycle.

In the average CME, the sun blasts out one or two billion tons of matter, mainly loose electrons and protons, at a speed of about a million miles per hour.

CMEs occur during strong solar flares. A solar flare is when a large explosion in the Sun's atmosphere gives off a whole bunch of energy spread across the entire electromagnetic spectrum -- from radio to gamma rays. It's caused by "magnetic reconnection," which I don't really understand. But I do understand the solar flares are really, really powerful. For example, during a solar flare, the sun may give off 1000 times its normal amount of x-rays.

Here is an SDO photo of a Solar flare last month when two CMEs were launched at earth:

On August 1st, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. There was a C3-class solar flare (white area on upper left), a solar tsunami (wave-like structure, upper right), multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection and more. This multi-wavelength (211, 193 & 171 Angstrom) extreme ultraviolet snapshot from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the sun's northern hemisphere in mid-eruption. Different colors in the image represent different gas temperatures ranging from ~1 to 2 million degrees K.

      http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

One thing that I like about SDO is that the raw data is accessible online, free. I haven't needed it yet, but when I do I'll know where to get it.

      http://aia.lmsal.com/public/data.htm

      http://lasp.colorado.edu/eve/data_access/

      http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/hmi/images/latest/

Sometime in the next 8 years or so, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft directly into the sun. That should get some interesting data.

      http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/20...

The Healy

My baby daughter Melinda is out wandering around the Arctic Ocean on the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy. She'll be at sea for 3 or 4 weeks.

She says she's doing research, but I think she's just taking a pleasure cruise and getting in some fishing.

Here she is getting ready for the helicopter ride out to the ship:

      http://www.whoi.edu/vanishingarctic/page.do?pid=46995...

They upload a photo from the mast every hour with their location, temperature, and wind. You can click on the top link here to see the latest:

      http://mgds.ldeo.columbia.edu/healy/reports/aloftcon/2010/

Melinda sunbathing:

More info from the Woods Hole blog site:

      http://www.whoi.edu/vanishingarctic/page.do?pid=47775

Interstellar Space Travel

I was thinking about taking a quick trip out to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. It's about 4.2 light years to the west. I considered Alpha Centauri, but I was afraid its binary star system might confuse the Garmin GPS I'd use for navigation.

One of the first steps for my trip is to calculate the power required. For a variety of practical factors, I'll make it a 50-year trip. I could make it in 4.2 years, or close to it, but that would require a lot more power, because of the higher acceleration, and would likely smash my body against the back wall of the spacecraft, again because of the higher acceleration. Taking a leisurely 50-year trip to Proxima Centauri will take a lot less fuel, and so less weight, and I'll have time for some reading.

The spacecraft that went to the moon weighed in at about 66,000 pounds, ten times the weight of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. I'll be gone for 50 years, so I might need a little more than that for food, water, recreation, and elbow space. But I can use the latest technology to save weight, and I could probably live in a confined space for a mere 50 years.

To accomplish the acceleration (first half of the trip) and deceleration (second half) of 66,000 lbs going 4.2 light years in 50 years requires about 68 megawatts of energy, or about 15% of a Chouteau coal-fired power plant unit, or 50% of the output from Pensacola Dam. Over the 50 years, that adds up to around 30 million gigawatt-hours, or 30 terawatt-hours.

If I am efficient and generate 1 mwh with 500 lbs of coal, we'll need 467,000,000 lbs of coal and 643,000,000 lbs of oxygen, which will add little weight to my 66,000 lb spacecraft. Of course, it would take millions of times more coal and oxygen than this to accelerate the coal and oxygen itself.

So maybe oxidation is not the best way to power my spacecraft. Even if I use natural gas, hydrogen, or firewood, it will not be feasible.

So I'll go with nuclear power. But it will still take a whole lot of fuel to generate the 30 terawatt-hours of power I need to get to Proxima Centauri, even at near 100% efficiency. In addition, if I use thrusters that use jets of matter to propel the spacecraft, I will need a lot of tons of matter to spew out the nozzles. And it will require millions more tons to accelerate those tons...

This trip to Proxima Centauri is sure getting complicated. It just takes far too much power to get there in a reasonable time. Maybe there is a reason I have never met someone from another star system.

F-18 Crash

On July 23, a Canadian F-18 crashed when the pilot was practicing for an air show at Lethbridge, Alberta the following day. One of the engines lost power at a critical time. There was no way to recover, so the pilot ejected.

You can see the canopy in the left part of the photo above. The small parachute behind the pilot is used to pull out the main parachute. The pilot is still in the seat, and rockets in the seat are pushing the pilot away from the plane. The pilot's head is pushed down by the force of the rockets. He had compression fractures of three vertebrea. He ejected parallel to the ground, but the ejection seat must have figured that out because rockets are pushing the pilot upward.

The seat has separated from the pilot, and the main parachute is coming out.

The right engine is the one that lost power. You can see flames coming from the left engine.

The pilot seat is still falling to the ground.

Aftermath. The F-18 looks a lot bigger on the ground.

It's hard to believe how fast this all happened. Eight seconds into this video, the plane started to yaw to the right when the right engine lost power. 4 seconds later, the pilot had evaluated the situation (correctly) and ejected. 2 seconds after that, the plane hit the ground. 3 seconds after that, the pilot reached the ground, unconscious but safe.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfiCyVKnSSw

Pilot Brian Bews is expected to make a full recovery. He said that Martin Baker, the ejection seat manufacturer, is his new best friend.

      http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2010/07/26/leth...

A Saudi Army Lieutenant Colonel died August 24 in Spain when his ejection seat separated from the parachute. The Eurofighter Typhoon probably experienced a bird strike. The Spanish instructor ejected successfully. Germany and the U.K. have grounded their fleets of Eurofighters after the incident.

      http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/19/defence-...

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurofighter_Typhoon

Hard Landings

On August 26, a Jet Blue Airbus A320 landed at Sacramento with the parking brake on and blew out its four main tires. The tires caught on fire and the passengers didn't have to wait so long to get off the plane. They took the slides. 7 people received minor injuries.

The parking brake had "become engaged" during the approach to Sacramento at an altitude of 5,100 feet. Neither pilot recalled any abnormal indications or warnings associated with the braking system prior to landing.

http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief.asp?ev_id=20100827X20401...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38871136

In 1966, Scott Crossfield made a hard landing in the California desert in an X-15.

Terrorists are Everywhere!

Two or three months ago, a guy in Canada named Brian was headed to Mississauga, Ontario to play a game. It was a fantasy role-playing game. Surprisingly, there are some of these games in real life, not just online.

Instead of using real swords, arrows, and such, Brian had made his own cushion-tipped arrows, taped-up shield, and other toy weapons. But the ever-vigilant Toronto Police took Brian's toys and displayed them on TV as "weapons seized from criminals."

The police said that the arrows could have been doused with gasoline, set on fire, and shot at important people. Brian was very lucky, because the police did not think of the possibility of him dousing his underwear with gasoline, setting it on fire, and flinging it at important people.

      http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/G20/2010/06/30/14570...

City Hall in Decatur, Alabama was evacuated and almost blown to smithereens by a small package of baby powder in the ladies room on Monday.

      http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/09/decatur_police_say_...

Steve Jobs attempted to hijack his own plane in Osaka, Japan using ninja throwing stars. Luckily, airport security people took the stars away from him before he could take over his plane. Jobs now plans to get some ninja throwing stars from Mark McDonald.

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-14/steve-jobs-sto...

A SWAT team of about a dozen police officers was called last month at Georgia Tech after a guy walked into a dorm with his girlfriend. He had an umbrella with a handle that looked like a samurai sword handle. The offending umbrella has been banned from campus.

      http://gizmodo.com/5615282/swat-team-called-over-umbrel...

A guy named Walter from New Hampshire was arrested last March for "possessing a powerful pipe bomb." The state police bomb squad destroyed the bomb with a water cannon at the scene of the crime.

Last week they dropped the charges against Walter when they finally figured out that his bomb was really a "tire thumper" used to check truck tire pressure. The bomb in question was a piece of PVC pipe with end caps and weights inside. It only took them six months to figure this out -- not bad for government work.

      http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/215768/man-cleare...

Police arrested a guy named Justin in North Carolina for "providing information related to the making, use or manufacturing of an explosive, destructive device or weapon of mass destruction to a person Moose believed was planning to bomb a North Carolina clinic." Among other things, Justin put a bunch of bombing info on his Facebook page. He said he was the Christian counterpart of Usama bin Laden. I'm not sure I understand his logic, especially when it comes to the part about loving your enemies.

      http://www.salisburypost.com/Crime/090910-WEB-Cops-FBI-...

Last month eight Pakistani military officers led by a Rear Admiral were on their way to a meeting with U.S. Central Command in Florida. After experiencing lots of extra security checks, they boarded their United Airlines flight from Washington to Tampa. One of the Pakistanis said he hoped this was the last plane to their destination.

A lady overheard this, concluded the eight military officers from Pakistan must be terrorists, and reported them to a flight attendant. United Airlines had them removed from the plane. The Pakistanis finally got mad and went home, skipping the high-level meeting with U.S. Central Command. This should ensure Pakistan's cooperation with the U.S. against the Taliban.

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan...

Kiska Bombing

Original caption: This photo, released in Washington today (March 24, 1943), shows columns of smoke rising from Japanese installations on Kiska Island in the Aleutians, after a recent heavy raid by U.S. Army Air Forces Bombers. The raid badly damaged the Jap's secondary seaplane hangar. Note giant Jap four-engined seaplane, its tail section missing and washed up on the beach (near top, right corner of photo), and four float type Zero fighter on the water just off the beach, (between wrecked seaplane and center of photo).

Wandering About Alaska

A few hearty and intellectually deprived souls went to Alaska last July and August. We meandered from Ketchikan to Savoonga to Barter Island, and lots of places in between. Here are some pictures.

http://xpda.com/alaska2010

Homeland Security

It seems to me that Homeland Security has so much money and so many people that they have to look for things to do, else lose their excess funding. One good example is the program called "Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT)."

There are 3,000 officers at 161 airports around the country looking for suspicious-looking people, at the low, low price of $212,000,000 per year. Homeland Security is asking for an extra $20,000,000 per year for what they call the vital program.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported, "No scientific evidence exists to support the detection or inference of future behaviour, including intent," and that the TSA had no business deploying SPOT "without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment."

      http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/06/does_ai...

      http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2010-05-24-airpo...

Here's the government's description of the program. They're not quite as negative as I am.

      http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_...

     http://avstop.com/news_may_2010/dhs_to_review_screeni...

The Department of Homeland Security is doing something that I like. They're scanning irises. I was wondering how they get those flowers to lay down flat in a flatbed scanner, but then I figured out this was something for identification of eyeballs, and whose head they are in.

They can take a digital photo of my eye from 3 or 4 feet away and get a unique ID on my iris. This makes a fast, positive ID. There are some privacy fans who don't like the idea, but I think it's pretty cool.

      http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/2010-09-...

Sewers

The US Copyright Group has sued over 14,000 IP addresses and/or people in a single lawsuit.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/the-ria...

While there is some question about whether 14,000 people can be required to show up in court in Washington DC for the lawsuit, and where they'll find a courtroom big enough for all those people, the lawsuit is going ahead.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/questio...

ISPs of the people being sued have been served subpoenas requiring them to give a name and address associated with every IP address the US Copyright Group has come up with.

I guess nobody has figured out that there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence between IP addresses and computers or between IP addresses and people. You can have several computers on a single IP address, several users on a single computer, a computer with no users, a computer on several IP addresses, and even a person without a computer.

Maybe the U.S. Supreme court will decide that IP addresses are people just like corporations are. Then the corporations can sue the IP addresses, and the real people won't have to get involved.

      http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/02/03/the-wa...

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Laptop Border Searches

There has been some controversy over the past several months over border searches of laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/laptop-border-...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20007315-38.html

Customs searched the electronic devices of 6,500 people between October 2008 and June 2010. About half of these were U.S. citizens. Customs does not have to have any reason to suspect wrongdoing before they search your laptop.

Recently, a guy from New York was crossing the Canadian border when U.S. Customs took his laptop to search it. They kept the laptop for 11 days.

If Customs would use just a little bit of common sense, they'd copy the hard drive and send people on their way, instead of keeping the whole laptop. Some people need to use their laptops daily for work and playing chess.

I've never had an electronic device searched, that I know of. But I think it would be funny to cross the border with a blank hard drive and then say, "What did you do to all my zeros and ones?!" when they search it.

iPad Insecurity

Last Junkmail I mentioned that someone copied the email addresses of 114,000 early iPad users, which included quite a few important people. I expected the FBI to expend some serious resources to catch and prosecute the person who harvested these email addresses.

http://xpda.com/junkmail/?issue=214#iPad-Insecurity

Not long after that, the Arkansas hacker who copied those email addresses was arrested on multiple drug charges after the FBI searched his home

http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2010/06/17/17idg-ip...

Pop Bottles

If you take a 2-liter Diet Coke bottle, or any other similar bottle, you can make it pop by putting something in it that expands, like dry ice and water, and screwing the lid on. You can also use vinegar and baking soda, calcium carbide and water, or about 2,527 other combinations of commonly available materials.

In the case of dry ice and water, the water causes the dry ice to sublime to a gas (dry ice is frozen CO2), and eventually it builds up enough pressure to pop the bottle. When that happens, some things might get a little wet from the water, but not much else.

The bottle pop is about 3% as powerful as an M80 firecracker, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

     PNNL-18696.pdf

For you youngsters, an M80 is a powerful firecracker that was legal in the U.S. until 1966. You could put one under a 5-gallon bucket and it would lift it several feet in the air.

But even an M80 is nowhere near as powerful as a real bomb. Popping a 2-liter bottle seems to me less powerful than an ordinary black-cat firecracker, and it has no fire associated with it.

Kids have been popping plastic bottles like that ever since there have been plastic bottles. However, now they are called bottle bombs or dry ice bombs, but they're still not very powerful. You can find hundreds of "dry ice bombs" on YouTube.

Last June, a 14-year-old boy in Omaha popped a pop bottle using dry ice and water. His mother, Dawn Martens, was arrested and charged with two felonies, possession of a destructive device and child abuse. Meanwhile, the people on Mythbusters who popped a bottle got away.

      http://www.omaha.com/article/20100629/NEWS97/100629602

      http://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Dawn-Martens/1405984...

I don't think I'll move to Omaha.

Seizing Domains

Last July the U.S. Justice department seized the domains and bank account of seven web sites that were streaming movies, and the sites were replaced with a message saying:

This domain name has been seized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Special Agent in Charge New York City Office in accordance with a seizure warrant obtained by the New York Attorney General's Office for the Southern District of New York and issued pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §§981 and 2323 by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

It's important to note that 30 of about 63 words in that sentence are capitalized. Very impressive!

      http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2010/07/takedown/

These were all fairly popular sites, ranked in the top 10,000 sites on the web. Xpda.com is slightly lower at 302,192 in the U.S.

The largest of these sites, tvshack.com, promptly registered a new domain name in China and got hosting somewhere outside the U.S. It's still in operation.

      http://tvshack.cc/

I assume the other sites are still in business under other names, too. The government notices are still up on the original sites.

      http://filespump.com/index.html
      http://tvshack.net/index.html
      http://movies-links.tv/index.html
      http://now-movies.com/index.html
      http://planetmoviez.com/index.html
      http://thepiratecity.org/index.html
      http://zml.com/index.html

Not satisfied with government action, some Hollywood movie companies have hired Indian software firm Aiplex Software to carry out Denial of Service attacks against movie pirate sites. This is illegal, by the way.

      http://www.watoday.com.au/technology/technology-news/fi...

A group on 4chan.org, a wide-open message board full of internet rowdies, decided to retaliate and took down the MPAA and Aiplex web sites with their own DoS attacks.

      http://torrentfreak.com/4chan-ddos-takes-down-mpaa-and-...

      http://gawker.com/5641634/4chan-attack-brings-down-mpaa...

They did this using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. No, that's not a satellite. It's open source software that can be configured to repeatedly ping a web site. When 50,000 irate internet users do this at once, it can effectively shut down a site. In truth, not all 50,000 of them have to be irate. A couple of them can be doing it for kicks, and it will still work.

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic/

Music

Here is an outstanding music video:

http://fuldans.se/?v=tqfsgcxvgb

Republican Health

Are Republicans fat? 9 out of the 10 of the states with the highest percentage of overweight people are "red states," while all 10 of the least overweight states are "blue states."

http://healthyamericans.org/reports/obesity2010/Obesity...

There's probably a reason for that, but I have no clue what it is. At any rate, the report on obesity is worth reading.

NPR

Are the people at National Public Radio (and/or American Public Media) getting old and lazy?

The other morning I woke up to NPR news. The lead news story was about runaway horses injuring some people. They went on with a story that claimed being overweight is healthier than being normal weight, as long as you exercise. They also mentioned that you cannot lose weight unless you exercise at least an hour every day.

Some days later, I heard a commentator on public radio's Marketplace who said, "Obama's proposed corporate tax cuts won't generate more jobs, because they won't put any more money in worker's pockets." That's a dumb statement, no matter where you stand on tax cuts. If corporations have more money, some will hire more people. If workers have more money, they won't be hiring anybody.

Actually, I should not use the term National Public Radio any more. They're changing their name to NPR.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Cable News Network and CNN Headline News are now CNN and HLN. I guess they wanted to take "News" out of the name since their shows now are more variety shows than news.

International Polar Year

The first International Polar Year was 1881 to 1884. That looks like 3 or 4 years to me, but maybe they counted differently back then. This site is really interesting, complete with photos and drawings.

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/aro/ipy-1/index.htm

Mexico

There have been a lot of people getting killed in Mexico. Since 2006, tens of thousands of people have been killed in violence related to the illegal drug business.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704862404...

On the U.S. side of the border, the Mexican drug cartels are paying off hundreds of U.S. Customs agents. 770 corruption investigations were opened this year alone.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Stupid Software Patents

A few months ago I read about this a in The Netherlands named Roy who wrote a program to search for music digitally, using the contents of the sound file instead of the name or file information. He called it a "weekend hack" and posted his code in a blog.

      http://sites.google.com/site/redcodenl/creating-shazam-...

Landmark Digital Services started writing him, claiming patent infringement. They told him, among other things, that he couldn't even describe the algorithm online, even though the algorithm is described online in their patent application.

      http://sites.google.com/site/redcodenl/

The algorithm is also described elsewhere on the internet:

      http://laplacian.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/how-shazam-works/

      http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/resources/matlab/f...

I think Roy in The Netherlands has figured out that since the software patent has not been registered in The Netherlands, he's free to post his code in The Netherlands. It must be nice not to have to deal with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Who is Landmark Digital Services? Before I looked it up, I had guessed they were just another patent troll. However, they are a subsidiary of BMI, the recording company. I read that they use the audio recognition software to recognize songs being played so they can sue the people who play them. It's a nice way to treat your customers.

Landmark Digital Services LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), a company long known for visionary technical innovation driven by a genuine passion for music. In 2005, BMI acquired the complete patent portfolio from Shazam Entertainment Ltd. This included patents covering award-winning BlueArrow digital audio recognition technology. BMI established Landmark Digital Services, LLC to exploit the value of this patented technology.

This is one more instance in which someone bought a patent and is using it to stifle creativity and innovation. It's a little like Microsoft's patent on how to turn a page in a digital book, except Microsoft did come up with this patent on its own:

      http://gorumors.com/virtual-book-page-curl-patent/2753244

Oracle Corporation has said that software patents are stupid, and they oppose the patentability of software. But they're going to keep getting software patents because everybody else is.

      http://progfree.org/Patents/testimony/statements/oracle...

Maybe he needs some defensive patents. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen just filed patent lawsuits against Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, and Yahoo. The patents involved are intuitively obvious to anybody with half a brain, which might not say much about the USPTO patent examiner who let them slip through.

      http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/microsoft-cof...

Subsistence Whale Hunting

This is how they hunt whales in the Faroe Islands (July 23, 2010). It's traditional.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXZPmdULIKs

National Security Letters

U.S. National Security Letters don't make me feel very secure.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/08/hbc-90007495

Lighthouses

Need a cheap vacation? Be a lighthouse tender for a few days. Or months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/15lighthouse.html

Stoned

There is a big deal in the news over a girl in Iran scheduled to be stoned for infidelity or adultery or something like that. But nobody seems to care that they've been stoning people in Afghanistan lately. I wonder why that is.

http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/afghan-coupl...

Radio Telephones

The latest plan by the RIAA is to require radio stations to pay recording artists for the music they play, each time they play it.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/obama-a...

Then, they plan to require every cell phone to come with an FM radio receiver.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/radio-r...

That sounds like an excellent idea. Maybe I can get Congress to require every computer to come with my software installed, and require everybody with a computer to pay me a royalty. But I guess that would never work because I don't make campaign contributions.

Stimulus

Who gets stimulus money? Texas gets $928 per person, Oklahoma $1,144, Alaska $3,145, and the District of Columbia gets $6,587 per person.

http://projects.propublica.org/recovery/

Why does Alaska get so much, when they're supposed to be so independent? Idunno.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/business/19stimulus.html

Eternal Copyrights

At least they seem eternal, thanks to Disney and other companies' campaign contributions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22sun3.html

Bailout Information

A couple of years ago, the U.S. Federal Reserve loaned some money to some banks. In fact, they loaned the money to a lot of banks, and they loaned a lot of money to them.

Now Bloomberg and some other news companies would like some details on these transactions, such as the bank, the amount loaned, and the collateral used to back the loan. I would like to see those details, too, but not many people care about that.

Bloomberg filed some Freedom of Information forms, and the Federal Reserve refused to fork over the information at all, let alone freely.

So Bloomberg sued. And won. And won on appeal. Now the Federal Reserve has 60 days to decide whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. They say they can't give out that information because it will damage the banks' competitiveness.

That's a pretty lame argument, considering that these loans happened two years ago. Even if those banks were close to collapse then, they shouldn't be now. I doubt if anything too shady was going on, but all this makes me wonder why the Fed is so adamant about not releasing information. They are spending all kinds of money on legal fees to avoid releasing the information that should be public to begin with.

The reason may be that many of the banks are essentially insolvent, if you consider the assets such as mortgage-backed securities that have not been written down to their current market value. It is legal not to write down the assets -- Congress changed the law.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/reuters/MT...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-23/u-s-appeals-co...

Hacker Arrest

Here's an interesting story about a Russian hacker who was arrested in France for internet crimes with U.S. victims.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/business/global/24cyb...

Arms for All

A guy from Miami Beach named Efraim got a $300 million contract with the Pentagon to provide weapons for Afghanistan. He sold hand grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades, mortar and artillery rounds, and tens of millions AK-47 rounds.

The contract was canceled when it the New York Times learned he was selling decades-old repackaged ammunition from China, through Albania.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/asia/27ammo.html

Efraim pled guilty to a single conspiracy count in 2009. Then last month, Efraim was arrested again on some more firearms charges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/us/24arms.html

Pentagon Virus

An infected flash drive planted a computer virus on some U.S. military networks. It looks like it was not too sophisticated, and the government should have had a few safeguards in place to prevent this sort of thing -- like turning off the autorun option on removable media.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/insiders-doubt-...

Leaking Oil

On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico had a big explosion and fire, and it sprang a leak. It was pretty hard to stop the leak. BP capped the well on July 15 and plugged the well casing with cement in August. They plan to seal any gaps between the casing and the hole within a few days.

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-15/bp-may-plug-it...

The oil spill didn't do as much damage as was expected by most people and hoped for by lawyers.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/earth/14spill.html

The Mississippi River and ocean currents helped keep the oil off shore.

      http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44527

10 or 30 times more birds got oily from the 1989 oil spill in Prince William Sound than this year in the Gulf of Mexico, even though about 10 times more oil was spilled in the Gulf of Mexico.

Sea turtles took the Gulf oil spill pretty well, too. About 600 were stranded, but only 56 dead ones were found, and most of those didn't die from the oil spill.

The consensus is, outside Louisiana politicians and others who hope to gain from catastrophe, that the area will recover soon from the oil spill, and much of it already has. 74% of the oil from the well has been captured, burned, skimmed, evaporated, dissolution, or dispersed. The rest of the oil "is on or just below the surface as light sheen or weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments," according to NOAA and USGS.

      http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/2931/Oil...

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/science/earth/04oil.html

Some people claim this report is too conservative. It seems to me that most of the people complaining have something to gain (i.e., money) by making the spill look bad.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/us/05oil.html

Samantha Joye is a professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. She and a team of people are out on the research vessel Oceanus researching the Gulf oil spill on a trip sponsored by NOAA. Here is one of her blog entries. Her questions and answers are really good. They are informative, factual, and not sensationalized like so much of the news on the oil spill.

      http://gulfblog.uga.edu/2010/08/where-has-the-oil-gone/

Samantha got quite a bit of publicity when she discovered the fabled "oil plume" last May. She is in the news again, after they discovered a layer of oil 3 cm thick on the ocean bottom near the Deepwater Horizon well.

      http://gulfblog.uga.edu/2010/09/focusing-in-on-oil/

Here's an interesting article about getting the well capped.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27well.html

This week the Department of the Interior announced they will require oil companies to plug about 3,000 nonproducing wells and dismantle 650 production platforms that are not being used. Previously, the oil companies could wait until their leases expired before doing this. I think this is a good idea.

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-15/u-s-interior-d...

Ahead Stop

Today's comics.

http://xkcd.com/781/

http://xkcd.com/792/

$10 Million Bank Robbery

Last March, the Federal Trade Commission filed a civil suit to recover $10,000,000 from some people who stole the money from credit card companies. They set up phony credit card merchant accounts, got ahold of a bunch of credit card numbers, and then spent four years charging credit cards anywhere from 20 cent to 9 dollars apiece. They only hit each card once, so not many cardholders noticed or complained.

They got away with about $10 million, transferring all but $100,000 or so to Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Kyrgyzstan. The scammers have not been caught.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/business/22digi.html

Zip Code Info

This is a cool site where you can get census info on any zip code. It's pretty interesting to browse. (I did mention this in Junkmail 5 years ago, but I was afraid someone might have forgotten.)

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts

Wallowing

Paul Bertorelli wrote something about September 11, 2001 that I wholeheartedly agree with. I rarely find someone who agrees with me.

"There's a permeable membrane between respectful remembrance and wallowing self-pity and nine years on, we tend more toward the latter than the former. We do maudlin in this country like no other. We've raised paranoia to religious status. 911 is politicized beyond anything decent. We've done to ourselves more harm than anything these bums could have inflicted upon us."

http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/AVWebInsider_Inspira...

In case you are interested in aviation, the AVWeb newsletter is really good.

http://www.avweb.com/register/

Washington UAV

I have done some occasional whining and complaining about the Aircraft Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) around Washington, DC, and how it was installed backwards, keeping citizens out of Washington instead of keeping the dangerous politicians in.

The ADIZ is now known as a Special Flight Rules Area (SFRA). This actually makes more sense than calling it an ADIZ, which is normally used for people entering U.S airspace from overseas. But when you are flying around and meander into the Washington SFRA, you still get to enjoy a close-up view of F-16s, complete with missiles. They normally entice you to land somewhere close by, and then you get an interview by some Secret Service Agents, apparently in case you want a job with the Secret Service.

On August 2, a helicopter strayed 23 miles into the Washington SFRA and flew around at about 1700 feet above the ground. It was 24-feet long and weighed 3,150 lbs, not counting the pilot. That's because it had no pilot. The Secret Service had nobody to interview!

The MQ-8 UAV helicopter was flying out of Pawtuxet River Naval Air Station in Maryland, when it decided to go off on its own for a while. The computer in the UAV claimed to have lost communications, but I believe it just decided to go off on a sightseeing tour. I did that once in the Aircam.

Eventually, the Navy used another ground control station to reestablish communications, and the MQ-8 came back and landed, no doubt receiving a severe dressing down by the commanding officer.

I would have guessed they'd program a UAV do something predictable like return to base or circle when it loses contact with its controller. Maybe they do now.

http://www.eaa.org/news/2010/2010-08-26_uav.asp

http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1724-full...

October Mid-Air

Last October, a Coast Guard C-130 and Marine Cobra AH-1 helicopter had a mid-air collision in a military training area off the coast of California. The C-130 was on a search and rescue mission, and the AH-1 was on a practice mission in formation flight with three others. It was night, and the helicopters were not using anti-collision lights or transponders. The C-130 was in contact with the navy controller, but was not given a traffic warning.

http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1714-full...

Tall Clouds

The U-2 and Global Hawk UAV fly up to 65,000 feet high, "above the weather." But not all weather is below 65,000 feet. The other day, I noticed a fairly isolated thunderstorm that was 70,000 feet high:

There is a new UAV used for reconnaissance, the RQ-170. It's a flying wing. The details are not public yet, but its wingspan is around 65 feet and it looks like it has a single jet engine. They are flying out of South Korea, Afghanistan, and Tonopah, Nevada.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQ-170_Sentinel

      http://gizmodo.com/5419363/usaf-confirms-new-secret-ste...

Another reconnaissance UAV under testing is the hydrogen-powered Global Observer, which will be able to stay in the air for a week. As long as it doesn't stray over Washington airspace.

      http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39102502/ns/technology_and_...

Translucent Government

I rant and rave about ACTA fairly often, because it's a push by the recording industry to muck up my computer and the internet in general. I also don't like it because it is a treaty and/or law that has no Congressional knowledge or oversight, let alone approval. ACTA has been negotiated in secret by a few people from the Commerce Department and several executives from the recording industry.

Even after Congressional requests, they refused to show draft copies of the agreement to Congress. The United States even tried to get Europe to keep the details of ACTA secret. Europe didn't. Maybe that's because Europe has limits on campaign contributions from organizations like the RIAA and MPAA.

http://www.euractiv.com/en/infosociety/us-told-eu-hide-...

Identified Flying Objects

There are a lot of satellites flying around the earth. You can see them here:

http://www.gearthblog.com/satellites.html

If you zoom out, you can see the concentrated ring of geostationary satellites around the equator.

More than 80% of all known asteroids have been discovered in the past ten years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw

Deluded

This is an impressive optical illusion. I usually can tell one shade from another, but...

http://www.mantlelabs.com/illusion/

http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_...

King Flight Schools

John and Martha own King Schools, a leading company that provides aviation ground school training and materials. They recently landed at Santa Barbara, California, and were ordered from their plane at gunpoint, handcuffed, and hauled off by police in separate cars.

But it was all a mistake. The King's airplane had the same tail number as a plane (of a different type) that had been stolen eight years earlier.

      http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1719-full...

      http://www.kingschools.com/

The Department of Homeland Security is asking people to report any suspicious activity at airports by private pilots, such as being vague about their travel itinerary or having an excessive amount of luggage. That would include me, most of the time.

      http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1719-full...

Political Delinquency

About 638 people who work for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives owe past-due income taxes, totaling $9.3 million. That's 4% of the total working for the House and Senate, about $14,500 each.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

I think if I owed back taxes like that, the IRS would start auctioning off my property. It also makes me wonder... if 638 people are only 4% of the staff at the House and Senate, why in the world are 18,000 people working there? That's 33 people per politician.

Automotive X-Prize

Three cars shared the $10 million purse for the Automotive X-Prize.

http://www.progressiveautoxprize.org/news-events/press-...

http://www.progressiveautoxprize.org/files/downloads/au...

Ponzi Scammers

What do you do when you lose your money in a Ponzi scheme? One approach is to pretend to be FBI agents and steal it back.

http://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-vassallo-2010-9

North Port, Florida

A lady named Diane lives in North Port, Florida. Diane had a 1986 Oldsmobile, but it was unreliable. So her Church gave her a 1998 Mercury Sable. She left her old Olds in the driveway for four months until the church picked it up as a donation. During that time, the tag expired and she got a citation for having a car in her driveway without a current tag.

The city charged her $50 per day and made it retroactive to the previous December when her tag had expired. Since Diane did not notify the city when the church took her old car, they say she still owes $50 per day. Diane found out about this in June 2008 when the city sued her for more than $27,000. The city paid the suing lawyers more than $9,000 to sue her.

This all sounds pretty severe, but there is another homeowner in North Port who owes $183,000 for code violations. I hope all this doesn't give the thriving metropolis of Pryor any ideas.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100120/article/1...

Politics as Usual

Senator Dodd is the head of the Senate Banking Committee. He authored a law giving the Treasury Department authority to make an interim appoint for the head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For whatever reason, a lot of people don't like Elizabeth Warren, who was expected to be the appointee, and it's creating a minor hoopla in Washington.

Mr. Dodd, when asked about the interim appointment powers, said, "I don't know what it is. I never heard of it before. It's kind of unique isn't it?"

I guess he uses a ghostwriter.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/dodd-unaware...

Poverty Level

There are more people living below the poverty level in the U.S. than ever before. There are also more people living above the poverty level in the U.S. than ever before, but that's not news.

News organizations try to make it sound like there are 40 million starving people in the United States. That's not true.

The definition of poverty has been expanded. "Government benefits" have also expanded, but are not considered in poverty calculations. So quite a few people living below the poverty level live a decent life and don't even consider themselves poor. Even the very poor can get food and shelter in the U.S.

The percentage of people below the poverty level in the U.S. was about the same or a little higher in 1994, 1983, and 1966.

Sailplane Accident

A guy named Mike crashed a sailplane at an air show in England on August 23. He cracked three vertebrae, but should make a full recovery.

http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/09/16/5115159...

Pictures of Today!

Two ferries crossing the Dover Strait. France is on the other side. England and Germany used to shoot at each other here.

A gas pump in Colorado. It seems that the programmer didn't quite get finished.

The other day a small thunderstorm came through with a lot of lightning. I took some pictures:

More lightning: http://xpda.com/lightning0810

I was wandering around Sleeping Bear Dunes with some other delinquents, and found this sailboat on the beach. The owner was sailing it up Lake Michigan and decided it was too wavy, so he beached the boat and walked away.

http://dailyme.com/story/2010082500002946/boat-washes-a...

Michigan Monarchs:

Michigants:

More Michigan pictures: http://xpda.com/onecomma

I got a new lens for my camera this week. It won't take those cool pictures of the sun like SDO, but it does pretty good with close-ups.

Close-Ups

The End